Podcasts about matthew oh

Visual Staring OCD (also known as Visual Tourrettic OCD), a complex and often misunderstood form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, involves an uncontrollable urge to stare at certain objects or body parts, leading to significant distress and impairment. In an enlightening conversation with Kimberley, Matt Bannister shares his journey of overcoming this challenging condition, offering hope and practical advice to those grappling with similar issues. Matt's story begins in 2009, marked by a sense of depersonalization and dissociation, which he describes as an out-of-body experience and likened to looking at a stranger when viewing himself in the mirror. His narrative is a testament to the often-overlooked complexity of OCD, where symptoms can extend beyond the stereotypical cleanliness and orderliness. Kimberley's insightful probing into the nuances of Matt's experiences highlights the profound impact of Visual Staring OCD on daily life. The disorder manifested in Matt as an overwhelming need to maintain eye contact, initially with female colleagues, out of fear of being perceived as disrespectful. This compulsion expanded over time to include men and intensified to such a degree that Matt felt his mind couldn't function normally. The social implications of Visual Staring OCD are starkly evident in Matt's recount of workplace experiences. Misinterpretation of his behavior led to stigmatization and gossip, deeply affecting his mental well-being and leading to self-isolation. Matt's story is a poignant illustration of the societal misunderstandings surrounding OCD and its variants. Treatment and recovery form a significant part of the conversation. Matt emphasizes the role of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) in his healing process. However, he notes the initial challenges in applying these techniques, underscoring the necessity of a tailored approach to therapy. Kimberley and Matt delve into the power of community support in managing OCD. Matt's involvement with the IOCDF (International OCD Foundation) community and his interactions with others who have overcome OCD, like Chris Trondsen, provide him with valuable insights and strategies. He speaks passionately about the importance of self-compassion, a concept introduced to him by Katie O'Dunne, and how it transformed his approach to recovery. A critical aspect of Matt's journey is the realization and acceptance of his condition. His story underscores the importance of proper diagnosis and understanding of OCD's various manifestations, which can be as unique as the individuals experiencing them. Matt's narrative is not just about overcoming a mental health challenge; it's a story of empowerment and advocacy. His transition from a struggling individual to a professional peer support worker is inspiring. He is now dedicated to helping others navigate their paths to recovery, using his experiences and insights to offer hope and practical advice. In conclusion, Matt Bannister's journey through the complexities of Visual Staring OCD is a powerful testament to the resilience of the human spirit. His story offers valuable insights into the disorder, challenges misconceptions, and highlights the importance of tailored therapy, community support, and self-compassion in overcoming OCD. For anyone struggling with OCD, Matt's story is a beacon of hope and a reminder that recovery, though challenging, is within reach. Instagram - matt bannister27 Facebook - matthew.bannister.92 Facebook group - OCD Warrior Badass Tribe Email :matt3ban@hotmail.com Kimberley: Welcome back, everybody. Every now and then, there is a special person that comes in and supports me in this way that blows me away. And today we have Matt Bannister, who is one of those people. Thank you, Matt, for being here today. This is an honor on many fronts, so thank you for being here. Matthew: No, thank you for bringing me on, Kim. This is a huge honor. I'm so grateful to be on this. It's just amazing. Thank you so, so much. It's great to be here. Kimberley: Number one, you have been such a support to me in CBT School and all the things that I'm doing, and I've loved hearing your updates and so forth around that. But today, I really want you to come on and tell your story from start to end, whatever you want to share. Tell us about you and your recovery story. Matthew: Sure. I mean, I would like to start as well saying that your CBT School is amazing. It is so awesome. It's helped me big time in my recovery, so I recommend that to everyone. I'm an IOCDF grassroots advocate. I am super passionate about it. I love being involved with the community, connecting with the community. It's like a big family. I'm so honored to be a part of this amazing community. My recovery story and my journey started back in 2009, when—this is going to show how old I am right now—I remember talking on MSN. I remember I was talking; my mind went blank in a conversation, and I was like, “Ooh, that's weird. It's like my mind's gone blank.” But that's like a normal thing. I can just pass it off and then keep going forward. But the thing is with me. It didn't. It latched on with that. I didn't know what was going on with me. It was very frightening. I believe that was a start for me with depersonalization and dissociation. I just had no idea of what it was. Super scary. It was like I started to forget part of my social life and how to communicate with people. I really did start to dissociate a lot when I was getting nervous. And that went on for about three or four years, but it gradually faded naturally. Kimberley: So you had depersonalization and derealization, and if so, can you explain to listeners what the differences were and how you could tell the differences? Matthew: Yeah. I think maybe, if I'm right with this, with the depersonalization, it felt like I knew how it was, but I didn't at the same time. It was like when I was looking in a mirror. It was like looking at a stranger. That's how it felt. It just felt like I became a shell of myself. Again, I just didn't know what was happening. It was really, really scary. I think it made it worse. With my former friends at that time, we'd make fun of that, like, “Oh, come on, you're not used to yourself anymore. You're not as confident anymore. What's going on? You used to try and take the [03:19 inaudible] a lot with that.” With the dissociation, I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. For me, if I sat in a room and it was really hitting me hard, as if I were anxious, it would feel like I was floating around that room. I couldn't concentrate. It was very difficult to focus on things, especially if it was at work. It'd be very hard to do so. That came on and off. Kimberley: Yeah, it's such a scary feeling. I've had it a lot in my life too, and I get it. It makes you start to question reality, question even your mental health. It's such a scary experience, especially the first time you have it. I remember the first time I was actually with a client when it started. Matthew: Yeah, it is. Again, it is just a frightening experience. It felt like even when I was walking through places, it was just fog all the time. That's how it felt. I felt like someone had placed a curse on me. I really believe that with those feelings, and how else can I explain it? But that did eventually fade, luckily, in about, like I said, three to four years, just naturally on its own. When I had those sensations, I got used to that, so I didn't put as much emphasis on those situations. Then I carried on naturally through that. Then, well, with going through actually depersonalization, unfortunately, that's when my OCD did hit. For me, it was with, I believe, relationship OCD because I was with someone at the time. I was constantly always checking on them, seeing if they loved me. Like, am I boring you? Because I thought of depersonalization. I thought I wasn't being my full authentic self and that you didn't want to be within me anymore. I would constantly check my messages. If they didn't put enough kisses on the end of a message, I think, “Oh, they don't love me as much anymore. Oh no, I have to check.” All the time, even in phone calls, I always made sure to hear that my partner would say, “Oh, I love you back,” or “I love you.” Or as I thought, I did something wrong. Like they're going off me. I had a spiral, thinking this person was going to cheat on me. It went on and on and on and on with that. But eventually, again, the relationship did fade in a natural way. It wasn't because of the OCD; it was just how it went. And then, with relationship OCD, with that, I faded with that. A search with my friends didn't really affect me with that. Then what I can recall, what I have maybe experienced with OCD, I've had sexual orientation OCD. Again, I was questioning my sexuality. I'm heterosexual, and I was in another warehouse, a computer warehouse, and it was all males there. I was getting what I describe as intrusive thoughts of images of doing sexual acts or kissing and stuff like that. I'm thinking, “Why am I getting these thoughts? I know where my sexuality is.” There's nothing wrong, obviously, with being homosexual or queer. Nothing wrong with that at all. It's just like I said, that's how it fades with me. I mean, it could happen again with someone who's queer, and it could be getting heterosexual thoughts. They don't want that because they know they're comfortable with their sexuality. But OCD is trying to doubt that. But then again, for me, that did actually fade again after about five or six months, just on its own. And then, fast forward two years later is when the most severe theme of OCD I've ever had hit me hard like a ton of bricks. And that for me was Visual Tourettic OCD, known as Staring OCD, known as Ocular Tourettic OCD. And that was horrendous. The stigma I received with this theme was awful. I remembered the day when it hit me, when I was talking to a female colleague. Like we all do, we all look around the room and we try and think of something to say, but my eyes just landed on the chest, like just an innocent look. I'm like, “Oh my God, why did I do that? I don't want to disrespect this person in front of me. I treat her as an equal. I treat everyone the same way. I don't want to feel like she's being disrespected.” So I heavily maintained eye contact after that. Throughout that conversation, it was fine. It was normal, nothing different. But after that, it really latched onto me big time. The rumination was massive. It was like, you've got to make sure you're giving every single female colleague now eye contact. You have to do it because you know otherwise what stigma you could get. And that went on for months and years, and it progressed to men as well a couple of years later. It felt like my mind can't function anymore. I remember again I was sitting next to my friend, who was having a game on the PlayStation. And then I just looked at his lap, just for no reason, just looked at his lap, and he said, “Ooh, I feel cold and want to go and change.” I instantly thought, “Oh my God, is it because he thought I might have stared that I creeped him out?” And then it just seriously latched onto me big time. As we all know, with this as well, when we think of the pink elephant allergy, it's like when we don't think of the pink elephant, what do we do? And that's what it was very much like with this. I remember when it started to get really bad, my eyes would die and embarrass somebody part places. It was like the more anxious I felt about not wanting to do it, the more it happened, where me and my good friend, Carol Edwards, call it a tick with the eye movement. So like Tourette, let's say, when you get really nervous, I don't know if this is all true. When someone's really nervous, maybe they might laugh involuntarily, like from the Joker movie, or like someone swearing out loud. This is the same thing with eye movement. Every time I was talking to a colleague face-to-face to face, I was giving them eye contact, my mind would be saying to me, “Don't look there, don't look there, don't look there,” and unfortunately think it would happen. That tick would happen. It would land where I wouldn't want it to land. It was very embarrassing because eventually it did get noticed. I remember seeing female colleagues covering their hi vis tops, like across their arms. Men would cover their crotches. They would literally cross their legs very blatantly in front of me. Then I could start to hear gossip. This is when it got really bad, because I really heard the stigma from this. No one confronted me by the way of this face-to-face, but I could hear it crystal clear. They were calling me all sorts, like deviant or creep or a perv. “Have you seen his eyes? Have you seen him looking and does that weird things with his eyes? He checks everyone out.” It was really soul-destroying because my compulsion was to get away from everyone. I would literally hide across a room. Where no one else was around, I would hide in the cubicles because it was the only place where I wasn't triggered. It got bad again. It went to my family, my friends, everyone around me. It didn't happen with children, but it happened with every adult. It was horrendous. I reached out to therapy. Luckily, I did get in contact with a CBT therapist, but it was talk therapy. But it's better than nothing. I will absolutely take that. She was amazing. I can't credit my therapist enough. She was awesome. If this person, maybe this is like grace, you're amazing, so thank you for that. She was really there for me. It was someone I could really talk to, and it can help me and understand as best as she could. She did, I believe, further research into what I had. And then that's when I finally got diagnosed that I had OCD. I never knew this was OCD, and everything else made sense, like, “Oh, this is why I was going through all those things before. It all now makes concrete sense what I was going through.” Then I looked up the Facebook group called Peripheral Vision/Visual Tourettic OCD. That was a game-changer for me. I finally knew that I wasn't alone because, with this, you really think you're alone, and you are not. There are thousands of people with this, or even more. That was truly validating. I was like, “Thank God I'm not the only one.” But the problem is, I didn't really talk in that group at first because I thought if other people saw me writing in that group, it's going to really kill my reputation big time. That would be like the final nail in the coffin. Even though it was a private group, no one could do that. But I didn't still trust it that much at that time. I was doing ERP, and I thought great because I've researched ERP. I knew that it's effective. Obviously, it's the gold standard. But for me, unfortunately, I think I was doing it where I was white-knuckling through exposures. Also, when I was hearing at work, still going back to my most triggering place, ERP, unfortunately, wasn't working for me because I wasn't healing. It was like I was going through the trigger constantly. My mind was just so overwhelmed. I didn't have time to heal. I remember I eventually self-isolated in my room. I didn't go anywhere. I locked myself away because I thought I just couldn't cope anymore. It was a really dark moment. I remember crying. It was just like despair. I was like, “What's happening to me? Why is all this happening to me?” Later on, I did have the choice at work. I thought, I can either go through the stillest, hellacious process or I can choose to go on sick leave and give my chance to heal and recover. That's why I did. And that was the best decision I ever made. I recommend that to anyone who's going through OCD severely. You always have a choice. You always have a choice. Never pressure yourself or think you're weak or anything like that, because that's not the case. You are a warrior. When you're going through things like this, you are the most strongest person in the world. It takes a lot of courage to confront those demons every single day to never ever doubt yourself with that. You are a strong, amazing individual. When I did that, again, I could heal. It took me two weeks. Unfortunately, my therapy ended. I only had 10 sessions, but I had to wait another three months for further therapy in person, so I thought, “Oh, at least I do eventually get therapy in person. That's amazing.” And then the best thing happened to me. I found the IOCDF community. Everything changed. The IOCDF is amazing. The best community, in my opinion, the world for OCD. My god, I remember when I first went on Ethan's livestream with Community Conversations. I reached out to Ethan, and he sent me links for OCD-UK. I think OCD Action as well. That was really cool of him and great, and I super appreciate that, and you knew straight away because I remember watching this video with Jonathan Grayson, who is also an amazing guy and therapist, talking about this. I was like, again, this is all that I have. And then after that, I reached out to Chris Trondsen as the expert. What Chris said was so game-changing to me because he's gone through this as well and has overcome it. He's overcome so many severe themes of OCD. I'm like, “This guy is amazing. He is an absolute rock star. Literally like a true champion.” For someone to go through as much as he has and to be where he is today, I can't ask for any more inspirement from that. It's just incredible. He gave some advice as well in that livestream when we were talking because I reached out and said, how did you overcome this? He said, “With the staring OCD, well, I basically told myself, while I'm staring, well, I might as well stare anyway.” And that clicked with me because I'm thinking he's basically saying that he just didn't give it value anymore. I'm like, “That's what I've been doing all this time. I've given so much value, so much importance. That's why it keeps happening to me.” I'm like, “Okay, I can maybe try and work with this.” Then I started connecting with Katie O'Dunne, who is also amazing. She was the first person I actually did hear about self-compassion. I'm like, “Yes, why didn't I learn about this early in my life? Self-compassion is amazing. I need to know all about this.” It makes so much sense. Why'd I keep beating myself up when I treat a friend, like when I talked to myself about this? No, I wouldn't. I just watched Katie's streams and watched her videos and Instagram. It was just an eye-opener for me. I was like, “Wow, she's talking about, like, bring it on mindset as well with this.” When you're about to face the brave thing, just say, “Bring it on. Just bring on," like The Rock says. "Just bring it. I just love that. That's what I did. That's what I started doing. I connected as well with my friend, Carol Edwards, who is also a former therapist and is the author of many books. One of them was Address Staring OCD. If anyone's going through this as well, I really recommend that book. Carol is an amazing, amazing person. Such an intelligent woman. When I met Carol, it was like the first time in my life. I was like, “Wow, I'm actually talking to someone who's got the same theme as me, and a lot of other themes I've gone through, she has as well.” We just totally got each other. I was like, “Finally, I'm validated. I can talk to someone who gets it truly.” And that really helped, let's say, when I started to learn about value-based exposures. I remember, again, Katie, Elizabeth McIngvale, Ethan, and Chris. I was like, “Yeah, I mean, I'm going to do it that way,” because I just did ERP before I was white-knuckling. I never thought of doing it in a value-based way. So I thought, okay, well, what is OCD taking away that I enjoy most doing? That's what I did. I created a hierarchy, or like even in my mind. I thought, well, the cinema, restaurants, coffee shops, going to concerts, eventually going on holiday again, seeing my friends, family is most probably most important. I started doing baby steps. I remember as well, I asked Chris and Liz, how do I open up to this to my family? Because I've got to a point where I just can't hide behind a mask anymore. I need someone else to know who's really close to me. Chris gave me some amazing advice, and Liz, and they said that if you show documents, articles, videos about this, long as they have a great understanding of mental health and OCD, you should be okay. And that's what I did. They know I had OCD. I've told them I had OCD, but not the theme I had. When I showed them documents and videos, it was so nerve-racking, I won't lie. But it was the best thing I ever did because then, when they watched that, they came to me and said, “Why didn't you tell us about this before? I thought you wouldn't understand or grasp this.” I know OCD awareness in the UK is not the best, especially with this theme. But they said, “No, after watching that, we're on your team; we will support you. We are here for you. We will do exposures with you.” And they gave me a massive hug afterwards. I was like, “Oh my God, this is the best scenario for me ever,” because then I can really amplify my recovery. This is where it started really kicking on for me now. Everything I've learned, again, from those videos, watching with the streams from IOCDF, I've incorporated. Basically, when I was going to go to the cinema at first, I know that the cinema is basically darkness. When you walk through there, no one's really going to notice you. Yeah, they might see you in their peripheral vision, but they're going to be more like concentrating on that movie than me. That was my mindset. I was like, “Well, if I was like the other person and I didn't have VTO and the other person did, would I be more concentrated on them or the movie?” And for me, it would be obviously the movie. Why would I else? Unless they were doing something really vigorous or dancing in front of me, I'm not going to look. And that's my mindset. The deep anxiety was there, I will be honest. It was about 80 percent. But I had my value because I was going to watch a film that I really wanted to watch. I'm a big Marvel fan. It was Black Panther Wakanda, and I really enjoyed that. It was a long movie as well. I went with my friend. We got on very, very well. For me as well, with this trigger, I get triggered when people can move as well next to me. I'm very hyper-vigilant with this. That can include me with the peripheral as well. But even though my eyes say they died, it was, okay, instead of beating myself up, I can tell myself this is OCD. I know what this is. It doesn't define me. I'm going to enjoy watching this movie as much as I can and give myself that compassion to do so. After that moment, I was like, “Wow, even though I was still triggered, I enjoyed it. I wasn't just wanting to get out of there. I enjoyed being there.” And that was starting to be a turning point for me because then I went to places like KFC. I miss KFC. I love my chicken bucket. I won't lie with that. That was a big value. You got to love the chicken bucket folks. Oh, it was great. Well, I had my parents around me so that they know I was pretty anxious still. But I was there. I was enjoying my chicken again. I was like, “I miss this so much.” And then the best thing is, as far as I remember, when I left that restaurant, they said to me, “We're so proud of you.” And that helps so much because when you're hearing feedback like that, it just gives you a huge pat on the back. It's like, yeah, I've just done a big, scary thing. I could have been caught. I could have been ridiculed. I could have been made fun of. People may have gossiped about me, but I took that leap of faith because I knew it's better than keep isolating, where in my room, being in prison, not living a life. I deserve to live a life. I deserve to do that. I'm a human being. I deserve to be a part of human society. After that, my recovery started to progress. I went to my friend Carol to more coffee shops. We started talking about advocacy, powerful stuff, because when you have another reason on a why to recover, that's a huge one. When you can inspire and empower others to recover, it gives you so much more of a purpose to do it because you want to be like that role model, that champion for the people. It really gives you a great motive to keep going forward with that and that motivation. And then I went to restaurants with my family for the first time in years, instead of making excuses, instead of compulsion. People would still walk by me in my peripheral, but I had the mindset, like Kate said, “You know what? Just bring it on. Just bring it.” I went in there. I know I was still pretty anxious, and I sat on my phone, and I'm going to tell myself using mindfulness this time that I'm going to enjoy the smell of the food coming in. I'm going to enjoy the conversation with my family instead of thinking of, let's say, the worst-case scenario. The same with a waiter or waitress coming by. I'm just going to have my order. And again, yeah, my eyes die, they spit in my food—who knows? But I'm going to take that leap of faith because, again, it's worth it to do this. It is my why to get my life back. That's why I did it. Again, I enjoyed that meal, and I enjoyed talking to my family. It was probably the first time in years where I wasn't proper triggered. I was like, that was my aha moment right there. The first time in years where my eyes didn't die or anything. I just enjoyed being in a normal situation. It was so great to feel that. So validating. Kimberley: So the more triggered you were, the harder it was to not stare? Is that how it was? Matthew: Yes. The more triggered I was going down that rabbit hole, the more, let's say, it would happen because my eyes would die, like up and down. It would be quite frantic, up and down, up and down. Everyone's not the same. Everyone's different with this. But that's what mine would be like. That's why I would call it a tick in that sense. But when we feel calm, obviously, and the rumination is not there, or let's say, the trigger, then it's got no reason to happen or be very rare when it does. It's like retraining. I learned to retrain my mind in that sense to incorporate that into doing these exposures. Again, that's what was great about opening up to my family. I could practice that at home because then, when I'm sitting with my family, I'd still be triggered to a degree, but they know what I have. They're not going to judge me or reject me, or anything like that. So my brain healed naturally. The more I sat next to my family, I could bring that with, say, the public again and not feel that trigger. I could feel at ease instead of feeling constantly on edge. Again, going to coffee shops late, looking around the room, like you say so amazingly, Kim, using your five senses. I did that, like looking around, looking at billboards, smelling the coffee again, enjoying the taste of it, enjoying the conversation, enjoying the surroundings where I am instead of focusing on the prime fear. And that's what really helped brought me back to the present. Being in the here and the now. And that was monumental. Such a huge tool, and I recommend that to everyone. Mindfulness is very, very powerful for doing, let's say, your exposures and to maintain recovery. It's just a game-changer. I can't recommend that enough. One of my biggest milestones with recovery when I hit it, the first time again in years, I went to a live rock concert full of 10,000 people. There would be no way a year prior that would I go. Kimberley: What rock concert? I have to know. Matthew: Oh, I went to Hollywood Vampires. Kimberley: Oh, how wonderful! That must have been such an efficient, like, it felt like you crossed a massive marathon finish line to get that thing done. Matthew: Oh, yeah, it was. It was huge to see, like I say, Alice Cooper, Johnny Depp, and I think—I can't remember this—Joe Perry from Aerosmith. I can't remember the drummer's name, I apologize, but it was great. You know what? I rocked out. I told myself, “I've come this far in my journey, I'm going to rock out. I'm going to enjoy myself. I don't care, let's say, where my eyes may go, and that's telling OCD, though. I'm just going to be there in the moment and enjoy rocking out.” And that's exactly what I did. I rocked out big time. I remember even the lead singer from the prior band pointing at me and waving. I would have been so triggered by that before, but now we're back in the game, the rock on sign, and it was great. Kimberley: There's so much joy in that too, right? You were so willing to be triggered that you rocked out. That's how willing we were to do that work. It's so cool, this story. Matthew: Yeah. The funny part is, well, the guy next to me actually spilled beer all over himself. That would have been so triggering against me before, like somebody's embarrassing body part places. Whereas this time I just laughed it off and I had a joke with him, and he got the beer. It was like a normal situation—nothing weird or anything. His wife, I remember looking at my peripheral, was just cross-legged. But hey, that's just a relaxing position like anyone else would do. That's what I told myself. It's not because of me thinking, “Oh, he's a weirdo or a creep.” It's because she's just being relaxed and comfortable. That's just retraining my mind out, and again, refocusing back to the concert and again, rocking out to Alice Cooper, which was amazing. I really enjoyed it. I just thought it's just incredible from where I was a year ago without seeing-- got to a point where I set myself, I heard the worst stigma imaginable to go to the other aspect, the whole end of the other tunnel, the light of the tunnel, and enjoy myself and being free. I love what Elizabeth McIngvale says about that, freedom over function. And that's exactly at that point where that's where I was. I'm very lucky to this day. That's why I've maintained it. Sometimes I still do get triggered, but it's okay because I know it's OCD. We all know there's no cure, but we can keep it in remission. We can live a happy life regardless. We just use the tools that we've learned. Again, for me, values-based exposure in that way was game-changing. Self-compassion was game-changing. I forgot to mention my intrusive thoughts with sexual images as well with this, which was very stressing. But when I had those images more and more, it's basically what I learned again from Katie. I was like, “Yeah, you know what? Bring it on. Bring it on. Let's see. Turn it up. Turn it up. Crank it up.” Eventually, the images stopped because I wasn't giving fear factor to it. I was going to put the opposite of basically giving it the talk-to-the-hand analogy, and that worked so well. I see OCD as well from Harry Potter. I see OCD as the boggart, where when you come from the boggart, it's going to come to your most scariest thing. But you have that power of choice right there and then to cast the spell and say ridiculous, as it says in the Harry Potter movies, and it will transform into something silly or something that you can transform yourself with compassion and love. An OCD can't touch you with that. It can't. It becomes powerless. That's why I love that scene from that film. Patrick McGrath says it so well with the Pennywise analogy. The more fear we feed the beast or the monster, the more stronger it becomes. But when we learn to give ourselves self-compassion and love and, again, using mindfulness and value and knowing who we authentically are, truly, it can do nothing. It becomes powerless. It can stay in the backseat, it might try and rear its ugly head again, but you have the more and the power in the world to bring it back, and you can be firmly in that driver's wheel. Kimberley: So good. How long did it take you, this process? Was it a short period of time, or did these value-based exposures take some time? Matthew: Yeah, at first, it took some time to master it, if that makes sense. Again, I was going to start going to more coffee shops with my friend Carol or my family. It did take time. I was still feeling it to a degree, but probably about after a month, it started to really click. And then overall, it took me about-- I started really doing this in December, January time. I went to that concert in July. So about, yeah, six, seven months. Kimberley: Amazing. Were there any stages where there were blips in the road, bumps on the road? What were they like for you? Matthew: Yeah. I mean, my eyes did that sometimes. Also, like I said, when I started to do exposures, where I'd walk by myself around town places, it could be very nerve-wracking. I could think I'm walking behind someone that all the might think I'm a stalker and things like that because of the staring. That was hard. Again, I gave myself the compassion and told myself that it's just OCD. It doesn't define who I am. I know what this monster is, even though it's trying its very best to put me down that rabbit hole. Yeah, that person might turn around and say something, or even look. I have the choice again to smile back, or I can even wave at them if I wanted to do so. It just shows that you really have all the power or choice to just throw some back into OCD space every single time. Self-compassion was a huge thing that helped smooth out those bumps. Same with mindfulness. When I was getting dissociated, even when I was still getting dissociated, getting really triggered, I would use the mindfulness approach. For example, when I was sitting in pubs, and that was a value to me as well, sometimes that would happen. But I would then use the tools of mindfulness. And that really, really helped collect myself being present back in the here and the now and enjoying what's in front of me, like having a beer, having something to eat, talking to my friend, instead of thinking like, are they going to see me staring at them weirdly? Or my eyes met out someone, and I don't know, the waitress might kick me out or something like that. Instead of thinking all those thoughts, I just stay present. The thing is with this as well, it's like when you walk down places, people don't even look at you really anyway. They just go about their business, like we all do. It's just remembering that and keeping that mindfulness aspect. You can look around where you are, like buildings, trees, the ocean, whatever you like, and you can take that in and relearn. Feel the wind around you. If it's an ice wind, obviously, that's freezing right now. The smells—anything, anything if it's a nice smell, or even if it's a bad smell. Anything that use your senses that can just bring you back and feel again that peace, something you enjoy, surround yourself with. Again, when I was seeing my friend Carol, the town I went to called Beverley, it's a beautiful town, very English. It is just a nice place. That's what I was doing—looking at the scenery around where I was instead of focusing on my worst worries. Kimberley: This is so cool. It's all the tools that we talk about, right? And you've put them into practice. Maybe you can tell me if I'm wrong or right about this, but it sounds like you were all in with these skills too. You weren't messing around. You were ready for recovery. Is that true? Or did you have times where you weren't all in? Matthew: Yeah, there were times where I wasn't all in. I suppose when I was-- I also like to ask yourself with me if I feel unworthy. That is still, I know it's different to staring OCD and I'm still trying to tackle that sometimes, and that can be difficult. But again, I use the same tools. But with, like I say, doing exposures with VTO, I would say I was all in because I know that if I didn't, it's going to be hard to reclaim my life back. I have a choice to act and use the tools that I know that's going to work because I've seen Chris do it. It's like, “Well, I can do it. I've seen Carol do it. That means I can do it. So I'm going to do it.” That's what gave me the belief and inspiration to go all in. Because again, reach out to the community with the support. If it was a hard time, I'd reach out. The community are massive. The connection they have and, again, the empowerment and the belief they can give you and the encouragement is just, oh, it's amazing. It's game-changing. It can just light you up straight off the bar when you need it most, and then you can go out and face that big scary thing. You can do it. You can overcome it because other people have. That means you can do it. It's absolutely possible. Having that warrior mindset, as some of my groups—the warrior badass mindset—like to call it, you absolutely go in there with that and you can do it. You can absolutely do it. Kimberley: I know you've shared with me a little bit privately, but can you tell us now what your big agenda is, what your big goal is right now, and the work you're doing? Because it's really exciting. Matthew: Sure, I'd be glad to do it. I am now officially a professional peer support worker. If anyone would love to reach out to me, I am here. It's my biggest passion. I love it. It's like the ultimate reward in a career. When you can help someone in their journey and recovery and even empower each other, inspire, motivate, and help with strategies that's worked for you, you can pass on them tools to someone else who really needs it or is still going through the process where it's quite sticky with OCD. There's nothing more rewarding than that. Because for me, when I was at my most severe, when I was in my darkest, darkest place, it felt like a void. I felt like just walking through a blizzard of nothing. Having someone there to speak to who gets it, who truly gets it, and who can be really authentically there for you to really say, “You can do this. I'm going to do it with you. Let's do it. Like really, let's do it. Bring it on, let's do it. Let's kick this thing's butt,” it's huge. You really lay the smackdown on OCD. It's just massive. For me, if I had that when I was going through it, again, I had a great therapist, but if I had a peer support worker, if I was aware that they were around—I wasn't, unfortunately, at that time—I probably would have reached out because it's a huge tool. It's amazing. Even if you're just to connect with someone in general and just have a talk, it can make all the difference. One conversation, I believe, can change everything in that moment of what that person's darkness may be. So I'm super, super excited with that. Kimberley: Very, very exciting. Of course, at the end, I'll have everyone and you give us links on how to get to you. Just so people know what peer support counseling is or peer support is, do they need to have a therapist? Who's on the team? What is it that they need in order to start peer support? Matthew: Yeah. I mean, you could have a therapist. I mean, I know peer support workers do work with therapists. I know Chrissie Hodges. I've listened to her podcast, and she does that. I think it may be the same with Shannon Shy as well. I'm not too sure. I think as well to the person, what they're going through, if they would want to at first reach out to a peer support worker that they know truly understands them, that can be great. That peer support like myself can then help them find a therapist. That's going to really help them with their theme—or not just their theme—an OCD specialist who gets it, who's going to give them the right treatment. That can be really, really beneficial. Kimberley: I know that we've worked with a lot of peer support, well, some peer support providers, and it was really good because for the people, let's say, we have set them up with exposures and they're struggling to do it in their own time, the peer support counselor has been so helpful at encouraging them and reminding them of the tools that they had already learned in therapy. I think you're right. I think knowing you're not alone and knowing someone's done it, and I think it's also just nice to have someone who's just a few steps ahead of you, that can be very, very inspiring for somebody. Matthew: Absolutely. Again, having a peer support work with a therapist, that's amazing. Because again, for recovery, that's just going to amplify massively. It's like having an infinite gauntlet on your hand against OCD. It's got no chance down the long run. It's incredibly powerful. I love that. Again, like you said, Kim, it's like when someone, let's say, they know that has reached that mountain top of recovery, and that they look at that and thinking, “Well, I want to do the same thing. I know it would be great to connect with that person,” even learn from them, or again, just to have that connection can make a huge, huge difference to know that they can open up to other people. Again, for me, it's climbing up that other mountain top with someone else from the start, but to know I've got the experience, I get to climb that mountain top with them. Kimberley: Yeah, so powerful. Before we finish up, will you tell us where people can get ahold of you if they want to learn more? And also, if there's anything that you feel we could have covered today that we didn't, like a main last point that you want to make. Matthew: Sure. People can reach out to me, and I'm going to try and remember my tags. My Instagram tag is matt_bannister27. I think my Facebook is Matthew.Bannister.92, if you just type in Matthew Bannister. It would be in the show notes as well. You can reach out to me on there. I am at the moment going to create a website, so I will fill more onto that later as well. My email is matt3ban@hotmail.com, which is probably the best way to reach out to me. Kimberley: Amazing. Anything else you want to mention before we finish up? Matthew: Everyone listening, no matter what darkness you're going through, no matter what OCD is putting in your way, you can overcome it. You can do it. As you say brilliantly as well, Kim, it's a beautiful day to do hard things. You can make that as every day because you can do the hard things. You can do it. You can overcome it, even though sometimes you might think it's impossible or that it's too much. You can do it, you can get there. Even if it takes baby steps, you're allowed to give yourself that compassion and grace to do so. It doesn't matter how long it takes. Like Keith Smith says so well: “It's not a sprint; it's a marathon.” When you reach that finish line, and you will, it's the most premium feeling. You will all get there. You will all absolutely get there if you're going through it. Oh, Kim, I think you're on mute. Kimberley: I'm sorry. Thank you so much for being on. For the listeners, I actually haven't heard your story until right now too, so this is exciting for me to hear it, and I feel so inspired. I love the most that you've taken little bits of advice and encouragement from some of the people I love the most on this planet. Ethan Smith, Liz McIngvale, Chris Trondsen, Katie O'Dunne. These are people who I learn from because they're doing the work as well. I love that you've somehow bottled all of their wisdom in one thing and brought it today, which I'm just so grateful for. Thank you so much. Matthew: You're welcome. Again, they're just heroes to me, and yourself as well. Thank you for everything you do as well for the community. You're amazing. Kimberley: Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Matthew: Anytime.

Matthew Bonig, Chief Cloud Architect at Defiance Digital, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experiences in CDK, why developers can't be solely reliant on AI or coding tools to fill in the blanks, and his biggest grievances with AWS. Matthew gives an in-depth look at how and why CDK has been so influential for him, as well as the positive work that Defiance Digital is doing as a managed service provider. Corey and Matthew debate the need for AWS to focus on innovating instead of simply surviving off its existing customer base.About MatthewChief Cloud Architect at Defiance Digital. AWS DevTools Hero, co-author of The CDK Book, author of the Advanced CDK Course. All things CDK and Star Trek.Links Referenced:CDK Book: https://www.thecdkbook.com/cdk.dev: https://cdk.devTwitter: https://twitter.com/mattbonigLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbonig/Personal website: https://matthewbonig.comduckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.comTranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. And I'm back with my first recording that was conducted post-re:Invent and all of its attendant glory and nonsense; we might talk a little bit about what happened at the show. But my guest today is the Chief Cloud Architect at Defiance Digital, Matthew Bonig. Matthew, thank you for joining me.Matthew: Thank you, Corey. Thanks for having me today.Corey: So, you are deep into the CDK. You're one of the AWS Dev Tools Heros, and you're the co-author of the CDK Book, you've done a lot, really. You have a course now for Advanced CDK work. Honestly, at this point, it starts to feel like when I say the CDK is a cult, you're one of the cult leaders, or at least very high up in the cult.Matthew: [laugh] Yes, it was something that I discovered—Corey: Your robe has a fringe on it.Matthew: Yeah, yeah. I discovered this at re:Invent, and it kind of hit me a little surprised that I got called out by a couple people by being the CDK guy. And I didn't realize that I'd hit that status yet, so I got to get myself a hat, and a cloak, and maybe some fun stuff to wear.Corey: For me, what I saw on the—it was in the run-up to re:Invent, but the big CDK sized announcement was the fact that the new version of Amplify now is much closer tied to the CDK than it was in previous incarnations, which is great. It sort of solves the problem, how do I build a thing through a variety of different tools? Great, and how do I manage that thing programmatically? It seems if, according to what it says on the tin, that it narrows that gap. Of course, here in reality, I haven't had time to pick anything like that up, and I won't for months, just because so much comes out all at the same time. What happened in the CDK world? What did I miss? What's exciting?Matthew: Well, you know, the CDK world has been, I've said, fairly mature for a while now. You know, fundamentally the way the CDK works and the functionality within it hasn't changed drastically. Even when 2.0 came out a couple of years ago, there wasn't a drastic fundamental change in the way that the API worked. Really, the efforts that we've been seeing for the last year or so, and especially the last few months, is trying to button up some functionality, hit some of those edge cases have been rough for some users, and ultimately just continue to fill out things like L2 constructs and maybe try to build out some L3s.I think what they're doing with Amplify is a good sign that they are trying to, sort of, reach across the aisle and work with other frameworks and work with other systems within AWS to make the experience better, shows their commitment to the CDK of making it really the first class citizen for doing IaC work in AWS.Corey: I think that that is a—that's a long road, and it's also a lot of work under the hood that's not easily appreciated. You've remarked at one point that my talk at the CDK Community Day was illuminating, if nothing else, if for no other reason than I dressed up as a legitimate actual cultist and a robe to give the talk—Matthew: Yeah. Loved it.Corey: Because I have deep-seated emotional problems. But it was fun. It talked a bit about my journey with it, where originally I viewed it as, more or less, this thing that was not for me. And a large part of that because I come from a world of sysadmin ops types, where, “I don't really know how to code,” was sort of my approach to this. Because I was reaff—I had that reaffirmed every time I talked to a developer. Like, “You call this a bash script? It's terrible.” And sure, but it worked, and it tied into a different knowledge set.Then, when I encountered the CDK for the first time, I tried to use it in Python, which at the time was not really well-supported and led to unfortunate outcomes—I do not know if that's still the case—what got me into it, in seriousness, was when I tried it a few months later with TypeScript and that started to work a little bit more clearly, with the caveat that I did not know JavaScript, I did not know TypeScript, I had to learn it as I went in service to the CDK. And it works really well insofar as it scratched an itch that I had. There's a whole class of problems that I don't have to deal with, which include getting someone who isn't me involved in some of that codebase, or working in environments where you have either a monorepo or a crap ton of tiny repos scattered everywhere and collaborating with other people. I cannot speak authoritatively to any of that. I will say it's incredibly annoying when I'm trying to update something written in the CDK, and then I have touched it in a year-and-a-half, and the first thing I have to do is upgrade a whole a bunch of dependencies, clear half a day just to get the warnings to clear before I can go ahead and deploy the things, let alone implement the tiny change I'm logging into the thing to fix.Matthew: Oh, yeah, yes. Yeah, the dependency updates are probably one of the most infuriating things about any Node.js system, and I don't think that I've ever run across any application project framework, anything in which doing dependency upgrades wasn't a nightmare. And I think it's because the Node.js community, more so than I've seen any other, doesn't care about semantic versioning. And unfortunately, the CDK doesn't technically care about semantic versioning, either, which makes it very tricky to do upgrades properly.Corey: There also seems to be the additional problem layered on top, which is all of the various documentation sources that I stumble upon, the official documentation, not terrific at giving real-world use case. It feels like it's trying to read the dictionary to learn how English works, not really its purpose. So, I find a bunch of blog posts, and all of them tend to approach this ecosystem slightly differently. One talks about using NPM. Another talks about Yarn.If you're doing anything that involves a web app, as seems to be increasingly common, some will say, “Oh, use WEBrick,” others will recommend using Vite. There's the whole JavaScript framework wars, and the only unifying best practice seems to be, “Oh, there's another way to do it that you should be using instead of the way you currently are on.” And if you listen to that, you wind up in hell.Matthew: Oh, horribly so. Yeah, the split in the ecosystem between NPM and Yarn, I think, has been incredibly detrimental to the overall comfort level in Node.js development. You know, I was an NPM guy for many, many years, and then actually, the CDK got me more using Yarn, simply because Yarn handles cross-library dependency resolution a bit different from NPM. And I just ran into fewer errors and fewer problems if I use Yarn along the way.But NPM then came a long way since then. Now, there's also a PNPM, which is good if you're using monorepos. But then if you're going to be using monorepos, there's another 15 tools out there that you can use for those sorts of things. And ultimately, I think it's going to be what is the thing that causes you the least amount of problems when dealing with them. And every single dependency issue that I've ever run into when upgrading any project, whether it be a web application, a back-end API, or the CDK, it's always unique enough that there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to solving those problems.Corey: The most recent experience I had with the CDK—since you know, you're basically Mr. CDK at this point, whether you want to be or not, and this is what I do, instead of filing issues anywhere or asking for help, I drag people onto this show, and then basically assault them with my weird use cases—I'm in the process of building something out in the service of shitposting, because that is my nature, and I decided, oh, there's a new thing called the Dynamo table v2—Matthew: Yes.Corey: Which is great. I looked into it. The big difference is that it addresses it from the beginning as a global table, so you have optionality. Cool. Trying to migrate something that is existing from a Dynamo table to a Dynamo v2 table started throwing CloudFormation issues, so my answer was—this was pre-production—just tear down the stack and rebuild it. That feels like that would be a problem if this had been something that was actually full of data at this point.Matthew: There's a couple of ways that you could maybe go about it. Now, this is a very special case that you mentioned because you're talking about fundamentally changing the CloudFormation resource that you are creating, so of course, the CDK being an abstraction layer over top of CloudFormation and the Dynamo table v2 using the global table resource rather than just the table resource. If you had a case where you have to do that migration—and I've actually got a client right now who's very much looking to do that—the process would probably be to orphan the existing table so that you can retain the data and then using an import routine with CloudFormation to bring that in under the new resource. I haven't tried it yet—Corey: In this case, the table was empty, so it was easy enough to just destroy and then recreate, but it meant that I also had to tear down and recreate everything else in the stack as well, including CloudFront distributions, ACM certificates, so it took 20 minutes.Matthew: Yes. And that is one of the reasons why I often will stick any sort of stateful resource into their own stack so that if I have to go through an operation like this, I'm know that I'm not going to be modifying things that are very painful to drop and recreate, like, CloudFront distributions, which can take a half an hour or more to re-initialize.Corey: Yeah. So, that was fun. The problem got sorted out, but it was still a bit challenging. I feel like at some level, the CDK is hobbled by the fact that under the hood, it really just is just CloudFormation once all is said and done, and CloudFormation has never been the speediest thing. I didn't understand that until I started playing with Terraform and I saw how much more quickly it could provision things just by calling the service APIs directly. It sort of raises the question of what the hell the CloudFormation service is doing when it takes five times longer to do effectively the same thing.Matthew: Yeah, and the big thing that I appreciate about Terraform versus CloudFormation—speed being kind of the big win—is the fact that Terraform doesn't obfuscate or hide state from you. If you absolutely need to, you can go in and change that state that relates your Terraform definitions to the back-end resources. You can't do that with CloudFormation. So CloudFormation, did release few years ago, that import routine, and that was pretty good—not great, but pretty good; it's getting better all the time—whereas this was a complete and unneeded feature with Terraform because if it came down to the point where you already had a resource, and you just want to tie it to your IaC, you just edit a state file. And they've got their import routines and tie-in routines as well, but having that underlying state exposed was a big advantage, in my mind, to Terraform that I missed going to CloudFormation, and still to this day frustrates me that I can't do that underlying state change.Corey: It becomes painful and challenging, for better or worse.Matthew: Yep.Corey: But yeah, that was what I ran into. Things have improved, though. When I google various topics, I find that the v2 documentation comes up instead of the v1. That was maddening for a little while. I find that there are still things that annoy me, but they become less all the time, partially because I feel like I'm getting better at knowing how to search for them, and also because I think I'm becoming broken in the right ways that the CDK tends to expect.Matthew: Oh, like how?Corey: Oh, easy example here: I was recently trying to get something set up and running, and I don't know why this is the case, I don't know if it holds true and other programming languages, but I'm getting more used to the fact that there are two files in TypeScript-land that run a project. One is generally small and in a side directory that no one cares about, I think it's in a lib or the bin subdirectory. I don't remember which because I don't care. And then there are things you have to do within the other equivalent that basically reference each other. And I've gotten better at understanding that those aren't one file, for example. Though they seem to sure be a lot in all the demos, but it's not how the init process, when you're starting something new, spins up.Matthew: Yeah, this is the hell of TypeScript, the fact that Node.js, as a runtime, cannot process TypeScript files, so you always have to pass them through a compiler. This is actually one of the things that I like about using Projen for all of my projects instead of using CDK init to start them is that those baseline configurations handle the TypeScript nature of the runtime—or I should say, the anti-TypeScript nature of the runtime a little bit better, and you run into fewer problems. You never have to worry about necessarily doing build routines or other things because they actually use the ts-node runtime to handle your CDK files instead of the node runtime. And I think that's a big benefit in terms of the developer experience. It just makes it so I generally never have to care about those JavaScript files that get compiled from TypeScript. In the, you know, two years or so I've been using Projen, I never have to worry about a build routine to turn that into JavaScript. And that makes the developer experience significantly better.Corey: Yeah, I still miss an awful lot of things that I feel like I should be understanding. I've never touched Projen, for example. It's on my backlog of things to look into.Matthew: Highly recommend it.Corey: Yeah, I also am still in that area of… my TypeScript knowledge has not yet gotten to a point where I see the value of it. It feels like I've spent far more time fighting with the arbitrary restrictions that are TypeScript than it has saved me from typing errors in anything that I've built. I believe it has to come back around at some point of familiarity with the language, but I'm not there yet.Matthew: Got you. So, Python developer before this?Corey: Ish. Mostly brute force and enthusiasm, but yeah, Python.Matthew: Python, and I think you said bash scripting and other things that have no inherent typing built into it.Corey: Right.Matthew: Yeah, that is a problem, I think… that I thankfully avoided. I was an application developer for many years. My background and my experience has always been around strongly typed languages, so when it came to adopting the CDK, everything felt very natural to me. But as I've worked with people over the years, both internally at Defiance as well as people in the community that don't have a background in that, I've been exposed to how problematic TypeScript as a language truly can be for someone who has never had this experience of, I've got this thing and it has a well-defined shape to it, and if I don't respect that, then I'm going to bang my head against to these weird errors that are hard to comprehend and hard to grok way more than it feels like I'm getting value from it.Corey: There's also a lack of understanding around how to structure projects, in my case, where all right, I have a front-end and I have a back-end. Is this all within the context of the CDK project? And this, of course, also presupposes that everything I'm doing is effectively greenfield, in which case, great, do I use the front-end wizard tutorial thing that I'm following, and how does that integrate when I'm using the CDK to deploy it somewhere, and so on and so forth. It's stuff that makes sense once you have angry and loud enough opinions, but I don't yet.Matthew: Yeah, so the key thing that I tell people about project structure—because it does often come up a lot—is that ultimately, the CDK itself doesn't really care how you structure things. So, how you structure, where you put certain files, how you organize them, is your personal preference. Now, there are some exceptions to that. When it comes to things like Lambda functions that you're building or Docker files, there are probably some better practices you can go through, but it's actually more dependent on those systems rather than the CDK directly itself. So I go through, in the Advanced CDK course, you know, my basic starting directory structure for everything, which is stacks, constructs, apps, and stages all go into their own specific directories.But then once those directories start growing—because I've added more stacks, more constructs, and things—once I get to around five to maybe seven files in a directory, then I look at them and go, “Okay, how can I group these together?” I create subdirectories, I move those files around. My development tool of choice, which is WebStorm—JetBrains's long-running tool—handles the moving of those files for me, so all of my imports, all of my references automatically get updated accordingly, which is really nice, and I can refactor things as much as I want to without too much of a problem. So, as a project grows over time, my directory structure can change to make sure that it is readable, well organized, and understandable, and it's never been too much of a problem.Corey: Yeah, it's one of those things that does take some getting used to. It helps, I think, having a mentor of sorts to take you under their wing and explain these things to you, but that's a hard thing to scale as well. So, in the absence of that we wind up defaulting to oh, whatever the most recent blog post we read is.Matthew: Yeah. Yeah, and I think one of the truest, I think, and truthful complaints I've heard about the CDK and why it can be fundamentally very difficult is that it has no guardrails. It is a general-purpose languages, and general purpose languages don't have guardrails. They don't want to be in the way of you building whatever you need to build.But when it comes to an Infrastructure as Code project, which is inherently very different from an API or a website or other, sort of, more typical programming projects, having guardrail—or not having guardrails is a bad thing, and it can really lead you down some bad paths. I remember working with a client this last year who had leveraged context instead of properties on classes to hand configuration value down through code, down through stacks and constructs and things like that. And it worked. It functionally got them what they needed, up until a point, and then all of sudden, they were like, “Well, now we want to do X with the CDK, and we simply cannot because we've now painted ourselves into a corner.” And that's the downside of not having these good guard rails.And I think that early, they needed to do this early on. When the CDK was initially released, and it got popular back around the 0.4, 0.5 timeframe—I think I picked it up right around 0.4, too—when it officially hit a 1.0 release, there should have been a better set of guidelines and best practices published. You can go to the documents and see them, and they have been published, but it really didn't go far enough to really explain how and why you had to take the steps to make sure you didn't screw yourself six months later.Corey: It's sort of those one-way doors you don't realize you're passing through when you first start building something. And I find, especially when you follow my development approach of more or less used to be copying and pasting for various places, now it's copying and pasting from one place which is Chat-Gippity-4, then—although I've seen increasingly GitHub's Copilot has been great at this and Code Whisperer, in my experience, has not yet been worth the energy it takes to really go diving into it. Your mileage may of course vary on that. But I found it was not making materially better or suggestions on CDK stuff then Copilot was.Matthew: Yeah, I haven't tried Code Whisperer outside of the shell. I've been using Copilot for the last year and absolutely adore it. I think it has completely changed the way that I felt about coding. I saw writing code for the last couple of years as being very tedious and very boring in terms of there weren't interesting problems to solve, and Copilot, as I've seen it, is autocomplete on steroids. So, it doesn't keep me from having to solve the interesting problems; it just keeps me from having to type out the boring solutions, and it's the thing that I love about it.Now, hopefully, Code Whisperer continues to get better over time. I'm hoping all of Amazon's GenAI products continue to get better over time and I can maybe ditch a subscription to Copilot, but for now, Copilot is still my thing. And it's producing good enough results for me. Thankfully because I've been working with it for four years now, I don't rely on it to answer my questions about how to use constructs. I go back to the docs for those. If I need to.Corey: It occurs to me that I can talk about this now because this episode will not air until after this has become generally available, but what's really spanked it from my perspective has been Google's Duet. And the key defining difference is, as I'm in one of these files—in many cases, I'm doing something with React these days due to an escalating series of weird choices—and—Matthew: My apologies, by the way. My condolences, I should say.Corey: Well, yeah. Well, things like Copilot Chat are great when they say, “Oh yeah, assuming that you're handling the state this way in your component, now…” What I love about Duet is it goes, and it actually checks, which is awesome. And it has contextual awareness of the entire project, not just the three lines that I'm talking about, or the file that I'm looking at this moment. It goes ahead and does the intelligent thing of looking at some of these things. It still has some problems where it's confidently wrong about things that really shouldn't be, but okay, early days.Matthew: Sure. Yeah, I'll need to check that out a little bit more because I still, to this day, despise working with React. It is still my framework of choice because the ecosystem is so good around it. And so, established that I know that whatever problem I have, I'll find 14 blogs, and maybe one of them is the answer that I want, versus any other framework where it still feels so very new and so very immature that I will probably beat my head more than I want to. Web development now is a hobby, not a job, so I don't want to bang my head against a hobby project.Corey: I tend to view, on some level, that these AIs coding assistants are good enough to get me almost anywhere I need to go, to the point where a beginner or enthusiastic amateur will be able to get sorted out. And for a lot of what I'm building, that's all I really need. I don't need this to be something that will withstand the rigors of production at a bank, for example. One challenge I have seen with all these things is there's a delay in something being released and their training data growing to understand those things. Very often it'll wind up giving me recommendations for—I forget the name of it, but there was a state manager in React that the first thing you saw when you installed it was, “This has been deprecated. This is the new replacement.” And if you explicitly ask about the replacement, it does the right thing, but it just cheerfully goes ahead and tells you to use ancient stuff or apply poor security practices or the rest.Matthew: Yeah, that's very scary to me, to be honest because I think these AI development tools—for me, it's revitalized my interest in doing development, but where I get really, really scared is where they become a dependency in writing the right code. And every time I ever use Copilot to fill out stuff, I'm always double-checking, and I'm always making sure that this is right or that is right. And what I worry about is those developers who are maybe still learning some things, or are having to write in-line SQL on to their back-end and let Copilot, or Code Whisperer, or whatever tool they pick fill this stuff out, and that answer is based on a solution that works for a 10,000 record database, but fails horribly on a 100 million record database. And now all of a sudden, and you've got this problem that is just festering in through a dev environment, in through a QA environment, and even maybe into a prod environment, and you don't find out that failure until six months later, when some database table runs past its magical limit and now all of sudden, you've got these queries that are failing, they're crashing databases, they're running into problems, and this developer that didn't really know what they built in the first place is now being asked, “Why doesn't your code work,” and they just sort of have to go, “Maybe ChatGPT can tell me why my code doesn't work.” And that's the scariest part of me to these things is that they're a little bit too good at answering difficult questions with a simple answer. There is no, “It depends,” with these answers, and there needs to be for a lot of what we do in complex systems that, for example, in the AWS world, we're expected to build complex systems, and ChatGPT and these other tools are bad at that.Corey: We're required to build complex systems, and, on some level, I would put that onus on Amazon in many respects. I mean, the challenge I keep smacking into is that they're building—they're giving you a bunch of components and expecting you to assemble them all yourself to achieve even relatively simple things. It increasingly feels like this is the direction that they want customers to go in because they're bad at moving up the stack and develop—delivering integrated solutions themselves.Matthew: Well, so I would wonder, would you consider a relatively simple system, then?Corey: Okay, one of the things I like to do is go out in the evenings, and sometimes with a friend, I'll have a few too many beers. And then I'll come up with an idea for I want to redirect this random domain that I want to buy to someone else's website. The end. Now, if you go with Namecheap, or GoDaddy, or one of these various things, you can set that up in their mobile app with a couple of clicks and a payment, and you're done. With AWS, you have a minimum of six different services you need to work with, many of which do not support anything on a mobile basis and don't talk to one another relatively well. I built a state machine out of step functions that will do a lot of it for me, but it's an example of having to touch so many different things just for a relatively straightforward solution space that is a common problem. And that's a small example, but you see it across the board.Matthew: Yeah, yeah. I was expecting you to come up with a little bit of a different answer for what a simple system is, for example, a website. Everyone likes to say, “Oh, a static website with just raw HTML. That's a simple”—Corey: No, that's hard as hell because the devil is in the details, and it slices you to ribbons whenever you go down that path.Matthew: Exactly.Corey: No, I'm talking things that a human being would do without needing to be an expert in getting that many different AWS services to talk to one another.Matthew: Yeah, and I agree that AWS traditionally is very bad at moving up that stack and getting those things to work. You had mentioned at the very top of this about Amplify. Amplify is a system that I have tried once or twice, and I generally think that, for the right use case, is an excellent system and I really like a lot of what it does.Corey: It is. I agree. Having gone down that, building up my scavenger hunt app that I'll be open-sourcing at some point next year.Matthew: Yeah. And it's fantastic, but it has a very steep cliff where you hit that point where all of a sudden, you go, “Okay, I added this, and I added this, and I added this, and now I want to add this one other thing, but to do it, now all of a sudden, I have to go through a tremendous amount of work.” It wasn't just the simple push button that the previous four steps were. Now, I have this one other thing that I need to do, and now it's a very difficult thing to incorporate into my system. And I'm having to learn all new stuff that I never had to care about before because Amplify made it way too easy.And I don't think this is necessarily an AWS problem. I think this is just a fundamentally difficult software problem to solve. Microsoft, I spent years and years in the Microsoft world, and this was my biggest complaint about Microsoft was that they made extremely difficult things, far too simple to solve. And then once those systems became either buggy, problematic, misconfigured, whatever you want to call it, once they stopped working for some reason, the people who were responsible for figuring those answers out didn't have the preceding knowledge because they didn't need it. And then all of a sudden, they go, “Well, I don't know how to solve this problem because I was told it was just this push-button thing.”So, Amplify is great, and I think it's fantastic, but it is a very, very difficult problem to solve. Amazon has proven to be very, very good at building the fundamentals, and I think that they function very well as a platform service, as a building blocks. But they give you the Lego pieces, and they expect you to build the very complex Batmobile. And they can maybe give you some custom pieces here and there, like the fenders, and the tires, and stuff like that, but that's not their bread and butter.Corey: Well, even starting with the CDK is a perfect example. Like, you can use the CDK init to create a new project from scratch, which is awesome. I love the fact that that exists, but it doesn't go far enough. It doesn't automatically create a repo you store the thing in that in turn hooks up to a CI/CD process that will wind up doing the build and deploy. Instead, it expects to do that all locally, which is a counter pattern. That's an anti-pattern. It'll lead you down the wrong path. And you always have to build these things from scratch yourself as you keep going. At least that's what it feels like.Matthew: Yeah, it is. And I think that here at Defiance Digital, our job as an MSP is to talk to the customer and figure out, but what are those very specific things you need? So, we do build new CDK repos all the time for our customers. But some of our customers want a trunk base system. Some of them want a branching or a development branch base system. Some of them have a very complex SDLC process within a PR stage of code changes versus a slightly less complex one after things have been merged into trunk.So, we fundamentally look at it like we're that bridge between the two, and in that case, AWS works great. In fact, all SaaS solutions are really nice because they give us those building blocks and then we provide value by figuring out which one of those we need to incorporate in for our clients. But every single one of our clients is very different. And we've only got, you know, less than a dozen right now. But you know, I've got project managers and directors always coming back to me and saying, “Well, how do we cookie-cutter this process?” And you can't do it. It's just very, very difficult.Not in a small-scale. Maybe when you're really big, and you're a company like AWS who has thousands, if not potentially millions of customers, you can find those patterns, but it is a very fundamentally difficult problem to solve, and we've seen multiple companies over the last two decades try to do these things and ultimately fail. So, I don't necessarily blame AWS for not having these things or not doing them well.Corey: Yes and no. I mean, GitHub delivers excellent experience for the user, start to finish. There's—Vercel does something very similar over in the front-end universe, too, where it is clearly possible, but it seems that designing user interfaces and integrating disparate things together is not an Amazon's DNA, which makes sense when you view the two-pizza teams assembling to build larger things. But man, is that a frustration.Matthew: Yeah. I really wonder if this two-pizza team mentality can ever work well for products that are bigger than just the fundamental concepts. I think Amplify is pretty good, but if you really want something that is this service that works for 80% of customers, you can't do it with five people. You can't do it with six. You need to have teams like what GitHub and what Vercel and other things, where teams are potentially dozens of people that really coordinate things and have a good project manager and product owner and understand the problem very well. And it's just very difficult with these very, very small teams to get that going.I don't know what the future of AWS looks like. It feels like a very Microsoft in the mid-2000s, which is, they're running off of their existing customers, they don't really have a need to innovate significantly because they have a lot of people locked in, they would be just fine for years on years on end with the products they have. So, there isn't a huge driver for doing it, not like, maybe, GCP or Azure really need to start to continue to innovate stronger in this space to pick up more customers. AWS doesn't have a problem getting customers.And if there isn't a significant change in the mentality, like what Microsoft saw at the end of the 2000s with getting rid of Ballmer, bringing in Satya and really changing the mentality inside the company, I don't see AWS breaking out from this anytime soon. But I think that's actually a good thing. I think AWS should stick to just building the fundamentals, and I think that they should rely on their partners and their third parties to bridge that gap. I think Jeremy Daly at Ampt and what they're building over there is a fantastic product.Corey: Yeah. The problem is that Amazon seems to be in denial about a lot of this, at least with what they're saying publicly.Matthew: Yeah, but what they say publicly and how they feel internally could be very, very different. I would say that, you know, we don't know what they're thinking internally. And that's fine. I don't necessarily need to. I think more specifically, we need to understand what their roadmap looks like and we need to understand, you know, what, are they going to change in the future to maybe fill in some of these gaps.I would say that the problem you said earlier about being able to do a simple website redirect, I don't think that's Amazon's desire to build those things. I think there should be a third-party that's built on top of AWS, and maybe even works directly within your AWS account as a marketplace product for doing that, but I don't think that's necessarily in the benefit of AWS to build that directly.Corey: We'll see. I'm very curious to see how this unfolds because a lot of customers want answers that require things that have to be assembled for them. I mean, honestly, a lot of the GenAI stuff is squarely in that category.Matthew: Agreed, but is this something where AWS needs to build it internally, and then we've got a product like App Composer, or Copilot, or things where they try, and then because they don't get enough traction, it just feels like they stall out and get stagnant? I mean, App Composer was a keynote product announcement during last year's re:Invent, and this year, we saw them introduce the ability to step function editing within it, and introduce the functionality into your IDE, VS Code directly. Both good things, but a year's worth of development effort to release those two features feels slow to me. The integration to VS Code should have been simple.Corey: Yeah. They are not the innovative company that would turn around and deliver something incredible three months after something had launched, “And here's a great new series of features around it.” It feels like the pace of innovation and face of delivery has massively slowed.Matthew: Yeah. And that's the scariest thing for me. And, you know, we saw this a little bit with a discussion recently in the cdk.dev server because if you take a look at what's been happening with the CDK application for the last six months and even almost a year now, it feels like the pace of changes within the codebase has slowed.There have been multiple releases over the course of the last year where the release at the end of the week—and they hit a pretty regular cadence of a release every week—that release at the end of the week fixes one bug or adds one small feature change to one construct in some library that maybe 10% of users are going to use. And that's troublesome. One of the main reasons why I ditched the Terraform and went hard on the CDK was that I looked at how many issues were open on the Terraform AWS provider, and how many missing features were, and how slow they were to incorporate those in, and said, “I can't invest another two years into this product if there isn't going to be that innovation.” And I wasn't in a place to do the development work myself—despite the fact that you can because it's open-source and providers are forkable—and the CDK is getting real close to that same spot right now. So, this weekend—and I know this is going to come out, you know, weeks later—but you know, the weekend of December 10th, they announced a change to the way that they were going to take contributions from the CDK community.And the long and short of it right now—and there's still some debate over exactly what they said—is, we're not going to accept brand-new L2 constructs from the community. Those have to be built internally by AWS only. That's a dr—step in the wrong direction. I understand why they're taking that approach. Contributions in the CDK have been very rough for the last four or five months because of the previous policies they put into place, but this is an open-source product. It's supposed to be an open-source product. It's also a very complex set of code because of all of the various AWS services that are being hit by it. This isn't just Amplify, which is hitting a couple of things here and there. This is potentially—Corey: It touches everything.Matthew: It touches everything.Corey: Yeah, I can see their perspective, but they've got to get way better at supporting things rapidly if they want to play that game.Matthew: And they can't do that internally with AWS, not with a two-pizza team.Corey: No. And there's an increasing philosophy I'm hearing from teams of, “Well, my service supports it. Other stuff, that's not my area of responsibility.” The wisdom that I've seen that really encapsulates this is written on Colm MacCárthaigh's old laptop in 2019: “AWS is the product.” That's the truth. It's not about the individual components; it's about the whole, collectively.Matthew: Right. And so, if we're not getting these L2 constructs and these things being built out for all of the services that CloudFormation hits, then the product feels stalled, there isn't a good initiative for users to continue trying to adopt it because over time, users are just going to hit more and more services in AWS, not fewer as they use the products. That's what AWS wants. They want people to be using VPC Lattice and all the GenAI stuff, and Glue, and SageMaker, and all these things, but if you don't have those L2 constructs, then there's no advantage of the CDK over top of just raw CloudFormation. So, the step in the right direction, in my opinion, would have been to make it easier and better for outside contributions to get into CDK, and they went the opposite way, and that's scary.Now, they basically said, go build these on your own, go publish them on the Construct Hub, and if they're good, we'll incorporate them in. But they also didn't define what good was, and what makes a good API. API development is very difficult. How do you build a construct that's going to hit 80% of use cases and still give you an out for those other 20 you missed? That's fundamentally hard.Corey: It is. And I don't know if there are good answers, yet. Maybe they're going in the right direction, maybe they're not.Matthew: Time will tell. My hope is that I can try to do some videos here after the new year to try to maybe make this a better experience for people. What does good API design look like? What is it like to implement these things well so they can be incorporated in? There has been a lot of pushback already, just after the first couple of days, from some very vocal users within the CDK community saying, “This is bad. This is fundamentally bad stuff.”Even from big fanboys like myself, who have supported the CDK, who co-authored the CDK Book, and they said, “This is not good.” So, we'll see what happens. Maybe they change direction after a couple of days. Maybe this is— turns out to be a great way to do it. Only time will really tell at this point.Corey: Awesome. And where can people go to find out more as you continue your exploration in this space and find out what you're up to in general?Matthew: So, I do have a Twitter account at@mattbonig on Twitter, however, I am probably going to be doing less and less over there. Engagement and the community as a whole over there has been problematic for a while, and I'll probably be doing more on LinkedIn, so you can find me there. Just search for Matthew Bonig. It's a very unique name.I've also got a website, matthewbonig.com, and from there, you can see blog articles, and a link to my Advanced CDK course, which I'm going to continue adding sessions to over the course of the next few months. I've got one coming out shortly about the deadly embrace and how you can work through that problem with the deadly embrace and hopefully not be so scared about multi-stack applications.Corey: I look forward to that because Lord knows, I'm running into that one myself increasingly frequently.Matthew: Well, good. I will hopefully be able to get this video out and solve all of your problems very easily.Corey: Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Matthew: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.Corey: Matthew Bonig, Chief Cloud Architect at Defiance Digital, AWS Dev Tools Hero, and oh so much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that you will then have to wind up building the implementation for that constructs that power that comment yourself because apparently we're not allowed to build them globally anymore.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.

What you'll learn in this episode: How Kentshire's partnership with Ulla Johnson came about and what they hope will come of it Why Matthew doesn't want his clients to keep their fine jewelry in a safe deposit box Why “Do I love it?” is the first question Matthew asks when looking at jewelry, and why things like designer or carats may not be as important as you think How Covid changed the vintage jewelry market How dealers work together to source the best jewelry for their clients About Matthew Imberman Matthew Imberman, along with his sister Carrie, are the co-presidents of Kentshire Galleries. Established in 1940 and spanning three generations of family ownership, Kentshire Galleries is one of the foremost dealers of fine period and estate jewelry. In 1988, Kentshire established a free-standing boutique in New York's premier luxury store, Bergdorf Goodman. Their antique and estate jewelry department continues to occupy a select location on the store's seventh floor. As the third generation of the family to lead Kentshire, Matthew and Carrie continue to refine the gallery's founding vision: buying and selling outstanding jewelry and objects of enduring design and elegance. Additional resources: Website Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest Photos Available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: Through a partnership with fashion designer Ulla Johnson, Kentshire Fine Jewelry will have a permanent presence on the West Coast for the first time. While other dealers might change their approach to appeal to a new market, co-president Matthew Imberman continues to buy jewelry based on one criterium: whether he loves the piece or not. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about the history behind the collaboration with Ulla Johnson; why following trends isn't the best way to buy jewelry; and how Covid changed his business in surprising ways. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the first part of a two-part episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it's released later this week. Today, my guest is Matthew Imberman, who, along with his sister, Carrie, is Co-President of Kentshire Fine Jewelry. At Kentshire, fine jewelry encompasses almost everything that you would categorize as fine jewelry: bridal, engagement rings, signed pieces, retro and even fine costume jewelry. They're the third generation to be involved in jewelry. Their administrative office is on Fifth Avenue in New York, and their retail location is on the seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman. Matthew is a returning guest who was with us several years ago in the pre-Covid days. Now, I'm excited to hear about his collaboration with the designer Ulla Johnson in their new store in West Hollywood. It's not often that New York jewelers come out this way, so I'm looking forward to hearing all about it. Matthew, welcome to the podcast. Matthew: Thank you for having me. Sharon: I'm so glad you're here. What about the West Coast clientele surprised as you were doing the store? Matthew: We have deep roots on the West Coast despite not having our own Kentshire branded store out there. We've been longtime exhibitors at the San Francisco Fall Show. The show has had some changes through the years, but we've been exhibiting for more than three decades, easily. Because of that, we've tracked with some of the West Coast feeling of our clients. Throughout the years, we've done different shows in L.A. At one point, we did have an agreement where we sold our pieces at Gump's. It's not that we are new to the West Coast, per se, but we have taken a bit of a hiatus. So, we were interested in getting out there and bringing what we have to our clients who are there. But by and large, it's not that we have a different sensibility about what we do for the West Coast versus the East. Kentshire has its viewpoint, which is a simple one. Carrie and I buy things that we think to be interesting, made well, rare. Whether it's from a famous designer or not, something that's not something you see every day and that we think will please a variety of our clients' sensibilities, but primarily it also has to please ours. At the end of the day, we end up looking at the pieces, whether they're with us for just a day or whether they're with us for a few years, so we buy things we like. We think that's a good viewpoint for anyone. So, for our West Coast clients, we are not such nose-in-the-air New Yorkers. We love our West Coast clients. We have family on the West Coast. We've spent a lot of time there, so for us, it wasn't like, “Oh, my god! We have to think through a whole new client type.” It was, “No, we're so excited to bring something we do to clients that, in some cases, do know us because we've been out there or they visit us at Bergdorf, but also clients who we haven't seen and who are friends of friends or know us through Ulla.” So, we touch all bases there. Sharon: I think you mentioned earlier Gump's San Francisco Show. I don't even know if they're still having that show. Matthew: It did take a few years off during Covid. It is happening again. I believe it's the 14th or 15th of October—I'll have to look back on the dates—at the Fort Mason Complex in the Festival Pavilion. I know this year Lauren Santo Domingo from Moda Operandi is attached as one of the social chairs. They have a fantastic gala evening. The show is run by Suzanne Tucker's entertainment team, who is just a consummate professional. What a combination of taste and savvy there. So, we're excited to be there, but we did the show when it was at the Santa Monica Air Hangar in the years back. We've done different shows off and on. It's been harder, I think, for a show to stick there, so to speak, but we also think it's a good fit for us. We've certainly started and stopped a few different shows in L.A., but it's been a long time since we've been in the city proper. I should add, actually—I'm leaving out the most glaringly obvious thing we did there. When Opening Ceremony had their larger line with accessories before the company went through restructuring during Covid, we also had our fine jewelry in Opening Ceremony. That both had a fashion bent and had a lot of store-within-a-store feeling, similar to what we're doing with Ulla. We had a targeted collection that was there in L.A. that represented us on the West Coast. We did that for, oh gosh, at least five years, I think. Sharon: I must have missed that because there's not any fine jewelry, except for maybe the big, commercial jewelers that are out here in Los Angeles. From what I've been told and from what I see, the clientele is very different. Matthew: It's funny. You know more because your boots are on the ground. We have a different feeling, but I'll say even looking at clients reaching out to us through Instagram or our website, we find that certainly the West is very well represented. The information, the data behind it, can sometimes be skewed because we have clients who come into Bergdorf, and they must happen to mention to us, “Oh, I'm visiting from the West Coast.” Maybe we'll get a little more granular detail, but I do know that when we look at the information, which we try stay up on for how people approach us and our work, we certainly feel that the West Coast is no slouch when it comes to looking at jewelry. I think that also shows with some of the dealers out there. Sharon: There's money out here to buy it. Maybe it's because I'm not really wild about the kind of jewelry they tend to wear. Who did you work with in terms of Ulla Johnson? Did they come to you, the designer? Matthew: I wish Carrie were here for a number of reasons. She's my business partner and obviously brings a tremendous wealth of knowledge and experience to the business, but she and Ulla have been longtime friends. I've known Ulla for a very long time, too. Ulla's husband and her family have been close for a long time because my sister and I share a friend group, and she's got some really wonderful friends. They've just had an affinity for each other and known each other, came up through a variety of different jobs together, and have always been very close. Ulla has always had a fantastic eye and really understood antique pieces, understood how a combination of design, manufacturing and color all come together to set some of these pieces apart. Throughout the years, she has grown in her notoriety, which now is incredible to see looking at the store on the West Coast in a picture, which we don't get to see in person until we go out in September. We're going to do a little trunk show, which I'll do a shameless plug for, on the 20th of September. We'll have more info for you as plans come together. Ulla has been a client of ours and borrowed things from us. We've worked together because we're friends, but sometimes friends don't always work well together. In this case, it's been beautiful because she's got such a clear vision of what she designs. It suits our inventory. Again, there's a reason she and her are friends. People tend to share a visual vocabulary. It's been a really good, seamless blend of both being in allied fields, jewelry and fashion obviously marching together to the same step, but also our viewpoints of what matters in terms of how things are designed, how things are proportioned, how colors work together or don't work together, how these things can interplay. We've been fortunate to count Ulla as a client, but much more fortunate to count her as a friend and somebody who inspires what we do when we look at things and address clients. What is she looking at?  How are those things playing together? There's a lovely synergy there. Sharon: Were you involved in picking the jewelry, or was it Carrie and Ulla who picked the jewelry to go in the store? Matthew: I take a much more hands-off approach in terms of that because Carrie and Ulla do not need to hear from me. I'm always happy when my opinion is asked for, but I also understand, and given that Carrie and Ulla are old friends—really, friends are not the same. They're very, very close. My influence is surplus to their needs. They've got it beyond spades, what they need to do, and they play off of each other. Ulla has a very clear vision of what she wants. She'll look at our collection or see things as they pop up on Instagram and get in touch and say, “What about this? What about that?” Similarly, when Carrie and I shop—because, again, we look for clients that we like. We love clients who are buying for themselves with a clear viewpoint, and that is Ulla to a T. So, we'll look at things as we're buying them and say, “This is the kind of thing that is for Ulla or her store or this kind of client.” One can never expect that means if you buy that piece, it sells in that way, but it does pull a spring at times on how we're acquiring certain parts of our collection. Thus far, it's proved pretty accurate. Sharon: I'm surprised. I'm the same as you; I've only seen the pictures of the store. There doesn't seem to be a lot of jewelry, at least from the pictures. Matthew: In the press pictures, it's hard to see. When they did the press pictures and when the store opened are largely different things. Obviously, one has to get the message out ahead of time before they open the doors. In one of the pictures, you can actually physically see the showcases, but I can send subsequent pictures that show you the jewelry displayed in them. There are two lovely floor cases, top-down vitrines that you'd be looking into. We're not looking to have 20 showcases. Given our requirements for how we purchase things and what they need to look like and the requirements we have for how we buy inventory, if we needed a whole new inventory for an entire store of jewelry, it would be extremely difficult. Right now, with the stock we have—not that everything sells immediately, but buying things is challenging because we do have a viewpoint and specific standards. Not to say there aren't a few things here and there that might be more bread and butter or commercial pieces. Even when we're sending things out to Ulla, we're looking for things where it doesn't matter. It's not like, “Oh, we're sending them out to another collection, so it can be different from what we put at Bergdorf.” Everything has pretty strict standards. In Ulla's space, they have two lovely, very interestingly built cases, I have to say. They're things I would never be clever enough to design in a million years, but it's displayed very, very beautifully. It's a very focused collection. We're not talking about 500, 600 pieces. Sharon: So, you do have vitrines and showcases. Matthew: Yes. Sharon: Nothing shows. It looks like you just have a few pieces. Matthew: That's just in the press photos. I understand with these things, there's always pressure to get the press photos out so the major press can be done, and the major message there should be Ulla. We are kind of an inclusion below the fold, but inasmuch as we are there, as they merchandise and get the pieces out there, this is the soft opening, as they say. Every store has to work out some of the kinks when it opens. In this case, it's easier for us given the nature of what we sell and it being valuable things that can't be just mixed in and around the inventory to cover Ulla after the fact. The formal opening is going to be closer into October, when we come out. By then, we'll have better photos of how everything is displayed in the store. People will come here and say, “There's always a new way to do design that somebody hasn't seen.” At the end of the day, it's still jewelry on props. Whatever they are, you still want people to see it and go after it. I think it's a tremendous success, given that they have a wonderful designer they worked with. Ulla herself has such a vision, and we were happy to be in the mix. Sharon: I think it's a really nice idea. It adds a lot to a store because you usually see—I don't mean to disparage it—but costume jewelry or whatever the store is selling. You don't see fine jewelry. How do you keep it secure? Matthew: It's all locked up at night, similar to what we do at Bergdorf. Things are in a locked case. If a client wants to see a piece, they work with a sales associate who will show it to them, and then everything is secured at the end of the day. Any proper jewelry store should be doing that. We're extremely careful and have all our little operations in place. We know their team is a crack team, too, and we will be doing everything to keep it very safe. Sharon: It looks like quite a large store from the pictures. Everything I'm talking about is from the pictures. Matthew: Yeah, but if you think of it this way, we operate in Bergdorf, which is a tremendously huge store and has so much going on. Once you know the order of operations and the sales associates understand the specific rules for showing jewelry, it's fairly straightforward and pretty easy. Nowadays it's different. Everything is very secure. Everyone has cameras in their spaces. We were doing retail for quite a long time before the advent of cameras and different sensors and all these ways of keeping things safe through technology. We feel very confident. Sharon: Do you think it's bigger than most of the stores in that area? That was my impression. Matthew: This is where I have to say I couldn't myself say. I am not an expert on that area of Beverly Boulevard or how the different retailers are size-wise. I know that when we started, it was quite a large store. We felt very comfortable because we're working with partners who we know well, who are leaders in their fields and have people working with them that are excellent. Given that Ulla is quite an accomplished designer and has a sizeable presence in New York already and obviously sells in other outlets and units, I would imagine that her store is commensurate with the level of success she's seen in our store, which is to say appropriate to what she does. Whether bigger or smaller than one of her colleagues, I don't know. Sharon: Do you or Carrie have any input in the design of the store? Matthew: No. Again, this is a lovely partnership and a meeting of minds, but our partnership is—like you said, where some retailers out there might fill their jewelry section with costume jewelry they've licensed out to someone else to design, or maybe they have a third party doing it. I think what Ulla saw in us is the idea that we have a similar viewpoint for how we present what we do. Part of the reason, even when you see on social media—if you look at Ulla on the internet, you see how she's wearing her own designs and her jewelry. It works so well together. Similarly, with the store, our input wasn't needed or even appropriate because it's Ulla's space to let her designs shine. But we know that whatever she does, her pieces are going to look good within the context of that collection. Despite what the store looks like, the main imprint is still, visually, that all of her wonderful clothing designs and our pieces have worked thus far. We obviously have the utmost confidence in both her and her designer to create an environment that would be wonderful for us to show our jewelry. Sharon: I don't know what Bergdorf carries, but do people come to you with one of her designs and say, “What can you recommend to go with this?” Matthew: I could certainly ask my sales staff. At Bergdorf it's not uncommon, whether it's Ulla or other designers, because we work across the store. We have our own specific private salon right on the seventh floor next to the restaurant. It's a little different than the main jewelry shown the ground floor. It's just our material, just our sales staff that works for us specifically, and we serve as an outlet for the rest of the store for what is essentially the antique and estate department at Bergdorf. What happens frequently is, whether it's an associate who is working in Ulla's section or somebody working in Chanel, they'll come and say, “I have a client who's looking at a gown and needs something to wear with it. This is a picture of the gown. What can you recommend?” Then the client would be able to try on the dress or whatever they're looking at with our pieces. If something works for them and they like it, then great; we can help them out that way. Certainly, that's part of it. One of the benefits for us to be in Bergdorf, aside from the fact that obviously it's Bergdorf and it gets a wonderful assortment of people who come to shop at the store, it puts us in the context of what people are wearing. While we have collectors who might specifically collect the pieces and wearing is secondary, by and large, our goal is for people to wear what they buy. We firmly believe things should not sit in the safe deposit box. They interact with the designer's clothing while the client is trying it on with our pieces. That's the best effect overall, I think, for a client looking at how the pieces are represented when they get them home and when they wear them. They look at them with the real eye. Sharon: Is there a decrease in the kind of people who are buying a Chanel piece, let's say, or a Chanel gown, a red carpet look? Matthew: Oh gosh, in terms of a red-carpet look, that's where my knowledge of Bergdorf sell-through would be behind. “I don't know” is the answer, but I can certainly say Chanel is experiencing a slowdown, at least judging by the number of people who shop at the Chanel departments at Bergdorf. Overall, I don't think I'm any genius or original thinker for thinking this. People have become less formal overall, but that hasn't really changed what we do. Yes, we have pieces that might be, to some clients, extremely occasion-specific and one or two pieces that would have to be worn for a red-carpet look, but what we're mostly buying is something that, given somebody's own personal comfort level, they can wear with anything. Whether it's a Deco diamond bracelet or it's a really simple pair of gold earrings, it's not for us to say, “Oh, you can only wear that at a fancy dress occasion,” or “Oh, that's just casual.” We like to think that's where one's own sense of creativity comes into play, because we buy things with the idea they'll be worn. We're not looking to pass on family heirlooms to sit in a box all year long. We really love our clients to experience their goods, wear them, have the confidence to wear them however they're going out. At the end of the day, it's one of those simple, little items that can really change how an outfit looks or how you feel. Sharon: I keep thinking about the jewelry in L.A. The collaboration you have, did that come about because you all were having dinner one night and you said, “Why don't we do this?” What happened? Matthew: In this case, Ulla, in opening her West Coast store—and I'm speaking secondhand because she and my sister initially had the conversations, but Carrie and I do everything together. So, it became a discussion we all had at one point. I think it was something as casual as, “I'm opening up a store on the West Coast. It would be great to have some Kentshire pieces there.” We feel so fortunate to have Ulla as a partner in this, specifically because she's such a good friend and has been so supportive of us when we took over the business. She has been herself one of the more inspiring collectors we have. Looking at the variety of pieces she's purchased that range from very modern to very old to things that are almost costume to things that are extremely fine—everything together, there's such a personal viewpoint about how these pieces come together. I took it as an incredible honor when she said she wanted to include us, because I don't think Ulla necessarily needs us to sell her fashion. She's so capable of creating a look that is beyond what we're able to think about. We're jewelers. We don't think about fashion that way necessarily, although we're certainly around it and we love it. In this case, I think it was a much more casual meeting of the minds where she said, “You know what? We all love each other. Let's work this out.” Then Carrie and Ulla talked about the details and figured out how it would work, and I played a supporting role in doing whatever I could do. Now we're seeing the fruits of that together as the collection is coming out West and people are starting to see it. Sharon: You mentioned some of the—I'll call them baby things you've tried out here, but do you think this is a beginning? Do you intend to do other things and make your brand more known out here? Matthew: Certainly, we would like our brand to be more known out there. In some ways, it's the biggest no-brainer for us, in that we have a lot of clients out on the West Coast, not just specifically the Northeast. We have a lot of clients who've purchased from us over the years. The challenge for us is always that I can't call up the factory and say, “Send me another 300 of those antique bracelets I sold.” We're a piece at a time. So, the challenge is always finding enough material that meets our qualifications so we can service all our clients. I think what we're hoping to see happen, all of us, is that this becomes successful, and we continue to grow our presence with Ulla and create a bigger collection for her there, which allows us to run similarly to how we run in New York. It's a comfortable setting for us, being in a fashion space and having clients coming in we know are already in the mindset of looking at jewelry and clothing together. I don't know if we necessarily have the appetite to open our own store out West, all things being equal, simply because it's more than a full-time job between Bergdorf and the website. So, for us having a partner like Ulla who can handle the day-to-day operations—and her team is so wonderful. To be able to do that is invaluable to us. We'll be doing trunk shows out there where we come and meet people at Ulla's store and introduce them to her brand and our brand, absolutely. That's something that will be starting in September on the 20th in the afternoon there. Then we'll continue as it goes and as we all find a good rhythm for how that works. Sharon: So, she did buy high-end. She bought what I call regular pieces that you wear every day and really high-end, over-the-top, red-carpet stuff. Matthew: We don't deal in things that we think are over the top simply because we're not looking to sell such specific pieces that way. It's not to say we never have, but it's by and large not a focus of our collection. I think what is incredible about Ulla's eye is she's looking specifically for what she likes. She's not looking at the of-the-moment piece or asking, “What do I see happening in the next year?” and it shows with her clothing. Ulla has this specific viewpoint. She'll see something in our collection and the first qualification isn't, “Oh, does it cost a lot or a little?” or “Is it by this designer?” It's, “Do I like it?” It's the simplest question, “Do I like it?” I think that nowadays, it's easy to get misled, even in the vintage jewelry world, with what's the hot thing now or who's the hot maker. At the end of day, for us, the most important consideration is, “Do you love it?” I know it sounds pedantic to say that, but I think it's easy sometimes to have the other parts of the piece drive it. Somebody will say, “Oh, who is it?” first or they'll say, “How much is it?” or “What's the size of the stone?” or what have you. This can all be important. I'm not saying they're not, but I think we're a good match for Ulla because we all approach the concept first of, “Do we love this? Does this excite us?” And then, “Why does it excite us?” Then, as you start to uncover the parts of what the piece is, if it's by somebody, if it's from a certain place, if it's from a certain time period, if it's got a rare stone, then those add to the excitement. But it has to be something inherently beautiful and unusual. Sharon: We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to the JewelryJourney.com to check them out.

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If you have a military teen, this podcast is a must-listen. Matt and Elena join Josie and share stories on what it's like to be a military teen and how that led to the creation of their organization, Bloom Military Teens. They also talk about what books they've found helpful over the years.Books mentioned in this show:Dear Mil TeenThe Field Guide to the Military TeenPercy Jackson seriesMoon Over ManifestPachinko (best for older readers)Other links:Bloom Military Teens websiteNational Military Family AssociationMore about Matthew Oh and Elena AshburnThis episode is brought to you by our friends at Veterans United Home Loans. Veterans United Home Loans is dedicated to helping Veterans and military families become homeowners.In two short decades, they've closed over half a million VA Loans. But they don't measure their success in numbers, they measure it in living their values every day: Be Passionate and Have Fun, Deliver Results with Integrity and Enhance Lives. United Through Reading is proud to be a part of Veterans United Home Loans' effort to lift up military families and communities across the country.Learn more about UTR and how you can strengthen your military family's bond through reading at UTR.org.Download UTR's reading app Want to help keep military families reading? Support UTR todayWhat do you think of the Ready for Reading podcast? Review us in your podcast app, or let us know

In this episode, Christina and Matthew talk about: their methods of making reservationsstaying at Airbnbssome of the destinations that they have been toThe extra mile (useful English vocabulary you'll hear in the podcast): to make a reservation = arrange for something such as a table in a restaurant or a room in a hotel to be kept for youto keep [one's] options open = to wait before making a final decision about something to allow for the possibility of having a different choicea good deal = to buy something at a lower price than normal; a bargainDo you want the transcript of the podcast, more vocabulary resources and live conversation practice?Join the Faster Fluency Conversation Club!You'll become more fluent and more confident in English faster, in a fun community of professionals from around the world!Brand new! Here's the link to the transcript! Use code 'FFCC50' to receive 50% off your 1st month in the club!  Special!! Buy 5 months, Get 1 free!! Buy 10 months, Get 2 free & an Individual Evaluation session!! We meet 6 times a week: Mondays 18:00-19:00 CEST (France time)Tuesdays 13:00-14:00 CEST (France time)Wednesdays 20:00-21:00 CEST (France time)Thursdays 0:00-1:00 CEST (France time)Thursdays 11:00-12:00 CEST (France time)Fridays 12:30-13:30 CEST (France time)    You can also check what time it is for your time zone with the Time Zone ConverterDetails about joining: https://mybusinessenglishcourses.com/faster-fluency-conversation-club/join-now--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Christina:Hey everybody. I hope you're having a lovely month of July and a lovely summer. Maybe you've got some summer vacation. I hope you're enjoying it if you're listening to this on the beach, in the mountains or wherever. Today, I'm here with Matthew. Matthew, how are you doing today? How's your summer going?Matthew:Oh, good, good. It's strange when you live in a tropical place, it's always the same weather so the seasons don't really change.Christina:Yeah.Matthew:I guess it's good. Good, as always.Christina:It's like, well, what is it? Was it the Beach Boys that put out an album called Endless Summer? It's just like endless summer.Matthew:Oh, okay.Christina:Yeah. Right. Okay. Today we're talking about a very, I guess, summery topic related to vacations and traveling and things like that. How do you make reservations when you're going to travel now that people can actually travel? Yeah. How do you, what's your, I guess your habits, your reflexes, when you want to book a vacation?Matthew:I think I'm probably a bit different than maybe the traditional way of booking, booking a hotel, booking a flight, picking a place to go. I don't get too particular actually about where I want to go or exactly when I want to go. I like to keep my options open by having more flexibility, then I can find really good deals. I'm really interested in finding good deals.(continues...)Support the show

In this episode, Christina and Matthew talk about: how being direct can be perceived as being rudeexpressions used to sound politein what situations we should try to be more politeThe extra mile (useful English vocabulary you'll hear in the podcast): pushy = excessively or unpleasantly self-assertive or ambitiousto neglect = to fail to care for properlya rule of thumb = a broadly accurate guide or principle, based on experience or practice rather than theoryDo you want the transcript of the podcast, more vocabulary resources and live conversation practice?Join the Faster Fluency Conversation Club!You'll become more fluent and more confident in English faster, in a fun community of professionals from around the world!Brand new! Here's the link to the transcript! Use code 'FFCC50' to receive 50% off your 1st month in the club!  Special!! Buy 5 months, Get 1 free!! Buy 10 months, Get 2 free & an Individual Evaluation session!! We meet 6 times a week: Mondays 18:00-19:00 CEST (France time)Tuesdays 13:00-14:00 CEST (France time)Wednesdays 20:00-21:00 CEST (France time)[NEW SESSION!!]Thursdays 0:00-1:00 CEST (France time)Thursdays 11:00-12:00 CEST (France time)Fridays 12:30-13:30 CEST (France time)    You can also check what time it is for your time zone with the Time Zone ConverterDetails about joining: https://mybusinessenglishcourses.com/faster-fluency-conversation-club/join-now--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Christina:Hey, everybody, Christina here with your Faster Fluency Conversation Club podcast. That is not the easiest title to say, but that's okay. I hope you're all doing well. And I'm here with Matthew today and Matthew, how are you doing today?Matthew:Oh, well, as we were just discussing a little bit before, I think good.Christina:Good, given the situation.Matthew:Yeah. As many people in FFCC know, I've been having problems with my electricity and my internet.Christina:Yes.Matthew:Yeah. It's been an adventurous week and a half or so, but I think everything is good now, I hope. Fingers crossed.Christina:It's good enough for us to be recording this podcast...Matthew:That's right.Christina:Hopefully it'll stay that way, but...Matthew:That's right.Christina:No, good to have you back. All right. Today we're talking about useful language to sound polite in English, because I don't know if you've noticed this in working with students either in their lessons or in emails or messages or things like that. Sometimes when you're using English as your other language, second or third or fourth, even, but as a foreign language, I kind of feel like sometimes people, maybe they don't know what should I say to be polite or they're maybe not just not aware of the impact of when you're being very direct in English that it can actually come across as maybe too direct or rude or pushy or things like that. And I don't think it's their intention, I just think it's maybe they don't know how to do it, how to be polite or even what are, I would say, the conventions for being polite in English. I don't know if you've had that experience.Matthew:Oh, of course. All of the Support the show

Dr. Crystal Lewis is the National Military Family Association's (NMFA) Director of Research. Matthew and Elena are the co-founders of Bloom, an organization that seeks to empower military teens around the world. In 2021, Bloom and NMFA designed a survey for military teens to evalute their mental health, food security, and more. After finding results that indicate military kids are "not okay", Bloom and NMFA created another survey to dig deeper into the well-being of military children. This new survey will be available February 1st. View the results of last year's survey here: https://www.militaryfamily.org/the-military-teen-experience/?fbclid=IwAR10ipEorN0o-n54z5kjFoQc-I4mzFzNIbNBXwZlzcGr0iyn-n6YDOPeGyA Link to this year's survey (available Feb 1): www.bloommiltaryteens.org/survey Check out NMFA's website here: https://www.militaryfamily.org/NMFA's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/militaryfamily Bloom's Website and Blog: www.bloomilitaryteens.org Follow Bloom @bloommilitaryteens on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok. Bloom on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bloommilitaryteens/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theshanonshow/support

Matthew Kepnes runs the popular travel blog, Nomadic Matt, and also writes a successful newsletter. In fact, Matt's newsletter is one of the biggest I've had on the show. His book, How to Travel the World on $50, is a New York Times Best Seller.After a 2005 trip to Thailand, Matt decided to leave his job, finish his MBA, and travel the world. Since then, he's been to nearly 100 countries, and hasn't looked back. Besides being a New York Times best-selling author, Matt's writings have been featured in countless publications. He's a regular speaker at travel trade shows, and is the founder of FLYTE, a non-profit organization that sends students overseas to bring their classroom experience to life.I talk with Matt about his unique approach to running his business. While others are building online courses, Matt has shifted to doing more in-person meetups and events. We talk about his newsletter, and we also talk about growing your Instagram follower count, scaling a business as a solopreneur, and much more.In this episode, you'll learn: When & why you need to start outsourcing day-to-day tasks Matt's email opt-in strategies and tips to get more subscribers The most important metric about your email list How to quickly get more followers on Instagram Links & Resources Blue Ocean Strategy Matador Lonely Planet Blue Ocean Strategy book Pat Flynn Women In Travel Summit Traverse Cheryl Strayed ConvertKit TravelCon FinCon Podcast Movement World Domination Summit Hootsuite Tim Ferriss Seth Godin OptinMonster Seth Godin: This is Marketing Rick Steves Nathan Barry Show on Spotify Nathan Barry Show on Apple Podcasts Matthew Kepnes' Links Matt's website Follow Matt on Twitter Matt's Instagram The Nomadic Network Nomadic Matt Plus Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Matthew:When I started these courses back in 2013, there wasn't a lot of folks. Now you have so many people with courses, so many Instagrammers and TikTokers selling their stuff. It's sort of like, is this worth the time to really invest in it when my heart really isn't in it? How can I maintain 400K in revenue a year? Is that the best use of our resources? The answer is, not really.[00:00:33] Nathan:In this episode, I talk to my long time friend, Matt Kepnes, from Nomadic Matt.Matt's got a travel blog that's wildly popular, and he gets into that—shares all the numbers. He's probably one of the biggest newsletters that I've had on the show, so far.What I love about him, in particular, is how thoughtful he is about his business model.Most people are just adding more courses and figuring out how to grow revenue; honestly, what's now fairly traditional ways, and it's quite effective. Matt takes another approach. He gets into in-person events and meetups. We get to talk about why in a busy, crowded online world, he's actually going offline.I think that Blue Ocean Strategy he references, the popular book by the same title, I think it's interesting, and it's something worth considering when some of the online strategies don't work. We also get into a bunch of other things like growing his newsletter. Like I said, it's quite large.Then, also growing an Instagram following. Instagram is not something that I'm going to actively pursue, but it's interesting hearing his approach of what you do if you're at 5,000 followers on Instagram, and want to grow to 50,000 or more.So, anyway, enjoy the episode.If you could do me a favor and go subscribe on Spotify or iTunes, or wherever you listen if you aren't subscribed already, and then write a review.I check out all the reviews. Really appreciate it. It helps in the rankings, and I'm just looking to grow the show.So, anyway, thanks for tuning in today. Let's go talk to Matt.Matt, welcome to the show.[00:02:06] Matthew:Thanks for having me, Nathan. I've been trying to get on this podcast for ages.[00:02:10] Nathan:Well, don't say that, that'll make people think they can get on just by asking. Really, you came to my house and stayed in my cottage on the farm, and then you're like, “Yo, have me on the podcast!” And that's when I was like, “Absolutely.” But if anyone just asked, that would not be a thing.[00:02:26] Matthew:No, I just mean I finally—I'm excited that I'm worthy enough in my blogging career to be on.[00:02:33] Nathan:Oh, yes.[00:02:35] Matthew:I've made it.[00:02:36] Nathan:Yeah. It's only taken you, what, a decade and a half?[00:02:39] Matthew:13 and a half years. Slow and steady wins the race.[00:02:43] Nathan:That's right.I actually want to start talking about that side of it, because I've been in the blogging world for 11 years now. But even I feel like things changed so much in the first couple of years, even before I entered into the world. So, I'm curious, going back to the early days, what were the prompts for you to come into the blogging world and say, “Hey, I'm going to start publishing online”?[00:03:10] Matthew:Yeah. You know, it was a very haphazard, there was no grand plan. Like I had Zanger when people had Zeno's, which is, you know, a personal blog, way back, you know, 2003, whatever. And so what, I went on my trip around the world in 2006, I just kept updating this Zynga. You know, it was called, Matt goes the world and it was just like, here I am friends here I am.And then, you know, everyone was really excited in the beginning. And then after a while I got sick in my update because the know their back of their office job. So I kinda just forgot about it until I came home and January, 2008 and I need money. And so I started a temp job, and I had a lot of free time and I really just hated being back in the, the office with the walls and everything.And so I was like, I need to earn money to keep traveling. And so I started the website really as with the goal of it being an online resume, you know, it was very bare bones. I used to share a travel news, have an update, like tips and stories from my trip. And then there was a section where we're like, hire me and it had my features and, you know, the guest blogs I did, I used to write for Matador travel.So just as a way to sort of build up, a portfolio of like, Hey, Yeah, freelance writing because I'm wanting to read guidebooks, you know, I wanted to write for lonely planet. That was a dream, right. The guidebooks. And so just the blog was a way to hone my skills and just get in front of editors to be like, Hey look, I do right.You know, here's where I've been, you know, and, and sort of build that base. And eventually that became a thing where I didn't need to freelance. Right.[00:05:03] Nathan:Was it called nomadic Matt from the beginning.[00:05:06] Matthew:He was, yeah. I B two names, nomadic Matt. And that does the world. Right. Because I like the double entendre of it. Right. Even though, but just cause I have a weird sense of humor and all my friends were like, you can't do that one. You gotta do nomadic Matt. It was really good because it's much better brand name, you know, in the long run.But again, I wasn't thinking about that. Right. I wasn't thinking like, oh, I'm going to start this brand. You know, I gotta think of a clever name that people can remember. It was like,Oh a place where people can see my work.[00:05:39] Nathan:Right. Okay. So now 13 and a half years later, what's the, what's the, the blog and newsletter look like. and I want to dive into the business side of it because I think a lot of people build successful newsletters, audience-based businesses, but don't make the leap to like something bigger than themselves.And so I want to dive into all those aspects of it.[00:06:01] Matthew:13 years later, it's seven people. We just hired a new events coordinator to help. my director of events, Erica, coordinate all these virtual in person events that we're going to kick off again. I have a full-time tech guy, a full-time director of content. We changed his title, but like three research assistants, because.I picked a niche that like is always changing. Right. You know, you have a fitness website, how to do a pull up. It's just, that's it,[00:06:37] Nathan:You ranked for that keyword. You're good to go.[00:06:40] Matthew:Yeah. Like how to do a pull up, doesn't change what to do in Paris or the best hospitals in Paris, constantly changing, you know? so it takes three resources, distance.Plus my content guy, me that basically keep up the content and then I have a part-time, graphic designer and part-time social coordinator.[00:07:00] Nathan:Nice. And how many subscribers do you have in the list now?[00:07:03] Matthew:We just called it, so it's a two 50 because we just, cause I haven't shaved it off in like five years or so. So we basically everybody that hasn't opened the email in one year where we're like, you want to be on.And like 2% of them click that button. And then we just got rid of the other 90%. It was like 60,000 names.[00:07:30] Nathan:Yeah. So for everyone listening, two 50 in this case means 250,000.[00:07:35] Matthew:Yeah.[00:07:36] Nathan:Just to clarify, I 7% businesses off of 250 subscribers would be remarkable. That would be just as impressive, but that's not what we're talking about here. going into, so a lot of people, talk about or worry about, should I prune my list or that kind of thing?What were the things that went into that for you? That's a big decision to, to prune 60,000 people off a list.[00:08:00] Matthew:I think it was probably more, maybe I want to say six 60 to 80 I somewhere around there. we were pushing up against our account before I went to the next billing step.So that's always a good impetus to prune the list, but you know, I I've been thinking about it for a while because. You know, I I really want to see what my true open rate.Is You know, like, okay, I have all these people and we were sending it this, I have multiple lists, but the main weekly list was like, 310,000-315,000 but it's been so long since we called and we have so many emails there and I just really wanted to get a true sense of like, what's our active audience.And so between, between that and, pushing up against the next tier price tier. Yeah. it yeah. It's cool to say like, oh, we have 300,000 300, you know, rather than 250,000 Right. But who cares? Right. I mean, at the end of the day, it's just a vanity metric, right? Yeah. It sounds cool. I get a million emails. Right. But if you only have a 10% open rate, You really only have 100,000.[00:09:20] Nathan:Right. I think that the times that it matters is maybe when you're selling a book to a publisher and that might be the only time that you like that dead weight and your email us actually helps you.[00:09:33] Matthew:Yeah. Like if you're, or you have a course, you know, are you trying to promote your numbers, but people would probably lie about that stuff too. yeah, so like, it really doesn't matter because all that matters is like, what's your true audience? Like who Who are the people that are really opening your stuff?[00:09:50] Nathan:Yeah. So let's dive into the, well, I guess really quick, I should say I am a hundred percent in the camp of, like delete subscribers, like do that once a year, that kind of thing. Clean up the list, go for the highest number of engaged subscribers, rather than the highest number of subscribers. It's just[00:10:06] Matthew:Right.[00:10:07] Nathan:To track.[00:10:08] Matthew:And, and I think you would know better than me, but isn't this a good. Like signal to Gmail. And you know, when you, you don't have a lot of dead emails, just go into a blank account. It's never getting opened or marked as spam or whatever.[00:10:24] Nathan:Yeah, for sure. Cause a lot of these times, there's a couple of things that happen. One is emails get converted to spam traps. And so it's like say someone's signed up for your email list six years ago And, they haven't logged into that email account for a long time.Google and others will take it and convert it to a spam trap and say, Hey, this email hasn't been logged into in six years.And so anyone sending to it, it's probably not doing legit things now you're over here. Like, no that person signed up for my list, but they're basically like you should have cleaned them off your list years ago. And then if that person were to ever come back and log into that Gmail account, do you remember like, oh, just kidding here, have the, have the email account back, but they're basically using that.And so you can follow all the. Best practices as far as how people join your list. But if you're not cleaning it, then you will still end up getting these like spam hits and, and other things. So you absolutely clean your list. Let's talk the business side, on revenue, I don't know what you want to share on the, on revenue numbers, but I'd love to hear any numbers you're willing to share.And then the breakdown of where that comes from, whether it's membership, courses, conferences, that sort of thing.[00:11:35] Matthew:Yeah.So there's like the pre COVID world and the post COVID world. Right. You know, like,[00:11:40] Nathan:Yes.[00:11:41] Matthew:Cause I work in travel, so like, you know, pre COVID we did over a million and like I was probably gearing up to like in 2020, like one, five, I think I were going to get a little over one five. and again, you know, this is, I work in the budget travel side of things, right.So like it's going to sell a lot of $10 eBooks to get up to seven figures. salary books are 10 bucks. and so. Postcode during COVID week, I think in 2020 made like half a million. and this year we'll probably get up to three quarters,[00:12:23] Nathan:Okay.[00:12:24] Matthew:K.[00:12:25] Nathan:He was coming back,[00:12:26] Matthew:Yeah. Yeah. and I think next year we'll, we'll get back over seven and then basically like how to go from there.You know, so maybe 20, 23, I might get to that one, five that was going to get to in 2020. most of the revenue now comes from ads, and then affiliates. we did, we did do a lot on courses, but then I, one of the things that, you know, a big pandemic that stops your business, allows you to do is really look at the things you're doing because every.Zero. So it's like when we start back up, is this worth investing time in? And so the answer is no. So we dropped down from, I think, peak of doing like $400,000 a year and horses, and this year we'll do maybe 40. and that's mostly because we just leave it up as like, you can buy this, we update it every six months.If it needs, it's basically like a high that blog course get all my numbers and tactics and strategies in there. but we don't offer any support for it. Right. It's just, you're buying information. and so it's very passive in that sense, but it's not like a core business where we're really moving and we were doing this pre COVID is moving into events and membership programs.So like we have pneumatic map plus, which gets you like all our guides, monthly calls and sort of like a Patriot on kind of thing, but like free.[00:14:03] Nathan:That cost.[00:14:04] Matthew:Five to 75 bucks a month, depending on what you want. So it's 5 25, 75. Most people opt for the five, of course. And it's really geared to like, get the five.But you know, that brings now, I think like three or four K a month. and then we have the events, which is donation based, but there's just like another two K a month. And so this is like, since COVID right. So like, that's say call it 50 K a year of, of revenue that we've added in. They didn't exist before.And now I know you're, you can compare that against the loss of the courses, but we had been phasing those out for years. and so that's really where we want to grow is bringing in more, you know, monthly revenue for that. Right. You know, Once we started, it's easy and we're gonna start doing tours again and, you know, so more high value things that don't take as much time.[00:15:08] Nathan:Right. So on the core side, I think a lot of people listening, maybe they have an email list of five, 10, 15,000 subscribers, and they're like, Hey, the next thing is to launch a course. And they're hearing that's where a bunch of the revenue is. And so it's interesting you moving away from that. So let's dive in more.What, what made you look at the core side of your business and say, I don't want to like restart that in a post COVID world.[00:15:33] Matthew:Yeah, there's just, there's a lot of competition, right? So like, I think it was like a blue ocean, red ocean strategy, you know, to think of that book of, you know, Blue Ocean Strategy. Right? One of the reasons we went into events is because a lot of our traffic comes from Google. And so it's a constant battle of always trying to be one or, you know, in the first couple of spots.Right with every blogger in every company with SEO budget, but there's not a lot of people doing in-person events or building sort of a community in the travel space. So I looked at that of being like, okay, there are a lot of people doing courses and they love doing courses and they're great teachers, you know, they're, you know, you get folks who know like path when, you know, low, like everyone, all these teachable folks, you know, they, they love that stuff.That's not where my heart really was. And so thinking of like, this is a red ocean now, because you have, when I started this, these courses back in 2013, there wasn't a lot of folks. Right. But now you have so many people with courses, so many Instagrammers and tic talkers selling their stuff. It's sort of like, is this worth the time.To like really invest in it when my heart really isn't right. Like how can I maintain your 400 K in revenue a year?[00:17:02] Nathan:Right.[00:17:03] Matthew:What's it going to take, you know, is that the best use of our resources? And the answer is not really, you know, let other people do that. Who love it. I mean, you want to buy my information.It's it's solid stuff. Right. Everyone loves the advice, but to really create like a cohort, like your class, which is sort of like the new version of courses, you know, like, whether it's a month or three months, it's sort of like, you go with this like cohort, right. My heart really wasn't into it because we can invest more in doing events and conferences and really in-person stuff.Especially now that everyone's really excited to do stuff in person again, with a lot less competition. It's easy. It's easy to start a course, but there's a lot of capital investment in doing events that we have the resource to do that, you know, somebody with a 10,000 email list might not.[00:18:03] Nathan:I think I see a lot of people going into courses in, particularly as you alluded to cohort based courses where they're doing it, like, Hey, this is a whole class that you're doing, you know, you're doing the fall semester for the month of October or whatever it is, I'm doing it, doing it the first time and really enjoying it because it's a new challenge they're showing up for their audience.It's just, it's super fun on that, doing it for the second time and going, huh? Okay. That was way easier and way less. And then the third time they go, I don't think I want to do this anymore. Like if the money is good and I just don't enjoy showing up at a set time for a zoom call or whatever else. So it's interesting of watching people jump on a bandwagon and some people it works for really well, and that is their strength and they love it.And then other people that I'm going to like, look, the money's good. And this is this just, isn't what I want to spend my time on.[00:19:02] Matthew:Yeah. You know, I've been doing it for, you know, seven, eight years now and I just sort of lost the passion for, you know, I think it's, I like when people take the information, they succeed with it. But I think after a while you start to realize, you know, it's sort of a 90 10 rule, right? You, 90% of your students, aren't really going to do anything with it.And it's not your fault. It's just because they become unmotivated or, you know, so we tried to switch to the cohort based to be like, okay, this is the class weekly, weekly calls.You know, come on, come together and you still get this drop off rate. That's, you know, sort, it gets this hard and you're like, all right, I've been doing this for eight years, you know, like moving on.But I mean, if you have the love for like pat loves it, you know, like you've got a whole team about it, he's got all these cohorts stuff that speaks to him where I think I'd rather do stuff in person that[00:20:01] Nathan:Right.Well, let's talk about the in-person side. Cause you did something that most people think is really cool and almost no one realizes how hard it is. I think I know how hard it is because I've attempted the same thing and that starting at a conference where everyone's like, you have this big online following, like what you just need to, you know, you have hundreds of thousands of people you just need, I don't know, 500 or a thousand of them to show up in a suit, that's gotta be easy.Right. And so they go and sort of conference, it's wildly difficult. And so.[00:20:33] Matthew:Difficult.[00:20:34] Nathan:I'd love to hear what made you want to start the conference and then yeah, how's it. How's it gone so far?[00:20:40] Matthew:Made me want to start the conference was I really don't think there's a good conference in the chapel space. Yeah. And there are good conferences in the travel space that are very niche and narrow. you know, like there's a woman in travel summit.That's really great. There's one in Europe culture verse, which I liked, but that's like a couple of hundred people there. Wasn't like a, something to scale, right. With wits, which is women to travel is like 300 people. There was, this is no thousand person, 2000 parts. And like mega travel conference for media that has done like, you know, the conferences we go to where it's like high level, you know, people coming outside of your immediate niche to talk about business skills.You know, there's, you know, In the conferences, there are, there's always the same travel, like it's me and like these other big names, travel bloggers over and over and over again. I want to take what I've seen and, you know, from social media world to, trafficking conversion, to mastermind talks, you know, to take all these things that I had gone to, we were like, let's bring it together for travel.Let's create a high level, not a cheap, like hundred dollar events, like, you know, with major keynotes who get paid to speak, because you know, in a lot of travel conferences, you don't get paid to speak, right? So you're high. You're going to get, you know, Cheryl strayed that come to your event for free.That's not waking up to do that. You know, I, you know, and while I can get nice deals from my friends, you still got to pay people right. For their time. And, and so that allows us to have a larger pool of people to create the event that I want to do. Because we will also get into the point where why should somebody who's been blogging for five or six years, go to travel blogging conference app when nobody is at a more advanced stage of blogging than you are, you know, nobody understands SEO better than you do, right?So like after a while you get into this, just drop off of people being like, do I want to fly around the world and hang out with my friends? So I wanted to also create an event where that I could go to and learn something is that I knew that would attract some of the other OJI, travel bloggers.[00:23:06] Nathan:Yeah. So how the, how the first one go, like what was easier than you expected and what was much harder than you.[00:23:14] Matthew:The first one went really well. We had 650 people, and you know, the next one we had 800. But now we're closed because of Kobe, but we're going to do one in 20, 22. And hopefully we get 800 again, things that shocked me, people buy tickets and don't show up. Right. That's weird. Right. Cause I was like, okay, we have 700, you know, I expected maybe like a 5% attrition rate, you know?So like I sold my 750 tickets, but then like six 50, those 600 showed up because the other 50 of those speakers, right. I was like, wow, that's a lot of no-shows for not achieving conference, you know? And so we plan, you know, a 10% attrition rate now.[00:24:04] Nathan:And you just mean someone who doesn't even pick up their badge? Not even, they didn't come to share us rates keynote, but just like they didn't show up to anything at the conference.[00:24:13] Matthew:Yeah, they just did not show up to the conference at all, you know? And. So that was a shock me. I mean, I know I work in travel and, you know, people get last minute of press trips or they, you know, they buy their ticket and they can't come cause, or they got stuck in the Seychelles or whatever, but I did not expect such a high level of no-shows. Because the food here's another thing, food costs a lot of money. Right.You know, I, I fully understand why the airlines took one olive out of your salad. Right. Because it's one olive, but times a million people every day it's actually adds up. Right. So like you think, oh, well it drinks five bucks.That's cool. We'll do a happy hour. Okay. Now times that by a thousand drinks Write, you know, times two, because everyone's drinking two or three, at least two. Right. So then you're like, okay, that's a $15,000 bill that you ended up with. you know, when everyone is all set up. Tax and tip hotel.It's crazy. It's like, okay, these fees, you're like, oh, I got to spend this like, yeah. Okay. Here is your lunch bill 50 grand.But then there's this fee that fee, this fee, this fee like Jake had like 65. You're like, all right. I guess I got a budget for that too. So that was, that was really weird. Like high is the lunch cost, $40,000, you know, and actually hotels, overcharge, and they add a bunch of fees and yeah, you can get them pretty quick.[00:25:46] Nathan:So if you were, if I was starting to conference. They have 50,000 people on a email list or a hundred thousand. And I'm like, Matt, I heard you started a conference. I'm going to do it too. What advice do you have for me? Like what are the first things that you'd call out?[00:26:03] Matthew:It's going to cost like three times more than you think. pricing. Where I went wrong in the second year. Right. So like we've lost money the first two years doing it, but I expected to lose money. It wasn't because I was investing in this long-term thing. Right. But we're at where I lost more money on the second year is that I really factor in flights as well as I did, like I kind of low balled it.And so I always think he should. Oh. And I also invited, I kept inviting people without really seeing, like, where was I? on my like speaker fees. Right. So like really creating a budget and then sticking to it. And even if that means not getting some of your dream folks, to a later year, but working up the food and beverage costs first, because you know, you go to the hotel and they're going to say your F and B, you know, is $90,000.And if they never going to hit that, no, you're going to go way. You're going to blow cause you got to get them to say, what are all the fees? You know, like, okay. You know, if I have a 300 person conference and I want to do two lunches, what does that look like?Plus all the taxes and fees,[00:27:23] Nathan:Okay, well, you, the launch price and you'll, you'll pencil that into your spreadsheet and they'll fail to mention that there's mandatory gratuity on top of that and taxes and whatever[00:27:33] Matthew:Yeah,And whatever, you know, plate fee there is. Right. So you gotta factor all that in and then look at what you got left.[00:27:40] Nathan:It's like when you're buying a car and you have to talk in terms of the out the door price in[00:27:45] Matthew:Yeah.[00:27:46] Nathan:The sticker price,[00:27:47] Matthew:Yeah. I made that mistake when I bought my car last year, I was like, oh 17. And I was like, wait, how did 17 go from 17,000 to 22? And like, well,[00:27:56] Nathan:Right.[00:27:57] Matthew:Thing that I was like, ah, okay,[00:28:00] Nathan:Yeah. Do you think w what are some of the opportunities that have come out from running the conference and has it had the effects of your community that you've hoped? It would,[00:28:10] Matthew:You know, this is a very, blogger faced event, you know, more than just travel consumers. but it's definitely allowed me to, you know, meet folks like Cheryl Austrade, you know, great way to meet your heroes. Is there pay them to come speak at a conference? so, you know, I, I know Cheryl, like, that's cool.The becoming more ingrained in sort of the, the PR side and with the demos and the brands, because, you know, on the website, I destination marketing organization.[00:28:44] Nathan:Okay.[00:28:45] Matthew:So they're like, you know, visit, you know, Boise visit Idaho, we call them a DMO. And so like since I don't really do press trips on the website, I don't know a lot of them really well.And so this has been a way to be, become more ingrained on that sort of industry side of events and not live in my own. and that's helpful because now I know all these folks, when we want to have meetups that might be sponsored when I do a consumer event, which is next up. So get these folks to come for that.So it's just really been good, just professionally to meet a lot of people that I would normally just not meet simply because I go to events and they were like, Hey, come to our destination, we'll give you a free trip. And like, you have a policy. And so I don't get invited to as many things as you would think.[00:29:37] Nathan:Yeah. Why, why do you have that policy? What do you like? What's behind it. And why is that different from other travel bloggers?[00:29:45] Matthew:Hi, it mostly stems from my hatred of reciprocity. You know, like if you, if I go on a free trip and it sucks, like I then create, it's awkward. If I have to go like hot, like, Hey, you suck. And I have to write this online. Then it creates a lot of bad blood that gets talked about, you know, it's a very small industry.People move around a lot, so you get less opportunities or I can just go, Hey, I'm not going to write that. And then they feel bad. Cause like, you know, like you're a nice person just doing their job, you know, like it's not your fault. I had a bad time. you know, I did this once with a friend and she gave me a couple of places to stay, at a hotel in San Jose, Costa Rica and chill out and sort of tell was really far out of town.And th the amount it took me to take a taxi back and forth. Like, I could've just got a place right. In the center of San Jose, you know? And so I was like, I really, I just don't think it's a good fit for my Anya. And she was very unhappy about it. I was like, I mean, I could write in, but I have to say that.Right. Yeah. And so I just never wanted to put myself in those situations again. I also think that taking a lot of free travel, like I do budget travel. So you given me a resort like that. Doesn't how does that help my audience? So if I start living this awesome life and getting free stuff, that's great for me, but it's not good for my audience.And so I don't mind taking free tours. Like, let's say I'm going to go to Scotland. Right? I did. This actually was real life example. I wanted to access cause I wanted to write about scotch. So I was like, Hey, I don't want to do like the public tour. you know, that 20 bucks, you know, it's like 10 minutes and you get the, I like, I want to talk to people because I want quotes for articles.I'm going to do like history stuff. So I contacted the Scottish tourism board and they got, got me visited. I that's where I went to. I just love P scotch. and so they got me like private tours. So I can like take notes in such. and they gave me a free accommodation that I was like, I want to be really clear about this.I'm not mentioning this place. And they're like, just, just take it. And so, and I didn't mention it and I didn't mention that, you know, I got access to these, you know, distillers to ask some questions, but it was more about building this article as a journalist than,Hey, I want like free tours, you know, like, I mean, I saved 20 bucks. Right. But the point was, I wanted to learn about the process to write about this story beam. And then they offered me free flights and stuff. It was like, now I just, I just want the tourist, please. Thanks.[00:32:44] Nathan:Yeah, it's interesting of the, what a lot of people would view as the perks to get into travel blogging. Right. I want to get into it because then I'd have these free chips or I can have these offs or whatever else, I guess the right apps you get, no matter what, but, You know that that's the other side of like, everything comes with a cost.And I think it's important to realize what you're doing because you want to versus what you're doing, because now you feel obligated because someone gave you something for free.[00:33:12] Matthew:Yeah. The most thing is I tend to accept our city tourism part, which gets you like free access to museums and stuff. I was like, okay, that's cool.But beyond that, I just, you know, I don't want to get into, like, you want to give me a museum pass. I'm going to see these museums anyway. Sure. I'll save some money and I'll, I'll make a wheel note, but I'm going to no obligation to write about which museum, because I write about the ones I like anyway.So,[00:33:39] Nathan:Right.[00:33:40] Matthew:You know, that's not to me like free travel. That's not what people think of Like the perks of. the job are.[00:33:46] Nathan:I, that was funny. When I learned about the, like the welcome packet that cities will, will give, like the first time I saw it in action was. I went to Chris, Guillebeau's like end of the world party in Norway. and I was hanging out with Benny Lewis there who runs, you know, fluent in three months, a mutual friend of both of ours.You've known him longer than I have, but like, we're both at our check into the hotel and he's got like this whole thing of all these museum passes he's got, and he's just like, yeah, I just emailed the tourism board and said, I was going to say, and they're like, oh, blogger. And they gave him like, you know, access to everything and you only ended up using half of it because we weren't there for that long, but,[00:34:28] Matthew:Yeah. That's great. You should always get these discount cards, like the comparison museum pass or the New York mic go card that will save you a lot of money if you're doing lots of heavy sites in.[00:34:39] Nathan:Yeah. Yeah, for sure. okay. So how does actually let's dive into the COVID side, right? Cause COVID took a hit huge hit on the entire traveling. we saw that just in the like running ConvertKit where, you know, having bloggers in so many different areas, we had a lot of growth because lots of people were stuck at home and start like, I'm going to start a new blog.I'm going to have time to, to work on this or whatever. And it was a lot of cancellations, mostly from the travel industry. If people like, look now that what this 50,000 person list, that was a huge asset is now just a giant liability. because no one's planning trips. How did you navigate that time? And what, like, what's the journey been?You know, the last 18 months, two years,[00:35:28] Matthew:Well first I would say that's really shortsighted of someone canceling their 50,000 person list like[00:35:34] Nathan:I think they were like exporting sitting on it and they're going to come back. But, but I agree. It was very shortsighted.[00:35:39] Matthew:Yeah. Like just like throw it away. 50,000 emails, right. I mean, it was tough in the beginning. You know, we went from like January and February were like best months ever, you know? And like, I mean, even, and then all of a sudden like, like March 13th is like that Friday, you know, it's like everything crashes, like again, like we were on our way to have a banner year, like, like, like hand over fist money, you know?And, and then to being like, how am I going to pay the bills? You know? and so, cause you know, we, haven't sort of the, the overhang from Java con, right. You know, like we didn't make money on the first two years. And year three was the, the breakeven year and travel con was in, Right in the world ended in March.Right. And so I had laid out all, like, you're so close to the event, that's you? That's when you start paying your bills. Right. And the world hits and all the sponsors who, you know, have their money, you know, in the accounting department are like, oh, we're not paying this now. And so you're like, well, I've just paid $80,000 in deposits and all that money that was going to offset.It has gone. and then you have people canceling. A lot of people were really mean about it. They're like, oh, I'm, I'm back now. And we're going to do charge backs, that, you know, you have that overhang and just, you know, fall in revenue it's it was really tough. thank God for government loans, to be quite honest, like I, I went to native through if it wasn't for, all that, because a lot of my.My money was tied up in non-liquid assets. So it wasn't like I could just like sell some socks though, you know, pay the bills. but things have come back a lot. I mean, there's a lot of paint up the man, for travel, I view it like this way, right? You got kids, right. You know, they get in trouble, you take away their toy and then you give them back.Right. Where do they want to do now? They just want to play with that toy even more because it's like, no, it's mine. No one else can have it. And like where you want to do this other toy. No. And so now that the toy of travel is being given back to people like people are like, never again, am I going to miss out on this opportunity to travel on my dream trips?Let's make it happen. So we had a really good summer. I spoke to mediocre fall and winter just as the kids are back in school, people are traveling less, you know, but as more in the world, that? will be good. but again, as I said, at the beginning of this, it's going to take awhile for us to get, to get back to where we were, but there's definitely demand there,[00:38:36] Nathan:When's the next conference when the travel con happening again.[00:38:39] Matthew:April 29th,[00:38:41] Nathan:Okay.[00:38:41] Matthew:22,[00:38:42] Nathan:So what's the how of ticket sales benefit for that? Is there like that pent-up demand showing up and people booking conference tickets or are they kind of like, wait and see, you know, you're not going to cancel this one too kind of thing.[00:38:55] Matthew:Yeah, I mean, we're definitely not canceling it. I mean, the world would have to really end for it. We just launched, this week. So, early October, we just announced our first round of speakers. and we sold like 10 or 15 tickets. I don't expect a lot of people, to buy until the new year I saw this.And the old event, right? Because in the old event we were had in May, 2019. Right. And we announced in the fall, but it wasn't until like, you know, a few months prior that people started buy their ticket. Right. Because they don't know where they're going to be. You know, where are they flying from? What were the COVID rules going to be like, the demand is there.But I, I know people are probably just waiting and seats for their own schedule too, you know? So, but you were against so 800 tickets and honestly, from what I've heard from other events, you know, people are selling out, you know, because there was such demand, like it's not a problem of selling the tickets, so I'm not sure.[00:40:01] Nathan:Yeah, one thing, this is just a question that I'm curious for myself. since I also run a conference, what do you think about conferences that rotate cities or like Mo you know, move from city to city, which we've been to a lot of them that do it. You know, the fin con podcast movement areTwo longer running ones that you and I have both been to. obviously that's what you're doing. The travel column. well, domination summit, which we've both been to a lot, you know, it was like very much it's Portland. It's always Portland. We'll never be anywhere anywhere else. What do you think, why did you chose? Why did you choose the approach that you did in what you think the pros and cons are?[00:40:39] Matthew:Yeah, for, for me it was, you know, we're in travel. I wanted to travel. Right. And plus, you know, I mean, you get up, we get a host, right? So like Memphis is our sponsor. Right. It's in Memphis. Yeah, it was supposed to be in new Orleans. New Orleans was our host sponsor. Right. So moving it from city to city allows us to get, you know, a new host sponsor every year is going to pony up a bunch of money.Right. I don't know how Podcast move into it, but I think if I wasn't in travel and it was more something like traffic and conversion, or maybe we'll domination summit, I would probably do it in the same place over and over again because you get better consistency. you know, one of the things I hate about events is that they move dates and move locations.Right. And, and so it's a little hard to in travel cause you know, COVID really screwed us. Right. But we're moving to being, you know, in the same timeframe, right. We're always going to be in early May. That's where I want to fall into like early may travel car, change the city, but you got the same two-week window, because it's hard to plan, right?So like if you're changing dates in cities, you're, you're just off of a year. So I wanted some consistency, make it easier for people to know, like in their calendar, Java con early Mac, Java con, early Mac, you[00:42:17] Nathan:Yep.[00:42:18] Matthew:It doesn't really work out cause of COVID, but post COVID we're we're moving to that, that, early may[00:42:24] Nathan:Yeah. Okay. So let's talk more about sort of scaling different between different levels of the business. So there's a lot of people who say, all right, 10, 20, 50,000 subscribers, somewhere in there. And it's very much the solopreneur of like, this is, I'm a writer. I just do this myself. Or maybe they, you know, contract out graphic design or a little bit more than that.What were some of the hardest things for you and why and what worked and what didn't when you made the switch from it being nomadic, Matt being just Matt to Matt plus a team.[00:43:00] Matthew:Yeah, it It's definitely hard to give up that control, right. Because you always think no one can do your business better than you can. And I mean, even to this day, I still have issues doing, you know, giving up control. Right.[00:43:14] Nathan:What's something that you don't want to, that you're like still holding onto that, you know, you need to let go of[00:43:19] Matthew:Probably just little things like checking in on people and, you know, Content probably like Content. I'm very specific about my voice, the voice we have. So. But I should let my content, people make the content that I know is fine. but I definitely, probably overly check on my teams to be like, what'd you do today?You know, you know, that kind of stuff. but I did take a vacation recently and I went offline for a week and they didn't run the thing down. So I was like, oh right. That was my like, okay, I can, I can let go. And it's going to be okay. But, so getting comfortable with that much earlier on, I would probably save you a lot of stress and anxiety.I definitely think you should move to at least having somebody, you know, a part-time VA, if you're making over six figures, hire somebody because you know, how are you are not going to go from a 100k to 500k really by yourself? Unless, you know, you just have some crazy funnel that you do, but even the people I know who are solopreneurs, they still have two or three people helping them a little bit part, even if it's just part-time because the more money you make, the more time you have to spend keeping that income up.And so your goal as the creator in the owner should be, how can I grow? How can I make more money? It should not be setting up your WordPress blog. You know, It should not be answering joke emails It should not be, you know, scheduling your social media on Hootsuite, that kind of low level stuff can be done by, you know, a part-time VA And maybe that part-time VA becomes a full-time VA as you scale up more. But you know, if you, you have to free up your time and you're never going to free up your time, if you're spending a lot of that time, scheduling. So you mean that the people I know who have half a million dollar businesses, selling courses, you know, and they're really just a solopreneur.They have somebody do that grunt work, right. Plus if you're making that much money, is that the best use of your time now? Really? Right. So getting somebody to do sort of the admin front work, as soon as you can, even if it's on a part-time basis will allow you to focus on growth marketing, and monetization, which is where you should be like Podcast.This week. I have like four or five podcasts I'm doing, right. You know, that is a good chunk of my week. If I have to spend that time scheduling on social media, you know, or setting up blog posts, like I can do that. And this is where the growth in the audience comes in.[00:46:12] Nathan:Okay. So since we're talking about growth, what are the things that you can tie to the effort that you put in that drives growth? Are there direct things or is it a very indirect unattributable[00:46:27] Matthew:Yeah, I think there's some direct things like, you know, before, you know, asking 10 years ago, I would say guest posting on websites. Right. You write a guest post on like Confederacy's site and boom, tons of traffic. Right. that doesn't exist anymore. I mean, yeah. You can get a lot of traffic, but it's not like the huge windfall it used to be, but it's still good for brand awareness.SEO. Great for links. Right. I would say things today that I can tie directly to stuff Podcast and, Instagram. So doing, like, doing a joint Instagram live with another creator. Right. You know, like me and, you know, it's I know pat. because someone with a big following there, we do, we do a talk, you know, 30 minutes, you know, I can see in my analytics, like a huge spike in my following right after that.And so that's a great way to sort of grow your audience is to do Instagram collabs in just like 30 minutes tops and[00:47:32] Nathan:Podcasts[00:47:33] Matthew:I get a lot of people will be like, I saw you on this podcast. I was like, wow, cool.[00:47:37] Nathan:I always struggle with that of like, of all the activities that you can do. Cause you get to a point where there's just so many opportunities open to you and it's like, which are the best use of time. What should you say yes to, what should you say no to, and I don't know. Do you have a filter along those or do you just, is it just kind of gut-feel[00:47:53] Matthew:I will say yes to any text-based interview, normally it is the same questions over and over again. So I sort of have a lot of canned responses that I can just kind of paste. and tweak But those are links, so I'm like, sure. Yeah. Send your questions over. Cut paste, tweak, you know, you know,[00:48:12] Nathan:Customize[00:48:13] Matthew:Customize a little bit, but you know, how many times do I need to rewrite from scratch?How'd you get into blogging, you know, what's your favorite country, Podcasts I definitely have a bigger filter on like you, I don't do new podcasts.[00:48:27] Nathan:Okay.[00:48:27] Matthew:I know that's like bad. because you know, this new podcast could become the next big thing, but come back to me when you have some following.[00:48:36] Nathan:I like Seth, Godin's rule I'm not on south Dakotan's level by any means, but he says like, come back to me. When you have 100 episodes, I will happily be your 100th interview on your podcast or something[00:48:47] Matthew:Yeah.[00:48:48] Nathan:And he's just like, look, Put in your time and then we'll talk.[00:48:51] Matthew:Yeah, so I like, I don't look for just following, but like again, you know, knowing that people give up on blogs, people give up Podcast too. So. You know, you have to have been doing it for like six months a year, like week a weekly, you know? So I know like this something you care about. and I like to listen because you know, you get a lot of new people and they're not really great.You know, they asked us like a lot of canned questions and you're like, listen, you're taking, you know, an hour, hour and a half of my time. You gotta make it interesting for me.Well, yeah, Podcast. And then for Instagram stories you gotta have, or Instagram lives, either a brand new audience, or if you're in travel, at least 75,000.Cause I have like a one 30, so I want to keep it in the same in a level.[00:49:43] Nathan:Yeah.I know nothing about Instagram and promotions on Instagram and all of that is there. If someone were to, like, in my case, if I came to you and say, Hey, I want to grow my Instagram following. I've got 3000 people or 5,000 people or something like that. And I want to be have 50,000 a year from now.Where would you point me?[00:50:05] Matthew:I would say, do you join Instagram lives with people like once a week, you know, and just, or maybe once a week for you and then go to somebody else on their side once a week. So, and just kind of work your way up, like find people in your, your sort of follower count level, you know? So in this case, I'd probably do, you know, you know, 1000 to 5,000, I would look for in your niche and like get online for 30 minutes and talk about whatever it is you want to talk about and and then go to someone else's channel and do that, and then keep doing that because you'll just see giant spikes and then you can move up the the ladder.Then you have 10,000 followers and someone with 25,000 followers might give you the time of day. And then you talk about that, you know, and you just sort of build awareness because you're always there. You're always around.[00:51:03] Nathan:It's a really good point about the figuring out what those rough bands are and reaching out within those. Because I think a lot of people are like, I'm going to go pitch whoever on doing Instagram live together. And it's like, you have 5,000 and they have 150,000. And like the content might be a perfect fit, but they're most likely going to say no, because you're not[00:51:24] Matthew:Yeah.[00:51:24] Nathan:Driving that much value for, or that many subscribers for their audience.[00:51:29] Matthew:Yeah. You know, and so you, maybe I would, you know, someone was like a finance blogger, and they had like 40,000, 30, 40,000. I'd probably.We do it because people who like to say money, like say money on travel. So it'd be like, there's probably a good fit. And you know, 30,000 people, they might not know me or they have like, like you said, 3000, come back to me, you know, when there's another zero,[00:51:57] Nathan:Right. Well, and then the other thing that's going to be true is if I'm bringing you to, to my audience to share and teach something, if you're using this strategy, like go do another 20 of these or 50 of these, and your pitch will be better. And the way that you teach finance to travel bloggers or whatever else it is, is going to get so much better.[00:52:17] Matthew:Yeah,[00:52:18] Nathan:It's like, I kind of don't want to be your Guinea pig. You know, I don't want my audience to be your Guinea[00:52:23] Matthew:Yeah,[00:52:24] Nathan:Pig for your content. And so just get more experienced and come back.[00:52:28] Matthew:Yeah. And you know, you also gotta think about, you know, people are so time-starved right. You know, when I started blogging, I could. There was no Instagram. There was no Snapchat. There was no Tech-Talk, you know, Twitter was barely a thing. So I didn't have to split my focus on so many different platforms and channels.Right. I can just, alright, I can be on this one blog, but now when people are like, whoa, sorry, I have to like manage all these different social channels and all of these comments in the blog and everything. They not don't have like an hour to give, you know, to just anybody way do you could have before,[00:53:12] Nathan:Yeah. Yeah. That's so true. Okay. So on the email side, specifically, if someone came to you with say 1,000 newsletter subscribers today, and they're like, I want to grow, I mean, you're looking to grow to 5,000. This might be so far removed from where you're at that you're like, I don't even know if that was, you know, a decade ago that I was in that position, but what are you seeing that's working?Where would you point them?[00:53:33] Matthew:What works for us right now? one having email forms everywhere on your site, sidebar, footer, we have one below the content below the content forms, and popups, popups, the work they're really great. we find for really long posts, having a form in the middle of the post converts better than, at the end of the post, because know a A lot of people don't read to the end, but when they get to in the middle you're still there.You know, if you look at heat maps are really long websites, right? You just see that drop-off right. So if all your forms are at the bottom of the page, they're just not getting the visibility, that you need. so middle of the page,[00:54:19] Nathan:Do you play with a lot of different incentives of like, you know, Opt-in for this fee guide, you know, or are you customizing it to something for a particular country or there, the content that they're reading[00:54:30] Matthew:Yeah, so we use OptinMonster for that. and so we have, like, if If you go to our pages that are tagged Europe, you get a whole different set of options. than if you go to Australia, like, and like the incentives are like, you know, best hostels in Europe, you know, best hostels in Australia, right? Like little checklist guides.And I tweak what the copy for that, you know, just to see what wording, will lift up a better conversion rate. But yeah, we definitely, because, you know, we cover so many geographic areas. The needs of someone going to Europe are a little different than somebody going to New Zealand. So we, we definitely customize that kind of messaging. And I think that helps a lot, you know, and definitely customizing messaging as much as possible. Um know, but in terms of just, you know, we can talk about, you know, the market, like how do you word things, but middle pop-ups and mil of blog posts definitely converts the best. And so like that's where we see a lot of growth, as well as, just on Instagram telling people to sign up for my newsletter or Twitter or Facebook, but don't let the algorithm, you know, keep you from your travel tips, sign up now and people do.[00:55:58] Nathan:Okay. And is that like swipe up on stories that you're doing[00:56:02] Matthew:Yeah.[00:56:03] Nathan:You know, on an Instagram live or all the above?[00:56:06] Matthew:All the above.[00:56:07] Nathan:Yeah.[00:56:07] Matthew:You just constantly reminding people to sign up for the list, you know, and. One of the failings of so many important for influencers today is, you know,They always regret everyone as everyone does. They always regret not starting to list, you know? And so, you know, you just got to hammer into people, sign up for the list, sign up for the list, sign up for the list.Yeah. And a lot of the copy is, do you see all my updates? No. Would you like to sign up for this newsletter?[00:56:39] Nathan:Yeah, because everyone knows. I mean, I come across people all the time. It's like, I used to follow them on Instagram. I haven't seen, oh no, I do still follow them on Instagram. Instagram just decided that I apparently didn't engage with their content enough or something.[00:56:53] Matthew:Yeah,[00:56:54] Nathan:So now I no longer see their posts,[00:56:56] Matthew:Yeah. You like, I go, I always go to my like 50 least interacted profiles. Right. And, you know, there are some people that aren't there. I interact with this guy all the time. How is this the least attractive? But that that's Instagram and saying, here are the people we don't show you in your feet.[00:57:13] Nathan:W where do you see that? Is that[00:57:16] Matthew:If you go to your, who you're following, it's it should be up on the top.[00:57:20] Nathan:Hmm. All right. I'll have to look at that.[00:57:22] Matthew:Yeah. I'll send you a screenshot. and so like, that's the algorithm be like, here are the people who you interact with the least, but it's like, no, I, I love their stuff. why why do it take them from me? So,[00:57:36] Nathan:Zuckerberg is like, do you really love their stuff? I just not feeling it.[00:57:40] Matthew:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, it's just, you know, the algorithms are terrible and what I hate and I learned this last year, and this was sort of a unsurprising, but surprising thing is that stories, which used to be like the latest first.[00:57:59] Nathan:Yeah.[00:57:59] Matthew:That is, they have an algorithm for that now, too. And I was like, I, I shouldn't be surprised, but I am surprised.And I'm annoyed by that because like, I liked it when it was just the newest first, but Nope, now that is based on, you know, sort of like Tik TOK thing of like, oh, this story is getting really a lot of interactions. We'll bring it up the front of people's queue or, you know, so it's not just like your first, because you had one, one second ago, you know, like it could, it's based on an algorithm[00:58:35] Nathan:Yeah.And that's how it's all going to go. Facebook did that a lot, you know, with Facebook fan pages back in the day where it used to be fantastic for engagement. And then they were like, yeah, it's fantastic. If you pay us[00:58:46] Matthew:Yeah. And even then it's like, I would pay to boost posts. I was like, great. You saw, I lectured five people. What? I just gave you a hundred bucks and that was. And there was some guy you remember him commenting last year. He was like, whatever happened to this page? I was like, I'm still here. He's like, no, no, no, no.And this isn't a common thread in Facebook. He's like your pages to get a lot more engagement. What happened? I was like, oh, Facebook algorithm. I was like, people just don't see it. Let me tell you where all my analytics side it's like this page. So I have 2000 people. You're like great. 1%, woo[00:59:23] Nathan:Do you do paid advertising? I'd like to get email subscribers.[00:59:28] Matthew:We used to, but, the CPMs went up so much that it wasn't worth the effort. You know, like paying a dollar 52 bucks for an email subscriber, is just a lot of money for, for, for things. We don't mind ties directly. Like we're not taking people through finals buy a course, right? Like just to get rot email, I'm not paying two bucks for.Yeah. And, and so I just, we stopped paying, like during the pandemic, like, June, June of last year, we were like, oh, we're going to take a break. And then we paid somebody to help us for it to make kind of reset it up. But I just had to spend down so much. I was like, you know what, I'm going to turn off for a bit.And yeah, that's been like,[01:00:17] Nathan:Didn't really miss it.[01:00:18] Matthew:Yeah, I looked at the numbers recently cause I was thinking, should we do it? And it's not that big of a difference of just doing it organically on like Instagram stories or just on the page. Right. And I also don't really like giving money to the Zuckerberg empire of VO. I just not a fan of that business.And so like, I know my ad spend is low, but I can't say just. On a rod number. Like it wasn't that big of a deal. Like, you know, like, cause the CPMs were so high, we were having to pay a lot of money. So like we put in like two grand a month and we weren't getting thousands. We getting hundreds of people, you know, I want four for two grand.I want thousands of people.[01:01:06] Nathan:Yeah. For my local newsletter, we're doing paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram and averaging about $2 per subscriber. And that I think now that's considered pretty good. You'd like a lot of, with a broader audience, you'd be at $3 or more per subscriber and it gets expensive pretty fast.[01:01:23] Matthew:Yeah. I mean, but I think at some point you'll just see such diminishing returns that, you know, I mean, how many people are in Boise, can you hit, you know, over and over again?Right.[01:01:35] Nathan:Yep.[01:01:36] Matthew:I, I was just reading Seth Godin's book. This is Marketing. And he said, you know, they talked about ads.You turned off ads when the Content says turn ‘em off. And my Content, I was like, you know, they're not really paying for themselves.[01:01:50] Nathan:Yeah. Let's see. Yeah. You turn that off. Looking forward, maybe like two or three years is that I think your business has fascinating of the approach that you have of taking an online audience, building a real team around it, and then building it into the in-person community. what do you think the business is going to look like in two, three years?Where, where is revenue coming from? What's your vision for the events and meetups and what are the things that like over that time period, they get really excited.[01:02:19] Matthew:Yeah. Two, three years. So we're talking, you know, 20 by 20, 23, most of our revenue coming from stuff in person, you know, having chapters around the world, people pay to go to them. So, you know, it it's like 10 bucks and you can bring your friends for free, right. So it's like five bucks versus. Just for the cost of like hosting events.Right. doing lots of that, doing tours, we're bringing back. and they won't be just with me cause they're community events. Right. So we'll have guides, right. So it's not just, you're coming to travel with me, sort of what Rick, Steve does. Right. You go on and Rick Steves tour, it's his itinerary, but he's not on the tour.Right. He shows up to a couple of them throughout the season when it's not like you don't expect him to be your guide at the time. So moving to that, having a consumer event for like, like a, like a world domination summit, you know, a weekend somewhere just for travel consumers, having an app for both having an app for that company. then online just being a lot of and affiliates and you know, even me. Just even taking away just having this like passive income course, just because, you know, one less thing to worry about. Right.And then travel con, so being around, but actually making money this time.[01:03:47] Nathan:Do you think travel con is going to turn into, I mean, obviously it's a significant amount of revenue, but the expenses are so high. Do you think it will turn into a profitable business[01:03:56] Matthew:Oh yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, a lot of the unprofitability is just comes from the fact that I had no idea where that was doing.[01:04:02] Nathan:Yeah, I know that firsthand from my own conference, so yeah.[01:04:07] Matthew:It was, I didn't realize how quickly expenses gets that. Right. You know, being like, oh, okay. Like my food and beverage budget is 120,000 writing that in there. And then getting $145,000 bill because, oh yeah, it's 120,000 food, but then there's tax fees, which we, you know, all this stuff and like, Okay, well, that's $25,000 off the profit.Right. and so with a better handle of expenses, like we were definitely like this year, we were gonna like reg even, you know, at the very minimum, we'll pre COVID and this year we'll also break break event. Um it's and just keeping a handle on, you know, like, well, how will I don't invite a hundred speakers, you know?And, and be like, oh, I had planned to only budget, you know, 50,000 speaker fees, but now I'm at 80. Okay. Like, handling the cost better. We're good. Now I have a professional events team that kind of slaps me around and it's like, can't spend that money.[01:05:06] Nathan:I know how it is, where I'm like, Hey, what if, and then just like, now[01:05:10] Matthew:Yeah,[01:05:10] Nathan:Love it, but no,[01:05:12] Matthew:Yeah,[01:05:12] Nathan:Don't like, you don't have the budget for it.[01:05:15] Matthew:Yeah. But no, I mean, you know, we used to have a party. And we're getting rid of the second night party because people don't want to go. Like we didn't have a lot of people show up cause like they're out and about on town. So it's like, wow, I just spent, you know, $40,000 for like a third of the conference to come, you know, why not take that money and use it to something that's more valuable for everybody that has more like impact for dollar spent and still not like go over budget.You know, same thing with lunches. We got, we were getting rid of, we're doing one lunch now.You know, cause people don't really care that much, you know, about in[01:06:01] Nathan:Yeah, it's super interesting.Well, I love the vision of where the conference is going, and particularly just the way that the whole community interplays. I think it's been fun watching you figure out what you want your business model to be, because obviously, with a large audience, your business model can be any one of a hundred different variations.I like that you keep iterating on it, and figuring out the community.[01:06:26] Matthew:Yeah, we're definitely going

Matthew Berman is President/ co-founder of Emerald Digital, a full-service data- and creative-driven digital marketing/ public relations agency that specializes in generating quantifiable leads and sales by: Mapping and generating consumer-journey-stage-specific touchpoints across multiple digital channels,  Developing and delivering personalized, consumer-journey-stage-specific content.  Typical clients are B2C premium consumer goods providers, B2B clients, and professional services (legal, healthcare, and some financial companies). Matthew talks about journey stages as being three funnels: awareness, consideration, and purchase. Awareness involves highlighting a consumer's major” pain points, introducing the client, and clearly presenting the client's unique benefits. At the purchase stage, where the user is already familiar with the client and trust and authority have been established, the message can be “a little more aggressive.”  The client, its product, and its target market determine the mix of content, platform, audience, and messaging needed to best address the target audience at each particular stage. Although the agency's focus is digital, Matthew says it will get into whatever space their target market is in. Matthew cites the example of a pet brand client with “two audiences.” When communicating with “the general public (traditional consumer channels), the focus is on digital with some print media, and media buying. For the industry-specific retail buyers (industry trades), the media mix is more traditional.  It has been difficult in the past to track billboard impact (except perhaps by sending viewers through distinct contact options). Today, companies can purchase digital space for times when prospective customers will be passing by that billboard, change up the message more frequently to keep it “fresh” or to meet the client's changing needs and goals (to increase business, build brand, hire new employees), or try to ping passing cell phones to track “views.” Matthew started his career in music production, selling songs through NYC ad agencies to support large brands' digital content. He partnered with a creative director contact to create Chunnel TV, a video curation and production platform. Funding for that evaporated with the Great Recession and Matthew moved to a traditional marketing agency in New Orleans to work on social and ambassador programs.  A few years later, he started Ember Networks, which provided other agencies with white-label social, web, and SEO support, and often consulted and collaborated with a close friend who owned Herald PR in New York City. On a joint project in the Turks and Caicos, they realized their teams were already integrated and that they would be able to tackle larger projects and work smarter if they combined the two companies. Ember Networks and Herald PR became Emerald Digital. When COVID hit, both locations shut down. Growth was exploding – the company probably tripled last year. Finding, hiring, and integrating new employees into the team was a challenge when everyone was remote. Processes needed to be thoroughly documented, mapped, and assessed; SOPs written, organized, posted, and automated; and communications tools updated and unified. In this interview, Matthew explains how a key tool of the agency's operationalization, a program called ClickUp, has allowed them to aggregate all their documents, automate processes, streamline reporting, and handle client communication.  Matthew is excited about how, today, his clients can tell never-ending stories and have ongoing narratives broken into digestible pieces across multiple platforms and multiple touchpoints and, even more so, how technological advances, AR, VR, AI will impact storytelling in the not-so-distant future. He can be reached on his agency's website at: https://emerald.digital Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Matthew Berman, who is President and Partner at Emerald Digital with offices in New York, New York and New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Matthew. MATTHEW: Thank you so much for having me, Rob. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start by introducing Emerald Digital and what it is that you all are excellent in doing for your clients? MATTHEW: Absolutely. I am the president and a co-founder of Emerald Digital. We are a full-service digital marketing and public relations agency. Our superpower is we are exceptional at generating quantifiable leads and sales. We do this by mapping out and generating consumer touchpoints across multiple digital channels, and we strive to engineer these consumer touchpoints by the stage which the consumer journey and the user is actually in. If they're at the awareness stage, we have different content pieces generated just for them and personalized just for them. If they're at the consideration stage, we do the same thing. ROB: You've kind of teased it; give us all the stages as you all think about it. MATTHEW: Sure. At a very general level, let's think about awareness, let's think about consideration, and let's think about purchase. We can break them down into those three major funnels. We try to identify, based on the client that we have, what mix of content, what mix of platform, what mix of audience, and what mix of message we need to best speak to our audience at that particular stage. If we're just trying to generate awareness, we want to highlight what their major pain points are. We want to introduce who our client is, and we want to distill our message such that it can focus on the unique benefits that our client offers in an easy-to-understand way for our target market. If it's at the purchase stage, we would generally have communicated with that particular user several times by now, so we've built up trust, we've built up authority. Our messaging is going to be a little more aggressive. ROB: Give us a picture here. Dive down a little bit. Are there typical clients for you? Particular industry, particular size? What's the wheelhouse? MATTHEW: I think in general, we see two different kinds, although it certainly extends beyond that. But the two different kinds that we have are a B2C company, generally consumer goods, with a product or service that might be a little more premium, a little more expensive, whether that be a luxury hotel or a private jet or a luxury villa or a more expensive food item. So we see that. On the other side, we handle a lot of B2B clients and professional services. We deal very frequently in the legal and healthcare and sometimes the financial space. ROB: I can't let it just sit there – I need to know more about expensive food items. MATTHEW: One of the examples is we're working with one of the most premium hotdog manufacturers and sellers in the United States. You would normally think about a hotdog as just a few bucks, and the ingredients that would go into that are maybe not the ingredients you would want to eat. We're working with this great brand where all of their ingredients are ultra-premium. It tastes amazing. It might cost a few dollars more than your typical hotdog, but we have to break down, where would this product be sold? Who would it be sold to? What type of benefits would a prospective buyer be looking for? That might be health, that might be ease of making it, things like that. But they do taste great. [laughs] I always love working with our consumer brands, especially in the food and drink business, because one of the benefits that we get is we get to try the product. I've probably worked with 50 alcohol brands or something by now, and that's always fun because you have to try it out. You have to make recipes, you have to shoot the product. You get to meet fascinating people all over the country. ROB: That might help with recruiting too. MATTHEW: [laughs] It's always a fun gig. ROB: You're like, “Hey, come here. Here's who we work with.” That makes sense, especially on the premium food side. There's a trend here that is fascinating. You're talking about educating people around considered purchases, but it is interesting how it spans across consumer versus the business side. The awareness, the consideration, the purchase, that's all there. You're not very much into the transactional world. You have digital in your name, but I would imagine you also – how do you think about traditional media as part of the media mix when you're talking about these long-term considered purchases? MATTHEW: Oh, without a doubt. Our expertise is certainly in the digital world, and that's where my background comes from. But I think as our business grows and as we take on more mature clients, we very much had to get into the space where it's also billboard, it's also print. It really matters where our target market is. I'm not going to only focus on a digital solution if my client's market isn't active there. We're working with a pet brand now, and we have two audiences that we need to communicate with. We need to communicate with the general public; those would be our more traditional consumer channels, and for us, we definitely highlight on the digital side there. But we can also focus on print media. We can focus on traditional news, media buying, things like that. But then there's this other audience, which is very industry-specific. Those are your retail buyers, your industry trades. Things like that, we might go with a more traditional mix than a more digital mix. But I've been a big proponent of this digital revolution for many years. It's sort of mirroring what my own personal habits were. I'm 34 now, so I've seen – I'm at that age where when I was younger, it was only traditional, and I've seen more and more brands moving to the digital space. If the last few years have taught us anything, we went from where you had to sell clients on the concept of digital 10-15 years ago, but now they all understand that that's where they need to be. They just need to know exactly what they have to do and what exactly they should be doing. ROB: It probably gives you a pretty good advantage. A lot of traditional media is digitizing in the buying, whether you're talking about billboards, out of home, whether you're talking about TV and you have the OTT stuff. That becomes an increasingly digital buy, I think. You might know better. MATTHEW: You're absolutely right. We were hesitant to recommend things like traditional billboards to our clients in the past. We're this interesting marriage of being data-driven but also creative-driven. If we couldn't get the right data for why we were buying something or why a client should be there, it was hard for me to make that recommendation. I might say, let's conduct some hopefully siloed experiment where if we buy this particular billboard without digital capabilities, let's see if we can see any noticeable lift in sales or phone calls. We can have a tracking number. We can send them to a unique URL that's on the billboard. But if it was hard for us to measure, it was hard for us to manage. With billboards now, especially in the digital space, there are Bluetooth – I'm not sure what the phrase is, but there's this Bluetooth tracking on it so it can try to ping all the phones driving by to give us some information on that. We can also purchase particular space if we only want it between 12:00 and 2:00 and 4:00 and 6:00 when people are driving back and forth. It just gives us more options than a general “This billboard is on the corner of X & X.” ROB: I'm just curious, because I've seen things on billboards that I would never have expected would have the correct ROI for the cost. What is the cost and entry point to get into a digital billboard placement? I see restaurants hiring for chefs and I'm like, man, how does that ever ROI? Or maybe they're thinking more about awareness. It seems like it doesn't add up to me, but how does that work? MATTHEW: There is such a variation in what these prices are. It's tough to give you an exact number. I would think there might be a branding component there. We bought a billboard for a client a few weeks back, and we were looking at rural markets versus urban markets, how many people. The urban billboard, I think we were looking at something like $15-$20K a month versus the rural one was maybe $800 or $1,000 or something. ROB: Wow. MATTHEW: So there's a wide variation of what those costs should be. With a message like “We need to hire someone,” that's not the message you would expect. [laughs] I'm not tracking that; I don't know what their ROI is. It's possible they just really needed workers. But it's also possible they're thinking about it from a brand place. ROB: Right, I get that. It's like, “Hey, we're a restaurant, we're here.” Even maybe an opportunity afforded by digital is you get to shift up the creative more often, sometimes saying you're hiring and sometimes talking about your fish and chips. MATTHEW: That's exactly it. ROB: Rotating the message. MATTHEW: Yes. Frequency – we have to heavily consider that, because you don't want to give the same individual the same message 10 times in a row. It will fall flat. It may also be that that particular restaurant purchased a set amount of billboard space, and they were committed to that for X amount of months, and it came to be that they were already busy, or perhaps COVID changed things for them, and they decided, with the digital billboard, “Let's allocate 15% of that space to hiring. We've already accomplished some of the goals we intended to here, and the money has already been spent, so let's use it for something that can affect us right now.” ROB: Matthew, let's rewind the clock here a little bit. Talk us through the origin story of Emerald Digital. Where did this business come from? What led you to start it? What were you leaving behind? All of that. MATTHEW: Let me give you a little run-through here. I got into this marketing world – I've been a musician for over 25 years, and in my late teens I was heavily into music production. I started selling songs to Heineken, Hennessey, and some other large brands for the digital content they were at that time producing. I was able to do this through some ad agency contacts in New York City, which ultimately led me to partnering with one of the creative directors there, and we created a video curation and production platform called Chunnel TV. After the Great Recession hit, we were unable to raise any more money for that, and I moved to a traditional market agency in New Orleans, where I was heavily involved in social and ambassador programs. A few years later, I decided to start my own firm. This is I think where the story of Emerald begins. At that point, I started a firm called Ember Networks. We focused heavily on social, web, and SEO. A lot of the time, there were other agencies that were hiring us. They would say they were able to do XYZ, but they either didn't have the bandwidth or the ability to, so they white-labeled out. More and more over time, I began working with a firm called Herald PR, which is owned by one of my dear friends. He was in New York City. He was my college roommate, so we were always bouncing ideas off of each other. As an agency owner, it's always helpful to have that bouncing-off point. “How are you doing this? How are you doing that?” So we started working together more and more on escalating projects. After a few years, we had a client who was a villa in the Turks and Caicos. Villa Bella Vita. It's absolutely gorgeous. We went down there, we were shooting drones and doing pictures, and we had brought some of our other clients down. We said, “Why are we doing this separately? Our teams are already integrated. They're already working together. We're able to take on larger projects together and work smarter than we are alone, so let's create a joint venture.” So Emerald is a joint venture between Ember and Herald PR. And you get to work with your friends. ROB: And hopefully you get to go back down to that villa every now and again. MATTHEW: Yes, we do, actually. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] That's good, to revisit the origin a little bit in that way, for sure. MATTHEW: Yeah. That's one of the benefits of working a little bit in the luxury space. You get to look at some of these beautiful places. ROB: As we follow the narrative of Emerald Digital, that's a good starting point. What have been some key inflection points, some times in the business where the difficulty level ramped up a little bit? MATTHEW: Well, an obvious one I think would be last year. I think everyone was under similar stress. We had to shut down both of our offices, but at the same time, we were growing at a tremendous pace. We were hiring, hiring, hiring. I think our team tripled or something last year. We were trying to identify people, work with them, merge them into our team, and inculcate them on the business without being in the same physical space. So I would say that was particularly challenging. That very much led us to hyper-focusing on the documentation of our processes and making sure that we had the right communication tools in place to try to break down these physical barriers that we have now, because we have people all over the country now. While our team was mainly focused in New Orleans and New York, during the last year we've had people want to move out of Manhattan; we've had people trying to move a little closer to the middle of the country, whether that's the Midwest, Michigan, and we've had a certain amount of team members moving to Florida. So how do we collaborate? How do we communicate? How are we working efficiently in this environment where we're all separated? That was a pretty major challenge. But it really led us to hyper-focusing on what these processes were and then implementing a toolset that was able to mold our workflow so that we weren't looking at “This thing is on Dropbox and this thing is on Drive and this guy communicates on Zoom and this person communicates on Slack.” It was looking at all of the different things we were doing across two offices, and now we're trying to operationalize this entire business. ROB: That's a really interesting thread to pull on. What are some of those key tools, practices? What makes distributed work for Emerald? MATTHEW: The first thing was we had to write all of these SOPs. First it was, what are the different stages in the work that we have to do, whether it's account service, biz dev, sales, the content creation process – everything from the brainstorm to the client revision to the scheduling to the ad buying? It was mapping out each of these different things we do. I think one of the first things was we wrote this book. I think we had 91 individual SOPs. And it didn't at that point cover everything. So it was like, all right, we have all of these SOPs. No one's going to read 91 separate things, so we need to put them in a single place that everyone can see at all times, and we have to add video. We added GIFs. We unified all of the documents. We had that all in a drive. But then in the last few months, we moved over to a program called ClickUp. It's been fantastic. We're very happy to have moved over because we can aggregate all of our docs. We implemented all of our different processes into the actual software, so we were able to automate a lot of different things. We were able to streamline a lot of our reporting as well and a lot of our client communication. If there was a particular deliverable we had, we were able to have that automatically pull up. So if we have a social client that needs XYZ, when that job is created, it will pull in the SOPs that we have made and automatically pull in some of our primary documentation so that the employee doesn't need to go looking for it or even realize they have to pull that up. It'll just have it right there.  ROB: Sure, and then nobody has to ask where something is, right? They can go look for it, actually, which is helpful. MATTHEW: Yes. Not only be able to look for it, but to remind them that it's there. I think that first month when everyone was working from home, it was, “Where is this thing? Where is that thing? Which folder?” It was a big organizational task. Not only to have it where it's all in a place that the person can find, but it's to create automated reminders and touchpoints on our end so that we don't even have to find it. It's right there. “Hey, by the way, since you're making a social media post, here's a few things that might help you out. Here's previous creative. Here's file assets. Here's a step-by-step on how to do this. Here's a video. And if you need help, here's a simple form that you can fill out right there, and that form will automatically be sent to your superior, our management team, or even our leadership.” ROB: Has it been difficult for everyone to make that transition? It seems like that's a cultural shift, and with that comes the privilege of being able to be distributed, of being able to move to Florida whenever you want. But has that been a tough transition across the team in some cases? MATTHEW: I want to point out that I'm so happy with the way our team has adapted. Everyone has done a tremendous job, to the point where I think in many cases we're more efficient now than we even were before. But I think on a personal level, for many people, with that shift in not going to the office and being in the same house with all of your kids who can't go to school for months at a time, or for even the new hires, there's certainly difficulty there. Or we have employees who have older parents. So there's certainly difficulties. But I think on a professional level, our team has adapted to it tremendously. ROB: That's good news. It's a tricky transition. Now, as you're spread apart, how are you thinking about in person? Is there a cadence of getting together, or is it off the table for now? MATTHEW: That's a great question. With your previous question, you asked what some of the challenges are, and I think one of the biggest ones, especially for me and our creative team, is there are these great ideas that happen off the cuff around the water cooler, and you can sit around a whiteboard in the same physical space and be like, “Wouldn't it be cool if we did XYZ?” There is absolutely something to being in the same physical space. I don't want to discount that. Where I believe we will be moving to as things open up is a more flex time model, where you can come into the office two or three times a week and then you can work from home the rest of the time. If you're not in a location where one of the offices is, then obviously you cannot come in. But wherever possible, I think we're going to identify physical opportunities for everyone to get together, whether that's once a quarter or – we're not sure exactly what that frequency is. But we have several different cadences now for our team to brainstorm, to basically connect. We have an all hands meeting every Monday, every Friday, and then each of our separate teams meets every single morning. “What are we doing today? What are our goals? How did yesterday go?” Those are our primary touchpoints. Most of us are in communication with each other throughout the day anyway, but it's still good to get everyone on those face-to-faces. On a digital face-to-face, I should say. ROB: [laughs] Absolutely. Matthew, as you think back on the journey so far, what are maybe some lessons you have learned that you would tell yourself to do a little bit differently if you were starting from scratch? MATTHEW: I think to document these processes is something I would've done much, much sooner. It would've helped us scale a lot faster, and I think a lot more efficiently. So certainly that. And it would have allowed us to train and hire people in a much easier manner, and I think for us to even identify what some of our own roadblocks were and to have a better understanding of what repeatable processes we have and where we can identify pain points and how we can grow those. And certainly another one for myself – for many years, I wanted to see every creative and had to approve it. It was almost like all roads went through me. That's a tough thing to let go of, but as a business owner, you have to. You have to trust the people that you're hiring to make the decisions that you hired them to do, and only to come to you when they need you, or for you to bring them that strategic vision or directive. But give them enough room to do their job properly. So I would say, “Chill out, Matt. Let go.” [laughs] Bring on the smartest people that you possibly can. That's a really major part. You as the business owner want to be the dumbest person in the entire room. Your job is to hire the smartest people for the best job that you can find, and hire them no matter what it takes so that you can trust them to do what they do well. ROB: How do you time that transition? Because clearly, you start the thing from zero and you're going to be working in the business, necessarily. Very few people – I know one guy that bought five agencies and he just starts being in charge. But for most of us, you're starting with a special talent. You're starting with that skill that you have being the reason that people come to you, and then you start having people fill in some of your weaknesses, and then people who also have your strengths. How do you think about when to start turning the corner on getting yourself out of every piece of creative? How do you time that? MATTHEW: That's a great question. Certainly bringing in smart people and then making sure they know exactly the job they're supposed to do, and then giving them – maybe working with them for the first month or two, where you are a little more hands-on, and just ensure that your processes work. Just oversee. Say, “I built all these processes out. I have trained you. Here's enough room for you to do it yourself.” And you set, “Every Thursday I'm going to dedicate three hours to ensuring that this foundation that we've made is actually working.” You start with different topics. Maybe I'm going to let go of all of the creative when it comes to social posts and video production, but I'm still going to hold on to this web dev side. For now, I want to be able to test everything and I want to be able to overlook the code. I just want to make sure everything's working properly. I think one by one, start making sure that each of those teams has that process down. I would start thinking about what unique assets you have. Are you the best at social? Are you the best web guy? Are you the best for overall strategy? Did you create a web firm because you're a killer coder? Start thinking about the things that you can offload that maybe don't fall into your expertise as much as the others. ROB: That makes perfect sense. As we look at the future of Emerald and of the work that you do for clients, what's coming up? What's the future look like? What's exciting there? What should we be looking out for? MATTHEW: Awesome. If we talk general industry – and I kind of mentioned this before, but it felt like for many years we had to pitch about why you should be in the digital space at all. That conversation, especially in the last two years, has really shifted to “You know that you have to be here. Now we can do some really interesting things.” Our clients are much more on board with this concept of telling a never-ending story, having an ongoing narrative that can be broken up into digestible pieces across multiple platforms, multiple touchpoints. I think that's very exciting as a storyteller. We can create video, we can create audio, we can do all these interesting things. I think that's really fun. That brings us to what's on the horizon. We're not going to be using the same platforms forever, and they change all of the time. More and more, we're seeing movement in the AR, VR, and AI space. I think it's really exciting. There's this fantastic firm up in New York that we are friends with, and some of the stuff they create is this marriage of a digital space with a real-world space. I think as a storyteller, that opens up so many different avenues for us, because now all of your content and all of your communication doesn't have to be flat. It can be 3D. It can be all-encompassing. You can build things that can sit on someone's table and look like they actually exist. So I'm very excited for that AR/VR space, and then on the AI side, it's certainly helping us to more intelligently gather and parse out what our data means, but also to create content faster. ROB: Lots going on there. It would probably be a whole interesting other conversation to get into the level and approach and who's appropriate to get into AR/VR. But I think with the right creative people, a lot is certainly possible. MATTHEW: Yeah. I definitely think we're still a few years out, and it's probably a matter of one of these big tech firms releasing the Apple Glasses or a contact lens. I think the general user hasn't adopted these yet. We're very much still in the first mover advantage. It's not quite there. But part of our role as a business owner here is to set the business up for success 10 years from now. We don't want to be the best Facebook ads guys in 10 years. We want to be the guys that are doing the next thing great as well. ROB: Excellent. Matthew, when people want to track you down, and Emerald Digital, how should they connect with you? MATTHEW: Check us out at https://emerald.digital. ROB: Awesome. We get these hot new domains. I kind of want to get a .digital myself, but maybe just to track my billboard ads. I don't know. We'll get there. [laughs] MATTHEW: Yes, done. [laughs] ROB: Thank you so much, Matthew. Thank you for coming on, for sharing. Best wishes to you and the whole Emerald team. MATTHEW: Thank you so much. ROB: And all the good stuff going on in New York and New Orleans and beyond, right? MATTHEW: And beyond. ROB: Excellent. Have a wonderful day, a wonderful week, and thank you so much, Matthew. MATTHEW: Thank you, Rob, for absolutely everything. Cheers. ROB: Cheers. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Elena Ashburn and Matthew Oh always found themselves moving. As children of military members, their lives were in constant flux, and adapting to a new home was never easy. Still not quite adults, the duo decided it was time to bring other together children whose parents were in the military. They built a community called Bloom, where they could express their ideas and generally commiserate. Federal News Network's Scott Maucione spoke with Oh and Ashburn.

Matthew Oh grew up in a tiny Texas town as a Korean American whose athleticism and need for father figures led him to an unusual career in football at many different levels. But he has also been a stunt man, a model, and an actor. On top of all that, he developed a passion for bettering the lives of everyone, not just himself. So he launched Optimizing Healthy Meals in order to help reduce plastic waste and to provide clean drinking water where it's needed most.

Born in 1985, @matthewoh got passionate about electronic music between 1999 and 2000, when he bought his firsts records. In 2006 he opened a small record resale corner, which he still carries on to this day. Over the years Matthew collaborated with some of the best clubs in central Italy including Red Zone and Serendipity, which he is one of the main resident djs since 2012. Eventually Matthew founded Outlaw in 2015, a pure dub techno label now on its eighth release that counts artists such as @ohm-599575574 & @octalindustries, a remix from the Ecologist, @tm_shuffle, Halbtomm and @kevin-arnemann. Stay Rave with #13!

If it seems like a new DTC brand is launching every day, that’s because it’s true. In every industry, across every vertical, on every channel, the next “big thing” is competing for your attention, your clicks and your cash. As a consumer, sifting through all that noise and filtering out which companies are worth your time can be a daunting task. And as a brand, it begs the question: how do you set yourself apart from the ever-growing pack?One option is to find a trusted source to vouch for you. Matthew Hayes can be that source, and his new marketplace, The Fascination, is where he wants to lift up some of the most worthy DTC brands coming to market.The Fascination is a product recommendation and reviews publication focused on emerging and purpose-driven direct-to-consumer brands, large and small. Users of the platform have the ability to filter through vetted brands, digest the company’s story, and even transact all in one place.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Matthew dives into lessons he learned while building Leesa Sleep, why curation is so important in the rapidly expanding direct to consumer space, and gives his take on why the convergence of media and commerce will be the one thing that impacts ecommerce the most. Plus, I even pull out a few stories from his trip to Richard Branson’s Necker Island.Main Takeaways:Curation Station: The saturation of the market with a new DTC brand every day is creating issues for consumers and brands alike. With so much clutter, it’s hard to stand out. Through measurable metrics, in-depth reviews, and by holding brands up to certain benchmarks, The Fascination created a space that customers can trust, and brands want to be listed. Layers of Use: For a brand to stand out, The Fascination has found that being mission-driven, promoting social good, and leaning into and highlighting the unique aspects of your business will be the most effective strategy. Lessons Learned: While not everyone can pick the brains of the biggest entrepreneurs in the world, when you get the chance, it’s wise to listen. Matthew was able to visit Necker Island and spend time with Daymond John, Marie Forleo, Tim Ferris, Seth Godin, and Richard Branson. Tune in to hear what advice they gave that has been helping him to this day.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone. And welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder at mission.org. Today, I'm chatting with Matthew Hayes, the co-founder at The Fascination and previously on the founding team at Leesa Sleep. Matt, welcome to the show.Matthew:Thanks for having me.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm very glad to have you on. So I was hoping we could start with maybe Leesa Sleep. Because when I saw that I'm like, "Whoa, you were like an OG in the D-to-C space," and I thought they'd be a good jumping off point.Matthew:Yeah. So I was part of the founding team at Leesa. Yeah, we launched it back in 2014 before everything exploded. Right? So we were very early. We were one of the first BedInABox brands to get out there, Tuft & Needle came maybe, I don't know, six months to a year before us. Casper was literally right before us. And then we were out right around Thanksgiving of 2014 and that whole industry just exploded under our feet. We had the wind at our back for most of our tenure, especially our growth years. But things are a lot different now and t's a different ball game in terms of launch and growing a D-to-C brand in 2021.Stephanie:Good. Tell me a bit about the differences. I mean, obviously the world is very different and there's a lot of new trends coming out about what to expect over the next couple of years, but are there any lessons that you took away from Leesa that are still relevant or is the world just like in such a different place now?Matthew:No, I think it's still really relevant. I think a lot of the stuff that we were learning as we grew is incredibly relevant to the way that we launched The Fascination, the way that brand founders are thinking about things now. When we first launched in 2015, cost of acquisition were beautiful. Like all day we could scale the auctions across Facebook and Google, were very, maybe a fifth of what they are now just in terms of competitiveness. Just, I mean the mattress industry specifically there was 180 entrants after we launched, so a huge amount of volume coming into that space and just generally in D-to-C. So the cost of acquiring just pure play digital customers was going up and people were seeing the writing on the wall and starting to diversify into brick and mortar.Matthew:And so I think that was one of the things that we realized, is we've got to have a diverse channel mix. And so we struck the partnership with West Elm, we leaned more into Amazon. We looked more at international and we actually set up our own brick and mortar stores. So I think the combination of that brand awareness and exposure helped our brand tremendously. Whereas a lot of brands stuck it out, stayed pure plays and they learneD-to-Costly less and overspending on acquisition.Stephanie:Yeah, that's definitely the biggest thing that I see from the past couple of years or past decade is like before you could just focus on paid acquisition, like throw a bunch of money at it and one's really, they're going to come to you either way. And then now it seems like a lot of the, I guess the brands that are ahead are more media companies now, and there's a big spectrum between paying for people versus organic or versus starting a community and then launching a product to them. So it does feel like a definitely a different world than just like pay, and grow, and scale up as you go.Matthew:Yeah. I mean, we're seeing that a lot actually. And I think our notion of how to build a profitable business with The Fascination is quite a bit different. No, we're not a pure play own D-to-C brand selling our own products, we're essentially a marketplace, but what we've done is we've seen the success that media companies have had in building an audience that's super loyal whether that's The Hustle, or Morning Brew or The Scam, all of this audience aggregation and demand with these customer demos, there's so much that you can do with it. And so, we saw a bit of an opportunity and the fragmentation that was happening across D-to-C brand for popping up literally every day. And you start to become a little leery of, is this a good brand? Is this is a good product? Does this align with my values and tastes? And we saw this need for curation across all spectrums of D-to-C really. And we saw an opportunity to really create a media platform and a commercial platform around that.Stephanie:So let's dive into The Fascination a bit. So it's a marketplace. You guys are curating D-to-C brands. I saw you have filters focused on the product technical quality, also the soul of the company. Tell me a little bit more about The Fascination. How do you allow brands into the marketplace? Yeah. And any other details around the platform?Matthew:Yeah, so I mean, people are basically referring to it as a marketplace meets magazine, which I think is an accurate description. It's basically at its core, it's a product recommendation and reviews publication specifically focused on emerging and purpose-driven direct to consumer brands. So in much the same way that Wirecutter or the strategists reviews top products and writes those objective third-party reviews and recommendations, as a media publisher we're really doing that, but we're focusing in on a subset of these D-to-C brands that are new and emerging and have purpose driven values.Matthew:And the idea is to create a single platform where people can come and discover new brands, they can read reviews and research those brands and products, and they can shop deals all in one place. So it's a linear play from discovery all the way through to purchase.Stephanie:Yep. So who are some of your favorite brands on the platform right now?Matthew:There's so many good ones.Stephanie:[inaudible].Matthew:Yeah, I know I'm going to get in trouble for this. We've got badges across the site, which are really cool. The badges call out things like women and minority led businesses, or organic, or made in the USA. And so like Girlfriend Collective is one of our women and minority led brands. Haus is another-Stephanie:Even Haus on, yeah.Matthew:... Yeah, they deal the [inaudible] and great products, great brand story.Stephanie:Delicious.Matthew:Delicious. Yeah. I was just chatting with the founders of Huron, which is a men's skincare line. Awesome story. And then we've got the big names that you'd expect. Like we've got Allbirds on the platform. We've got Warby joining soon if they're not up already any day now. We've got UNTUCKit so, those it's a nice mix of the old school D-to-C incumbents with a lot of really cool emerging brands that honestly I'm intimately involved in direct consumer and a lot of these brands I hadn't heard of for the first time.Matthew:So if you think about like, as it broadens out the halo from the bulls-eye of our tightest demos, there's going to be so many people that are discovering these brands for the first time. And that's really what we want. We want some of these big names to attract people into the site, and then we want a lot of our awesome emerging brands and products to be discovered while you're there.Stephanie:Yeah. That's great. So how are you convincing these larger brands to join the platform? Because I'm thinking your space, I think also is very competitive. I mean, the world right now is headed to a place where everyone wants curated collections. I mean, they don't want to spend a bunch of time everywhere. They want it all in one place. We had the CEO of Fast on talking about, you need the one-click checkout and be able to allow people just to check out instantly and not have to bulk it into a cart. It seems like your space is very competitive too. How are you convincing the Warby Parkers? And the older brands who probably are approached by quite a few marketplace platforms to, "Oh, join us." Why are these brands going with you?Matthew:Well, I think we've really a ton on the story and the user experience and just the overall look and feel of our digital product and what we stand for. I think it's also in our favor that we have been D-to-C operators ourselves and we can really empathize to what these founders need. And we've been fortunate to be in the community for several years now. So we had a few close partners that our spring pad, if you will. Not to mention Nick Sharma as an advisor, who's great at pulling in brands.Stephanie:He was on our show too, man, I was just-Matthew:Yeah, I know.Stephanie:... fortunate.Matthew:And so yeah, between that, and we had some really amazing brands reach out the first day that just totally shocked us. We have a type form application that comes through and we had a couple of 100 brands, including some of the biggest names in the space on day one, which it was super exciting. And just a lot of founders getting really excited by seeing their brands mentioned in our round ups, or seeing products being shared. So I think that the validation that we're starting to provide, and really empathizing with what brand founders need is something that they're really clamoring for. And I think word it gets out fast.Stephanie:Yeah. That's great. So is there any trends you're seeing right now around what customers are most excited about? I mean, I'm guessing you have all this data now and you can see, okay, a bunch of people are coming on during quarantine and buying Haus. We need another type of Appertiff or something to offer that's similar because we see so much engagement there, any trends?Matthew:I think that one of the things that we've seen that's really interesting is our roundup pieces on brands that are making an impact and just the social impact stories are really, really resonating with consumers. And the brands are sharing the stories, which is just amplifying the message that much more. So the general consumer sentiment that we're getting from a qualitative perspective is that a platform like this is very much needed and like, thank you for building it. So I don't think it's even halfway to where we want it to be, or it could be in terms of the overall product development evolution, but we're going to get there quickly.Stephanie:Yep. So how, when you're... You just said that certain stories that you're telling around the brands and the social good aspect of it are really resonating. Is that your main play when it comes to acquiring new customers on your platform is by writing good pieces of content, having the brand share it to get in front of their audiences as well, or how do you think about acquiring new customers?Matthew:Yeah, I mean, customer acquisitions, it's always a challenge for a marketplace like this. And that's why from day one, we didn't approach it as a pure play commercial marketplace where you're just aggregating and selling products. From a consumer perspective, that's really not serving the overall need that we're trying to address, which is discovery, research, and shop and convert. And so the research aspect of that is really where we're going to focus a lot of time and attention and work. And what I mean by that is writing really in depth, thorough product reviews that are authentic, that are meaningful, that consumers value and ultimately Google values that content really highly as well. And so, what I'm getting at is the SEO and organic traction and such. It's going to be a big part of how we grow organically, keep our acquisition costs low.Matthew:There's a lot of performance marketing things that we can and will be doing. Brands have had tremendous interest in doing paid marketing partnerships, whether that's white listing on Facebook, or sponsoring newsletters, or any sponsorships. I think there's a tremendous amount of demand for that. And we really are just dipping our toes into the very first test there. And then I think PR and having, as I said, our brands amplify, our content is also, it's just going to be a latent, organic way to continue to build low cost audience. I mean, I think if you think about the way that Leesa scaled and a lot of those 2015 brand scaled, we know that we can't run the same playbook and build a sustainable business.Matthew:And so as we were launching in early days, it's like being a media company is really hard, right. Coming up with really engaging content every single day, pumping it out, like the Morning Brews and Web Smith's of the world, I take my hat off to those guys because it's not easy, but I think you can already start to see the rewards that we're going to reap from that.Stephanie:Yeah. So what channels are you... Well, maybe actually first, let me talk about the content piece, because that's top of mind for me is, a lot of people say you just need to create good content and that's the key to finding great people. How do you go about brainstorming something that will resonate? Are you actually going through maybe search trends and starting there to see what's going on in the industry, and then writing articles around that? Or is it purely, just like, I want to talk about Haus's story and we're going to talk about what they're doing behind the scenes? Like, how do you brainstorm content?Matthew:It's a mix of all of that actually. So we've got a number of things that we're covering at any one time. A lot of it is when we have new brands onboarded, we've got to write the brand story and we've got to review their products. That's phase one. And that's like an ongoing process as we get up and running. But yeah, we're also looking at industry trends, category wide trends, search trends around specific products or competitive products to see how we can write really compelling content that meets that need.Matthew:And then we're thinking about the cultural relevance, things that are happening topically in everyday life. And we've got a couple of different personas that we look at. And so what are our personas caring about, what's their headspace, and then what are the things that are happening in their specific lives at this very moment in mid January? So as we think through those things, you start to surface really relevant content ideas, and that's where our social content, a lot of our editorial content comes from. And that's generally how we do it.Stephanie:Cool. And what are some of the channels that you're most excited about right now, or you think that there's untapped potential? Are you sticking with the Facebook where of course stick the Facebook? How is sticking with-Matthew:Afterthought.Stephanie:I like that. Hey, they used to be though. Right?Matthew:Yeah. Drop that.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, when? It's still pretty relevant, but yeah. Are you sticking with Facebook? A lot of other brands still say that's the best place to reach customers. Are you trying out a bunch of new channels and experimenting? How are you thinking about that?Matthew:So Facebook isn't a priority for us right now other than to the extent that we use it for paid social advertising. I would say it's there. Of course it's there. But when we're thinking about building audience, Twitter has been a nice surprise for me, I'm really bummed that I didn't get myself on Twitter several years ago, but Sharon, our audience development team's doing an awesome job of engaging that really passionate community.Matthew:I think LinkedIn has sneaky, organic reach and potential. And we found that a lot of our brand founders are sharing our content there and we're getting a lot of engagement.Stephanie:They're more organic then, right, because LinkedIn is super expensive when it comes to advertising.Matthew:Yeah. All organic. And then stuff like TikTok is interesting as we look at really organic product reviews doing things with founders, I think that's something that we're going to be looking at as well as Clubhouse.Stephanie:Yeah. Clubhouse. I think that's where it's at. I'm on there. I listen to people. I think you can connect with a lot of great people on there. I'm still not sure about the unstructured format sometimes where things can go on for hours and hours, but yeah, it seems like there's a lot of potential there to at least connect with new people. I don't know about selling.Matthew:A lot of untapped potential.Stephanie:Yeah. So I saw that you were also an investor in GRIN. Right. And that's the influencer platform, which is... That's the right brand. Right?Matthew:Yup. [inaudible].Stephanie:Okay. So our guest yesterday that we had on was, that's her favorite new tool that she's looking into and I had not heard of it before. And I'm interested to hear a little bit about how are you thinking about influencers? What attracted you to GRIN, where's that market headed over the next couple of years?Matthew:Yeah. I mean, we've been doing influencer marketing since 2012, honestly. And I think there's going to be a lot more regulation around it for one. So you've got to be buttoned up as you execute itMatthew:So I think that's just part of the industry growing up. A lot of these minors are now celebrities in their own right with huge followings and PR teams. And so the days of just engaging with an influencer that way are over. It's really about adopting a micro/nano strategy where you're activating pockets of a couple thousand followers up to 50 to 100,000 followers and doing it more strategically at scale. And that's where I see a lot of brands and agencies having success doing this stuff. So GRIN is just a really awesome tool for managing that entire workflow. Keeping you really on top of things, you can search for look alikes of an influencer. So if you have someone or something that you want to find influencers around, it's great for that.Stephanie:That's awesome. And how did you think about attribution and analytics around utilizing influencers and seeing if you're really getting the most bang for your buck?Matthew:Yeah. I mean, well, especially with iOS 14 and everything that's going on there, it's always been an imperfect science, we never assume that we would have even close to perfect attribution on influencer activations. So we always treated it very top of funnel and you do what you can in terms of attribution. So you give them trackable UTM parameters, you give them a bespoke promo codes with their name. You give them a landing page experience, everything that you can do to cookie the user on your website and get them into what feels like an authentic customized experience for that loyal following. That's going to increase conversion, I think as much as anything.Matthew:And the vast majority of influencer activity is probably happening on mobile anyway. So wherever you're sending them, it's got to be very mobile optimized because if they switch over, your attribution's lost at that point.Stephanie:Yeah. And I think that authentic piece you're saying, I mean, it has to fit your brand. The person has to not just be saying something just to say it. And I think taking that longer-term approach more of like a partnership and someone who is going to be a part of your brand, even if they start out smaller and grow with you, will be way better than just trying to target a big name, because I normally don't really put any weight in products that large celebrities are showcasing, just because I'm like, I just know how much money you're getting paid and I highly doubt you're using that teeth whitener.Matthew:Yeah, I mean to that point and a lot of grants are basically incentivizing on the CPA or per sale basis with, like you're saying a subset of really loyal influencers and affiliates that they can send that influencer their fall collection of bags and apparel or whatever, and they can get 10 or 15 posts out of it if the influencer continues to see performance. And so I think that's the new way of doing things nowadays.Stephanie:Okay. So yeah, viewing it from a content generation perspective of, they're not just posting once trying to get their product off, but they're also creating an article or blog posts that you can repurpose and pull quotes from or whatever it may be.Matthew:Yeah. And more frequency drives more conversion. So the more you get that brand in front of your audience, the more likely it is they'll finally take action.Stephanie:Yep. So I want to talk a bit about mentorship, which I always love asking questions around this. I saw that you went to Necker Island a few days ago... a few years ago [crosstalk], really? Few years ago. And of course Richard Branson's Island. So I want to hear, what did you learn there? What advice did you hear? I saw, I think Damon John was there, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, Marie Forleo, a bunch of great people to learn from. And I want to hear about the stories behind going there. What did you learn, all that?Matthew:Yeah, I mean, it was a life changing experience for sure. Damon is still pretty close to us in the business. He got involved with Leesa after we met, especially with their 110 program, and I really just learn from him the hustle, the grind. He told his story about how he came up with FUBU and really built that business from zero. And so, talking about fundraising with him is a different thing.Matthew:Tim was on the Island too. I was fanboying out when I met Tim actually, because I was obsessed with four hour workweek, four our body and here I'm chatting with him in person. We actually started talking about going up against Casper. At the time, we were pushing pretty heavily into podcasts and Casper was buying up literally every podcast that we could find, that we wanted to go after. And funnily enough, he would really push a micro strategy to us. He said, "You need to go after these very small podcasts that aren't affiliated yet, that have nascent, but growing followings." And we did, we found 10 of those, especially in comedy and gaming, and we stayed with them for years and they ended up crushing for us.Stephanie:Oh, that's great. And did you secure long-term partnerships with this company?Matthew:Yeah, I think we're still working with a few of them honestly.Stephanie:Oh, that's great.Matthew:We just completely sapped the audience, an everyone's got a Leesa now. Yeah. And then we talked with Seth. David and I chatted with Seth Godin, who's a marketing genius. He's like the professor of modern day marketing. And at the time, we had done around 30 million in our first year of sales, which was just crazy. And he was talking about making this leap called crossing the chasm. Basically when you're attacking the early adopter market and you're doing quite well, there's a point at which you have to "cross the chasm" and reach the broader demographic of people. And so I don't remember the tactics that he talked about, but he always impressed that idea of our okay, now we've got to broaden our sphere of influence. We still use that phrase today.Matthew:And then Marie Forleo was there and we had a lot of really good, we like chatted one-on-one several times, because I was incredibly anxious. I've always dealt with anxiety issues in my career, in my past. And so we had some frank chats about vulnerability and putting yourself out there. And once you do that, it just eases the tension, eases the anxiety. And I still use that to this day.Stephanie:Yeah. I was going to say, does it help now? Because I mean, I definitely feel that too. I remember when we first sold this podcast, then they're like, "Oh, Stephanie can new host it?" And just being like, oh, I usually always would have our other team members host the shows and yeah, I liked working behind the scenes and it definitely was hard being like, okay, you just have to do it. You have to get yourself out there. Did it help afterwards thinking through about her advice?Matthew:Yeah, it totally did. And I always think of this idea of demonstrated performance, where it's like, you're nervous about something, you're anxious, you step on stage or you sit in the seat, you put yourself out there and you have a really good performance. And then that just gives you one more step, one more piece of confidence and you keep going and building. And now stuff that I do every day without even looking at my calendar is stuff that I would have just freaked out about all day five years ago. So I think it's just about experience.Stephanie:Yeah. Now I agree. I remember even just thinking about doing video meetings, like when I first was starting out in the corporate world and being like, "Oh, my gosh, my first meeting." I was just so scared and sweaty and nervous and then now taking like 10 a day and being like, not even thinking twice. So yeah, I think just doing the work and pushing past and knowing you'll probably fail a couple of times and who cares?Matthew:Exactly.Stephanie:That's great. And did you meet Richard Branson when you were there?Matthew:Yeah. We met briefly. He gave us a talk which was awesome. He talked a lot about Virgin's impact program, and what he's doing there. And so that was really important to us at the time, because we were setting up our Leesa 110 program and that was cool to hear from him.Stephanie:That's great. So where do you see the next couple of years headed for The Fascination? What are you guys building for? What are you doing in stealth mode right now? What are you planning for the world to look like in a couple of years?Matthew:Yeah, I mean, right now we're really heavily focused on getting the digital product where it needs be to really deliver on a full transactional marketplace that's cutting edge for consumers. So in the next couple of years, we want to have a destination that is super engaging. We want to have brand founders engaging with consumers real time in the platform. We want to have people shopping and reading and researching brands and products all seamlessly, and to be able to buy those products in one click, right? Right on The Fascination.com. And so a lot of things have to happen in the background to obviously make that work.Matthew:And then we're always thinking about, how can we acquire the best customers, bring them in most cost-effectively? And it's always on my mind of like, delivering really solid, meaningful content to the audience, not just fluff stuff, but stuff that's really, really valuable. And so that's what I think we're trying to win.Stephanie:Well. Yeah. It also seems like there's such an opportunity to... I mean, when you have all these brands and they have access to a lot of insights on their customers or who's coming to their website to then build lookalike audiences off of those brands, and then all of a sudden you have access to customers and you're coming from a different angle where maybe if Leesa would have already gotten in front of a customer two times and they're like, "Nah," they then see The Fascination comes in and they're like, "Hey, check out this mattress. It's like a third touch point. That's very separated." But it seems like there's a lot of opportunity there to get insights at a much more accelerated rate than you would get just by yourself.Matthew:Yes. That is the goal. Yeah, there's a whole data infrastructure that we really need to put in place to get the most out of it. And honestly, coming from Leesa for so long, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what that all looks like in terms of affiliate click attribution and how we create audiences and how we do product recommendations. So we're only a month old, but we'll get there. And I can tell you that there is such tremendous demand for what you're talking about. Just leveraging lookalike audiences, leveraging audiences across categories that aren't competitive with one another. At the end of the day, everyone that comes to The Fascination as an interested consumer if we do it right, it's always going to have similar demographic profiles, right. Whether they're a man or a woman. So as you aggregate that at scale, there's a ton of value for brands to be able to tap into that.Stephanie:Yeah. It seems like eventually they'll have to be tools for the merchants as well, to be able to interact with all the platforms they're on. Or like, I mean a lot of sales are moving towards the edge. There's a lot of people say and how do you keep track of that? Like, how do these merchants they're selling on The Fascination, they're selling on Fancy, they're selling on not that Fancy is the same, but there are quite a few places popping up where these brands might be like, "Yeah, I want to sell on that platform or over here," but I don't know if enough tools exist right now to keep track of what you're doing and consolidating it all in one place.Matthew:Yeah. I mean, it's got to be a challenge for these fairly young brands. There's product feed software that'll handle some of that, but at the end of the day there's manual stuff that's always needed once you're drop shipping and wholesaling and you have retail partners. So yeah, we're going to be thinking about it from the other side, just the same, how do you manage 100, 200, 300 merchants and keep them happy?Stephanie:Yeah. Crazy. All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce commerce cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Matt?Matthew:Yes.Stephanie:One minute to answer. All right. Yeah. Prepare, drink your drink, whatever that may be. All right. First thing, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Matthew:I think the convergence of content and commerce is, is going to have one of the biggest impacts. You've got media companies that are converging in the commerce, they all want to be transactional. They all want a bigger slice of the pie. They all want more lifetime value extraction from their readership. And then I think on the commerce side you see brands and retailers who are obviously seeing the cost rising of customer acquisition in the traditional sense and creating really rich content. It's the only way to do that. So we're diving in right at the intersection with what we're doing at The Fascination and that's where we saw it going. And that's why I think we're bullish on where we're headed.Stephanie:Yeah. Well, it'll also be interesting to do a recap episode on what's happened since some of these brands got into mixing media with commerce. I mean, I'm thinking about NBC, I think did a whole shoppable TV thing. And I remember seeing them launch that maybe in February or April last year, but I don't know what actually happened. So it'd be fun to do a recap of like, here's who launched in 2020 when it came to mixing media and commerce and here is status update.Matthew:Hopefully we will be one of the givers.Stephanie:Yeah. Hopefully. What's one thing from 2020 that you hope sticks around in 2021?Matthew:I think that we've all had to embrace things like this, just getting on video conferences, not having to present ourselves through this façade, in the office I would have never thought about wearing my hat backwards and rolling around in athleisure. And now that's just the norm for everybody. And kids are on work calls and it's just, the whole thing feels a lot more familial. And even if we do go back to offices, I really have loved that work now feels a little bit closer to home because you're in your home, but also because just the interactions, you see more than you would if everyone was in an office environment.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. And I think it definitely brings a more human perspective too. Like you're saying, working together, knowing someone's kids, seeing them in the background, and then you also have more, I guess, empathy when a mom or dad's like, "Hey, I got to go do this with my kids." It's like, "Oh yeah, I saw your kid connection." Of course you can, whereas I'd say prior to this. Yeah. Not as much of a leniency, I guess for that. Yeah. That's a good one.Stephanie:What is the funniest story or best story you can think of when it comes to either building up Leesa or building up The Fascination where you're like, "Oh, this is a good time or a good story that really sticks in my brain from those years."Matthew:We've done so many like gimmicky things at Leesa. We were growth hacking like crazy and we were throwing stuff against the wall and not all of it stuck. We did a ton of stuff with Barstool Sports. We maybe did a few influencer integrations that wouldn't go over so well today with certain influencers.Stephanie:And with Barstool, I feel like they're so edgy that they can get you in trouble all these days anyways.Matthew:They're very edgy and we purposely like with all of those podcasters and creators, we're like, go be very authentic. And so you can't tell Barstool like, tame it down and not be authentic. But they were a huge converter for Leesa for several years.Stephanie:That's fun.Matthew:So we did a lot of fun stuff. We sponsored Larry at the gambling goldfish, which was a gold fish swimming around in a tank on Barstool sets, they pulled a mattress behind a truck with a Santa Claus riding on it. But we've also done a lot more admirable things, like we did a sleep out for the homeless. We've done a lot of cool things at Leesa just in the experientials side of things that made it fun.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean I have a love for the gambling goldfish. I want to go check that out. That actually sounds pretty funny.Matthew:Yeah. One more thing that we did is I think it was the 2017 NFL Draft, it's shown on ESPN and all the players are interviewed in their homes. And so we sent the players that we knew would be interviewed on TV, on ESPN Leesa mattresses. And we had them put their Leesa mattress boxes behind them and their families. And we got millions of impressions that night because we had Leesa mattresses all over the air on ESPN Draft.Stephanie:Oh, that's fun. See, I love creative stuff like that, where I mean, as long as it actually converts too, I always have the question about TV, does it actually convert or what happened after everyone saw the mattress behind them? Did you guys see a big uptick in sales, or?Matthew:I don't remember if we did or not. I think we saw a bit of an uptick, but I mean, it was such a low cost stunt to do that. It wasn't a swing for the fences, but we also did a ton of TV in heyday at Leesa. And you can really see the brand awareness effects the TV has even though it's insanely hard to track.Stephanie:Yeah. I agree. What is next on your reading list?Matthew:I'm probably going to do Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.Stephanie:Such a good one. I love that book. Yeah. So inspirational. I highly recommend. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Matthew:Well, that's an interesting question because we may very well have one soon.Stephanie:Oh, nice.Matthew:Yeah, I don't know in what format it will be. It may be a podcast. It may just be like Instagram TV stories, but we really want to interview, just do flash interviews with our brand founders, asking about their origin story, asking about what makes their products different, fun facts. And I think a groundswell of really interesting stories like that would be fun.Stephanie:Cool. That sounds good. And then the last one, what's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Matthew:Oh, that's tough. I mean, I there's been so many instances of generosity. I think honestly, giving me a chance to make the career switch that I did, and this is a bit of a shout out to David my co-founder, but he really took a chance on me. He's been super supportive of me for years, and it's really gotten me to where I am today in terms of my career and the place that we're at collectively. So him and the people around me that pushed me to make that leap out of the traditional corporate world of consulting. I was really hesitant to do that coming right out of my MBA and looking at a nice salary, and he was one of those people that pushed me over the top to do that. And I'm thankful for it.Stephanie:That's really cool. Great story. All right, Matt. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and The Fascination?Matthew:So about me, you can find me on Twitter at MattDHayes, all one word, and then The Fascination.com. Go check it out.Stephanie:Awesome. Thanks for joining us, Matt.Matthew:All right. Thank you.

Hey, y'all! Welcome to the third Dispatch! We cover so so SO many topics on this episode of Mission Control; we talk about Civic Season, the Transmission, Civics 2030, and more! I am joined today by Gary Sheng (CU's co-founder and Mission Control 2030 regular), Chabu Kapumba (Founding Fellow and CU Builder that works on TONS of projects), and Zoë Jenkins (Founding Fellow, Steering Committee Chair, and DICCE Founder). A huge thank you to Gary, Chabu, and Zoë for taking the time to talk to me! To learn more about Civics Unplugged, go to civicsunplugged.org. Follow CU on all social media platforms (including LinkedIn haha) at @civicsunplugged!

In this episode of Functional Medicine Research, I interview Dr. Deb Matthew about her new book on male sexual health "Why Can't I Keep Up Anymore?: A Guide to Regaining Energy, Focus, and Peak Physical & Sexual Performance for Men Over 40". We discussed the causes of male sexual dysfunction, lab testing, causes of low testosterone, stress and cortisol levels, sex hormone binding globulin, testosterone replacement methods, how sleep affects hormones and much more. This book isn't just for men. If your male partner is showing signs of low testosterone then this book is a must-read with resources on how to find the right kind of doctor to get well. Male Sexual Performance with Dr. Deb Matthew Interview Transcript Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome, everyone, to "Functional Medicine Research." I'm Dr. Hedberg, and I'm really excited today to have Dr. Deb Matthew on the show. Dr. Matthew is a medical doctor, and she's also known as the happy hormones doctor. She's a best-selling author, international speaker, educator, wife, and mother of four. And after suffering for years with fatigue and irritability, her quest to resolve her personal health led her to change everything about her practice of medicine. She has been featured on national podcasts, radio, and broadcast shows, including NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox. Dr. Matthew, welcome to the show. Dr. Matthew: Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Dr. Hedberg: So, we're going to be talking about your new book, "Why Can't I Keep Up Anymore?: A Guide to Regaining Energy, Focus, and Peak Physical & Sexual Performance for Men Over 40," which I read recently. It's an excellent book. Wanted to have you on and talk about something that is...well, I would say most male issues are overlooked, but testosterone is really a big one and so is sexual performance and male hormones. So, why don't we begin by talking about why testosterone is so important for men? Dr. Matthew: Yeah. You know, hormones, in general, play a big role in how we feel on the inside, how we relate to the world around us, how we react to other people. And so, testosterone drives a lot of how men feel and even behavior, and it really plays a role in men feeling like a man. So, it's important for drive and for motivation so that when you wake up in the morning and your boots hit the floor, you're ready to take on the world. And when testosterone levels are not quite right, men just don't quite feel right. And for women, when we go through our hormonal changes, it's pretty obvious. We either get menstrual problems or, you know, we get hot flashes. And so, there's some pretty obvious things that happen at some pretty obvious times in our life in order to notify us that our hormones may be changing. But for men, it's much more subtle. So, it is something that often happens gradually over time. And so, what I hear men say a lot is, you know, "I just don't quite feel like myself anymore. I'm just not quite keeping up the same way that I used to. But you know, maybe it's just my age." I hear that all the time, "It must just be my age. I'm not 18 anymore." And so, you know, maybe it's not fair to compare to an 18-year-old, but if you're 40 or 50, like let's not blame it on age. If you're 95, okay, fine. We'll blame it on your age. But when you're younger, even though things change, they don't have to feel that way. And so, one of the things that could be contributing to not quite feeling like yourself anymore is low testosterone. Dr. Hedberg: One of the things I see in practice is men who, you know, they're diagnosed with low testosterone or they have the symptoms and they see their conventional medical physician and they try a testosterone, but it doesn't work at all. Sometimes they get a little bit worse. Sometimes there's really no change. What do you think the conventional medical approach is missing when something like that happens to a man? Dr. Matthew: Oh,

Welcome to the second Dispatch! We are chatting about all sorts of things on this episode of Mission Control, from the Trek to Launch Year to the Platform. Elena is joined today by Gary Sheng (CU's co-founder and Mission Control 2030 icon), Thanasi Dilos (another one of CU's amazing co-founders), Madison Adams (Founding Fellow and Director of Dialogue at CU), and Will Fredericks (Program Associate and all-around awesome person). To learn more about Civics Unplugged, go to civicsunplugged.org. Follow CU on all social media platforms (including LinkedIn haha) at @civicsunplugged!

Welcome to the first Mission Control 2030 Dispatch! As you may notice, some things are a bit different about today's episode, and that's because we are trying something different here at Mission Control. This is the first of a series of episodes called "Dispatches" where we are going to have a more laid-back/honest conversation with members of the CU team and community about what is happening in the world of Civics 2030. These are going to be posted a lot more often than the normal episodes to keep you up-to-date on the community. We are excited to try this new series, and we hope you enjoy it! Today's dispatch features Nick Delis, Gary Sheng, and Josh Thompson, three of CU's co-founders! We're talking about everything from Fellowship 2021 to Nick's potato mic in our first dispatch. To learn more about Civics Unplugged, go to civicsunplugged.org. Follow CU on all social media platforms (including LinkedIn haha) at @civicsunplugged!

Michael talks with fellow Dartmouth graduate Matthew Oh about what led him from a career in football to modeling and acting. They also discuss how psychology and the balance of practice and play allow you to find flow and react in the moment whether it's at game time or on set. @matthewjamesoh

Episode 5 - Podcasters Choice - Anything goes on this edition of What the Lyric. Becky and Matthew choose their favorite bad lyrics from any decade and and genre. One is from 2016 and the other is from 1978. Who will be victorious? Podcasters Choice   [Start 00:00:00]   [Music playing 00:00:06]   Becky: Welcome. To What he Lyric? the podcast that confirms, yeah, that actually made it to radio.   Hello and welcome to What the Lyric? Today and What the Lyric? podcasters choice, we pick apart whatever song we want, it's a free for all. And I have picked something recent.   Matthew: Oh.   Becky: I think it still fits into the me-too movement theme I got going on.   Matthew: I do have to ask first though. Most hated bands…   Becky: These guys.   Matthew: Across the board…   Becky: Yes.   Matthew: Do not tell me yet. But any others like…   Becky: These guys.   Matthew: Was it an easy choice for you to make?   Becky: Yes. It was so… The first song that James Arthur, horrific train wreck of a wedding song that people are using. That one and I think this one are the reason that this podcast exists.   Matthew: Wow.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: There was no other song. That popped into your head?   Becky: Nope. This one. I was like and this is it. There are a couple others. That I thought of because they were funny, but I was like, no, I hate this one immensely. Like. So much, so much   Matthew: Fascinating. See! Mine was less generated by hatred and more confusion. Because I do have… This is again a favourite song of mine.   Becky: Kind of how bizarre confusion?   Matthew: Yes.   Becky: Okay.   Matthew: It is precisely how bizarre. I think everyone has heard the song and everyone has been like the fuck. I am excited to get into that.   Becky: Then I am going to let you go first, because…   Matthew: Really?   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: End on the hatred note but start with confusion.   Becky: I have got a heavy dissertation going on over here.   Matthew: I mean, it is going to take, you no time to get…   Becky: Okay.   Matthew: What this song is. I am trying to think. Let me find. Oh, the songwriter is Jimmy Webb. And you know what…   Becky: Jimmy Webb?   Matthew: You’re going to have to think of more of the 70s. This is coming out of the 70s. I am breaking my millennial streak and also my 2008 streak.   Becky: Does it have to do with pina colada?   Matthew: It does not, although that is a fantastic song and I will not hear a word about those lyrics. I am going to skip the part where the song title is. Well, let's just start at the beginning. Spring was never waiting for us, dear. It ran one-step ahead as we followed in the dance. Blank is melting in the dark. There is your first clue.   Becky: Is this MacArthur Park?   Matthew: Yes, and I…   Becky: And I can't tell you how much I love this song for craziness of it.   Matthew: Right, but precisely right. If you look at the lyrics and this is a fantastic song by Donna Summer.   Becky: Oh, no. It is not, have you read the history of this?   Matthew: I have read a part of it. I don't know all of it. I love the Donna Summer version.   Becky: Oh, that is the classic. That one. Yes. Then Anthony Clark, a comedian, did a version. Well, he did a part about this song and his bit, which always made me giggle.  We used to play this at work, I looked it up, and there was somebody that did a cover of it. That we then spent a good half an hour trying to find so that we could play it. Now I get to look it up. But yes, MacArthur Park, genius.   Matthew: So I already knew off the bat, like, this is going to be low on the yikes scale. because…   Becky: Oh, it is so good.   Matthew: It is a phenomenal song if you have not heard it. But again, the entire thing is about MacArthur Park.   Becky: Cake out in the rain.   Matthew: And supposedly, it is supposed to be about the park because it says MacArthur's park is melting in the dark.   Becky: Yep.   Matthew: All the sweet green icing flowing down, presumably foliage.   Becky: Yep.   Matthew: And then it just goes off the fucking rails and it is like someone left the cake out in the rain. I don't think that I can take it. Cause it took so long to bake it.   Becky: Oh, my God.   Matthew: And I will never have that…   Becky: Here is when I hear the disco [Making noise 00:4:48] noise, yeah.   Matthew: There is so much going on in the song and this person is lamenting it took so long to bake it and I will never have that recipe again. And the series of oh no. Like you cannot describe the depth of emotion captured by that no.   Becky: So good. It is so good. And it's a seven minute long song. Also my favourite, it was Waylon Jennings. Matthew: I did not know Waylon Jennings.   Becky: Including a 1969 Grammy winning version by Waylon Jennings. And you can hear how pissed off he was singing that. Like he's fuckin lyrics don't mean shit. He was probably drunk or stone or whatever.   Matthew: [Inaudible 00:5:30]   Becky: Yeah. Oh, amazing. Waylon Jennings, Grammy won a Grammy.   Matthew: Did not know that. Also, I apologize, it was not in the 70s but it was in the 60s.   Becky: Yeah, 69. Yeah. I had to look it up.   Matthew: General area.   Becky: 68 was when it was first recorded. But you were close. It is a known area for the Donna Summer one.   Matthew: Right.   Becky: My mom had that album by the way.   Matthew: I mean it is phenomenal. And the thing is, there aren't many lyrics here. And I would argue that none of them are terrible. It is just so fucking weird. Like I recall the yellow cotton dress. Okay, that makes sense presumably someone wearing it, foaming like a wave. That makes absolutely no sense. And the ground beneath your knees, even less sense. Like how do you track and create lyrics that make absolute zero sense when you take three sentences together.   Becky: Let's be honest. Late 60s, the whole summer of love coming up soon.   Matthew: Wholesome non-drug usage   Becky: Probably a lot of drugs happening. Why is there a cake reference? What the whole cake reference? Matthew: Like looks at a park and says, you know, I really want to go to the cake.   Becky: It looks like a cake.   Matthew: Everything that I walk around this park screams cake.   Becky: I have never had a park look like a cake. Yeah,   Matthew: I would want to go the park more if it did.   Becky: That's again, that's an acid trip. And I may or may not have seen things that looked unlike that.   Matthew: It’s just like so weird because someone… Interesting fact, though, if you look at the lyrics, the first time you hear about the cake. It says someone left the cake out in the rain. She says it again; someone left the cake out in the rain. A little bit later on the song, the final stanza…   Becky: Does it becomes her cake?   Matthew: It does. It said someone left my cake out in the rain. And I don't think that I can take it because it took so long to bake it. And I'll never have that recipe again.   Becky: I will tell you what. After the whole cake off that we had at work, I understand that layer…     Matthew: There was a cake off?   Becky: We had the cake off. The Halloween theme, Friday the 13th, cake off.   Matthew: Well, we should clarify that this cake off was not for October Friday the 13th. It was a September Friday.   Becky: Yeah it was September, Friday 13th, a Halloween. It was more horror Friday 13th inspired cake off that we did it work. And yeah, I get that. I get that. The It cake I did was rough. I will never do that one again. And I hope I never remember that recipe because it did take so long to bake it.   Matthew: And you will never do that recipe again.   Becky: And I will never do that recipe again. Yeah. So yeah, I get it. I understand where she's coming from on that. I mean, I get it. I am with her.   Matthew: I know. All of them get it. I mean I personally don't understand the analogy of a park to a cake.   Becky: So good.   Matthew: The emotion in it, regardless of how…   Becky: She is good.   Matthew: batshit crazy the lyric are.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: I honestly give this zero yikes. Because it is, weird but I just wanted to bring it because it is a favourite song.   Becky: It is so good.   Matthew: And it make so a little sense.   Becky: Yeah. It makes no sense whatsoever. It is so good. So good. All right. So mine.   Matthew: Who do you hate? Oh, it might be recent. I might get it.   Becky: It is from 2016.   Matthew: Ariana Grande?   Becky: Oh, no, it’s a group and then another singer. These guys are known also for being producers, but they do all these collabs, as the kids say. And this was the first time that I heard them. At first I was like, well, this is kind of bland. Then I start listening to lyrics and I wanted to punch them in the face.   Matthew: I am intrigued.   Becky: Okay let me read some of the lyrics. Here is how it starts. Hey, I was doing just fine before I met you. I drink too much and that is an issue, but I am okay. No. hey! tell your friends it was nice to meet them, but I hope I never see them again. I know it breaks your heart. Moved to the city in a broke down car. In 4 years, no calls. Now you are looking pretty in a hotel bar. And I can't stop. No, I can't stop.   Matthew: I remember vaguely the song and I would not remember it if I had not heard you. Months ago talking about how much you hate this band.   Becky: Eviscerate this band. Yeah.   Matthew: I forget what the song is called, but is it The Chainsmokers?   Becky: Oh, it is.   Both Speakers: And Halsey.   Matthew: That is it.   Becky: I necessarily have issue with Halsey. I have a lot of issues with the fucking Chainsmokers. First off, let us just start with. I drink too much and that is an issue, but I am okay. No, clearly you are not. This is what AA is.   Matthew: I have issue but I am okay.   Becky: I'm okay. No, it is intervention time. Then like he sees you looking pretty good in a hotel bar? This is the dude that broke up with you because you got fat. Then comes back and is like, whoa! Somebody lost some weight. And wants to get back in on it. No, and then it goes in to baby pull me closer in the backseat of your rover that I know you can't afford. Come on. You don't know that. You have been away from her for four years. She could be doing well because  she did not have that frickin rock of an ex hanging around her.   Matthew: Dragging her down.   Becky: Yeah. Pull the sheets right off the corner of the mattress you stole from the roommate back in Boulder. There are several issues here. First off, bed bugs.   Matthew: Absolutely riddled with them. There is no way she is not.   Becky: God knows what else is on that mattress. Or has been on that mattress. There is not enough steam cleaning. or defogging or what you do with a mattress to kill anything that is on it. You should have just left that out in the backyard or on the side of the street somehow. No, gross. So gross. I can’t even.  How is that a lyric in a song way?   Matthew: Wait, pause because technically wait. Not only bed bugs would be a concern, but she…   Both Speakers: Stole it.   Becky: From her roommate.   Matthew: Yeah, at what point…   Becky: We don’t know.   Matthew: Did she just decide to up and leave while the like roommate was at work. Oh, shit this is a nice like Caspar mattress. Caspar if you would like to sponsor this podcast.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Please contact us.   Becky: I picture like the tablecloth trick. Roommate sleeping whip the mattress out from underneath there. Drops 0n the box spring and runs.   Matthew: Done, love it.   Becky: That is what I am picturing. Gross, cooties. You don't know what that roommate's done on that mattress. What if that roommate blacked out, drunk, peed on the bed or…   Matthew: Worse?   Becky: Worse or, you know, maybe…   Matthew: There are so many imagination.   Becky: There is so, many fluids that could be on that bed.   Matthew: And likely are.   Becky: Again, not enough steam cleaning or de-fogging or whatever you could do.                                       Matthew: When they say get a new mattress every eight years, they mean get a new mattress from the factory, not a new mattress to you. So don't steal your roommates mattress.   Becky: Yeah and no amount of mattress bag or pads could get me further away. I am like the princess and the pea. I would be like, I still now that there is pee there.   Matthew: Wow! Again, well done.   Becky: Yeah. Then he just like we ain’t ever getting older. You are, you are, you are, you turd, you are, you are. I can't stand these guys. Then now all of a sudden he is like, you look as good as the day I met you. I forgot just why I left you. Cause you are a turd. I think we have established you are an alcoholic turd. Because you have a drinking problem, but you are okay with it. The first reason to leave the guy, I don't know why you even went back. I mean, granted, maybe your whole revenge plot was the mattress did have some sort of cooties and you put him down there first was like, I will be right back.   Matthew: Good lie. Becky: While all the bugs jump on him.   Matthew: Abandon ship.   Becky: Yeah, I mean, I can't. I would not. Then he says, stay and play that Blink-182 song, right there   Matthew: Yeah, which is it...That one?   Becky: I’m out.  Blink-182. Are we that old?   Matthew: Wait, which one is it?   Becky: Blink-182. There is so many. Oh, it's the one that they beat to death in Tucson. Did they beat the Blink-182 to death?   Matthew: Blink-182 death.   Becky: Then it just goes the course. I know I broke your heart. I know it breaks your heart. Moved to a city in a broke down car and four years later didn't call. I don't know why? Why?   Matthew: This go back into your craw.   Becky: I was like, what the…This is bull shit. You don't know I can't afford a Rover. I am paying for your sad ass. And not four years later I've been able to save up for a Rover and then bite the tattoo on your shoulder. No, you ain’t touching me.   Matthew: Gross don't?   Becky: Get your get your shit away. Get your…   Matthew: Bed bug infested.   Becky: You need to get back to the hole. Just get on track. Now I am looking pretty in a hotel bar.   Matthew: Wait, he is saying that?   Becky: That is her singing it now.   Matthew: Oh, yikes.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: No.   Becky: I mean. I am sure you are Halsey. You are a good looking gal. But…And I and I can't stop. No, I can't stop. Yeah. It is called self-control.   Matthew: Yeah. No, I have…   Becky: I can’t stand this, I can’t… everything.   Matthew: What I love about this. Going back to the we ain't ever getting older because I'm like, wait. You already admitting you have a drinking problem. So like, that is for sure. Aging your liver.   Becky: You are going to get aged quick.   Matthew: But your band is The Chainsmokers. Yeah, like all are 100 percent getting old just because you are going to die young. Does that mean you are not getting older?   Becky: Yeah. Then they have a collab with Coldplay that I just hear everywhere. Is that I want something just like this. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. I can't.   Mathew: Oh, I never heard it.   Becky: Oh, you have.   Matthew: Have I?   Becky: You have. Yeah, it is fucking everywhere. That one, they have another one, and I was like, oh, this sounds like…oh it is The Chainsmokers. This feeling maybe. I don't know. I can't. They just need to stop. They need to really take stock of what, the hell they are doing. I am sure they are great producers. I don't give a shit. Just don't sing anymore. Don't write any more lyrics. Just produce the music. Be happy with making that money. You are good looking guys. You get whatever you want.   Matthew: You will be fine.   Becky: You will be giving the ladies. It is not a big deal. Just stop singing and putting out this piece of crap.   Matthew: Now the question I have. Is, how many yikes you assigning it? One is the worst. Are you going for one?   Becky: There are a big fat one for me, across the board. You could go, hey, The Chainsmokers. Nope. one. I don't like it. I don't like it. They could do something with Pavarotti. And I'm still like, no. They could bring Elvis back from the dead. And I will still say, no. Beatles back from the dead. Nope, nothing. There is nothing. Yeah.   Matthew: What, if they cured cancer?   Becky: Maybe   Matthew: That is hard maybe.   Becky: Maybe if they cured cancer and never recorded again…   Matthew: Deal.   Becky: I would pump it up to two. But they won't stop producing crap.   Matthew: No.   Becky: It is in their blood now. They have had like two or three hits. So now they're like, yeah,   Matthew: We are band.   Becky: We fucking rock. Everything we touch turns to gold bitches. Yeah. No.   Matthew: Yikes.   Becky: I hate them. I hate them. Oh, my God, they make my skin crawl. I hate so much.   Matthew: It is important to have that. I was like, okay, this is good, you know. James Arthur,   Becky: James Arthur and The Chainsmokers.   Matthew: Wait for that collab. When that does inevitably happen. We will have to talk about it here.   Becky: Oh, it is going to happen. You know it is going to happen.   Matthew: If it has not already.   Becky: The sweet, sweet dulcet tones of James Arthur followed by the. I don't even know what the producing style of the…   Matthew: The Chainsmokers   Becky: The Chainsmokers.   Matthew: We know that there singing style will be slurred because both of them have drinking problem.   Becky: Yes. It is all about alcohol, and I am pretty sure it'll take forever because I have to keep stopping for a smoke break, run out side. Then come back in and be like, all right, let's do it.   Matthew: Ah, the wheeze.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Just wait for the smokers hack.   Becky: Before, okay. Let me just clears out. [Making coughing hacking sound 00:19:20] All right I am ready, and then…   Both speakers:  That is the dulcet of James Arthur.   Becky: Yeah. Oh, yeah.   Matthew: Wow! Cause there, you know. Puff, huffing and puffing.   Becky: I am trying to think. They don't even really singing that song. It is like doing just fine before. Like mumbling of, yeah.   Matthew: [Inaudible 00:19:40-45]   Becky: Yeah. It is like a teenager who's doesn't want to talk to his parents. That is what it is like. That is how they sound to me.   Matthew: They just get close to the microphone [Inaudible 00:19:57].   Becky: I am pretty sure that's how they do it.   Matthew: You know the mumblers.   Becky: Yeah. Oh my God. Oh…   Matthew: Mumble core.   Becky: I dislike…the mattress you stole from…What is wrong with you people? Have we not heard of hygiene? I mean.   Matthew: They, no.   Becky: Bleach? anything. Please, dear God.   Matthew: You have the money. Please buy a new mattress.   Becky: Yeah. You could buy 50 or 40, however.   Matthew: I think we should make several pleas here. The first is please send us pizza or cake whenever you so desire. Check out the Website.   Becky: Oh, yes.   Matthew: whatthelyrics.com.   Becky: Nice one. I am glad you pulled that one because I didn’t. I was not even thinking about it.   Matthew: And specifically, we are going to make a plead directly to The Chainsmokers to use their money, put their money to good use and buy a new mattress. You deserve it, Casper mattresses.   Becky: Just buy a new mattress every year because if this song is any indication of what you are going through and doing. Maybe even every six months.   Matthew: Wait; was the name of the song? Remind me.   Becky: Closer.   Matthew: That is a closer. Well, that will be.   Becky: I don't want to get closer. I don't want to get closer to that mattress. I don't want to get closer to them. I don't want to get closer to anything in this song. I don't understand. Why are we just glossing over your alcoholism? That is like a one-liner. Like yeah! I know I drink too much. It is all right.   Matthew: No, it is not a problem.   Becky: I am a throw up on that mattress you stole from your roommate. Then I am going to pass out, blackout and pee on it like…   Matthew: You are going to love it.   Becky: Oh and why do you want to take that back?   Matthew: No, instead of closer. That was will be our closer.   Becky: Oh, I like it.   Matthew: Well, what will we be talking about next time?   Becky: Next time. Its party anthems.   Matthew: What kind of party anthems?   Becky: Yeah, it’s kinda open… children's birthday party. So party anthems I took to mean a song that everyone sings along to has their own kind of version of it when they sing. Or is like the go to karaoke one or like the end of the night drunky song that everybody sings drunk to. That is what I kind of took as the party anthem.   Matthew: I have mine. I don't know if it's from 2008, but it's probably close.   Becky: Minds of course, from the 80s. This I believe, is the first one that does not fit into the me too movement theme. I finally found one.   Matthew: We’re doing good work.   Becky: Maybe I can work it there. I got to look at the lyrics again, but I'm pretty sure it's not really, me too. It is more stalker-y.   Matthew: Okay, in the family of but not directly under the category.   Becky: Yeah, there is no overt booty references.   Matthew: Mambo number 5?   Becky: There is no donkey… ass   Matthew: With a monkey   Becky: Yeah, no big old butt kind of thing.   Matthew: Not yet.   Becky: Not yet. Although I don't know. It would be hilarious to have this. Yes next time. Party anthems. I cannot wait for mine.   Matthew: Well, I am excited and we will talk ‘atcha then?   Becky: Yes. Talk to you soon.   [Music playing]   [End 00:24:00]

In this episode Becky and Matthew delve deep into the late 80s and the early 2000s hip hop.  Will it be a hip hop battle to end all battles?   What the Lyric? Rap/Hip-Hop   [Start 00:00:00]   Music: [00:00:07]   Becky: Welcome to What the Lyric?, the podcast that confirms. Yeah, that actually made it to radio.   Welcome to What the Lyric? Today we are talking about hip-hop, the rap. I don't know what else I'd call it.   Matthew: The rap.   Becky: The rap.   Matthew: I mean you are talking to the two white people in the room talking about hip-hop. That is what this episode is.   Becky: I know. Oh, this is going to go down horribly. Although I do love my 80s, rap and I love the old Run DMC stuff before Aerosmith. Who else is in there? I am trying to think. A tribe called Quest. Although I cannot remember if they were 80s or not. It all runs together now for me. Then, of course, Public Enemy. I don't think that was 80s. Maybe they were 80s. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, there is a lot in there. 3rd Bass. That is right; I pull out 3rd Base, which you will never know. But the one guy in 3rd Base, a white guy is now like a baseball historian at Cooperstown, if I remember correctly.   Matthew: That is a turn career.   Becky: Yeah, Pete Nice. Was it Pete Nice? Oh I don't think it was Pete Nice. I cannot remember who it was now.   Matthew: Was it was not Pete Townsend? Becky: No, now I am going to have to look it up. Who were the members of 3rd Base? Yeah, so that is where I am coming from.   Matthew: Interesting. Mine, you know. Like, that is all I really need to say. We actually had a very interesting discussion at the end of the last episode talking about where does R&B begin versus hip-hop specifically.   Becky: Yes.   Matthew: I approach hip-hop from the more R&B side. So I am thinking Beyoncé, Lemonade.   Becky: All right, okay.   Matthew: To an extent, Drake, although he is not my favourite.   Becky: Oh God!   Matthew: And then smaller artists, particularly from the HBO show Insecure, has some very good hip-hop…   Becky: See I don’t know that.   Matthew: References. TT the artists. What is the name of the song? Is featured in it. She is great. Now I will have to introduce you to it. Then, of course, where would we be? But two people, two white people talking about hip hop. Also, listen to the entirety of Hamilton and needed to get said. There it is. It has been said we can now glaze past it.   Becky: I only know the Alexander Hamilton [Making sound 00:2:56]. I don't know anything else.   Matthew: That is all you need to know. That is what the musical is.   Becky: Yeah, I. Oh, man. I think I was right with Pete Nice. What did I say? Oh, my God.   Matthew: You did say Pete Nice.   Becky: Yeah. There is MC Serch and Pete Nice, but I feel like. Yeah. Pete Nice. Baseball historian, I had it right the first time.   Matthew: Well, with a band name like 3rd Base, you kind of have to.   Becky: They had a song called The Cactus.   Matthew: Why?   Becky: I can't even remember. I just remember The Cactus. I am sure I still have that CD somewhere. But yeah, The Cactus.   Matthew: I love.   Becky: I cannot even remember. It is all gone. It is so bad; they did have a big hit. What was their big hit?   Matthew: Was, it baseball related?   Becky: No, surprisingly. You would think with a name like 3rd Base. Pop goes the weasel.   Matthew: Oh.   Becky: From 1991. I remember that. That sounds like a hit. I did not have that one. I had the Cactus album and that was eighty-nine derelicts of dialect, which had the pop, goes the weasel. Yep, that was ninety-one. That was when I graduated high school.   Matthew: I won't say where I was at the time.   Becky: And a hoodie [Laughing], moving on. All right. I am going to let you go first this time.   Matthew: All right. So like I said, my primary job on this podcast is to serve as millennial ambassador.   Becky: And I am the only.   Matthew: There is a generation, obviously listen to this podcast. Who is waiting for your songs, too?   Becky: I am sure.   Matthew: But I want to bring them up to speed in case they hopefully missed it.   Becky: I would also like to point out I am representing old school with my older school tortoiseshell old schools.   Matthew: Wow! Well done. Actually…   Becky: I did not even think about that. I just put them on this morning.   Matthew: I should as a side note, give Becky more credit for being much more fashionable than me. I mean, because I have just got like these shitty Nike…   Becky: No   Matthew: Running shoes and blue jeans.   Becky: It is Old Navy jeans and Adidas. It is not really fashionable, it is just comfortable.   Matthew: As we should.   Becky: As my vsco [Inaudible 00:5:26] said.   Matthew: Oh, I forgot the vsco queen of this podcast.   Becky: Yeah, the old lady vsco queen.   Matthew: So really, this song I remember driving to high school, I think senior year of high school.   Becky: Okay.   Matthew: This song is being played a lot.   Becky: 2008?   Matthew: 2008   Becky: Okay.   Matthew: Right. I was graduating high school that year.   Becky: Lord, have mercy, okay.   Matthew: And more specifically, I am trying to think. Where do I go with this? I am not really sure, but let me just say…   Becky: 2008 [Inaudible 00:6:09]   Matthew: There you go. Very fluent in Spanish.   Becky: Is he like Pitbull?   Matthew: Oh, nailed it, yes. And it was his first song. Because I was going to say, like oh! He is like…   Becky: The one with Robin Thicke?   Matthew: I did not know there was one, but that really disturbs me.   Becky: Where he sing I don't like it. I love it, love it, love it. Oh, is that Pitbull? That is Pitbull.   Matthew: Probably.   Becky: yeah, oh boy.   Matthew: This is his first one. He speaks a lot of Spanish and again, since I am incredibly white. Even though I grew up in Texas, I know no Spanish. Because I took French in high school for whatever…   Becky: Yeah, I took German.   Matthew: For whatever godforsaken reason. But my favourite my favourite thing about Pitbull is the fact that he can't decide on a nickname. He is either Mr. 305 or he is Mr. Worldwide, which therefore implies that the entirety of the 305 area code is actually the world to either him, which could either be very sweet, or the fact that he doesn't travel a lot.   Becky: 305, Miami, I am assuming?   Matthew: Yes.   Becky: Yeah, okay.   Mathew: So that is where he is from. I am assuming he is Cuban. No offense to Mr. Pitbull, if he eventually listens to this podcast…   Becky: I think he is.   Matthew: Which I highly doubt.   Becky: I am sure he is a big fan.   Matthew: Obviously.   Becky: Can't wait to get fan mail about that one.   Matthew: So really, the song that he chose was I know you want me. Becky: Mm hmm.   Matthew: Which makes several assumptions that I think Pitbull has not quite figured out. I am not sure there, is a huge audience who is craving his music, but nonetheless, he still posits that people do want him. Again, most of it is in Spanish. So I will skip those parts because quite simply, I just did not take the time to Google translate any of it. The bad lyrics for it. I give it minus one point for repetitiveness…   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Because some of it is simply. I know you want me, want me. Then it is like…   Becky: oh, God, I don't remember.   Matthew: You know I want you, want you. Then it just repeats multiple times. I will not go into that. There is a lot of just, word association.   Becky: Yeah, okay.   Matthew: I know that Good hip-hop. You can do word association. And it makes sense and it flows. Pitbull just being like, oh, shit. Got it right. Like you can you can hear him like a train barrels towards the end.   Becky: Those are make the favourite raps. Post Malone, I hate that guy so much for this. At one point, he says something. He is trying to rhyme something. Instead of saying Luck Roy, he is says Lecroy, so he can rhyme it. First off, I hate that damn drink anyways. Second, you cannot even pronounce it right. Why? Just so you can fit in your little rap. Mr. Syracuse? I don't think so.   Matthew: Oh, he is from Syracuse.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Congrats. Another New York native like Becky.   Becky: Yeah. I did not get all the face tats, though.   Matthew: Not yet, you are young.   Becky: Working on it. I am working on it.   Matthew: Pitbull goes on to say, you know, stick to the clock on my way to the top, which I am like, okay. He is being timed. One assumes.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: I do not think that is necessarily a bad lyric. Then there is just a weird word association, so like Pit got it locked from Bruce to the lock her. The bruise, b-r-e-w-u-s according to the lyrics, I find that amusing. RIP so rest in peace…   Becky: Yeah.     Matthew: Huh, Big and PAC. P-A-C, I don't know if that's like the…   Becky: Biggie and Pac? Biggie and 2Pac   Matthew: That is what I am assuming, right?   Becky: Yeah, okay.   Matthew: So it is like ok, he is doing due diligence as one does in hip-hop by making references.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: So far he has not necessarily run afoul of anything, he said premise.   Becky: He is also hitting both coasts like he's trying and play Sweden…   Matthew: Right?   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Even though he very clearly raps the east coast by being like Mr 305 checking in for the Remix.   Becky: Yet it is also Miami like it's not New York vs LA…   Matthew: You can calm down.     Becky: Hip-hop, yeah.   Matthew: He extends his condolences to both of them, and then disses himself.   Becky: Many years kind of late too, by the way.   Matthew: This is where I started to get concerned. As far as bad lyrics and also his self-esteem, because he immediately feels like R.I.P too Bigg and Pac. That he is not, but damn, he is hot. So what that implies to me is, Pitbull is actually saying that, oh, actually I'm not nearly as talented as Bigg and Pac, which I was like…   Becky: Truth,   Matthew: Which is just truth.   Becky: Truth.   Matthew: I do appreciate it. Then he has to saddle himself like, you know, I can never be them, but I am attractive. And that's still a stretch.   Becky: Yeah, I would say to 2Pac is probably better looking than him in my opinion.   Matthew: I would agree.  I am inclined to agree. Pitbull, He has a face like a pit bull.   Becky: He does, there is a reason he have that name. Yeah.   Matthew: I don't know what it is, but I can assume it's his face.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: And so continuing. What is even weirder is that he is like the label flop. So he's already saying that like whatever label he's on is going to flop presumably because of his songs like that doesn't inspire confidence. So it's like again, a diss at the start. Then he says, but Pitt won't stop. Label flop, but Pitt won't stop.   Becky: Wait a minute. Maybe what he is saying is, you know, I like when you would be like, oh, my God, I am totally failing this test. Then you nail it like he's psyching himself out, like I am the shittiest rapper. Then boom! Platinum.   Matthew: Huge fame. I don’t know if this ever went platinum. I would be surprised, but also not surprised if that were to happen.   Becky: You never know.   Matthew: But he is always starting with the dislike that he is not. But damn, he's hot. Label flop. But Pitt won't stop. And I'm like, ok. Then very left turn. Got her in the car playing with his como. And that's where he answered Spanish. Oh, wait, why are you having sex in a car? I am not surprised.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: But he was like, I am going to be an amazing rapper. Oh no, getting my dick sucked in a car.   Becky: Well, all right. I mean, you know, to each his own is all I am saying. You granted it back in the day…   Matthew: So, we should let Pitbull have his own.   Becky: Whatever makes him happy? You do you. Live your best life.   Matthew: Right. And this is where the associations continue because right. In two lines, He has gone from being like, I am sorry that Biggie died…   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: And Tupac died. The label is going to flop. I mean, but I am going to keep making music. I am receiving oral in our car. Then he says, watch him make a movie like Alfred Hitchcock. Ha! Enjoy me.   Becky: Has, he made a movie?   Matthew: No, not at all. None. I don't think he's directed his own music videos. If he has, I can tell you the music one for this one. Looks like it was directed by…   Becky: I might know somebody who has done a video with him.   Matthew: Did they direct it?   Becky: No. He is a cinematographer. Curious at least he picked a good director.   Matthew: Right.   Becky: Alfred Hitchcock.   Matthew: He was not choosing…   Becky: One of my favourites.   Matthew: I am trying to think of who would be a bad director.   Becky: Well, the guy did. Oh, God. What is that movie that? James Franco did a movie about him that won an award, but he did not.   Matthew: Tommy Wiseau.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Watch him make a movie like Tommy Wiseau. Huh! Enjoy me.   Becky: See, that works a little better for this.   Matthew: It actually does.   Becky: If he could have just let us edit his words, he would be spot on. Yeah, either him. I am trying to think Ed Wood.   Matthew: What does he do? I don't think I know, Ed Wood.   Becky: Oh, you have to go back and watch an Ed Wood movie. I think one of my favourites, which is called Jail Bait. And there's this weird 1950s. There is this weird, depending on which version you get. There is this weird kind of like guitar piece in it that keeps showing up randomly throughout and you think it is there to like build tension, but you are like, [Inaudible 00:15:01] just threw that guitar riff in there for no real reason. It is like you have flamenco, kind of. I don't know how to describe it, but it's hilarious. Johnny Depp actually starred is him in a movie called Ed Wood. He was pretty epic at making like B movies where you're like, what! is going on here? Plan 9 from outer space, I think is him…   Matthew: Oh! Okay,   Becky: Yes. Jailbait is probably my favourite.   Matthew: I will have to check these out. Thank you for the movie recommendation. The last time I recommended Repo the Genetic Opera.   Becky: Yeah. Plan 9 from outer space…   Matthew: Jailbait first.   Becky: Jailbait though is my favourite and I used to own it on VHS. That is how old I am.   Matthew: Oh yeah. If it makes you feel any better. I was acquainted with VHS.   Becky: Yeah. I am the VHS. Oh God! That movie was so good. So bad, it was so good. I am sure it is him, Jailbait. It has to be. He has done so many, and I think he did with like Vampira. Yeah, that is Ed Wood. Oh, so many. Oh, yeah. Glen or Glenda? Also a classic. Mm hmm. Genius of a man.   Matthew: That is incredible.   Becky: I wish there were more like him out there that could do these kinds of movies.   Matthew: We can only aspire too. But I mean, also Pittbull could aspire to, be the Ed Wood but currently he wants to be Alfred Hitchcock.   Becky: That is not happening.   Matthew: But when I was really thinking about this, I was like, what? You know, in my limited experience with hip-hop, what lyric stand out to me is like the worst things I can think of.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: And this one stood out in my brain, has not left my brain for the past eleven years, and presumably will not be my brain until I die. It is this line.   Becky: Okay.   Matthew: Because remember, the rest is repetitive. Mommy got an ass like a donkey with a monkey look like King Kong. Welcome to the crib. Now, granted, also, I do need to…   Becky: Okay.   Matthew: Make a very specific point that when I say mommy, it sounds like I am talking about…   Becky: Mom. Matthew: Right.   Becky: And actual Mom   Matthew: Its spell M-A-M-I. It is Spanish. I am incredibly white. I cannot make this work. I need you to know...   Becky: Mommy and Pappy.   Matthew: Yes. Exactly. Like he is clearly talking about an attractive young woman.   Becky: A lady friend.   Matthew: Quite honestly, does not make me feel any better about it because he's dancing. She has an ass like a donkey, which I do. I will give him credit for the association…   Becky: That is good little…   Matthew: Word played.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: It is like saying like, oh, hurray. I can do this wordplay. But I forgot that this is implying that I would fuck a duck.   Becky: Yeah. Yeah, like a donkey got a sweet booty. Yeah…ewe.   Matthew: An ass like a donkey and he says monkey. Like a donkey with a monkey. Then why with a monkey? She specifically has an ass like a donkey that has a monkey. Look like King Kong. Now, does he mean the woman? Does he mean the monkey? Or does he mean the donkey?   Becky: It is all very offensive. However, you look at it, every part of that is offensive. Like there is not a moment where you go, well, that is very flattering. I appreciate that. No, nothing like. Where does the monkey come in? That is just to make the rhyme, clearly.   Matthew: Now, would you be flattered if a man would actually say you have an ass like a donkey.   Becky: That is like Sisqo she got dumps like a truck, truck, truck.   Mathew: Okay I did forget about that.   Becky: The Thong Song, and then there is Wreckx-n-Effect with the rump shaker. There is another one, actually. This is a perfect lead in mine.   Matthew: Done, I was like, honestly, that I just want to say for the audience at home, that lyric haunts me to this day and I truly wish that it haunts you as well.   Becky: Great. Okay and mine is from 1989.   Matthew: That was prior to around the time of conception but definitely not [Inaudible 00:19:48].   Becky: Okay. So mine is from 1989 and I remember this song so I'm going to read the first part of it. I was at the mall sipping on a milkshake, playing the wall, taking a break. Admiring the girls with the bamboo earrings, baby hair and bodies built to swing. That is when I seen her. Name was Tina. Grace and Poise, kind of like a ballerina. I say how you doing? My name's big L don't ask me how I'm living because yo, I'm live in swell. But then again, I am living kind of foul because my girl don't know that I'm out on the prowl. To make a long story short, I got the digits.  Calls, one that drives me crazy. Calls her on my car phone and paid her a visit. I was spanking her, thanking her, chewing her, and doing her. Land like a king and sat on sheets of Satin. Well, that is what time it is. You know what is happening? She had a big old booty, and I am doing my duty.   I mean, yo, I admit that girls cutie. But Tina was erratic, Earl is my witness with the kind of legs that put stockings out of business. I went home. I kissed my girl on the cheek, but in the back of my mind was this big butt freak. I fat my girl down. I could not hold it in, and that is when I said to her, with a devilish grin. Tina got a big old butt. Matthew: That was a perfect Segway. Becky: Yeah, then it goes on. I know I told you I would be true. But Tina got a big old butt, so I'm leaving you. So this is LL Cool J, big old butt.   Matthew: This is LL Cool J?   Becky: Oh, my God. He has another one called Backseat in my Jeep, which is another one of my favourites, one of the lyrics said. It is like backseat of my Jeep. We swing an ep. So you could not say episode, he had to shorten it down to ep to sound hard.   Matthew: Wow   Becky: But yes, the whole song has him bouncing around from girl to girl with big old butts. So then, he moves on to I believe it is Brenda. Who he met at high school. Mm hmm.   Matthew: That's, you know, usually where this occurs.   Becky: Then he goes to Red Lop, so he started at the mall. Then he goes to the high school.   Matthew: Have we confirmed that he too is in high school?   Becky: Oh, I don't think so at this time.   Matthew: Oh, yikes.   Becky: Yeah. Mm hmm. He went to the high school about three o'clock. So clearly, he is not in high school.   Matthew: Oh.   Becky: To try and catch cutie. Riding my jock.   Matthew: That is a popular line.   Becky: I have not heard that a long time. She had that kind of booty that I always remember. I would say to my man, stop the jeep. She is only 17, but yo, don't sleep. So again, I have a theme for this series, apparently.   Matthew: You sure you do. I like 2008. You like rape song.   Becky: Yeah. I don't know what it is. Then he put the big booty on a bearskin rug.   Matthew: Wow! Why the fuck does, he have a bearskin rug?   Becky: He got satin sheets and a bearskin rug. LL…   Matthew: He just fuck so much.   Becky: He is on point as far as like 70s porn house.   Matthew: Easily. He call Hugh Hefner and I was like, can I fuck as many girls in your house as possible?   Becky: Yeah. I like I scope the booty like a big game hunter. I said to the girl, you, you look tired. Let's go get some rest. Relax by the fire.   Matthew: Oh, okay. Naked.   Becky: Apparently.   Matthew: But that is a terrible way to lay naked, because let us all remember that fires only come in one direction.   Becky: Yes, so half of you is sweating to death. The other half is freezing and you are on a bearskin rug. So now, half of you is sweating with bear fur stuck to you. Everything about this is wrong.   Matthew: That is so erotic. Becky: Then if you move to like the satin she. She just like right off. like nothing about it is good. Yeah. Oh, he also grabbed a pack of bullets and pulled out the steel. So how about that?   Matthew: The steel?   Becky? How about that for slang for putting a condom on?   Matthew: Okay.   Becky: Yep. Then he gets back, and he goes to Tina. I am going with Brenda now because she got a big old butt. So he's leaving you.   Matthew: Wow!   Becky: Later on, he goes to Red Lobster. For shrimp and steak, as it says, it must be the next day because we are at lunchtime now, because this is around the time when the waitresses are on lunch break. You know, he is hanging his bro, then he meet Lisa, one thing leads to another. And he's got to tell Brenda.   Matthew: It is time for her to go.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Wait! What is the name of the song? Remind me.   Becky: Big ole butt.   Matthew: Big ole butt. It is just butt?   Becky: This was on the radio.   Matthew: Constantly.   Becky: Yeah, I remember this. Yeah.   Matthew: This is…   Becky: Big ole butt.   Matthew: Fascinating.   Becky: Hmmm. LL Cool J 1989.   Matthew: Assinating that is what I am going to call it.   Becky: It is assinating. I mean, he just. You know, I out and about. Maybe pulled in the parking lot, and parked his car. Somebody shouted out. I don't care who you are, I pay no attention. I walk inside because Brian had a nine and he was chilling in the ride. I got to be honest, I don't know what the hell that means.   Matthew: That is so weird.   Becky: Shrimp and Steak was not the only thing cooking.   Matthew: What?   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Although this does make you feel better that like consistently hip-hop artist, do you go to Red Lobster after they are fucking because, you know, Beyoncé is like… like,   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Fuck him so good. I don’t remember.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Basically the sex so good that she's like, I take his ass to Red Lobster and now turns out LL Cool J originated the like lets go to lobster.   Becky: I feel Beyoncé is lying on this one.   Matthew: She would never…   Becky: Jay Z…..Red Lobster.   Matthew: There are multiple things like really…   Becky: For reals, yeah. But this girl Lisa was like, you got a girl and it don't matter. You are looking tastier than a piping hot pizza. Then he of course, I don't know why this was something he thought the ladies are going to enjoy this line. When she walked out the door, I threw my tongue down her throat.   Matthew: Ewe.   Becky: No.   Matthew: Also, that is a terrible verb for it. Like I threw it down her throat.   Becky: I don't want you touching my tonsils. The doctor is the old one who should be touching my tonsils and my uvula, and I love that term uvula.   Matthew: Even there on him fucking ice when they touch your tonsils.   Becky: Yeah. Dentist if necessary. No. And of course, this is the 80s. Late 80s after he has done his business. He grabs his pants and put on his kangol.   Matthew: Wow. It is the 80s.   Becky: Yeah. Then who did I see? Oh, yow it was Brenda. Yow, she worked at Red Lobster but I did not remember.   Matthew: Wow!   Becky: Lisa got a big ole butt. Matthew: Wait, he bring Lisa to Red Lobster.   Becky: He picked up Lisa a Red Lobster, but forgot Brenda also worked at Red Lobster.   Mathew: LL Cool J, what the hell are you doing.   Becky: I mean you just getting yourself into a train wreck. Yeah-Big Ole Butt.   Matthew: Wow! That is…   Becky: I can still hear the whole thing in my head. Brenda got a big ole butt it is awesome. I will listen to it tomorrow at work.   Matthew: See what I appreciate. I feel like with very few exceptions, most of the songs that we choose are so lovable.   Becky: Oh, I am still going to listen to him.   Matthew: In spite of the bad lyrics.   Becky: Except for two. The first one we did. Which is that James Arthur piece of trash.   Matthew: Yes.   Becky: That one, never. Like I will listen to it because I am being forced to. Because somebody wants to see me go what the fuck is? Does anyone not listen to this.   Matthew: Is anyone hearing this?   Becky: Yeah. Then there is another song. That is right up there for me. That every time it comes on I am like no. There is no way, no how, nope.   Matthew: What is it?   Becky: Oh, you will find out because it is going to be, I think, on our next episode.   Matthew: Oh, this will be interesting.   Becky: Yeah, yes.   Matthew: Actually. You know what. I realized we mistakenly forgot to do for our last episode.  We need to give…   Becky: We keep doing this.   Matthew: We have to assign a yikes.   Becky: We did not assign a yikes. Then we also forgot that we do have a Web site.   Matthew: You, know what? People who are bingeing this up.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: You will been binge these episode…   Becky: And you will know. It is just whatthelyric.com. I mean, really make sense.   Matthew: Exactly.   Becky: The yikes factor on this one for me. Oh God. I love it.   Matthew: Yeah. That is the thing where it is like honestly.   Becky: Hmm.   Matthew: Well, it depends. Right. Because it is like infidelity.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: That is not pleasant. But lyrics purely on lyrics alone. I think that is where we have to go with.   Becky: It is a little like that holiday song. Baby its cold outside where people like, oh, my God, that is awful.   Matthew: Oh, yes.   Becky: We should never play it again, but we remove it out of the context of the time that it was done in. And granted, it's never okay to be pushy with a woman at the same time. Is 1940s much like shipoopi with 1950s. It is not like somebody is writing up, redoing shipoopi.   Matthew: To make it…   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Hip and also consensual.   Becky: Though maybe I will give it a go.   Matthew: I hope you do.   Becky: I am going to do the female version of it.   Matthew: He poufy?   Becky: What would that be? Oh, no.   Matthew: He is shitty.   Becky: Oh that, I am writing it down. He is shitty. Okay I am writing down he is shitty, and then this is my assignment. Okay, it is going to take a while, but I will come up with something.   Matthew: Love it. That should be the season finally.   Becky: [Inaudible 00:30:35] shitty. Matthew: Debuting.   Becky: Oh, if only I knew someone who could get like Peter Griffin to read it. It would be amazing. Yeah, so on the yike scale. For me, I just…sigh, [Inaudible 00:30:56] is a tough one for me because I have seen interviews and he's just Mr. Positive.   Matthew: I know.   Becky: So you cant really hate him, but God. His lyrics are awful.   Matthew: The lyrics are bad. I give it, trying to be unbiased, but I can't.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Like I would say a solid 3, I'm almost out of 4. But the positivity and honestly the rest of it is like huh! Most of this is in Spanish. You just mistakenly said that you wanted to fuck a donkey with a monkey around or on the donkey.   Becky: Yeah, Maybe it is just the setting. He did not express what the setting was. Like they are out on a beach, some tropical beach where there is wild animals.   Matthew: That is true, and also, I feel like it's one of those things where it's like Pitbull is the Tobias Funke of hip hop.   Becky: Really? He is.   Matthew: Because he said shit where he is like, oh, I want it. It sounds like he wants to fuck this animal. But really, it's like I just blow myself.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: That is the equivalent.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: I just blew myself.   Becky: Yeah, I think you are right. I think he is. Yeah. Matthew: So I will give it a three.   Becky: See, I am going four. I feel like he's never really offended, like he's not. There is nothing super offensive about it. Like the donkey, butt thing is probably the worst. But that kind of rolls back on him, I mean.   Matthew: He did let these lyrics…..he both…   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Helped write and perform these lyrics.   Becky: Yeah. I am going with a four on that one.   Matthew: [Inaudible 00:32:30]   Becky: LL Cool J on the other hand. He is like right up there. I am going with like one is like the end all be all the yuck factor. Is that what we said before? I probably do it all around.   Matthew: No. I forget… honestly I do also forget what the scale is. For the purposes of this podcast and moving forward.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: One is the worst. Five is the least offensive.   Becky: I am saying Pitbull is low grade offensive.   Matthew: Yes, okay. I would agree.   Becky: Yeah. On the scale, he is low grade. LL Cool J In the 80s, full on offensive like that whole song is epically like wow! In every way. I feel like I need a crying game shower after listening that. Also same deal with backseat of my jeep. But I still listen to them.   Matthew: You got to love them.   Becky: Kind of Religiously. Yeah, so I would give them. Backseat of my jeep, which I really wish I had kind of done too. And big ole butt more like two for me. Matthew: Okay, see I was leaning much more toward four for with this.   Becky: Oh!   Matthew: I will say I am a product if nothing but of my generation.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: You have to remember, like, boom. Twenty-three. Robin Thicke Blurred Lines come out.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Suddenly someone being like I am having sex with a lot of these women and in really inconvenient places. But I'm only referring to their butt, I'm referring to their butts as butts and not like she's got a fine ass on her like a donkey.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: So I am kind of like this is heart-warming. He is only calling it a butt. And, you know, it's like he is problematic in different ways, but not as bad as…   Becky: Oh.   Matthew: You know, raping people, raping and pillaging.   Becky: Yeah, he was definitely rapey. Yeah, I'm going…     Matthew: I like spread, though.   Becky: Apparently so did LL Cool J. Seems to be a common theme in the rap.   Matthew: They all like the spread.   Becky: Even some of the ladies. Yeah. God, I am trying to think who is the one. There was one Lil Kim who you can't even… doesn't even look like she used to. I was like that's not a Lil Kim. Oh, my God, it is. Yeah, she liked the spread, so to speak.   Matthew: Oh, I agree. But I feel like this is product. I feel like we hit some high notes in hip-hop. Becky: Yes. We went with the tried and true. The old school, like one of the godfathers of hip-hop, sort of. More popular hip-hop.   Matthew: And one of the parasite's.   Becky: Yes. Exactly I mean, God love your Pitbull.   Matthew: But is he even making music? I am sure he is.   Becky: Guarantee tomorrow we will be like, oh…   Matthew: The newest Pitbull song.     Becky: He just drop the deuce, so to speak.  That is kind of wrapping it up on the hip-hop. Oh, I pull a dad joke. Next time, we are just going rogue and we are picking whatever, the hell we want. And I will tell you, I have a doozy.   Matthew: I have no doubts. Oh, I should have thought of No Doubt.   Becky: No   Matthew: [Inaudible 00:36:06] hole But we will save that for next.   Becky: Oh, all right. So next time it is our free for all. And we will talk to you guys then.   [Music playing]   [End 00:36:35]

Join Becky and Matthew as they turn their attention to musicals - both the broadway kind and the movie musical kind.  One is from the golden age of Broadway.  The other is from a little know movie opera from 2008.  Both deserve to be skewered.   What the Lyrics? Musicals [Start 00:00:00]   Becky: Hey, guys, just a quick note. When we went to record this, I left my headphones at home so I couldn't hear the funky noises that were happening when I was banging on the table during this discussion because I was so excited and heated about this discussion of musical songs. I apologize for that. Hopefully doesn't interfere with you loving the episode and liking us a million times and telling your friends about how awesome we are. With that said, I hope you enjoy it, and next time I will remember my headphones.   Music playing [00:00:38-00:00:45]   Becky: Welcome to What the Lyric? The podcast that confirms, yeah, that actually made it to radio. Welcome to Episode 3 of What the Lyric? Today we are talking musicals. How are you doing Matt?   Matthew: I am doing pretty well considering how much research I had to do into bad musicals, of which there are many.   Becky: There are a lot and a lot have made money, which is the part that I don't quite get. I am not sure how they made money because they were so bad.   Matthew: Agreed, and I took a broad stance on the definition of musicals. So thinking more along the lines of not just Broadway musicals, but off Broadway and basically movie musicals.   Becky: It was the movie ones that I was kind of like, do I go Disney? Because Disney has some crap lyrics, or I could go to all the stuff, we did when I was in high school. What did we do? We did Grease, but we had to change the lyrics on some of the stuff because it was too racy.   Matthew: Such as?     Becky: In one of the songs about him meeting. It was some weird slang for condom, but we could use it. Matthew: Was it rubber?   Becky: It was not using. I don't think it was. I would have to look it up but I think it was rubber. I feel like it was something like balloon or something. But you knew what it was when he was thinking about it. So we had to kind of do like the radio edit and go [sound 00:2:30] or something in it so that you filled in the blank.   Matthew: Which teenager does not know about condoms?   Becky: Oh my god. It was in the 1990s.   Matthew: Oh, they really did not know about condom.     Becky: 1991, so we should have. I mean it was all coming up then so we should have left it in there but no.   Matthew: I mean our high school did Wizard of Oz. That is very wholesome to an extent considering the fans, I don’t know, destruction.   Becky: Yeah. The Wizard of Oz. What else do we do? Of course, there is always music Man Fiddler on the Roof.   Matthew: South Pacific.   Becky: You guys had some serious production.   Matthew: I did not say it was good.   Becky: High school musicals are very rarely good. I mean, let us be realistic on that one. I went back to my high school musical roots for mine.   Matthew: I think that is a perfect segue way into me asking   Becky: Okay.   Matthew: Where did you go?   Becky: All right.   Matthew: Take us back.   Becky: We are going back to and in the movie sung by Buddy Hackett, who I remember from when I was younger and he was an older man who I have this vague recollection of him being like a dirty old man kind of guy.   Matthew: I mean he was way. Wait, when was this made?   Becky: 60-65, let us say. I want to say 65. No, Sorry. Well, the musical was 57; 62 was the movie.   Matthew: That was a generation of dirty old men.   Becky: Yeah, yeah. Also covered by the Family Guy and several other outlets. I am just in a dive right into it. You ready?   Matthew: I don't believe so, but I'm willing to listen.   Becky: I think this first group, set it up nicely. Well, a woman who will kiss you on the very first date is usually a hussy and a woman who will kiss you on the second time out is anything but fussy. But a woman who will wait till the third time around. Head in the cloud, feet on the ground. She is your girl. You are glad you found. She is your shipoopi, shipoopi, shipoopi. The girl who is hard to get shipoopi, shipoopi. shipoopi, but you can winner yet. Mm hmm. That is shipoopi from the Music Man.   Matthew: Wow.   Becky: The whole thing is yet again a me-too movement in song form.   Matthew: Do we have any historical context for, is shipoopi slang for anything. Do we..   Becky: I don't think so. When I was doing the research for this. I just typed in worst song in a musical ever, and it brought up like some sort of forum for Broadway musicals. And everybody was writing these dissertations and one person just wrote shipoopi. And that's really all you need because shipoopi, I mean you can't say without giggling either, before, after, during and it shipoopi. What is that?   Matthew: And they don't explain it? That is why I love that. He does not need to explain it. He is just like.   Becky: No.   Matthew: So she is playing hard to get or presumably saying no. But it was like men who are super into...   Becky: My guess is she probably hates this guy. Thinks he is a total dill hole, but yet he just keeps breaking her down by saying shipoopi in front of her. Like a playground thing. He just keeps calling her shipoopi. And eventually she breaks out and goes, okay, I guess that's the guy.   Matthew: That is the guy from me. You know, I was not going to have sex with him the first day. Then he said shipoopi about 17 more times.   Becky: You know when I met your father.   Matthew: [Laughing] he had cutest name for me.   Becky: All he said was shipoopi. He did not say anything. He just said shipoopi over and over and over again. And we thought he had been dropped on his head, but apparently not. And that's when I fell in love.   Matthew: I knew he was the one.   Becky: By the third day of shipoopi. That is when I knew.   Matthew: Wait. What is the bumper sticker slogan that is like? Sorry, like not having to say sorry.   Becky: Oh, I cannot. Yeah, I know the one you are talking about.   Matthew: I think it is from a movie. Something means not having to say you are sorry.   Becky: Yeah, shipoopi mean.   Becky and Matthew: Not having to say that you are sorry.   Becky: I'm going to just start filling in shipoopi when I can't remember the words, which is a lot of times now that we've found out we have Alzheimer's and dementia in the family. So now, all of us are forgetting everything. So we are just going to be like, you know, that time shipoopi, you know? Right. shipoopi and see, who knows. But yeah, I mean and it continues on in the kind of abusive way with squeezer once when she isn't looking.   Matthew: Who!   Becky: Who does that?   Matthew: Apparently Buddy Hackett.   Becky: I like if you get a squeeze back that is fancy cooking. I don't know anyone, any woman who would get squeezed and be like oh, oh well hello. Then squeeze back and mean it.   Matthew: It brings up a very viable point. Of where on the spectrum of being touched does being slapped follow like is it technically a squeeze?   Becky: It could be. Or she might have just grabbed him by his junk and was like, never do that again, if you want to keep this and then he said once more for a pepper upper, she'll never get sore on her way to supper. So all this is happening, I presumably on the first date?   Matthew: No, because then she will be a hussy. So would it be…?   Becky: Well, no. If you kissed her on the first date, is she is usually a hussy.   Matthew: I see.   Becky: The second date it is your borderline because a woman who you kiss the second time out is anything but fussy. She is, you know, almost out to pasture. Then the third time around, that is the gal.   Matthew: Okay, got you.   Becky: If on the third day you squeeze her and she squeezes you back, home run.   Matthew: Fancy cooking.   Becky: Yeah, It is fancy cooking and a home run. Then once more up for a pepper upper. If you do it again and she is game, then you have just won the World Series, I guess.   Matthew: Marry this woman.   Becky: Yeah. Yeah. I cannot even.   Matthew: I feel like this song is a good example of like, is it bad lyrics? Because in the 50s and 60s, you had no way of just saying like, oh, we are banging on the bathroom floor.   Becky: Yeah. I mean.   Matthew: There is a lot of euphemisms for sex here. Fancy Cook and Pepper upper.   Becky: Well, pepper upper. I think drugs. I think we are looking for like an upper. Like maybe, a little ecstasy or I don't know, special k. Do kids still do that? Is that even a drugs?   Matthew: I think I am sure. I am a square, you are talking to the wrong person. I am impressed. I am assuming that most of these are euphemisms for sex.   Becky: I don't know. I should have asked my mother and father and be like, hey, when you guys were kids and talking about slang for sex. Did you ever go shipoopi or fancy cooking or pepper upper?   Matthew: Actually, there is still time. So like the follow up to this episode will be the [Inaudible 00:10:37]   Becky: I will call my parents after this.   Matthew: We will record it.   Becky: Quick question. It would not be any worse than, some of the questions my mom woken me up with her asking to, tell her what some slang means because somebody's at work, young kids that work mentioned and she didn't want to seem like she was not cool.   Matthew: Uncool.   Becky: Yeah. Tea bagging was one of them.   Matthew: Perfect. Never forget where you were. The moment your mom asks you.   Becky: No, I was not. I will not. I just gotten to work. And my mom called and she said, hey, look, I got a question for you, can you. What is tea bagging? I just walked in the door. Can I call you back after I call my therapist and get some coffee? And apparently it was during the whole like…   Matthew: Tea Party moment?   Becky: Tea Party stuff. And mom, they were joking. It said something about Tea Bagging and I had to explain tea bagging. It went downhill from there. Years of therapy for that one.   Matthew: That is fancy cooking.   Becky: And a pepper upper in the morning if you have to answer that question, yeah.   Matthew: To say the least.   Becky: [Laughing] you have no idea. I was like I'm sorry, what now? did you just ask me. I got to go. I need to call my therapist. And I’m actually my therapist right now, and the siren. Oh, Seattle full moon weekend. You are the best.   Matthew: I should have curse a lot more. Just so, we can edit it out.   Becky: I know, oh well. All right. So Matt, what did you go with?   Matthew: Since we will be releasing the other music episode, we did.   Becky: Yes.   Matthew: This is actually a redo by my request. Upon reflection, realized that I feel like I had not done my due diligence. Right. Because the purpose of this podcast is to find bad lyrics and call them out as they happen, even in songs that we love. Upon reflection, I realize that rent, the reason why I called out rent the way I did is because I fucking hate that musical.   Becky: The musicals is awful.   Matthew: The lyrics were not necessarily the problem. The content of the entire musical is what really bothered me.   Becky: Yeah. That is a whole other episode. Like we could take down the entire musical in one episode. Maybe that would be a probably a two-parter.   Matthew: Yes just for me.   Becky: There is an intermission in that play.   Matthew: Forty-five minutes of me bitching about this movie because of how much, I fucking hate rent.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: But I was like, you know the lyrics were not necessarily bad. I just hated the content. So then, I dug deep and ended up watching a movie musical from 2008.   Becky: 2008.   Matthew: The two biggest names would have been Paris Hilton, and Sarah Brightman.   Becky: what?   Matthew: Who famously.   Becky: Was married. To Andrew Lloyd Webber.   Matthew: The best play write of a generation.   Becky: I dislike that guy and all, he's written so much. I cannot. I just cannot. I cannot.   Matthew: Surprisingly, though, he did not write. It feels like this would have been something he wrote.   Becky: Paris Hilton and Sarah Brightman.   Matthew: I think they were the two biggest names. Also, the guy who played well, he was on Buffy. I think he was British.   Becky: Oh, yeah. Who then married…   Matthew: Giles.   Becky: Yeah. Who then married one of the other characters in that.   Matthew: Did not realize that.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: But he is in this movie as well. I ended up watching.   Becky: 2008.   Matthew: Eleven years ago.   Becky: God. Okay, 2008. I don't even know what happened in 2008.   Matthew: Financial crisis.   Becky: Okay.   Matthew: Well actually, that could play into this story.   Becky: Please tell me, they did a musical, The Wolf of Wall Street.   Matthew: I think that on is still in the works.   Becky: probably. What the hell?   Matthew: I don't really have any hints, but I will say that it is. Repo, the genetic opera, which if you have heard of or have not heard of, rather, is a movie musical from 2008. The overall plot of which is that everyone is getting cancer. Everyone is dying in this dystopian land. As they are dying, there is this one capitalistic company that says, oh, well, we have organs essentially for rent. We will give you these organs to keep you alive. But if you miss any payments, the repo man will come take the organ and you will die.   Becky: This feel like that Tom Cruise movie. What was that one? Similar? I don't know if it was similar. It is probably not, I just see Tom Cruise and then I go to my happy place because I cannot stand him either. Oh, well that is gone now. I have to look at.   Matthew: I feel like…   Becky: It is shipoopi. It is shipoopi.   Mathew: Tom Cruise in shipoopi.   Becky: I would see that. Actually, that would be something I would see.   Matthew: His voice undoubtedly is terrible.   Becky: That laugh, I needed that laugh.   Matthew: That is the overall plot of it. There are a lot of twists and turns in it. It is a real weird movie musical. I am not sure if I recommend it, but I do recommend watching it just so that you get context for how bad the song is. One of the main characters is a girl who is told that she has this terrible condition. She basically can't go outside.   Becky: Oh, my God. Like bubble boy?   Matthew: Exactly. Spoiler alert. Full spoiler alert. It is not real. Her dad was just like I told you that so you wouldn't leave an entry this like dystopian land, whatever. But the entire movie is incredibly angst. The main character, this little girl named Shiloh is 16. Then she celebrates her 17th birthday and she has a song about turning 17. That, is the song that I have picked. It is called 17 and I chose it. Not only because of how terrible the lyrics are, but also it is precisely a Goth version of 16 going on 17…   Becky: Thank you.                                                                                                           Matthew: From sound of music.   Becky: I was going to ask is it? Please tell me that it has something to do with, I am 16, going on 17. Minority Report was the movie I was thinking.   Matthew: Yeah, okay. I could see that.   Becky: Yeah, sorry.   Matthew: Sound of music. Right. It is super cute. She is falling in love with the Nazi.   Becky: Sad note, I have never seen it.   Matthew: Oh. Spoiler alert. She fall in love with the Nazi.   Becky: Yeah. I have never seen it, but I know it. I know all the lyrics, to that frickin musical as well.   Matthew: She is 16   Matthew and Becky: Going on 17.   Matthew: It gets repeated a lot. It is very cute. I think she is like very excited about that.   Becky: She dating a Nazi, wait.   Matthew: Yes.   Becky: Okay. Yep, there we go.   Matthew: She is dancing on a gazebo with him and she is very happy to turns 17. Shiloh in this movie, however, is very displeased to be 17. And what I will pause it here. Is that Repo the genetic opera for all of the bad lyrics, in fact, actually nails were being 17 is like. Let's take a look at the lyrics.   Becky: The title of the movie makes me think a repo man like an opera of the Repo Man, which would be kind of awesome. I don't know if you can still get Emilio Estevez.   Matthew: Probably not, but this is like a much dumber version of it. I still recommend watching it. Only if you are inebriated in some way, but don’t do drugs kids.   Becky: Yeah, that will be later on today.   Matthew: Yes. Alcohol or weed. That is as strong as my recommendation get.   Becky: That will be today.   Matthew: It is very angst. She cries out 17. Momma drama has to go dad. 17, nothing is going to bring her back. Oh, her mom is dead. Also spoiled alert. Her mom's dad. Hence mama dramas.   Becky: I thought maybe he had a couple of ladies on the side and he didn't know which one was the actual mother of this kid.   Matthew: Oh, no, he is not dating. But the daughter is distraught. Her mom's dead, so 17. Nothing is going to bring her back. 17, experiment with something living. 17, cause I am sweeter than 16.                              Becky: That sounds like dad is hooking up with his daughter.   Matthew: The movie leaves that open. I mean, not really, but there are some weird things happening there.   Becky: Please tell me that this, character's played by Paris Hilton.   Matthew: No, sadly.   Becky: Damn it.   Matthew: But Paris Hilton's character is very on brand…. I will does not spoil that.   Becky: Does she sing?   Matthew:  Not well.   Becky: That is right. She did have an album out.   Matthew: She did. We all know she did not get many after or any Grammys.   Becky: Did she really mean to? She is loaded,   Matthew: Right. That ends up being the chorus. So I will stop yelling 17 at you, but just know that throughout this she got 17. Other choice lyrics, I would say. Again, I feel like this captures my experience being a 17 year old. I have always longed for true affection is one lyric. I am like, okay. Like, that is not a bad lyric.   Becky: No.   Matthew: But the next line after it is. But you compare me to a corpse.   Becky: What?   Matthew: And then the third lyric is Stay with the dead. I'm joining the living cause I'm freer than 16.   Becky: Huh? Okay.   Matthew: Right. It is teenage angst.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Specifically served up in teenage incomprehension.   Becky: Yep.   Matthew: Which I do appreciate. I don't know why 16 is the thing holding her back. Why she needs to be freer than 16. Also, I don't know why she got compared to a corpse.   Becky: Yeah, and I got to say, being 46 now. 16 looks awesome because nobody else is paying my goddamn bills.   Matthew: Doesn't it feel great?   Becky: And like my laundry was getting done? Like, yeah. Food was…   Matthew: Served.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: You did not have to cook. You did not have to clean.   Becky: No.   Matthew: Pay bills.   Becky: Nope.   Matthew: did not have to work.   Becky: I just had to be angst, and sit in my room and listen to music.   Matthew: Exactly.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: Music like 17 from repo the genetic opera.   Becky: Just like that.   Matthew: So it goes on because there are two more things that I really appreciate about this. Number one; there is a Joan Jett solo in this.   Becky: As in like the real Joan Jett?   Matthew: Yes. She makes an appearance in the movie.   Becky: Wow.   Matthew: Bless you Joan Jett. But you did not need that.   Becky: No, no, no, no, no, no.   Matthew: Joan Jett makes a very strange appearance. But the final lines, I just love because they're terrible. She goes something is changing. I can feel it building suspense. I am 17 now. Why can't you see it? 17 and you cannot stop me. 17 and you won't boss me. You cannot control me, father. Daddy's girl is a fucking monster and that is the end of the song. It is one of these that I am like, I know that they're bad lyrics, but deep down the very small angst part of me as a twenty nine year old is like, yeah, fuck em, fuck parents. Boom make money.   Becky: She is a monster. What? Please tell me. She turns into like some sort of weird. I don't know. I just picture like the Toxic Avenger. But a 16 oh 17 year old girl.   Matthew: Yeah. She is freer. She is sweeter and freer than 16.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: She did not turned into a monster. She ends up actually being. Actually, I think it is a very good metaphor for puberty because she is saying all these things in song form.   Becky: Yeah.   Matthew: First of all, you took the time to create a song to convey your angst. That is a very teenage trait.   Becky: Oh, God, yes. Yeah.   Matthew: She does all of this. Then at the end of the movie, it turns out she is a big softie who like as her spoiler alert, dad dies. She is like, I love you, dad. I am sorry I was kind of an asshole. And I forgive you for lying to me about a debilitating condition that led you to lock me up for 16 years.   Becky: Okay, I have never been in that situation before, but clearly, the last time we heard about this, the girl killed her mother, just saying.   Matthew: That is true.   Becky: Yeah. Serving in time.   Matthew: Now, she is locked up in a different way.   Becky: Yeah. You are no longer free. So probably should have just left the house. Yeah. Okay, that is bad. Now I kind of want to see this at the same time.   Matthew: I do recommend it, but not because it is good.   Becky: Where did you see this? How did you see this?   Matthew: If anyone is interested in watching Amazon Prime, it is available. Just watch it.   Becky: Okay. Well, now I know what I am doing this week.   Matthew: Imagine if you really, really overfunded my chemical romance music video,   Becky: Oh God.   Matthew: So that is your aesthetic. Repo the genetic opera is absolutely the movie for you.   Becky: Oh, that is…   Matthew: Paris Hilton. Her best performance, arguably.   Becky: That is just awful. I cannot even like I bought this backpack. Then I realized, oh, my God, I am 46-year-old version of a vsco girl, unintentionally. Now I am, oh I kind of want to return.   Matthew: Wait, a what girl?   Becky: Vsco girl. Apparently, all these Instagram girls, it is a weird of crunchy, granola hippy kind of thing with really expensive accessories. Vsco is like a filter. You can run the photos through. Of course, all these girls do that.  It is like the backpack, like scrunches. Why? Anyone, want to bring that.   Matthew: [Inaudible 00:26:11]   Becky: I cannot even begin crocs in like Birkenstocks. It’s like, can we go in now on both of those? Sorry. No, no, no. No. Can do skis. What was the other thing? Oh, like a puka shell.   Matthew: Oh yeah.   Becky: Necklace kind of thing. I did not buy the $80 backpack. I went for the Chinese knockoff, but it is like that. Eighty-dollar Swedish backpack, which, by the way, somebody told me they got for their daughter. And she's like, and I looked inside. It is made in Vietnam. I was like, way to go, Sweden. Then I thought, well, had I known about that 6 years ago, I would have bought one when I was there. But no, no, no. I was like, oh, I am now this…   Mathew: Vsco girl.   Becky: Forty six year old vsco girl. I will put my hair up in a scrunches. Then there was some other accessories that I was like, Oh, sweet Jesus. There is one clothing company. That only makes one size. And it's like a size Barbie doll. I don't know. It is like a small. Then their clothes are like. It is like some Italian clothing company, Quartz.   Matthew: Yikes.   Becky: Which is funny because all the Italian ladies in my family were not Barbie size. But whatever, probably not their target market, but yeah, so.   Matthew: Wow. I mean, I, for one, am just grateful that I'm neither a vsco girl nor am 17 anymore.   Becky: Oh, thank God. Yeah, I don't even remember what… Oh, I do remember it as doing and it was not good. Properly better, pass that.   Matthew: You could have put all of your angst into a song and you would have felt properly much better.   Becky: I would properly come up with shipoopi though, as opposed to that.   Matthew: I think we both are on par.   Becky: Yeah, we got it.   Matthew: We nailed what being 17 was like in two different decades.   Becky: Shipoopi. Oh, shipoopi. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that probably rounds out the old musicals. Thank God. So coming up next week, or next episode next week, episode, whatever. It all runs together right now.   Matthew: We will release it when we want.   Becky: When we feel like it. No pressure, please. So next time around, we are doing hip-hop.   Matthew: I am excited.   Becky: I had to kind of figure out what the definition really was, because for me, it was just straight up rap. But it's not cause I looked and Drake's in there and post Malone. I don't get that one at all. Beyoncé was in there, and like that's more like R&B stuff to me.   Matthew: Interesting.   Becky: R&B pop.   Matthew: I will be very curious to know what you choose.   Becky: Now, full disclosure, I do love me some Old-School Hip-Hop and by Old School, I mean like 80s. Cause I remember Fab 5 Freddy on MTV, which you have no idea who that is.   Matthew: I sure don’t.   Becky: Yeah, he was in Blondie video and she even mentioned him in it. Old school. I can't remember, I think he was a rapper and M.C. but I can't remember it. Oh my god. My brain is fried and all of my friends who know are yelling right now. But yeah, I remember Fab 5, Freddy and then Yo!, MTV Raps and then it became the two Ed lover and Dr. Dre, but not the Dr. Dre we all know and love today. Yeah, so.   Matthew: This will be good because we are going to be getting that [Inaudible 00:30:14] and then I will be serving my purpose as the millennial on the podcast by bringing us back to 2008.   Becky: Oh, minus.     Matthew: Wow. I just realized I am a 2008 freak.   Becky: Sticking with the year. I don’t even know when mine came out. I want to say it was late 80s, early 90s. So Yeah. All right. Well, that is something to look forward to, and I guess that is the end of this episode. And we will see you next time. When we ask What the Lyric?   [End 00:30:45]  

Matthew publishes blog content and case studies on his personal website and on his company website. The case study that we talked about is published here with much more information and all the tiny details. You can also find Matthew on Linkedin or Twitter. You can also watch the whole presentation on YouTube Here is the transcript of the podcast: Matthew: One of the biggest wins we had was with the homepage where we deploy I think around 10,000 words of content. Peter: This is the time for marketing. The marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference. Peter: Hello welcome to the time for marketing podcast the podcast that gives you all of the information that you have missed when you didn't attend your marketing conferences. Welcome to episode number 25 my name is Peter and I'll be your host for today before we go to our guests. I'm not going to tell you to subscribe to the podcast I'm going to tell you and ask you something else tomorrow when you go to work. Yes, I know you work with a lot of marketing people when they leave their cell phones on the table take them open their podcast app and subscribe them to my podcast, that's probably the easiest way to tell people to subscribe to the podcast thank you. All right and now let's go to the guests that we have this time hello Matthew Woodward how are you doing? Matthew: [laughs] Hey, thanks for having me on. I love your little tip there a very blackhat approach so to speak I think I might steal that one for myself of next conference [laughs] Peter: Well, people don't randomly talk about podcast and mention podcasts to other people that doesn't happen. We have to give them specific advice this is always a marketing thing be very specific on what people should do click here, subscribe other people to my podcast. Nice to have you here on the podcast, Matthew. Matthew: Thank you very much. Peter: Matthew people know you. You have a very known blog that is matthewwoodworth.codit.uk and you are also the director of search logistics. Tell me what are the fun things that you do in your line of work? Matthew: Well, my line of work all of it is fun from top to bottom. I've been doing SEO since before link-building existed and I've been following my passion ever since. The fun things I get to do every day is just nerd out on what I love doing and that is SEO and digital business and everything like that. Honestly, it doesn't matter if I'm doing like some like boring data entry tasks or planning a new promotion [laughs] I love it all. Peter: All right. I invited you to this podcast because you were in Barcelona, how is Barcelona? Matthew: Yes Barcelona a beautiful city. I don't usually like cities, but Barcelona was pretty cool. The Affiliate Summit Conference is one of my favorite conferences because it attracts such a wide variety of people rather than just SEO or just the ECOMAS guys and so forth. It's a great conference and I put together a great presentation for them which I'm hoping to boil down and share with you guys today. Peter: I feel that affiliate marketing is, similar to SEO, it has been pronounced dead a couple of times in the past. Matthew: Yes.[laughs] Peter: It's still there and it still works very well right? Matthew: Yes, as long as there are things to buy there'll be affiliates and as long as there are search engines to search they'll be SEOs. [laughs] Peter: All right let's not beat around the bush that's what we do. Let's go directly to your presentation, your presentation was a case study on how to increase your search traffic for 14 times? Matthew: Yes, we took search traffic from 2,700 a month to 38,000 in just eight months with an affiliate site in the health niche. Peter: All right. I think we have to take our five minutes so that you can explain to us how you did that so that we can repeat that for our own websites here you go. Matthew: Look SEO doesn't have to be complicated. One of the things I know as popular SEO blog owner is that people always like looking for the secret ingredient or the supersecret to SEO. The truth of the matter is it just doesn't exist. There isn't a super-secret to find, there isn't a super ingredient, there isn't that one thing that's going to push you over the edge. It just doesn't work like that. It's a combination of factors that will help to elevate your search traffic. The problem is most people are only focused on one of those factors which is building links. It's very easy to get lost in the technicalities and complications of SEO, but look it boils down really to a very, very simple three-step process. That is, first of all, take a look at technical SEO. You've got to build the structure of a solid and healthy website structure that not only Google loves, but people love as well. The second step is you've got to create content that actually helps people. It's actually, got to be relevant people actually want to engage with it. It's got to be the content that when people read it they want to share it. No one wants to link to a lemon and many people don't produce good enough content that's worthy of attracting links naturally it's a common mistake. The third step is link building and that just acquiring links from relevant websites. That is 10 times easy to do when you've taken care of content creation and your technical SEO and on-site experience. Those three pillars the healthy site structure, the content and the link building those three pillars if you pay attention to them and work them together have absolutely incredible effects. You don't need SEO to be complicated just take care of the basics and Google will reward you. The problem is many people don't want to take care of the basics. Honestly, that's all we did in this case study we 14 times search traffic in a highly competitive health niche and we only built 76 links. Over that period the site actually attracted around 350 links. Now the reason it was able to attract 280 links was that because we paid attention to site structure and content before we went out to do the link building. now if you had to budget for those additional 250 links in the health niche you'd probably have had to spend around a hundred to 150 dollars per link. Not only from an ROI perspective is taking care of your technical SEO and quality of content important. It's important for your users, it's important for Google your rankings your traffic and conversion everything relies on getting those three pillars right, but so many people are blindly obsessed with link building they can't see the woods for the trees and then they use all of their effort and all of their resources building links which they're not getting the maximum value from those links because they haven't taken care of the other core pillars and when you take care of all of them they all work together and it's the most cost-effective way of increasing your search traffic. Now the case study site and I've got a very detailed case study that drills down into all of the technical differences that we could simply not cover in five or ten minutes. If you want to check that out there's a full post on my blog along with a video that goes through all of the real nitty-gritty technical bits it leaves no stone unturned. We faced a common problem with this site that many people might face and when we were trying to rank it the search results were dominated by huge brands huge, huge, huge brands and that's quite scary when you're looking at it. What we noticed is the brands that were ranking specifically the pages that were ranking were only ranking out of the strength of the domains Authority. They were not ranking because of individual page level metrics like backlinks that men that if we focused on page-level metrics we had an opportunity. For example where a site like Holland and Barrett might be ranking number three, but with zero links to the page. Yes, if we build a page it's got 15 links to it we've beaten them on page-level metrics and that gives us an opportunity to compete in the search results. That was the common theme of this case study we were looking for search results where sites were purely ranking out on the main level metrics rather than page level and then we optimized all of the page level metrics in order to compete. Now the health niche is seriously, seriously competitive, but that approach allowed us to find lots of opportunities that once we approached it with that mindset and that's how we got the competitive advantage with the entire strategy that was really the foothold that allowed us to take control. Once we identified the opportunity, it was in just a case of looking at our competitors seeing what they were doing why they were doing it how they were doing it. We were looking at what they did that we liked, what we didn't like where they're using trust signals on the page was the content aligning to intent we really just did a very manual observation of the search results to see what we felt. Now, manual observation, the power of observation is one of the most underutilized skills you can have as a human being, like in general life. Not only in SEO but we can learn so much as by observing and in the SEO world, we're often distracted by big data and tools and analytics and all these other things that actually stops us from just using the computer between our ears. Quite often you can just look at a search result and just ask yourself questions, why is this ranking and look through the data and come up with your own observations rather than just looking at what a tool says. That's important to do because you really start to get a feel not just for the SEO of the niche, because every niche is different, but also who your competitors are. Why are they your competitors, what they do good, what they do bad? It becomes more of a business exercise and it's something that's lost on many SEOs and people skip over. Once we decided on our strategy, we observe the search results and we found our opportunities, then it was just a case of going and making sure we had build a solid site structure that Google loves and humans love. I drilled down more into that in the post be`cause it gets very technical and the issues this site had is unique to this site. We have issues with page speeds, site structure, duplicate content, had some issues with trust signals and a few other areas. Have a look at the full case study and see if your site suffers from any of those problems as well. If it does, you need to fix them. Once we've taken care of there was like seven or eight key issues that was preventing us from building a solid foundation that Google loves. Once we built that, it was then just a case of creating content. Now, we created the content of the back of the manual observation we've done in the search results. We've made a note of what was ranking, what we liked about it, what we didn't like about it and so forth. We went out and created content that matched that specifications. One of the biggest wins we had was with the home page where we deployed I think around 10,000 words of content. Sorry, the home page originally had 1,500 words of content on it. We increased that to nearly 11,000 words just by answering 20 of the most popular questions in the niche. The impact on that was the home page went from ranking for like a handful or keywords to over 11,000 different keywords just by adding about 10,000 words of content to the home page. We went out and we made sure all of the content we were creating for our target keywords is at least equal to or slightly better than our competitors. There's literally no reason to be ten-timesing your content, you've just got to match or better your competitors. Once that was in place, it was just a case of acquiring links from relevant sites and trust me, many, many people struggle link building, but link building is really, really, really easy when you've created content that people actually want to link to. It's a much easier sell when you picture, hey, look at this awesome post when it is actually awesome and that's a big part that many people will miss when they're so focused on link building. They can't see the woods for the trees and then they miss out on much bigger opportunities and end up spending a bunch more money than they need to, to acquire the same amount of links. Once we have taken care of on-site structure, technical SEO, the content and then the link building, those three basic pillars of SEO. We saw traffic grow from 2,700 per month to 38,000. That's a 14 time increase in 8 months in one of the most competitive niches on the planet. We did it solely by taking care of the every basic pillars of SEO, wasn't complicated and that's the biggest advantage that you often have in it in SEO. Just by using the power of manual observation and seeing where you can fit in with things rather than relying on tools and analysis and this and that and the other. Just look for those opportunities with your eyes and then make sure you do the basics right, because if you do the very basics right of any business whether it's SEO or offline business, whatever it is, if you do the very basics right, you always see success and that is very much the case with SEO. Peter: All right, thank you. A couple of very interesting things were mentioned, home page started ranking for giant number of keywords. Usually I would say that the home page, because it has to look nice and it doesn't really have as much content, it would usually rank for the brand keywords and more or less nothing else, but you switched that and wanted to get the home page ranked. How can be a home page competitive to 1,000 worded article from the competition? Matthew: The home page usually has the most weight in terms of SEO. It usually has the most authority and you're right, most people only use a home page to try and rank for brand terms. What we did was we just made a list of the most popular questions in the niche and answered them. In you know, when you clicked to expand the question and it reveals the answer? That on it's own attracted a bunch of long tail keywords that were all relevant to our niche and then also reinforce all of our topical relevance. That was just something that tried on that site and we have great, great, great success with that. Peter: All right, so it should be tried at other places too. Matthew: Yes, and I've just have to point it out, beyond just finding out what the top questions where and answering to them, there was no keyword research that went into it. There wasn't any like strategy or planning that went into it. It was just, okay, let's answer all of these super relevant questions on the home page and see what happens, and that's what we did. Peter: Very interesting, the tools got to compare yourself to the competition, Pop or Quora or others are really, really popular right now in SEO in the last couple of months. You're saying, use your brain and just see for yourself and you're going to understand your competition much better than using the tools. Matthew: Yes, I'm not saying don't use the tools, but the tools shouldn't be the first thing that you use. The first thing that you should do is use the computer between your ears, do the search yourself, look at the search results, manually review them both on a desktop and a mobile phone and get a feel for it. Often just by looking, you see opportunities and while everyone else is distracted with automation and tools, you can just observe. It's how I see most of my success in life, I just sit back and observe. Observe the people that are winning, observe the people that are losing. Why are they winning? Why are they losing? Why is this person doing that? Why do they making it? Just sit back and observe and if you apply that to the search results, I learn more just observing search results and doing random searches like best gaming laptop. I like watching how that search result has changed over the years. Two years ago you would've found a bunch of amazon affiliate sites there. Right now, there's not a single affiliate site there. Just that kind of observations tells you the direction that things are moving in. If you're building Amazon affiliate sites and you're not building businesses right now, well the search results are already telling you you're making the wrong decision. That's the power of observation, it's underutilized not just in SEO but in general life as well. Peter: Yes, and I had a boss once who every morning he wanted to type all of the costs and income for the different marketing channels into the spreadsheet himself. He went through the numbers every day himself with his own brain and understood and of course, now the company has grown to up 300 people. Matthew: Yes. That's- Peter: There is an idea of understanding, getting the deep understanding of the field is the additional benefit. Matthew: Yes, that's a very intelligent decision by him because he could just have someone else enter the numbers him read the data, but when you read the data you're not analyzing it in the same way as when you're actually in the got to doing it. Very smart move by your boss and I think there's a lesson there for all of the SEO community to take [laughs] Including myself actually. Peter: All right Matthew. I think we had a very nice summation of your presentation at the Affiliate World in Barcelona. As mentioned, we'll add links to your blog post with your video and to your short presentation to the show notes. Where can people find you, contact you and of course read stuff that you write on your blog? Matthew: Yes, the best way to read anything by me is to hit matthewwood.co.uk. There's a ton of content there that answers pretty much every SEO question you can ever think of. You'll also find a case study section and you'll find this case study, How We 14 Times Search Traffic. The case study includes all of the technical details that I wasn't able to include on the talk along with a video that steps you through the entire thing. I'm hoping that it's one of the best SEO videos you've ever seen, so leave me a comment and let me know if that's the case. Peter: All right, let everyone go and check that. Do you have any future conference plans already set up? Matthew: I'm going to be talking at Chiang Mai SEO in November and I got a couple of a potential bookings next year that we're just ironing out the details of [laugh] but Chiang Mai SEO will be next one, yes Peter: One more thing, when I went through our communication in Gmail, I searched for your name and then I found out when was the first time when I really met you but contact with you. It was probably last year. I think it was last year when you were having SEO Black Friday deals. Matthew: Oh yes. Yes. Peter: Black Friday is coming slowly. Are you having something similar this year too? Matthew: Yes. For the last five or six years, I've published a site, internetmarketing.blackfriday, which covers all of the Black Friday deals across the SEO and blogging niche. I think last year we had like a whole 120 different deals loaded and I think 11 of them were exclusive to us as well. That's something that I've been doing for quite a long time and we'll be doing it this year as well. Peter: All right. Excellent. I think that's it. Thank you very much for being on the podcast. It was extremely informational. Matthew: Yes. Perfect. Peter: Glad for having you here and have a great day. Matthew: Thank you very much. It's been great to be here.  

In this very special episode, we sit down and interview Matthew Oh, the founder and CEO of Forefront. Forefront is a non-profit organization that seeks to build communities and raise change makers in India. They do this by providing clean water, building schools, and so much more. Listen to the story of how it all began as well as ways you can take action. For more information about Forefront and to contact Matt, visit: https://www.goforefront.org/

Not sure if you caught it, but Archbishop Vigano recently told the American bishops they'd better be afraid...very afraid. Why? Because if you want to become a saint, the first thing you need is fear. Fear isn't typically the first thing that pops into your mind when you think about growth in sanctity, but it's a must. Not any old fear, of course...we're talking fear of the Lord - one of the most powerful gifts of the Holy Spirit (see Isaiah 11). And Archbishop Vigano's recent letter nails it. So in this episode of the Art of Catholic podcast, I'm going briefly unpack why I think the one paragraph letter he wrote is, in a way, the most powerful letter he's written so far...at least on the spiritual level. Among other things, I'm going to get into: Why fear of the Lord doesn't equal terror How fear is directly linked to the virtue of temperance (and why that's so important) Why spiritual fear leads to hatred of sin The beauty of filial fear How the gift of fear moves us to reverence This is a super powerful podcast because it shows how instead of just complaining, we can become part of the solution to the Church crisis. May God bless you and the whole Catholic Church! Matthew Oh yeah...Here's the link to Divine Intimacy on the EWTN Religious Catalog, I mentioned in the podcast. P.S. I'm leading a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with Jim Caviezel, star of The Passion of the Christ! We'll also be joined by Fr. Don Calloway and John Michael Talbot! It's going to be epic! CLICK HERE for details!     P.P.S. If you'd rather go to Italy, I'm heading there on pilgrimage, too! Join me in March 2019 for a time of deep spiritual renewal and amazing adventure in Rome, Assisi, Orvieto, LaVerna, and much, much more! CLICK HERE for details!   CLICK HERE to subscribe to the Art of Catholic podcast!

We sit down with creator Matthew Manning to discuss his entrepreneurial journey in launching Gumbo Media.Learn about Gumbo here: https://gumbomedia.com/Connect with us: https://linktr.ee/livingcorporateTRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and yes, you're listening to a B-Side. Now, every episode is someone's first episode, so for our new folks, B-Sides are essentially random shows we have in-between our larger shows. These are much less structured and somehow even more lit than our regularly scheduled shows. Today, we have a special guest - Matthew Manning. Matthew is the co-founder and [inaudible] director of Gumbo Media, a trans-media storytelling platform of curated content and experiences to expand the narrative of black life through various programs, services, and content platforms. Gumbo is amplifying new nuance and more humanity into our stories, creating pipelines that encourage us to speak for ourselves. Today, Gumbo is a coalition of over 60 artists, activists, entrepreneurs, and allies committed to a collective vision of inclusive representation. Matthew, welcome to the show, man.Matthew: Hey, thank you, man. I really appreciate it.Zach: Hey, man, I appreciate you being here, man. Now, look, today we're talking about starting a startup. Talk to us a little bit about your history and how Gumbo started.Matthew: Yeah. I think there are a few ways to tell this story, but to keep it simple, Gumbo, which was formally Royal Media, really emerged from a gap. It was a gap that my co-founder and I, Courtney Phillips, felt--to be honest on a personal level, but it translated into some of the professional. Representation was lacking, even in our jobs, in our classes. You know, anywhere we went that was professional or academic, educational, just social, it felt like we were often wearing a mask, or perhaps more aptly like we were living half of ourselves. And when the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling happened in the same week a few days apart, it was a difficult week for us. They were killed, and we instantly felt this shift that we couldn't come back from. And this had been already--this had already been happening with the deaths of black [inaudible] by the police force and kind of the growth of racial discord, but this heightened those feelings. We were forever changed, and we knew that our work in some way had to reflect it. One of the things that we were saying at the time was, you know, we really feel our tide shifting. And so what we did was we ideated and thought about what is a platform that we can build that allows these stories to be better heard, that allows us to feel like that representation is present in our own spaces? You know, kind of a cross-culture, and so essentially we built a squad of creatives who felt the same way, and then we asked ourselves, you know, how we can build--how we can build a platform and use content and storytelling in unique ways to really amplify the underrepresented, if you will. So additionally, how can we ensure that the voices of everyday people aren't swallowed or silenced by, you know, silencing forces, including sometimes those that are intra-communal, those that are within our own community. And lastly, we thought about how do we ensure that this becomes an equitable platform where others can engage and tell their stories, not merely a stage where we yell out the answers? You know? We don't want to speak for people. We want to create a pipeline and a platform that allows for people to speak for themselves, and that's really where the--you know, where the secret sauce is for us, if you will. We're all exploring, learning, and growing together, and black being has bound us, and so we really wanted to create a space that honors this truth that is consciously committed to amplifying all of its nuances and all of its complexities, especially by offering up space to the creatives among us who really do their thing and allow those expressions to be seen and heard around the world.Zach: Man, that's amazing. So I'm curious, right? So in starting any startup, building any company, you're gonna take your Ls along the way, right? So I'm curious, what were some of the biggest Ls--and I'ma call those Ls lessons, folks--that you've taken in starting a startup?Matthew: Well, this is my second go around, and so a lot of them I gathered from the first and used as kind of fuel for the second, and so some of the things that I think I've really learned are--and I'll speak more to the lesson portion of it. One is strip away your ego, especially as men. I think it's ingrained that, you know, we're kind of conditioned to feel like we know and we have all the authority and the agency and our voice, and so I think it's important to strip away our ego and to understand if we're doing what we're doing for ourselves or for others. I think it's okay to be both, but others should be a part of it, at least if it's something that's socially-minded, right? And for us it's more important that we get content right or that we tell the story in the--in the right way, that we are as inclusive as we can be, than that it is that I'm right, and so I think that's something that has been to remind ourselves of, all of us, but for me that starts with me, especially as kind of a leader in the company along with a few other folks. It's important that I try to be as prideless and egoless as I can be. We can be proud of our work. We can have confidence in our voice, but those voices can't be silencing of other people. Another one is just don't be afraid to fail. In fact, I've learned to really embrace it. Not in the sense that I'm encouraging or that I'm seeking out failure, but in a way I--I suppose in a way I actually am, you know? In a sense that I want to succeed, but I also know and recognize that failing fast and failing forward is one of the fastest ways to grow, you know? It's important to seek out growth. It's important to seek out criticism even, to better understand how we can refine our own processes and things of that nature. So failing, especially as an entrepreneur, allows you to really be the best version of yourself and to implement those lessons moving forward. Beyond that, it's really about doing it for the love, you know? Passion is, I think, the only fuel that's really strong enough to push us through some of these experiences. Being an entrepreneur is hard, man. As you know, it's hard work. You and your team are grinding every day. You're building. When you look at something that you admire, like a company, a movement, a platform, whatever it might be, and you say, "Okay, I want to get there," like, that's a--that's a large question. How do you get from nothing to...Zach: Something.Matthew: Everything that you admire. To something, exactly. It's a hard thing, and so if you're not doing it for the passion, if you're not doing it for the love, then, you know, then I just don't know that you're gonna have enough fuel, enough motivation to push you through all those little moments, all those difficult questions, all those shortcomings, because those are inevitable parts of the journey, and they're actually part of what makes the journey so beautiful. So valuing every step of that journey is a lot easier the second time around, granted, but those are all valuable things to keep in mind for me. Those have been big lessons.Zach: Man, that's a great point. And it's funny because, you know, you and I connected back--initially back when, you know, Gumbo was Royal, and I was working on another--on another nonprofit, and, you know, definitely--this is also my second go around with Living Corporate, right, and trying to figure out and take the lessons learned from my past venture to this, and it's like, okay. You're absolutely right. Like, failing forward, right? And, like, to your point around being passionate and letting that passion drive you, 'cause I can tell you--I mean, I completely vibe with you on the whole "It's a lot of work," and it has to be something you're passionate about because, you know, it's gonna be long days and long nights, and if you don't really, really care, like really care about what you're doing, you know, you'll end up taking time off, you know? Your content gets delayed. You get delayed, and then out of nowhere you look up and you haven't moved anything in a month, right? And a month in an entrepreneur's--a month of no activity in an entrepreneur's world is like a year, right? Like, you've got to keep it going. So--Matthew: Then there's also the comparative sense too, right? Which is that if you don't really care, there's always somebody out there that does care and that cares more and that is putting in that work, and so if you really want to make it, if you want to, you know, make what you're doing a success, if not for yourself then for the others that you're serving, then, you know, you need to put in that--you need to put in that work to get there and be smart about it.Zach: Right. And it's funny, right? So it's--and of course there's a duality in, like, not being so comparative that you end up robbing yourself of your own journey and your own development and driving your thing, but there's still the reality of, like, "Look, there's two people, Matthew, sitting down right now talking about something similar to what you and I are talking about and grinding," right? And there's always somebody else out there trying to--and if the goal is for your platform to grow and get out there, no one's gonna cry for you, right? You have to go, and you have to go get it, and I think--because I'm a Type A in that particular way and I'm a driver that really resonates with me, but like I said earlier, I think you have to kind of balance it between not going to the far end where you end up sapping yourself of the joy of even what you got into it for, you know what I mean?Matthew: Absolutely, I agree.Zach: So let me ask you this. What was the--what was the final push? Let's talk about Gumbo. Let's talk about Gumbo. What was the final push for you to pursue and commit to growing Gumbo full-time? And what all are you working on these days?Matthew: Yeah. So the final push was--I mean, it was interesting, right? 'Cause sometimes I say and think often that, you know, life is like water. I think I heard Will Smith say this someday, and it's just kind of laws of attraction, right? Like, you put in--the energy you put in comes back to you, and life in a lot of ways is kind of like water in that way in that if you make a decision, if you decide what you want to do and you start moving, it'll get out of the way. It'll make a path for you, even if it's masked under something else, right? So when we started at the time what was Royal Media, which our language at the time was celebrating the complexity of black life, which we're still doing, but it's now more embedded in what we're doing, I actually was laid off my full-time job. I was a nonprofit consulting. The company--I won't mention the company, but they've grown. I was part of, you know, an 8-person team that had grown to about 16 people, and then they laid off about three quarters of the workforce in a matter of months, and I was on the front end of that. So it wasn't just me, but I think likely part of the energy I was putting into that job was something that was lackluster. I was doing my job, I was being professional, but I also recognized that what I really wanted to do was this work over here. What I really wanted to do was commit to telling the stories and building the pipelines that allow black folks to really celebrate and honor themselves and each other, and that was passion to me, and I think that was felt, but I also think that was felt, you know, kind of cosmically, in a cosmic sense if you will. And so that was kind of a forced push, but at that time I recognized that, "All right. Well, if I'm already in this space, if I've already kind of taken the jump, even forcibly, maybe it's wise that I use the time that I have here to commit to growing this company as much as I can," especially as one of its co-founders. That's an unfair weight to put on other people, you know? When it's not paid work yet, when it's something that's scaling. It's, like, early, early, early stages of startup life. Maybe I'm the right person to do that, and so I did, and I've kind of continued to grind on that. It hasn't been easy by any--you know, any stretch of the word, but it was simple, right? I think there's a difference between simplicity and [inaudible], and I think we often conflate the two. It's a choice. The choice is simple - do it or don't. The path can be very difficult, and the path has been difficult, but the choice was simple. I knew what I wanted to do and I committed to doing it, and, you know, (tried it?) to say after some time we built enough--Gumbo's essentially an umbrella brand, and so it has other subsidiary groups and companies, and one of them is a creative consultancy, and now I'm one of the full-time consultants in that group. So now I'm starting to pay myself through business revenue to do work that ultimately feeds my soul, feeds my passion, and is a company that I started, and that feels great. And so it's taken some time, but it's becoming sustainable work now for me. And so it was kind of a forcible thing, but it was also energy that I put out there that came back at me and said, "You know what? You're ready for this."Zach: So for those--for those who say they can't afford to pursue their startup full-time, like, what would you say? Right? And if I may ask, like, how did you make it work before you were able to pay yourself?Matthew: Right. It's difficult. I would say that there are--one person I really admire who's hustling in this space, and you guys admire them as well, is John Henry.Zach: Oh, yeah. Shout out to John Henry, straight up.Matthew: Yeah, shout out to John Henry from Harlem Capital. He's doing some amazing work. One thing that he says often is, you know, you can work two things, but the moment that the new thing that you're building is losing money by not committing full-time, that's the moment to transition, and so I think if you have the capacity and you have kind of the agency to be at a job that you can enjoy, that you can continue to grind at while you're building your venture on the side, I think that is a wise choice if you have that--if the energy's there, right? If it fits, until there's a moment, and you'll know when that moment comes. Like, you'll know when you're actually being a detriment to your venture because you'll feel that your energy is the most valuable asset you have, and so there will come a shifting moment where you can make that shift and take that plunge. Beyond that though, I would say it's really about thinking creatively about your capacity and about what you're able to do, you know? Especially as creatives. A lot of us have skills that are accessible and valuable as freelancers. I mean, we've started this consultancy, and I know that this is a part of what's paying us now, but the valuable feedback that I recognized in that--you know, stepping back for a moment is that we have a pool of creatives who are looking for work, and a whole lot of business is coming to us asking for work to be done. So there is work out there ready to be accomplished. There are people who are requesting services, and so there are ways to kind of creatively find, you know, services to help pay you and support you while you're building what you're doing. Maybe it's about living a life that's a little bit more--a little bit more frugal, living a life that's a little bit more reserved, you know? But you can make it kind of on a part-time basis depending on what your expenses are and what you're doing to buy yourself that time so that you can open up as much flexibility and time as possible during the day. You know, I didn't think about how much of a privilege it was that I could have a meeting any literally time of the day, you know? If I'm working 9-to-5, a lot of people don't want to meet--a lot of business people specifically, new partners, potential investors, they don't want to meet after 5:00, they don't want to meet on the weekends, and, like, I don't know what my solution would be to that apart from taking off time from work if I had a full-time job. So I do think there is a moment when you know that a plunge is necessary to take that next step, you know? Businesses are all about plateaus. Well, they're all about growth, but every growth curve has a plateau unless you make another shift, unless you, you know, invite new kind of breath, new life, new wind into the company, and for me I recognize that in order to take this to the next level, I need to take a step, and I need to do this for myself passion-wise and joy-wise, but also for the team in terms of the work that we're doing. So it's just about being creative, and that's kind of what I did. So I did some graphic design, I did some editing, content creation, things of that nature, you know? But I'd be lying if I said it was easy. It was not easy. It was one of the harder things I've ever done, but it paid off.Zach: Man, that's amazing. So look, before we let you go, do you have any shout outs or any parting words?Matthew: Yeah. I mean, I would love to shout out the squad always. Courtney, Andre, [inaudible], Amir, Asia, Mike, John, [inaudible]...Zach: Let's get some air horns for the team, for the squad.[Sound Man throws 'em in]Matthew: Yeah. I mean, we do it all collectively, you know? And I feel blessed to call these people my family. I guess what I would say is to get yourself a squad, you know? Failure, I think, is easier when it's shared. Triumphs are more fun when they're collective, but also strategy becomes easier, I think, for a startup to fill. Like, when you're filling an asset map, when you're filling all of the things that you're capable of doing, it's easy when you have a team. It's more enjoyable, and I think it's a great way to understand that, you know, my skills may not be in finance per se, but I'm great at this [inaudible] stuff. I'm great at people. I'm great at programs. This person's great at event curation. This person's great at content. So once you start building and assembling that, that's really where it's kind of the shortcut--there are no shortcuts, but it's the faster route, I guess, to finding a more equitable and well-rounded form of success for whatever your business might be, and so that would be my parting words. Those people I love, I'm fortunate to call them family, and I encourage you to get you some of your own.Zach: That's so dope, man. Well, look, that does it for us, guys. Thank you for joining us on the Living Corporate podcast. Make sure to follow us on Instagram at LivingCorporate, Twitter at LivingCorp_Pod, and subscribe to our newsletter through www.livingcorporate.com. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're gonna just cut all that out. So let me ask--oh, we're gonna cut this 'cause I want to make sure you plug Gumbo, like--Matthew: Oh, yeah.Zach: So I know you gave your parting words, Matthew, but man, we didn't even plug Gumbo. Like, where can people find out more about the platform? Like, plug all your stuff, man. Drop some air horns for Matthew real quick, and then let's go ahead and plug your stuff, brother. Where you at?[Sound Man complies]Matthew: [laughs] Yeah, appreciate that. You know, the best way to find us across the board is GumboMedia.com. We were lucky to get a solid domain, excited about that since we kind of rebranded and relaunched a lot of our mission, and so everything is housed there. You'll find access to all of our content, all of our social, all of that stuff at GumboMedia.com. You can find us on Gumbo Media just by searching really any platform. So yeah, we're--you know, we're out here. We're creating. We're always inviting collaboration, innovation, so reach out, you know? Get involved if you're interested. We have about 60 creatives that we're working with and a core team of about 6 or 7, but we're scaling and building and always looking to build, so hit us up.Zach: Awesome. Well, look, that does it for us, folks. Thank you for joining us on the Living Corporate podcast. Make sure to follow us on Instagram at LivingCorporate, Twitter at LivingCorp_Pod, and subscribe to our newsletter through living-corporate.com. If you have a question that you would like for us to answer and read on the show, make sure you email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. This has been Zach, and you've been talking with Matthew Manning, founder of Gumbo Media. Peace.Matthew: Peace.Kiara: Living Corporate is a podcast by Living Corporate, LLC. Our logo was designed by David Dawkins. Our theme music was produced by Ken Brown. Additional music production by Antoine Franklin from Musical Elevation. Post-production is handled by Jeremy Jackson. Got a topic suggestion? Email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. You can find us online on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and living-corporate.com. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned.

Matthew Oh, founder of FOREFRONT Charity (www.goforefront.org) based in New York City with a global mission to enable every person, equip leaders, and establish self-sustaining communities through a four-phase approach. The journey to FOREFRONT started back in college serving with his local church congregation in overseas missions. The obedience of waiting on the Lord proved to be the light entering into the county of India when the organization where the organization first took its roots. We discuss discerning calling and prayer as an essential element in the process.

Can you think of anyone better? I don't think so. Teresa of Avila is one of greatest spiritual theologians in the history of the Church. In fact, this 16th century Spanish mystic is the "Doctor of Prayer". Join me in discussion with Dr. Anthony Lilles about the spiritual legacy of this dynamite Carmelite nun on her 500th anniversary. But this episode isn't all history. Not even close. The spiritual life is meant to be practiced! And nobody is more practical than St. Teresa of Avila. So listen up and be transformed! God bless! Matthew Oh yeah...PLEASE head over to iTunes and leave the show a rating! Doing so helps promote the podcast and gets Catholic material in front of people who may never otherwise be exposed to the faith. Thank you! “All who have been lost were lost because they did not pray.” St. Alphonsus Liguori. Don't be lost! Grab your FREE copy of my quick guide to deeper prayer 8 Ways To Jumpstart Your Prayer Life!  It's an easy step-by-step summary of the spiritual giants of the Church designed to help you rocket to God!