Podcast appearances and mentions of john right

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I discuss John Marvin's transformative leadership journey as CEO and President of Texas State Optical (TSO). Founded in 1936 by the Rogers brothers, TSO evolved into a franchise operation spearheaded by John starting in the 1990s. Hear John's compelling account of reviving the brand, establishing the franchise association, and guiding the innovative physician-owned business model that has empowered young optometrists for decades. With the evolving eyewear landscape, our conversation analyzes consumer behavior shifts and their implications for strategic competition amid growing online retailers. We also explore the importance of supporting TSO's physician member network through mentorship and partnerships, especially given industry consolidation challenges. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS John D Marvin shares the history of Texas State Optical (TSO), founded by the Rogers brothers in 1936, and its growth into a franchise operation. We discuss how John Marvin revitalized TSO in the 1990s and his journey to becoming the president of the company in 2001. The episode explores the challenges and strategies involved in competing with online retailers in the eyewear industry, emphasizing the importance of convenience and well-stocked dispensaries. John describes the shift in optometry ownership trends, with fewer young optometrists interested in private practice, paralleling broader healthcare industry trends. We examine the strategic importance of building a physician member network to support optometrists and the criteria for network inclusion. The episode delves into leadership principles inspired by John C. Maxwell, highlighting the role of influence, trust, and accountability in effective leadership. John reflects on the transformative impact of setbacks, such as being fired, and how these experiences shape one's leadership journey. We explore the importance of forming strategic vendor partnerships and the role of mutual accountability in maintaining long-lasting business relationships. John emphasizes the need to adapt to industry shifts, including the rise of artificial intelligence, while fostering an innovative mindset among optometrists. The episode concludes with a discussion on the significance of understanding and meeting customer needs through effective consumer research, as a universal business strategy. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Texas State Optical GUESTS John D MarvinAbout John TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet John Marvin, ceo and President of Texas State Optical. John shares his views on how the fundamentals of leadership boil down to influencing and how having mutual accountability in your business relationships create win situations. John, I want to thank you for taking the time to join me today. It's really been a pleasure to get to know you before we got started here. John: Well, Chris, I appreciate the opportunity to sit down. I always love talking about business. Chris: Well, that's good, that's what we're going to do. So you're the CEO and president of Texas State Optical, or most people know it as TSO. That's right. Tell us a little more detail about what is the company, what does it do and what is it really known for in the market. John: Okay Well, texas State Optical was founded in 1936 by four brothers the Rogers brothers, in Beaumont, texas, and anybody who's been to Beaumont or familiar with Beaumont knows of the impact those four brothers had on that community and then in turn throughout Texas. Two of the brothers were optometrists and they opened pretty traditional optometry practice. And if you'll think about what else was going on in 1936 in Beaumont, it was the oil boom that was just blowing up, and so the one that originally came to Texas from Chicago all four of them were from Chicago called back home and said boys, you need to move down here. We got a big opportunity and they did, and consequently, over the next several years they built a large retail optical chain they called Texas State Optical, and one time in the early 60s it had reached over 300 locations. And one time in the early 60s it had reached over 300 locations and those were in New Mexico, oklahoma, arkansas, louisiana and Texas, and so that went on until, due to some legal issues with the state optometric group, who decided that they didn't want someone in the state running 300 locations, they passed some legislation that limited optometrists to only three locations and so they could subsequently, after a long legal battle had to sell off most of their property, but they kept the core of the business of the optical lab. They kept that and kind of a condition of buying. The practice was that you obligated yourself to continue to purchase items from them. But then in the late 60s the Rogers, having gone through this process of dissolving their ownership in it, decided to turn their attention towards real estate development and at one point they owned 25% of Caesars Palace in Vegas. They just got involved in other things and then consequently in the early 70s they sold the company to a large pharmaceutical company, gd Searle, who then subsequently sold the company in the early 80s to Pearl Vision. Most people are familiar with Pearl Vision, most people are familiar with ProVision and ran that until the late 80s when they sold it to a group of kind of investors who wanted to own it. They didn't really know how to run it than investors. So in I got involved in 1993 doing consumer research for the corporate office. My background at the time I had a company marketing management group and based here in Houston and it was a small marketing management and consumer research group and was doing work in other areas. But picked them up as a client and began to do a lot of consumer study for them and learned about the business. At that time it was somewhat distressed because of the leadership that had taken over from the Pearl Vision taken over from Pearl, and so there was a lot of unrest among the franchisees because at that time TSO was a franchise operation and so I helped them form a franchise association and then kind of on a part-time arrangement took on an executive director position within that while maintaining my consumer study and research stuff. And so that happened until the late nineties, when everyone was planning for the great millennium you know, the 2000 and Y2, right, right. And so we gathered everybody in my conference room over here and how, booty building, and down here in the galleria and they started you know, flip chart sheets, what do we want to accomplish? And blah, blah, blah, and and that the result of that was really, guys, you're not going to get any of this done unless you own it. And so we began to have some discussions about them buying the company, the, the franchisor, and that took about a year to negotiate, and during that process I was asked to come on as the new president and since and then we closed in June of 2001, and since that time I've been the acting and operational by president and CEO of the company, and one of the reasons that it appealed to me was it was the ultimate fixer-upper, because the company had really was kind of loosely held together but had an iconic brand, and so we started opening new locations with Young Optometrist and we're a brand license company. So we knew that the only way we could pick up a new customer, if you would be, if a young OD wanted to open their own practice and then we could help them do that. People that were established at the time and successful weren't interested in converting to a retail trade name, so we did. We opened up about 80 new locations and helped a lot of young ODs live a dream and had put together a whole turnkey system commercial realty contractors the whole nine yards. Chris: That's a fascinating history, you know, to kind of just see it grow so big in the beginning, get broken down and then almost come back together. Yeah with, I guess in 2001 you said, with these individual practice owners or franchisees becoming owners. John: That's, you know, kind of unique, especially for doctors yeah, it was a different approach to it, one of the reasons we can set it as a now. We never incorporated it as a cooperative, we incorporated it as for-profit. We simply chose to run it as a cooperative, which, by its nature of co-op, isn't intended to make money, right? So we could keep the services and the value of what we offer members very high because we priced it at a break-even point, and so it was very appealing to a lot of young ODs who needed that help without any experience knowing what to do. And, of course, we then had a retail trade name that had market appeal. So a lot of them benefited greatly by, as opposed, to, opening up under their own name and unknown in a community. Chris: Yeah, it gives it instant credibility with the brand name right. That's right. What are some of the things I guess that you know since that time in 2001, that you do and your team around you, to kind of help preserve that brand value, to make it marketable and enticing to these doctors. John: Well, part of it is the importance. An optometry practice as a small business has a very defined marketplace of about three radium miles Okay, so one. That's part of that is because there are so many options and the profession is a licensed profession and so there's a little bit of perception by consumers that it's a commodity. In other words, anybody who's got a license will be able to give you a good exam. Consumers at one time back in the 60s and 70s, thought mostly of wherever they got their exams. That's where they purchased their eyewear. Chris: Out of convenience, right Out of convenience. John: That's right. And in the 80s you had a much more proliferation of retail optical chains like LensCrafters and EyeMasters at the time and Pearl Vision, which were creating an awareness among consumers that you know what, I can get my exam in one location and I can buy my eyewear in another location, and so that added to that sense of commodity. And so what we've done is focus on a three mile marketplace. So instead of running one advertising campaign in Houston, we run 50 around each of our locations, and those are largely driven through community involvement, pay-per-click, you know, today pay-per-click In the beginning though, a lot of it was just getting to know your school nurse, getting to know the coaches in the league ball game, and so from a marketing strategy it was always hyper-local standpoint. And so if you go into some neighborhoods, everyone knows the TSO. If you go into an neighborhood where we have no location, maybe not so much, and that was done probably more just from a practical standpoint of cost than it was anything else, because you know Houston and Dallas. Where we're at in San Antonio, they're very expensive media markets and so if you've only got, you know, 20 locations in the DFW market to go in and try to buy television, advertising or something more traditional is prohibited, and so it makes a lot more sense because that's where people live and work. People ask me sometimes how do you go about picking your locations, your real estate stuff? And I said we tend to let Kroger and HEB do that for us. So, wherever they're at, we want to be close because that's a neighborhood. Chris: That's right. You figured they thought there were enough households to support a grocery store. So I like that, you know, uh, you know. There's a lesson there, though, for a business owner, an entrepreneur, in that you don't necessarily have to do all your own organic research if you don't know, aware what's going on, you can, you know, let someone else do some of that and just make sure that their end users look like yours, and that's right. John: They do a tremendous job, both of those companies, at understanding the market before they ever buy land or pour concrete. I'd hate to insult them by not taking advantage of all that good work they do. Chris: They're genius right, they're genius, that's right. You just mentioned, you said 30 different or 50 different marketing campaigns in Houston alone. I mean, how do you go about figuring out you know the right message for the right place? That must take a lot of work. John: Well, not so much I mean because the message in Sugar Land is the same as the message in the Woodlands. I mean people. While we, as as in our profession, try to complicate this, it's pretty simple from a consumer standpoint. They're looking for a place where they can get their eyes checked and buy a pair of glasses. But probably two-thirds of all of our revenue today come from a third-party payer. So that changes kind of the basic consumer behavior dynamic. But by putting out a message that really is focused on that group of people in terms of maximizing the value of those coverage benefits, that becomes real consistent and then it's a matter of just being louder than anybody else. Chris: Sure, while we're on the subject of that consumer and consumer behavior, what are some of the things that you have done over the last 10, 15 years to either combat the online competition, as you mentioned, because people get their eyes examined and they either go online or do something. How are you managing that and what are some of the strategies you found to be successful? John: Well, first of all, consumers are driven, and I think this may be generally true, but certainly our consumers are driven with the priority on convenience, and one of the reasons the online marketing purchase of eyewear is so appealing is its convenience, and oftentimes it's not a price issue as much as it is a convenience issue and assortment and selection. So one of the things that we focus on is to make sure that our retail dispensary that's what we call the retail store aspect of a practice is well inventoried with product and assortment price points, and then the ultimate differentiation is customer service and knowledgeable people, and so if you have selection pricing and knowledgeable people, it's a home run and you don't have to worry about it, because if you can make it convenient for them, then they're not tempted to go online. And because there's a lot of I don't know if you've ever bought a pair of shoes online, but all you need to do is have one bad experience with that and have to turn around, send them back and so forth and so on that people would really prefer to get it locally, where I got my, where they received their exam, and it's kind of hours to lose. So we try to make sure we don't give them a reason to leave. Chris: Yeah Well, it's an interesting analogy with the shoes, because I can relate to that and see that people like to try on shoes but also glasses right. John: What are these going to look? Chris: like, and if you're at a store with a good selection, it's all right there as opposed to ordering one or two online and knowing you're going to be returning something. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at BoyerMillercom, and thanks for listening to the show. That's right, yes, well, that's it. So let's shift now kind of to this physician member network. What do you look for, if anything, as far as qualifying people to come into the brand, and then how do you help, kind of manage and support once they're in the network, if you will, to make sure that you're doing all you can to help them be successful? John: It's an interesting change we're seeing right now, especially in the last five to 10 years, and that is, the number of young optometrists who have an interest in owning their own practice is going away. Chris: It's really an interesting thing. John: One. It's very similar to what's going on in healthcare in general. You know, I was just talking to some people last week and I said you know when was the last time I asked them? I said do you have children? Yes, do you have a pediatrician? Yes, is that pediatrician private practice? Chris: No. John: It's owned by some big organization like Texas Children's, and what you're seeing in healthcare delivery at the provider level is a consolidation of these organizations and the disappearing of private practice, and we're seeing that now in optometry. And another big dynamic is 85% of all optometry graduates today are female, and in the 80s that number was just the opposite. It was very unusual in the 80s and early 90s to see women in optometry school. I mean they certainly didn't represent the majority. And so with that comes different priorities of practice. You know you don't have the hard-charging young guy who wants to go into small-town Texas and really build up a big practice or even a metro area. You have people that are much more interested in part-time, that I want to be able to step aside, raise my family, then maybe come back later, and so there's a whole different culture among the providers now coming in. So our organization as a business model relies on young optometrists wanting to own their own practice, and if that category is declining we've got to come up with some other plan here to maintain Sure. So one the opportunities we have are less. The vetting process is largely a discussion with very successful people. Our board of directors consists of nine doctors and three outside directors, but the nine doctors are all very successful. And so a young person does approach me and we talk, I want them to speak to one of our successful guys, and then their job is to kind of assess and come back to me and say, John, I don't know if she's ready, I don't know if he can do this, or I think this is a home run, let's go. And with their input and my discussion I've been doing it now long enough that I kind of get a feel for it Then we'll say let's go. And really it's a matter of they own everything. It's a matter of us guiding them through the process and then supporting them with just the knowledge they don't have about building a practice afterwards, and then lots of follow-up and hand-holding. Chris: And it's done. I think you said just as, basically a license agreement where they're licensing the name and brand and they get some support as a result of that as well. John: I mean contractually, I'm not obligated to support anything. Contractually I'm not obligated to support anything. All I'm obligated to do is to keep the value of the brand consistent with what they're paying for it. But I realized that if they're not successful, my brand value suffers. So we do all that we can to support them and help them be successful. Chris: So let's talk a little bit about your internal team. I mean, you've got a team I think you said 12, that's kind of help support you, that support these members. What have you found to be successful as you've gone through maybe trials and tribulations of hiring the right people, making sure you've got the right people in the right seat to kind of support the business and the brand? John: You know, that's a great question, because I, up until about 2015, I took a whole different approach to personnel than I did 2015 and on, and it was like I learned something, and that is I put together a group of really knowledgeable people in terms of their expertise in certain areas, but the quality that I had not paid attention to prior to that was they also had to be connectors. They had to be the kind of people that could say hey, chris, I know somebody you ought to talk to. And so because when a non-doctor walks into a doctor's office, even with the responsibility of helping, they carry a different level of credibility with that doctor than if a doctor told them something. If we go in and say, hey, listen, you need to be open Saturdays, because there's a lot of business on Saturdays, I don't want to do it. But if a doctor tells them, oh man, you got to be open Saturday, they'll listen to it. But if a doctor tells them, oh man, you've got to be open Saturday, they'll listen to it. And so our guys who are in the field, they do tactical training and support for staff, but when a doctor is facing an issue that they know the answer to, they in turn, seek out other leadership in the doctor community to say would you mind giving so-and-so a call Because I think you could help them get through whatever issue they're dealing with. And so that quality and frankly it's, you know it requires someone who doesn't have much of an ego. Sure, because you know I say this all the time like my old friend Ronald Reagan used to say, there's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. Chris: Yeah. John: And so we take that approach, and ours isn't about trying to get a bunch of credit. Ours is about trying to lift up this organization and get these guys successful, and if we're simply a facilitator in information to how to do that, we don't have to be the initial provider of that information. Even if we know it, it comes much better from a colleague, and so that's one of the things that we put a lot of emphasis on is helping the network, help each other. Chris: So you know you were very quick to say 2015. Have you seen a dramatic improvement in the performance of the overall business since making that change and kind of focusing on the connector quality as being an additional important quality in the people you bring on? John: Very much so, because what Texas State Optical was in the beginning was a doctor-owned organization and doctors working with other doctors to help them grow a network and large business. We're trying to replicate that from the standpoint of, especially as the business, the structure we use I mentioned earlier as a cooperative. It requires doctor leadership to be active and engaged in running their own company, their owners of the company, and so, while I have certainly an important role in that, the more doctors that engage in the leadership of the organization, the better it is overall. And since we took that intentional effort in 2015, a couple of things too. We had a kind of an evolution of membership. I mean, we had a lot of our older doctors retire and sell practices, and then we had a whole influx of young doctors, and so we ended up in 2015 with an organization that was significantly different demographically, both age and gender. That was significantly different demographically, both age and gender. But we thought they need mentorship among the leadership in the organization, and so we worked at creating that for them, and it impacts not just clinical I mean, there's also that aspect of it they're learning clinically from friends but operationally, and so it made a big difference Very good. Chris: I know that you have supply agreements with certain labs and other things. Let's talk about some of the things that you found to be successful in maintaining, I guess, forming those kind of key strategic relationships for the business, and maybe some of the things you do to make sure that you foster and keep them strong of the things you do to make sure that you foster and keep them strong. John: Well, in the vendor-doctor community there is a kind of an assumption made by both sides, and one is the doctor assumes that the vendor's got more money than they know how to spend or what they've got all this money to spend, and the vendor assumes the doctor's not going to follow through on all the promises they make. So that's kind of where we start at the table, and so I think it's important and what we've worked at bringing to our relationships is mutual accountability, and we have found our vendor partners to be extremely invested in our success, but at the same time they've got a business to run as well, and so our success with them and that dynamic of that exchange or relationship cannot be at the vendor's expense. It's gotta be the classic cliche win type of thing, but you only get win if you have mutual accountability. And so in every agreement we have, here's what the vendor commits to and here's what the doctor community commits to. And then we have business reviews where we sit down and say here's where we're dropping the ball or here's where you're dropping the ball, and we hold that accountability does a long goes a long way to not only making the relationship productive but also building trust and longevity into those partnerships, because if you're making money with a partner, you don't want it to stop, right, you know? And that goes both ways If you're a doctor making money with a partner, you don't want it to stop, and if money with a partner, you don't want it to stop, and if you're a partner, you don't want to stop. So I found that type of mutual accountability and the willingness to be held accountable is critical to those relationships Very good. Chris: So you know. Talk a little bit about leadership. You've been running this organization for a long time now. How would you describe your leadership style and how do you think that's evolved over time? John: well, I would. I don't know if I've ever been asked to describe it, but I would say it's Maxwellian. Okay, and that means John C Maxwell, who is an author, has written a number of books on leadership and, in my opinion, probably is the most the best leadership author. I'm biased, of course, but I think he is. Forbes Magazine said that a few years ago, but basically his definition of leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just influence. And an example of that is if you walk into a room of people, you're naturally going to notice someone who's exercising influence on others, and it isn't an authoritarian way, it's in a trust and credibility way. And so if you're influencing, you're leading. If you're not, it doesn no matter what title you have. So an example is my when I explained how we use doctors to help influence other doctors. So that's a level of influence that doesn't come because I require somebody to do something. It it occurs because you're able to influence others to to make a difference. So I would. I'm a big believer in that. I'll plug his book. There are 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. It's a classic, and so that's like a Bible. It's my business Bible in terms of leadership style. Chris: I was going to use that word because others and it's fair to plug books, because sometimes I ask people what's a book you would recommend. We hear a lot of good to great from people Sure, jim Collins. But what I love what you said if you're influencing, you're leading, because I say a lot of times a true leader leads without a title. John: Right, you're actually doing things without the title to demonstrate leadership, which is what you're talking about Exactly, and if you do have the title and can influence, it's a home run. It's a home run, yeah. Chris: So you've learned that through lots of trials and tribulations. I think we all learn through mistakes or setbacks Anything you could share with the listeners about a decision made that didn't go the way you thought but you learned from it and that learning kind of catapulted you made you better because of it. Setback, failure whatever word you want to describe Anything you could you care to share in that realm. John: Sure the. So I came to Houston. I was born and raised in Western Kansas and I was in Wichita born and raised in western Kansas, and I was in Wichita, kansas, in 1989, excuse me, in the late 80s, 84, 89 era and I was working for a large ophthalmology practice up there as a marketing administrator and in that role I attended a lot of national meetings in ophthalmology and during that meeting I met an owner of a large Houston ophthalmology and during that meeting I met an owner of a large Houston ophthalmology group who ended up offering me a job and I came to Texas. Due to some marketing challenges we were facing at that practice, I was introduced to Texas State Optical while I was at that practice and then left after about four years, left that practice and went to a consumer research firm here in Stafford and quickly turned around and went to Texas State Optical to see if they would like to buy some insurance I'm not insurance, buy some research and they did so. I ended up doing this large project for them but also ended up doing a ton of work for HLMP. During the time they were prepared to try to go to battle with Enron and this was like early nineties, right, and so everything was going well. And then I get fired from the research thing. Now I moved my family down from Kansas. I've been in the state about five and a half years and I get fired. I've been in the state about five and a half years and I get fired. And that was a big you know. Anytime you've been fired, that kind of devastates you Right, it shakes you up. Chris: Yeah, it does. John: But had that not happened, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing Right, and so I have learned, and what pulled me through that is faith, Faith in God and faith in myself is faith, faith in God and faith in myself, and I felt like I can do, kind of what. There was a part of it, chris, that was liberating, because that was like, instead of thinking now what am I going to do, I was thinking now what am I going to do. I mean, it was a whole different frame of attitude and that subsequently ended up leading to the position I have today, through working with franchisees at Texas State Optical and so forth. Chris: That's a great story. Thank you for sharing. You bet A lot of people don't want to talk about, especially if they've been fired for something. But to your point on that, these other opportunities would have never presented themselves right, because you likely stayed in the comfort of the job and seeing where that takes you. You know there's so much that can come. John: Actually, I'd gone to that research firm. The owner of it had brought me there with the promise implied I mean not implied, but it wasn't in writing but the idea was that I would take over that firm at some point and it turned out that didn't work out Well you know a lot of what you, I think, describe. Chris: The undertone to that is the mindset you had in the wake of that setback. You know you didn't let it take you down. You're like like you said what am I going to go? Do I got all these opportunities and go? Explore and figure it out. John: So I had about 30 days before the next house payment came, so that you were acting quick, got to be decisive man. Chris: You can't be stewing on decisions forever, for sure, well, that and so you know that leadership, you know is forged and helped you get to where you are today. You know, when you, when you think about applying that mindset and that leadership kind of style, how does it help you kind of navigate the ups and downs of the economic cycles that we've experienced over the last 20 plus years? John: Well, you know, first of all is to understand which of these cycles are cyclical. That's a little redundant, but I mean, what is it we're going through that's cyclical. That you can. You know, business loves a stable and predictable environment. Right Now, the reality is it's ups and downs. But if it's ups and downs within a certain range of up and down, it's stable right, and you can prepare for it Certain tolerances right, yeah certain tolerances. What we've seen, not only in the economy and that's a whole different issue but what we've seen in the profession itself and the consolidation of private practice by private equity that's come into the marketplace, is we're seeing disruption like we haven't seen before. And I was talking to one of our board members doctor board members about it and we were just, you know, he was pointing out all of the things that are kind of out without from under excuse me, out of our control, and as we were talking about it, I had this thought and I told him. I said it's a great time to be alive and that because we're the ones that get to go through this, and in many ways I believe that our profession is going through a transformation that will take probably a 20 year period of time. But 40 years from now, optometry, I don't think, will look anything like it does today, and it's always bumpy to be in the middle of that turbulent transformation. The 80s were very steady, the 90s were pretty steady. It was in starting about 2010, 2000, that things started rapidly changing and then the acceleration with just technology and everything else is just gone, and then you've got now the whole world of artificial intelligence coming into play and it's. I consider it exciting, invigorating, challenging, but I mean what's? The alternative is to be bored right. Chris: Well, if you don't adopt and if you're not using it, you die use it you die, that's right. So I mean, you know, kind of it's a great segue to what are some of the things you do to kind of foster that maybe innovative mindset of how you're going to embrace the technological changes and use them in the business model to further the brand and the business. John: So I there's very little I can do without the support of the doctor, owner, community right. And sometimes there's a lot of indecision, because when you're not sure what to do, you're scared of doing the wrong thing. Chris: Sure, Well, it seems like you got a lot of opinions that out there too, right? John: You got a lot of them, and so what I have to do is to influence them through other people and through information, to get them to a point of being open enough to consider ideas that they might consider kind of sacrilege in some case. For instance, what is real common in most optometry practices today is what's called an autorefractor. It's a machine that people go through and it gives you a prescription, and the prescription is used by the doctor to zero in on where your visual acuity is right. Well, when that first came out, optometrists thought that was the end of the profession. Here's a machine that'll do what I'm doing. Optometrists thought that was the end of the profession. Here's a machine that'll do what I'm doing. And so there's a fear oftentimes of innovation. Right, that you have to assure people that there's a way to use this to our benefit, and that's what we're going through with artificial intelligence right now. One group is scared to death. It's going to replace them. The other group is glad they're old enough, they're probably not going to have to go through with it. And then you're looking for those people who say, hey, how can we utilize this to really to our benefit? Yeah, and once people feel that's safe enough to kind of try. Then the people realize that the fear is misplaced. Chris: So true, right, but it takes education, information and influence, as you said, to get people to get there so that they can adopt it One of the things that I teach my team to say. John: I mean to believe, and I say it all the time is we believe in everybody's right to make a bad decision. So if someone listens to us and they choose not to do what we're recommending and we know it's a good decision what we're recommending and they choose not to, it's their right. You know, I mean everybody's right to waste their own money. So that kind of patience is necessary with a group like ours. In many ways it's like working with a volunteer organization. Chris: Yeah, well, lots of challenges there, I'm sure. Well, john, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you sharing everything I want to ask you, I guess, going back to your days, you know, I guess growing up in Kansas what was your first job? John: A drugstore Rexall drugstore and I grew up in a town of 2000 people and my dad was the family physician of the community and so of course in a town like that in western Kansas the doctor and the pharmacist are close relationship. And so I got my first job at a drugstore, working a soda fountain, delivering prescriptions, restocking things. Like that had a blast and that really I learned a lot in that, not just like everybody learns a lot from their first job, but understanding. I was intrigued by Rexall. I don't know how familiar you are with Rexall, but Rexall was a national organization that gave private ownership of drugstores the purchasing power of a large corporate chain, and so my employer was the pharmacist. He owned the drug store and he stood up in the stand in the dais every day counting pills and chatting with people. So that was my first job. Chris: Very good. Well, you've been in Texas now since what the late? John: 80s. Chris: So do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue Barbecue? Okay. John: Barbecue Very good. My waistline prefers barbecue. Chris: And last thing if you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? I don't know, Probably nuts. John: I just I've got to be engaged and I mean I don't have to be. I'm not select. I love business and I love the challenge it has. So I'm not I don't. You said earlier in our discussion about you were describing about the law firm. When I was doing consumer research, I did some healthcare work 12 Oaks Hospital was a client and so but I would tell people, is I specialize in a process, not an industry, because the process is the same and I would say that's what I really love about business, because when you boil it down to what I do and what you do and others that run businesses, it's the same process. It's understanding your customer and then directing how your services or products benefit that customer and communicating and the whole marketing scheme of promotion, price, product and place applies to every industry. And so I'd probably do something if I had 30 days. Like I said, I'd go nuts. Chris: Well, but I think what you just said there in the end is you have great insight and learning for business owners and entrepreneurs out there. You're trying to find their way. It's it is figure out what the consumer that you're catering to really wants and then deliver that as efficient as best you can that's why you know my, when I first got into consumer research, I thought this is like cheating. John: I mean you're actually going out and saying what do you want? They tell you, and then you give it to them. I mean it's like, it's amazing. Chris: Yeah, right, so well, this has been great, John. Thanks again for taking the time. You bet I really appreciate your invitation. Special Guest: John D Marvin.

Anthony Diana and Therese Craparo are joined by John Collins from Lighthouse to provide an overview of some of the challenges and strategies around data retention and eDiscovery with Microsoft's AI tool, Copilot. This episode explores Copilot's functionality within M365 applications and the complexities of preserving, collecting and producing Copilot data for legal purposes. The panelists cover practical tips on managing Copilot data, including considerations for a defensible legal hold process and the potential relevance of Copilot interactions in litigation. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Hello, and welcome to Tech Law Talks, a podcast brought to you by Reed Smith's Emerging Technologies Group. In each episode of this podcast, we will discuss cutting-edge issues on technology, data, and the law. We will provide practical observations on a wide variety of technology and data topics to give you quick and actionable tips to address the issues you are dealing with every day.  Anthony: Hello, this is Anthony Diana, a partner in the Emerging Technologies Group at Reed Smith, and welcome to the latest Tech Law Talks podcast. As part of our ongoing podcast series with Lighthouse on Microsoft M365 Copilot and what legal departments should know about this generative AI tool in M365. Today, we'll be focused on data retention and e-discovery issues and risks with Copilot. I am joined today with Therese Craprro at Reed Smith and John Collins of Lighthouse. Welcome, guys. So, John, before we start, let's get some background on Copilot. We've done a few podcasts already introducing everyone to Copilot. So if you could just give a background on what is Copilot generally in M365.  John: Sure. So the Copilot we're talking about today is Copilot for Microsoft 365. It's the experience that's built into tools like Word, Excel. PowerPoint, Teams, Teams meetings. And basically what it is, is Microsoft's running a proprietary version of ChatGPT and they provide that to each one of their subscribers that gets Copilot. And then as the business people are using these different tools, they can use Copilot to help generate new content, summarize meetings, create PowerPoints. And it's generating a lot of information as we're going to be talking about.  Anthony: And I think one of the interesting things that we've emphasized in the other podcasts is that each M365 application is slightly different. So, you know, Copilot for Word is different from Copilot for Exchange, and they act differently, and you really have to understand the differences, which we talked about generally. So, okay, so let's just talk generally about the issue, which is retention and storage. So, John, why don't you give us a primer on where is the data generally stored when you're doing a prompt and response and getting information from Copilot?  John: So the kind of good news here is that the prompts and responses, so when you're asking Copilot to do something or if you're chatting with Copilot in one of the areas that you can chat with it, it's putting the back and forth into a hidden folder in the user's mailbox. So the user doesn't see it in their outlook. The prompts and responses are there, and that's where Microsoft is storing them. So there's also files that get referenced that are stored in OneDrive and SharePoint, which we may talk about further. But in terms of the back and forth, those are stored in the Exchange mailbox.  Anthony: That's helpful. So, Therese, I know we've been working with some clients on trying to figure this out and doing testing and validation, and we've come across some exceptions. You want to talk about that process, I'll say.  Therese: I think that's one of the most important things when we're talking about really any aspect of Copilot or frankly, new technology, right? It's constantly developing and changing. And so you need to be testing and validating and make sure you're understanding how it's working. So as you said, Anthony, you know, we found early on when Copilot, our clients first started using Copilot, that the prompts and the responses for Outlook were not being retained in that hidden folder, right? And then Microsoft has since continued to develop the product. And now, in most cases, at least we're seeing they are, you know, similarly, for those of you who are using transcriptionless Copilot, so it's Copilot that doesn't can give you meeting summaries and answer questions during the meeting, but doesn't retain the transcript, because people had some concerns about retaining transcripts, we're seeing that those Copilot artifacts, so the prompt and the response are now currently not being retained in the hidden folder. So a lot of this is you need to understand how Copilot is working, but understand that it's also a dynamic product that's constantly changing. So you need to test it to make sure you're understanding what's happening in your environment with your organization's use of Copilot.  Anthony: Yeah. And I think it's critical that it has to constantly be tested and validated. Like any technology, you have to constantly test it because the way it's happening now, maybe even if it's being retained now, could change, right? If they revise the product or whatever. And we've seen this with Microsoft before where they may not always, you know, they change where it's stored because for whatever reason, they decided to change the storage. So if you have an e-discovery process and like, you just have to be aware of it. Or if you're trying to retain things and you're trying to govern retention, you just have to make sure you understand where things are stored. Okay, so John, if you could explain presently sort of how retention works with Copilot data that's stored in the hidden folder of Exchange.  John: So what Microsoft has done so far is they've made it possible for the prompts and responses that we were talking about. So when you're in Word or Excel or PowerPoint, or if you're using the chat function inside of the Teams or in general, those are the subject to the same retention that you've set for your one-to-one in your group chats. So if you have a 30-day auto-delete policy for your one-to-one in group chats, that's going to be applied to these Copilot interactions. So I've heard, and I think you guys may have heard this as well, that Microsoft is going to split those off, but it's not on the roadmap that we've seen, but we've heard that they are going to make them two separate things. But right now they're the one in the same.  Therese: Yeah, and I think it's the good and the bad news, right, for people who are looking at Copilot and how do I best manage it. The good news is that you can control retention. You can set a retention on it that's within the organization's control and you can make the decision that's right for your organization. The bad news is that it has to be the same as whatever right now is for whatever you're setting for Teams chat, which may or may not be how long you would like to retain the Copilot data. So there are some features that are good, that gives you a little bit control to make decisions that are right for the organization. But right now, they're only partially controllable in that sense. So you have to make some decisions about, you know, how long do you need Teams chat? How long do you need Copilot? And where's the right place in the middle to meet business needs, right? And also to take into consideration how long this data should exist in your organization.  Anthony: Yeah. And John, we've heard the same thing and heard from Microsoft that they're working on it, but I haven't heard if there's a roadmap and when that's happening. But we have several clients who are monitoring this and are constantly in contact with Microsoft saying, when are we going to get that split? Because at least for a lot of our clients, they don't want the same retention. And I think, Therese, we could talk a little bit about it in terms of what people are thinking about, what to consider. Once we get to a place where we can actually apply a separate retention for Copilot, what are the factors to consider when you start thinking about what is the appropriate retention for this Copilot data?  John: And Therese, do you want them to be ephemeral where you could have a setting where they just go, they aren't captured anywhere? I'd be curious if you guys think that's something that you would want clients to consider as an option.  Therese: Well, look, I mean, the first thing all of our clients are looking at is business needs, right? Is this with anything, right? Do the artifacts from Copilot need to exist for a longer period of time for a business use? And in general, the answer has been no. There's no real reason to go back to that. There's no real reason to keep that data sitting in that folder. There's no use of it. The users don't go, like John, as you said, you can't see it. Users aren't going back to that data. So from a business perspective, you know, number one thing that we always consider, the answer has been no, we don't need to retain these Copilot artifacts for any business reason. The next thing we always look to is record retention, right? Is there a legal regulatory obligation to retain this Copilot artifacts that are coming out? And in most cases, when our clients look at it, the answer is no, it's not a record. It's not relied on for running the company. It doesn't currently fall under any of the regulations in terms of what a record is. It's convenience information or transitory information that may exist in the organization. So typically, again, that next component is records. And typically, at least with Copilot, we're seeing that the initial output from Copilot, the question and the response, are not considered records. And so once you get to that point, the question is, why do I need to keep it at all? Which is, John, to what you're alluding to, you know, today for all data types, whether it's Copilot or otherwise, right, over-retention presents risks. It presents privacy risks and security risks, all kinds of risks to the company. So the preference is to retain data only for as long as you need it. And if you don't need it, the question arises, do you need to keep it at all? Do you need it even for a day? Could you make it ephemeral so that it can just disappear when it's gone because it has served its useful life and there's no other reason to keep it? Now, we always have to consider legal holds whenever we have these conversations, because if you have a legal hold and you need to retain data going forward, you need to have a means of doing that. You need to be aware of how to retain that data, how to preserve that data for a legal hold purpose if you deem it to be relevant. of it. So that's always the caveat. But typically when we're seeing people look at this, when they actually sit down and think about it, there hasn't been to date really a business or records reason to retain that data in the ordinary course of business.  Anthony: And so it's a matter of how do you enforce that? And whether, John, I mean, when we talk about ephemeral, it is retained. So ephemeral would be probably like one day, right? So it would basically be kept for one day, which raises all kinds of issues because they're there for one day. And as we've seen with other, whether it's team chats or any type of instant messaging, once it's there, and we're gonna talk a little bit about preservation, it's there, right? So for one day it's there. So let's talk a little bit about sort of the e-discovery issues and particularly preservation, which I think is the issue that a lot of people are thinking about now as they're rolling this out is, can I preserve this? So John, how do you preserve Copilot data?  John: So that's pretty straightforward, at least in one respect, which is if you're preserving a user's Exchange Online mailbox, unless you put in some kind of condition explicitly to exclude the Copilot prompts and responses, et cetera, they're going to be preserved. So they will be part of what's being preserved along with email and chats and that type of thing. So the only The only question is, and if we're going to get into this, Anthony and Therese, but the reference files, the version shared and all that. But as far as the prompts and responses, those are part of the mailbox. They're going to be preserved.  Anthony: So you're talking about a potential gap here then. So let's just talk about that. When you're doing prompts and responses, oftentimes you're referencing a specific document, right? It could be a Word document. You're asking for a summary, for example, of a Word document. it's going to refer to that document in the prompt and response. So what is or isn't preserved when you preserve the mailbox in that situation?  John: Well, I know we were talking about this before, but there's really, the question is, do you have the version shared feature enabled? Because the Microsoft documentation says if you want referenced files to be preserved as part of your Copilot implementation, you have to enable version shared. But in our testing, we're seeing inconsistent results. So in one of our tenants, we have version shared, and that's exactly what it's doing is if you say, summarize this document or use this document to create a PowerPoint, it is treating it almost like a cloud attachment. And it's it, but that's not, but that's not for preservation purposes. That's at the collection stage. It goes back to the topic that I know you guys, we talk about this a lot is, well, do I have to preserve every SharePoint and OneDrive where something might live that somebody referenced, right? And that's kind of the question there with the reference files.  Anthony: Got it. So you're not preserving it necessarily because like a modern attachment, which we've talked about in the past, it's not preserving it. Although if they're looking at a document from their OneDrive and you have the OneDrive on hold, that document should be there. So when you go to collect it, you can. Assuming that there's this setting, you have to have the version shared. So it's actually linking that attachment to this Copilot data. So a lot to digest there, but it's complicated. And again, I think you point out, this is a work in progress you have to test, right? You cannot assume that based on what we're saying, it's actually going to work that way because we've seen the same thing. You have to test and it often changes because this is a work in progress and it's constantly being changed. But that's an interesting point to think through. And again, I think from a preservation standpoint, Therese, is it required to preserve it if you have Copilot data and they're referring to a document? Is it similar to like an e-comms where we say, generally in the e-comms front where we talk about a Team's message, we always said, well, you need it because it's the complete electronic communication. So therefore to get completeness, we generally say you should be producing it in the like Copilot data, do we think it's going to be any different?  Therese: Look, I mean, I think it depends is the answer. And if you look out there, even when we're talking about e-discovery, when you look at the cases that are out there talking about links, right, links to attachments or links to something that's in an email or in an e-comm, it's mixed, right? Right. The courts have not necessarily said in every case you have to preserve every single document for every single link. Right. You need to preserve what is relevant, even with production. Courts have said I'm not going to make them go back and find every single link necessarily. But if there's something that is deemed relevant and they need that link, you may have an obligation to go back and find it and make sure that you can find that document. So I don't think it's as clear cut as you must, you know, turn on version shared to make sure that you can, you are, quote, preserving every single referenced file and every single Copilot, you know, document. We certainly don't preserve every single document that's referenced in a memo, right? Or in a document that it refers to. There's a reference to it and maybe you have to go find that. So I think that it's not really clean cut. It's really a matter of looking at your Copilot setup. And making some strategic decisions about how you are going to approach it and what makes the most sense and making sure you're communicating that, right? That the structure and the setup of Copilot is coordinated with legal and the people who need to explain this to courts or to regulators and the like. And that you're educating your outside counsel so that they can make sure that they are representing it correctly when they're representing you in any particular case that says, this is how our Copilot works. These are the steps that we take to preserve. This is why. And this is how we handle that data. And I think really that's the most important thing. We're sort of, this is a new technology. It's, we're still figuring out what the best practices are and how it should be. I think the most important thing is to be thoughtful. Understand how it functions. Understand what steps you're taking and why. So that those can be adequately communicated. I think most of the time when we see these problems popping up, it's because someone hasn't thought about it or hasn't explained it correctly. Right? And that's the most important thing is understanding the technology and then understanding your approach to that technology from a litigation perspective.  Anthony: Yeah. And I think one of the challenges, right? And I think this is both a risk and a challenge. And we've heard this from a lot of litigation teams as this Copilot is being launched is it's not always accurate, right? Like it's, and I think you maybe make the argument that it's not relevant because if I'm a user and I'm asking a question, and it comes back, and it's just answering a question, and it's wrong, but you don't know that. I mean, it's Copilot. It's just giving you an answer. Is it really relevant? What makes it relevant? I may be asking the question of Copilot relating to the case. Let's assume that it's relating to the case in some way, underlying matter. You ask a question, you get a response back. Do you really need to preserve that? I've heard from litigators saying, well, if they go to Google, and they do a Google search on that topic, we're not preserving that necessarily. So what do we think that the arguments are that it's relevant or not relevant to a particular matter?  Therese: I mean, look, relevance is always relative, right, to the matter. And I think that it's difficult with any technology to say it's never relevant, right? Because relevance is a subject matter and a substantive determination. Just to say a particular technology is not relevant is a really hard, I think, position to take in any litigation, frankly. It's also very difficult to say, well, it's not reliable, so it's not relevant. Because I can tell you, I've seen a lot of emails that are not reliable, and they are nonetheless very relevant, right? The fact that somebody asked a certain type of prompt in certain litigations could be quite relevant in terms of what they were doing and how they were doing it. But I think it's also true that they're not always going to be relevant. And there's a reliability aspect that often comes in, I think, probably less so at the preservation stage and more so at the production stage. Right, in terms of how reliable is it, is this information? Again, this is about understanding the technology. Does your outside counsel know that if you are one, are you going to take the position that we're not going to produce it because it's not reliable, right? And be upfront about that and take that position and see if that's something that you can sustain in that particular case. Can you can explain that they would not be relevant here and it's not going to be reliable in any case, right? Are you going to take that position or not? Or at the very least, if you are going to produce it, that you understand that it is inherently unreliable, right? A computer gave an answer to a question that may or may not be right, and depends on a user reviewing that. You know, if the user used it and sent it out, you can review, that's when it becomes important or valuable. But understanding the value of the data, so you take appropriate positions in litigation, so that if for some reason Copilot artifacts are relevant, you can say, well, sure, that may be on a topic that is relevant to this case. But the substance of that is unreliable and meaningless, right, in this context. So I think, I mean, one of the funny things that I always think is, right, we say email is relevant, but not all email is relevant. We preserve all email because we don't have a way at the preservation stage to make a determination as to which email is relevant and which email is not, right? But I think that's true, right, with Copilot. I mean, at the end of the day, unless you are being upfront that I'm not preserving this, or you can say this type of data, there are cases where email is not relevant, right, at all for the case, unless you could take that position. You preserve that data because you don't know which of those Copilot interactions are on the topic that could matter or could be relevant. But you're thoughtful again down the road about your strategic positioning about whether or not it should be produced or whether or not it has any value in evidentiary value in that litigation given the nature of the data itself.  Anthony: And John, you talked a little bit about this. I know you're doing some testing. Everyone's doing some testing now on collecting and reviewing this data, this Copilot data. What can you tell us about? You got prompts and responses. Are they connected in any way? Is there a thread if you're doing a bunch of them? How does it all work based on what you're seeing so far?  John: Right. Well, like a lot of Microsoft, when it comes to e-discovery, some of it's going to depend on your licensing. So if you have premium eDiscovery, then for the most part, what we've been seeing in our testing is that when you collect the chats or when you collect the Copilot information, what it's going to do is if you select the threading option and the cloud attachment option, it's going to treat the Copilot back and forth largely like it's a Teams chat. So you'll see a conversation, it'll present as an HTML, it'll show you, it'll actually collect as cloud attachments, the files that are referenced, if you've got that set up. So to a large degree, in terms of determining if things are relevant and that type of thing, you can do keyword searches against them and all of that. So at this point, what we're seeing with our testing is that for the most part, it's treating the back and forth as these chat conversations similar to what you see with Teams.  Anthony: And I'm sure there'll be lots of testing and validation around that and disputes as we go forward. But that's good to know. Okay, well, I think that that covers everything. Obviously, a lot more to come on this. And I suspect we'll be learning a lot more about Copilot and retention and discovery over the next six months or so, as it becomes more and more prevalent, and then starts coming up in litigation. So thank you, John and Therese, and hopefully you all enjoyed this and certainly welcome back. We're going to have plenty more of these podcasts on this topic in the future. Thanks.  Outro: Tech Law Talks is a Reed Smith production. Our producers are Ali McCardell and Shannon Ryan. For more information about Reed Smith's Emerging Technologies practice, please email techlawtalks@reedsmith.com. You can find our podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, reedsmith.com, and our social media accounts.  Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers.  All rights reserved. Transcript is auto-generated.

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with the writer of a great new book, “London After Midnight: The Lost Film,” a book about the classic lost Lon Chaney film.LINKS A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Daniel's Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/p/London-After-Midnight-The-Lost-Film-100075993768254/Buy the Book “London After Midnight: The Lost Film”: https://www.amazon.com/London-After-Midnight-Lost-Film/dp/1399939890Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastTRANSCRIPTJohn: So, Daniel, when did you first become aware of London After Midnight? Daniel: I was about seven years old when I first stumbled into Lon Chaney through my love of all things Universal horror, and just that whole plethora of characters and actors that you just knew by name, but hadn't necessarily seen away from the many still photographs of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And the Phantom was the one to really spark my interest. But this was prior to eBay. I couldn't see the film of Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera for a year. So, I kind of had the ultimate build to books and documentaries, just teasing me, teasing me all the time. And when I eventually did watch a few documentaries, the one thing that they all had in common was the name Lon Chaney. I just thought I need to learn more about this character Lon Chaney, because he just found someone of superhuman proportions just who have done all of these crazy diverse characters. And, that's where London After Midnight eventually peeked out at me and, occupied a separate interest as all the Chaney characterizations do.John: So how did you get into the Universal films? Were you watching them on VHS? Were they on tv? Did the DVDs happen by then?Daniel: I was still in the VHS days. My dad is a real big fan of all this as well. So he first saw Bela Lugosi's Dracula, on TV when he was a kid. And prior to me being born he had amassed a huge VHS collection and a lot of those had Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Hull, Claude Rains, Vincent Price, what have you.And a lot of them were dedicated to Universal horrors. And as a young curious kid, my eyes eventually crossed these beautiful cases and I really wanted to watch them. I think my first one I ever watched was The Mummy's Tomb or Curse of the Mummy. And it's just grown ever since, really.John: You're starting at the lesser end of the Universal monsters. It's like someone's starting the Marx Brothers at The Big Store and going, "oh, these are great. I wonder if there's anything better?" Jim: Well, I kinda like the fact that you have come by this fascination, honestly, as my father would say. You sort of inherited the family business, if you will. The book is great. The book is just great. And I'll be honest, I had no, except for recording the novel that John wrote, I really had no frame of reference for London after Midnight.John: Well, Jim, were you a monster guy? Were you a Universal Monster kid?Jim: Oh yeah. I mean, I had all the models. I love all of that, and certainly knew about Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I knew he was the man with a thousand faces. I knew he, when he died, he wrote JR. on his makeup kit and gave it to his kid. So, I knew stuff. But London after Midnight I didn't know at all, except for the sort of iconic makeup and that image, which I was familiar with. What was the inspiration for you in terms of writing this book?Daniel: Like you say, I really had no immediate go-to reference for London after Midnight, away from one or two images in a book. Really clearly they were very impactful images of Chaney, skulking around the old haunted mansion with Edna Tichenor by his side with the lantern, the eyes, the teeth, the cloak, the top hat, the webs, everything. Pretty much everything that embodies a good atmospheric horror movie, but obviously we couldn't see it.So that is all its fangs had deepened itself into my bloodstream at that point, just like, why is it lost? Why can't I see it? And again, the term lost film was an alien concept to me at a young age. I've always been a very curious child. Anything that I don't know or understand that much, even things I do understand that well, I always have to try to find out more, 'cause I just can't accept that it's like a bookend process. It begins and then it ends. And that was the thing with London after Midnight. Everything I found in books or in little interviews, they were just all a bit too brief. And I just thought there has to be a deeper history here, as there are with many of the greatest movies of all time. But same with the movies that are more obscure. There is a full history there somewhere because, 'cause a film takes months to a year to complete.It was definitely a good challenge for me. When we first had our first home computer, it was one of those very few early subjects I was typing in like crazy to try to find out everything that I could. And, that all incubated in my little filing cabinet, which I was able to call upon years later.Some things which were redundant, some things which I had the only links to that I had printed off in advance quite, sensibly so, but then there were certain things that just had lots of question marks to me. Like, what year did the film perish? How did it perish? The people who saw the film originally?And unlike a lot of Chaney films, which have been covered in immense detail, London after Midnight, considering it's the most famous of all lost films, still for me, had major holes in it that I just, really wanted to know the answers to. A lot of those answers, eventually, I found, even people who knew and institutions that knew information to key events like famous MGM Fire, they were hard pressed to connect anything up, in regards to the film. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. I had all these amazing facts. However, none of them kind of made sense with each other.My favorite thing is researching and finding the outcomes to these things. So that's originally what spiraled me into the storm of crafting this, initial dissertation that I set myself, which eventually became so large. I had to do it as a book despite, I'd always wanted to do a book as a kid.When you see people that you idolize for some reason, you just want to write a book on them. Despite, there had been several books on Lon Chaney. But I just always knew from my childhood that I always wanted to contribute a printed volume either on Chaney or a particular film, and London after Midnight seemed to present the opportunity to me.I really just didn't want it to be a rehash of everything that we had seen before or read before in other accounts or in the Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, but just with a new cover. So, I thought I would only do a book if I could really contribute a fresh new perspective on the subject, which I hope hopefully did.John: Oh, you absolutely did. And this is an exhaustive book and a little exhausting. There's a ton of stuff in here. You mentioned Famous Monster of the Filmland, which is where I first saw that image. There's at least one cover of the magazine that used that image. And Forrest Ackerman had some good photos and would use them whenever he could and also would compare them to Mark the Vampire, the remake, partially because I think Carol Borland was still alive and he could interview her. And he talked about that remake quite a bit. But that iconic image that he put on the cover and whenever he could in the magazine-- Jim and I were talking before you came on, Daniel, about in my mind when you think of Lon Chaney, there's three images that come to mind: Phantom of the Opera, Quasimoto, and this one. And I think this one, the Man in the Beaver hat probably is the most iconic of his makeups, because, 'cause it is, it's somehow it got adopted into the culture as this is what you go to when it's a creepy guy walking around. And that's the one that everyone remembers. Do you have any idea, specifically what his process was for making that look, because it, it is I think ultimately a fairly simple design. It's just really clever.Daniel: Yes, it probably does fall into the category of his more simplistic makeups. But, again, Chaney did a lot of things simplistic-- today --were never seen back then in say, 1927. Particularly in the Phantom of the Opera's case in 1925, in which a lot of that makeup today would be done through CG, in terms of trying to eliminate the nose or to make your lips move to express dialogue. Chaney was very fortunate to have lived in the pantomime era, where he didn't have to rely on how his voice would sound, trying to talk through those dentures, in which case the makeup would probably have to have been more tamed to allow audio recorded dialogue to properly come through.But with regards to the beaver hat makeup, he had thin wires that fitted around his eyes to give it a more hypnotic stare. The teeth, which he had constructed by a personal dentist, eventually had a wire attached to the very top that held the corners of his mouth, opening to a nice curved, fixated, almost joker like grin.You can imagine with the monocles around his eyes, he was thankful there probably wasn't that much wind on a closed set, because he probably couldn't have closed his eyes that many times. But a lot of these things become spoken about and detailed over time with mythic status. That he had to have his eyes operated on to achieve the constant widening of his eyelids. Or the teeth -- he could only wear the teeth for certain periods of time before accidentally biting his tongue or his lips, et cetera. But Chaney certainly wasn't a sadist, with himself, with his makeups. He was very professional. Although he did go through undoubtedly a lot of discomfort, especially probably the most, explicit case would be for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which his whole body is crooked down into a stooped position.But, with London After Midnight, I do highly suspect that the inspiration for that makeup in general came from the Dracula novel. And because MGM had not acquired the rights to the Dracula novel, unlike how Universal acquired the rights of the Hunchback or, more importantly, Phantom of the Opera, by which point Gaston Leroux was still alive.It was just a loose adaptation of Dracula. But nevertheless, when you read the description of Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel, he does bear a similarity to Chaney's vampire, in which it's the long hair, a mouth full of sharp teeth, a ghastly pale palor and just dressed all in black and carries around a lantern.Whereas Bela Lugosi takes extraordinary leaps and turns away from the Stoker novel. But it must have definitely had an impact at the time, enough for MGM to over-market the image of Chaney's vampire, which only appears in the film for probably just under four minutes, compared to his detective disguise, which is the real main character of the film.Although the thing we all wanna see is Cheney moving about as the vampire and what facial expressions he pulled. It's just something that we just want to see because it's Lon Chaney.John: Right. And it makes you wonder if he had lived and had gotten to play Dracula, he kind of boxed himself into a corner, then if he'd already used the look from the book, you wonder what he would've come up with, if Lugosi hadn't done it, and if Chaney had had been our first Dracula.Jim: You know, the other thing that I think of strictly like through my actor filter is here's a guy who -- take Hunchback or Phantom or even this thing -- whatever process he went through to put that makeup on, you know, was hours of work, I'm sure. Hunchback several hours of work to get to that, that he did himself, and then they'd film all day.So, on top of, I mean, I just think that that's like, wow, when you think about today where somebody might go into a makeup chair and have two or three people working on them to get the look they want. Even if it took a few hours, that person is just sitting there getting the makeup done. He's doing all of this, and then turns in a full day, uh, in front of the cameras, which to me is like, wow, that's incredible.Daniel: Definitely, it's like two jobs in one. I imagine for an actor it must be really grueling in adapting to a makeup, especially if it's a heavy makeup where it covers the whole of your head or crushes down your nose, changes your lips, the fumes of chemicals going into your eyes.But then by the end of it, I imagine you are quite exhausted from just your head adapting to that. But then you have to go out and act as well. With Chaney, I suppose he could be more of a perfectionist than take as much time as he wanted within reason. And then once he came to the grueling end of it all, he's actually gotta go out and act countless takes. Probably repair a lot of the makeup as well after, after a couple of takes, certainly with things like the Hunchback or the Phantom of the Opera.John: And, you know, it's not only is he doing the makeup and acting, but in, you know, not so much in London After Midnight, but in Phantom of the Opera, he is quite athletic. When the phantom moves, he really moves. He's not stooped. He's got a lot of energy to him and he's got a makeup on that, unlike the Quasimoto makeup, what he's attempting to do with the phantom is, reductive. He's trying to take things away from his face.Daniel: Mm-hmm.John: And he's using all the tricks he knows and lighting to make that happen, but that means he's gotta hit particular marks for the light to hit it just right. And for you to see that his face is as, you know, skull-like as he made it. When you see him, you know, in London After Midnight as the professor inspector character, he has got a normal full man's face. It's a real face. Much like his son, he had a kind of a full face and what he was able to do with a phantom and take all that away, and be as physical as he was, is just phenomenal. I mean, he was a really, besides the makeup, he was a really good actor.Daniel: Oh, definitely. Jim: I agree with that completely. I kind of in what I watched, I wonder if he was the makeup artist, but not the actor and he did exactly the same makeup on somebody else. And so we had the same image. If those things would've resonated with us the way they do today. I think it had everything to do with who he was and his abilities in addition to the incredible makeup. He was just a tremendous performer.Daniel: Absolutely. He was a true multitasker. In his early days of theater, he was not only an actor, but he was a choreographer. He had a lot of jobs behind the scenes as well. Even when he had become a star in his own time, he would still help actors find the character within them. like Norma Sheera, et cetera. People who were kind of new to the movie making scene and the directors didn't really have that much patience with young actors or actresses. Whereas Chaney, because of his clout in the industry, no one really interfered with Chaney's authority on set. But he would really help actors find the character, find the emotion, 'cause it was just all about how well you translate it over for the audience, as opposed to the actor feeling a certain way that convinces themselves that they're the character. Chaney always tried to get the emotions across to the audience. Patsy Ruth Miller, who played Esemerelda in in the Hunchback, said that Chaney directed the film more than the director actually did.The director was actually even suggested by Chaney. So, Chaney really had his hands everywhere in the making of a film. And Patsy Ruth Miller said the thing that she learned from him was that it's the actress's job to make the audience feel how the character's meant to be feeling, and not necessarily the actor to feel what they should be feeling based on the script and the settings and everything.So I think, that's why Chaney in particular stands out, among all of the actors of his time.John: I think he would've transitioned really well into sound. I think, he had everything necessary to make that transition.Jim: There's one sound picture with him in it, isn't there, doesn't he? Doesn't he play a ventriloquist? John: I believe so.Daniel: Yes, it was a remake of The Unholy Three that he had made in 1925 as Echo the ventriloquist, and the gangster. And yes, by the time MGM had decided to pursue talkies -- also, funny enough, they were one of the last studios to transition to, just because they were the most, one, probably the most dominant studio in all of Hollywood, that they didn't feel the pressure to compete with the burgeoning talkie revolution.So they could afford to take their time, they could release a talkie, but then they could release several silent films and the revenue would still be amazing for the studio. Whereas other studios probably had to conform really quick just because they didn't have the star system, that MGM shamelessly flaunted. And several Chaney films had been transitioned to sound at this point with or without Chaney. But for Chaney himself, because he himself was the special effect, it was guaranteed to be a winner even if it had been an original story that isn't as remembered today strictly because people get to hear the thing that's been denied them for all this time, which is Chaney's voice. And he would've transitioned very easily to talkies is because he had a very rich, deep voice, which, coming from theater, he had to have had, in terms of doing dialogue. He wasn't someone like a lot of younger actors who had started out predominantly in feature films who could only pantomime lines. Chaney actually knew how to deliver dialogue, so it did feel natural and it didn't feel read off the page.And he does about five voices in The Unholy Three. So MGM was truly trying to market, his voice for everything that they could. As Mrs. O'Grady, his natural voice, he imitates a parrot and a girl. And yeah, he really would've flourished in the sound era. Jim: Yeah. John: Any surprises, as it sounds like you were researching this for virtually your whole life, but were there any surprises that you came across, as you really dug in about the film?Daniel: With regards to London after Midnight, the main surprise was undoubtedly the -- probably the star chapter of the whole thing -- which is the nitrate frames from an actual destroyed print of the film itself, which sounds crazy to even being able to say it. But, yeah the nitrate frames themselves presented a quandary of questions that just sent me into a whole nother research mode trying to find out where these impossible images came from, who they belonged to, why they even existed, why they specifically existed.Because, looking for something that, you know, you are told doesn't exist. And then to find it, you kind of think someone is watching over you, planting this stuff as though it's the ultimate tease. To find a foreign movie poster for London After Midnight would be one thing, but to find actual pieces of the lost film itself. It was certainly the most out of body experience I've ever had. Just to find something that I set out to find, but then you find it and you still can't believe that you've actually found it.John: How did you find it?Daniel: I had connections with a few foreign archives who would befriend me and took to my enthusiasm with the silent era, and specifically Chaney and all the stars connected to Chaney films.And, quite early on I was told that there were a few photo albums that had various snippets of silent films from Chaney. They didn't really go into what titles these were, 'cause they were just all a jumble. All I knew is that they came from (garbled) widow. And he had acquired prints of the whole films from various, I suppose, junk stores in Spain.But not being a projectionist, he just purely took them at the face value that he just taken the images and snipping them up and putting them in photo albums, like how you would just do with photographs. And then the rest of the material was sadly discarded by fire. So, all we were left with were these snipped relics, survivors almost to several Chaney lost films. Some of them not lost, but there were films like The Phantom of the Opera in there, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mockery, The Unknown. But then there were several lost films such as London After Midnight, the Big City, Thunder. And All the Brothers were Valiant, which are mainly other than Thunder are all totally complete lost films.So, to find this little treasure trove, it was just finding out what the images meant and connecting them up, trying to put them in some sort of chronological scholarly order. Grueling, but it was very fun at the same time. And because I had identified myself with all of these surviving production stills from the film -- a lot of them, which formed the basis of the 2002 reconstruction by Turner Classic Movies -- it didn't take me too long to identify what scenes these surviving nitrate frames were from. But there were several frames which had sets that I recognized and costumes that I recognized, but in the photographic stills, they don't occupy the same space at the same time. So, it's like the two separate elements had crossed over. So that left me with a scholarly, question of what I was looking at. I was able to go back and, sort of rectify certain wrongs that have been accepted throughout the sixties as being the original, say, opening to London after Midnight. So I've, been able to disprove a few things that have made the film, I suppose, a bit more puzzling to audiences. Some audiences didn't really get what the plot was to begin with. So, it was nice to actually put a bit more order to the madness finally.John: At what point did you come across the original treatment and the script?Daniel: The treatment and the script, they came from a private collector who had bought them at auction a number of years ago who I was able to thankfully contact, and they still had the two documents in question. I had learned through Philip J Riley's previous books on London after Midnight that he had the two latter drafts of the script, the second edition and the third draft edition.And, again, the question of why and where. I just always wondered where that first draft of the script was, hoping it would contain new scenes, and open new questions for me and to study. And once I've managed to find those two documents, they did present a lot of new, perspectives and material that added to the fuller plot of the original hypnotist scenario, as opposed to the shortened, time efficient London After Midnight film that was ultimately delivered to audiences. So again, it helped to put a little bit more order to the madness.Jim: You found an actual piece of the film that you were able to, somebody got images from it? And then you found the scripts? But the images are terrific and they're all in your book. They came from what exactly?Daniel: The just below 20 images of the film came from originally a distribution print, a Spanish distribution print, from about 1928. Originally, they were on 35 millimeter indicating that they were from the studio and as is with a lot of silent films that have been found in foreign archives.Normally when a film is done with its distribution, it would have to be returned to the original studio to be destroyed, except for the original negative and a studio print, because there is no reason why a studio would need to keep the thousands of prints when they have the pristine copy in their vault. But, in a lot of smaller theater cases, in order to save money on the postage of the shipping, they would just basically declare that they had destroyed the film on the studio's behalf. There was no record system with this stuff and that's how a lot of these films ended up in the basements of old theaters, which are eventually when they closed, the assets were sold off to collectors or traveling showmen. And eventually these films found their ways into archives or again, private collections. Some of which people know what they have.A lot of times they don't know what they have because they're more obsessed with, naturally, more dedicated to preserving the films of their own culture that was shown at the time, as opposed to a foreign American title, which they probably assume they already have a copy of. But it's how a lot of these films get found.And, with the London After Midnight, example, there were the images that I found spanned the entire seven reels, because they came from different points in the film. It wasn't a single strip of film, of a particular scene. Having thankfully the main source that we have for London After Midnight is the cutting continuity, which is the actual film edited down shot for shot, length for length.And it describes, briefly, although descriptive enough, what is actually in each and every single shot of the film. And comparing the single frame images from the film with this document, I was able to identify at what point these frames came from during the film, which again spanned the entire seven reels, indicating that a complete seven reel version of the film had gotten out under the studio system at one point.As is the case, I'm assuming, 'cause these came from the same collection, I'm assuming it was the same with the other lost Chaney films that again, sadly only survive in snippet form.John: It's like somebody was a collector and his wife said, "well, we don't have room for all this. Just take the frames you like and we'll get rid of the rest of it." So, you mentioned in passing the 2002 reconstruction that Turner Classic Movies did using the existing stills. I don't know if they were working from any of the scripts or not. That was the version I originally saw when I was working on writing, those portions of The Misers Dream that mentioned London After Midnight. Based on what you know now, how close is that reconstruction and where do you think they got it right and where'd they get it wrong?Daniel: The 2002, reconstruction, while a very commendable production, it does stray from the original edited film script. Again, the problem that they clearly faced on that production is that there were not enough photographed scenes to convey all the photographed scenes from the film. So what they eventually fell into the trap of doing was having to reuse the same photograph to sometimes convey two separate scenes, sometimes flipping the image to appear on the opposite side of the camera. And, because of the certain lack of stills in certain scenes cases, they had to rewrite them.And sometimes a visual scene had to have been replaced with an inter-title card, merely describing what had happened or describing a certain period in time, as opposed to showing a photograph of what we're meant to be seeing as opposed to just reading. So, they did the best with what they had.But since then, there have been several more images crop up in private collections or in the archives. So, unless a version of the film gets found, it's certainly an endeavor that could be revisited, I think, and either do a new visual reconstruction of sort, or attempt some sort remake of the film even.Jim: That's an idea. John: They certainly have the materials to do that. I've got an odd question. There's one famous image, a still image from the film, showing Chaney as Professor Burke, and he is reaching out to the man in the beaver hat whose back is to us. Is that a promo photo? Spoiler alert, Burke is playing the vampire in the movie. He admits that that's him. So, he never would've met the character. What is the story behind that photo?Daniel: There are actually three photographs depicting that, those characters that you described. There are the two photographs which show Chaney in the Balfor mansion seemingly directing a cloaked, top hatted figure with long hair, with its back towards us. And then there is another photograph of Chaney in the man in the beaver hat disguise with a seemingly twin right beside him outside of a door.Basically the scenes in the film in which Chaney appear to the Hamlin residents, the people who are being preyed upon by the alleged vampires, the scenes where Chaney and the vampire need to coexist in the same space or either appear to be in the same vicinity to affect other characters while at the same time interrogating others, Chaney's character of Burke employs a series of assistants to either dress up as vampires or at certain times dress up as his version of the vampire to parade around and pretend that they are the man in the beaver hat. Those particular shots, though, the vampire was always, photographed from behind rather than the front.The very famous scene, which was the scene that got first got me interested in London After Midnight, in which the maidm played by Polly Moran is in the chair shrieking at Chaney's winged self, hovering over her. It was unfortunate to me to realize that that was actually a flashback scene told from the maid's perspective.And by the end of the film, the maid is revealed to be an informant of Burke, a secret detective also. So, it's really a strong suspension of disbelief has to be employed because the whole scene of Chaney chasing the maid through the house and appearing under the door, that was clearly just the MGMs marketing at work just to show Chaney off in a bizarre makeup with a fantastic costume.Whereas he is predominantly the detective and the scenes where he's not needed to hypnotize a character in the full vampire makeup, he just employs an assistant who parades around in the house as him, all the times with his back turned so that the audience can't latch on as to who the character actually is, 'cause it must have posed quite a fun confusion that how can Chaney be a detective in this room where the maid has just ran from the Vampire, which is also Chaney?John: Yeah, and it doesn't help that the plot is fairly convoluted anyway, and then you add that layer. So, do you think we'll ever see a copy of it? Do you think it's in a basement somewhere?Daniel: I've always personally believed that the film does exist. Not personally out of just an unfounded fanboy wish, but just based on the evidence and examples of other films that have been found throughout time. Metropolis being probably the most prominent case. But, at one point there was nothing on London After Midnight and now there is just short of 20 frames for the film. So, if that can exist currently now in the year 2023, what makes us think that more footage can't be found by, say, 2030? I think with fans, there's such a high expectation that if it's not found in their own lifetime or in their own convenience space of time, it must not exist. There's still a lot of silent lost treasures that just have not been found at all that do exist though. So, with London After Midnight, from a purely realistic standpoint, I've always theorized myself that the film probably does exist in an archive somewhere, but it would probably be a very abridged, foreign condensed version, as opposed to a pristine 35-millimeter print that someone had ripped to safety stock because they knew in the future the film would become the most coveted of all lost films. So, I do believe it does exist. The whole theory of it existing in a private collection and someone's waiting to claim the newfound copyright on it, I think after December of last year, I think it's finally put that theory to rest. I don't think a collector consciously knows they have a copy of it. So, I think it's lost until found personally, but probably within an archive.Jim: Lost until found. That's a great title for a book. I like that a lot. What do you think of the remake, Mark of the Vampire and in your opinion, what does it tell us about, London After Midnight?Daniel: Well, Mark of the Vampire came about again, part of the Sound Revolution. It was one of those because it was Chaney and Todd Browning's most successful film for the studio. And Browning was currently, being held on a tight leash by MGM because of his shocking disaster film Freaks, I suppose they were a little bit nervous about giving him the reign to do what he wanted again. So, looking through their backlog of smash silent hits, London After Midnight seemed the most logical choice to remake, just simply because it was their most, successful collaboration. Had it have been The Unholy Three, I'm sure? Oh no, we already had The Unholy Three, but had it have been another Browning Chaney collaboration, it might have been The Unknown, otherwise. So, I suppose that's why London After Midnight was selected and eventually turned into Mark of the Vampire. The story does not stray too much from London After Midnight, although they seem to complicate it a little bit more by taking the Burke vampire character and turning it this time into three characters played by three different actors, all of which happened to be in cahoots with one another in trying to solve an old murder mystery.It's very atmospherical. You can definitely tell it's got Todd Browning signature on it. It's more pondering with this one why they just did not opt to make a legit, supernatural film, rather than go in the pseudo vampire arena that they pursued in 1927. Where audiences had by now become accustomed to the supernatural with Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, which no longer relied on a detective trying to find out a certain mystery and has to disguise themselves as a monster.The monster was actually now a real thing in the movies. So I think if Bela Lugosi had been given the chance to have played a real Count Mora as a real vampire, I think it would've been slightly better received as opposed to a dated approach that was clearly now not the fashionable thing to do.I suppose again, because Browning was treading a very thin line with MGM, I suppose he couldn't really stray too far from the original source material. But I find it a very atmospherical film, although I think the story works better as a silent film than it does as a sound film, because there's a lot of silent scenes in that film, away from owls, hooting and armadillos scurrying about and winds. But I do think, based on things like The Cat and The Canary from 1927 and The Last Warning, I just think that detective sleuth with horror overtones serves better to the silent world than it does the sound world away from the legit, supernatural.John: So, if Chaney hadn't died, do you think he would have played Dracula? Do you think he would've been in Freaks? Would Freaks have been more normalized because it had a big name in it like that?Daniel: It would've been interesting if Chaney had played in Freaks. I think because Todd Browning used the kinds of individuals that he used for Freaks, maybe Chaney would've, for a change, had been the most outta place.John: Mm-hmm.Daniel: I do think he might have played Dracula. I think Universal would've had a hell of a time trying to get him over because he had just signed a new contract with MGM, whereas Todd Browning had transferred over to Universal by 1930 and really wanted to make Dracula for many years and probably discussed it with Chaney as far back as 1920.But certainly MGM would not have permitted Chaney to have gone over to Universal, even for a temporary period, without probably demanding a large piece of the action, in a financial sense, because Universal had acquired the rights to Dracula at this point. And, based on the stage play that had, come out on Broadway, it was probably assured that it was going to be a giant moneymaker, based on the success of the Dracula play.But because of Cheney's, status as a, I suppose retrospectively now, as a horror actor, he was probably the first person to be considered for that role by Carl Laemmle, senior and Junior for that matter. And Chaney gone by 1930, it did pose a puzzle as to who could take over these kinds of roles.Chaney was probably the only one to really successfully do it and make the monster an actual box office ingredient more than any other actor at that time, as he did with. Phantom, Blind Bargain and London After Midnight. So, I think to have pursued Chaney for a legit, supernatural film would've had enormous possibilities for Browning and Chaney himself.You can kind of see a trend, a trilogy forming, with Browning, from London After Midnight, in which he incorporates things he used in Dracula in London After Midnight. So, he kind of had this imagery quite early on. So, to go from – despite it's not in that order -- but to have London After Midnight, Mark of the Vampire, and he also did Dracula, he clearly was obsessed with the story. And I think Chaney was probably the, best actor for someone like Browning who complimented his way of thinking and approach to things like silence. As opposed to needing dialogue all the time, loud commotions. So, I think they dovetailed each other quite well, and that's why their ten year director actor relationship was as groundbreaking as it was.Jim: If the film does surface, if we find the film, what do you think people, how are they gonna react to the movie when they see it? What do you think? What's gonna be the reaction if it does surface?Daniel: Well, the lure of London After Midnight, the power in the film is its lost status rather than its widespread availability. I think it could never live up to the expectation that we've built up in our heads over the past 40 to 60 years. It was truly people, fans like Forrest J Ackerman that introduced and reignited the interest in Chaney's career by the late fifties and 1960s. That's when London After Midnight started to make the rounds in rumor, the rumors of a potential print existing, despite the film had not long been destroyed at that point. So, it was always a big mystery. There were always people who wanted to see the film, but with no access to home video, or et cetera, the only way you could probably see the film would've been at the studio who held everything. And, by the time the TV was coming out, a lot of silent films didn't make it to TV. So again, it has just germinated in people's heads probably in a better form than what they actually remembered. But, the true reality of London After Midnight is one more closer to the ground than it is in it's people are probably expecting to see something very supernatural on par with Dracula, whereas it's more so a Sherlock Holmes story with mild horrorish overtones to it that you can kind of see better examples of later on in Dracula in 1930 and in Mark of the Vampire.It's a film purely, I think for Lon Chaney fans. For myself, having read everything I can on the film, everything I've seen on the film, I personally love silent, detective stories, all with a touch of horror. So, I personally would know what I am going in to see. I'm not going in to see Chaney battling a Van Helsing like figure and turn to dust at the very end or turning to a bat. I'm going to see a detective melodrama that happens to have what looks like a vampire. So, it certainly couldn't live up to the expectations in people's minds and it's probably the only film to have had the greatest cheapest, marketing in history, I would think. It's one of those films, if it was discovered, you really would not have to do much marketing to promote it.It's one of those that in every fanzine, magazine, documentary referenced in pop. It has really marketed itself into becoming what I always call the mascot of the genre. There are other more important lost films that have been lost to us. The main one again, which has been found in its more complete form, was Metropolis, which is a better movie.But unlike Metropolis, London After Midnight has a lot more famous ingredients to it. It has a very famous director. It has a very famous actor whose process was legendary even during then. And it's actually the only film in which he actually has his make-up case make a cameo appearance by the very end. And it goes on the thing that everyone in every culture loves, which is the vampirism, the dark tales and folklore. So, when you say it, it just gets your imagination going. Whereas I think if you are watching it, it's probably you'll be looking over the projector to see if something even better is going to happen.The film had its mixed reactions when it originally came out. People liked it because it gave them that cheap thrill of being a very atmospherical, haunted house with the creepy figures of Chaney walking across those dusty hallways. But then the more important story is a murder mystery.It's not Dracula, but it has its own things going for it. I always kind of harken it back to the search for the Lochness Monster or Bigfoot. It has more power in your mind than it does in an aquarium or in a zoo. Hearing someone say that they think they saw something moving around in Lochness, but there's no photographic evidence, you just have the oral story, that is much more tangible in a way than actually seeing it in an aquarium where you can take it for granted. And it's the same with London After Midnight, and I think that's why a lot of hoaxster and pranksters tend to say that they have seen London After Midnight more than any other lost film.Jim: For a film that I would say the majority of the world does not have any frame of reference, and I'm using myself as the sort of blueprint for that, no frame of reference for this film. That image is iconic in a way that has been, I mean, it at first glance could be Jack the Ripper. I was talking to John before we started the podcast, once I locked in on that image, then I started to think, oh, the ghosts in Disney's Haunted Mansion, there's a couple of ghosts that have elements of that. I mean, it was so perfectly done, even though we don't, I bet you nine out ten people don't know the title London After Midnight, but I bet you seven outta ten people know this image.Daniel: Definitely, it has certainly made its mark on pop culture, again, I think because I think it's such a beautiful, simplistic design. Everything from the simplistically [garbled] to the bulging eyes and the very nice top hat as well, which is in itself today considered a very odd accessory for a grotesque, vampire character.But it's one of those things that has really carried over. It's influenced what the movies and artists. It was one of the influences for the Babadook creation for that particular monster. It was an influence on the Black Phone. It's just a perfect frame of reference for movie makers and sculptors and artists to keep taking from.John: Yep. It's, it'll live long beyond us. Daniel, one last question. I read somewhere or heard somewhere. You're next gonna tackle James Whale, is that correct? Daniel: James Whale is a subject, again, coming from, I happen to come from the exact same town that he was born and raised in, in Dudley, England. So, it's always been a subject close to home for me, which is quite convenient because I love his movies. So, I'm hoping to eventually, hopefully plan a documentary feature on him, based on a lot of family material in the surrounding areas that I was able to hunt down, and forgotten histories about him and just put it together in some form, hopefully in the future.John: That would be fantastic, and we'll have you back at that point.Jim: So, let's pretend for a minute that the audience is me, and they'd have absolutely no idea who James Whale is or what he's done. Just for a minute, let's pretend.John: Pretend that you don't know that?Jim: Yeah.Daniel: James Whale is the most known for his work for directing Frankenstein with Boris Karloff in 1931. But he also directed probably some of the most important horror films that have ever existed in the history of motion pictures. The Old Dark House, which can be cited with its very atmospherical, and black comedy tones, The Invisible Man with Claude Rains and Gloria Stewart in 1933. And, the most important one, which is probably the grand jewel in the whole of the Universal Monsters Empire, which is Bride of Frankenstein in 1935, which is the ultimate, example of everything that he had studied, everything that he'd learned with regards to cinema and comedy, life and death, and just making a very delicious cocktail of a movie in all of its black comedy, horrific, forms that we're still asking questions about today. One of his first films that he did was for Howard Hughes Hell's Angels, in which -- because he'd coming over from theater -- when again, films in America were taken off with the sound revolution. They all of a sudden needed British directors to translate English dialogue better than the actors could convey.So, James Whale was one of many to be taken over to America when he had a hit play called Journeys End, which became the most successful war play at that point. And he did his own film adaptation of Journeys End. He also did a really remarkable film called Showboat, which is another very iconic film.And again, someone with James Whale's horror credentials, you just think, how could someone who directed Frankenstein directed Showboat? But, clearly a very, very talented director who clearly could not be pigeonholed at the time as a strictly horror director, despite it is the horror films in which he is remembered for, understandably so, just because they contain his very individualistic wit and humor and his outlooks on life and politics. And being an openly gay director at the time, he really was a force unto himself. He was a very modern man even then.

John Wynkoop, Cloud Economist & Platypus Herder at The Duckbill Group, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss why he decided to make a career move and become an AWS billing consultant. Corey and John discuss how once you're deeply familiar with one cloud provider, those skills become transferable to other cloud providers as well. John also shares the trends he has seen post-pandemic in the world of cloud, including the increased adoption of a multi-cloud strategy and the need for costs control even for VC-funded start-ups. About JohnWith over 25 years in IT, John's done almost every job in the industry, from running cable and answering helpdesk calls to leading engineering teams and advising the C-suite. Before joining The Duckbill Group, he worked across multiple industries including private sector, higher education, and national defense. Most recently he helped IGNW, an industry leading systems integration partner, get acquired by industry powerhouse CDW. When he's not helping customers spend smarter on their cloud bill, you can find him enjoying time with his family in the beautiful Smoky Mountains near his home in Knoxville, TN.Links Referenced: The Duckbill Group: https://duckbillgroup.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlwynkoop/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. And the times, they are changing. My guest today is John Wynkoop. John, how are you?John: Hey, Corey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.Corey: So, big changes are afoot for you. You've taken a new job recently. What are you doing now?John: Well [laugh], so I'm happy to say I have joined The Duckbill Group as a cloud economist. So, came out of the big company world, and have dived back in—or dove back into the startup world.Corey: It's interesting because when we talk to those big companies, they always identify us as oh, you're a startup, which is hilarious on some level because our AWS account hangs out in AWS's startup group, but if you look at the spend being remarkably level from month to month to month to year to year to year, they almost certainly view us as they're a startup, but they suck at it. They completely failed. And so, many of the email stuff that you get from them presupposes that you're venture-backed, that you're trying to conquer the entire world. We don't do that here. We have this old-timey business model that our forebears would have understood of, we make more money than we spend every month and we continue that trend for a long time. So first, thanks for joining us, both on the show and at the company. We like having you around.John: Well, thanks. And yeah, I guess that's—maybe a startup isn't the right word to describe what we do here at The Duckbill Group, but as you said, it seems to fit into the industry classification. But that was one of the things I actually really liked about the—that was appealing about joining the team was, we do spend less than we make and we're not after hyper-growth and we're not trying to consume everything.Corey: So, it's interesting when you put a job description out into the world and you see who applies—and let's be clear, for those who are unaware, job descriptions are inherently aspirational shopping lists. If you look at a job description and you check every box on the thing and you've done all the things they want, the odds are terrific you're going to be bored out of your mind when you wind up showing up to do these… whatever that job is. You should be learning stuff and growing. At least that's always been my philosophy to it. One of the interesting things about you is that you checked an awful lot of boxes, but there is one that I think would cause people to raise an eyebrow, which is, you're relatively new to the fun world of AWS.John: Yeah. So, obviously I, you know, have been around the block a few times when it comes to cloud. I've used AWS, built some things in AWS, but I wouldn't have classified myself as an AWS guru by any stretch of the imagination. I spent the last probably three years working in Google Cloud, helping customers build and deploy solutions there, but I do at least understand the fundamentals of cloud, and more importantly—at least for our customers—cloud costs because at the end of the day, they're not all that different.Corey: I do want to call out that you have a certain humility to you which I find endearing. But you're not allowed to do that here; I will sing your praises for you. Before they deprecated it like they do almost everything else, you were one of the relatively few Google Cloud Certified Fellows, which was sort of like their Heroes program only, you know, they killed it in favor of something else like there's a Champion program or whatnot. You are very deep in the world of both Kubernetes and Google Cloud.John: Yeah. So, there was a few of us that were invited to come out and help Google pilot that program in, I believe it was 2019, and give feedback to help them build the Cloud Fellows Program. And thankfully, I was selected based on some of our early experience with Anthos, and specifically, it was around Certified Fellow in what they call hybrid multi-cloud, so it was experience around Anthos. Or at the time, they hadn't called it Anthos; they were calling it CSP or Cloud Services Platform because that's not an overloaded acronym. So yeah, definitely, was very humbled to be part of that early on.I think the program, as you said, grew to about 70 or so maybe 100 certified individuals before they transitioned—not killed—transitioned to that program into the Cloud Champions program. So, those folks are all still around, myself included. They've just now changed the moniker. But we all get to use the old title still as well, so that's kind of cool.Corey: I have to ask, what would possess you to go from being one of the best in the world at using Google Cloud over here to our corner of the AWS universe? Because the inverse, if I were to somehow get ejected from here—which would be a neat trick, but I'm sure it's theoretically possible—like, “What am I going to do now?” I would almost certainly wind up doing something in the AWS ecosystem, just due to inertia, if nothing else. You clearly didn't see things quite that way. Why make the switch?John: Well, a couple of different reasons. So, being at a Google partner presents a lot of challenges and one of the things that was supremely interesting about coming to Duckbill is that we're independent. So, we're not an AWS partner. We are an independent company that is beholden only to our customers. And there isn't anything like that in the Google ecosystem today.There's, you know, there's Google partners and then there's Google customers and then there's Google. So, that was part of the appeal. And the other thing was, I enjoy learning new things, and honestly, learning, you know, into the depths of AWS cost hell is interesting. There's a lot to learn there and there's a lot of things that we can extract and use to help customers spend less. So, that to me was super interesting.And then also, I want to help build an organization. So, you know, I think what we're doing here at The Duckbill Group is cool and I think that there's an opportunity to grow our services portfolio, and so I'm excited to work with the leadership team to see what else we can bring to market that's going to help our customers, you know, not just with cost optimization, not just with contract negotiation, but you know, through the lifecycle of their AWS… journey, I guess we'll call it.Corey: It's one of those things where I always have believed, on some level, that once you're deep in a particular cloud provider, if there's reason for it, you can rescale relatively quickly to a different provider. There are nuances—deep nuances—that differ from provider to provider, but the underlying concepts generally all work the same way. There's only so many ways you can have data go from point A to point B. There's only so many ways to spin up a bunch of VMs and whatnot. And you're proof-positive that theory was correct.You'd been here less than a week before I started learning nuances about AWS billing from you. I think it was something to do with the way that late fees are assessed when companies don't pay Amazon as quickly as Amazon desires. So, we're all learning new things constantly and no one stuffs this stuff all into their head. But that, if nothing else, definitely cemented that yeah, we've got the right person in the seat.John: Yeah, well, thanks. And certainly, the deeper you go on a specific cloud provider, things become fresh in your memory, you know, other cached so to speak. So, coming up to speed on AWS has been a little bit more documentation reading than it would have been, if I were, say, jumping right into a GCP engagement. But as he said, at the end of the day, there's a lot of similarities. Obviously understanding the nuances of, for example, account organization versus, you know, GCP's Project and Folders. Well, that's a substantial difference and so there's a lot of learning that has to happen.Thankfully, you know, all these companies, maybe with the exception of Oracle, have done a really good job of documenting all of the concepts in their publicly available documentation. And then obviously, having a team of experts here at The Duckbill Group to ask stupid questions of doesn't hurt. But definitely, it's not as hard to come up to speed as one may think, once you've got it understood in one provider.Corey: I took a look recently and was kind of surprised to discover that I've been doing this—as an independent consultant prior to the formation of The Duckbill Group—for seven years now. And it's weird, but I've gone through multiple industry cycles and changes as a part of this. And it feels like I haven't been doing it all that long, but I guess I have. One thing that's definitely changed is that it used to be that companies would basically pick one provider and almost everything would live there. At any reasonable point of scale, everyone is using multiple things.I see Google in effectively every client that we have. It used to be that going to Google Cloud Next was a great place to hang out with AWS customers. But these days, it's just as true to say that a great reason to go to re:Invent is to hang out with Google Cloud customers. Everyone uses everything, and that has become much more clear over the last few years. What have you seen change over the… I guess, since the start of the pandemic, just in terms of broad cycles?John: Yeah. So, I think there's a couple of different trends that we're seeing. Obviously, one is that as you said, especially as large enterprises make moves to the cloud, you see independent teams or divisions within a given organization leveraging… maybe not the right tool for the job because I think that there's a case to be made for swapping out a specific set of tools and having your team learn it, but we do see what I like to refer to as tool fetishism where you get a team that's super, super deep into BigQuery and they're not interested in moving to Redshift, or Snowflake, or a competitor. So, you see, those start to crop up within large organizations where the distributed—the purchasing power, rather—is distributed. So, that's one of the trends is the multi-cloud adoption.And I think the big trend that I like to emphasize around multi-cloud is, just because you can run it anywhere doesn't mean you should run it everywhere. So Kubernetes, as you know, right, as it took off 2019 timeframe, 2020, we started to see a lot of people using that as an excuse to try to run their production application in two, three public cloud providers and on-prem. And unless you're a SaaS customer—or SaaS company with customers in every cloud, there's very little reason to do that. But having that flexibility—that's the other one, is we've seen that AWS has gotten a little difficult to negotiate with, or maybe Google and Microsoft have gotten a little bit more aggressive. So obviously, having that flexibility and being able to move your workloads, that was another big trend.Corey: I'm seeing a change in things that I had taken as givens, back when I started. And that's part of the reason, incidentally, I write the Last Week in AWS newsletter because once you learn a thing, it is very easy not to keep current with that thing, and things that are not possible today will be possible tomorrow. How do you keep abreast of all of those changes? And the answer is to write a deeply sarcastic newsletter that gathers in everything from the world of AWS. But I don't recommend that for most people. One thing that I've seen in more prosaic terms that you have a bit of background in is that HPC on cloud was, five, six years ago, met with, “Oh, that's a good one; now pull the other one, it has bells on it,” into something that, these days, is extremely viable. How'd that happen?John: So, [sigh] I think that's just a—again, back to trends—I think that's just a trend that we're seeing from cloud providers and listening to their customers and continuing to improve the service. So, one of the reasons that HPC was—especially we'll call it capacity-level HPC or large HPC, right—you've always been able to run high throughput; the cloud is a high throughput machine, right? You can run a thousand disconnected VMs no problem, auto-scaling, anybody who runs a massive web front-end can attest to that. But what we saw with HPC—and we used to call those [grid 00:12:45] jobs, right, the small, decoupled computing jobs—but what we've seen is a huge increase in the quality of the underlying fabric—things like RDMA being made available, things like improved network locality, where you now have predictive latency between your nodes or between your VMs—and I think those, combined with the huge investment that companies like AWS have made in their file systems, the huge investment companies like Google have made in their data storage systems have made HPC viable, especially at a small-scale—for cloud-based HPC specifically—viable for organizations.And for a small engineering team, who's looking to run say, computer-aided engineering simulation or who's looking to prototype some new way of testing or doing some kind of simulation, it's a huge, huge improvement in speed because now they don't have to order a dozen or two dozen or five dozen nodes, have them shipped, rack them, stack them, cool them, power them, right? They can just spin up the resource in the cloud, test it out, try their simulation, try out the new—the software that they want, and then spin it all down if it doesn't work. So, that elasticity has also been huge. And again, I think the big—to kind of summarize, I think the big driver there is the improvement in this the service itself, right? We're seeing cloud providers taking that discipline a little bit more seriously.Corey: I still see that there are cases where the raw math doesn't necessarily add up for sustained, long-term use cases. But I also see increasingly that with HPC, that's usually not what the workload looks like. With, you know, the exception of we're going to spend the next 18 months training some new LLM thing, but even then the pricing is ridiculous. What is it their new P6 or whatever it is—P5—the instances that have those giant half-rack Nvidia cards that are $800,000 and so a year each if you were to just rent them straight out, and then people running fleets of these things, it's… wow that's more commas in that training job than I would have expected. But I can see just now the availability for driving some of that, but the economics of that once you can get them in your data center doesn't strike me as being particularly favoring the cloud.John: Yeah, there's a couple of different reasons. So, it's almost like an inverse curve, right? There's a crossover point or a breakeven point at which—you know, and you can make this argument with almost any level of infrastructure—if you can keep it sufficiently full, whether it's AI training, AI inference, or even traditional HPC if you can keep the machine or the group of machines sufficiently full, it's probably cheaper to buy it and put it in your facility. But if you don't have a facility or if you don't need to use it a hundred percent of the time, the dividends aren't always there, right? It's not always worth, you know, buying a $250,000 compute system, you know, like say, an Nvidia, as you—you know, like, a DGX, right, is a good example.The DGX H100, I think those are a couple $100,000. If you can't keep that thing full and you just need it for training jobs or for development and you have a small team of developers that are only going to use it six hours a day, it may make sense to spin that up in the cloud and pay for a fractional use, right? It's no different than what HPC has been doing for probably the past 50 years with national supercomputing centers, which is where my background came from before cloud, right? It's just a different model, right? One is public economies of, you know, insert your credit card and spend as much as you want and the other is grant-funded and supporting academic research, but the economy of scales is kind of the same on both fronts.Corey: I'm also seeing a trend that this is something that is sort of disturbing when you realize what I've been doing and how I've been going about things, that for the last couple of years, people actually started to care about the AWS bill. And I have to say, I felt like I was severely out of sync with a lot of the world the first few years because there's giant savings lurking in your AWS bill, and the company answer in many cases was, “We don't care. We'd rather focus our energies on shipping faster, building something new, expanding, capturing market.” And that is logical. But suddenly those chickens are coming home to roost in a big way. Our phone is ringing off the hook, as I'm sure you've noticed and your time here, and suddenly money means something again. What do you think drove it?John: So, I think there's a couple of driving factors. The first is obviously the broader economic conditions, you know, with the economic growth in the US, especially slowing down post-pandemic, we're seeing organizations looking for opportunities to spend less to be able to deliver—you know, recoup that money and deliver additional value. But beyond that, right—because, okay, but startups are probably still lighting giant piles of VC money on fire, and that's okay, but what's happening, I think, is that the first wave of CIOs that said cloud-first, cloud-only basically got their comeuppance. And, you know, these enterprises saw their explosive cloud bills and they saw that, oh, you know, we moved 5000 servers to AWS or GCP or Azure and we got the bill, and that's not sustainable. And so, we see a lot of cloud repatriation, cloud optimization, right, a lot of second-gen… cloud, I'll call them second-gen cloud-native CIOs coming into these large organizations where their predecessor made some bad financial decisions and either left or got asked to leave, and now they're trying to stop from lighting their giant piles of cash on fire, they're trying to stop spending 3X what they were spending on-prem.Corey: I think an easy mistake for folks to make is to get lost in the raw infrastructure cost. I'm not saying it's not important. Obviously not, but you could save a giant pile of money on your RDS instances by running your own database software on top of EC2, but I don't generally recommend folks do it because you also need engineering time to be focusing on getting those things up, care and feeding, et cetera. And what people lose sight of is the fact that the payroll expense is almost universally more than the cloud bill at every company I've ever talked to.So, there's a consistent series of, “Well, we're just trying to get to be the absolute lowest dollar figure total.” It's the wrong thing to emphasize on, otherwise, “Cool, turn everything off and your bill drops to zero.” Or, “Migrate to another cloud provider. AWS bill becomes zero. Our job is done.” It doesn't actually solve the problem at all. It's about what's right for the business, not about getting the absolute lowest possible score like it's some kind of code golf tournament.John: Right. So, I think that there's a couple of different ways to look at that. One is obviously looking at making your workloads more cloud-native. I know that's a stupid buzzword to some people, but—Corey: The problem I have with the term is that it means so many different things to different people.John: Right. But I think the gist of that is taking advantage of what the cloud is good at. And so, what we saw was that excess capacity on-prem was effectively free once you bought it, right? There were there was no accountability for burning through extra V CPUs or extra RAM. And then you had—Corey: Right. You spin something up in your data center and the question is, “Is the physical capacity there?” And very few companies had a reaping process until they were suddenly seeing capacity issues and suddenly everyone starts asking you a whole bunch of questions about it. But that was a natural forcing function that existed. Now, S3 has infinite storage, or it might as well. They can add capacity faster than you can fill it—I know this; I've tried—and the problem that you have then is that it's always just a couple more cents per gigabyte and it keeps on going forever. There's no, we need to make an investment decision because the SAN is at 80% capacity. Do you need all those 16 copies of the production data that you haven't touched since 2012? No, I probably don't.John: Yeah, there's definitely a forcing function when you're doing your own capacity planning. And the cloud, for the most part, as you've alluded to, for most organizations is infinite capacity. So, when they're looking at AWS or they're looking at any of the public cloud providers, it's a potentially infinite bill. Now, that scares a lot of organizations, and so because they didn't have the forcing function of, hey, we're out of CPUs, or we're out of hard disk space, or we're out of network ports, I think that because the cloud was a buzzword that a lot of shareholders and boards wanted to see in IT status reports and IT strategic plans, I think we grew a little bit further than we should have, from an enterprise perspective. And I think a lot of that's now being clawed back as organizations are maturing and looking to manage cost. Obviously, the huge growth of just the term FinOps from a search perspective over the last three years has cemented that, right? We're seeing a much more cost-conscious consumer—cloud consumer—than we saw three years ago.Corey: I think that the baseline level of understanding has also risen. It used to be that I would go into a client environment, prepared to deploy all kinds of radical stuff that these days look like context-aware architecture and things that would automatically turn down developer environments when developers were done for the day or whatnot. And I would discover that, oh, you haven't bought Reserved Instances in three years. Maybe start there with the easy thing. And now you don't see those, the big misconfigurations or the big oversights the way that you once did.People are getting better at this, which is a good thing. I'm certainly not having a problem with this. It means that we get to focus on things that are more architecturally nuanced, which I love. And I think that it forces us to continue innovating rather than just doing something that basically any random software stack could provide.John: Yeah, I think to your point, the easy wins are being exhausted or have been exhausted already, right? Very rarely do we walk into a customer and see that they haven't bought a, you know, Reserved Instance, or a Savings Plan. That's just not a thing. And the proliferation of software tools to help with those things, of course, in some cases, dubious proposition of, “We'll fix your cloud bill automatically for a small percentage of the savings,” that some of those software tools have, I think those have kind of run their course. And now you've got a smarter populace or smarter consumer and it does come into the more nuanced stuff, right.All right, do you really need to replicate data across AZs? Well, not if your workloads aren't stateful. Well, so some of the old things—and Kubernetes is a great example of this, right—the age old adage of, if I'm going to spin up an EKS cluster, I need to put it in three AZs, okay, why? That's going to cost you money [laugh], the cross-AZ traffic. And I know cross-AZ traffic is a simple one, but we still see that. We still see, “Well, I don't know why I put it across all three AZs.”And so, the service-to-service communication inside that cluster, the control plane traffic inside that cluster, is costing you money. Now, it might be minimal, but as you grow and as you scale your product or the services that you're providing internally, that may grow to a non-trivial sum of money.Corey: I think that there's a tipping point where an unbounded growth problem is always going to emerge as something that needs attention and needs to be focused on. But I should ask you this because you have a skill set that is, as you know, extremely in demand. You also have that rare gift that I wish wasn't as rare as it is where you can be thrown into the deep end knowing next to nothing about a particular technology stack, and in a remarkably short period of time, develop what can only be called subject matter expertise around it. I've seen you do this years past with Kubernetes, which is something I'm still trying to wrap my head around. You have a natural gift for it which meant that, from many respects, the world was your oyster. Why this? Why now?John: So, I think there's a couple of things that are unique at this thing, at this time point, right? So obviously, helping customers has always been something that's fun and exciting for me, right? Going to an organization and solving the same problem I've solved 20 different times, for example, spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, I guess I have a little bit of a little bit of squirrel syndrome, so to speak, and that gets—it gets boring. I'd rather just automate that or build some tooling and disseminate that to the customers and let them do that. So, the thing with cost management is, it's always a different problem.Yeah, we're solving fundamentally the same problem, which is, I'm spending too much, but it's always a different root cause, you know? In one customer, it could be data transfer fees. In another customer, it could be errant development growth where they're not controlling the spend on their development environments. In yet another customer, it could be excessive object storage growth. So, being able to hunt and look for those and play detective is really fun, and I think that's one of the things that drew me to this particular area.The other is just from a timing perspective, this is a problem a lot of organizations have, and I think it's underserved. I think that there are not enough companies—service providers, whatever—focusing on the hard problem of cost optimization. There's too many people who think it's a finance problem and not enough people who think it's an engineering problem. And so, I wanted to do work on a place where we think it's an engineering problem.Corey: It's been a very… long road. And I think that engineering problems and people problems are both fascinating to me, and the AWS bill is both. It's often misunderstood as a finance problem, and finance needs to be consulted absolutely, but they can't drive an optimization project, and they don't know what the context is behind an awful lot of decisions that get made. It really is breaking down bridges. But also, there's a lot of engineering in here, too. It scratches my itch in that direction, anyway.John: Yeah, it's one of the few business problems that I think touches multiple areas. As you said, it's obviously a people problem because we want to make sure that we are supporting and educating our staff. It's a process problem. Are we making costs visible to the organization? Are we making sure that there's proper chargeback and showback methodologies, et cetera? But it's also a technology problem. Did we build this thing to take advantage of the architecture or did we shoehorn it in a way that's going to cost us a small fortune? And I think it touches all three, which I think is unique.Corey: John, I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to in a given day, where's the best place for them to find you?John: Well, thanks, Corey, and thanks for having me. And, of course obviously, our website duckbillgroup.com is a great place to find out what we're working on, what we have coming. I also, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I know that's [laugh]—I'm not a huge Twitter guy, but I am pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can always drop me a follow on LinkedIn. And I'll try to post interesting and useful content there for our listeners.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:28:37], which in my case, is of course extremely self-aggrandizing. But that's all right. We're here to do self-promotion. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me, John. I appreciate it. Now, get back to work.John: [laugh]. All right, thanks, Corey. Have a good one.Corey: John Wynkoop, cloud economist at The Duckbill Group. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice while also taking pains to note how you're using multiple podcast platforms these days because that just seems to be the way the world went.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

We are here because of the "No Limits " people who were willing to take a risk. So, if you're thinking of taking a risk, go do it. Now onto more serious issues, like parents caring too much about their toddler's sport, breast milk "curing" everything, and the fact check that proves John RIGHT, instead of wrong.Topics Include: Intro (0:00)No limits people (4:40)Juneteenth debacle in Greenville (30:25)Jack Harlow (43:35)John was actually RIGHT (54:40)Breast milk (1:11:14)------WATCH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3j3mFrENaUJohn's NEW Comedy Special, "John Crist Would Like To Release A Statement"------THE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT TOUR: https://johncristcomedy.com/tour/6/30 Las Vegas, NV7/1 San Diego, CA7/2 Anaheim, CA7/21 Goshen, IN7/28 Hattiesburg, MS9/14 Oklahoma City, OK9/15 Tulsa, OK9/16 Wichita KS9/17 Springfield, MO9/21 Ottawa, ON9/22 Peterborough, ON9/23 London, ON9/29 Myrtle Beach, SC9/30 Roanoke, VA10/1 Greensboro, NC10/14 Atlanta, GA10/15 Birmingham, AL10/20 Cedar Rapids, IA10/21 Springfield, IL10/22 Evansville, IN-----Catch the full video podcast on YouTube, and follow us on social media (@netpositivepodcast) for clips, bonus content, and updates throughout the week.Email us at netpositive@johncristcomedy.comFOLLOW JOHN ON:InstagramTwitterTikTokFacebookYouTubeSUPPORT OUR SPONSORS:MANSCAPED: Get 20% OFF + free shipping with promo code NETPOSITIVE at manscaped.comAG1: Free 1-year supply of Vitamin D & 5 free travel packs. Go to drinkAG1.com/netpositivePRODUCED BY:Alex Lagos / Lagos Creative

John Mille, Principal Cloud Engineer at Sainsbury's UK joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how retail companies are using cloud services. John describes the lessons he's learned since joining the Sainsbury's UK team, including why it's important to share knowledge across your team if you don't want to be on call 24/7,  as well as why he doesn't subscribe to the idea that every developer needs access to production. Corey and John also discuss an open-source project John created called ECS Compose-X.About JohnJohn is an AWS Community Builder (devtools), Open Source enthusiast, SysAdmin born in the cloud, and has worked with AWS since his very first job. He enjoys writing code and creating projects. John likes to focus on automation & architecture that delivers business value, and has been dabbling with data & the wonderful world of Kafka for the past 3 years.Links Referenced: AWS Open-Source Roundup newsletter blog post about ECS Compose-X: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/automating-your-ecs-container-architecture-deployments-with-ecs-composex/ ECS Compose-X: https://docs.compose-x.io/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-mille/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohnPre32286850 TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: It's easy to **BEEP** up on AWS. Especially when you're managing your cloud environment on your own!Mission Cloud un **BEEP**s your apps and servers. Whatever you need in AWS, we can do it. Head to missioncloud.com for the AWS expertise you need. Corey: Do you wish your developers had less permanent access to AWS? Has the complexity of Amazon's reference architecture for temporary elevated access caused you to sob uncontrollably? With Sym, you can protect your cloud infrastructure with customizable, just-in-time access workflows that can be setup in minutes. By automating the access request lifecycle, Sym helps you reduce the scope of default access while keeping your developers moving quickly. Say goodbye to your cloud access woes with Sym. Go to symops.com/corey to learn more. That's S-Y-M-O-P-S.com/coreyCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today my guest is a long-time listener, first-time caller. John Mille is a Principal Cloud Engineer at Sainsbury's, which is UK-speak for ‘grocery store.' John, thank you for joining me.John: Hi, Corey. Thanks for having me.Corey: So, I have to begin with, I guess, the big question that I used to run into people in San Francisco with all the time. They would work at Walmart Labs and they would mention in conversation that they work at Walmart, and people who weren't aware that there was a labs out here figured they were a greeter at the grocery store. Do you ever wind up with people making that sort of fundamental assumption around the fact, oh, you work at Sainsbury's as a checker or whatnot?John: No. But it actually is one of the—if you look at one of the job descriptions from Sainsbury's, the first thing is, why would you join a retail company to do tech? And as it turns out, tech—I mean, I think retail companies, as any other companies in the world, rely on Cloud more and more and more. And I think that one of the things that is interesting today is, if you look at the landscape of retailers, I've heard many times people saying, “We don't want to go for AWS because we're giving money to the competition.” And actually, I think AWS does a fantastic job overall giving you all the tools to actually beat them as your competition. And as it turns out, we've had really, really great success running a lot of our workloads on AWS for many, many years now.Corey: On some level, if you can't come to terms with the idea of Amazon as competition, you shouldn't be using AWS, regardless of what industry you're in, because their entire company strategy is yes. It's very hard to start to even come up with industries that they don't have some form of presence within. On some level, that's a problem. In fact a lot of levels, that's something of a problem.Everyone tends to wind up viewing the world in a bunch of different ways. I like to divide companies into two groups. More or less it's, is the AWS bill one of the top three line items at the company? And if the answer's no, on some level, you know, that usually is an indicator that there's a sustainable business there that, you know, both our grandparents and our grandchildren will be able to recognize, in the fullness of time. You absolutely have a business that winds up falling into that category, whereas, “Oh yeah, I fix the AWS bill,” yeah, my parents would have no idea what I do and my kids don't have much of a better one. It feels like it's very point-in-time type of problem. At least I hope.Technology is not the core of what grocery stores tend to do, but I also don't get the sense that what you're doing is sitting there doing the back office corporate IT style of work, either. How do you use technology in the overall context of the business?John: Well, so we use it in a very wide variety of sense. So, you obviously have everything that has to do with online shopping, orders and all of those sort of things, which obviously, especially with the drive of Covid and being everybody from home, has been a huge driver to improve our ability to deliver to customers. But certainly, I think that Sainsbury's sees AWS as a key partner to be able to go and say we want to deliver more value. And so, there's been a number of transformation over the years to—and one of the reasons I was hired is actually to be part of one of those transformation, where we're going to take existing infrastructure servers that literally—I usually say to people, “Oh, are we doing an upgrade this month? Has somebody gotten their little brush to go and brush onto the hard drives to make sure that nothing is going to die?” And actually do that transformation and move over to the cloud in order to never have to really worry about whether or not they have to manage hardware and infrastructure.Corey: It's strange in that I never got very deep into containers until I was no longer hands-on hardware, managing things. I was more or less doing advisory work and then messing around with them. And you'd think given my proclivities historically, of being very unlucky when it comes to data, you would think that this would be great because, oh yeah, you blow away an ephemeral container? Well, that's kind of the point. We'll all laugh and it'll re-instantiate itself and life goes on.But no. Making fun of them was more or less how I tended to do approach them for the longest time until I started to see them a little bit… well I guess less as a culture, less as a religion, and more as an incredibly versatile packaging format, which is probably going to annoy the people I know who are the packaging [unintelligible 00:04:58] for Linux distributions. How do you tend to view them? And how did you start using them?John: Right. So, that's a great question. So historically, I was a student at, I think the school were one of the original creators of Docker were. And one of the things that you learn when you do development at the school is that, you know, containers [unintelligible 00:05:18] new invention. Docker, I think, came on the platform as the way to, you know, give everybody a great framework, a great API, to drive the deployment of containers in the world and bundle them and ship them around the world, on your laptop and somebody else's, and help a little bit with, you know, solving the problem of it works on my laptop, but not just on the laptop properly. Maybe.It's obviously gone viral over the years and I really enjoy containers; I quite like containers. What I find interesting is what people are going to do with. And I think that over the last few years, we've seen a number of technologies such as Kubernetes and others come into the scene and say—and trying to solve people's problem, but everybody seems to be doing, sort of, things on their own way. And historically, I started off using ECS, when it was terrible and you didn't have security groups per containers and all of this. But over the years, you know, you learn, and AWS has improved the service quite significantly with more and more features.And I think we are today in the place where there's this landscape, I think, where a lot of workloads are going to be extremely ephemeral and you can go [unintelligible 00:06:28], you know, wherever you want and you have a bit—if you have a platform or workflow that you need to have working in different places, maybe Kubernetes could be an easy way to have a different sort of sets of features that allows you to move around in maybe an easier way. But that also comes with a set of drawbacks. Again, I look at using EKS, for example, and I see okay, I have to manage IAM in our back now, whereas if I used something like ECS, for the whatever the [unintelligible 00:06:56] cloud vendor of choice, I don't have to deal with any of this. So, I think it's finding the fine balance between how you do orchestration of containers now and what works for you and is any sustainable over the time, more than about are you going to use containers? Because the chances are, somebody is using containers.Corey: My experiences and workflows and constraints are radically different than that of other folks because for a lot of the things I'm building, these are accounts that are I'm the only person that has access to them. It is me. So, the idea of fine-grained permissions for users from an ARBAC perspective doesn't really factor into it. Yes, yes, in theory, I should have a lot of the systems themselves with incidents roles being managed in safe and secure ways, but in many cases, the AWS account boundary is sufficient for that, depending on what it is we're talking about. But that changes when you start having a small team of people working with you and having to collaborate on these things.And we do a little bit of that with some of our consulting stuff that isn't just the shitpost stuff I build for fun. But there's multiple levels beyond that. You are clearly in a full-blown enterprise at this point where there are a bunch of different teams working on different things, all ideally going in the same direction. And it's easy to get stuck in the weeds of having to either go through central IT for these things, which gives rise to shadow IT every time you find a corporate credit card in the wild, or it winds up being everyone can do what they want, but then there's no consensus, there's no control, there's no architectural similarity. And I'm not sure which path is worse in some respects. How do you land on it?John: Right. So, what I've seen done in companies that works very well—and again, to the credit of my current company—is one of the things they've done really well is build a hub of people who are going to manage solely everything that has to do with accounts access, right? So, the control, IAM, Security Hub, all of those sorts of things, for you. There's things that are mandatory that you can't deal without, you have permissions boundary, that's it, you have to use those things, end of story. But beyond that point, once you have access to your accounts, you've been given all of the access that is necessary for you to deliver application and deploy them all the way up to production without asking permission for anybody else apart from your delivery managers, potentially.And I think from there, because there is the room to do all of this, one of the things that we've done within my business unit is that we've put in place a framework that enables developers—and when I say that it really is a question of allowing them to do everything they have to do, focus on the code, and I know it's a little catchy [unintelligible 00:09:33] a phrase that you hear these days, but the developers really are the customers that we have. And all that we do is to try to make sure that they have a framework in place that allows them to do what they need and deploy the applications in a secure fashion. And the only way to do that for us was to build the tools for them that allows them to do all of that. And I honestly haven't checked a single service IAM policies in a very are longtime because I know that by providing the tools to developers, they don't have this [will 00:10:05] to go and mess with the permissions because their application suddenly doesn't have the permissions. They just know that with the automation we've providing them, the application gets the access it needs and no more.Corey: On some level, it feels like there's a story around graduated development approach where in a dev environment you can do basically whatever you want with a big asterisk next to it. That's the same asterisk, by the way, next to the AWS free tier. But as you start elevating things into higher environments, you start to see gating around things like who has access to what, security reviews, et cetera, et cetera, and ideally, by the time you wind up getting into production, almost no one should have access and that access that people do have winds up being heavily gated. That is, of course, the vision that folks have. In practice, reality is what happens instead of what we plan on. The idea of it works in theory, but not in production is of course, why I call my staging environment ‘theory.' Does that tend to resonate as far as what you've seen in the wild?John: Yeah. Very much so. And when I joined the company, and we put together our [standard 00:11:11] pipelines for developers to be able to do everything, the rule that I would give to my team—so I manage a small team of cloud engineers—the one rule I would say is, “We have access to prod because we need to provision resources, but when we're going to build the pipelines for the developers, you have to build everything in such a way that the developers will only have read-only access to the production environment, and that is only to go and see their logs.” And at least try to foster this notion that developers do not need access to production, as much as possible because that avoids people going and do something they shouldn't be doing in those production environments.Now, as the pipeline progresses and applications get deployed to production, there are some operational capabilities that people need to have, and so in that case, what we do is we try to fine-tune what do people need to do and grant those people access to the accounts so that they can perform the jobs and I don't have to be woken up at two in the morning. The developers are.Corey: One thing that I think is going to be a cause of some consternation for folks—because I didn't really think about this in any meaningful sense until I started acting as a consultant, which means you're getting three years of experience for every year that you're in the wild, just by virtue of the variety of environments you encounter—on some level, there's a reasonable expectation you can have when you're at a small, scrappy startup, that everyone involved knows where all the moving parts live. That tends to break down with scale. So, the idea of a Cloud Center of Excellence has been bandied around a lot. And personally, I hate the term because it implies the ‘Data Center of Mediocrity,' which is a little on the nose for some people at times. So, the idea of having a sort of as a centralized tiger team that has the expertise and has the ability to go on deep dives and sort of loan themselves out to different teams seems to be a compromise between nobody knows what they're doing and, every person involved should have an in-depth knowledge of the following list of disciplines.For example, most folks do not need an in-depth primer on AWS billing constructs. They need about as much information fits on an index card. Do you find that having the centralized concentration of cloud knowledge on a particular team works out or do you find that effectively doing a rotating embedding story is the better answer?John: It varies a lot, I think, because it depends on the level of curiosity of the developers quite a lot. So, I have a huge developer background. People in my team are probably more coming from ex-IT environments or this sort of operation and then it just naturally went into the cloud. And in my opinion, is fairly rare to find somebody that is actually good at doing both AWS and coding. I am by no means really, really great at coding. I code pretty much every day but I wouldn't call myself a professional developer.However, it does bring to my knowledge the fact that there are some good patterns and good practices that you can bring into building your applications in the cloud and some really bad ones. However, I think it's really down to making sure that the knowledge is here within the team. If there's a specialized team, those really need to be specialists. And I think the important thing then is to make sure that the developers and the people around you that are curious and want to ask questions know that you're available to them to share that knowledge. Because at the end of the day, if I'm the only one with the knowledge, I'm going to be the one who is always going to be on call for this or doing that and this is no responsibility that I want. I am happy with a number of responsibilities, but not to be the only person to ever do this. I want to go on holidays from time to time.So, at the end of the day, I suppose it really is up to what people want or expect out of their careers. I do a job that it was a passion for me since I was about 14 years old. And I've always been extremely curious to understand how things work, but I do draw the line that I don't write anything else than Python these days. And if you ask me to write Java, I'll probably change job in the flip of a second. But that's the end of it. But I enjoy understanding how Java things work so that I can help my developers make better choices with what services in AWS to use.Corey: On some level, it feels like there's a, I guess, lack of the same kind of socialization that startups have sort of been somewhat guided by as far as core ethos goes, where, oh whatever I'm working on, I want to reach out to other people, and, “Hey, I'm trying to solve this problem. What is it that you have been working on that's germane to this and how can we collaborate together?” It has nothing to do, incidentally, with the idea that, oh, big company people aren't friendly or are dedicated or aren't good or aren't well-connected; none of that. But there are so many people internally that you're spending your time focusing on and there's so much more internal context that doesn't necessarily map to anything outside of the company that the idea of someone off the street who just solved a particular problem in a weird way could apply to what a larger company with, you know, regulatory burdens, starts to have in mind, it becomes a little bit further afield. Do you think that that's accurate? Do you think that there's still a strong sense of enterprise community that I'm just potentially not seeing in various ways because I don't work at big companies?John: It's a very fine line to walk. So, when I joined the company, I was made aware that there's a lot of Terraform and Kubernetes, which I went [unintelligible 00:16:28] all the way with CloudFormation is yes. So, that was one of the changes I knew I would have. But I can move an open mind and when I looked around at, okay, what are the Terraform modules—because I used Terraform with anger for an entire year of suffering—and I thought, “Okay, well, maybe people have actually got to a point where they've built great modules that I can just pick up off the shelf and reuse or customize only a tiny little bit, add maybe a couple of features and that's, it move on; it's good enough for me.” But as it turns out, there is I think, a lot of the time a case where the need for standardization goes against the need for business to move on.So, I think this is where you start to see silos start to being built within the company and people do their own thing and the other ones do their own. And I think it's always a really big challenge for a large company with extremely opinionated individuals to say, “All right, we're going to standardize on this way.” And it definitely was one of the biggest challenge that I had when I joined the company because again, big communities and Terraform place, we're going to need to do something else. So, then it was the case of saying, “Hey, I don't think we need Kubernetes and I definitely don't think we need Terraform for any the things—for any of those reasons, so how about we do something a little different?”Corey: Speaking of doing things a little bit different, you were recently featured in an AWS Open-Source Roundup newsletter that was just where you, I think, came across my desk one of the first times, has specifically around an open-source project that you built: ECS Compose-X.So, I assume it's like, oh, it's like Docker Compose for ECS and also the ‘X' implies that it is extreme, just, like, you know, snack foods at the convenience store. What does it do and where'd it come from?John: Right. So, you said most of it, right? It literally is a question where you take a Docker Compose file and you want to deploy your services that you worked on and all of that together, and you want to deploy it to AWS. So, ECS Compose-X is a CLI tool very much like the Copilot. I think it was released about four months just before Copilots came out—so, sorry, I beat you to the ball there—but with the Docker Compose specification supported.And again, it was really out of I needed to find a neat way to take my services and deploy them in AWS. So, Compose-X is just a CLI tool that is going to parse your Docker Compose file and create CloudFormation templates out of it. Now, the X is not very extreme or anything like that, but it's actually coming from the [finite 00:18:59] extension fields, which is something supported in Docker Compose. And so, you can do things like x-RDS, or x-DynamoDB, which Docker Compose on your laptop will totally ignore, but ECS Compose-X however will take that into account.And what it will do is if you need a database or a DynamoDB table, for example, in your Docker Compose file, you do [x-RDS, my database, some properties, 00:19:22]—exactly the same properties as CloudFormation, actually—and then you say, “I want this service to have access to it in read-only fashion.” And what ECS Compose-X is going to do is just understand what it has to do when—meaning creating IAM policies, opening security groups, all of that stuff, and make all of that available to the containers in one way or another.Corey: It feels like it's a bit of a miss for Copilot not to do this. It feels like they wanted to go off in their own direction with the way that they viewed the world—which I get; I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with that. There's a reason that I point kubernetestheeasyway.com to the ECS marketing site—but there's so much stuff out there that is shipped or made available in other ways with a Docker Compose file, and the question of okay, how do I take this and run it in Fargate or something because I don't want to run it locally for whatever reason, and the answer is, “That's the neat part. You don't.”And it just becomes such a clear miss. There have been questions about this Since Copilot launched. There's a GitHub issue tracking getting support for this that was last updated in September—we are currently recording this at the end of March—it just doesn't seem to be something that's a priority. I mean, I will say the couple of times that I've used Copilot myself, it was always for greenfield experiments, never for adopting something else that already existed. And that was… it just felt like a bit of a heavy lift to me of oh, you need to know from the beginning that this is the tool you're going to use for the thing. Docker Compose is what the ecosystem has settled on a long time ago and I really am disheartened by the fact that there's no direct ECS support for it today.John: Yeah, and it was definitely a motivation for me because I knew that ECS CLI version 1 was going into the sunset, and there wasn't going to be anything supporting it. And so, I just wanted to have Docker Compose because it's familiar to developers and again, if you want to have adoption and have people use your thing, it has to be easy. And when I looked at Copilot the first time around, I was extremely excited because I thought, “Yes, thank you, Amazon for making my life easy. I don't have to maintain this project anymore and I'm going to be able to just lift and shift, move over, and be happy about it.” But when the specification for Copilot was out and I could go for the documentation, I was equally disheartened because I was like, “Okay, not for me.”And something very similar happened when they announced Proton. I was extremely excited by Proton. I opened a GitHub issue on the roadmap immediately to say, “Hey, are you going to support to have some of those things together or not?” And the fact that the Proton templates—I mean, again, it was, what, two, three years ago now—and I haven't looked at Proton since, so it was a very long time now.Corey: The beta splasher was announced in 2020 and I really haven't seen much from it since.John: Well, and I haven't done anything [unintelligible 00:22:07] with it. And literally, one of the first thing did when the project came out. Because obviously, this is an open-source project that we use in Sainsbury's, right because we deploy everything in [ECS 00:22:17] so why would I reinvent the wheel the third time? It's been done, I might as well leverage it. But every time something on it came out, I was seeing it as the way out of nobody's going to need me anymore—which is great—and that doesn't create a huge potential dependency on the company for me, oh, well, we need this to, you know, keep working.Now, it's open-source, it's on the license you can fork it and do whatever you want with it, so from that point of view, nobody's going to ask me anything in the future, but from the point of view where I need to, as much as possible, use AWS native tools, or AWS-built tools, I differently wanted every time to move over to something different. But every time I tried and tiptoed with those alternative offerings, I just went back and said, “No, this [laugh] either is too new and not mature enough yet, or my tool is just better.” Right? And one of the things I've been doing for the past three years is look at the Docker ECS plugin, all of the issues, and I see all of the feature requests that people are asking for and just do that in my project. And some with Copilots. The only thing that Copilot does that I don't do is tell people how to do CI/CD pipelines.Corey: One thing you said a second ago just sort of, I guess, sent me spiraling for a second because I distinctly remember this particular painful part. You're right, there was an ECS CLI for a long time that has since been deprecated. But we had internal tooling built around that. When there was an issue with a particular task that failed, getting logs out of it was non-trivial, so great. Here's the magic incantation that does it.I still haven't found a great way to do that with the AWS v2 CLI and that feels like it's a gap where yes, I understand, old tools go away and new ones show up, but, “Hey, I [unintelligible 00:24:05] task. Can you tell me what the logs are?” “No. Well, Copilot's the new answer.” “Okay. Can I use this to get logs from something that isn't Copilot?” “Oh, absolutely not.” And the future is inherently terrible as a direct result.John: Yeah. Well, I mean, again, the [unintelligible 00:24:20]—the only thing that ECS Compose-X does is create all the templates for you so you can, you know, then just query it and know where everything has been created. And one of the things it definitely does create is all of the log groups. Because again, least-privileged permissions being something that is very dear to me, I create the log groups and just allow the services to only write in those log groups and that's it.Now, typically this is not a thing that I've thought Compose-X was going to do because that's not its purpose. It's not going to be an operational tool to troubleshoot all the things and this is where I think that other projects are much better suited and I would rather use them as an extension or library of the project as opposed to reinvent them. So, if you're trying to find a tool for yourself to look at logs, I highly recommend something called ‘AWS logs,' which is fantastic. You just say, “Hey, can you list the groups?” “Okay.” “Can you get me the groups and can I tell them on a terminal?”And that's it. Job done. So, as much as I enjoy building new features into the project, for example, I think that there's a clear definition between what the project is for and what it's not. And what it's for is giving people CloudFormation templates they can reuse in any region and deploy their services and not necessarily deal with their operations; that's up to them. At the end of the day, it's really up to the user to know what they want to do with it. I'm not trying to force anybody into doing something specific.Corey: I would agree. I think that there's value to there's more than one way to do it. The problem is, at some point, there's a tipping point where you have this proliferation of different options to the point where you end up in this analysis paralysis model where you're too busy trying to figure out what is the next clear step. And yes, that flexibility is incredibly valuable, especially when you get into, you know, large, sophisticated enterprises—ahem, ahem—but when you're just trying to kick the tires on something new, I feel like there's a certain lack of golden path where in the event of not having an opinion on any of these things, this is what you should do just to keep things moving forward, as opposed to here are two equal options that you can check with radio boxes and it's not at all clear what you which does what or what the longer-term implications are. We've all gotten caught with the one-way doors we didn't realize we were passing through at the time and then had to do significant technical debt repayment efforts to wind up making it right again.I just wish that those questions would be called out, but everything else just, it doesn't matter. If you don't like the name of the service that you're creating, you can change it later. Or if you can't, maybe you should know now, so you don't have—in my case—a DynamoDB table that is named ‘test' running in production forever.John: Yeah. You're absolutely right. And again, I think it goes back to one of the biggest challenges that I had when I joined the company, which was when I said, “I think we should be using CloudFormation, I think we should be using ECS and Terraforming Kubernetes for those reasons.” And one of the reasons was, the people. Meaning we were a very small team, only five cloud engineers at the time.And as I joined the company, they were already was three different teams using four different CI/CD tools. And they all wanted to use Kubernetes, for example, and they were all using different CI/CD—like I said, just now—different CI/CD tools. And so, the real big challenge for me was how do I pitch that simplicity is what's going to allow us to deliver value for the business? Because at the end of the day, like you said many, many times before, the AWS bill is a question of architecture, right? And there's a link and intricacy between the two things.So, the only thing that really mattered for me and the team was to find a way, find the service that was going to allow to do a number of things, A, delivering value quickly, being supported over time. Because one of the things that I think people forget these days—well, one of the things I'm allergic to and one of the things that makes me spiral is what I call CV-driven tech choices where people say, “Hey, I love this great thing I read about and I think that we should use that in production. How great idea.” But really, I don't know anything about it and is then up to somebody else to maintain it long-term.And that goes to the other point, which is, turnover-proof is what I call it. So, making tech choices that are going to be something that people will be able to use for many, many years, there is going to be a company behind the scenes that he's going to be able to support you as well as you go and use the service for the many, many years to go.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?John: So, people can find me on LinkedIn. I'm also around on Twitter these days, although I probably about have nine followers. Well, probably shouldn't say that [laugh] and that doesn't matter.Corey: It's fine. We'll put a link into it—we'll put a link to that in the [show notes 00:29:02] and maybe we'll come up with number ten. You never know. Thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.John: Thanks so much, Corey, for having me.Corey: John Mille, Principal Cloud Engineer at Sainsbury's. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that you go to great pains to type out but then fails to post because the version of the tool you use to submit it has been deprecated without a viable replacement.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Welcome to March 4th, 2023 on the National Day Calendar. Today we celebrate playing outside and a chip off the old block. Marlo: Hey Anna, it's National Play Outside Day, let's get out of here, what do you want to do today? Anna: Oh! I'd like to go for a hike, let's go! Marlo: This is great! Fresh air, sunshine, not a care in the world! Anna: Yup, taking the show on the road! Playing outside is so good for us too, fresh air and exercise! Marlo: And it's so nice that the technology allows us to work AND play…hey John, you doing okay with all that gear? John: Oh…sure…no problem…  Marlo: Let us know if we can help with anything… Anna: On National Play Outside Day go get some fresh air and stretch your legs, right John? John: Right.  John Adams played an important role in the birth of America. And all the while, his son John Quincy observed him and took mental notes. As a child, he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill. By the age of 14, he was already involved in politics, serving as secretary to the American ambassador to Russia. A couple years later, he joined his father in Paris to aid the men working out the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the American Revolution. Over the next few decades, he served as an ambassador, then a Senator, and eventually became the 6th president of the United States. Although he wasn't a very popular Commander in Chief, his parents were very proud of their son. On National Sons Day, remember that the kid following your footsteps today, will likely be leading others tomorrow.   I'm Anna Devere and I'm Marlo Anderson. Thanks for joining us as we Celebrate Every Day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Dawn Brodey and Brian Forrest, talking about the various film versions of “Frankenstein” and “Dracula.”Dawn gave me 4.5 films to revisit: The 1931 version of Frankenstein, Frankenweenie (the feature and the short), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Young Frankenstein.Meanwhile, Brian assigned me the original Nosferatu, the 1931 Dracula, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, Dracula in Istanbul and Bram Stoker's Dracula. LINKSDawn's podcast (HILF): http://dawnbrodey.com/ - showsBrian's Blog and Vlog, Toothpickings: https://toothpickings.medium.com/ A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Frankenstein (1931) Trailer: https://youtu.be/BN8K-4osNb0Frankenweenie Trailer: https://youtu.be/29vIJQohUWEMary Shelley's Frankenstein (Trailer): https://youtu.be/GFaY7r73BIsYoung Frankenstein (Trailer): https://youtu.be/mOPTriLG5cUNosferatu (Complete Film): https://youtu.be/dCT1YUtNOA8Dracula (1931) Trailer: https://youtu.be/VoaMw91MC9kAbbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (Trailer): https://youtu.be/j6l8auIACycHorror of Dracula (Trailer): https://youtu.be/ZTbY0BgIRMkBram Stoker's Dracula (Trailer): https://youtu.be/fgFPIh5mvNcDracula In Istanbul: https://youtu.be/G7tAWcm3EX0Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastDawn and Brian TRANSCRIPT John: [00:00:00] Before we dive into the assignment you gave me—which was to watch stuff I hadn't seen and also rewatch stuff I had seen to get a better idea of who's done a good job of adapting these books—let's just jump in and talk a little bit about your area of expertise and why you have it. So, I'm going to start with you, Brian. I was very surprised after working with you a while to find out that you had a whole vampire subset in your life. Brian: A problem, you can call it a problem. It's fine. John: Okay. What is the problem and where did it come from? Brian: I was just vaguely interested in vampires for a while. When I was in my screenwriting days, someone had encouraged me to do a feature length comedy about vampires, and that led me to do a lot of reading. And then I just kind of put it aside for a while. And then I was, I had just finished a documentary for Committee Films and they said, do you have any other pitches? And I thought, and I said, you know, there's still people who believe in vampires even today, that could be really interesting. And I put together a pitch package. Then, the guy in charge of development said, [00:01:00]this is what we need to be doing. And then it stalled out. Nothing ever happened with it. And I said, what the hell. I could do this on my own. I could fly around and interview these people. And I did, I spent a couple years interviewing academics and some writers. And along the way, I started finding all these very intriguing moments in the history of either vampire lore or fiction or even just people who consider themselves vampires today. And all these things would connect to each other. It was a lattice work of vampires going back hundreds of years. It didn't fit the documentary, unfortunately, but I found it way too interesting. And I said, I need some kind of outlet for this. And so I started writing about it on Tooth Pickings. And that eventually put me in touch with people who were more scholarly, and it opened up a lot more conversations. And now I can't get out. I'm trapped. John: Well, the first sign is recognizing there's a problem. [00:02:00] Okay. Now, Dawn, you had a different entryway into Frankenstein. Dawn: Yeah, well, I was a theater major and a history minor at the University of Minnesota. Go Gophers. And, this was in the late nineties, early two thousands, when there were still a lot of jobs for people who had degrees and things like this. Or at least there was a theory that this was a reasonable thing to get educated in. And then I graduated in 2001, which was months after 9/11, when all those jobs went away. And so, I had this education so specific and what was I gonna do? And gratefully the Twin Cities is a great place for finding that kind of stuff. And one of my very first jobs out of college was at the Bakkan museum. So, the Bakkan museum was founded by Earl Bakkan, who is the inventor of the battery-operated pacemaker. And he has always, since childhood, been obsessed with the Frankenstein movie that came out in 1931. And he attributes [00:03:00]his great scientific invention and many others to a science fiction in general. And to the spark of the idea that comes from sources like this. So, when he opened the museum, he insisted that there'd be a grand Frankenstein exhibit. And that means going back to the book, and that meant going back to the author, Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel Frankenstein, she started writing it when she was 16.And so, I was hired because—boom, look at me—my degree is suddenly colliding, right? So, I was hired by the Bakkan museum to create a one-woman show about the life of Mary Shelley, where I would play Mary Shelley and would perform it within the museum and elsewhere. And through the course of that research, I read the novel for the second time, but then I read it for my third, fourth, fifth onwards and upwards. Because the show was about 45 minutes long, I referenced, you know, the novel, the books, the popular culture, the science behind it. And the deep dive just never stopped. And so long after I was required to do the research and the show was done and up, I just kept reading. [00:04:00] And it gave me the opportunity to meet experts in this field and the peripheral field, as I would sort of travel with this show and be an ambassador for the museum and stuff like that. And, yeah, it still curls my toes. John: All right, so with that background. I'm going to just be honest right here and say, I've read Dracula once, I've read Frankenstein once. So that's where I'm coming from, and both a while ago. I remember Frankenstein was a little tougher to get through. Dracula had a bit more of an adventure feel to it, but something I don't think has really been captured particularly well in all the movies. But they both have lasted and lasted and lasted.Why do you think those books are still, those ideas are still as popular today? Dawn: I will say that I think Frankenstein, it depends on what you mean by the idea. Because on the surface, just the idea of bringing the dead to life, is, I mean, the Walking Dead franchise is right now one of the most popular franchises. I mean, I think we are really pivot on this idea. And I remember saying to a friend once that the part in [00:05:00]Revelation where the dead rise is like the only part of the Bible that I don't question. It's like, oh, the dead will get up. You know, we always just seem to be real sure that at some damned point, they're getting up. And so I think that that is part of why that it sticks in our brains. But then the story around Frankenstein—especially as it was written in 1818—has so many universal and timeless themes, like ambition and what is right and wrong. And the question that Jurassic Park posed in 1995 and continues to—1993 around there—and continues to pose, which is: just because science is capable of doing something, should it do something? And how do we define progress? Surely the very idea of being able to beat death and not die seems to be kind of the ultimate goal. And here is someone saying, okay, so let's just say, yeah. We beat death and everyone goes, oh shit, that'd be terrible. [00:06:00] You know? And then also, I always love the idea of the creature, the monster, Frankenstein's creature himself, who has a lot of characteristics with which people have identified throughout history. Some people say, for example, that Mary Shelley's whole purpose for writing Frankenstein was a question of: didn't God do this to us, make us these ugly creatures that are imperfect and bumbling around and horrifying? And then once he realized that we weren't perfect, he fled from us in fear or fled. He just keeps going and every generation has a new media that tells the story a little bit better, a little bit different, and yeah, there we are. John: I will say that for me, the most memorable part of the book was the section where the monster is the narrator and is learning. And I think with the exception of Kenneth Branagh's film, it it's something that isn't really touched on that much. There's a little bit in Bride of Frankenstein, of him going around and learning stuff. But the sort of moral questions that he [00:07:00] raises as he's learning—what it is to be human—are very interesting in the book. And I wish they were in more of the movies, but they're not. So, Brian on Dracula, again, we have dead coming to life. Why do we love that so much? Brian: Well, it's one of the questions that made me want to make a film about it myself: why has the vampire been so fascinating for hundreds of years? Why does it keep coming back? You know, it ebbs and flows in popularity, but it never leaves. And it keeps seeming to have Renaissance after Renaissance. Dracula specifically, I think one of the interesting things about that novel is how many different lenses you can look at it through and not be wrong.People have looked at it through the lens of, is this thing an imperialist story? Is it an anti-imperialist story? Is it a feminist story? Is it an anti-feminist story? And you can find support for any of those views reading Dracula. And I think that some of it might be accidental; there's times where Dracula is catching up to whatever the cultural zeitgeist [00:08:00] is right now. And we look at Dracula and we say, oh, he was thinking about this back then. Or maybe Bram Stoker was just very confused and he had a lot of different ideas. John: All right, let's explore that a little deeper. You each gave me an assignment of some movies to watch or to re-watch that you felt were worth talking about, in relation to your subject of Frankenstein or Dracula. I'm going to start with Frankenweenie, just because I had not seen it. And in going through it, I was reminded—of course, as one would be—of watching Frankenweenie, I was reminded of Love, Actually. Because I came to the realization after years of Love, Actually being around that it—Love, Actually—is not a romantic comedy. It is all romantic comedies, all put into one movie. And Frankenweenie is all horror films. Condensed, beautifully and cleverly into one very tasty souffle. [Frankenweenie Soundbite] John: I stopped at a certain point making note of the references to other horror films. Just because there are so many of them. But the idea that it references everything from Bride of Frankenstein to Gremlins. They do a rat transformation that's right out of American Werewolf in London. The fact that they have a science teacher played by Martin Landau doing the voice he did as Bela [00:10:00] Lugosi in Ed Wood. I mean, it's a really good story that they just layered and layered and layered and layered. What was it about that movie that so captivated you? Dawn: Well, so much of what you just said. And also it seems to me the epitome of the accessibility of the story of Frankenstein. The idea that if anyone can think of any moment in which if I could bring someone back to life. But what I love about it too, is that the novel Frankenstein that is not Victor Frankenstein's motivation. It generally tends to be the motivation of almost every character, including the Kenneth Branagh character--at some point, he, when Elizabeth dies, his wife dies for the second time, he says, yes, I'm going to try to bring her back. But it is so not the motivation of the scientist in the book. It is just ambition. He just wants to do something no one else has done. And lots of people die around him and he really never, ever says to himself at any point in the novel, I wish I could bring them back, I'm going to bring them back. That's never, that's never part of it. He just wants to be impressive. And so, I love [00:11:00] that it starts with that pure motivation of wanting to bring the dead to life; just wanting to bring your dog back, so that it's so accessible for everyone watching it. Who wouldn't wanna try this? But then, even in that scene with the teacher, when he shows the frog. And he's demonstrating that if you touch a dead frog with electricity, its legs shoot up, which give the kid the first idea of bringing his dog back. Which is like a deep cut in, in the sense that that's nothing -- Mary Shelley herself and her friends were watching experiments exactly like that before she wrote the book: galvanism and animal magnetism were these really popular public demonstrations happening in London and elsewhere where they would do just that. But because electricity itself was so new, I mean, it blew people's hair back you know, that these dead frogs were flopping around. It was the craziest thing. And a lot of them were thinking to themselves, surely it is only a matter of time before we can, we're gonna have our dead walking around all the time. So, it was so circulating and so forward. [00:12:00] So it's not just movie references and it's not just Frankenstein references. That movie really includes source deep source references for how Frankenstein came to be. And I just love it. John: Which brings me to Frankenstein, the 1931 version, in which Colin Clive has a similar point of view to what you were talking about from the book. He just wants, you know, he wants to be God. [Frankenstein soundbite] John: What I was most impressed with about that movie or a couple things was: it starts, it's like, boom. We're in it. First scene. There there's no preamble. There's no going to college. There's no talking about it, right? It's like, they're starting in the middle of act two. And I think a lot of what we think of when it comes to Frankenstein comes from that movie, [00:13:00] that the stuff that James Whale and his cinematographer came up with and the way they made things look, and that's sort of what people think of when they think of Frankenstein. Now, as you look back on that movie, what are your thoughts on the, what we'll call the original Frankenstein? Dawn: Yeah. Well, I love it. You'll find with me and Frankenstein that I'm not a purist. Like I love everything. Like I have no boundaries. I think this is great. One of the things that 1931 movie did was answer—because it had to, anytime you take a novel and make it a movie, you take a literary medium and make it a visual medium, there's obviously going to be things that you just have to interpret that the author left for you to make for yourself individual. And in this instance, that individual is the cinematographer. So, we're gonna get their take on this. And one of the real ambiguous things that Mary Shelley leaves for you in the novel is the spark of life. What is the spark of life? She does not in any [00:14:00]detail describe lightning or static or any of the recognizable or, or future developments of how electricity would've been. Brian: I was shocked when I first read that book and saw how little space was devoted to that, that lab scene. It's blink of an eye and it's over. Dawn: “I gathered the instruments of life around me that I may infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my.” Period. I just, what I love is what I love about film in general is that they went, oh, spark being all right, girl, it's a dark and stormy night and you know, and there's chains and there's bubblers and there's a thing. And the sky opens. I mean, God bless you, like way to just take that thought. Make it vivid, make it, build a set, make us believe it. And it's so, so pervasive that in Frankenweinie, you know, which of course is about Frankensein. [00:15:00] Like that is one that they do: he's got the white robe that ties in the back and the gloves. And in Young Frankenstein, it's the, you know, that lab scene. And so I love that. And the other thing that they had to do was describe the look of the creature, make the creature—Frankenstein's monster himself—look so like something. Because she, similarly in the novel, says that he is taller than a regular man, has dark hair and yellow watery eyes. That's all we know about what the Frankenstein looks like. And so, in 1931, Boris Karloff with the bolts. And it's black and white, remember, we don't think his skin is green. That he turned green at some point is kind of exciting, but of course he was just gray, but just dead flesh, you know, rotten, dead walking flesh is what's frightening. And, I just thought that the movie did that so well, John: I think the makeup was kind of a green/gray, and that when color photos came out of it, that's why someone went, oh, [00:16:00] it's green, but it wasn't green. Brian: I thought I saw a museum piece of, you know, an actual makeup bit that Jack Pierce did and I thought it was greenish. Dawn: Yeah. Greenish/gray. I think, yeah, the rots, just kind of trying to capture the sort of rotten flesh. Brian: It's just like the bride's hair was red. Dawn: That's right. That's right. My day job here in Los Angeles is as a street improviser at Universal Studios, Hollywood. And two of their most treasured characters of course are Frankenstein and Dracula. So, while most people might separate them, John, they are usually arm and arm where I work every day. And the bride has recently come back to the theme park as a walking character, and they gave her red hair. We don't mess around. John: That's excellent. But you mentioned Dracula, let's jump into the 1931 Dracula. There's a connection point between the two that I want to mention, which is the amazing Dwight Frye, who is Fritz, I believe in Frankenstein. And I'm not the first one to mention his naturalistic [00:17:00] acting kind of putting him above everybody else in that movie. Famously, when he's running up the stairs, stopping to pull his socks up at one point. He's just really, really good in that. And then you see him in Dracula as the, essentially the Harker character. I think he was called Harker -- Brian: Yeah. Well, he's Renfield in Dracula. They merged those two characters. I thought it was a smart move for a first attempt at the film. Yeah. And Dwight Frye, he's in a lot of other Universal horrors, too. Dwight Frye often doesn't get the credit. He somehow was not the leading man he should have been. John: I don't know why that is. He turns up again as an assistant in Bride of Frankenstein. He's a towns person in Frankenstein meets the Wolfman. And then he tragically died on a bus ride to an auto parts job that he took because he wasn't getting any acting work, which was too bad. A really, really good actor. Brian: There is another intersection besides the fact that they were both produced by Junior. Lugosi was put into the [00:18:00] short, the trial film they shot for Frankenstein. I can't call it a short film, because it was never intended for release. But they shot a cinematic test reel and they had Lugosi play the monster, but he was under a sheet the whole time. I think he may have been able to pull the sheet off. It's a lost film. We don't know for sure. We just have kind of the recollections of a few crew people. John: I've never heard of that. I would love to see that. Brian: I would too. I think a lot of people would really love to see it, but it was as much a kind of a testing ground for Lugosi— whether they wanted him to be the monster—as it was for some of the techniques, the things they wanted to try in the film. And what I understand is the producer saw the test reel and they said, yes, we love this look, this is the look we want you to give us. And then it's whatever version of Lugosi not getting that part you want to believe: whether Lugosi turned it down or the producers didn't like him or something. But he ended up not taking that part. John: But he is of course always known as Dracula. So, what are your thoughts on their adaptation? Which [00:19:00]again is not the first adaptation but is the kind of first official? Brian: Yeah. The first to bear the name Dracula, although, well, I'll back up a second. Because some releases of Nosferatu called it Dracula. He would be named as Dracula in the subtitles, you know, because that's an easy thing to do in silent film, you can just swap that out however you want to. But yes, it's the first authorized official film adaptation. John: Well, let's back up to Nosferatu, just for a second. Am I wrong in remembering that the Bram Stoker estate—Mrs. Stoker—sued Nosferatu and asked that all prints be destroyed? And they were except one print remained somewhere? Brian: Close. That is the popular story that she sued Prana Films. She won the lawsuit. All films were set to be destroyed. Now there's a guy named Locke Heiss and a few others who've been doing some research on this. And they will tell you that there's no proof that a single print was ever destroyed. It's a more fun story to say that, you know, this one was snuck away and now we have the film. But there was no real enforcement mechanism for having all the theaters [00:20:00]destroy the film. Who was going to go around and check and see if they actually destroyed this film or not? Nobody, right? So maybe some people destroyed it. Maybe Prana Films destroyed their remaining copies. But the exhibitors kept all of theirs and there's different versions and different cuts that have been found. So, we know that some of these reels went out in different formats or with different subtitles or even different edits. And some of them have made their way back to us. John: There's some really iconic striking imagery in that movie. That haunts me still. Brian: What I always tell people is see the film with a good live accompaniment, because that still makes it hold up as a scary film. If you see a good orchestra playing something really intense when Orlok comes through that door. It feels scary. You can feel yourself being teleported back to 1922 and being one of those audience people seeing that and being struck by it. John: What do you think it would be like to have [00:21:00] seen that or Dawn to have seen the original Frankenstein? I can't really imagine, given all that we've seen in our lives. If you put yourself back into 1931, and Boris Karloff walks backwards into the lab. I would just love to know what that felt like the first time. Dawn: You know, what is so great is I was fortunate enough to know Earl Bakkan who saw the movie in the theater in Columbia Heights, Minnesota when he was 10 years old.And he went, he had to sneak in. People would run outta this, out of the theater, screaming. I mean, when they would do the close up of Frankenstein's Monster's face, you know, women would faint. And of course that was publicized and much circulated, but it was also true. People were freaking out. And for Earl Bakkan—this young kid—the fear was overwhelming, as you said. And also in this theater, I was lucky enough, I did my show in that theater for Earl and his friends on his 81st birthday. So, I got to hear a [00:22:00] lot of these stories. And they played the organ in the front of the curtain. Brian: Is this the Heights theater? Dawn: Yes, the Heights. Brian: Oh, that's an amazing space. Dawn: So, they played the organ in there and it was like, oh my God. And it was so overwhelming. So, I'm glad you asked that question because I was really fortunate to have a moment to be able to sort of immerse myself in that question: What would it have been like to be in this theater? And it was moving and it was scary, man. And yeah, to your point, Brian, the music and the score. I mean, it was overwhelming. Also, I think there's something that we still benefit from today, which is when people tell you going in this might be way too much for you, this might scare you to death. So just be super, super careful. And your heart's already, you know… John: And it does have that warning right at the beginning. Dawn: Yeah. Versus now when people sit you down, they're like, I'm not gonna be scared by this black and white movie from 1931. And then you find yourself shuffling out of the bathroom at top speed in the middle of the night. And you're like, well, look at that. It got me. Brian: That reminds me, there [00:23:00] was a deleted scene from the 1931 Dracula that was a holdover from the stage play. Van Helsing comes out and he breaks the fourth wall and he speaks directly to the audience. And he says something to the effect of—I'm very much paraphrasing—about how we hope you haven't been too frightened by what you've seen tonight, but just remember these things are real. And then black out. And they cut that because they were afraid that they were really going to freak out their audience. Dawn: It's like a war of the world's thing, man. It's oh, that's so great. I love that. [Dracula Soundbite] John: So, Brian, what is your assessment of the 1931 version? As a movie itself and as an adaptation of Stoker's work? Brian: The things they had to do to try to adapt it to film, which they borrowed a lot of that from the stage play. They used the stage play as their guide point, and I think they made the best choices they could have been expected to make. You know, there's a lot of things that get lost and that's unfortunate, but I think they did a decent job. I don't find the 1931 version scary. I like Bela Lugosi. I think he's a great Dracula. I think he set the standard. With the possible [00:25:00]exception of the scene where the brides are stalking Harker slash Renfield, I don't think the imagery is particularly frightening. The Spanish version, I think does a little bit better job. And you know the story with the Spanish version and the English version? Dawn: We actually talk about it on the back lot tour of Universal Studios. Because they shot on the same sets in some cases. Brian: Yeah. My understanding is that Dracula shot during the day, Spanish Dracula would shoot at night. So, they got to benefit maybe a little bit by seeing, okay, how is this gonna be shot? How did Todd Browning do it? Okay. We're gonna do it a little bit differently. It's a little bit of a cheat to say they move the camera. They do move the camera a lot more in the Spanish version, but the performances are a little bit different. I'm going to, I can't get her name out. The actress who plays the ingenue in the Spanish Dracula, I'm not going to try it, but you can see her kind of getting more and more crazed as time goes on and her head is more infected by Dracula. You see these push-ins that you don't see in the English version. There's blocking [00:26:00] that's different. I put together a short course where I was just talking about how they blocked the staircases scene. The welcome to my house, the walking through spider web. And how it's blocked very differently in the two versions. And what does that say? What are these two directors communicating differently to us? In one, Harker slash Renfield is next to Dracula. In one, he's trailing behind him. In one, we cut away from the spider web before he goes through. And in the other one, we see him wrestle with it. That's not really what you asked, John. Sorry, I got off on a tear there. John: I agree with you on all points on the differences between the two films. Although I do think that all the Transylvania stuff in the English version is terrific: With the coach and the brides. The Spanish version, the biggest problem I have is that their Dracula looks ridiculous. Brian: He's not Bela Lugosi. You're right. John: He looks like Steve Carell doing Dracula and there is no moment, literally no moment [00:27:00] where he is scary, whereas Lugosi is able to pull that off. Brian: There's a lot of people who have observed that the Spanish Dracula would be a superior film were it not for Bela Lugosi being such an amazing Dracula in the English version. John: He really, really nailed it. Brian: And since he learned his lines phonetically, he could have done the Spanish Dracula. Just write it out for him phonetically, because he didn't speak English very well. John: If we could just go back, you know, cause a lot of things in history we could change, but if we could just be at that meeting and go, Hey, why not have Bela do it? Okay. So then let's jump ahead, still in Dracula form, to Horror of Dracula. From 1958. With Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. [Soundbite from Horror of Dracula] Brian: For some people, Lee is the ultimate Dracula, and I think that's a generational thing. I think he's great. He's got the stage presence and I love Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. I don't like the film as a whole. It feels like I'm watching a play with a camera set back. It doesn't work for me the way it works for other people. That is personal taste. Don't come after me. John: It does, however, have one of the greatest, ‘Hey, we're gonna kill Dracula' scenes ever, with Peter Cushing running down the table and jumping up and pulling down the drapes and the sun. Brian: Oh, right. Interesting. Because in Dracula, the book, the sun is not deadly, remotely really. But that's [00:29:00]the influence of Nosferatu being pasted onto the Dracula cannon, that the sunlight is deadly to Dracula. Dawn: I remember having this fight very enthusiastically in the nineties when Bram Stoker's/Winona Ryder's Dracula came out and I was already sort of a literary nerd. And they were like, hey, they have a scene with him walking around during the day. And I was like, yeah, nerds. That's right. That's cuz vampires can walk around during the day.I was very already, like, you don't know anything, go back to history. Brian: And there's a seventies version where he's out on a cloudy day, but he is not hurt either. There suggestions in the book that he's more powerful at night. Dawn: He's a creature of the night. I always understood he had to wear sunglasses. He was sort of like a wolf. Like they show him as a wolf during the day; it can happen, but it's not great. Brian: I like the way they did it in the Gary Oldman version. He's suited up. He's got the sunglasses on. There's not a whole lot of skin exposed. But he's not [00:30:00] going to turn into smoke. John: Well, okay. Let's talk about that version and Kenneth Branagh's version of Frankenstein. Dawn: Ug. John: I'm not going to spoil anything here, when I say it doesn't sound like Dawn cared it. Dawn: You open this, you opened this can of worms. John, sit down for a second. Listen. He calls it: Mary Shelly's fucking Frankenstein. I inserted the fucking. I'm sorry, I wasn't supposed to say that. He calls it. He calls it. How dare you, Kenneth, Brannagh, call this Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. So that was A-number one. But I went into it all excited: It's Kenneth Brannagh. Love him. He calls it Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and he starts with the ship captain out at sea, just like the book. And so I pull up my little, you know, security blanket and I'm like, oh, Kenneth Brannagh, do this to me, buddy. Do it to me buddy. Show me Mary Shelley Frankenstein as a movie. [00:31:00] And then he just fucks it up, John. And he doesn't actually do that at all. It's a total lie. He screws up every monologue. He makes up motivations and then heightens them. And it's dad. The acting is capital B, capital A, capital D across the board. Everybody sucks in this movie. It looks bad. The direction is bad, and it has nothing to do. He tries to bring Elizabeth back to life. This is a huge departure from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Thank you very much, Mr. Brannagh, that's all I have to say for now. John: All right, I was fooled by the fact that he started at, at the north pole. Dawn: That's because he's tricking us, John. That's because it's the whole movie is a lie. John: Okay with that same mindset, what do we think of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola? Dawn: I love that one. Brian: I'm afraid that I don't have, I can't match Dawn's intensity in either respect. Um, except I thought Robert DeNiro [00:32:00] was really good in Frankenstein. Dawn: But that's no, he's not. you're wrong. Your opinion is valid and wrong. Yeah, I'm kidding for listeners who don't know me. I am, I am kidding. Of course. Everybody's opinion is valid except for that one. Yeah. The movie, everything about that movie is bad. John: He is, I think, miscast. Dawn: And Helen Bonan Carter is one of the finest actresses of not just our generation, but of all time. And she sucks in this movie. John: Right. So. Bram Stoker's Dracula. Brian: Bram Stoker's Dracula. [Soundbite: Bram Stoker's Dracula] Brian: Also produced by Branagh. And I assume that is the connection, why they both start with the author's name. I always call it Coppola's Dracula because it gets too confusing to make that distinction. I thought it was a decent movie, but it didn't feel like Dracula. It felt like someone who had heard of Dracula and wrote a good script based on what they had heard. So many divergences that bothered me, although I think it's aged better than it felt the first time. I remember seeing it when it first came out in the nineties and not thinking much of it. And I think audiences agreed with me and it seems like it's been kinder, that audiences have been kinder to it as it's gotten older. John: Okay. Dawn, you love it. Dawn: I loved it. I loved it. It, you know what though? That was one of [00:34:00] those movies that unlike, unlike Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I can't look at with like an adult critical eye because I, what year did it come out? Was it like 90, 92? I'm like middle school getting into high school and like Winona Ryder was everything. Vampires are everything. I mean, Gary Oldman is the, is a great actor and it's so sexy, very sexy. The sex is Primo. And so I remember loving it, very moving. I don't remember comparing it as certainly not as viciously to the novel because I read Dracula after I had seen the movie. And so there's always that inherent casting where Nina is always going to be Winona Ryder. But I do remember really loving the Gothic convention of the letter and that the movie did seem to utilize and to great effect how letter writing can build suspense and give us different perspectives in a, in a unique cinematic way. Brian: [00:35:00] The two or three biggest stakes that film puts in the ground are not to be found in the book. So there's no love story in the book. There's no Vlad in the book. John: Can I interject there? Isn't that basically, didn't they just rip that off of Dark Shadows, The idea of my long lost love is reincarnated in this woman. I must connect with her. Brian: That is a good question, John. I'm glad you asked that because I call it the doppelganger love interest. Right? We first see that, the first time I know of it happening, I'm sure there's an earlier precedent, is in The Mummy, but then Dark Shadows does it. But that's not where Stoker, I mean, that's not where Coppola and a screenwriter claimed to have gotten the idea. They claimed to have gotten it from Dan Curtis's Dracula in 74. John: Dan Curtis, who produced Dark Shadows, with Barnabas Collins, falling in love with his reincarnated love. Brian: But Dan Curtis's Dracula comes out two years after Blacula. That has a reincarnated love interest. John: Not only does the Blaclua [00:36:00] have a reincarnated love interest, but if I'm remembering movie correctly at the end, when she says I don't want to go with you. He goes, okay. And he's ready to go home. It's like, sorry to bother you. Brian: No, uh, in Blacula, he commits suicide John: Oh, that's it? Yeah. He walks out into the sun. Brian: He goes home in a different way. John: Yes. He's one of my favorite Draculas, the very stately William Marshall. Brian: Yeah, absolutely. That is a favorite of mine. John: Anyway, you were saying stakes in the ground from Coppola's Dracula. Brian: Well, the, the love story, the equating Dracula with Vlad the Impaler. And I felt like they did Lucy really bad in that movie. They had her turn into a wanton harlot, which is not in keeping with the book. Some things are okay, but they really said these are the building blocks of our story and that bugged me. But Anthony Hopkins I liked, so, all right. Dawn: Alright, but see, this [00:37:00] the itch that still that still makes me wanna scratch though: why say Bram Stoker's Dracula? Why say Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? I mean, because I think you heard the venom, obviously. If they took Mary Shelley's name off that thing, you can make Frankenweenie. And I will love, like, I love Frankenweenie. Do your Frankenstein homage all day, all the time. But when you call, when you say it's Bram Stoker's, I think that this is what has been frustrating historians like me and getting high school students Ds in English class ever since. Because it just creates the false perception that you've basically read the book. Right. Or that you, if you know the thing you know the book and it's just a cheap ploy. And I don't like it. Brian: I think, somebody correct me on this, that there, there had been a plan to do a reboot of the Universal monster franchise, and these two movies were supposed to be the reboot of it. [00:38:00] And then they would've then done HG Wells' Invisible Man. John: The Mummy killed it. They've tried to reboot it several times. And that was the first attempt. Brian: Yeah, I've heard that called the dark universe. They were trying to do their own MCU. Dawn: Yeah. Well, at Universal Studios, there is of course in, in LA, in general, there's the property wars, you know? What what's, who has what? And sometimes those get really blurred. Like why does Universal Studios have Harry Potter? When we can see Warner Brothers from the top of our wall/ And that's obviously, you know, those things happen. But when it comes to like the IP or intellectual property, those original monsters are so valuable and they always are at Halloween. And then it's like, sort of, how can we capitalize on this? And yeah. And it's cross generational. Brian: All they really own right now is the look right? They own Jack Pierce's makeup job from Frankenstein. Dawn: But I think that that's exactly the point; [00:39:00] the delusion of what is it that you own if you own, you know, Frankenstein, whatever. But yes, there was definitely an interest to sort of revamp all of the original Universal Monsters they call them and it's the Mummy, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Invisible Man. John: It's everybody who shows up in Mad Monster Party. Dawn: Exactly. [Soundbite: Mad Monster Party] Dawn: But yeah, The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise, was a tremendous flop. And I think that sort of took the wind out of everybody's sails. John: Let me ask you this, Dawn. If Mel Brooks had titled his movie, Mary Shelley's Young Frankenstein, instead of Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, would you have a problem with that? Dawn: Yeah, no, but no, I would not have had a problem, because that would've been irony and juxtaposition. Not just a straight lie. John: So that brings us to some comedies. Young Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, which I was very surprised and a little unnerved to [00:40:00] realize a few years back, Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein was made a mere 10 years before I was born. And I had always assumed it was way back then. And it's like, no, it wasn't all that way back then. It was pretty, pretty recently. Brian: That happened to me when I realized that Woodstock was only six years before my birth. And it always seemed like ancient history. John: Is that the common thing, Madame Historian? That people kind of forget how recent things were? Dawn: Oh yeah. Remember Roe V. Wade. Sorry, too soon. Brian: We're recording this on that day. Dawn: Yeah, absolutely. I think that it happens to everybody so much faster than you think it's going to. I remember looking around in the nineties feeling, well, surely the seventies was ancient history, you know, because they had That Seventies Show, which debuted as like a period piece. I am still very young and hip and happening and [00:41:00] they are in production for That Nineties Show right now. And I said to my husband, That Nineties Show. I was like, Jesus, I guess that's 20 years because I was in the nineties they did That Seventies Show. And he goes, no baby that's 30 years. And I was like, I'm sorry. I said, I'm sorry, what? He goes, the nineties was 30 years ago. And I just had to sit down and put my bunion corrector back on because these feet are killing me. John: All right. Well, let's just talk about these two comedies and then there's a couple other things I wanna quickly hit on. What are our thoughts on, let's start with Young Frankenstein? [Soundbite: Young Frankenstein] Dawn: I told you I'm not an idealist and we're not a purist about Frankenstein, but I am an enthusiast. So that is why I told you to watch Kenneth Branagh's movie, even though I hate it so much. And that is also why I love Young Frankenstein, because I think that it is often what brings people into the story. For many, many people, it introduces them to the creature. They may know literally nothing about Frankenstein except for Young Frankenstein. And that's actually fine with me because I'm a comedian myself. And I believe that parody is high honor. And often when you parody and satirize something, especially when you do it well, it's because you went to the heart of it. Because you got right in there into the nuggets and the creases of it. And there is something about Young [00:43:00] Frankenstein as ridiculous as it is that has some of that wildness and the hilarity and The Putting on the Ritz. I did find out from my Universal Studios movie history stuff, that that scene was very nearly cut out. Mel Brooks did not like it. And he just didn't like that they were doing it. And of course it's the one, I feel like I'm not the only one who still has to make sure that my beverage is not only out of my esophagus, but like aside, when they start doing it. [Soundbite: Young Frankenstein] Brian: And I understand they were about to throw away the sets from the 1931 Frankenstein when Mel Brooks or his production designer came up and said, Stop stop. We want to use these and they were able to get the original sets or at least the set pieces. John: I believe what it [00:44:00] was, was they got Kenneth Strickfaden's original machines. Ken Strickfaden created all that stuff for the 1931 version and had been used on and off, you know, through all the Frankenstein films. And it was all sitting in his garage and the production designer, Dale Hennessy went out to look at it because they were thinking they had to recreate it. And he said, I think it still works. And they plugged them in and they all still worked. Brian: Oh, wow. Dawn: Oh man. It's alive. John: Those are the original machines. Dawn: I didn't know that. That's fantastic. John: At the time when I was a young kid, I was one of the few kids in my neighborhood who knew the name Kenneth Strickfaden, which opened doors for me. Let me tell you when people find out, oh, you know of the guy who designed and built all those? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I know all that. One of my favorite stories from Young Frankenstein is when they sold the script. I forget which studio had said yes. And as they were walking out of the meeting, Mel Brooks turned back and said, oh, by the way, it's gonna be in black and white, and kept going. And they followed him down the hall and said, no, it can't be in black and white. And he said, no, it's not gonna work unless it's in [00:45:00] black and white. And they said, well, we're not gonna do it. And they had a deal, they were ready to go. And he said, no, it's gonna stay black and white. And he called up Alan Ladd Jr. that night, who was a friend of his, and said, they won't do it. And he said, I'll do it. And so it ended up going, I think, to Fox, who was more than happy to, to spend the money on that. And even though Mel didn't like Putting on the Ritz, it's weird, because he has almost always had musical numbers in his films. Virtually every movie he's done, he's either written a song for it, or there's a song in it. So, it's weird to me. I've heard Gene Wilder on YouTube talk about no, no, he didn't want that scene at all, which is so odd because it seems so-- Brian: I never thought about that, but you're right. I'm going in my head through all the Mel Brooks films I can remember. And there is at least a short musical interlude in all of them that I can think of. John: But let's talk then about what's considered one of the best mixes of horror and comedy, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [00:46:00] [Soundbite: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein] Brian: As with comedies of that age, it, it starts off slow, but then it starts to get very funny as time goes on. And all the comedy is because of Abbot and Costello. They are the, [00:47:00] the chemistry they have on screen. I don't know how much of that was actually scripted and how much of it was just how they rolled with each other. But it works really well. Not much of the comedy is provided by the monsters or the supporting cast or even there's maybe a cute, a few sight gags. But wouldn't you say most of the comedy is just the dynamics between them? John: It is. The scary stuff is scary and it's balanced beautifully at the end where they're being chased through the castle. The monsters stayed pretty focused on being monsters and Abbot and Costello's reactions are what's funny. Dawn: If I may, as someone who has already admitted I haven't seen much of the movie, it's feels to me like it may be something like Shaun of the Dead, in the sense that you get genuinely scared if zombie movies scare, then you'll have that same adrenaline rush and the monsters stay scary. They don't have to get silly. Or be a part of the comedy for your two very opposing one's skinny, one's fat, you know, and the way that their friendship is both aligning and [00:48:00]coinciding is the humor. Brian: I believe there is one brief shot in there where you get to see Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolfman all in the same shot. And I think that might be the only time that ever happens in the Universal Franchise. During the lab scene, does that sound right John? John: I think you really only have Dracula and the Wolfman. I'll have to look it up because the monster is over on another table-- Brian: Isn't he underneath the blanket? John: Nope, that's Lou Costello, because it's his brain that they want. And so they're fighting over that table. And then just a little, I have nothing but stupid fun facts. There's a point in it, in that scene where the monster gets off the table and picks up someone and throws them through a window. And Glenn Strange, who was playing the monster at that point -- and who is one of my favorite portrayers of the monster, oddly enough -- had broken his ankle, I believe. And so Lon, Chaney, Jr. put the makeup on and did that one stunt for him, cuz he was there. Brian: He did that as Frankenstein's monster? John: Yes. Frankenstein. Brian: I didn't know that. Yes, I [00:49:00] did not know that. So he plays both of those roles in that movie? John: Yes. Let me just take a moment to defend Glenn Strange, who played the monster three times: House of Dracula, House of Frankenstein, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. In House of Frankenstein, he is following up the film before that, which was Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, in which, in this very convoluted universe, Lugosi is playing the monster, even though he didn't wanna do it in 31. Because his brain in Ghost of Frankenstein had been put into the Monster's body. So, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, it is Lugosi as the Frankenstein monster. It is Lon Chaney Jr., who had played the monster in Ghost of Frankenstein, now back to playing Larry Talbot. So, it is Wolfman versus Frankenstein. And the premise of the script was he's got Ygor's brain and it's not connecting properly. He's gone blind. They shot that. They had tons of dialogue between the two characters of Larry Talbot pre-wolfman, and the monster, Bela Lugosi. And the executives thought it sounded silly. So they went in and they cut [00:50:00] out all of Lugosi's dialogue out of the movie. So now you have a blind monster stumbling around with his arms in front of him, but he doesn't talk. And if you look at the movie, you can see where he's supposed to be talking and they cut away quickly. And it's really convoluted. Glenn Strange who then has to play the monster next, looks at that and goes well, all right, I guess I'm still blind. I guess I'm still stumbling around with my arms in front of him. Which is the image most people have of the Frankenstein monster, which was never done by Boris in his three turns as the monster. So with, in that regard, I just think Glenn Strange did a great job of picking up what had come before him and making it work moving forward. Anyway, a couple other ones I wanna just hit on very quickly. Brian asked me to watch Dracula in Istanbul. Under the circumstances, a fairly straightforward retelling of the Dracula story. I would recommend it--it is on YouTube--for a couple of reasons. One, I believe it's the first time that Dracula has actual canine teeth. Brian: Yes. John: Which is important. But the other is there's the scene where he's talking to Harker about, I want [00:51:00] you to write three letters. And I want you to post date the letters. It's so convoluted, because he goes into explaining how the Turkish post office system works in such a way that the letters aren't gonna get there. It's just this long scene of explaining why he needs to write these three letters, and poor Harker's doing his best to keep up with that. That was the only reason I recommend it. Brian: That movie is based on a book called Kazıklı Voyvoda, which means The Warrior Prince and it was written in, I wanna say the 1920s or thirties, I wanna say thirties. It's the first book to equate Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, which I've come back to a couple times now, but that's significant because it was a Turkish book and the Turks got that right away. They immediately saw the name Dracula like, oh, we know who we're talking about. We're talking about that a-hole. It was not until the seventies, both the [00:52:00] fifties and the seventies, that Western critics and scholars started to equate the two. And then later when other scholars said, no, there, there's not really a connection there, but it's a fun story. And it's part of cannon now, so we can all play around with it. John: But that wasn't what Bram Stoker was thinking of? Is that what you're saying? Brian: No. No, he, he wasn't, he wasn't making Dracula into Vlad the Impaler. He got the name from Vlad the Impaler surely, but not the deeds. He wasn't supposed to be Vlad the Impaler brought back to life. John: All right. I'm going to ask you both to do one final thing and then we'll wrap it up for today. Although I could talk to you about monsters all day long, and the fact that I'd forgotten Dawn, that you were back on the Universal lot makes this even more perfect. If listeners are going to watch one Dracula movie and one Frankenstein movie, what do you recommend? Dawn, you go first. Dawn: They're only watching one, then it's gotta be the 1931 Frankenstein, with Boris. Karloff, of course. I think it has captured [00:53:00] the story of Frankenstein that keeps one toe sort of beautifully over the novel and the kind of original source material that I am so in love with, but also keeps the other foot firmly in a great film tradition. It is genuinely spooky and it holds so much of the imagery of any of the subsequent movies that you're only watching one, so that's the one you get. But if you do watch any more, you've got this fantastic foundation for what is this story and who is this creature? John: Got it. And Brian, for Dracula? Brian: I was tossing around in my head here, whether to recommend Nosferatu or the 1931 Dracula. And I think I'm going to have to agree with Dawn and say the 1931 for both of them, because it would help a viewer who was new to the monsters, understand where we got the archetypes we have. Now, why, when you type an emoji into your phone for Vampire, you get someone with a tuxedo in the slick back hair or, I think, is there a Frankenstein emoji? Dawn: There is, and he's green with bolts in his neck. [00:54:00] Brian: Yeah, it would. It will help you understand why we have that image permanently implanted in our heads, even though maybe that's not the source material. We now understand the origins of it. Dawn: And if I may too, there's, there's something about having the lore as founded in these movies is necessary, frankly, to almost understand what happens later. I mean, I get very frustrated in 2022, if there is a movie about vampires that takes any time at all to explain to me what a vampire is, unless you're breaking the rules of the vampire. For example, you know, like in Twilight the vampire sparkles, like a diamond when it's out in the sunshine and is the hottest thing ever. That's really great to know. I didn't know that about vampires. That wasn't necessarily true before, you know, but you don't need to take a lot of time. In fact, when you do read Dracula, one of the things for me that I found very frustrating was the suspense of what is it with this guy? They were like: He said we couldn't bring [00:55:00] garlic and they take all this time. And you're kind of as a modern reader being like, cuz he is a fucking vampire. Move on. Like we know this, we got this one. It's shorthand Brian: That's one snide thing I could say about the book is that there are times where Dracula's powers seem to be whatever his powers need to be to make this next scene creepy and move on to the next chapter. John: He was making it up as he went along. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sempre en segon pla, sense fer soroll i sense donar-se import

There is no quick fix in whatever endeavor you are working on. It's determination, acknowledgement, and a whole lot of self trust. This week's conversation is a testament that wherever your life path takes you, there is time to adjust, to chase the things on your heart, and to overcome the negative voices that are holding you back.  If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co . And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe.In this episode you will learn about:From summer jobs to NASA Stop listening to the odds of success and take action Noble obstacles and the weight of responsibility Surrounding yourself with the people who have been where you are Overcoming Imposter syndrome and mental health struggles Creating the right space for empowerment Episode References/Links:InstagramMollura Photo WebsiteFacebookJohns Course on Profitable Pilates...COMING SOON :) BIO: John is a multi-award-winning luxury portrait photographer specializing in empowering and creative portraits that create personal transformation. John's backstory is one that exudes personal transformation. Prior to becoming a full-time photographer, John had a successful fifteen-year career as a leading test engineer for NASA and military projects. However, after a series of personal and professional changes, he chose to follow his dream of becoming a photographer.  If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox.ResourcesWatch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube!Lesley Logan websiteBe It Till You See It PodcastOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley LoganOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTubeProfitable PilatesSocial MediaInstagramFacebookLinkedInEpisode Transcript:Lesley Logan 0:00  Hey, Be It listener, how are you? Have you ever had a plan not go as planned? I guess it's not really anything like, how have you ever had something not go as planned? There it is. Um, yeah, me too. I think that's actually helped plans go. I'm, I'm becoming more increasingly convinced that plans are only meant to like be like the compass that gets you started. And then the rest is kind of figure it out as you go. And, and that's the hard part because we all want certainty. And we all really want to know that, like, if I do this, and this is going to happen. And the more people I interviewed, the more I am noticing a strong theme and that a) things don't go the way we expect. And b) sometimes, not sometimes, every time something is happening is happening for you. And it's setting you off on this track and this, and this journey that you are meant to be on. And I'm so grateful that our next guest cross paths and our like our paths cross because he's super cool. I really I really liked him. I I think Brad and I will be friends with him for hopefully a long time because he is just an inspiration. And he share so passionately and authentically his story. And I really believe that you can learn so much from it. So he when you'll hear in the interview, but this is the person whose plan A didn't go and then plan B didn't go and like, of course you get down and depressed. And you find yourself doing a job. You're like, "Why am I doing this?" Like, "Why am I doing this?" And that's the thing, that's the thing that actually makes you shine a little differently, shine a little brighter become something that somebody else pays attention to. And and it completely changes trajectory of your life. And so please don't underestimate the crazy weird jobs you've ever had to do, or the experiences you've ever had. Because those experiences, those weird jobs, those weird skill sets, literally might be the reason and the thing someone is looking for to hire you or to spring you on to their show or to or to have you speak in front of their audience. Like those are the things, too often we're looking for the degrees or the certifications or, or you know, some sort of like title with letters after it that we think is going to be why someone picks us. But it could literally be the weird thing you did one summer. And so stop under estimating yourself. Give yourself some time to write down all the things you've ever done. And think about it as you listen to this interview with John because I think it's really powerful. And I'm really excited for you to hear from him how he became a rocket scientist. And now he is a really well sought after photographer and I can't wait to work with him. So that's going to happen, I'm putting on my list for this year. All right. So let me know how this interview impacts your life. Please let John and I know, tag us on Instagram. Share this with people that need to hear it and here he is.Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast, where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guests will bring Bold, Executable, Intrinsic and Targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.All right, my loves. I have John Mollura with us. I didn't say your name, right. John Mollura. (John: You got it.) How do you say it? John Mollura?John Mollura 0:25  Just like you said it. Mollura. Yeah.Lesley Logan 0:28  I do this all the time, like I, I 100% check names and like, "Oh, I know his name we're good." And then I'm like, "Did I say it, right?" And it's anyways, it's my own thing. Everyone, we have John Mollura here. And I am so excited from literal rockstar to incredible photographer, and he has an amazing story. And I'm just so happy our paths crossed, I really have to say, you know, I put out a thing like, "Hey, I'm looking for this," and you put yourself up there. And then when you're like, "Oh, here's the topic that I'm going to talk about." It made me laugh because I'm like, "How on earth could you talk about impostor syndrome when you had like no imposter syndrome with of like saying, 'Hey, I'm the person you should talk to.'" So John, thank you for being here on this podcast. I really am excited to talk about all the things that you rock at. Can you please tell everyone a little bit about how you became like a rocket scientist to a photographer? (Lesley and John laughs) Not exactly like the linear plan that I think people would expect?John Mollura 1:24  Well, the key was I didn't really have any life plan. And that's something that I've just kind of done. So exhibit A, you know the podcast like I just, even though I wrestled with impostor syndrome, and pretty severe anxiety, a lot of my life. I just always had that pioneer spirit, if you will, or I would just, I'd rather be, you know, on the tip of the spear, the first person going in because I get bored, so easy. And I'd rather just put myself out there. And just try something, (Lesley: Yeah) with risk being, you know, just bored and static. So ...Lesley Logan 2:04  So you're saying you could never have just like, worked behind a cubicle doing the same thing every day? You're ...John Mollura 2:10  That lasted nine months ... (John laughs)Lesley Logan 2:12  Oh, hey that's longer than I think I lasted when somebody tried to ask. I was like, "I don't think I'm really good at this." (Lesley laughs)John Mollura 2:19  Yeah, yeah, that came right at the end where I where I jumped ship on corporate world after 16 years and start doing photography full time. But backing up, yeah, so I used to be a literal rocket scientist. I lead test missions for NASA and the Department of Defense from Antarctica on projects to England. You know, garden spots, like, you know, Sandusky, Ohio in February. It was literally all over the map. And the way I fell into that job was my buddies and I were sitting around Penn State, senior year, probably, like some wing and beer night. And a call came for people to interview for the company. I made the spacesuit for NASA. And I say, I'm gonna ...Lesley Logan 3:05  Wait. (John: Yeah) Wait, hold on. I'm sorry. You're just having wings and beer. And they're like, "Hey, there's this job to work for NASA. We're you qualified for this?" (Lesley laughs)John Mollura 3:15  Oh, I felt I wasn't because although I did, I did okay in school. School never came real easy for me, in engineering school, for those of you that are familiar with is an absolute grind. It whenever we sat in our freshman orientation, they said, "Look to the person to the left to you and the person to your right. And they're going to wash out in the next four years. One (Lesley: What a pep talk.) of you, two of you three." Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was like, it was like signing up for you know, buds with the Navy seals, it's like, "Pretty much all of you are not going to be able to make it. So good luck."Lesley Logan 3:47  Okay, so here's what I can tell you. Absolutely, very few people listen to this podcast, probably are familiar with engineering schools. (John: Right) I don't know. No offense to the ones who are so. So you did go to engineering school. (John: Yeah.) Okay. And then you're having the wings and beers. And then you see that this is job with this company who made the NASA outfits.John Mollura 4:06  Yeah, the spacesuits like since like the Apollo days. (Lesley: It's a real thing.) Yeah, the real deal. Yeah, not the stuff you know, for soundstage like the stuff they actually put on the rocket and you know, allegedly landed on the moon with you know, depending on which side of the fence you fall on (Lesley: Yeah) the debate. But so I sent my resume in as a joke like thinking like there's no way like this company is ever going to want to hire me. And sure enough, they did, they want to do a phone interview. You know, this was back in the late 90s. So like, there was no FaceTime, no Zoom, like I was sitting on my shared landline in my fraternity house. And yeah, there were some guys like you know, ... next dorm sitting there on a phone interview talking to ... (Lesley: NASA) Yeah, yeah. (Lesley: No big deal.) Yeah, no big deal. And I was interviewing to be like a project manager, which I had no clue what that would be. And knowing what I know now, that would have and awful fit, I would have been terrible that. And the summer before I applied when I was I think a junior in school, I taught rock climbing for the Boy Scouts. Because I have all lined up, you know, to go do an internship at Disney, like be Disney. And I lost it to like another person like me and one other person and I lost it. And yeah, and it was like, late April, you know, this is also a recurring thing with me. I don't really have a plan B a lot of times.Lesley Logan 5:34  Right. Doesn't, it also kind of no offense, doesn't really sound like yeah, there's a either, it's ...John Mollura 5:38  Yeah. It just like Forrest Gump my way through life. (Lesley: Yes, I'm loving it.) Yeah ...Lesley Logan 5:44  I wish, I wish I could do that. I'm like, I need a b 27 letters later. I would like another.John Mollura 5:51  Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, I not not my thing. You know, my wife and I always joke. It's like, you know, there's two types of people in the relationship. There's the person that says, "All right, I got the passport. I got the boarding pass. I got the hotel reservations and the rental car reservations." And then the other person in the relationships, like, "Where are we going?" (Lesley and John laughs) (Lesley: Oh, my God.)Lesley Logan 6:14  You know what's really funny, is up until this moment, like I was like, oh, yeah like Brad is like, kind of that person. He's like, "Oh, I can do that. Oh, I'm gonna sign up. What?" Like he'll get bored and the same thing all the time. But when it comes to travel, he has our passport. He has a dropbox folder of all of our visas. He has all the things that I'm like, "So we're going?" So anyways, okay, so, you, you're going you're teaching rock climbing for Boy Scouts.John Mollura 6:42  Yeah, yeah, that was that was the summer before the infamous wings and beer night where we decide to apply to you know work on critical life saving equipment. And but I put that on my resume because I got that job after the whole Disney thing fell through, my fraternity brother walked in the room and they'll say, "Hey, you're right, man." And I'm like, "No, I'm pretty far from okay, right now, dude." Tell them what happened because we are outdoorsy, you want to you know, you want to work at a scout camp. I'm like, "I was never a Boy Scout. I didn't wear goofy green shorts and run around." It seems like, alright, well, don't say things like that, but we could hire you. So I worked with the maintenance crew. Like until like, I could do my assigned job, which was I was supposed to be a watersports director. And I, once again, I was like, "I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to sail or do anything. I can swim that's about it." They're like, "We'll train you." I'm like, "Alright, cool, you'll train me," whatever. And, but until like training, like there was like a six week gap. And I worked with the maintenance crews and I had like zero, like trade skills. So I was I was the guy just like schlepping the chainsaws through the woods. And you know, when the when the septic drainage truck would need something like I'd like run out their stuff. And the crescendo of my glamorous jobs was when we got the cabins readied for the people to come in. They've been uninhabited in the Catskills for like nine months. Well, a lot of mice apparently with like, try to get water in the toilets and like fall in the toilet. Yeah, the look on your faces at all. (Lesley laughs) So my job was I, I got to pull the dead mice out of the toilets that I had, like sunk. Now, that was my job, honest to God.Lesley Logan 8:24  Oh, my God. So that's what NASA, you put that on your resume?John Mollura 8:27  Well, not yet. I didn't put that on there. But which, you know, unfortunately, those kinds of skills did come, come in handy down the road in my career. So here I am doing this job. And I'm like, "This sucks. Like, I didn't sign up for this." But whatever, I'd no options. And, you know, I thought maybe it was just karma. You know, since Mickey Mouse like, you know, just me like now I'm like, dead mice ... (Lesley and John laughs) So, so anywho, so I'm getting ready to, I'm psyched, like I'm counting down the days. We go to training. They're gonna teach me how to like teach people to water ski and all this cool stuff. I'm like, "Awesome." And I'm like sitting in the middle of some like field like scrubbing rust off a propane tank that's like leaking next to me. And I'm thinking, "This sucks." But one more day, and they came up, the Directors came up and they're like, "Hey, John, how you doing?" I'm like, "Oh, I'm good. Good train and train. I'm leaving for training tomorrow." They're like, "Hey, yeah, bout that. We just got the call from the person that was here for the past two years. And they want their old job back so we don't have to pay to train you anymore." And I'm like, "Oh, God." So it's like ...So they're like, they're like, "You're fired. But we're happy because we ..."Oh, no, no, no, I wasn't fired. (Lesley" Okay, okay.) I impressed the Ranger, the maintenance crews so much (Lesley: that they wanted to keep you on.) They want to keep me on there and I'm thinking, "Oh my God. Alright, well, okay."Lesley Logan 9:46  How many more cats and toilets are there? John Mollura 9:48  Yeah, yeah. Right. How many more propane tanks am I gonna have to scrub? And so they're like, or you could be Assistant Director of rock climbing. I'm like, "I'll do it." They're like, "You want to hear what it is?" I'm like, "I don't know how to rock. I don't care. I'm not that scared of heights. I'll do it. When you trained me how to do it?" They're like, "Yeah, we'll send you to training." I'm like, my bags already packed like, "Alright, I'm out of here, man." So, so it ended up being a great fit. Yeah, I've worked with a great crew. Like, I supervised like I think over 700 Scouts, rappelling and rock climbing on like natural cliffs. We weren't in like a gym. We were like, (Lesley: Oh, this is like ...) outside, like turkey buzzards. Yeah, this is like, (Lesley: Oh) yeah, (Lesley: Like real, real stuff.) Like real deal. Yeah, like, like the rocks, like falling down. Like kind of stuff.Lesley Logan 10:33  That's crazy. So that's, what was on your resume that made them go?John Mollura 10:36  That's what was on my resume, Director of Rock Climbing.Lesley Logan 10:38  How crazy. (John: And ...) I wonder, you know what, probably if you had Disney on there, they'd be like, "hmm another Disney kid." Like ...John Mollura 10:44  Yeah, right. Yeah, (Lesley: They thought like they wouldn't have been as impressed.) It was Christina Aguilera's boyfriend, whatever. That Timberlake guy trying to get a job again? But so I put that on my resume, because I thought, you know, it showed I had some practical experience. You know, I had other engineering type stuff. And they said, "What's this about rock climbing?" I gave my little spiel, and they said, "Hang on a second, someone just walked by, we want you to talk to." And like they put me on mute. And I'm like, "O-oh." (Lesley: Yeah) And this nasally voice came on the phone again. No video back in the 90s. Sneezes voice goes, "Hey, what do you think about rock climbing on Mars?" And I just knee jerk reaction said, "Are you going to pay my airfare?" (Lesley: Yeah) And I thought, "Oh, God, I just blew it, just being a smartass." And this dude, who I had no idea who he was. Yeah. And then he interview, he gives "Get them down here." And they're like, "Alright, well, we're going to arrange an on site visit." And it was like an eight hour drive from where I went to school in Pennsylvania. And I come down here and lo and behold, that like mystery person that jumped on at the last minute. I was like the lead test engineer for like Mars landers. And he was a former Air Force Special Operations guy and tested fighter jets. And he and I just like hit it off like a ball of fire. He said, "I don't need the smartest person in the room." I'm like, "Good because you didn't get him." He's like, "I need someone I can send out into the field." You know, then ...And you're like, "Oh, actually super good. I can scrub brass top off propane." (Lesley: Yeah) Did you know that?Propane tank, you need dead mice. I'm also your guy for that. (Lesley: Do you have that on Mars? Don't worry. I've been there.) Yeah, right. We terraform Mars, I'll be I'll take care of all the plumbing issues. But so he said, "You're not you're not being confined to an office, being a some project manager." So for the next like seven years, like Skip, and I just went all over the world. He was my mentor. His name was Skip Wilson. And we just, you know, just did some pretty radical shit for the world.Lesley Logan 12:41  That's so ... Here's what I, here's what's so crazy. I hope, like, I hope you all just heard that. You could have easily been like, "Oh, I'm not smart enough. Oh, I'm not qualified enough." Like, I think so many people do not put their name in the hat for things because they they pre reject themselves. And yeah, you were probably like, you were like you said, half joking. Or like, whatever. Let's just like it's a game. Let's see what happens. But oftentimes, people are not looking for the most qualified, perfect scored, most well trained, they're looking for someone who they can get along with that they want to travel the world. (John: Yeah) And like, we'll get their hands dirty. And like, actually, just try and not assume that they know the answer. I think that is really a cool story.John Mollura 13:24  Yeah, yeah. So I did that. I said, you know, I did Skip for the next seven, eight years, you know, we we sadly lost him to cancer in mid 2011. Which really, I didn't realize how much it affected me. But it really affected me because he and I were one of the few that did what we did in our country and also in the world. So it really left the whole, like kind of like not having that like fallback position. Because you know, even though I was in charge, and I would lead a bunch of stuff, it's always nice to kind of like be like, "Hey, Skip." Or like, "Hey, Dad, what do you think of this?" (Lesley: Yeah, yeah.) So that's, that was what I did. And I stayed at that company until 2016. And by that point, like, I'd been there for 15 years, so the leadership had changed. It had become a very much profit driven company. Because the company the company, they got bought by venture capitalists, and yeah, that that old chestnut ...Lesley Logan 14:21  Yep there, I just actually heard it was on the Daily podcast, not a sponsor of the show everyone but they literally explain in layman's terms about like VCs and how like, these like they're taking over, like your vets, and your dentists and your all these things and (John: Yeah.) I'm like, "Oh my God," Anyways, (John: That's crazy.) that's another podcast, not ours. (John: Yeah) So go listen to that one if you actually don't understand how that works. Okay, so so you're in this job for 15 years that isn't that is in... insane like, "Let me see how this goes." Journey. What? I mean, obviously, it wasn't as exciting at work are they are having goals that were outside of what yours were? What how did you end up in your next thing? Were you, were you dabbling in photography while you're doing this? How did that go?John Mollura 15:09  Yeah, I had always done photography as a hobby. I think I got my first camera and I was like seven. So it was back in the mid 80s. So like I learned to shoot on film. And I was actually just looking through the first travel album I ever did after I got a real camera. We got my first Nikon with my daughter today. And she's like, "Why are these pictures so weird?" I'm like, "Well, it's because they were on film." And like ... (John and Lesley laughs) just had the kind ...Lesley Logan 15:34   Why are these pictures not moving themselves?John Mollura 15:36  Yeah, right. Yeah. But no, photography had always been a hobby. And like I said, I got to go to some very awesome places in my tenure as an engineer, and I was I just threw my camera in the bag. And you know, I'd have my Little Walter Mitty fantasies when I'd be out, you know, working on some engineering job pretending like National Geographic had just sent me an Anartica instead. And ...Lesley Logan 16:00  Okay, that is being it till you see it. You're like, (John: Yeah) "I am, I am taking pictures and they don't... like for National Geographic. Great."John Mollura 16:08  Yeah, so yeah, because that's like one of the big dreams like, you know, for photographers like that's like the gold standard. And I remember I was reading a National Geographic once, because that's actually what kindled my love of like photography, and like travel and wonderlust. It was a episode I saw my grandparents table, and it was about Mount Vesuvius, like back in the 80s at, like a par... I can still I could still see and that's what sparked my wanderlust in National Geographic, other than just kind of being like, the gold standard of photographers holds a special place in my heart because I, you know, it, that's really what kindled my wanderlust. And I remember reading an episode or a issue of National Geographic, probably 10, 15 years ago. And they had the statistics of like, the chance of like, having National Geographic, like, even look at your photo and let alone getting published. And they're like, look, you know, for an issue like the photographer's that we send out, they shoot, like umpteen 10s of 1000s of pictures, we get this many pictures just sent to us. This many pictures make it to the, like, final edit, but like it came down to these statistics that were like, just insane, like ...Lesley Logan 17:23  Less than a percent of a percent. (John: Right.) Yeah.John Mollura 17:27  So, I of course, tore that out, (Lesley: Yeah) and put it on my little vision board. And I'm a huge Star Wars nerd, as you know, from from the May of 4th, you know, thing we did together this year. (Lesley: Yeah) Han Solo is always like, just like my, like, such an icon to me, because he just had that swashbuckling like self confidence that I really didn't have, like, I might like, jump in and do things. But, you know, like I mentioned, like, imposter syndrome and anxiety and stuff were like, things that like traveled with me throughout my life. So like, Han Solo, it was always like, the, like the dude. You know, it's like, (Lesley: Yeah) "Man, if I could just be like that and have that confidence in my abilities. Like, that would be so awesome. So I print out his picture of Han Solo, you know, in it just said his one of his famous quotes from on the lot movies. Never told me the odds. Like he was doing some like thing where, like, there was like, zero chance of success. And he's like, "Don't tell me the odds. I'm just gonna do it."Lesley Logan 18:27  Oh, I see. (John: Yeah) I see. (John: Yeah) I see.John Mollura 18:29  Yeah. I never never tell me the odds of success or failure, because I'm just going to do it. It's not going to change my effort. So I took that and like, pinned it overtop of the National Geographic thing. And it (Lesley: Yeah) was always like, right next to my thing. And in 2016, I got notified that National Geographic was featuring one of my photos ... (Lesley: Shut up) Yep, in their your shot program. It was like they selected 12 photos a day to feature and mine was one of them.Lesley Logan 18:53  Shut up! (John: Yeah) That is insane. (John: Yeah) Oh, my God!John Mollura 18:56  Yep. So, (Lesley: Oh, my God.) I had that above my thing, like open like at these like insane odds, but then, you know, Han Solo always reminding me, you know, (Lesley: Oh, my ...) but don't worry about the odds, just do it.Lesley Logan 19:05  That is amazing. And also, Brad's gonna nerd hell out about this right now. Like, I know that he's listening right now. He's like, chuckling because, first of all, Star Wars. Yes. National Geographic. Yes. Like, and, you know, there's this like, common thing you said, like, you're like a pioneer, and I know very little about Star Wars, everyone. It's, it's okay, we clearly know this. By now like, I don't think I can get away with it. But what I do know, what I do know about Han Solo is, he is like that pioneer. He's like, just gonna like he is like, like, he doesn't need to see the map. He's just gonna go do it. And so I feel like, I feel like you've had some really good like spirit animals in your life guiding you into like, (John: Yeah) "Okay, I'm gonna be like Han Solo right now. I'm just gonna go do it." Anyways, that is so cool. (John: Yeah) This is amazing. Because, you know, I think, again, going back to like people thinking like, life gets really linear. You, you suppose to like you're like, "Okay, I'm a rocket scientist and then I'm a photographer." Like you were like, you were organically allowing one to still happen while you were doing this other thing. And I think that is really cool. We don't have to just be one thing and we don't have to just only like, we don't have to wait our turn for, for this thing to happen. Okay, that's amazing. So all, so when did that happen? When were you in National Geographic?John Mollura 20:21  That was in 2016.Lesley Logan 20:24  Okay, about the same time that you were leaving.John Mollura 20:26  It was right after I left my job that I had been 15 and a half years. And I've been doing photography as a side hustle for a number of years, like getting paid for it. But what self respecting father of three that lives in Southern, rural Southern Delaware would like leave the six figure job to be a photographer. So I didn't, I didn't leave the job I was at and go straight to a photographer. I went to another engineering company, (Lesley: Yeah) where I got paid even more money and like they'd fly me like first class to like Shanghai for these like meetings and ...Lesley Logan 21:02  Okay. So that the harder thing to give up. I'm just gonna be real, (John: Yeah, it was.) first class Shanghai, that's a little hard to give up.John Mollura 21:07  Yeah, yeah. If you're gonna be first class anywhere, like, don't don't be first class from like New York to Miami. Be it on like, a day long flight. (Lesley: Yes, yes.) But that job was was like a desk, it was a desk job. And I was, I was so unhappy in my previous job just because I had a lot of personal change going on, you know, that led up to that. But, you know, I just felt this, you know, responsibility in my family, where I couldn't do that. I couldn't, I couldn't be a photographer full time. Because there's no way I you can make anywhere close, you know, all these stories. And the Author Jon Acuff that I love called them noble obstacles.Lesley Logan 21:49  Oh, I love Jon Acuff. (John: Yeah) And that's noble obstacles. (John: Yeah) Interesting. Um, I also think it's interesting, like you said, a couple stories, like what self respecting, father of three would like leave this job to go do this. And then like, you know, these things, and it's, I know, people listening, a lot of them are saying the same thing to themselves right now. Maybe not that sentence, but like, there's a story that's keeping them from doing the next thing because of like, what other people will think or like, how, that's a crazy idea. And like, because we've not necessarily seen it, maybe didn't see Han Solo do it yet. Like, (John: Right) it's hard to imagine that it could be a possibility. So what was the impetus? How did you leave that job? How did you get over that?John Mollura 22:33  I had someone that was a mentor to me for a number of years in photography, and she was also a coach. And she invited me to a networking event because my thing was, I knew I had skills in photography. And but I didn't know how to sell it or market it and, or how to, like, even get in front of people. And she invited me to a networking event. And I'm like, "Oh, my God, there's actually like, ways to make this happen." So I came home and talking with my wife about it. And she's like, "You're miserable, dude." Like, she's like, "Your skin has like the pallet of like a wet ashtray." ... (Lesley: I like that she keeps it real.) Well, what she'd been living this for years (Lesley: Yeah) with me like, (Lesley: Yeah) yes, as my, my job just wasn't satisfying it. So yeah, I turned in my, my resignation in the spring of 2017, which was over five years ago. And when I became a full time photographer, and even that's evolved over the past five years and what I currently do, which is, which is portraits.Lesley Logan 23:38  Yeah. Okay, so, um, there's, I mean, like, I love this story, because A said, the detonics, but also like, it's not, it's, it's not predictable, but it's completely like something and every single one of us have a story like this. And we get caught up that like, it's has to be, "Oh, has to be a certain way. Oh, I have to do this and when I'll have this." And I just like that you kind of followed your passion. And even when you didn't, you have people around you who like shined a little flashlight on possibility. And there's just like constant theme, you have a mentor and you have people around you who are like being, who are being honest with you about who you are. And I think a lot of us don't have, like a lot of us pull ourselves back. We hide, we like don't want to be like fully seen because we want people to necessarily know like, the mistakes we make or like the thoughts we're having. But actually are you having a mentor and a coach and your wife and your like, they're they are the ones that kind of guided you to where to go next. And so it's just really cool because we don't have to do it on our own.John Mollura 24:41  Yeah, and that's always that's one of the biggest suggestions I always give people when they say, "How do you, how do you make a living, like make a good living as a photographer?" I say, "I hire people that have been down that path before me." They're like, "Oh, that sounds expensive." And I said, "Well, it's not inexpensive." But the paybacks monetarily are easy to quantify, but also just giving you that confidence that oh, these people have been down that path is worth a lot.Lesley Logan 25:15  Yeah, that's actually. I mean, and that's the thing that most people skip. They're like, they're, and I get that I get that everyone has bills, and everyone has a different budget, and there's all these things and but I agree, like, I would not be where I am today, had I not hired people who had gone through what I wanted to be through. Like, like, I was like, they knew the what it took to get to the next level because they already left that level. So like, I think, it is not the easiest decision to invest in yourself. But you have like, if you don't you just you don't even get to stay where you were. You you go backwards because you you're gonna feel stuck, miserable. And also, the world keeps going forward. Like that's the energy, your a rocket scientist, you I don't tell you that you know how energy works. So ...John Mollura 26:01  Physics of a cruel mistress, is very cruel. (John and Lesley laughs)Lesley Logan 26:07  Yeah, I actually, I'll be really honest, I am changed my major. This... So yes, I lost feeling in my fingers, which is one of the reasons why I changed my athletic training major. The other reason was, is I was like, "Physics? Why the hell do I have to do that? No, we're not doing that." So I was like, "What Science classes does a communications major have to do?" Great. The Math class, it was like statistics like, "Nope, I don't want to do that. What's the other like, what major gets me out of Algebra? I just, I just, I'm gonna hire someone to do the Math. It's fine." (Lesley laughs) Anyways, um, so okay, we've talked about it a couple of times. And I just want to touch on a little bit, because you've mentioned you had an anxiety you've had impostor syndrome. I know a lot of our listeners struggle with either one or the other, or both. And, and how, like, how has that been? Because I'm sure like, having anxiety and also like, being a parent and being a partner and being someone who's like, making these major changes. And now it's like, how did you get over... like, what was that? How did you move past that with everything going on?John Mollura 27:11  It, it goes back to the same way I did it in my business was working with therapists you know, coaches, people that even just a trusted person. But but, you know, therapy therapy was was super important. And what that was one of the hardest decisions for me to make, because, you know, one of my traumas from growing up was, you know, I had to become like, very self sufficient, you know, I just had this in it, and it still crops up, you know, I'm one of those fools that sometimes will be like, "You need help with that, John?" "No, no, it's just, it's just awkward," you know, when really, like, I need like three other people to help me. (Lesley: Yeah) So being aware of that, because, you know, there's no, there's no quick fix, especially with it will anything with your health, mental or physical, you know, just because you eat a salad one day doesn't mean you're gonna drop 15 pounds. (Lesley: Right) You know, it's, it's, it's putting in the reps and doing it. And it's the same with with mental, your mental health. You know, once, you know, I got got some tools from a therapist, and, you know, took medication for a while, just as a as, you know, as she put it, in vernacular, I could understand when I was an engineer, like, "This is just another tool in your tool chest John. This doesn't mean anything. It's just another tool." (Lesley: Right) So, you know, acquiring those skills, and doing some very honest self reflection, and realizing when things come up, and, you know, looking for patterns, maybe and those things and just having the desire to get better. You know, and (Lesley: Yeah) which was huge. And, you know, it's not perfect, not every day is sunshine and rainbows, and (Lesley: Yeah) but, you know, it's not about having everything be perfect. It's about how do you how do you respond when that's not perfect?Lesley Logan 29:12  Oh, yeah, that's good. That, that's a great question. That's also like, something to think about on a good day. So you have an answer for when on a bad day, you're like, "What am I supposed to do right now?" You're like ,"Oh, I actually on a day that I was feeling good about life, (John: Yeah, right.) wrote down a game plan for myself." Yeah, I think, um, I mean, it's there more and more, it's easier for people to talk about mental health and anxiety. And I do love that. But we do have so much more work to do, because I think so many people look at others and they, and for better or worse, you know, social media is always going to show the good stuff. Just is. And we then put on it, "Oh, they must not suffer from impostor syndrome, anxiety or any other things." It's like, no, it's just that they just didn't post about it on that day, they you know, that doesn't mean that like, they don't struggle with the same things. And so so a) the more we all can be aware that everyone is going through it at some point it that makes it easier. And then I love what you said like, had to decide, like you have to decide that like you wanted it to be better, that you wanted to do something. And I think that that's that's that's a tough one decision to make and but also believe that it could, so good for you. And also thank you for sharing that. You, I'm going to just let the cat out of the bag, because when this is up, it should be hopefully ready. You came into Agency to talk about impostor syndrome. Agency is our group coaching program. And literally after it was over people were like, "I need to buy that. I need to rewatch that. Oh my God, I can't believe I'm in that." And it's an interesting topic because I feel like more and more and more people will say, "I have impostor syndrome. I have impostor syndrome," is kind of like a catch all title. But when you broke it down, you explain a lot of things. And I and you know, everyone can go watch the course. But can you talk about why you got excited about this topic? Like what made you investigate it? What made you go, "Oh, I want to I want to, I want to explore this and also teach people about it." What was that?John Mollura 31:18  I don't want people to suffer like I did. And I didn't even know what impostor syndrome was for a very long time. And just being able to put a name to something, especially things that are troubling you, already gives you some power over that. So I really wanted to educate people on what impostor syndrome is. You know if anyone's listening to this, and you know, a real quick check to see if you've ever had impostor syndrome. That's a term you've never heard before is, "how do you respond when someone gives you a compliment"? Do you like genuinely say, "Oh, thank you very much. I'm so glad that you know that that spoke to you." And feel good about yourself or like, do you kind of get like these like weird feelings in your stomach. And maybe do some poorly delivered is tempted self deprecating humor, like, "Oh, you liked that song I wrote. Oh, you should probably get your hearing checked. Ha ha ha." (Lesley: Yeah.) Those are how impostor syndrome manifests. And I really just wanted people to understand how that is. Because if you look at my, my resume, my professional record on paper, you know, engineering or photography wise, you know, NASA, Department of Defense Commendations, National Geographic features, like, it sounds like I, you know, I got it all together. But a defining moment in my life was I remember getting a commendation letter from the Department of Defense for a project that I led. And I thought I'm up on the stage, so everyone can actually point their fingers at me and be like, "See, we knew you were full of crap. And you're actually not supposed to be here." And I remember like almost being in tears when I got the letter. And like, that's like one of those core memories that I have. So whenever the opportunity came up to speak about impostor syndrome, like, I don't want people to feel like that. Or if they do feel like that I want to teach them, provide them some resources that they can use to move past that.Lesley Logan 33:27  Yeah. Yeah, that's... Well I think, I think anyone listening is like, "Oh, my God, I can't believe that's how he felt when something amazing is happening." And yet, I bet, if we asked all of them like they would have, they could think of a time when an amazing thing happened. And they were letting their imposter syndrome. Tell them that it wasn't as amazing and that this isn't, they didn't deserve this, or somebody got it wrong. I loved it. I love, I love how you explained it, I loved everything you have to say our members loved it. And so everybody, we we will definitely put in the show notes. So you can watch, you can watch this amazing course from John, because I want to help you make sure that no one else has to suffer through that too. I think it is really important. It's really incredible. It's also what what so many of our listeners are suffering from and it's holding them back. And the whole point of this whole podcast is that I just know that every single person here listen to this has something that they're meant to do. And I cannot be imposter syndrome or the feeling that they're not good enough, which is the exact same things. I maybe redundant, but it cannot be that, that cannot be the reason that they don't do it. Like other reasons, sure. That one, no. Because that one, that one is something that together as a world I think we can really combat and we can we can we can work on that. So John, thank you for being you. Okay, we're gonna take a brief break, and then we're gonna find out how people can get their picture taken by you, find you, follow you, all that stuff.Alright, John, where do you hang out? Where are you on the socials? Where do people get to know more about you?John Mollura 35:10  Well, literally, I hang out in my car a lot, shuttling my three kids to various things. (John and Lesley laughs) But when I'm not doing that, they can track me down on social media, there's not a lot of John Mollura's out there. So just John Mollura Photography, M o l l u r a. And my website's mulloraphoto, and you can see samples of my work on there. And if, like I said, I do portraits, I specialize in people. And we're not talking about like the white, you know, backgrounds of JCPenney's Days of Your. I really like to create empowering photos of people. Because you know, how awesome does it feel to look at a really good photo of yourself, whether it's a selfie, or someone took it, and they just happen to catch you, right? Like that makes you feel so good. And ...You are so correct. You are so... I'm sorry to interrupt. You are so correct the other a couple episodes back, y'all. My friend Clare asked me about like, "How are you get ready for photo sessions?" And I have to say, many of the photo sessions in fact, one of the best photo sessions I had. Recently, I was not having a good day when the photo shoot was supposed to happen. I'm like, "I can't beleive I have a photo shoot today." And I'm like, "I'm like having impostor syndrome, all the stuff." And yet, when you have a photographer like you, who would like first of all loves what they're doing and is does it really well. But when they capture that photo of you in, in this portrait, you're like, "Oh, that's I may feel like this, but that's who I am."Right.Lesley Logan 36:38  Ah, it's amazing.John Mollura 36:40  Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, so one of the things I love to do is remove as much stress from the whole situation as possible that goes from like, you know, initial consults, but then like going to their homes and like helping them pick their wardrobe. (Lesley: Whoa.) Yeah, yeah. Right.Lesley Logan 36:56  You are in it. That's amazing.John Mollura 36:58  Oh yeah. Yeah. You know and then the day of the shoot, you know, there's always professional hair and makeup offered for folks so they can just show up and not worry if it's raining outside and what happens to my hair. No, you can just sit in Kelly's chair and she'll take care of it. I'll get you a glass of wine or tea or whatever you want. Do the photo shoot where I you know, I guide people through all the poses because it was at Talladega Nights, you know that ... What do I do with my hands? (John and Lesley laughs) So I tell people what to do with their hands, you know. But then, even afterwards, I help them pick the photos, and then they're all professionally retouched. So, you know, it's showing people in like, very treated, I don't make people look fake, and like, you know, like some plastic Barbie. But you know, let's face it, like the the high end digital cameras that we use, like they capture a lot of details that like, don't need to be captured that you don't really see. But then even helping them with like, because like you said with photos, when you see a photo that makes you feel really good, but I'm a firm believer in like the power of like a physical product. So every photo people select, they always get a print of it. Five by seven, it's matted, I mail it to them with a thank you note. But then I offer like heirloom quality like wall art. Like I'll come to their house I install it. So it's like start to finish like ...Lesley Logan 38:20  Oh my God.John Mollura 38:21  How much stress can I remove from you and have this actually be what it is, which is showing, showcasing the world the true you and more importantly, because some people are like, "What am I going to do with like 15 photos of myself, John?" I'm like, "Put them in the nice little gift box I give you and then when you're having you know and keep like one of them out. Have some boss ass photo of you hanging up and like your bedroom, your closet. If you don't want the world to see it, in when you're having those bad days, like you were having like how awesome that'd be to look over and see that picture and be like, 'Okay, I got this for five minutes. I can. (Lesley: Okay) I can do this.'"Lesley Logan 38:56  You've inspired me to print some of our photos. (John: Yeah, you should.) That I only been putting on Instagram. You know, um, well, now I just have there's so many reasons why my family is listen to this, they're be like, "Well, we have to get Delaware anyways." But now I feel like we have to get to Delaware so that we can do a photo shoot with you.John Mollura 39:14  Yeah, love the photograph. You and Brad.Lesley Logan 39:16  Oh, yeah, yeah, no, it's gonna happen. There's we literally go to Delaware. So it's gonna happen. You know ...John Mollura 39:25  You the president and Dave Grohl my ... (Lesley: Right) Yeah, well, they all frequent Delaware.Lesley Logan 39:30  And also, for those of you who are on the East Coast, I from what I understand, like Delaware, it's really easy to get to, your states are all very small you're because you're not in California. You can get there in a couple hours. (John: Yeah) Go do it. Um, okay, so we can talk about photography even more, and maybe it'll come up but be it till you see it action items. Bold, executable, intrinsic or targeted steps that people can do to be it till they see it. What do you have?John Mollura 39:54  My friend Paige who's like, just one of these people that you talk to you and you're like, "Well, you're you're really smart. You just understand people." She said something to me years ago, and I don't even know if she meant it to have this much impact. So when I was talking about doing photography and like, "I don't know, Paige, I'd love to do it full time. But you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And she just matter of factly said, "Well, John, somebody has to do that." And like, that stuck with me, like, so anytime, I think it's impossible for me to make this sale or make this much a year or for my band to make a CD. It's like, "No, somebody has to. So why not you?" (Lesley: Yeah.) And you know, if you want to get even, you know, more positive, don't say someone has to because I can have a negative connotation, but someone gets to, somebody gets to make a living from photography, or make a living from Pilates, what they love. Why can't that be me? (Lesley: Yeah) So that's what I want people to really take away. You know what, why not me? (Lesley: Yeah) And then when the negative voices start coming up, you tell him to shut up and just remember, why not me? Some somebody has to.Lesley Logan 41:10  Somebody has to. Why not you? John, ah, I am obsessed with you. You're amazing. You've got so much to offer this planet. We can keep we'll have to have you back. I'm sure Brad is like, you could have gone more into the Star Wars or something else but ...John Mollura 41:25  So tell Brad to call me we'll nerd out.Lesley Logan 41:27  I know.John Mollura 41:27  Do some legos or something.Lesley Logan 41:29  I know the day of our shoot, we'll just have to block out extra hours for time for that. Anyways. Okay, everyone, how are you going to use these action items in your life? Right. Tell us by tagging John Mollura and tagging @be_it_pod and letting us know. Also, do us a favor, send this to a friend. And you know what if this had an impact on you DM John or myself or text a friend what it was because not only does it change people's lives, like it really does if you they could there could be a sentence that like Paige said to John that changes and sticks with someone. But also it's literally how we change the world. Like we get rid of impostor syndrome and these feelings of of being alone. One person at a time. So thank you everyone so much. And until next time, Be It Till You See It.John Mollura 42:14  Thank you, Lesley.Lesley Logan 42:15  Yeah. Okay.'Be It Till You See It' is a production of 'As The Crows Fly Media'.Brad Crowell 42:17   It's written, produced, filmed and recorded by your host Lesley Logan and me, Brad Crowell. Our Associate Producer is Amanda Frattarelli. Lesley Logan 42:17  Kevin Perez at Disenyo handles all of our audio editing. Brad Crowell 42:17  Our theme music is by Ali at APEX Production Music. Lesley Logan 42:17  And our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi. Special thanks to our designer Jaira Mandal for creating all of our visuals (which you can't see because this is a podcast) and our digital producer, Jay Pedroso for editing all video each week so you can. Brad Crowell 42:17  And to Angelina Herico for transcribing each of our episodes so you can find them on our website. And, finally to Meridith Crowell for keeping us all on point and on time.Transcribed by https://otter.aiSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/be-it-till-you-see-it/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

“John: Right, Karen and DT…what I meant is not to get hung up on things that haven't happened. Doubting Thomas: And might never happen! John: Might. Never! Yes! Earl Nightingale tells us that we do that with about 30% of the things we think about, and that's after spending 40% of our worries on the unchangeable past which we CAN NOT control! Doubting Thomas: That's 70% right there!” Referenced Links: AI Voices & Other Stuff @ Online Tone Generator Credits: This podcast & our other podcast are productions of Little Red Hen Industries. Learn all about financial education & personal financial management in this episode segment with John Brandy on the Simple Success podcast. Learn more about Simple Success with John Brandy using our all-in-one access link here Visit the Simple Success with John Brandy website today! We also have websites, & you can subscribe to both podcasts & there is a Listen Notes site for even more personal ideas. Send us a video, audio or text message, but of course you'll head to head to the show notes to get links. Simple Success Website: https://www.simplesuccesswithjohnbrandy.com/ A Choice Voice Website: https://www.achoicevoice.com/ iOS Link for Simple Success: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/simple-success-with-john-brandy/id1549566678 Droid Link for Simple Success: https://podcasts.google.com/search/simple%20success%20with%20john%20brandy iOS Link for A Choice Voice: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-choice-voice-with-john-brandy/id1560026051 Droid Link for A Choice Voice: https://podcasts.google.com/search/a%20choice%20voice%20with%20john%20brandy Support: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/support https://anchor.fm/achoicevoice/support Voice Messages: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/message https://anchor.fm/achoicevoice/message ListenNotes (Podcast Playlist & Other Cool Stuff): https://www.listennotes.com/playlists/john-brandys-podcast-playlist-GxK2g7uwZDU/podcasts/ Finally, you can find us on Podmatch, where we consider guests & guesting on other pods. Podmatch Host Profile https://podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1611285111512x890580376127176400?return=true Podmatch Guest Profile https://podmatch.com/guestdetailpreview/1611285111512x890580376127176400?return=true And really finally, our music and our sound effects come from freesound.org --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/support

“John: Right. Either you control your mind…or it controls you. Doubting Thomas: Ha! Our friend Napoleon Hill again? That negative person... John: Impressive, even though we're all about positive thinking. You know, it's really odd. Doubting Thomas: What is? John: When I was young… Doubting Thomas: Everyone get their canes out! Goin into one of those elderly brain regions.” Learn all about financial education and personal financial management in this episode segment with John Brandy on the Simple Success podcast. Learn more about Simple Success with John Brandy using our all-in-one access link here Visit the Simple Success with John Brandy website today! We also have websites, and you can subscribe to both podcasts. You can even send us a video, audio or text message, but of course, you'll have to head to the show notes, either on your phone or on the web, to actually get links and stuff. I mean, I COULD read the URLs where you can subscribe, support or leave one of those video or audio messages, but you really don't want me to do that. And those explicit and clickable links are in the show notes. Simple Success Website: https://www.simplesuccesswithjohnbrandy.com/ A Choice Voice Website: https://www.achoicevoice.com/ iOS Link for Simple Success: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/simple-success-with-john-brandy/id1549566678 Droid Link for Simple Success: https://podcasts.google.com/search/simple%20success%20with%20john%20brandy iOS Link for A Choice Voice: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-choice-voice-with-john-brandy/id1560026051 Droid Link for A Choice Voice: https://podcasts.google.com/search/a%20choice%20voice%20with%20john%20brandy Support: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/support https://anchor.fm/achoicevoice/support Voice Messages: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/message https://anchor.fm/achoicevoice/message Finally, you can find us on Podmatch, where we consider guests as well as consider guesting on other people's pods. Podmatch Host Profile https://podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1611285111512x890580376127176400?return=true Podmatch Guest Profile https://podmatch.com/guestdetailpreview/1611285111512x890580376127176400?return=true And really finally, the music for our pods comes from “Cute” by Bensound, and from “Piano Background” by Nick Simon Adams, both on freesound.org. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/support

Richard Shumack (John 2:13-25)

Sempre en segon pla, sense fer soroll i sense donar-se import

“Doubting Thomas: You said you have Shiny Object Syndrome. John: Yes, I admit that I do. When I see… Doubting Thomas: Or are shown… John: Right, or when I am shown something new, some little solution on the computer, I have a tendency to go try it out now, even though I have more important things to do.” Learn all about financial education and personal financial management in this episode segment with John Brandy on the Simple Success podcast. Learn more about Simple Success with John Brandy using our all-in-one access link here Visit the Simple Success with John Brandy website today! Our Simple Success Website: https://www.simplesuccesswithjohnbrandy.com/ Our A Choice Voice Website: https://www.achoicevoice.com/ Podcast Subscription: iOS Link for Simple Success: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/simple-success-with-john-brandy/id1549566678 Droid Link for Simple Success: https://podcasts.google.com/search/simple%20success%20with%20john%20brandy iOS Link for A Choice Voice: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-choice-voice-with-john-brandy/id1560026051 Droid Link for A Choice Voice: https://podcasts.google.com/search/a%20choice%20voice%20with%20john%20brandy Support: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/support https://anchor.fm/achoicevoice/support Voice Messages: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/message https://anchor.fm/achoicevoice/message Finally, you can find us on Podmatch, where we consider guests as well as consider guesting on other people's pods. Podmatch Host Profile https://podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1611285111512x890580376127176400?return=true Podmatch Guest Profile https://podmatch.com/guestdetailpreview/1611285111512x890580376127176400?return=true And really finally, the music for our pods comes from “Cute” by Bensound, and from “Piano Background” by Nick Simon Adams, both on freesound.org. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/support

In this episode, we cover: 00:00:00 - Introduction  00:03:15 - FinOps Foundation and Multicloud  00:07:00 - Costs  00:10:40 - John's History in Reliability Engineering  00:16:30 - The Actual Cost of an Outages, Security, Etc. 00:21:30 - What John Measures  00:28:00 - What John is Up To/Latinx in Tech Links: Palo Alto Networks: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/ FinOps Foundation: https://www.finops.org Techqueria.org: https://techqueria.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmartinez/ TranscriptJohn: I would say a tip for better monitoring, uh, would be to, uh turn it on. [laugh]. [unintelligible 00:00:07] sounds, right?Jason: Welcome to the Break Things on Purpose podcast, a show about chaos engineering and operating reliable systems. In this episode we chat with John Martinez, Director of Cloud R&D at Palo Alto Networks. John's had a long career in tech, and we discuss his new focus on FinOps and how it has been influenced by his past work in security and chaos engineering.  Jason: So, John, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where do you work? What do you do?John: Yeah. So, John Martinez. I am a director over at Palo Alto Networks. I have been in the cloud security space for the better of, I would say, seven, eight years or so. And currently, am in transition in my role at Palo Alto Networks.So, I'm heading headstrong into the FinOps world. So, turning back into the ops world to a certain degree and looking at what can we do, two things: better manage our cloud spend and gain a lot more optimization out of our usage in the cloud. So, very excited about new role.Jason: That's an interesting new role. I'd imagine that at Palo Alto Networks, you've got quite a bit of infrastructure and that's probably a massive bill.John: It can be. It can be. Yeah, [laugh] absolutely. We definitely have large amount of scale, in multi-cloud, too, so that's the added bonus to it all. FinOps is kind of a new thing for me, so I'm pretty happy to, as I dig back into the operations world, very happy to discover that the FinOps Foundation exists and it kind of—there's a lot of prescribed ways of both looking at FinOps, at optimization—specifically in the cloud, obviously—and as well as there's a whole framework that I can go adopt.So, it's not like I'm inventing the wheel, although having been in the cloud for a long time, and I haven't talked about that part of it but a lot of times, it feels like—in my early days anyway—felt like I was inventing new wheels all the time. As being an engineer, the part that I am very excited about is looking at the optimization opportunities of it. Of course, the goal, from a finance perspective, is to either reduce our spend where we can, but also to take a look at where we're investing in the cloud, and if it takes more of a shift as opposed to a straight-up just cut the bill kind of thing, it's really all about making sure that we're investing in the right places and optimizing in the right places when it comes down to it.Jason: I think one of the interesting perspectives of adopting multi-cloud is that idea of FinOps: let's save money. And the idea, if I wanted to run a serverless function, I could take a look at AWS Lambda, I could take a look at Azure Functions to say, “Which one's going to be cheaper for this particular use case,” and then go with that.John: I really liked how the FinOps Foundation has laid out the approach to the lifecycle of FinOps. So, they basically go from the crawl, walk, run approach which, in a lot of our world, is kind of like that. It's very much about setting yourself up for success. Don't expect to be cutting your bill by hundreds of thousands of dollars at the beginning. It's really all about discovering not just how much we're spending, but where we're spending it.I would categorize the pitting the cloud providers against each other to be more on the run side of things, and that eventually helps, especially in the enterprise space; it helps enterprises to approach the cloud providers with more of a data-driven negotiation, I would say [laugh] to your enterprise spend.Jason: I think that's an excellent point about the idea of that is very much a run. And I don't know any companies within my sphere and folks that I know in the engineering space that are doing that because of that price competition. I think everybody gets into the idea of multi-cloud because of this idea of reliability, and—John: Mm-hm.Jason: One of my clouds may fail. Like, what if Amazon goes down? I'd still need to survive that.John: That's the promise, right? At least that's the promise that I've been operating under for the 11 years or so that I've been in the cloud now. And obviously, in the old days, there wasn't a GCP or an Azure—I think they were in their infancy—there was AWS… and then there was AWS, right? And so I think eventually though you're right, you're absolutely right. Can I increase my availability and my reliability by adopting multiple clouds?As I talk to people, as I see how we're adopting the multiple clouds, I think realistically though what it comes down to is you adopted cloud, or teams adopt a cloud specifically for, I wouldn't say some of the foundational services, but mostly about those higher-level niche services that we like. For example, if you know large-scale data warehousing, a lot of people are adopting BigQuery and GCP because of that. If you like general purpose compute and you love the Lambdas, you're adopting AWS and so on, and so forth. And that's what I see more than anything is, I really like a cloud's particular higher level service and we go and we adopt it, we love it, and then we build our infrastructure around it. From a practical perspective, that's what I see.I'm still hopeful, though, that there is a future somewhere there where we can commoditize even the cloud providers, maybe [laugh]. And really go from Cloud A to Cloud B to Cloud C, and just adopt it based on pricing I get that's cheaper, or more performant, or whatever other dimensions that are important to me. But maybe, maybe. We'll remain hopeful. [laugh].Jason: Yeah, we're still very much in that spot where everybody, despite even the basics of if I want to a virtual machine, those are still so different between all the clouds. And I mean even last week, I was working on some Terraform and the idea of building it modularly, and in my head thinking, “Well, at some point, we might want to use one of the other clouds so let's build this module,” and thinking, “Realistically, that's probably not going to happen.”John: [laugh]. Right. I would say that there's the other hidden cost about this and it's the operational costs. I don't think we spend a whole lot of time talking about operational costs, necessarily, but what is it going to cost to retrain my DevOps team to move from AWS to GCP, as an example? What are the underlying hidden costs that are there?What traps am I going to fall into because of that? It seems cool; Terraform does a great job of getting that pain into the multiple clouds from an operations perspective. Kubernetes does a great job as well to take some of that visibility into the underlying—and I hate to use it this way but ‘hardware' [laugh] virtual hardware—that's like EC2 or Google Compute, for example. And they do great jobs, but at the end of the day we're still spending a lot of time figuring out what the foundational services are. So, what are those hidden costs?Anyway, long story short, as part of my journey into FinOps, I'm looking forward into not just uncovering the basics of FinOps, where is what are we spending? Where are we spending it? What are the optimization opportunities? But also take a look at some of the more hidden types of costs. I'm very interested in that aspect of the FinOps world as well. So, I'm excited.Jason: Those hidden costs are also interesting because I think, given your background in security—John: Mm-hm.Jason: —one of the challenges in multi-cloud is, if I'm an expert in AWS and suddenly we're multi-cloud and I have to support GCP, I don't necessarily know all of those correct settings and how to necessarily harden and build my systems. I know a model and a general framework, but I might be missing something. Talk to me a bit more about that as a security person.John: Yeah.Jason: What does that look like?John: Yeah, yeah. It's very nuanced, for sure. There are definitely some efforts within the industry to help alleviate some of that nuance and some of those hidden settings that I might not think about. For example, CIS Foundations as a community, the foundations of benchmarks that CIS produces can be pretty exhaustive—and there are benchmarks for the major clouds as well—those go a long way to try and describe at least, what are the main things I should look at from a security perspective? But obviously, there are new threats coming along every day.So, if I was advising security teams, security operations team specifically, it would be definitely to keep abreast into what are the latest and go take a look at what some of the exploit kits are looking for or doing and adopting some of those hidden checks into, for example, your security operations center, what you react to, what the incident responses are going to be to some of those emerging threats. For sure it is a challenge, and it's a challenge that the industry faces and one that we go every day. And an exploit that might be available for EC2 may be different on Google Compute or maybe different on Azure Compute.Jason: There's a nice similarity or parallel there to what we often talk about, especially in this podcast, is we talk about chaos engineering and reliability and that idea of let's look at how things fail and take what we know about one system or one service, and how can we apply that to others? From your experience doing a wide breadth of cloud engineering, tell me a bit more about your experience in the reliability space and keeping—all these great companies that you've worked for, keeping their systems up and running.John: I think I have one of the—fortunate to have one of the best experiences ever. So, I'll have to dig way back to 11 years ago, or so [laugh]. My first job in the cloud was at Netflix. I was at Netflix right around the time when we were moving applications out of the data center and into AWS. Again, fortunate; large-scale, at the cusp of everything that was happening in the cloud, back in those days.I had just helped finish—I was a systems engineer; that's where I transitioned from, systems engineering—and just a little bit of a plug there, tomorrow is Sysadmin Day, so I still am an old school sysadmin at heart so I still celebrate Sysadmin Day. [laugh]. But I was doing that transition from systems engineering into cloud engineering at Netflix, just helped move a database application out from the data center into AWS. We were also adopting in those days, very rapidly, a lot of the new services and features that AWS was rolling out. For example, we don't really think about it today anymore, but back then EBS-backed instances was the thing. [laugh].Go forth and every new EC2 instance we create is going to be EBS-backed. Okay, great. March, I believe it was March 2011, one of AWS's very first, and I believe major, EBS outages occurred. [laugh]. Yeah, lots of, lots of failure all over the place.And I believe from that a lot of what—at least in Gremlin—a lot of that Chaos Monkey and a lot of that chaos engineering really was born out of a lot of our experiences back then at Netflix, and the early days of the cloud. And have a lot of the scars still on me. But it was a very valuable lesson that I take now every day, having lived through it. I'm sure you guys at Gremlin see a lot of this with your customers and with yourselves, right, is that the best you can do is test those failure scenarios and hope that you are as resilient as possible. Could we have foreseen that there was going to be a major EBS outage in us-east-1? Probably.I think academically we thought about it, and we were definitely preaching the mantra of architect for failure, but it still bit us because it was a major cascading outage in one entire region in AWS. It started with one AZ and it kept rolling, and it kept rolling. And so I don't know necessarily in that particular scenario that we could have engineered—especially with the technology of the day—we could have engineered full-on failover to another region, but it definitely taught us and me personally a lot of lessons around how to architect for failure and resiliency in the cloud, for sure.Jason: I like that point of it's something that we knew theoretically could maybe happen, but it always seems like the odds of the major catastrophes are so small that we often overlook them and we just think, “Well, it's going to be so rare that it'll never happen, so we don't think about it.” As you've moved forward in your career, moving on from Netflix, how has that shaped how you approach reliability—this idea of we didn't think EBS could ever go down and lead to this—how do you think of catastrophic failures now, and how do you go about testing for them or architecting to withstand them?John: It's definitely stayed with me. Every ops job that I've had since, it's something that I definitely take into account in any of those roles that I have. As the opportunity came up to speak with you guys, wanted to think about reliability and chaos in terms of cloud spend, and how can I marry those two worlds together? Obviously, the security aspect of things, for sure, is there. It's expecting the unexpected and having the right types of security monitoring in place.And I think that's—kind of going back to an earlier comment that I made about these unexpected or hidden costs that are there lying dormant in our cloud adoption, just like I'm thinking about the cost of security incidents, the cost of failure, what does that look like? These are answers I don't have yet but the explorer in me is looking forward to uncovering a lot of what that's going to be. If we talk in a year from now, and I have some of that prescribed, and thought of, and discovered, and I think it'll be awesome to talk about it in a year's time and where we are. It's an area that I definitely take seriously I have applied not just to operational roles, but as I got into more customer-facing roles in the last 11 years, in between advising customers, both as a sales engineer, as head of customer success, and cloud security startup that I worked for, Evident.io, and then eventually moving here to Palo Alto Networks, it's like, how do I best advise and think about—when I talk to customers—about failure scenarios, reliability, chaos engineering? I owe it all to that time that I spent at Netflix and those experiences very early on, for sure.Jason: Coming back to those hidden costs is definitely an important thing. Especially I'm sure that as you interact with folks in the FinOps world, there's always that question of, “Why do I have so much redundancy? Why am I paying for an entire AZs worth of infrastructure that I'm never using?” There's always the comment, “Well, it's like a spare tire; you pay for an extra tire in case you have a flat.” But on some hand, there is this notion of how much are we actually spending versus what does an outage really cost me?John: Right. We thought about that question very early on at another company I worked at after Netflix and before the startup. I was fortunate again to work in another large-scale environment, at Adobe actually, working on the early days of their Creative Cloud implementation. Very different approach to doing the cloud than Netflix in many ways. One of the things that we definitely made a conscious effort to do, and we thought about it in terms of an insurance policy.So, for example, S3 replication—so replicating our data from one region to another—in those days, an expensive proposition but one that we looked at, and we intentionally went in with, “Well, no, this is our customer data. How much is that customer data worth to us?” And so we definitely made the conscious decision to invest. I don't call it ‘cost' at that point; I call that an investment. To invest in the reliability of that data, having that insurance policy there in case something happened.You know, catastrophic failure in one region, especially for a service as reliable and as resilient as S3 is very minuscule, I would say, and in practice, it has been, but we have to think about it in terms of investing. We definitely made the right types of choices, for sure. It's an insurance policy. It's there because we need it to be there because that's our most precious commodity, our customers' data.Jason: Excellent point about that being the most precious commodity. We often feel that our data isn't as valuable as we think it is and that the value for our companies is derived from all of the other things, and the products, and such. But when it comes down to it, it is that data. And it makes me think we're currently in this sort of world where ransomware has become the biggest headline, especially in the security space, and as I've talked with people about reliability, they often ask, “Well, what is Gremlin do security-wise?” And we're not a security product, but it does bring that up of, if your data systems were locked and you couldn't get at your customer information, that's pretty similar to having a catastrophic outage of losing that data store and not having a backup.John: I've thought about this, of course, in the last few weeks, obviously. A very, very public, very telling types of issues with ransomware and the underlying issues of supply chain attacks. What would we do [laugh] if something like that were to happen? Obviously, rhetorically, what would we do? And lots of companies are paying the ransom because they're being held at gunpoint, you know, “We have your data.”So yeah, I mean, a lot of it, in the situation, like the example I gave before, could not just the replication of, for example, my entire S3 bucket where my customer data is thwarted a situation like that? And then you think about, kind of like, okay, let's think about this further. If we do it in the same AWS account, as an example, if the attacker obtained my IAM credentials, then it really comes down to the same thing because, “Oh, look it, there's another bucket in that other region over there. I'm going to go and encrypt all of those objects, too. Why not, right?” [laugh].And so, it also begs the question or the design principles and decisions of, well, okay, maybe do I ship it to a different account where my security context is different, my identity context is different? And so there's a lot of areas to explore there. And it's very good question and one that we definitely do need to think about, in terms of catastrophic failure because that's the way to think about it, for sure.Jason: Yeah. So, many parallels between that security and reliability, and all comes together with that FinOps, and how much are you—how much do we pay for all of this?John: Between the reliability and the security world, there's a lot of parallels because your job is about thinking what are the worst-case scenarios? It's, what could possibly go wrong? And how bad could it be? And in many cases, how bad is it? [laugh].Especially as you uncover a lot of the bad things that do happen in the real world every day: how bad is it? How do I measure this? And so absolutely there's a lot of parallels, and I think it's a very interesting point you make. And so… yeah so, Jason, how can we marry the two worlds of chaos engineering and security together? I think that's another very exciting topic, for sure.Jason: That is, absolutely. You mentioned just briefly in that last statement, how do you measure it?John: Yep.Jason: That comes up to something that we were chatting about earlier is monitoring, and what do you measure, and ensuring that you're measuring the right things. From your experience building secure systems, talk to me about what are some of the things that you like to measure, that you like to get observability on, that maybe some folks are overlooking.John: I think the overlooking part is an interesting angle, but I think it's a little bit more basic than that even. I'll go to my time in the startup—so at Evident.io—mainly because I was in customer success and my job was to talk to our customers every day—I would say that a bunch of our customers—and they varied based on maturity level, but we were working with a lot of customers that were new in the cloud world, and I would say a lot of customers were still getting tripped up by a lot of the basic types of things. For example—what do I mean by that? Some of the basic settings that were incorrect were things just, like, EC2 security groups allowing port 22 in from the world, just the simple things like that. Or publicly accessible S3 buckets.So, I would say that a lot of our customers were still missing a lot of those steps. And I would say, in many of the cases, putting my security hat on, the first thing you go to is, well, there's an external hacker trying to do something bad in your AWS accounts, but really, the majority of the cases were all just mistakes; they were honest. I'm an engineer setting up a dev account and it's easier for me, instead of figuring out what my egress IP is for my company's VPN, it's easier for me just to set port 22 to allow all from the world. A few minutes later, there you go. [laugh]. Exploit taken, right? It's just the simple stuff; we really as an industry do still get tripped up by the simple things.I don't know if this tracks with the reliability world or the chaos engineering world, but I still see that way too much. And that just tells me that even if we are in the cloud—mature company or organization—there's still going to be scenarios where that engineer at two in the morning just decides that it's just easier to open up the firewall on EC2 than it is to do, quote-unquote, “The right thing.” Then we have an issue. So, I really do think that we can't let go of not just monitoring the basics, but also getting better as an industry to alert on the basics and when there are misconfigurations on the basics, and shortening that time to alert because that really is—especially in the security world—that really is very critical to make sure that window between when that configuration setting is made to when that same engineer who made the misconfiguration get alerted to the fact that it is a misconfiguration. So. I'll go to that: it's the basics. [laugh].Jason: I like that idea of moving the alert forward, though. Because I think a lot of times you think of alerts as something bad has happened and so we're waiting for the alert to happen when there's wrongful access to a system, right? Someone breaks in, or we're waiting for that alert to happen when a system goes down. And we're expecting that it's purely a response mechanism, whereas the idea of let's alert on misconfigurations, let's alert on things that could lead to these, or that will likely lead to these wrong outcomes. If we can alert on those, then we can head it off.John: It's all the way. And in the security world, we call it shifting left, shifting security all the way to the left, all the way to the developer. Lots of organizations are making a lot of the right moves in that direction for embedding security well into the development pipeline. So, for example, I'll name two players in the Infrastructure as Code as we call it in the security space. And I'll name the first one just because they're part of Palo Alto Networks now, so Bridgecrew; so very strong, open-source solution in that space, as well as over on the HashiCorp side where Sentinel is another example of a great developer-forward shift-left type of tool that can help thwart a lot of the simple security misconfigurations, right from your CI/CD pipelines, as opposed to the reaction time over here on the right, where you're chasing security misconfigurations.So, there's a lot of opportunity to shorten that alert window. And even, in fact, I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of years—I and my team have spent a lot of time in the last couple of years thinking about what can the bots do for us, as opposed to waiting for an alert to pop up on a Slack message that says, “Hey, engineer. You've got port 22 open to the world. You should maybe think about doing something.” The right thing to do there is for something—could be something as simple as an alert making it to a Lambda function and the Lambda function closing it up for you in the middle of the night when you're not paying attention to Slack, and the bot telling you, “Hey, engineer. By the way, I closed the port up. That's why it's broken this morning for you.” [laugh]. “I broke it intentionally so that we can avoid some security problems.”So, I think there's the full gamut where we can definitely do a lot more. And that's where I believe the new world, especially in the security world, the DevSecOps world, can definitely help embed some of that security mindset with the rest of the cloud and DevOps space. It's certainly a very important function that needs to proliferate throughout our organizations, for sure.Jason: And we're seeing a lot of that in the reliability world as well, as people shift left and developers are starting to become more responsible for the operations and the running of their services and applications, and including being on call. That does bring to mind that idea, though—back to alerting on configurations and really starting to get those alerts earlier, not just saying that, “Hey, devs, you're on call so now you share a pain,” but actually trying to alleviate that pain even further to the left. Well, we're coming up close to time here. So, typically at this point, one thing that I like to do is we like to ask folks if they have anything to plug. Oftentimes that's where people can find you on social media or other things. I know that you're connected with Ana through Latinx in Tech, I would love to share more about that, too. So.John: For sure, yeah. So, my job in terms of my leadership role is definitely to promote a lot of diversity, inclusion, and equity, obviously, within the workspace. Personally, I do also feel very strongly that I should be not just preaching it, but also practicing it. So, I discovered in the last year—in fact, it's going to be about a year since I joined Techqueria—so techqueria.org—and we definitely welcome anybody and everybody.We're very inclusive, all the way from if you're a member of the Latinx community and in technology, definitely join us, and if you're an ally, we definitely welcome you with open arms, as well, to join techqueria.org. It is a very active and very vibrant community on Slack that we have. And as part of that, I and a couple of people in Techqueria are running a couple of what we call cafesitos which is the Spanish word for coffees, coffee meetings.So, it's a social time, and I'm involved in helping lead both the cybersecurity cafecito—we call it Cafecito Cibernético, which happens every other Friday. And it's security-focused, it's security-minded, we go everywhere from being very social and just talking about what's going on with people personally—so we like to celebrate personal wins, especially for those that are joining the job market or just graduating from school, et cetera, and talk about their personal wins, as well as talk about the happenings, like for example, a very popular topic of late has been supply chain attacks and ransomware attacks, so definitely very, very timely there. As well as I'm also involved—being in the cloud security space, I'm bridging, sort of, two worlds between the DevOps world and the security world; more recently, we started up the DevOps Cafecito, which is more focused on the operations side. And that's where, you know, happy to have Ana there as part of that Cafecito and helping out there. Obviously, there, it's a lot of the operations-type topics that we talk about; lots of Kubernetes talk, lots of looking at how the SRE and the DevOps jobs look in different places.And I wouldn't say I'm surprised by it, but it's very nice to see that there is also a big difference with how different organizations think about reliability and operations. And it's varied all over the place and I love it, I love the diversity of it. So anyway, so that's Techqueria, so very happy to be involved with the organization. I also recently took on the role of being the chapter co-director for the San Francisco chapter, so very happy to be involved. As we come out of the pandemic, hopefully, pretty soon here [laugh] right—as we're coming out of the pandemic, I'll say—but looking forward to that in-person connectivity and socializing again in person, so that's Techqueria.So, big plug for Techqueria. As well, I would say for those that are looking at the FinOps world, definitely check out the FinOps Foundation. Very valuable in terms of the folks that are there, the team that leads it, and the resources, if you're looking at getting into FinOps, or at least gaining more control and looking at your spend, not so much like this, but with your eyes wide open. Definitely take a look at a lot of the work that they've done for the FinOps community, and the cloud community in general, on how to take a look at your cloud cost management.Jason: Awesome. Thanks for sharing those. If folks want to follow you on social media, is that something you do?John: Absolutely. Mostly active on LinkedIn at johnmartinez on LinkedIn, so definitely hit me up on LinkedIn.Jason: Well, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for sharing all of your experiences and insight.John: Likewise, Jason. Glad to be here.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called, “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

So much focus in the financial world revolves around accumulating money. There's all sorts of advice, how- to guides and guardrails in place when it comes to saving and investing, but a lot less resources out there to help retirees navigate the period of time after retirement. This is known as decumulation, the spending down and managing of the assets you've accumulated through your life. Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is a registered investment adviser. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. 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. Investment involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment adviser to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Transcript of Today's Show: For a full transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/ ----more---- Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. Welcome into the podcast. Thanks for hanging out with us here on Retirement Planning - Redefined with John and Nick and myself once again chatting about investing, finance and retirement. We're going to talk about decumulation, five things you must know about decumulation to retire successfully. We're going to get into that in just a second.   Speaker 1: Of course, if you've got some questions, need some help, reach out to John and Nick at PFG Private Wealth. That's PFGprivatewealth.com. That's the website you can stop by at, and gents, what's going on? John, how are you buddy?   John: I'm good, I'm good. I know it's been awhile since I think we've done one of these sessions here.   Speaker 1: Enjoying the summer, I guess, right?   John: Yeah. It's been a busy summer for myself, and Nick can speak to what he's been up to, but yeah, it's definitely been busy. But my little one started kindergarten, so I'm adapting to that life of drop-off car line and pickup, which is fun.   Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't know if you remember this movie or not, but do you remember this Michael Keaton movie, Mr. Mom? If you haven't seen it, you should go watch it because you could probably relate to it. The whole car line drop-off thing is hysterical and that was from like the '80s.   John: I'll definitely go check it out.   Speaker 1: Yeah.   John: Yeah. Right now my wife's, she's studying for her boards, so I've been helping out with all that stuff and yeah, it's been interesting.   Speaker 1: It's a great movie. It's a great old '80s movie, but yeah, you could probably really relate to some of this stuff right this minute. Especially when you mentioned that car line thing, it made me think of that because he just, he has the hardest time understanding and getting his mind wrapped around the whole car line thing. It's pretty hilarious. Yeah, definitely check it out.   Speaker 1: Nick, what's going on with you, buddy? I know you've been traveling and running around.   Nick: Yeah. I was a recently up north hometown in Rochester, New York. I've got a lot of friends, family and clients up there, so did my yearly pilgrimage. Just kind of catching back up from being back and readjusting to the heat, so all good.   Speaker 1: Yeah. Got you. All right. Well, good. Well, I'm glad you guys are doing well and yeah, let's get into the five things we need to know about decumulation.   Speaker 1: First of all, it's a big fancy sounding word, but really it just is the spending of your assets, right? I mean, we've accumulated the money, now we're going to decumulate it. It's just kind of a fancy way of spending down what we have saved.   Speaker 1: On this episode, let's point out a few items that people might want to think about to retire successfully. Let's start with the first one. Nick, I'll give this to you. Just a lack of support. I think if you go in, obviously if you type in any kind of a financial something or another, you're going to get 18 billion hits on Google, and a lot of it is about how to accumulate money versus not too much necessarily about the decumulation side.   Speaker 1: But I think if you think if you're working with a good financial professional or an advisor like you guys, obviously that's where some of that support is going to come from, a lot of that support is going to come from. But there is a real lack of that it seems like if you're just trying to do it yourself.   Nick: Yeah, it's interesting. The perspective that people tend to have for this phase of their life, as far as whether you refer to it as decumulation or the distribution phase of life, is oftentimes kind of ingrained in them from their parents a little bit.   Nick: What we've seen a lot with people that are really entering or soon to enter into retirement, and I had this conversation recently with a client is, hey, we know what our expenses are. We have an idea what's going to be coming in from social security, and we just want to protect our principal and go ahead and just take interest in dividends from our accounts, because that's what we know from our parents, and that's kind of... That just makes sense to us.   Nick: The conversation that we get into and we take them really have to force them to go and review the plan that we've put together because the plan will really lay out how this is going to be structured and the underlying components can be a little bit confusing.   Nick: As an example, when I explain to somebody that brings that up that that's what they want to do and help them understand that, hey, on average your dividends on the stock side of your portfolio might be around 2%, if you want solid stocks. Then from an interest rate standpoint, maybe you're looking at 2 or 3% as well. If we're looking at a million bucks, we're talking a total of 20 to $30,000 a year and that will often send them right into a panic attack.   Nick: Understanding how these things tie together, understanding that with the advent and the prevalence of things like exchange traded funds and mutual funds where we can do fractional shares and we can break accounts into a short-term, mid-term, long-term bucket to help us try to preserve some principle over time via growth, but also have a safe withdrawal rate and strategy is really important. It's hands down the most misunderstood, but important thing when it comes to retirement planning.   John: Yeah. I think what we've seen a lot of advisors and client, or a lot of advisors individuals focus on just accumulation, so it's really just kind of building, building it up and they never, as Nick mentioned here, there's never a strategy for as far as how do you actually start taking that money out?   John: It all comes back to you don't want to start planning for that once you retire, that really needs to be as soon as you can, but in reality when you hit that red zone of 5 to 10 years from retirement, I would say more towards 10, you should really start considering, "Hey, what is my distribution strategy?"   Speaker 1: Got you. Okay. Yeah, and I think a lot of times we do kind of get wrapped up in the accumulation thing and we tend to forget about these other stages and it leads me really into the second topic guys on this, which is it's funny, maybe not funny, but it is interesting how the fear of spending is really real.   Speaker 1: At first, when I first started, I've been doing this now for a number of years, talking with advisors all across the country and you think, hey, you get to retirement. You're looking forward to finally spending your and having a good time and so on and so forth and enjoying your golden years. But many, many, many people are truly afraid of actually spending what they've saved.   Speaker 1: I think a lot of it probably comes down to just confidence, but it's a real thing getting over that hump and getting comfortable saying, "Okay, it's okay to spend this money we've saved for the last 40 years now." What do you guys see?   John: Yeah, no, we see the same thing. It really is, again, back to the accumulation phase or savings phase in this scenario. They're just so used to getting a paycheck, saving it, and then they live off of their paycheck. Well, now your nest egg is now retirement that providing that paycheck for you, and the biggest fear for retirees is not running out of money. With that comes, can I spend this much? What will my assets, or what does my plan look like if I continue this spending or if I go buy this?   John: It's important, and we've had scenarios where the plan really does give clients confidence of when they look at it and say, "Okay, if I continue my current spending rate, I have X amount at the end of the plan." The cool thing about some of the stuff that we do when we get to see our clients see it is we'll show, "Hey, what if you spend an extra 10 to 15 grand over the next 10 years for a vacation?" And we'll model it out and they get to see how does that affect their overall plan, and is there still money left at the end? Is there enough money left where you feel comfortable?   John: We find that when people see that and there's two versions of it. One's a very detailed kind of actuarial cashflow number, which is kind of boring to look at. But then we also have a chart form, which just makes it easy to understand and it's, "Okay. You know what? I can go spend that money," and it just provides a nice peace of mind.   John: We've had scenarios where people see that and then they go do some of their goal, whether it's buy an RV, do this vacation, spend time with family. It's the fear is definitely real, and it's important to have a plan to give you some peace of mind, to see if you... That you're not going to outlive your money.   Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think definitely it's that confidence factor, right? Because oftentimes people that are in good shape, they just don't really feel comfortable that they can go through that transition period. I think that's a lot of the value that you guys bring to the table by saying, "Okay, now we've built a plan. I've showed you this is going to work, and then you're there as that kind of coaching sounding board to say, "No, it's okay. We can get over this hump together. You're going to be able to enjoy this because that's what you've built up and worked towards."   Speaker 1: Now we know obviously we're living longer and there's more things to be... There's more risky stuff out there, and not even talking about the crazy kooky world we find ourselves in right now, but just risks in general. If we're talking about the de cumulation phase, which is when we're into retirement, the risks in general become more numerous, especially financially speaking.   Nick: Yeah, so one of the things that can impact a retirement plan or this phase of somebody's life, this decumulation phase, is what's called the sequence of returns. Essentially, what that means is that on a typical case, people think in terms of average rates of return, and that's understandable because that's how most people are taught.   Nick: But there can be an average over a 10 year period, a 15 year period of, you can call it 6, 7, 8%. But if the... Even though it averages that number, if the losses are incurred early on and they're significant, that has a much greater impact on how long the money will last than if those losses come further on down the road.   Nick: That's why it's important to really have a strategy, to understand that the plan should be consistently updated. And what ends up happening, especially in one of the things that we're starting to see a little bit is, the markets have been up for the last 6, 7, 8, 9 years, so there's a little bit of, I don't know if you euphoria is the right term, but a little bit of a sense of invincibility for some people. Where it's like, "Hey, I keep taking money out and it keeps going up and that's great," and that is good, but it doesn't always happen like that.   Nick: When we have these risks of AC goes out, child loses their job and you help them financially, you get grandkids, there's a change of social security, you have a health issue, all these different things. We're trying to prepare for all uncertainties, and so making sure that your investment strategy is really lining up with your overall plan is important even in good times, which is what we've had for quite a while.   Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I definitely would agree with that statement for sure. You know, and John, listen, hey, they've passed another trillion dollars just a few weeks ago at the time we're taping this podcast, now they're talking about another $3 trillion. So focusing on tax consequences has probably never been more important than what it's going to be over the next couple of years. Whether they sunset, they do nothing and leave them alone, and they sunset back to the old means here in a couple of years, or they make some changes, you got to have some focus on taxes.   John: Yeah. Taxes are definitely an eroding factor on your money, especially going into retirement. Because that for the majority of people, that's their... The IRA pre-tax money is typically their biggest part of their nest egg and they're pulling it out. Every time you pull out a hundred grand, you're getting whacked with taxes on that. It's important, again kind of that red zone area, even before that you want to start planning for what you think your tax situation is going to be. But also you want to start planning to have the flexibility to adapt to any type of tax environment so you can basically limit how much taxes you're actually paying.   John: So example, Nick mentioned some risks where let's say you have a health event, you need to pull out 30, 40 grand. It might be nice to have some tax free money, AKA kind of some Roth money that you can pull from so you don't really jump into a higher tax bracket and just start paying enormous amount of taxes that you could ultimately have avoided.   Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, again, it's not what you make, it's what you keep. It's all those kinds of things we know, we hear about it, but if you're not talking about taxes as you're preparing for retirement, I mean, I'll go out on a limb and just say you're doing it wrong. Right? You've got to make sure that you're factoring that in there and having those conversations, and if you're not, well, then that needs to be a red flag as well.   Speaker 1: So that at the end of the day, we've got these five things I mentioned. Here's the fifth one, guys, just leveraging the lifetime income. We got to replace a paycheck, whether it's for 1 year, 5 years, 15 years, 25 years, 40 years. It'd be easy if we knew exactly how long we're going to live, but we don't, so you've got to have that thing ready and you've got to leverage that income for life.   Nick: Yeah. It's one of the things that we try to emphasize with people and one of the keys to planning is that everybody's situation is different. When you talk to your brother, your sister, your friend, your neighbor, whatever, and when I was just up north, I'm reminded about, I was reminded about how much people love to talk about just everything. Being down in Florida, people tend to be a little bit more private from what I've seen. People are, "Oh yeah, I did this, I did that. I did this."   Nick: One of the things that I try to emphasize to people on a consistent basis is that sure, your sister may be doing X, Y, and Z, but maybe your sister has a pension. Maybe your sister's mortgage is paid off. Maybe your sister didn't have kids, and so her situation and all of the decisions that line up with that are very different from yours. Because you don't have a pension, your house isn't paid off, you did have children that cost you more money, and let alone the risk tolerance from the standpoint of the market, that's a whole different ball game.   Nick: When we evaluate things, one of the things that when we go through a plan, one of the things that we typically go through with people is just looking at options from the standpoint of a guaranteed income. In reality, the only way to get guaranteed income is through annuities, and a lot of people have a certain perception of annuities or they don't like them. We always try to remind people that, hey, our job is to make sure you understand what options are out there and available for you. Make sure how you know that they work or would work for you in your situation. Then if it's something that you don't like, then we just don't do it, and we move on.   Nick: But when we factor in social security, whether or not somebody has a pension and/or whether or not they want to have some form of guaranteed income in the future, it can really make a significant difference. Not only from just a pure planning standpoint, but also from a peace of mind standpoint.   Nick: One of the things that is probably underestimated are how people emotionally respond to different things that happen in the market, and how that can impact their decision-making. No matter how many times somebody, says, "Hey, I know I need to invest longterm. I know I need not to be reactionary," when it hits the fan, it's really hard not to be.   John: Nick, I'm going to stop you for a second. A perfect example of that was actually when Coronavirus hit. I think we had a true indication of how much risk some people were willing to take.   Nick: A hundred percent, and so this is that whole... I referred to it a little bit earlier, this level of euphoria over the last year is that, "Hey, everything's going well." Or we've had conversations with clients where maybe they've used some sort of annuity or some sort of guaranteed income product. It's like, "Well, hey, if I would've kept it in the market, it would have done this, this and that." It's like, "Yes, but what we did was we separated that money and we gave it a certain job, and as long as that does its job, then we have a lot less pressure on everything else, including your brain and your emotions, and that cannot be underestimated."   Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Well, those are five things, folks, that happen or can happen during the decumulation phase, which again is a fancy word for the spending of the assets that you've accumulated through the years to get to retirement. Hopefully, that helped you a little bit, gave you a couple of useful things to think about.   Speaker 1: As always, if you've got some questions, we talk in generalities here on the podcast, make sure you're checking with your advisor or reach out to qualified professionals like John and Nick before you take any action. You can find them online at PFGprivatewealth.com, that's PFGprivatewealth.com.   Speaker 1: Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast while you're there on Apple, Google, Spotify, whatever platform you like to use. We put these out quite often here, so you've got definitely a lot of content. You can go back and listen to some past episodes and, of course, get notified when new episodes come out as well.   Speaker 1: So guys, thanks for hanging out with me. I appreciate it. Glad to have you back in and chatting with me and I'll see you guys in a couple of weeks. We'll be getting ready for football season.   Nick: Yes, sir.   John: Right.   Speaker 1: We'll catch you next time here on Retirement Planning - Redefined with John and Nick from PFG Private Wealth.

We all have something we want to pursue, a goal or an objective we want to reach. We might not always know what it is from the get-go, but as we go on, we can find what we value doing the most. Now, there may be obstacles in our paths, making it feel like our goals are but unachievable and improbable dreams. However, when you are pursuing what you value, nothing can stop you from achieving your destiny.   In this episode, world-renowned human behaviour specialist Dr John Demartini joins us to inspire you to start pursuing what you value. He shares advice and a range of wonderful stories on this topic. Learning about delegation can greatly help you with pursuing what you value. We also talk about the neuroscience of flow states and getting people to understand the quality of your work. If you're mulling over starting your journey to doing what you love, listen to this episode! This might be the push you need to reach for what you've thought was improbable.   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme, optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition, and mental performance to your specific genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, goals, and lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training and coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com. We can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity, or want to take your performance to the next level and learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health, and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books, Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, dramatically decreases over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting-edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that can boost NAD+ levels in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements of the highest purity, rigorously tested by an independent, third-party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third-party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop Now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500 mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust: NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting-edge science) combats the effects of ageing and is designed to boost NAD+ levels. The NMN capsules are manufactured in an ISO 9001-certified facility. Boost Your NAD+ Levels: Healthy Ageing Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn about delegation and how you can utilise it to make the most out of your job. Discover the two different flow states that come into play when you're doing what you love best. Listen to a variety of enlightening stories that show how pursuing what you value can change your life.   Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to the Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! Listen to other Pushing the Limits episodes: #198: How to Prioritise and Reach Your Goals with Dr John Demartini Connect with Dr Demartini: Website | Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube Check out Elon Musk's interview on 60 Minutes. A new program, BoostCamp, is coming this September at Peak Wellness!      Episode Highlights [04:21] Achieving the Improbable No matter what obstacles you face, you will get up again if you have a big enough reason. Each of us has a set of priorities. At the very top is our destiny, which is non-negotiable. When you're pursuing what you value, you'll continue regardless of pleasure or pain.  By delegating low-priority things, you can go on pursuing what you value.  [09:20] The Importance of Delegation As long as you're doing your top priority, something that produces the most per hour, it doesn't cost to delegate. Delegation frees up your time so you can pursue something that makes more income. However, when you don't recruit the right person, you end up losing money because you're having to micromanage and getting distracted.  [14:07] Hiring the Right People  Do the basics, such as references and background checks. Dr Demartini specifically asks what applicants would do if they never had to work another day in their life.  If they don't answer something close to the job description, he turns them down.  Don't hire somebody who can't see how the job you're offering can fulfil their highest value. Tune in to the full episode to hear how Dr Demartini helped one of his applicants pursue what they value! [26:06] Job Security vs. Pursuing What You Value Dr Demartini shares a story about how he guided a young man to chase after his dreams. He sees this man eight years later, the owner of eight franchises. Many people stay in their jobs because of security. However, quitting work and pursuing what you value is your choice. Dr Demartini's recalls a time when he accompanied a ditch digger to work. He was so proud of his job, as he brings water—and life—to people. It doesn't matter if the job seems small, as long as you're pursuing what you value.  [44:30] Taking Pride in What You Do When your identity revolves around pursuing what you value, the higher your pride is in your workmanship. You'll excel in whatever you do, as long as you're pursuing what you value.  People who are pursuing what they value go beyond what is expected of them. Whether you start early or late, you can always begin pursuing what you value.  Master planning is a way to get there quickly. [46:26] The Neuroscience of Flow States There are two flow states. The manic flow state is a high that does not last long, as it is driven by the amygdala and dopamine. You get into your real flow state when you are pursuing what you value—something truly inspiring and meaningful.  In the real flow state, you're willing to embrace both pain and pleasure while you are pursuing what you value. Dr Demartini likens the two states to infatuation versus love. Infatuation is short-lived and only sees the positives; love endures even the negatives.  Manic flow is transient; real flow is eternal. [53:33] Finding the Middle and Paying for Quality You shouldn't get over-excited about good things and over-depressed about bad ones. Stay in the middle. Looking at the downsides isn't cynicism. It shows that you have grounded objectives. Dr Demartini's father, who is in the plumbing business, carefully considers all variables before taking on a project. As such, he charges more than competitors. People will be more willing to pay for your work once you explain what sets it apart from others. If you get defensive about your work, you start to sound arrogant. Instead, try to be informative about the value of what you offer. [1:03:32] Staying Stable and Flexible  Dr Demartini is neither excited nor fearful about the future.  He looks at both sides so that he does not become too elated or depressed. Emulating this can help you be stable enough to keep pursuing what you value. Over support leads to juvenile dependency, while challenges encourage independence.  Adapt and do what needs to be done. If you can't delegate it to others, learn to do it yourself.   7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode [05:34] ‘Nothing mortal, can interfere with an immortal vision.' [07:00] ‘There's wisdom in not doing low priority things; there's wisdom in not pursuing something that's not truly and deeply meaningful to you.' [23:18] ‘Don't ever hire anybody who can't see how the job description you want can help them fulfil their highest value.' [44:37] ‘The pride in workmanship goes up to the degree that it's congruent with what you value most.' [50:26] ‘Fantasies aren't obtainable, objectives are.' [54:31] ‘If you're overexcited, you're blind to the downside.' [1:06:22] ‘People can be really resourceful if somebody doesn't rescue them.'   About Dr Demartini Dr John Demartini has been a public speaker for nearly 50 years. He is a world-renowned specialist in human behaviour, researcher, author, and educator. He empowers people from all walks of life by sharing his knowledge on self-development and financial wellness. One of his fields of interest is personal development where he has developed a curriculum of programs. One of his seminars, The Breakthrough Experience, uses his revolutionary techniques, the Demartini Method and the Demartini Value Determination Process.  If you want to learn more about Dr Demartini and his work, you may visit his website. You can also see him on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you were inspired to start pursuing what you value, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they too can be pushed to go after their passion. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript of the Podcast Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa, brought to you by www.lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: I want to welcome you back to Pushing The Limits. This week, I have Dr John Demartini. Now you may recognise that latter name. He's been on the show before. And he's definitely one that I want to have him back on again. He is an incredible teacher, and educator, and author of I don't know how many dozens of books. He's been working in the personal development in space for 50 years, I think. Incredible man.  I hope you enjoy part two of this very in-depth conversation about upgrading your life–how to grow your businesses. We talk about also how to reach your full potential. And what sort of things we put in our own way. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Dr John. Also, I would like to let you know we have a Boost Camp coming up. This is a, not a boot camp. It's all about upgrading your life. This is all about being the best version of yourself that you can be, upgrading everything in your life from your health fundamentals to things like sleep, and understanding your brain better your mood and behaviour. Lots and lots of science, and lots of information, and stuff that's going to be actually practical stuff that you can implement in your life to improve how you're performing your health, your vision and purpose in life. And aligning all of these things together.  I hope you'll come and join us. This is an eight-week program that is live with Neil Wagstaff and myself. Neil is my longtime coach and business partner. And he runs all the programs with me that we do with epigenetics, with running hot coaching, and so on. And he is an incredible teacher. I do hope you'll check it out. You can go to peakwellnessco.co.nz, peakwellness, p-e-a-k, peak wellness dot co dot NZ forward-slash boost camp, b-o-o-s-t-c-a-m-p. To find out more, and come and join us, it's going to be a fantastic writer and you're going to learn an awful lot and get to hang out with a whole bunch of people while you're doing it. So check that out.  I also like to remind you too, of our Patron program. We have a Patron program for the podcast to help us keep this on-air, keep us great content, to help us keep the mission going. If you're into doing that, please, for the price of a coffee or a month. Sorry, a coffee a month, you can be involved in this project. And you can also get a whole lot of exclusive member benefits for your troubles. So check all that out at patron.lisatamati.com, p-a-t-r-o-n dot lisa tamati dot com. Right. Now, over to the show with Dr John Demartini.  Hi, everyone. And welcome back to Pushing The Limits. I'm super excited to have an amazing name back again for a second round, Dr John Demartini. Welcome to the show, Dr John. It's fabulous to have you back again.  Dr John: Demartini: Yes, thank you for having me back.  Lisa: It's just–I was so blown away by our conversation last time. And I know you do thousands of these interviews and in the work that you do that you probably can't even remember what you talked about. But it was a real life-changing episode that ended up– we dived into some of your medical work earlier. We went all over the place with your breakthrough experience. I just felt like we didn't quite cover all the bases that I want to tap into your great knowledge.  Having you back again today, and today I thought we'd look at things like I want to dive into things like, ‘How do we achieve the impossible?' I've been doing a lot of work and researching around, what is it that makes incredible people incredible? And that they had the ability to overcome incredible odds and difficulties and obstacles in order to achieve some possible things. And I'm pretty much into a lot of the big thinkers out there. So I wanted to start directly if that's okay. How do we achieve the impossible, Dr John?  Dr John: Well, I don't know. Maybe that's a bit of a metaphor–the impossible is impossible.  Lisa: But yeah, it's a metaphor.  Dr John: Improbable, the improbable.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr John: When the why is big enough the hows take care of thems elves. When you have a big enough reason for doing something, no matter how many obstacles you face, you get up again. And there was an interview. There was an interview by a gentleman I think from 60 minutes with Elon Musk. And they asked him after having three launches explode back to back. ‘You ever think about giving up?' He looked at the guy and he says, ‘I never give up. I'd have to be incapacitated.' Meaning that his mission to go to Mars is too important for any obstacle that might arise to stop it. I would say nothing mortal can interfere with an immortal vision.  Each of us, as you know, have a set of priorities. And the very top, top, top priority is non-negotiable. It's where human sovereignty and divine providence come together, where you feel that it's impossible for you not to fulfil your true destiny. I feel that way with my mission of speaking. I just felt that that was my destiny when I was 17. And I've been doing it 48 plus years now, be soon 49 in a few months. So if you'd have a big enough reason for doing it, you'll see the challenges on the way, not in the way. It's like Edison, a thousand ways to that didn't work for the light bulb to get the light bulb. There was no option about getting a light bulb, he knew he would come up with an answer, he just kept, ‘Okay, that doesn't work. Okay, next. That one doesn't work, next.'  When things are lower on your value, you'll do it if there's pleasure; you'll stop doing it if there's pain. When something's tying your value, you'll do it regardless of pleasure or pain. And you'll see both of them on the way, not in the way. So there's wisdom in not doing low-priority things. There's wisdom in not pursuing something that's not truly and deeply meaningful to you. People who do that build incremental momentum that reaches an unstoppable state, an inertia that's unstoppable. That's the key to extraordinary things. And when it's truly aligned with your value, your identity revolves around it, you feel it's impossible for you not to do it. It's not an option; it's who you are. Lisa: So this involves looking at your values determination, how to sort out what your real– because I think this is where a lot of us come unstuck. We have lots of things we want to do, and we're curious about lots of things and have lots of passions, and it's sorting out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, in order, distilling down that vision so that you're actually hyper-focused and being able to concentrate on the things that you need to concentrate on. I know that's something that I definitely struggle with, when you have so many things that you're interested in. But you're really right when you say like, for me, with my story with my mom, if you remember bringing her back from the mess of aneurysm, there was a non-negotiable. We were doing it, and I was going to get her back or die trying was the attitude that I went inwards. That means sacrificing whatever it took to get to that place. And then we do get there, you know?  Dr John: Well, the thing is not to pursue low-priority things, and to know what those are, and say and delegate everything other than what's important. I don't do anything but research, write, teach. Those are the three things I love doing. But it's all about educating people in human behaviour. So that's the one thing that is non-negotiable that I do. Then I delegate everything else away. That way, you don't have to be distracted and run down. What drains you is doing low priority things. Lisa: Yeah. And this is a lot– yeah, this is a lot that a lot of people, especially startup entrepreneurs, and people that are just getting there, finding your way, are struggling with: the whole delegation thing when they don't have a team around them. What sort of advice do you want to give to people who are at the beginning of their career and don't have a team yet around them to help do all those aspects of it that are draining the hell out of their lives? Dr John: Well, what you do is you ask the question, ‘How is doing this action temporarily until I can find somebody to delegate it to helping me fulfil my mission?' Link it to your brain. Reframe its words. You see it on the way, not in a way, with the knowing that you're going to delegate it. And then, it doesn't cost to delegate. It costs not to. As long as you're doing what's highest in priority that produces the most per hour, it doesn't cost to delegate. Because you're releasing yourself to do the most important thing that produces the most income that produces more than the cost of the delegation, and that they can produce. And yet the person that would love to do that inspired to do that but doesn't have to be motivated to do that. They will spontaneously do it without even thinking about it, you can free yourself up. In 1982, end of 1982, I hired somebody to take care of my financial things: paying payroll, paying bills, bank reconciliations, all that stuff. Because I was sitting there in October of 1982. I was sitting there doing a bank balance, like, ‘What on earth am I doing?' I didn't want to do it. It was distracting, time-consuming. And while I was doing it, I didn't want to think about clients because it was interfering. I needed to get this done, and I'm pushing clients away. I freed that up, and I have not gone back, nor even seen a chequebook. That's 1982. Lisa: Gosh I would love that.  Dr John: I can't even tell you what a chequebook in my company looks like. Lisa: Or accounting or any software.  Dr John: I don't have any of that stuff. I have somebody that does that. That's their job. I– because that's a 20 to $50 an hour job. And why do I value my time? Well, I can make thousands per hour, and tens of thousands per hour. Lisa: But what about the people that can't make the ten thousands of per hour or the thousands per hour, and there's still a net, they're still in taking that leap into getting the first person in the team on board and the second person. I think there's a lot of people in that, jumping from, say, the $100,000 mark to the million-dollar mark of a turnover in a company where it's chaos. I think it's chaos beyond that as well. But it's that getting the initial, taking that risk when you don't have a solid income yet, and yet, you're taking a risk on hiring a business manager or hiring whatever, even assistants. Dr John: If you have a clear job description and you have a clear actions that you can do that can produce more per hour than having to do those things, and you can see, ‘Well, I'm doing five hours a day doing trivial. If I had those five hours, could I go out and close deals?' If you're willing to do that it doesn't cost, ever cost, to hire people.  Lisa: Yeah. So it's a mindset shift, really?  Dr John: Yeah. Because what happens is you think, well, if you're not going to be productive, and they're now, you're just going to pay somebody to do something you were doing, and you're not going to go produce more per hour than it's going to cost. But it frees you up to do something that closes a deal or makes a bigger deal. Makes more income. You're insane not to do it. Now, in my situation, I saw that if I was out doing presentations and taking care of clients, I can make more than tenfold what is going to cost, 20-fold to 100-fold what I was going to pay somebody to do it. It's a no-brainer.  It doesn't cost to hire somebody. Unless you do it ineffectively. You are somebody who doesn't love doing it, you're pushing him uphill, is not inspired by it, and you have the skill by it, and you're micromanaging him and you're having to distract yourself, and you're not doing the thing that produces. That's why it costs money. Not because of delegation, but inadequate delegation. Lisa: So in other words, recruiting the right people to your team is a huge piece of this and getting the right— So what are some of the things that you do when you're analysing somebody to take on into your team? What are some of the processes that you go through from an entrepreneurial standpoint? Dr John: Well, I do all the basics: references and checks and those things. But I just sit them down when I meet them if they get through the screening. I sit down with them. I said, ‘If I was to write a check right now for $10 million and handed it to you, and you never had to work another day in your life. What would you do with your life?' If they're, they don't say what the job is or close to it, I say, ‘Thank you very much.' I walk away.  Lisa: Right? Because they're not. That's not the key thing.  Dr John: That's not their dream. Can I share an interesting story? I don't think I shared this before. Sorry. If I had, just tell me, cut me off. When I was in practice many years ago, I was hiring a manager, and I was scaling up and delegating more and more. We were down to two people's potentials: one was a woman, one was a man. And the man was in for that evening, about five o'clock. I worked till six, usually, but at five, I was telling my patients, five o'clock, this gentleman comes in. He had passed much of the things I thought. But he came into my office. He had a little briefcase, is about 54, looks like a violator jet, this guy. He comes in, sits down on the edge of his chair, and he says, ‘Wow, this is a great opportunity. I've had the opportunity to work with your company would be fantastic. I'm awe-inspired.' I said, ‘Great. Hope you don't mind. But I just got a few questions.' And I had a check. This is back before I got rid of my checks. I got a check that my lady at the front organised. I had the check in front of me. And I said, ‘Your proper name is?' I put his name on the cheque. I wrote 10 million US dollars.  Lisa: It was a real piece?  Dr John: I didn't sign it, but I just put it there. I made sure he saw it. Because any facade he might have, if he saw a check with $10 million on it, his name on it, that's going to distract him. Because the infatuation of that's going to throw any facade that he might try to put on me, ultimately. So I said, ‘If I was to hand you this cheque,' and I showed him the cheque. ‘And I gave you $10 million upfront, and you never had to work another day in your life. What would you do?'  Lisa: What did he say?  Dr John: And he leaned back in his chair like this. He goes, he relaxed a second. He goes, ‘Wow, if I had $10 million. What would I do? I would manufacture furniture. I have a hobby. I love making furniture. I'd make furniture and open up furniture companies.' I said, I got up. I said, ‘Thanks very much.' He stood up and he was like, ‘What?' He said, ‘Well, did I get the job?' I said, ‘No.' ‘Do you mind if I ask why?' I said, ‘Very simple. I'm hiring you for a management position. You said if you had $10 million, you'd love to make furniture. If you're a great manager, how come you haven't managed your life in such a way where you can do what you love?' He just looked at me and he just paused because that's a very good question. ‘And I have nothing I could say, except, you just woke me up.' I said, ‘Thank you,' and I escort him out.  I watched him walk with his head down slowly to his car and sit in his car for a few minutes to just process that. He's like going, ‘Whoa. I thought I'm looking for a job. I'm enthused, I'm really excited, everything else. And I just got slammed with a reality check of what was really important to me. And the real truth was, is I love making furniture.' So he sat in that car, and finally slowly drove off and we ruled him out. We ruled the girl out. So we had to go through another round. Yeah.  Lisa: And so this is part of the process.  Dr John: Three weeks had gone by. And all of a sudden my assistant said. ‘Dr Demartini, there's a gentleman here a few weeks ago that was looking for a job. He's back.' ‘Alright, okay.' He said, she said ‘Should I just sent him back in?' I said, ‘Yeah.' I come down to the same office, same thing, comes in. I'm sitting in the same place, you sit in the same place. But this time, he walks in with a paper bag, a big paper bag, large paper bag with handles on. He said, ‘Dr Demartini,' shook my hand. He said, ‘Dr Demartini. I was here a few weeks ago,' I said, ‘Oh. Yeah, I remember you.' He said, ‘You changed my life.' I said, ‘How so?' He said, ‘When I was enthusiastic looking for the job, I've been looking for a job for three months. I didn't find one. I thought when you said, if I'm such a good manager, how come I haven't managed my own life? And you nailed me. I was a bit depressed after that, and I had a soul searching, and I had a conversation with my wife. Part of the reasons I was taking on jobs is for security instead of doing what I really love to do. And so after that conversation, I told my wife that and I said, “If I was to go out and try to build my own company in furniture manufacturing, would you endure the, whatever we go through to get there?” And she hugged him, and she says, “That's what you've always wanted to do. We'll make ends meet. We'll find a way.”'  He started his company. He started telling people he's there to make furniture and he started making pieces of furniture. He made a bed, and he made a dresser, and he started making furniture and stuff. He also made it available that he could do interior in homes that were being built. He started letting people know in his network. So he's back in my office three weeks later, and he told me that that's the best thing ever happened to his life. He says, ‘I've already got commissioned $5,400 worth of product with the furniture, and that's in three weeks. I'm on track, probably for making $10,000 to my first month now. And that's more than what I was probably going to get paid.'  I said, ‘Congratulations.' And this is what he said to me. He said, ‘You have no idea how much more energy I have, how inspired I am. I don't care about how many hours it is I'm working. I'm staying up, and I'm a different man. I'm loving it. I'm in, I now understand what an entrepreneur is, a bit.' And he said, ‘But this is what I want to do. Because you gave me such a gift. When I came in your office, I noticed the wood. Because you filter with your polar nuclei of your diencephalonic thalamus. You put, you filter reality coin, what you value most. So he noticed the wood in my office.  He said, ‘And I noticed that you had Kleenex boxes sitting on these little rolling carts. It would really be honourable for me if I could actually take those little Kleenex boxes, and melt my Kleenex box systems on your wall that match your wood. All you do is lift them up on a hinge, put the Kleenex box and pull the tissue, put it back down to replace it. And then you have more space on your thing, because I noticed you had less space on there than probably ideal. It really means a lot to me if I can put them in all your rooms.' I said, ‘I would be honoured to have those in there. And I want you to do me a favour. I want you to put your card on the bottom of each one. So I can, for referrals.' He said, ‘I would be glad to do that.' He said, ‘But that would mean a lot. Because you just changed my life.'  He ended up doing what he really loved to do, grew his business. I got complimentary things in all my rooms, which was an added bonus. But it just goes to show that people, when they're doing something that's deeply meaningful, truly inspiring, high in priority, they excel. So don't ever hire anybody who can't see how the job description you want to help them fulfil their highest value. Lisa: Be it personal and be it roles. And not this division of the company. Dr John: The actual actions. So you make sure you have a job description with all the actions and you ask your potential candidate: ‘How specifically is doing this actually going to help you fulfil what's most deeply meaningful to you?' If they can't answer it, don't hire them. If they answer with enthusiasm on all those things, you get them, grab them. If they don't, don't worry because they're going to be microman— you're gonna have to motivate them. Motivation is a symptom, never a solution to humanity. Lisa: And in changing that, I've got a friend Joe Polish. If you know Joe, he's a very famous marketing man and an incredible connector and so on. He talks about, he was talking about entrepreneurship one day, I forget the context of the situation. But he teaches about entrepreneurial things, how to do it. He's hugely successful. Someone said to him once, ‘You've had the same assistant for the last 21 years, for how many years, a lot of years. If she's been hearing you talk about how wonderful it is to be an entrepreneur to do all these things, how come she hasn't gotten that information and runoff and become her own entrepreneur?'  He called the lady over and he said, ‘Why is it that you still with me?' He knew the answer. But she answered, ‘Because I don't want to take on the risk. That's not my job. That's not my passion. My passion is to serve Joe and be the person in the backstage setting all those things up. That is my highest power. That is what I love. That's why I'm still here. I love working with Joe, and I love his mission. And that's what I'm happy doing.' That's the key, is not everybody should be an entrepreneur. Or everybody should be having the same mission. It's that she understands what her passions, what the job is. Dr John: If everybody was an entrepreneur, who would be working for him? Lisa: Yeah. We'd have a hell of a mess. And being an entrepreneur is a long, arduous, often difficult, lonely road full of holes, along the way, potholes. It isn't for everybody, but for people like you and for me, it's, I can go for it. I've got to be running my own ship. And learning from people like you is great for me because then I can see what helps my next steps and what I should be doing. Instead of—  Dr John: Can I share another story?  Lisa: Go for it. Dr John: So, right about the same time when I was hiring that other person, a young gentleman, late 20s, I'm guessing, mid to late 20s, came into my office, and asked if he could have a meeting with me. And he worked with Yellow Pages. There used to be a thing called Yellow Page.  Lisa: Yeah. I'm old enough.  Dr John: They were ads, telephone ads. You put a listing, it's free. But if you put a listing with a little box or a little ad in it, it's a little bit more. You bought the Yellow Page ad. So he was trying to sell Yellow Page ad. So he sat in my office. And he started to do this little spiel. And I had the time. So I took a moment to do it. Because I was curious what the prices were. And at the end of his little spiel, and not even to the end, three quarters through, I stopped him. I said ‘Stop. Just stop.' That was the worst presentation. That was so off. I said, ‘This is not what you want to do in life. What do you really want to do in life?' And he looked at me and he goes, ‘That bad?' And I said, ‘It was bad.' ‘I bet you haven't sold anything.' He says, ‘No, I haven't.' I said, ‘This is not you. What's your heart? Where's your heart? What do you really, really, really, really dream about doing in your career?' He said, ‘I want to be in the restaurant business.' I said, ‘Go to a restaurant today to get a job there, and work your way up until you own your restaurant.' He goes, ‘Well, I needed to hear that. Because I respect you and I needed to hear that from you.' And then I sold him a little audio cassette tape that I'd done, called The Psychology of Attainment. And he bought it, it was only 10 bucks.  He walked out with his $10 thing to listen to because I knew if he listened to it, it would encourage him to keep it going. He left there. Eight years go by, never seen the guy again. Eight years go by. I had moved to a new office. And I was on my way to go have lunch with my CPA. He picked me up. I came downstairs, he picked me up, took me to this little Super Salad restaurant nearby because we both had less than an hour to eat. So it's quick. Get in there and get a salad. You walk in and this Super Salad is a thing where you get a tray, and it's got a whole bunch of foods. And whatever it is they weigh it, and they charge you the acquired weight. So you get salad. You pay less if you get something with it.  As I walked in, and we started going to the line, I saw that young man grown up eight years older in this suit, talking to another man in a suit. And I said, ‘If you don't mind going get me a tray. And I'll catch up. I see someone I must say hi to.' I walk over to this guy. He's talking this man. He's not paying attention to me. I'm standing right next to him. And as he's talking I'm just standing there waiting for him to finish. All of a sudden he finishes, the guy starts to walk off he turns around as if he's going to say, ‘Can I help you?'  Lisa: Yeah, he didn't realise this.  Dr John: And obviously he looks at me and he goes, ‘Oh my god. Wow, wow.' He shook my hand, and ran off and got the other guy to come here, ‘This is the guy I told you about.' And he told him, ‘This is the guy.' And the guy said, ‘Oh, thank you. I'd love to meet you. He's told me all about you, he said you changed his life.' And I said, ‘Well didn't know until today. What impact– Lisa: What are you doing? Yeah. Dr John: But the guy told me, he says, ‘I have eight franchises. I come into my restaurant. That was the manager. I'm checking up on my restaurants and I'll go to the next one. I check them out once a week, I go make my rounds.' He said, ‘That day, I got me a job at Super Salad. I worked myself into a management position for over two years. As I was saving the heck out of my money, which your tape set said to do, I bought into the franchises and I got eight franchises.' Lisa: Jesus! Just from that one tape, that one conversation, see this is the impact– Dr John: I said to him, ‘You just inspired me.' It brought a tear to my eye to know that– because I thought maybe I was a bit tough on you. He said, ‘Sir, you did the most amazing thing to my life that day. Because the truth is, I wanted to be in the restaurant business. And now I am.' Lisa: Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new Patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing The Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody, and we want to keep it that way. But to do that, we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a Patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on patron.lisatamati.com. That's p-a-t-r-o-n dot lisatamati dot com. We have two patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand, or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us, everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries and much, much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com, and thanks very much for joining us.  Lisa: You've encouraged him basically to have faith in the dream and to– because everybody else, like your family, often your friends, often are, ‘You can't leave that safe job.' I've had this conversation with my husband who's a firefighter. And he says like, ‘I can never leave the fire brigade because it's what I've always done. And that's how I've always, you know, it was my passion,' and so on. And I said, ‘Yes, but you don't have to stay there. That's your choice. Opt for security and– If you want security, if you want to do something, then do it. Life is short.' Dr John: All I know is that if you're not doing something you're inspired by, life can be pretty horrible. I see people. I didn't, I used to get, I lived in New York for a while. And we lived in Trump Tower there, fifty-sixth and fifth, right underneath Donald, so I knew Donald. So I live there for 29 years. And sometimes, you can take taxi. Sometimes, you take, when we're going in the airport, I got a limo. But just going around the city, sometimes I'd have a taxi. I get in the taxi and I– if there was a mess, sometimes I'd pass it by. I go, ‘No, smelly. No, no respect.' But again, in a taxi– if I'm in a hurry, it's hard to get, right? It's 3:30 to 4 o'clock march, I get in whatever I get, because I don't want to wait another 20 minutes. But I get it and I go, ‘How long have you been driving a taxi?' And they'll say a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whatever it may be. I said, ‘Do you love it?' Some will look in the mirror and go, ‘Pays the bills, man.' And I said, ‘But do you love it?' He goes, ‘Are you kidding, man? If I got a thing in New York, you got to be nuts.' And they have that attitude.  Of course, the car is usually a mess. It's got ripped holes in it. It's got cigarette burns. It's got a little bit of an odour. You know it's not taken cared of; it's not clean. But then you get in another car. And, ‘How long have you driven a taxi?' ‘28 years.' I said, ‘Do you love it?' ‘I love it. I get to meet people like yourself. I meet the most amazing people every day. My father was a taxi driver. My grandfather was a taxi driver in New York. I know every city, every street, I know every part of the city. Here's my card. You want some water?' ‘Sure.' ‘Anything you need to let, give me feedback about my car, please tell me. If there's something not in order, if somebody left something there, if it's dirty, let me know. I'd like to make sure that everybody gets a good experience in my car. If you want to know about the city, you just ask me. Anytime you want to go anywhere in the city, you contact me. And there's my card, I will take you, and I'll make sure you got the best thing, and I'll be on time for you.' He was just engaged. And he loved it. And of course, I got his card. And I called him. And sometimes when I was going around the city, I would use him. He would even come back and pick me up. Lisa: And it shows you that it doesn't matter if you're cleaning toilets or you're a taxi driver or you're at the garbage disposal. Whatever job you're doing, do it well, for starters. That can be your mission in life, is to provide that service. It doesn't have to be taking on the world and flying to Mars like Elon Musk. It's just, do your job; do it well. I don't, I just– I have issue too, with people who just doing the job, getting the paycheck, not doing the job with passion.  You can tell. I walk into my gym and there's a new lady on reception who is just beaming from ear to ear, fully enthusiastic. I see her training; she trains like a maniac. She's just always happy and positive. When somebody comes into that gym now, they get a positive smiley receptionist. ‘Come in' and ‘How was your day?' The contrast to the other person that works at the gym who's surly looking, never smiles. And if you, say ‘Hello, how are you doing?' It's like, ‘Mmm.' And you think, ‘Wow, that is just the difference between someone who's just, “I'm so lucky to be here” and “I'm working.”'  Dr John: They're engaged versus disengaged. Can I share another story?  Lisa: This is great.  Dr John: Right. My father, I started working for my father when I was four. He owned a plumbing business. He wasn't a plumber. He's an engineer, but he had plumbers working for him. And my job was to clean the nipples. And they sound a little sexual, but it's actually, these little pipes and couplings, so it's interesting. But I used to scrape them out with a brush and oil them to make sure they would be preserved because they'll get a little rusty sitting around. Then, my dad would then, every once while, not every day, but most of the time, would give me the opportunity to go out with the plumbers to go on calls to learn plumbing. Everyone, so he would say, ‘Well, you're going to go with Joe today. You're going to go with Bob. You're going to go with Warren. You're going to go with…' And this one day, he said, ‘You're going to go with Jesse.'  I spend part of the day with Jesse. And Jesse was a ditch digger. He was an Afro-American man that was a ditch digger. And I said, ‘You want me to go with Jessie, am I going to dig a ditch?' He said, ‘Yes. I want you to go with Jesse.' I said, ‘Why?' He said, ‘You'll know when you get back.' ‘Okay.' So I go out with Jesse. We drive to this house that is about a 35-year-old house that needs a new water main from the street, the main from the street up to the house. And so he got a T-bar out, and he got a hose, and he got some paper, and he got a sharpshooter, which is a special shovel, and a little round-headed shovel, and a level and a string. This long string thing wrapped up on this piece of wood. And some, and another stick. The stick that had string around it where there are two sticks on either end. You could open them up unravelling. He stayed one at one place, stayed the other place, exactly where the line is going to go. Then he took a T-bar and went down into the ground to make sure there's no roots, no rocks, no anything that might interfere with the laying of a pipe. Then he watered it to make sure that you could go and if you dug it, it was just wet enough that it wouldn't crumble if you turn the sod over. And then he lined paper on one side of it. And then he showed me how to dig the ditch. I would go down to exactly the width of the sharpshooter, which is how deep it had to go. And then we would turn it over onto the paper. And that meant that the grass wasn't even cut, it was just folded over. Right. And we had a perfectly straight ditch. And then he showed me how to create the ditch with this other little thing. And it would go on top of the sides. It wouldn't fall off into the grass. It would just be on top of the paper, and on the inside. Then he took the level and he made sure that the grade was perfectly level from one place to the other because if you have a dip in it, water will sit there and rust and it'll wear out quicker. But if it flows exactly in line, you don't get as many rusting. We put this pipe down, pretty perfectly clear, perfectly graded. We levelled it, made sure it was perfectly level. We installed it to the house, into the main. We then put some of the dirt back over it. Put the sod back on, patted it down, watered it, squished it down, loosened up the grass so you couldn't even tell it had ever been done now. And we had a brand new waterline done. And when you're done, you could not, until you could walk around, you couldn't tell it was done. It was perfect. And then we got in the truck and started to drive off. And I asked, you know, Jesse, his name was. I said, ‘That was neat.' You know, I'm a young kid. And I said, ‘Call me J for John.' He said, ‘J, I have the greatest job on this planet, the greatest job a man could ever, ever, ever ask for.' And I said, ‘What do you mean?' I thought he's a ditch digger. He said, ‘Without water, people die. I bring life to people. My job is the most important job. They can't bathe. They can't drink. They can't make food. They can't do anything without my water pipe. I had the most important job on this planet. And I bring water to people. Without water people die.' And I thought, ‘Whoa.' And I came back and he said to me, ‘My job is to do such an amazing job that they call the office and complain that we never came.'  Lisa: Because they can't see where he's been!  Dr John: It's so immaculate. They don't believe that somebody came and they'll call and cuss out your dad. “Why is it not, why did you not do the main?” And your dad knows. Tell them, “If you don't mind just walk out. They will see that the main is there.”' They're unbelievably astonished that there was no mess and it's perfect. And he didn't tell us about Jesse, and the respect he does when he does water main. He knew that if I would go out there and learn from him, here's a man that does what he loves. Yeah, and he's the ditch digger. And in those days, you didn't make a little bit, you didn't make a lot of money. Lisa: And I love that. And it just reminds me of my dad. He was always cleaning up at the garden. He was a firefighter professionally, but he would be, every spare moment, gardening somebody's garden, cleaning up, landscaping, doing it. And he worked on films as a landscape artist and so on. He was always the one that was cleaning everything up, everything was immaculate by the end of the day. Whereas every, all the other workers were just, ‘Down tools. It's five o'clock, we're off,' sort of thing. Drop it and run. Everything was always a mess.  My dad, he always had everything perfectly done. And was, always came home satisfied because he'd spent, when he wasn't at the fire brigade, he spends his day with his hands in the dirt, out on the sun, physically working in nature, and loving it and doing a proper job of it. So yeah, it just reminded me because he taught us all those things as we were growing up too. And would take us and teach us how to paint and teach us how to, all of these things.  Dr John: The more something is high on your value that you're doing, your identity revolves around your highest value. Whatever is highest on your value, your identity revolves around. As a result of it, the pride in workmanship goes up to the degree that it's congruent with what you value most. Because you're inspired and love doing it. And it's, your identity goes around it. So my identity would rather revolve around teaching. So I'm inspired to do teaching. I can't wait to do it.  Whatever high an individual's values is what they're going to excel at most. And they are wanting to do it not because they have to, but because they love to. People do something they love to, completely do a different job than people that have to. They're creative, innovative. They go out of their way. They don't care if they have to work extra time. They don't care about those things because they're doing what they love. Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. I love it. You have some fabulous stories to illustrate the point. So whatever you're doing people, do it properly, and do it with passion, and try to get to where you want to. You might, this just takes time to get to where you want to go. You come out of school, you're not going to end up being near the top of your game. But you have to start somewhere and head towards what your passion is. I wanted to figure— Dr John: If you start out right at the very beginning, master planning, you can get there pretty quick. In 18 months, I went from doing everything, to do the two or three things that I did most effectively. I delegated the rest away. But my income went up tenfold.  Lisa: Wow. Yeah. Because you were actually doing the things that mattered the most. Dr John: Me going out and speaking and me doing the clinical work was the two things that I was, because that's the thing I went to school for. That's what I wanted to do. I didn't want to do the administrative or I didn't want to do all that other stuff. Hire people to do that. That freed me up. Lisa: Yeah, it's a fantastic message. Now, I wanted to flip directions on you if I could, and I've been doing a lot of study around flow states and optimising. How do we build into ourselves this ability to be operating at our best, which we've been talking a little bit about? What neurotransmitters are at play when we're in a flow state? How do we maintain this over time to remain inspired and not be worn down?  We think about flow state or I don't know how to put this into words, people. By that I mean, it's that state where you're just on fire, where everything's happening really well, you're at your genius place, your talents are being expressed properly, and you're just in it. I would get that when I'm running, or when I was making jewellery and I would, time would disappear, and I'd be just in this otherworldly place, almost sometimes. How do we tap into that? Because that is where we as human beings can be our optimal, be our best. Have you got any ideas around that as far as the neurotransmitters and the neuroscience of flow states? Dr John: Yes. It boils down to the very same thing I was saying a moment ago: not doing low priority things. There's two flow states though, and they get confused. Maybe people have confused a manic elated, utopic, euphoric high, which is a fantasy of all positives, no negatives in the brain that makes you manic. That flow state is a hypocriticality, amygdala-driven, dopamine-driven fantasy high that won't last.  Then there's a real flow state. When you're doing something that's truly inspiring and deeply meaningful, you get tears in your eyes getting to do it. You're not having a hypocriticality, you're having a supercriticality, where the very frontal cortex is actually activated, not the lateral but the medial one, and you're now present. It's the gratitude centre; it's grace. There you're in the flow because you're doing something you really love to do that you feel is your identity. That's where time stops.  Some people confuse a manic episode with that state. But a manic episode crashes. But the real flow state is inspired. That's when you're able to do what you love doing consistently. When Warren Buffett is doing, reading business statements, and financial statements, and deciding what companies to buy, this is what he loves doing. For me, I'm studying human behaviour and anything to do with the brain, and mind, and potential, and awareness. I'm that way. I can lose track of all time and just be doing it for hours. It's not a manic state. That's an inspired state. An inspired state is an intrinsically driven state where you're willing to embrace pain and pleasure in the pursuit of it.  You love tackling challenges and solving problems, and you'll just research and research or do whatever you're doing, and you just keep doing it because you won't stop. That's not a manic episode. Although manics can look similar, there's a difference. Though a manic state comes from the dopamine, you got a high dopamine, usually high serotonin, you got encapsulants, endorphins. But you also don't have, you're not perceiving the downsides. You're just seeing all upsides. You are blinded by little fantasy about what's going to happen. And that eventually catches you, because that it's not obtainable. Fantasies are not obtainable, objectives are.  Eventually, the other side comes in, and osteocalcins comes in and norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisol, the stress responses. Because all of, all of a sudden your fantasy's not being met. But when you think you're going after the fantasy, just think of it this way: when you're infatuated with somebody, you're enamoured. You're in this euphoria. All you see is the upside, and you're blind to the downside. Actually, at this time, you say, ‘I'm in love.' No, you're infatuated. And then when weeks go by, and months go by, you start to find out, ‘Oh, I was fooled. That person I thought was there is not who I thought.' And you find out about this person. And that's short-lived. Yeah.  When you actually know that human beings can have both sides, and you don't have a fantasy of one side, but you embrace both sides, and know that they're a human being with a set of values. If you can communicate and articulate what you want in terms of those values, you now have a fulfilling relationship. It's a long term relationship. It's not volatile. It's not manic depressive. It's just steady. That's the one that's the flow. That's what allows the relationship to grow. The manic thing is transient. The real flow is eternal. Lisa: So it's the difference between being in love, and infatuated, and being in actual true real long-term love. Dr John: Well, infatuation, people confuse with love. If I have an expectation on you to be nice, never mean; kind, never cruel; positive, never negative; peaceful, never wrathful, giving, never taking; generous, never stingy; considerate, never inconsiderate. If I have a fantasy about who you are and I'm high because I think I've found this person, that's ‘Oh, well, it's all one-sided.' It's not sustainable. No one's gonna live that way. But if I have an expectation, if they're a human being with a set of values, I can rely on them to do what's highest on their value, and nothing more. I respect their value, I see how it's serving my value, and I can appreciate what they're committed to, and don't have any expectation except them to do what they do. They won't let me down. And I'll be grateful for them. Lisa: Why didn't you tell her that when I was a 20-year-old finding the wrong people in my life? Relationship-wise, are you going after the wrong types of people? Dr John: If you go after it a little infatuation, you have to pay with a broken crush. You never have a broken heart; you have a broken fantasy. Eventually, it helps you actually learn to go after what's in your heart. Lisa: And value what is really important. Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to have had never met a lot sooner? Dr John: There's no mistake, so much happened, because you wouldn't be doing this project. Lisa: No. Then this is what every piece of crap that's ever come your way in life has got an upside and a downside. Because I hear in one of your lectures talking about this: don't get ever overexcited, and don't get really depressed. It's always in the middle. You put it so eloquently, it was, whenever something good happens to you, don't get too overly excited about it. And whenever something bad happens to you, don't get overly depressed about it. Because there's something in the middle of there. You're not seeing the downsides of that good thing, and you're not seeing the upsides.  I've actually integrated that now into my life. When something good, I used to have this thing, ‘Oh my god, I have this breakthrough. I've had this breakthrough.' And ‘This happened to me.' And then I'll go and talk about it. And, because I'm a very open person and I found actually that's not good in a couple of ways. Because I'm overexcited about it. I've ticked it off in my brain almost as being happened. Dr John: If you're overexcited, you're blind to the downside. Lisa: Yeah. And you think it's already happened. Say you meet someone, new possible job, or it's a possible contract, or something like that. And you got all excited about it. Because you've got you've initiated the process, but in your brain, you've already ticked that box and got the job and you're off.  Dr John: Then you undermine it. And you said it's related about a job opportunity. You usually have it taken away from you. You're mostly unready for it. If you're really ready for the job opportunity, you're going to know what it's going to take workwise to be able to get paid. You'll already get the downside and your objective. And know, ‘Oh, that's gonna be 28 hours of work here.'  Lisa: That's not cynical, that's not cynicism. That's actually not realism.  Dr John: It's grounded objectives. People who keep grounded objectives don't have job opportunities taken away from them. But people who get elated about it, brag about it, talk about it, almost inevitably disappears. Lisa: Wow. Okay. And so you got to be looking at, I've elated— a couple of opportunities come up that are possibly I'm thinking about doing. I'm like, ‘That one's gonna take so much work in this direction. That means going to be the sacrifice for you.' And the old me would have just gone, ‘Yeah. Let's do it, jump in. And I'm like, ‘Am I just getting old or is this actually a better way to be?' Dr John: My dad taught me something as a plumbing industry. He'd have to, they'd say, ‘Okay, we're going to build this house. Here's all the plumbing that's going to be involved in it.' They'd see the plans. He'd have to do an estimate. What would it cost to produce all that, put that together? If he got elated and he didn't do his cost, by the time he finishes, he didn't make any profit. But if he does his due diligence and knows all the responsibilities, what happens if it rains? What happens if there's delays? What happens if the permits are delayed? He puts all the variables in there and checks it all off. He then goes in to the customer and says, ‘This is what it's going to cost.'  He said, sometimes the customer would come to him and say, ‘Well, yeah. But this other one came in at $10,000 cheaper.' My dad would sit there and he would say to him, he said, ‘I want to show you something. I guarantee you, the man that comes in at $10,000 cheaper, is not going to be thinking of all the variables. You're going to end up not having the job that we're going to do. Let me make sure you understand this. You may not hire me, and that's okay. But I want to make sure you're informed you make a wise decision. Because if you don't, you're going to go pay that side to save $10,000, it's going to cost you an extra 10.'  Lisa: Yep. Been there, done that. Dr John: Well, my dad used to go through it, and with a fine-tooth comb, he explained all the different variables. He says, ‘Now, what I want you to do is go back to the person that's giving you those things and ask them all those questions. If they didn't think about it, they're going to either not make money off you and they're not going to want to continue to do the work. Or they're not going to do a great job because they're losing money. Or you're going to end up getting a thing done, then they're never going to want to do follow up and take care of you again as a customer. So here's what it costs. I've been doing this a long time. I know what it costs. I know what the property is. So I'd rather you know the facts, and be a little bit more and make sure it's done properly. Then go and save a few bucks and find out the hard way.' Here's the questions they go check. They came back to my dad.  Lisa: Yep. When they understood that whole thing. And I think this is a good thing in every piece of, every part of life. It's not always the cheapest offering that's the best offering, which you learn the hard way. Dr John: I had somebody come to me not too long ago, maybe four months ago, earlier this year. And said, ‘I go to so and so's seminar for almost half the price of your seminar. Why would I go to your seminar?' And I said, ‘That's like comparing a Rolls Royce to a Volkswagen.' I said, ‘So let me explain what you're going to get here. Let me explain what you're going to get here. Then you can make a decision. If you want that Volkswagen outcome, that's fantastic. If you want a Rolls Royce, I'm on the Rolls Royce. I'm going to give you something about here.' And once you explain it, and make the distinctions, people will pay the difference.  Lisa: Yeah. And that's– in a business, you have to be able to explain to them as well. When I was a jeweller, when I started, I was a goldsmith in a previous life. And we used to make everything by hand and it was all custom jewellery, etcetera, back before China and the mass production and huge factories and economies of scale really blew the industry to pieces. For a long time you were actually in that hanging on to one of those and not transitioning into the mass production side of it because I didn't want to, but not being able to represent the value that actually what you were producing: the customisation, the personalisation, the handmade, and people wouldn't understand that.  You end up chopping your own prices down and down and down to the point where it no longer became a viable business. And that was the state of the industry and so on and so forth. But people could not see the difference between this silver ring and that silver ring. That one's a customised, handmade, personalised piece that took X amount of hours to produce. And this is something they got spit out of a production line at a team and other people are wearing. But people can't see the value difference. Dr John: Yeah, you have to, you're responsible for bringing it to their awareness. If you've been to a sushi restaurant, they have this egg that's in layers. I noticed that to get some nigiri with an egg on it with a little seaweed wrapped around it, it was like $4 per piece. And the other sushi was like $2 at the time. I thought, just an egg. Why would it be that much? And then I thought, and then I watched him prepare one, and how many hours it took to prepare one of those slabs of egg because he had to do it in layers. We had to loony take a pan, take an egg, poured in the egg, cook it just a certain level. And then lay that, scramble it, laid on top layer to time while it's hot, and layer by layer by layer by layer and cut it and everything else to make that thing. And I realised that is an individual egg-layered piece of egg. And I realised after seeing him I go, ‘That's a $10 egg.'  Lisa: This is cheap.  Dr John: I was thinking, ‘How the heck does he do that for four bucks? How did he make any profit out of it?' I never questioned it after th

About JohnJohn Allspaw has worked in software systems engineering and operations for over twenty years in many different environments. John's publications include the books The Art of Capacity Planning (2009) and Web Operations (2010) as well as the forward to “The DevOps Handbook.”  His 2009 Velocity talk with Paul Hammond, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation” helped start the DevOps movement.John served as CTO at Etsy, and holds an MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund UniversityLinks: The Art of Capacity Planning: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Capacity-Planning-Scaling-Resources/dp/1491939206/ Web Operations: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Operations-Keeping-Data-Time/dp/1449377440/ The DevOps Handbook: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/ Adaptive Capacity Labs: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com John Allspaw Twitter: https://twitter.com/allspaw Richard Cook Twitter: https://twitter.com/ri_cook Dave Woods Twitter: https://twitter.com/ddwoods2 TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by CircleCI. CircleCI is the leading platform for software innovation at scale. With intelligent automation and delivery tools, more than 25,000 engineering organizations worldwide—including most of the ones that you've heard of—are using CircleCI to radically reduce the time from idea to execution to—if you were Google—deprecating the entire product. Check out CircleCI and stop trying to build these things yourself from scratch, when people are solving this problem better than you are internally. I promise. To learn more, visit circleci.com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by John Allspaw, who's—well, he's done a lot of things. He was one of the founders of the DevOps movement—although I'm sure someone's going to argue with that—he's also written a couple of books, The Art of Capacity Planning and Web Operations and the foreword of The DevOps Handbook. But he's also been the CTO at Etsy and has gotten his Master's in Human Factors and System Safety from Lund University before it was the cool thing to do. And these days, he is the founder and principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs. John, thanks for joining me.Corey: And now for something completely different!John: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk with you, Corey.Corey: So, let's start at the beginning here. So, what is Adaptive Capacity Labs? It sounds like an experiment in auto-scaling, as is every use of auto-scaling, but that's neither here nor there. I'm guessing it goes deeper.John: Yeah. So, I managed to trick, or let's say convince some of my heroes, Dr. Richard Cook and Dr. David Woods, these folks are what you would call heavies in the human factors, system safety, and resilience engineering world, Dave Woods is credited with creating the field of resilience engineering. And so what we've been doing for the past—since I left Etsy is bringing perspectives, techniques, approaches to the software world that are, I guess, some of the most progressive practices that saved other safety, critical domains, like aviation, and power plants, and all of the stuff that makes news.And the way we've been doing that is largely through the lens of incidents. And so we do a whole bunch of different things, but that's the core of what we do is activities and projects for clients that have a concern around incidents; both, are we learning well? Can you tell us that? Or can you tell us how to understand incidents and analyze them in such a way that we can learn from them effectively?Corey: Generally speaking, my naive guess, based upon the times I spent working in various operations role has been, “Great. So, how do we learn from incidents?” Well, if you're like most of the industry, you really don't. You wind up blaming someone in a meeting that's called blameless, so instead of using the person's name, you use a team or a role name, and then you wind up effectively doing a whole bunch of reactive process work that in long enough timeline and enough incidents ossifies you into a whole bunch of processes and procedure that is just horrible. And then how do you learn from this?Well, by the time it actually becomes a problem, you've rotated CIOs four times and there's no real institutional memory here. Great. That's my cynical approach, and I suspect it's not entirely yours because if it were, you wouldn't be doing a business in this because otherwise, it would be this wonderful choreographed song-and-dance number of, “Doesn't it suck to be you? Da-da.” And that's it. I suspect you do more as a consultant than that. So, what does my lived experience of terrible companies differing in what respects from the folks you talk to?John: Oh, well, I mean, just to be blunt, you're absolutely spot on. [laugh]. The industry is terrible at this.Corey: Well, crap.John: I mean, look, the good news is, there are inklings, there are signals for some organizations that have been doing the things that they've been told to do by some book or website that they read, and they're doing all the things and they realize, “All right, well, whatever we're doing doesn't seem to be—it doesn't feel—we're doing all the things, checking the boxes, but we're having incidents”—and even more disturbing to them is we're having incidents that seem as if—it'd be one thing to have incidents that were really difficult, hairy, complicated, and complex, and certainly those happen, but there is a view that they're just simply not getting as much out of these sometimes pretty traumatic events as they could be. And that's all that's needed, yeah.Corey: In most companies, it seems like, on some level, you're dealing with every incident that looks a lot like that. Sure, it was a certificate expired, but then you wind up tying into all the relevant things that are touching that. It seems like it's an easy, logical conclusion. Oh, wow. It turns out in big enterprises, nothing is straightforward or simple.Everything becomes complicated, and issues like that happen frequently enough that it seems like the entire career can be spent in pure firefighting reactive mode.John: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I would say that just like these other domains that I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of, sort of, intuitive perspectives that are, let's just say, sort of unproductive. And so in software, we write software; it makes sense if all of our discussions after an incident trying to make sense of it, is entirely focused on the software did this, and Postgres has this weird thing, and Kafka has this tricky bit here. But the fact of the matter is, people and—engineers and non-engineers—are struggling when an incident arises, both in terms of what the hell is happening, and generating hypotheses, and working through whether the hypothesis is valid or not, adjusting it if signals show up that it's not, and what can we do, what are some options? If we do feel like we're on a good [unintelligible 00:06:09] productive thread about what's happening, what are some options that we can take?That opens up a doorway for a whole variation of other questions. But the fact of the matter is, handling incidents, understanding really, effectively, time-pressured problem solving, almost always amongst multiple people with different views, different expertise, and piecing together across that group what's happening, and what to do about it, and what are the ramifications of doing this thing versus that thing? This is all what we would call above-the-line work. This is expertise. It shows up in how people weigh ambiguities, and things are uncertain.And that doesn't get this lived experience that people have, it just we're not used to talking about—we're used to talking about networks, and applications, and code, and network. We're not used to talking about and even have vocabulary for what makes something confusing? What makes something ambiguous? And that is what makes for effective incident analysis.Corey: Do you find that most of the people who are confused about these things tend to be more aligned with being individual contributor type engineers, who are effectively boots-on-the-ground, for lack of a better term? Is it high-level executives who are trying to understand why it seems like they're constantly getting paraded in the press? Or is it often folks somewhere between the two?John: Yes.Corey: [laugh].John: Right? Like there is something that you point out, which is this contrast between boots-on-the-ground, hands-on keyboard, folks who are resolving incidents, who are wrestling with these problems, and leadership. And sometimes leadership who remember their glory days of being an individual contributor sometimes are a bit miscalibrated. They still believe they have a sufficient understanding of all the messy details when they don't. And so, I mean, the fact of the matter is, there's the age-old story of Timmy stuck in a well, right?There's the people trying to get Timmy out of the well, and then there's what to do about all of the news reporters surrounding the well asking for updates and questions, and how did Timmy get in the well? These are two different activities. And I'll tell you pretty confidently, if you get Timmy out of the well, pretty fluidly, if you can set situations up where people who ostensibly would get Timmy out of the well are better prepared with anticipating Timmy is going to be in the well, and understanding all the various options and tools to get Timmy out of the well, the more you can set up those and have those conditions be in place, there's a whole host of other problems that simply don't go away. And so, these things kind of get a bit muddled. And so when you say ‘learning from incidents,' I would separate that very much from what you tell the world externally from your company about the incident because they're not at all the same.Public write-ups about an incident are not the results of an analysis. It's not the same as an internal review, were the review to be effective. Why? Well, first thing is you never see apologies on internal post-incident reviews because who are you going to apologize to?Corey: It's always fun watching the certain level of escalating transparency as you go up through the spectrum of the public explanation of an outage, to ones you put internal customers, to ones you show under NDA to special customers, to the ones who are basically partners who are going to fire you contractually if you don't, to the actual internal discussion about it. And watching that play out is really interesting. As you wind up seeing the things that are buried deeper and deeper, yeah, you wind up with this flowery language on the outside, and it gets more and more transparent, and at the end, it's, “Someone tripped and hit the emergency power switch in a data center.” And it's this great list of how this stuff works.John: Yeah. And to be honest, it would be strange and shocking if they weren't different. Because like I said, the purpose of a public write-up is entirely different than an internal write-up and the audience is entirely different. And so that's why they're cherry-picked. There's a whole bunch of things that aren't included in public write-up because the purpose is, “I want a customer or potential customer to read this and feel at least a little bit better.”Or really, I want them to at least get this notion that we've got a handle on it. “Wow, that was really bad, but nothing to see here, folks. It's all been taken care of.” But again, this is very different, the people inside the organization, even if it's just sort of tacit, they've got a knowledge. Tenured people who have been there for some time, see connections, even if they're not made explicit, between one incident to another incident.To that one that happened—“Remember that one that happened three years ago, that big one? Oh, sorry, you're new. Oh, let me tell you the story. Oh, it's about this and blah, blah, blah. And who knew that Unix pipes only passes 4k across it.” Blah, blah, blah, something—some weird, esoteric thing.And so our focus, largely, although we have done projects with companies about trying to be better about their external language about it, the vast majority of what we do and where our focuses is, is to capture the richest understanding of an incident for the broadest audience. And like I said at the very beginning, the bar is real low. There's a lot of, I don't want to say falsehoods, but certainly a lot of myths that just don't play out in the data about whether people are learning. Whenever we have a call with a potential client, we always ask the same question. Ask them about what their post-incident activities look like, and they tell us and throw in some cliches, and everyone—never want a crisis go to waste.And, “Oh, yes. And we always try to capture the learnings and we put them in a document.” And we always ask the same question, which is, “Oh. So, you put these documents, these write-ups in an area?” Oh, yes, we want that to be shared as much as possible.And then we say, “Who reads them?” And that tends to put a bit of a pause because most people have no idea whether they're being read or not. And the fact is, when we look, very few of these write-ups are being read. Why? I'll be blunt: because they're terrible. [laugh].There's not much to learn from there because they're not written to be read. They're written to be filed. And so we're looking to change that. And there's a whole bunch of other things that are unintuitive, but just like all of the perspective shifts, DevOps, and continuous deployment, they sound obvious, but only in hindsight after you get it. That's characterization of our work.Corey: It's easy to wind up, from the outside, seeing a scenario where things go super well in an environment like that, where, okay, we brought you in as a consultant, suddenly, we have better understanding about our outages. Awesome. But outages still happen. And it's easy to take a cynical view of, okay, so other than talking to you a lot, we say the right things, but how do we know that companies are actually learning from what happened as opposed to just being able to tell better stories about pretending to learn?John: Yeah, yeah. And this is, I think, where the world of software has some advantages over other domains. And the fact is, software engineers don't pay any attention to anything they don't think the attention is warranted, or they're not being judged, or scored, or rewarded for. And so there's no single signal that accompanies learning from incidents. It's more like a constellation, like, a bunch of smaller signals.So, for example, if more people are reading the write-ups. If more people are attending group review meetings. In organizations that do this really well, engineers who start attending meetings, we ask them, “Well, why are you going to this meeting?” And they'll report, “Well, because I can learn stuff here that I can't learn anywhere else. Can't read about it in a runbook, can't read about it on the wiki, can't read about it in an email, or hear about it in an all-hands.”And that they can see a connection between, even incidents handled in some distant group, they can see a connection to their own work. And so those are the sort of signals—we've written about this on our blog—those are the sort of signals that we know that progress is building momentum. But a big part of that is capturing this, again, this experience. Usually, we'll see, there's a timeline, and this is when memcached did X, and this alert happened, and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right?But very rarely are captured the things that, when you ask an engineer, “Tell me your favorite incident story.” People who will even describe themselves, “Oh, I'm not really a storyteller, but listen to this.” And they'll include parts that make for a good story. Social construct is, if you're going to tell a story, you've got the attention of other people, you're going to include the stuff that was not usually kept or captured in write-ups. For example, like, what was confusing?A story that tells about what was confusing, well—“And then we looked, and it said, ‘zero tests failed.'”—this is an actual case that we looked at—“It says ‘zero tests failed.' And so, okay. So, then I deployed. Well, the site went down.” “Okay, well, so what's the story there?” “Well, listen to this. As it turns out, at a fixed font, zeros, like, in Courier or whatever, have a slash through it and at a small enough font, a zero with a slash through it looks a lot like an eight. There were eight tests failed, not zero.” So, that's about the display. And so those are the types of things that make a good story. We all know stories like this, right? The Norway problem with YAML. You ever heard of that Norway problem?Corey: Not exactly. I'm hoping you'll tell me.John: Well, so lay [laugh] it's excellent, and of course it works out that the spec for YAML will evaluate the value no—N-O—to false as if it was a boolean. Yes, for true. Well, but if your YAML contains a list of abbreviations for countries, then you might have Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, US, false instead of Norway. And so that's just an unintuitive surprise. And so, those are the types of things that don't typically get captured in incident writeups.There might be a sentence like, “There was a lack of understanding.” Well, that's unhelpful. At best. Don't tell me what wasn't there. Tell me what was there. “There was confusion.” Great. “What made it confusing?” “Oh, yeah. N-O is both ‘no' and the abbreviation for Norway.”Red herrings is another great example. Red herrings happen a lot; they tend to stick in people's memories; and yet, they never really get captured. But it's, like, one of the most salient aspects of the case that ought to be captured. People don't follow red herrings because they know they're a red herring. They follow red herrings because they think it's going to be productive.So therefore, you better describe for all your colleagues what brought you to believe that this was productive. Turns out later—you find out later that it wasn't productive. Those are some of the examples. And so if you can capture what's difficult, what's ambiguous, what's uncertain, and what made it difficult, ambiguous, or uncertain, that makes for good stories. If you can enrich these documents, it means people who maybe don't even work there yet, when they start working there, they'll be interested; they have a set expectation they'll learn something by reading these things.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: There's an inherent cynicism around… well, from at least from my side of the world, around any third-party that claims to fundamentally shift significant aspects of company culture, and if the counter-argument to that is that you and DORA and a whole bunch of other folks have had significant success with doing it, it's just very hard to see that from the outside. So, I'm curious as to how you wind up telling stories about that because the problem is inherently whenever you have an outsider coming into an enterprise-style environment, is, “Oh, cool. What are they going to be able to change?” And it's hard to articulate that value, and not—well, given what you do, to be direct—come across as an engineering apologist, where it's well, “Engineers are just misunderstood, so they need empathy, and psychological safety, and blameless post-mortems.” And it sounds to crappy executives, if I'm being direct, that, “Oh, in other words, I just can't ever do anything negative to engineers who, from my perspective, just failed me or are invisible, and there's nothing else in my relationship with them.” Or am I oversimplifying?John: No, no. I actually think you're spot on. I mean, that's the thing is that if you're talking with leaders—remember, a.k.a. People who are, even though they're tasked with providing the resources and setting conditions for practitioners—the hands-on folks who get their work done—they're quite happy to talk about these sort of abstract concepts, like psychological safety and insert other sorts of hand-wavy stuff.What is actually pretty magical about incidents is that these are grounded, concrete, messy phenomena that practitioners have, and will remember; they're sometimes visceral experiences. And so that's why we don't do theory at Adaptive Capacity Labs. We understand the theory, happy to talk to you about it, but it doesn't mean as much without the practicality. And the fact of the matter is that the engineer apologist is, “If you didn't have the engineers, would you have a business?” That's at the flip side; this is, like, the core unintuitive part of the field of resilience engineering, which is that Murphy's Law is wrong.What could go wrong almost never does, but we don't pay much attention to that. And the reason why you're not having nearly as many incidents as you could be is because, despite the fact that you make it hard to learn from incidents, people are actually learning. But they're just learning out of view from leaders. When we go to an organization and we see that most of the people who are attending post-incident review meetings are managers, that has a very particular signal. That tells me that the real post-incident review is happening outside that meeting, it probably happened before that meeting, and those people are there to make sure that whatever group that they represent in their organization isn't unnecessarily given the brunt of the bottom of a bus.And so it's a political due diligence. But the notion that you shouldn't punish or be harsh on engineers for making mistakes completely misses the point. The point is to set up the conditions so that engineers can understand the work that they do. And if you can amplify that, as Andrew Schaffer has said, “You're either building a learning organization, or you're losing to someone who is.” And a big part of that is you need people; you have to set up conditions for people to give detailed story about their work, what's hard.This part of the codebase is really scary, right? All engineers have these notions: this part is really scary, this part is really not that big of a deal, this part is somewhere in between. But there's no place for that outside of the informal discussions. But I would assert that if you can capture that, the organization will be better prepared. The thing that I would end on that is that it's a bit of a rhetorical device to get this across, but one of the questions we'll ask is, “How can you tell the difference between a difficult case—a difficult incident—handled well, or a straightforward incident handled poorly?”Corey: And from the outside, it's very hard to tell the difference.John: Oh, yeah. Well, certainly if what you're doing is averaging how long these things take. But the fact of the matter is that all the people who were involved in that, they know the difference between a difficult case handled well, and a straightforward one handled poorly. They know it, but there's nowhere, there's no place to give voice to that lived experience.Corey: So, on the whole, what is the tech industry missing when it comes to learning effectively from the incidents that we all continually experience and what feels to be far too frequently?John: They're missing what is captured in that age-old parable of the blind men and the elephant. And I would assert that these blind men that the king sends out—“Go find an elephant and come back and tell me about the elephant”—they come back and they all have—they're all valid perspectives, and they argue about, “No, an elephant is this big flexible thing,” and other one is, “Oh, no, an elephant is this big wall,” and, “No, an elephant is a big flappy thing.” If you were to make a synthesis of their different perspectives, then you'd have a richer picture and understanding of an elephant. You cannot legislate—and this is where what you brought up—you cannot set ahead, a priori, some amount of time and effort. And quite often what we see are leaders saying, “Okay, we need to have some sort of root cause analysis done within 72 hours of an event.” Well, if your goal is to find gaps, and come up with remediation items, that's what you're going to get. Remediation items might actually not be that good because you've basically contained the analysis time.Corey: Which does sort of feel, on some level, like it's very much aligned as—from a viewpoint of, yeah, remediation items may not be useful as far as driving lasting change, but without remediation items, good luck explaining to your customers that will never ever, ever happen again.John: Right, yeah. Of course. Well, you'll notice something about those public write-ups; you'll notice that they don't tend to link to previous incidents that have similarities to them because that would undermine the whole purpose, which is to provide confidence. And a reader might actually follow a hyperlink to say, “Wait a minute. You said this wouldn't happen again.”Turns out it would. Of course, that's horseshit. But you're right. And there's nothing wrong with remediation items, but if that's the goal, then that goal is—you know, what you look for is what you find, and what you find is what you fix. If I said, “Here's this really complicated problem and I'm only giving you an hour to describe it,” and it took you eight hours to figure out the solution.Well then, what you come up with in an hour is not actually going to be all that good. So, then the question is, how good are the remediation items? Quite often what we see is—and I'm sure you've had this experience—an incident's been resolved and you and your colleagues are like, “Wow, that was a huge pain in the ass. Oh, dude. I didn't see that coming. That was weird. Yeah.” And one of you might say, “You know what? I'm just going to make this change because I don't want to be woken up tonight, or I know that making this change is going to help things. I'm not waiting for the post-mortem. We're just going to do that.” “Is that good?” “Yep.” “Okay, yeah, please do it.”Quite frequently, those things, those actions, those aren't listed as action items, and yet it was a thing so important that it couldn't wait for the post-mortem—arguably the most important action item—and it doesn't get captured that way. We've seen this take place. And so again, in the end, it's about those who have the lived experience. The live experience is what fuels how reliable you are today.You don't go to your senior technical people and say, “Hey, listen. We got to do this project. We don't know how. I want you to figure out—we're going to—let's say we're going to move away from this legacy thing, so I want you to get in a room, come up with two or three options. Gather a group of folks who know what they're talking about. Get some options, and then show me what the options. Oh, and by the way, I'm prohibiting you from taking into account any experience you've ever had with incidents.” It sounds ridiculous when you would say that, and yet, that is what [unintelligible 00:27:54].So, if you can fuel people's memory, you can't say you've learned something if you can't remember it. At least that's what my kids' teachers tell me. And so yeah, you have to capture the lived experience, and including what was hard for people to understand. And those make for good stories. That makes for people reading them. That makes for people to have better questions about it. That's what learning looks like.Corey: If people want to learn more about what you have to say and how you view these things, where can they find you?John: You can find me and my colleagues at adaptivecapacitylabs.com where we talk all about the stuff on our blog. And myself, and Richard Cook, and Dave Woods are also on Twitter, as well.Corey: And we'll, of course, include links to that in the [show notes 00:28:42]. John, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.John: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm honored.Corey: John Allspaw, co-founder and principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment giving me a list of suggested remediation actions that I can take to make sure it never happens again.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need the Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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.

John: Okay. So Sarah, you said you participated in rodeos before but I thought only men ride horses in rodeos?Sarah: Yeah. Like 99.9% of the time, the men do all of the rodeo sports. There's like two sports for women and the rest of them are all for men.John: Oh.Sarah: When I said I wanted to do the traditionally male events, they said, "You can't do that. You're a woman. You have to do these other events that are not dangerous. They're safe."For example, the men do calf roping. You work with a baby cow, a calf that's about 100 pounds. The women do goat roping.And they work with a tiny goat that's about the size of a small dog. So I just always thought the difference was stupid. I don't want to do the easy, safe event. I want to do the difficult event and people were really surprised. And first, they said, "You can't." And I said, "I'm going to anyways."John: Wow!Sarah: And the first time I did the saddle bronc, they said, "Look, look, look. We got you a girl horse because you're a girl."John: Oh my.Sarah: And I thought, "Well, you didn't need to draw more attention to it. I just want to compete like everyone else."John: Right.Sarah: And my first time, I fell off the horse and I was really injured. And I was laying there and one of my friends came running out. And he said – I thought he was going to help me up and help me leave because I was really hurt. And instead he said, "Hurry up! You got to get off the – you get out of the arena because the next person wants to go."John: Oh, wow!Sarah: And I was really happy that he said that actually because he was just treating me the way he treated any other competitor. "Oh, get up. Be tough. You're fine."John: Yeah.Sarah: And I didn't want anyone to help me.John: So he didn't help you.Sarah: Right. And I was really glad that he was treating me like everyone else. And when you see a rodeo, you'll see that the women do events where they can dress really nice. They always wear nice clothes, beautiful hat. They even have earrings and things on.And when the men do events, they're doing events that they really have to use their muscles and get dirty, and I really liked doing those instead. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm just saying I like to do the other one and I think that maybe other women like to do the other events, too.John: So do you think that the situation is improving? Are more girls joining rodeo now?Sarah: I don't think so. I think the sport of rodeo is becoming less popular. So I think in the future, there won't be more women in rodeo. There will just be fewer people in rodeo.John: Oh, I see.Sarah: Because the rodeo events, they're not very kind to the cows or the other animals. And as people get older, maybe they get more softhearted like me, and they don't want to make the animals get tied up or chase the animals. And so I think fewer people are interested in rodeo these days.

John: Okay. So Sarah, you said you participated in rodeos before but I thought only men ride horses in rodeos?Sarah: Yeah. Like 99.9% of the time, the men do all of the rodeo sports. There's like two sports for women and the rest of them are all for men.John: Oh.Sarah: When I said I wanted to do the traditionally male events, they said, "You can't do that. You're a woman. You have to do these other events that are not dangerous. They're safe."For example, the men do calf roping. You work with a baby cow, a calf that's about 100 pounds. The women do goat roping.And they work with a tiny goat that's about the size of a small dog. So I just always thought the difference was stupid. I don't want to do the easy, safe event. I want to do the difficult event and people were really surprised. And first, they said, "You can't." And I said, "I'm going to anyways."John: Wow!Sarah: And the first time I did the saddle bronc, they said, "Look, look, look. We got you a girl horse because you're a girl."John: Oh my.Sarah: And I thought, "Well, you didn't need to draw more attention to it. I just want to compete like everyone else."John: Right.Sarah: And my first time, I fell off the horse and I was really injured. And I was laying there and one of my friends came running out. And he said – I thought he was going to help me up and help me leave because I was really hurt. And instead he said, "Hurry up! You got to get off the – you get out of the arena because the next person wants to go."John: Oh, wow!Sarah: And I was really happy that he said that actually because he was just treating me the way he treated any other competitor. "Oh, get up. Be tough. You're fine."John: Yeah.Sarah: And I didn't want anyone to help me.John: So he didn't help you.Sarah: Right. And I was really glad that he was treating me like everyone else. And when you see a rodeo, you'll see that the women do events where they can dress really nice. They always wear nice clothes, beautiful hat. They even have earrings and things on.And when the men do events, they're doing events that they really have to use their muscles and get dirty, and I really liked doing those instead. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm just saying I like to do the other one and I think that maybe other women like to do the other events, too.John: So do you think that the situation is improving? Are more girls joining rodeo now?Sarah: I don't think so. I think the sport of rodeo is becoming less popular. So I think in the future, there won't be more women in rodeo. There will just be fewer people in rodeo.John: Oh, I see.Sarah: Because the rodeo events, they're not very kind to the cows or the other animals. And as people get older, maybe they get more softhearted like me, and they don't want to make the animals get tied up or chase the animals. And so I think fewer people are interested in rodeo these days.

John: Okay. So Sarah, you said you participated in rodeos before but I thought only men ride horses in rodeos?Sarah: Yeah. Like 99.9% of the time, the men do all of the rodeo sports. There's like two sports for women and the rest of them are all for men.John: Oh.Sarah: When I said I wanted to do the traditionally male events, they said, "You can't do that. You're a woman. You have to do these other events that are not dangerous. They're safe."For example, the men do calf roping. You work with a baby cow, a calf that's about 100 pounds. The women do goat roping.And they work with a tiny goat that's about the size of a small dog. So I just always thought the difference was stupid. I don't want to do the easy, safe event. I want to do the difficult event and people were really surprised. And first, they said, "You can't." And I said, "I'm going to anyways."John: Wow!Sarah: And the first time I did the saddle bronc, they said, "Look, look, look. We got you a girl horse because you're a girl."John: Oh my.Sarah: And I thought, "Well, you didn't need to draw more attention to it. I just want to compete like everyone else."John: Right.Sarah: And my first time, I fell off the horse and I was really injured. And I was laying there and one of my friends came running out. And he said – I thought he was going to help me up and help me leave because I was really hurt. And instead he said, "Hurry up! You got to get off the – you get out of the arena because the next person wants to go."John: Oh, wow!Sarah: And I was really happy that he said that actually because he was just treating me the way he treated any other competitor. "Oh, get up. Be tough. You're fine."John: Yeah.Sarah: And I didn't want anyone to help me.John: So he didn't help you.Sarah: Right. And I was really glad that he was treating me like everyone else. And when you see a rodeo, you'll see that the women do events where they can dress really nice. They always wear nice clothes, beautiful hat. They even have earrings and things on.And when the men do events, they're doing events that they really have to use their muscles and get dirty, and I really liked doing those instead. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm just saying I like to do the other one and I think that maybe other women like to do the other events, too.John: So do you think that the situation is improving? Are more girls joining rodeo now?Sarah: I don't think so. I think the sport of rodeo is becoming less popular. So I think in the future, there won't be more women in rodeo. There will just be fewer people in rodeo.John: Oh, I see.Sarah: Because the rodeo events, they're not very kind to the cows or the other animals. And as people get older, maybe they get more softhearted like me, and they don't want to make the animals get tied up or chase the animals. And so I think fewer people are interested in rodeo these days.

John Lawson, Chief Executive Officer at Colder Ice Media, started in e-commerce in 2000 on eBay. He claims that people talked about business in Ebay chat rooms, making it  “the first social commerce platform” before there was such a term. At the time, John sold bandanas, and was pestered by constant customer questions for information on “how to fold a bandana.” So, he made a video and tracked ten thousand sales – not ten thousand dollars in sales – from that single video listing. Today's digital/social media was not the beginning of social commerce. John says, “No matter where you go, whether first world country or third world country, there is a central location that is a marketplace where people do commerce” and that no matter the channel, there is always a person on the other end. If you appeal to human instinct, people will respond. Commerce, by its very nature, requires human interaction and “social” should be much more broadly defined. John explains that there are social channels that many people do not recognize as social, e.g., Amazon Comments. John wrote a book, Kickass Social Commerce, which offers universal stories of social commerce (as opposed to social media). In one story the book, he tells how Madam C.J. Walker, an African-American entrepreneur, developed a line of hair care products, marketed them to her friends, then sold them door to door, and finally had her friends set up “product presentation” parties for a cut of the sales, a sales strategy later used by such companies as Tupperware and Avon. Walker became the first self-made female millionaire in the US. John describes this as “early social marketing.” John presented “Twenty-one Kickass Social Commerce Tactics to Sell More Today” at HubSpot's 2020 Inbound Conference, where he talked about the phases of social that make people buy and “the flywheel of contacting, engaging, getting people to take action, and then measuring that action to create better contact.” Two key concepts he covered were: Identify and define your avatar, your King Consumer . . . and profile in detail a minimum of three people who would purchase your product. Establish a need for reciprocity. DO SOMETHING for your King Consumer that creates an imbalance that makes them feel that the need to do something for you in return. In a candid and enlightening history lesson, John also discusses how race has impacted the growth and development of black entrepreneurship. Thank you, John. John can be reached through “Colder Ice” on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest – almost everywhere except on Tick-Tock. ROB: Welcome to the marketing agency leadership podcast, I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Lawson, Chief Executive Officer of Colder Ice Media, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Hey, thanks for having me, bro. ROB: Yeah. Good to have you here. If we were you know, if it weren't COVID, we might meet up in person. JOHN: Right? ROB: We have an Atlanta episode today. JOHN: Absolutely. ROB: Well, why don't you start off, John, by giving us a rundown of Colder Ice Media and what you all do exceptionally? JOHN: What I do exceptionally. I do e-commerce. Right. And I started my e-commerce business back in 2000 on eBay as a necessity. People were asking me the same question over and over, how to fold a bandana because I sold bandanas. It was annoying. So, I made a video on YouTube on how to fold a bandana. I would give everybody who asked that question that link. That bandana video went completely viral. Three hundred thousand people watched the video. Out of that, we were able to track ten thousand sales – not ten thousand dollars – but actual sales from that single video listing. That was like a cavalcade of understanding for me as people started asking me, “Hey, how do you do videos for selling stuff online?” I'm like, “Answer questions that people want.” That got me on stages. Finally I was like, “OK, if you need help with how to use social – the whole world of social – then that's what we did with Colder Ice Media. ROB: That's a very fun story. I can see why someone would put you on stage to talk about it. I think within that, at a tactical level, there's some cleverness, I think probably in your attribution –  because when you're talking about was not the easiest time to tie through who bought this thing. So how did you sort out that people were buying OR buying more of your product from that particular video? What was your tracking? JOHN: We would just look at the Google tag. Google tells you where traffic was coming from and we would see YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, and I'm like, “Dude, this is crazy.: And then, like you say, back in the day, the tools were not that deep, but they would show you the views. I would see these peaks and valleys in the number of views.  The week of Halloween, the peak would be 10X normal viewership. I had no idea that Halloween would be a great time to run specials selling bandanas. And I got that kind of information just by the volume of watchers during that Halloween week. So, it's if you take all of the parts, then you start seeing trends. You can't see a trend in a month. I know people think you can, but a real trend comes over years. When you see something happen three years, you can jump on and really take advantage of those little blips that other people are not able to see because they're just getting started. So, there's value in being there for a long haul, especially on social media. ROB: Wow. How many YouTube channels do you have in your orbit now? JOHN: Five. Yeah, I'm short. I will tell you one thing that I do – every time I get a new client, I create their own Google space – go out and create a Google account – because you need a Google account to create the YouTube. You're going to need that for writing or using their Google advertising. I will create that entire environment and isolate it for myself. What we do – we can show them the value of one-to-one versus, “Oh, by the way, here's some other tracking inside of your tracking.” I'm like, “No, we're tracking this. Put this in your cart so you can see exactly what our efforts are bringing to your business.” ROB: That makes perfect sense. You got this start in understanding on the video side, but you have this, I think, a broader intentionality around social commerce in general. How has that unfolded – your understanding from that first moment of “a video driving sales” to the broader portfolio of social platforms and tactics? JOHN: That's great . . . I like that question. What happened with me is I got really fascinated with Twitter in the beginning. I'm talking about . . . there were like one hundred thousand people on Twitter when I joined. What was fascinating for me is that I had created this business and I left the office space and I didn't have a whole lot of conversations anymore. So, I started using Twitter to just conversate with people while I was sitting at home in my home office. All of a sudden, it just started naturally moving into, “Hey, what do you do?” “Here's what I do.” “Oh, Ok.” Then I start talking about what I did. The e-commerce thing just started bringing other people in that were in the same field. That made me say, “Why or what is it about being or putting your expertise out that makes people suddenly feel like you are their expert?” You hear about this – everybody today will say, if you want to be an influencer, the first thing you do is start going to places and giving your expertise, There was no playbook when I was doing this. But I would watch this happen and it would happen organically. So, you start wondering. Social is very organic. I know people think it is some technology, but it's really not. I've traveled all over the world and no matter where you go, whether first world country or third world country, there is a central location that is a marketplace where people do commerce. In that commerce marketplace, there's always at least one coffee shop where you have social. Social and commerce go together. I tell people. Facebook was not the first social platform neither was MySpace. Actually, eBay was the first platform. Why? Back in the day, we would sit in these chat rooms while we were waiting for eBay auctions to end. A lot of people were talking about business in those chat rooms. They were a social commerce platform way before there was a term. They were doing social because social has been here since chat boards and chat rooms. AOL was Facebook, 1990. Social has been here forever. And if you grasp what I'd like to call the flywheel of contacting, engaging, getting people to take action, and then measuring that action to create better contact  . . . it goes around and around in that flywheel. And that's kind of what I talked about when we were doing the Inbound thing. It was about the phases of social that make people buy. ROB: Let's get right into that. We were talking beforehand. We were probably hoping to meet up at the Inbound conference and record this live and in person or in Atlanta. But we're not meeting up for things like that right now. But Inbound still happened. HubSpot's big Inbound conference, tens of thousands of people, maybe more – online. And your session there was “Twenty-one Kickass Social Commerce Tactics to Sell More Today.” And so I'd love you to dig in and get us into some of the meat and potatoes, maybe some particular things that you saw resonate back out into your audience on Social because you probably were paying attention to that. JOHN: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'm all about and I tell people and Ok, I get it these do feel very, "Oh I've heard that before." And that's probably the problem is that if you've heard identify your avatar, I call him the King consumer. If you can identify and get in the mind of your King Consumer, then everything that you do after that speaks to that King Consumer. Create at least one. But I say really, at minimum three people that actually purchase your product. They can be real people or they can be fake people. Let's say you don't have your product in market yet, or you think you know who's going to buy that product when you create this King consumer, what you have to do is start thinking about everything that that consumer is into. I want you to go deep into your thought patterns about, not just what they're what they want, but what do they need, what situation are they in? How do they know how many kids do they have? What job do they have?  What are they what do they listen to? What do they say? What are some of the terminology they use? And the more you find that out, the better your business is going to be. I know when I created our business and I was selling those bandanas, I bought those because I was into hip hop and everybody in my neighborhood was wearing the bandanas. I could sell that to people in my sphere. But once I started putting it out there and getting the feedback from others, I was like, whoa, wait a minute; these aren't hip hoppers that are just buying these. These are the bikers. Oh, wow, that's cool. Like I said, people do in the Halloween. Oh, Ok. Cool. And once I started asking my people, hey, how are you using that? How did you like that? You got to definitely go out there and ask. You have to ask. What you're going to learn from your ask are things you're never going to be able to come up with in your own mind. Things that you think when you think that your product and you are your customer – you're not. You're absolutely not. So back to the original question. Identifying that King consumer is one of the things you have to do. The next thing I talk about was reciprocity. If you do something for others, there becomes an imbalance in them that makes them feel like they have to do something for you. That was the whole thing about me teaching people – and I didn't tell you that is the main question actually was – how to fold a bandana like Tupac. Right. And it's so ridiculous. But remember, this is early 2000s, so or late 2000. So, the deal was in my mind, I'm like; everybody knows how to do that. But here's the deal. The people between the East Coast in the West Coast – those flyovers would watch videos and they wanted the same look and they didn't know. Once I taught them how to fold that bandana, then when they were making their choice on who to buy one from, they automatically thought about, “Hey, those guys taught me how to do it.” And just by the nature of who we are, we wanted to make the balance inside of ourselves with reciprocity. So, I'll buy it from them. They might be a dollar more, but I'll go ahead and do it. So, you really want to think about that. That's human nature. We want to get in balance. We always do. If I ask all my friends to help me move, I know, when one of them asks me to help them move, I can't say no. That's reciprocity. Right? ROB: And it's even more helpful in it's not just that they want to know this information. It's that the Internet to an extent and social have made it possible to ask questions that you're too embarrassed to ask your friends. So, you're bailing people out of feeling silly that they don't know how to fold that bandana. JOHN: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Or, they don't even know who to ask. ROB: Yeah. And that continues on out to – I think you look at the some of the beauty influencers and all these makeup tips. There are people who want to know how to do something with their makeup and they are embarrassed that they cannot. Yeah. YouTube bails us out of that. YouTube bailed me out of not knowing how to fix my toilet . . . anything. JOHN: And think of who are the biggest beauty influencers out there – a lot of them are males. That's crazy, right? But you think these guys wanted to put on makeup and a lot of their audience maybe never did. So, who are you going to ask? Your sister? There's a whole lot I got to do before I ask my sister how to put on makeup, There's a whole lot of steps I got to go through. ROB: Yeah, you're probably not going to get a straight up answer right away on that. JOHN: There's going to be some other conversation where exactly we need to have a deeper conversation. ROB: Amazing. I like how the story it started out. When did you realize that you were going to be into this world of social and commerce and Colder Ice Media for the longer run? Was that evident right away? Or was there something after the instigating moment that really cemented the business for you? JOHN: It was probably around 2012 2013. These guys were writing a column about eBay sellers and they asked me if I could do an interview as one of people who are eBay success stories. I agreed.  We get on the phone and were doing this interview and she's like, ”You're one of ten people we're going to feature blah, blah, blah.” But we stayed on the phone for 80 to 90 minutes. And I was like, “Just for a feature piece, this is kind of weird.” We were just having good conversation. At the end of that call . . . she and her husband are a team and write together . . . . . . at the end of the call, they said, “John, man, that was really good stuff. I think we're going to make a multipart feature just on your business.”  I was like, “Really? That's pretty cool.”  And then he's like, “Hey, and if you ever think about writing a book, I'd help you because we've written twenty-two books and we'd love to help you.”  I was like, “Really?” I had never thought about writing a book before because I never thought I had much to say . . . or how much you need to say. But once we put the treatment together, it became my social commerce book. First. It was about social commerce, not just social media. But the key thing was, I don't care how many people like me – I want you to buy from me. There are a lot of people out here who have social influence but couldn't get people to piss on them if they were on fire – they don't really have the ability to move people. There's a difference between having likes and having people that will buy from you. And that's the big difference to me in social media. For me, it was all about the commerce portion. ROB: And what's the name of the book folks want to go . . . JOHN: Kickass Social Commerce. ROB: Excellent. Excellent. Any additional publishings of it or is it still pretty fresh? JOHN: You know what? Here's the thing. When I wrote the book, I wrote it forever. Yeah, right. I did. I literally did because the concepts, again, of social and purchasing go together. So, I grabbed all of these universal stories. And one of my major stories, he first story I talk about is a woman called Madam C.J. Walker. Have you heard of her? ROB: I am not familiar with her. JOHN: Great. Fantastic. So, I could tell this story if you don't mind. ROB: Go. JOHN: All right. So, here's the deal. Madam C.J. Walker was an African-American, a black woman. OK, I like that better. Right? She was a black woman and she created a scalp ointment because her hair was falling out from straightening it. She created an ointment that would keep her hair healthy. And other women saw her hair from going to where she had maybe patches, bald spots, and not healthy hair to these long, luxurious locks. People asked, “What are you using?” She had created this thing in her kitchen and she ended up going from her sink and to the bathtub to create larger volumes of it to sell to her friends. Well, the business starts growing and she starts going door to door to do sales. So that's the first part, right? You go from friends telling friends to going door to door. Her door to door sales grew so much that she realized that she was limited by the number of doors she could go to in a day, and that was hampering the growth of her base simply because there's only so many doors you can knock on. So, she came up with this great idea. She said, look, I'll get one of my clients that already buys for me to have a party and I'll go to the party and display my products at the party. Sound familiar? ROB: Mmm-hmm. JOHN: She was the one that created the model that today Mary Kay and Avon use. She created that and that was, again, social. You're expanding your network by using small influencers to bring their friends in and allowing you to do that demonstration. Of course, you would give them a cut for the party. Ultimately, she built a house bigger than the White House . . . and this was in 1918. This is she is the first self-made female millionaire in America. She was ranked number six of the top 10 entrepreneurs in Entrepreneur magazine for all time, one of the greatest success stories. But I tell this story because, as I was listening and reading and researching, I realized how social media can grow for commerce because. literally, she had her own, quote “Facebook” by doing what she did with these people. So, it's universal. I wrote from that understanding . . . from that standpoint. ROB: Yeah. You can imagine a version of a book on social commerce that would get nitty-gritty – focus very much on the popular channels, marketing channels of the day, would talk about specific ad-spending tactics – and it would have a very short shelf life. But I get the sense from talking to you that you define social channels – and you did this a little bit with eBay – you define that remarkably differently from many people. So, when we think about social channels today, what are some other channels you think may not be intuitively understood as social, but yet are extremely so? JOHN: Hmm, that's a good question. ROB: Because we could talk about Tick-Tock, but we don't and we can, but we don't have to. I don't think you could write a book with a long shelf life if that was your frame of mind. JOHN: Right. Because the channels always change their rules. Yeah. But if your understanding is, no matter what their handle is, there is a person on the other end and there are certain things that we . . . we as humans are just a higher level of animals and there's certain habits that we have that we're always going to use. No matter what channel you use to get there, if you nail that human instinct, they're going to respond to it. Here's what I give you that you wouldn't think of: Amazon comments. Amazon comment, that is a social channel. There are some people that do nothing but read and post or try things and post and then they read other stuff from people. And then they respond in those posts. They do this all day long. Why are they doing that? Because that's their social world. ROB: Hmm. Have you seen some people using Slack communities in a business context, maybe? JOHN: Yes, absolutely. Because what they're doing now is they're getting people away – moreso Reddit. I mean, Reddit, its killer. Reddit is really killer. But a Slack community is a great way to get people that are interested in a specific topic away from the distraction that is social media, especially in an election year. ROB: Hmm, right. Plenty of that. JOHN: There's so much of that. And people's moods are being changed sometimes by the constant back and forth in these major social channels like Facebook or Twitter. It gets distracting. So, you get your people out from there into a nice global world that doesn't have all the noise in it. ROB: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's almost in some cases, there's too much – If you were in a room, there are some rooms where there's too much shouting to be helpful. You can't help people who are in the middle of a fight. JOHN: Right. Exactly. It's like it's really hard to get my attention when there's a train wreck right in front of us. ROB: What does that pivot point look like? What's it look like? What's an example – help us kind of think through it and catalyze our thinking – of someone who's commenting on reviews on Amazon and they're selling something and it's driving – I understand it conceptually, but it's a bit abstract. Is there a concrete example you've seen where they comment on this thing because they were selling this other thing? JOHN: Well, what ends up happening is, if you comment a lot, Amazon flags you as a commenter. Once you get that known as a trusted source, once you get that flagging, then other people that are trying to get reviews by people that have that tag or that flag will start reaching out to send you products. ROB: Got it. JOHN: Right. So, here's the deal. Once you recognize that people are gravitating to you, starting to ask you for your opinion, you've probably got something going on there. I've got a client right now that built a business – and this is so weird – around selling old music media. So, it's flipping CDs. Who buys a CD today? Why don't I get that? I didn't get that. I get it now. He's done six figures just teaching people how to look for CDs at garage sales and thrift stores. That's just amazing to me. You wouldn't think there was a community around that before this. I just never knew. So, there are a lot of niches – there are people that do nothing but needlepoint – there's a niche for darn near everything and it doesn't take a lot of people for you to reach out and find an audience that will either purchase from you or take your recommendations and purchase other things so you can become that influencer for that thing. ROB: Right. It's like the kind of the Kevin Kelly conversation, around a thousand true fans and there are lots of thousands of fans that are looking to be with him.  JOHN: Who did you say? ROB: Kevin Kelly, I think. JOHN: Who's Kevin Kelly? Wait a minute, is not the original? ROB: It might be. Where have you heard it most? JOHN: I'm just going to check this out because. Ok, says Kevin Kelly. Interesting. I'm thinking. Anyway, go ahead. Go ahead. I want to talk about it, Ok? KK.org got it. Technically. ROB: Yep. JOHN: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's funny you say that. When it first came out, I was so into that. The reason why I was into it, just to go a little bit backwards. is because I'm a huge Prince fan. When Prince left the label, he left a multi-million-dollar deal with Warner Brothers. He was like, “You know what? You can have my entire song category. I just want to be free.” And I was like, “What the hell?” Right after that, he put out his own album. This was the early 90s, He used like a chat room, basically a chat board, to sell a hundred thousand records. Now, this is a man that sold 10 million records for just his Purple Rain album and now he's selling a hundred thousand. And he said, “You know what? I made more off that hundred thousand records than I ever made off of Purple Rain. And when that thousand true fans came out, I was like, ‘Wow'.” That is the basis from where I teach. If you can get a thousand true fans, you're in. ROB: That's amazing, I didn't know that story about Prince, but even in the music world, it brings me forward even to someone like Run the Jewels. Their first album, they put it on their website for free. And they kept on doing their albums for free. And now their albums are basically for free, even if on Spotify. But they were able to cut through a lot of noise and find their fans a lot faster, but still make a living and in a way that is far beyond just selling music. JOHN: Right. Most musicians don't make their money off selling music anyway. That's why they have to tour. Yeah. They have to tour to pay for everything because, I mean, the music business is an amazing thing. I don't want to go into how they really do their business, but let's put it like this: If you sell a million records, you're probably not a millionaire. ROB: Yeah, man. Well, John, this is this is quite a knowledge drop here. I hope that when we're back to meeting in person, people will get a chance to get out and see you and meet you and hear you. When people want to find you and when they want to find Colder Ice Media, where should they go to track you down? JOHN: Just put in Colder Ice. That's all you got to do. Put it in your browser and I will show up I'm Colder Ice on every platform. I am one of those branding crazy people that did that a long time ago. And I'm Colder Ice on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. I don't care where you go. Pretty much I own Colder Ice except for Tick-Tock. Somebody stopped me on Tick-Tock. ROB: Oh man, that's tough. Well maybe you can make a phone call at some point and get it unlocked for Colder Ice. The handle you reserve when you were early on Twitter, did you get another good Twitter handle early. JOHN: Man, you are just pulling out all the good stories. But my name is so common. John Lawson. When I first looked it up, there were like eight million John Lawsons. I had the story in my head. I remember this story that back in segregation – a lot of people don't understand this, but African-Americans are some very original entrepreneurs, not because we had the entrepreneurial spirit – but you had to be an entrepreneur if you wanted to feed your family. You couldn't I couldn't walk into the regular grocery store and buy groceries back then. You had to have a black-only grocery store. There was a black-only cab company. There was a black-only bus company, black-only hotels. All of that. Run by black people because “white people wasn't sharing.” But literally, those storefronts that were serving the black community, the day that integration became the norm, they would see their customers walk right past their storefronts to go shop downtown. They came up with the saying, “Well, I guess the white man's ice is colder.” And I always remember that: colder ice. That's the story. ROB: Wow, I didn't know that either and you're gracious in your history lessons. There's a lot of strong feelings tied up in that. I know. We're all trying to figure out different ways to actually be sorry and be better. JOHN: No, we're all getting better, man. That it's all good effects on your ear. That's the great story of America. ROB: Well, John, thank you for coming on again. I can't wait to get out and hear you share something in real life, but I appreciate you joining virtually as well. And I think our audience is better for it as well. JOHN: This was a great interview. I really had fun. ROB: Thank you. Thank you for listening. The marketing agency leadership podcast is presented by Converged. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting email info@convergehq.com or visit us on the web at Convergehq.com.

Billion dollar companies rely on competitive intelligence to stay ahead in their markets. What lessons can the rest of us take from how they use CI to make better decisions? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Cipher Systems VP of Marketing John Booth talks about what competitive intelligence is, and how companies can use it to inform decision making. Cipher's customers are some of the largest companies in the world, and they have highly specialized units dedicated exclusively to competitive intelligence. Not every company has the budget, or the team, to support that, so John explains what the rest of us should be looking at, and how we should use information about our competitors to develop marketing and business strategies. Highlights from my conversation with John include: Many marketers use the terms data, information and intelligence interchangeably, but they are very different things. Intelligence is the product of analyzing information and data, and it requires people to do it. There's also a lot of confusion around the difference between business intelligence, market intelligence and competitive intelligence. BI is the information you have within your own business, whereas MI is the information about what is happening in the market.  Competitive intelligence is information about your markets and also your competitors and how that influences your ability to sell within your markets or deliver the services that your business does. There are three kinds of software tools used in competitive intelligence: 1) Generic tools like Sharepoint or Google Alerts that can be used or many things: 2) Specific tools like Klue that are built to fulfill a very particular need, such as sales enablement; and 3) Purpose-built tools like Cipher's Knowledge360, which are built specifically for competitive intelligence professionals. Before any business engages in competitive intelligence, it should start by developing a deep understanding of its differentiators, strengths and weaknesses. Resources from this episode: Connect with John on LinkedIn Visit the Cipher Systems website Listen to the podcast to learn more about competitive intelligence and how businesses both large and small can use it to get an edge.   Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. This week, my guest is none other than my husband John Booth. Welcome John. John Booth (Guest): Well, I mean, it only took 150 some odd episodes for me to get an invitation. Kathleen: Saving the best for last. So I don't know if my listeners know this, but John and I, so John and I used to own a marketing agency together for 11 years and somehow miraculously, we're still married. And when people ask me what he does now, I always say he does the same thing I do just at a different company. He is also a vice president of marketing. He is VP of marketing for a company called Cipher Systems, which is in the competitive intelligence space. So John, for those who may not know you, who may not know Cipher, can you just tell my audience a little bit about yourself as well as about Cipher systems and what it does? About John Booth and Cipher Systems John: Sure. So as Kathleen said, I was a part of our digital agency for about a dozen years or so. And before that I held different sales positions started out in the staffing world and then held lots of different positions there. But since Quintain, I have joined Cipher systems and Cipher is a small, there's probably about 20 of us now, competitive intelligence firm. John: And we'll give to the definition of that because it's, I think it's very important. I see a lot of similarities in the competitive intelligence to what I saw in the content inbound marketing world maybe 10 years ago. So it's it's a, it's a developing industry and I think more and more people within the organizations, particularly certainly larger organizations are finding the need for, and using competitive intelligence today. But so we have a classic kind of services side of the business. And, and then in addition to that, we have a technology or a software side of the business where we have a software platform. It's a cloud based competitive intelligence platform that acts as a knowledge management system, as well as the competitive intelligence tools for all of your competitive Intel and dashboards and reports and newsletters and, and information like that. Kathleen: And what kinds of companies does Cipher work with? John: So Cipher works with large organizations. So our ideal buyer has more than a billion dollars in revenue. Typically at least 5,000 employees, they're headquartered in the United States and they operate in industries that have one or one of two key kind of characteristics. The first is they're either highly regulated. So think financial services, insurance, healthcare, or the industries are incredibly competitive. So think about things like technology government contractors those types of industries. So those are, those are kind of the, the ingredients that make for the need for competitive intelligence. Kathleen: So side note, I just think it's really funny this doing this interview because I am interviewing you like I don't know the answers to these questions already. But everyone listening doesn't so I still need to ask them. So one of the reasons I wanted you to talk about who you work for or with the kinds of companies you work for is that, it's the thing that I have found interesting, kind of watching as you've worked there is that prior to you working at Cipher, you know, I was familiar with the field of competitive intelligence, you know, roughly but there are such different levels of it, right? I mean, the stuff that you guys do, like you were saying, it's really big companies that have, you know, the stakes are high. They have a lot to lose. It's highly competitive or regulated or this or that. It's serious business. And they have teams of people whose jobs are just to do competitive intelligence. And then you have like the kind of competitive intelligence that, that smaller companies do where you're like, I've got a Google alert on my competitor, you know, that sort of thing. And so it's, it's very interesting to me the different shades of it. So segwaying from that, you mentioned defining competitive intelligence. So like how do you guys see it? What is it, how do you define it? What is competitive intelligence? John: So so there are a couple of key definitions, just so the audience and, and the two of us are on kind of the same page here. So the first one is the difference between let's define data, information and intelligence. So an example of data might be the number three. Okay. So that is data. Alright. Information is a series of data pieces. So an example, a pretty example of information is a streetlight. So a streetlight has three different colored lights, right? Red, yellow, and green. All right. And so when red is on, I stop when yellow is, I slowed down or hit the gas. And when green is, I continue on my way. So that is, so that is information. So there's several different data points there. There's the number of lights, what the, the, the meaning of those lights. Intelligence is the product of analysis. So intelligence requires people today. So so you might hear a lot of the impact of artificial intelligence on competitive intelligence and market intelligence and things like that. So today, intelligence requires a human being to perform some type of analysis and deliver some types of insights to the business that's intelligence. And that is that's what has value. So just simply gathering information, there's no value that's delivered to the organization. It's not until a person actually applies the filters and understandings and kind of teases out what this might mean that there is any value delivered, and that is intelligence. So then I'm going to define three other terms that are often kind of used interchangeably. And they shouldn't be much like a, when we had our agency often found that people would use marketing, advertising and PR interchangeably, when, as marketers, we all know that those are completely different you know, services and they mean different things, but to the lay person, they kind of get interchanged interchangeably. So competitive intelligence market intelligence and business intelligence are often interchanged kind of the same way. So let's use business intelligence. So business intelligence, we define that as the, the information that the business intelligence is based off of information on your business. So if you think about if all of the information that we have within our four walls of our business, that is our business intelligence. Okay. So if you manufacture something that might be how many widgets that you can manufacture in an hour and how many people you need and the profitability of those widgets, et cetera. So business intelligence really means focused on your business, right? No external sources or information, it's all internal data. Market intelligence is just that it is the market. It might be trends in the market. It, it might be consumer behavior and how consumers are responding to certain trends or, or things along those lines. And then competitive intelligence is information about your markets and also your competitors and how that influences your ability to sell within your markets or deliver the services that your business does. Kathleen: So earlier you mentioned that competitive intelligence requires people, but you guys sell competitive intelligence software. So like, how does that work? John: Because software, obviously it doesn't have people in it, but so think of it as think of it as this. What's a good analogy? So if I am a marketer and I have a tool like HubSpot, which we love, because it allows me to host my website, allows me to post and schedule my social. It allows me to have my content and edit it and do keyword work. All of that helps me with my marketing strategy and deliver a strategy. So you wouldn't buy HubSpot and say, Oh, well, HubSpot is going to do my marketing strategy. It's, you know, it's going to, you know, help me be a better marketer. Yes. But it still requires people to deliver that strategy. You know, you you're using a tool. Yes. but the tools can never, they, there are at least the tools today can not replace what an analyst, a researcher, a strategist, a person, a marketer, could be a product marketer. You know, what a person does. What kinds of tools are available to support competitive intelligence? Kathleen: And I feel like there's this vast array of tools out there for competitive intelligence. Like I mentioned earlier, it's everything from a simple Google or all the way up to a platform like you guys have that is used by huge corporations. So maybe you could speak to like, kind of what that landscape looks like. John: Right. So one of the one of the things that we're trying to educate people that are looking for tools are the different types of tools. We believe there are three different kinds of tools out there. There are what we call generic tools, and those are tools that are typically they've been built for a different purpose, but they're often adopted or adapted to a competitive intelligence use. And a good example of that is SharePoint. So SharePoint wasn't built for competitive intelligence, but SharePoint is, it can be an adequate kind of knowledge management source. It can, you know, you can have teams adding information to it and downloading information. You could even, you know, use some of the collaborative features there, et cetera. And so that's like the use of a generic tool. And then you have your your second type of CI tools, a tool that is built for a specific really for a specific person purpose. And, and an example of that is, so there's a company, one of our competitors, Klue. And they do a very good job of sales enablement. So if you have a large sales team and you want to empower your sales team to close more deals, and you want to give your sales team the resources that they need to have the right information at their fingertips, when they're on calls and and kind of, and, and sell against other competitors, they're a great tool for that. And then you have the third category, which is kind of that the tool that is built specifically for competitive intelligence and, and those are tools that do primarily three things. They gather information. So they're going to allow you to aggregate information and that information could come in from newsfeeds. It might come in from subscriptions to information, the research that you have it, it might be internal documents that you have kind of those business intelligence documents that we talked about. It might be information that your sales or marketing team uncovers maybe during the course of their day. So one of the things that, that we help companies with is most companies have just, just dozens, if not hundreds of nuggets of information within the organization, but they just don't have the ability to give it visibility. So, you know, it's, you know, the salesperson that knows what he's up against for a particular deal, because the prospect shared this with them and it's sitting within his inbox and he's the only person that has access to his inbox. So the product marketing team that is getting ready to do the roadmap for their product, can't see what the customer, the prospect is looking for because they don't have access to this information. So that third tool allows all of this information to go into it. And then with our tool, we use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to automatically tag this information. And we use semantic learning for it to identify things like location company and individuals by reading through and analyzing the, the, the content that you're adding to the system. So, there are those types of tools and, and it's interesting. We did some research a couple of years ago. The pharmaceutical industry is by far kind of the most advanced commercial, competitive intelligence kind of industry. Most other industries, they're still kind of developing CI practices and, and most outside of the pharmaceutical industry. And I kind of call that life sciences. So not strictly just pharmaceuticals. Most organizations have I think it's like 1.2 people working on their CI. So not big teams, not, not at all. How can marketers use competitive intelligence? Kathleen: Yeah. It's so interesting. It's such a specialized field. I feel like you know, now coming back to kind of, the focus of this podcast obviously is inbound marketing. So a lot of marketers are listening and this can seem very unapproachable because like, for example, if you guys, you work with really large companies and they have these dedicated people let's start with what, how are those companies using competitive intelligence and how is that helping them make better business decisions or get better results from their businesses. And then we can kind of bring it back down to, for smaller companies, what are ways they could begin to approach this? So let's begin some like actual examples of how this plays out. John: Okay. So so I think that that, that the marketers marketers today, this is, this is my own belief. I believe they're, they're waking up to this need for competitive intelligence because your inbound marketing is no longer delivering the results that you were seeing before. So for just about a decade or so, we have as marketers, we've been really focused on the content I'm creating and attract, creating content, solving problems, answering questions, et cetera. And we've been rewarded with that with prospects and customers and results, and kind of the, you know, Marcus shared approach. They have questions kind of, you know, answer their questions and, and, you know, you'll be rewarded well. In the beginning that was really, really successful because there were fewer people doing it and, and the people that were doing it for the most part were really doing it. You know, it's not until much later that you're downloading the ebook and it's actually just 18 PowerPoint slides with two bullets on each slide and has nothing to do with an actual book. So we have to, as marketers look for things that are going to give us results. And so, as we were focused kind of internally on what we're talking about, what our prospects and customers are talking about, we're really ignoring what was going on in our market and our competitors. And so we were ignoring these macro issues. And so competitive intelligence is kind of the other side of the equation. So you know, you've take your prospects and your customers, and that's one piece of success. And then, but, but you can't do that in a vacuum. Those that do SEO work understand that. So you find out what your teams are, you know, what you want to rank for and what your competitors are ranking for. And then you do SEO work to help change those rankings. Well, your competitors, don't just sit still. They're also looking at what's going on in the market and looking at the actions that you're doing. And so, you know, we found this need to to address, well, how do I understand what's going on in the marketplace and how do I position myself against my competitors or the other options that that my prospects and customers have. So that's a long roundabout way of explaining how companies are using competitive intelligence to better deploy their resources. And so when, when you're doing this before, you can get to actually doing competitive intelligence work, you have to have a really clear understanding of your differentiators and, and your vulnerabilities. So that's where, you know, somebody who wants to begin doing competitive intelligence work, I would challenge them to to, to sit down and do the, the work on how are you different from your competitors, you know, and, and where do you have overlap and where is that overlap? Where does that lead to, or where could you be vulnerable because of that overlap? What impact does competitive intelligence have on businesses? Kathleen: So the larger companies that you guys work with, obviously have that part figured out. They, you know, they have their teams in place, they understand their differentiators. So when they undertake competitive intelligence, how are they using it? Like in practical terms to get better business results? Do you have some case studies or some success stories or anything like that that you can share of how, like, how does competitive intelligence produce better outcomes for these companies? John: Yes. So this was this was a very kind of rude awakening coming from the marketing agency world where you know, you have clients and you're working with clients and you're doing great work for them. And you ask your clients, Hey, you know, would you mind providing a testimonial, a quote, being a part of a, you know, a white paper case study you know, sharing your experience and, and usually it's, Oh yeah. You know, they're very supportive of that when you are in the competitive intelligence world, nobody wants to talk about the tools that they're using, what you're doing for them, because by nature of it, you are, you know, you're giving away intelligence for your competitors to use against you. Kathleen: You know what other industry is like that? Cybersecurity. I know that, of which you speak. John: So let me, I can talk in some kind of in general terms. So we estimate and Cipher has been around for 20, 25 years. We estimate that most most people doing CI work spend about 70% of their time gathering and organizing information. If we go back to the definitions that we had of data, information, and intelligence, data and information add zero value to the business. So you're spending 70% of your time on things that have no value add to the business. Only 30% of your time is on the analysis, developing the insights, you know, all of that information that your CI consumers, whether it be your sales teams, your, your C suite, your product development team, your marketers, they all need this information, but the bulk of your time is spent gathering it and, and organizing it. And, that is because your business is complicated and information comes in lots of different forms, and some of it is structured. And some of it is unstructured. You know, you have information internal reports. You have, as I mentioned before, you have emails that are received from salespeople. You have teams that are out in the field and going to trade shows and seeing you know, what your competitors, their messages at their trade show boots, you have competitor websites that are changing and messaging. And so so what our tool does is it automates a lot of that. For example we have many customers before they started using our tool Knowledge360, that would have 18 number. And some of them would have more that would manually go out to competitors' websites and look at their websites and look for changes in their websites. And that could be pricing changes if you're in an industry or, or, you know, a market that is price sensitive, you want to know about those changes. And, you know, it could be messaging changes. So by using a tool like Knowledge360, we can automate that. And so the tool goes out, it gathers the information. It says, Hey, this page has changed. It highlights the, the, the new information, you know, and, and that's, that's there in one color, it highlights the information that has been changed or removed and another color. And now an analyst can take a look at that and say, Oh, this is really meaningful. You know, so that's, that's an example of how are a tool like ours or how anyone can use competitive intelligence. So, to monitor the messaging that your competitors are using, or if they have a pricing page, you know, you can, you can monitor that for changes in their pricing. How do companies use competitive intelligence? Kathleen: So it sounds like the tool itself can be used to save time to streamline the process, but like, what are these companies doing with this information? How, like, why are they spending all this money on competitive intelligence? What is it doing things successful? John: So if you think about this so it's helping them be successful by giving insights and providing this intelligence that your decision makers are looking for. And ultimately, hopefully you're, you're enabling them to make better informed decisions. So if you think about think about someone that has you know, you're wearing glasses, but they have blinders on, and you can only see right in front of you. And you're making your decisions based on your field of vision that is just in front of you. Now, you take those away and you have a wider field of vision, and you have more information. You may, you may make a different decision. Kathleen: What's an example of something, a marketing thing that I might do differently based on the information I would find? John: So here's, here's an example. So if I have a, let's say I'm a nationwide company and I compete with someone on the East coast. Okay. And they're a good competitor. I went against them. Sometimes they went against me sometimes. But I have offices on the East coast and also on the West coast. Well, if I had a CI department, one of the things they might be monitoring or looking for is job postings with my competitors. So if all of a sudden, one of my competitors is posting a sales manager position in the Seattle market, and they're not in the Seattle market. And one of my key customers is in the Seattle market. Oh, that's something that I want to know about because it looks like my competitor is coming into, if they're going to invest in building out a sales team, putting an office in Seattle. Now, all of a sudden, my sales people that have only had to deal with maybe the competitors that were in that local market without this East coast competitor, they now need to be aware of this new competitor coming into the market. And that may change how we position ourselves. It may change how we price things. It may change, you know, the terms of her contracts. It could have all types of different information, you know, of, of business decisions that we make. How Cipher uses competitive intelligence for itself Kathleen: So I'm assuming that you guys are, as I like to say, drinking your own champagne, because I don't like the phrase eating your own dog food. So how does Cipher use competitive intelligence? John: So so we use this fantastic tool called Knowledge360. It's very comprehensive. We have several dashboards that we use. And one in particular that is called our competition crusher. And so with our competition crusher dashboard, it's a feed of news announcements on it's a feed of social. It has intelligence that our salespeople gain talking to prospects and customers. Our marketing team will add information like messaging changes that we might see and all of this battle cards. So if we know we're going up against a particular competitor, we want to, you know, we want to draw attention to these benefits of using our product. And, and if we know that there are gaps, you know, we want to ask our prospects about, you know, the gaps that we know our competitors have. So, that's one example of how we're using it to kind of gather all of that information, organize it in a way, you know, and the beauty of using something you're using a tool that provides dashboards is the dashboards are updated in real time. So unlike, you know, most people, if they have any experience or exposure to CI work it's typically a part of the, you know, quarterly sales meeting. And there's somebody that comes up that says competitor ABC is doing this. And then, you know, they share the PowerPoint deck and, you know, a quarter later another report comes out, but there's a lot of time and a lot of change that goes on between, you know, the publishing of those two different reports. And, you know, you may make different decisions having a dashboard that's always on always available, always monitoring. You're always getting the most up to date information. And so we share that with our leadership team, our sales team, marketing team, customer, all of them add to, and, and consume information from those dashboards. Prediction markets and the future of competitive intelligence Kathleen: And then real quickly, because I feel like this could be an entirely other podcast episode. I feel like with competitive intelligence, you're looking at things that have already happened, right? You guys have something I find fascinating, which is this other side to your business where you can do much more predictive stuff. It's super cool. And you have something called predictive markets. So can you, somewhat quickly because we are coming up on our time, just give people a sense of what I mean, cause that's really like competitive intelligence looking into the future, if you will, or trying to figure out what's gonna happen in the future. So how does that work? John: So that is really cool stuff and it is relatively new. So Cipher systems and another company Consensus Point, we merged towards the end of last year. Consensus Point is a a research company. So as competitive intelligence professionals, they gather information and they do research. You have two primary types of research yet. Primary research and secondary research, secondary research being research that's available to anyone and those might be market reports or things that are publicly available and anyone has access to those or they're not restricted. Primary research is research that you do, you hire someone to do on your behalf and that's information that you have. And that if, if done correctly and on the appropriate things could be a competitive advantage having this primary information or more information about a particular topic. Well, what you're talking about is predictive markets research. So if you think about primary research, most people are familiar with polls and surveys. And so that is a traditional kind of primary research method that is it's, it's very effective for certain things. It's also riddled with problems for other things, for example human beings in general, we are very poor predictors of our own performance. So you know, just ask anyone with a child and ask them how bright their child is. Nobody is going to tell you that their child is below average average, you know, they're Oh, you know, top 1%, 10%, 5%. Well, that's not true because most of us are average. Kathleen: That's why it's the definition. 90% of us are not in the top 10%.  John: That's exactly right. So what a prediction market is, is it is think of a market, probably one of the most common is the stock market. So, you know, the stock market is a platform where people have are placing wagers on whether or not, you know, the value of a company is going to increase or decrease. So if you think about this, and this is a great book that I'll have to give you. It's by a poker player. I'll give it to you so you can add to the show notes, but basically if you ask somebody, you know, do you think Apple stock is going to be higher than it is the value of it is going to be higher in one month from today's point you know, you might say, yes. Okay, well, how much are you willing to bet it's up? So if you put real money, your hard earned money, like how many shares of Apple stock are you willing to purchase at today's price? Check out "Thinking In Bets" by Annie Duke John: You know, and it is, are your beliefs, do they change? So a prediction market is, you are using the social behavioral characteristics of individuals and their collective kind of wisdom of the crowd, thinking about whether or not the probability of something becoming true or taking place. And so that is a much more accurate indicator of actual events that happen than simply asking someone in a survey or a poll. So now, what we're so excited about is the two of those together. So now you know, our platform, not only do we help aggregate information that you're gathering and do that analysis on it, we are now adding this research component to the tool as well, so that you can do your research. You can, you know, you can store it within one central repository and you can make it available to the organization as it needs to be Kathleen: Cool. And I know you guys are using it for things like trying to predict what the world post COVID is going to look like and all kinds of other really interesting forward looking applications. So thank you for sharing that. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: We are now coming towards the end of our time, so I wanna make sure I squeeze in my couple of questions that I ask everybody. The first is, of course we are all about inbound marketing on this podcast. So is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? John: Let's see, you know, I I just recently became aware of a tool MarketMuse. I think that they're doing a very good job with their messaging, kind of very classic, kind of inbound marketing freemium model, et cetera. So I would say that they're one company that does a really good job of inbound marketing. And I have to say then another one that comes to mind and you know, full disclosure here, I'm a customer and and a big fan of Databox. I think Databox, and Pete Caputa's doing a phenomenal job there. He cranks out more content and they use their chat panel to support customers and are really all about helping customers solve problems. And they're, they're doing a fantastic job. I think, of inbound marketing. Kathleen: Yeah, Pete's awesome. And fun fact, he was a very early guest of this podcast. So if you want to get some insight into how Pete does marketing, you can listen to that episode with him. And I will put that link in the show notes. Question number two. The biggest challenge I hear marketers share with me is that so much changes so quickly in the world of digital marketing. So how do you personally keep yourself educated and up to date on everything that's going on? John: I have a hugely unfair advantage being married to a fantastic marketer who is constantly scouring the interweb for the latest and greatest tool and slacking me at home because yes, we have our own personal Slack channel for our youngest son and Kathleen and myself. But, selfishly I rely heavily on what you share with me. Kathleen: Well, that's a valid answer and it's true. I mean, it's so funny. So we're sitting here, it's during the COVID pandemic and of course we're still working from home. So I am up in my office, which is on the second floor of our house. John is in his current office, which is smack dab in the middle of our kitchen. And we are Zooming with each other from two rooms away and yes, we Slack each other from two rooms away all week long. So we are the big old marketing nerds that do that. How to connect with John Kathleen: All right. If somebody wants to connect with you learn more about Knowledge360, ask you a question about competitive intelligence. What is the best way for them to connect with you online?  John: I would say the best way to connect with me is via LinkedIn. John Booth, like the guy that shot Lincoln, but not related. And if you want to learn more about Knowledge360, you can go out to Cipher-sys.com or TryK360.com and learn. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Awesome. I will share that in the show notes. Thank you for joining me, John. I know you have a busy day. We are recording on a Sunday and I'm pretty sure there's like some kind of house project that you want to be working on instead of recording a podcast with me. And if you're listening and you learn something new and you like what you heard, please, head to Apple podcasts, leave the podcast at five star review. That is how other people find us. And I would really appreciate it. But that is it for this week. Thank you, John. John: Thank you, Kathleen. Kathleen: And happy father's day. Because we are recording on father's day. You're the best for doing this for me. Thank you. Alright. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening everyone.

It's a narrative that often gets repeated to parents of young children with disabilities: the more services the better. But John and Connie found a different way early on with their son Mark. Their family's dream was bigger. The vision they have for an ordinary life really gets to the heart of why this podcast started - to offer out ideas for families and people with disabilities to go after more in life than the expected route of disability services and segregated activities.As founders of the Plan Institute in Rhode Island 15 years ago, the Susa family connected with Starfire to learn how to launch community projects. They said that this way of bringing people together, over a shared goal like a community garden, generates a certain magic - almost instantly.If you are someone who wants to think seriously about how you and your loved ones spend your time, how to connect more deeply in community, and ways to make longterm relationships a reality, this episode is for you. GET THE PODCAST FULL TRANSCRIPT:CONNIE: - I have heard speakers talk about this concept as a way of healing the world and as we're in the midst of the COVID19 virus outbreak right now, I think the world could use a lot of healing, not only physically but also in terms of relationships. We have a new neighbor who shares that passion with us, and it has been such a joy to get to know one another, to have a real give and take. I can see how if this were multiplied throughout communities, and states and nations, the world would be a beautiful place. KATIE: Beautiful. JOHN - I'm John Susa. I think what moves me for a lot of this work is almost a therapeutic plan for me. I grew up very very isolated and I had very few interactions with anybody besides my family. And most people would have described me as being very introverted. When people asked me when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? My answer was always the same. I wanted to be a long distance truck driver. So I could sit in that cab and not have any human interaction for days. And if left to myself that's probably what would have happened. But instead I learned that if I pushed myself a little bit and started interacting with people and meeting people then I could change that desire to be a loner. And so I think the reason I'm so involved in all of this stuff is still mostly for myself to avoid falling back into be a loner. So I made pretty much a conscious decision that I was just going to change my behavior first. And of course after I changed my behavior for a while my attitude started to change.Fast forwarding then to when you and Connie met, and you had children and you were - down the road, you know, deciding how to engage as a family in the community, what were some of the things that you had to consider first to be connected?JOHN - I think for me the recognition that Mark developmentally was experiencing life differently than others made me realize it was going to be very helpful if I became more engaged in the disability advocacy world. I was kind of driven by two different quotes that were in my head that I learned while I was in the military. And they're very a-typical but they're very powerful. One is from Johann Goethe a German philosopher and he said, “Dream no small dreams for they have power insufficient to change the hearts of men.” That's been something that I've always come to recognize as a very powerful piece of instruction and advice. And I saw that there were people who were encouraging us in many ways to dream small, to be satisfied with what Mark is able to do, focus in on his disabilities, spend your time searching out services. In many ways that was dreaming small. There were occasionally people who would say, “No, no, no don't do that. Dream big. Dream like Mark's future is limitless. Dream like if you just provide him with all the opportunities that life has to offer, you will be amazed at how much he is going to accomplish.” And that is what I took from Goethe, dream big. And we have ever since. And that really has kind of put us into contact with a lot of other big dreamers. It's those big dreamers that really have changed the world works for people with disabilities.KATIE - Beautiful. MARK - Excellent.CONNIE: - For me in terms of community building, I think one of the greatest advances has been our church. Mark turned three at the end of December.MARK - Right. CONNIE: And three-year-olds were supposed to begin in what most people would call “Junior Sunday School.” When Mark was three, we were still carrying him - cradling him in our arms. Did you know when you were three years old you couldn't sit up by yourself? MARK - No way, really?CONNIE: Truly. Mark just kept attending our Sunday school classes with us and about two, three weeks into that sequence one of our friend's who taught the three year old class, the Sunbeam class, came to us in the hallway and said, “Why hasn't Mark been in my class?” And I said, “Edith - look.” As if seeing where Mark was at that moment meant everything. And she said, “Yes, but look at my role.” And Mark's name was there, without x's in the attendance boxes.And she said, “We really need him in our class.” And I said, “Edith he can't even sit up independently.” She said, “Well we could get a highchair and we could put pillows all around it so that he can sit up.” And I said, “We're not even sure that he can understand what you're teaching the other kids.” And she said, “That doesn't matter.” She said, “The reason I need Mark in my class is because all the other kids have so much to learn from him.” MARK - Really.CONNIE: And while we had been working seriously on stimulations and Mark had gone through early intervention and we learned about you know sensory stuff and what have you. We were doing that once a week, in a group and the rest of the time at home. But what Edith had said really started Mark and us on the path to community. Mark now…well, tell Katie what you do at church.MARK - A lot. CONNIE: - Some things that you're responsible for?MARK - I'm secretary. CONNIE: - Secretary for what?MARK - For attendance. CONNIE: - Yup, and you set up appointments for interviews.MARK - Set up appointments for interviews. CONNIE: - We were amazed, Mark was enfolded in the arms of these people who understood all about community because that fits the teachings that we have as Christians. Going back to what Edith had said to you that you know, diversity and having different types of learning in a classroom is really really really important and once you accepted that invitation, what unfolded in that first year? JOHN - What I remember is that it reinforced something that I came to realize, everybody became comfortable and it was now normal and accepted that Mark would be part of that congregation. Once people got to the point where they were comfortable because of exposure and experience they relaxed and they accepted Mark for who he was. And they didn't feel the need to treat him any differently than they would any other child. It reminds me of another one of my kind of guiding principles and this comes from a guy, Rudolf Steiner, talking about early childhood. Rudolf Steiner is the founder of the Waldorf educational system. Are you familiar with that?KATIE - Yes. JOHN - He said that, “There is nothing more therapeutic than normalcy.” That was a piece of advice that was given to us by a good friend, developmental pediatrician, when Mark was finally identified as having all these developmental challenges. The meeting at the end of the two-day evaluation process was nothing but a group of people who were very pessimistic about Mark. “He's not going to walk. He's not going to talk. He's probably not going to be aware of you. He's certainly not going to hear.” A whole bunch of things, they all at the end say “Well, good luck, take him home and love him.” That was their advice, which is good advice but inadequate. When they all left, their boss who was sitting at the back of the room observing asked us to go into his office because Connie was bawling. Sig closes the door and the first thing he says is, “Don't believe a word of what those people said to you.” And I said, “Sig if you say that, why didn't you stop them before they started?” And he said, “You know all those people in that room were doing or could do is describe Mark now, as they see him. They could not possibly describe Mark in the future. I believe if you believe them, that future will happen. If you don't believe and you adopt the approach that the best thing to do is to have Mark experience as much normalcy as possible he will become a different person. He will become more like the ‘normal kids' whatever that may be. Every person will develop depending on how much they're exposed to.” So he said, “I'm not going to let them label him because that will result in other people reading the report and it will only help them treat him in a stereotypical way based on his label. I'm just going to say he's developmentally delayed.” And his advice was, “Take him home and love him but then help him have every normal experience as other children.” And that kind of guided our thinking really from then on. KATIE - And you know, dreaming big in this instance is to dream ordinary, to dream normal. JOHN - Exactly. Yeah. KATIE - And sometimes ordinary is the biggest gift anyone can have.JOHN - Right, right. It's kind of counterintuitive because in the world of disabilities a lot of times people think that dreaming big means getting more services, the more the better, the more services the better. Steiner said think seriously about substituting every hour of normalcy with an hour of service because that hour of service is removing that person from normalcy. So it's almost in the disability world it's almost a flipping of thinking that that has to happen. CONNIE: - Be concerned if you were just going to services. JOHN - Be big in your thinking by vying for normalcy. KATIE - Yes, so even in services are... they're not normal. It's interesting. JOHN - They're not normal. CONNIE: - What's more important is that Mark participated not only in that class but every subsequent class. And when Mark was eleven years old we took our school district to a due process hearing because they had adamantly fought us for two years in bringing Mark back into district from a segregated day placement that was anything but normal, because they were sure that Mark would not act appropriately in a classroom setting. They were sure that Mark would be a disruption to other students, they were sure that he might even be self injurious or injury other people, because they were thinking in terms of stereotypes not in terms of who Mark is as an individual. And do you remember Jennifer Coats, Mark?MARK – Yeah. The one with the power.CONNIE: - She came to your hearing. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - And she told everybody just how you act in a classroom setting. That you raised your hand just like that, that you participated appropriately in singing time, that you sat with your class and no additional extra support. That you sang the songs that you answered questions, you gave talks. MARK - Right. Yes I did. KATIE - So it sounds like Jennifer had another piece of Mark and your family's story along this journey to dream big, to live an ordinary life? She made an impact during that hearing.I want to see if we can dip our toes briefly in the water of the day placement that you mentioned, that Mark was in, and how that was anything but normal. Can you explain how abnormal it was or what about it made it not ordinary?CONNIE: - Sure, the very fact that there were multiple kids with multiple disabilities just ate up so much of the instruction time. What else do you remember about it? JOHN - Everybody in Mark's class was just like Mark. Six little kids, wheelchairs. So the biggest thing I believe happened when he left there and went into a regular classroom is that for the first time he started culturally and socially experiencing life as every other eleven, or twelve or fifteen year old does. KATIE - You agree with that, Mark?MARK - Yes, excellent. KATIE - Yeah and I think that's a good segway to the phrase ‘a good life' that is something you hear a lot from Al Etmanski and Vickie Cammack. It's a big part of the PLAN institute model and you all have been involved with PLAN at Rhode Island for quite some time. So what ways has it helped? CONNIE: - John first heard Al speak, he recognized the wisdom in their model that we always acknowledge how deeply we depend on the work. When we brought PLAN (Personal Lifetime Advocacy Network) to Rhode Island 15 years ago we knew that we were standing on the shoulders of giants. The two things that we have focused on in trying to replicate their model is we help parents put all their ducks in a row, plan for the time that they are no longer going to be there or able to enrich the lives of their sons and daughters out of the love and the family history, the precious relationships. The much more important part of what they did in Canada and what we did in Rhode Island is to build a personal support network around the member. The family joins on behalf of their son, daughter, brother, sister and they engage with a facilitator to build and maintain that support network so that it's not just every individual having a relationship with a person at the center of the circle but it is all those people getting to know one another, to recognize one another's strengths, to trust one another. Between all those group gatherings individuals will do things with the members at the center, with our loved ones. And as parents we try to do that early enough so that we can fill in the important parts of the history. So the support network is really there to build a circle of support around a person, and yet also it's not just about the person in the center it's about everyone in the network joining together, being in relationships together, and in that way being in a community. Where are you now with the support network?CONNIE: - Right. Mark has had a personal support network for the entire time that PLAN has been in existence in Rhode Island. It really does take some time for relationships to mature that if we had to step off the Earth the next week, this would go on. MARK - Right.CONNIE: - And that it would provide Mark with people that he could depend on, people who were real friends, who had proved that over time. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - People who enjoy spending time with him. And we feel secure. In one of the questions that PLAN Institute seems to start with is what would happen to my loved one after I pass on, if I'm not around, if we're not there to help what will happen? And so starting from a young age it sounds like you guys have done a lot of work to build that support network so that in a time of disaster or otherwise that there is somebody there for Mark?JOHN - Right. When PLAN in Canada was first put together it was even before Al Etmanski, it was just a group of parents and they hired Al. They originally thought that they were preparing for their demise, the focus was on what's going to happen? What they quickly discovered was that yes they were doing that but they were also starting to develop a stronger sense of security and the feeling that their son or daughter was safe. There were some very positive benefits to the parents while they were still alive. And they figured it out that it was the existence of this network that provided that sense of security. And not only the sense of it but the actual security. KATIE - I love how you put that, that's very clearly stated for me and I think it's actually it starts as soon as you begin to community build: the benefits, the magic, the parts of it that are really just supportive feeling begin right away. And every parent needs that and we need to raise our children as a village. You all as a family have taken the brave step being able to say well even though some experts are telling us otherwise we're going to not believe that and in doing that we are going start this support network early and we're going to build and the more people who have joined in along the way it sounds like the more momentum has build towards this? Tell me about your family's leadership in the community as it relates to your street, and how your support network, Mark, how they were involved in that process? JOHN - So as we kind of navigate our life with Mark, I'm always looking for things that are in the way of him achieving greater independence. So this little project about looking at Warwick Avenue, Mark and his brother live about two and a half, three miles apart, they both require a wheelchair in Mark's case or a scooter in Frank's case. And so when Frank moved back here to Rhode Island we thought, “Wow wouldn't it be nice if these two guys could get together once in a while without Mom and Dad having to be the go between.” We started looking at this road and we recognized very quickly that this road was a problem. I've known that this road was a problem probably for at least fifteen years now, but I've not had a real strong reason for us to say, “Let's do something about it.” So we naturally thought that this is going to be something that is much more powerful if we have a group involved. We had a group, we had Mark's network, they all know him, they're comfortable with him. So we posed the idea, the project, people thought this is great. And the fact is that there is appropriated money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development every year for infrastructure maintenance. But the fact is also is that many states use that money for something else besides not worrying about wheelchair accessibility. So our complaint kind of brought this into the public eye and I'm pretty confident that we will be able to see some change and some action as we kind of work through the process. But it is also what ever you want to call it, karma, good luck whatever, that here we have our network and one of the powerful things about a network is the fact every member of that network has other connections with other people and within our little group we were able to identify somebody else who is not part of Mark's network but is only peripherally connected, kind of, who is going to be very helpful in resolving. And you never know who you may know until you start talking and working and interacting in community. Every network is a little community and every little community has a lot more resources than we certainly had by ourselves. Absolutely and maybe you can share how some of the other families you know in Rhode Island who have similar networks of support like you all do around Mark, how they've utilized their networks of support to do other projects in their communities with Starfire's facilitation support. What are a few of those other projects that have happened or sprung out of this collaboration?JOHN - So in about a month or so another network is going to do a project that is to create a mosaic welcome sign to this little town's community garden. It's prompted by a family who have a son who has very significant disabilities but who is a very very talented artist who is really good at sketching and painting vegetables. So they're going to take his work and they're going to create a mosaic welcome sign. This is a family I've known for quite a while, also been part of PLAN for a while, and they have dramatically really been able to bring their son like we did out of a special school into the real world and Sid has really blossomed as a result of that real world life experience. Why do you think it's important for families to lead efforts toward building community? And how do you think families are helping other people in the neighborhoods see the light of community building, the magic of community building?CONNIE: - We've been told for years on end that certain federal programs are underfunded and that there may come a time that those things are no longer available or that their support and services get shrunken and Mark loves people, he's a very social person. MARK - I do. CONNIE: - You do and you contribute in a lot of ways. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - And we're very proud of that. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - So just in terms of politics alone it's important that we give our sons and daughters opportunities to show that they can contribute to society. JOHN - From our own experience and from the experience of a lot of people we know that the amount of community, acceptance and inclusion that people with disabilities experience is really very much influenced by how much their family is integrated and included in their community. Our experience was that after Mark started going to special private school we spent more and more and more time at that school helping them with fundraising, helping them with all kinds of stuff and we spent less and less time in our community. We often meet family with children with disabilities and very quickly they'll say, “Oh, but we don't know anybody. We're not engaged in our community.” And without spending a lot of time we recently were able to recognize that that was because they were spending their time in a different world than their community. So we really really strongly encourage people to become more engaged and more involved. One of the ways is get engaged in a community project and all of a sudden you know a bunch of people, not all of those people are going to become part of their son's or daughter's network but some will. And that's because all of a sudden they know people who have common interests, there are all kinds of things that happen when you start doing things together. These projects are just ways people becoming engaged in their community, as a family, and then as time goes on for that family to be unique and having people have a relationship with that son or daughter who has a disability.Absolutely. And maybe we'll end with a quote here I think that is related to everything you just said. It's by Al Etmanski he says, “People are naturally ingenious when faced with adversity.” What ways do you think you all have managed to be ingenious?CONNIE: - With the COVID19 crisis, Mark's facilitator of Mark's support network is putting out requests with two things. One to ensure them that Mark is no more susceptible to this virus than anyone else in the community is. More importantly, because Mark has benefited so much from his contact with all the members of his network, she is going to ask them to engage with him regularly remotely as long as they cannot engage with him personally. He reads and he can enjoy texts and answer emails and appreciates post cards and greeting cards and phone calls.MARK - Right. CONNIE: - That's an adaptation that we're making right now. JOHN - We've learned that we really have to remain flexible. We have to depend on other people's creativity and let them interact with Mark in their way. In the beginning when he was younger people would always ask us, “What does Mark like to do?” And a long time ago we basically came up with the same answer, “Well I don't know, ask him.” Not only ask him but invite him. Mark surprises everybody with his ability to express his enthusiasm for things. KATIE - I love how you turned a question into a way to mobilize community to be more involved and be more inclusive. It's wonderful to meet and hear your story. JOHN: As parents we've benefited from such wonderful and powerful messaged from guys like Tim (Vogt) and Al Etmanski and David Wehterow and John O'Brien. There's a million of these messages that we've been lucky enough to try and hear and try and incorporate into what we're trying to do for Mark. That's what it's all about we're doing it for our family first - and hope that other families will see what we've done and will say, “Hey if those guys can do it so can we.” That's the power of this movement. KATIE: It's actually moving, it's doing something. That's the exciting part of it. Thanks for being movers, so great to meet you. MARK: Good-bye.

What You'll Learn From This Episode: How to work efficiently when suddenly your organization works virtually Having a uniform sales process by using effective CRM system The right execution of handling your sales team when working virtually ​ Related Links and Resources: Get a 14-day free trial of the pipeliner by going to their homepage and get a feeling of how the product looks like and how it might work for your business. Visit www.pipelinersales.com. Also, since people are working remotely right now, checkout John's series of 1-minute remote working tips, it's a video and there's about 17 of them. Go to www.salespop.net. Summary: John Golden is an Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World's Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. He is a globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, and has conducted over 350 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine and has a podcast channel on iTunes with over 287 audio interviews. John is the CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, he is an avid Martial Artist. Here are the highlights of this episode: 1:40 John's ideal Client: It's anybody who has a sales team and who understands and believes in sales process, any size from small, medium to large. 2:25Problem John helps solve: It's visibility into your revenue, management of your sales organization, and you having a uniform sales process, predictability, and efficiency. We do it through visual CRM that actually Sales Manager and Sales people likes to use because it gives them all of the tools to self-manage as well. It provides all of the data, you can automate some of the process in there so you can get away from the mundane, the repetitive task that sucks up your time, and really focus on intelligent and informed prospecting and selling. 3:25Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to John: Right now, if ever you have a wakeup call, like in the crisis that we're in, is the wakeup call for people who don't have good digital process, who don't have good visibilities to their pipeline, who maybe have run their sales organization or business through a combination of I can pop over the bill, share the spreadsheet with me, is there something in the CRM so give me the extra information I need to fill-in the gaps.. that doesn't work when suddenly the organization is virtual. You need to be able to trust the data, you need to access the data, you need to have good digital processes, you need to have your sales people executing the sales process in a uniform manner, and you need to be able to access reporting both leading and lagging indicators of success. And just manage your business in a much more organize and efficient manner. And right now, a lot of people are realizing that when times are good and business is good, it really does cover up a lot of inefficiency and you tend to overlook things. And you say it maybe broke but I'm not interested in fixing it because business is good right now. But now if it's broke, it's broke, it's hurting you. Having digital process, having a CRM system and having everybody work properly and work within it and utilizing it properly is critical. 5:34What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding John and his solution: You don't have real time data, you constantly update spreadsheets, and getting information from multiple sources. Ultimately you are not getting a clear Realtime picture of what's going on with your sales organization, process and revenue. And you're working off out of date working information which is not a good thing and fundamentally, you are wasting an awful lot of time on manual processing. 6:20John's Valuable Free Action (VFA): Review your sales process immediately, and find out if you have a sales process.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode: How to work efficiently when suddenly your organization works virtually Having a uniform sales process by using effective CRM system The right execution of handling your sales team when working virtually ​ Related Links and Resources: Get a 14-day free trial of the pipeliner by going to their homepage and get a feeling of how the product looks like and how it might work for your business. Visit www.pipelinersales.com. Also, since people are working remotely right now, checkout John’s series of 1-minute remote working tips, it's a video and there's about 17 of them. Go to www.salespop.net. Summary: John Golden is an Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World's Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. He is a globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, and has conducted over 350 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine and has a podcast channel on iTunes with over 287 audio interviews. John is the CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, he is an avid Martial Artist. Here are the highlights of this episode: 1:40 John’s ideal Client: It's anybody who has a sales team and who understands and believes in sales process, any size from small, medium to large. 2:25Problem John helps solve: It's visibility into your revenue, management of your sales organization, and you having a uniform sales process, predictability, and efficiency. We do it through visual CRM that actually Sales Manager and Sales people likes to use because it gives them all of the tools to self-manage as well. It provides all of the data, you can automate some of the process in there so you can get away from the mundane, the repetitive task that sucks up your time, and really focus on intelligent and informed prospecting and selling. 3:25Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to John: Right now, if ever you have a wakeup call, like in the crisis that we're in, is the wakeup call for people who don't have good digital process, who don't have good visibilities to their pipeline, who maybe have run their sales organization or business through a combination of I can pop over the bill, share the spreadsheet with me, is there something in the CRM so give me the extra information I need to fill-in the gaps.. that doesn't work when suddenly the organization is virtual. You need to be able to trust the data, you need to access the data, you need to have good digital processes, you need to have your sales people executing the sales process in a uniform manner, and you need to be able to access reporting both leading and lagging indicators of success. And just manage your business in a much more organize and efficient manner. And right now, a lot of people are realizing that when times are good and business is good, it really does cover up a lot of inefficiency and you tend to overlook things. And you say it maybe broke but I'm not interested in fixing it because business is good right now. But now if it's broke, it's broke, it's hurting you. Having digital process, having a CRM system and having everybody work properly and work within it and utilizing it properly is critical. 5:34What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding John and his solution: You don't have real time data, you constantly update spreadsheets, and getting information from multiple sources. Ultimately you are not getting a clear Realtime picture of what's going on with your sales organization, process and revenue. And you're working off out of date working information which is not a good thing and fundamentally, you are wasting an awful lot of time on manual processing. 6:20John’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): Review your sales process immediately, and find out if you have a sales process.

Don't Waste Your Life (Part 1) - John PiperDon't Waste Your Life (Part 2) - John PiperDon't Waste Your Life (Part 3) - John PiperFamilyLife Today® Radio TranscriptReferences to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Don't Waste Your LifeDay 1 of 3 Guest:                           John Piper From the Series:         Following the Call of Christ ________________________________________________________________­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Bob:                So why are you here?  For that matter, why is anything here?  Well, here is an answer from Dr. John Piper. John:              We need to help people see why the universe was created, and it wasn't created for people to become famous and for people to become powerful, it was created to display the worth and excellencies and beauty and wonders of God.  And we are here to receive that excellency and reflect it out in our lives so that other people see it.  It's all about God – from Him, through Him, and to Him are all things to Him be glory forever and ever. Bob:                This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, July 26th.  Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.  Understanding why we're here is the first step in not wasting our lives.  Stay tuned.                         And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us.  I have a distinct memory of an event that took place when I was in high school.  I was in an English class, and we were in a unit study on the subject of existentialism – "Existentialism and Man" – we were reading Camus and Sartre and the guy who wrote the story about being a cockroach – Kafka, Franz Kafka. Dennis:          This was in high school?  Bob:               This was in high school, and Mrs. Venary [sp] was our English teacher, and Mrs. Venary said one day, she asked us, "What's most important in your life?"  And I remember, we were going around the room and answering that question, and we got to me, and I don't remember what I said.  If I had to guess today, I would probably have said, "One of the really important things in my life is music."  I was in a band, I played guitar, I really liked music.                           But by the time we got to one of my classmates who was about halfway through the group, she said, "Really, the most important thing in my life is my relationship with God."  And I remember thinking, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the right answer.  I need to remember that next time." And then it dawned on me that if I didn't have that as the right answer when the question came around, it probably wasn't really the most important thing in my life, you know? Dennis:          Yeah, and I was thinking how I would have answered it – I'm sorry that God would not have been my answer, either – athletics would have been.  And I think whether you're in high school and how you would have answered it then or where you are today, the question is still a good question, and we have someone today with us on FamilyLife Today who I think is going to help you – well, maybe either realign your spiritual tires or maybe answer the question in the right way for the first time.                           John Piper joins us on FamilyLife Today.  John, welcome to FamilyLife Today. John:              Thank you, I'm glad to be here. Dennis:          John is the pastor of preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church where he has served since 1980.  He and his wife, Noelle, have four sons and a daughter, live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he's a prolific writer.  And, you know, Bob, it's not often that books come to our attention here at FamilyLife Today through our wives, but this one did.  Back last Christmas Barbara came to me, and she said, "You know, there is one book I want to give our kids for Christmas."  I said, "Oh, really?  Who is it by?"  She said, "John Piper."  And I immediately thought of some of the books that I've had the privilege of reading, browsing my way through, "Desiring God," among others, and she said, "It's a new book called "Don't Waste Your Life."  And I thought, "Now, that's a good title."  Because we have a generation of people, I believe, who are really not getting around to the question you asked, Bob – what is most important in your life.                         John, you tell a story about a couple who had retired on the coast of Florida. John:              Yeah, I got the story from "Reader's Digest." Bob:                That's okay, Ronald Reagan got a lot of his stories from "Reader's Digest," too.  There's nothing wrong with that. John:              And it was written by them, so it's not told about them, and I won't give any names, but they were marveling that at, I think, age 51 and 52 or something like that, they were able to retire early, go to Florida, and the peak of their excitement about this stage in their life was that they could play softball and collect shells.  And I just read that and thought, "You've got to be kidding?" Dennis:          Now, we're talking about the ultimate experience in their lives? John:              Evidently.  I mean, I'm thinking in the last chapter of my life, I am mainly preparing to meet the judge of the universe and give an account with my little vaporous life on this earth.  He is not going to ask, "Can I see your shell collection?"   Bob:                Who won the softball game?  It's not going to matter, is it? John:              It's not.  And so it became a kind of paradigm story for me of the American way because tragically the AARP and most people giving counsel on what to do with your latter years are telling you to go play them away on a golf course somewhere or something, and I'm thinking, "That is not the way I want to spend my life at all let alone my last few years in the months just preceding seeing the king of the universe." Bob:                And I think that's important.  The message in this book, "Don't Waste Your Life," is not just about not squandering the latter years of your life, but it's about the whole of your life.  It's a stewardship that we've been entrusted with, right? John:              Right.  Young people are making incredibly important choices early on, especially right at the juncture of early college years and post college years of "What am I going to do with my life?"  And I think they're eager and ready to hear somebody to call them to a radical kind of life that has a significance about it that is eternal and deep.  So that's what I've tried to talk about. Dennis:          Going back to your shell collection, as I read that, I thought – and you asked the question in your book, you can't imagine someone appearing before the judgment seat and God asking to see our shell collection.  And I thought, "What other kind of collections do we have?"  It could be our golf scores, our trophies, our businesses, our portfolio of stocks, our home that we built, the car we drive, the wardrobe or jewelry.  It could be our family.  We could make the family the chief end of man.  Or it could be our bank account.  You know, man has been collecting stuff, John, from the beginning of time.  It may not be as silly as a shell collection, but we have the wrong object of worship going all the way back to the Garden.                         When you were a young lad growing up, in your home there was a – was it a plaque or what was it?  Was it in the kitchen, as I recall, is that right? John:              Right, it was in the kitchen and probably it had as much to do with the title of the book as anything.  It hung, I remember it hung up where a clock started to hang later, but I now have it in my living room at home, so it's been on the wall for 50 years of my life, at least.  It says, "Only one life, 'twil soon be past, only what's done for Christ will last."  And that was emblazoned on my mind as a child, that significance and lasting reality is going to come from connectedness with Jesus.  If something is done to display the worth of Jesus, then that something will have value and significance, and if it didn't, it won't last. Bob:                So you would say that from early on, you understood this idea of the stewardship of your life and that it needed to be focused and rightly directed.  It's not something that came to you later in life? John:              I would say in my high school years, as I reflected back on the kinds of things I was thinking, the kinds of things I was writing and reading – as I reviewed those, it was amazing to me how much I was thinking about it in those days.                         The other thing that probably affected the title of this book, "Don't Waste Your Life" is the story my dad, as an evangelist, would tell when he was doing evangelism.  He came home one time and, with tears in his eyes, he said, "A man came to Christ who must have been in his 70s, and he'd been a sinner in the community for years, and people had prayed for him, and he'd resisted the Gospel, and he walked to the front, and he sat down.  And after the service, as I sat beside him and counseled him, he just wept and wept, and when I asked why he was weeping he just repeated over and over, 'I've wasted it, I've wasted it.'"                         I'll tell you, as a teenager, that story from my dad landed on me with such power that I thought, "Never, ever, ever do I want to be able to say that – I've wasted it."  So from maybe age 16, 15 on, I had this impulse in me, don't waste it, don't waste it. Dennis:          I have, for some reason, been kind of chewing on Acts, chapter 13, verse 36, and it reads, "For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep, and he was buried."  And I thought, you know, if that could be said of my life at the end of it, that I fulfilled God's purpose for my generation, whether you're a mother, a father, a businessman, and businesswoman, a single person, to be smack-dab in the middle of walking with God and fulfilling what He has for you, that's what you're talking about in the book.  You're talking about people who have a confidence that they are fulfilling not only God's will for their lives but they're a part of a grand scheme, a bigger picture, of what God's accomplishing on this planet. John:              Right, we need to help people see why the universe was created, and it wasn't created for people to become famous and for people to become powerful, it was created to display the worth and excellencies and beauty and wonders of God.  And we are here to receive that excellency and reflect it out in our lives so that other people see it.  It's all about God – "from Him, through Him, and to Him are all things to Him be glory forever and ever" – Romans 11:36 says.  And so I think significance must be defined in terms of God – depending on Him, being guided by Him, giving Him all the praise and all the glory and all the honor and then finding lifestyles and ways of talking and thinking and feeling and acting that make God look really good to this culture. Dennis:          In the '60s, your passion intensified for finding God's purpose and making sure you were about what He was doing, and it was your encounter with two different people that ultimately changed the course of your life.  Why don't you share those two people that you encountered in college? John:              I have three in mind, so I'm not which two you have in mind.  I'll mention Dan Fuller as a living teacher who had a tremendous impact in the way I read the Bible, and then I mentioned the dead person, Jonathan Edwards, and I'll mention another dead person, died in '63, the same days as John Kennedy died – C.S. Lewis.  So that triumvirate in the years, say, '64, as I began college to '68 when I went away, and then in the years '68-'71 in seminary that's where Dan Fuller and Jonathan Edwards conspired, and the key of the living teacher and the dead teacher was to show me that there is no final conflict between God's passion to be glorified and my passion to be satisfied.  I had grown up, for whatever reason, I'm sure it wasn't my dad's fault or maybe even the preacher's fault, thinking you can't have both of those.  Either God is going to be glorified or I'm going to be happy, because I heard – maybe it wasn't said, but this is what I heard – people would say, "Well, you should stop doing your will and do God's will."  And I kind of wanted to say, "Isn't there a third alternative?"  Like, maybe I would want to do God's will?  Maybe I would enjoy doing God's will?  And what those men showed me is that God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in Him; that God's glory shines in my being happy in Him.                         And so there isn't this necessary conflict between my pursuit of pleasures and his pursuit of glory if, in fact, my pursuit of pleasure is pleasure in him – that insight from Jonathan Edwards mainly, mediated through Dan Fuller and C.S. Lewis in his one page in "The Weight of Glory," where he said, "The problem with the world is not that we are pursuing pleasure but that we are far too easily pleased.  We are like children fooling around with mudpies in the slums when we could have a holiday at the sea, and we can't imagine what it's like."                         And what he meant was, we're fooling around with that list you gave earlier, Dennis, about just money, even family and possessions and business.  If we could see what a holiday at the sea that is a relationship with God, a delight in His beauty and power and excellencies was, then we'd see the problem in the universe is not that people are pursuing pleasure, but that they are settling for the low, fleeting, wrong, suicidal pleasures.  And so that's what I learned from Lewis and Edwards and then Fuller between '68 and '71, and it changed everything. Bob:                You later expressed that or referred to that as "Christian hedonism." John:              Right. Bob:                Hedonism is the philosophy that says the highest goal is the pursuit of pleasure.  And you said if we understand the Scriptures right, that's true, but the only real pleasure we're going to find is not in what the culture tells us will bring us pleasure. John:              Right, and the reason that is not in conflict with saying the highest goal is the glory of God is because God is glorified precisely in my being satisfied in the end.  That was the insight that makes lights go on, I find, for a lot of people these days. Dennis:          I have to read a passage that I know you're passionate about – Psalm 16:11 – "Thou will make known to me the path of life.  In Thy presence is fullness of joy."  And we don't believe this last third of the verse here.  It says, "In Thy right hand there are pleasures forever."  Frankly, it's what you described that for a number of years kept me at a distance from Christianity.  I didn't believe I could have a good time; that I could truly experience pleasure and happiness and fulfillment and walk with Jesus Christ.  I thought becoming a Christian was having to put on something black, put on a sour look, and be unhappy for the rest of my life.                         Now, I don't know where I got that picture, because I really grew up in a good church.  But nonetheless I had a caricature of Christianity that I was rejecting, and it wasn't this.  It wasn't the idea of a glowing, vibrant life filled with smiles and laughter and, as this says, enjoyment and pleasure.   John:              Right, but I think there are a lot of people who have said something like that and given it a little bit of our own twist; that is, I think there have always been rah-rah evangelistic youth crusades where we feature the athlete and the smiling beauty queen who say, "You really can have a great and happy life if you'll be a Christian."  And the ordinary folks look at that and thought, "That's not quite what I'm thinking.  That's not going to work for me, because I've got pimples, and I'm not strong."                           The difference with my message, and it's where you were going, I think, is that what I want to hold up is a joy and is a God who, in Himself, when all the beauty goes and all the strength goes and all the popularity goes and all the parties go, He's enough, and He's thrilling.                          You know, my wife and I were married in December of 1968, and we chose Habakkuk 3, the last four verses, I believe, of the book to be read at our wedding.  I don't know it all by heart, but I can paraphrase it.  It goes something like this – though the olive fail, though there be no fruit on the vines, though there be no cattle in the stall, though there be no sheep in the fold; in other words, we're talking famine and devastation, and then he says, "Yet will I rejoice in the Lord my God."                         Psalm 63:3 says, "The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life."  Or Paul says, "To die is gain."  So my message is a little more radical than what I was hearing from the rah-rah evangelistic crusade, "Yes, we can all have a good time" message but rather you may have an absolutely horrible life and smile your way all the way to heaven.                           In fact, 1 Corinthians 6, verse 10, Paul uses this phrase that, for me, has really stamped the way I want to talk about joy.  He says, "Sorrowful yet always rejoicing."  So I want there to always be a kind of minor key playing in the background of my parties and my celebrations, because I know the world is absolutely filled with pain and filled with suffering, and when I am rejoicing with those who rejoice, there is somebody very close to me weeping with those who weep, and so I just want to present an authentic call to radical pleasure at God's right hand when you may be wracked with cancer, your wife may have left you, your kids may be prodigal, your business may be failing, and you can say, "The Lord gives, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord."                          So there's a flavor, I think, to this hedonism that I have that I hope is really realistic. Dennis:          And the time to develop that kind of relationship with Jesus Christ is not when you go through the valley.  The time to develop it is now.  It's to become focused on Him as your absolute source of life, of pleasure, of joy, and begin the process of walking with Him moment by moment.                           You know, I couldn't help but think, John, as you were talking about how those of us here at FamilyLife watched Bill Bright die.  The last two and a half years of his life were marked by him only having about 40 percent lung capacity, and he was literally – his body was starving for oxygen, and yet every time I saw him, and everyone else, too, he was praising God; talking about Him being his strength, his joy, his portion.  He never complained.  And I contrasted his life with how I've watched others die, and I thought, you know what?  Bill Bright taught me how to live, and he also taught me how to die.                         And what I want to do with my life is I want to do the same thing.  I want my deathbed to be as vigorous in the enjoyment and the pursuit of God, even though there will undoubtedly be pain, it will not be easy, but I would like it to be the way Bill Bright demonstrated as a man, and we can do that if we get into the Scripture and we find out who God is, because it's only as we know Him as He is that you can relate to Him as the God of the Universe. Bob:                You talk about somebody who didn't waste his life, Dr. Bright is a great example of someone who had the right priority, the right focus; who understood the implications of the Christian faith, and it changed the direction of everything.  It shaped every decision he made.  And I want to encourage our listeners that's really what is at the heart of the book that you have written, John.  It's called "Don't Waste Your Life," and it's a book that we have in our FamilyLife Resource Center.  I think this book gives each of us a good opportunity to re-evaluate how we're doing spiritually; whether the direction of our life is rightly aimed or not, and I think your book is helpful in that evaluation process.                         Let me encourage our listeners – contact us to get a copy of John Piper's book, "Don't Waste Your Life."  You can go online at FamilyLife.com to request a copy of the book or you can call 1-800-FLTODAY.  If you go online, in the middle of the home page you'll see a red button that says "Go."  If you click on that red button, it will take you right to the page where you can get more information about the book "Don't Waste Your Life."  You can order online, if you'd like, or call 1-800-FLTODAY and request a copy of the book.  We can have it sent out to you.  If you're interested in a copy of our conversation this week with John Piper, you can order that on CD, or you can download it as an MP3 file from our website at FamilyLife.com.  If you'd like the CD either order that online or call 1-800-FLTODAY.                         Over the last several years, one of the places where you have spoken, John, is at the Passion Conferences, and I know Beth Moore has also spoken to young people there challenging them to a wholehearted commitment to Jesus Christ.  Not long ago we had Beth as a guest on FamilyLife Today, and we talked with her about her 25-year marriage to her husband Keith, about some of the ups downs.  She was very candid in that interview, and this month and next month, we wanted to say thank you to those of you who can help support the ministry of FamilyLife Today with a donation of any amount by sending you a copy of this CD that includes our conversation with Beth Moore.                         Simply go to our website, FamilyLife.com, and click on the button that says, "Make a Donation," or call 1-800-FLTODAY and make a donation over the phone.  When you do, mention that you'd like the CD with Beth Moore and someone on our team will make sure that gets sent to you.  Or if you're making your donation online, when you come to the keycode box just type in the word "free," and we'll know that you want the CD sent out to you.  Again, it's our way of saying thanks for your financial support of the ministry of FamilyLife Today, and we appreciate hearing from you.                         Well, tomorrow we're going to continue our conversation with Dr. John Piper.  We're going to talk about the call to a cross-centered life and why we need to make sure that we're not sugar-coating our presentation of the Gospel.  Some folks may respond better if we tell them the hard truth, and we'll talk more about that tomorrow.  I hope you can join us for that.                         I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team.  On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine.  We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.                          FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.   We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you.  However, there is a cost to transcribe, create, and produce them for our website.  If you've benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would   you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © FamilyLife.  All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com      

Don't Waste Your Life (Part 1) - John PiperDon't Waste Your Life (Part 2) - John PiperDon't Waste Your Life (Part 3) - John PiperFamilyLife Today® Radio TranscriptReferences to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Don't Waste Your LifeDay 2 of 3 Guest:                          John Piper From the Series:         Glorifying God From Your Wealth ________________________________________________________________Bob:                If you really understand and embrace the realities of the Christian faith, it will change your life.  Here is Dr. John Piper. John:              It seems to me that in this global village of ours, those who have any sense of reality at all know if Christianity is real, it's worth dying for.  If it's not real, then let's not even talk about it.  So, absolutely, I think we need to be straight up with young people and say, "Look, are you going to give your life and lay it down for Jesus or are you just going to play games?"  And nobody is out there saying, "What I really want to do with my life is play games." Bob:                This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, July 27th.  Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.  Is your Christian faith worth dying for?  Is it worth living for?  Stay with us.                         And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us.  A couple of songs I remember from the 1960s.  You know, I always kind of – we talk about a program, and I always think of a song – you remember the song, "Alfie?"  Do you know that song? Dennis:          Well, I couldn't sing it, but I remember it. Bob:                "What's it all about, Alfie, is it just for the moment we live?  What's it all about?  Wouldn't you sort it out, Alfie?  Are we meant to take more than we give or are we meant to be kind and if only fools are kind, Alfie" – it keeps going on and on.  That was kind of an existential, philosophical – Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote that.  They were – and then there was this other one – remember Peggy Lee?  She had this song about life, and she'd experienced the house burnt down one time, and she looked at the ashes, and she looked up, and she said, "Is that all there is?"  If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing.  Let's break out the booze and a have a ball, if that's all.                          You know, they were talking about some pretty heavy themes back there in the '60s.  They needed John Piper who could have told them what's it all about and that this is not all there is. Dennis:          Well, you know, you're going to like John Piper, Bob, because in his book he quotes a Bob Dylan song called "Blowin' in the Wind."  "How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?  Yes, and how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?  Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knows" … Bob:                [mimicking Bob Dylan] "that too many people have died?  The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, the answer is blowin' in the wind."                         I thought I'd throw in a little Bob Dylan. Dennis:          And those who know him can make their own judgments about that. John:              It was pretty good. Dennis:          Was it good, John?   Bob:                [as Bob Dylan] Thank you. Dennis:          But as John points out, you know, think about that – the answer is blowing in the wind?  I mean, what a great place to look for a solution to life, huh? Bob:                In the wind. John:              Well, there are two ways to take that.  I took it both despairingly and hopefully because he said "the answer."  I mean, today, nobody believes there is such a thing in this post-modern age, there is no "the answer" blowing anywhere – wind or Bible.  And the fact that he would say "the answer is blowin' in the wind," held up to me, as a young person in those days, I'm hungry for the answer.  I'm hungry for the answer.  And so there was at least an echo of confidence, of objectivity there, and in those existentialist days, and our days are not any different, even moreso, anybody that believes in there is "the answer" is in a minority.  He's in a minority, and I want to get around him and say, "I believe that, too."  That's my only hope.  If there is no "the answer" then life really is empty. Bob:                You don't think he'd been reading John, chapter 3, where Jesus says, "the wind blows wherever it will, and the answer is here, and the spirit moves" … John:              I would like to think that. Dennis:          He would love to believe that.  Well, the author of this book, don't waste your life, is John Piper.  He is the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and, John, increasingly you are writing for a generation of college students and young professionals, I believe, who drink deeply from your writings because I think they're fed up with the culture of tolerance and political correctness and the lack of absolutes, and you're talking about absolutes here that rock their world in your book, "Don't Waste Your Life."                           In fact, in your book, you actually call these young men and women and all of us to be ready to give our lives for our faith.  I mean, that's a radical absolute that we would be willing to give our lives for our faith in Jesus Christ. John:              You know, it's hard not to issue that call where you read, as I read an article about the Christians in Sudan.  Choose life or choose Christ; that is, you're going to be threatened and perhaps killed for just talking about mobs of people who circulate in Southern Sudan, take people and say, "Are you a Christian or are you not?"  If it's a woman, if she says, "I am," a gang rape happens.  If she says, "I'm not," fine, go on.                           And so you know that around the world today the persecuted church is dealing with these things at the cutting-edge level of life and death.  I can't see going around the country today or standing in my pulpit and talking another language and saying, "Well, we really have an easy life, and Christianity doesn't mean the same thing to us here, it's just a nice way to get healthy and wealthy and prosperous," blah-blah-blah.  If I can't call young people to be a Christian in Sudan, I can't call them to Christian anywhere. Bob:                Well, and here's the challenge, even as I hear you talk about this, because you're absolutely right – to call people even to modern, suburban, evangelical Christianity, that's not a radical call, and yet that's kind of what I'm living, you know?  I mean, that's where I am, and so I read your book and go, "Do I have sell my house and move to the inner city and do I have to do radical things like that?"  Or can I live in the suburbs and still not waste my life?   John:              My approach in dealing with wealthy Americans, which we all are, is not to dictate the particulars of a lifestyle but to hold up Christ who calls people to follow Him when he has no place to lay his head, who says it's hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom, who says, through John the Baptist, if you have two coats, sell and give to him who has one."  Who says, "Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven and not on earth."  Through His Apostle Paul, He says, "Those who desire to be rich pierce themselves with many pangs and ruin and destroy their soul."  I just hold up these challenges and say, "You decide whether your house is too exorbitant.  You decide whether you need as many cars as you have.  You decide whether you need a cabin by the lake.  You decide whether you need five suits and 18 ties.  You decide" – and what I want to do is just push us towards a wartime lifestyle.                         Now, here is the reason I use "wartime" instead of "simple."  Simple lifestyle might mean go live in a cabin in northern Minnesota, plant carrots, eat organic foods, and they are no good for anybody. Dennis:          Could we go to Montana instead of northern Minnesota? John:              Yeah, you can go to Montana if you want to do that. Dennis:          Okay. John:              But here's the reason I'm not into that – I'm into blessing the world with my life as much as I can with Jesus Christ flowing out from me.  You might need to buy a computer and have e-mail access to be maximally invested for Jesus with your calling.  That's not a simple lifestyle.  It will cost you a couple thousand dollars to get set up with that.  If you want to win a war, you might buy a B-52 or a rocket launcher, but the people back home might be on austerity lifestyle so that the army can have its B-52.  So when I say, "Well, what about the people who are at home in America and the cutting-edge people?"  Well, I'd say probably the people back home need to streamline their life for two reasons at least – one is to maximize their resources for kingdom purposes, and the other is because the world is watching.                           It says in 1 Peter 3:15 that they're going to ask you a reason for the hope that is in you.  When was the last time they did?  Not very often.  Why?  Because we look like we're hoping in the same stuff they do – same car, same insurance policy, same retirement plan.  So why would they ask us what are you hoping in?                           But if you do something radical with your life, if you take a chance, if you do some risking, if you let your children go, you know, or you go yourself, or you're around someplace where you might get malaria or AIDS from the orphans, then they might say, "Isn't a little bit risky for you and your kids?"  We say, "Yeah."                         I want to breed a kind of Christian so that the world will look at this life and say what is your hope in?  My hope is in money and good retirement and 911 and health insurance.  What's your hope in?  And I hope the answer can be "Christ." Dennis:          You know, you can tell how close you are to the battle lines on the basis of what you're complaining about.  The guys who are complaining about the lack of ammo and artillery and air support and fuel and additional troops – those are the guys who are on the front lines.  The guys who are taking the R&R are complaining about how hard the cot is or the bed that they're sleeping in; that their accommodations generally are less than satisfactory.  Those are a long ways from the front line of battle.                         And what we've sought to be about here on FamilyLife Today is to call the listener to say, "You know what?  I'm not going to live an R&R lifestyle."  Where it's rest and relaxation.  Instead, I'm going to press in to the battle and the cause and the war that is taking place right now, whether you're a part of it or not.  And it is a kingdom war, and the reality is the results, the result of this war are lasting. John:              They're eternal. Dennis:          They're eternal, and for most of us I think that war and that battle begins in our marriage and in our family.  That's where it starts, but it wasn't meant to end there.  It was meant to spill over and impact our neighborhoods, our schools, our communities, our states and our nation. John:              Yes, it is so clearly a family issue, this issue of wartime lifestyle and kingdom orientation and eternal perspective, because your kids are watching big-time what your values are, and if you buy from the finest restaurant and the finest department store and drive the finest car and insist on having the finest cabin, that's exactly what they're going to live for.  But if you buy your clothes at Saver's down the street for 50 cents a bag, and you have a one-car family, and you don't have to have a new car, and if you live in a neighborhood where you choose it for ministry and not for safety, they're going to pick it up.                         So, for example – I'll give you a concrete example.  We haven't had a television in our house in America for 30 years, and I used to think, "Oh, dear, I'm going to raise these boys, and they're going to be out of it," and yet I was choosing to take that risk because mainly time and banality.  I wasn't worried about sex and violence.  I mean, who cares about sex and violence, the Bible is full of it.  I care about the silliness of it all and dragging the soul down into such small, empty, insignificant junk that fills that screen every day – how can anybody have a capacity for glory and greatness and magnificence and chivalry and beauty?                         And so we've done this for 30 years.  My boys have never once – they're grown now – and they've never once complained in my hearing that we didn't have a TV because their lives were full.  Instead of saying, "Oh, they've got to see reality, they've got to see suffering, they've got to see life as it really is."  I say, "Look, why don't you just take them and live where life really is."  So we live in the poorest neighborhood in Minneapolis, Phillips Neighborhood.  They've seen people do drugs, they've seen prostitutes, they've seen me pull a guy off of a woman trying to rape her in my front yard, they've heard the gunshots.  They don't need a TV, just go there.  Really, come on, parent, if you're serious about wanting your kids to see life as it really is, do you really think TV is the answer?  It's not the answer, it's an escape hatch when you're tired at night, and you're most vulnerable, and you're letting the world infect your brain.                         So I've got an orientation on family for wartime lifestyle that I hope embraces and says "Amen" to everything you stand for, because if we don't get it at the home, we won't get it anywhere. Bob:                John, if the idol of Mammon is the dominant idol in American culture, why has not God stepped in and destroyed it?  Why haven't we had the next great Depression where God says, "I will not allow you to worship lesser things?" John:              God is always doing more than one thing, and we must be very careful to judge ahead of time what any given season of life in America is.  If things are going really well, it would be a mistake to say, "This is all blessing from the Lord," because it may be judgment.  I mean, the worst judgment America could get would be for all people to become prosperous and forget God.                           And when things are going really bad in the culture, we better not jump to the conclusion, "This is all judgment," because what could be better than for a father to discipline his children, including the church?  And so the short answer to your question is grace, sheer, undeserved grace that has been poured out on America.  Not because we have the right governmental system or have the right forefathers or have the right anything, but because God is merciful.                         I would say, though, that probably the presence of many, many God-exalting, Bible-saturated, Christ-centered Christians, according to that principle in Genesis where Abraham says, "Won't you spare if there are 50, 40, 30?"  And God seems to say, "Yeah, I will."  And so I think there is an element of that as well – that God does spare America because there are such remarkable ministries and churches and Christians of faithfulness here.  But I wouldn't make that absolute, because God could wipe us off the scene in a minute and do us no wrong. Bob:                Do you think we're seeing a generation emerge that is less materially centered than our own? John:              It's a mixed bag.  I couldn't say that for sure.  When I watch, say, kids who don't seem to be as bent on dressing up as I was with my bleeding madras shirt and my penny loafers and yellow socks … Bob:                You were a prepster, weren't you? John:              Yeah.  I look at them today, I see nothing better because I think they put as much time and thought and effort into their kooky, kinky, twisted, messed up, half-blond hair as I did in my "Kooky, Kooky, lend me your comb hair" back in the '60s.  I don't really see any basic difference.  You can spend as much time and as much money on looking down as you can looking up, and so maybe, maybe not, I'm just not a sharp enough assessor of culture to know what the majority is like right now.                         What I'm interested in is harnessing the good that I do see and transforming the bad that I see, because I think there are tens of thousands of young people on the edge of their chair saying, "Tell me how to die for Jesus." Dennis:          Yeah, and, frankly, that's where I'd like to go right now.  Let's harness some of the good who are listening to this broadcast – that person who has listened to you and to us, and they've resonated with what you're saying.  So you know what?  I've had enough of the toys.  I've had enough of the games.  I'm tired of the R&R.  I want a life characterized by being near the front lines of battle, by being in the war about what God's about, which is displaying His glory, changing people's lives, transforming them through the Gospel.  There's a person listening right now, what would you say to them – how can they engage in that battle? John:              The number-one issue is treasuring Christ above all things.  Before you do anything you must be a lover of Jesus, which means you must see – I've got this book called "Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ."  We must see Him.  So I would say to the person, labor to see Jesus for the glorious person that He is.  Which probably will boil down to some pretty basic and simple things.  Get your Bible, get a pad of paper, get alone with God, open it up, and pray that He would open your eyes to see wonderful things.  In other words, mull the Bible, meditate over the Bible, read the Gospels over and over until you see Christ as inimitably and self-authenticatingly glorious, worth dying for, because until you see Him, your lifestyle is not going to change except legalistically.  But once you see Him, and He is your treasure, then things will start peeling away, and there will be a straight-arrow kind of living for Him.                         So I think the real battle is fought in what do we see and what do we savor? Dennis:          But after we've seen him, there needs to be that fruit in our lives, where there is that peeling away, as you described.  John:              Right, and I think it helps tremendously at that point to get alongside other believers and help each other in churches, small groups, recognize the challenges before us, the sins remaining in our lives, so that we can renounce the sins and embrace the challenges, and I think reading some good missions literature would be great, because most young people are so insular in America, we don't even know what's going on in the rest of the world, especially we don't know what's going on at the kingdom level. Dennis:          And I think today, as Jesus said, "The fields are white into harvest."  These are days to engage in the battle, and if what John has been saying here resonates with you, I want to give you a challenge.  Either right after this broadcast is over, or tonight before you lay your head down to go to sleep, I want you to pull out a sheet of paper, and I want you to sign over the very title deed of your life to Jesus Christ.  Barbara and I did this our first Christmas together in 1972.                           Now, I'm not saying there hasn't been struggles since then, because there has.  But you know what?  It's one thing to operate from a commitment where you have said, "I will pursue you and your agenda for my life."  It's one thing to operate from that, it's another thing to have never done that. Bob:                And here is what's happening – you are essentially trading in your cubic zirconia for diamonds.  You may look at your cubic zirconia and go, "But it's so pretty.  I don't want to let lose of this cut glass, it's so beautiful."  And that's only because you haven't seen the diamonds.  That's the essence of what John is saying in the book, "Don't Waste Your Life," and not only do we need the message, but we know people who need this message.  I'm going to ask John to sign a copy of this book for my kids, because they need this message but so do their parents, you know? Dennis:          I agree. Bob:                In fact, when the book first came out, my son, Jimmy, went through this book with a group of his fellow classmates, and we were thrilled that he was reading John's strong exhortation to make your life count.                         We've got copies of the book in our FamilyLife Resource Center.  If you'd like to get a copy for yourself or for someone you know who could profit from reading this book, go to our website, FamilyLife.com, and in the center of the home page you'll see a red button that says "Go."  You click that button, it will take you right to a page where you can get information about this book.  You can order online, if you'd like.  Again, our website is FamilyLife.com or you can call 1-800-FLTODAY, that's 1-800-358-6329, and someone on our team can let you know how you can have a copy of John's book sent out to you.                         You can also order a copy of the CD of our conversation with John Piper, or if you're interested in it as an MP3 file, that's available on our website as well.  Once again, our website is FamilyLife.com, and the toll-free number is 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY.                         My daughter, Amy, has had the opportunity to hear you speak on this subject, John.  She attended the Passion Conference back – I think it was in 1999 and maybe again in 2000, and both times Beth Moore was speaking at that conference with you, and I think both of you were really pouring out your hearts to students on the same issue, and that is making Christ central to everything you do, having Him be the consuming center of your life.                         Not long ago, Dennis and I had the opportunity to sit down with Beth and to talk with her about her 25-year marriage to her husband, Keith; about some of the challenges they've experienced.  She was very open, and she spoke with us during that interview, and many of our listeners contacted us asking for a copy of that CD.  In fact, many of our listeners who have gone through Beth's studies were very interested to hear what she had to share about her marriage and her family.                          This month and next month, we are making that CD of the interview with Beth Moore available as our way of saying thank you to any of our listeners who can make a donation of any amount for the ministry of FamilyLife Today.  We're listener-supported, and those donations are what keep this ministry on the air, and if you can help with a donation this month, we want you to feel free to request a copy of the CD from Beth Moore.                          You can donate online, if you'd like, and if you do that, as you're filling out the donation form, you'll come to a keycode box – just type the word "free" in the keycode box, and we'll know that you'd like the CD from Beth Moore sent to you.  Or you can call 1-800-FLTODAY and make a donation over the phone.  Again, it's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY, and just mention that you're interested in the CD with Beth Moore, and we'll be happy to send that out to you as well.  Again, it's our way of saying thank you for your financial support of this ministry, which we not only need, but we very much appreciate your partnership.                         Well, tomorrow Dr. John Piper is going to be back with us, and we're going to focus our hearts and our minds where they ought to be focused – on the cross of Christ.  I hope you can be with us for that conversation.                         I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team.  On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine.  We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.                          FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.    We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you.  However, there is a cost to transcribe, create, and produce them for our website.  If you've benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would   you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © FamilyLife.  All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com      

Don't Waste Your Life (Part 1) - John PiperDon't Waste Your Life (Part 2) - John PiperDon't Waste Your Life (Part 3) - John PiperFamilyLife Today® Radio TranscriptReferences to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Don't Waste Your LifeDay 3 of 3 Guest:                            John Piper From the Series:         Boasting in the Cross ________________________________________________________________ Bob:                On days other than Good Friday is the cross central to your thinking?  Is it central to your life?  Here's Dr. John Piper with thoughts about the cross. John:              The word "cross" might mean something you're crucified on, or it might mean a piece of jewelry, or it might mean the last name of somebody you know, but in redemptive historical terms Jesus Christ the Son of God came into the world, He lived a perfect life, He laid Himself out voluntarily to be slaughtered on a cross.  He breathed his last breath in obedience to the Father so that He was a perfectly righteous substitute.  Then He raised Himself from the dead, He was taken up, sits at the right hand of God, intercedes for us.  When I say "the cross," I mean that great redemptive work from incarnation to the installation at God's right hand.  Yeah, that's really crucial to see. Bob:                This is FamilyLife Today for Friday, July 28th.  Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.  Today we'll look at the implications of the cross, why it still matters for your life 2,000 years later.                         And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the Friday edition.  You know, Dennis, I don't know that I will ever forget something that I heard our guest today say.  I remember where I was.  I was driving along on a highway on my way to Mount Ida, Arkansas.  I was tooling along listening to John Piper on tape, and he was saying that the world is not going to look at Christians in times of prosperity and say "I want to be a Christian," because you know what?  When Christians are blessed, they say "Praise the Lord," and when pagans are blessed, all we say is, "Boy, wasn't that lucky?"  He said, "No, the world is going to sit up and take notice when we go through adversity, and we still have a confidence in God; when we go through trials, and when we live the kind of radical life, then the world will say, 'Where does that come from?'"  And I thought, "He's right.  I am too comfortable, I am too content."  In fact, I should say here at the very beginning there needs to be a surgeon general warning on today's program. Dennis:          Mm-hm, I'll tell you that. Bob:                This program will create conviction in your soul and could bring you to a point of personal repentance yourself. Dennis:          It could bring you to the conclusion that you are dangerously close, too close, to the world. Bob:                Yeah, and it might bring you to the point where you need to get more dangerously involved in the Gospel.  And so let me introduce the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church and the person who has brought me under conviction many times, John Piper, who is back with us for a third day.  Welcome back to FamilyLife Today. John:              Thanks, I'm real glad to be here. Bob:                And this book, "Don't Waste Your Life," you felt so strongly about this book you went to the publisher and said, "I want to give 50,000 copies of this book away." John:              Yeah, we created a website just to give it away called "Don't Waste Your Life."  You can go there now, but we don't give them away anymore, because people took them, and we got a special deal because we just wanted to jumpstart the impact of the book and give as many away as we could, so we raised the money and people took them. Bob:                Gave away 50,000?  Do you have any idea – any of the stories of folks who wrote to get a copy of this book? John:              Not yet. Dennis:          John, at the end of the broadcast yesterday, we challenged the listener to consider writing a title deed and transferring ownership over to Jesus Christ to become a disciple, a learner, a follower, a pursuer of God and His agenda for their lives.  And this is really at the core of what "Don't Waste Your Life" is all about.  In fact, you quote 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, as really one of the seminal passages in the New Testament calling people to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Christ. John:              Yeah, the link that I heard, what you ended the program that way, was between signing your life off so that it belongs now to another and the glory of God, which is the ultimate value of the universe and the value that we live to display, and the link is made there in that verse in 1 Corinthians 6 because Paul says you are not your own, you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your bodies, which are God's.  So he made the link between being owned by God and glorifying God.  And so I think you're absolutely right – every person should be challenged to sign the title of their lives over to another who will not then say, "Ah, now I have a slave."  He will say, "No longer do I call you slaves.  I call you friends.  And now, come on, let's live together to magnify my glory in the world, thus says the Lord."                         So that was the link I heard, and I thought it was crucial because the cross is right at the center of this book, and that's what I thought it might be helpful to think about a little bit – in what way is the cross center, because this book grew out of the one-day event in Memphis, Tennessee, in the year 2000, I think it was, where I delivered a message called "Boasting Only in the Cross," and told the illustration of the shells and so on that we talked about a couple of days ago.  That message was taken from Galatians 6:14, which says, "God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world was crucified to me and I to the world," and I raised the question, "Really?  How can you only boast in the cross, only glory, only enjoy the cross?  What about your family?  What about your health?  What about your job?  I mean, aren't these good things that the Lord has given us?  Shouldn't we be glad that we have them?"  And my answer was, "Yes, you should be glad that you have them, but you should realize that as a sinner you only have them to enjoy forever because Christ died to take away the penalty of judgment and to become your righteousness and to become your sacrifice."                         So the cross is relevant for every single delight in my life.  If it's a beautiful blue sky day outside, and I have eyes to see it, I should be glad because of the cross, because apart from the cross I'd be in hell today.  He would snuff me out of existence because I deserved to be judged.  So the cross really is an absolutely central reality in everything I think about and everything we all do. Dennis:          And the passage that commands us as followers after Christ to take up our cross and follow after Him – what do you think He's challenging us to do at that point, John?  If the cross is to be central, and we're focusing on Christ-finished work, the love that is poured out there, the grace, forgiveness, the purpose, the peace with God, the relationship with God, all that's found in the cross, and He commands us to pick up our own cross, it seems to me at points it's almost like the fine print in the contract.  It's like now that he's got me, hello, there's a cross that I must carry. John:              Yeah, the whole text, in fact, uses the words "deny."  If anyone would be my disciple and deny himself and take up His cross and follow me, but the argument that he gives following that verse is "For he who seeks to save his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake and the Gospels will find it," and you do want to find it, don't you?  Therefore, lose it.                         So you've got this paradoxical call from the Lord saying, "Look, I have come to give you life.  I will give you everlasting joy in My presence at My Father's right hand if you join me on the Calvary road of self-denial and love."  Now, what does that mean?  I think it means assess all the things that stand in the way of making Jesus look more valuable than life and get rid of them.                         In other words, it might be your car, it might be your house, it might be the job you presently have.  Whatever is standing between you and an effective display of the superior worth of Jesus in your life, let it go.  That's what I think self-denial is. Dennis:          Isn't it interesting how we, as believers, can find something or someone or some activity that we enjoy and become enslaved to other than God?  It's just fascinating to me.  He made us to know Him, walk with Him, enjoy Him, interact with Him, and yet it's as though we're running from the hound of heaven in pursuit of all these different things, even the ministry.  And you've experienced this as a pastor, I'm sure – even the ministry can be addictive. John:              Right, it can be.  And how to move away from that without contradicting the goodness of creation is a challenge.  Because most of the idols that we have are good, they just shouldn't be idols.  And so to move away from them, you can swing to the ascetic side where you become a creation-denying person, and do you know who I got a lot of help from on that, is St. Augustine, and it's a prayer that he made.  He said, "He loves Thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake."  I found that very helpful, because it's saying anything can be an idol, any good thing can be an idol.  "He loves thee too little who loves anything together with Thee," and then he qualifies it by saying, "Which he loves not for Thy sake," which means that any good thing that is an idol can be deposed from its idolatrous position and become an instrument of worship.  So you might be worshiping food, and the solution to that is not to starve yourself to death with an eating disorder, but rather to say it's a precious gift from God to be used in moderation for the joy it brings and the strength it brings, and I will now turn all my eating back in thanks and worship to God and eat in moderation.  That's the kind of thing that he wants the shift to involve. Bob:                We started talking about not the cross that we pick up and carry but about the one that He carried for us.  I don't know that I can go through the day consciously aware of the cross.  Is that something that comes to mind on a conscious level for you, hour by hour, throughout a day? John:              I wish it came more often.  I think, to be honest there, I'd have to say no.  But my prayer is that when Paul said, "God forbid that I should glory, exalt, boast, rejoice, save in the cross, he meant, I think, number one, the cross bought all my joys as a believer.  It bought all my joys.  Therefore, as I rejoice in anything, that joy should be attached to the cross.  It doesn't, I'm sure, have to consciously be at every moment but probably more often than we do.  If we could realize the magnitude in the history, in the universe, of what happened when Christ, the Son of God, died in the place of sinners and provided a righteousness for us ungodly people, I think we would be more ravished with it than we are, and it would be more constant in our thinking than it is.  So, to be honest, no, but to express my longing, I wish it were. Dennis:          And so, for you, when you say, "I want to glory in the cross, I want to focus on the cross, I want to be caught up in the cross," you are caught up with the presence of God, His righteousness, His incarnation, His death on the cross on behalf of your sins, His burial and resurrection and ascension into heaven.  Have I done a good job of paraphrasing or describing what you are caught up with as we describe the cross?  Because a lot of people wear it as jewelry, and it's an event.  It's not just an event, though, is it, John? John:              That's a very helpful observation for the radio, especially, because the word "cross" might mean something you're crucified on, or it might mean a piece of jewelry, or it might mean the last name of somebody you know, but you summed it up – in redemptive historical terms, that's right – Jesus Christ the Son of God came into the world, He lived a perfect life becoming a holy, perfect lamb of God, He laid Himself out voluntarily to be slaughtered on a cross.  He poured out his forgiveness on us – "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing" – He breathed his last breath in obedience to the Father so that He was a perfectly righteous substitute, and then He raised Himself from the dead.  I say that, even though the Father raised Him, it says in Romans 6, because He said, "Nobody takes my life from me.  I'll lay it down, and if I lay it down, I can take it again."  Jesus Almighty raised Himself from the dead, He was taken up, sits at the right hand of God, intercedes for us.  When I say "the cross," I mean that great redemptive work from incarnation to the installation at God's right hand.  Yeah, that's really crucial to see. Dennis:          And to that person who is listening to us right now, who does not have the awe, who does not have the wonder, who looks at the cross and said, "Yeah, that was an event in history," but who doesn't know the Savior, who doesn't know God's forgiveness, the peace with God that passes all understanding, what would you say to that person right now?   John:              Depending on how much they know, I would say, "Get to know Him by looking at the Scriptures, reading the Gospels, and once you see Him crucified, risen, then do what the Bible says – "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved."  And if you say, "Believe on Him," what does that mean?  What does that involved – believe on Him?                         I would say take these three words – it means trust Him or accept Him or embrace Him as Savior from your sin and judgment, as Lord of your life who has the right to dictate what is healthy and good and right for you to do, and the third and maybe just as important as the other three is embrace Him as your treasure, because I find that many people today will talk about Jesus as Savior or Jesus as Lord, and it's such worn-out language, they don't really realize the impact it must have in the transformation of their values.  But when I say, "Is He your treasure?  Are you accepting Him as your treasure," to as many as received Him, to them gave me power to become the children of God, receive Him as what, that I say, "Treasure, the treasure of your life."  Then they say, "Whoa, maybe He's not."                         And so I would say to every listener, get to know Him well enough to see that He is a Savior.  He is a wonderful Lord.  He's not a hard taskmaster, and He is a treasure that is so valuable that you can "let goods and kindred go, this mortal life, old soul, the body they may kill, God's truth abided still," and you can live a radical God-glorifying lifestyle because He's the treasure that will never fail. Dennis:          We have people listening from all types of denominations, and when you just went through what you explained, immediately they thought, "Well, do I need to pray to be able to move into that right relationship with God?  Do I need to kneel?  Do I need to go to a church or a cathedral?  Where do I need to go, how do I go about establishing this right relationship with God?" John:              One of the most beautiful things to me about the coming of Jesus Christ into the world is that He de-localized and de-externalized worship.  Because when He met the woman at the well, and she said, "Well, now, help me to understand this worship issue, Jesus.  Do we worship in this mountain or do we worship in Jerusalem?"  And Jesus said, "The day is coming and now is when you will not worship in this mountain or in Jerusalem, but you will worship in spirit and in truth."                         Notice the shift in categories from geography to spirit, and the reason he shifted from mountain in Jerusalem to truth in spirit is because truth in spirit can be anywhere, anytime.  In fact, Jesus Himself becomes the new temple.  Christianity is the one religion that has no geographic center.  We have no shrine.  You don't have to go anywhere or move one single muscle to get right with God through Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ is here, now, whenever He is called upon.                          And so I would say, "Call upon the name of the Lord, and you will be saved" – Romans 10:13.  And you can do that without moving your tongue.  A paralyzed person lying in bed unable to move eyelash or tongue can call upon the name of the Lord in their heart, and He promises you, "Call upon me as Savior, as Lord, as treasure, and you'll have all your sins forgiven, and you will have a righteousness imputed to you.  You'll have a home in heaven with me forever, because you've just honored me as a great Savior." Dennis:          And what I would say to the listener after the compelling picture you've presented to them of the love of God, poured out in the person of Jesus Christ, after we've spent an entire broadcast describing the cross and how attractive it is – if right now that picture, the person of Jesus Christ and all the cross represents is attractive to you as Savior, Lord, and treasure, right now, don't drive another mile, don't do another activity at work or at home or wherever you are listening to this broadcast.  Right now stop and make it right with God.  Do business with Him. John:              And, you know, I would just add when you use the word "attractive," they're going to feel that as yes and no, aren't they? Dennis:          Uh-huh, they are. John:              The cross is horrific.  It is ugly.  In fact, we've seen it recently in the movie.  It's really ugly.  Mel Gibson's, "The Passion of Christ," portrays Gethsemane and the cross for what it really was and yet in that very substitutionary ugliness is the attraction.  I mean, my only hope is that that didn't happen to me, it happened to Him for me, and so I'm both repulsed by it.  I've talked to people who say they can't watch more than a third of that movie, it's so horrible, and yet others are drawn to that movie because that it happened is my only hope.                         And so I hope that my effort to describe the meaning of that suffering will really help people see what that's all about. Bob:                You know, I was in the audience with about 3,000 others back in April when you spoke at the "Together for the Gospel" conference in Louisville, and you talked about how the cross is really the centerpiece of the Gospel, and if we're going to present the Gospel, we have to present the reality of the cross.  And if that's the centerpiece of our life, then our life is not going to be a wasted life.                         I really want to encourage our listeners, get a copy of John's book, "Don't Waste Your Life," which we have in our FamilyLife Resource Center.  This would be a good book to read together with your teenagers over the summer or just hand it off to them as a reading assignment and pay them $15, $20, whatever it takes, to get them to read it.  Maybe there's some other incentive you can use to get them to go through this book, and have them write a book report on it and report back to you on what they learned from the book.                         We have it, again, in our FamilyLife Resource Center.  Go to our website, FamilyLife.com, and in the center of the home page, you'll see a little button that says "Go."  Click on that button, it will take you right to the page where you can get more information about John's book, "Don't Waste Your Life."  You can order online if you'd like.  Again, it's FamilyLife.com or you can call 1-800-358-6329; that's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY, and someone on our team can let you know how you can have a copy of this book sent out to you.                         I've already mentioned this week that my daughter had a chance to hear you speak at one of the Passion Conferences a few years ago.  In fact, she heard you twice – one year – I think it was in Texas, and the next year it was in Tennessee, and she brought back CDs, and I listened to them as well, and both of us profited from your teaching ministry during those conferences.                         She also heard Beth Moore speak at those same events with you and was struck by Beth's passion that our lives would be cross-centered, spiritually centered and, Dennis, you and I had the opportunity to talk to Beth several months ago.  We talked about her marriage and her family.  She's been married to her husband Keith for 25 years and, of course, tens of thousands of women have done her Bible studies in churches all around the country.                          Our conversation with her, I described it to my wife later and said she was one of the most highly caffeinated people I've ever met.  It was an energetic conversation, a lot of fun, and this month we'd like to make a CD of that conversation available to any of our listeners who can help support the ministry of FamilyLife Today with a donation of any amount.  We are a listener-supported ministry, and we depend on your financial support in order to continue the ministry of FamilyLife Today.                         If you can help us with a donation of any amount, you can request the CD of our conversation with Beth Moore.  You can go online at FamilyLife.com, fill out the donation form that you find there.  As you do that, you'll come to a keycode box, and if you type the word "free" into that keycode box, we'll know that you're interested in getting a copy of the CD with Beth Moore or call us at 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY, and make a donation over the phone and, again, mention you'd like the CD with Beth Moore, and we'll be happy to send it out to you.  It's our way of saying thanks for your financial support of the ministry of FamilyLife Today.  We appreciate hearing from you.                         Well, I hope you have a great weekend.  I hope you and your family are able to worship together this weekend, and I hope you can be back with us on Monday when we're going to begin to look at the kind of a foundation that needs to be poured underneath a family to make sure that it grows to become a spiritually strong family.  I hope you can join us to be part of that conversation.                         I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team.  On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine.  We'll see you next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.                          FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.   We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you.  However, there is a cost to transcribe, create, and produce them for our website.  If you've benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would   you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © FamilyLife.  All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com      

Download the Pocketbook Guide: https://www.starfirecincy.org/guidebookTRANSCRIPT:Katie: Yeah so pivoting a little bit I'd like to talk about this idea that for people with disabilities especially because that's what we care a lot about at Starfire, that this connection to social services usually means a disconnection from community life.That it means a person getting kind of pulled off the path of community member and onto a path as a client. What can you say just initially about how that looks and how that works for people with disabilities?John: I learned a lot from people who are labeled disabled, I'm not the wise guy on this. My response is I've learned from people with the real experience. One of these people was a Canadian named Pat Worth. And Pat was a younger man when I first met him, maybe 25, rather tall. He had escaped from an institution for the developmentally disabled, big old fashioned institution. And he said to me, “You know I think, one of the things, not all but one of the thing we ought to do is to organize people who are labeled in local communities so they could have a strong voice. Not their parents, not the professionals, but them, me, right?” He said, “You know about organizing, will you come with me for a month across Canada and see if we can start little organizations in the major cities of people who could come together and become a voice for themselves?” And so we did that and we got started with a fair number of groups. They chose as a name People First. When we got done we ended up in Vancouver after a month Pat said to me, “Now I think you can finally understand that our problem is not that we are disabled, our problem is we are disorganized. And the answer for us is to be organized.” But he also recognized, “and become active in communities.”And I think initially that he had the idea that People First would be entry points into community life because they would be independent of agencies and systems.Once we understand what Pat understood, that what we call and label a disability is really a name for a lack of power to join everyday life. The lack of power to join everyday life. And Pat had discovered how to make that power when he escaped from the institution, right?So one of the basic things I think about the movement is, is everyday life goal? Is being a citizen in connection with others the place in life that you're trying to achieve? And Pat had that in mind when he formed the group, but he first thought we ought to get enough power to get free of people who were controlling us and then we would have the possibility of moving to the world where we were connected rather than disconnected, or disorganized.Another thing, one of my best friends, she passed away I think now three years ago, was another Canadian named Judith Snow. I think she was very famous in the United States too. And Judith was born so that she could only move her thumb and her face. And we became very, very close friends. She used to come and visit us for her vacation. And she told me one time she said, “You know it wasn't until I was thirty years of age that I really understood who I was.”And she said, “I had spent so much of my life being labeled and accepting the label and fighting the label but that didn't tell me who I was.” And then she said to me, “When I was thirty I had a revelation, and it is that I am exactly the person who God created me to be and therefore I have every reason in the world to participate in this world because I have God's gifts.”Now you don't have to put it in religious terms, you could say “I have gifts.” And so I think the relentless, relentless insistence that the critical question about somebody is not what's wrong. It is, what's their gift? And building a life out from their gift is the key to entering community.Katie: You know for listeners who don't know who Judith Snow is she is a pioneer really in education, in training programs, she's an author, she's written a lot of things and I actually had pulled a quote of hers leading up to this because I knew of your friendship with her.“A gift is a personal quality that when it's brought into relationships in a valued way allows opportunity to emerge.” - Judith SnowJohn: Oh boy, that's Judith. And Judith was a person who wanted to be a part of everyday life and I remember one time we have sort of a weekend home up in rural Wisconsin. She knew I was a fishermen and so she said to me, let's go fishing. And I didn't know about whether or not that was something that was going to be very good for her or if she'd really like it. But we went and the place we went to fish had some canoes and she said, well if I'm going to fish, I'll have to be in a canoe. And she was in a wheelchair. You know and the idea of getting her into that canoe seemed to me a little perilous. But she had an aid and we got into the canoe. You know they're a little tippy, I was very careful, a little afraid. And we went out together and I fished and she talked with me and watched and enjoyed the lake. And I caught more fish than I've ever caught before.And I thought you know, she made me a real fishermen by taking her adventure, desire to discover, to be a part of it all. And she brought me into that world, and see what a benefit I got?Katie: And those are exactly the gifts that she's talking about.John: Right.Katie: Yeah, I love the list that you share that she has, that she said the gifts that people with labeled with disability have. I'll link to that in the show notes for people to see but it's brilliant.One thing you mentioned when you were speaking about Pat's story that I want to go back to is that sometimes parents, in the time that Pat was advocating and starting People First, parents were actually getting in the way of people with disabilities being part of community life. And now today, what we're doing at Starfire is really putting families at the center of building community and we're asking families and parents to participate alongside their children with or without disabilities to be a part of effective community change. So how do you know when you're on the right track with that, as a parent, as a neighbor, as a connector, how do you know when you're on the right track with building community?John: You know that very idea is pioneering. I'm looking forward to learning from these families what kind of things they did, sometimes it might not have worked, I'd like to know that too. So I think I would probably approach the question you're asking the same way I would approach if you weren't say, anybody involved happened to have a label. And I would say that a family might first examine themselves in two ways: number one what do we all care about? What common interest do we have? And the second is: what gifts do we have? Those answers to those two questions are the keys to opening your access into community life.Because you'll usually find that almost any interest that people have there is some group, club, or association that is focused around that. So if you can come to that part of the communities' life with what makes the group work anyway, a common interest about the same thing, I think that's a pretty clear path to becoming engaged. Now you're not creating something anew but something new may grow out of that relationship, right? And the other possibility is your gifts as against your interests. Your gifts are key to your entry into community. So what do we have that we care about, and can share, can use as our key and if we have been great stewards of Christmas maybe we can bring more Christmas to the block than the block has had before. I think that's happened with one of your groups. So they're looking at what they have to offer as the starting point that would involve other people who are attracted to that. Now, there aren't a lot of people sitting around thinking, “Gee, I'd like to have a better Christmas.” But when a group of people offer them a better Christmas, right? All of a sudden they're attracted. And that's what makes almost all groups work.Natural groups, clubs, groups and associations in neighborhoods are groups of people who are together for one or two reasons or both. Number one they care about each other, number two they care about the same thing.Very often the way you come to care about one another is you get together because you care about the same thing. And then your care for each other grows. So those are the avenues I think of, what's the ramp into the community? And it's interests and gifts. And your honest conviction that you have something to offer, and not that the community will solve your problems.You have something to offer. Everybody does. I've never met anybody who didn't have something to offer.Katie: So it sounds like you're on the right track as long as you are using gifts as your north star and you're focusing on that and the minute you start to veer off into some other direction maybe around your empty half or the problems, or going toward the service to fix things then you're kind of veering away from the path.John: Yes, excellent summary.Katie: One of the things that you worked on in Chicago was a project called Logan Square. You were the principal investigator in this what became a publication written by Mary O'Connell. And in this introduction Mary starts to describe the myths of the ideal of a small town past where “people sipped lemonade together on the front porch, watched out for the neighbors kids, shared the works of the town and the fruits of their gardens.” And I think there's a common argument, especially today, we're very aware of how the way things used to be is oftentimes mythologized, you know, things were way worse back then for people who were marginalized typically who are left out typically. People with disabilities, people of color, people who are part of the LGBTQ community, people who are typically just like I said left out of communities. So when we're talking about community building are you trying to get back to the way things were, or how do you marry those two ideas? Because I know you worked a lot with civil rights in your career?John: Well I'm not sure they're two things. I think people who are concerned about civil rights are concerned about equality and they're overcoming formal ways of exclusion. So you can't discriminate against me when I eat or when I'm in a restaurant or when I'm seeking housing. Those are formal ways of overcoming exclusion. But the law can't reach to a local community that may be exclusive, right? You can't pass a law saying you can't be exclusive here folks. You've got to include everybody.So I think our asset based development effort is always circumscribed by something that Judith said, and she was one of our best faculty members.She said, “It's our job to ensure that there's always a welcome at the edge. That exclusion is not what binds us together but invitation and welcome is what binds us together.”I think that the idea of “civil rights” works as a means of dealing with formal structures and systems - but it is invitation and inclusion that works in the space that isn't the formal world.Katie: It's so interesting how you just put that because it goes back to what you said about police officers, we need to generate safety in our own communities. They can't be the only answer, and same with laws, laws can't be the only answer in creating equality or inclusivity. We have to be the inviters and conveners.John: People of color, people with labels of any kind live in a world where the majority or at least a large number of people, do not respect them. And laws will not produce respect. But if somebody on a block says, I know this person who's been on the margin and they have something to offer, come on in, we need you and that gets shared. Then you begin to see respect. And it's the building of respect I think that is very much a word that says, we want you because you are valued, we know you have something to offer.Katie: That's beautiful. I'd like to just end with one final kind of question and it's something that I like to end on usually is hope but I think too we need change and sometimes when you end on hope it doesn't motivate people to do anything on their own. So I'd like to motivate people today with this question. What is the most urgent call to action that you think we have today as citizens?John: Know your neighbor. Start at home. Margaret Mead said that all change starts with small groups of people. It doesn't start out there it starts in here. So just historically if you want to change things, go next door, start there.

How do you market a company that is selling something fundamentally new and different? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, John Rougeux of Flag & Frontier talks about category design. It's not a tactic for every company, but when used strategically, category design can drive truly remarkable marketing results. John digs into who category design is right for, how long it takes, what a category design go-to-market plan looks like, and how to gain organizational support. He also shares examples of companies and marketers who've successfully created new categories. Highlights from my conversation with John include: John is an experienced category designer who has also owned and exited a business. He says that compared to traditional inbound marketing strategies, category design requires a much larger lift when it comes to educating the market. Every business has a choice to either compete in an existing market or create a new market.  If you're creating a new category, you have three choices: 1) try to fit your product within an existing category; 2) ignore category in your marketing and focus on the product's features and benefits; or 3) create a new category. John says options 1 and 2 don't work. When considering whether category design is right for you, you need to honestly evaluate your product and determine whether its simply a niche within an existing category or something that has truly never been offered before. If its the latter, then category design is really the only logical solution. Category design takes time. John says you should expect to spend six to nine months just designing the category behind the scenes, and then once you roll that out publicly, it can take another few years before it really takes hold. Category design needs to be a business initiative, not simply a marketing strategy, because it affects product roadmaps, sales and more. When executing a category design strategy, it is critical to focus marketing messaging on the problem that your audience is experiencing and the outcomes that they will experience as a result of your solution rather than how the product itself actually works. The companies that have been most successful at category design have evangelists whose job it is to go to market and talk about the problem and why there is a new solution. Its also important to build a consistent conversation around your new category. That might mean holding a big event (like HubSpot's INBOUND or Drift's HYPERGROWTH) or building a community, like Terminus's FlipMyFunnel.  If your company is venture-backed, it is also important to get your investors on board with the idea of category creation so that you have the funding to support the strategy. There are examples of category design all around us. Some of the bigger and more visible ones are minivans and music streaming services. The category wasn't created overnight, and in many cases, people don't even realize its a new category, but we see it is as fundamentally different from the status quo, and that is what successful category design looks like.  Resources from this episode: Visit the Flag & Frontier website Email John at John@FlagandFrontier.com  Visit John's personal website Purchase a copy of Play Bigger Listen to the podcast to learn more about category design, when it makes sense, and how you can use it to dramatically improve your marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is John Rougeux, who is the founder at Flag & Frontier. Welcome, John. John Rougeux (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Thanks for having me on. John and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah. I'm really excited to have you here for completely selfish reasons. I am deep, deep into the weeds, trying to learn everything I can right now about category creation because it's something that I'm kind of working on for a little project at work. And I stumbled across your name. I think it was in a LinkedIn post mentioned by Sangram Vajre at Terminus, and he mentioned you as somebody who's doing a lot of work on category creation. And I immediately thought, oh, I need to have him in on the podcast. And here you are. I am so excited, so welcome. John: Thanks. Thanks. I actually want to come back to something that you said a minute ago. You mentioned this was a little project for you, so I'm going to pick your brains about why it's not a big project. Kathleen: I think I might just be downplaying it. John: Okay, all right. Kathleen: It's a huge project. John: All right. Kathleen: Yes, yes. It is a giant. In fact, it's probably bigger than I think it is. No, it's- John: Well, Sangram told me a few weeks ago. He said, "If you're not doing something that scares you a little bit, then you're not setting your sights high enough." So I think you're on the right track there. Kathleen: Yeah, no, I think my whole career has been a succession of choices that consistently terrify me. So hopefully, that means I'm on the right track to somewhere. So you have an interesting story. You started out or your career really grew in B2B tech, and you worked in some companies that were looking at category creation as a potential strategy and it seems that that wet your appetite and led you to where you are today. Can you just talk a little bit about your background and how it got you to where you are now and what you're doing now with Flag & Frontier? About John Rougeux and Flag & Frontier John: Yeah. Yeah, happy to. So the thing that I like to tell people is that I always wish that I knew about category design earlier in my marketing career. I think it would have helped me be more successful and make better choices and think through the strategy of what I was working on at the time a lot more thoroughly. So the reason I say that is in 2013, I co-founded a company called Causely. And I won't get too far down into the weeds of what Causely does and the business model, but we were basically using cause marketing as a way to incentivize people to take action. And specifically, we were looking at incentivizing referrals on social media. And at the time, I was looking at marketing through a fairly narrow lens, like a lot of people do maybe when they are kind of earlier in the middle of their marketing careers. We were looking at things like you know how do you improve the performance of an advertising campaign? How can you write a better better blog post? All of those kind of tactical things. And I didn't realize at the time that what we were doing was something categorically new. People didn't have context for what that meant, what they should compare it to, what value they should expect, what things should it replace or not replace? And so we had a reasonable trajectory. We scaled the business to a few thousand locations. It was acquired. But when looking back on it, I know that if we had had this lens of category design of how do you describe something when it's different than anything else out there, I think we could have gone even further. And so when I joined a company called Skyfii in 2018, I had started to kind of understand what that meant, so I had read Play Bigger. I read some, the works by Al Ries and Jack Trout that talk about how if you can't be first in a category, design any category you can be first in. And at Skyfii, that business, it's a publicly-traded SaaS company out of Australia and they found that they were participating in a fairly commoditized space. Or I guess to be more accurate, the perception was that they were a competitor in a fairly commoditized space. And their business had evolved past that and the product did all sorts of other things that were much bigger than the category the market thought they participated in, but they didn't really have a framework for talking about that. And so we went through a repositioning exercise where we defined a new category that better reflected what they were all about and and how people should kind of relate to that. And that was a really, I think, powerful and challenging exercise to think through.We've got something new in the market, but how do we describe that? How do we tell the right story? How do we tell the right narrative so that people know how to relate to it? Why category design is a fundamentally different approach to marketing Kathleen: This is so interesting to me. There's so much I want to unpack here. I guess, starting with something that you kind of started with, which is that there is this typical marketer's playbook, right, where people come in and they think, "Oh, we need to top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. We need to create content and attract people," this and that. And when it comes to category creation or trying to market something that is different than anything else people are used to, that playbook doesn't really work. Because as I'm quickly learning, especially looking just at the top of the funnel, traditional top of the funnel marketing, it's like well what is that problem that people are having and they start to look for a solution. And the challenge you have is that if the solution you're offering is something they've never heard of, it's such a steeper climb to try and gain their attention. It's like they don't know the right questions to ask even, if that makes sense. John: No, that's absolutely right. And I always like to mention a really thoughtful post that Mike Volpe, the founding CMO of HubSpot wrote a few years ago because it lays such a great groundwork for any discussion around category design. And the blog post simply says that look, every marketer has two choices on their strategy. They can pick an existing category and try to carve out a niche within that category. Maybe they can dominate that category. But basically, they have to pick a space and then do the best they can within that space. Or they can try to design a new category. And when you look at kind of the underlying product or business model and you really take a close examination of what it is and whether it's different or whether it's something better, you almost don't have a choice. If you're doing something that is new that people don't have a framework for, you really have three choices. So I want to pack these for you. So choice number one is you can try to shoehorn this new thing you've built into an existing category. And we'll come back to why that doesn't work in a second. Number two is you can just talk about the products, like features and benefits but not really think about a more underlying narrative for that. And then number three is you can design a new language, a new framework, which is called category design. And so here's why number one and number two don't work. So again, number one is if you try to shoehorn something new into an existing category. The reason that works against you is that people will make the wrong comparisons for what you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to be priced, how you deliver value. That just works against you. Secondly, if you just try to talk about the product itself but don't provide a larger context, you're not giving people, you're not giving them really any framework, and it makes it difficult to understand what you're all about and why they should be interested in you. I'll give you a great example. A friend of mine works at a company and I won't mention the name of the company, but they combine two different categories kind of in an existing platform. So one of these is VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol communication software, very established, known space. The other thing they do is they have these marketing automation functions that they add to their software to at least in my view very disparate types of software, but they combine them together. And so far, they haven't really given their buyers a context, a category for what this thing means. And so they're basically letting people to their own devices to understand and come up with their own conclusions about what that is. And that just puts a lot of work on your buyers when they have to think about who they should compare you to when they need to think about what department is this even for, or what products does this replace or not replace? That's generally too much work for people when they're trying to understand something new. And like you said, Kathleen, if you're not telling them what questions they should ask, then chances are they're just going to be too confused before they'll even really be interested in having a conversation with you. Kathleen: Yeah, and there's two other aspects to what you just said that I think are really interesting, which I'm beginning to appreciate more with the work that I'm doing. One is that human nature is such that people want to slot you into something that they already understand. They don't want to have to think outside the box. So when people hear about something new, that their natural inclination is to try and categorize it in with things that they already know. And that's a hard thing to battle because you are literally battling human nature. And the second thing is if you do allow yourself to be put into a category that already exists that maybe isn't really truly what you're doing and you are actually successful in selling your product, you will wind up having a lot of problems with churn once you do sell it because people are still going to be thinking that you are like that other thing that you're not actually like. And they're going to be looking for your product or your service or whatever it is to solve for them in the same way that other thing does, when in reality your thing does not solve those problems. So it's like you're setting yourself up for a very long horizon of failures that you might not see at the outset, but it's kind of a you're failing before you've even begun. John: Yeah, that's a great point. And yeah, people do... They tend to... The world is so complicated, and there's so many things that we have to deal with and try to understand that we use this rule of thumb of categorizing things. Sometimes we do it explicitly, like smartphones are a great example of a category we all know about and buy them and we know why they're different than a mobile phone. Sometimes we just do it implicitly. We don't necessarily have the language or the terms to describe that category, but we know that we try to group likes things together because it makes it easier to understand the world. Kathleen: Yeah or we use analogies. So many times, you hear things like, "Well, that's just the Uber of," and then they list a different industry. Or, "That's the Airbnb of something else." John: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: And so we're constantly trying to put these things into comfortable mental frameworks, which I think is fascinating. So you mentioned there were three things. The first two, I think you covered. And then the third is really designing a new category. John: The third is designing a new category. That's right. That's right. When does category design make sense? Kathleen: So how do you know... I guess the first question is how do you know when that's the path you should be taking? John: That's a great question because I've heard from some people that they have this idea that every company should try to design a category, and that's really not the case. It applies to some companies. But for many other companies, like if you're developing a CRM, a better version of a CRM, don't try to build a new category around that. So yes, so the way you would look at that is there's no formula you can put into Excel and calculate and churn all this out, but it really comes down to does the thing that you've built, does it solve a problem that has not been solved before? Or does it do so in a way that the world isn't familiar with? So is there a new business model behind that? Is there a new delivery mechanism behind that? It really comes down to those two things. And maybe if you want to look at it at a more fundamental level, you could ask yourself do the existing categories that my market is familiar with, do they accurately capture the type of thing that I'm offering? If they do, then one of the reasons you may want to choose to carve out a niche in an existing category is that people are looking for established products in established categories. People are looking for marketing automation software, they're looking for smartphones, they're looking for video communications tools like Zoom, like we're using today. And so, if you say, "Hey, we have the right tool within this category for this specific market or for this specific need," that can be very powerful. And arbitrarily forcing yourself out of that category just because you like that idea of category design is going to work against you. Now, that being said, again to kind of flip it around, if you find that the categories and the language that are used to describe existing products your market is familiar with just don't capture what you're doing or they limit it in some way, then ultimately you need to find a way to break out from that and that's what the process of category design is all about. What does it take to create a new category? Kathleen: Now, one of the things that I've come to appreciate just the more I look at this is what a big lift creating a category is. As you said in the beginning, this isn't a little project, right? I would love it if you could just talk a little bit about sort of expectation setting. If somebody is listening to this and they're thinking this really sounds like it could make sense for me, from your experience and what you've seen and you've talked to people who've been involved in category design, how long does it take before you can really expect that the market will recognize a new category? John: Yeah. It's a pretty long-time horizon. And so I mentioned Mike Volpe at the beginning of the call and I'll mention him again and Kipp Bodnar, the following CMO of HubSpot mentioned the same thing I'm about to tell you. And they told me that when they first started talking about inbound marketing, it was like standing in the middle of a town square on a soapbox just shouting into the wind with nobody paying attention. And that was the case for two to three years before that phrase really started to work its way into the lexicon of marketers. Salesforce, they pioneered, not so much CRM but cloud-based software. And even today, they still talk about other applications to cloud-based software that's 20 years later. And another example might be... So at Terminus, they talk about the account-based marketing gospel. And maybe this kind of hints to the challenge of how difficult it is to build a category. Sangram used to be there, I think he was their head of marketing if I'm not mistaken. He's definitely a co-founder, but his role is chief evangelist. And so they recognize that to really get people to be aware of and to understand and use this terminology around account-based marketing, they've had to invest very heavily in evangelizing that market or that message out in the market. Kathleen: Yeah. The other story that I've always found interesting... I followed all the ones you just mentioned really closely. And then the other one that's been fascinating to me is Drift because they came on the scene. And if they're listening, they may take issue with what I'm about to say, but look. A big piece of what their product does is live chat, website live chat, and then they have chatbots. Well, those things have been around for a while. That was not anything new, but they were really smart and they coined it as conversational marketing and they really focused more on, not so much the how and what the technology does, as what it enables the business to do, and kind of wrapped a methodology around existing technology in a way that made it feel fresh and new. And it was pretty genius. And I feel like they actually moved really quickly by comparison to a lot of the other examples I've seen. So it's interesting to me why in some cases, businesses are able to gain traction faster than others. John: Yeah. I would have to think that a lot of it has to do with the culture and how quickly or rapidly that business has gone through change in the past. And the other thing we should probably discuss is just the timeline of everything that happens before you share your new category with the world. I was talking with... There's an interview I did with, let's see, Anna and Cassidy at a company called Narrative Science. And they expected just the category design process itself to take about six to nine months. This is before they released language out publicly. And at Skyfii, that was our experience as well. And for that situation, that company, I think they were founded in 2012 or 2013. So they were five, six years into the business and there had already been a lot of discussion around the space that they started in, which was Wi-Fi marketing or Wi-Fi analytics. And so anytime that you're going into a space where the culture already kind of thinks and has a mental model for what their business is, the process of reworking all of that and getting everyone on board, especially the leadership team and perhaps even investors, getting them on board with that new message in a new way of thinking about the business, it takes time. And I would argue it should take time. Because if you rush the process and you ask your team to start using maybe even radically different language about what you do, people need time to really think through that and maybe they need to push back or challenge you a little bit or ask questions or provide suggestions. There's just this change management process you have to go through. And if you rush through that, people are not going to feel like they're a part of that process. And then ultimately, that's going to undermine your efforts in years one, two, three and further as you're asking your team to help you share that message. And at Skyfii, Skyfii is publicly traded in the Australian market and so they have investors and they have a public... They're very thoughtful about the message they put out into the market. And so they really wanted to take the time to make sure that message was right and that it made sense. And so, yeah, it took us, I don't know exactly how many months, but yeah, around six to nine months to really start that discussion and then get to a point where we were comfortable with the category name and the underlying narrative to support it. Why category design needs to be a company-wide effort Kathleen: Yeah, and I think there's... To me, one of the most important things is consistency because you kind of said if everybody is not on board and everybody isn't speaking from the same playbook, all it takes is one or two people to diverge and talk about your thing and language and terms that puts it squarely back in with all of the other things out there that... And it destroys your effort. John: Yeah. Well, and this is probably a great segue into another really important point about category design, which is that it's not a marketing project. Sometimes, it can be spearheaded by marketing, and marketing will often do a lot of the legwork, but it's not something that's relegated or exclusive to marketing. It has to be something that that CEO is involved in. It affects the company vision and is affected by the company vision. They kind of play off of each other. It affects the product roadmap. It affects what the sales team says. It affects what you might tell investors. So if your CFO is in charge of investor relations, he or she, they have to be on board and educated on the message. That's another misconception I heard a few times and it was... Personally, I thought it was a marketing initiative when I first read about it. But the more I dove deep into it and the more people I talked to, I realized it's actually a bit more of a business initiative, more so than a marketing one. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point. Having that buy-in top to bottom, it's really important. John: Yeah. What's been your experience at Prevailion in kind of leading your team in that discussion? Kathleen: So it was interesting because I came in really excited to make this a category design play. And shortly after I came in, we hired a head of sales, who also had some experience with category design and saw that that was a really strong play for us. He and I had both read Play Bigger, and we just kept talking about it until we basically beat the rest of our leadership team down into buying copies of the book. They've all now read it. They're all super excited about it, and it's great because it's given us a common language and framework around which to talk about what it is we're doing. So we're still really early stage, but I think we have that excitement and that buy-in in principle at least is there. And now, we're at the stage where we have to figure out our plan. What does a category design strategy look like? Kathleen: So along those lines, let's talk a little bit about somebody who's listening and they think, "Yep, this makes sense for me. Okay, I'm going to set my expectations. I understand I need to get top to bottom buy-in." What are the elements that you've seen in your experience from the companies that you've studied that have done this that contribute to successful category design efforts. In other words, what would be a part of a company's plan if they were looking to move forward with this? John: Yeah. So I'll mention two things that come to mind. So one I touched on a moment ago, but it's making sure that the CEO and the leadership team are involved and to the extent that they feel like they have a stake in the success of the project. What I mean is it's not enough for them to say, "Sure, that sounds great. Category sounds great, Mr. or Mrs. CMO. Go for it. Let me know how it turns out." That's not sufficient for getting buy-in. So getting them to be a stakeholder and have a real level of participation, that's absolutely key. And there's an interview I did with Chris Orlob of Gong.io, where we talk about that in more depth. So if you want to link to that, I'm happy to- Kathleen: Yeah, that would be great. I would love that. John: Yeah. The second thing is category design, it's all about talking about a problem that you're solving and less about the product. And so one thing I always like to say is that problem... Let's see, so your solution, your product. Solutions don't exist without problems, right? And then problems don't exist without people. And so you have to go back and understand the people that you're trying to work with and serve, and understand the problem you're trying to solve and the language they use to describe that problem, and the context for which they're trying to solve that problem or maybe they're not even aware that it is a problem or they think it's unsolvable. The point is you have to really understand the problem first and use that to lead your messaging. If your category is all around, here's why this specific product is so great and it's called this category, you're kind of missing the point. When you look at the language and the marketing that companies like Drift, for example, do, 80% of it is on the problem. Drift likes to talk about how the buying process has changed. Buyers are not interested in waiting hours or days or weeks for someone to respond to them. They want a response now. And you even see that word, "now", used.  Kathleen: Yes. That word, that one word... I went to HYPERGROWTH. I think it was not this year, but the year before. I went this year too. John: Okay. Kathleen: The year before, their whole keynote at HYPERGROWTH was all about the one word, "now." And it was so powerful, the way they distilled that down I thought, really, really simple but effective. John: Yeah, yeah. And they've written a book around conversational marketing. If you've used Drift products, you can kind of see some tie-ins but it's really about the problem that they're trying to solve. And people smarter than me have said lots of times that if you can articulate that you understand the problem better than anyone else, then people will assume you have the best solution. You don't have to work so hard to talk about every single little feature or benefit that you offer. Showing that you understand the problem creates empathy with your audience, and then again, they'll assume that you have the best solution to address that problem. Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting that you talk about that because I think that's a really easy mistake for marketers to make, which is to say that, especially when you talk about B2B technology, it's really easy to fall into the trap of talking a lot about what the product does, how the product works. And I think many times, that's facilitated or even encouraged sometimes by the customer asking, "What does the product do? How does it work?" John: Right. Kathleen: And yet, I think the challenge as a marketer is to try to really get ahead of that and take control of the conversation and steer it towards not only the problems as you say and really deeply understanding them, but the outcomes that come from the use of the products. There's problems, and then there are what is the outcome for the user? How does it make their life better? How does it change them for the better? If you think of those as two different poles, and in the middle, lies the product and all the stuff it does, if you can keep the conversation more at the periphery on those poles, then I think you can be really successful. But that's tough. John: No, I've never heard it described that way, but that's a really clear way of describing that. And it's funny you mention that because I was having the opposite experience just this week. I was there was looking for a new email client for my computer. And that's a pretty established category. There's a million email clients. And in that context, you don't need to talk about the problem of communicating with people. Kathleen: Right. John: You know what email is. You don't need to talk about the outcome so much. There were a few features I was looking for and I was trying to find a client that had those features. And so you can talk about that a little bit more upfront when the category is established and people know what the category is, what it isn't, what it's supposed to do. But to your point, Kathleen, if that category doesn't exist and you're really trying to sell a vision around solving a problem, emphasizing what the problem is and then emphasizing the outcomes are really what's necessary to get people interested in just having a discussion around this new idea. And then from there, they're probably going to ask, "Okay, this sounds really good. Tell me about that product itself. What does it actually do?" Then you're in a perfect position to go into those details because they're ready for it. And they get the larger idea. Kathleen: Yeah, and that's where I think the traditional framework of top, middle, and bottom of the funnel comes back into the discussion, right? When you do get towards that middle to bottom of funnel stage, you can get into the weeds of how it works. And I know in our case, for example, it might not even be the same person we're having the conversation with. Our ultimate buyer isn't going to ever care so much how it works. They're going to hand that part of the decision off to somebody on their team and say, "Validate this for me." And it's almost like we've talked about it. We just need a spec sheet, but that... It's kind of like when you're going to a conference and you get the convince your boss letter, but in reverse. We're selling to the boss and the boss needs a convince their engineer letter that they can just hand to them and say, "Here, take this. It's in your language. It'll answer all your questions." Right? To me, that's the steps that we need to go through, but if we get too stuck in the weeds of convincing the engineer early, we're never going to get to convince the boss. John: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Building your category design go-to-market plan Kathleen: Yeah. Well, have you seen... So there are those foundational elements of how you talk about what it is you're doing, how you talk about the category, how you begin to gain share of mind. And then there's the actual go to market. And I've seen a lot of information written. For example, in the book, Play Bigger, which we've mentioned a few times, which is kind of like the Bible for category creation and other places. They talk about the concept of a lightning strike, which is just really a big kind of splashy go to market. It could be an event. It could be some other, something else that really makes an impression on the market and gets it talking about your thing. What have you seen or have you seen anything that has worked really well as far as like quick, well, I don't know if quick is the right word, but very high impact kind of strategies for really making an impression on the market? John: That's a great question. I'm not sure that I've seen a ton of really great examples beyond the few that we've discussed. So back to HubSpot, I don't recall a big... They have their INBOUND event, right? I don't recall that having a huge kind of blow up the world moment at the time when that conference first came out, but they've certainly been consistent and they made it a very conscious decision not to call it the HubSpot User Conference or even put the word HubSpot in there. It was about inbound, something bigger than themselves. I've seen Terminus, they have focused on this idea of a community of people who are interested in account-based marketing. Sangram told me they started with a fairly small event, relatively small event. And they've kind of built it from there. But that's more of an ongoing exercise, I guess, an ongoing process. Drift has their HYPERGROWTH conference. They came out with a book called Conversational Marketing. That's probably the biggest kind of high profile thing they did that was explicitly around that category. I think one of the things around lightning strikes is that, at least the way they're described in the book, is that they feel like they could be appropriate for a VC-backed company, or maybe a publicly traded company who's launching a new category and wants to really make that big splash and can afford to do that. I would say if you're earlier on and you don't have millions to drop on a big event or a massive campaign of another nature, it seems like other companies can can be successful with more of a process-driven approach of who are we trying to get to care about this category? What are they interested in? Where do they spend their time? And how can we just have these conversations with them on a repeatable basis? Because, like we were talking about earlier, it's not like once you name your category, the whole world suddenly cares about it and there's all these... Gartner doesn't give you a ring and say, "Hey, I guess we're going to create a Magic Quadrant because we saw your lightning strike. That's good. This is so great." Everyone who I've talked to anyway, who's done it well, has had to dedicate consistent resources over time to really get people to understand it and think about it. Kathleen: Yeah. You're talking about something that strikes very close to home for me because I've looked at those examples too and I had an opportunity... I've interviewed Kipp Bodnar. I've interviewed Nikki Nixon, who was one of the first leaders of the FlipMyFunnel community for Terminus. I interviewed Dave Gerhardt at Drift. So I've had a little bit of an inside peek into some of those companies. We didn't talk about this topic specifically, but what did strike me about all of those conversations and all of those examples is, as you say, consistency but also not just consistency, volume. There's a difference between, "Hey, we're going to consistently blog once a week, and it's going to be a great blog," and that's just an example. All of these companies not only have been super consistent, but they have turned the volume dial way up in terms of the amount of content they're creating around their category. I think every one of them has written a book actually, because Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah wrote the book, Inbound Marketing. You mentioned the book that Drift wrote. Sangram has written a couple of books. I don't know if that's a requirement or it's just a coincidence, but I think it certainly has helped. But it's also a reflection of that turning up the volume. We're not just going to write a bunch of blogs and use this keyword on them. We're going to write the book on our topic and really own it. And to me, there's something to that. If you're going to do a category creation play, you don't necessarily have to have the biggest budget in the world. Maybe you're not going to throw a HYPERGROWTH type conference, which is a cool conference. But you are going to need to really be prepared to just saturate the market with content, flood people with educational content around what is that problem you're solving, why it matters, why it's new, and why the new approach is better than the old one. John: Yeah. And that comes down to having patience and the right time horizon. And like you were asking about earlier, if your expectation is that category design is something maybe you can do for a few months and then you can go about business as usual, that's a wrong time horizon. And it will take months or probably years for people to really get what you do and talk about it, independent of conversations with you. And you have to have the content to support that, whether that's an event or a blog or a book or a podcast. And I think you also have to make sure that your investors understand that vision. They understand that you want to create something big, you want to create a category that you can dominate and design to your favor. And then if you do that, five to 10 years from now, you will be in a very good position. But also understanding that the first few years will have a different trajectory than someone who's just really trying to scale growth right off the bat at a very high level. Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like you just brought the conversation perfectly full circle because we started talking about how important buy-in was, top to bottom. And you can think of top to bottom as like CEO to the bottom of the organization. But honestly, if you have investors, that's really the top. Your board has to be totally bought-in because you'll get a ton of pressure. I mean we do have investors. We just got a series A round, so I'm dealing with this right now. And we're very fortunate that we have a really bought-in board, but I completely agree with you. It's also fascinating, you mentioned earlier analysts. That's another thing. If you're working with the analysts, what are the expectations you should have there? Because I recently read a quote that was like, "Gartner will never create a new market if there's only one player in it." Right? Because what's in it for them to build a Magic Quadrant for one company? They're not going to do it. So by definition, if you truly, truly are creating a new category, your thing is new and different and not like anything else and you "don't have any competition" which is like the bad words to ever say... Because even if you don't have competition, you have perceived competition. There's nothing in it for an analyst to say, "Well, this is a new category because a lot of work to produce a Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave." They're not going to do it for one company. So that goes back again to the conversation around time horizon. So it's such an interesting play and not for everyone certainly. You mentioned a couple of really good examples from the marketing world, Drift, HubSpot, Terminus. Can you think of any examples from outside of the marketing technology world that are really great examples of category creation? So if somebody is listening and they want to kind of look out in the wild and see who's doing this well, who would you point to? Examples of category creators John: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Once you understand what category design actually means, you start to see new categories all over the place. So I'll mention two. So in high school, Kathleen, I drove a minivan. It had wood siding, I hated it, and it was just the dorkiest car you could drive. But at the time, I didn't know- Kathleen: We have to come back and have a conversation about that in a minute. John: So at the time, I didn't know that minivans were actually representative of a new category in the market. And I can't remember when they first came out. I think it was maybe the mid-80s, and I mean there were these full-size work vans, but people didn't conceive of this van that you would use to haul your family around. It was a completely new category. And it continues to be... I've come full circle. We've got a minivan today, another one. And so anyway, that's kind of a great example. You see that in automotive all the time, so hybrid cars. The Prius was a great example of designing that category. Tesla now for electric cars, SUVs as well. So that's one. And then another one is, I was actually thinking about this on the way to work this morning, the way that Apple and Spotify have really created, I guess, a new category around how music is distributed, I think, is another interesting example. And I think it's a... The reason I bring it up is category design isn't so much about a specific name or a specific taxonomy or a word that Gartner has capitalized. It more has to do with the business model and the way people look at a space. So when Apple launched iTunes, they completely changed the way music was distributed from buying a full album to buying individual songs and to needing to have the physical copy of the media to having a digital copy you could take anywhere. And now, I would argue that maybe Apple or iTunes created that category. They are the first to do that. But I would also argue that it's really Spotify, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think their user number is larger than Apple's for Apple Music, they're the ones who have actually designed the category. They're the ones who said, "This is what streaming music looks like. This is what you're supposed to pay. This is about how many artists or songs we're supposed to have available. This is how we're going to curate music to you." And that's a completely new way of using music or listening to music. I don't know what the official name for that category is. Maybe it's just called streaming music. It's not something I'm an expert on, but that was a very long answer to your question but those I think are two that come to mind for me. Kathleen: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I do feel like we're surrounded by category creation. And it's happening even faster than I think it used to because of the pace of technological change. We just don't necessarily recognize it as such. But when you have that framework through which to think about it, you do start to see it everywhere and it's really interesting to watch. And I think it's kind of like the whole frog that boiled in the water analogy, which is actually a terrible analogy when you really think about what you're talking about. But the notion that- John: Who's actually tried that by the way? Do you know anyone? Kathleen: No, God, I hope not. That's like, don't they say serial killers start by torturing animals? No, no, no. Do not boil any frogs. But the whole idea being it's happening to us. We are experiencing category creation. It's just that it's happening at a pace that we don't like see it. It's not like a yesterday it didn't exist, and today it does. That by the time the category has happened and has become commonplace, it just feels like it's been there all along kind of. It's really interesting. I think there's probably a whole psychological aspect to this that hasn't even been mined in a way that it could. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: But all right, shifting gears because I could talk about category creation forever, but we don't have forever. Inbound marketing. We talked about really what the podcast is about, and I love talking about category creation as part of it. Because when you talked about consistency and HubSpot and Drift and Terminus, really they were all phenomenal examples of companies that really did inbound marketing well. So when you think about inbound marketing as it is today, is there a particular individual or company that you really think is killing it? John: I'm going to say that it's really like a style of inbound marketing that I think is starting to get a lot of attention and it's this idea of having an evangelist be a voice for the company. And the reason I think this is so interesting is because, like our world is, there's so many messages we get from brands today, both on the consumer side and on the B2B side, that I think people have a real... They started to see that you can have a brand say anything, right? It's a construct. But when you have a person who's a real human being talking about the vision and the values and what their brand represents and how it might be able to help, to me, that's a much more authentic way and it's just very relevant in the world today because I feel like people just crave more human-to-human interaction. So a three examples of that. We've mentioned a couple already, so Sangram and Terminus does that very well. Dave Gerhardt does that. He doesn't have the title of evangelist, but he's much more of the face of the company I think even than David Cancel or others. And then, Ethan Beute at BombBomb is doing that really well. Kathleen: Yeah. John: I know you had him on a previous episode, and yeah. I know there's others out there, but those are the three that come to mind. I see their content very regularly. They all do a different job. They have their own styles. They have their own voice, but they're very authentic. And I think they're adding a lot of value for the respective companies through what they do. Kathleen: I totally agree. Those are three great examples. And picking the right person or settling on the right person to fill that role is such a critical decision for the company. It has to be somebody that truly, deeply understands, as you said, the problem that the audience is experiencing, but that also can come across as charismatically and passionately believing in that shift that needs to occur to create that new category. So it's an interesting mix of skills that you look for when you try to find your evangelist. John: Right, right. So does this mean you're going to step up and be the evangelist at Prevailion? Kathleen: I don't know. We actually... I'm really lucky. And one of the reasons I joined the company is that we have this amazing team of really smart people, who are also very invested in participating in marketing. So our CEO is unbelievable. He could sell ice to the Eskimos, not that he would. That makes him sound like he's a smarmy sales guy. He is so smart and he really has been in the market a long time and knows it, and he's also incredibly well-spoken. So while I would love to get up and talk about it, I think I'm really lucky that I have an executive team that is full of people who could probably fill that role better than I could. John: And you know what? I don't think it's entirely an either or situation. Some of those companies I've mentioned, they have someone who's maybe has the largest following or the loudest voice, but there's others on the team who can contribute to that. And I think that's what's really exciting, is it's not just one person, but you can have a whole series of people on your team evangelize for the company. And I don't know about you, there's something about when I just see the people behind a product that I'm thinking about using. I feel so much more comfortable having that conversation and and exploring what they do than I would if I was just reading pure brand messages. Kathleen: Absolutely. It all comes down to trust, right? And if you feel like you can trust that person who is the chief spokesperson, somehow or another there's a halo effect from that that shines down on the brand. And it really saturates the brand with that feeling of trustworthiness, that makes you want to buy from them. John: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: Yeah. I love it. Well, digital marketing is changing so quickly. This topic of category creation is so fascinating because conceptually it seems like something that will stand the test of time, but then how you implement it obviously will change over time. With everything changing so quickly, how do you personally stay up to date and stay educated on all things marketing-related? John: Yeah. For me, both listening to and hosting podcasts has been a big driver of my growth. And so conversations like this one with you are really helpful because you and I could swap ideas. The episodes I've done... So I co-host a series on the B2B Growth show around category creation. I also did a series on FlipMyFunnel. That's given me the chance to talk to people who have done more category design work than I have and learn from them in the process. And for me, that's been so much more valuable than anything I could read or stumble across in a newsletter, not that those things aren't valuable. But having one-to-one access to experts, there's few things that are... I'm not sure if anything is going to beat that. Some of those conversations have led to ongoing relationships, where I've been able to ask questions and dive deeper into other topics. And so that's where I found the most valuable use of time, is just having conversations. I love to read, love to listen to podcasts, but anytime I could just talk to people and listen to them and then talk through my own ideas, man, I'd do that every day if I could. Kathleen: Amen. I just filmed a LinkedIn video about this, about how I learn. And the number one way I learn is through hosting this podcast, which when I say that to people, I know that that's not something that's going to be feasible for everyone. Let me just spin up a podcast so that I can learn. But it is the most amazing vehicle because you get to meet such incredible people like yourself, pick their brains, really get into detail that you can't get into in other ways. And it's amazing how much I take away from it. Second for me is I love to listen to Audible business books on 2X speed as I do my commute. John: What are you listening to right now? Kathleen: I am finishing Crossing the Chasm. And then before that, it was Play Bigger, From Impossible to Inevitable, and I come back. I'll listen multiple times to books because I feel like you absorb more the second time. John: Right. Kathleen: So yeah, lots of good ones. There's never too many books to read or never too few books, I should say. I always have more. John: Right, no shortage of content, yeah. How to connect with John Kathleen: Thank you. That's what I was trying to say. Well, if somebody has questions about category design and they want to reach out, learn more about what you're doing, or ask you a question, what's the best way for them to get in touch? John: Sure. So you could email me at John@FlagandFrontier.com. So that's J-O-H-N@FlagandFrontier.com. You can also just put in John.Marketing in your browser, and it'll bring up a really simple page with just my contact info. Sometimes that's easier to remember. Kathleen: So smart. That's great. I love that. John: I can't believe no one bought that domain, but it was there so why not? Kathleen: Genius. John: It's easier than spelling my last name. And then you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I won't attempt to spell my name here, but if you want to link to it in your episode- Kathleen: I'll put that in the show notes, absolutely. John: Yeah. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great. Well, I have really enjoyed this. I've learned so much. I feel like I probably could have made this podcast three hours long, but nobody wants to listen for that long. If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, I would really appreciate it if you would take a minute, go to Apple podcasts, and leave the podcast a five-star review. That is how other people discover us, and that is how we get in front of a bigger audience. So take a minute and do that. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, John. This has been fun. John: Yeah, my pleasure, Kathleen. And hopefully, we can have another conversation later on as you go further into your own category design process. Kathleen: Yes, about that and also about the minivan that you drove in high school. John: All right, sounds good.

Saffron in the SouksVibrant Recipes from the Heart of LebanonBy John Gregory-Smith Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors. John: I'm John Gregory-Smith, and my new cookery book is called Saffron in the Souks. It's packed with vibrant recipes from Lebanon. Suzy Chase: The first line in this cookbook says, “When I was writing my first cookbook in 2010, I went to work as a chef in Beirut.” Let's go back for a minute, and tell me how you got to that point in 2010, in Beirut? John: So, the landscape was very different then. Social media was a completely different beast back in 2010, I think. I don't even think Instagram was really a thing back then. I was more like Facebook and Twitter. I'd read an article on a restaurant, very old school, like in the newspaper, that was like a community kitchen. The guys set up this place called Tawlet in Beirut, where they had a really good front of house, really good chefs, and they would invite people from local regions of Lebanon to come and cook their local cuisine. The landscape there was a bit, let's say, challenging outside of the city. It was still a bit dangerous. A lot of the people with the money who were living in Beirut weren't traveling anywhere. What you wanted to do was encourage people to come and cook, they could take home a bit of cash. Just do good things via food. I thought it sounded incredible, and I also thought it sounded like a very smart way to go to one place and learn about all the regional cuisine of the country. Lebanon is not a huge country anyway, but it wasn't a great place to be traveling around. You could just go to the city and stay there. I emailed them and they got back to me and said, “Yeah, come out. That would be great, we'd love to have you.” I basically was there for a couple of weeks. I'd go in every morning and do the morning shifts, and help the guys prep for lunch service. The way they eat in this restaurant is just beautiful. You go and you pay a set price, I think it's about $30 or whatever. You have this ginormous banquet laid out for you of hot and cold [mezzes 00:02:21], and then amazing stews and meats, and amazing vegetarian food from the different regions. The ladies who would come in from the regions would spearhead what they wanted to cook, and then the chefs would help them prepare it. It was really quality food, really interesting menus, and it was changing all the time. The desserts, oh my God, they were so delicious! They'd have this huge counter laid out, with opulent desserts. It was just incredible. I learned so much. Really, really enjoyed the city as well. It was a very vibrant place to be, there was a lot happening, it felt like it was really exciting. I was very much advised to just stay in the city, for my own safety. I don't speak Arabic, and that was ... When the locals tell you to do something, you tend to do it, do you know what I mean? Suzy Chase: Yeah. John: So, I had this incredible time, kept in touch with everybody in the restaurant. They were saying, "Oh, you know, the country is changing, it's really opening up, it's a lot safer now. You should think about coming back." I did, I just decided that's what I wanted to do. I went back, hired a car, and drove around for a few months on my own. Tapped into these lovely ladies who'd helped me originally. It was so nice, going to revisit them, and going to stay in their homes. Spend time with them properly, and cook with them on their own terms. It was just phenomenal. Suzy Chase: Now, years later when you went back, did you go thinking about writing a cookbook, or did you just go back, just to revisit it? John: Absolutely writing a cookbook. I got the green light that I could ... Basically, I said to the guys I'd stayed in touch with in the restaurant, if I come back, the way I write books is I need to drive around, I need to be on my own, I need to soak things up. I need to feel that I can go anywhere, do everything, meet everyone. Is that doable? They were like, “Absolutely.” So, I spoke to my publisher. I felt if I could do it, go for it. They were quite supportive. Suzy Chase: Did you have a translator? John: Yes. My Arabic is dreadful. It's a really hard language. Suzy Chase: Yes. John: I'm very bad at languages, anyway. I can speak three words of French. Arabic is a very different beast. I can say hello, and thank you. Most of the times when I say that, people don't really understand what I'm saying. I would very much have a translator. Actually, what I found when I was there is that most of the guys would speak a bit of English. I could get around it quite easy. It was nice when I did have a translator, because I could get the beautiful stories, and the nuances of the food quite a lot better. Suzy Chase: Tell me about the title, Saffron in the Souks? It just rolls off the tongue. John: So, what I like to do is, when I go to these countries, I get incredibly overexcited. I'm quite an excitable person. I charge around, full of energy. I see everything, do everything, and I tend to just love it all. What I want to do is communicate that to everybody, really. It has to be through the recipes, through the writing, and the title. What I was trying to come up with was something really evocative, and beautiful, and that would inspire how the country had inspired me, really. Saffron in the Souks just felt like it had that lovely hint of something exotic. It felt perfect for it. Suzy Chase: It's nice. You could even name a restaurant Saffron in the Souks. John: Yeah, it's gorgeous. I love it. Suzy Chase: It's really pretty. John: Trademarked, by the way, so you can't. Suzy Chase: Oh, darn. I was going to do my new Twitter handle, Saffron in the Souks. John: Funny. Suzy Chase: What is typical Lebanese street food? John: So, the really good stuff would be kebabs. Amazing kebabs, they eat them meat over fire. You wouldn't cook it at home because you don't have a huge fire pit. That is served everywhere. Any town you go to will have a really good kebab shop. They make everything from chicken sheesh, which is the very basic marinated cubes of chicken, to more elaborate lamb kebabs, and ground meats. The other thing is, again, because they don't have ovens, you use communal bakers. Even in the tiny villages, they'll have a local baker. The baker will obviously cook the bread, but they also do these really wicked things called manouche, which is a flatbread that's cooked fresh with zaatar. Zaatar is a spice blend of different dried herbs. Sumac, which is a red berry that grows in dry areas. It's ground and it's got a very tart flavor. Then, finally, sesame seeds. It's quite a sucker punch of flavor. They drizzle oil and put the spice mix over the raw dough and bake it. You eat that as breakfast on the go, and it's just divine. Suzy Chase: Tell me about picking fresh zaatar in Nabatieh? How do you pronounce it? John: Nabatieh. Suzy Chase: Nabatieh. John: Yeah, that was really interesting. Actually, that was right in the south of Lebanon, by the Israeli border. I was advised not to go there. I think people just felt it could be a bit risky, basically. Anyway, I was with the guys who I'd been working with the whole time, who ran this kitchen. I was say I really want to go down there, but I've been told not to. They went, “Listen, we know this brilliant farmer there. He's really lovely. Let's call him and see what he says.” We called this guy, he's called Abu. Abu was so lovely. He went, “Look, it's completely fine at the moment, it's really safe. It feels like it's been safe for quite a while. Why don't you come down to the farm?” I went with a friend of mine, she actually drove me. Now, I did drive everywhere in Lebanon, and it was only out of laziness she decided to drive. It also meant that the journey, which probably would have taken me maybe four hours, because I drive so slowly, took about an hour because they drive ... She drove so fast. We went there, and it was exquisite. It was a really vibrant, green part of Lebanon. Beautiful, it was springtime. Wild flowers everywhere, and this herb called zaatar grows there. If you buy this blend called zaatar, say in America, it will probably have thyme or oregano in it as the herb. In Lebanon, they actually have a herb called zaatar. It's native to their country, and it's got this incredible perfume. Abu was this wonderful man. Really just so much energy and life, he was gorgeous, grew this herb commercially. When he first started growing it, everyone was like, you're insane. This just grows wild everywhere, we can just pick it. He basically knew that he had found the best zaatar plants. He had the last laugh, because now is zaatar is very coveted all over Lebanon and beyond. Suzy Chase: Mm-hmm (affirmative).John: I think he even stocks some restaurants in London now with it. He was just so lovely. We strolled around his farm, and he took me down to this incredible river that was in this gorge. It was just so beautiful. I was thinking I was so lost in the whimsical beauty of this place. I was like, my God, we're actually in a really dangerous part of the world. Who would have thought this kicks off here? It's just too beautiful. He developed ... He was such a canny old man. He developed this technology, this machine that could spin the herbs. He would dry it and spin it, and it would remove all the little bits of grit, and separate the lovely top bit of herb from the grit. I'm like ... the journalist in me was like, I want more information. Tell me about this? How does it work, what does it do? He was really funny, because it was all through a translator. I could just see his face, he was very serious while she was talking. Then, he'd just roared laughing. I even understood what he was saying. He was like, “There's absolutely no way that I'm telling you how this works. This is my trade secret. Back on your horse.” It was just so wonderful, it was such a lovely experience. I'm really glad that I went down there. I felt completely safe, and it's great for me to be able to report back on it. I'm not saying everyone should run down there immediately, but if you choose to and it's right for you, it's pretty fabulous. Suzy Chase: I love the photo of him on page 139. John: Yeah, it's amazing. Suzy Chase: There's just so many stories in that face of his. John: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's amazing. Suzy Chase: Describe the Lebanese seven spice? John: Lebanese, they do use a lot of spices, but actually it tends to be, in general, quite herb heavy and fresh. It's more the old, Arabic dishes that they use spices in. One of the blends is called seven spice. It's typically more than seven spices, that's what I came to realize when I was there. I was like, that's not seven, that's about 12. People would just look at me, very blankly. It tends to be quite heavy, woody spices. Cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, those sorts of things. They add in this incredible spice called mahleb. Mahleb is actually cherry stones, so the pits or the seeds from a cherry, and they're ground, which sounds disgusting. You'd just be thinking, why would you want to grind a gross old stone after you've eaten it? But it has the most incredible sweet perfume. Actually, in Syrian cuisine, they use it a lot in desserts. Lots of pastries and baklava, they'll add it too. It goes into some seven spice mixes, and you can smell the ones that have it. It can be quite hard to find. I think America is very similar to the UK, in if you order it, you get it, but that can be a bit of a faff. I think you can get a mix called [baharat 00:12:17]. I know, for example, in Whole Foods, you can buy baharat. That's a sort of similar style blend. I've tried to put that in. Everywhere I've said seven spice, I've put that in, just so you can stay on top of the cooking. Suzy Chase: How do you spell that, if we want to look for it at Whole Foods? John: Oh, let's try. I'm quite dyslexic, but I'll give it a go. Suzy Chase: Okay. John: I think it's B-A-H-A-R-A-T.Suzy Chase: Okay.John: That's it. Suzy Chase: So, it's spelled like it sounds? John: Yes. I think so. Maybe check on Google just in case-Suzy Chase: Yeah. John: -I've got it completely wrong. Suzy Chase: Well, just look in the Bs. John: Yeah, exactly. Suzy Chase: I found it interesting that Beirut used to be called The Paris of the East. John: Yes. Suzy Chase: Talk a bit about that? John: So, Beirut was originally a very Liberal city, a coastal city. Beautiful beaches, beautiful people, beautiful drinks, beautiful food. It was a French doctorate for quite a long time, Lebanon. It had a massive French hangover, almost. The architecture there was very Parisian, beautiful wide streets, very unlike typical Arabic. It would have wide balconies, beautiful French windows. Things were very open on the facade, whereas if you go to a very Arabic city, everything's very closed because they like to do things behind closed doors. So, it had this beautiful architecture, really good art scene, and it was known as being a quite decadent city. There's a city outside of Beirut called Baalbek, which is an extraordinary city near Syria. Baalbek used to have ... It's famous for Roman ruins, actually. It's got the most incredible Roman ruins. The temples look like the Acropolis. It's the Temple to Dionysus, which is the God of Booze. They used to do these incredible festivals there in the forties, where all the Hollywood greats would go. It was a real roaring place to be. Unfortunately, just because of politics, and religion, and strife, it took a massive turn for the worst. The people who live there remember that, and they hold onto that, and they treasure that. What's really lovely now is that people are like, “We want that back, and we're going to get it back.” You really feel that when you're there now. Beirut has so much energy when you're there. Really amazing, all along the coast, really rocking beach bars where you just hang out all day. Really creative artsy side of the city as well, so lots of poets, and musicians, and artists, and they're really injecting life back into it. Fingers crossed that they can do it, because it's certainly a cool place to be. Suzy Chase: Speaking of Dionysus, when you think about an Arabic country, you would assume no one drinks or parties. John: Exactly. Boy, do they drink and party there. Lebanon is a very small country. It's near, obviously, Jerusalem, so it has ... During the Crusades, it was always quite a hot spot. That coast was very dominant. That whole area has always been ... What's a nice way to put it? A slight tussle between the different religions, let's say. Suzy Chase: A tussle. John: Yeah, really top line way of saying it. When you're there, there's obviously a massive Christian community still there. In this small country, you've got big Christian community, there's a big Arabic community. They've got Drus, they've got Jews, they've got loads of different communities there. A lot of those communities are very happy. Arabs do party, but they just party in a very different way. There's a lot of them there who certainly like to party with a good drink in hand. The interesting thing about Lebanon is they have, to the east valley called Becker Valley. Becker Valley is the wine region, so it's filled with vineyards. They make some exquisite wines there. Suzy Chase: So, describe the sour tang that the Lebanese palette is so partial to? John: Yeah, right. It's extraordinary. They love sour. When you're cooking with Lebanese, there're certain ingredients that their eyes light up, and they love the taste of sour. Pomegranate molasses, which is essentially just pomegranate, which we know are full of those pits with that lovely bejeweled bit of fruit around each one. They just squeeze the juice out and simmer it down. The natural sweetness turns it into this very sticky molasses. They will shove that in salads, stews. They'll make vinegarette and sauces out of it. It gives this very sweet sour tang. The lemons there are incredible. They are tart, but they're not like really horrid, bitter lemons that make you wince. They're more like Amalfi lemons. They're huge, slightly sweet flavored. They're gorgeous, and they will really go for it with that. The other ingredient, I think I mentioned earlier, is the sumac, which is the ground red berry. Quite often, they'll use all three. For example, when they make fattoush, which is a classic Lebanese salad, which is essentially chopped ingredients with bits of crispy fried bread. Just deeply pleasing. They'll make the dressing with pomegranate molasses, lemon juice, and sumac, and then they put in their gorgeous olive oil. It's very, very sour. It's interesting when you're cooking with someone who's palette's a bit more developed in that direction than you. I'd be like, oh, just a little hint. They're like, "What are you doing? Keep going, keep going." Actually, it does work. When you're using really lovely fresh ingredients, they can quite often take a sour that's lovely. Suzy Chase: When I think about Lebanon, I don't think about exciting produce. Talk a bit about that? John: Yeah. It's a funny old place. Again, for such a small country, it's got the most incredible different terrain. You've obviously got the Mediterranean Sea to one side, so you get all the coastal food. Then, you've got the mountains in the North and the South. Really, you've got a band of band mountains in the middle, and then a valley on the other side. It's very fertile, it's incredibly fertile country. They grow everything from fruit and vegetables to amazing herbs. Really, really amazing herbs. Rice grains, everything grows there. They get really good seasons. You get really long, hot summers. You get good autumn, good spring, where it's a lot cooler. Then, cold winters so things can regenerate. You do get this incredible, incredible turnaround of produce there. What's lovely is they don't have a culture like, say, mine or yours, where we're so used to going into the supermarket and you get whatever you want, whenever you want. There, they do have supermarkets in the cities, but everything is just seasonal. You just get what you get, and it is really lovely. They'll be certain things at certain times of the year. For example, strawberries. Well, they'll just go bad for it. Or, in the spring, when the green beans come, farva beans. They just love it. You see little stalls popping up everywhere, selling just one ingredient. The farmers will come, we've got a glut of them. Everybody gets really excited about it, it's so sweet. They may only be around for a couple of months. I don't have that. I've just grown up in London where you go to the supermarket and get what you want. I just love being around that excitement over something so simple. It's really gorgeous. Suzy Chase: One recipe that was surprising in this cookbook is the Garlicky Douma Dumplings. Is it Douma? John: Oh! Yes! They're so good. Suzy Chase: Tell me about those. John: Douma is this beautiful little Christian village. It looks like you're in Tuscany, it's in the hills before you get to the mountains. It is so beautiful. Really, it's extraordinary. I took my parents there, and they couldn't believe it. You've got these little villages with huge churches in. Everything is dome, tiled roofs. It really looks like Italy, it's really weird. All the olive trees going around. In the villages there, they make these dumplings. They almost make a pasta dough, and they fill them with meat. They actually look even like little tortellini. They serve them in a yogurt sauce. When I first got given this bowl of joy, I was so overexcited. Because I'm such a geek, the first thing I wanted to do was take a photo. The light was really bad. I was in this beautiful old house, with this amazing kitchen, and these lovely women cooking and chatting. I got given this bowl of food and yelped, and made a run for what had been the door to go outside. I hadn't realized that someone had actually closed the glass door, so I just ran into it, into the glass door. Suzy Chase: No!John: Luckily, nothing bad happened, but the whole bowl of food just flew all over me. I was like, turned around covered in these dumplings dripping down my face. They were all just in utter hysterics. Suzy Chase: Oh, my. John: They thought I was weird enough anyway, and that was definitely the cherry on top. Suzy Chase: Just pushed you over the top. John: It was so funny. They are absolutely dreamy. They're quite easy to make, because the dough is ... There's actually no egg in it. Unlike pasta, there's no egg in that dough, so it's super easy to work with. They are delicious. Suzy Chase: Last weekend, I made your recipe for Beirut meatballs on page 111.John: I saw! Suzy Chase: Now, this is a traditional recipe named after an Ottoman name Daout BashaJohn: Yeah. Suzy Chase: How have you adapted this recipe, and how did this guy get a dish named after him? John: So, funnily enough, the woman who told me this story, it was really funny. She was this incredible woman, she was so glamorous and cool. I met her in the restaurant in Beirut. I didn't meet her 10 years ago, I met her this time around because I kept going to the restaurant for lunch. Whenever I was in the city, I'd always pop in to say hi to everyone. I met her. We got on like a house on fire, and actually went to her house. She showed me how to cook these. She was like ... You know how when you meet some people, you're just naturally drawn to them? Suzy Chase: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. John: They've just got something about them. She'd been through really bad cancer. She was so full of life and energy. Her son was an opera singer. They were just really cool. I'm a bit obsessed with pasta and meatballs, and for some reason we were talking about that. She was like, “Oh my goodness. There's this dish that I've got to teach you.” She showed me how to make them. They're sort of like sour meatballs in a ... There's a lot of onions, and pomegranate, and it's very perfumed. I was asking her, where is this recipe from? She gave me that story, that this Turkish guy had come. This was named after him. I said, why? She just went, “Well, it just is.” That was the end of the story. Suzy Chase: Okay. John: I was like, oh. Can you give me any more detail than that? She's like, “No, they're just named after him.” I've Googled it, and spoken to other people, and they all said the same thing. Whoever he was, came over, and left this dish. That's it. Regardless of the slightly stunted story, they are delicious. They're really, really nice. Suzy Chase: I even made my own pomegranate molasses, which was so easy. John: Wow. That's really top marks. You win. That's amazing. I would never do that. Suzy Chase: It was really easy.John: Really? How long did it take to cook down? Suzy Chase: About eight minutes. Not that long. John: That's so good, that's amazing. Suzy Chase: I didn't need that much. John: Is that because you couldn't find a bottle? Suzy Chase: Yeah, I couldn't find-John: Oh. Suzy Chase: I used pomegranate juice. John: Oh, that's great. How intuitive of you. Suzy Chase: Yeah, look at that.John: Look at you. Suzy Chase: Look at me cooking. I also made the recipe for roasted carrots with tahini and black sesame seeds on page 51. John: Yeah, that's nice. Suzy Chase: Describe this dish. John: Obviously I said earlier about the way the produce works, and the way things are just eaten in season. They have an innate love of vegetable. They just love veggies. They do them really, really well. Most meals you go to, actually, will have ... Actually, quite a lot of people will eat vegetarian food quite a lot of the time, certainly in the more rural areas where they've not got so much cash. Even if you eat a big meal, it will tend to be a little meat or fish, then loads of veg. This was just one of those dishes that was very simple, and it makes the vegetables sing. What you want is ... Do you have the word ... You do have the word heritage for vegetables in America, don't you? Suzy Chase: Yes. We call them heirloom. John: Okay, so heirloom carrots. Suzy Chase: Mm-hmm (affirmative).John: You want the nicest carrots that you can get. All different colors, all different flavors. You just roast them up with a bit of cumin. The lovely bit is the tahini. Carrots have that deep sweetness that you get from a root veg. Tahini is almost like a peanut butter, but it's made with sesame seeds. It's a ground sesame seed paste, and it has a wonderful, rich sweetness that just compliments the carrots. It's just two ingredients that work so well together, and I just love it. Suzy Chase: I also made the Akra smashed Lemon Chickpeas on page 16. John: Whoa. Suzy Chase: How is this different from hummus? John: Okay, hummus is chickpeas, tahini, garlic, and lemon. That's how you make classic hummus. This recipe, it's called Akra Smashed. Akra is the name of the restaurant in Tripoli. Tripoli is this fabulous, old Venetian city on the coast, north of Beirut. It really is buzzing, it's brilliant. I think, actually the best street food in Lebanon is in Tripoli. There's this ginormous restaurant called Akra. It opens really early in the morning, like six o'clock, maybe even earlier, and it stays open until about two. All they serve is hummus. It's got about 350 covers, it's packed the whole time. The point being, you basically get a whole bowl of hummus for yourself, with a little bowl of pickles, veg, and some pitas. That's a snack or a light meal. Actually, it's not that light because you eat so much of it. They serve the classic hummus. They serve a thing called hummus ful, spelled F-U-L. That's made with fava beans. It's quite an acquired taste, actually. Then they make this other style of hummus that I copied in this book. It's basically the same ingredients. You've got your chickpeas, your lemon, your garlic, and your tahini, but it's blended so that it has a bit more texture. It's more lemon juice than you would normally serve, so it tastes a bit fresher, a bit lighter. It's got a lovely texture to it. It's not that silky smooth complexion of hummus, it's a bit more chunky. Like a guacamole or something. What was so nice about it is you get that sort of texture, and almost dryness from the chickpeas. It feels like it's gagging for something. What they did is they drizzle it with a chile butter, a very rich chile butter, and then loads of roasted nuts. You get all the things in it missing, and it's just divine. Suzy Chase: Now to my segment this season called my favorite cookbook. John: Right.Suzy Chase: Aside from this cookbook and your others, what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why? John: Oh, all-time favorite book, that's really hard. Can it only be one? Suzy Chase: Yes. John: Yes, because that was the question, wasn't it? Oh my God, that's really hard. What would be the one book that I would hang onto? I would be Delia Smith, How To Cook. Delia Smith is a stalwart British cookery writer and TV chef from the ... She was really massive ... She's still huge here now, but she was really big in the seventies and eighties. It was before cookery was cool, so on telly. It was a bit like a school teach telling you how to cook. Her recipes really worked. It was everything from how to make an omelet to how to make a roast chicken. I taught myself how to cook with that book. My mom had a copy. The cover, Delia has the most extraordinary, coiffed 1970s haircut you've ever seen. It looks like someone's put a weird bowl over her hair, tilted it backwards, and cut around it. Suzy Chase: I love it. John: It's extraordinary. If you Google it, it will just make you roar with laughter. That book, I learned how to cook from it. I think that would probably be the one book I feel so nostalgic about and hang onto. Suzy Chase: In interviewed James Rich, who wrote the cookbook Apple yesterday. John: Oh, yeah, right. Suzy Chase: He said the same thing! John: Did he? Suzy Chase: Yes! John: That's so funny. That is so funny. Suzy Chase: Okay, so you've done Turkey, Morocco, and Lebanon. What's next? John: I'm entirely sure, actually. I came up with a brilliant, very hair brained idea. I like really weird and wonderful, I love weird and wonderful a lot, and I my publisher thought my idea was way too weird, and perhaps not so wonderful. They've asked me to rethink. Yeah, I definitely want to continue with the Middle Eastern thing. I feel that I want to dip into another country there, because I just love it around there. I've got a trip coming up, actually. I'm going to Gaza in a couple of weeks, which is going to be very, very interesting. Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh. John: Yeah, I'm going with a charity to look at child nutrition out there. It's all quite intense. I think it will be incredible, I think it's going to be really extraordinary going to pretty much a war zone to see how people eat. Yeah, it's going to be quite an intense trip. I would love to go somewhere ... I love the Eastern Mediterranean, it's beautiful. I'd love to do a book in Iranian food, but I don't think now is the time to be going to Iran. Suzy Chase: What does your mom say? Is your mom freaking out?John: Yeah, completely. When I said the G word, they made that teeth wincing noise. She went, “Oh, my baby. What are you doing? Why are you doing that?” I said, I want to go because it's this amazing charity and we're going to help children. It means this tiny thing I can do to contribute could be a really good thing. She was just like, “But why there? Why don't you pick somewhere nicer?” I'm dead excited. I think it'll be great. Suzy Chase: So, where can you find you on the web, and social media? John: So, I use Instagram an awful lot, much to the annoyance of my family. My Instagram handle is @JohnGS. I've got a lot of content on there, I do a lot of free content. I'm trying to stick a couple recipes out every week for people to copy. Then, everything on my website, which is just JohnGregorySmith.com.Suzy Chase: As the Lebanese people say, Sahtain, which means double health. Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast. John: Loved it, and love you. Outro: Subscribe over on CookeryByTheBook.com. Thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Are you a property manager or owner who wants to recoup financial losses when stuck with a bad tenant who stops paying rent or needs to be evicted? Lower your risk? Trust somebody else to manage your properties? Protect all parties involved?  Today, I am talking to John Higgins, co-founder and CEO of Steady Marketplace, a leading technology platform for property owners and managers. Steady’s subsidiaries offer financial products, including rent default insurance.  You’ll Learn... [02:00] Background of Big Financial Numbers: Starting with event-driven, distressed, and activist hedge fund managers with billions in assets.  [06:37] Steady’s products protect property owners/managers from bad tenant outcomes.  [07:40] Rent Default Insurance: Protection against rental income loss due to tenant’s failure to pay.  [10:15] Rent Default Insurance is widely available and adopted around the world. About 70% are renters and 30% are owners. [12:38] Collaboration Over Competition: Don’t simply copy-and-paste products and policies; leads to lack of innovation. [13:55] Automate It All: Learn from online lending space using technology to streamline processes, operations, and pricing. [15:05] Perfect Businesses are Out of Business: Entrepreneurs think they've got something perfect, only to realize they need to make it better.  [16:15] By the Book: Take regulatory issues seriously, and make sure to do it right. [17:00] Adoption is #1 challenge with any solution, software, or service.  [17:55] Competitive Advantage: Education, awareness, and understanding of product.  [20:53] FAQs: How does it work? Why does this exist? What’s the catch?  [21:55] Renter’s Insurance vs. Rent Default Insurance: What’s the difference? Tweetables Every entrepreneur should make a difference. Otherwise, they're just causing problems. When there’s a loss of rental income due to tenant default, there is no protection. Automate everything: Go slow to go fast. That's how the process works. It's constant iteration to get better, and better, and better. Resources John Higgins’ Email Steady Marketplace Steady Marketplace FAQ John Higgins on LinkedIn SureVestor Rent Rescue National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners, we want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today, I am hanging out with John Higgins of Steady Marketplace. John, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. John: It's great to be here, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: John, you've got a really big bio and you're really impressive. Do you want me to read all of it? John: You can read whatever you want to read. I'm not that impressive. I'll say you're more impressive hosting this show and with your following in the space. I'm just a guy trying to make a difference. Jason: I appreciate it. That's what every good entrepreneur is trying to do is make a difference, at least I hope. Otherwise, they're just causing problems.  I'll read a little bit here. It says you are the co-founder and CEO of Steady Technologies Inc., a leading technology platform for property owners and property managers. Steady, through subsidiaries, offers financial products that benefit property owners and managers. Their first product is rent default insurance, offered in partnership with the top US insurance carrier that is a Fortune 100 company, rated A+ by AM Best, and S&P.  Prior to co-founding Steady, Mr. Higgins founded Nobadeer Advisors which provided business development and capital market expertise to technology-enabled lending platforms across the variety of consumers and business, lending verticals, and backed by top venture capital firms globally.  Prior to Nobadeer, Mr. Higgins spent 2.5 years at Prosper Marketplace, Inc. where he helped build the institutional loan program growing it from $0 to over $5 billion over his tenure and help scale Prosper's monthly origination volumes over 4000% during his time at the firm.  Mr. Higgins also previously served as a director at Topwater Capital, now owned by Leucadia, where he made investments between $5-$100 million to hedge fund managers across a variety of strategies via structured managed accounts.  Prior to Topwater, Mr. Higgins spent five years working for event-driven, distressed, and activist hedge fund managers with assets as large as $1.85 billion. There's a lot of big financial numbers here, John. A lot of big financial numbers. John: Want me to dive a bit deeper on it and summarize for you? Jason: Yeah. Let's dive into that and then tell us how you got into all of these. John: Sure. I can start from how I got into the hedge funds space which led me through here. I started and talk my way into an internship my junior college, totally unqualified, at the University of New Hampshire versus people that are top of their class from top business schools. Got a shot to join big hedge fund on my way up. I worked my tail off that summer and got a full time offer. I joined that firm full time after I graduated college. I was really lucky. I worked for the really brilliant entrepreneur there who would start this business with $500,000. Four years later, he grew it to almost $2 billion.  Then, left that company and went to Topwater where I was invested in hedge fund strategies via structured managed accounts, kind of cross the bench of the long, short, and distressed credit. That company was acquired by Leucadia which is now Jefferies Investment Bank; the two merged. Leucadia was at a big stake and Jefferies a long story anyway. As that transaction was transpiring, I was approached by the former management team across the marketplace who've I known from the hedge fund industry. They had great entrepreneurs that built and sold the company that served hedge funds called Merlin Securities. They're backed by Sequoia. Sold that business to Wells Fargo and decided they were going to take over Prosper.  They reached out and said, "We're looking for someone to help us build out this business as we take it over and turn it around." Really fortunate to work with tremendous entrepreneurs and the tremendous team there. During my time there, we went from about 50 employees up to about 600+ when I left. That was my first foray into more pure play technology.  We're a financial technology platform. We're offering unsecured personal loans online to end consumers. If you're thinking about going online, applying for a personal loan, no human interaction, [...] pricing, I can get you a loan in a matter of days as opposed to having to leave your house, go to a bank, et cetera, and fill up paper forms. After leaving Prosper, I was consulting for various lending platforms as you touched on in the intro. I got to work again with tremendous entrepreneurs across a bunch of different verticals. One of the people I've got to work with was doing some lending into the small landlord space. It's fix and flip lending and also rental lending. I started looking at the opportunities. I said, "This is really interesting. I know all of these products that helped multifamily owners protect them against bad tenant outcomes."  There's a lot of companies that pop up doing that, but no one's really going after single family. I started looking at the space and opportunity. As you and everyone else in the space realizes, it's actually bigger than the multifamily space. When you live in New York, everyone thinks rental properties are the big highrise. In fact, there's roughly more than 16 million single family rental units in the US, then another 8 million duplexes, triplex quads. All in all, you have about 20 million rental units in the US owned by individual investors that owned less than 10 units. These owners actually can't solve for this risk which is if the tenant goes bad. The smart owners are getting professional property managers or actually better at picking tenants at the established processes and procedures. They're getting bad tenants out. It can help manage those properties and have better outcomes. But still, when there’s a loss of rental income due to tenant default, there is no protection. In fact, my business partner and co-founder, Viken, had a property in New York City that he was renting. Person just skips town in the middle of the night. He was left with close to $20,000. It actually might have been north of $20,000 loss because the tenant just left the unit and didn't say anything. It took awhile to get it rerented. He had no coverage. If he had, it had no protection against that. If you had Steady or some of these other providers that are popping up, they could've indemnify themselves from that loss, and could've been made whole for a modest premium.  Long story short, there's a big need in the market to this type of product. What we're really excited about is working with all the property managers across the country to help ensure this is product underlying landlords and finding ways for everyone to win. Jason: Cool. Let's talk about the product specifically. Explain this to somebody that's never heard of this. They might even be an unseasoned property manager. Describe the problem that exists, that this solves for. John: Sure. When you look at it, if the tenant goes bad whether it's professionally managed or not—let’s suppose it’s some professionally managed properties; that's really who we're serving here in this podcast, and who we speak to—if their tenants goes bad, the owner's mad at them. They might've lose that door because guess what? They probably picked the tenant. They were entrusted by the landlord or the owner to find the tenant, to select the right tenant, and now the tenant's bad. So, the owner's mad, they might lose every relationship. The owner's also rental income. As a result, property managers also lost their property management fee income. Generally, they're charging based on the property management fee.  If you look globally, across Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, this type of insurance product, rent default insurance, is widely available and widely adopted. The reason is that, if you look in other jurisdictions, primarily Europe, it's flipped from the US. It's about 70% renter 30% owner. As we know, post financial crisis, more and more US consumers are now choosing to rent instead of own. So, the property management space is going to be larger and the rental property market is getting larger.  As this is occuring, we think that more and more people will be in need of this insurance because we have a growing market. The insurance itself indemnifies and there's different flavors. We'll speak generally about rent default insurance and what's out there as opposed to Steady, specifically. What we want to do is educate the market on the availability of these types of products.  Rent default insurance, generally speaking, indemnifies the owner against losses as a result of the bad tenant outcome. It could be eviction, tenant skips, et cetera; different programs to different coverages. What this does is it allows the owner who can't self-insure due to the diversification to recoup losses if they are unfortunately stuck with the bad tenant that stops paying rent or needs to get evicted.  Different people had different approaches to it. Us at Steady, we've taken a lot of the learnings from the online lending space using technology to streamline processes, operations, and try to deliver a great product that are at a reasonable price to the end market.  A lot of property managers are saying, "Hey, this is great. This is a huge concern that my underlying owners have. What happens if the tenant doesn't pay rent?" They see property management companies out there that have eviction protection plans or other plans. You've got the SureVestors, the Rent Rescues, and a bunch of other great companies out here, all serving for these types of risks and helping solve these pain points. The reason for that is this huge market is a huge concern. If you've got one property, say you own a home and you move for work across the country. You can't sell your home or whatever reason you have. You put it with the professional property manager. They're managing that, but you're relying on that cash flow for maintenance, upkeep, taxes, et cetera. In many cases, to pay the mortgage. If that tenant goes bad, all of a sudden, you're break even or your cash flowing property gone upside down and now you're coming out of pocket. You now have a liability that you have to come out of the pocket for every month. That's a big pain point, a big concern, and what these types of products do is solve for those types of risk, help landlords have peace of mind, and protect against bad tenant outcomes. Jason: You name dropped some of your own competitors, which is very generous of you. How does Steady standout or differ? How do you compare, standout, or differ in the space? John: We've taken a bit of a different approach on how we can structure our products and policy. A lot of other competitors, not just in space but in insurance generally, what they do is copy and paste what other products work on their markets or other products that other people have launched, and there's not a lot of innovation. As a result, we haven't seen a huge take rate for these types of product in the US.  What we found—you might feel differently—my business partner, Viken, grew up in Paris. What works in Europe doesn't necessarily work in the US. What works in Australia doesn't necessarily work for the US. What Viken and I did when we came together is we deconstructed how these programs work globally. We took a lot of the learning from online lending to build what we believe is a better program here in the US.  One differentiation is automation. Our entire process is fully automated. We just set an email prior to this event saying, "We are now in 20 states." We've got the ability to be in all 50 states. The reason we're not in all 50 states right now is because we want to automate everything. It is going slow to go fast. As we start to take it off here and ramp because the updates have been very strong, it's continuing to go stronger daily, everything will be automated. What that will result in is more efficient processes, procedures, and better pricing.  Jason: Explain what that means so everyone understands. You're saying that automation is a differentiator and that it's fully automated. What's automated? John: A property manager or a property owner can go online to the website, inquire about rent default insurance on their own, and complete the entire process in less than two minutes. There's no human interaction necessary and they could do everything themselves. Now, newer company, newer brand, we’re lucky to be aligned with the very strong brand in the insurance space, but nothing's perfect. As you know, as an entrepreneur, you think you've got something perfect and they realize you need to make it better. That's how the process works. It's constant iteration to get better, and better, and better. Jason: The perfect businesses are out of business. John: Right. We continue to constantly push new development releases and streamlining things. What we believe is that, if you can make the process as easy as buying, say for instance, travel insurance when you're buying a flight and make it that easy, that will be a great outcome for us and for this market. The way which you can do that is through API integrations, the right product structures, the right creativity, the right business development strategies, et cetera.  If you look at our product, where our technology is our technology, our product is our product, the two weren't built separately. They're built together. They work very closely together and in tandem. Because of that, it allows us to deliver a great customer experience, a frictionless process, high scalability, and keep headcount well. Right now, our biggest expenses have been legal and engineering, as you can imagine. It's a technology company, but legal because we invest heavily in making sure that we do everything right and by the book. Also, that our partners do things right by the book. As you know, the property management space has some instances where people have more of a cavalier or cowboy type approach that works until it doesn't. For us, we have ambitions to be a very large company and we operate in a highly regulated space. It's non negotiable for us to run into issues on the regulatory front or have our partners run into those issues. We take that very seriously and focus on in making sure everything is done the right way. Jason: That makes sense. The number one challenge when it comes to any solution or software or third party service is adoption. It's how easy is it for them to adopt this and use. If adoption is a challenge, then it's not going to work. It's not going to grow. People are not going to use it or it's going to be confusing or frustrating.  I'm a big Apple fan. Apple made adoption very easy. My AirPods, I just hold them out, open them up, my phone just show them on the screen, and they connect. It was magic, it's easy, I didn’t have to fill around weird Bluetooth settings or hold down buttons. What you're saying makes a lot of sense.  You've mentioned that it's easy for the consumer or for the property manager. One challenge that I see a lot of firms run into is when you're servicing an audience that's servicing that same audience. You almost can become competitors with them. How do you negotiate that? How does the property manager still have a competitive advantage against them just working with you directly? John: I guess, education, awareness, and understanding. People [...] this in massive market. People don't even know about this product. One parallel I draw frequently is pet insurance. I’ve got a pet, I’ve got a dog who's five now. I have pet insurance that I pay $70 or $80 a month. They haven’t got a good plan because the vet at the time said, "Hey, you should consider pet insurance if there's ever an issue." To me, the asset there is the pet. A little bit different than a rental property, maybe not as emotional as a rental property would be. They said, "Maybe you should look at this." It's a similar thing as what you're seeing happening in the property management space. Property managers are the fiduciary, the trusted advisor to the asset and the asset owner, which is the landlord or the small rental property owner who's contracted the property manager for their services. If they can be introduced to this product, it's for their benefit.  We don't have a big direct push. We're not looking to go after single family rental landlords directly. Our entire business model is predicated on partnerships. Based on our analysis, there's roughly eight million rental units in the US managed professionally. We've love to see that grow larger. Those are also, for us, we believe the best risk. As I touched on earlier, we believe strongly that property managers are better at picking tenants, have an established processes and procedures in getting bad tenants out, and they can get units rented more quickly. Jason: Which lowers your risk as an insurance provider. John: Correct, which results in better outcomes from the underwriting perspective.  Jason: Okay, makes sense. Your interests are aligned directly with property managers. They're your focus.  John: Yes. They are our focus. We just did a giveaway today to property management conference for people that could enter. We view property managers as our partners. Again, the reason I mentioned some of our competitors earlier because the rising tide lifts all boats. We want to see everyone do well, we want to see landlords have access to the solution so they get better outcomes, and we want to see property managers to be able to benefit from this as well.  Jason: Yeah, I love it. I believe that too. I have said before, rising tide raises all ships, but sometimes the bar is so low in property management in some areas and in some markets, that I don't think every ship's going to rise. Some have too many holes and are going to sink, but that's okay. John: That's right. That's Darwinism. Jason: Right, survival of the fittest. What are some of the most frequently asked questions or concerns that property managers are asking you or have been asking in sales conversations? So that we can make sure we address them here on this show. John: A lot of things that a lot of property managers ask is simply how it work. We have an FAQ section on our website and we can share the link on it. "How does it work?" "Why does this exist?" "How can no one else is doing is?" As I catch on, this is the third time I'll mention SureVestor, Rent Rescue, and others. The awareness is growing and that's what the biggest challenge is for all of us in this space is awareness that these types of solutions are available. This isn't like rental insurance or pet insurance. Pet insurance, I guess, is now becoming widely adopted, but people don't know about it and don't understand it. Most of the reactions we got is, "Wow, this exists? This is great. How does it work?" "Wow, that's inexpensive. This makes a lot of sense." It all depends on the property address, the rent amount, and the pricing. Jason: For anyone that's confused, let's just explain the difference between renter's insurance and rent default insurance. John: Renter's insurance covers the renter's possessions and liability to the landlord, generally speaking. It's paid for by the renter and they're doing it, so if there's a fire in the unit, they're not covered from the landlord's policy. Their possessions are gone. The landlord gets the unit rebuild, the house rebuilt, but they don’t receive anything. Now with renter's insurance, then we get some coverage for that.  From the landlord's perspective, if the renter has renter's insurance, they have a guest over, they slip and fall, and break their leg, it protects the liability to the landlord for them getting sued from that slip and fall. That's renter's insurance. Rent default insurance, it depends on the program. Different people, different features. Generally speaking, it covers loss of rent due to tenant skips, eviction, and tenant nonpayment for whatever reason. Jason: Sometimes, we have to make sure things are at an 8 year old level so that everybody gets it.  John: I generally need things at an 8 year old level to understand.  Jason: Right. Most entrepreneurs do because we're just so damn impatient at paying attention to things sometimes.  All right. We talked about how it works, why is anyone doing this. Any other frequently asked questions that people are concerned about? John: "What's the catch?" generally. Insurance companies, for better or for worse, generally don't always have the best reputation for making it easy to make claims, et cetera. That's another thing. Some people want to see the policies and see things in that nature.  Again, the big thing is people just don't understand these types of products exists. That's why we're out there educating the market and letting people know that there are these types of coverages available and you can get the coverage to these types of risks.  Jason: Let's touch on the benefits for a property management business in having this in their repertoire of services and how this can help them sell and close more deals, give them the competitive advantage, maybe. John: What do you see is property managers are now looking at this and some are saying, "I'm just going to include it in all my plans," and say, "This makes a lot of sense.” Now, we've got a differentiator. All of my property management packages include three months of rent default insurance if the tenant goes bad. They're out there marketing and saying that it includes it. Others are saying, "This is interesting. How can we offer this and earn some B revenue?" The only way it works, as I touched on earlier with compliance, is you can't get paid for the sales, solicitation, negotiation of insurance, unless you're an insurance producer. You can do other things such as marketing fees, et cetera, but you can't make conditions on the sale, solicitation, negotiation, and insurance. That's why we spend so much to make sure that anything we do, anything our partners do in partnership with us, is fully vetted and above board. We make sure everyone stays on the right side of the rules. Jason: Do they become somewhat of an insurance agent? Or you're just laying that all together? John: No. They do not become insurance agents in any way, shape, or form unless they've got an insurance agent license. Then, they could be an insurance agent, obviously.  Jason: Okay. John, it's great to see an entrepreneur doing something that's impacting the industry. I believe these products are going to have massive ripple effect in the industry. They're going to create a lot more safety and certainty in the property management space. It's going to lower the risk. It's going to lower the pain threshold for landlords to trust somebody else to manage their properties. It's going to protect all the parties involved and that means it's going to help the industry grow. If Australians, somebody said their markets are any indicator, it seems like these types of products help these markets grow significantly in a relatively short period of time, over a decade. They've grown phenomenally. I heard stats like Australia's grown through 25% in a decade. Largely, they claimed that it was connected to that. I don't know if that's accurately or true, but if that were true and the industry—single family residential—were maybe about 30% are professionally managed, that almost be our industry doubling here in the US. I don't know that there's enough companies here in the US right now to handle that level of growth. That would mean we need to double the amount of companies or we need to double the size of every company that exists. Something in between that. John: Or let's double the size of every company that exists. That'll be a good outcome for everyone. Jason: Yeah. Regardless, I want to make sure that we've got the best. Let's raise the tide. I appreciate that you're seeking to raise the tide. I think collaboration over competition is what builds market, it's what builds the category. It's always important to build the category before you try to build the individual brand. That's Marketing 101, everybody.  Property management is in the same boat. Property management has very low awareness, in general, here in the US and right now, we've got a lot of people going around something in their chest, trying to fill their individual brand. We need to build the category first. There's a lesson for the industry to take away from what you've mentioned and what's going on in what you're doing, so I appreciate that. John: NARPM’s done a good job trying to get the industry moving in the right direction. People like you and a lot of others that are trying to educate and build awareness are very helpful as well. It's great to see everyone working together in some way, shape, or form. Jason: There's no scarcity in property management. There just really isn't. There's 70% in single family residential that are self-managing right now. That does not indicate scarcity. In certain channels of marketing, there is a lot of scarcity because everybody's doing the same stuff, there is scarcity. John, I appreciate you coming in the show. How can people get in touch with Steady and learn more about this? John: They can go to the website www.steadymarketplace.com or shoot me an email john@steadymarketplace.com. Jason: Perfect. John, I appreciate you coming on the show, I appreciate what you're doing, and I wish Steady success. John: Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: Check them out at steadymarketplace.com. If you are, for some reason, not getting the growth that you want, you're growth is good, but you want to pour a little gasoline on that fire, if you find that you're getting a lot of your business lately from word of mouth, and from the trust that you built in the marketplace, I would love to pour gasoline on that fire. That's what DoorGrow specializes in, optimizing your warmly funnel and optimizing your business for more organic growth, which is a lot less expensive than showing up tens of thousands of dollars a year towards pay per click, SEO, and everything that everybody is competing and already doing.  Like I said, I don't believe there's scarcity in the industry, but I believe there's false scarcity that's been created by marketers, and you can avoid that. For those who can't see, I'm wearing my "SEO won't save you" shirt. A lot of people are relying on SEO to save you. Don't get me wrong, SEO is great. If you have the top spot in Google, that's great to have search engine optimization. But there are things that are better than having the top spot in Google like being the most trusted company in your market. Our whole system is focused on building trust for your brand, for your business, and helping you to go after that blue ocean where there's all that business available; that 70%. I appreciate John being on the show. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Bringing outside perspectives and experiences to our business and podcast episodes adds another perspective to our expertise. This episode brings in someone with a lot of experience in a particular niche, in this case, the exit strategy/buyout arena. Quiet Light's own Walker Diebel is here today talking to our guest all about exit planning. BEI Institute founder John Brown started working as a lawyer in estate planning in the late 70s. John walks us through his journey managing business owner's assets and becoming aware that no one was helping them plan successful exits from their companies when the time came. Without being educated, he asked himself how these business owners would plan a strategic exit from their businesses and move successfully into their post-business lives. John's company, BEI is now is the leader in the exit planning industry. Episode Highlights: John explains exit planning. The first thing that someone who potentially wants to sell their business should do. The value drivers that are important to pay attention when building your business. The role of the business owner in the process. Business risks that are not avoidable or hard to foresee. The biggest deal killers. John walks us through the four exit paths. The Karl case study – an exit strategy lesson. Transcription: Mark: Joe I don't know if you know this or not but one of the advisers here at Quiet Light Brokerage; Walker, he's kind of a big deal. Joe: He is kind of a big deal. Let's do this; let's make a pact. This is the last intro and the last time that we will say did you know Walker Deibel wrote a book and a best-selling book, Forbes and Amazon, all this other stuff because you know Chuck and I did talk about it the last episode as well. We need to stop making fun of Walker. The truth is he's brilliant and we're jealous. That's the bottom line. Mark: That is why we make fun of him, right? I mean we kind of wish that we had that book to our name and he is brilliant. And he's well for a reason. Joe: And he's being asked to be a featured speaker all over the country to entrepreneurial groups. And he just had somebody named John H. Brown, founder of BEI on the podcast. I'm looking down because I'm looking at the book here; a brilliant guy. The wisdom that John brought in terms of exit planning and what entrepreneurs should do in terms of goal setting and looking out to the future and how to adjust their business as necessary to achieve their financial goals and their personal goals; it was brilliant. A great deal of wisdom that John brought to this podcast that Walker hosted instead of you, right? Mark: That's right. You guys get a break from us this week which is fantastic for you. I love bringing in outside opinions. We've brought in some people in the past who are also in our industry that do things that are similar to what we do at Quiet Light Brokerage but they come with a different perspective than we do. I love doing this because I think sometimes with what we do we can kind of get set in our ways and our perspectives and bringing somebody else in who has a lot of experience in this space and seeing how they look at it, it tends to stretch you a little bit and structure your viewpoints a bit to maybe look at things that you haven't looked at before. So this is going to be a fascinating interview that Walker did with John to see what he has to say about exit planning. Joe: I agree. I've listened to it twice. Let's go to it for our studio audience. Walker: Hi everybody it's Walker Deibel with Quiet Light Brokerage. Today I have John Brown who is the CEO of Business Enterprise Institute; the oldest and largest provider of exit planning education in North America and the author of the best-selling exit planning book of all time. And most recently John wrote Exit Planning The Definitive Guide To Sell Your Business When You Want For The Money You Need To The Person You Choose. John, welcome to the podcast. John: Thank you, Walker. It's nice to be here. Walker: Now here at Quiet Light we have a tradition of having our guests introduce themselves because we believe that you're going to be able to do a better job than we ever could. And what I might do is throw a curveball at you and say… John: There was never a good curveball if you will know. Walker: Maybe if you can tell us about your journey of being an attorney and then how you evolved to ultimately start BEI and writing all these books on exit planning. John: Sure. So I was the son of two business owners in Michigan. So I've always had some I guess passion for business owners because they ended up selling their business and it didn't turn out well. It was an absolute bust. And this was when I was probably in law school at the University of Wisconsin. I wasn't in a position to do anything because I didn't know what to do. Walker: Well let me interject a question little fast, when you say an absolute bust selling a business what does that mean? John: Well they sold the business to the management team for a promissory note. They retired because they're from Michigan. They retired at Florida like all the people from Michigan and within a year the business had gone under. And they received very little of the proceeds from the sale of their business. So that was just a bust. It really affected their retirement dramatically. Walker: I got it. John: And at the time I was just a young and stupid law student. I really didn't know how I could have helped them. And it was long enough ago that the word; the term exit planning hadn't even been coined. I think we probably coined the term back in the 1980s. So that always stuck with me. So when I started to practice law in Denver I really had a desire to work with business owners. So the law firm developed along the lines of representing closely-held business owners. And we had about 20 attorneys and all we did was represent closely-held business owners. It was a different type of law firm back then at least. Walker: Were you a transaction attorney or no? John: Half the firm was transactional, an M&A firm buying and selling businesses. But the other half was a planning firm and I headed that side. It was then evolved into explaining; how to design and implement a plan to allow the owner to leave on his or her terms. And then often would end up being a third party sale and so the M&A firm was active in that. But even more frequently it ended up being transferred to family members or to management. And so we just developed an exit planning process about that in the law firm with hundreds of clients and then I'm never having a passion for being a lawyer. I transitioned out of that. I exited my law firm and started BEI. Walker: Are you still a recovering attorney or have you had a chance to move on from that? John: I think my former partners would say I had recovered from being an attorney while I was still at the law firm. Walker: John what is exit planning? I mean what is the goal of exit planning? What is it; I mean what is this thing? John: So every owner is going to leave the business at some point. I think we can agree on that. Walker: If they don't? John: They may die. They may go bankrupt. Or hopefully something in between where they develop value that's transferable to another owner and they create a plan as part of that to exit the business when they want; is it three years, five years to whenever for the money they want or need and to the person they choose; the person of their choice. That's, in essence, is exit planning and a raptor into that then is an exit planning process that owners can use and BEI does not represent business owners. We train lawyers and CPAs and financial planners and so on to actually do the exit planning for business owners. Walker: And brokers? John: And brokers; and the good brokers I should say, Walker. Only the good brokers. Walker: Only the good ones. John: Only the good ones. And so that's what BEI does today. We train and support other advisors throughout North America. Walker: So I have to ask you as coming from the buy-side of the deal hearing about something called exit planning it almost seems to me like the goal from a buyer perspective might be perceived as the goal being to maximize the value, potentially some end gaming going on, or for lack of better description is exit planning just kind of putting lipstick on a pig in preparation of taking it to market or it' more…? John: Putting lipstick on a pig is the broker's job. Walker: Packaging it up; I got it. John: We're trying to convert the pig into a beautiful stallion. Walker: Right. So in other words what you're trying to do is address the sort of levers that drive value and build a lot more muscle into a company for an exit. John: Exactly. A better term for us instead of exit planning would probably have been pre-exit planning because almost all the planning and implementation work must take place and be completed before you transfer the business to a third party, before you go to market, or before you substantially transfer ownership to the kids or to an insider. So that planning needs to be done now for most owners because 80% of all owners according to our last summer survey want to leave their business within 10 years. I was about to say 10 days and it's true for some but it's 10 years to be a little more accurate. Walker: Every month I have calls with both ends of that spectrum. John: Yeah. Walker: Okay, so how should a seller plan strategically about their exit? Like what are the things that they need? Or let's start at the beginning, what is the first thing that someone who potentially wants to sell their business should be doing or thinking about? John: The first thing that would be really the first phase of explaining which consists of understanding what they want growth both in money, when they want to leave the business, who they want to transfer to, do they want to maintain the culture or legacy of their company, do they want to benefit the employees, do they want to keep the business in the community. Those are all goals that owners need to think about and then they need to create with some specificity. A quick example is most owners would say if I ask them when do you want to leave, they would say oh I'd like to leave in five years. If I were to come back in a year and I'd say hey when do I leave, they'd say oh I want to leave in five years. Well, that lacks clarity and specificity. So we would say okay, you want to leave in five years; you want to leave on August 8, 2024. Now we can start to plan towards that. So that's the goal side and the other side is knowing what the resources are. So in third party sale in your world the potential clients you talk to have an idea of the value of their company and that value is always quite a bit higher. It's almost always quite a bit higher than reality. So they should be coming to the transaction advisors. And this is what BEI members do, they have transaction advisors they work with all the time and if a client says I'd like to leave my business in five years and I think it's worth 10 million dollars so I think we can get started. The first thing one of our trained advisors is going to do is to say okay let's go talk to an experienced M&A advisor; you, an investment banker, a cayenne business broker and let's have them tell or give us a range of likely sales value. Hey that comes back at four million dollars or maybe something in between. We don't know as exit planners what it's going to be worth but we can't do any planning that suggests owners can't do any planning if they don't know what the heck they have and what in the heck they want to do. And that's the first phase of exit planning. And then it determines; the final part of that is is there a gap between the resources they have today and the resources they're going to need? We've determined all that using financial planners, maybe business valuation people if it's going to be a transfer to management, or an M&A business broker, or an investment banker if it's a third-party sale. What we know is where the owner stands and so does the owner before they make decisions on what they're going to do. Usually that decision is going to be I've got to grow value in the company and it may take me years to do so but not always. Walker: So it sounds like number one is to set the goals; apply what is the number we're trying to hit and what is the timeline in which we're trying to hit it. John: Right. Walker: Number two seems to be working with someone like a broker to get a valuation on the business today so that you know where you are and where you're trying to build to. Is that accurate? John: Well yeah we would say the first step is goal setting, the second step is resource determination. But to do it accurately like you just said. And then the third step in our exit planning process is to grow value, grow cash flow, minimize; do some tax planning. There's not so much tax planning most owners can do that they don't; they're totally unaware of because their attorneys and their CPAs have never suggested tax planning to them. I mean there are ways where you can sell the stock of your corporation; a C Corporation and not pick up a gains tax if it's been structured properly from the inception. Walker: Amazing. John: And few owners know about that. Walker: When we talk to our potential sellers at Quiet Light I mean if we really were to boil it all down there's probably seven different things that I kind of look at. And this isn't about Quiet Light, it's about you and the process that you've built. My question to you is what are the levers that drive value in a business? John: So we have a whole part of explaining in this third step called value drivers. And so we look at what are the value drivers in most businesses. And how do we get this idea; the value driver concepts? It's not from being a lawyer. It's from talking to the M&A community. What do they look for especially private equity in acquiring businesses? And then those value drivers or levers work equally well in selling the business to insiders. So two things, one is we focus on creating what we call transferable value. For smaller businesses where the owner is in charge of almost everything, it may have a million dollars of EBIDTA a year but that's probably not transferable because the owner sells the business, the owner goes away, and maybe the customers go away, maybe the employees go away. So a buyer is not going to be interested in a company where the owner is too important in the operation of the business. So to us, transferable value means the owner could leave the business today with minimal interruption to the company's cash flow. So part one; does the company have that? If not we need to work on that. And the value drivers then are what we work on which is the second part. The three biggest value drivers we see today, and you can probably comment on this better than I can Walker, is one having a top-notch best in class management team. That's what most buyers like to look for because most buyers don't have that management team to put in place in the company they acquire. And it also means there can be transferable value because the management team can continue the business without the owner. The second thing is diversity of the customer base or maybe the vendor base to make sure that the company is not dependent on any small group of customers or clients because again those customers and clients might leave when the owner does because they're loyal to the owner. So that's a risk that buyers don't want to have. And the third thing I hear today that I didn't hear a few years ago is the quality of the operating systems within the company. I'm hearing from a lot of the PE firms hey we don't want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more to go; to rip out the old operating system that's eight years old and put in a new operating [inaudible 00:16:50.8] operating system. They want to see that in the companies they're requiring; at least those worth millions of dollars. I mean a smaller company maybe they wouldn't expect that; I really don't know but maybe you want to comment on that. Walker: Hey, it's a really great point. I think that a lot of the sellers at Quiet Light Brokerage are online businesses, right? And as you know I've bought over half a dozen companies in my life and I sold a couple. And I've done everything from manufacturing and distribution to online. As a broker, I really only work in online businesses. But part of the reason for that is a lot of the reasons you're talking about because a management team is almost eliminated. I mean we can sell a company for five million dollars say and that's just one person and they've got a bunch of virtual assistants. So the most important person in the company might just be the hired gun that's running paid ads or something like that. So making sure that that management team can transfer is key. I want to come back to something you said around transferable value and I want to kind of dive into that just a little bit; a little surgical here and the question is it seems to me like what you're saying is that the owner can't be the craftsman in the business whether that be I'm out hustling doing one on one sales or I've got some key relationships or an industry of like in math analogy I'm the one making the pots. Is that accurate? I mean does that sort of core business need to be transferred to a different person that is going to transfer with the business even if it means a reduction in earnings because you're paying for a new person on staff? John: Yeah I think that for most buyers that would be critical. Now in the world you're in, the owner may not be that important. It might be the technology itself that's important then the owner is not; the owner maybe developed it and created it. Well he may no longer be important in the whole process. Walker: It does depend. But yes, go ahead. John: Yeah. So that would be in your world more than my world. In my world which isn't; I mean all worlds now have developed technology involved that seems like. Even farmers have a lot of technology. But that would be more towards an operating system. They're not developing the technology they're just using it. So I'm not sure I can answer your question I just don't have enough experience in that. But I would say if I were buying a company for its technology and it was created by the owner I would sure as heck want the owner to stay with the company because he or she probably has other ideas in their brain and I may want to capture some more of that. That might just be a situational issue more than anything else. Walker: You know I think it's one of these things where I was recently talking to; it was about…well, I shouldn't date it for confidentiality reasons. Months ago I was talking with a potential seller who wanted to exit and he owned a SaaS business; a Software As A Service business. And it turned out through the sort of valuation call I was having with him that he was the actual developer on the whole system which to me was like this is an unsellable business which is kind of what I'm getting at. So sometimes you get the; where the owner is the craftsman and that doesn't transfer and what we talk to our sellers about is the person who's likely to buy your business is an entrepreneur. It's a business person it's not a software developer it's not even necessarily a paid ads expert. So I'm glad to see that you agree with that transferability is all. I mean trying to outsource that craftsmanship and skill set to other team members makes the business sellable, to begin with. It sounds like that's really one of your first steps. John: That would be one of the things but then tied into that that's clearly the case is the owner before the sale. Let's say there are two craftsmen in the business that are really key to the growth and the continuation or stability of the business. We would want to tie those two key people, incent them to stay with the business through cash; maybe stock bonuses or stock options, have them really have a reason to continue on with new ownership because they're going to benefit from it themselves if they stay. If you don't do that in advance of making efforts to sell the business then the owner can be held hostage in effect by the craftsman because they can say you know owner if I leave your business sale is going to go out of the window and I know you've been talking about 10 million dollars and I think I'm probably responsible for at least 20% of that value so I need two million dollars. I've seen that happen not in high tech but I've seen it happen in traditional businesses all the time. Walker: Right. John: And so you've got to protect the trade secrets which is the value of the business. You've got to prevent somebody from going out and taking something. You've got to prevent your key people from going out and just joining a competitive firm. All that can be done in almost all states; California is an exception to this unless they have ownership which is something to look at. But you still can do some things and certainly motivate; incent them with deferred compensation, stock, stock bonus points. Those are all things your listeners should be aware of. They should be talking to attorneys and M&A advisers about how to protect themselves against that risk that is right there next door to them. Walker: John, I want to ask you this question is every business risk addressable? I mean in other words it sounds like a lot of what you talk about and help people navigate through is essentially eliminating the sort of risks that are going to; that a buyer is going to see when they come to the table to buy it, right? But is there anything that is just not addressable? John: Well I would say the thing that's not addressable is general business risk. Now let's say you guys one of your would-be buyers has just this great software for the quick print industry 10 years ago. Well that industry goes away. Now where does that work? So there's that element of business risk. Again you can take measures to try to be aware of that but some of this is hard to foresee. But most other things within the business you can do something about; maybe not everything you'd like to do at maybe a pure loss to the company. Walker: Yeah. And I just; where my brain is kind of going is more like in an offline business probably the number one problem that I see is maybe customer concentration issues, right? In the online world that usually is not a problem. Sometimes in SaaS businesses, you get one customer that's a bit of a behemoth but it tends to look more like supplier power if you will. Like maybe you've got one supplier that supplies all of your product and you're kind of a reseller for that. I mean I think that it's probably easier to address if it's supplier power because you can diversify your suppliers. I guess I'm just… John: That doesn't mean your owners are going to do that, right? Inaudible[00:24:25.6] has a good point. And you just have to figure out how can you mitigate your risk by diversifying it could be vendors, it could be suppliers, it could be customers; direct customers, it can be all kinds of different things. And advisers are not necessarily the best person or the best route to figure that out. Usually, the owner alone can figure that out through some good questioning by advisors. They may know what those business risks better than let's say a lawyer in your case you probably know all that because you're in this space yourself. So I think you would be a very valuable asset. Walker: John what are the biggest deal killers? John: The biggest deal killers; the first one is the owners doesn't understand if they sell the business what they're going to get and how they're going to get it. They go into the marketplace, they hire a transaction intermediary like yourself, they don't really know how much money they're going to need as a result of that sale. One if they want to retire after that, how much do they need for the rest of lives? Or secondly, if they're just going to flip companies, how much money do they really need to go to the next level and make sure that they have a reasonable chance of doing that before they even start the sales process. So we have investment bankers who are members of BEI and one of the main reasons they're members is that they've gone through that. They go to market, they get some good offers; lots of money, but the owner then looks at what he or she is living on now and the proceeds from that will not support that lifestyle even though it's a lot of money and they drop out of the market. They tainted the marketplace. It's difficult to reenter down the road and the broker and investment banker spend a lot of time and effort with nothing. Walker: Can you unpack that for me if you wouldn't mind? Can you kind of give me an example of what that might actually look like? John: An example would be a dealing with one of our members who is an investment banker in Texas and he had a client who went to market and a cash offer for 16 million dollars for his company. So the broker and the investment bank was pretty hands-on with that. It was at the top percentile of what he thought he could get when he sold the business. And at that time for the first time with a firm offer on the table the owner looks at how much money he needed; money after taxes, transaction fees, paying off debt, etcetera in order to support his lifestyle and it wasn't enough money. Walker: It was a surprise. John: It was a surprise and so he dropped out. So that's a real risk of doing it. And then along with that is another closely related risk; probably new world as well, is the owners have an overinflated concept or idea of what their business will sell for. And so again they either don't take steps to grow value, they don't take steps to protect the value and they just decide they're going to go to market. They talk to you and they learn that business is worth a third of what it really is and they've wasted years that they could have been working to put in the value drivers and other factors that would lead to greater value. Walker: There's a couple of times where I try to buy companies by going directly to the seller before the company was on the market so to speak and every single time they wanted 20 times EBIDTA. I mean just some [inaudible[00:28:05.1] with what the value of a company was. So I learned pretty quickly to find the sellers that are already working with advisers because they've already gone through the hard learning process of what the market actually is, right? You can want what you want but the market tells the truth. John: That's right. Working with an adviser there's going to be better information available as well. They're going to have a deal book. They're going to have vetted some of the owner's beliefs. Walker: Tell us about the four different exit paths and kind of like a brief synopsis on sort of the pluses and minuses of each. John: Gosh Walker you have read part of my books if you'd known about that. Walker: I take it pretty well. John: Did you just look at the chapters and figured out from there in the introduction? I get that; I mean I'm going to rip those Table of Contents off from now on. The four types of; the four exit paths starting with the least used to the most used. The least used is an ESOP, an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. It's a great concept. It's a great tool. About 1% of the exit plans or members do use that path. Walker: And this is where the buyer of the company is the employees of the business. John: Well the buyer of the company is a retirement plan; a trust in which all of the employees are beneficiaries. And there are some great tax advantages in doing that but they're relatively complicated. You need a business that has probably 5 million dollars of value or more in good cash flow and a strong management team to do that. That can be great especially for owners who might say well I really want to keep my business and my community or I want to benefit my employees; I want the legacy of my company continue. In ESOP it's good because it's going to be indirectly owned by the employees and so the legacy etcetera will continue. The next used is sort of a tie; it's between transferring the business to kids. About a quarter of all business; all exit plans are members prepared with an exit plan are transfers to family. About 29% are transfers to third parties. So those are the second and third least used. And then the exit path most commonly used is transfer to management; surprisingly transfer to management. And the reason for both the transfer to management and transfer with the kids is that with the planning they can do really through our BEI members they can start to transfer the business sooner rather than later. They keep control over the business however until they get all of the money and achieve all of the other objectives they want to achieve. So that might be a 3, 5, 8, 10-year process of transferring ownership, getting the excess cash flow, getting some money for the transfer of new ownership, and then having a liquidity event at the end in which the buyout occurs. So that's kind of the general design of both transfers to family members and transfers to management. A transfer to a third party is used about 30% of the time and that's your world. And for a lot of owners they would like to maximize the dollars they'd like to exit; if their business is prepared they'd like to exit sooner rather than later. They don't have family members involved. Their management doesn't want to buy the business. So a lot of reasons for an outside third party sale. And so from an exit planning standpoint; in our world, that's the owners choice. The owner tells us the path they want to go down and then we just talk about the pluses and minuses of everything. But then our goal is to make sure that that owner is able to use that exit path and achieve this financial time-driven goals. Walker: Well, just knowing that you have options and the fact that you can outline it so clearly is a great roadmap just to start with. So your parents selling their business and kind of getting it all screwed up is a perfect example of what happens when you don't do exit planning. John: Right. Walker: Do have a story from your past that you can share that kind of shows the benefit of exit planning for an entrepreneur wanting to exit their company? John: Yeah there's a story that we often use in our training; we call it the Carl story. So actually Karl was a real client of mine. I started working with Carl while I was still practicing law. He came to me. He wanted to sell his business sooner rather than later. He wanted roughly five million dollars for his business. He wanted the business to become a world-class company; that was a soft goal. So I looked to his business. His business was worth maybe a million dollars. Carl was the business. He didn't really have a management team. It was actually a manufacturing type of company; plastic injection molding type of company. So I said Carl that your biggest; if you want to grow the value you want to maybe leave five or six years and you realized you couldn't leave right away, you're going to have to develop a management team. That's the number one weakness in small businesses; they don't have a management team. And Carl said I get it. He's actually really a bright guy. I get it. I know just the person to hire. And I thought oh no this is going in the wrong direction now. It's probably his son who is a bicycle mechanic. He said there's this guy in the Netherlands who is the young executive of the world in my industry niche and I'm going to go and this; my client was like in the eastern plains of Colorado which was hundreds of miles away from civilization. He said that I'm going to go over to the Netherlands. He's in Amsterdam; a world-class company and I'm going to hire him. He's going to come over and grow my business. I said go for it but you're not going to be able to do that because you can't afford to give him enough money. So we talked about how the new guy coming in to buy part of the company from Carl. And so that's what happened. We designed an exit strategy to enable that to happen where the new guy coming in; call him Wilhelm, was able to buy a portion of the company every year if the company get performance standards which were tied into the cash flow. And we knew if we hit those standards in general over a six or seven-year period Carl could sell the balance of the business to a third party or to Wilhelm and he will have financial security. That's exactly what happened. Wilhelm came in; knocked the lights out. It's a fascinating story how we did that. We can talk about it another time but at the end of seven years the business sold for 38 million dollars cash. Walker: Oh my God. John: Yeah. So for a long time I thought well Carl was just lucky because he happened to hit upon this boom; this technology at a certain point but then I realized he was lucky, yes, but he never would have accomplished that if he hadn't gone out and sold 49% of the company over time to this person who did all of the growth and who by the way got half of the 38 million dollars. Walker: Amazing. That's amazing. John: So that can happen but it was in accordance with the plan that we developed. It just happened to work out extremely well. And I think it shows the value of world-class management even in a small company. Walker: John, I'm thrilled that you decided to spend time with us. Thank you so much. How can our listeners learn more about why they should be exit planning or how to do it? John: Well there's a number of ways; they can always go to our website ExitPlanning.com but we just released a new video podcast series called Why We Plan. It's on iTunes. It's on Spotify. Really we've just released it this week. It's that new. So I encourage people do that. The CEO of my company and myself have recorded 20 podcasts so far; mostly case studies like the Carl Case Study. What went right, what went wrong, what might you do as an advisor in that situation or as an owner in that situation. So I encourage them to listen to that. Walker: John, thanks so much. John: Thank you, Walker.   Links and Resources: John's Business Website John's Bestselling Book John's Latest Book Why We Plan Podcast

James: Let's get started, 1 2 3. Hi listeners, welcome to Achieve Wealth Podcast. It's a podcast where we focus on how to achieve wealth through value add real estate investing. And today I have John Jacobus from, John, where are you from?  John: I'm from New York.  James: New York. Awesome. Awesome. Why not John, you talk to our listeners about, you know, about yourself and what you've been doing and we are going to be focusing a lot on a mobile home park investment and John is an expert in the operation of mobile home parks. And I thought of bringing him on board and learn that asset class through the level of details where we can learn and figure out, you know, why that would be a really good investment vehicle for everybody. So, John, why don't you go ahead and take a and tell our audience things that I would have missed out. John: Sure. Yeah. Thanks, James for having me on the show, it's really good to be here. As I said, I live in New York City but I invest in the southeast and the southwest. I got started in real estate investing in the early 2000s just doing single-family rentals and fix and flips, down in southern California. I'm originally from the San Francisco Bay area out on the west coast. And there was an equity opportunity down in southern California in the early part of this century. And with my dad, brother and I, we just got started. At the time, I was about 18, so I got started early and that really triggered an interest in investing and building wealth. And from there, just sort of followed my nose. So I got interested in stock market investing and just general assessing quality businesses. And then maybe four years ago, got interested in multifamily investing, being surrounded by skyscrapers and multifamily housing here in Manhattan. I poke my nose into that, got to know people, build the network and started my first multifamily opportunity as a limited partner in a project in Dallas, Texas. And since then, just sort of took incremental steps to become more active and raising capital. As you know, James, it's gotten pretty competitive in the apartment space, especially when you're out of state and don't have the ability to get on planes and meet brokers or property managers for tours. So seeing that it was a sort of impossible for me to compete with locals and the markets that I wanted to invest in, I stumbled across mobile home parks. And the more I learned about it, the more I poked my nose into it, the more I liked it. And I found that I could be competitive despite being located out of town. And for about the past year and a half now, I've been focusing full time on mobile home park investing. Now, I've acquired a portfolio of three parks and I'm looking to continue to scale where we find value. James: Awesome. So yeah, I mean mobile home parks, I mean, I do know some things about mobile home parks, but not to the level of details that you would know. Right. So can you explain to the listeners how does the whole, and at a high level, then we can go into a bit deeper into the details of mobile home parks. Why did you start with mobile home parks? Why not self- storage or office or retail warehouse and all that? John: Yeah, so I'm generally attracted to assets that are under the radar and have a kind of negative stigma with them. So I mentioned I am into investing in businesses on the stock market as well. And I tend to adopt a contrarian mindset where, you know, the more popular or something is in the media or among, you know, the masses, the less interested I become. And so, I think point number one that triggered me to look into mobile home parks was when I would attend these conferences of real estate investors or go to meetups or just hear about mobile home parks in the news, generally, there was no one really focusing on it. So amongst the thousands of people that were at a conference, there was maybe two or three people that were focused on mobile home parks.  And anytime you hear about mobile home parks in the news it seems to be negative. Nobody wants to brag about the fact that they're in the business full time because of the negative public stigma. To me, that's attractive because there are fewer competitors and especially when you dig into the details and see the fundamentals of the business, they're awfully attractive. So I think just generally the unpopular nature of the asset class was something that really appealed to me. And then, you know, the fact that it actually has appealing economics was even more of an attractive factor of the asset class. James: Okay. That's exactly why people can still find really good deals in mobile home parks where there's a lot of stigma tied to it, to mobile home parks and that could be just an opportunity. So I mean, I attended like a two days boot camp, on mobile home parks, like two, three years ago. And I thought it was a really good asset class to enter at the time because as you said, not many people, know mobile home parks, it's not out to the masses. There are not many gurus teaching mobile home park too even though they're teaching, they are not everywhere, right? They're not in the social media guys like what's happening now. And that's a huge stigma on mobile home parks. This is a bit cross kind of thing, right?  I mean that's what even the guy who was teaching that three-day boot camp was telling us, which can be a really good thing, right? I mean, I know the day we want to make sure that we have a good asset class where you know, it's very stable and able to predictably give you good cash and good returns at a high level. So let's talk about how do you make money out of buying a mobile home park? John: Yeah, so a number of ways. We focus on turnaround parks. So one of the areas, well, I said that mobile home park investing is unpopular relative to self- storage or apartments. There is some competition in the market so I still face very healthy competition in some of tier one, tier two markets, where the parks are closer to class B Class So, in an effort to find value, we've found that there's value currently in parks that are rough around the edges. So whether they have high vacancy rates, they have a high percentage of park owned homes, there may be an issue with the infrastructure, whether the sewer or the water. So those things that have a little bit of hair on the deal, those we're finding pretty attractively priced. So currently we focus on those turnarounds and that's where we're able to generate outsize returns, by digging into those problems and fixing them and either elevating the class of the asset or simply filling in vacancies or in some cases, like one of the projects that we have under ownership right now in San Antonio is we're actually expanding the size of the park.  So it's almost like a development deal, where we bought it for 20 units and we have plans to expand it by double. So those types of heavy lifts in terms of either turnaround operationally or expanding the footprint of the park, that's how we're finding ways to make money currently in the mobile home park business. James: Got It. Got It. And correct me if I'm wrong, so the mobile home park is basically you own the park, you don't own the housing units on top of it, right? John: So in an ideal world, and it really, depends on your perspective and what your preferences, but in the traditional way is that you just own the land and not the infrastructure. So you buy the land and you rent out the land to homeowners who pay you for the privilege of placing their home in your park. So in terms of operational cost standpoint, if you pursued that model, your operating costs are pretty low because you really just own the dirt and you're collecting rent for owner residents to use your land. Now, as you look more deals and get involved in the business, there are very few of those types of properties available because over the course of time, where residents come and go, ultimately you're going to find yourself as a park operator with some homes that you end up with, whether they're abandoned or sold to you or just come with the deal.  So there are models in the southeast, in particular where there are parks, where the park owners not only own the land and the infrastructure but also own all of the homes, in which case they're more or less operating an apartment complex just with a different look. There are individual units rather than stacked or adjacent to each other. And for those that can do it and have the model and the pricing is right and their strength in the market, that can be awfully attractive. But I think if you're looking to reduce the amount of time and energy to operate the park when you're a dirt owner, that's the lowest touch, lightest maintenance, I think most appealing and certainly most profitable model from an operating margin perspective. James: Yeah. It's like you have a big parking lot where people come and park their houses on top of it, I guess.   John: That's right. Yeah. Look at it. And it's great because you know, it's very high margin, but also you've got owners that are in your community so there's an alignment of interest. You've got people that have skin in the game because they own the home and they want to take care of the community. So that's a really unique aspect in contrast to apartments where, you know, apartments, you always have renters and just by nature, you know, they're going to treat their place as if they're renting it. And that's very different from the mindset and the behavior of owners who are in your community. It's a stakeholder group shared alignment of interests and it's a mindset shift and something that I really pursue and try to cultivate in our communities. James: Got It. Got It. Yeah. It's a very interesting model. It's a very simple concept. It does serve the affordable housing crisis that we have. Both apartments and mobile home park do serve it, even though it's two different, slightly different tenant base. One is one who wants to be a homeowner, even though it's a cheaper house, right? It's not like normal single-family houses but it's something that gives you a roof on top of your head and people liked that. And they have that community feeling when they are in that park so they are able to take care of it much better than like what you're saying in the apartment. You have leases turnover and you're 50% turnover per year and they leave the place every two years. So you have to go and do a turn around cause a lot more management intensive. How do you add value in mobile home parks? John: Yeah, so a couple of ways. So increasing the rents. So one of the appeals of being in the asset class is it's a very fragmented and somewhat a non-professionally managed business. So in contrast to apartments where you have, I think very high transparency into pricing, because you have things like Yardi Matrix and some of the other platforms, where you can get a very quick insight into what the market rates and comparables are, you don't have that level of transparency into pricing in mobile home parks. So there isn't this invisible hand of pushing up rents with inflation or with market forces because the industry is just sort of 30 to 40 years behind, relative to single-family and multifamily, in terms of just, you know, pricing transparency. So simply coming in and raising the rents to market rates or what should be market, is one way in which you can add value. Another that I described was expanding the footprint of rentable space. So in some cases, like our project in San Antonio, the former owner had given their residents very large lots, so they were almost twice as much as was required or determined as per the setback requirements. And so we found that if we simply move the homes over a bit and decreased the density by half, people would still be given pretty reasonable living space, we would be able to adhere to the setback requirements, and we would effectively double the rentable units within the property. So that's a way in which we're creating significant value by simply taking a look at the zoning requirements and the setbacks and seeing how we can reconfigure the lots well within the land to create new rentable space.  A third is just operating it more professionally. Again, this industry is not one where there's a very sophisticated network of third-party property management. And you know, it's largely mom and pops owner-operators who, you know, at this point in time probably own the property outright. They don't have any data on it and they don't really have a need to maximize or optimize the performance of the property and in which case they let things go. So they may run operating expenses high, where relative to where they should be, they may have their friends working for them doing maintenance and or day to day operations. And as a result, probably pay them at higher than market rates. So coming in and introducing professional practices and professional management, running it as a real business, that's a way to bring down operating costs and increase the NOI. Those are really the main drivers, you know, rent increase, increase the rentable space and push down operating costs, those are the things that we focus on and usually have the greatest impact in terms of value. James: So what about loans? I mean, you said a lot of these are mom and pop and fully, they own the whole thing, right? There is no debt on it. Are you able to get like seller financing deals? John: Yeah, so of the three properties that we own, two of the three are seller financed. So we've got interest-only loans for six years on those two. And it's awfully attractive not to have to go through a bank or an agency to go through the underwriting process. James: So you structure your non-recourse or recourse or how did you do that? John: Yeah, non-recourse loans on both of them. So really great, fairly low down payments. So we have a 75 loan to value on one and 80% loan to value on the other. And we even on the first one, we strung out the timing of the down payment so that we could minimize the use of upfront capital. So, yeah, just increased flexibility, ability to execute with speed and fairly attractive loan terms. Again, another appeal of, of the businesses, you have a lot of flexibility with the lending for some of these smaller to mid-sized parks. James: Yeah. Yeah, that makes it really interesting because recourse versus nonrecourse and loan terms, you know, in this case, you can structure this how you want, right? Because you're talking to mom and pop owner and how big are these parks? John: Yeah, so for us, so we have one in North Carolina, which is 75 spaces. That was the first one that we took down. And that was, we negotiated seller financing for six years at 75% loan to value. And then the second park, we closed the month after. That's in San Antonio, that's 20 spaces and we're currently in the process of expanding that to 49 spaces. So by the end of the summer, that's the one where we're reconfiguring the land and bringing in 29 new homes to expand the footprint of the park. And then the third one is in South Carolina and that's about 45 spaces. So in a 20 to 75 space range, that's where we're finding opportunity value and that's about in the zone where you can negotiate seller financing. You know, it's good and bad, the financing.  One, the pool of capital and the liquidity and access to the debt market is not at the level that multifamily is. So one of the nice things about multifamily is, you know, through Fannie and Freddie and other conduit lenders, you just have masses of capital available to you and it's an industrialized process to go through and get financing for these projects. That type of infrastructure doesn't exist really to the same extent with mobile home parks. So you know, on one end, financing can be really difficult, especially for the smaller parks. But what that affords you is the opportunity to negotiate more flexible and creative deals, through seller financing. Because ultimately, and in many cases, sellers, they don't have a choice. So if they are really interested in selling, buyers can't get financing through traditional sources and so they're sort of left with one choice, which is to carry a note. So, you know, in some cases we celebrate the fact that we can do this stuff, but in other cases we kind of bang our heads against the wall and say, if only we could go to Fannie or Freddie and get this financed, that, you know, very long term, low-cost rates. James: So you are in New York and scattered all over the nation. How are these parks being managed, who's managing them? John: So we have onsite managers for all three of our parks. And for all intents and purposes, they carry out the actions that we dictate. So all of them either live onsite in the park or live very close by and most of the time, we have daily calls with the managers to tell them what to do. Now their level of sophistication and their ability does not rival what you're accustomed to in multifamily because you know, in multifamily you've got a level of professionalism and sophistication that just isn't there yet in the mobile home parks that we deal in. So for us, it's just, we've got boots on the ground. Their jobs are primarily focused on collections. So making sure that people are paying rent on time, posting pay or quit notices or facilitating evictions, coordinating repairs to the extent that we need to bring in someone to fix the plumbing, for example. And then to the extent that we're filling in new units, they're coordinating showings with prospective residents to come and see homes and see if they want to sign a lease. So that's really where their job is focused on. So it's not a full-time gig really for any of them, it's part-time income for them and it's in peaks and valleys. So depending upon the activity, whether that's new rentals that we have, rental units available or repairs that are happening, they may be either really busy or find themselves with not much to do. James: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I see they're not very highly sophisticated people. They are basically, you know, house-owner. So you know, mobile home users, on how people are paying, then we don't expect a lot from them in terms of management. I mean, even in multifamily. Yeah. I mean, we have a lot of professional management, but still, you have to manage them, right? So much moving parts, there's so many expenses, so much of repair and maintenance that need to be taken care of, which doesn't exist in mobile home parks. Because mobile home parks, supposedly, you know, you're just looking at the land and collecting rent. Looking at some common area, usually this kind of thing. So I think it would balance out in terms of, you know, the amount of time that you need to spend, especially for operators. 20:56inaudible] me who's managing our own property management and also people who are not having their own property management, their own active asset managers of apartment, failing to be involved very, very closely. You can't just go to the party. I mean they'll take it to somewhere else. John: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Great. You know, and I think that's an important point that a lot of people miss. You know, going to the boot camp that you mentioned, I also attended, I think one of the things, I think the boot camp, people who leave the boot camp are fairly transparent about what it's like day, day in, day out. But for whatever reason, I talked to a lot of people that are interested in the mobile home park industry and one of the appeals to them is this sense that it's passive. And I would say, you know, it is very hands-on in the projects that we're involved with that we're turning around and trying to increase the value. We are pretty close to being full-time property managers as opposed to seeing the checks, you know, come in and you know, loving the passive income. So that's fine for us. I mean we like getting our hands dirty and taking action and being involved but that's one thing I would caution people about for whatever reason. I think headline news suggests that this is a passive income source and that's absolutely not the case at all when you're dealing with value add, you know, medium size mobile home parks. James: Yeah. I mean if you want really passive and you invest passively or [22:28unintelligible] I don't think there's any business, which is really, really passive in real estate, right? Especially if you're an active operator and you want to make the most money. If you want to be at the top of the food chain, then you have to do work. If you don't do work, you can buy the deal and all that but the thing is you've got no control on the returns that are being made and being generated unless the market is getting up. There a lot of guys out there who are making, who are boasting themselves that they made a lot of money real estate without doing work. But it's actually the market is doing the work for you.  John: Right, exactly. James:  So this is the elephant in the room, right? So how're the returns compared to multifamily class B and C in mobile home parks? Because you have worked a lot on the capital raising side on the multifamily, so you can see a lot of operational stuff on that side compared to mobile home park, you know, how does that compare to..? John: Yeah, so I'd say just general rule of thumb, it all depends, deal specific. I know that there are, you know, opportunities that you come across in apartments, they get into the 20% IRR. But generally speaking, I think hurdle rate for me, for apartment complexes, is about 15% IRR over say a five year holds. Whereas the hurdle rate for me for mobile home parks is about 20% IRR. So I'd say it's a 5% difference in terms of a return premium there that I'm seeing and that I'm using as a guideline for allocating capital in my projects. James: Got It. What about cash flow on a yearly basis? What do you expect between these two asset classes? John: It's about the same. So whereas, you know, you may expect an 8% yield a cash on cash for an apartment complex, larger apartment complex. We're looking at sort of 10 to low teens on cash on cash return. James:  Are you syndicating this deal or you're doing this on your own? John: No. So we use our own capital for all three of our projects and with this fourth in the pipeline. So, I work with other partners. There are about four of us that work together and to date, we've only used our own capital and that's intentional. We think we're still learning. We want to build a track record and we really want to get our arms around these heavy turnarounds so that in the future, we can raise outside capital and go to market with credibility and feel confident taking other people's money to do projects. So yeah, to date, it's just our own capital that we've used. So we're all active partners and no syndication. James: So you could do a Jv type of thing.  John: Exactly.  James:  Okay. So you're saying when you're doing syndicate, you know, I mean, if you do syndication then you have to make sure you allocate some money for your passive investors as well from [25:24inaudible] whatever you guys are putting in I guess. So you're saying cash flow wise is almost similar, is that what I heard? John: So like 3 to 5% premium, cash on cash return. Whereas the IRR was about 5%. That's what we're seeing. We see a significant portion of the overall return allocated towards the equity, the increase in equity because we are doing a turnaround. So you know, the cashflow is nice, but a majority of our returns are coming through the boost because we are fixing problems, elevating the class of the property or expanding it to generate significantly more income. James: Got It. Got It. Got It. I mean audience just want to let you guys know as I wrote my book, you know, as a passive investor, you can choose any asset class, right? It's not only multifamily. I know multifamily is a lot of, what popular names nowadays is more famous than anybody or anything else. I mean, yeah, it is doing very well. There's a black swan effect of people become renters, you know, just demographic shift too. You know, people becoming renters. But there are also other asset classes like mobile home parks, self-storage, office industry. There's a lot of different asset class in that people are doing very well, right? Like, I mean, if you as a passive investor can make a couple of percents more compared to multifamily and you can find a good operator who will give you the returns on the backend you can always definitely do that. The key thing is to diversify your investment from what I see, even though I only do multifamily but I just think that, you know, wearing a bigger hat, my thought process, I think that's the message for passive investors, right? So the question for you is, you're talking about the 5% premium with the IRR and that's where the value adds are being generated, I guess. Right? And how do you plan to exit? I mean, are you going to sell to someone else? Is there like a big reap that is coming in? John: Yeah, so for us, I mean, we like buying and we don't ever want to sell. So I say that in air quotes, you know, we'll own it forever. But for us, the exit is really through a cash-out refinance. For us, we find these smaller to medium size parks where we think that we can elevate the class of the property. So take it just under a million dollars and you know, at a low vacancy and augment it such that it can be financed through, either a conduit loan or a Fannie or Freddie debt. And at that point, we will have created sufficient equity that we can more or less pull out all of our capital that we've put in. And then when we're done, we've got long term, low-cost debt on the property and then we'll just collect the cash and go on and do our next thing.  So that's the vision for all three of these properties is to execute the heavy turn of the value add in the first three to four years and then refi, take out all our capital and then go rinse and repeat and do that elsewhere. Because, I mean there's a very stable asset class. We liked the business. Affordable housing, we think is going to be a thing for the very long term. We like owning productive cash flowing assets and so we don't have any desire to sell now. So someone comes along and gives us an offer we can't refuse, well, we've got to, you know, do the math and see if it makes sense. But we're definitely not looking to go in, execute a turn and then exit to other private equity owners. James: Very interesting. I mean that's what value add keeps you in commercial and that's the real power of commercial real estate. The other day, I was talking to a passive investor. He said, hey, this guy is giving me, you know, 8% cash on cash flow and that's it. Right? What about the back end? He said, oh, I don't care what the backend. I say, well then you can get much higher cash flow on mobile home parks. So if cash flow is the only thing that you're looking at, you know, you shouldn't look at multifamily alone. Or maybe you should look at 'A' type, 'A' class multifamily in a very strong location near to core urban center as what I call a core type of deal, right? You really don't have to do just multifamily, you can do a lot of other asset classes, right?  The power in commercial real estate is actually on the cash flow plus the backend. The equity growth that you generate through value add, right? So that's why I named this podcast as value add real estate investing, because that is the gs of commercial real estate, right. Otherwise, I mean, unless you are rich or unless you are a big family office where you want to preserve your wealth; you're not investing, you're preserving your wealth. You're making slightly more than your inflation. Say inflation is 3%, you're making 8% cash flow. There's nothing on the back end, then you can go and do, you know, that kind of deal. The majority of people, people want the value-add component where it grows on the backend. John: Sure. Yeah. I mean, we'd love to sell to those types of buyers. The ones that are looking at this squeaky clean, I mean, we'll do the work, we'll create the equity and then, you know, for those that just want to collect the rents, we're happy to sell for a premium. James: Yeah, there's a lot of syndicators who buy the type of deal where you just cash flow because they get fees. Right? But for the passive investors and you don't understand, you're just going to get a cash flow, right. And some times people are very intrigued by the cash flow concept. Suddenly they come out from work, you know, working w two for their whole lives. Oh, there's a cash flow coming in monthly, you're going to jump on it, which is okay. It's okay for some people, but there are much better alternatives out there. Where you can grow your wealth as well on top of preserving your cash against the inflation. So that's good. So, how are you finding these deals because you are New York, how do you find it? John: Yeah, so we explore all channels. So we do cold calling, we network with other owner-operators. We had done some fairly extensive direct mailing. We no longer really do that much. We talked to brokers, we go to industry conferences, we look at Facebook, Craigslist, eBay, a variety of other digital platforms. Really, we try to cast as wide a net as possible because again, this industry is really fragmented, not as industrialized as, you know, apartments are. You'd be hard pressed to find significant deal flow on a loop net, for example, for mobile home parks. So we just try to put ourselves in the flow of deals in as many instances as possible. Which means that we look at a lot of deals, we say no to most of them and it's very structured and haphazard. But, I mean, the three deals that we've sourced so far have been through relationships. So whether it's through meetups, we've met people and they needed to refer a deal because they had other priorities that they were going after. So despite, you know, we've done the work and built out databases of owners, throughout the country and, you know, done the cold calling, done the direct mail, despite all that time and energy put into revving up that engine, ultimately today, it's come down to relationships with other people. James: I mean, it is so fragmented, right? It's just so hard to go and get to a broker and buy a right deal. Right. And daily, even in mobile home parks there to work hard for it. But that's okay. I think you're able to find it, which is really awesome. John: Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's good and bad. It's hard work to do it because it's so fragmented. But at the same time, that's one of the reasons why there's value there because you've got really mispriced opportunities because the market isn't as efficient. So I mean, I'll take the hard work any day if it means you can still get good deals. James: Got It. What about the depreciation or tax benefit of mobile home parks? How does that compare to the apartments? John: Yeah, so with those parks where you're owning the land and the infrastructure, so you don't have quite as a large depreciable base as you do in multifamily. One good thing is that you have a condensed depreciation timeline. So while the depreciable base is not as high in terms of absolute dollar value, you can take a decent material dollar value for the depreciable base and depreciate it over sort of a 12 to 17-year timeframe instead of the, I don't remember the exact number.. James:  27.5 John: Yeah, 27 and a half year timeframe. So what you find yourself in a situation is that in the first sort of 10 to 15 years, you have about the same depreciation benefits and taxable losses that you would experience in multifamily. But then after sort of the 10 to 15-year mark, you run out of the depreciation and then, you know, you find yourself in with a larger taxable income. James: Well, I didn't know that that is shorter than multifamily, is it 12 to 17 years? John: Yeah. About that because it's not real property that you're depreciating. These are the utilities, so [35:11crosstalk] and the light posts and the roads and I mean this is equipment, essentially, depreciating. With the schedule, you apply a different shorter schedule depreciation. Then you do the actual structures, James: You're not paying for the whole, I mean, you're paying for the land plus the utility infrastructure. Infrastructure maybe 10% of the overall cost, is that right? John: Roughly. Yeah, it depends. It depends on what your infrastructure looks like. But it's still material; in most cases, it's material amounts that you can depreciate, but it accelerated, right? So now while you may have a lower absolute dollar value of an asset that you can appreciate, you can do it over a much faster time so it's accelerated, which means your yearly depreciation charge is higher and can also be a significant portion. But again, that expires faster than you find in multifamily. James: Yeah. Yeah. But even in multifamily, I don't think anybody owns it for 12, 17 years. I mean, on syndicated deals, I guess. John: Right. James: Interesting. So, okay. So yeah, usually I think in commercial office industrial, is it 39 years? Multifamily residential, it's usually 27.5. And you're saying some of the utilities or infrastructure in the mobile home parks minus the land is 12 to 17 years. Okay. Yeah. Very interesting. So, John: Yeah, so not quite as attractive from a tax basis. Look, after tax returns, I think you still find yourself in a very favorable situation because you know, the overall returns generated by the property are at a premium. And so even if you are paying taxes on that, you're after tax returns still tend to trend above what you would find in other commercial... James:  Are you able to get a negative K1 in the first few years? John: Yeah, yeah, definitely. James: I mean, let's say after value add is done, let's say after value-add is done stabilized, do you still get negative K1? John: I'd say, I mean deals specific, but it would be reasonable to expect that for, you know, the initial years of operation for sure. James: Okay. Okay. Yeah. For our listeners, I mean K1 is the form that everybody gets when you're invested in a deal where it shows what is your paper loss or a paper gain. But usually most of the times, it's the loss. Because your mind is seeing the mortgage or you're minusing the depreciation of the asset and also you're minusing the interest on the loan that you are doing. But in this case, I think, John's case, there is a lot of it is seller finance so that still be interest. Yeah. You still have interests, right? Because for your IOS and all that.  Interesting. So where do you think you want to grow from here in mobile home parks? John: Yeah. So continuing to scale. As I mentioned before, we're probably right on the cusp of taking in outside capital. We'd like to complete the turnaround with the three properties that we have under our ownership now so that we can prove out the concept, you know, go to market credibly with we've executed, have you turn arounds. We did it successfully and just have the inner confidence to be able to go and take outside capital. So look, we're trying to find value and when value presents itself, we'll act. We don't have any stated goals in terms of the number of units that we want to acquire. We do want to get larger. We wanted to do, you know, more complex, more interesting projects. Well, it's hard work, it's also really fun and we find a lot of sizes faction and turning around some pretty beat up and run down communities and augmenting the sense of community, beautifying the neighborhood and again, solving a really meaningful problem, which is the lack of affordable housing. So we get a lot of satisfaction and find fun and interest in solving these problems and continuing to grow the portfolio. James: Yeah. And how frequent do you go and visit these parks? John: So I make trips about quarterly. So I was just in San Antonio in April and was out there for a week and then flew back through the Carolinas to see the other projects. And in South Carolina, North Carolina, I'm going back to the Carolinas in June. So about, you know, every two to three months, I'm a boot on the ground, either looking at deals in the pipeline, checking up on progress on existing turnarounds or, you know, in some cases, we've got to get state licensing in order to do what we want to do in terms of lot infill. So for example, you know, I was in Austin in January to sit for the dealers licensing exam. So in order to execute the law and fill that we want to do in San Antonio, we need to be licensed dealers in order to buy homes directly from the manufacturer. So we were in Austin doing that. The same thing is happening in June. We're getting a dealer's license in North Carolina to be able to execute these large turnarounds. So between checking up on projects, chasing new deals and getting whatever required licensing we need in states, we're on the road a lot and touring around the southwest and the southeast. James: Yeah. Yeah, that's very interesting. How are you getting dealer license to turn it on these properties and how are you finding a lot of fun in doing a lot of value? That's where you make the money. To solve problems that other people don't want to solve.  John: Exactly.  James: Right. So, and what's the point of buying a cash flowing deal?  John: Right, right, exactly. You know, in maybe 30, 40 years from now, great. I'll do those and just collect the rent checks and that'll be fine. But in the meantime, you know, I'm still relatively young, hungry. I want to make an impact. And so that's where value add is really where the opportunity is. James: I don't know, I mean, I think if you didn't want to work hard, I mean, I know if people want to get into real estate, but just so many people either, they don't want to take action or they think the problem is too hard or they just didn't want to put their mind into solving that problem. And that's where the barrier to entry comes in. Not many people want to solve the problem. And people like you who are in New York, you know, is solving the problem like in San Antonio and North Carlina, it's hard work but that's fun. And you make money out of it and it's generational wealth too, right? Because after you refi, you take out your money out, it's your cash flowing for your whole life. So you don't have to answer to anybody since you're not syndicating anyway, so that's awesome. So let's go to a bit more personal side. Why do you do what you do? John: Yeah. So again, I think it's just fun. I'm the kind of person that I don't think I'm ever going to retire and sit on a beach or golf all day. I like to be active and doing things that are interesting. I liked doing challenging things and so, you know, for me, I just get a deep sense of satisfaction in doing hard things and really doing those hard things with teams of people. So I like surrounding myself with partners and binding together as a team to solve challenges that are just intensely satisfying for me. James: Got It. Got It. Is there daily habits that you practice that you think has made you more successful? John: Yeah, so I would say I'm a distance runner. So I'm an athlete, I've been running marathons for what seems like forever. And what that practice is instilled in me is a couple of things that have really translated directly into investment success. One is just the concept of compounding. So logging miles every day, over long periods of time. You know, maybe in a week or a month, I don't notice the progress, but over years of repeated activity and continuing to grind it out despite pain or cold weather or you know, emotional blocks that would, you know, would it difficult for me to want to move forward, I keep powering through it and ultimately it's led to a lot of success in my running endeavors. Implying that same approach of compounding and continuous daily incremental action in the investing space has really helped position me for success in investing there too. James: Got It. Any advice that you want to give to newbies who want to get started in the mobile home park operation or investment in the business? John: Sure. I'd say definitely learn about the nuances of the industry. Take the time to not only attend boot camp or something similar, but talk to other owner-operators about the details of owning and operating parks. You know, it's not enough to just read materials or listening to podcasts, I encourage people to do that, I do it myself, but really get to know owner operators because there are a lot of nuances about running or even finding parks that are glossed over or not adequately covered in podcasts, reading material or boot camps. So I'd say education, definitely take the time. I mean, I took about a year to really get my head around, you know, what is this industry like and what is it going to take to succeed? So education and then just get started. I mean, there's a lot of reasons to say no and to walk away from opportunities. Again, with mobile home parks being kind of 30 to 40 years behind the times relative to multifamily. There's just the nature of the asset classes, there always are going to be problems with these assets because they're not usually professionally managed and they all have some level of hair or warts on them. Don't let that scare you, that should inspire you to learn about which problems are fixable in which are not; where you should run away quickly and where you should dig in. And really find an opportunity to solve problems and create value. So I think those are my two best pieces of advice. Just get educated and then learn to get started and get going. James: Awesome. Hey, John, why don't you tell our audience about yourself and where to get hold of you or if they want to contact you? John: Yeah, so my website has my contact details. So Loan Juniper Capital is the name of my firm. We own and operate mobile home parks in the southeast and southwest. That's loanjunipercapital.com. There you can find my email address, my phone number and I'm on Bigger Pockets as well, I'm all over Facebook as well and the mobile home park forums and multifamily forums in Texas. So I try to be active and get my face out there and I do a fair amount of attending conferences in the southeast and the southwest too. James: Awesome. Thanks for joining us today. I'm very sure that you added so much value. You know, I like to talk about different asset classes such as mobile home parks, other than just multifamily. Because as I said, opportunities everywhere. You have to find the right guys to partner with to know or to learn from. So, absolutely, I had a lot of value. Thanks for coming to the show, John. John: Yeah, thanks for having me, James. This was fun. Appreciate it. James: All right. Okay. Bye. Bye.

John Cutler is a Product Evangelist for Amplitude, an analytic platform that helps companies better understand users behavior, helping to grow their businesses. John focuses on user experience and evidence-driven product development by mixing and matching various methodologies to help teams deliver lasting outcomes for their customers. As a former UX researcher at AppFolio, a product manager at Zendesk, Pendo.io, AdKeeper and RichFX, a startup founder, and a product team coach, John has a perspective that spans individual roles, domains, and products. In today’s episode, John and I discuss how productizing storytelling in analytics applications can be a powerful tool for moving analytics beyond vanity metrics. We also covered the importance of understanding customers’ jobs/tasks, involving cross-disciplinary teams when creating a product/service, and: John and Amplitude’s North Star strategy and the (3) measurements they care about when tracking their own customers’ success Why John loves the concept of analytics “notebooks” (also a particular feature of Amplitude’s product) vs. the standard dashboard method Understanding relationships between metrics through “weekly learning users” who share digestible content John’s opinions on involving domain experts and cross-discipline teams to enable products focused on outcomes over features Recognizing whether your product/app is about explanatory or exploratory analytics How Jazz relates to business – how you don’t know what you don’t know yet Resources and Links: Connect with John on LinkedIn Follow John on Twitter Keep up with John on Medium Amplitude Designing for Analytics Quotes from Today’s Episode “It’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. My advice is to fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business.” – John “We definitely ‘dogfood’ our product and we also ‘dogfood’ the advice we give our customers.” – John “You know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. […] there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is, fight for it, because you know that it is important, and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem.” – John “It’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want.” – Brian “We got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked, and it’s so powerful” – Brian “Instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to consider, [I sometimes suggest teams] write in plain English, like in prose format, what would be the value that we could possibly show in the data.’ maybe it can’t even technically be achieved today. But expressing the analytics in words like, ‘you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and here is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.’ This method is highly prescriptive, but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience.” – Brian Transcript Brian: My guest today on Experiencing Data is John Cutler who is a product evangelist at Amplitude Software. I have been really enjoying John’s commentary on Twitter and some of his articles on medium about designing better decisions of work tools. If you’re in this space and you’re trying to figure out, “How do I get into the heads of what our customers need? What types of data is actually important to track?” Especially, if you’re looking at longer term outcomes that you want to be able to measure and provide insight on, I think you’re going to enjoy my conversation with John. Without further ado, here’s my chat with John Cutler. All right, we’re back to Experiencing Data, and today we’ve got the cutlefish as your Twitter handle is known, right is it cute-l-fish or cutlefish? John: We’re going to go with cutlefish, not cute-l. Brian: That’s what I thought. John Cutler is here from Amplitude Software, which is a product analytics company, and I wanted to have John on today, not because he is cute necessarily, but because I’ve really been enjoying what you’re espousing about customer experience, and particularly, product management. Which for some of our listeners that are not working in tech companies necessarily, there’s not really a product management kind of role explicitly by title. But I think some of the, as you will probably account to, the overlap between design, user experience, and product is sometimes a gray area. I think some of the things you’re talking about are in important in the context of building analytics tools. Welcome to the show, fill in, make corrections on what I just said about what you’re doing. You’re a product evangelist at Amplitude, so what does that mean and what are you up to over there? John: Well, we’re still trying to figure out the evangelist part because I don’t necessarily sell or evangelize our product, I think our product is great and I like to say it sort of sells itself. But what I’m really focusing on is helping up level teams, now that could be like our internal teams, our customers, but largely to just prospects and teams that have never even heard of Amplitude. What we’re really looking with this role is to do workshops, provide content, I do these coaching sessions with just random teams, so it’s like one hour coaching sessions. But generally trying to fill in the blanks, I think a lot of times people think, “Well, I’m just going to purchase this analytics tool or this product analytics tool,” and suddenly it’s going to answer all our questions and everything’s going to be fine. But what they don’t quite realize is that you really have to tweak a lot of things about how you work as a product development team to really make use of the great tools that are available. There are amazing tools available. I believe Amplitude is one of them, but there is so many good software as a service products to help product teams. But really at the end of the day, it’s about the team also being aligned and things like that. I really try to take a broad view of what it will take to help people make better products with this role. Brian: Yeah. Can you give an example? I think I know where you’re going with this, but give an example of where someone had to change their expectation? You need to change the way you’re working or let’s figure out what’s important to measure instead of just expecting. I think you’re alluding to like, “Oh, buy our tool, we know what the important analytics and measurement points are that you should care about and we will unveil them.” Instead it’s like, “Well, what’s important to track? Does time on the site matter? Does engagement in the application matter? Does sharing matter? What matters, right?” Can you talk about maybe where there was a learning experience? John: Oh, absolutely. I think maybe a good way to describe this as well is a lot of the learning, a lot of the questions begin way before the team is unwrapping the problem, unraveling the problem. I’m not sure this answers your question exactly but I think we could lead into something more specific. But imagine you’re a team and someone says, “It’s the second half of 2018, what’s going to be on your roadmap?” You think about it and you know what you know and you’ve heard customers tell you things, and the CEO of the company has subtly but not so subtly hinted he’d really like to see X or she’d really like to see X. You put together this roadmap, and at that point once you’ve got people thinking that those solutions are the right solutions, and you force that level of convergence, there’s not a lot of… measurement will not save you at that point, you’ve already committed at that point to deliver those things in that particular setting. One example of a practice that might change to further or amplify the use of measurement would just be not making… committing to missions, committing to move particular metrics that the company believes are associated with mid to long-term growth of the company, and commit to those things instead of committing to build features. An example, a real world example, maybe for someone’s effort, maybe what you’re shooting at before is do they shift from same time on site was important to something else? But for a lot of these teams, it’s shifting from build feature X to something like shortening the time it takes for a team to be able to complete a workflow. That’s the big shift for that. It’s nothing-to-something that makes sense, not necessarily even something-to-something. Brian: One of the things we talk about on the show is designing for outcomes instead of designing outputs. John: Yep. Brian: Because it’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want let alone measure them. Do you run into the problem when you… If you’re coaching someone and getting them into this mindset of designing around an outcome and building your sprint or your next, maybe it’s even a strategy for the next six to 12 months around outcomes? That the important things to measure are not quantifiable in the tool? Do you work yourself out of a customer sometimes because the tool can’t actually measure what’s important? Does that ever happen? John: That’s a great question because I think that I do a fun exercise with people, which is called let’s predict the success of a relationship. We start with this activity and we just we forget about what we think is possible to measure and we just start mapping our beliefs. The team will say something like, “Well, I think that they shouldn’t have arguments.” Then someone will say, “Well, yeah, but it’s not just,” and maybe they’re talking about their own life like, “Well, we argue a lot, but we resolve our arguments pretty, we become stronger once we have the arguments.” Then the team will sit there and go, “Huh, okay.” It’s not just about the number of arguments, it’s ability to resolve your arguments. Brian: Resolve. John: We keep playing this game and we map our beliefs out to predicting these things, and some of these things we have more confidence about and some of these things we don’t have a lot of confidence about. Some of these things we strike and we get this big messy network of nodes and edges on the wall and that’s what we start working with. What’s really, really interesting is that we actually, as a company, there’s almost always some percentage of these things that we can contribute to in terms of what they can instrument in using our product. It’s not like…we would much rather our customers map the universe of things and acknowledge some things that might be difficult to measure or they’re just beliefs at the moment, they haven’t figured out how to measure them. Because really what Amplitude is very powerful at is doing behavioral analytics about these long standing customer journeys through products and those types of… Anyone who’s done a 15-table join and tried to communicate it to other people in your company and then tweak it and have people collaborate with it just knows how painful that is. That’s the type of pain that we solve. But back to the particular question, all the coaching really centers around mapping all the beliefs, and we’re usually confident that there are ways to measure some percentage of those things using our product, and that’s fine by us. Brian: There’s almost like a meta-question, right? John: I like, I’m meta, yeah, I got it. I’m there with you. Brian: You’re like analytics, you’re an analytics product and you talk to your clients about what’s important for them to measure. But then at some point, you have to know what’s important to measure to know that your customers are getting the value. John: Yeah. Brian: Is it directly…are you interested in what they’re setting up to measure and then that becomes your measurement? Do you piggyback off that or do you… How do you justify that the sprint or the epic we worked on last quarter provided business value? How do you…? John: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, we definitely dogfood our product and we also dogfood the advice we give people usually first. To give you an example like in 2018, we had this North Star Metric called “Weekly Querying Users”, WQUs. That seemed about right and we did some analysis and it looked like, “Well, for increasing WQUs, it’s probably going to mean this and this and it’s going to be some early indicator that our monthly recurring revenue is going to keep going up”, etc. But there were obvious problems with that and we saw that. And as 2018 went along, we started to look at it more, and for any SaaS company, there’s a point at which your expansion within existing accounts starts to be really, really important in terms of percentage of revenue that you’re in. We thought, “Well, is that metric, can you hand WQUs to any new team member and say move that or move something that you think moves that,” and then be 100% confident they’re going to make good decisions? It broke down after that. What we did is we shifted to weekly learning users. Now a weekly learning user is not just someone querying, because anyone who uses one of these tools knows you could just sit there and query all day and not get an answer. In fact, querying more might indicate that you are not getting an answer. Not like doing anything with it. A weekly learning user is actually someone who shares some piece of digestible content whether it’s notebook, whether it’s a dashboard, whether it’s a chart, and they share it. We actually have this North Star, which is weekly learning users, we believe these three inputs drive weekly learning users and those are activated accounts. They need to know what they’re doing, they’re broadcasted learnings, which is the ability for the user to attempt to broadcast some number of learnings, and then a metric that is a consumption of learning metric which is the broad consumption across the organization of that particular piece of learning. This is all sounds really heady, why would we go to all these lengths to do this, and Weekly Querying User sounded good. But to us this really encapsulates a strategy. I think that that’s an important thing that a lot of people from pure analytics backgrounds or who are used to sitting with a queue of questions and answering those questions are maybe not used to the idea of moving towards a cohesive strategy as expressed by a number of metrics and the relationships between those metrics. That’s something that we really encourage our customers to do, it’s not data snacking. It’s not like, “Oh, I got this itch today so I’m going to answer this question.” That took a lot of work to come up with that, and we’re confident about those relationships between those things. But more importantly, it helps any new team member like all you need to do is show a skilled product manager or a skilled designer or a developer even and say, “This is our current mental model as described by the relationship between these things. Where do you want to slot in? What do you have in mind?” That’s really, really powerful. I don’t know if that roundabout way of saying we take this really, really seriously. Brian: If I can sum this up, and I’ll need you to repeat part of it, but you have monthly querying users, so what I take that to be is I, the customer, using, paying for the Amplitude software, a querying user means I went in and I looked for content or I literally used a search interface to probably look up an analytic or some stat. You moved away from the number of people doing that and how often they’re doing it as a measurement of your company’s success to this three-stage kind of thing that I heard included sharing some knowledge. But can you repeat what those three grains were? John: Oh, yeah, sure. The North Star is what we call “Weekly Learning Users”, so WLUs. Those are users performing the behavior of interest, which is sharing, distributing some piece of content. Then we believe there are three inputs that explain that metric or three inputs that we really focus on. One is that the accounts are activated, which are meaning that does this account just have a minimum number of people doing that? The next one is broadcasted learnings, which is me, “is the initial attempt to broadcast the learning?” Then consumption is the actual long tail consumption of that particular learning. Let’s say it is a story like I sign up with Amplitude, no one’s really using it all because we haven’t really onboarded and we haven’t really instrumented, we haven’t done any of that stuff. Okay, well, then we get that done, so we get just that we’ve activated, we have at least a certain number of users learning, some amount. I’m in the tool, I’m in a notebook that is really interesting that I’m putting together that tells a story with data, very interesting about the mission that I’m working on. I attempt to invite people to that notebook or get them involved, that’s the broadcast. Then, finally, the consumption of learning would be the accumulated interactions with everyone with a notebook. If that sounds too complex… Brian: Got it. I don’t know, I- John: But the whole idea is for people listening and I think especially folks, designers and other folks is that their experience with analytics might be something very simple like “what percentage of people used feature?” Or something. What they’re not getting is the context, the relationships, and what I’m describing here, there’s amazing belief networks, there’s causal relationship diagrams, there’s just simple stickies and string on the wall, whatever you want to call them. But we’re describing our beliefs as it relates to the data, and I think that, that’s really important. For some background too, I’m not a data scientist, I’ve been a product manager and a UX researcher and that’s been my focus for a long time. It’s not like I’m a pro at this stuff, and even for me, though, it grounds me in what I’m working with and makes my analysis a lot easier. Brian: I imagine you may have some, not resistance, but when you’re working with quote data people or analytics people or data science people in your staff, in Amplitude, are there routine things that you wish they would hear that would sink in or problems that maybe they’re not aware of that you think they should be like, “We need to look at the problem differently.” Maybe you encapsulated that and that’s why you have this three stage thing as a reaction to the data snacking mentality, which is “What data do we provide? Great, they have it, now they can eat it.” Is that their reaction to that or are there other things that… I’m thinking of our listeners, we do have data scientists and analytics type people, and I’m wondering if you were to work with them, it’s like, “Here are the things that I want you to think about here to get our head a little bit out of the tech for a second and into the decision support mentality.” Anything, what would you espouse or advocate? John: That’s a great question. I think I can answer it a little bit with a story. I was the PM for search and relevance at Zendesk, like support software. My background is not in information retrieval or the guts of search but very, very early on working on a team with very, very talented people, data scientists, data engineers really, at the end of the day. One thing that I very much advocated for is we needed to be able to get everyone in the same room, we needed to get the people who were experts in what I would just call the actors, the support agents, or the support managers, or the the person trying to get help on their Uber app. There’s experts in that, there’s domain experts. There’s also people who are experts in the surface area, the surface, like the interface. There’s people who are really, really good at searching or finding information on mobile. There’s people who’s very good at finding information on, in our case, like the support agents view in their web browser. Then you had our people who are really smart and creating data as it related to search and they were great at data engineering, etc. The main thing that I noticed was that there’s just a silo-ing, and the people on my team were just craving, craving to be sitting next to someone who understood these other things really well. I think that for a lot of listeners it’s probably you know that, you know that from a first principles angle, you’re like, “Well, I know that there’s a bigger picture here.” I know that just in our case of searching like we knew that raising the mean reciprocal rank of a search term, we are searching it, where does the person click? Do they click on the second item, the fifth item. In theory, raising that would make a difference but when we look more broadly, it really didn’t relate to deflection of tickets and things like that. Our traditional metrics, the way we were measuring success is locally related to search. If we broadened our horizon to what makes a difference for the human beings out there who need their support tickets resolved or the support agents or things, that perspective was so helpful. What I would say to the folks on listening, it’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think, organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business. Brian: Sure, and you’re echoing sentiment I had a Data Center from the Broad Institute on, he was mentioning how much he’s like, “My work is so much more powerful when I have a great domain expert with me who really knows the space.” We met over music, I’m a musician as well and he was trying to explore creativity in the context of jazz. He’s a enthusiast in terms of music, he’s not a musician, but he’s an enthusiast so he understood some of it but he didn’t have the lingo. It’s just interesting when you look at someone working in that space trying to answer a question about like, “How does creativity work in jazz?” They don’t have all that domain lingo. Being on for a change, being the domain expert, it was fascinating for me to be on the other side because usually I’m the hymn advocate, even though I’m not a data scientist, as a designer and a consultant, we deal with this all the time. It’s like, we got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked and it’s so powerful so I totally agree with you on the need to provide that bigger context sometimes so you don’t just- John: Jazz is just a mistake played more than once, right? Brian: Yeah. Oh, there’s tons of them, there’s no wrong notes, just bad choices. John: It’s very easy for them to create the model for that. You’re just making a mistake and play it more than once. Brian: Exactly. John: Then you go back to the top. Brian: Exactly. Well, even that, like play the head again. Well, what’s a head? Oh, okay. Well, it’s just one form of the tune and they cycle through it and play chorus. Well, what’s a chorus? Okay, shit. But even having that, you can imagine that on the business client, this was like a fun side project he was working on. But you can imagine that in a business context where you don’t even know what you don’t know yet about it yet. I hear this as happening, they’re still in the, especially, in the non-tech company space, the more traditional companies that are, “Oh, we have 100 years of data and let’s go, we need to go buy some data scientists and throw them at this pile of data and then magic will come out the other end.” John: Oh, I think that that happens in tech companies, too, though. I think that that’s the number of data scientist friends who’ve been hired in is like some large effort. Then, one, they’re like, “Yeah, and data engineering was the actual problem.” Okay, we spent our first year there just going around in circles on solving that problem, and then, yeah, the number of friends I have who’ve been frustrated by that dynamic, even in tech companies, I think it’s a pretty common, more common everywhere than we would think. Brian: Tell me a little bit about, so we’ve been talking about the analytical part of all this, the quantifiable parts largely but you have a UX research background as well. We talk, on this show, we talk about empathy, we talk about the needs to go talk to people to ask good questions, to ladder up, get into all that. How does that fit in? When you’re working on an analytics tool, can you fill us in on your approach to qualitative research and more the soft, mushy stuff that UX people deal with? John: Yeah, and it’s interesting. For context, I’m not a UX researcher at Amplitude but I’ve done that in prior environments that required the chops. But in talking to teams and doing it, I think so many of the basics apply in the sense that you’re really… Not to overuse the jobs-to-be-done stuff, you’re really, really trying to understand what decision this person is hoping to make. You’re really trying and then what impact that decision has on the rest of the organization and who is involved in it. I think anyone who’s done this knows that even as a UX researcher, if I do like a co-design activity with customers related to anything analytics oriented, it’s just, “Oh, we’re going to do an Excel mock up or you know.” Anytime you get customers involved with that, it’s so easy. If either side, and I’ve been on both sides of this, it’s so easy to forget what you were trying to do. I think that has a lot to do with the exploratory aspect of data in general that we have a gut instinct that if we just saw this stuff organized like this, then it would somehow be valuable for something we have to do. I think that for, and I don’t know if it answers the question, but I think it requires the same chops but also understanding that people just have a hard time, users have a hard time talking about what they are looking at and what they’re hoping to get out of the data when they’re looking at it over and over and over. I think that really, it really you have to use all the tools in the tool shed. To give you an example, there was… I don’t know if you’ve done these things too, I’ll do these exercises where it’s like, “Okay, we’re revamping the app, it’s just going to be this mobile browser with three numbers on it.” That’s it, that we’re not going to have all these fancy charts, we’re not going to have all this stuff. And three numbers and then one piece of narrative advice, like “Consider this or do this.” I love activities like that from a UX researcher standpoint when I’m working with people because it really, really forces them to just get out of their own head to think about it. That’s like a common trick and you probably have a lot more. But, yeah, I don’t know if I answered the question but it’s a lot of the same tools. But I think also you have to really… It’s a job environment, they’re making decisions, they’re hiring these analytics to do a job. But then with this added layer that I think that people are just incredibly, they find it incredibly difficult to talk about the numbers that they’re looking for. Brian: When you say it’s difficult for them to talk about it, are you talking about their digestion of what’s on the screen or their expression of what’s important to them to actually find out? What do I actually want to learn about? Is it… John: Both really, and that’s the thing that I think just makes it doubly as hard. It means that if you show them something, and I think that we can all relate to it too, like any of us who have been shown some mock or some prototype of information on the screen, you can see your gears turning. You’re having to process it and where did this come from? Can I trust it? What is it? We see that all the time just in Amplitude, it’s people… Our understanding of how people experience some of these querying screens that we have, when you actually ask them to just talk through what they’re thinking about as they move through it, it’s just it’s so complex. Data trust, where is this stuff coming from, data over time, their challenges with certain visualization techniques, even if it’s “the right technique” like, “Well, I just need a radar chart.” Just like no you don’t really. But that’s how they’ve been anchored or whatever. It’s just complex. I don’t have a fancy answer, it’s just complex. Brian: What you just told me reminds me of you had mentioned you do this exercise, and I’m wondering if it’s the same exercise that I’ve done as well with analytics tools, especially, in the context of monitoring applications. There’s some system that’s monitoring stuff and it’s supposed to advise you on what should I do next or what happens with something like this? It’s like “instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to do”, it’s “write in plain English like a prose format what would be the value that we could possibly show”, and maybe we can’t even technically do it today. But it’s “express the analytics and words like you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.” It’s highly prescriptive but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience. How close to that can we get to it, where I don’t have to infer from charts or whatever the date of this format is, how close could we get to something that prescriptive and then try to work backwards from that. We probably can’t get right to that full prose. Is it something like that where you jump to this conclusion, like value conclusion or something like that? John: Yeah, and I do a couple of these like that, one is if I have an Alexa or if I have a tube of crackers or whatever I’m like, “This is the interface now.” You can ask Alexa, that’s your interface. This is a beautiful future world where you just have your smart person, your smart assistant to do these things. Yeah, similar type of, I think, what it does is it creates just enough dissonance to snap people out of just immediately trying to unravel the visualization, which can be I think all of us do that. I think that that’s our instinct whenever we look at something like that. Brian: The default next question is how should we visualize this data that we’ve captured? That’s the itch that we may not be the one to scratch? John: Yeah, but I think that’s also what we can test with, that point, when we’ve got that need to fill, that’s when we can try multiple approaches, I think to see that. That’s my experience, there is that point at which you need to you go back to the drawing board. Although, I would say that depending on the subject, the user in that case or the person you’re working with, some people are really, really good at just the co-design aspect. I don’t know your experience with that, but it seems to have a lot to do with what the people do each day and how they think about visualization and stuff. But I’ve done co-design sessions with people who the next step was, “Well, let’s start thinking about, let’s start drawing, let’s start doing some other things to do it.” I think that depends a lot on the background of the people that you’re working with. Brian: If you were starting over today with Amplitude, is there either a… Not necessarily a feature you would change but is there something that you would approach differently? If someone says, “Hey, we have this JavaScript widget, you paste it in your, all your app or whatever, and we can track almost anything, any activity, whatever. What should we show?” Is there something you would change about maybe how you guys went, the process you went about arriving at the current product that you have? John: That’s interesting. I wish Spencer and Jeffrey were here to answer because they’re the founders of the company. But I think that it’s funny how products have their history about them, so Amplitude, for example, it was a Y Combinator. The founders didn’t go to Y Combinator, they had this fancy voice app or something that they were working on, and this was actually just their effort. They were like, “Well, we kind of had this app,” and they surveyed what was available and then just said, “We really need, there’s a thing, it’s a little different. It’s like an event based measurement thing. We really want to instrument this app and know whether people are using it or not.” That was the founding story, it wasn’t their key thing. A lot of the early customers were folks from Zynga or Facebook or other places that had moved on to other startups and then they wanted something that helped with the 90% of product questions that they had around retention and engagement and complex behavior patterns. Does this behavior predict this or is there a relationship between these things? That’s the founding story, these discerning teams that had a fair amount of autonomy and were tasked with working in these environments and that they wanted a product that they could do that with. When I’m thinking about what I would change as the newcomer to the company, now maybe five years on, was it, yeah, or six years or seven years on, I think it’s what they’re starting to do now, which is interesting. This notebooks feature to me is just so, so, so good and it gets away from a traditional dashboard. But with a notebook, it’s very similar to a data science notebook, you can weave this story and this narrative and you can make the charts live and you can communicate it and you can do those things. As a product manager, that is pure gold to me, and it’s just we’ve started to do those things. I think that the answer would be more of what they’re really digging into now, which is around this learning user concept and how do you create stories with the data to motivate your team and keep everyone aligned and things. I think if it hadn’t existed and I joined a year ago, I would have been like, “Oh, you’re missing this little element like the actual part that integrates it into day to day product development.” But they’ve just started doing that now, so they stole my answer. Brian: Nice, and just for people that don’t know, tell me if I got this right, but the notebooks for people that aren’t data scientist, it’s effectively a collection of both quant data like maybe charts or tables, stats, data collection that you guys have put into some visualized widgets or whatever it may be insights plus qualitative stuff like my commentary on it. Like “Why do we care about this? Well, design is currently tracking these metrics because we’re running a study on dah, dah, dah, and we think we can move this up” and that’s a proxy for this other thing. You can provide all this context in that storytelling mentality so that when someone new comes in, they’re like, “Why do I care about time on site or whatever the metric?” John: Exactly, and that’s the huge thing. One thing that we learned, we’re in this business of teams getting going and it’s like it’s so easy to get to the point where you’ve instrumented your products and any new person joining your company can’t make heads or tails of anything. It’s like you’ve got all these events, are these duplicate events? We’ve invested a lot of time in this taxonomy feature, which helps manage your taxo- It’s way, way, when people try to build this stuff in-house, they just forget about all that stuff. Like, “Oh, it’s just events, it’s semi-structured information, we’re going to put it here and then we’re just going to run queries on it.” But all that’s really, really important, so back to the notebooks thing, one of the biggest use cases we’ve seen in notebooks is people using them to onboard people and orient them with all the available analytics that and metrics and things that are being recorded. That’s actually a really good testament to show that need. Brian: They use it to actually show how they use Amplitude at the- John: Right, it’s pretty meta. Brian: Wow, that’s awesome. John: Yeah, we see them do that or even some of them use it for training like, “Okay, let’s start with this idea that we’ve got this whole universe of users. Well, how would we segment those? Well, here are the key ways that we segment.” Okay, that we’ve gone down one layer, and so I think that that’s kind of cool. But, yeah, for people who don’t know about these data science notebooks, it is a mix of qualitative, quantitative, you can embed charts that are live or you could embed point-in-time charts, you can make comments, and you can do various things. I think for a lot of people who don’t do this for a living, they get intimidated and it’s not, a lot of the stuff is not rocket science, but it’s just annoying to have to go to someone in your company and say, “Hey, can you spend like three or four hours just explaining our information to us.” That’s really hard to do, so these notebooks help with that particular thing. I think that type of stuff is really the future of moving away from just very, very stayed dashboards and things like that. Brian: Right. I don’t know if there’s much in terms of predictive or prescriptive intelligence in the tool, does the tool provide that as well or is it mostly rear view mirror analytics? John: It’s interesting you say that, so we have this new feature called Impact Analysis, and so in Impact Analysis you are able to go from day zero of a particular use of a particular feature and then see the impact that it has on another set of things. We give some statistics and we give some other values in there. So we’re middle of the road moving to more and more complex questions. But one thing that our team realizes that anything… To prevent people from making bad decisions or making poor statements, you need to be so, so, so careful about presenting what you’re actually showing if there’s a correlation between something or even implying that there’s causation without doing the background on it. We’re not completely rear view and we’re in this middle ground, but we’re also going to go on record and say we’re predicting what this value’s going to be in six months. Brian: Right, and the reason, and not just the hype of machine learning, blah, blah, blah, that’s not my main reason for asking was going to lead into my next question, which was do you struggle at all with the expression in the tool of the evidence that backs up any types of conclusions that you’re showing? Do your customers care? Well, how did you guys arrive at this? John: They absolutely care, and so like one of the… We spent a lot of time in the ability, in Amplitude, any data point that you see, usually, if you hover over it, there’s a message it says, “Click to inspect,” or you can create a cohort off of that or you can see the paths to that particular thing. What we really made this effort to do is exactly right, is that people… Working at two analytics companies now, Pendo and now Amplitude, data trust and people being able to unravel what that number means in a way that makes sense to them seems like one of the massive limiters. It’s just that thing that it’s best laid plans start, that’s the entropy that exists with these tools as people use them more and more. There’s just it gets messier, a bunch of hands, a bunch of people are playing around. At least with Amplitude, they try to make a really big effort to like if you want to understand why that number is there and what is behind it, we try to make that really easy. John: But we could always do better because in my mind this is the number one difference between the more data snacking approach like “it kind of looks interesting, that number,” something that you can really pin your business on, which I think is what people… That’s the dream of all this, but then once people start to ask good questions really, it really challenges the tool. Brian: John, this has been fantastic chatting with you, I really appreciate you sharing this with our listeners. Do you have any parting wisdom or anything you’d like to share with people that are maybe working more on the tech side or the data side of the thing and the vents and they’re trying to, “I want to produce more use, whether it’s reports or actually software applications. But we’re trying to provide better stuff, more engaging, more useful…” Any closing advice you might give to someone like that? John: I’m going back to what we were talking about from the UX research angle is that I think that in this area, there’s so much temptation to any one of us who’ve done this is that there’s this constant push and pull between customizability and then this promise of preemptive insights like smart system, it’s intelligent, it’s doing these things. Then so how prescriptive are you? Is what you’re presenting and actually helping someone to do their job. I think that it’s probably reflective of my learning at Amplitude is that really going to human centered design, like really thinking about if the person is able to effectively do their job and really able to answer the questions that they’re answering. I think that what happens is all of us want that, but then we hit this wall and we start to get really some conflating information from users and we start to… Then we’re like, “Well, okay, we’re just going to let them find what they want to find. I think that, that exploratory type of research should be something that’s possible in these tools. In fact, I think that leads to asking some of the best questions when users can do that. But I would really hope that people don’t abandon the idea of being really patient and seeing if before they just throw their hands up in the air and will say, “Well, we’ll just make a query builder and that’s it, that’s it.” Like really seeing if that thing can solve the problem. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think it’s something that’s really been on my mind a lot lately. Brian: Yeah, I talk about sometimes like with clients and people in this space about knowing whether or not you’re producing an explanatory product or an exploratory product. It doesn’t mean you can’t necessarily have some of both but there’s a big difference between the value, like in your case, I’m guessing a lot of these people really want some explanations when they tell us about what we can do to make our software better. They’re not there for fun, but they might run across some things they didn’t know were possible which begins the questioning. But if you put all the effort on them, you’re just shifting the tool effort over to the customer. You’re making it much harder for them to get the value out at which point they may abandon or quit. It’s not just knowing are we explanatory or exploratory or at least there’s this feature or there’s this outcome that this goal that we’re working on, the sprint. But just being aware of that I think is part of the challenge. Like should they be able to walk away with… I should be in the six to 19 apple’s range, whatever that means, like, should I be able to walk away with that level of clarity or not? I don’t know. John: I think that it’s also something like, that’s interesting you said that, because a lot of features that we’re experimenting with, one thing that Amplitude does is anytime you… We built an undo feature, so we try to make it really easy to go really deep and then just back out really gracefully. It’s like infinite, every version of the chart as you work on one is saved. You can back out of it. There’s a lot of features like Save As or you’re built like you could go to someone else’s chart, and if you have some idea of where you want to take it, you could edit it. But you’re not editing their chart, you’re editing a copy and you can think about it. But back to that point is I think that there’s many things that you can do to encourage, that you can juggle those needs concurrently for having definitive things and then also encouraging exploration. We’ve found that with our product as we experiment more. One, I just told you about it, like the ability to telescope into a metric and then do more exploration around it. That didn’t exist before and then we were like, “Oh, well, how about when you hover over any data point and you allow them to inspect that or explore that?” I would say that there are ways to accommodate both at least from our perspective and what we’ve learned. Brian: Right, and I think there’s always some of both of that, and I don’t think most people are going to take everything on its face value. But I hear what you’re saying. One of the things I’ve been recently working on is a UX framework for this called the CED framework, just conclusion, evidence, and data. It’s not necessarily a literal expression of “Where should the screens go? What goes on every screen?” But the concept that when possible, if the tool can provide conclusions with the second tier of being the evidence by which the tool or application arrived at this conclusion. Level three might be really getting into the raw data like, “What are the queries? What was the sequel that actually ran?” Or whatever the heck it may be, there’s times when maybe that data is necessary early on a customer journey. It may just be, “We need to build trust around this stuff.” We can’t be totally black box, but we don’t actually expect people to spend a lot of time at the D-level. We really want them to work in the C level, but it’ll take time and evidence is required sometimes if you’re going… Especially, I got to go to the boss, I can’t just tell him it’s 18, we should be at 18, not 12. It’s like, “Well, how did you arrive at that?” John: We find a lot is the instrumentation rigor is like that’s one of our big problems to solve really is there are these products on the market that do just try to record everything for it. There’s a lot of entropy there and there’s a lot of issues. They’re very fragile, in some ways, so we as a company definitely believe in explicitly instrumenting these events. But at the same time, you’d be amazed how many product teams… There’s this thing called a user story, you write a user story that’s from the user’s perspective, what are you trying to do? Now you would think that like, “Okay, well, we’ll tack on to the acceptance criteria for any story that you’ll use a noun and a verb, and you’ll get these properties and you’ll get these things. Integrating instrumentation on the product level, not necessarily like, “Okay, we’re instrumenting how our servers are working or anything,” but just, “What did the user do?” That’s still relatively new. People who’ve worked in environments that just do that as second nature that, okay, they’re in another thing, but we find that companies even need to change that approach. You’ve mentioned your CED thing like what’s interesting is that extends to the UX of instrumenting. It’s pretty interesting from that, it’s you’re the user trying to draw some conclusion, you’re doing these things. But it’s almost like service design, in some sense, because you need to design the approach to even instrumenting this stuff. It makes your head hurt sometimes. Brian: Yeah, all this stuff makes my head hurt. But that’s why we have conversations, hopefully, we’re knowledge sharing and it’s like giant aspirin conversations or something, I don’t know. But I found this super useful, thanks for coming on the show. Where can people follow you? I know I found you on Twitter. I forget how but what’s your [crosstalk 00:47:23]- John: Twitter is good, I’ve installed a Stay Focused app to prevent more than 20 minutes a day on Twitter. But you will find me eventually there. I write a fair amount on Medium and it’s pretty easy to find me there. Brian: Okay. John: If you just type in “John Cutler product”, I have about 400+ posts on Medium. Some are better than others but- Brian: Awesome. John: … yeah, that’s the best way for right now. Brian: Awesome. Well, I will definitely link both of those, your Medium page and your Twitter up in the show links. Man, John, it has been really fun to chat with you here. Thanks for coming on the show. John: Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, awesome. Brian: Yeah, super. All right, well, cheers. John: Cheers, bye-bye.

El dia 6 ens va deixar una aut

The 45 Minute Business Breakthrough Creating More Income with John Gies After more than two decades in corporate, John Gies heard a potential client say that $400,000 tax free was not worth his time. John knew then that he wanted to work where he could make a difference. Over the next several years he gained his Coach Certification, He has taught and coached organizations around the country and he now works with small business owners and non-profit organizations to help them create the income they need to thrive. John's personal live vision is a world where people are inspired to leverage their power and influence to contribute to a more sustainable and positive workplace.   Read the Interview [Due to a video issue, the beginning of interview is lost. Transcript begins when video was restored.] John Gies: A communication coach, that transitioned from- I see your face. Was there a question there?   Hugh Ballou: No, I love that story. Go ahead. I'm excited about that. John: When I left, what I wanted to do is I tried to look at other companies or other industries. The roads seemed to be closed. I said, What do I like doing? I love speaking in front of an audience. I love training and mentoring my teams. I love facilitating that conversation around the table where we've got different interests, maybe sales, operations, and technology trying to create a common vision, and trying to get to that with all those different points of view. I said, Why don't I become a coach and a trainer? I went to work with a company. I got a chance to do some teaching and coaching across North America and Europe around sales, sales training, presentation skills, negotiation skills. Hugh, I hate to sound stereotypical, but stereotypes do exist. The Brits were almost on time, the Germans were early all the time, the French and the Italians showed up when they wanted to show up. It was an interesting experience. The Americans unfortunately were the ones who said, “We're doing great. We don't need any help.” It was an interesting experience for me. Hugh: That's a stereotype, but it's sad, isn't it? John: It is. Yet it sounds something about us, right? Stereotypes are stereotypes in some cases. His name is going to escape me. Someone once said, “If you hear a cliché, look to the truth in the cliché. There is probably something in there that led to the cliché.” Hugh: Isn't that why they are clichés? John: Right. While I was working with them, when they had lots of clients, I was busy. When they didn't have clients, I wasn't busy, so I decided to embark on my own. Today, I work with organizations with what I call a wholehearted approach to business. It's not a name that you often think of when you think about business. But wholehearted is three pillars. There is the profit/revenue/money. I used to work with a nonprofit healthcare executive, who I will call Sister Mary. She said, “People come to me all the time and ask why we don't provide this for free.” Her response was, “If there is no money, there's no mission.” It's really making sure that we have the money to fulfill our mission. Then there is leadership. Self leadership starts. If we can't manage ourselves, we can't manage other people. Hey, Russell. Russell Dennis: Greetings. John: Then it's the impact we have. Same impact we have on our people, our clientele, our community, the environment, the whole thing. That's three pillars. Hugh: Russell, there is some background noise, so I muted you. You will have to unmute yourself when you come on. He is putting on his headset. John, I want to get those three points. Those went by fast. Let's capture those bullet points. John: There is profit. Whether we are in a nonprofit, a small business, or a big business, we can't fulfill our mission without money. People rely upon us to be here in the long haul. It's not just a dream to serve. We have to create the sustainability for our future. There is leadership. Leadership starts with self-leadership before we can lead others. I can share with you what I mean about that. When I think of one place that leadership is the weakest, it tends to be ourselves. The third pillar is impact. What impact are we having on our clients, customers, employees, communities, and stakeholders? I was really influenced by a book called Firms of Endearment. It's a good-to-great comparison of stakeholder organizations versus shareholder organizations. Stakeholders are employees, vendors, the community, the environment, and shareholders. They outperform the S&P by 16X. They outperform the good-to-great companies by a factor of 10X. This lasted even through the Great Recession we just went through. For me, it's how we take care of all the people in our organizations instead of just focusing on one limited subset of our stakeholders. Hugh: Absolutely. We teach those very same things. But it's good to have you on here because people don't listen to us. We're so much in sync with that. John Maxwell in his 21 irrefutable laws of leadership has the law of the lid. You hit the ceiling of the lid, and your organization can't progress any further than your ability to lead. That is true over and over. Our boards, our teams, our cultures are a reflection of our leadership. You may or may not know I am a musical conductor. What they see is what I get. What I practice in real life as a conductor works in the board room, works with the staff, works with the volunteers. It really doesn't matter where we're leading; the concepts are the same. Russell is coming in from a remote location. He was trying to find a connection last we spoke. Russell is the one who connected with you and suggested you be our guest today. I have looked over your website. It's good stuff with some nice design. I am impressed with what you do. Thanks to Russell for finding you and finding the synergy. One thing you said was about the mindset. Thinking about the profit, leadership, and impact, and the stakeholders. [Audio issue] Clergy, people like that. Maybe even major donors. If you want to get money, you want to make sure you demonstrate impact. We want to see a difference. [Video freeze] Did I lose you? I'm here. Talk about that a minute, and where that fits into your thinking, how people misperceive profit, how people misperceive leadership. Can you hear me? I think he's frozen. Maybe, we're having a technical issue today, folks. So maybe we'll get back together. John, he showed up over there. We seem to be having some technical issues. John, your video dropped out. There you are. Russell? Same neck of the woods as him. Is there an internet outage out there? Russell: I am downtown preparing for the GlobalMindED event. We have leaders here, global-minded. It's a nonprofit that provides services to help first-generation college students connect with employers. Very big event coming up here. Starting tomorrow. It will be running through Friday. That's where I'm at. Helping with that, looking to set up interviews with leaders and coverage of the event so we have things to talk about. Hopefully, John is back with us. He has done a lot of work. He started out with healthcare organizations and started seeing some leadership challenges around that. He has done a lot of work and worked with a lot of organizations here in the Denver area to deal with some of the bottlenecks you experience with leadership. When those bottlenecks are prevalent, you can run into issues with funding. He wrote a book about that. That is one thing I want to ask him about later and have folks get access to that. It's a very good book. Hugh: We did a teaser about the book. We haven't told anybody about it yet. John, before the technology devil came in here and ate up your feed, I was talking about the misconception of the word “profit” with nonprofits, and how boards have gotten into a negative groove. Do you want to talk about that a minute? Then I will hand it over to Russell, who is the one with the real tough questions. John: Great. Yeah. If I understand you, the question is profit versus nonprofit? It's interesting. Russell did this for a long time. There really is no difference. If there is no money, there is no mission. We have to generate enough profit, retained earnings, income, whatever you want to call it, so we can redistribute it. I often encounter both in the corporate world from healthcare providers who were nonprofit, and nonprofits I have volunteered with over the years, that money is not the big thing. It's all about service. It's all about serving the customer, the patients, our clientele. If you can't keep the lights on, you can't deliver any service. I feel like I'm rambling a bit. This is where my wholeheartedness comes from. If you look at the way businesses are being structured today, more and more of them are being structured to deliver a different kind of value than just the bottom line. There are benefit corporations. There are LLCs that are for-profits embedded within nonprofits. There is a whole host of ways we can use our work, I have air quotes up there, to do good in the world. I think it was Kahlil Gibran who said, “Work is love made visible.” Regardless of what we're doing, we should be able to bring love into the world, or wholeheartedness, even at a profit. Hugh: We generate income because we generate value. Russell has helpful observations and questions. I'm going to park for a minute and let him participate. Thank you, Russ for being here. I know it was a challenge getting on today. Russell: Thanks. It's good to be here. I know John is an amazing person. I am glad I met you. One of the things that you and I talked about over coffee was the notion of value, and how that is being redefined today. Folks that are running businesses to make a profit often talk in terms of value. It seems to be a word that nonprofit leaders haven't wrapped their arms around yet. Even if they do, some of the team may not be aware of what exactly is value. How do you ramp up those discussions when you are talking to nonprofit organizations in terms of speaking to value and what that means to the different audiences they serve? John: What a great question. Nonprofits deliver such value. Whether it's providing a roof over our heads, food and shelter. They look and say, “That's what we are giving to our clientele, people who need that value.” They're also delivering value to the donors and people who are fundraisers. I met with a young man who moved here from D.C. His whole background is in philanthropy. If I'm a donor, the example I was thinking through on this is do you remember Sally Struthers and the Feed the Children campaign from years ago? She would come on TV and see all these images of hungry children. We would make a donation. We got a letter from that child. We are in relationship to that child. Now there is this warm, fuzzy feeling of, I, as a donor, am getting real value from that donation in my heart. What happens for a lot of us today is we don't think about how we're delivering value to all of our stakeholders, be they fundraisers, donors, clientele, you have different kinds of value to each one of them. For a donor, one of the big questions donors all have is, “If I give you money, will it go to the end user, or will it go to administrative costs?” There are a whole host of people who are doing valuations and rankings around that. How can I pluck John's heartstring? How can I pluck Russell's heartstrings? A friend of mine had a daughter who came into the world with a lot of physical challenges. In Children's Hospital for years. Her mom was in and out. If I deliver a message to her that talks about children and supporting people while they are waiting for a child to come out of the hospital, that is delivering value to me because it sings and resonates with me. Does that make sense? Russell: That's the trick. That's the challenge a lot of for-purpose enterprises (as we prefer to call them, a term given to us by one of our guests). That is the challenge. You have multiple audiences. Value is not only something that has to be quantified in material terms. It's different for every audience. The way that we relate to each other is through stories. People are discovering that. The big question is what is your story? Different people have different metrics, depending on their perspective. How important is it to have ways to measure what is valuable? How do you help nonprofits navigate that when they have these multiple audiences? How do you help them navigate figuring out what the message is for each audience? John: Really good question. When I share measurements, I think to my friend Annette, who is a good evaluator, who does research to quantify numbers and cents. When you think about a sentence or a paragraph or a story, how do you measure the ROI? What is the equation? Actually, there is a lady by the name of Nancy Duarte, who has mapped a really good storyteller. She took Martin Luther King's “I Had a Dream” speech, and mapped the structure of the speech with its peaks and valleys to lead to the enrollment of the audience in his message. To answer your question, sometimes the impact is emotion. Even though we are driven by our spreadsheets in business, those are only to back up the emotional decisions we have already made. Working with a nonprofit, when we think about the donor, we have to think about what emotions we touch on. If I am talking to a philanthropist or a fund, like The Knight Foundation, what is the emotion or feeling I want them to feel about what they're going to do for us? When I am trying to pull people off the streets as clients into my organization, how do I want them to feel? What I find most of us do is we run, run, run. And we don't stop to think about the value. It's not always what we think it is. What I counsel my clients on is it's not putting food in someone's hands. It's answering a question about the concern of who is giving them the food. I'll give you an example. Most painting contractors think they are hired to paint the house. They will tell the consumer, “We do great painting.” The reality is, the consumer is thinking, I'd like to have my house painted, but how do I know that painter will be on time, done on time, and won't leave a mess? We have to answer the questions behind the question to call those, whether it's a donor, a fundraiser, the clientele, or the public because the public can be very strong advocates for our for-purpose organizations. Great word choice by the way. I'm bouncing a bit, but that changes the whole framework of how you think about the organization. There is the nonprofit and the for-purpose. There is a withdrawal and an engagement. Good choice of words there. Russell: I'd like to go back to the statement of people looking at how you spend the money. I think we have seen some perception problems with the structure of an organization. A lot of people want to write checks for programs, but they don't necessarily want to pay the nonprofit's rent. You have to have a structure to deliver a program. But if you are running the organization delivering the programs, you have to be efficient. You have to be good stewards of the resources entrusted to you. Talk about some of the things you do when working with organizations of any stature to navigate that. John: When you say stewardship, are you talking about attracting money? Are you talking about managing expenses? Russell: Taking care of the money entrusted to you. Making the best use of it and maximizing value with it. Taking good care of it. John: A great question. Years and years ago, this will surprise you. I ran into a nonprofit collection agency. This was an organization embedded within another organization. Their money was to support the organization they were embedded in. For them, they could have really good expenses and really nice cars and really great lifestyles, but a lot of that wasn't coming back to what was originally meant for. I contrast that with the man who I was telling you about earlier who sits on the board of a nonprofit. Someone came in and said, “We are getting ready to do our new benefits. We want to have a nine-month maternity leave. We want to have 35 days of PTO.” He said, “Wait a minute. How can we do that? That is stealing from our organization and our constituents.” The easy answer for you is the mindset. What are we really here to do? Are we here to serve, or are we here to take? My experience is the more we deliver into the world, the more we give, the more we receive in return without having to strive for that. The way I work with most of my customers is to help them attract the stakeholders they need. What prompted our conversation was this book, The 45 Minute Business Breakthrough. What that is about is to get leads. How do I get people who are interested in coming to my organization, whether it's a client or a donor? We will often think, They will find us. It's not who you know; it's who knows you. We have to craft a message that resonates with those people. Hugh: John, hold that book up again. Remember my age and mental condition. Tell us about the book, John. John: It's called The 45 Minute Business Breakthrough. It's how to find revenue for your business in 45 minutes. Hugh: 45 minutes? John: Yes. Hugh: What takes so long? That's pretty fast. That got my attention. John: It's simple. Think about the real estate agent who tells you, “I sell real estate, commercial and residential, up and down the range.” Here in Denver, there are 20,000 real estate agents. Contrast that to the one who says, “I help millennials find the loft of their dreams in downtown Denver.” Even though I am not a millennial, I am far past the millennial stage, I will remember that message. When I hear someone say they are looking for a loft, I can make the hook. If you ask yourself, What would that do for my business? You can find money really fast. When you talk about how do I make an offer that is so compelling that I can come into relationship with you? Maybe it's I sign up for your newsletter. I hear stories about the organization how you are changing lives. When it comes time to write a check, I am more likely to write a check. There is an organization I do some work with here called Goodwill to Work. I get to work with high school students as they are preparing to enter the work force: mock interviews, reviewing portfolios, reviewing resumes. It gives me great faith in the future of ourselves. When they come looking for money, I am more open to that because I am invested in that. It's helping the business owner, to answer your question, look at the five areas that drive 80% of their growth. It's leads, how to turn leads into customers, how to create an offer that gives more value so they are willing to spend more money with me, and quit discounting. You have to sell more of the product to get the same. Hugh: There is a correlation here. We talk about selling to churches. Churches say, “We don't sell.” Then what is evangelism? I talk to generic nonprofits about business models. No, we are a nonprofit. People are supposed to give everything. That does not mean you can beat up your employees. That is why the burnout rate is about 50% with executive directors. You are moving into the mindset. It's a social entrepreneurial mindset. You talked about businesses having a triple bottom line. I think nonprofits should have multiple bottom lines. One of them should be retained earnings. Russell, why don't you weigh in on this? You used to work for an agency who had three letters. It's about where the money goes. We need another number for profit, and we need another way to look at accounting so overhead is really clear. Overhead goes to the people we serve. The words for profit are uncomfortable. Russell: When people in our circles call it “surplus,” but the bottom line is you have to bring in more than you push out. If you bring in more than you push out, you become what is known as sustainable. Operating with a surplus is important because you have to be prepared for all types of contingencies. There are things that happen. Mother Nature, for example. You have fires, floods, hurricanes, different events that impact different businesses that impact the nonprofits on the ground as well. It's important to operate at that surplus. When it comes to overhead, which is everything that isn't directly poured into the services, people think of that in terms of costs versus an investment. If it's an investment, you get a good return on that. That means the management is taking care of the assets. They are providing superior service. They are effective and efficient at keeping costs under control. But you still have that structure there so you can go out and create more impact, as it were. The impact is in the eyes and ears of the beholders. I know John has heard this multiple times. John, you deal with it in for-profits and nonprofits when it comes to talking about impact. What is your experience with that word? Do you find that it is overused or misused? How do you help people frame that in a way that is balanced? John: I play with the word “balance.” If there is a balance, we are going to disrupt it. It's more how do we create harmony around it? Impact is in the eyes of the beholder. Again, it's about- I find this with myself often. I get up, sit down at my desk, and start working. When I get done, I have done a lot, and think about what impact I actually have. The first step is to slow down. As Stephen Covey said, “What is the end in mind?” What impact do I want to have? One client recently, the impact she wanted to have was more visibility in her organization. If that's what I want to have, if that's my end in mind, how do I have to make you feel to get that visibility? Now that I know those two questions, I can ask myself, “Who do I have to be to bring it?” In terms of messaging, what do I want them to experience? A great example. I had a customer the other day tell me. We often think about painting as putting a coating on the wall. For this company, it is a customer experience. The experience that you and I as a homeowner experience for you painting. In the case of the Rocky Mountain Microfinance Institute, what impact do they have on their small business owners as they compete in a 12-week boot camp for a microloan? The answer is they get 95% of their loans are repaid. Those companies are still in business years later. Every time I go, there is someone who would not have gotten a job in the corporate world who has created a successful business because they went through a 12-week boot camp to learn basic kinds of things. The impact is how are they feeling? What are the net results? It's all of that. Does that answer your question? Russell: That does, yes. For anybody who is out there making a difference, there are all these measures. How people measure things is critical. It's getting out there, being of service, and doing that better than others efficiently and effectively as you possibly can. There are a lot of tools that leaders need to have in order to drive value, in order to grow as an organization. What are the most basic tools that you give your clients when you start working with them initially? Are there some key basics that are missing in the large quantity? Or some things that leaders overlook? In that sense, what are some of the things that you find nonprofit leaders overlook more frequently than not?   John: Great question. I think there are two big opportunities, whatever your work is. The first one is really getting clear and planting your flag on who you serve. Being clear that we are in this to serve children, sick children, healthy children, starving children, whatever the service is. And then nobody else. We all think we can serve everybody. We want to serve all sorts of people. Until we plant the flag and say this is who we serve, how we serve, and why we serve, we are noise. Russell, you know this because you're in Denver. There are 11,000 nonprofits in the Denver/Boulder community. Many of them are duplicating services. It's noise in the marketplace. How do they stand out? Planting the flag, being clear, and saying, “I am for the 10% that this resonates with.” Because then they will find us. We will get some of the other people who will be in that outer circle who will be attracted to us. We have to call our tribe to us. From the business standpoint, that is the biggest thing. I get this. I want to serve everybody, too. We have to get clear on who we serve, how we serve, and why we serve. Russell: The idea of niching down and picking a category is frightening for both business owners and nonprofit leaders. I know I've had movement within my own business of who do you serve, will there be scarcity. I think scarcity thinking is terrible for the mindset of an entrepreneur regardless of the tax status of the organization he/she runs. How do you have that conversation with people who may be apprehensive about the idea of niching down and being more focused and targeted? John: It's history. It's experience. I'm working with a company right now. They have been doing Groupons to call in their clientele. I finally got him to stop that because what he would get is people coming in looking for the discount all the time, but they weren't coming back to purchase more. He recognized that is not the clientele he wants to serve. He wants to serve the people who really care about what he delivers. When he gets one of them, they don't question his cost. They know he can trust him, he will deliver the service, and they will walk away with value. You have to ask people to step out on faith and try it. I have yet to have someone who tries it fail at it. I just had this conversation with a lady at a digital marketing firm this morning. She said, “Sometimes I just have to have faith. I don't have to worry about this deal or that donor or that foundation. I have to have faith that if I serve, I will be rewarded. It took me until I was in my forties to realize that my middle name is Faith. Faith plays a role in all of this.” Hugh: It does. John, you talked earlier about going to the bottom for the price. We tend to race to the bottom because we think we have to have the lowest price to attract people. There is a similar model with nonprofits. We have this money shadow. We don't want to talk about money, and we don't want to ask for money. It's reframing the whole conversation about what you said earlier about value. What we're talking about is value. Money is an exchange. We have to pay the rent. We have to pay the salaries of those good people we employ. Talk about this thing with money. Do you see what I'm talking about? Is there a similarity with entrepreneurs looking at everyone else and pricing themselves under it? That's not a good way to do it. Nonprofits are asking for too little money. John: I lost your audio there. It's a good question. What I find- I grew up in sales. I'm afraid to ask for more because I was afraid I was going to hear no. As a nonprofit, if I'm asking for donations, I don't want to hear no. Nobody wants to hear no because they are afraid of being outcast. I wrote this on a blog post not too recently. I came to a realization. I was on my way to a meeting with someone to give a presentation, and I had this voice in my head say, “Who are you? Who do you think you are?” I was in the presentation watching the audience, and I saw a couple of people on their phones. “Oh my God. They're not paying attention to me. I've lost them.” I got some of the highest marks I've ever had for a delivery. I have come to the conclusion that I want to have that voice say, “Who are you? This is not your comfort zone.” on my shoulder because I know I'm doing the work that will deliver value to my organization. I think to get to your question of how we get past that fear of asking for money or undervaluing ourselves, we step out of our comfort zone and realize the value that we bring. I have yet to have an experience where I have said, “I can step into this, even though I don't know where it's going to go.” that hasn't delivered value. All too often, we think if we don't know exactly how it's going to happen, we don't want to step into it because we are afraid it might go wrong. Russell: Life begins outside of the comfort zone. John: It really does. I was teaching a class one time. It was very dependent on a certain program running just the right way. About 20% of the class got an update from Microsoft that eliminated that functionality. What am I going to do? We'll get to it. We'll talk about it. Stay away from me. Get feedback from my tech team. Keep teaching. It was some of the highest reviews I'd ever gotten. They've asked me back several times. I want to create something going wrong in the presentation just so that there is that kind of result. When we get out of our comfort zone and into that place where it's not working exactly right, we become more present. We become more focused on what we want to deliver to our audience, whether it's one or many. One of the things I wanted to come back to, you asked me earlier about one of the biggest things that for-purpose or for-profits or anybody struggles with. I shared with you that niching idea. The other piece is more personal. It's self-accountability. We talked earlier about self-leadership. Many of us are more than willing to hold anybody accountable for what they are supposed to do. We have meetings around it. We have metrics to race for it. But the thing that we're not accountable to is our own self. The #1 appointment we break on our calendar is the one we set with ourselves. I might sit down and say, I need to plan my budget for next quarter. But if the phone rings, I will pick up the phone instead of working on that budget. Or I might decide I want to lose ten pounds. I will quit eating French fries and start running. But then it snows. When we don't hold ourselves accountable, we can't hold other people accountable. When we start breaking promises to ourselves, we start disbelieving ourselves when we say we can get something done. So part of it is keeping promises to ourselves. Russell: It's interesting that people make commitments to others they won't make to themselves. I think that is a human nature thing. That plays into what's best. There are a number of people who talk about self-care and taking care of yourself. One of the things about leader burnout is people drive themselves far too much and don't necessarily take care of themselves. When you come across executives you're working with, a lot of times they are burned out, what is the first thing you tell them as far as taking care of themselves? How do you go about finding out if that's the problem they do have?   John: It's about creating psychological safety. We can do this in our own organizations and families. We want to create safety so that people can be and bring their whole self into the conversation. I am a child of the ‘80s. Greed is good. We have to put up a front. If you remember the shoulder pads from back then, we literally put our armor on. But the reality is when we can bring our whole self into a conversation, we don't have to carry the stress of trying to be someone we're not. The first part is bringing psychological safety. People will begin to open up and tell us what is really wrong in our lives. I tell people when they are working with me, “There is a lot to do, but you have to schedule two hours a week for you to sit back and think about, “What do I want to do this week? What happened last week? What did I get done? Celebrate! What did I not get done? What will I do to move that forward?” All too often, we run from task to task to task to task. We don't slow down to shift our state to move into the next meeting. I work with a lot of people who have nine meetings a day. That's incredible. When do you get your work done? I see three. Hugh: We're coming to the last minutes of our interview. I want to give you a few minutes to talk about one of the most important topics: communication. In 32 years of working with organizations, there has never been an organization who brought it up as one of the top topics. In a quick overview, I want you to talk about why that is significant in the work that you do. Then I will have a sponsor message before giving it back to you for a closing thought. Then Russell will end this interview. John, there are a lot of good sound bites, I must say. John, what is missing in communication? What do we need to do to make it better? John: There are four things we need for effective communication. One is clarity. If we are not clear with our message, I ran across this the other night. It's from Yo-Yo Ma. If we don't have clarity of message, we are just noise. What happens all too often is I tell you I'm looking for a dog. You will tell me, “You should get a Labrador.” Russell will tell me that I need a terrier. Someone else will tell me a shepherd. I am allergic to most dogs, and my wife doesn't want anything over 20 pounds. If I had been clear in what I was looking for, you would be clear in your response. Slowing down to get clear. Two is respect. Every organization you and I work with has respect in their manual, their mission statement, or their vision statement. Yet 94% of the workforce reports having uncivil behavior in the last year. 54% in the last month. This comes from Harvard Business Review. What does disrespect look like? It might not be holding the door open. It might be perceived disrespect. But what we have to think about how do we create psychological safety? Even if you are a high performer, if you are not treating people right, we need to help you move to a place where your humor is appreciated. Candor. Everyone wants more candor. If I were to show you my slide, there would be a burning plane behind me because NASA did research that said commercial airline pilots in a simulator that gave them a crisis, there were three outcomes. One, the captain took control of the plane and crashed it. Two, the captain said, “Crew, I need some help.” Everyone contributed, shared information, and worked together. The plane landed safely. The third one was the interesting one. The captain said, “Help me!” The crew said, “You got this.” They crashed almost as often as the first one. Why? Because the captain created an environment where candor was not appreciated. What happens in our organizations if we are not open to candor? What are we not learning about? The last piece is attention. What are we focused on? How many times have you told your child, “Don't spill the milk?” What happened? Hugh: Spill the milk. John: When we tell people, “Stop complaining. Stop smoking. Stop fighting.” they don't hear stop. The brain doesn't hear stop. Let's focus on what we want. Those four things are what we need for good communication. Hugh: Don't be late to the meeting. Those four are clarity of message- John: Clarity, respect, candor, attention. Hugh: John, a lot of good sound bites. You are so well-read. I love this thing about the clarity of the dog. A guy goes up to an intersection in Denver to a guy with a dog and says, “Does your dog bite?” The guy says, “No.” He reaches down to pet the dog, and the dog takes a big chunk out of his arm. He said to the guy, “I thought you said your dog doesn't bite.” The guy says, “That's not my dog.” It's an old joke, but it's a good example of what you're talking about. We are assuming that's his dog because it's standing next to him. We talk about how leaders set up problems. Then we make them worse. This candor and autocratic leadership is not what we do. Thank you for this. *Sponsor message from Wordsprint* Before Russell closes out this really helpful interview, what thought do you want to leave with people today? John: I thought in preparation for this. I talked to a couple of colleagues who are active in the nonprofit community. What they shared with me is one of the big stressors for nonprofits is resiliency. They are overstressed, under-resourced, struggling against how do we deliver value to our constituents? I thought what would be helpful to them is to acknowledge the stress is there. Leaders paper over the stress or frustration. Until we admit there is something there, we can't deal with it. If we don't admit it, our team is looking to us and thinking there is something you're not telling us. So acknowledge it. Have a little bit of grace. We are all doing the best we can. Everybody is doing something for their own reasons. Let's get clear about what's going on. Be accountable to yourself and to others. When everybody is doing what they are supposed to do, and I don't have to pick up after you and you don't have to pick up after me, there is less stress in the organization. Clarity of values, beliefs, and behaviors. Making sure we all agree what we want to do to serve our organization and our constituents. Appreciation of ourselves and others. We go from day to day to day, from win to win to win, and we don't stop and celebrate. Celebrate the things you have done well. This has been a lot of fun. Russell: Thank you very much, John. I appreciate that. It's been an enlightening conversation. Always remember that honesty without compassion is brutality. How we talk to each other and work with each other is critical inside so we can serve the audiences we can serve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank van 't Hof laat je twee uur lang dansen met: 1. O’Jays – I love music (Joey Negro Remix) 2. Redhead Kingpin – Do the right thing 3. Blackmachine – How gee 4. Maceo & the Macks – Soul Power ‘74 5. Love the system – Nice life 6. Prince – Get Off 7. Foxy – Get Off 8. Double Exposure – Everyman 9. Beats International – Dub be good to me 10. The Haggis Horns – Outta my head 11. Whirpool Productions – From disco to disco 12. Delegation – Put a little love on me 13. KC & The Sunshine Band – Queen of clubs 14. Gus Pirelli ft. Andre Espeut – Meet in the middle 1. Ini Kamoze – Here comes the hotstepper 2. Freeez – Southern Freeez 3. Grover Washington jr. – Just the two of us 4. Fat Larry’s Band – Zoom 5. The Bar-Kays – Holy ghost 6. Full Force – Alive, I want you just for me! 7. Jackson Sisters – I believe in miracles 8. Patti Labelle – Release 9. Dr. John – Right place, wrong time 10. Cheryl Lynn – Got to be real 11. James Brown – The payback mix 12. Fatboy Slim – Gangster trippin’ 13. Heatwave – The groove line 14. Jamestown & Jocelyn Brown – She got soul 15. Marvin Gaye – Let’s get it on 16. Starpoint – It’s all yours

Episode 2 of the Wisconsin Great River Road Microcast features Raptor Resource Project execuitive director John Howe.Bob: Why are we all fascinated with the bald eagle?John: It’s our national symbol. I think the thing that draws people in and they’re so interested in the details of the eagle is that people typically see bald eagles and you see them flying way up in the air, you might see a nest or you might see them perched along the river. Bob: John Howe is the Executive Director of the Raptor Resource Project. John, what is that? What is the Raptor Resource Project?John: The Raptor Resource Project was started back in 1988 by Bob Anderson, and primarily started to captively bred and raise peregrine falcons to help repopulate falcons after the devasting effects of DDT across the country. The work actively monitoring the peregrine falcon population up and down the Mississippi River from northern Minnesota down to Illinois, at about 50 sites that we band peregrine falcons. We’ve got nests. We’ve got nest cams and ways that we share that and help educate people.Bob: John, why is the Wisconsin Great River Road the home to such a high number of eagles nests and raptors in general?John: It’s the river that brings them. The Mississippi River is a national flyway for raptors and other waterfowl. It’s amazing. They congregate along that flyway, and it’s part of their instinct to follow that flyway. It’s a major food source for them. It’s a pass way for their migration. It’s a home. It’s being along the Wisconsin boundary of the river and the river floodplain along the Mississippi and the tributaries that come in. That’s where you’re going to find the tide populations and the congregations of these raptors that we love to watch, [including] the bald eagles. We were talking the other day a little bit about the peregrine falcons. At different times of the year there are great opportunities to hear them and see them and watch them in their home territory.Bob: Where’s the best place on the Wisconsin Great River Road to watch the eagles and the raptors?John: Right in the season of Bald Eagle Days up and down the river – Ferryville, Prairie du Chien. A lot of the little towns along the river have their Bald Eagle Days celebrations. Really, the way to get hooked into that is seeing it. Up until about this point where we’re watching, for example, bald eagles, we’re watching them grabbing sticks, breaking sticks, perching, and they’re pair bonding and they’re getting ready for egg laying. When that comes up, we’re going to be looking at egg laying. You can’t see that kind of stuff when you’re driving on the highway or even if you’re along the river. We were talking earlier about that fascination with eagles, and the wild popularity with the Eagle Cam is we actually get to see those details about what’s going on.Bob: Let’s just jump into that right now and ask a little bit more about the Eagle Cam. If we don’t have the opportunity to be on the Wisconsin Great River Road, how can we check out and find out more about eagles and watch them be born and kind of see their habitat?John: We manage a number of different cams in the area. For bald eagles, the premier eagle cam is the Decorah Eagle Cams. Going to our website, www.raptorresource.org, our cams are there. We also stream them through explore.org.Bob: Where along the Wisconsin Great River Road is the best place to view eagles and raptors?John: Between La Crosse all the way down to Prairie du Chien, there’s some great viewing areas. You’re right along the rivers, so it really depends on timing. [There also are] lock and dam areas. The lock and dams typically … That disturbing that happens right at the downstream where you always see the boats and the fishermen, that’s where the eagles are going to be congregating to fish also.Bob: John, earlier you were mentioning about the Mississippi River Flyway. Are there any cameras you have in the Great River Mississippi Flyway area?John: One of the original peregrine falcon cams – and probably the best one we have – is the Great Spirit Bluff peregrine falcon cam. That’s also available on our website, as I mentioned before. When you move away from the bluff and look down and see the tundra swans and the pelicans and the eagles during the great migration along the flyway in the Mississippi River. It was a dream, and we ended up putting up a cam down there on an island out on Lake Onalaska. It was a collaborative project with the National Wildlife and Fish Refuge and the Raptor Resource Project. We started that up last fall, and we have one season of watching all the waterfowl and the eagles. We’ve caught falcons, and we’ve caught great horned owls out there. [There is] a lot of neat waterfowl and raptors right out in Lake Onalaska. The audio on the camera, it’s almost like you’re sitting right down there in the middle of the flyway. Birds will do things out there without a human there. You’re going to get to see and hear some things that you would not see or hear if it wasn’t being brought to you by a camera.

John began his career working in politics, including as a writer in the Clinton White House, Office of Presidential Letters and Messages. He was also a Speechwriter in the California Governor's Office during the Davis Administration, and later he became an Attorney. John gave up speechwriting and the law to become a blogger and podcaster! He helps business owners connect with anyone they want to connect with. And they find their businesses grow exponentially because of it. He also owns and operates a website and related Podcast called SmartBusinessRevolution.com where he shows entrepreneurs how to build and use relationships to build more value, revenues and profits in their businesses. John's take on the business: The number one, most important thing that will determine your level of success or failure in business is your relationships. In this Podcast episode John shares his insights on building stronger relationships, and connecting with people that can make a difference in your business. Episode Highlights: John's history as a white house intern, staff writer, attorney and entrepreneur Why “helping first” matters most. How to build relationships without being awkward. How to break the ice with a new group of people. Learn some basic mechanics of talking with people. Making connections brings more value. Why delivering value works best. How making introductions builds value for you. How does John make a living in “networking”. Events where “mixing” is required and new people are attending. How to monetize Podcasting Transcription: Mark: So I remember an event … I think it was three years ago, I was at Pubcon and I had hired a PR firm to be able to help with Quiet Light Brokerage and some things that we were trying … no was it four years ago we were trying to do and I had hired somebody to come with me from a PR firm and she was an awesome networker. I mean she was phenomenal at what she did. And she came out to me laughing at the networking event at Pubcon because she said this is so funny. She's like I'm so used to networking events where everybody's a professional networker and she said people here obviously are not because everyone was looking down at their phones and shuffling their feet and saying I don't really want to introduce myself to anybody so I'm going to pretend like I actually have something to do on my phone. And you know what that was also me. I'm a terrible networker. I'm not really good at it. I'm a natural introvert. Joe, I understand you had John Corcoran and he's a networker and you guys talked about networking. This is an area where I struggle so I'd love to learn a little bit more about what you guys discussed. Joe: You know one of the first things John said was don't fall asleep, don't tune out because it's networking. You can grow your business dramatically by meeting the right people and being introduced to the right people. You don't go at it with that approach ias John's thought it's more just building relationships and those relationships lead to additional connections and relationships that can help grow your business; double, triple the size of your business. It's helped us dramatically through what this podcast we've met so many people. It's broken down doors and they feel like they know us more because of it. The networking that John talks about is exactly the same. It's through all of the different events that we might attend to. And he kind of gives some tips on breaking the ice to make connections and really kind of the Golden Rule approach to networking. It's a fascinating story. John's actually a fascinating guy. He used to work as a speechwriter for … I think it's called presidential letters during the Clinton administration. He did not know Monica Lewinsky. For those listening, I did ask. It was pre-recording but he absolutely didn't know her. Yeah, everybody chuckles poor girl really, seriously. He went to law school after doing that and eventually became a lawyer, practicing attorney and replaced his income as a lawyer by podcasting and blogging and doing that through networking. Pretty impressive guy, great story and I think he can help a great deal with people that don't realize how important networking is in helping other people is to their business at the end of the day. Mark: Awesome let's go right on into it and learn a little bit more about networking. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got a very special guest. His name is John Corcoran and he has a ton of experience both as a writer for the White House, as an attorney, and as a networking specialist. John, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. John: Thanks to have had me, Joe. Joe: Quite heavy here man. We met at the Prosper Show you're doing that very thing, walking around with a camera and a microphone, networking, talking to people, helping James do a great job there which they always do and I think you've been a big part of that. But that's my intro right there. I need you to tell these folks that are listening all about your background, your experience, who you are, and what you're all about. John: Sure. Well hopefully, people didn't tune out when they heard oh networking I hate that stuff. That's a funny reaction that people have. It's kind of like sales right? We know it's important but we also kind of hate it. And oftentimes that's because we've had some kind of negative interaction or negative experience with it; some guy coming up and sticking you his business card in your hand, in your face trying to sell you on something at a networking event. I'm not an advocate of that. I think there's a lot smarter ways to do it, a lot of tools that we have available. My background you know when I was a kid I moved around a lot. My father lost a job three separate times and each time we had to move across the country 3,000 miles away; away from family and friends. That experience taught me the importance of building relationships in business and it's critically important. And as a result of that, I've had some amazing experiences in my career. As you mentioned right there in the White House, in the Clinton White House years, speechwriter with the Governor of California. I had my own legal practice for a number of years and now I've got a business called Rise25 and a blog and a podcast called Smart Business Revolution. That's really more of my focus now and we bring people together at live events and I really enjoy doing that. Joe: Tell us a little bit about your background in terms of … I'm looking at your bio here and it says you went from party school to the White House. Just for the sake of the people that are listening, how the hell did you make that transition from being at a party school to writing speeches for the president? John: It's strange I know. It's a strange trajectory. So yeah I mean basically I went from an English major, getting a BA in English at a party school to within a year of that I was a writer in presidential letters and messages in the Clinton White House. It's kind of like a second tier speechwriter. I'm kind of like a … you know as a speechwriter has pulled a hamstring then we would step in, that kind of thing. But it was an amazing experience. I had interned in the speechwriting office during college. It was an amazing experience and I went back to college. And networking lesson number one is keep in touch with the people in your network. And once you build a relationship with someone it's really important to keep in touch with them. And so I was back at college, I knew I'd love to get a job at the White House but not all former interns get that kind of gig and so I kept in touch. I would send things from time to time like speeches or articles or passages that I found that I would send to the speechwriters. Not as a way of saying like hey do you have a job for me? But they … it kept me top of mind and what do you know a month or a couple of months later, a year later something like that they reached back out and said hey we heard about this position for you and I ended up applying and getting it. So it was an amazing experience. Joe: Were you taught that or did you just intuitively share information, stayed in touch and tried to help with little bits and informa,tion that you found? John: Yeah looking back I think really it was part of how I grew up and having to be that kid who is new in the class. I remember what it's like to move in the middle of a school year into … I went from Southern California to Massachusetts which is a huge culture shock. From being a kid it was like out at the beach to like dock siders and button downs and stuff like that in Massachusetts. It's a very different kind of culture and showing up in the middle of the school year when everyone had been in the same group of kids for years and years. And so it taught me the importance of being able to go into a new community and be able to make friends essentially. And I did that a number of times growing up and so I just realize the importance of it. And also just with watching my dad struggle when he got laid off a couple of times, the importance of building a network before you need it. You need to have these things so that when the S-H-I-T hits the fan, which it does from time to time, the economy or your company going under or whatever you've got to have that network. You have to have built those relationships first so that you can use them when you need them. Joe: Yeah I think it's essential. There are several mentors in my life that have given imparted wisdom. One of them is along those lines and it kind of goes with what I've recently studied which is a DarrenDaily … they call them DarrenDaily it's a Darren Hardy program, you know essentially it sounds like what you do about speechwriters was you gave something to them first. You didn't expect anything in return. You were giving them something to help them. Hey here's an idea and you were on top of mind because of that. And then you kept giving throughout the year and eventually, you got something back. Maybe it wasn't your intention to get something back but you were there, you were front of mind and you were offering something to them. I find that the same thing applies to what I do. You talked about networking it'll gross folks, don't tune out because of that. Same thing with a broker man, I'm a “broker” right? I'm a business broker. People get sort of turned off by that if they go with the general label of business broker. But more than anything else we just simply try to help. We try to help people with whatever the issue is, with the experiences that we have, with the knowledge that we have, with the relationships that we have. I refer people out all the time helping them connect with bookkeepers, attorneys, whatever it might be expecting absolutely nothing in return. Eventually, we'll run into them at a conference and spend some time with them and build a relationship with them and then they may refer somebody to us or if when they decide to sell their business they'll think of us first. I don't like networking. I don't. I never have. I'm a bit of an introvert. I love doing the podcast because it's just you and me it's not a whole group of people here. I don't have to walk up in a crowded room. I'm a kind of a low talker so people can't hear me. I've got a big microphone now so that helps. How do you advise people to sort of break the ice with a new networking group or a mastermind group or if they're at an event like Rhodium Weekend like E-commerce Fuel like Smart Marketer, like Blue Ribbon Mastermind, and to just walk up to a group of people and start talking? How do you recommend they do that? Just say hey because obviously, they're strangers too? John: Yeah I mean there's a high level and then there's the mechanics of what you use in a physical … a face to face type of interaction like that which also applies to online. You know a lot of networking we do these days can be through tools like LinkedIn or Facebook or something like that where you can really leverage relationships. So I would say first you got to start with okay am I at the right event to begin with? And that requires some really deep soul searching. Are you going in the right direction with your career? And people do pivots all the time. They change, they just … they lose passion for something. So you have to be sure you're going in the right direction because you can't squeeze blood from a turnip. And if you're at the wrong event then you're not going to find the right people there who you're going to want to engage with or you're going to want to talk to. So start with that and then secondly I think you're right about the give approach. You've got to focus on okay I'm going to give, give, give as much as possible and then after that people are going to want to return the favor. And that doesn't mean you should be taken advantage of but it means you should try and deliver value to people first before you try and hit them with a sales pitch. We've all been hit with a sales pitch right off the bat where people tries to get something from us or tries to get us to buy from them and it just doesn't feel right. It sits in our stomachs. So don't be that kind of person. Be a giver first. And then [inaudible 00:11:08.3] talking to people face to face in an event or something like that. Usually, I think people struggle because they over think it and they think okay I want to come up with some brilliant thing that will be related to my vocation, that will get us in a big discussion around what it is I do so that I can sell them on something. Well, the truth is you should spend a lot more time on just more human conversation. It could about hey how about this crazy weather we've been having or when did you get in? If you're at a conference you know where are you from? Maybe it's something on their attire, maybe they have an interesting shirt on or something like that. A lot of times there are little tidbits that you can you can pick out of there and then that gets you into a conversation. And then people leave little breadcrumbs all the time they just require exploring. People will mention oh yeah I was a little delayed my daughter had a volleyball tournament and so I wasn't able to get here when I wanted to. Well, that's a huge opening right there explore that. Go a little bit further and say oh really where did she play volleyball, what was the tournament, what was … how is she doing, what position is she in? Just taking an interest in people will get you really really far. Joe: It almost goes back to our teenage days when our parents told us just to take an interest in the girls and ask questions and it would work out pretty well. John: I know. Joe: We were teenagers and we paid no attention and we got it all wrong. At least I did, I don't know about you though. John: Exactly. I don't even know if my parents gave me that amount of advice so [inaudible 00:12:37.8]. Joe: I'm trying to do with my kids and I know that you're doing something with your son. I saw it on LinkedIn. I love that you're helping him sell some- John: Yeah we're- Joe: It's … I almost said Girl Scout cookies. John: Yeah … oh no, it's Kab Scout. And it's funny he's like a natural born entrepreneur. He just turned eight and loves selling stuff, loves making money and so we're kind of using it as a teaching opportunity. But right there, there's a good example okay. You said I hate networking, a lot of people say that I hate networking but I love connecting with people. They'll follow it up with that and then I'll say okay well what do you think networking is really? I mean it's connecting with people. Maybe you hate being in a room full of strangers and not sure what to say, that's a given and that's fine. I totally get that. A lot of people get uncomfortable in that kind of situation. But me sharing my son's experience and experience we're going through with learning about setting up a website to sell Boy Scout popcorn as a fundraiser you know that's a way of remaining top of mind with people who are in your network on LinkedIn. And people see that and then it's also a way of teaching too because I'm also using it as a teaching opportunity as well. And it also personalizes me. I found … you probably found this too, when people they know more about you personally, a passion, or a hobby that you have or they know something about your kids or something they're a lot more connected to you. And I mean I discovered this a long time ago, long before I had kids. When I asked people about their children before I had kids I would ask too about their children because I notice they would light up. And it just breaks down these walls, breaks down these barriers, it allows you to really accelerate the connecting process so that you get to know that person a lot better and they're a lot more motivated to help you. They start to treat their interactions with you less transactionally and more like a true friend, a relationship; something that they actually are invested in helping. So that's why I do things like that is sharing a little piece … if you share a little piece about your life, it's not everything, but sharing a piece about your life it makes people more connected to me. It makes me top of mind and who knows where it might lead after that. Joe: Right, I couldn't agree more. I saw it and I felt it humanized you and I felt like I knew you a little bit better even though we've only met a couple of times. I was a guest on your podcast, you're a guest on ours, and we met at the Prosper Show. So I totally get it. By way of example a lot of people listening they're either buyers or sellers and they love to monetize things. They say well how can I monetize something? And I want to give an example, I got a text today about two hours before this recording where someone was at an event in Miami and I introduced him to somebody else. They connected and he said to me, he sent me a text and he's like thank you for introducing me to so and so. I feel like I got 1.5 million dollars' worth of value out of that lunch and I'm buying a business from him for much less than that so I feel like I've doubled my money. And they were able to meet face to face for the first time and just get that connection. And that particular individual is making a point of helping lots of different people. I can't give you his name but every time I speak with someone that has connected with him it's not about what they got from him it's what … which they did get it's what he did for them. And that comes back around and it gets monetized in a variety of different ways. Most people listening again are either buyers or sellers thinking how the heck is this going to help me? Back when I sold my business in 2010 there weren't really any Mastermind groups. There were certainly not any Facebook groups. There weren't any Smart Marketer events or Rhodium weekend, any of these things that we go to now and connect with people over and over and over again and it's eventually just a trip to hang out with our friends. Hanging out with those friends now and sharing that information without expectations or getting back anything else is what I think is the way to immaterially monetize it. You can monetize it but you have a hard time calculating it. Do you have any direct experiences or examples where you can say you know I introduced these two people … this person connected with so and so and their business took off because of it? John: Oh … I mean I couldn't narrow it down. I mean I have so many examples of that sort of thing and I do it more than most people. So I don't want to say that you need to spend all your time doing that. There are some connectors who spend too much time going out delivering value, connecting other people. But let me put it this way if you try the alternative … the opposite that certainly doesn't work. We know that doesn't work. If you just go out there and you don't try and deliver value and you just try and pitch people we all know that doesn't work very well right? So if you try the alternative, if you try the give first approach you will see dollars and cents to your bank account, others will see dollars and cents in their bank account. I can think of offhand two situations where I introduced two people to each other, kind of like you, you're just an introduction; no strings attached or anything like that. I just thought you two would get along and they started a business together. In one case those two individuals, they lived in the same state but opposite sides of the state. One ended up moving to the other part of the state so that they could work together and have a business together as a result of that one introduction. And you know those people will walk to the end of the earth for me after I've made that introduction. So it definitely turns into dollars and cents in terms of more clients, more referrals that sort of thing. Joe: But that wasn't your intention right? John: No … I mean it's not my intention but I will say this, look we're all in business, we're all motivated by making money, we want to keep the lights on, we want to keep food in the fridge right? So I don't say at all that you should go out there and you should just be randomly introducing everyone on the street or be doing it matchmaking or something like that. You should do it strategically. You should do it because it's good for your business. I'm not saying go on and do it because for charitable purposes although it is a great thing to do and it does great … it puts great good out into the world. I'm saying do it because it's good for your business. It's good for your career. And it has just been the experience that I've lived. There are great books out there by the way, Give and Take by Adam Grant, Dale Carnegie all the books that he's written. These books they give voluminous examples of people who have resulted in much value coming back to them as a result of the value that they put out in the world. Joe: And you got to a lot of events, a lot of networking events where you have got both business owners, employees, founders, and potential buyers attending them; are there any particular events that you love because specifically the way that it's organized for networking that you can … through off the top of your head, two or three of your favorite events? John: Is this cheating or can I say the ones that we do because they're- Joe: You know people are probably going what the hell does this guy do for a living? It's networking, how does he make money so … answer the question how do you make a living? John: Sure. Joe: You're a networking guy, how do you make a living? What do you do? John: Yeah. So … well, first of all, I was a practicing lawyer for many years. And even when I was a practicing lawyer I mean just introducing your clients is really valuable and giving … thinking about your clients because they will send more business back to you. Your referral partners would send more business back to you. So when I was actually full time practicing law I was practicing what I do today. Eventually, that pivoted into a blog and a podcast which replaced my income as a lawyer and I monetized both of those through a variety of digital courses and through affiliate promotions and that sort of thing. Today I run Rise25 with my business partner. We do live events. We go to conferences and we partner with conferences and hold on connection events like VIP receptions, like dinners, like all-day Masterminds at conferences. Again connecting people but we create the forum. We invite the people. We bring them in. Another thing we do also- Joe: Just to understand so you're not actually putting on the entire event, you're putting on a segment of it or a specific group of attendees. John: Right, and there's an important lesson in that because we've done our own standalone events but the reason that we do a lot of that now … an important lesson for others is it's a lot easier to go where the fish are already gathered to go fishing rather than try and pick some spot in the middle of the lake where there are no fish and attract them back to it. Go to the spot where all the fish are gathered which is what we do around conferences. The other thing we do is we do some Done-For-You lead generation as well. So we do Done-For-You lead gen so helping people with the process that we've used for years to generate leads for our self we help other businesses with that as well. Joe: What types of businesses? John: It's primarily professional services but e-commerce as well. So it's anyone who's … I mean who doesn't need leads right? Every business needs leads whether it's you're trying to connect with someone who might buy your business or whether you're trying to connect with new customers or clients or referral partners or strategic partners or whatever. You know there's a lot of different … the truth is everyone need … and like you're selling like a very inexpensive widget which is often the case with e-commerce there's often someone higher leverage who you are trying to connect with. So that might be other website owners or it might be other people who are selling on the same marketplace as you, or just other sellers that you want to connect with, or other professionals or something. It's a variety of different applications that we'd manage for people. But you asked … so you asked the question earlier was types of events that I'm preferable to. The type of event … and I want to answer that because that's an important question and it actually guides my decision making in what events I go to. I don't like going to events where the culture does not encourage people to mix with one another and what do I mean by that? Oftentimes you have events where at a local … this often happens on a local level like at a chamber of commerce or something like that where you have repeat people coming back month after month and they kind of know enough other people that there isn't enough mixing. I like events personally where I go to an event and I can just stick out my hand and talk to someone or someone else will stick out their hand and just talk to me where you feel free to meet other people. The other thing is I really like formats of events which breaks the mold. They're not just the boring, stuffy kind of reception type of format but I like the ones that are different. So actually just last night we had an event in Chicago which was a VIP food tour and we've done this a number of times, I did one in San Francisco a couple of weeks back and it's like a progressive dinner party meets a networking reception. We kind of combine the two and rather than keeping everyone in one room with watered down drinks and talking to each other all night or maybe being at a dinner table where you're stuck talking to the guy in the right of you and the guy in the left of you for the entire night, we take a group and we take them to multiple locations over the course of an evening. So you're up, you're down; you're sitting next to different people the entire time. You're walking or sitting on a bus next to different people. And we love doing that format because it gets people meeting more people which is really what we're about. So that's another piece of what we do. I realize [inaudible 00:23:45.3] to what we do but you asked the question what types of events so I really enjoy that format. Joe: All right. Tell us about Rise25 and the blog … the podcast and the blog. I want to know more about that. I have a feeling here John that people are going to want to listen to your podcast and learn more about what you do. John: Yeah. Joe: Just … let's hear it. John: Yeah so Smart Business Revolution I started it about eight or nine years ago now. It was a blog and a podcast, it still is. I continue to write there. I continue to publish podcasts. I started … this is an important lesson because now we do help clients with this as well so this is part of the lead generation piece is eight or nine years ago when I was a full time practicing law literally I had a client who came in and he hired me for a tiny little matter. It was $500 of writing a lease for him. I was reading about the guy and I was like wow this is a really interesting guy. He was an entrepreneur. He had started multiple companies one of which had gone public. So he's really successful. I was thinking how can I make … how can I turn this guy into like my best client? You know come back to me over and over again. Literally what I just did is I said hey do you have like 20 minutes I'd love to just like ask you some questions about your career and your businesses and everything. I'm going to record it and I'm going to publish it. I didn't even know how to do that. I didn't even know how to record or publish; podcasting wasn't even a thing back then. And so I ended up doing that, I asked him all these questions. What's amazing is you're publicizing that person. It's exactly what we're doing right now. But you're publicizing that person and you're also asking them questions about their challenges, their opportunities, you're figuring out are there other ways that you can help this person or deliver value to that person? And so what do you know he ended up turning into a great client. He ended up coming back to me and saying hey can you help me with this and this and this other thing too. And it's a strategy that I've used over and over again. I've done it probably three or 400 times with different people where you just simply take an interest in someone else. And you go the extra mile so you actually record it and you publish it and you give them a promotion, give them publicity, you send traffic, you send eyeballs to them. Again it's exactly what you're doing right now. You don't have to have a podcast to do it although podcasting is such an accepted and understood medium these days so that's really the best way to do it today. And I think everyone should have a podcast because it's so powerful. Joe: And you've figured out a way to monetize the podcast and the blog as well which is really weird if we think about the fact that you went to law school, quit to be a podcaster and a blogger and you replaced your income. How did you manage to do that? John: Well so, first of all, you can monetize a podcast … when people hear … I know I just wrote an article about this. I did a research study and I surveyed hundreds of podcasters and I asked them how they monetized their podcast. And so you can go to Smart Business Revolution and you can see the article now. It's at Rise25 also. And people generally thought … they thought of the traditional model, the old school media model. Like I'm just going to build up a big audience and then I'm going to sell ads or sponsorship. And that is only one of dozens of different ways of monetizing a podcast. It's actually probably the worst of all of them and yet everyone thinks that that's what you need to do. It's the most difficult to do. So I mean I've monetized my podcast in a variety of different ways including getting more clients, getting more referrals, filling live events, filling webinars, strategic partnerships; you name it. If you can connect what it is you do which is your business, your profession with the podcast which not everyone does a great job of connecting those two. Sometimes they are completely unrelated and if you have a hobby podcast that's fine that's not what we're talking about here. But if you connect those two and you use them to build more relationships with prospective clients, with referral partners, with strategic partners, you use that podcast in order to build more of those relationships and connect with SALT leaders and gurus and speakers and authors that you would never otherwise have a chance of connecting with then it's an amazing powerful tool. It's … I mean I've been able to have conversations with people who would never give me the time of the day you know what I mean? Like I can't email Gary Vaynerchuk and say hey man I would be in New York can you meet me at a Starbucks for 45 minutes? I want to pick your brain; I'm going to ask some questions about my business. Is that cool? [inaudible 00:28:00.1] like who are you I'm not going to do that but I had him on my podcast even though he's a busy guy because of the nature of the medium. So that's why I'm such a huge fan of the medium it's just … and it's a much better way to network. That's what we're talking about right? Connecting, building relationships, seeing how you can help each other, giving, all of those are encapsulated in the process of doing a podcast and everyone should do it. Joe: I agree 100%. It's what we do; it's why we do it. Because we're connecting with people like you that might be hard to connect to or with otherwise. John: Oh yeah absolutely, I wouldn't return your call if it weren't for that. Joe: I know you're never going to list it … and it personalizes things right? You can write an amazing article, give some amazing advice but without that personality behind it, it's just words on paper. We had people tell us that if they chose someone else to go with someone else it's because they felt like they knew them because they listened to their podcast. John: Yeah. Joe: So I think the personalization of it is important. I think that for those listening that maybe an expert on an advertising business, content, blog, or a SaaS business, or an e-commerce business and you're wondering how the heck do you benefit from this, how would you start a podcast and what … how is it going to work for you? You're going to connect with people that are going to be experts giving advice and you're going to benefit from it in your own business being able to apply some of that advice and being able to pick their brain as well. In addition to other people that have had great success that may come onto to the podcast and share their story and may want to do business with you as well. You just never know what's going to come of it if you just help others and give. And yes it is business we're all in this to put food on the table and hopefully put some money in retirement and stop doing this someday when were not capable anymore but it's fun and it's enjoyable. John: Yeah. Joe: And we get to make a living from it which is kind of nice too. John: Yeah and you know I say it's kind of personal and professional development that also doubles as marketing. Because you're enriching yourself, you're learning, you're asking questions, you're learning and you're also recording it and you're going to put it up on the internet and it's going to exist forever. So it's marketing that will be out there for you forever. And if you're asking well I sell a widget, it … I don't see how that's going to help me or maybe it's some other seller out there that you want to connect with or maybe it's potentially a buyer. I mean that's a great way to use that as a tool. It will help me with hiring, recruitment right? There's so many other ways that you can you can do it. I mean I'm sure Joe you've had this experience, I've had this experience when people come up to me and you have a conversation with them and they're just kind of like smiling as they listen to you talk because you know what's going on in their head they're thinking wow he sounds just like he does in the podcast. And people will say that, they'll be like man you just … you talk just like you do in the podcast. Well, guess what when I'm on the podcast that's me. I'm not putting out an act or anything like that I'm just actually being me you know. And we've had people that would go … a couple of people who came in to our event recently in San Francisco who had gotten to know me from the podcast and the funny thing is … and this takes a little getting used to, the funny thing is that they've been listening on their own time while I'm doing other things to episodes, past episodes, the whole back catalog and when they come up they feel like they've already built a relationship with you. That's wonderful because of the know like and trust process right? You are already that much further along so it then makes it just a lot easier to have a conversation with them around some kind of strategic partnership or a client … a relationship of some sort. It's just a lot easier. You'd move the ball a lot further down the field. Joe: 100%, I couldn't agree more and I would recommend that everybody does it. For those that are going to events and I've been to many of them and I have that stigma of being a broker. We don't pitch at Quiet Light, we're just here to help so we have to get around that stigma some way. But I was at an event last March I think it was and I've had a conversation with two or three other people and this guy walked up and he just stood there and he started to shake his head up and down and you know at the right moment he just stuck his hand out and introduced himself. And that I think taught me a lesson. It's the hardest thing to do when you go to some of these events like this, you see groups of people talking and you'd say damn they all know each other. I really don't know anyone. It's my first time here. The reality is that even though they're talking and having a good time and having a drink and laughing they may have just met. That was exactly the case that night. The three of us had just met and this person came into our conversation not knowing whether or not we really knew each other and he was welcomed into it and that's what these events are all about. You should never be shy about walking up to somebody and saying hello. You should never be shy about talking to someone like John, talking to someone like myself if we have something that we can help with that's our operation. That's exactly what we do. We're going to give you any and all advice we can. And if someone like John and myself try to get their hooks into you for a commission they're the wrong people to work with. Just walk away, get what you can, and move on. But don't be afraid to stick your hand out and shake your hand and just say hello. It starts a conversation. It's the hardest thing to do but it's also the best thing to do wouldn't you agree? John: I totally agree. Absolutely. Yeah. It's just funny as you're saying about having a stigma you know I think a lot of people feel that way. Especially when they're in business which most people are right? You're in business, you're at a networking event and you're thinking oh other people are thinking that I'm just going to try and sell them. I know this because people email me every day about this saying these things. And I think a lot of times we get stuck in our head a little bit and look I mean I totally get it. I worked for politicians. I've been a lawyer. I think I'm going to round up my career by working for the IRS or as a tax professional so just the most detested professions possible. So I'm used to being in that type of position. I totally get it but look if you approach not thinking about okay how am I going to get this person as a client as soon as possible and you approach thinking okay I'm just going to learn about this person. I'm going to learn what I can do if there's some recommendation I can provide. Maybe they're a huge fan of something else I'm a fan of and we can connect over that. That's it. That's all that matters. You're going to build up trust. You're going to get to know them. And then later there might be the possibility of doing business together but start with that first and that gives you a great foundation. Joe: I agree if you do that enough your pipeline of new business will eventually fill up and it will be continually flowing. John: Absolutely. Joe: John, how do people find out more about you and learn about your experience and get to listen to the podcast and things of that nature? John: Yeah, thank you sir. So Smart Business Revolution is the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you listen to podcasts. SmartBusinessRevolution.com is the website. Rise25 is the other website and yeah reach out, I love hearing from people who heard me on a podcast so I appreciate it. It's a pleasure being here. Joe: You're a good man John. Thanks for your time. John: Thank you.   Links: John's LinkedIn Profile Smart Business Revolution Blog & Podcast Rise25 Book recommendation: Give and Take by Adam Grant

John Shaughnessy has solved the mystery of the ancient pyramids built all over the world. Amazing lost scientific knowledge on how the moon is a grandmother clock that regulates large cycles on Earth, like ice-ages and interglacial periods. If you're interested in the civilizations of the ancient past, Shaughnessy proposes a revelatory, mind-blowing new theory... MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Why the Pyramids Were "Really" Created by Brandon Ellis GUEST LINKS - JOHN SHAUGHNESSY Pyramid Gravity Force 1 Video lecture Pyramid Gravity Force: How the Earth's Pyramids Work by John Shaughnessy There is Something About the Moon... by Wendy Salter and John Shaughnessy HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT John: Well, I'm John Shaughnessy. I come from Massachusetts. I grew up in Massachusetts a few miles outside of Boston, downtown Boston in a small suburb. I first got introduced into space, generally the... whatever you want to call it, the Cosmo. I got a part time job working on the weekends at the Museum of Science. And in the Museum of Science, they have a place called the Planetarium. I was taking tickets. I sold tickets to the Planetarium show and I just fell in love with it. I was doing special effects. I was involved with running around during the show and changing slides in the old Don Howard projectors. I had to place myself Saturday, Sunday mornings, I'd get in there early. I had to place myself, this big giant sized projector, I could... After I knew what I was doing, I was click shutting the lights down and having my own light show and... That lasted about two years but it sowed a seed in me. Later on, like, I've always had, say, psychic anomalies that would just come in and I would know stuff before it happened or... to the point where I freaked out my friends I was hanging out with. You know, I just shrugged it off, made a joke out of it, because I didn't know what was actually happening. Back in the day, you didn't have a class in middle school on how to deal with your psychic personality, you know what I mean? Slade: I still don't think they have that on the curriculum. John: Yeah! You know, there's reasons for it, you know? It scares the hell out of people. Well, the ones that are in control, anyhow. That all being said, I joined the navy. It was my first geographical cure and you know, jumped into the service. I was on a small ship, the USS Miller and we did a couple of major cruises. I was at three 6-month deployments. One of them, it was like a small shakedown cruise just going up and down the eastern seaboard, say, from Halifax to Puerto Rico and maybe down to the Bermuda Triangle. One particular day in the Bermuda Triangle, I had an event and that kind of shook me to the core. You know, we're a mighty ship and it was a clear blue day. Not a cloud in the sky and the ocean was the same colour as the sky, really. You couldn't tell where the horizon began and end. We just lost power - this mighty ship with backup generators, batteries. Everything just went completely dark, still, quiet. There was no waves. Just amazing, and it was about 10 minutes of just sitting there. The eerie thing is it wasn't a lot of talking. It was like we were just looking into each others' eyes, because we had little battery lights that lit up so you could catch people's faces. It was like a show made up of mimes, you know? We were just looking at each other. It was, What's going on? What's happening here? So it was pretty profound. After we got the power back, generators finally kicked on. We got going and really, there was no real investigation that actually came down to the crew. I wasn't an Officer. I was just an enlisted man, so it kind of triggered something in me and I started chasing the paranormal, you know? One of my favorite books back then, I forget the author, it was 'The Probability of the Impossible'. It was like, maybe hundreds of incidences where things just defied logic and science. So I just got hooked into that and the Bermuda Triangle. There was a lot of books back then of the Bermuda Triangle and von Däniken. It was Erich von Däniken's work I grabbed a lot. Chariots of the Gods. Started reading a lot. I was always interested in the unknown, the mysteries. If somebody couldn't figure something out, I'd show up. But if everybody had it all figured out, it didn't interest me. So any puzzle or conundrum wasn't working right or something like that, I kind of enjoyed solving those problems. It's just how my brain worked and a lot of times, I would get intuitive... I'm the type of guy who would get from A to C without going to B. A lot of areas in my mind.. I have the mind where I can put things together inside my brain. I don't have to draw things. I can just, you know, build up systems and troubleshoot without having to do the hard work on the bench, so to speak. I can walk it through and all that while working and kind of works like that. So I got into the power industry. I'm retired right now. I got into generating electricity at the utility level. Gas turbines and boilers, steam turbines, so pretty large machines. 100,000 horsepower. I got into hydroelectric dam operations. I used to supervise, I was a supervisor in the big utilities, Con Edison Northeast Utilities, and retired now. So that's good. So I can put more of my work into my real passion and that's these leftover enigmas that seem to be sprinkled all over the planet. One particular time I got into... I was watching, getting into the pyramids. I touch topics and I just dig deep into them. I read all I could. I just get obsessed with it and I just hit a wall. I just hit a block. I was fascinated with gravity early on. I thought that was an awesome field to get into and try and unlock and basically get some kind of anti-gravity machines going. I did a lot of experiments. I was able to manipulate the weight of an object in an apothecary scale with rotating mass. As I got deeper and deeper into this, I would be reading Einstein's theory of special relativity, a lot of Tesla's work. Self-taught, really. Whatever I kind of got obsessed with, I just dug into it until I got to the bottom or got bored with it and couldn't get any further. One particular day I came into the living room. The TV was on and Michio Kaku's a pretty famous physicist out of New York. He was cutting right to a commercial and he kind of just, the last words he said as I was doing the dead drop into the lazyboy was, 'We still don't know what these pyramids are doing!' Then it just went off to a commercial. I muted it like I usually do. I just had an epiphany in my brain, just a thought going, I wonder what's on the other side of Giza? You know, the Giza Plateau pyramids. I've always had globes around me. If you came into my house, there's globes, atlases, maps and things of that nature. So I was pretty up on geography and, like I said, I got a little bit of training when I was 16 at the Museum of Science because I was obsessed with how the universe worked. So I got up, I walked across the living room, looked at the globe. There's a floor-mount globe about a three feet high and I found Giza and I spun it 180 degrees. Same latitude. Not antipodal, latitude. My finger landed right on a Hawaiian island chain, right? So that's strange. Just my background in gravity and the tidal lock with the moon and things like that automatically clicked in subconsciously, like this, the only real connection here is gravity. It's such a large distance. Therein lies the basis, the foundation of a theory that I've put out into the world with books, videos, talks, conferences and so on and so forth. So as time went on, next couple of weeks, my brain was just set on fire. I was driving down the road writing down notes. It's like you got this proverbial download of 30,000 words in about 5 minutes. And you're like back-engineering what you just took in kind of, type of thing. Because it was pretty profound. You know, the hair on the back stands up, on your neck stands up. You get the shivers. You know you're on to something. Long story short, I started saying, If Giza lines up with Hawaiian hot spots, what are the other pyramids doing? You know. So you gotta back out of my early theory that there's a connection between the two and say, Well if there's a connection between those two there's gotta be a connection to the other ones. Lo and behold, every time I went to a large cluster of pyramids, a large pyramid, 180 degrees and on the same latitude, there would be a volcano that aligned with it. So the pyramid at sundown in Mexico aligned with Mount Sigiriya in Sri Lanka, which is an ancient volcano. It has a, if you can believe it, an alien-shaped, elongated, not alien, elogated shape skull for a magma plug, and it's got huge claws at the base of it and nobody knows where it came from, who built it or anything. They rival the size of the Spinx, so that's interesting. Then I went over to the Chen pyramids, a large cluster of pyramids and that aligned with the... ironically, the Bermuda Island, which, unbeknownst to me at the time, it was made up of two ancient dormant super calderas that actually make up that island. And then there's El Tigre. It lines up with the Andaman Islands. Down in Guatemala, those pyramids are twice as high as Giza. As I said, El Tigre, the other name escapes me but... La Dante. It was like, 'Okay, these pyramids are lining up with these volcanos, or this strip of volcanic islands, or another island with a volcano.' So after I get up to 20, and then 30, and then 40, I said, 'Okay, alright. There's definitely a connection here.' And I'm like, at the time I didn't have it all figured out. I don't know if I have it all figured out now but I'm pretty deep into the theory. I was like, 'Okay, what's driving this...' My mind at the time, I just felt like gravity was static on the earth, that my concept of gravity was static gravity like, we have the gravitational field and it's x amount of meters per second, the force of it, and... After writing the book, I wrote my book and then a lot of times you get as much information as you have, and you have to get it out of you. You have to put it in writing and so I put my first book out, Pyramid Gravity Force. During that process of putting that all together, if you look at the cover of my book, it's the earth, the moon, and a large pyramid. A large super-imposed pyramid on the planet earth and I got a little one-line diagram that goes from the pyramid down to the core and back out to the moon. So that's where the gravitational energy was coming from that was actually connecting these spots together. Now, at this particular geographical time, geological time, sorry, geological time frame that we're in right now, the Nile Valley pyramids are aligned with the Hawaiian hot spot. That particular alignment is active right now. That in and of itself is, I call the Hawaiian hot spot the Magma Relief Valve of the planet in that particular location. It's the only constant erupting volcano because it's artificially controlled from the large pyramids on the other side of the planet. So basically we spin through the gravitational field of the moon, and that is the perpetual motion. This is a perpetual motion energy machine and you get the feedback from that energy when you go down to the ocean and see the tides roll in and roll out. I mean, this is a massive energy connection between this heavenly body we call the moon. So I said, 'Okay, it is the engine, the mechanics behind the system that basically lowers the gravitational field. When the pyramids of the Giza plateau spin through the moon's gravitational field, it lowers the gravitational field under the Hawaiian hotspot and allows that magma to dribble out. Now, granted, different alignments out there in the solar system like we just went through, not to get off topic. I gotta watch out or we won't be coming back. I mean, this is a real weird alignment anyway. I'll just touch this. Hopefully I can get back to where I was going. Slade: I'll bring you back in a minute. I'll bring you back. John: Well, I mean, this is where I've sold a minimum in conjunction with that, at the same time, we have all the planets on one side of the sun. You have this huge draw of gravitational pull collectively by all the planets, and that's why... Consequently, we have this very hot summer that we just went through. On top of when the sun is at a solar minimum, it actually puts out more radiation. It's actually hotter. Most people can probably identify.. when they walk outside, it feels like someone's jumping on your head. Slade: Yup. John: Pushing down on you. It's like someone's deflecting your field. It's like you're carrying a 50lb backpack around everywhere you go. Slade: It's making us feel a little crazy, right? John: Oh yeah, definitely. It's a lot of energy coming in and most people probably intuitively will just duck in from one shaded place to the next. From one air conditioning place to the next just to stay out of it. Anyway, so that all being said, getting back to the moon and the pyramid here. When we spin through the, the alignment of the pyramids and the Giza Plateau, they're set up in the Orion configuration, or dogleg. The smallest pyramid cuts into the moon's gravitational field. Because we spin in to the moon's gravitational field. So what this does, this way they have it set up, so if you can visualize, the earth spins in to the moon's gravitational field, it sets up the Fibonacci vortex, okay? And then the other larger two pyramids, GP2 and GP1, follow suit and flow through it. Now that creates a huge gravitational vortex in that zone and it goes through the planet and lowers the gravitational field on the Hawaiian hot spot and allows the magma to freeflow . That all being said, that's kind of the mechanics of what's going on with Hawaiian hot spot and the Giza Plateau pyramids. Slade: So it's controlling the volcanic forces at work in the earth, right? It's stabilizing something, right? Like what's the purpose here? John: When you step back, the god built the planets. If you go back and all the, you go into the ancient texts, it was built by higher minded beings, God, whatever you choose. And you put a planet together like Earth, you're gonna ask, What are my biggest challenges here? One of the biggest challenges on earth is magma control, like controlling tectonic plate slips. Most of our volcanism, volcanic activity on the planet are, build up pressure, explode, kill everything for a hundred miles around and seal it back up again. So that all being said, I mean you've got the Ring of Fire, which we have, you know, consistent volcanic activity. And right in the middle of the Ring of Fire is the relief valve of the Hawaiian hot spot. So it's actually, when we do go into these alignments I just alluded to this past summer, well since April. We went in, all the planets are on one side of the solar system. When that happens, going back just 120 years, you can go back thousands of years now, but just the last 120 years that actually happened SIX times. Every time that happened, we had a 3000% increase in volcanic activity on the planet. So, stepping back, your inner solar system, your planets in the solar system and it's affected by outside gravitational influences by the planets. So you're the host planet for intelligent life. So you want to keep it calm. So what you do is, you build some pyramids and you create this relief valve using the gravitational force of the moon, which is the biggest player of gravity on the planet. The other planets do increase and decrease that force, but nevertheless the moon is the biggest gravitational force. When these energies come into play on the planet, and create magma pressure, and especially in intergalacial pressure like right now we're in the warm up period, so you're in expansion, the poles are rising, the plates are getting squished together on the equatorial region because of heavier ocean. So you get a lot of... we're going from pumpkin-shaped to spherical-shaped. So you're in a constant changing environment. So this tool, this mechanism, this engineering, that's been on the planet for eons, I think it comes and goes. These things have been, probably have been rebuilt before. These pyramid systems, they've been rebuilt as the little ones underneath have been... As a technology comes back into the human consciousness and mainstream grabs it and says, 'Hey, these things are important. We'd better do something about this.' They're actually playing a critical role in our survival. And that re-emphasizes the rebuild and the physics and everything else that comes along with this. To sum that up, that's what this is. It's terraforming, and it's also, I hate to use the word geo-engineering, because it's got a bad rap lately, but it's geo-stabilizing. In essence, when you get control over... You saw that amount of magma come out of the Hawaiian hot spot just recently because the alignment of the planets and solar minimum piggyback. And that alignment we had a lot of magma... If you didn't have the Hawaiian hot spot, the lower gravitational field with the pyramids and the Nile valley manipulating that and allow that magma just to flow out freely, and after that the Hawaiian hot spot just sealed up for a year or so. It'd have been a catastrophic explosion beyond biblical proportions. We could have been going into the Stone Age a lot sooner, so... And what that particular location does, it lowers the lower mantle and upper mantle pressures and allows it to bleed out. And it prevents super calderas like Yellowstone Super Caldera from erupting. There's another giant super caldera in South America. So there's a reason behind the madness. All the magma. No pun intended. But there's a reason behind magma control so that's what it's all about. That's kind of where I've pulled this all into some serious scientific theory. And what backs up my gravitational theory is the moon and the high tide. A lot of people aren't aware that on the moon side, you get the high tide. On the moonless side, 180 degrees opposed to it, you get a high tide also. I call that the moonless high tide. So you get the moonless high tide and a moon high tide. Therein lies the evidence. Physical, repeatable, observable evidence that this is how gravity works on the planet. Recently, just recently, like the last couple of weeks, Russian scientists released a study and got published, I think, by Itmo University, I forget the name of the university in Russia. They built the Giza GP1 to scale using the same material. And what they did was they submerged it in bath of, not a bath, they submerged it with electromagnetic energy. And what they were able to find was, the three chambers inside the pyramids, the king's chamber, the queen's chamber and the subterranean chamber actually were focal points, okay? They were concentrating the energy inside these focal points. And then they did the same thing with the non-ionizing radiation, we know it as radio waves, some form of radio wave. They got the same result. They published the result. I put a, it's in my book, you know, the different language but the pyramids of subatomic particle lenses and they published the videos on YouTube in my name on pyramids being lenses. And I've also put down, in the chambers were the focal points. I've gone out and spoke about this. I had a Russian interview on, it was like their version of the History channel. I got about 15 minutes. They were really great. They do a lot of great graphics, bring in my theories and about four years ago, three years ago I think it was, three or four years ago, so I got on Russian TV and I got to expel on that. Somebody must've been listening, 'Maybe this guy's got something going', they were actually pretty advanced in their search for understanding what the pyramids do and what it's all about. So that all being said, that came back recently to me as, okay, proof positive, your theory's right in a lot of aspects. They're actually coming back with physical repeatable evidence that are being done in controlled labs. So the next step is getting the industry to, the mainstream paranormal New agers to look at these alignments that are... There's a connection between the pyramids and volcanoes. These things are... You're not putting 6 million tons of stone together to run a couple of light bulbs, you know? It's just... It's not... And I'm not putting down anybody that comes up with theories of what have you, because it's those theories that we all build our theories on. You know. Get higher and try to figure out what's going on. Slade: So what is this... What's coming up? What does this mean? You talked about the fact that this is controlling the ice ages, right? There's going to be a pole swap at some point, correct? John: Well I'm probably the only one out there that's not in the pole-swap camp. Slade: Okay. John: But I'll tell you why. Getting into my science there, and looking at the planet and knowing how the subatomic particles flow, just like the astrophysics did, theoretical physics community and all the what do you call it, neuron, electrons, galvatron, croutons, whatever. They all come in from the poles and they go out the equatorial region and they rotate back in, just like magnetic flux line, they call it. That's so famous. That image of the magnetic field on the planet that creates the Van Allen belts and so on and so forth. But what these, I call them 'planet builders', what they've done is they've created a huge... The Antarctica continent is shaped like a hexagon, just like Jupiter and Saturn. In effect, it kind if ties in with the tetrahedron. So it's a tetrahedron. In my book, the tetrahedron, the shape of this particular continent, sets up to be a subatomic land. It's like a giant pyramid. It concentrates the inflow of subatomic particles in the southern hemisphere of the South pole. Now if you look at the North pole, there's nothing really up there. It's water. Ice. There's no giant land, so... What you have to visualize is that you're going to have a higher flow coming in to the North pole and a slower flow coming in to the South pole, because the continent is right there. Antarctica. So what that does is slows down the subatomic flow. And it also slows down, or blocks the flow, to singularity. So you have a larger, say like a 70% of subatomic flow in the North and 30% in the South. But the flows are actually going at different velocities. So this is what locks in the magnetic field. Slade: So this is maintaining the magnetic field and it's also ultimately making the planet more habitable? John: Right. Slade: Without it, it'd be too chaotic and volcanic for us to even be here. John: Yeah, exactly. So it's all part of a huge system. Anywhere you go, any continent you go to. That's why I'm a naysayer on the magnetic pole swap because the people that built this planet, that did the last rebuild terraforming, they're geniuses. They're not gonna... They don't want to come back and rebuild pyramids every year. They do it and they make it last. And they see the human consciousness when it needs to be and when we get to that level so we can understand the technology and re-utilize it and build it and re-build it. And things of that nature. Slade: Let's talk about that for a second. So first of all, let me ask you: When you talk about the planet builders, are we talking Atlantis, Lemuria, Ancient Aliens kind of concept? Where do you come in in that whole thing? Do you think somebody came here and set this all up for us? John: Yes. Slade: Well tell me a little bit about that. Because you're obviously a very science-minded guy, but then you also, you do mention Edgar Cayce. And you talked about how you were intuitive, that you get these downloads, which was crazy because this is the first time you and I ever talked, but the people who listen to this show, that's something we talk about a lot. So when you say it's coming into the consciousness, talk to me about, are you one of the people who's bringing this through currently? Do you see yourself as, okay, I'm meant to bring this information in and put it back into human consciousness? John: Yes. Yes, I feel with the trying to stay humble and keeping your ego in check is like... And yeah, I feel that my information is radical. It's new. It's not mine. This stuff was already here, you know? I'm just saying, 'Hey, I think this is the way these things work.' And this is the proof that I have. This is the physical evidence. So yes. I think there's a, it's part of the human consciousness. We get seated at different ages in the human history. This last go from the ice age into the intergalacial period was, I feel that was when humanity peaks at the peak of the intergalacial period. And then we go into the ice age and we drop off and we forget everything. Only to come back and do it again the next intergalacial period. Hopefully we won't be on the oil economy. We got sidetracked into this oil economy by some corrupt individuals. But anyways... Slade: So this is waves of rise and fall of human civilization, right? John: Right. Slade: Okay. John: Yeah. Like it's, I'll just make a point. Michael Cremo, I don't know if you know. He's done a lot of work and he's got a lot of evidence that modern man has been down here for a minimum of half a million years. There's evidence all over the place that supports this. Obviously it's buried because it goes up against the narrative, whatever the narrative is, at any particular day, so... It's just a rise and fall of humanity. Now to come into this environment, you have to take the physical form of a human being. Whether it's just walk-ins or people just coming in to you who are what have you, or you're just a real mature soul and you've ascended to a real high level of consciousness. You've got the Buddha, Gandhi... You have a lot of very mature souls. Jesus Christ and going on and on and on. I'm just talking. There's a lot of them. I'm not getting everybody obviously. I don't want to offend anybody. Just saying, there's... We get seated with these master, these masters, really, of human consciousness. And in the middle of that, we get people like Tesla, Einstein, Newton, Galileo, a lot of the Greek philosophers, you know. They come in and they pass a message along. They bring in ideas, technology, concepts, sciences, and things of that nature. So it's just a re-circulation of the human consciousness on the planet. And it's like the old proverbial saying that your soul is here to have a human experience, not the other way around, you know? So... And I think it's a tool for growth. For the spirit, if you believe in reincarnation. You know, you keep coming back and hopefully every time you come back, you utilize that space and time to ascend to a higher state of consciousness. Then maybe eventually you don't have to come back. You can just sit up on the moon and watch the big show. Slade: So in your theory, the information that you're accessing, is kind of held in the collective consciousness. Some people call it the Akashic Records. There's some other dimension where this knowledge exists and different ones of us tap into it and... I actually think a lot more people tap into it than we even give credit for. You know, there are those Ascended Masters that are kind of like the rock stars. Then there's a bunch of us that do it a little bit here and there, right? Just humbly, you know, thinking of it that way. John: Yeah. It's a collective group. Yeah, I wouldn't be where I was at... Maybe I'm supporting somebody I don't know, and they're going to come up with something that's going to add to it and... You know, the Russian scientist's doing this research and then... The time spans are amazing. I mean, you're only down here for a short amount of time and all of a sudden, you're starting to get this wave of science, you know? And it's all coming together collectively from different parts of the world. And from places you'd never expect. It's like, we're a very small pocket of humanity. People in this new age, 'truth seekers', they call them, I call us. We're not satisfied with the story. We're lifting up the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, going behind the curtain to see who's running the machine, you know? So we're a small pocket. We do add to the human family. We do add a consciousness that helps, will help in the future, I think, to navigate us through changes that are coming. And that's what I think it's all about. Slade: Do you think there's something we're supposed to do in particular, like, do the pyramids need to be refurbished in some way? Do they need to be maintained or something like that? John: Right, I mean, my mind's always going on about that. Where are we at? What do we need to do? Are we at a critical stage right now? Four years ago, they came up with there's three times the amount of water trapped in the transition zone between the upper and the middle mantle. And I'm thinking, so that ties in to the volcanism. That ties in to the magma control. A lot of times, I just get overwhelmed. I have to jump on the couch and take a nap. Slade: Do you think we're in danger of breaking something? John: Yeah, I think we're going up fast. The only thing I can say to sum up where I'm at, the science and everything. And I go back to the icicle sample. Thank god for the icicle samples. Because we can get some grounded, we can ground our thoughts on this particular source of time. It goes back a million some odd years, but... They've done a great job showing intergalacial periods and ice ages. For the most part, it's like clockwork. It's like 104,000 ice age. 13,500 on average for the intergalacial period. That all being said, all the ice is not going to melt in intergalacial period. If that ice is 1,000,000 years old, we just came out of the ice age 13,500 years ago, something big is... A lot of people are going to wait for the ice to melt. But my theory in my other book, 'There Is Something About the Moon' gets into the physics of what controls the ice age. And that is, as the ocean rises, the gravitation - this is common knowledge - the moon's gravitational field is shifting from the glaciers and the polar caps... The actual claw... There's actually five images on the moon and that tells a whole story also but anyway... So transfer to the hard surface of the ice to the girth of the ocean. What that does is it, it in effect is causing the earth to tilt from 23.5 or 23.4 to, it's gonna go to 19.4. And Tiwanaku, the Gate of the Sun, the name escapes me now, but that's 4 degrees off. The Gate of the Sun, the sun is supposed to rise in the middle of it, and it will once we get back to the ice age tilt. The ice age tilt goes from 23.5 to 19.4 degrees, and then the sun will rise up in that Gate in Tiwanaku. I think it's in Tiwanaku. But anyway, long story short, there's a highway in Mexico and they've been marking the summer solstice sun at high noon and it's been travelling 100 miles, feet, north.. south.. Let me back up a bit I'm stepping on my words here. They're actually marking it and they're marking the tilt. They're acknowledging the tilt is changing. So we are going to a lower tilt. Now I mean, you gotta go like a thousand miles to get one degree. It's a pretty significant move. We don't think it is. You know, 23 to 19, you wouldn't think it'd be that big, but it's actually a significant drop, a significant movement. And the sun actually coming up over the Tropic of Cancer in the summer, what do you call it, solstice. The summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. So what's going on is that the solstices are squeezing the Tropics, the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn will move to 19. And what that does is lowers the light on the upper latitudes, both in the north and southern hemisphere. And essentially, we're going into ice-building mode, okay? So this is the control mechanism that the moon also ties into. It's a multi-faceted engineering system that protects the planet. So if we're melting faster because of human activity, which we probably are because of the higher greenhouse gases that they surmise based on the previous ice core samples, we are way off the charts. We're going to accelerate the melting of the ice and it's going to hit what I call is the high water mark. And I think maybe [unintelligible] island out in the Pacific might be the high water mark island. It's only 5 feet high. I mean, 5 feet's a lot of water but it is... As the water increases in volume on the earth, you're gonna get more of a larger degree tilt in a period of time. So instead of 100 feet a year, you could be getting a quarter mile. At some point, it's gonna really pick up pretty quick. And that'll launch us into the Ice Age. But this is a good thing! Because we're in an environment where you can't flat-line. Because there's so much energy, you know, the sun, the Milky Way galaxy, the planets... You're either going up or down. And that's just the nature of the beast that we're here. Hopefully we attain higher level of technology that operates on the natural energy that the planet makes besides burning stuff. We're in the burn-scorch technology. Slade: Yeah. It does seem like there's probably some better stuff we could be using. My mind is spinning out as you're talking. I'm thinking about, you know, maybe I'm getting downloads too. But I'm seeing all these potential explanations for what we call astrology, I'm seeing how a lot of this ancient architecture that we have, the Henges and all this stuff that the Aztecs left behind. They really are some kind of calendars or... Like you were talking about, they're marking the stuff on a highway but that's like the really scratching on the chalkboard version of something that has been left behind for us, right? John: Mmhmm. There's a book by Derek Cunningham. He surmised that the Sacsayhuamán, you know the saw-toothed walls up there, and I did the same thing. We're different theories but he's kind of, said there was a language being... Those shapes of blocks are actually a language. Slade: Ooo! Interesting! John: Again, it's like a lot of these little tiny pockets of information. These people come in, they do the download, and they're gone. You know? So it's up to the next generation to come in and pick up and keep putting this together. But I think it's all experimentation. That whole plateau up there is literally instrumentation of where we are in the ice age, or intergalacial period, and you can actually measure the degree of tilt on a lot of these obelisks. The three big power centres: You've got the Vatican, Washington, and some other place that escapes my mind. It has these obelisks and they actually measure the tilt. That's what those giant obelisks do. You can keep an eye on and measure what's going on. There's a huge one in St. Peter's Square where I've been before. That all being said, there's instrumentation all over the place. You got Stonehenge. You got the pyramids. You got the temples. The temples are, haven't completely been transcribed as a lot of... There's information on the moon. You know, the images on the moon also tell a story of where we are in the intergalacial period. There's a famous stele with Akhenaten and Nefertiti. They're with their three children. They have a disc and they have the lines coming down. At the end of every one of those lines, is a saying, iconography of the moon, the claw, right? So you have this claw coming down. And you go through, this is actually a very short period in the span of time between the ages. This is actually just a very rare point in time on earth. The intergalacial periods are very short span of time. A normal weather pattern is an ice age on the planet. 100,000 years building ice and you know, it's habitable, humanity survives it, and life does flourish, but obviously not, you know, a mile under a glacier, but... That all being said, as far as I'm concerned, a lot of the hieroglyphs and steles and images in Egypt, because Egypt seems to have a huge amount of information on the moon and Mars and a few things. Past life on the planets. So essentially, that stele, that round circle in the middle is the moon, okay? And we rock back and forth. And you can read the moon as it comes up out of the ocean or out of the horizon with the naked eye. Any higher than that you have to get binoculars because you have a lensing effect when it comes up out of the ocean. But that tells us where you are in a time on the... There's two clocks. You got the moon clock, which I bring in through with my research with co-author, researcher, Wendy Salter, we kind of put this whole thing together on what the moon is. So there's a way of reading where you are in the intergalacial period and the ice ages. Just to sum that up. Now the other big clock is the wobble of the earth, where you know it's a 26,000 year old clock (approximately, it's a little less than that). That actually is the only time we really have besides the moon. Like, if we didn't have wobble, we wouldn't really have any real time clock. Because we're just in a Milky Way band just floating around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy and all the stars remained the same. If you didn't have that wobble, you wouldn't have the change, the zodiac houses where the sun rises up in the zodiac house. We're in Pisces right now, going into Aquarius. So those are two giant clocks. So it's like the wobble was made on purpose, to give us time. For me, every time I get into, you know, why is it like that? And it comes back with an answer. That's the answer I got for the wobble. It's not like a defect. It's not... Everything is perfect on this planet. The solar system is absolute perfection. The highest level of knowledge. Universal knowledge. Slade: Wow. Okay. Just to sum up for everyone because, again, we're just scratching the subject here, and possibly starting like, 10 different conversations that I could go on. John: You gotta take it easy on the listeners, you know? Slade: I'm going to link to all these things in the show notes for everyone. But just to break it down so everyone knows where to go to get more information. You've got a free YouTube video of a lecture that you gave. It's a pretty good length. The main book that we're talking about here called 'Pyramid, Gravity, Force - How the Earth's Pyramids Work'. And then you co-authored with Wendy Salter, a book called 'There is Something About the Moon'. What are you working on next? John: Just the last couple of weeks, I brought in some discoveries on what controls the solar minimum. The irony here is, the orbit of Jupiter is 11 years. The solar minimum is 11 years. It's like, Hello! Is anybody paying attention? Even though the earth rotates past Jupiter 11 times, it only comes in direct alignment between Jupiter and the sun, the last 11 years, right before the solar minimum, so it comes into direct alignment between the sun and Jupiter. And so basically I put a paper out. I put a video out and I do try to get my stuff published. I put stuff out and I send it to the journals and hopefully someday they'll get it through. But the bottom line is that what a lot of people don't understand is Jupiter is not in orbit around the sun. It's like a binary orbit between these two bodies, like they actually wobble on each other's axises, or elliptic orbits, rather and they kind of bounce out and around each other. So Jupiter's movement actually creates a corkscrew orbit of the sun and that also has an 11 year cycle on it also. But long story short, what happens when the earth gets in between Jupiter and go full circle, going back to the point I wanted to make, once the earth gets directly in line with Jupiter and the sun, it actually blocks the gravitational field and kind of filters it, it lowers it. That is the source of all the turbulence on the sun, the sun storms, the black spots, the giant magnetic storms. Once the earth comes in front of it, the sun just goes into this pure fusion environment. This fusion or fission. I always get the two mixed up. But anyway, it just goes into a ball and there's no spots at all for three or four months. Sometimes six months, it depends. So it actually shuts down all that turbulence. Once the earth passes out, it's like two or three months later, the torque begins between these two giant heavenly bodies and you get the massive storms. So that was a recent discovery that I've just brought in and... It's tough. I'm not in academia, so I'm outside. But I think that's where you do the most work. I don't have any constraints. Nobody's saying I can't say this and... I can say whatever I want. I don't have to.. Slade: Right. John: So this is like what's good for me and I think it seeds the, whatever you call it, the mainstream world of academia. It resonates out and they'll grab it and, you know, put something together with it. I mean, we need to know these things. We really need to get on top of what effect these planets are having on our environment. Because we're in a critical stage where we're pretty critical with the heat. There's a lot of environments that are changing yearly, rapidly, very fast and... Prior to that, I put a system together to forecast volcanic activity a little tighter with the alignments with planets and the moon and the moon's Metonic cycle. It's a huge influence on, say, volcanic eruption. So like right now, the prediction system we have right now, the USGS (United States Geological Survey), every country that has a volcano has some kind of prediction. Basically it's like, Okay if it's rumbling, they put a warning out to the local people, societies that are living at the foothills of these volcanoes. Guatemala, we lost a lot of people just this past summer. They put the warnings out to them and the people there are saying, 'Well it's been rumbling the last 10 years. Nothing happened.' I'm trying to get someone to help me build a software because all this information is available. What you can do is, you can go back the last time a volcano erupted and you can time stamp it and go back and say, Okay, get the time stamp on the last time it erupted. Go back to a solar simulator and find out where the positions of the planets were. And then also go back to the moon's Metonic cycle. And what it is is, and this is what I've done is, I've gone back and looked at where that eruption was and I went back and saw they were in the same alignment that it was 400 years ago. I don't know the date off the top, just to make a point. And so, what this does is you can go to these people and say, 'Hey look. We know it's been rumbling the last 20 years. 100 years. Nothing's every happened, but the last time it did erupt, the planetary alignments were in this position and the moon was in this particular part of the Metonic cycle.' So you have more concern. So you're coming in with a little bit more heavier warning than 'You should get out of here.' Slade: Yeah. John: It's tough for people to just pick up and take off. Their whole lives' are around these volcanoes. So that's kind of what I'm working on. I'm working on that type of thing. I'm working in on tying in this new ocean system into my volcanic theory that said three times the ocean are locked up in this material called ringwoodite. It's a blue crystal-type looking thing but it actually has a high percentage of water in it. It's equivalent.. the numbers are wild. One of the numbers was three times the equivalent of the surface ocean volume is trapped in this lime. Trying to figure out, is this something we need to be concerned with? It's a huge amount of water and my thing is, seeing that all the ice doesn't melt, we know that because, you know, going back a million years, we've had 10 ice ages with this ice that doesn't melt. And then you have the Biblical flood stories from every ancient text. And I'm thinking, Does this water that's trapped in that section of the planet, is this something that somehow ruptures and bleeds out to the surface for 40 days and 40 nights and goes back down, you know? Slade: Yeah! Ohmygod. John, this is all so truly truly fascinating. We're just scratching the surface here. I want everyone to go and check you out so that they can see the amount of research and detail there is behind all these stories and theories. Tell us where we can go to find you online. John: I'm on Facebook under my name John Shaughnessy. My websites are http://www.pyramidgravityforce.com/ and http://www.tisatmoon.com which is abbreviation for There Is Something About the Moon. You can go there too and that'll link you up. Both my books you can get on Amazon, Kindle or Lulu books. Yeah you can get my emails also. I'm available. Contact links are on those two sites. I have 62 videos on YouTube and yeah, I'm pretty much out there. Google 'John Shaughnessy'. Put 'Pyramid' or 'moon' behind it because there's a lot of John Shaughnessys. I guess we have a reputation of breeding like rabbits. There's thousands of them. So you want to get the right guy. Put pyramid and moon in and you'll get me. Slade: I'll be sure to put all those links that you just mentioned. Make them really easy for people just to click on. John Shaughnessy. Thank you so much for taking some time this morning to talk to me. John: Alright. Really appreciate you having me on too, Slade. Thanks again. Maybe we'll do it again soon.

There are a number of common questions that policyholders ask in regards to reporting claims. In this episode, ALPS Claims Attorney John Ries talks with Mark about some of questions he often hears. John also sheds light on why it's important for attorneys to call their legal malpractice insurance provider even if they suspect that an issue or event may give rise to a claim.   ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte.   Transcript: MARK: Welcome to ALPS In Brief, the ALPS risk management podcast. We're recording here at ALPS home office in the historic Florence building in downtown Missoula, Montana. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the ALPS risk manager. I have the pleasure of sitting down today with ALPS claims attorney John Reis. John, before we get into some discussions here, can you tell our audience just briefly a little bit of your background here at ALPS? JOHN: I've been here eight years. Before that, I was in private practice in Washington state for about five years. Then before that, I was in Oregon as a prosecuting attorney. MARK: Ah, interesting. Very good, very good. Both of us in terms of the roles that we're in get some common questions, which are just concerning, “I think I might've made a mistake. There's a problem out here. What happens? What do I need to do? What should I do?” The idea today is just to have some discussions about the claims process. If I am an attorney and I'm concerned that a mistake has happened, can you talk me through what the basic reporting requirements are? When do I need to report this? You see where I'm going? I don't even know. JOHN: In the past, and this is changing starting next year, we have in the past asked for attorneys to give us notice as soon as reasonably possible. Like all attorneys, reasonable is up for interpretation. Now we are changing it to “immediately notify us.” Basically, I always tell attorneys when they call, inevitably they'll say, “I wasn't sure if I should report this or not because it's not a claim yet.” Sometimes there are claims; they're just flat out “I missed the statute and I had to my tell my client.” MARK: Right, of course. JOHN: Sometimes, it's a little more in the gray area. “I've just lost a summary judgment motion. Is that a claim?”, or, “I may have forgotten to list an expert. Is that a claim?” I always advise people that it is a claim as soon as you think it's a claim. If you're thinking about whether or not to report it, you should just default and automatically report it, and not wait and see if it develops into an actual malpractice claim. There's a lot of problems if you wait. There's always the problem down the road. Someone will accuse you of having knowledge of it and not telling ALPS. MARK: Right, right. JOHN: Nobody wants to fight over that. ALPS doesn't want to. We'd rather you just tell us up front. It doesn't hurt you any, so you might as well tell us as soon as you think it's a possible claim. MARK: Right. A takeaway for me here is some people just assume “I don't have a claim until I've been sued,” and that's not really what this is about. It's about awareness. If you have questions or concerns, just call us. We'll sit down and work through it. I think just as a side note, we don't open everything that is reported as a claim. JOHN: Right. MARK: Would you explain that just briefly? JOHN: Yeah. We have the choice. Sometimes someone will call in and it's clearly not a claim or even a potential claim, and so we don't even open anything. We just put a note on the file. Other times, maybe many years down the road, it can turn into a claim or not. We'll open those as circumstances. A circumstance, we don't report it when you go to another insurance company, heaven forbid. We don't report those, so it's just an internal notation. If it does develop into a claim, they can turn it into a claim down the road. We call them circumstances. Sometimes, you'll see some insurance companies say, “We don't require you to report circumstances.” Basically what they're saying is, “We don't require you to notify us of things that are not actual claims,” which we think is problematic. That's why we ask you to report even potential claims, what we call circumstances. MARK: It seems to me, the value of that is “we're just going to pin down coverage.” JOHN: Yeah. MARK: “We've taken care of our reporting requirements just in case it's a little muddy.” JOHN: Right. MARK: Okay, okay. So, I've had a call with you or someone to chat with me, and the decision is, “Okay, this is something that should be reported.” Is there a formal process that I need to go through to formally report a claim? JOHN: Required in writing. We don't have a form. A lot of people call and ask, “Is there a form we have to fill out?” There's no form. Oftentimes, it's best you just call us first and we'll give you an idea of what we want so you're not sitting down and writing a 10-page letter that doesn't really help us that much. We just require written notice that just basically puts us on notice of what the issues are. Has what has been missed, what's being alleged, who the client is, when did this happen. It could be as short as a paragraph, depending on what the error or the potential error is. MARK: So you're talking about writing. Can I do this even via email? JOHN: Email's fine. Fax, email, regular mail. MARK: Okay, very good. Now you and I both know we get these questions a lot too: “Are you guys going to raise my rates?” This kind of thing. Is there an impact? What happens? How does ALPS deal with the fact that a claim has been reported? When we think about underwriting, rates, those kinds of things going forward. JOHN: Yeah, there's no impact on your future rates for just reporting claims. MARK: Mm-hmm (affirmative). JOHN: In fact, I would consider it to be more of a benefit to you as far as underwriting, that you're more cautious than the average person if you call in something that's maybe not a claim. At least it shows that you're thinking about the issue, which is much better than the other way, if you call us up six months after the claim has been made. MARK: Right. JOHN: If anything, I think it helps your future rates. There's not formula that really takes it into consideration. It all goes into the black magic of underwriting. There's not direct impact on your rates. MARK: So what I'm hearing is if I report a claim, you guys do your thing in claims and provide excellent customer service, and the claim goes away. I'm successfully [defended 06:45]. I'm hearing that that's really not going to be a problem. How about I've blown a statute and there is a significant loss here? Let's say there's a $300,000 loss and I don't know, $50,000 or something in defense costs, these kinds of things. Is that a similar outcome? What happens rate-wise there? JOHN: Yeah, the first thing that happens is there's a surcharge. Anything over $30,000 is surcharged. MARK: Whether it's loss or defense? JOHN: Right, loss or expense. I don't know what the exact number is, but the majority of claims are probably in the surcharge level. A fair number don't ever get to that high number. We can resolve them for next to nothing, or nothing at all. The ones that go over $30,000, the surcharge is relatively small. It's half the basic rate, which is 1900. It's a $950 surcharge, but that's added into the formula mid-way through, so the final number could be higher than that. MARK: Are there any obligations that I have under a policy when a claim arises? JOHN: Well the only real obligation is you have to report it. When the new policies go into effect beginning next year, you have to immediately notify ALPS as soon as you become aware of a potential or actual claim. That's your only requirement, is to immediately notify us. All of the claims attorneys have cellphones. We take calls 24 hours a day. Sometimes people say, “Oh, this came in over the weekend.” You can call us on the weekend. MARK: I get that I need to report the claim, but how about as you handle the claim, go through the process? Do I have obligations along those lines? JOHN: Yeah. The first thing that we'll tell you after you report the claim, if it is a claim and it's not just a potential claim or a circumstance, we'll ask for a complete copy of your file. That'll be the first, probably the biggest task you have as an insured is copying a file, depending on who the- MARK: – the importance of file maintenance and keeping files, but … JOHN: Yeah. Some people or some firms and some attorneys have a lot better record-keeping procedures than others. For some people, it's not a big deal. They can just hit a button, copy it to a memory stick, and mail it to us. Other people, their banker box is scattered through several offices. Papers are loose, they're difference sizes. I understand that's a bigger task. Some files are just plain huge. They can take a whole room. If that's the case, sometimes we can limit the request. Just give us the pleadings for now, or just give us the correspondence for now. Just enough to get us going. I guess the flip side would be if, we usually err on the side of just getting everything. It's just like when you get a new claim or a new case as a lawyer. You want all of the information, or in discovery, you want all the information. You don't want just the little bits that they give you. If there's too much there, we'll let you know and we can send it back, or just tell you not to send it to us to begin with. MARK: Do you prefer that digitally? JOHN: It's a lot easier for us digitally. I guess the downside of digitally, sometimes people copy a file, if there's multiples of thousands of pages, if it just goes from one to ten thousand, it's a little hard to sort through. We manage. MARK: I can imagine that one. JOHN: Yeah. It happens a lot, so we've gotten pretty good at going through and sorting it out. Most files are, even poorly kept, some files are better kept than others but all files have some natural order to them. Pleadings, correspondence, notes. There's a predictable outcome to each one. MARK: Going back to this sort of example of blowing a statute or something, I realized, “Oh my gosh, I really have made a mistake here and messed up here. This is going to be a malpractice claim.” Do you have any thoughts or advice that you would share in terms of, what do I do with my client? Should I just run out and fall on my sword and say, “[inaudible 11:18], I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll make it right?” What is your advice? Walk through that, that issue of client information or management. JOHN: That's a tricky one. Knock on wood, I've never had to deal with that, even when I was in private practice. I can understand that's a difficult situation. I think most attorneys really want to tell their client, “I'll make it right,” or they feel bad. If it's a missed statutes of limitations, for example, they feel bad inevitably. Any error I guess an attorney feels bad. Then the next question is, “Well how do I communicate that to the client?” Well I guess we all tell the insured that you can be honest with them and tell them that the mistake was made. The only thing you can't do is tell them that the insurance company will pay you a certain amount, or that the insurance company will fix it somehow. You have to limit it to just, “I made a mistake. Here's what the error was.” You can't say, “And you've been damaged in the amount of x dollars. Just call up John and he'll cut you the check on Monday.” In the policy, it requires the insured to cooperate with ALPS. Part of that is to not undertake any debts or any obligations with your client. Within that limitation though, you can pretty much tell your client anything that you feel is necessary. That you feel bad, you wish it never happened. All of that's fine. It will come back in your deposition, so you have to be aware of that. If you say that you feel bad and you wish it never happened, you'll be asked about that. Keep that in mind. I think the best advice is just to tell them succinctly as possible, “I made an error. Your case is no longer viable. I've reported this to my insurance carrier. Here's the claim number. Please call him or her as soon as you can.” That's good enough. MARK: Well, my takeaway here is not to be afraid. If I am concerned that I've made a misstep, just to call and talk to the people that are experienced in handling these kinds of things and you will work with any of the attorneys calling in to try to understand, “Is this reportable or not?”, understand, explain how the process works. The other takeaway that I have here is, “Hey, if I am afraid I've made a mistake, I want to call ALPS first and have some discussions about how to handle this because I can get into some trouble in terms of just coverage issues and these kinds of things. I want to be informed.” For those of you listening, any time a claim comes up, I would just, “Hey, call John and he'll take you through the process. Well John, thank you very much for spending a little time. Thanks to all of you for listening to our show. If any of you happen to have any questions about the issues we've discussed today, please don't hesitate to contact me at mbass@alpsnet.com. We'd love your feedback on the podcast, including other issues you'd like to hear us cover. Thanks again. It's been a pleasure.

www.OCC.edu - Ozark Christian College - Joplin, Missouri - 417.626.1234

www.OCC.edu - Ozark Christian College - Joplin, Missouri - 417.626.1234

www.OCC.edu - Ozark Christian College - Joplin, Missouri - 417.626.1234

John Sekevitch, President of CyberSolutions.io, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss, conflict between direct and indirect sales, making your partners money, customer experience ownership and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.   Jen: Hi, everybody, welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer. And today I'm joined by John Sekevitch, who is President of CyberSolutions.io. Welcome, John.   John: Thanks, Jen. It's good to be here. Hi, everybody.   Jen: It's great to have you here. And before we dig into sales leadership and channel, tell me a little bit about Cyber Solutions and what that organization is.   John: Well, Cyber Solutions is a channel. Right now there's roughly a thousand companies representing about 5,000 different offerings in the cyber security space. And each one of them wants to have access to cheap information, like the security officers of major banks and financial services, organizations, large retailers, and other high tech companies with intellectual property to protect. And as a result of the challenges that these companies are having in going to market and getting access to their targeted executives, they work with channel partners such as I in terms of bringing their products to market.   So right now, I'm representing a couple of application security companies, a threat and vulnerability management company, risk management company, one involved with threat intelligence sharing, and finally, another associated with risk scoring and security scoring for cyber insurance purposes. I think what's going on is it's very difficult for new companies to get access to the market. So more and more companies are going right to channel partners rather than trying to field a direct organization first, and then expand into the channels. And I'm sure we'll probably get into some of that later.   For the most part right now what I'm doing is helping these companies and representing their offerings to roughly 100 of those types of companies. So I have established strong relationships over the past 20 years, and I can get them into places they wouldn't be able to get into themselves. And I think that's typically why companies are looking for their channel partners.   Jen: Well, this is a real treat for us. Typically on the podcast, I'm interviewing channel executives who represent a vendor and they're talking about their best practices, and their triumphs and challenges in engaging a channel of partners to help them achieve their revenue goals. And so, what's so great is you bring the perspective of the channel partner, which is a really powerful voice that many of our listeners need to hear. So I'm excited. This is going to be great.   John: Yeah, I've also been on both sides. So I've definitely been that head of sales and marketing who was looking to expand my direct team into places where they weren't able to get into, or to just scale to the market opportunity. So I have recruited and worked with channel partners, and not only in this situation of my own company, but prior to that being a channel partner of IBM and being a channel partner of Oracle, which are two of the biggest that work with channel partners and have a lot of the best practices in the space. So I'm happy to share my perspectives from both sides of the table.   Jen: That's exactly what I wanted to dig into next. Looking at your background, you've had these executive leadership positions that you've held over the last 20 years, companies like IBM, like Net SPI. You've worked directly in sales and marketing like you mentioned. So you have a vast amount of business experience, and so I imagine you understand what works and what doesn't when it comes to channel, but also really business in general. Channel is just one aspect of an entire business. I'd love to hear, what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen in channel sales and marketing?   John: Well, I think the biggest change I've seen is more and more companies starting with the channel, rather than starting with their own direct sales organization. I think that's just symptomatic of what's happening out in the marketplace, which is, it's very difficult to do direct sales these days without spending a lot of money on marketing. For the most part, in my experience everybody's kind of focused on a handful of executives, and those executives don't answer their phone and they don't respond to emails. They get their insights from their relationships, their trusted relationships.   And so more and more, hiring a sales guy just because they have the ability to sell isn't enough anymore. What you're looking for is potentially getting a channel partner who already has those trusted relationships. In the cyber security space for instance, there's a company called Opto, and Opto has relationships with most of the top banks and financial services, organizations and large retailers. So as a result, everybody wants to get their attention so that their products are being represented. What's interesting is that now the channel partner is in power, because of the fact that they have these relationships, and they can try to exact a pound of flesh out of the product or offering provider.   So what's interesting is you'll see things like big commission payouts for the direct side being in the 5% to 10% range, and on the channel side being in the 20% to 25% range, regardless of whether or not they're selling at this price or not. So I'm seeing starting with the channel rather than the direct, and also the power of the channel to be able to dictate economic terms, which hasn't been the situation in the past.   Jen: Well, working for Allbound, where we believe in the power of selling with partners, I'm definitely biased, but we started our own channel partner program very, very early on. It was one of the first things we did as an organization, and I love my partner leads. I talk frequently about how they're my favorite leads, because like you said, they're coming from a trusted adviser. So when I get a lead from one of my agency partners, that is not just a lead, that is somebody who is coming to us because someone that they trust and work with on a regular basis recommended me to them. So it's the warmest hand-off that you can possibly get in sales. I think that's part of why we're seeing these organizations starting those channel partner programs earlier and earlier on in their business.   John: Right. But there's also a lot of challenges in an effective channel program. For instance, you were just mentioning getting those channel leads. Well, one of the things that has to be managed is the channel conflict between the direct organization and the channel. Who has what responsibilities? What account responsibilities? What happens if the channel's not getting the traction that you were hoping to get out of a particular territory? How do you get a channel partner to support all of the sales reps rather than just one or two sales reps? And so these are all things that obviously you need to have executive leadership over. You always need to have somebody who wakes up in the morning caring about whether those deals are being done by the channel or being direct.   I've always had situations where I ran sales and marketing and had responsibility for the whole number. However, I always had somebody who was responsible for that channel. To think that that person who has responsibility for the total can also be the person who has responsibility for the channel number, is just not going to work because they can always get their number with the big number, rather than working through the channel. So you need to have deal headquarters, if you will, to make sure that everybody knows what's going on. And you've got to have trust in the partners to be able to share access to your salesforce.com or whatever CRM system that you're using, and also to have content that's relevant to the channel and not just for yourself.   So one of the things that companies are struggling with is the fact that they barely have enough content to support their own people, much less what's needed by the channel. At the end of the day, the channel still needs to have content. They might have relationships and that might get them access, but they need to have content to be able to share with their relationships to advance the value propositions that they're trying to represent out there.   Jen: Absolutely. They're your volunteer salespeople. They're out there selling on your behalf. They need to be empowered and enabled. So my next question I was going to ask you was, really, how do you determine if and when a company is ready to build a channel partner program? You mentioned a couple of things, you mentioned having a leader who is responsible for that revenue. You mentioned making sure they figured out some of those internal processes to avoid conflict. You mentioned content. So are those really hard and fast signs and if you don't have those three or four things, then you really can't launch a partner program? Is there anything else? What do you think is really the bare minimum for an organization to really start selling through and with channel partners?   John: Well, I mean, if you start with a channel partner program, then you don't have to worry about channel conflict. You're just going through the partner.   Jen: This is true, yeah.   John: So when you hire a person who has that experience, it'd be a different person than you would if you're going to hire the head of an internal sales organization, if you will. The other thing is what are you going to do about leads? Are you going to develop leads for your channel? A lot of companies are looking for both sides. So I remember working as a channel partner for Oracle, and we were a systems integrator for their e-commerce solution, and for a while, that company lived on business given to them by Oracle. But then came to the point where Oracle was expecting them to be bringing business to them. So there's got to be that give and take, if you will. So I would say that, if you're going to start with just a channel, be prepared to use your marketing and inbound resources, and perhaps even some of the inside sales resources to feed the channel, not just looking for the channel to feed you.   Jen: That's really great advice. I think about that, and I think about some of the mistakes that I've seen organizations make mostly around being under-resourced. So an organization, maybe that's been selling direct and then decides to build out a channel partner program, that group decides, "All right, we're going to hire this one person to really spearhead this and own it", except that person might be an operations type of individual, or a sales type of person...   John: Yeah, typically.   Jen: Right. Or maybe marketing but...   John: They're moving the paperwork, they're not moving the market. And that's a mistake. I'm glad you mentioned it.   Jen: Right.   John: I mean, naturally it is important to have somebody who moves the paper because of the fact that these people need to be paid. And if they're not being paid and if it's not worth their while, they won't put the work into it, and that's bad because sometimes you've given them exclusive territories, and they're not making any money on it, and they decide to walk away from the commitment so then nobody's pursuing these opportunities. So you got to be concerned about whether or not the channel's making money, because if they're not making money you're eventually going to lose them.   Jen: Are there any glaring mistakes that you've seen executives make in the channel? You don't you have to tell us who they are, or what companies they were. Just wondering if in your experience you've seen any like big failures that maybe, our listeners who are either building channel programs or nurturing them can learn from?   John: Well, there might be some people on the line that are familiar with this company, IBM for instance. So IBM pays 20% to 25% commission to their channel partners. The caveat is the fact that they pay 20% to 25% based on a deal that sold at list price. So the thing is that when it isn't sold at list price, and those of you on the podcast probably understand that there's never an IBM product that gets sold at list price. So consequently, these channel partners are making 5% to 10% instead of 20% to 25% because of the market realities that these IBM products need to be sold at a discount in order to be competitively priced.   So consequently, they lose a lot of the channel traction that they could be getting because even though the 20% to 25% seems like it's a reasonable commission to be paid, it's not actually being paid, and the result is the channel's not making any money, and they eventually lose some of that traction. So that's probably the most glaring example, other than just flat out, taking all the cherry accounts as in-house, and leaving the dogs and cats to the channel. That's again, not paying attention to whether or not the channel's making money. So you may be able to get somebody interested in it to begin with, but when the results don't stand up to their expectations, you eventually lose a channel, and I've seen that happen on a number of occasions.   Then the other thing is that you have to be continually diligent about whose account it is. On the one hand, it's the channel's account, but they're buying your product. And so consequently, you have to have a way of being able to stay involved so that they end up being a happy client. Because when they throw you out, you're going to get the black eye, not necessarily the channel partners. So something that needs to be coordinated is how do you maintain some degree of account ownership and ownership of the customer experience when there's a channel partner involved.   Jen: That's a really great point. That's something that we're seeing grow in importance, particularly in this as a service subscription economy that we're in, and where buyers have more choice than ever before to move from one product to one solution to another. Gosh, I mean, making sure that if you're a vendor you have the ability to easily collaborate with your channel partners or vice versa, so that you could ultimately take care of the customer, because that's what's most critical to your business. I think that's really, really great advice.   John: This is becoming a complication nowadays, because as customers move towards annual subscriptions versus perpetual licenses for many of these solutions, we're talking about paying commissions off of smaller numbers, or you're paying commissions off of just the first year rather than years two and three, type of thing. Again, this is all related to asking “Is my channel making money?” You can imagine if you got a $100,000 deal for a one year deal, and you're getting 25% of it, what do you get? You get a $25,000 doesn't go very far, but if you can pay them up front 25% of a $300,000 deal for instance, now you've got a bigger hit.   However, you don't get your money until years two and three. So you just have to figure out how to do that. So maybe instead of offering 25%, you offer 20%, but you pay the full three years upfront, that type of thing. These are all things that, again, focus on is my channel making money? If your channel's making money, you're going to be successful. If your channel's not making money, you won't be successful.   Jen: I couldn't agree more. It's perfect, perfect mic drop. Before I let you go, a lot of listeners of The Allbound Podcast are in their partner program infancy, and they're not the IBMs and the Oracles of the world. They are maybe some smaller mid-market SaaS companies that are really setting out to to build a partner program for the first time. Do you have some tips that you could share with folks like them, maybe the CEOs of those types of organizations? What do you recommend they do to really get started? Maybe it's even things they need to think about.   John: Well, I think what you're kind of describing is somebody who's already got a direct sales organization and now they're looking to expand into a channel, because otherwise, if you started with the channel you'd already have it there, so it's a little bit different. So let's assume that there is a direct sales organization, and now you're going to supplement that with the channel. So the first thing I would do is get somebody and invest in that person who is going to worry about the channel. Who's going to work with your inside teams to feed the channel? Who's going to set up the deal center to be able to manage channel conflict? Which accounts are the channel's? Which accounts are the inside team? Who's going to manage that? Who's going to put together the compensation plan that's going to be attractive to the channel, and still help the product company make money?   And then the other thing from a customer experience, is how are you going to share ownership of your mutual client? What are the expectations that you're going to have for your clients, for your channel's clients, and what are the expectations? How are you going to be participating in it? So I think if you take care of who's feeding the channel, who's compensating the channel, and how, and then also, how are you going to manage your mutual client? I think those are the three things that are most important to have a successful channel on your hands.   Jen: Excellent. Excellent advice. Well, this has been so great getting a chance to talk with you. Gosh, I could probably stay on the line even longer, and just pick your brain, but I won't. But before I really truly let you go, John, at the end of all of our podcasts, I have a little bit of a speed round of more personal questions, just four simple questions that I'd like to ask you. Are you open and ready for it?   John: Sure, sure.   Jen: All right. All right.   John: They're all related to channel, right?   Jen: No. They're actually not all related to channel. They're all related to you. So the first question is what is your favorite city?   John: My favorite city is Los Angeles. I like the ocean, and I like warm weather, and it's got a buzz to it. So I'm a Los Angeles type of guy, as compared to all my compatriots who seem to be Silicon Valley guys. So I'm a Los Angeles guy.   Jen: Southern California, awesome. Second question for you, are you an animal lover?   John: I am an animal lover. We have had cocker spaniels for years, and they live a long time, very painful to see them leave. We just had one that passed in the last few months. And so my wife is now in the process of getting a Saint Charles, I think is the type of cocker that she's expecting to get next, so we'll have one soon.   Jen: Aw! Those are so adorable. Will this be a puppy?   John: Oh, it will be a puppy, yeah. We always start from scratch and go through all that pain. But cockers are a lot of work, I'm telling you. So if you're looking for a puppy or a dog that is not a lot of work, I would not recommend cocker spaniels.   Jen: I don't think I've met a puppy that's not a lot of work. So if anyone out there on the internet knows of puppies that are easy, let me know. Okay, question number three, Mac or PC?   John: Mac for sure.   Jen: And last question...   Jen: What's that?   John: The only way I made much affordable, however, is every time I bought one, I bought a share of Apple stock. And so it's been able to keep up.   Jen: There you go. All right, my last question. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip, where would it be to?   John: All-expenses paid trip would have to be someplace in the US. I'm a US guy. Where have I not been? I've not been to Charleston, South Carolina. And I think I need to go there. My wife and I have thought about doing that and it's like, it never gets to be the right time to go to Charleston, South Carolina. But if you were going to pay for it, I'd go.   Jen: That's the first time that someone has picked Charleston, South Carolina as their destination of choice. So I need to ask you a fifth question which is, what is so amazing about Charleston, South Carolina that I am missing?   John: I think it's just the architecture. They've kind of kept their hands on the old, while still having all of the modern conveniences.   Jen: All right.   John: And it's warm.   Jen: And it's warm, and it's warm. Well, lovely. Thank you. Thanks so much for sharing your time with me today John, talking about channel, talking about South Carolina. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally and just connect with you, what's the best way for them to do so?   John: Just my corporate email's fine. Its jsekevitch, S-E-K-E, V like Victor I-T-C-H@cybersolutions.io.   Jen: Wonderful. Again, thank you so much for your time. And thank you everybody else for tuning in. And I hope you'll join us next week for an all new episode of The Allbound Podcast.   Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone.   Intro: Effective selling takes an ecosystem. Join host Jen Spencer as she explores how to supercharge your sales and master the art of never selling alone. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast, the fundamentals of accelerating growth with partners.