Podcasts about matthew there

Naomi and Alex, go over the US result, with a special focus on what it means for the UK and Europe, and what leassons we can learn from it. With two extraordinary guests: Former diplomat and UN Deputy Secretary General, Lord Mark Malloch Brown, and former Obama campaign staffer and CEO of 38 Degrees Matthew Mc Gregor. ***SPONSOR US AT KO-FI.COM/QUIETRIOTPOD*** Mark: “There is, frankly, a class-versus-identity issue. Some latinos, for example, feel that they are entering the middle class and want their vote to be consistent with their life in the suburbs, membership of a country club, and resent Democrats who tend to lump them together by identity and assume that they want certain services or support from the state.” Matthew: “Yes, economic issues were front and centre, but there are other issues in this election. For a lot of Americans, the impact of the roll back of reproductive rights, the fact that women are losing their lives because of it, was not a deal-breaker. And this is going to be an incredibly painful fact for people to absorb.”   Mark: “The person who lost this campaign was Joe Biden and those around him, who cynically kept him propped up long after he should have declared himself not a candidate, and prevented the primary process, in the white hot heat of which a candidate is toughened up.” Matthew: “There is a real danger from this result for the UK, that the Labour Party, and progressives more generally, will suffer a crisis of confidence. In the current environment, caution is the riskier option. The gov't needs to drive forward, probably even more boldly than Reeves set out in the Budget.” Mark: “If Trump goes with these very high tariffs, he is not only going to throw the American economy into deep confusion, in the medium term, he is going to throw the global economy into a chaotic state. And anaemic growth is going to be even more anaemic.” Matthew: “Feelings don't care about your facts. Keir Starmer said something that really concerned me during the election campaign: ‘I believe in actions, not words.' If you want to be a successful PM in the year 2024, you need both.” LINKS: You can join the fight with 38 Degrees here. You can join the fight with Best for Britain here. You can join the fight with Hope not Hate here. You can find out about Open Society's work here. Click here for your Quiet Riot Bluesky Starter Pack. Email us at quietriotpod@gmail.com. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. ***SPONSOR US AT KO-FI.COM/QUIETRIOTPOD*** With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou and Kenny Campbell – in cahoots with Sandstone Global. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Matthew Kimberley is the CEO of Book Yourself Solid Worldwide, author of Get A F*cking Grip, and creator of Delightful Emails, The School for Selling, The Single Malt Mastermind and more. Today, Matthew joins the show to discuss the nuances of negotiating and selling, how to exercise your ‘Sales Muscle,' and the power of speaking things (or asking them) into existence.Key Takeaways01:04 – Tom introduces today's guest, Matthew Kimberley, who joins the show to discuss his background in recruitment and how he got involved in real estate investing 07:24 – The Sales Muscle 19:43 – Overcoming the fear of selling and building confidence 32:05 – The power of speaking things into existence 34:53 – The difference between Negotiation and Sales 38:12 – Play the Game and have fun doing so 39:32 – Tom thanks Matthew for joining the show and lets listeners know where to connect with himTweetable Quotes“I help people who haven't been trained in selling, but they have got some other technical skill. And I help them marry their desire to make a decent living from their technical skill with the ability to actually make a decent living. So, they have the desire, and I show them the processes, the skills and the knowledge that they need to have in place. And I try to keep things as simple as possible.” (06:34) (Matthew) “There is absolutely no question that there's a direct correlation between meaningful sales activity - asking people, ‘Would you be interested in buying my thing? Would you be interested in sitting down and talking about this opportunity? Are you in the market for? - and how many sales you make. The old adage from Glengarry Glen Ross that we should ‘Always Be Closing' is nonsense. We should always be opening. We should always be creating opportunity. And creating opportunity is as easy as asking, ‘Are you interested?'” (09:55) (Matthew) “Nobody ever gets offended, ever, when you say, ‘Would you be interested in buying my thing?' People get offended when you don't listen to their answer.” (16:14) (Matthew) “The temptation for many people - especially at the beginning of their sales journey - is to invest a lot of opportunity in anybody who expresses interest.” (21:52) (Matthew) “We can all improve the quality of our lives by recognizing that if we ask for something, there is a much higher possibility of us receiving it. And, you can apply this to your actions as a buyer as well as your actions as a seller.” (32:05) (Matthew) “Anybody who decides that they will learn selling can make a living. In any economy, there will always be supply and demand requirements. If you can sell, then you'll never go hungry. And if you can remember that, it can be an awful lot of fun.” (38:51) (Matthew)Guest ResourcesTom's LinkedInTom's WebsiteTom's Training programMatthew's LinkedInMatthew's WebsiteMatthew's Instagram

In this episode of Don't Break the Bank, we hear from leaders in tech and finance about what technology will be game changing for the industry over the next year. EPISODE NOTES 3 Takeaways: Security and especially cybersecurity is a scary reality across financial services. New technologies bring new risks and the bad guys only have to be successful once to make it worth their while. Listen to Tom and Chris for thought-provoking approaches. People should be seen as an investment, not a cost. To get the most from this investment, focus on getting the best from people by playing to their differences and strengths (or as René Carayol calls them, their Spikes) rather than trying to transform them to fit into a bell curve. You can find more about René on his website or on LinkedIn or check out his book Spike. AI is with us and will only get more immense and intense. We hope to focus more on this in the future. Until then, Louise Öström has recommended the book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century: Yuval Noah Harari and especially as an audiobook. Key Quotes: “Look for the things you excel at, and focus on those, rather than worrying about the areas where others could be better.” - Matthew "There is a need to invest in people in a way that makes them feel special, valued and not just a resource, a number or a row on a spreadsheet. You cannot change a conservative,stuffy, risk and control-based culture overnight, but it needs to change if financial services wants to regain its crown as the place where technical talent wishes to work.” - Matthew “There is no question that we are on the march to quantum, although we are a little way off from quantum supremacy, but crypto has to keep up and be steps ahead if we are to stay ahead of the bad guys.” - Matthew ---- About the Hosts Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware. You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter. Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware. You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

Matthew: There's another thing that I think is really valuable for recognition, right? We have on our Slack, we have a validation channel. And what that is for is peer-to-peer recognition of people who are living up to the values. So it's not top-down, although sometimes managers do it, it's one another recognizing and it costs nothing. There's no cash value. But my goodness, I know for myself when somebody goes, Matthew did this and I think it's a really I feel quite proud and that recognition and as a manager offering that kind of recognition and validation is also critical. It's not only about money, it's about validation and recognition. I just wanted to everything I've talked about has been money based. And I want to say there's more than money. Sean: No, that is amazing. I 100% agree with that. We practice this as well. In SEO hacker, we have around 40 plus people in the team, and at every town hall meeting we have our clap session because we go to the office three times a week, Tuesdays to Thursdays, and on Tuesdays, we have the town hall meeting. And in that clap sessions, every person in the room gets a chance to say, I want to give claps to so-and-so because he or she did this and that. So I love it being live for me. I'm an office guy. I'm a face-to-face guy. You know, I've worked we work remotely for two years, from 2020 to 2022. So this year, April is when we started coming back to the office. But I find that it's it's completely different, and more effective for me at least as a leader if it's face-to-face. So we have three days a week going to the office. And I completely agree with what you're doing 100%. And I wish more leaders in the world would do the same. Matthew: I'm going to borrow that idea clap session. I like that. Yeah. Sean: Yes, that is what we do. Every time someone says something good about someone, we clap our hands and make sure that that person is recognized. - - - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack Leadership Stack Merch: https://leadershipstack.com/shop/ - - - Matthew Stibbe Website: https://www.stibbe.net/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewstibbe

Matthew Hunt built and sold two agencies over the past decade. Automation Wolf is his third iteration. In his second agency, after losing almost two years of momentum because he never “got around” to marketing his own business, he hired another marketing agency to promote his agency. Although he was not completely satisfied with the result, he says, “80 percent done is better than not done at all” and his agency finally gained momentum and grew. In this interview, Matthew explains his understanding of what a lot of agencies don't understand – that clients are “not looking for a do-it-yourself model or a done-with-you model” and “not looking to coach-and-consult it.” He claims, “They're looking for done-for-you model.”  Matthew believes that most agencies should probably not be trying to do for themselves what they do for their clients. He has found that webinars, epic inbound-outbound marketing efforts, and labyrinthine Rube-Goldberg-machine sales funnels don't work. He proposes that the most important website component for agencies with under a million dollars in annual revenue is a “ten-minute amplifier video,” where the owner-founder (usually an agency's best salesperson) articulates the transformation the agency can provide for its clients. Skip the blogs. Skip the podcasts. The abbreviated VSL (video sales letter, which Matthew says needs to be “done right”), social proofs of success (before-and-after reports, analytics screenshots, and brief descriptions of how the agency effected change), a scrolling list of customer testimonials, and the price are all a smaller agency needs to drive business. The goal is to get as few leads as possible but to get pre-qualified, pre-sold leads and to close them all.  As it grows, the “filter” for an agency is not how much money it will take to scale, but how much time you can put into it. Matthew holds that low effort, high-impact demand generation is the most effective way to generate business. He recommends connecting with clients and potential clients on LinkedIn and posting helpful, short-form (snackable) content to build relationships and entice potential customers to the agency's VSL. Matthew says, “People only buy from people they know, like, and trust, and no selling can be done until you actually establish trust.” He then goes on to say that the biggest mistake many people make with inbound and outbound is they're always trying to sell too early.” Matthew discusses the challenges an agency faces in building an agency team and a “referral engine” and the strategies he has employed to move his agency quickly through the phases of startup . . . stay up . . . and scale up. He can be found as Matthew Hunt on LinkedIn or on his agency's website at: automationwolf.com. ROB: Welcome to The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host Rob Kischuk and I am joined today by Matthew Hunt who is the founder at Automation Wolf based in Toronto Ontario, welcome to the podcast, Matthew. MATTHEW: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by giving us the rundown on Automation Wolf? What is your sweet spot? MATTHEW: Automation was created because it was one of my own problems. I wish I had had this service when I built my first two agencies. Most agencies, at the end of the day, suffer from what we call the cobbler's kid goes with no shoes syndrome – where they're so busy taking care of their team and their existing clients that they never get around to doing their own marketing. I remember my second agency, so this is my third agency. I've had two that I sold in the last ten years and built – this is the third one. But my second one, I remember losing almost two years of momentum because I kept thinking we were going to get around to doing our own marketing. Finally, after two years, I finally bit the bullet. I hired another agency to do marketing for our marketing agency. It wasn't done perfectly, but I'll tell you something – 80 percent of done is better than not done at all. So even though I didn't think it was perfect and it wasn't exactly what I wanted, it provided so much momentum. That's when we really started to grow, so sometimes you just got to do it. ROB: What was the lag time from pulling the trigger to impact? Because there's kind of some shortcuts . . . there's some cheats . . . there's some fast forwards you can do and then you really have to do the work and build the engine, right? MATTHEW: Yeah, totally. What's really interesting is another thing a lot of marketing agencies tend to make mistakes with is they think what they do for their clients is what they should do for themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. I spent a lot of time doing a lot of inbound marketing and then even trying outbound marketing. In general, both were pretty epic failures for my agency. Same thing with webinars or doing other things like this . . . they really did not produce the results that I was after. I would say that's the case for most marketing agencies. They can't understand, or there's two things – one is it becomes sort of, for lack of better vocabulary, but of a mind eff because it works so well for your clients, but then it doesn't work for you. The second thing, right? You're like, “Why is this working for clients but my own damn agency, it doesn't work for.” The second thing is a lot of times the thing that they do for their client isn't the right thing for them because they're not – they shouldn't be using the same filter, The filter you should be using for your own agency is really a different question than the money question. That's usually what people are asking, like “What's the ROI and how much money can I throw at this thing to scale this thing up?” That's not the real problem for them. The real problem is time. How much time can you provide? What you want to look at is, “What is the thing that we can do as an agency that is a low effort but yet high impact? That's the first thing. So, to get things in the right order. Once you use that as a filter, what you're going to discover is, it's much like growing up as a kid – if you've ever raised kids. I've got 3 of them myself now. But they have to learn how to sit up first before they crawl. Then they learn how to crawl and then they learn how to walk, and then they learn how to run. Then, when they get to be – my kids' age now is teens, they start to do backflips off the back shed of the house and you go, “My god! Get off the shed! Why are you on the roof?” Right? But that's a good problem to have. That's one filter. The next thing is really understanding. You know how your ideal clients actually buy and where your best customers come from. Once you understand that, then you start making the right marketing decisions. A lot of agencies, what they don't understand is their clients don't actually want to know how to do something – they're coming to you because they're not looking for a do-it-yourself model or a done-with-you model. They're not looking to coach-and-consult it. They're looking for done-for-you model. They're also busy as well, too. In general, the first thing that most agencies need to do is get their ten-minute amplifier video on their website that explains what sort of transformation they provide for other people. The reason why you want to do this – some people call the VSL, but a VSL is way too long. If it's more than ten minutes, it's too long. That's the first asset you need because, what it does, it multiplies you. Usually, who's the best salesperson in your organization? Yeah, usually owner-founder. If you can create your signature system and you can clearly articulate the transformation that you provide for people – from the before and after state that they're going to receive – in ten minutes or less and you don't gate the video, people will watch it and they will fill out your contact form and you've already done the demo. So, then you're only getting people . . . and you should put the price in there too and that is the only thing you need. And if you're a marketing agency that's under a million dollars per year, if you do anything else besides that VSL and a whack of testimonials down below, you are totally wasting your time. Do not do anything else. Do not blog. Do not create a podcast. Do not. You do not get to collect go and collect your two hundred dollars. That is where you need to start. If you haven't done that, that's the only thing you need to do. Then you need to find a way to get people to that VSL. Getting them there is not as hard as you think. You don't need as many people as you think either, because the goal is not to get lots of leads and fill your calendar with loads of leads. The goal is to get as few leads as possible but close them all. And have them pre-qualified before they get there, right? And if you can have them pre-qualified, pre-sold, then the time that they get to you – you can suck at sales and you can charge more. Because you shouldn't seem like everybody else – which is like all your other competitors – which is probably a sea of sameness. If – just go ahead and do this – please type in digital marketing agency of any kind that you want. You go and do this right? Go to Google right now, I dare you to pause this and go and look. I want you with it, quickly go and look at all the digital marketing websites from city to city to city, from service offer to service offer – you all look exactly the freaking same. Then I dare you to go and look at your Google analytics or whatever analytics tool you want to look at and look at what is the average time on your website. It's probably a minute. What do you think all this other stuff is doing for you at the end of the day? I know you sell this as a service – to blog and create content and to run ads into having these epic crazy labyrinth funnels that one thing triggers to another thing, which triggers this email, and this triggers this upsell, in this downsell and ends up turning into this giant Rube Goldberg machine which is totally cool. Don't get me wrong – I am wowed by it. It is awesome and there was so much work into it, but it didn't do anything for you. It didn't create any transformation. It didn't help you, except for create a whole lot of noise, a whole lot of effort, and provided very little impact for you. So, these are some things I want you to consider. The other thing I want you to consider is usually when you're focused on inbound and/or outbound, it's very, very small thinking. It does not leverage what you have already created because most agencies, right, or businesses, begin organically and grow out of referrals. The business grows, which is awesome. But what happens is the business grows and you get some people on payroll and then you have mouths to feed and mortgages to cover and it starts going, “Oh, crap! This is a serious business!” And then you go, “Oh, a client left.” Or, all of the sudden you have a bad month or Covid hits and shish hits the fan and you're like, “I need a consistent way of getting business,” and so you think the solution is . . . more leads. You're like, “Hey, that worked for my clients and B2C. We sent the gym or the dentist or the lawyer the whatever more business and they're loving it. This is going to work for my agency too.” And wrong. It doesn't, you don't need leads, what you need is a consistent way of getting more referrals and staying top of mind with your existing clientele, with your existing partners with, your existing network at the end of the day, without coming across as being salesy or sleazy because nobody likes to be marketed to. Including you, right? Marketers are the most jaded people in the world, right? Nobody likes to be sold to – so it has to feel invisible. So, if it has to feel invisible, it has to be low effort but high impact. Well, what do you do? What I usually recommend is that you look at doing something called Demand Gen. Demand Gen is just a simple way of saying putting helpful content out there that makes people more awesome and gives you the ability to do one to many selling, ideally to your existing warm network. Now, if you're going to do that, a great place to begin is emailing them if you have a list with your database but more ideally, that feels like marketing, a better thing to do is make sure you're connected with them on a place like LinkedIn and then publish little short snackable content on LinkedIn where they go. They don't go to LinkedIn to consume long-form content or read articles or blogs they go to LinkedIn because they treat it like any other social media network and they're in the mindset to discover, maybe learn something very quickly, and/or most likely procrastinate before and after meetings, right, is what they're doing. If you do, that your warm network will see you being helpful and will keep you top of mind. Then they continue to send you referrals. Good things happen and more opportunities come up because, at the end of the day, people only buy from people they know, like, and trust. No selling can be done until you establish trust. So, the biggest mistake that people make with inbound and outbound is they're always trying to sell too early. It's they're eager beavers, right? ROB: So, we poke in tactically a little bit on LinkedIn. Obviously, strategy level makes sense. Tactically, you get all sorts of advice all over the map. You have your brand page. You have companies developing entire initiatives around getting their team to share their brand content. Sometimes there's just the founder as a salesperson in an authentic way. What kind of mix of activity do you see as effective? It seems to me it's a golden age in LinkedIn right now. I see nothing but opportunity there. But there's a lot of ways to waste time, too. MATTHEW: Totally. So, we have a system that we recommend agency owners follow. It's called the “ACES” method – to keep it simple. Basically, you're asking what kind of content do we create and what is most impactful, right? And how do we do this? Here's how you the ACES method – Authority, Connect, Engage, and Show. Authority is anything that you want to be known for, that you know really well, that you can share – where you can offer a tip and make people more awesome. Connect is anything that hits the heart, the gut, and/or the funny bone – comedy goes a long way. Engage is not necessarily always having to come up with the content – a lot of time you can ask your network, your community, your connections for advice to start conversations. Let them create the content for you to gamify a little bit. Why do you always have to be the one coming up with the content? The last one is Show. We don't tell, we Show. We don't want to come across as braggadocios, right? We don't want to be telling people and beating our chest about how amazing we are. What we want to do is give sneak peeks behind the scene. We want to show before-and-after transformations or screenshots of analytics and growth with a little tip of how you went about doing it. This positions you as an expert on what you're doing by showing. If you do that and then break it up into the different content formats – we've got video, text posts, images, and polls, and then pdf documents – those are basically the core types of content, because you don't know what people enjoy. Do a version of each. I only put a post out per day. That's how you stay top of mind. It's all about consistency, right? They can't trust you if they don't like you. They can't like you if they don't know you. So, step one is about being consistent. The biggest challenge is most people are inconsistent. We all know we've got to go to the gym on a regular basis and eat clean if we want to be fit, right? That this is not brain surgery. Well, it's the same thing with LinkedIn, you need the consistency. The problem is time. It's why most people fail. This is why we created one of our personal branding LinkedIn products. We created a product because this would solve this problem – where someone can spend an hour-and-a-half with us per month and we will create all of their social media, snackable content including for LinkedIn, and post it every single day. The way we do it is we record them via Zoom with the intention that snackable content is the lead domino which gets all the videos, and the videos that inspire all the text posts, the images, the polls, the pdf document carousels, etc., and then we post it for them. Basically, we created a product that allows people to look like they go to the gym every day and eat clean. Yet, they only have to go to the gym once a month for an hour and a half. ROB: It's like a filter for your social media. You just put the filter on, everybody looks good. You hinted at it and I'm curious. You said, you had your previous agencies. You sold them. You had one agency that came in and did things about 80 percent right, and then you started Automation Wolf. Number one, what led you to want to dive back into the fray and then start over again? Number two, what was that difference – the twenty percent between what was done for you and what you felt like needed to be done for others? MATTHEW: Great questions. I sold my shares in my second agency due to partner conflicts. Having partners is a very tricky ship to sail. When it works well, it's amazing. When it doesn't, it's like going through an ugly divorce. It's never fun. So, we went through our divorce and I was not finished with my mission yet on creating the business that I wanted to create. That's what sent me back to the fray now. We had an inbound marketing agency that we were a Goldspot, a Reseller of Hubspot, did PPC, did SEO. We were mostly focused on enterprise clients, mostly Fortune Five Hundred. Very successful agency, did very, very well. I was in a non-compete – to not able to do any sort of inbound marketing for two years – which is fine. When you sell your shares, that's the rightful thing that needs to come up – which led me to doing outbound. Yeah, it was like, “All right, fine. I can't do inbound. I'll do outbound.” So, I started the outbound agency. We basically sprayed and prayed. We basically spammed people on LinkedIn, used LinkedIn automation. We cold emailed you and did all kinds of stuff. Throughout that process, I quickly realized what worked and what didn't work. The reality was outbound sucks even more than inbound and works even less if you really want to piss the whole industry. Inbound is the same thing but when you do inbound and outbound, you're focused on the exact same market which is the 1 to 3 percent of the market that's in market right now. So, you can grow that way. Inbound, you don't feel it emotionally because you don't see all the nos. When you do outbound, you feel it immediately because everybody tells you how much they hate you in the process, right? What the challenge that I realized was – both are not the correct answer. The right answer is actually creating demand first so you can do outbound and inbound. You want to put them into an invisible marketing funnel where you're adding value first and creating demand. Once we switch around to being focused on that – wow! Magic happened. So, we focus a lot on personal branding on LinkedIn so you can connect with people and put them in a controlled environment where they can get to know, like, and trust you. You could do it through an interview series just like you're doing right now, you can do it through community, you can do it through all different ways. There's a lot of different tactics that do it. But, at the end of the day, all we're trying to do is take a group of people and put them in a controlled environment where it doesn't feel like we're marketing and selling to them. Then we can do one-to-many selling to them where they can get to know, like, and trust me and they can go across that trusto meter to like – ding-ding-ding-trust – that once they end up in our pipeline, they're presold. And this way we can suck at sales and we can charge more money. And that's basically the gist of it, at the end of the day, once you set up a system like that and use the right tactics in the right order, you're off to the races. The right order is always not based on money. It's based on your time. ROB: Yeah, it's certainly about kind of getting to that distinctive place. You mentioned you can do a ten-minute video but you've got to look different from the other thousand agency websites that people saw along the way. Peter Thiel put it differently in saying he likes to be a monopoly. You're talking about a way of being a monopoly in the eye of the buyer. When it comes time to buy, you just can't predict, that you can't time it. That ten-minute video, to me – maybe to some people that's a short video – that sounds like a lot. What is the structure of a good ten-minute video that introduces someone to an agency and starts to build that layer of trust? MATTHEW: That's a great question. There's absolutely a format to doing it. I'll tell you the format and the framework that I follow every single time that works like gangbusters. One is, your first thirty seconds should be a big giant epic promise. For example, when it comes to our LinkedIn services, ours is, “How to get new clients right now from LinkedIn, organically. I'm going to show you how to create all your LinkedIn content by only spending one-and-a-half hours with my team each month.” That's it. That's the offer, right? Something like that. The second part is, who it is for, and who it is not for? You can't be all things to everybody. It's really important that you niche down. That's the case. So, for us, we call it out, “Hey! We work with consultants, coaches, people who do B2B, B2B, SAS companies, and agencies. That's, “If you're in B2B and your audience is on LinkedIn, this is for you.” The next thing you need to do is tell them all the things that they want and that they've been lied to. It's really, really important that you shout out that they've been lied to because you have to absolve them of their problems. If you tell them it's their fault, they're not going to listen to you. But if you tell them, “It's someone else's fault that's lied to you,” then you're going to get their attention. Now that you have their attention, you start going through and describing their problems better than they can describe themselves. You need to hit the hot buttons, fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations. Remember, if you can make it sound like you're reading their mind, you're saying the stuff they're thinking but they won't say out loud, you know you've hit the hot buttons. Once you've been able to describe their problems better than they can themselves, the next thing is to have counterintuitive thinking about what the problem is. It must be something that's new. So, if you'll notice me, I keep playing with this theme, ‘inbound sucks, outbound sucks, but demand gen is right' – here's the old way of doing things versus the new way right? We're playing constantly with FAQ's versus SAQ's, so, frequently-asked questions versus should-ask questions. You know when you discover a problem, the questions you ask to discover it are not going to solve it. You have to ask deeper questions to get there. This is why the five whys exists right? There's a whole system from this – “Why did that happen? Well. why did that? And why did this? Why did that? Why?” And then you get to the root cause of really what's causing the problem and if you can come up with this counterintuitive thinking that is different than everybody else's saying – Boom! That's called positioning and you are no longer in the sea of sameness. You are now unique. You are now monopoly like you said, right? Once you have the monopoly you need to have a very simple signature system that explains what it is that you do. I recommend that everybody have a three-pillar system. So, mine is short-form, long-form, community, which is tied to “know you, like you, trust you.” You have three pillars. Usually you have a three-step process for each pillar, so you have a three-by-three matrix. If you can clearly articulate the matrix, then you're good-to-go to get their attention. You clearly state what you're going to charge, so that it's not a surprise to anybody. Nobody should be coming into your marketing funnel who doesn't know what the approximate price is going to be. You don't want to talk to them. You want to spend a lot of time on repelling just as much as you were attracting. This way, by the time they get to you, they're pretty qualified. You didn't have to spend thirty minutes qualifying them when you could have used an automated ten-minute video to do so, right? Then, a sign of the only thing you need is some sort of social proof of success, of transformation – before-and-afters or a whack of testimonials on your site. If you go to my website today, it's a 1-page website with nothing else that you can do except watch a ten-minute video or read the endless scrolling testimonials that are there of our clients. The only thing you can do is reach out and connect to us, so you have no other options. There's nowhere to be confused about what to do. That business in twelve months has grown an agency from zero to over a million dollars of recurring revenue. ROB: That's solid. It sounds like you're at a price point where, if you're demonstrating results, it recurs at loops. You keep building. You scale the process. All of that clearly makes sense and you've kind of shorthanded. But if you really get down to it, in particular, what are some things you're doing differently this time, what you know? You built two companies before. What did you learn in those – obviously a partnership lesson, but outside of that – what have you learned that's different this time? MATTHEW: Less is more, right? Which we all know. Even this system here that we're doing on-demand gen – we just launch one service per year and perfect it. This last year, we perfected the LinkedIn content creation, demand gen system. It's awesome, man. It's perfect. It took a whole year. They do it really well. Next year, we're adding on a few more services. So, do one thing at a time. The one thing. I think there's a whole book on it – just the one thing, right? So, that's the big lesson – less is more. The next big lesson is, spend a lot of time on operations and hiring, on talent and training your talent, and supporting your team, right? You don't want to have false starts. Your team is everything, especially for an agency. Your highest expense is going to usually be people. People are difficult – more people, more problems. It's not like Biggie said. Biggie said, “Mo money, Mo problems.” It's not. It's more people, more problems, right? So, focus on really developing the team and understanding the team and understanding what that looks like and getting a lot of referrals. That next thing is, if you deliver what you say you're going to deliver and you even come close to coming to what you say you're going deliver, you will get referrals – and a ton of referrals. So, if you get the referral engine going, you get the team going, I would say that you've got a decent startup and a proof of model. The goal from a startup is to get to stay up and then from stay up is to scale up. I believe that you can do it in a three-year period. Usually, year one is startup. In my case, I even had year one as a false start, focusing on the wrong business – which is proof of model really, right? So, proof. So, it's one thing to sell it. It's one thing to keep it. It's a little bit of the balance of two. I was able to sell the cold emailing spamming thing because people want to buy that too, just like inbound. But ultimately it kind of worked. I wasn't really excited about it. It didn't focus on my unique ability. It didn't make me happy. I didn't go to bed going, “Oh, my god! That was a great day!”. It was like, “Oh, my god! I just spammed the world. I'm a fraud, right?” You know, you've got to love what you do, too. But once you get the right thing that people want to buy and then you can keep them, then you've got what's called proof of model and that's really your first year. The second year, and the way I'm looking at this is the first year is proof of model, the second year is getting up or the first years is about getting you out of operations – the day-to-day operations – so, that the second year, you can focus on marketing, selling, and talent acquisition. The third year is scale up that you can get you out of marketing, selling, and talent acquisition. Then once you're out of the third year you have the option at that point to keep it as a running asset because it doesn't take . . . you should only be attending the board meetings and a few other things or you have an asset that you can sell, right? Which is exactly why you bought the business or created the business. Whether you bought it or created it, that's it. If you can't do that in a three-year period, you're probably on the wrong track – you're probably spinning your wheels and not focusing on the right things. That's a very realistic and fair amount of time to build a great business. ROB: It's an interesting mirror that you talk about holding up with the spamming. There were some folks who were involved in starting Sales Loft, which is now a billion-dollar valuation company. Their first product was built around scraping and spamming LinkedIn, harvesting email addresses, that sort of thing. They had a million dollars in revenue around it and they threw the product away because it wasn't really authentic to them. They were selling a sugar high. It sounds like you've been in that world. I've seen the LinkedIn automation in the agency space. We've seen how many sugar high newsfeed optimizations, spamming, SEO, right? SEO used to be about tactics and ways to skirt the rules. We keep having to figure out how to be authentic if we want to build a real business. MATTHEW: It always comes back to the fundamentals. At the end of the day, most people think they have a sales problem or they think they have a lead-gen problem – but they don't. They actually have a community problem and a trust problem. If they made the measurement of the objective to build more community and to build more trust in that community, they would make very different decisions. Same thing, as well, to the mindset about forever business versus a short-term business – because one is focused on tactics and me-me-me-me versus you-you-you-you. Then the same thing even when it comes like creating content. You're very smart to have this podcast because you're focused on being a talent scout instead of being the talent. Being talent is actually really hard. If you look at the biggest and best and fastest-growing companies out there, they focus on two things – one, being a media company is really good talent scouts or two, they focus on the network effect. Okay, if you do that, you have epic growth really, really quick. The reason you have it is this. If you are a talent scout, then you become Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, Oprah. What are the experts of absolutely all? Okay. But what are they really good at? What are they really good at doing? Bringing in really interesting people, asking them really interesting questions to teach their audience what to look for and what to look out that builds trust. So then expert comes and goes, okay, and the law of transference passes all that expertise to those hosts. They're the ones who are the sticky ones that everybody is after going forward. They're building what's called a media company. Then those who take that media company flip it into these private communities -- something like real vision television – you name it. They then get the network effect, which is what Facebook is, and Youtube is, and Instagram is, that has exponential growth that it takes on its own life. Once you have the network effect and you have that ability of hosting where you built trust with the community basically – instead of calling it network, call it community – it's a deeper connection, you then have a license to print money – because you can go to that community you want and say, “What is the problem? What is it that you want to solve?”, go find the product or service and connect it with your community, and instantly print money. The end. If you ask yourself, instead, as a business and in B2B, “How do I create more community? How do I build more trust with this? How do I treat this as a forever business?”, you start making really different decisions about what you're going to invest your time and energy and money into at the end of the day. So, it's usually just that you're asking their problems. They're asking, “How do I get more leads and how do I get more sales?” It's a very surface-level question. It's a byproduct. A byproduct of community and trust is lots of leads and sales and rabid buyers who are ready to throw you money. ROB: But there's a lot of work ahead of that.  MATTHEW Yeah. ROB: Lots of good thoughts, lots of distilled knowledge from experience from building businesses, from scaling up. Congratulations on all of that. When people want to connect with you and with Automation Wolf, where should, they go to find you? MATTHEW: There's only two places you can find me – either on LinkedIn – you just search Matthew Hunt – or at automationwolf.com. You won't find me anywhere else. ROB: Yeah, and you can do like three things on the site – you can read the testimonials, you can watch the video, you can schedule some time. It's all pretty clean and simple, very good. Well thank you so much for that distillation of wisdom, Matthew. Good to connect with you. Thank you for sharing with the audience I wish you all the best.  MATTHEW: You too Rob. Thank you for having me. ROB: All right. Be well. Thanks.

This week Matthew and Kim take a deep dive into the third pillar of successful relationships, conflict resolution. No matter how healthy your relationship is, it is human nature to fall into conflict from time to time. When we hear the word conflict we think of yelling, arguing, and negativity… but it does not have to be that way. Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional. Running into conflict with your partner can bring you closer by learning to understand one another on a deeper level. If you feel like you and your partner always fall into the same rhythm of criticism, contempt and defensiveness, you are not alone. Tune in this week to learn to resolve conflict in a healthy and productive way with your partner. Key Ideas-Tools and skills in conflict resolution -The three states of every relationship -Conflict resolution isn't about changing your partner -The Four Horsemen Theory -How women deal with their feelings vs men Quotes: “Conflict resolution is a skill, it's learned, you have got to practice it, you have to develop it, you have to grow it and learn how to use it.”- Matthew “Human tendency is to go in and try to fix it, or go in and try to be defensive and we have to practice the good skills and learn how to manage the conflict to be able to resolve or even get beyond it.” -Kim “It's about I and You when you're in conflict you're not commenting and saying what the other person did but you're saying I feel, I need… because in using those I statements you're communicating your state in an effort to help your spouse understand.” -Matthew “There's really always 2 realities… Everybody in every situation has the right to feel how they feel... It doesn't mean I have to feel the same way but I need to validate and make sure that you know that I understand how you feel and why you feel that way   ” -Matthew “You gotta figure out what the dream is within the conflict, because there is a conflict but the dream means what's the underlying issue or what do you really want to happen here.” -Matthew“If I could give advice to men in general, women really need to talk about and express their feelings… a lot of times women will bring it up in a heated way and it's not because they are in conflict or coming at their spouse they just need to get it off their plate.” -Kim Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok @kickasscouplesnationFor access to workshops with professional therapists, keynote speakers, hot seat training and more exclusive content join our online learning community at: https://matthewphoffman.comOrder ‘Kickass Husband: Winning at Life, Marriage, and Sex' by Matthew Hoffman at https://matthewphoffman.com/ And don't forget to leave us a review! 

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.

3 Takeaways:Security and especially cybersecurity is a scary reality across financial services. New technologies bring new risks and the bad guys only have to be successful once to make it worth their while.  Listen to Tom and Chris for thought-provoking approaches.People should be seen as an investment, not a cost. To get the most from this investment, focus on getting the best from people by playing to their differences and strengths (or as René Carayol calls them, their Spikes)  rather than trying to transform them to fit into a bell curve. You can find more about René on his website or on LinkedIn or check out his book Spike.AI is with us and will only get more immense and intense. We hope to focus more on this in the future. Until then, Louise Öström has recommended the book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century: Yuval Noah Harari and especially as an audiobook.Key Quotes: “Look for the things you excel at, and focus on those, rather than worrying about the areas where others could be better.” - Matthew"There is a need to invest in people in a way that makes them feel special, valued and not just a resource, a number or a row on a spreadsheet. You cannot change a conservative,stuffy, risk and control-based culture overnight, but it needs to change if financial services wants to regain its crown as the place where technical talent wishes to work.”  - Matthew “There is no question that we are on the march to quantum, although we are a little way off from quantum supremacy, but crypto has to keep up and be steps ahead if we are to stay ahead of the bad guys.” - Matthew----About the HostsMatthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

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.

Today brings a special YAWA with an extra special guest! For more than 16 years, Los Angeles-native Matthew Rubino has been heavily involved in the city's DJ community with long-standing residencies at some of the city's most successful venues including Cliftons, the Standard Downtown LA and Hotel Erwin in Venice where he has served as Music Director since 2011. He has also been programming the music at the Ace Hotel Los Angeles since 2016.
 He has performed for the likes of Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), Debbie Harry (Blondie), Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Anne Hathaway, Kim Kardashian, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a whole lot more (to name a few)... Matthew's experience runs deep. Matthew became a part of the Flashdance in 2014 and has since traveled the world over with the crew. In 2018 founder Michael Antonia asked Matthew to join him as co-owner of The Flashdance! Big Takeaways The Flashdance is hosting parties at your house. Through zoom, two DJs, a hype-man and more, a live online party is thrown. Check the affiliate page! Q&A Lauren Amanda: What are fun and not corny ways to release tables to the buffet? Matthew's style is the enthusiastic minimalist. He tells people to have the wedding coordinator go up to the tables and release them one by one. It then doesn't distract from the fun of the music and doesn't add too much banter. What are their top 3 get everyone on the dance floor songs? Parties can vary. But in general, something in a familiar is always good. 1. Arethra Franklin - RESPECT 2. Prince - Let's Go Crazy 3. Stevie Wonder - Sir Duke Stephen Lawrence: *When planning to work with both a band and a DJ for the reception, what advice do you have? * Share the band's set list with the DJ ahead of time, if possible. Especially if the band is doing the first part of the dancing. It's nice to be able to plan a little bit. If possible, have the band break down while the DJ is starting. Keep the party going. Catherine Asikis: I'm greek. My fiancé is French Canadian. Our DJ, a great friend of ours, specializes in soca and Caribbean music. He's very talented but I'm worried about how he will work with my cultural music because he hasn't done a Greek wedding before. I am giving him a list of songs, but would it be appropriate to ask him to pre mix the Greek song portions of the evening so I can listen before the wedding day? Matthew says people come to them because they kind of already know their vibe. But since you are friends, it is a little different. For Matthew, he tells his clients to send him a list of songs (10-15, no more than 20) and he will play some but probably not all of them. Providing a window into what you are into is helpful, but you still have to let the DJs have creative control. When you are working with friends who are being generous, we encourage you to ask for less. Asking to hear something ahead of time is potentially more effort and work than you are paying for. Myriah Cohen Moses: How do we go about explaining to the DJ who probably takes pride in getting people on the dance floor, that we aren't big dancers? Yes to the first traditional dances, maybe a few fast songs but my fiancé will definitely have reached his limit by then, as will his side of the family. I really don't like an empty dance floor so I'm working with my venue to make it pretty small. People like to dance at a wedding! They just do. Unless it's just a small group of people that you know never dance even at a party. If there is over 50 people, you'll probably have a good amount of people that want to dance. At the end of the wedding, the groom or bride or someone will come up to the DJ and share how excited that people that they never see on the dance floor were out there going wild. Matthew's tips for inciting a packed floor: a small dance floor, make sure the lights have dimmers, wedding crashers that you can hire to basically hype people up. Brenda Lira: To me, the music and dancing are the best part of weddings. So naturally now that I'm engaged, its the part I'm most excited about and most worried about. My fiancé is very white, like Scottish/Irish white. I am very Mexican, like a 1st generation Mexican-American. We both have key family members that will party to any type of music and we're really counting on them to help us to get the party started. Aside from looking for a bilingual DJ with similar experience, what should I be asking or looking for? *Also I have 1 venue but 3 different spaces for ceremony, reception/dinner, and dancing. *Is it too much to ask a DJ to play music at all 3? It's all well within walking distance. And should I expect an up-charge for this? Definitely expect an up-charge. Every company will have their own set of pricing. But in each area, they have to set up equipment and sound, so expect to pay more. Three different areas is definitely feasible! The ability to play a little bit of something for everyone there is key. The DJ should be preparing beforehand. Matthew builds playlists, but also knows how to read the crowd and pivot when it's needed. Hire a DJ you vibe with! It makes a difference.
 Amanda Watt: I have a ton of specific songs that I want to dance to at our reception, but I am worried if I request all of them to be added to our must-play playlist it will stifle our DJ. He's amazing, and I totally trust him to keep our reception fun and our guests up and dancing at our reception...which is our number one priority, we want everyone to have a good time and have fun. How many songs do you recommend putting on a must-play playlist? And how many is too many? I don't want to be a music Bridezilla!! (Reception will have about 5ish hours of dancing) Thank you!! Give them 10-15 songs, 20 at most. That gives the DJ a taste of what you're into and gives plenty of room for creative freedom. Remember you're hiring him because you like him and trust him! Links We Referenced theflashdance.com (https://www.theflashdance.com) sharkpig.com (http://sharkpig.com) instagram.com/theflashdancedjs (https://www.instagram.com/theflashdancedjs/) alpinerings.com (https://alpinerings.com) (Promo Code: BIGWEDDING for 15% off sitewide!) Quotes “There's something to the idea of when you put effort into how you look, you do your hair, you put some clothes on, you know, you feel good.” - Matthew “It's not for everybody, but I do love that there is this option. That we can pivot and react.” - Michelle “Everyone is afraid of a corny DJ.” - Christy “People don't get weird when the lights are on super bright!” - Matthew “There are going to be different crescendos throughout the evening and day. The music at pre- ceremony is going to be different than the music at cocktail hour. It's fun to play with things.” - Matthew “I want people, from the moment they hear me start playing music, to look at each other and be like, ‘dude we are in good hands tonight.'” - Matthew Get In Touch EMAIL: thebigweddingplanningpodcast@gmail.com FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/TBWPpodcast/ (https://www.facebook.com/TBWPpodcast/) INSTAGRAM: @thebigweddingplanningpodcast (https://www.instagram.com/thebigweddingplanningpodcast/) BE SURE TO USE THE HASHTAG: #planthatwedding TWITTER: @TBWPpodcast PHONE: (415) 723-1625 Leave us a message and you might hear your voice on the show! PATREON: www.patreon.com/thebigweddingplanningpodcast (https://www.patreon.com/thebigweddingplanningpodcast)

Connect with Matillion on the Azure Marketplace: https://bit.ly/2M8LqF1 Matthew Scullion is the CEO of Matillion, a company that reduces the complexity of a company’s data journey by providing rapid time to value with data integration and data transformation software for cloud data warehouses. As part of this discussion, we shared how their partnership with Microsoft, their use of Azure, and the Azure Marketplace has empowered them to scale and grow their business. Contact Matthew: Web: https://matillion.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/matillion-limited/ Twitter: @matillion Microsoft partnership opportunities for Storage and Data partners: StorageAndData@microsoft.com Contact Avrohom: Web: https://asktheceo.biz Facebook: AvrohomGottheil Twitter: @avrohomg Instagram: @avrohomg INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS: [00:53] Cloud is now a mature technology, and many businesses are moving their mission-critical applications to the cloud. One of the byproducts of Digital Transformation and moving to the cloud is the copious amount of data that’s generated by all of our connected devices. As we know, data, for its own sake, doesn’t have that much intrinsic value. The real value is in the analytical information and business intelligence that we gather from that data. Of course, that’s much easier said than done. What are the challenges that businesses and large enterprises struggle with when it comes to unlocking that hidden value from within their data? [01:50] Every company needs to compete by using data. [02:07] Cloud gives businesses the ability to compete using data. [05:39] What can businesses do to overcome some of these challenges? Matthew: There are various ways to potentially solve data management and data transformation challenges highlighted above. Enterprises can still continue to manage on-premises ETL platforms for data transformation. If a company has decided to adopt a cloud strategy, there are various SaaS based data pipeline providers to help move data into a cloud data warehouse. Once data is in the cloud, there are various technologies (provided by cloud provider or 3rd parties) that can help to then perform transformations. Companies can also continue to leverage ETL developers to manually write SQL jobs for transformations. [10:21] Matillion recently launched a new offering on the Microsoft Azure marketplace, called Matillion ETL for Azure Synapse. Tell us about it and how it addresses some of the challenges we just discussed. Matthew: Matillion provides purpose-built data transformation for Microsoft Azure Synapse. Matillion enables Enterprises to easily integrate with over 100 data sources and then create data orchestration and transformation jobs to prepare data for analytics. Matillion is also cloud-native, taking advantage of the speed, scale, and economics of the Azure cloud platform. [17:24] How would a company use your solution with Azure? Matthew: Matillion products (Matillion ETL for Azure Synapse and Matillion ETL for Snowflake on Azure) are both available on the Azure Marketplace. Enterprises seeking to acquire Matillion can easily select a Matillion product, select the size of the Azure instance needed, and then deploy Matillion within the virtual environment. [19:39] How can customers find out more about Matillion ETL for Azure Synapse, and procure it through the Azure Marketplace? Matthew: They can access it via this link: https://bit.ly/2M8LqF1. [20:19] How has partnering with Microsoft helped Matillion scale and grow your business? [21:47] How can people find out more about Microsoft partnership opportunities for Storage and Data partners? Matthew: For more information you can send an email to storageanddata@microsoft.com. [22:26] How do people connect with you? [23:00] Do you have any parting words of wisdom that you’d like to share with the audience? #AskTheCEO With Matthew Scullion

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Matthew: Hey Kat, I understand you grew up in Europe, you lived in the States and now you're in Japan. Being all over the place, you've got to have seen the differences in censorships in movies and in songs.　What's your take on that?Kat: Well I've definitely experienced that and I find it really interesting especially when I lived in the States. I had a bit of a culture shock there. In TV shows and in movies, curse[诅咒，咒骂；骂人] words are beep-beeped out and you're never going to see a woman's naked breasts or anything. You're never going to see naked people during daytime television which actually kind of surprised me because on German television that's not a problem. Even curse words are OK. When I came to Japan, I was surprised that there was also a lot of censorship.Matthew: In what ways are there censorship in Japan because I think TV shows in Japan they don't censor very much of anything other than nudity[赤裸，裸体].Kat: That is true. I think the main part that is different to Europe is the censorship of nudity. In Germany for example if nudity is a part of the story, if for example, a soccer team is having a conversation in the shower, you will see naked guys because it is a normal part of the story.Matthew: But don't you think they could just have had the courtesy to aim a little higher with the cameras or do you think there is absolutely nothing wrong with it?Kat: In Germany, we kind of grew up thinking there's nothing wrong with that. Nobody would blink an eye on seeing something like that on TV. In America, do you think people would be extremely offended?Matthew: There are too many religious parties in the States that would go off on it and people want to protect their children if TV started to allow uncensored programs or programs that were intentionally using sexual or vulgar[粗俗的；庸俗的；不雅的] language. But there are exceptions to the rule such as HBO or there are some premium channels that you pay for extra every month but when you purchase those channels you know what you're getting, it's not a part of a standard package that you get. So you don't have to worry about your children watching the shows or anything.Kat: I think in Germany parents are very aware of what their children are watching and parents would not let their children roam free when it comes to TV. Parents control what their children watch so I think it would not be such a big problem.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Matthew: Hey Kat, I understand you grew up in Europe, you lived in the States and now you're in Japan. Being all over the place, you've got to have seen the differences in censorships in movies and in songs.　What's your take on that?Kat: Well I've definitely experienced that and I find it really interesting especially when I lived in the States. I had a bit of a culture shock there. In TV shows and in movies, curse[诅咒，咒骂；骂人] words are beep-beeped out and you're never going to see a woman's naked breasts or anything. You're never going to see naked people during daytime television which actually kind of surprised me because on German television that's not a problem. Even curse words are OK. When I came to Japan, I was surprised that there was also a lot of censorship.Matthew: In what ways are there censorship in Japan because I think TV shows in Japan they don't censor very much of anything other than nudity[赤裸，裸体].Kat: That is true. I think the main part that is different to Europe is the censorship of nudity. In Germany for example if nudity is a part of the story, if for example, a soccer team is having a conversation in the shower, you will see naked guys because it is a normal part of the story.Matthew: But don't you think they could just have had the courtesy to aim a little higher with the cameras or do you think there is absolutely nothing wrong with it?Kat: In Germany, we kind of grew up thinking there's nothing wrong with that. Nobody would blink an eye on seeing something like that on TV. In America, do you think people would be extremely offended?Matthew: There are too many religious parties in the States that would go off on it and people want to protect their children if TV started to allow uncensored programs or programs that were intentionally using sexual or vulgar[粗俗的；庸俗的；不雅的] language. But there are exceptions to the rule such as HBO or there are some premium channels that you pay for extra every month but when you purchase those channels you know what you're getting, it's not a part of a standard package that you get. So you don't have to worry about your children watching the shows or anything.Kat: I think in Germany parents are very aware of what their children are watching and parents would not let their children roam free when it comes to TV. Parents control what their children watch so I think it would not be such a big problem.

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]  

How does the endless scroll of Netflix impact our desire for sneakers? How does the manufactured scarcity of shoes influence a billion-dollar secondary market? What is a sneaker bot? The difference between iPhones and Sneakers: This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade sit down with product designer Matthew Famularo to talk about sneaker appreciation, manufactured scarcity, and the second-hand marketplace built around sneakers. We get acquainted with sneaker bots and discuss the ways that teens unknowingly carry out digital strategy for their favourite brands. We also listen to Rich’s admiration of Paul Newman’s good looks. [podcast player] ►iTunes/►SoundCloud/►Overcast/►Stitcher/►MP3 /►RSS 5:25 — Matthew: “Part of this multi-billion-dollar industry of sneakers winds up being sold because the supply is so incredibly limited and the demand is so high.” 7:25 — Matthew: “People will camp out for sneakers… It’s like Apple products, it’s like when the iPhone comes out.” 9:40 — Paul: “There was kind of a larger trend of athletes going from cool hometown celebrities to global mega superstars where everything is affiliated with them, like when Steph Curry came out with his sneaker and everybody made fun of it — I don’t follow basketball or sneakers, but that was big news.” 10:00 — Rich: “It’s fully baked at that point. You’re not wearing a sneaker to go play basketball in the schoolyard. You can, but it became fashion.” 16:18 — Matthew: “It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry, sneakers. It’s a marketplace. Because of this multi-billion-dollar industry and supply that doesn’t meet with demand, there’s now a billion-dollar secondary market that StockX is participating in, that eBay is participating in, that people are using platforms to sell sneakers.” 16:30 — Paul: “There’s a low cost of entry, it’s connected to street culture, there’s an element of hustle to it, and there’s a key thing you’ve just described which is that you’ve got this marketplace over here, you’ve got this waiting room here, you can automate this — or you could, theoretically.” 16:55 — Matthew: “There are a lot of different kinds of sneaker bots that you can get and it depends on the shoes that you’re looking for… Some bots do all of them. Some bots only do websites that use Shopify. Some bots only work on jailbroken iPhones because they work on the Nike SNKRS app. You have to understand what you’re looking for, and dependant on that, there are a number of options available.” 17:35 — Paul: “Everything you can do with the web has ended up in sneaker bot development territory.” 19:25 — Matthew: “We are now exposed to digital objects more than types of physical objects.” 20:05 — Matthew: “What you have today is between the digital objects [of music, TV, and film] is the notion of scarcity has exploded. Netflix will just pour content over your head until you drown in it so the perceived value is gone. I think that this is almost in a way a reaction to it, because you actually have this thing you can cherish in a weird way because not everyone has it. You know for a fact that because of the marketplace that there are just not a lot of them.” 20:50 — Paul: “That aspect, that sort of raw capitalist consumption part of street culture got really into the brains of cool rich young kids who are like, ‘Oh yeah, $1500 for a cool pair of sneakers, that’s no big deal. I’m a DJ and my parents are funding the next 30 years of my college education.’” 22:00 — Paul: “It’s not such a big market that serious, giant players are really deeply invested in it so it stays kind of ground level. Even the fact that there’s this whole sneaker culture and the bots and so on becomes part of the mystique. The marketplace is now connected to the big public branding event… They’re seeing this growing marketplace as feeding into their overall big brand efforts. Matthew at some level is pulling off the digital strategy around perceived value in the adidas and Yeezy brand for them.” 22:50 — Matthew: “One of the key points is that demographically you’ve got teenagers who fully understand that everything’s disposable. Everything. My Instagram, my Snapchat.” 27:35 — Paul: “Watches are very specific. Watches are rich people catnip.” 28:25 — Rich: “I just it’s cool that there’s this appreciation for this thing that there aren’t just endless amounts of.” 28:35 — Matthew: “There’s a separation between how widespread it can be. On social media, you can see photos of the shoe everywhere. But you go to… Ohio, and you’re not going to see that.” 29:30 — Paul: “When we’re having our kids play Pokemon Go, we’re training them to be sneaker drop consumers.” 31:10 — Paul: “As a species we find scarcity. I think it’s really exciting and I think it’s because we like having access to everything and then we get really excited about rich people having access to things we don’t and we’re like, ‘well why don’t I have it?’” LINKS Matthew Famularo, product designer StockX Virgil Abloh x MoMA x Nike The Story Behind The Air Menthol 10s YEEZY 500 | adidas + KANYE WEST Supreme Paul Newman’s Rolex