Podcasts about jordan you

The Man with No Name is back and this time his name is Manco and he has a friend Morty (played by Chief Van Cleef). They are in love and express that love by shooting each other's hats!FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE is the bigger, better, and richer sequel to last week's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. Your hosts are joined by a special guest, friend of the pod Max. Max rode into town on a pale horse, joined us at the campfire, ate some beans, and spun us an old cowboy tune.We also talk about Alex and Max's favourite film THE BIKERIDERS, and some other stuff we've been watching like CABARET, THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL, and PRIME CUT (RIP Gene Hackman)Join us next for week for the exciting conclusion of the Dollars Trilogy, THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Perhaps another lonesome cowboy will drift into our ranch and join us for an impromptu Sergio Leone filmography ranking. You'll have to listen to see who (it's Jordan)You can follow The Franchisees on Twitter and Instagram @thefranchisees or email us at thefranchiseespod@gmail.com 

Al and Codey interview Jordan, the developer of Rusty's Retirement Timings 00:00:00: Theme Tune 00:00:30: Intro 00:01:43: What Have We Been Up To 00:17:26: Game News 00:40:24: Rusty’s Retirement Interview 01:22:47: Outro Links Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma Trailer Harvest Hills Release Mika and the Witch’s Mountain Exiting EA Galactic Getaway EA Release Usagi Shima “Chinese New Year” Update Chill Town Roadmap Fields of Mistria Roadmap Webfishing Cat Plush Animal Crossing Aquarium UK Tour Rusty’s Retirement on Steam Rusty’s Retirement Links Contact Al on Mastodon: https://mastodon.scot/@TheScotBot Email Us: https://harvestseason.club/contact/ Transcript (0:00:30) Al: Hello, farmers, and welcome to another episode of The Harvest Season. (0:00:36) Al: My name is Al. (0:00:38) Codey: and I am Cody. (0:00:40) Al: And we’re here today to talk about Cottagecore Games. (0:00:44) Codey: Woo. (0:00:45) Codey: Whoooo! (0:00:46) Al: This episode, we have a very exciting thing. (0:00:49) Al: It’s not often we get an interview, but the first interview of the year this year (0:00:53) Al: is with the developer of 2024’s The Harvest Season game of the year. (0:01:01) Al: Rusty Retirement, Jordan, the developer of Rusty Retirement, (0:01:05) Al: will be joining us later in the episode to talk about the game and many other things. (0:01:12) Codey: Yeah, we talk, we kind of talk about a couple things. (0:01:12) Al: So we talk about stuff, it is, it is mentioned, and some super exciting secret stuff. (0:01:16) Codey: The game is mentioned though. (0:01:18) Codey: Yeah, it is talked about, which will be revealed in this episode. (0:01:27) Al: Yeah. (0:01:31) Al: So if you’re here just to listen to that, you can see the time in the show notes, (0:01:35) Al: or you can click on the chapter in your podcast episode. (0:01:38) Al: But please do stay around as we talk about the news for this week. (0:01:43) Al: And also, Cody, what have you been up to? (0:01:46) Codey: I have been playing Slay the Spire. (0:01:52) Codey: I haven’t been playing it nearly as much, (0:01:54) Codey: but I did finally beat all of the characters (0:02:00) Codey: and beat like the end game once you– (0:02:04) Codey: and like got credits. (0:02:06) Codey: But it doesn’t really ever end, really. (0:02:08) Codey: You just keep playing. (0:02:10) Codey: But it’s fun. (0:02:12) Codey: doing that, doing more PhD studies. (0:02:16) Codey: It’s like starting to hit me now that like, cause I was talking to my advisor (0:02:20) Codey: and he was like, yeah, so if you’re going to defend in or graduate in December, (0:02:24) Codey: you have to defend in October, which means you should have your data done by (0:02:28) Codey: July. And like, I was just like, Oh, oh gosh, it’s all coming up so fast. (0:02:35) Codey: So yeah, it’s starting to hit. (0:02:38) Codey: Um, and also clearly Rusty’s retirement played a hot minute of that by you. (0:02:38) Al: Fair enough, obviously. (0:02:44) Al: Nice. I think last episode I talked about playing Legends Arceus for the second time, (0:02:51) Al: gone through and caught most of the Pokémon, I was nearly done. I have now finished that, (0:02:56) Al: so that’s that’s done. I’ve got my full Pokémon home decks, got the crown on Pokémon home for (0:03:03) Al: for that. And then I decided to do go from (0:03:08) Al: the best Pokemon game to the worst Pokemon game. And I am now playing Brilliant Diamond (0:03:13) Al: and Shining Pearl again. So it hasn’t, I already, I had a save. I had done a Professor Oak challenge. (0:03:24) Al: So I still had that. However, I didn’t finish, I didn’t keep everything. So there was a bunch (0:03:30) Al: of Pokemon I need to catch and breed and stuff, but it wasn’t too hard, except I am now, I (0:03:36) Al: I now need– (0:03:38) Al: Well, two Pokémon lines, one of which is just a version exclusive, (0:03:44) Al: so I’ve been playing through the other game, Pearl, to get that one. (0:03:47) Al: And I’ve almost got it. I’m almost there. (0:03:49) Al: The other one I need is Palkia, so I do need to finish Pearl till the end. (0:03:54) Al: So I do need to play through that game all the way to the end (0:03:58) Al: and get Palkia and be finished with that. (0:04:00) Codey: I’m sorry. That sounds awful (0:04:03) Al: I do– I feel like I don’t know. (0:04:05) Al: I didn’t, I don’t feel like I hate. (0:04:08) Al: the games when I was playing them, but maybe that rose tinted glasses. (0:04:11) Al: Maybe I did when I was playing it, but they are not great. (0:04:13) Codey: Mm-hmm. (0:04:19) Al: I do not miss random encounters in the grass. (0:04:23) Al: I mean, that in and of itself, like I don’t, I don’t want that to ever come back. (0:04:28) Al: I know some people like it. (0:04:29) Al: Whatever. (0:04:29) Al: I don’t, please don’t, please don’t bring it back, please. (0:04:35) Al: and obviously just the thing that annoys me. (0:04:38) Al: most about Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl is the stickiness. Like if you walk next to a wall (0:04:48) Al: you slow down. I just hate that so much because it’s like especially if you’re going through a (0:04:53) Al: cave and it’s like you happen to brush against a rock and suddenly you’re going at snail space. (0:04:59) Al: It’s just I really hate it. I do hate it so much and I feel like those games could have been a lot (0:05:05) Al: a lot better if there’s just been like a few decisions made. (0:05:08) Al: I could have dealt with the fact that it was random encounters in the grass right, (0:05:12) Al: like I would have preferred if they’d done something like Let’s Go right like I think (0:05:12) Codey: Yeah. (0:05:16) Al: Let’s Go is one of my favorite games. So if they’d done something like that I would have (0:05:21) Al: been much preferred it but I can understand why they would want to do like let’s keep let’s bring (0:05:26) Al: back the random encounters because that’s what these games were fine but it’s just all the other (0:05:32) Al: decisions that were made. Yeah, not fun. So (0:05:34) Codey: Yeah, I think that was like why I didn’t get them because if I wanted to play Diamond or Pearl, I would play it first like they didn’t change enough to me to make it worth it. (0:05:46) Al: Yeah, are we past the point now where you can just remake a game? Like, red and blue, (0:06:00) Al: when they were remade into Fire Red and Leaf Cream, I think that needed to happen, right? (0:06:05) Al: To make those games fun. Because those games were so, like, they were obviously really (0:06:10) Al: complicated and difficult for what they were at the time, and they were running on like (0:06:14) Al: of shoes. (0:06:16) Al: The company nearly folded multiple times before they got those games out. (0:06:20) Al: And so I think it makes absolute sense to redo those. (0:06:23) Al: I think HeartGold and SoulSilver, whether you like those games or not, I think did a (0:06:28) Al: lot to those games and made them better in a lot of ways. (0:06:33) Al: I personally really like what they did with Oras. (0:06:36) Al: I liked how they did that in the 3D style. (0:06:43) Al: And then let’s score, I think is. (0:06:46) Al: One of their best, I think it’s their best remake full stop. (0:06:48) Al: I think it’s amazing what they did with it. (0:06:50) Al: They took what was the original games and made it different. (0:06:54) Al: I really like that. (0:06:57) Al: And even if they’d done Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl as Platinum, (0:07:01) Al: I still feel like people would have been like, “But why?” (0:07:04) Al: Right? Because you can use it. (0:07:05) Al: Like a DS is not, DS games don’t feel old, like Game Boy games feel old. (0:07:12) Al: And yeah, some people would prefer to play a Game Boy game (0:07:16) Al: and remake of a Game Boy game. (0:07:17) Al: But a lot of people wouldn’t. (0:07:18) Al: A lot of people would prefer to play a newer game. (0:07:20) Al: But I feel like if you’re looking for a 2D Pokémon game, (0:07:24) Al: go play a 2D Pokémon game. (0:07:26) Al: I don’t think just remaking them as what they are makes sense anymore. (0:07:30) Codey: Yeah, I agree. I don’t think that that’s exciting enough to merit people dropping down another $60 or $50 or however much these games cost nowadays. (0:07:44) Al: or 120, if you buy them both, which obviously I would never do. You’d never find me doing that. (0:07:46) Codey: Yeah. No, of course not. No. Yeah, so I don’t… I think that it does a disservice to them to… (0:08:00) Codey: Not try and improve the games with the quality of life features that the fandom clearly needs or at the minimum, like have them be like a setting you can toggle or something. (0:08:14) Codey: So if people want to play the game on hard mode, they can. (0:08:18) Codey: Yeah. (0:08:18) Al: Let’s not get into the debate of hard mode. (0:08:22) Al: Yeah, I think, yeah, I just, it’s not even like Brilliant Diamond and Chime Pearl brought (0:08:30) Al: it up to the best or the most modern 2D games, right? (0:08:34) Codey: Mm-hmm (0:08:34) Al: Like the graphics were better, right? (0:08:37) Al: In my opinion, I know a lot of people didn’t like how it looked, but that’s fine. (0:08:40) Al: If you don’t like how it looked, that’s fine, but it is like more modern looking. (0:08:44) Al: It’s cleaner graphics, et cetera, et cetera, right? (0:08:48) Al: No, it’s not, it didn’t have as many quality of life improvements as even Gen 5 did, one (0:08:54) Codey: Mm hmm. Yeah. (0:08:55) Al: generation later, right? (0:08:58) Al: And so what are you doing if you’re not even going to improve it in that way, right? (0:09:04) Al: And that’s ignoring the stuff that they ignored that they had improved in Platinum. (0:09:09) Al: A Gen 4 game that came out two years later, right? (0:09:14) Al: Like if you’re going to ignore all of those improvements that you have made over the years (0:09:19) Al: don’t bother, but anyway, so yeah, I think I enjoyed the Professor Oak challenge because (0:09:20) Codey: Yeah (0:09:23) Codey: Hard agree (0:09:27) Al: it was very different compared to other ones, like having the grand underground, I think, (0:09:33) Al: was made that more interesting, but anyway, most people don’t care about that sort of (0:09:40) Al: stuff. (0:09:41) Al: So yeah, I’ve been playing through that and I’ll get there eventually. (0:09:44) Al: I’ve taken a break today to do some shiny hunting in Scarlet and Violet. (0:09:48) Al: But once I’ve done this, once I’ve caught Palkia, (0:09:52) Al: the only ones I’ll have left to do are, I don’t have a, (0:09:57) Al: because I’ve been for listeners who are, for new listeners or people who aren’t aware, (0:10:01) Al: I lost almost all of my Pokemon saves two years ago on my Switch. (0:10:05) Al: And I’ve recreated most of them now. (0:10:07) Al: So I have the only one, the only one I say I didn’t lose was my sword, (0:10:14) Al: Pokemon sword, because that was on a different Switch. (0:10:16) Al: because I was running two games at the same time. (0:10:18) Al: And I didn’t really like having to close a game and reopen it. (0:10:22) Al: So I just had two switches running the two games. (0:10:25) Al: So because of that, I managed to keep my sword. (0:10:29) Al: But other than that, I lost everything else. (0:10:31) Al: So all I’ve got left I don’t have is Let’s Go Pikachu and Shield. (0:10:39) Al: I think I have everything else because I’ve got Scarlet and Violet. (0:10:41) Al: I’ve got Legends Arceus. (0:10:44) Al: I’ve got Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl now. (0:10:47) Al: and I’ve got Let’s Go Eevee. (0:10:48) Al: And I’ve obviously got my original sword. (0:10:50) Al: So I think I’ve just got Let’s Go Pikachu to do and sword. (0:10:55) Al: And I will probably, I think I’ll probably do with Let’s Go Pikachu (0:10:58) Al: like I’m doing with Palkia and I’ll just kind of like rush through it (0:11:01) Al: and get it finished and then do the last couple of Pokémon (0:11:03) Al: that I need for the crown on Pokémon Home for those games. (0:11:06) Al: And then I think I will probably at some point, (0:11:11) Al: certainly not before the next Pokémon games that comes out, (0:11:14) Al: maybe at the end of the year or something, (0:11:17) Al: I will probably (0:11:18) Al: do a Professor Oak Challenge in Shield and get that done that way and finish up that (0:11:24) Al: dicks like that. Because that’s the only set of games on the Switch that I haven’t done (0:11:33) Al: a Professor Oak Challenge in because I started it for brilliant time in Shining Pearl. What a game (0:11:40) Al: to start that on. And then I went back and did Let’s Go Pikachu, but I didn’t go back and do (0:11:49) Al: Shield. No, I didn’t go back and do Pikachu because I already had a Pikachu save, (0:11:54) Al: but then I’d lost it, so I did Eevee. Anyway, doesn’t matter. Point is, I suspect by the middle (0:12:03) Al: of February, I will only have one Pokémon game not finished and that’ll be Shield and (0:12:12) Al: that’ll be the only Pokédex I don’t have finished on home as well. But I’ll get to that eventually. (0:12:16) Al: There’s no rush. (0:12:17) Codey: So, so I have a question. (0:12:19) Al: Yes, go for it. Yes, my secret is I don’t work. (0:12:20) Codey: Do you sleep? (0:12:23) Codey: I don’t believe you. (0:12:27) Codey: Oh, that worked. (0:12:28) Codey: That’s, that’s fair. (0:12:30) Al: Or if you are my employer, please don’t listen to this. The secret is that obviously the ADHD (0:12:35) Codey: Yeah. (0:12:38) Al: allows me to do like a week’s worth in like a day. And then I spend the rest of the time feeling (0:12:41) Codey: Yep. (0:12:43) Al: guilty that I’m not doing anything because my brain can’t, but it then distracts me. (0:12:45) Codey: Yep. (0:12:47) Codey: Yep, that’s where I am, too. (0:12:52) Codey: But that is part of working with neurodivergence. (0:12:59) Codey: So yeah, that’s actually, I’m doing a conference in November, and (0:12:59) Al: Yeah, weeeeeeee. (0:13:04) Codey: I’m going to try and have a symposium in that conference for, (0:13:08) Codey: it’s an entomology conference. (0:13:10) Codey: I want a symposium specifically on neurodivergence and why, and (0:13:14) Codey: and how to accommodate for… (0:13:17) Codey: people that work in your in your area or group or whatever university (0:13:22) Codey: accommodate for students and faculty that have neurodivergences versus like (0:13:27) Codey: just trying to make them conform because that is very left hand of left hand right (0:13:35) Codey: hand of people so that’s what we’ve been up to oh my gosh he doesn’t sleep you (0:13:38) Al: Oh, oh, wait, no, I’m not finished yet. (0:13:43) Al: I’ve been playing Harvest Moon Home Sweet Home. (0:13:45) Codey: guys I don’t believe it (0:13:47) Al: I’ve not been doing this very much, (0:13:49) Al: because I’ve just been doing like a day or two every day, (0:13:54) Al: which only takes like five or 10 minutes. (0:13:56) Al: But I’m trying to play these games like some people play (0:13:58) Al: them and just playing a little bit every day. (0:14:00) Al: And it’s been so much better with the controller support. (0:14:02) Al: I can actually play it now. (0:14:04) Codey: But can you save it the right way? (0:14:06) Codey: Bye. (0:14:08) Al: It doesn’t seem to work properly in so much as it saves fine, (0:14:12) Al: and it seems to be saving fine. (0:14:14) Al: And it seems like it loads when I go on. (0:14:16) Al: So I’m using it on my iPad, and I play it on my iPad, (0:14:19) Al: and it all seems to work. (0:14:20) Al: And I close the app, and I open up, and it all works fine. (0:14:22) Al: And then I go on to my Mac, and I open it up, and it says, (0:14:25) Al: oh, you’ve got new data. (0:14:26) Al: Do you want to download this? (0:14:27) Al: You go, yes, I’ll take the new data. (0:14:29) Al: And it shows the right thing on there. (0:14:31) Al: It says I’m at spring 23, year one, (0:14:34) Al: and I’ve got this much money, blah, blah, blah. (0:14:36) Al: And then you click on it, and then you actually (0:14:38) Al: get the game, and you’re back on spring one, (0:14:41) Al: and you have nothing. (0:14:42) Al: And the best thing about it is the save (0:14:44) Al: is completely mucked up in so much as there are no people. (0:14:46) Codey: Mm hmm. That sounds lovely, actually. (0:14:48) Al: People don’t exist in the game. (0:14:50) Al: There are no NPCs, and there’s nothing you can do. (0:14:53) Al: You just walk around and do nothing. (0:14:56) Al: It’s– it’s an autistic paradise. (0:15:02) Codey: That’s my kind of farming. (0:15:05) Al: Um. (0:15:06) Codey: Just give me give me all the tasks to do without the social interaction. (0:15:14) Al: So yeah, I can still only play on my iPad, (0:15:17) Al: which I do want the cloud save, (0:15:19) Al: and that would probably, (0:15:20) Al: I’d probably play it more if I had the cloud save, (0:15:22) Al: but the controller support means (0:15:24) Al: that I’m actually playing it. (0:15:26) Al: So, yeah. (0:15:29) Al: So that’s why I’ve been up to, (0:15:30) Al: I’ve also been thinking about the Switch 2. (0:15:32) Al: I don’t know if you’ve been thinking (0:15:33) Al: about the Switch 2 at all. (0:15:34) Codey: Nope. I don’t play my Switch that often, like at all. I know that I am going to play it. (0:15:35) Al: No, that’s fine. (0:15:37) Al: I’m excited for the Switch too. (0:15:38) Al: Hmm. (0:15:44) Codey: I’m going to play the Zelda games eventually, right? And then I enjoy having it for if I (0:15:50) Codey: want to play anything, but Xbox Game Pass has all I really need right now. And no, no, (0:15:57) Al: did you get did you get us a steam decadent Oh sad come on Jeff by the (0:16:03) Codey: I did not. (0:16:04) Codey: I am unloved no we yeah he was like still deciding if he wanted to do it or not he (0:16:13) Codey: actually did just get a raise so yeah maybe I’ll like walk by his phone and do that whole (0:16:16) Al: There you go. Perfect. (0:16:22) Codey: like steam deck like whisper into his phone so that his algorithm will start picking up (0:16:27) Codey: like ads first yeah. (0:16:28) Al: or we can get your is is it your neighbor Micah is it Micah can go in when Jeff moves (0:16:34) Al: in and get Micah to go and talk to him hint are you listening Micah you can we can we (0:16:35) Codey: Uh-huh does Micah have one I can’t remember I don’t know but yeah no my neighbor I’m wondering (0:16:46) Al: confusing Micah’s again I have no idea I don’t think that’s relevant to whether or not he (0:16:50) Codey: if he has a steam deck yeah oh true true true true yeah Micah when we have like a Jeff moved (0:16:55) Al: can convince Jeff to buy U.S.D. (0:17:03) Codey: and party. (0:17:04) Al: Yeah. Yeah, I heard it. I heard it on the podcast. (0:17:04) Codey: Um, you should be like, man, Cody really like was excited about (0:17:08) Codey: possibly because Jeff doesn’t, because Jeff does not listen to this. (0:17:15) Al: I guessed, I guessed. (0:17:18) Codey: Yeah, for sure. (0:17:19) Al: All right. Well, I’m excited about the switch too. And I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about it in (0:17:23) Al: the future, even though they’ve not really said anything yet. But all right, should we talk about (0:17:28) Al: the news? First up, we have Rune Factory Guardian. (0:17:29) Codey: Sure. (0:17:34) Al: So, first of all, they’ve announced that it’s coming out on the 30th of May. (0:17:39) Codey: Woo. (0:17:40) Codey: Something. (0:17:44) Al: So, there we go. That’s the thing. They’ve given a bunch of information on the new features. (0:17:52) Al: So, it has a village building thing, which is, I think, quite cool. In the trailer, (0:17:58) Al: you see them placing buildings and stuff and that. (0:18:04) Al: That’s cool. I quite like that idea because I get all the previous Rune Factory games have been like, (0:18:09) Al: “Here is an existing village. Go and interact with it.” Whereas this seems to be like you’re (0:18:14) Al: building up a village from small as you do the rest of things as well, which is a fun addition. (0:18:20) Codey: Yeah, I got the vibe that you’re like going through an area that has been like devastated and you’re helping to like rebuild (0:18:28) Al: Yeah, but that’s cool. Because if the whole point of Rune Factory is, it’s what if farming (0:18:38) Al: game plus adventure, I feel like adding in Village Building to that is a good logical (0:18:45) Al: continuation of that. (0:18:46) Codey: Yeah, going elsewhere, spreading your farming knowledge to the masses. (0:18:52) Al: The rest of it seems pretty similar to previous Rune Factory games, your combat and stuff (0:18:59) Al: like that. (0:19:00) Al: There maybe seem to be a bit more in terms of what’s the word I’m looking for, the movement. (0:19:06) Al: You seem to be able to glide on wind and stuff like that that I haven’t experienced in the (0:19:12) Al: previous games, which is a fun addition, making it more Breath of the Wildy, I guess. (0:19:19) Al: And there’s also 16 romanceables in this game. (0:19:22) Al: Get your waifu or husbandu. (0:19:25) Codey: Has a bundle I think it’s Joe (0:19:31) Codey: Yeah, never played a room factory game so I don’t have much (0:19:34) Al: Probably never going to. (0:19:37) Codey: Probs not (0:19:40) Codey: But I mean it looks the village building aspect I really do like like the idea of (0:19:47) Codey: going through an area and like helping to rebuild and restore peace and (0:19:52) Codey: maybe like you can set up farms and then you (0:19:55) Codey: find someone who can farm it and then you (0:19:57) Codey: move on. So it’s like you are creating the (0:19:59) Codey: farms and that kind of stuff and creating the (0:20:03) Codey: little societies. But then you get to disappear (0:20:06) Codey: into the ether. (0:20:07) Al: Is this going to be a, this is going to be the third run factor in a row where I go, (0:20:10) Al: “Ooh, I could, I could, maybe I’ll like this.” (0:20:13) Al: And then I play it and go, “Eh, it’s not really for me.” (0:20:16) Codey: Okay, maybe maybe the village maybe the village thing will be not will will make it change, (0:20:16) Al: Isn’t it? (0:20:17) Al: It’s going to, it’s going to happen again, isn’t it? (0:20:20) Al: Cause I’m getting that feeling. (0:20:27) Codey: maybe you will enjoy. We’re going to be optimistic here, because you’re going to have to play it. So (0:20:28) Al: Yeah, no one’s making me. (0:20:38) Codey: I am promising at this because I make the promises in this hostel. (0:20:46) Codey: Yeah, if you you can only marry. Yeah. (0:20:48) Al: What I didn’t notice is there didn’t seem to be anything about whether the romanceables (0:20:56) Al: are segregated. Oh dear. You know what I mean? Whether you can romance anyone or not. It (0:21:06) Al: does look like… I’m not seeing anything… I can’t remember five, but before five it (0:21:09) Codey: What has it been in all the previous games? (0:21:15) Al: It was definitely only… (0:21:18) Al: opposite gender. But I can’t remember what five did. However, obviously, that was also an issue (0:21:24) Al: for Story of Seasons and is no longer an issue for Story of Seasons and it’s the same company. (0:21:29) Al: So I would hope that now it will allow you to romance any character, but who knows? We’ll see. (0:21:39) Codey: We live in a society. (0:21:41) Codey: Thank you. (0:21:45) Al: It is $60. (0:21:48) Al: euros or 42 pounds. (0:21:50) Al: That is pretty cheap here. (0:21:52) Codey: What why why did you guys like pay a premium to like your government paid a (0:21:53) Al: I don’t know why it’s cheaper here than not though, I don’t know. (0:22:02) Codey: premium so they could get it for cheaper. (0:22:05) Al: The limited edition is $100 or 66 pounds and 66 pence. (0:22:10) Al: What a weird… (0:22:11) Codey: What the heck? (0:22:11) Al: Why is this such a weird number? (0:22:15) Al: it’s interesting. So the standard way. (0:22:18) Al: One. So this is for switch physical is (0:22:18) Codey: Uh huh. (0:22:21) Al: fifty nine ninety nine dollars forty one sixty six pounds or forty nine ninety nine euros. (0:22:27) Al: Right. So I would think maybe it was just (0:22:29) Al: auto-converted if it weren’t for the fact that the euros was a sensible one as well. (0:22:33) Al: So that’s weird. (0:22:34) Al: But then you go on to the limited edition one, which is nine ninety nine ninety nine (0:22:40) Al: dollars sixty six sixty six pounds or eighty three thirty two euros. (0:22:43) Codey: I mean, is it, do you guys have like a tax or something like a tariff on them that that (0:22:48) Al: What is with these numbers? (0:22:51) Al: So confused. (0:22:56) Al: Yeah, but. (0:22:58) Codey: would counteract? (0:23:00) Al: I mean, not if if so, it would be the case on every game, right? (0:23:06) Codey: Well, but maybe they’re like doing you a solid, like this company is like, we know, we know that (0:23:09) Al: Well, not rounding up. (0:23:11) Codey: you have to pay out your nose for shipping. So we’re just going to make the cost cheaper. (0:23:20) Codey: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m just trying to grasp the straws because that’s a little bizarre. (0:23:20) Al: if amazon has the the limited edition for 80 and the standard for 45 which I think was (0:23:24) Codey: Seems like a typo. (0:23:35) Al: the limited edition was more expensive yeah that was like 20 quid more for the limited edition (0:23:35) Codey: the euro prices. (0:23:41) Al: and three pounds more for the oh it’s very confusing what is happening here (0:23:46) Codey: There’s no logic in this place. (0:23:49) Al: I think these must. (0:23:50) Al: be auto translated like auto thing made because I can’t even find I can’t even find (0:23:59) Al: that number anywhere on any shop so I’m just going to ignore it I’m in all right anyway (0:24:03) Codey: Are they trying to say that this is the devil’s game? (0:24:11) Al: there’s that you can go pre-order it now if you want to go go go buy the game if you want (0:24:15) Al: it or if you’re me um next we have harvest hills uh have announced (0:24:15) Codey: Mm-hmm. (0:24:20) Al: they’re out now uh I don’t think we got previous notice of this coming out on this date because (0:24:26) Al: I didn’t have it down as that so they’ve just it’s out shadow drop they go (0:24:30) Codey: Yep, that’s the way to do it (0:24:33) Al: um trying to decide if I wanted to play this game or not uh it looks nice it’s nice graphics (0:24:41) Al: but oh no they did announce their release date I just missed it they released it on Christmas eve (0:24:47) Al: I don’t think this had an early access, so this is just… (0:24:52) Codey: Yeah, no, this one was one that I was interested in because of the beehives looking actually like beehives. (0:24:58) Al: Oh yes, oh yes. Oh, it’s cheap. Five quid, that’s wild. Okay, okay. (0:25:00) Codey: And I’m really, yeah, it’s only like $5. (0:25:07) Codey: Okay, the final the final question, can it be played on Mac? Nope. Sorry, y’all. (0:25:12) Al: Oh, but it can on Steam Deck. I’d say it’s unknown compatibility on Steam Deck, but (0:25:17) Codey: Well, I (0:25:20) Al: I suspect it’ll be fine on Steam Deck, because it has controller support. (0:25:22) Codey: It does look really cute, cool. (0:25:24) Al: Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So if you want that game, go play it. Mika. (0:25:28) Al: Which is mountain have announced that their non early access release is coming on the 22nd (0:25:35) Al: of January. What I’m a little bit confused by is that they’ve said that the third update is coming (0:25:44) Al: in the coming weeks. So this seems to be leaving early access without an update. (0:25:50) Al: Like they’re just going, Oh, it’s not early access anymore. But this is this is they’ve been weird (0:25:56) Al: about this since the beginning, right? Because I… (0:25:58) Al: Still don’t understand why they ever put this out in Early Access, (0:26:01) Al: because it wasn’t Early Access. They just added extra content after the fact. (0:26:04) Al: And now they’re releasing their non-Early Access version before the final update. (0:26:10) Codey: I mean, that seems pretty par for the course, given that Coral Island did a lot of the same stuff. (0:26:11) Al: Weird. Weird. What are they doing over there? (0:26:19) Al: - Well, yeah, I mean, I feel like “Mika and the Witch’s Mountain” was more complete on (0:26:23) Codey: Yeah. (0:26:23) Al: its early access release than “Coral Island” was on its 1.0 release. I don’t know, weird, (0:26:28) Codey: Yeah, that’s fair. (0:26:33) Al: confused, whatever. Why they didn’t go, “Oh, this is now out of early access” with their (0:26:38) Al: second content update, because the third content update is extra stuff that they’d want to (0:26:44) Al: add but wasn’t originally promised and so why they didn’t go or the second up (0:26:49) Al: it is the non-early access release okay great fine done but they didn’t do that they’ve gone (0:26:55) Al: no this random date a few weeks before the final update that doesn’t have an actual update (0:27:02) Al: that is the non-early access version (0:27:04) Codey: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don’t know is this this is the one where they’re gonna do they’re gonna add dungeons, right? (0:27:11) Al: yes correct (0:27:11) Codey: Yeah, cuz it says into the mount gone (0:27:14) Codey: uh (0:27:15) Al: Yeah, this is the time if you played the game before and you haven’t played. (0:27:19) Al: either of the content updates this will be the time to play it because I believe this is the (0:27:23) Al: final update and yeah it has a lot of extra content whereas the previous ones they were fun (0:27:30) Al: they do look fun but they were kind of small things it was like here’s a minigame here’s (0:27:35) Al: an extra collectible whereas this is yeah here are dungeons that you can go into much bigger. (0:27:40) Codey: Mm-hmm. Yeah, cool (0:27:42) Al: Galactic getaway they have announced that their early access comes out in March (0:27:48) Codey: Sorry, I just reread my comment and didn’t even realize it was a pun. (0:27:53) Al: Yeah (0:27:55) Al: You (0:27:57) Codey: So I wrote, how are they getting away with this? (0:28:01) Codey: And it’s galactic getaway. (0:28:04) Codey: So what I was referring to, I almost typed it out, but I wanted it to be like a secret. (0:28:09) Codey: When I look at this like Kickstarter picture that they have, the little robot is clearly (0:28:18) Codey: WALL-E with like a headset on and the dog looks kind of like Doug from up. (0:28:18) Al: Okay, bye. (0:28:27) Codey: And then the spaceship in the back left looks like Stitch’s spaceship from Leelo and Stitch. (0:28:34) Codey: So they’re just, the getaway part of this is that they’re getting away with not being (0:28:38) Codey: sued by Disney, I think. (0:28:38) Al: Right. Okay. So a couple of things. One, I don’t get the spaceship one. It doesn’t look (0:28:41) Codey: Okay. (0:28:44) Al: in it. Oh, no, I see. I know. I see. You mean that one. And I feel like I can see what you’re (0:28:51) Al: getting, what you’re coming, where you’re coming from, but they’re all pretty generic anyway, (0:28:56) Al: right? Like Eve is a pretty like generic looking robot. Doug is a dog, right? Like there’s only (0:29:01) Codey: Yeah, this is the we have Eve at home. (0:29:04) Codey: Uh-huh. (0:29:07) Al: so many dogs that the. (0:29:09) Al: And the spaceship is a red spaceship it it doesn’t even. (0:29:14) Codey: And the watering can has a star on it, like in, uh, I look at, I’m, the more I look someone (0:29:15) Al: Like it doesn’t even have the exact same design. (0:29:19) Al: Oh, come on. (0:29:22) Al: Come on. (0:29:28) Codey: in the background has buns like in, uh, Star Wars. No, I just, that like the, the picture. (0:29:34) Al: The robot is your biggest argument, I see why you’re saying that and I understand what you’re coming from, however, it’s a pretty generic looking robot shape, I think, personally. (0:29:51) Codey: But no, I, I just, I noticed that and I was like, Oh wow. (0:29:55) Codey: But yeah, I don’t know. (0:29:57) Codey: I’d like to see, uh, more stuff about this game. (0:30:00) Codey: I mean, they’ve, they’re going to add, they’re fixing the creatures, the (0:30:04) Codey: farming, the crafting, the mini games, um, and early access in March, 2025. (0:30:11) Codey: So, oh, woo. (0:30:15) Al: Usagi Shima have announced that they have a Chinese New Year update out now with one (0:30:21) Al: very important thing. Would you like to mention it? Yeah, you can give a costume to your bun (0:30:22) Codey: Uh, lion… lion dancing. (0:30:29) Al: to make it look like a… See, I thought these were dragons. I know it says lion, but I feel (0:30:33) Codey: No, they’re quick. Yeah. Have you ever seen lion dancing? Have you ever seen lion dancing? (0:30:35) Al: like it’s the Chinese New Year dragon, isn’t it? No, from a traditional saying. (0:30:43) Codey: I had um, I had a woman. Yeah, no, they’re lions. Um, there were a couple people in my high school (0:30:45) Al: Those are really, those are meant to be lions. I thought they were dragons. They don’t look (0:30:53) Al: anything like lions. (0:30:56) Codey: that uh were lion dancers and so they would do um in all the (0:31:03) Codey: like assemblies. They’d have a lion dancing part to the assembly. It was really cool. (0:31:10) Codey: Oh, that’s that was a big jump that I had to make. So you said this is a costume? (0:31:16) Al: So there’s a costume and there’s a minigame. You maybe have to do the minigame to get the costume, (0:31:21) Al: I’m not sure. Yeah, you jump over buns, some of which are in the costume. (0:31:22) Codey: Is the minigame the jumping? (0:31:29) Codey: Well, I just jumped over a plant and then lost to a mushroom, so. (0:31:33) Al: Oh, OK, so it’s more than buns that you jump over. Fair enough. (0:31:36) Codey: But that’s exciting. (0:31:39) Al: Yeah, if you love this game, it’s another update and with stuff for you to do. (0:31:40) Codey: I haven’t played this game in a while. (0:31:45) Codey: And it’s still cute. (0:31:47) Al: Yes, if you liked the game before, you’ll probably like this update. Let’s be honest. (0:31:50) Codey: you will continue the (0:31:52) Codey: liking shall continue. (0:31:54) Al: Yeah, for sure. (0:31:56) Al: Chill Town have announced their upcoming updates, 0.9 and 1.0. They’ve given some details on them. (0:32:04) Al: It’s mostly 0.9, like right at the end of the post to go, (0:32:10) Al: “Oh, and by the way, there will be festivals. That’s coming in 1.0.” (0:32:15) Codey: Yep, they talk about how they have sprinting, which I thought folks might like given that, (0:32:16) Al: But the rest of it seems to be 0.9. (0:32:28) Codey: you know, the issue was that you had to run across the map, right? That was something (0:32:32) Codey: folks were complaining about when they played it. So maybe being able to run faster will (0:32:37) Codey: alleviate some of that. But the more important thing is that they lied to me in that steam (0:32:45) Codey: that says that there’s a nature exhibit with it that you can fill with insects. But I saw no insects. (0:32:50) Codey: So that’s all they haven’t. But like, you can’t mention that without showing an insect or two, (0:32:51) Al: Maybe they’ve just not put any in yet (0:32:59) Codey: as like an example. They don’t, they, they literally just, they just walk through it’s as (0:33:02) Al: Don’t think they show anything in that they just it’s like completely empty (0:33:08) Codey: if an animal crossing or coral island or whatever, like you just walk through the part of the museum (0:33:13) Codey: in which the insects are supposed to be. (0:33:15) Codey: I was like waiting, I’m like, is there going to be like a butterfly that lies out? (0:33:16) Al: Yeah, very weird. (0:33:27) Codey: Um, yeah, I was, I was really excited to see insects and then there weren’t any, but that’s (0:33:33) Codey: okay. (0:33:34) Codey: Something to look forward to. (0:33:34) Al: Wooo! (0:33:37) Al: Fields of Mystery app have announced their next update, the second major update coming in March. (0:33:46) Al: It adds a new villager, some additional dialogue and schedules for the NPCs. (0:33:54) Al: More unlocks in the mines, which is important. I need to get further down those mines, (0:34:01) Codey: Yep. Yep. (0:34:01) Al: Although I need to I need to not play this (0:34:05) Al: yet. I need to not go into the cut zone. I think I need to wait for more updates, (0:34:10) Al: otherwise I’ll just end up burning out before the end of it. New areas in the town, additional (0:34:17) Al: requests, more museum stuff, new festival, just yeah. Oh the farmland expansion is added. Oh yes. (0:34:27) Al: Gotta get a bigger farm. Do I need a bigger farm? No I do not. Sprinklers! Yes! Finally! Adding (0:34:30) Codey: But you can. (0:34:34) Al: sprinklers and an auto petter. This is getting good. This game’s getting good. It was already (0:34:43) Al: good. It’s getting even better. They’ve also listed a bunch of stuff that’s coming in future (0:34:48) Al: updates but they just they say in no particular order. Just like here are things that we’re (0:34:50) Codey: But, but the automation is the most important. (0:34:53) Al: thinking about. Oh yes. Gotta love it. Also in-game time adjustment options, which is something that (0:35:03) Al: that always sounds like a good idea. (0:35:07) Codey: I mean people probably use it because they want to like skip forward to something or (0:35:12) Codey: other or skip back possibly if they missed a festival or something. (0:35:16) Al: Yeah. All right. And finally, finally, second, finally, next, next we have (0:35:24) Codey: But penultimate final. (0:35:30) Al: just an ultimate. You don’t need to add on the final one to the end. (0:35:35) Al: Next, we have webfishing have released a plush of their main character, the cat, (0:35:43) Al: on Makeship. So if you want that, and it’s funded, it’s out. (0:35:47) Codey: Uh-huh (0:35:47) Al: Definitely happening. So if you want it, go get it. (0:35:51) Codey: Yep, it is $29.99 and most importantly that Al did not mention is that it is holding a salmon (0:36:00) Al: for sure it’s very cute I don’t need (0:36:01) Codey: That’s the most important part (0:36:05) Codey: No, but wait, do you what if you don’t get it and then you want it later? (0:36:10) Al: So Craig, my youngest, is really into Astrobok recently, right? (0:36:12) Codey: Uh-huh (0:36:14) Codey: Okay (0:36:15) Al: Like obsessed with it. (0:36:17) Al: He’s been playing it a couple of hours most days of the week. (0:36:17) Codey: You (0:36:20) Codey: Mm-hmm (0:36:21) Al: He is, and he’s getting really good at it, right? (0:36:22) Codey: Mm-hmm. (0:36:23) Al: This is his first proper game that he’s played. (0:36:26) Al: Like he’s done a couple of bits here and there, (0:36:28) Al: but he’s not really like been playing them properly. (0:36:31) Al: But this is, he’s like doing most of it. (0:36:33) Al: There’s a few times where he’s like, can you help me with this? (0:36:35) Al: Because it’s too difficult, but he’s getting really good at it. (0:36:38) Al: like from it’s been like three weeks. (0:36:40) Al: or something and from the start till now he’s improved so much but he’s absolutely obsessed (0:36:46) Al: with it so much that we we just ordered the astrobot plush and that should be arriving (0:36:49) Codey: Oh. (0:36:51) Al: the day this episode comes out so he is very excited about that. (0:36:54) Codey: So if I hear a squeal from around the world of excitement. (0:36:59) Codey: Cool. (0:36:59) Al: Yeah finally we have information on a new Animal Crossing aquarium tour this time in the UK. We’ll (0:37:07) Al: We’ll come back to that word in a minute. (0:37:10) Al: I believe they did this in Japan and a few other places. (0:37:14) Al: I feel like I said about it in Canada and America, maybe as well. (0:37:18) Al: There’s a few. (0:37:19) Al: Anyway, it’s coming to the UK as well in collaboration with Sea Life UK. (0:37:23) Al: Now, I say UK because it is very much a tiny, tiny portion of one part of the UK. (0:37:32) Al: It’s like four different cities that are like half an hour to travel between each other. (0:37:40) Al: It is like a pathetically small amount, and you might go, “Oh, well, it’s because it’s (0:37:45) Al: Sea Life. (0:37:46) Al: It’s a specific company, and they don’t have any other place. (0:37:49) Al: They do. (0:37:50) Al: They have one in Scotland, and they didn’t do it there. (0:37:52) Codey: Well, yeah, they don’t want to do that, right? (0:37:53) Al: Thank you very much.” (0:37:53) Al: Don’t call it a UK tour if it’s just England. (0:37:57) Al: It’s an England tour, but like saying a US tour, and it’s just New York. (0:38:02) Codey: Yeah, just New York and Los Angeles. (0:38:02) Al: Go away. (0:38:05) Al: It’s a Europe tour, European tour. (0:38:10) Al: I’m annoyed. (0:38:10) Codey: Yeah, I guess I don’t really understand like what this is, (0:38:14) Al: Yeah, I think so, yeah, I believe so. (0:38:15) Codey: like, will there just be characters around? (0:38:20) Codey: Around. (0:38:24) Al: There’s activities as well. (0:38:25) Al: I think they have the stamp thing that they do in the game, so it says, “Visitors will (0:38:31) Al: be able to collect character stamps, discover many interesting facts about the inhabitants (0:38:35) Al: of Sea Life, and meet with Tom Nook and Isabel. (0:38:38) Al: at the end of the visit fans will be able to purchase. (0:38:40) Al: Animal Crossing New Horizons merchandise, of course they will, at the Aquarium store. (0:38:44) Codey: What villager would have to be included in either the merchandise or the stamp thing for you to go? (0:38:54) Al: or for me to travel all the way down to, I think Manchester is the closest one, (0:38:59) Al: which would be a, I think it’s a five hour drive for me, which is not insignificant. (0:39:08) Al: I know it means nothing to Americans who will drive five hours for dinner. (0:39:16) Al: I don’t think there is someone, I don’t really think so, like, (0:39:19) Codey: I would think, so if this was in New York or DC, which are like a three to five hour drive from (0:39:24) Codey: where I am, if Blue Bear was in there, Blue Bear is my favorite. (0:39:30) Al: Yeah, I just don’t think… I think it would be… I would drive two hours to go to this, (0:39:37) Al: I think. That’s how far I would drive to get to this. Coincidentally, about the time it (0:39:41) Al: takes to leave Scotland. I would drive two hours to this. I don’t think there’s anything (0:39:49) Al: realistically that would make me drive five hours. I don’t think I could do that. That’s (0:39:56) Al: too far. Especially considering we have an (0:40:00) Al: aquarium five minutes from us that we have a season pass to. So I would be paying to travel (0:40:08) Al: five hours to then pay to get into an aquarium when I have a season pass to an aquarium next to (0:40:14) Al: me. That doesn’t feel the most sensible situation, right? Oh, we do. All right, that is the news. (0:40:18) Codey: We have an aquarium at home. (0:40:25) Al: So next we will be going into our interview with Jordan, the developer of (0:40:30) Al: overseas retirement. We recorded that at a different time. So if it sounds different, (0:40:36) Al: that’s why. I hope you enjoy the interview. (0:40:38) Al: Weeee! (0:40:39) Al: Woo! (0:40:39) Al: Woo! (0:40:48) Al: Okay, we are now back with the developer of Rusty’s retirement, which just to remind listeners (0:40:56) Al: was the winner of the Harvest Seasons Game of the Year last year. (0:41:01) Al: Hello, welcome to the podcast, what is your name and what are your pronouns? (0:41:06) Jordan: Hiya. My name is Jordan, he/him. Yeah, I’m the developer of Rusty’s retirement, and also a smaller, lesser-known metroidvania called Hyekuda Robot, which is in the same universe as Rusty, actually, if you didn’t know that. A little bit of lore for you. (0:41:24) Al: I did not know that and I do like metroidvanias, maybe I’ll look at that at some point. (0:41:30) Codey: wait it’s a metroid haiku as in haiku the helper of russey (0:41:35) Jordan: Yep (0:41:37) Codey: he metroid what okay continue I have questions (0:41:41) Al: Well, good thing that you have questions because this is an interview, so I guess we’ll start (0:41:48) Al: off with a couple of easy questions. What is your history with games, just in general? (0:41:54) Al: What did you play when you were young? How did you get to where you are with games? (0:41:59) Jordan: Yeah, so I think my sort of gaming journey, let’s say, started when I was little, (0:42:08) Jordan: and I can’t remember the age exactly, but it was when Game Boy Color came out, (0:42:13) Jordan: because that was my first console that I ever got. And I just have super fond memories of playing (0:42:21) Jordan: Pokemon Gold on the Game Boy Color. So yeah, after that, and it was just like all the game. (0:42:29) Jordan: Boy stuff, Game Boy SP, Game Boy SP Advance, all of those ones. Nintendo DS when it came out, (0:42:39) Jordan: you know, all that sort of stuff. And then eventually I got like a PlayStation, I think. (0:42:44) Jordan: So I played like typical PlayStation games like GTA and stuff when I was definitely not age (0:42:51) Jordan: appropriate to play GTA, but still pretty fun times. So yeah, just sort of a mix, but it definitely (0:42:59) Jordan: with Game Boy and Game Boy Color. (0:43:01) Al: Yeah, fair enough. What was your starter in in Pokemon gold? (0:43:04) Jordan: Oh, I think it was the crocodile looking guy. Yes, that’s the one. (0:43:09) Al: Totodile. Yeah, good one. Good one. You’re in good company because we are both also Pokemon fans. (0:43:16) Codey: Mm-hmm (0:43:16) Al: I’ve been doing a lot of Pokemon recently. (0:43:20) Jordan: Yeah, I even I even actually bought because they did this remaster edition of like heart (0:43:25) Jordan: gold or something for like at the time I didn’t have a DS, I think it broke or I was only using (0:43:33) Jordan: my cousins or something like that. So I literally went out and bought a DS just so I could buy (0:43:39) Jordan: Pokemon Heart Gold. And that was like the only game I had for it. That was it. (0:43:44) Al: Yeah, I was actually the same because I dropped out of Pokémon after Gen 2 and came back (0:43:50) Al: for HeartGold SoulSilver. And I didn’t have a DS either, but my mum had a DS for brain (0:43:55) Al: training games. And so I was like, “Can I use your DS, please?” I used her DS and played (0:44:02) Al: HeartGold SoulSilver. I then got my own DSi for when the black and white came out. It (0:44:08) Al: a good time to jump back in, I think. (0:44:10) Codey: I think everyone had that like break period where they like played and then they stopped (0:44:15) Codey: playing and then they jumped back in, or at least I had that, yeah, yeah. (0:44:18) Jordan: - Yeah, I did as well. (0:44:20) Jordan: After HeartGold, I think I went and played all the DS, (0:44:24) Jordan: Pokemon games that released, (0:44:25) Jordan: like Diamond, Pearl, Sapphire, Ruby, all of those ones. (0:44:30) Al: Fair enough. Rusty’s retirement is obviously a farming game. What is your history with farming (0:44:36) Al: games? When did you because obviously there’s got to be a point where you’re like I’m making (0:44:40) Al: a farming game. So how did you get to that point in enjoying farming games or you know (0:44:46) Al: cottagecore games in general? Wow, okay interesting. (0:44:48) Jordan: I’ve never played a farming game, still to this day, other than Rusty’s retirement. (0:44:58) Codey: - Wild. (0:45:00) Jordan: So I know they exist, I know how they work, and obviously when I landed on Rusty’s retirement, (0:45:09) Jordan: well first of all, let me go back a little bit more. So after my first game, which was (0:45:14) Jordan: haikura robot, the same haikura that appears in Russia’s retirement. (0:45:19) Jordan: I was kind of stuck with what to do because making a Metroidvania was just a massive undertaking, especially to do it solo. (0:45:27) Jordan: Like I did all the art, animations, the coding, and there’s just so much content like you need. (0:45:33) Jordan: There was like 10 or 10 to 15 bosses at the end, you know, it’s just so much work. (0:45:39) Jordan: Like each boss needs their own unique animations, attack patterns, all this sort of stuff. (0:45:45) Jordan: And I was like, vowed to myself that I’m never going to (0:45:48) Jordan: put myself through this again, that I’m going to try and make (0:45:52) Jordan: something smaller and simpler as my next game. But when I (0:45:56) Jordan: finished from Metroidvania, that I didn’t know what to do. So I (0:46:03) Jordan: had this sort of brainwave of, I’m just going to make these (0:46:07) Jordan: sort of small prototypes, spend about two weeks on an idea (0:46:11) Jordan: because, you know, I had a bunch of ideas I wanted to try out, (0:46:15) Jordan: spend about two weeks on each sort of idea. (0:46:18) Jordan: And just test them just to want to see if I could actually do some of this stuff, you know, like some my technical capability isn’t like fantastic. I’m not like a fantastic coder. So some of this stuff is just simply out of my reach, just from a technical standpoint. (0:46:34) Al: You’re not making a 3D Zelda game. (0:46:35) Jordan: And then (0:46:37) Jordan: Yeah, or like, you know, I love strategy games and forex games as well. So like, but those things are like humongous. I would never be able to do something like that. (0:46:47) Jordan: And, and yes. (0:46:48) Jordan: So I just did these prototypes and I made Rusty and funnily, funnily enough. (0:46:55) Jordan: I actually shelved Rusty for like three months because I made it and most (0:47:01) Jordan: of the prototypes I made, and then I showed them on Twitter, right? (0:47:06) Jordan: I showed like, Hey guys, what do you think of this sort of thing? (0:47:10) Jordan: Just to kind of gauge, you know, interest and stuff like this, because I (0:47:14) Jordan: didn’t want to make something that, you know, at the end of the day, (0:47:17) Jordan: nobody wants to play. (0:47:18) Jordan: I was kind of trying to find this balance of like, okay, I’m going to do these (0:47:21) Jordan: ideas that I want to make and find out if I want to make them, but then also (0:47:26) Jordan: show them to people to see if there’s interest because I think if there’s (0:47:28) Jordan: interest, it also kind of motivates you to make it as well. (0:47:31) Jordan: You know, so it’s like this balance. (0:47:34) Jordan: Uh, but for Rusty, I thought, man, this is such a stupid idea. (0:47:38) Jordan: Nobody’s going to want to play this. (0:47:40) Jordan: And I just shelved it for like three months. (0:47:42) Jordan: Uh, but luckily I had commissioned, um, the sprites for. (0:47:48) Jordan: Rusty and they came through and I was thinking, you know, I should at (0:47:52) Jordan: least put sprites in the game now that they’ve done, just see what it looks like. (0:47:56) Jordan: And that’s when I thought, Oh, it was pretty cool. (0:47:58) Jordan: And I should make this into something. (0:48:00) Jordan: But before that, I hadn’t played any farming games or anything like that. (0:48:04) Jordan: But then once I kind of had this rusty idea and I also put it on Twitter (0:48:09) Jordan: and people really liked it, then I started like, uh, researching more (0:48:13) Jordan: into farming games and stuff. (0:48:14) Codey: » Mm-hmm. (0:48:16) Al: if you still not played any. (0:48:16) Jordan: But interestingly enough, I… (0:48:18) Jordan: No, I haven’t, because I was tempted to play Stardew Valley, (0:48:22) Jordan: but I didn’t want to get too influenced by the decisions that were made in that game. (0:48:29) Jordan: Like, I researched enough to know what’s the sort of loop, the core gameplay loop, (0:48:34) Jordan: and understand how that works, but I didn’t want to play it and see exactly how it’s done, (0:48:39) Jordan: because then I felt like it’s just going to influence my decision too much. (0:48:43) Jordan: And that kind of happened with my first game th

S10P10 - Le lettere di Cesare Pavese e le esplorazioni musicali al chiaro di lunaPLAYLIST LETTERARIA. Lettera di Cesare Pavese a Bianca Garufi21 ottobre 1945Tu sei veramente una fiamma che scalda ma bisogna proteggere dal vento. a volte non so se un mio gesto tende a scaldarmi o a proteggerti. anzi allora m'immagino di fare le due cose insieme e questa è tutta la mia e la tua tenerezza come una cosa sola. (…)non credere alle soluzioni, alle decisioni, alle grandi crisi; credi ai giorni, alle ore, ai minuti. tanto, per grave che sia una crisi, una decisione, ti tocca pure vivere le ore, i giorni e i minuti, e questi li vivi naturalmente (…) ...ciao e sii bellaLettera di Cesare Pavese a Fernanda Pivano, 11 gennaio 1943Cara Fernanda,ricevo le due lettere, quella della malinconia, e quella su Spoon River e sul mio richiamo.Per S. R. farò tutto io qui, ma non s'illuda troppo presto perché vorranno vedere le bozze e potranno ritornare sulla decisione. Per il richiamo è una notizia del giornale, che dal 1° al 15 febbraio chiameranno tutti i laureati in congedo del 1923 e precedenti, per utilizzarli. Io, a buon conto ho già cominciato a muovermi per sapere, primo, se sarò chiamato; secondo, se lo sarò davvero; terzo, per guarire dall'asma. Stia certa che i miei desideri coincidono coi Suoi.Mi preoccupa di più la Sua malinconia e il tono di bestia condotta al macello da Lei assunto. Perché? È sola e disagiata, ma può studiare e lavorare; non se l'intende coi Suoi, ma studiando e lavorando si prepara il modo di farsi un'indipendenza; non Le sono vicino a farle prediche, ma gliele faccio da lontano, e tanto più meditate e inesorabili, e assisto i Suoi lavori e insomma non sono in Polinesia.Pensi che qui soffro il freddo come a Mondovì. Siamo in quattro in una casa, anzi cinque, tre uomini e due donne; viviamo studentescamente; si mangia non male; io giro tutto lacero e scalcagnato, e a Torino dovrò venire certo uno di questi giorni, non fosse che per rifornirmi di abiti. Da Torino passerei a Mondovì. Faccia sì che il primo incontro avvenga tra noi due soli, perché vorrò abbracciarla e baciarla. Ho deciso. Ho trovato molti complimenti per il Mare, che pare abbia colpito tutta Roma, ma io vivo isolatissimo, anche perché a girare di notte su questi maledetti autobus e circolari, dove non si capisce niente, non mi pigliano certo.Cara Fernanda, si sta meglio con Lei a Torino, e anche a Mondovì. Stia allegraLettera di Cesare Pavese a Constance Dowling - 17 marzo 1950Cara Connie,volevo fare l'uomo forte e non scriverti subito, ma a che servirebbe? Sarebbe soltanto una posa.Ti ho mai detto che da ragazzo ho avuta la superstizione delle "buone azioni"? Quando dovevo correre un pericolo, sostenere un esame, per esempio, stavo attento in quei giorni a non essere cattivo, a non offendere nessuno, a non alzare la voce, a non fare brutti pensieri. Tutto questo per non alienarmi il destino. Ebbene, mi succede che in questi giorni ridivento ragazzo e corro davvero un gran pericolo, sostenendo un esame terribile, perché mi accordo che non oso esser cattivo, offendere gli altri pensare pensieri vili. Il pensiero di te e un ricordo o un'idea indegni, brutti, non s'accordano. Ti amo.Cara Connie, di questa parola so tutto il peso - l'orrore e la meraviglia - eppure te la dico, quasi con tranquillità. L'ho usata così poco nella mia vita, e così male, che è come nuova per me.[…] Amore, il pensiero che quando leggerai questa lettera sarai già a Roma - finito tutto il disagio e la confusione del viaggio -, che vedrai nello specchio il tuo sorriso e riprenderai le tue abitudini, e dormirai da brava, mi commuove come tu fossi mia sorella. Ma tu non sei mia sorella, sei una cosa più dolce e più terribile, e a pensarci mi tremano i polsi.PLAYLIST MUSICALE >>> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/27FzChJdoNvn0ZE2TdGgC4?si=JAupD-dpSlmdgtkIShAWWw&pi=e-EcexSxGeTXiS. Bonobo, Andreya Triana - The Keeper. The Jordan - You don't even know me— Lettera di Cesare Pavese a Bianca Garufi 21 ott 1945 Tu sei veramente una fiamma che scalda ma bisogna difenderla dal vento… ciao e sii bella. James - Hello. Gerra G & Luana Godin, Pade Ona— Lettera di Cesare Pavese a Fernanda Pivano 11 gen 1943 cara fernanda ricevo le tue lettera, quella della malinconia… stia allegra. Sierra Moreno - Alarma. Caterina Barbieri - Fantas. Maddalena Ghezzi - Tenderly— Lettera di CP a Constanze 17 marzo 1950 Cara Connie, volevo fare l'uomo forte. Nicola Cruz - Contato ft. Marcela Dias Sindaco. Charlotte Adigery, Bolis Pupul - Haha. Headkube, Pete K - Olimpia

Key Takeaways: • Acupuncture affects the whole nervous system due to energetic intentionality, whereas dry needling is most helpful for localized areas of the body. • You can always retrain yourself to think more positively, no matter what has happened in your life. • You are your own best healer. There is more access to information and resources than ever before. Use your discernment to determine what is really serving you.   Chinese medicine is no ordinary remedy—it's a vibrant fusion of nutrition, herbs, Qi Gong, and acupuncture that revitalizes your entire being. In this episode, join Jordan New, a well known acupuncturist and herbalist, as he teams up with host Dr. Andrew Fix to unravel the wonders of Chinese medicine. Prepare to be amazed by the immense power that lies within you as your own ultimate healer.   Picture this: A 12-year-old Jordan receives a disheartening diagnosis of scoliosis, with doctors insisting surgery is the only solution in the long run. But destiny had a different plan. Exploring the realms of yoga in his late teens, Jordan experiences a mind-boggling transformation. His flexibility soars, posture improves, and pain vanishes into thin air. But life decides to throw him a curveball—a snowboarding accident lands him in a coma at the age of 23. Instead of surrendering to despair, Jordan embarks on an incredible journey to reclaim his health and transform his life. Armed with unwavering determination and a positive mindset, he delves into the ancient wisdom of Chinese medicine. Through the potent combination of hot yoga, herbal supplements, and acupuncture, Jordan emerges victorious, experiencing a complete recovery and a newfound level of vitality.   Thanks to the boundless wonders of the internet, a treasure trove of knowledge on diverse healing modalities awaits us all. So, it's time to embrace your discerning spirit and remember this powerful truth: You, yes, YOU are the ultimate healer because no one knows your body better than you do.    Quotes • “Acupuncture is kind of like the cleanup crew that gets the car moving on the highway again…It's the key that unlocks the healing potential within the human body.” (8:08-8:45 | Jordan)  • “Just like anything in life, intention is so important.” (13:25-13:28 | Jordan) • “Acupuncture is highly effective for fertility.” (19:38-19:41 | Jordan) • “You can retrain yourself to think positively.” (24:40-24:42 | Jordan) • “You are your own best healer, every single one of us.” (37:32-37:35 | Jordan) • “You have the power to change your life, to heal yourself, to do whatever you want.” (42:35-42:40 | Jordan)   Links   Flux Footwear https://snwbl.io/flux-footwear/andrewfix 10% off   Xero Shoes: 10% off https://xeroshoes.com/go/drandrewfix   drinklmnt.com/physioroom - free variety pack with purchase.   RAD Roller - $5 off http://radroller.refr.cc/drandrewfix   Revogreen https://revogreen.co/drandrewfix   Connect with Jordan New: Website | https://www.healthynewvibes.com/ Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/healthynewvibes/ Connect with Physio Room:  Website | ​​https://physioroomco.com/  Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/physioroomco/ Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/physioroomco Andrew's Personal Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/dr.andrewfix/  Andrew's Personal Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/andrew.fix.9/   Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Nothing Can Stop You9/29/22 – Th – F4F – E188 (E216) - Chuck Weldon - Farm Progress Show            FFA magazine quote - You're the only one that can tell yourself that you can't, and you don't have to listen.            Ex: If someone tells me that I can't, that motivates me even more to prove that I can.  If you tell yourself that     you can't, you don't have to listen. 10/20/22  – Th – F4F – E191 (E222) - (no Busch Lite intro) Nick Hansen (newly engaged, wedding May 6,  2023) Farm Progress Show            Nick – If you're passionate about doing something, just do it.  Don't let any obstacles hold you back. 10/31/22 – Mon – F4P – E99 (E225) – Mitchell Hora – Contiuum Ag – Fresh on the Forbes 30 under 30 Farm Progress ShowGet the first check! Start small, try something new to get that first check.  Possibly try a new product, or new procedure, but make sure there's a market.  After you get that first check, others come easier.In business and farming, figure out the first one, then rinse and repeat.  Hard Work Pays Off10/10/22 – Mon – F4P – E96 (E219) – More Profit Per head (cattle) Balance4Ward – Wade Saymo and Cameron EchmanWade – Good enough is never good enough if you're capable of more.  Which means, you can get comfortable, lazy and complacent, or you can go out there and get better.  If you're capable of more, it's not good enough. 9/8/22 – Th – F4F – E185 (E210) – 5 Star Dairy Brothers – Jordan and Ryan Siemen from the thumb of Michigan            Ryan – You have to work hard to play hard. (Dad says)            Jordan – You don't deserve success, you earn it.That's with everything in live. If you want to do something, just do it.  Don't worry about what other people think. 9/1/22 – Th – F4F – E184 (E208) – Andrea Severtson – That Fit Agvocate             You're always able to adapt.  You're never stuck in life. 8/29/22 – Mon – F4P – E90 (E207) – Fall Ag Technology Update – Cart Ace by Ag Leader, Bird Control Group, DGI-drones, Energy Logic-waste oil heaters            Brett Buehler (Ag Leader) – Opportunity – don't pass one up.  Capitalize on it when it presents itself.  Be Strong of Mind & Body10/17/22 – Mon – F4P – E98 (E223) Luke James – Ag Leader – How to best use YOUR data for more profit            It may sound corny, but we all have two ears and one mouth.  We need to listen twice as much as we talk. 7/4/22 Mon - F4P – E82 (E191) - Vance Crowe - Legacy Interviews            THIRD ANNIVERSARY of the podcast.            If I had known how important it is to be flexible enough to get on and off the ground and in and out of the          tractor,I would have kept my body "going".  Preserve your body!  Build That Strong Team Around You11/7/22 – Mon – F4P – E100 (E227) Building a Better Brand, Matt Koch, Sukup Manufacturing Co. Chief Marketing            If you want to go FAST, you go alone.  If you want to go FAR, you go together.Equip others to help you succeed and achieve your goals.  Realize how great it would be if more people were equipped to do what's already been successful.  Look at how you can get good things done as a team. 5/30/22 Mon – F4P – E77 (E181)– Red River Ag – Growing the Right Way – Aaron YaggieImportance of people that help you come to your success.  Believe and invest in other people. There's a fit for everyone.  Everyone has talents. Clarity to recognize who to invest in.  Get great people involved, don't try to do it alone. 7/21/22 Th - F4F - E178 (E196) – Stephanie Nash            Grandpa was very encouraging.  It's good to have people pushing you.  You're going to have people in your life that you lose that didn't support you, and that's ok.  Take along you're biggest fans.  They'll push you.  Have a strong family support system. 1/3/22 - F4F - E160 - Tony Feed and friends - invited back 3 of the top 10 guests -                        Tony Reed, Huey B Cool, and Justin Danger Nunley            Tony – The older I get, the smarter my dad was.I wouldn't do that…and he was right.Listen to your dad. 9/26/22 – Mon – F4P – E94 (E215) - Equipment Market update with TractorZoom  - TJ Masker Farm Progress Show            WWIA - Molly Woodruff of Farmmee - linking ag industry as a "Barter" system            TJ Masker - Never underestimate the power of your team.  You raise the level of your knowledge with a network. Your network is so important. 12/27/21 - F4P - E66 - Most Common Traits of Successful Farmers - Robert & Emily Sharkey            2021 question - Emily - be the dumbest person in the room; surround yourself with people who inspire you and            push you to be better; no time for nay sayers or negativity; don't let people bring you down. 

About JordanJordan is a self proclaimed “hacker.” Links:Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordansissel 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: This episode is sponsored in part by “you”—gabyte. Distributed technologies like Kubernetes are great, citation very much needed, because they make it easier to have resilient, scalable, systems. SQL databases haven't kept pace though, certainly not like no SQL databases have like Route 53, the world's greatest database. We're still, other than that, using legacy monolithic databases that require ever growing instances of compute. Sometimes we'll try and bolt them together to make them more resilient and scalable, but let's be honest it never works out well. Consider Yugabyte DB, its a distributed SQL database that solves basically all of this. It is 100% open source, and there's not asterisk next to the “open” on that one. And its designed to be resilient and scalable out of the box so you don't have to charge yourself to death. It's compatible with PostgreSQL, or “postgresqueal” as I insist on pronouncing it, so you can use it right away without having to learn a new language and refactor everything. And you can distribute it wherever your applications take you, from across availability zones to other regions or even other cloud providers should one of those happen to exist. Go to yugabyte.com, thats Y-U-G-A-B-Y-T-E dot com and try their free beta of Yugabyte Cloud, where they host and manage it for you. Or see what the open source project looks like—its effortless distributed SQL for global apps. My thanks to Yu—gabyte for sponsoring this episode.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at VMware. Let's be honest—the past year has been far from easy. Due to, well, everything. It caused us to rush cloud migrations and digital transformation, which of course means long hours refactoring your apps, surprises on your cloud bill, misconfigurations and headache for everyone trying manage disparate and fractured cloud environments. VMware has an answer for this. With VMware multi-cloud solutions, organizations have the choice, speed, and control to migrate and optimize applications seamlessly without recoding, take the fastest path to modern infrastructure, and operate consistently across the data center, the edge, and any cloud. I urge to take a look at vmware.com/go/multicloud. You know my opinions on multi cloud by now, but there's a lot of stuff in here that works on any cloud. But don't take it from me thats: VMware.com/go/multicloud and my thanks to them again for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I've been to a lot of conference talks in my life. I've seen good ones, I've seen terrible ones, and then I've seen the ones that are way worse than that. But we don't tend to think in terms of impact very often, about how conference talks can move the audience.In fact, that's the only purpose of giving a talk ever—to my mind—is you're trying to spark some form of alchemy or shift in the audience and convince them to do something. Maybe in the banal sense, it's to sign up for something that you're selling, or to go look at your website, or to contribute to a project, or maybe it's to change the way they view things. One of the more transformative talks I've ever seen that shifted my outlook on a lot of things was at [SCALE 00:01:11] in 2012. Person who gave that talk is my guest today, Jordan Sissel, who, among many other things in his career, was the original creator behind logstash, which is the L in ELK Stack. Jordan, thank you for joining me.Jordan: Thanks for having me, Corey.Corey: I don't know how well you remember those days in 2012. It was the dark times; we thought oh, the world is going to end; that wouldn't happen until 2020. But it was an interesting conference full of a bunch of open-source folks, it was my local conference because I lived in Los Angeles. And it was the thing I looked forward to every year because I would always go and learn something new. I was in the trenches in those days, and I had a bunch of problems that looked an awful lot like other people's problems, and having a hallway track where, “Hey, how are you solving this problem?” Was a big deal. I missed those days in some ways.Jordan: Yeah, SCALE was a particularly good conference. I think I made it twice. Traveling down to LA was infrequent for me, but I always enjoyed how it was a very communal setting. They had dedicated hallway tracks. They had kids tracks, which I thought was great because folks couldn't usually come to conferences if they couldn't bring their kids or they had to take care of that stuff. But having a kids track was great, they had kids presenting. It felt more organic than a lot of other conferences did, and that's kind of what drew me to it initially.Corey: Yeah, it was my local network. It turns out that the Southern California tech community is relatively small, and we all go different lives. And it's LA, let's face it, I lived there for over a decade. Flaking as a way of life. So yeah, well, “Oh, we'll go out and catch dinner. Ooh, have to flake at the last minute.” If you're one of the good people, you tell people you're flaking instead of just no-showing, but it happens.But this was the thing that we would gather and catch up every year. And, “Oh, what have you been doing?” “Wow, you work in that company now? Congratulations, slash, what's wrong with you?” It was fun, just sort of a central sync point. It started off as hanging out with friends.And in those days, I was approaching the idea of, “You know what? I should learn to give a conference talk someday. But let's be clear. People don't give conference talks; legends give conference talks. And one day, I'll be good enough to get on stage and give a talk to my peers at a conference.”Now, the easy, cynical interpretation would be, “Well, but I saw your talk and I figured, hey, any jackhole can get up there. If he can do it, anyone can.” But that's not at all how it wound up impacting me. You were talking about logstash, which let's start there because that's a good entry point. Logstash was transformative for me.Before that, I'd spent a lot of time playing around with syslog, usually rsyslog, but there are other stories here of when a system does something and it spits out logs—ideally—how do you make sure you capture those logs in a reliable way so if you restart a computer, you don't wind up with a gap in your logs? If it's the right computer, it could be a gap in everything's logs while that thing is coming back up. And let's avoid single points of failure and the rest. And I had done all kinds of horrible monstrosities, and someone asked me at one point—Jordan: [laugh]. Guilty.Corey: Yeah. Someone said, “Well, there are a couple of options. Why don't you use Splunk?” And the answer is that I don't have a spare princess lying around that I can ransom back to her kingdom, so I can't afford it. “Okay, what about logstash?” And my answer was, “What's a logstash?” And thus that sound was Pandora's Box creaking open.So, I started playing with it and realized, “Okay, this is interesting.” And I lost track of it because we have demands on our time. Then I was dragged into a session that you gave and you explained what logstash was. I'm not going to do nearly as good of a job as you can on this. What the hell was logstash, for folks who are not screaming at syslog while they first hear of it.Jordan: All right. So, you mentioned rsyslog, and there's—old is often a pejorative of more established projects because I don't think these projects are bad. But rsyslog, syslog-ng, things like that were common to see for me as a sysadmin. But to talk about logstash, we need to go back a little further than 2012. So, the logstash project started—Corey: I disagree because I wasn't aware of it until 2012. Until I become aware of something it doesn't really exist. That's right, I have the object permanence of an infant.Jordan: [laugh].That's fair. And I've always felt like perception is reality, so if someone—this gets into something I like to say, but if someone is having a bad time or someone doesn't know about something, then it might as well not exist. So, logstash as a project started in 2008, 2009. I don't remember when the first commits landed, but it was, gosh, it's more than ten years ago now.But even before that in college, I was fortunate to, through a network of friends, get a job as a sysadmin. And as a sysadmin, you stare at logs a lot to figure out what's going on. And I wanted a more interesting way to process the logs. I had taught myself regular expressions and it wasn't finding joy in it… at all, like pretty much most people, probably. Either they look at regular expressions and just… evacuate with disgust, which is absolutely an appropriate response, or they dive into it and they have to use it for their job.But it wasn't enjoyable, and I found myself repeating stuff a lot. Matching IP addresses, matching strings, URLs, just trying to pull out useful information about what is going on?Corey: Oh, and the timestamp problem, too. One of the things that I think people don't understand who have not played in this space, is that all systems do have logs unless you've really pooched something somewhere—Jordan: Yeah.Corey: —and it shows that at this point in time, this thing happened. As we start talking about multiple computers and distributed systems—but even on the same computer—great, so at this time there was something that showed up in the system log because there was a disk event or something, and at the same time you have application logs that are talking about what the application running is talking about. And that is ideally using a somewhat similar system to do this, but often not. And the way that timestamps are expressed in these are radically different and the way that the log files themselves are structured. One might be timestamp followed by hostname followed by error code.The other one might be hostname followed by a timestamp—in a different format—followed by a copyright notice because a big company got to it followed by the actual event notice, and trying to disambiguate all of these into a standardized form was first obnoxious, and secondly, very important because you want to see the exact chain of events. This also leads to a separate sidebar on making sure that all the clocks are synchronized, but that's a separate story for another time. And that's where you enter the story in many respects.Jordan: Right. So, my thought around what led to logstash is you can take a sysadmin or software IT developer—whatever—expert, and you can sit them in front of a bunch of logs and they can read them and say, “That's the time it happened. That's the user who caused this action. This is the action.” But if you try and abstract and step away, and so you ask how many times did this action happen? When did this user appear? What time did this happen?You start losing the ability to ask those questions without being an expert yourself, or sitting next to an expert and having them be your keyboard. Kind of a phenomenon I call the human keyboard problem where you're speaking to a computer, but someone has to translate for you. And so in around 2004, I was super into Perl. No shocker that I enjoyed—ish. I sort of enjoyed regular expressions, but I was super into Perl, and there was a Perl module called Regexp::Common which is a library of regular expressions to match known things: IP addresses, certain kinds of timestamps, quoted strings, and whatnot.Corey: And this stuff is always challenging because it sounds like oh, an IP address. One of the interview questions I hated the most someone asked me was write a regular expression to detect an IP address. It turns out that to do this correctly, even if you bound it to ipv4 only, the answer takes up multiple lines on a screen.Jordan: Oh, for sure.Corey: It's enormous.Jordan: It's like a full page of—Corey: It is.Jordan: —of code you can't read. And that's one of the things that, it was sort of like standing on the shoulders of the person who came before; it was kind of an epiphany to me.Corey: Yeah. So, I can copy and paste that into my code, but someone who has to maintain that thing after I get fired is going to be, “What the hell is this and what does it do?” It's like it's the blessed artifact that the ancients built it and left it there like it's a Stargate sitting in your code. And it's, “We don't know how it works; we're scared to break it, so we don't even look at that thing directly. We just know that we put nonsense in, an IP address comes out, and let's not touch it, ever again.”Jordan: Exactly. And even to your example, even before you get fired and someone replaces you and looks at your regular expression, the problem I was having was, I would have this library of copy and pasteable things, and then I would find a bug, and edge case. And I would fix that edge case but the other 15 scripts that were using the same way regular expression, I can't even read them anymore because I don't carry that kind of context in my head for all of that syntax. So, you either have to go back and copy and paste and fix all those old regular expressions. Or you just say, “You know what? We're not going to fix the old code. We have a new version of it that works here, but everywhere else this edge case fails.”So, that's one of the things that drew me to the Regexp::Common library in Perl was that it was reusable and things had names. It was, “I want to match an IP address.” You didn't have to memorize that long piece of text to precisely and accurately accept only regular expressions and rejects things that are not. You just said, “Give me the regular expression that matches an IP.” And from that library gave me the idea to write grok.Well, if we could name things, then maybe we could turn that into some kind of data structure, sort of the combination of, “I have a piece of log data, and I as an expert, I know that's an IP address, that's the username, and that's the timestamp.” Well, now I can apply this library of regular expressions that I didn't have to write and hopefully has a unit test suite, and say, now we can pull out instead of that plain piece of text that is hard to read as a non-expert, now I can have a data structure we can format however we want, that non-experts can see. And even experts can just relax and not have to be full experts all the time, using that part of your brain. So, now you can start getting towards answering search-oriented questions. “How many login attempts happened yesterday from this IP address?”Corey: Right. And back then, the way that people would do these things was Elasticsearch. So, that's the thing you shove all your data into in a bunch of different ways and you can run full-text queries on it. And that's great, but now we want to have that stuff actually structured, and that is sort of the magic of logstash—which was used in conjunction with Elasticsearch a lot—and it turns out that typing random SQL queries in the command line is not generally how most business users like to interact with this stuff, seems to be something dashboard-y-like, and the project that folks use for that was Kibana. And ELK Stack became a thing because Elasticsearch in isolation can do a lot but it doesn't get you all the way there for what people were using to look at logs.Jordan: You're right.Corey: And Kibana is also one of the projects that Elastic owned, and at some point, someone looks around, like, “Oh, logstash. People are using that with us an awful lot. How big is the company that built that? Oh, it's an open-source project run by some guy? Can we hire that guy?” And the answer is, “Apparently,” because you wound up working as an Elastic employee for a while.Jordan: Yeah. It was kind of an interesting journey. So, in the beginning of logstash in 2009, I kind of had this picture of how I wanted to solve log processing search challenges. And I broke it down into a couple of parts of visualization—to be clear, I broke it down in my head, not into code, but visualization, kind of exploration, there's the processing and transmission, and then there's storage and search. And I only felt confident really attending to a solution for one of those parts. And I picked log processing partly because I already had a jumpstart from a couple of years prior, working on grok and feeling really comfortable with regular expressions. I don't want to say good because that's—Corey: You heard it here first—Jordan: [laugh].Corey: —we found the person that knows regular expressions. [laugh].Jordan: [laugh]. And logstash was being worked on to solve this problem of taking your data, processing it, and getting it somewhere. That's why logstash has so many outputs, has so many inputs, and lots of filters. And about I think a year into building logstash, I had experimented with storage and search backends, and I never found something that really clicked with me. And I was experimenting with Leucine, and knowing that I could not complete this journey because that the problem space is so large, it would be foolish of me to try to do distributed log stores or anything like that, plus visualization.I just didn't have the skills or the time in the day. I ended up writing a frontend for logstash called logstash-web—naming things is hard—and I wasn't particularly skilled or attentive to that project, and it was more of a very lightweight frontend to solve the visualization, the exploration aspect. And about a year into logstash being alive, I found Elasticsearch. And what clicked with me from being a sysadmin and having worked at large data center companies in the past is I know the logs on a single system are going to quickly outgrow it. So, whatever storage system will accept these logs, it's got to be easy to add new storage.And Elasticsearch first-day promise was it's distributed; you can add more nodes and go about your day. And it fulfilled that promise and I think it still fulfills that promise that if you're going to be processing terabytes of data, yeah, just keep dumping it in there. That's one of the reasons I didn't try and even use MySQL, or Postgres, or other data systems because it didn't seem obvious how to have multiple storage servers collecting this data with those solutions, for me at the time.Corey: It turns out that solving problems like this that are global and universal lead to massive adoption very quickly. I want to get this back a bit before you wound up joining Elastic because you get up on stage and you talked through what this is. And I mentioned at the start of this recording, that it was one of those transformative talks. But let's be clear here, I don't remember 95% of how logstash works. Like, the technology you talked about ten years ago is largely outmoded slash replaced slash outdated today. I assure you, I did not take anything of note whatsoever from your talk regarding regular expressions, I promise. And—Jordan: [laugh]. Good.Corey: But that's not the stuff that was transformative to me. What was, was the way that you talked about these things. And there was the first time I'd ever heard the phrase that if a new user has a bad time, it's a bug. This was 2012. The idea of empathy hadn't really penetrated into the ops and engineering spaces in any meaningful way yet. It was about gatekeeping, it was about, “Read the manual fool”—Jordan: Yes.Corey: —if people had questions. And it was actively user-hostile. And it was something that I found transformative of, forget the technology piece for a second; this is a story about how it could be different. Because logstash was the vehicle to deliver a message that transcended far beyond the boundaries of how to structure your logs, or maybe the other boundaries of regular expressions, I'm never quite sure where those things start and stop. But it was something that was actively transformative where you're on stage as someone who is a recognized authority in the space, and you're getting up there and you're sending an implicit message—both explicitly and by example—of be nice to people; demonstrate empathy. And that left a hell of an impact. And—Jordan: Thank you.Corey: I wound up doing a spot check just now, and I wound up looking at this and sure enough, early in 2013, I wound up committing—it's still in the history of the changelog for logstash because it's open-source—I committed two pull requests and minutes apart, two submissions—I don't know if pull requests were even a thing back then—but it wound up in the log. Because another project you were renowned for was fpm: Effing Package Manager if I'm—is that what the acronym stands for, or am I misremembering?Jordan: [laugh]. We'll go with that. I'm sure, vulgar viewers will know what the F stands for, but you don't have to say it. It's just Effing Package Management.Corey: Yeah.Jordan: But yeah, I think I really do believe that if a user, especially if a new user has a bad time, it's a bug, and that came from many years of participating at various levels in open-source, where if you came at it with a tinkerer's or a hacker's mindset and you think, “This project is great. I would like it to do one additional thing, and I would like to talk to someone about how to make it do that one additional thing.” And you go find the owners or the maintainers of that project, and you come in with gusto and energy, and you describe what you want to do and, first, they say, “What you want to do is not possible.” They don't even say they don't want to do it; they frame the whole universe against you. “It's not possible. Why would you want to do that? If you want to make that, do it yourself.”You know, none of these things are an extended hand, a lowered ladder, an open door, none of those. It's always, “You're bothering me. Go away. Please read the documentation and see where we clearly”—which they don't—“Document that this is not a thing we're interested in.” And I came to the conclusion that any future open-source or collaborative work that I worked on, it's got to be from a place where, “You're welcome, and whatever contributions or participation levels you choose, are okay. And if you have an idea, let's talk about it. If you're having a bad time, let's figure out how to solve it.”Maybe the solution is we point you in the right direction to the documentation, if documentation exists; maybe we find a bug that we need to fix. The idea that the way to build communities is through kindness and collaboration, not through walls or gatekeeping or just being rude. And I really do think that's one of the reasons logstash became so successful. I mean, any particular technology could have succeeded in the space that logstash did, but I believe that it did so because of that one piece of framework where if a new user has a bad time, it's a bug. Because to me, that opens the door to say, “Yeah, you know what? Some of the code I write is not going to be good. Or, the thing you want to do is undocumented. Or the documentation is out of date. It told you a lie and you followed the documentation and it misled you because it's incorrect.”We can fix that. Maybe we don't have time to fix it right now. Maybe there's no one around to fix it, but we can at least say, “You know what? That information is incorrect, and I'm sorry you were misled. Come on into the community and we'll figure it out.” And one of the patterns I know is, on the IRC channel, which is where the logstash real-time community chat… I don't know how to describe that.Corey: No, it was on freenode. That's part of the reason I felt okay, talking to you. At that point. I was volunteer network staff. This is before freenode turned into basically a haven for Nazis this past year.Jordan: Yeah. It was still called lilo… lilonet [crosstalk 00:20:20]—Corey: No, the open freenode network, that predates me. This was—yeah, lilo—Jordan: Okay.Corey: —died about six years prior. But—Jordan: Oh, all right.Corey: Freenode's been around a long time. What make this thing work was that I was network staff, and that means that I had a bit of perceived authority—it's a chat room; not really—but it was one of those things where it was at least, “Okay, this is not just some sketchy drive-by rando,” which I very much was, but I didn't present that way, so I could strike up conversations. But with you talking about this stuff, I never needed to be that person. It was just if someone wants to pitch in on this, great; more hands make lighter work. Sure.Jordan: Yeah, for sure.Corey: And for me, the interesting part is not even around the logstash aspects so much; it's your other project, fbm. Well, one of your other projects. Back in 2012, that was an interesting year for me. Another area that got very near and dear to my heart in open-source world was the SaltStack project; I was contributor number 15. And I didn't know how Python worked. Not that I do now, but I can fake it better now.And Tom Hatch, the guy that ran the project before it was a company was famous for this where I could send in horrifying levels of code, and every time he would merge it in and then ten minutes later, there would be another patch that comes in that fixes all bugs I just introduced and it was just such a warm onboarding. I'm not suggesting that approach and I'm not saying it's scalable, but I started contributing. And I became the first Debian and Ubuntu packager for SaltStack, which was great. And I did a terrible job at it because—let me explain. I don't know if it's any better now, but back in those days, there were multiple documentation sources on the proper way to package software.They were all contradictory with each other, there was no guidance as to when to follow each one, there was never a, “You know nothing about packaging; here's what you need to know, step-by-step,” and when you get it wrong, they yell at you. And it turns out that the best practice then to get it formally accepted upstream—which is what I did—is do a crap-ass job, and then you'll wind up with a grownup coming in, like, “This is awful. Move.” And then they'll fix it and yell at you, and gatekeep like hell, and then you have a package that works and gets accepted upstream because the magic incantation has been said somewhere. And what I loved about fpm was that I could take any random repo or any source tarball or anything I wanted, run it through with a single command, and it would wind up building out a RPM and a Deb file—and I don't know what else it's supported; those are the ones I cared about—that I could then install on a system. I put in a repo and add that to a sources list on systems, and get to automatically install so I could use configuration management—like SaltStack—to wind up installing custom local packages. And oh, my God, did the packaging communities for multiple different distros hate you—Jordan: Yep.Corey: —and specifically what you had built because this was not the proper way to package. How dare you solve an actual business problem someone has instead of forcing them to go to packaging school where the address is secret, and you have to learn that. It was awful. It was the clearest example that I can come up with of gatekeeping, and then you're coming up with fbm which gets rid of user pain, and I realized that in that fight between the church of orthodoxy of, “This is how it should be done,” and the, “You're having a problem; here's a tool that makes it simple,” I know exactly what side of that line I wanted to be on. And I hadn't always been previously, and that is what clarified it for me.Jordan: Yeah, fbm was a really delightful enjoyment for me to build. The origins of that was I worked at a company and they were all… I think, at that time, we were RPM-based, and then as folks tend to do, I bounced around between jobs almost every year, so I went from one place that—Corey: Hey, it's me.Jordan: [laugh]. Right? And there's absolutely nothing wrong with leaving every year or staying longer. It's just whatever progresses your career in the way that you want and keeps you safe and your family safe. But we were using RPM and we were building packages already not following the orthodoxy.A lot of times if you ask someone how to build a package for Fedora, they'll point you at the Maximum RPM book, and that's… a lot of pages, and honestly, I'm not going to sit down and read it. I just want to take a bunch of files, name it, and install it on 30 machines with Puppet. And that's what we were doing. Cue one year later, I moved to a new company, and we were using Debian packages. And they're the same thing.What struck me is they are identical. It's a bunch of files—and don't pedant me about this—it's a bunch of files with a name, with some other sometimes useful metadata, like other names that you might depend on. And I really didn't find it enjoyable to transfer my knowledge of how to build RPMs, and the tooling and the structures and the syntaxes, to building Debian packages. And this was not for greater publication; this was I have a bunch of internal applications I needed to package and deploy with, at the time it was Puppet. And it wasn't fun.So, I did what we did with grok which was codify that knowledge to reduce the burden. And after a few, probably a year or so of that, it really dawned on me that a generality is all packaging formats are largely solving the same problem and I wanted to build something that was solving problems for folks like you and me: sysadmins, who were handed a pile of code and they needed to get it into production. And I wasn't interested in formalities or appeasing any priesthoods or orthodoxies about what really—you know, “You should really shine your package with this special wax,” kind of thing. Because all of the documentation for Debian packages, Fedora packages are often dedicated to those projects. You're going to submit a package to Fedora so that the rest of the world can use it on Fedora. That wasn't my use case.Corey: Right. I built a thing and a thing that I built is awesome and I want the world to use it, so now I have to go to packaging school? Not just once but twice—Jordan: Right.Corey: —and possibly more. That's awful.Jordan: Or more. Yeah. And it's tough.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: And this gets back to what I found of—it was rare that I could find a way to contribute to something meaningfully, and I was using logstash after your talk, I'd started using it and rolling it out somewhere, and I discovered that there wasn't a Debian package for it—the environment I was in at that time—or Ubuntu package, and, “Hey Jordan, are you the guy that wrote fpm and there isn't a package here?” And the thing is is that you would never frame it this way, but the answer was, of course, “Pull requests welcome,” which is often an invitation to do free volunteer work for companies, but this was an open-source project that was not backed by a publicly-traded company; it was some guy. And of course, I'll pitch in on that. And I checked the commit log on this for what it is that I see, and sure enough, I have two commits. The first one was on Sunday night in February of 2013, and my commit message was, “Initial packaging work for Deb building.” And sure enough, there's a bunch of files I put up there and that's great. And my second and last commit was 12 minutes later saying, “Remove large binary because I'm foolish.” Yeah.Jordan: Was that you? [laugh].Corey: Yeah. Oh, yeah, I'm sure—yeah, it was great. I didn't know how Git worked back then. I'm sure it's still in the history there. I wonder how big that binary is, and exactly how much I have screwed people over in the last decade since.Jordan: I've noticed this over time. And every now and then you'd be—I would be or someone would be on a slow internet connection—which again, is something that we need to optimize for, or at least be aware of and help where we can—someone would be cloning logstash on an airplane or something like that, or rural setting, and they would say, “It gets stuck at 76% for, like, ten minutes.” And you would go back and dust off your tome of how to use Git because it's very difficult piece of software to use, and you would find this one blob and I never even looked at it who committed it or whatever, but it was like I think it was 80 Megs of a JAR file or a Debian package that was [unintelligible 00:28:31] logstash release. And… [laugh] it's such a small world that you're like, yep, that was me.Corey: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's check this just for fun here. To be clear, the entire repository right now is 167 Megs, so that file that I had up there for all of 13 minutes lives indelibly in Git history, and it is fully half of the size—Jordan: Yep.Corey: —of the entirety of the logstash project. All right, then. I didn't realize this was one of those confess your sins episodes, but here we are.Jordan: Look, sometimes we put flags on the moon, sometimes we put big files in git. You could just for posterity, we could go back and edit the history and remove that, but it never became important to do it, it wasn't loud, people weren't upset enough by it, or it didn't come up enough to say, “You know what? This is a big file.” So, it's there. You left your mark.Corey: You know, we take what we can get. It's an odd time. I'll have to do some digging around; I'm sure I'll tweet about this as soon as I get a bit more data on it, but I wonder how often people have had frustration caused by that. There's no ill intent here, to be very clear, but it was instead, I didn't know how Git worked very well. I didn't know what I was doing in a lot of respects, and sure enough in the fullness of time, some condescending package people came in and actually made this right.And there is a reasonable, responsible package now because, surprise, of course there is. But I wonder how much inadvertent pain I caused people by that ridiculous commit. And it's the idea of impact and how this stuff works. I'm not happy that people are on a plane with a slow connection had a wait an extra minute or two to download that nonsense. It's one of those things that is, oops. I feel like a bit of a heel for that, not for not knowing something, but for causing harm to folks. Intent doesn't outweigh impact. There is a lesson in there for it.Jordan: Agreed. On that example, I think one of the things… code is not the most important thing I can contribute to a project, even though I feel very confident in my skills in programming in a variety of environments. I think the number one thing I can do is listen and look for sources of pain. And people would come in and say, “I can't get this to work.” And we would work together and figure out how to make it work for their use case, and that could result in a new feature, a bug fix, or some documentation improvements, or a blog post, or something like that.And I think in this case, I don't really recall any amount of noise for someone saying, “Cloning the Git repository is just a pain in the butt.” And I think a lot of that is because either the people who would be negatively impacted by that weren't doing that use case, they were downloading the releases, which were as small as we can possibly get them, or they were editing files using the GitHub online edit the file thing, which is a totally acceptable, it's perfectly fine way to do things in Git. So, I don't remember anyone complaining about that particular file size issue. The Elasticsearch repository is massive and I don't think it even has binaries. It just has so much more—Corey: Someone accidentally committed their entire production test data set at one point and oops-a-doozy. Yeah, it's not the most egregious harm I've ever caused—Jordan: Yeah.Corey: —but it's there. The thing that, I guess, resonates with me and still does is the lessons I learned from you, I could sum them up as being not just empathy-driven—because that's the easy answer—but the other layers were that you didn't need to be the world's greatest expert in a thing in order to credibly give a conference talk. To be clear, you were miles ahead of me and still are in a lot of different areas—Jordan: Thanks.Corey: —and that's fine. But you don't need to be the—like, you are not the world's greatest expert on empathy, but that's what I took from the talk and that's what it was about. It also taught me that things you can pick up from talks—and other means—there are things you can talk about in terms of technology and there are things you can talk about in terms of people, and the things about people do not have expiration dates in the same way that technology does. And if I'm going to be remembered for impact on people versus impact on technology, for me, there's no contest. And you forced me to really think about a lot of those things that it started my path to, I guess, becoming a public speaker and then later all the rest that followed, like this podcast, the nonsense on Twitter, and all the rest. So, it is, I guess, we can lay the responsibility for all that at your feet. Enjoy the hate mail.Jordan: Uhh, my email address is now closed. I'm sorry.Corey: Exactly.Jordan: Well, I appreciate the kind words.Corey: We'll get letters on this one.Jordan: [laugh].Corey: It's the impact that people have, and someti—I don't think you knew at the time that that's the impact you were having. It matters.Jordan: I agree. I think a lot of it came from how do I want to experience this? And it was much later that it became something that was really outside of me, in the sense that it was building communities. One of the things I learned shortly after—or even just before—joining Elastic was how many folks were looking to solve a problem, found logstash, became a participant in the community, and that participation could just be anything, just hanging out on IRC, on the mailing list, whatever, and the next step for them was to get a better paying job in an environment they enjoyed that helped them take the next step in their career. Some of those people came to work with me at Elastic; some of them started to work on the logstash team at some point they decided because a lot of logstash users were sysadmins.And on the logstash team, we were all developers; we weren't sysadmins, there was nothing to operate. And a lot of folks would come on board and they were like, “You know what? I'm not enjoying writing Ruby for my job.” And they could take the next step to transition to the support team or the sales engineer team, or cloud operations team at Elastic. So, it was really, like you mentioned, it has nothing to do with the technology of—to me—why these projects are important.They became an amplifier and a hand to pull people up to go the next step they need to go. And on the way maybe they can make a positive impact in the communities they participate in. If those happen to be fpm or logstash, that's great, but I think I want folks to see that technology doesn't have to be a grind of getting through gatekeepers, meeting artificial barriers, and things like that.Corey: The thing that I took, too, is that I gave a talk in 2015 or'16, which is strangely appropriate now: “Terrible ideas in Git.” And yes, checking large binaries in is one of the terrible ideas I talk about. It's Git through counter-example. And around that time, I also gave a talk for a while on how to handle a job interview and advance your career. Only one of those talks has resulted in people approaching me even years later saying that what I did had changed aspects of their life. It wasn't the Git one. And that's the impact it comes down to. That is the change that I wanted to start having because I saw someone else do it and realized, you know, maybe I could possibly be that good someday. Well, I'd like to think I made it, on some level.Jordan: [laugh]. I'm proud of the impact you've made. And I agree with you, it is about people. Even with fpm where I was very selfishly tickling my own itch, I don't want to remember all of this stuff and I also enjoy operating outside of the boundaries of a church or whatever the priesthoods that say, “This is how you must do a thing,” I knew there was a lot of folks who worked at jobs and they didn't have authority, and they had to deploy something, and they knew if they could just package it into a Debian format, or an RPM format, or whatever they needed to do, they could get it deployed and it would make their lives easier. Well, they didn't have the time or the energy or the support in order to learn how to do that and fpm brought them that success where you can say, “Here's a bunch of files; here's a name, poof, you have a package for whatever format you want.”Where I found fpm really take off is when Gem and Python and Node.js support were added. The sysadmins were kind of sandwiched in between—in two impossible worlds where they are only authorized to deploy a certain package format, but all of their internal application developer teams were using Node.js and newer technologies, and all of those package formats were not permitted by whoever had the authority to permit those things at their job. But now they had a tool that said, “You know what? We can just take that thing, we'll take Django and Python, and we'll make it an RPM and we won't have to think a lot about it.”And that really, I think—to me, my hope was that it de-stresses that sort of work environment where you're not having to do three weeks of brand new work every time someone releases something internally in your company; you can just run a script that you wrote a month ago and maintain it as you go.Corey: Wouldn't that be something?Jordan: [laugh]. Ideally, ideally.Corey: Jordan, I want to thank you for not only the stuff you did ten years ago, but also the stuff you just said now. If people want to learn more about you, how you view the world, see what you're up to these days, where can they find you?Jordan: I'm mostly active on Twitter, at @jordansissel, all one word. Mostly these days, I post repair stuff I do on the house. I'm a stay-at-home full0 time dad these days, and… I'm still doing maintenance on the projects that need maintenance, like fpm or xdotool, so if you're one of those users, I hope you're happy. If you're not happy, please reach out and we'll figure out what the next steps can be. But yeah. If you like bugs, especially spiders—or if you don't like spiders and you want to like spiders, check me out on Twitter. I'm often posting macro photos, close-up photos of butterflies, bees, spiders, and the like.Corey: And we will, of course, throw links to that in the [show notes 00:38:10]. Jordan, thank you so much for your time today. It's appreciated.Jordan: Thank you, Corey. It's good talking to you.Corey: Jordan Sissel, founder of logstash and currently, blissfully, not working on a particular corporate job. I envy him, some days. 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 in which you have also embedded a large binary.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.

How To Find A Business Coach Or Mentor with Jordan Montgomery. My discussion with Jordan involved learning about the various types of performance coaches, the styles, how can someone benefit from a coach and why you would need/want one. I enjoyed this honest conversation with Jordan, his ideas and how well he spoke and conveyed his ideas and message. There's a good chance a performance coach could really improve so many things in your life, that it's worth looking into for sure. Thanks for listening! Joe #thejoecostelloshow #montgomerycompanies #performancecoach Jordan Montgomery Owner - Montgomery Companies Website: https://www.montgomerycompanies.com/ Instagram: @jordanmmontgomery Facebook: @montgomerycompanies LinkedIn: @jordanmmontgomery Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Jordan: Hey, Joe, thanks for having me, man. I've been following your work, and I want to say congratulations on all that you've built and continue to build. And it's an honor to have this conversation with you. Thanks. Joe: Hey, Jordan, welcome to the podcast. Man, I'm glad you're here. I'm excited to talk with you. Jordan: Well, Joe: Thanks Jordan: I appreciate Joe: For coming. Jordan: That question and I'll try to be succinct with my answer, but I grew up in southeast Iowa and a little town called Colonia in Kelowna is the smallest Joe: Thank you, man, I appreciate Jordan: One of the smallest Joe: It. 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Jordan: So Joe: So Jordan: I live in Iowa Joe: The stage Jordan: City, Joe: Is Jordan: Iowa, Joe: Yours. Jordan: Actually just outside of Iowa City and a little small town called Tiffin with my wife Ashley and our three daughters. My wife today runs the business. I run my mouth. We have a full scale coaching and consulting firm, Montgomery Companies. We have several coaching partners, and today we serve several thousand coaching clients. Those clients range from professional athletes to entrepreneurs and salespeople. We do work with some executive leaders at some larger firms. And I just have a blast getting to do what I do. And I meet some really interesting people. We get to help people think more deeply about who they are and where they're headed. And ultimately you get to help people live into who they were created to be. And it's a tremendous blessing. So I had a career in the financial services business, allowed me to pivot into this world pretty open about my professional journey. But at the end of the day, I graduated college 2010 and University of Iowa spent the last 11 years really building a skill set that's allowed us to build a business around coaching, consulting and leading people. So that's kind of the short version of my story. Obviously, there's a lot of twists and turns and gods provide a lot of grace. Jordan: Certainly I've been thankful to be around a lot of the right people. But if you're asking me the short version on how I got to where I'm at today, that's the the short version on Jordan Montgomery. Yeah, I think my dad, at the end of the day, my dad was a family man with a business, not a business man with a family. And I wanted to model that. I wanted to be a family man with a business, not a business man with a family. And I think as a driven type, a young man living in America, I kind of fight that every day. I mean, at the other day, like my wife and my kids are my top priority. But if I say they're my top priority, then that needs to show up in my calendar and that needs to be reflected in how I spend my time. And I want to be respected the most by people who know me the best. And that means that I'm a father first. I'm a husband first. I'm leading my family well. And if I lead inside the walls of my home, then I think I can lead in other areas of my life Joe: Cool. Jordan: As well. But Joe: So Jordan: I just didn't want to be Joe: First Jordan: The guy Joe: Of Jordan: That Joe: All, I love the part Jordan: Built Joe: Where you Jordan: Something Joe: Said Jordan: Professionally Joe: That because your father Jordan: But Joe: Was Jordan: Then Joe: Able Jordan: Sacrificed Joe: To make it, Jordan: Or Joe: You Jordan: Compromised Joe: Gravitated Jordan: In really other Joe: Towards Jordan: Important Joe: That Jordan: Areas Joe: Feeling Jordan: Of life. 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Not a lot of people have said that in the past on the show when they when they said, oh, I became an entrepreneur because and it was all of these other reasons. But to actually associate it with your father sitting on the sidelines, watching you play sports and concert or whatever it might be, that was really cool. Jordan: Well, and I'll say this to Joe, because there are some entrepreneurs listening that maybe don't have that flexibility, like maybe you're truly in a situation where you've got a team or your businesses in an industry that requires you to work certain hours or whatever. So that's not a shame or guilt. Anyone who's working really hard to provide, because at the end of the day, entrepreneurs are called to work longer hours is just part of the deal. So if you're in that grind right now, here's what I'd encourage you with, is somebody that's going to change and the reason that you're doing what you're doing right now, the reason that you're working as hard as you're working right now is to have the flexibility and the autonomy. And, you know, I also wasn't there for my dad's early years. Like, I missed you know, I was born when my dad was eight to 10 years into being an entrepreneur. So he earned that flexibility. So let's just not forget that that flexibility is earned. And that looks different for every entrepreneur based on the industry Joe: Yeah, that Jordan: That Joe: Was Jordan: You're Joe: Really Jordan: In Joe: Cool, and I Jordan: And Joe: Came Jordan: This Joe: From Jordan: Stage Joe: An entrepreneurial Jordan: Of Joe: Family as well. Jordan: The business Joe: The Jordan: That Joe: Unfortunate Jordan: You're in. Joe: Thing for Jordan: So Joe: Me is that Jordan: I think Joe: My Jordan: That's Joe: Father Jordan: Important to Joe: Could Jordan: Underscore. Joe: Not attend most of my stuff. So when you said it, it kind of hit home and I hold nothing. He's passed on at this point. But I never held a grudge because he just he worked his butt off and and just to provide and create something great. So it never struck me the other way. It wasn't Jordan: Yeah. Joe: Like I was resentful over it. But I just love the way you framed that whole thing. That was really cool. Jordan: Well, yeah, you know, I just I fell in love with sports at a really early age. I just love competition. I loved competing. I love watching other people compete. I love the atmosphere. I love the energy that goes into a sports competition. I'm still the guy, Joe. Like, I will watch one shining moment at the end of the final four for those who are familiar with that show. I cry every year when I watch that one shining, but that little three minute clip. And I think part of the reason I get emotional about that as you watch young people get emotional over competition. And I just loved the rush of competition. I loved watching people give their all to a very specific activity, blood, sweat and tears. And Joe: Yeah, absolutely, Jordan: So Joe: I totally Jordan: I just fell Joe: Agree Jordan: In love with sports Joe: And Jordan: At a young Joe: I'm Jordan: Age. Joe: Still Jordan: I played Joe: Working Jordan: Sports Joe: Like Jordan: All the way Joe: Crazy, Jordan: Through high school. Joe: But Jordan: I did Joe: It's Jordan: Not compete Joe: Just Jordan: In college. Joe: Because Jordan: And Joe: I Jordan: It's something Joe: Don't Jordan: That's Joe: Say no Jordan: Kind Joe: And Jordan: Of Joe: I Jordan: Interesting Joe: Just keep Jordan: About Joe: Adding Jordan: My story Joe: More and more Jordan: And background. Joe: To my plate. 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But you get paid and your best to show you get paid really, really, really well to be prepared Joe: Hmm. Jordan: In small little windows of time. And so I developed the sort of fascination or obsession with helping athletes prepare and be at their best when that small window of opportunity presents itself and, you know, your clutch, your clutch when you can show up and do normal things. In an abnormal times, so like Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant, you know, they're considered clutch because at the end of the day, they could show up normal. They could just be who they were because they had practiced so much in the most important windows of time. And it's a really interesting metaphor that we can apply to all of life. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's it's a pursuit of excellence, right, and you know, I'm reading a book right now by Tim Grover, The Unforgiving Race to Greatness, and it's called Winning. And, Joe: Yeah, it's Jordan: You know, there's Joe: And Jordan: So much of what Tim Joe: Again, Jordan: Grover preaches Joe: People Jordan: That I Joe: That Jordan: Really love. Joe: Maybe Jordan: I'm Joe: Just Jordan: Not Joe: Watch sports casually Jordan: Maybe not aligned Joe: Don't Jordan: With one Joe: Understand Jordan: Hundred percent of it, Joe: The Jordan: But Joe: Grueling Jordan: Winning has a price, Joe: Effort Jordan: You know, in Joe: In the lifelong Jordan: Pursuing your Joe: Commitment Jordan: Calling has a price Joe: To potentially Jordan: Regardless Joe: Never, Jordan: Of what you do, Joe: Ever Jordan: You know, sports or otherwise. Joe: Getting Jordan: If you're an Joe: That Jordan: Athlete, Joe: Chance Jordan: Great. 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And it's just to live on the edge of not knowing if you're playing or you're sitting each day and who's who's looking for your spot and the work so hard and give up so much from a really young age all the way through. It's unbelievable. You know, and I watch certain friends here in Arizona, believe it or not, Arizona has got a very big hockey base. You know, like fans love hockey. And there's a lot of kids that come here, play hockey, play on the farm team of the coyotes or and we've had friends that had their kids just go through all in hockey. Moms and dads have the worst it's the worst schedule I've ever seen. And to go all the way to the very end and be on the farm team and never get called up. And I can't even imagine that it's just grueling. Jordan: Yeah, well, you know, there's there's a lot that goes into speaking, right, speaking as an art form, and in today's world, attention is currency. So something we think about a lot and the keynote speaking world is you've got Joe: Mm Jordan: To Joe: Hmm. Jordan: Keep people's attention. And if you can't, you're out, you're done. You'll never be the really high demand keynote speaker if you don't know how to keep somebody's attention. So there's multiple ways that we do that. One of the ways that we keep people's attention is through story. It's a story sell facts, tell. When you get really good Joe: Yeah, Jordan: At telling stories, Joe: Yeah, I Jordan: You keep Joe: Agree. Jordan: People's attention. Joe: Ok, Jordan: In Joe: So Jordan: Fact, Joe: Enough about sports. 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And then the other thing I think about is being really you centered in the message being you centered. So I'm going to use two people's names. I'm going to pick people out in the crowd. I'm going to touch people, maybe even on the shoulder or the arm as I'm speaking. And I'm going to move through the crowd. And so much of communication is nonverbal, right? 90 percent is nonverbal. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. And it's also not what you say. It's what people hear and it's what they remember. Maya Angelou famously said it's not what you say that people remember. It's how you make them feel. And so I try to stay really in tune with how I make people feel. A lot of that is my energy, my body language. It's you focus communication, it's telling stories, and it's the difference between connecting and communicating. So if you're listening and you're thinking about your communication style or maybe you want to develop your craft as a keynote speaker, those are a few things that you could consider. Jordan: And I'll say this to Joe. I'm a long way away from where I want to be. I got a long way to go. So those are things that I think about repetitiously. And I get obsessed with the practice of my craft. And I'm evaluating and observing high level keynote speakers. You know, how do they move? What do they say? What do they not say? You know, their pace, their tonality, the way that they tell stories, their presence. Yeah, those are all things that I'm paying attention to. So I appreciate your kind words. I think communication as an art form is no different than playing an instrument or doing a dance. And for anybody that's in sales, for any entrepreneur, if you're not taking that seriously as you develop and grow your business, that's something to really consider and think about. Because whether you're speaking to an audience of one hundred or a thousand or an audience of five or ten, you're in the human connection business before you're in the construction business or before you're in the marketing business or financial planning business or real estate business. We've got to remember that the human connection is at the center of everything that we do. Well, thank you. It's kind of you to say. I did and I went to school for interdepartmental studies, which is a fancy way to cover recreational management, so I literally wanted to go to school, have a great social experience, and then start a business and the fitness world. Jordan: That was kind of my dream. And so I took some entrepreneurial courses, got a degree in recreation management, fell into finance and in two things were true. I didn't want to have a boss, so I went to work for myself and I wanted to create my own schedule that that was it. I want to call my shots, create my own schedule. But I didn't have any money and I didn't have any experience. And so I fell into financial services because it allowed me to be in business for myself, but not by myself. So I had a great support system. It was kind of like a franchise model, had a lot of success in that world at an early stage, had a big event in my life in twenty fifteen that really have me thinking about my future in a deeper way. And then I decided to pivot into sort of the consulting and coaching world making financial planning, kind of our kind of our core client. And so in a very early stage in a coaching business, financial advisers were some of our first clients by way of my background in the financial planning world. Joe: Yeah, and you do it incredibly well, my friend. So thank you. So let's just backtrack really quickly so that I can get the progression from college into starting this company. So did you go to school for finance? Jordan: I think it's so true Joe: Ok. Jordan: In life and in business, definitely in entrepreneurship, where we're leading people, that more is caught than taught. Joe: Ok. Jordan: And so nobody really taught me how to coach. But I watched other people coach and I watched other people in my industry that do what I'm doing now, do it at a really high level. And again, I paid attention to quality of life. I paid attention to the relationships. I paid attention to the way that they manage their decisions and manage their time. And I thought, you know, I want to do that. I think I can do that. And I actually did it in tandem with my own financial planning. And so I started sort of coaching on the side and I had really been coaching all the while I was in financial planning and some aspect working with clients. But I also started getting asked to speak and do workshops. And so I sort of fell in love with that work, Joe. But the reality is I had a couple of mentors. I had some key people in my life that had done that work in a really high level. One of those people is a guy by the name of Ben Newman. Another guy is John Wright Senior. And they both had Joe: How did Jordan: Big Joe: Coaching Jordan: Coaching Joe: Catch your Jordan: Practices Joe: Eye, or Jordan: Working with Joe: Was it because Jordan: Professional Joe: You were Jordan: Athletes Joe: Just taking Jordan: And Fortune Joe: From Jordan: 500 Joe: Your Jordan: Executive Joe: Love of Jordan: Leaders. Joe: Sports Jordan: And Joe: Being a coach? Right. Jordan: I just Joe: I Jordan: Admired Joe: Mean, just Jordan: The work. Joe: Taking Jordan: I thought, Joe: That, Jordan: You know, Joe: But Jordan: I think Joe: Now Jordan: I Joe: Saying, Jordan: Can Joe: Ok, Jordan: Do that. Joe: Wait, Jordan: I got a lot to learn, Joe: I want Jordan: But Joe: To do a little Jordan: I'll Joe: Bit Jordan: Learn Joe: Of that Jordan: As I Joe: With Jordan: Go. Joe: Sports Jordan: And Joe: People. 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And that's when it really starts to get financed, when you can impact the world or you can impact the world around you through the people that work with you. So virtually everybody on our team right now, with the exception of maybe two to three people there in the coaching business, so their coaching partners, so they're leading, they're doing coaching and consulting work, either individual coaching group, coaching, keynote speaking, they're all contracted out. So some of them have five clients, some of them have 30 clients. We have a couple that have just a couple of clients and they're all sort of specialized. So we have some former professional athletes. We have some people that came from the ministry world. So they're actually pastors or they have been pastors. And then we have some people in the world of sales. We have some real estate agents and financial advisers. Some of them are very technical. Somebody might say a more motivational, but all of them are for hire as coaching partners. It's my job to lead them and make sure that they're getting what they need from a content standpoint and also just keeping them connected to to a vision and and keeping them connected to our company. But we're having a ton of fun. I mean, it's it's awesome to be on a team. It's fun to be a part of something that's bigger than just me. And, you know, each one of them is unique in terms of what they bring to the table. Joe: So that's a great segue because you do have a fairly Jordan: You Joe: Sizable Jordan: Know, what's Joe: Team. Jordan: Most important Joe: So Jordan: To us, Joe, Joe: What Jordan: Is that Joe: Do those Jordan: We all Joe: Team Jordan: Have Joe: Members Jordan: Similar Joe: Do Jordan: Values, Joe: For you? Jordan: So I want to give people the freedom and flexibility to be autonomous and how they work with clients. And so I've never told somebody, hey, here's the five step plan. Here's exactly what you have to do. Now, I'll make some general suggestions about the way that we lead people and care for people. But at the end of the day, most of the people that are on our coaching platform have been wildly successful in other arenas. And so they've been leading. They've been coaching. They've been training and developing people. So I think we're aligned in terms of our values. But beyond that, I want them to really operate in their true giftedness. And for some of them, that giftedness is in listening. You know, for some of them, it's in the world of neuroscience. You know, they just really understand how the brain works for others. They're just big on accountability, the kind like the bulldog that's in your face. It's really intense and motivational. So we want people to be who they are. We want them to have strong values, which for us means their faith filled and family oriented. And if they're faith filled, family oriented, others focus. They're usually a good fit for our coaching Joe: Did Jordan: Practice. Joe: They follow Jordan: And then, of course, Joe: A Jordan: There Joe: Certain Jordan: Are some other criteria Joe: Structure Jordan: That we want to Joe: That Jordan: Vet Joe: You Jordan: Out. Joe: Have Jordan: But Joe: Set up Jordan: That's Joe: So Jordan: A that's Joe: That Jordan: A good question. Joe: When someone hires one of those people, they know that if they're getting the quality of the Montgomery companies coach and there's a certain structure formula, something like that? The. Jordan: Yeah. Yeah, I would say that's that's very true of of our team, I think we're well positioned to help just about anybody in any industry with any problem. You know, there's a few that we would say, hey, we're not not licensed to do that. We're not going to dive into that space. But for the most part, if it is in the world of performance sales and driving results, there's somebody on our team that can handle the issue of the opportunity. Yes, so there's really two components to coaching for us and our business model, one is group coaching and one individual coaching, and those are obviously very separate. If I'm working with an individual client and we're talking about the phases of coaching or how I work with a client, first is discovery. So the answers you get are only as good as the questions that you ask. And people don't care how Joe: Cool. Jordan: Much you know Joe: Well, Jordan: Until Joe: I Jordan: They Joe: Just Jordan: Know that you care. Joe: It's important Jordan: And Joe: Because Jordan: To Joe: I Jordan: Us, Joe: When Jordan: It's Joe: I Jordan: A Joe: Went Jordan: Relationship. Joe: And looked at the website, I was like, Jordan: And Joe: This Jordan: So Joe: Is this Jordan: I Joe: Is Jordan: Always Joe: Cool. 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Joe: Loves working with you for all Jordan: And so Joe: The reasons Jordan: If I sign Joe: That Jordan: Up Joe: They Jordan: To work Joe: Love Jordan: With a client, Joe: To work with you, they Jordan: What Joe: Can Jordan: That means Joe: Get Jordan: Is Joe: Basically whatever Jordan: I'm going Joe: They Jordan: To advocate, Joe: Need under one roof, Jordan: I'm going Joe: Which Jordan: To support, Joe: Is cool. It's Jordan: I'm Joe: Not Jordan: Going Joe: Like Jordan: To connect Joe: You do. It's not one Jordan: And Joe: Dimensional Jordan: I'm going to highlight Joe: In any Jordan: And spotlight Joe: Any way, Jordan: Who Joe: Shape Jordan: You Joe: Or form. Jordan: Are and what you do. That means that my network is your network. It means if you want to speak engaged, we're going to help you with that. If you need marketing help or we're going to help you with that. If I need to get you connected to another leader, I'm going to help you with that. If we need help, you track down a client or prospect, I'm going to help you with that. So it's our approach is a little bit different that way. It's it's heavily based around relationship. The relationship has to start with Joe: All right, Jordan: Discovery. Joe: Cool. So let's talk about Jordan: One of my Joe: The Jordan: Other Joe: Coaching Jordan: Beliefs, Joe, is Joe: Part Jordan: That if Joe: Of it, Jordan: I'm working Joe: And Jordan: With a client, Joe: If Jordan: It's always Joe: You can go through Jordan: 100 percent Joe: And tell Jordan: Of the time, Joe: Me the Jordan: Their time, not Joe: Different Jordan: Mine. Joe: Types Jordan: Which Joe: Of Jordan: Means Joe: Services Jordan: I've got to Joe: That Jordan: Deal Joe: You Jordan: With Joe: Have Jordan: The issues, Joe: For the coaching Jordan: The Joe: Piece Jordan: Opportunities Joe: Of. Jordan: And the challenges that are most present for them right away before I try to drive my agenda. So if I show up to the call and I say, hey, Joe, here's three things I want to talk about today. Here's the here's the new approach to closing a sale or here's the new approach to the discovery process or whatever. And I find out that your dog just died or that you just lost the key employee or that your house just burned down. But I'm using really dramatic examples. But anyway, the point, is there something else on your mind? I'm missing it. I'm not know I've failed to connect with you, and candidly, I failed to lead you. So the first question I asked to all of our coaching clients and a coaching meeting, and they would tell you, this is not to say, hey, Joe, how do we create space to discuss and talk about the things that are most pressing, interesting and relevant for you today? I want to start there and then we'll recap and we'll talk about some of the stuff that we've talked about the past. I'm always, you know, forcing accountability. So we're we're bringing things to the forefront. Did you do X, Y and Z to do that or Yapp with that? But we addressed the issues that are most present. And then I'm always trying to share ideas and concepts that I feel like are relevant to them based on the seasonal life there in industry they're in or what they've said that they needed help with. Conversations tend to be fairly organic because, again, it's it's a relationship. And, you know, people open up to us about all kinds of stuff, their marriage, their finances, their friendships, their their problems that go way beyond their professional life. Jordan: So I appreciate the question. I don't know if I if I answered it exactly. But to give you a window into our world and how we work with people, that that's sort of our our process and style. You know, right now we work with such a wide range of people, Joe, so I'm not as concerned about like industry or niche. Here's what I what I'm really concerned with this character traits. So they've got to be values oriented, right? They got to care. They're going to be a decent person. In other words, if they just want to go make all the money in the world, they don't want to leave their family. I'm probably not a good fit. I'm going to challenge them on their values and lead in their family and growing in their faith. And that's part of who I am. But that's not for everybody. But so we're probably not a good fit if that's not part of who they are. And then the second thing that I would tell you is they got to be open minded. They have to be willing to learn. They have to be somebody that enjoys new information and new ways of thinking. A new perspective, fresh perspective. Right. Doesn't mean that I'm always right or my perspective is the right perspective. It just means that they're willing to listen right there. They're willing to hear and then they're willing to be challenged. So they want somebody to ask them the tough questions and share the truth and mix even said it best. You said average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached, great players want the truth. I want people that want the truth. I want people that really want to be challenged. Joe: Great. Jordan: They've Joe: So Jordan: Got Joe: Before Jordan: An open Joe: We Jordan: Mind Joe: Move to Jordan: And they have strong Joe: A Jordan: Values. Joe: Group coaching piece Jordan: And Joe: Of it, Jordan: If they've Joe: Because Jordan: Got those Joe: We just Jordan: Three Joe: Talked Jordan: Things, Joe: About the one on Jordan: They're Joe: One. Jordan: Usually a good fit for Joe: What's Jordan: Our coaching Joe: Your sweet Jordan: Practice. Joe: Spot? Who who are the people that you feel you work best with or can can help the best. Jordan: So the group coaches typically kind of a one hour session, we try to kind of meet people where they're at. So I work with organizations, as do our partners, to figure out, hey, what really do you need? What's the right time frame? What's the right size? I'd love to tell you that we've got, like, this specific program. It's cookie cutter. It's not. But that's by design. We really want to be a partner and meet people where they're at. So sometimes it's a small as is five people. I've got one group right now, 60, which I think is a little too big. What's important to us is that that's it's intimate or as intimate as it can be where people really feel like, you know, them. And and so we call on people. I try to get to know everybody by name and remember little facts about who they are and what's important to them. It's highly interactive. So I'm calling on people throughout the session. Usually I'm delivering 30 minutes of content or 30 minutes of discussion. We challenge challenge on the spot. I have other people challenge each other. I always say this in our group coaching program that where you sit determines what you see and you see something different than everybody else's and different is valuable. And so what that means is your voice matters because whether you're the most experienced person on the call are the least experienced person on the call, you see something that nobody else in the organization sees. And so we need your voice. We need your perspective, because you've got a different perspective than everybody else. So, Johnny, that sits at the front desk, that's the director of First Impressions, has some really valuable Joe: Awesome, Jordan: Perspective Joe: I Jordan: Because Joe: Love Jordan: Johnny Joe: That. OK, cool. Jordan: Sees Joe: So Jordan: Something Joe: The group Jordan: That Sarah, Joe: Coaching, Jordan: The CEO, Joe: What does that entail? Jordan: Doesn't see. And so we really just try to foster conversation, encourage people and empower people to share and speak up and then deliver content that's inclusive and relevant to the group. Yes, so much of our business is virtual, it just kind of always has been and most a lot of our clients aren't local. So they're you know, they're kind of spread out. We have people all over the US. I'm pretty used to Zoom calls and phone calls, and I speak a lot. Right. So keynote speaking is live often, but we still do virtual keynotes as well. So it's a good mixture, I would say, in so many ways covid changed our business. I was always willing to do things virtually, but I think a lot of companies weren't until they realized like, hey, we can do it this way. And so for me, as a person with a young family, it allowed me to stay at home and I didn't have to. I wasn't on a plane twice a week sleeping in a hotel. So so covid in some ways I'd be careful how I say this, because it was a really difficult time for a lot of people for our business. It actually affected my day to day rhythm or quality of life and I think a positive way and allowed me to be more present with my family. So it's a good mix of both. But I would say the pandemic certainly forced it to be more virtual. Joe: The coaching business, covid or not covid, were you doing live coaching up until that point and now a lot of Jordan: Yeah, Joe: It has shifted Jordan: I would say Joe: Onto Jordan: A good Joe: Like Zoom Jordan: Portion Joe: Calls and things Jordan: Of Joe: Like Jordan: Our Joe: That, Jordan: Clients Joe: Or Jordan: Are either Joe: How your Jordan: In Joe: Business Jordan: Sales or entrepreneurs, Joe: Today and what's Jordan: You know, Joe: The Jordan: So Joe: Mixture Jordan: There Joe: Of live Jordan: In fact, Joe: Versus Jordan: I would say it's Joe: Online? Jordan: Probably 80 percent of our business, either business owners or they're in sales and then there's maybe 20 percent that are in the world of executive leadership or sports. So that's kind of a mix of our business. When I say executive leadership, they're a leader in some sort of a corporate setting, but it's starting to change more every day. Like we work. I work right now with a group of physicians. We've got a gal that owns a very successful cosmetology clinic. So her whole thing is cosmetology Joe: Yep. Jordan: And she's been wildly successful and real estate agents and financial advisors and and college athletes and pro athletes. And so it's a it's a it's a wide range of people. Joe: Perfect out of the clients that you have, what is the percentage of general corporations, then entrepreneurs and then sports related? OK. Awesome. OK, we're closing in on the amount of time that I have you for, which is unfortunate because I love talking with you and I love your approach. 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First of all, have 20 years of experience, a team of 20 people there doing tens of millions of dollars revenue, that they're very successful. And so they hire us. They hire me to come in and do coaching work with them. And every one of them has sort of a different set of needs. But one of the things that we always talk about, at least on some level, is our communication style. Right, because they're in sales and they're communicating all day, every day for a living. So I challenge this financial advisor. Usually within the first few meetings, I'll say, hey, I want you to send me your approach language, which is really their what they say to engage a client and conversation. So it's a first time meeting and this is the first five minutes of sort of the introductory meeting. And I can I can feel their energy when I when I challenge them and I say, I want you to send me that communication. Their energy is like at a negative to. Right, they're thinking you're going to bill me X for coaching, I've been doing this for 20 years, like what I don't need is help on the basics of what I say. And, you know, I can just feel that just not really excited about that. Jordan: But I challenge him. I say I think this is a really important part of our work together. It helps me understand who you are and how you're showing up for people. So send that over when you get some time. So they send it over and it's not going to have all the answers. But I'm willing to listen to it repeatedly. Our team listens to it repeatedly. And then we give them an analysis. We give them feedback. The energy level, when we give them feedback, goes from a negative two to a 10. Every single time. Because they do not know what they do not know. And I just had a guy the other day, I said, OK, so when the first two minutes of your communication, you said the word thirty seven times. Did you know that? You know, hey, the way that you show up, did you know that you use me focused conversation? Over and over, you are literally saying I my, me repeatedly. And you were doing it for 20 years and nobody has ever told you that you're doing it, and that's a shame because you would connect with people and a deeper and more meaningful way because you would be able to drive better results. You would have more purposeful conversation if you could just make that one small tweak. Jordan: You know, we could end the conversation at the cozy relationship right there, and the time that we had spent together would have been massively impactful. Again, not because I have all the answers, but because I'm willing to listen, give real feedback and press in on blind spots that we all have. And the last thing I'll say is people need to be encouraged. You know, people will go farther than they think they can when someone else thinks they can, period. And I don't care for the most successful person, the least successful person, the most experienced, the least experienced. I'm working with a guy the other day, Fortune 500, executive leader, big time leader of people. They had a record breaking year at the firm. Unbelievable year. This guy is in charge of literally hundreds of direct reports. And I asked him in a conversation, I just said, hey, how many people told you over this past fiscal year? So you just wrapped up the year. How many people told you? Good job. And he says, well, like, what do you mean? I said, you know what I mean? Like e-mails, texts, phone calls. Like how many people reached out to you said, hey, good job, great you. And he said, Zira. Zero people had picked up the phone and sent a text instead of an email, so the point is this job that I've worked with, this guy named John. Jordan: So the point is this, John, that you need to be encouraged. You need somebody to point out what you're doing. Well. You need somebody to touch your heart and remind you of who God made you to be and all of the natural God given giftedness that's inside of you. And I just want to share with you it's an honor to be able to do that for you and with you. But let me let me help you see what I see. Let's look back at the last 12 months. Here's what you've achieved. In that moment, I think I think when you step into somebody's life in that way, you're a lid lifter and you do it authentically and you help them see more and you help them see before. Man, I think you're in a position of strength relationally. And I think that person at that moment realizes that that relationship means more than they ever realized. So there's a lot that we can say about coaching. But I think, Joe, when you touch somebody's heart, when you appreciate people for who they are, when you point out their God given gift A. and when you deliver the truth and love and you point out the blindspots, you can be a world class coach and it has nothing to do with what you know, it's all about. Jordan: You show up and serve people. Well, that's just my answer. I don't know if it's the right answer by anybody else's standard, but in my world, it's the way that I try to live each and every day with the people that we serve. I love it. Yeah, so here's what I'd say, we do a lot of work through social media, so Instagram is probably where I'm most active. I'm Jordan and Montgomery on Instagram, so I would love it. If you want to get in touch to send a direct message, I'll communicate back with you. I would love to connect Montgomery Companies dot com is on our website. I'm also active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and if anybody reaches out, I will gladly respond. If you got a question, if you're wrestling with an issue, an opportunity I'd love to talk to it with and be of service to anybody listening. And Joe, I want to say thank you for having me on your show. It's an honor. It's always an honor to share your great with the questions that, yes, it's very clear that you showed up prepared and you also had great energy. And so I just want to say thank you for your time and attention. Thanks for who you are and for what you're putting out into the world. It's making a difference. I. Right back at you, brother.

Do you feel like a warrior when you go to work? Do you feel like you MUST be a warrior?Warriors are tough. Is that a necessity for getting people to work together and produce desired results?My conversation with Jordan Goldrich, author of Workplace Warrior, had some surprises. The subtitle of his book is "People Skills for the No B.S. Executive." He immediately brought up the word, abrasive, to describe many leaders. Not a surprise! Sometimes people think they have to be tough, competitive, and yes, abrasive in order to be seen as a leader. Often, that backfires!If you're going to be successful at work, you have to create a workplace that people are not afraid to go to. So, how does a leader create the desired balance?Two big pieces of advice from Jordan:"You have to show respect and compassion to others. Talk to them like they are human beings...because they are.""Acknowledge and apologize for your past behavior." That's where his seven steps to an apology come in.Great insights for leaders who want to be better, leaders who need people skills!Excellent information for everyone who goes to a workplace every day.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->>>>> AND, Don't miss all the good stuff at the bottom of this page for you.ARE YOU--OR, HAVE YOU BEEN--IN A TOXIC RELATIONSHIP WITH A PARTNER, EX, PARENT, OR SIBLING?Join my OptimizeCircles.com and get the ongoing insights and support you want--safely off social media and it works just like Facebook! Many other free & low-cost resources to help your relationships. All safely off social media, too!___________________________________HIGHLIGHTS OF TODAY'S EPISODE:Answers to...Why do we need a war metaphor for this?Why do workplace leaders think they have to aggressive?What's the difference between what he calls "straight talk," and having no filters?What makes leaders abrasive?How can leaders and would-be leaders learn to be assertive without being degrading or demanding?Why is it that abrasive executives are often overly-protected?What are his seven steps to making an apology? GUEST: Jordan GoldrichJordan Goldrich partners with executives to drive results without damanaging relationships. He is the co-author of the newly published book, "Workplace Warrior: People Skills For The No BS Executive." He is a Chief Operations Officer, Master Corporate Executive Moach (MCEC), Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and California Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW.) He is partner in the business consulting firm CUSTOMatrix, Inc, and an executive coach for the Center for Creative Leadership. FREE GIFT FROM JORDAN :The Battle Plan. A downloadable excerpt from his book, Workplace WarriorWorkplaceWarrior.comCONTACT INFO FOR JORDAN GOLDRICH:Website: JordanGoldrich.comPodcasts:LinkedIn: @jgoldrichFacebook: @jordan.goldrichInstagram: @jordangoldrichTwitter: @jordangoldrich1YouTube: @jordangoldrichCONNECT WITH DR. RHOBERTA SHALER:Website: TransformingRelationship.comPodcasts: RelationshipHelpNetwork.comFacebook: RelationshipHelpDoctorTwitter: Twitter.com/RhobertaShalerLinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/RhobertaShalerInstagram: Instagram.com/DrRhobertaShalerPinterest: Pinterest.com/RhobertaShalerYouTube: YouTube.com/ForRelationshipHelpWant my help? New client's one-hour introductory session only $97WANT TO ASK ME QUESTIONS AND HAVE DIRECT ACCESS TO ME IN MY SECRET (Off Facebook) GROUPS?Even, two group Ask Me Anything calls each month.You can. Join my Optimize Circles! CLICK HERE And, get my 21 Steps to Empowered Emotional Savvy course via email FREE!Free Passive-Aggressive ChecklistFree Relationship ChecklistSubscribe to Dr. Shaler's newsletter, Tips for RelationshipsFREE ebook: How to Spot a Hijackal®If you have not worked with Dr. Shaler before, you can have your first one-hour session for only $97.#JordanGoldrich #workplacewarrior #nobullshitexecutive #peopleskills #leadersasbullies #abrasiveleaders#relationshipadvice #Hijackals #toxicpeople #RhobertaShaler #healthyrelationship #toxicrelationships #narcissisticabuse#difficultpeople #emotionalabuse #verbalabuse #mentalhealth #emotionalhealth #difficultconversations #workplacerelationships #relationshipadvice #toxicrelationshipadvice See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Do you feel like a warrior when you go to work? Do you feel like you MUST be a warrior?Warriors are tough. Is that a necessity for getting people to work together and produce desired results?My conversation with Jordan Goldrich, author of Workplace Warrior, had some surprises. The subtitle of his book is "People Skills for the No B.S. Executive." He immediately brought up the word, abrasive, to describe many leaders. Not a surprise! Sometimes people think they have to be tough, competitive, and yes, abrasive in order to be seen as a leader. Often, that backfires!If you're going to be successful at work, you have to create a workplace that people are not afraid to go to. So, how does a leader create the desired balance?Two big pieces of advice from Jordan:"You have to show respect and compassion to others. Talk to them like they are human beings...because they are.""Acknowledge and apologize for your past behavior." That's where his seven steps to an apology come in.Great insights for leaders who want to be better, leaders who need people skills!Excellent information for everyone who goes to a workplace every day.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->>>>> AND, Don't miss all the good stuff at the bottom of this page for you.ARE YOU--OR, HAVE YOU BEEN--IN A TOXIC RELATIONSHIP WITH A PARTNER, EX, PARENT, OR SIBLING?Join my OptimizeCircles.com and get the ongoing insights and support you want--safely off social media and it works just like Facebook! Many other free & low-cost resources to help your relationships. All safely off social media, too!___________________________________HIGHLIGHTS OF TODAY'S EPISODE:Answers to...Why do we need a war metaphor for this?Why do workplace leaders think they have to aggressive?What's the difference between what he calls "straight talk," and having no filters?What makes leaders abrasive?How can leaders and would-be leaders learn to be assertive without being degrading or demanding?Why is it that abrasive executives are often overly-protected?What are his seven steps to making an apology? GUEST: Jordan GoldrichJordan Goldrich partners with executives to drive results without damanaging relationships. He is the co-author of the newly published book, "Workplace Warrior: People Skills For The No BS Executive." He is a Chief Operations Officer, Master Corporate Executive Moach (MCEC), Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and California Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW.) He is partner in the business consulting firm CUSTOMatrix, Inc, and an executive coach for the Center for Creative Leadership. FREE GIFT FROM JORDAN :The Battle Plan. A downloadable excerpt from his book, Workplace WarriorWorkplaceWarrior.comCONTACT INFO FOR JORDAN GOLDRICH:Website: JordanGoldrich.comPodcasts:LinkedIn: @jgoldrichFacebook: @jordan.goldrichInstagram: @jordangoldrichTwitter: @jordangoldrich1YouTube: @jordangoldrichCONNECT WITH DR. RHOBERTA SHALER:Website: TransformingRelationship.comPodcasts: RelationshipHelpNetwork.comFacebook: RelationshipHelpDoctorTwitter: Twitter.com/RhobertaShalerLinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/RhobertaShalerInstagram: Instagram.com/DrRhobertaShalerPinterest: Pinterest.com/RhobertaShalerYouTube: YouTube.com/ForRelationshipHelpWant my help? New client's one-hour introductory session only $97WANT TO ASK ME QUESTIONS AND HAVE DIRECT ACCESS TO ME IN MY SECRET (Off Facebook) GROUPS?Even, two group Ask Me Anything calls each month.You can. Join my Optimize Circles! CLICK HERE And, get my 21 Steps to Empowered Emotional Savvy course via email FREE!Free Passive-Aggressive ChecklistFree Relationship ChecklistSubscribe to Dr. Shaler's newsletter, Tips for RelationshipsFREE ebook: How to Spot a Hijackal®If you have not worked with Dr. Shaler before, you can have your first one-hour session for only $97.#JordanGoldrich #workplacewarrior #nobullshitexecutive #peopleskills #leadersasbullies #abrasiveleaders#relationshipadvice #Hijackals #toxicpeople #RhobertaShaler #healthyrelationship #toxicrelationships #narcissisticabuse#difficultpeople #emotionalabuse #verbalabuse #mentalhealth #emotionalhealth #difficultconversations #workplacerelationships #relationshipadvice #toxicrelationshipadvice See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, we sat down with Jordan Stupar: a sales LEGEND who has over 15+ years of sales experience! We dive deep into conversations on: how he got into sales at a young age, social media consumption, sales mentality, how he got sued (wild story) and why you need to always be auditing who you spend your time with! Jordan is the founder of Sales Domination System, an innovative CRM that helps sales people spend MORE time selling and LESS time entering data. This is a CRM made with sales people in mind! Questions for Jordan? You can reach him at: jordan@dominatesales.com or shoot him a direct message on any of his social media accounts listed below: https://www.instagram.com/jordanstupar/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-stupar-l-sales-expert-b7525366/ https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=219703570

In this latest episode of The Only Business Networking Podcast on iTunes, we have Part 7 of the Who or What Series where Jordan Harbinger from the Jordan Harbinger Show, Amy Porterfield from the Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast, and Jeff Hoffman, serial entrepreneur from Priceline.com and Ubid.com talk to your host Travis Chappell, to continue the debate of whether who you know or what you know is more important, and why. Episode Highlights: Jordan Harbinger: It’s all about who you know - not just connecting up but up, down, and laterally. Your network is the most important resource you have. Short term  - your network is great, long term - your network is crucial. How Jordan defines networking - helping people without the expectation of return and in a scalable way. When people help you and keep score they’ll write you off when you don’t reciprocate. Never think about networking transactionally. If you think everyone is taking advantage of you, it’s probably you. If someone won’t help you, even with small things, they’re probably taking advantage of you. Amy Porterfield: Who you know is important to a certain extent, but what you know is also important. People always need things done, so figure out what those things are. How Travis developed a relationship with John Lee Dumas and then got Amy Porterfield on the show. How Amy became friends with Marie Forleo and why she didn’t pay for that friendship. How to get started adding value to others. If you’re an evangelist for what someone is doing you can’t help but notice them. A person of influence is not going to tell you how they want you to support them. Jeff Hoffman: Who you know is more important because you don’t know everything. You’re not as smart as you think you are, and you’re not good at 12 things, you’re good at one thing. If you’re a founder/CEO/Manager you should schedule days to be out of the office to build your network. Why Jeff engages strangers all the time. How Jeff got a Universal Studios executive to come to be a partner in his independent studio. Most people neglect networking because they’re too busy being inefficient to stop and take time to be more efficient. 3 Key Points: Networking is not all about schmoozing people ahead of you, you should be well-connected with everyone - up, down, and laterally. There is not a difference between networking and real relationship building. Don’t build your network when you need it, build it way before you need it. Tweetable Quotes: “The only things people can’t take away from you are your skills and relationships.” -Jordan “You don’t have to be Richard Branson to offer value to people.” -Travis “Your heart has to be in the right place, it’s never about making something happen for you, and then magic happens.” -Amy “The only way to build anything of significance in life is to build a team.” -Jeff Resources Mentioned: Visit Travis’ website at Buildyournetwork.co (http://www.buildyournetwork.co/) Learn more about mentorships and masterminds for FREE at freemmcourse.com/enroll (http://www.freemmcourse.com/join) Download Meet Your Hero at travischappell.com/hero (http://travischappell.com/hero) Explode Your Network at travischappell.com/explode (http://travischappell.com/explode) For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy (https://www.acast.com/privacy)

This week, Taylor Gibb from the customer success team at Braze brought in Senior CSM, Jordan Houghton, to discuss how she met her husband on OKCupid. Match Group finally acquires Hinge, adding to it's caché of dating apps, and don't forget about Bounce (the dating app on which you can do nothing EXCEPT meet for a date that very evening).     TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:02] PJ Bruno: On this Valentine's Day, me and the team would like to say, whether you're swiping for fun or looking for that special one, whether you're cuffing at home, or just love being alone, if you're going to give a gift, make sure it's relevant, personalized, and well timed. That apple of your eye wants nothing that isn't personal, and poorly timed, well, that's a crime. So, this year, kiddies, avoid the mess of a shameful Valentine's tragedy. Keep it personal, and treat your valentine like your customer engagement strategy.   [0:00:36] The Captain: This is the captain. Brace for impact.   [0:00:45] PJ Bruno: Hi again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest, and I'm so thrilled today to have back again by population demand Taylor Gibb from CS. How you doing, Taylor?   [0:00:58] Taylor Gibb: I am excited to be here. This is a big one.   [0:01:01] PJ Bruno: It is.   [0:01:02] Taylor Gibb: This is an inaugural run of me on this podcast on Valentine's Day in 2019.   [0:01:08] PJ Bruno: It is, and you brought a buddy with you, I see. You have a friend.   [0:01:10] Taylor Gibb: I definitely did. We roll deep in succeed, I like to say, so I brought one of the very best, and I'm apparently rhyming.   [0:01:15] Jordan: No. This is Jordan.   [0:01:18] Taylor Gibb: Jordan, guys, it is so good to have you here, and I really wanted to lean into our Valentine's Day festive podcast here.   [0:01:26] PJ Bruno: Ooh, I'm intrigued.   [0:01:26] Taylor Gibb: I brought a little theme in to guide today, because you know we're all thinking about love. A lot of us in New York City are kind of looking for that special date tonight, a lot of restaurant reservations out there-   [0:01:36] PJ Bruno: Don't you know it?   [0:01:36] Taylor Gibb: ... So I wanted to kind of focus in on dating apps today, and Jordan, I brought you in not just because you've got a silky smooth voice-   [0:01:45] Jordan: Oh, thank you very much.   [0:01:47] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, absolutely, but because I know that you actually... You've got a particular stance on dating apps, or at least the way that they were a couple of years ago. Do you care to elaborate there?   [0:01:56] PJ Bruno: Interesting.   [0:01:56] Jordan: I am a success story of dating apps. I met my husband on OkCupid.   [0:02:01] PJ Bruno: How about that?   [0:02:02] Taylor Gibb: That's right. Yeah. I brought in one of the very best. Jordan, tell me about your OkCupid experience there.   [0:02:09] Jordan: Okay. So, this was a few years ago. I had absolutely no intention of meeting anybody online. I just wanted to make a profile, maybe have some people reach out, make me feel a little bit better about myself, never thought I'd actually go out in person, and met some really great people, and met my husband.   [0:02:27] Taylor Gibb: That is a huge success story, and I always used to think that was rare, that you were more likely to run into a dud than you were the one, but these success stories are getting more and more prevalent. I think I saw a statistic that it's expected something wild, like 71% of couples in the year 2025 will have met online.   [0:02:45] PJ Bruno: What?   [0:02:45] Taylor Gibb: I saw that, and I thought that was just absolutely crazy because it seems like maybe five years ago that the idea of dating online was this kind of... I don't know.   [0:02:54] Jordan: No. I made the mistake of telling my mom, as I was walking to my first online date, that I actually had made a profile on OkCupid, and I was going to meet somebody, and I'm from Kansas originally, and she was literally screaming into the phone, begging me to either go to a public place, or turn around and walk home, because you don't know who you're going to meet, and they could very much be an ax murderer.   [0:03:14] PJ Bruno: So, the advice there is don't always listen to Mom?   [0:03:17] Taylor Gibb: If we wanted to tell you one thing here in this podcast, it's don't listen to your mom.   [0:03:22] PJ Bruno: It could cost you the love of your life.   [0:03:23] Taylor Gibb: Come on.   [0:03:24] PJ Bruno: So, wait. Was this the mobile app, or this is the-   [0:03:26] Jordan: This was the mobile app.   [0:03:27] PJ Bruno: Okay, cool.   [0:03:28] Jordan: I got really addicted to swiping.   [0:03:29] Taylor Gibb: An early adopter.   [0:03:30] Jordan: Yes.   [0:03:30] PJ Bruno: Early, early adoption.   [0:03:31] Jordan: Yes.   [0:03:32] Taylor Gibb: I love that.   [0:03:33] Jordan: I was very much into it.   [0:03:34] Taylor Gibb: You know, we're going to dig into a little bit more on kind of the dating apps, the pros and cons, ways they're changing here later, but I would be remiss if I didn't have a mini intro for you, PJ-   [0:03:44] PJ Bruno: Oh, really?   [0:03:44] Taylor Gibb: ... Because I know, and without going too far into detail, I know that you've used your share of dating apps, maybe a bit of a connoisseur.   [0:03:51] PJ Bruno: Oh, wow.   [0:03:52] Jordan: A connoisseur of dating apps.   [0:03:52] PJ Bruno: Where are you getting your information?   [0:03:54] Taylor Gibb: I don't know.   [0:03:55] PJ Bruno: You been through my phone?   [0:03:57] Taylor Gibb: I've been swiping through your phone when I was testing earlier.   [0:03:59] PJ Bruno: You know, I like to do research, so I like to... I have Hinge on my phone. I think that's pretty neat. We're going to touch on Hinge soon. I've tried Tinder, I've tried Bumble, and there's something to be said for it. I think I can argue for both sides. There's something very cool, especially in a city like New York, the ability to connect with random people that, honestly, I have a handful of people that are still friends to this day that I met on dating apps, so that's a cool thing, but then, of course, other side of the coin, you start to not appreciate people as much. They're just so easily dismissible, and you just don't really put the time that's required to build something that matter and lasts.   [0:04:37] Jordan: Oh, tell me-   [0:04:37] Taylor Gibb: We kind of forget that they're human beings because they're just a sound bite, maybe a picture, and one thing about them that may or may not have caught your eye, and you forget that, hopefully, they're a fully fleshed human being on the other side that might be waiting for your text, or might but hoping that you swipe right on them. I think it's really easy to have choice paralysis when there's an endless array of options.   [0:04:57] PJ Bruno: Totally. Well, that leads really nicely into our first little article here, which may be the solution to that swipe paralysis, or whatever you want to call it, people not willing to jump in and get stuck in and meet someone in person. We're really thrilled, actually, to be able to plug a good friend of ours. A previous coworker from Braze, Dylan Petro, was able to launch his dating app, Bounce, and all you can do on the app is date. Right? There no chatting?   [0:05:26] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah.   [0:05:27] PJ Bruno: It's just literally you connect, and that night, the date, it's on. They pick a spot. Is that right?   [0:05:31] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah.   [0:05:31] Jordan: They do.   [0:05:31] Taylor Gibb: That's right, and I have to say, I actually was one of the first users of this app. I remember Dylan gave a special code to a beta group of testers, and there's something really exciting about it. Right? You get a notification on your phone... First of all, love notifications here at Braze, so having get ready to go on a date, that's amazing to get delivered to your lock screen.   [0:05:53] Jordan: It also makes sense, though, because it is so time-sensitive, it's not just so-and-so likes you, or you have 35 swipe right people, but it's like, you have a date in 25 minutes, or two hours from now, so it's very time-sensitive, so that's the right channel, in my opinion. An email could get lost in your inbox.   [0:06:09] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely, and it's funny, too. This article that we brought up here says that this is the perfect dating app for Millennials who have this kind of analysis paralysis. It even said anything that I'm unfortunately very familiar with. It's like swiping through Netflix, and you've got so many options that you just end up looking at the options for an hour and going to bed.   [0:06:27] PJ Bruno: Yep, yep.   [0:06:28] Taylor Gibb: This is exactly what I do every time, and so when it comes to dating, absolutely, I'm going to keep swiping.   [0:06:33] PJ Bruno: That's the thing. It's like, because, I don't know, you always go back to the well, and I'm a big Netflix browser, and some people are just like, “Oh, my God. Pick something,” but I enjoy going through all the stuff and just keep scrolling and scrolling, and so sometimes I get into that mode with swiping. It becomes-   [0:06:51] Jordan: Definitely.   [0:06:51] PJ Bruno: I mean, they've gamified it. Right?   [0:06:53] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah.   [0:06:53] PJ Bruno: So, it's like you're talking to someone, and I don't know, there's always that incentive get back in and continue to swipe.   [0:06:59] Jordan: My girlfriends, they have a rule that if you've been texting for more than three days and they haven't mentioned a date, to cut it out right then-   [0:07:05] PJ Bruno: That's a pretty good rule.   [0:07:05] Jordan: ... Because they're not necessarily interested in dating, so Bounce is so interesting because it's forcing you to say, “I actually want to meet someone tonight. My makeup's already on. I got my shoes on. Let's go. Let's not just go back and forth and then just flow into the ether of ghosting.”   [0:07:18] PJ Bruno: Right. Right.   [0:07:18] Taylor Gibb: Definitely, and I know that PJ hates when he puts on his makeup, expecting to go out on a day. He's got it all, and then they ghost him.   [0:07:25] Jordan: He's got the shoes on, he's got the mascara ready to go.   [0:07:26] Taylor Gibb: God, and he just looks so good, so fly.   [0:07:28] PJ Bruno: When you put that much time into it, of course you're going to be upset when nothing comes to fruition.   [0:07:31] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely.   [0:07:32] Jordan: Lord knows, you're not going to meet someone in real life, so why would you actually go out unless you've got a date already planned?   [0:07:37] PJ Bruno: Exactly. That's silly.   [0:07:38] Taylor Gibb: So, here's the devil's advocate thing, though. I find that some of my friends who are maybe a little more shy, a little more reserved, really like to put in that emotional groundwork before they meet somebody. Love the idea of being on Hinge and being able to message for weeks. It's kind of a... You've got your Jane Austen pen pal romance a little bit.   [0:07:54] PJ Bruno: Yeah, it's a vetting process.   [0:07:55] Taylor Gibb: There's something to be said, right?   [0:07:56] PJ Bruno: There is.   [0:07:56] Taylor Gibb: Because it may be that for a certain kind of person, well, maybe for anybody, it's scary to meet somebody that night not knowing much about them. Right?   [0:08:03] PJ Bruno: Absolutely, and I'll say about Hinge, actually, out of all the apps that I've used, Hinge is pretty good about giving you more than just, okay, this is what a person looks like. They have those little prompts. Have you seen these texts? It's just like-   [0:08:14] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah. Oh, I love those little prompts.   [0:08:16] PJ Bruno: It's thing like, “Something I'll never do again is,” or, “One thing I'm weirdly attracted to is,” and it just is three prompts that you can pick what they are, and it just tells you a little bit about themselves, and if it's funny or quirky and weird, it's just kind of like, oh, okay, I can get down with this. So, it's kind of like-   [0:08:31] Jordan: That's why I loved OkCupid. The concept of just meeting someone because they're within a hundred feet of me and good looking freaked me out. So, I think I answered, I'm not kidding, maybe 300 or 400 questions. It was like an SAT that I filled out to potentially meet the love of my life, and it was actually really interesting, some of the questions that I differed with people. Yeah, it was really interesting to me because I'm similarly of the mind of you, Taylor, that I don't necessarily want to meet a stranger unless I'm literally in the same place as them. The idea of leaving my house and meeting a complete stranger would've freaked me out a little bit, so I think having both sides of it, either I know what you look like, I know what you think like, I know what you believe, I know what we're doing, we're both interested in sushi. Cool. Okay.   [0:09:15] PJ Bruno: One thing I'll say for the audience out there is even if you're using dating apps, and you're not quite finding that special one, you're losing if you're not learning, so at least take stuff away from it. For example-   [0:09:25] Taylor Gibb: You're losing if you're not learning. I like that.   [0:09:27] PJ Bruno: ... Two things I found, just call it research, one is that apparently I look different in every picture I own.   [0:09:34] Taylor Gibb: Great.   [0:09:34] PJ Bruno: So, apparently I look different in every photo, one, and two, girls who own cats are less likely to own guns than girls who have dogs.   [0:09:43] Taylor Gibb: That's interesting because you would think it's a little utilitarian.   [0:09:44] PJ Bruno: I'm a dog-   [0:09:45] Jordan: Have you met a lot of gun-wielding dog owners in New York?   [0:09:48] PJ Bruno: Actually, I don't run into them personally. I'm just telling you from the series of photos I see-   [0:09:52] Jordan: Oh, interesting.   [0:09:53] PJ Bruno: ... There's cat girls, and I'm like, “Cool. I like you. I'm allergic to cats, though, so sorry,” and then girls... Not all dog girls have guns, but there are way more dog girls that have guns than cat girls.   [0:10:03] Jordan: I will tell you a learning that I... I have two learnings. One, if you are taking a mirror selfie in a restroom, I'm probably not going to swipe right on you.   [0:10:12] PJ Bruno: Well, you're married, but...   [0:10:14] Jordan: Thank you very much. Tristan, I am not swiping.   [0:10:16] Taylor Gibb: She might be researching, PJ.   [0:10:17] PJ Bruno: Oh, you're doing research. That's right.   [0:10:18] Jordan: Absolute research. But no, I also realized there's a game of which person are you in this picture that I love to play, where it's like you see a group, and you're like, oh, I really hope you're the second from the right, and then there's that two second of anticipation of swiping to the next picture and being like, oh, no, you are the guy on the left, or you're the one in the back that's just at the very end of the photo. It's such a fun game because it's so exhilarating.   [0:10:45] Taylor Gibb: He's the guy photo bombing in the background.   [0:10:46] Jordan: Yes. Yeah. No, it's my favorite part. Who are you? Which on are you?   [0:10:50] Taylor Gibb: Who are you?   [0:10:51] PJ Bruno: Oh, my gosh.   [0:10:52] Taylor Gibb: Speaking of who are you, one thing I forgot to ask that I loved to hear is, I believe back in the day of OkCupid, maybe still, you would have a screen name that you'd have to put out there. Right?   [0:11:02] Jordan: Oh, gosh. Yes.   [0:11:02] Taylor Gibb: I want to hear about your screen name, Jordan. I almost forgot to ask.   [0:11:06] Jordan: Oh, my gosh. I'm going to be giving you all my secrets now.   [0:11:09] Taylor Gibb: That's what this is about.   [0:11:09] Jordan: So, my screen name, true story, I made a profile and a password, so I made a username and a password, and it sat for six months because I was too mortified, this was five, six years ago, to actually add pictures and meet someone online. My username is [Rockjock3213].   [0:11:28] Taylor Gibb: [Rockjock], like rock climbing?   [0:11:29] Jordan: Some people would reach out about that.   [0:11:31] PJ Bruno: I thought it was like rock show.   [0:11:32] Jordan: So, mine's Rockjock, [J-hock 00:11:34]. It's a KU slang. I'm from Kansas, so it was important to me that I mentioned the fact that I love Kansas, I love sports, and 3213 are two of my lucky numbers.   [0:11:43] PJ Bruno: So, say it again, one more time.   [0:11:44] Jordan: Oh, gosh.   [0:11:45] Taylor Gibb: We'd love to look this up. Everybody on the air, take notes.   [0:11:48] Jordan: Rockjock3213.   [0:11:51] PJ Bruno: Sounds like a total babe. I mean-   [0:11:52] Taylor Gibb: I love it, Rockjock. Slide into those DMs.   [0:11:54] Jordan: You know, PJ, any other time, if it hadn't been Tristan, you never know.   [0:11:57] Taylor Gibb: Just waited a few more years.   [0:12:00] Jordan: If you had done OkCupid, because Tinder and Hinge, all that scared me at the time, I wasn't quite ready to delve out of the question, question, question realm.   [0:12:07] PJ Bruno: Fair.   [0:12:08] Taylor Gibb: Well, that's a good transition, too. Right?   [0:12:09] PJ Bruno: Wow. I missed the boat again, it seems.   [0:12:11] Taylor Gibb: Well, as always, [Peej], you're one canoe behind, one safety boat behind, but I was going to say, I had a great segue before you so rudely coming off. I was going to say, speaking of Hinge, Tinder, Match.com groups, we do have another little article here that speaks to a somewhere dystopian future of dating, our overlords at Match.com, and good thing or a bad thing, essential, the article says, “Match Group, which operates dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid, completed its acquisition of the seven-year-old app Hinge on Thursday, following its purchase of a majority stake in June 2018.” So, we've got a bit of a monopoly of love on our hands here, which sounds like it would but a great slow jam, but is instead a monopoly of love. PJ, get on writing that.   [0:13:04] PJ Bruno: I'm going to do that.   [0:13:05] Taylor Gibb: Instead, means that there's one company that's kind of determining at least my friend group's dating lives in 2019. What is your take on it, fellow pundits?   [0:13:17] PJ Bruno: I mean, I think I speak for everyone in the room. Monopolies in general are a bad idea. Right?   [0:13:21] Taylor Gibb: You always end up throwing the board. I mean-   [0:13:23] PJ Bruno: You end up in jail.   [0:13:25] Taylor Gibb: ... I was bound to.   [0:13:25] PJ Bruno: I don't have a get out free card. Who knows? No. Yeah, I don't like this one bit, and I'm a big fan of Bumble and the whole female-centric thing that... Was it Whitney Wolfe Herd, I think the CEO [crosstalk]   [0:13:38] Taylor Gibb: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep, exactly.   [0:13:40] Jordan: Previously of Tinder.   [0:13:40] PJ Bruno: Exactly. I love everything that she's done with Bumble, and they're staying strong, and they've staved off acquisition from Match Group. No, I don't like big, huge companies just absorbing and acquiring all this stuff, especially the Match CEO I guess was quoted saying, “Every person who's 18, 19, 20 should be on Tinder. We really want to be integrated into people's single social life, especially when they're young,” put the hooks in. Just because, while I said, dating apps can bring you towards a lot of really cool people, and who knows, maybe even the love of your life. I can also make you kind of be detached from society in a certain kind of way. Right? You're looking at your screen all the time. You're easily casting away person, after person, after person. I don't know. That's the thing, is I don't know if it's super good for our psyche, as far as the way that we treat people in general, and I don't know that's an outlandish thing to say.   [0:14:33] Jordan: I agree with that in the sense that one thing about choice analysis paralysis is the always consideration of what you didn't choose, so analysis paralysis being the more options you have, the more terrible your choice could be. If you had five versus 20, you could choose a statistically worse option if you had more than 20, things like that, but also, you're going to spend a lot of time thinking about the other 19 options that you didn't choose, which is very similar to dating apps.   [0:15:03] PJ Bruno: Totally.   [0:15:03] Jordan: I think that this concept that there's always the next person, which is also with these dating apps, their lifecycle, if they do their job, they're losing their audience. It's kind of like a babysitting app.   [0:15:16] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:15:16] Jordan: If you get the nanny you're looking for, or the before, or the girlfriend, or the partner you've been looking for, you deactivate your profile, you're done with that. The cost of acquisition just got higher. So, for them, they either need to, as you mentioned, hook me back in by always having that in the back of my mind, that there's more option and I should go back and swipe, and I miss the gamification, or they have to buy every other part of their audience, which means this massive acquisition and having this monopoly.   [0:15:43] PJ Bruno: I see. That makes sense.   [0:15:43] Taylor Gibb: That's brilliant.   [0:15:44] Jordan: So, no, it's not ideal. I think that it's changing... It's not just my thought. It's scientifically proven that it's changing the way people date, the way people interact, and I don't necessarily think it's for the best, but I think it's part of the nature of the game that everything is digital, and we want things in the palm of our hand, literally, and we don't necessarily want to have to go out. We're paying for convenience.   [0:16:06] Taylor Gibb: That's interesting, and that's a really... It's a good take I think that a lot of people share. I will say, it's also interesting to think about being one of these companies. Right? If your goal at the end of the day is technically to match people up with their perfect other person, but then that means they're off the app. Right?   [0:16:26] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:16:26] Taylor Gibb: So, I've posed this to clients before. I work with a few dating apps here at Braze, and I remember going in and saying, “Devil's advocate, if your app works perfectly, you're out of users. You don't have anybody in there. What does that make you feel like?”   [0:16:42] PJ Bruno: Right. It's a catch-22.   [0:16:42] Taylor Gibb: They said, “Honestly, we want as many marriages, as many people dropping off at the end of this as we possibly can do. When we look through the section of The New York Times, we want to see, 'We met on blank dating app. We met on this dating app,' and that's going to mean that we're really successful.” Now, of course, that's me going in in the moment as an outsider. It could be that there are other things that come from that, but-   [0:17:05] Jordan: It's de-stigmatizing it.   [0:17:07] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely.   [0:17:07] Jordan: The more that you see it's prevalence, that's great. I mean, I'm just going to throw this out there. I would love an app to make friends, because I think it's so easy to meet people with the instance of dating and love, and I think building community, if it's not at your office, or it's not in a friend group that you had from college, or it's not something that's based off of your personal belief system, it's really hard to make friends, and I think that's something that would benefit everybody. I know that Bumble tried to do that, I think, with business.   [0:17:34] Taylor Gibb: Bumble BFF.   [0:17:34] PJ Bruno: That's right, yeah.   [0:17:35] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:17:35] Jordan: Oh, yeah. They did it for business, too. I don't know how... I say this, but also, I met my person online, so I can't give them too much crap because I maybe wouldn't have met him otherwise. We both lived in the same city for six years and had mutual-mutual friends, never met, so I'm very grateful they were able to find the needle in the haystack was looking for.   [0:17:55] Taylor Gibb: Most definitely, and there's an app for everything. You've got your Bumble BFF. You've got your Bumble for business. I just heard today about a new app called [Tudder], which is Tinder for cows, and if you're looking to breed your cow-   [0:18:08] PJ Bruno: [Exsqueeze] me?   [0:18:08] Taylor Gibb: ... You get online, and you find a... On Tudder, you can swipe, say, "This looks like the steer for my particular cow."   [0:18:16] PJ Bruno: But how do cows even use apps?   [0:18:20] Jordan: Is it the farmer looking for the best lady cow?   [0:18:23] Taylor Gibb: I like to think it is just a cow that's swiping over there. He's got his big hoof, and he's like, “Oh, no, no. This will never do.” [crosstalk]   [0:18:29] PJ Bruno: What are the pictures of? It's just-   [0:18:31] Taylor Gibb: They're of the cows. It's absolutely 100% Tinder, just with cows.   [0:18:35] PJ Bruno: Is it like a group of cows, and you have to guess which cow is the one?   [0:18:40] Taylor Gibb: Yep, and it's always the shortest cow, isn't it?   [0:18:41] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:18:42] Taylor Gibb: Always the shortest cow.   [0:18:43] PJ Bruno: It's always-   [0:18:43] Jordan: Taylor, how did you find this? Did you product hunt this, or is this from experience [crosstalk]   [0:18:49] PJ Bruno: This is a good question.   [0:18:49] Taylor Gibb: Yeah. You know, we're actually trying to get them in as a client for next year, so thanks so much.   [0:18:53] PJ Bruno: Tudder.   [0:18:54] Taylor Gibb: I've just been doing Tudder.   [0:18:55] PJ Bruno: We got our eye on you.   [0:18:56] Taylor Gibb: Look out. We're going to be sending notifications. Is your cow lonely?   [0:19:00] PJ Bruno: You know, just real briefly, I want to come back... I love that whole idea because Hinge says designed to be deleted. Right?   [0:19:07] Taylor Gibb: Yes.   [0:19:07] PJ Bruno: That's their tagline.   [0:19:09] Taylor Gibb: That's it.   [0:19:09] PJ Bruno: I love that that's their mission and standpoint, is to get everyone to get off of it. I don't really buy it, especially now that they're acquired by Match Group, which is this big, huge, monster Frankenstein company, so I just... My question is, how do you build customer loyalty? Right? It's by building brilliant experiences. Right? So, what does loyalty look like in this industry? How is loyalty fostered in an app like this?   [0:19:38] Taylor Gibb: Oh, definitely, and it's funny too because we've got these preferences, but more and more, it's preferences within this Match monopoly. Right? I like OkCupid. I like Hinge. Match says, “That's great. It's all under us. Come on in.” Yeah, fostering loyalty, and then also, there is somewhat distressingly now this price put on things like a super like, or a boost. It's like, not only do I like you, Jordan, but I'm willing to pay an extra $2.00 to show you how much I like you.   [0:20:06] Jordan: Listen, that was before my time. That didn't exist back in the day.   [0:20:12] Taylor Gibb: Do you think Tristan would've dropped a couple of bucks to say hi to you?   [0:20:14] PJ Bruno: $2.00?   [0:20:14] Taylor Gibb: $2.00?   [0:20:14] Jordan: I think he did pay to be anonymous, so you couldn't see how often he looked at someone's profile. I didn't know that existed, so there might be some people out there that knew I was heavily stalking them.   [0:20:25] Taylor Gibb: They're like, “Rockjock?”   [0:20:27] Jordan: Oh, my gosh.   [0:20:27] Taylor Gibb: Didn't you view my profile 20 times?   [0:20:27] Jordan: Okay. This is getting too real. No, but to answer your question, PJ, this is something I actually thought a lot about. As a customer success team, we were doing some workshops, just trying to think about the user lifecycle across different verticals, and we were doing data apps at one point, and this is something that I think is so critical to think of as a marketer, but also as a person, is that it can be an exhilarating experience. I got in at a really good time, I found my person, I got out. It was great. It can be an incredibly lonely experience, especially if you're somebody who is putting yourself out there and being vulnerable, and maybe not getting the number of people interested in you that you'd hoped for, or the quality of people that you'd hoped for. I think that it's imperative that these companies remember that their relationship is with the person using their app, in that when you're the person that's bestowing all these amazing compliments, you can also be incredibly silent unintentionally, and so something that I like to think about is today is Valentine's Day. This can be a really tough day for some people, so use what you have. You have the ability to talk to them. Talk to them and remind them how many people swiped on them in the last year, how many people liked their photo, or how many people did they end up getting to see to build their community, things that you're in control of that aren't necessarily how hot did people think you are, or how many people wanted to go on a date that you said no to, weirdly, vanity metrics. Use what you have at your disposal-   [0:21:53] PJ Bruno: Totally.   [0:21:53] Taylor Gibb: Literally.   [0:21:53] Jordan: ... And truly build a relationship that you can, which can be either the comforter or the cheerleader, or both.   [0:22:00] PJ Bruno: So, so well said, Jordan. I love that message to everyone out there. You know, we're in the world of automation, and it's going to make our lives continually easier and easier, but let's not forget, along the way somewhere, we can lose something as well. So, on Valentine's Day, reach out to those loved ones, even if it's over the phone. Try to-   [0:22:19] Taylor Gibb: Even if it's in a push notification.   [0:22:20] PJ Bruno: Even if it's in a push notification that's triggered in realtime or near realtime. Who's to say?   [0:22:25] Jordan: Be good to yourself, too. I think it's a love day. Love can be everything, but love should also point right back at you.   [0:22:32] Taylor Gibb: Well, I can't-   [0:22:33] Jordan: Getting sentimental there.   [0:22:34] Taylor Gibb: That's good. It's Valentine's Day. It's the day to be sappy, and quite honestly, we can end it on that note.   [0:22:41] PJ Bruno: I'd love to end it on that note. This has been beautiful, you guys. Happy Valentine's Day to you both-   [0:22:46] Taylor Gibb: [crosstalk] Happy Valentine's Day.   [0:22:49] PJ Bruno: ... And happy Valentine's Day to all you out there.   [0:22:50] Taylor Gibb: All you listeners out there.   [0:22:52] PJ Bruno: This is PJ Bruno-   [0:22:53] Taylor Gibb: Taylor Gibb.   [0:22:54] Jordan: And I'm Jordan.   [0:22:56] PJ Bruno: Thanks a lot for coming with us, guys, and take care. [0:22:58]

Episode 45 of #TwoWiseJawns is available for your listening pleasure on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, and SoundCloud. The topic du jour is LETTING THAT HURT GO! Set it free sis, bro. The person you liked in 1st grade liked someone else? LET IT GO. The girls didn't like you because you "liked anime"? LET IT GO, but more importantly take the time to reflect on the fact that's not the anime that's deterring the ladies and it surely isn't Michael B. Jordan :) You were roasted on the playground and still mad about it 26 years later? LET IT GO. Your childhood wan't perfect? Neither was a lot of people's. LET IT GO. You're blaming black women for your romantic partner choices, yes you Taye Diggs -__- LET IT GO! You're a hotep who only recognizes the most Western civilizations in Africa as worthy of acknowledgment? LET IT GO. Learn to love all of the continent my good brother. Fall in love with kinky hair and Jackson 5 noses! Beyonce did! This episode isn't meant to be dismissive and invalidate your hurt or purview, but rather to encourage you to set it aflame, sage your life, and practice self-care. HOT TOPICS: -- Rihanna turned 30 and that's important to us as we STAN Robyn. Also we were both born Year of the Dragon -- a POWERFUL year. -- The Oscars happened and Morg wants Maya Rudolph to host everything and do everything; and is also upset Chadwick Boseman didn't respond to Margot Robbie's flirtations -- a true king of Wakanda -_- -- Janelle Monae and Tessa Thompson are friends who probably hooked up once or twice or a lot... cute video for Make Me Feel! The sheer rose petaled jeans from Adam Selman are LOVE. -- The students of Parkland, Florida are shaking the table and leading to the NRA losing partnerships. Sparks conversation on how private sector liaises with public sector in states like Georgia, etc. -- Mo'Nique and her professional bun are still on their world tour. Not sure if the points she's making are concrete, but we're always here for a healthy read of "Charlamagne tha God." Mo went in on him like Olivia Pope and Annalise Keating at the hair salon. -- Kylie Jenner is POWERFUL. She tweeted Snapchat is dead and sis lost $1.6 Billion in stock value. Yikes! See when your company doesn't have a solidified revenue stream, your worth is literally at the whimsy of the Kardashians and Kris Jenner and Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen and kiddies on the Robinhood app and their perceived value of you. -- Prayers up for Rick Ross and his health! #Pears -- The White House is still a mess. Just hemorrhaging staffers. Hope Hicks and her beautiful sheath dresses, gorgeous sheath dresses are out. The drunky man Sam Nunberg is out. Day in the life. -- Amandla Stenberg claims she gave the chocolate sisters a chance when she self-reportedly dropped out of Black Panther auditions. ...now see. Rachel Dolezal would have NEVER -- a true ally. -- South Africa is uprooting the Afrikaans! Apartheid reparations!? Recorded Tuesday, March 6, 2018.

This episode is brought to you by The Kolada Group. Today, I’m talking about if your team can read your mind. Topics: (:44) Systems Saved Me Summit (2:07) Mind reading is possible! (3:25) How? (4:57) Jordan and Chelsea (5:52) Make it easy for your team (6:52) Perfecting the process (10:08) Wouldn’t it be nice? (11:02) Google-able questions (11:53) Team Sanity Blueprint (12:38) Give your mind on a silver platter Quotes of the Week: “It takes time. It takes training. But once your team is used to you, they understand how you want things done.”– Jordan “You need to take things out of your brain and you need to give them to your team in the simplest, most clear way possible.”– Jordan Resources: Systems Saved Me Summit See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A good filmmaker friend, who like me is always shooting and always pitching for the next gig, asked me how I avoid burning out. My answer is simple.. shoot and edit more. But what if you are getting burnt from trying, hitting a wall because you are not shooting or pitching enough? Don't give up... do this. Listen. If you're ever in a bad place, you can always hit me up.  Truly, Jordan You know it's just me today for 8 minutes. August 8th is "I Am Battle Comic" and click and buy from this link and some money goes to National Military Family Association. ! Bootcamp is likely sold out by the time you read this.

At Shopify Unite, we heard that Shopify is advancing their checkout process by adding new features like Shopify Pay. Advancement in the checkout process is great for merchants, and especially important for Shopify. It's important because the Shopify checkout process is tightly controlled. There's limited customization options, and unless you're on Shopify Plus, you're not given access to edit the checkout process. This brings us to a controversial point: is it not being able to edit that checkout process good or bad? And if we wanted to edit it, how could we do it? Then, what would do to improve the checkout process for the better? Joining me on the show to discuss it is Jordan Gal. Jordan is the Cofounder and CEO of CartHook, a software company that offers products that make your ecommerce business more successful. — Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via Email Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on iTunes Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on Stitcher Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via RSS Join The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group Work with Kurt — Learn: The coming battle for your Shopify checkout The arguments for and against replacing your Shopify checkout Customizations to consider that may improve conversion at checkout The one trend in ecommerce you need to know about The power of free plus shipping offers The strategy used by the most sophisticated Shopify store owners to dramatically increase ROI on ad spend Links Mentioned: CartHook Bold Apps Cashier (Beta) Zipify One Click Upsell Shopify Pay Address Auto Completion ClickFunnels Free Guide I want to send you a sample chapter of Ecommerce Bootcamp, absolutely free. Tell me where to send your sample at ecommerce-bootcamp.com Transcript Kurt: One of the interesting and perhaps blessed things that happen in Shopify is that unless you're on plus you can't mess with the checkout, and even on plus you can mess with it a little bit but totally rewriting the thing just probably isn't a great idea. The reason I say I like this about Shopify is the Shopify checkout is based on millions of data points, so in theory they're always optimizing this thing and we know it works well. I've seen really optimized stores with conversion rates at 3% and 5% and those that really juice their traffic to the store, conversion rates in the low double digits, so we know the checkout works. We've certainly seen it work a number of times, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways to improve it, and not just in terms of conversion rate but there are other features maybe we would like to add to the checkout which would be cool. There's a controversial practice that happens and we'll go into why, but it's replacing the checkout. If you've ever used a subscription app, Bold app's recurring orders is a wonderful way to do subscription. It actually when someone goes through the checkout to place their subscription, it entirely circumvents the Shopify checkout, replaces it with Bold's that is just a duplicate. They have remade the standard Shopify checkout so that they can do their own payment processing, and then just funnels all that stuff back into your Shopify store via the API. It's kind of crazy and early on we were like, "Oh damn, that's how they solved that? That's nuts." And now we're seeing more people do it. You've probably heard about Ezra Firestone's Zipify, his company Zipify. Zipify's one click upsell. Bold Apps has one in beta. I've seen it enough places now I'm comfortable mentioning it, that we got a replacement called Bold Apps Cashier that's designed to try and pull all these things together, add a bunch of features to the checkout. And of course we have heard from him before. Jordan Gal from CartHook, who joins me today to talk about what's going on in this space, why and how it's heating up, and why it's controversial, what the trends are and what's going on. It's a more high level discussion but I think this should be very interesting. Jordan, welcome. Jordan: Thank you very much, Kurt. Thanks for having me on. I had to bite my tongue through the intro because I have a lot of interjections to make. Not disagreements but adding to the richness of the debate. How about that? I think we can get into it. I think it's a good, good topic. Kurt: I don't even know where I fall on this, so we'll see if you sway me. You probably will. You're a charismatic gentleman. Jordan: I don't even know if it's about swaying. It's a laissez faire argument. The checkout on Shopify right now is good. It converts well. Once people get into the checkout, it converts and it's standardized and it looks great on mobile and it's super stable and super fast, so there's not an argument to be made about how Shopify's checkout is terrible. That's not the argument. The argument is, should the eCommerce merchant have control over their checkout? And if so, then why? What are people trying to do with the checkout? And we saw the first rumblings of it with the subscription apps, and now it's starting to blossom a little bit in that space and we've got a few different companies playing in that space. Our company, CartHook, has a one page checkout and post purchase upsell app, and then Ezra's got OCU and then Bold's coming out, so it's getting interesting and my only argument is to let the merchant do what they want with their store. Kurt: When you phrase it like that then it's hard to argue with it. I'll play devil's advocate. The argument against it would be, protect people from themselves. If the checkout is based on ... It works and it's got these millions of data points, then lock it down. It's so important. Don't let people mess with it. But then I have said that and we've heard that on the show, but then I've also said if you want to add predictable, recurring revenue to your store, you should try selling subscriptions, in which case you got to replace the damn checkout. Jordan: And it may not even be like that forever. This very well may be a temporary period where things are in transition around the checkout. That's one of the things that we keep an eye on. We say to ourselves, how long does this last? This period where Shopify's checkout is locked down and then people are replacing it. Maybe there's something that we're transitioning into with some of Shopify's new APIs that allow for more features to be built into the Shopify checkout instead of replacing. I think it's a very fluid thing. To back up a touch, our product, it originated years ago when I ran an eCommerce business on Volusion where I ran the company with my three brothers. One brother was in charge of getting traffic to the store. I was in charge of converting that traffic into sales, and my other brother was in charge of everything that happened after the sale, from customer service to shipping, inventory, and so forth. So I spent my days staring at, okay, how do I convert more of this traffic into sales? The truth is I spent a considerable amount of my time on the checkout process or the cart page and the checkout page and trust symbols and error notifications and as everyone knows, every little tweak can make a difference. Sometimes you don't know which tweak makes a difference so you start off with your best practices and you make it super simple, and then you start to work from there and a lot of unexpected things happen. That's where it originated and now what we're really doing is we're bringing that same mindset and that same situation into Shopify. We're saying what works for one store may not be optimal for another store, so let's give control over to the merchant to experiment. Kurt: If we hand control over to the merchant, what are the things that people are going to do? What are they missing out on now that they could be doing if they had access to this checkout, or swap it to one of these other replacements such as CartHook? Jordan: We're seeing it happen in two different ways. The first is on the checkout page itself, and the second is what's happening after the checkout. I don't even know where we should focus first. I guess the first one's almost easier. Kurt: We'll do it in order. Jordan: Sure. I think it's more straightforward too and then the second part that the upsells after the purchase go deeper, so we can go deeper into that side. The first part is the checkout page itself. Shopify has a three step checkout and it's debatable whether or not that is the right way to go compared to a one page checkout. These days with more and more traffic and more and more conversions happening on mobile, you want it to be as fast as possible. Again, it's not straightforward that a one page checkout is faster and easier and converts better, but you can't tell without experimentation. What our customers are doing is they're trying to match up their checkout page with their brand so that it's on their own domain and it has trust symbols, testimonials, images, design that match the rest of the company's site so that there's a consistency from the product page to the cart page to the checkout page and then that consistency is generally understood to help conversions. Kurt: So the first is we want access to design for two reasons. One to make it match the store so you have a cohesive experience. You don't have this jarring, suddenly I'm on a different domain name with a different feel, a different look entirely. That's usually the first objection is listen, I just want this thing to look the same. Okay, cool. Then the second would be, all right, you're asking a lot saying to a stranger, "Hey, give me your credit card details and your home address, buddy." That's a big ask, so you want to add some psychological triggers in there like social proof, trust indicators. Even just, "Hey, if you have questions call us. Here's our toll free number." That kind of thing. Then of course remove all the friction. Make it as easy to use as possible. Add fancy features like address auto-completion would be a not atypical customization we see. Jordan: Yeah, and along with that just the desire to experiment with whether or not one page checkout will convert better for you than the multistep, and it's not straightforward. Kurt: It really does depend on the audience, because before we hitched our cart and did only Shopify, and obviously this was years ago so things have changed wildly, but we saw situations where some stores did better where you gave people the option to register as customers versus be guests. Some stores did better when you did one page checkout versus multistep. It really was dependent on the audience. Jordan: Yeah, it makes sense and that's what we're seeing too. It is not a straightforward, the second you add a one page checkout it converts better. It's not straightforward like that, so it's an experimentation piece. Kurt: And the end goal there to have those options, to have those features, is to increase the conversion rate. We make it as easy as possible, remove all those barriers, all that friction and we just make it easier for people to buy, and in theory our purchased rate goes up, right? Jordan: Yes, and one of the interesting things that we have an eye on is it's my opinion that the thumbprint wins. That's where I think everything is going on checkout. What I say is that my ideal is that 12 months from today, our default checkout page has no fields. Like the cart summary where you don't see the cart summary until you click on it and then it opens up and extends the cart summary. My hope is that the fields are hidden and you have to click on it to open up the fields to put your name and address in, because the thumbprint purchase will be that prevalent. That's what I hope things get to for merchants, because once ... There are a few different options. Apple Pay, Android Pay, some type of a Shopify Pay, Stripe. Whatever comes out over the next year I think the thumbprint is the thing that wins. Kurt: We see that with Apple Pay now and really I've only used it in maybe two or three situations and it was absolutely magical. Like oh my gosh, this is the easiest thing ever. How long has it been around? A year? And it's stunning to see how few ... This is not a criticism of just Shopify stores. Of just eCommerce and mobile in general that just don't use Apple Pay and that confuses me. Jordan: I think these things happen all at once. They grow and then all of a sudden you look at it and you say, "Whoa,". It wasn't that big last year and it's bigger this year and it's anticipated to be big, and the next thing you know it's huge and then everyone adopts it all at once. Over a 12 month period everyone will add it. That's my ... It's just inefficient, man. To be on a phone and punch in all those buttons when you're just using the credit card that you already have in your wallet and then you will eventually have inside your phone. It seems inevitable to me. Kurt: Absolutely. I'm confused as to why it didn't happen sooner. Jordan: I agree. Kurt: That's our dream as we get to, I want to check out. I just tap my thumb and it's like, "Hey, you want to pay with this card and send it to this address, right?" Yeah. Done. Send. No more thinking about it. It's done. It's over. It's one step. It works on our mobile devices and soon we'll see touch ID on everything. Jordan: It's a bit scary, isn't it? Kurt: A little bit. Jordan: The fact that the entire Internet will be as easy to purchase from as Amazon is scary. Kurt: Yeah. I ... It's a total rabbit hole here. I don't keep Amazon on my phone to prevent impulse purchases. When I need to shop on Amazon, I download the app and then I have to log in, make a purchase, then delete it. Jordan: Wow, good for you. Kurt: Because it's too easy. Jordan: If I were a Shopify merchant, that's what I would want. I want it to be too damn easy to buy from my store. Kurt: Right and fundamentally, with conversion rate optimization, that's the end goal is it is too damn easy to buy from this store. That's number one is, give me access to design so I can optimize this thing tailored to my specific audience. Then the pushback against that would be, "Well, if we do that we're giving you enough rope to hang yourself or you could mess it up and make it harder to use." In theory you're sophisticated enough. You can test it. You would know that your conversion rate goes down. Jordan: Yes. Like all business. I have plenty of rope to hang myself with in my business, just like you do and just like everyone else does. Kurt: There are other places I could through things up like uploading 12 meg PNGs to my carousel slider and that kind of thing. Then the other is this post purchase stuff, which I think is really exciting and is an untapped opportunity. Talk to me about that. Jordan: I think it's fascinating, and I have really enjoyed my job for the past year working in this space because it's just genuinely interesting and new. Once again, let's back up two steps. Here's what I see that happened over the past year or two. What's happening is that the marketers, the army of marketers that move around the web and identify opportunities, they have been moving from digital products to physical products en masse. Just a gigantic trend. It was not kicked off but accelerated by ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels brought marketing innovation in their platform. They basically said, "Okay, Leadpages, you guys have awesome landing pages, but people don't build landing pages on their own. They build them together in a funnel." So ClickFunnels just put that concept into play and said, "Now instead of building standalone landing pages, we're going to help you build landing pages that connect in a funnel," and then on top of that they provided a ton of education around how to use that. How to sell both digital and physical products through a funnel, and one of the key components of the funnel is the post purchase upsell. It's not just an opportunity to add something to someone's order. It is an opportunity to completely change the way you actually sell. The strategy from the starting point can be changed because of the fact that the post purchase upsell exists. A popular example is the free plus shipping offer. The free plus shipping offer, the way it works is what you want to do is offer something on the front end on your checkout page that's really low, low price. Ideally it's free. It's, "Hey, I just wrote a book. Buy my new book. I'll give it to you for free. All you need to do is pay for shipping." So the book is free, $0, and the shipping is call it $6.95, hence the free plus shipping nomenclature. Kurt: If you want to see this in action, if you've ever seen ads ... Clearly Facebook has considered me an info-marketer because I see ads for this stuff all the time. I got ads continuously for Russell Brunson, the owner, creator, of ClickFunnels, for his book DotCom Secrets, which was offered to me as free plus shipping and sure enough, after seeing enough ads, I did end up buying it for free plus shipping and it was like $7. Jordan: Right. And now after- Kurt: Then it worked on me a second time. He just came out with another book. Did it again. Jordan: That's right. So look, it works. It's a great offer, and so what that does is it gets the person into your funnel. All of a sudden your checkout page, what you're selling on the front end becomes an entryway. It's not the point. It is the beginning of the point. Once you put in your credit card information to pay $6.95 in shipping, what happens is that payment token can then be used again, which means ... Kurt, when you bought that book, what happened after you made the purchase? Kurt: Immediately afterward it's like, thanks. That's great. You purchased it. By the way, one time offer. You'll never be able to get this again. For $150 or something, add this extra package of just amazing value and it had a video and it was it's own amazing landing splash page and I said no thanks. But I also made sure to not read it because I'm sure it was very compelling and I might have bought it, and then when I said no thanks, it offered me another different thing. Jordan: A downsell. Kurt: A downsell, which is always going to be cheaper than the first thing it offered me. It always seemed way cheaper because I was just price anchored to the other thing. Jordan: Right. So if you had decided to purchase, in order to purchase all you would've had to do is click on the button that said, "Yes, I want to purchase." You would not have needed to reenter your credit card again. The credit card would have been stored in the payment token stored from the checkout page. That became very, very popular in the ClickFunnels world, and then the next phase what happened is a lot of people on ClickFunnels started selling physical products in this way. They'd say, "Okay, here's one unit of skin cream," and then after the purchase it's, "Hey, do you want to buy another one for a different price?" And, "Hey, do you want to subscribe and just save and get it every month without you having to do anything?" So then it started to creep into the physical product world. People started making a lot of money being really successful in the physical product world, and then what do they realize, Kurt? They realize, "Oh man, I really want to use Shopify to do the order management because it's really good at it." Then you had this strange gap where you said, "Okay, I want to sell like ClickFunnels but I want to manage like Shopify," and that's really what's happening in the market right now. You have a ton of these marketers coming into Shopify and they're introducing all these marketing concepts and now they're slowly seeping into the regular retailer world, not just the marketer world, and now there's this crazy [crosspollinization 00:19:30] around post purchase upsells are ... It's a legitimate strategy. It works. Kurt: Right. Initially, as soon as I think retailers and eCommerce folk in general hear info-marketer, they're like, "Oh, it's sleazy. I don't want to do it." Then over time they open their mind to it. It works for them for reasons, and a lot of the stuff is based on 50, 100 year old direct response marketing ideas. We've seen that with the power of landing pages and people's desires to rather than just have a product page, make these much more sophisticated, compelling landing pages for their Shopify store that are borrowed straight out of this info-marketing world. Jordan: Yes, and I actually want to make sure we talk about the landing page thing. That's probably the biggest insight I can give to your audience based on what we're seeing, so let's put a marker on that. I just wrote that down as a note. The process of normalization. I remember three years ago when we first launched our abandoned cart application, CartHook started off as an abandoned cart email app. We used to get people who saw our site and email us in such anger. Just, "I cannot believe what you guys are doing, that you are horrible, evil people who do this," and it's because we're sending emails to people after they abandon their cart. Do you know anyone who thinks that's a horrible, controversial, sleazy practice? No, it's normal. It works. It's inevitable. You need to do it in a tasteful way. It's always in the way you do it. Kurt: Yeah. Don't damn the tools. It's what you do with them. Jordan: Exactly right. I think there is now a process of normalization around upsells. I think within a year, basically not every single time but most of the time you buy something online you will have a post purchase upsell, and people will start to learn about it and be conditioned to it and understand that they're going to get certain offers and then they'll start to try to game it to see what kind of offers they get after the purchase. It's just a totally normal process. Kurt: I had not thought of it that way but yeah, we're already doing that as a standard practice in email marketing automation. You've got to be doing an upsell after the fact to extend customer lifetime value. Even the previous episode to this one that's literally what we discussed. Like a third of the emphasis was devoted to those post purchase sequences. At no point did we think it was strange, sleazy, or anything like that. Jordan: No, it's just a normal part of retail. Anyway, so that's the second piece. The first piece is the checkout. The second piece is what happens after the checkout. Now there's this amazing experimentation. What can you do ... If it's helpful I can give you what a typical post purchase funnel looks like. Kurt: I love examples. Really solidify it, picture it, so lay it on me brother. Jordan: Yeah, let's do it. Let's say you are selling flip flops. Okay. You sell flip flops from Brazil, so it's cool. You've got a brand going. A typical post purchase upsell funnel would look something like this. Visitor puts a pair of your flip flops in the cart, goes to the checkout page, fills out the forms, puts in their payment information, and clicks "complete purchase." After that checkout page the first page they would see would be an offer for more of the same. Meaning, the product you just bought, I'm going to offer you the same thing but for a better deal. Basically say, "You want to get a second pair of flip flops for 20% less?" And it's positioned as a one time offer because literally on the site publicly, it's offered for call it $40, but because you just purchased it, it's a thank you to someone who just purchased it. It's a one time offer. Add a second pair for you, for your spouse, for safekeeping, whatever. You get it for $30. Then, if they accept it, let's not get into downsells because that gets complicated, so let's just say three upsells in a row. Let's say they have two pairs of flip flops and they got a good deal on the second one and they're happy. The second would be for a complimentary product. What goes along with your flip flops? It is your flip flop cleaning kit. Then again you can say a one time offer, publicly or it may not even be available publicly on the website, or on the website the cleaning kit is available for $10 but now you can add it to your order for $5. So upsell number one is more of the same. Upsell number two is complimentary. Then what some people do, upsell number three is expedited shipping. What you're doing is you're saying, "This person is really interested. They just purchased. Maybe they want to get their product faster," and so instead of trying to convert them to upgraded shipping on the checkout page which creates friction, you can add an upsell as the third upsell for expedited shipping. Basically offering the same type of upgrade in shipping that you would've on the checkout page but this time you're not adding the friction up front. You're making an offer after the fact, then they can decide whether they want expedited shipping or not. That would be a typical post purchase upsell. More of the same, complimentary product, expedited shipping. Kurt: I love it. I love it and I can't do it right now. Jordan: Right. The point of this is really to change your average order value. Kurt: Right, obviously you're increase customer lifetime value but we're doing it in a much faster way. Where normally it'd be they make the purchase and then you email them their upsell offers, versus now we're doing it like, they have already committed to the first purchase, and in that same transaction now we're increasing that average order value, I think in theory extending their customer lifetime value through these upsells. Jordan: Right and the whole theory is, because these offers come after the checkout they don't interfere with the conversion rate on the front end. Kurt: Right and that's the risk. Right now if I want to do something similar I would use an app like Bold Apps Product Upsell [inaudible 00:25:51] pops up in the cart based on what's in the cart and offers me additional items. It's like, "Oh, you bought this beach towel. Did you also want to buy this suntan lotion?" So it pops this thing up. But they haven't bought the first item yet, so there's always the fear that this is going to increase bounce rate on the cart page. It's going to impact that conversion rate. Jordan: You got it. So it should be the same math on the front end. If you spend $10,000 a month in advertising and that usually results in let's just say 100 orders and the average order value is $100, that makes you $10,000 in revenue. Cool. Now, if you add post purchase upsells, that doesn't change at all. It's still the same spend, the same conversion rate, the same revenue but now 20% of those 100 purchases also add an additional average of $10, so now you've just made an extra $200. It shouldn't change the math on the front end at all on the conversion rate. Now what you're doing is just X% of customers are also taking an upsell, so you spend the exact same amount on ads but you make more revenue as a result. Kurt: So I'm getting a higher ... My initial order, my customer value goes way up but my cost per acquisition of customers doesn't change in the slightest. Jordan: Right. Shouldn't change, but the average order value goes up, and what does that allow you to do? It allows you to spend more on ads, and then you can make more money, and then spend more on ads, and make more money. Kurt: Right, you step on the gas and just keep this ... which I learned from you in a previous episode. If you get a funnel that works, it's profitable, step on the gas. See what you can do. Jordan: Yeah, step on the gas. Kurt: See how far you can scale it. That's a good example of how one might use upsells in eCommerce. Can I do this in Shopify right now? Jordan: You can do it in Shopify right now and there are a few options for merchants. Between ourselves and Ezra's OCU, there's starting to be some innovation in the space. Bold just came out with their Cashier. That's in beta, so the features there, we don't know what they're going to do but right now in the market you can use our product, CartHook Checkout or you can use Zipify OCU and people are doing it. We are getting a healthy amount of demand and we are kind of quiet. We don't really do any advertising and marketing, and we're just getting a wave of people who are talking about it in Facebook and then wanting to try it. It's starting to grow very organically and I think it's going to tip at some point over the next few months where it's just going to be more standard practice as opposed to the innovators on the marketing side. We're already talking to some really well known merchants that I don't want to mention, so it's already seeping into the ... The mean. The one standard deviation away from the normal. It's already creeping into the norm for them. Kurt: Right. Once we have these big ... You have some hero stores. Some stores that you aspire to be like. Very large, work in public Shopify stores. A good example would be [Beer Brand 00:29:18] or I always reference [Everest Bands 00:29:19] on here where you hear a lot about them and you're just like man, I want a store like that. Once you see those people, because we perceive they're successful and therefore when we see them adopting these things we go, "Well, they must know what they're doing." Everybody has that thought, even if they're just experimenting. That's what's going to normalize this and we're going to see more demand for it, and then we'll see more education about it, more people talking about it in Facebook groups, and you're right about that. I start seeing more and more mentions, especially in the Shopify Plus Facebook group. See mentions like, "Hey, how do I do this?" Then, "How do I do upsells? How do I do this?" And you hear people like, "Oh, check out CartHook. Check out OCU. Have you heard about this new thing from Bold?" I keep seeing this in the last month this conversation keep happening. Jordan: I think it's a great thing for Shopify merchants. I think it's a good thing for our market specifically. I expect more competition. Ezra and I are in touch and we're both supporting what the other person's doing and I think it's good for everybody. Kurt: That's one of the wonderful things about this community in general. Everybody works together for the greater good. Jordan: Yeah, and it's big enough. It's all good. Kurt: There's 400,000 Shopify stores. Jordan: That's wild. Kurt: It's all good, man. Jordan: Kurt, how we doing on time? I want to get to this one thing that we see that I don't want to leave out. Kurt: Right. We're at 30 minutes recording so I do want to wrap it up after this, but give me that one hit. Give me the tremendous value. Lay it on me. Jordan: All right, here's what we're seeing. People who are heavy into Facebook advertising, the people who really, really care about their ROI every single day for every dollar spent. What they are doing is they are first figuring out which product on their store sells, and then they are no longer sending the traffic to the product page. They are building a landing page and sending the traffic there and they are getting much more success from it. In theory you and I know that works. We know that a landing page converts better than a homepage let's say, but it is being put into practice in a big way in the Shopify world. People will figure out which of their products sell best and then they will do more work on the page to sell. Instead of just sending to a standard page where there's some photos on the left and then on the right there's some bullet points and a description, they'll put together a full blown landing page that does away with the navigation, keeps a super focus on the product, and does a lot more work with videos, additional testimonials, additional images, more copy, and they are being rewarded for going that next step in effort beyond just the standard page on the Shopify store. Kurt: I'm totally with you. I absolutely believe it. Just to give the crash course in Shopify landing pages, imagine a more purposeful product page. Often that is how we do it is if you've got access to a front end designer developer, we make a longer form version of the product page where we've got longer sales copy. We go through the whole pain, dream, fix format. We include social proof. Maybe we include urgency on there, scarcity. We'll do little hacks with that stuff ... And you can't do this for every product, right? So either you sell a few products, you could do it for all of them. Do it for your flagship product or use the 80/20 rule. Figure out, this is the big bad boy. Do it on just this one. Then take that same page, make a version of it where you just throw in some extra style tags and hide, display none, all the extraneous links that would get someone to leave the page. The fundamental thing that makes a landing page is in theory, it only has one call to action. Generally that means you got to strip out your navigation from your header/footer, so there you go. There's the easy crash course in Shopify product landing pages. Jordan: Just to plug my own product a little bit, what they're doing from there is they're using ... This is what our most successful merchants are doing. They're using what we call product funnels. In CartHook you can build something called a product funnel which links up directly to one specific product in your Shopify store and then provides you with a URL that goes right to a checkout page that has that product preloaded. They don't go from the landing page to the cart. They go directly from the landing page, they put the funnel URL from the CartHook product funnel, and then they go straight from landing page into the checkout page with that product preloaded, and then all the post purchase upsells after it and because you know exactly where the traffic is coming from, that one landing page, you know which product they bought so you can put testimonials that are specific to that product on the checkout page and then you can have a post purchase upsell sequence that's very specific to that product. It's a super, super focused funnel that you have full control over. You have control of the landing page, checkout page, upsell pages, thank you page. That's where our most successful merchants are dialing in their ad spend. Kurt: Just thinking out loud, if you are just starting out with a Shopify store, is this something you want to worry about or is this once you've got where your processes, your product validated, dialed in, then you want to start exploring this stuff? At what point do I start doing this, I think is my question. Jordan: I'm going to say that this is not something you should do as one of the first things. There are so many other foundational elements to your store that you need to get right, between the positioning and copy, navigation, and so on. I would work on that first. This is an optimization. This is, okay, how do I make things better? I think maybe eventually it will get to the point where, okay, I need an email app. I need a cart abandonment app. I need an exit intent popup app, and I need a checkout app. That's where I hope it gets to where every single person that starts a store just grabs these few fundamental apps that they need to add. I don't think it's quite there yet. I think this is a bit more advanced. Kurt: I want to wrap this up but now I got more questions. You rattled off here's the four apps you need to have. Do you have a preferred one or recommendation for an exit intent popup app? Jordan: No. I don't know. I don't know. I know OptinMonster. I know OptiMonk. I know Bounce Exchange for bigger stores, but I'm not as familiar with the app ecosystem to recommend exactly what to use. We partner with certain apps like ReCharge Apps on the subscription billing so people can sell subscription products inside the funnel and so on, but beyond the larger market, I'm not the right person to make those recommendations. Kurt: Okay. All good. I'll throw in my recommendation. I really like OptiMonk, but I've also heard fantastic things about Justuno but I have not personally played with it. I think in theory the thing I'd like to do and I never get around to because these other exit intent popup builders are so convenient, would be just coding our own using Ouibounce which is just an open source JavaScript snippet. It's O-U-I bounce, Ouibounce. I will throw those into the notes, the links mentioned. Jordan, where can people go to learn more about you? Jordan: Go to CartHook.com/checkout and you'll see more about the products, and then we interact with our customers and people on the site a lot so if you have questions just click on that chat button in the bottom right or hit us up at support@CartHook.com and if you are feeling podcasty, check out BootstrappedWeb.com which is my weekly podcast. Kurt: Who do you host that with? Jordan: Brian Casel. Kurt: He is a good dude. Jordan: My man. Kurt: Wonderful man. I will not go down any more rabbit holes as I was about to do. No, this is good. We're going to wrap it up here. Jordan: Cool. Kurt: Thank you, Jordan. I greatly, greatly appreciate it. I think that's all for us today at the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. And to our listeners, I would love to hear your thoughts on what you've heard come out of this discussion, so join our Facebook group. Just search the Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. You'll find it. Apply to join. I will approve you, and come talk to us. I post every episode there. Or, you can always sign up for my newsletter at KurtElster.com. Shoot me an email. Either way, you'll be notified when a new episode goes live. And of course if you want to work with me, I'd love to have you. Go apply at Ethercycle.com. That's my consultancy. As always, thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.

01. Royksopp - I Had This Thing (Joris Voorn Remix) 09.03 02. Zwette feat. Molly - Rush (Extended Mix)

01. Zedd ft. Selena Gomez - I Want You To Know 02. W&W - Love High High 03. Quintino - Escape 04. Galantis - Gold Dust 05. FTampa & WAO - Troy 06. Benny Benassi - Satisfaction (Jordan Jay Remode) 07. Tritonal - Ginzu 08. Rick Mitchells - Tactical Nuke 09. Bobby Rock - Thriller 10. Alex Adair - Make Me Feel Better (Don Diablo & CID Remix) 11. Zonderling - Telraam 12. Smash of the Week: Calvin Harris feat. Ellie Goulding - Outside (Hardwell Remix) 13. Naten - Automation 14. Yoel Lewis & Punk Party feat. Keith Varon - Thrive 15. Gareth Emery - Huracan 16. Jack & Jordan - You & Me 17. Lush & Simon x Rico & Miella - We Are Lost 18. Alexandre Bergheau - Titanides