Podcast appearances and mentions of mike yep

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I chat with Mike Snavely, CEO of Phunware. Mike details Phunware's evolution from a mobile development agency into a thriving SaaS company delivering high-ROI apps to hotels and healthcare providers. Hear how shifting culture from rigid control to empowering autonomous teams with accountability revived success. Key strategic maneuvers included trimming the workforce judiciously and securing capital patiently. Timely decisions breathe new life into businesses' surfaces repeatedly. We delve into crafting a trusting, candid culture. Difficult conversations are promptly addressed and failures learned foster innovation and resilience. I share that I founded such an environment at a former startup. Mike's unique hobby of creatively mapping dream destinations blends work wisdom with life's pleasures, crafting an episode uplifting attendees' strategies and spirits. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Mike Snavely explains the evolution of Phunware from a mobile solution development agency to a SaaS company that specializes in customized mobile apps for hotels and healthcare institutions. We discuss the strategic decisions and cultural shifts necessary during the transition to new leadership at Phunware, including capital injection and reshaping the balance sheet for growth. Mike highlights the move from a command-and-control culture to one that champions autonomy and accountability, emphasizing the importance of empowering team leaders. We explore the significance of building a leadership team grounded in trust, accountability, autonomy, and candor, and how these principles contribute to a positive organizational culture. Mike shares his personal career journey, detailing his long-standing experience in mobile technology and his eventual rise to the CEO position at Phunware. We examine how Phunware fosters a culture of appreciation and collaboration through a Slack channel called Momentum, which recognizes and celebrates employee contributions. Mike talks about balancing professional obligations with personal passions, including the importance of prioritizing family and maintaining a positive trajectory in both areas. We discuss the importance of in-person engagement for building and maintaining key relationships with stakeholders, despite the trend toward virtual interactions. Mike reflects on past experiences and learnings, including the value of having prompt and honest conversations to avoid delays in decision-making and mitigate potential failures. We delve into Mike's hobby of pinning dream travel destinations on Google Maps and how this practice turns travel planning into an immersive and memorable adventure. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Phunware GUESTS Mike SnavelyAbout Mike TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In today's episode, you will meet Mike Snavely, ceo of Funware. In building and maintaining key relationships with your stakeholders, mike shares his opinions on why there is no substitute for being in person to engage on a human level. Mike, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business and thank you for taking time to come on the show with me. Glad to be here. Thanks for the invitation. So, as the CEO of Funware, let's start by just orienting the listeners to what is Funware and tell us what the company's known for. Mike: Sure so. Funware is a 15-year-old publicly traded company based in Austin, Texas. We build mobile experiences that help hotels and healthcare institutions engage their guests and patients while they're on premises in ways that drive satisfaction and monetization. Chris: Very interesting. So you said the company started I guess in the early 2000s. Mike: Then it would have been in 2009. The company started. It was private for the first 11 or so years of its existence and then we went public via SPAC transaction in 2000. I believe it was 20. Chris: Okay, and it sounds like a fairly niched focus for the company. How did it come to be that the company, I guess, was so focused on kind of those two industries and providing that type of, I guess, service to those customers? Mike: Well, originally it wasn't. So over 15 years, you might imagine, there's been an evolution in the focus of the company, and so the company in 2009 was really more of a mobile solution development agency. So some of the biggest brands you know in the world really selected Funware back in the timeframe to build some of their first mobile apps in the app store. So companies like Fox, the NFL, the Sochi Olympics, wwe, a number of airports and so on were spending a lot of money to build their first mobile application and then to develop their first mobile audience. For lots of reasons and that was two years after the iPhone was introduced. It was actually before the iPad was introduced and so obviously there's a lot of evolution of consumer expectations when it comes to engaging on mobile, and those brands were spending a lot of money in the early comes to engaging on mobile, and those brands were spending a lot of money in the early days to build their first mobile presences. That's evolved over time, and so agencies are really not, they really don't drive the valuation that a SaaS company does, and so we've, over time, evolved into becoming a SaaS company. So we license our technologies. We'll essentially build an app, configuring it for the customer, launch it into the app store and then generate license fees off that app for as long as it exists and is available for download. That's a much better valuation model because typically when our customers get involved with us they stick around. Our retention rate is very high because we drive a positive ROI. So we've kind of followed the evolution of mobile from really high investment work for hire, boutique agency-like development all the way through today where we charge between 50 and $150,000 a year for a given property, whether it's a hotel or a hospital, to have their own mobile app in the app store, to have their own brand in front of their users or guests and then ultimately to develop that one-on-one relationship with that guest or patient in a way that drives repeat business and satisfaction and additional monetization. Chris: That's fascinating. Now you mentioned retention rate. What do you which obviously is very important for success of a company, especially like yours what do you attribute that successful retention rate to? Mike: Well, we do good work and I can make available to you a list and you could even put it in the podcast if you'd like of the apps that we build, or some of the apps that we build. They're beautiful apps. So, number one, we do really high-quality work that all of our customers are proud to have their name on. And then, number two, we drive ROI, plain and simple. For a dollar they put into our solutions, they get between $5 and $50 back, depending on who they are and the specifics of their business. And you know, if I could give you a machine that would, you put a dollar bill in, you get a five or a 50 back out. You would say how many dollar bills can I put in there? Chris: Yeah, no, no, kidding, right Well. I mean, but fundamentally, you mentioned at least you know two fundamental things that is key to customer retention. That's one provide good service. If you're in the service industry, it starts with providing good service and I think an outcome of that is your customer sees a valuable return on the investment for your service. Those are not unique to software but for any kind of service type business right, exactly, that's right. Let's talk a little bit about your. So you're the CEO. The company was founded by others than yourself. How did you come, I guess, to work at Funware and I know just a little bit that you've had this is like your second stint there but give us a little background on your connection to the company and how it was you became the CEO. Mike: Yeah, sure enough. So I've really made a career of pursuing technology trends. So I'm kind of an old guy so I've been in business for a long time. But I started off in offline marketing technologies, sending out snail mail and running telephone centers. Then I evolved into social marketing with a startup in Austin, texas. I then got into mobile and I've been in mobile really kind of on and off ever since. Mobile's a big deal because you've got a device that knows who you are and knows where you are, you tell it all your secrets. It really is an indispensable. It's become an indispensable tool. And so I've really made kind of a career over the last shoot 15 years at this point in mobile. And so I was originally with my first stint in mobile was with a little mobile application development boutique in Austin called Mutual Mobile. That was 2008, 9, 10, 11 timeframe Did something else and then I was recruited to come to Funware by somebody who had worked for me at Mutual Mobile and I said look, we're building out this platform company. We're very interested in having somebody who can really help to drive revenues. Would you be interested in joining? So that in 14, I joined Funware for the first time and I came to run the software business. So I was responsible for all revenues for the software business of Funware from 14 through 16 or so, got to know the company, got to really understand the technologies Actually, a number of the people who were there then are still with the company. Then I went off, worked at a Silicon Valley startup and did a couple of other things, couple of other things. And then, when the founding CEO left in 23, they hired a guy that I had worked with at Mutual Mobile back in the day as the new CEO and he said look, mike, I know that you're great at building businesses on the revenue side. Would you like to come and be my CRO, as I'm CEO of Funware? And he said I'll make it worth your while. So I said no a couple of times and then eventually I said yes. Well, this was September of last year that I rejoined the company and 30 days in the board said look, you know, what we really need is somebody with sales DNA at CEO. Let's try that again. Easy for me to say CEO role. So, mike, would you like to step in as CEO? So I actually I had a buddy who brought me back to be a CRO and then wound up taking this job. We're still friends, we still talk all the time and he was very supportive of that move. But a long story short, I think that the company for a time kind of lost its way in the simple fact of selling, servicing accounts and driving revenues, and that's something I've had the good fortune to develop pretty good skill at, and so now I'm the CEO and I'm going to tell you I think the E in CEO stands for extra. Everything about it is extra, but it really is the best job I've ever had and I'm really enjoying it. I still spend a lot of time working with customers, selling, identifying strategic partnerships and that kind of thing, because I enjoy it, I feel like I'm good at it and it's absolutely critical to positioning the company for growth and valuation, which is exactly my job. Chris: There you go, so let's talk a little bit about that. What are some of the things that you do to build and maintain relationships with those partners, customers, strategic relationships that you think someone listening might learn? Mike: from. Well, it's funny, there's been a real trend away from in-person, and so you and I are meeting today on Zoom. Our business, funware, is essentially 100% virtual at this point, and what I find is there's no substitute for hopping on a plane and going to see somebody, breaking bread with them, getting to know them as a person, understanding what it is they're trying to accomplish, what their hopes and dreams are, what their fears are. Once you get to that point and really just kind of understanding them as a person, and then exposing yourself as a person and say, look, you know, this is what I'm trying to accomplish, mr and Ms, partner or prospect, and really kind of, you know, engaging on a human level, which you know is a whole lot easier for sitting across the desk from somebody, and that's that to me, is is where I spend a lot of my time. I do invest a lot of time in in person, you know, spending time with customers, prospects, partners and the rest of it, and I really just don't think there's much of a substitute for that. Chris: Couldn't agree more. I think that's how, really, until the pandemic, it's how business got done in person. I don't think anything's changed here. I think, especially these days, I think it says so much more that you take the time to do that when you could otherwise, yeah, do a Teams or Zoom call or whatever, and just the human interaction I mean. As humans, I think we're meant to be together, right and interact, and I think that just fosters the relationship. So great advice there. Keeping on that kind of theme you've come back in not in an easy economic time, so let's talk a little bit about managing through kind of some economic uncertain, rising interest rates and all the stuff that's out there in the news. Let's talk about kind of what are some of the things you've done to stay focused and keep your people focused on driving the business forward? Mike: Sure enough. Well, there are some benefits and some drawbacks to being a public and trading company. Of course One is access to the capital markets. That's a benefit, and we certainly have the ability to draw capital out of the markets in ways that don't require us to be as susceptible to excuse me, the interest rate environment, but that doesn't mean that our customers aren't susceptible to that environment. And so we've had to do some things. Selling into hospitality and healthcare, I mean, we're typically selling into pretty big organizations and they have a little bit of a buffer, I suppose, from the ebbs and flows of the economy, particularly when you look at luxury hospitality. I mean, COVID aside, luxury hospitality has really been on a growth tear because of the generation of a lot of wealth on the part of a lot of people and they're wanting to spend it on high-quality experiences. But that doesn't mean that we don't have to be creative from time to time when it comes to pricing a deal or generating terms that are acceptable to the customer. They can digest, they can maybe capitalize the expense as opposed to turning into an OPEX expense and that kind of thing, and certainly we've had to be creative there. When I first took on the CEO role. The company was having a little bit of financial trouble and you could read in our public filings all about it. But, long story short, we were having problems with access to capital and I had to work with my CFO and others you know capital partners to really inject some capital into the company from the market in ways that allowed us, you know, the ability to move forward without paying a lot of interest, frankly. So we were able to kind of reshape the balance sheet in a way that puts us in a great spot for growth today Smaller companies I can only imagine what it must be like if you're dealing with debt financing, distinct from capital financing, and what some of the challenges there must be. We had to make some hard decisions in connection with the recapitalization of the company that had to do with people, in large part because that's our number one expense and those are hard things to do, and I spent many a sleepless night, you know, because I had to do some of those things. But the fact of the matter is that most companies don't cut fast enough and they don't cut deep enough because of those reasons, and it feels terrible, but preserving the company and giving ourselves the ability to go forward and thrive is really kind of the job for the shareholders. Chris: Yeah, and yeah, I agree. I think, regardless of the size of the company, making those people decisions are extremely difficult because, again, we went back to in person and it's human and these people have been with you typically and but it's what they say, right, it is when you have to make the hard cuts, you have to cut muscle and those can be challenging decisions. On the flip side of that, sure, as you come into the CEO role, you are either have or still in the process of building your team. What are some of the things that you do? Processes maybe you've created to help you identify the right people to surround yourself with to further the mission and strategies of the company. Mike: Well, there are two non-delegable duties that the CEO has, in my belief. Number one it's setting the strategy of the company. So we're going to be a SaaS company serving these markets, we're going to drive toward these margins, we're going to deliver in this way, and these are the things that are important for the strategy of the business. Number two is the culture of the business, and so I can't hire somebody to give me a culture. I've got to work with the company to create the culture that we want, and so I'll give you a little bit of a story there. So I have a lot of respect for the fellows who founded the company, a lot of respect for them, because they built something that I now have the good fortune to run and take to the next level. But there was a lot of. They were literally army guys, and there was a lot of army DNA in the company. Now that there's nothing wrong with that, there's nothing at all wrong with that, and the company was successful for a number of years, but and the culture that was built was one of command and control, because that's what the army is Right. Chris: Well, it's not. I'll just interrupt it. That's also not atypical of kind of startup mentality. Right, it's dominant kind of leadership. Got to get it done, got to get this off the ground. Mike: Yep, dominant leadership plus the military background equaled very much a command and control structure, a bit of a cult of personality around the founding CEO, and all of that, you know, paid great dividends. For a long time, I could not be any more different from the founding CEO. I'm not an army guy, you know. And so one of the first things I did when I took on the job is I said look, you know, you know if you're the vice president of sales or you're the vice president of, you know of product or delivery or deployments or whatever it is. You're the CEO of your own business and I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to give you an objective and I'm going to give you the flexibility and the support to go and achieve that objective. You need people. You get people. You need investment. You get investment. But your accountability is to go and run your portion of the business as if you were the CEO. I'm not going to micromanage the decisions at all. I'm going to empower you to do the right thing number one for the customer, because then that ultimately becomes the right thing for the company over many observations and so that was a transition that some people are still working through. Frankly, in leadership roles within the company. It's sometimes people get comfortable being told what to do and we just we don't do that anymore. And you know a couple of people have left as a result of that. They did not have that comfort and that's okay because it's not the right job for them anymore. But most people have really embraced the opportunity of agency and empowerment and the ability to kind of run their own part of the business. ADVERT Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom. And thanks for listening to the show. Chris: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, but clearly what you're talking about in my terms are giving people autonomy, but with accountability, which I think is the right way to go. However, organizations evolve over time, just like people. So I think we talk about command and control in the early days. That, for most companies, may make sense, but where this company is now and size and scale, you couldn't do that because there's too much going on and you have to then hire the right people, and the people that work for the company in the first few years may not work, you know, 10 years, 15 years later, because different skill sets needed, right, so it sounds like you've got your hands around that pretty well. Mike: Well, you know, it's always a work in progress, and so one of the one of the accelerants to adopting a new cultural tone is bringing in people, you know right. So I brought in a couple of guys and they are both guys, I'm afraid, who I had worked with a number of times in the past, who I knew kind of got the way that we wanted to run the railroad and who are are the kind of guys who just roll up their sleeves every day and make the most of the day. And, you know, those guys are not only in leadership roles within the company but they're also, you know, setting a tone for the others they work with most closely day to day, and I absolutely think it's working. Chris: That's great. So kind of sum that conversation up for us how would you define the culture of Funware today? Mike: I'd say that we're kind of a restart up, but with all the good elements of a startup, and what I mean by that is that we had a revenue profile that grew, grew and then it kind of dropped off. For some reason I wasn't here, and we're in the process of growing back up and we're getting in the right people who are interested in not only doing great work and serving the customers really well and building a terrific product, but also ones who are embracing the autonomy and the accountability that we're providing to them, and I couldn't be any more pleased with the reception that I'm getting. Chris: Anything special that you've kind of put in place to kind of help foster that type of culture so that you can perpetuate it and see it grow. Mike: Well, we tend to recognize the behaviors that we're looking for, and here's what I mean by that. So you know, somebody will just do a thing right and they'll do it. They'll achieve an accomplishment, whatever that accomplishment may be, and we'll talk. We've got a Slack channel. Slack is a tool we use all day long, every day, and we have a Slack channel called Momentum, and the Momentum channel is really about recognizing the contributions that a person makes, and the deal is that if you put something in Momentum, you've got to recognize somebody else. So you say, hey, a great thing happened, you got to recognize somebody else. So you say, hey, a great thing happened. And I want to thank Bob over here for his contribution to the thing, because Bob, you know, contributed in a way that if he hadn't done that, you know we might not have gotten the outcome that we're looking for. You know that that's something that you see traffic in every single day, that's great. Chris: We obviously I can relate to that we do something similar here at the firm Every single day. That's great, I can relate to that. We do something similar here at the firm, not necessarily on a specific channel, but it's kind of become part of our culture to. We call them core value kudos and it's about recognizing other people not yourself, obviously in efforts that they made and tying them to our mission and values, so that the behaviors and the values marry up right. And then people. It makes it tangible that I want to thank or, you know, congratulate someone for doing X, Y and Z which demonstrated this value in action. Mike: That's terrific. Yeah, I've been in companies that have done that. I think that's something that I may need to reincorporate into my bag of tricks there, for sure that have done that. I think that's something that I may need to reincorporate into my bag of tricks there for sure. Chris: So you know along those lines your software company. I always am interested to know what are you doing to kind of promote or foster creativity and innovation within the company? Mike: Well, some of the things that you know it's interesting, I'm going to I'll give you maybe a little bit longer answer you might be looking for, but there is, and it's really important to kind of separate the day-to-day from the long-term vision. And what I mean by that is that I'm, let's say, a developer and today I have to fix a bug, and I just have to fix the bug because the bug exists and it's in the way of something happening and it's not my favorite part of the job, I'm quite confident of that. Not my favorite part of the job, I'm quite confident of that. Not my favorite part of the job to fix a bug. But there is some long range stuff that I'm really excited about. A big part of what we do is indoor wayfinding and hyperlocal marketing offers, and there are lots and lots of innovations that we're looking at right now, and so we identify people who are interested in innovation. We put together both formal processes for them to say, okay, you're on the R&D team and you're going to be doing this work, but we also give them informal opportunities. Hey, look, I want you to go to Denver to our customer with Gaylord Rockies and I want you to actually go into the physical space that we're trying to map, and I want you to help me figure out a better way to do it. And so that's two things. It's number one, solving a strategic problem for the business, but it's also kind of getting them out of their, since we're all virtual, it's getting them out of their own office, sending them to Denver, take an extra day, engage the customer, do great work, but also enjoy yourself a little bit. So we try to give people an opportunity to get out of the context within which they're working sitting in my home office squashing bugs and get out into the real world where our solutions are deployed in ways that are not only sort of fun but also problem solving. Chris: So you've been in some leadership roles throughout your career, obviously CEO now. How would you describe your leadership style and how do you think it's evolved over the last few years? Mike: Well, I try to work with people. I try to work as best I can. You can't always do that right, but you can absolutely make the investment of time to get to know them, and so I walk into this job. I've got a CFO that I just met very recently, and I had a chief legal officer that I met just recently, and I had a chief operating officer that I had known actually for some time and one of those guys wound up leaving that I had known actually for some time and you know, one of those guys wound up leaving. But you know the other two guys that I had just met. I made it a real point of going to where they were, sitting down with them breaking bread, understanding who they are, what they were trying to accomplish, why they were at the company in the first place and all the rest of it, because it was important for me to understand whether I could trust and whether it was appropriate to invest in these guys. Right and absolutely it was. By the way, I had a couple of gaps in my leadership team and what I did was find people that I'd worked with in the past and I said, look, are you willing to come and work for me again, and the answer in every case was absolutely so, and that's not because I'm the greatest guy in the world or because I gave him a zillion dollars or anything like that. It's because we have, over the years, established a working cadence that's founded on this idea of trust and accountability, autonomy of action and really candor of discussion. There's nothing that the leadership team and I don't discuss in detail and with candor. We're not afraid to tell our truths to each other. We've created what I think is a safe space for us to really talk about what's on our mind and what concerns or challenges we have, or if somebody is all wet, you know, and and that kind of. That kind of culture. The executive table, I think, filters down to the rest of the business in ways that help support the culture we're trying to build. Chris: Yeah, and I was gonna say it sounds like it's a culture of safety to have the hard conversations, but that those conversations are done in a respectful way. Mike: Yeah. Chris: I don't know if there's no better way to do it Right, and it's okay to fail. Mike: And I got to tell you, I used to race, I used to race cars a long time ago and you know, if you don't crash, you're not driving fast enough and so it's okay. It's okay to crash every once in a while because that means you're pushing the envelope, You're trying to get, you know, you're trying to get to the edge of the performance envelope and that's positive. Chris: Yeah, no, let's talk about that, cause I I there. There's always learning, and so I think there's. You know, when you have setbacks or failures, you can learn from them and it can make you better. Don't let it define you. So can you give us an example of more than not the car racing, because crashing is easy to understand as a failure, but in the business world, as a leader something that you felt a failure of yours, a bad decision, a setback that you absolutely grew from, and it's made you better today. Mike: Yeah, sure enough, I think that my greatest learnings are not being decisive enough and not acting quickly enough. And so you know, let's say, for example, I'll give you the example of last company I worked for before. Well, yes, I'll give you that example. So I was working at an AI video startup in Madison, Wisconsin. It was essentially a unit of a publicly traded company that I won't name, but your viewers can certainly look it up. And, long story short, that company is now bankrupt and I don't fault any of the. I don't fault the CEO of that company, which was not me, by the way, in that, but I fault myself. Yeah, exactly, it wasn't me. I didn't bankrupt the company. This was a guy I had worked with before were pretty small, and so what I said was I need this much to make this happen. I was given about half that much and I didn't adequately reset the expectations on how long it was going to take to get that thing done, slash. I should have had probably more pointed discussion about is this worth doing at all, and I didn't do that. And the long story short is that company is now bankrupt for lots of reasons, but the thing that I that my not being as aggressive as I felt like I should have been was a contributor to that. I think it was a small contributor, but you know all that to say that it didn't help. Chris: And so I kind of trace it. I would say the learning for you is kind of having the hard conversations faster right and that's the kind of culture that's terrifically important for me. Mike: So that informs the culture I'm building at Funware, which is like, if this ain't going to work, I just need you to tell me, and I might disagree and I might argue with you, but I will absolutely hear you. I might argue with you, but I will absolutely hear you. It's going to be super important for us to just trust each other enough to be able to have the discussion about you know, without fear. I guess is where I'm coming from. Chris: I understand that, so let's talk a little bit about you know these are important jobs that you've held over the last few years, and as is the current one. I don't like using the term work-life balance, but how do you? Manage work and personal life to try to keep them both going in a positive direction. Mike: Well, I spend a lot of time with my kids. I really, yeah, my daughter. So I'm here in Ohio, I'm spending time with my father and mother, but my daughter came along, my older daughter came along, she's out of school already. I'm going to go next week pick up my younger daughter in boarding school in Colorado, drive her down to Big Bend, where she has never been, and then, you know, spend time with her over the summer. So I mean, it's really about being deliberate about that and working from anywhere, candidly, in my opinion, helps. There's no expectation. I'm going to the office, I'm going to be there during the business day on Monday through Friday, and what I kind of joke is that I mean, I work a lot, no question about it, but I work around my life as opposed to work, as opposed to planning my life around my work, to planning my life around my work. So I might work, you know, 60 hours a week, but that's not going to be five times 12. That's going to be, you know, kind of eight-ish times seven. I'll work every day a little bit, but I'm certainly going to put my kids first and that's just the way it is. Chris: Well, I can identify with that. I think everyone has to find their own way and each job and role requires different things. In different stages of life require different things. So I think that's what people you know should stay focused on, individually as well as the companies to try to make sure you have good people. You don't want to lose them for those types of reasons. People you don't want to lose them for those types of reasons. Yeah, so, mike, this has been a great conversation. Before we wrap up, I just want to kind of get a little bit more less or a little less serious about things. Tell us what was your first job as a kid? Mike: It'd be funny, you should ask. So I'm back in rural Ohio where I grew up. Right now, at my parents' house, as I mentioned earlier, my first job was was am I allowed to say shit on your podcast? Of course, the texas my first, my first job was shoveling hog shit. Chris: Shoveling hog shit for minimum wage and I was nothing that wants to make you go to college and get a degree than that right. Mike: well, the funny thing is that I wound up raising hogs to pay for college. So it was fine to shovel the hog shit, but I was like, if I was fine to shovel the hog shit, but I was like, if I'm going to shovel the hog shit, I'm going to do it for more than $3.35 an hour. I'm going to do it in exchange for a college education. So that's not exactly that way, but that's a big part of how I kind of got off the farm and moving ahead. Chris: I love that, okay, well, yeah, obviously, as we now know, you're from Ohio, but you spent enough time in Texas for me to ask you this question Do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Mike: I love Tex-Mex. I would eat Tex-Mex every day of the week All right. And sometimes I do. I do love barbecue, but the thing is that the best barbecue is something I don't want to wait in line for and I don't want to drive a long ways. If I happen to be by La Barbecue or Franklin's a little bit over their great barbecue a little bit overhyped, or if I want a great barbecue, I'll just treat it as a destination thing. I'll go down to Lockhart or something like that, but I can get absolutely terrific Tex-Mex around the corner from my house every day of the week. Chris: Yes, it was one good thing. You know, I think we living in Texas both are abundant right. Mike: But you're right. Chris: The marquee barbecue, you know, is tucked away in some places. All right, so my last thing is if you could do a 30 day sabbatical, where would you go? What would you do? Mike: Well, I got a bunch of customers who have really beautiful beach resorts so I might go to one of those. Chris: You might go break bread with them there. Mike: Break bread with the customers at the most beautiful resorts in the world. That would be one thing I might do. There are a lot of places around the world that I'd love to see, so I've got a Google Maps layer that has little flags. There are probably 800 flags on that map and I add some every week. Places that I like to go around the world. Sometimes they're restaurants that I read about. Sometimes they're beautiful. You know natural features, like you know mountain ranges, the Painted Mountains in the Andes, or you know beautiful lake I've never been to Crater Lake, things like that so what I'd probably do is find 30 days worth of those pins in an area that I can consume within that 30-day period and I'd just go knock it out. Chris: I love that. I like the concept of keeping track of the pins. Yep. Mike: And there's too many on the map that you know I'll be dead and gone before I get to see all of them. But you know, it is kind of a it's a memory bank for things that have caught my interest and that I do want to experience at some point, if I can pull it off. Chris: Love it. Love it Well, mike, thanks so much for taking the time to be a guest on the show. Really enjoyed hearing your story, and the things y'all are doing at Funware sound really fun, exciting and innovative. Mike: Thanks a lot. Special Guest: Mike Snavely.

Rounding Up Season 2 | Episode 15 – Making Sense of Story Problems Guest: Drs. Aina Appova and Julia Hagge Mike Wallus: Story problems are an important tool that educators use to bring mathematics to life for their students. That said, navigating the meaning and language found in story problems is a challenge for many students. Today we're talking with Drs. Aina Appova and Julia Hagge from [The] Ohio State University about strategies to help students engage with and make sense of story problems.  Mike: A note to our listeners. This podcast was recorded outside of our normal recording studio, so you may notice some sound quality differences from our regular podcast. Mike:   Welcome to the podcast, Aina and Julia. We're excited to be talking to both of you.  Aina Appova: Thank you so much for having us. We are very excited as well.  Julia Hagge: Yes, thank you. We're looking forward to talking with you today.   Mike: So, this is a conversation that I've been looking forward to for quite a while, partly because the nature of your collaboration is a little bit unique in ways that I think we'll get into. But I think it's fair to describe your work as multidisciplinary, given your fields of study.  Aina: Yes, I would say so. It's kind of a wonderful opportunity to work with a colleague who is in literacy research and helping teachers teach mathematics through reading story problems.  Mike: Well, I wonder if you can start by telling us the story of how you all came to work together. And describe the work you're doing around helping students make sense of word problems.  Aina: I think the work started with me working with fifth-grade teachers, for two years now, and the conversations have been around story problems. There's a lot of issues from teaching story problems that teachers are noticing. And so, this was a very interesting experience. One of the professional development sessions that we had, teachers were saying, “Can we talk about story problems? It's very difficult.” And so, we just looked at a story problem. And the story problem, it was actually a coordinate plane story problem. It included a balance beam, and you're supposed to read the story problem and locate where this balance beam would be. And I had no idea what the balance beam would be. So, when I read the story, I thought, “Oh, it must be from the remodeling that I did in my kitchen, and I had to put in a beam, which was structural.”  Aina: So, I'm assuming it's balancing the load. And even that didn't help me. I kept rereading the problem and thinking, “I'm not sure this is on the ceiling, but the teachers told me it's gymnastics.” And so even telling me that it was gymnastics didn't really help me because I couldn't think, in the moment, while I was already in a different context of having the beam, a load-bearing beam. It was very interesting that—and I know I'm an ELL, so English is not my first language—in thinking about a context that you're familiar with by reading a word or this term, “balance beam.” And even if people tell you, “Oh, it's related to gymnastics”—and I've never done gymnastics; I never had gymnastics in my class or in my school where I was. It didn't help. And that's where we started talking about underlying keywords that didn't really help either because it was a coordinate plane problem. So, I had to reach out to Julia and say, “I think there's something going on here that is related to reading comprehension. Can you help me?” And that's how this all started. ( chuckles ) Julia: Well, so Aina came to me regarding her experience. In fact, she sent me the math problem. She says, “Look at this.” And we talked about that. And then she shared frustration of the educators that she had been working with that despite teaching strategies that are promoted as part of instructional practice, like identifying mathematical keywords and then also reading strategies have been emphasized, like summarizing or asking questions while you're reading story problems. So, her teachers had been using strategies, mathematical and also reading, and their students were still struggling to make sense of and solve mathematical problems. Aina's experience with this word problem really opened up this thought about the words that are in mathematical story problems. And we came to realize that when we think about making sense of story problems, there are a lot of words that require schema. And schema is the background knowledge that we bring to the text that we interact with.  Julia: For example, I taught for years in Florida. And we would have students that had never experienced snow. So, as an educator, I would need to do read alouds and provide that schema for my students so that they had some understanding of snow. So, when we think about math story problems, all words matter—not just the mathematical terms, but also the words that require schema. And then when we think about English learners, the implications are especially profound because we know that, that vocabulary is one of the biggest challenges for English learners. So, when we consider schema-mediated vocabulary and story problems, this really becomes problematic. And so, Aina and I analyzed the story problems in the curriculum that Aina's teachers were using, and we had an amazing discovery.  Aina: Just the range of contexts that we came across from construction materials or nuts and bolts and MP3 players—that children don't really have anymore, a lot of them have a phone—to making smoothies and blenders, which some households may not have. In addition to that, we started looking at the words that are in the story problems. And like Julia said, there are actually mathematics teachers who are being trained on these strategies that come from literacy research. One of them was rereading the problem. And it didn't matter how many times I reread the problem or somebody reread it to me about the balance beam. I had no kind of understanding of what's going on in the problem. The second one is summarizing. And again, just because you summarized something that I don't understand or read it louder to me, it doesn't help, right? And I think the fundamental difference that we solve problems or the story problems … In the literacy, the purpose of reading a story is very different. In mathematics, the purpose of reading a story is to solve it, making sense of problems for the purpose of solving them. The three different categories of vocabulary we found from reading story problems and analyzing them is there's “technical,” there's “sub-technical” and there's “non-technical.” I was very good at recognizing technical words because that's the strategy that for mathematics teachers, we underline the parallelogram, we underline the integer, we underline the eight or the square root, even some of the keywords we teach, right? Total means some or more means addition.  Mike: So technical, they're the language that we would kind of normally associate with the mathematics  that are being addressed in the problem. Let's talk about sub-technical because I remember from our pre-podcast conversation, this is where some light bulbs really started to go off, and you all started to really think about the impact of sub-technical language.  Julia: Sub-technical includes words that have multiple meanings that intersect mathematically and other contexts. So, for example, “yard.” Yard can be a unit of measurement. However, I have a patio in my backyard. So, it's those words that have that duality. And then when we put that in the context of making sense of a story problem, it's understanding what is the context for that word and which meaning applies to that? Other examples of sub-technical would be table or volume. And so, it's important when making sense of a story problem to understand which meaning is being applied here. And then we have non-technical, which is words that are used in everyday language that are necessary for making sense of or solving problems. So, for example, “more.” More is more. So, more has that mathematical implication. However, it would be considered non-technical because it doesn't have dual meanings.  Julia: So, by categorizing vocabulary into these three different types, [that] helped us to be able to analyze the word problems. So, we worked together to categorize. And then Aina was really helpful in understanding which words were integral to solving those math problems. And what we discovered is that often words that made the difference in the mathematical process were falling within the sub-technical and non-technical. And that was really eye-opening for us. Mike: So, Aina, this is fascinating to me. And what I'm thinking about right now is the story that you told at the very beginning of this podcast, where you described your own experience with the word problem that contained the language “balance.” And I'm wondering if you applied the analysis that you all just described with technical and sub-technical and the non-technical, when you view your own experience with that story problem through that lens, what jumps out? What was happening for you that aligns or doesn't align with your analysis?  Aina: I think one of the things that was eye-opening to me is, we have been doing it wrong. That's how I felt. And the teachers felt the same way. They're saying, “Well, we always underline the math words because we assume those are the words that are confusing to them. And then we underline the words that would help them solve the problem.” So, it was a very good conversation with teachers to really, completely think about story problems differently. It's all about the context; it's all about the schema. And my teachers realize that I, as an adult who engages in mathematics regularly, have this issue with schema. I don't understand the context of the problem, so therefore I cannot move forward in solving it. And we started looking at math problems very differently from the language perspective, from the schema perspective, from the context perspective, rather than from underlining the technical and mathematical words first. That was very eye-opening to me.   Mike: How do you think their process or their perspective on the problems changed either when they were preparing to teach them or in the process of working with children?  Aina: I know the teachers reread a problem out loud and then typically ask for a volunteer to read the problem. And it was very interesting; some of the conversations were how different the reading is. When the teacher reads the problem, there is where you put the emotion, where the certain specific things in the problem are. Prosody?  Julia: Yes, prosody is reading with appropriate expression, intonation, phrasing.  Aina: So, when the teacher reads the problem, the prosody is present in that reading. When the child is reading the problems, it's very interesting how it sounds. It just sounds the word and the next word and the next word and the next word, right? So that was kind of a discussion, too. The next strategy the math teachers are being taught is summarizing. I guess discussing the problem and then summarizing the problem. So, we kind of went through that. And once they helped me to understand in gymnastics what it is, looking up the picture, what it looks like, how long it is, and where it typically is located and there's a mat next to it, that was very helpful. And then I could then summarize, or they could summarize, the problem. But even [the] summarizing piece is now me interpreting it and telling you how I understand the context and the mathematics in the problem by doing the summary. So, even that process is very different. And the teacher said that's very different. We never really experience that.  Mike: Julia, do you want to jump in?  Julia: And another area where math and reading intersect is the use of visualization. So, visualization is a reading strategy, and I've noticed that visualization has become a really strong strategy to teach for mathematics, as well. We encourage students to draw pictures as part of that solving process. However, if we go back to the gymnastics example, visualizing and drawing is not going to be helpful for that problem because you are needing a schema to be able to understand how a balance beam would situate within that context and whether that's relevant to solving that word problem. So, even though we are encouraging educators to use these strategies, when we think about schema-mediated vocabulary, we need to take that a step further to consider how schema comes into play and who has access to the schema needed, and who needs that additional support to be able to negotiate that schema-mediated vocabulary.  Mike: I was thinking the same thing, how we often take for granted that everyone has the same schema. The picture I see in my head when we talk about balance is the same as the picture you see in your head around balance. And that's the part where, when I think about some of those sub-technical words, we really have to kind of take a step back and say, “Is there the opportunity here for someone to be profoundly confused because their schema is different than mine?” And I keep thinking about that lived experience that you had where, in my head I can see a balance beam, but in your head you're seeing the structural beam that sits on the top of your ceiling or runs across the top of your ceiling.  Aina: Oh yeah. And at first, I thought the word “beam” typically, in my mind for some reason, is vertical.  Mike: Yeah. Aina: It's not horizontal. And then when I looked at the word balance, I thought, “Well, it could balance vertically.” And immediately what I think about is, you have a porch, then you see a lot of porches that balance the roof, and so they have the two beams …  Mike: Yes! Aina: … or sometimes more than that. So, at no point did I think about gymnastics. But that's because of my lack of experience in gymnastics, and my school didn't have the program. As a math person, you start thinking about it and you think, “If it's vertically, this doesn't make any sense because we're on a coordinate plane.” So, I started thinking about [it] mathematically and then I thought, “Oh, maybe they did renovations to the gymnasium, and they needed a balance beam.” So, I guess that's the beam that carries the load.  Aina: So, that's how I flipped, in my mind, the image of the beam to be horizontal. Then the teachers, when they told me it's gymnastics, that really threw me off, and it didn't help. And I totally agree with Julia. You know when we do mathematics with children, we tell them, “Can you draw me a picture?” Mike: Uh-hm. Aina: And what we mean is, “Can you draw me a mathematical picture to support your problem-solving or the strategies you used?” But the piece that was missing for me is an actual picture of what the balance beam is in gymnastics and how it's located, how long it is. So yeah, yeah, that was eye-opening to me.  Mike: It's almost like you put on a different pair of glasses that allow you to see the language of story problems differently, and how that was starting to play out with teachers. I wonder, could you talk about some of the things that they started to do when they were actually with kids in the moment that you looked at and you were like, “Gosh, this is actually accounting for some of the understanding we have about schema and the different types of words.”  Aina: So, the teacher would read a problem, which I think is a good strategy. But then it was very open-ended. “How do you understand what I just read to you? What's going on in the story problem? Turn to your partner, can you envision? Can you think of it? Do you have a picture in your mind?” So, we don't jump into mathematics anymore. We kind of talk about the context, the schema. “Can you position yourself in it? Do you understand what's going on? Can you retell the story to your partner the way you understand it?” And then, we talk about, “So how can we solve this problem? What do you think is happening?” based on their understanding. That really helped, I think, a lot of teachers also to see that sometimes interpretations lead to different solutions, and children pay attention to certain words that may take them to a different mathematical solution. It became really about how language affects our thinking, our schema, our image in the head, and then based on all of that, where do we go mathematically in terms of solving the problem?  Mike: So, there are two pieces that really stuck out for me in what you said. I want to come back to both of them. The first one was, you were describing that set of choices that teachers made about being really open-ended about asking kids, “How do you understand this? Talk to your neighbor about your understanding about this.” And it strikes me that the point you made earlier when you said context has really become an important part of some of the mathematics tasks and the problems we create. This is a strategy that has value not solely for multilingual learners, but really for all learners because context and schema matter a lot.  Aina: Yes. Mike: Yeah. And I think the other thing that really hits me, Aina, is when you said, “We don't immediately go to the mathematics, we actually try to help kids situate and make sense of the problem.” There's something about that that seems really obvious. When I think back to my own practice as a teacher, I often wonder how I was trying to quickly get kids into the mathematics without giving kids enough time to really make meaning of the situation or the context that we were going to delve into. Aina: Exactly. Mike, to go back to your question, what teachers can do, because it was such an eye-opening experience that, it's really about the language; don't jump into mathematics. The mathematics and the problem actually is situated around the schema, around the context. And so, children have to understand that first before they get into math. I have a couple of examples if you don't mind, just to kind of help the teachers who are listening to this podcast to have an idea of what we're talking about. One of the things that Julie and I were thinking about is, when you start with a story problem, you have three different categories of vocabulary. You have technical, sub-technical, non-technical. If you have a story problem, how do you parse it apart? OK, in the math story problems we teach to children, it's typically a number and operations.  Aina: Let's say we have a story problem like this: “Mrs. Tatum needs to share 3 grams of glitter equally among 8 art students. How many grams of glitter will each student get?” So, if the teacher is looking at this, technical would definitely be grams: 3, 8, and that is it. Sub-technical, we said “equally,” because equally has that kind of meaning here. It's very precise, it has to be exact amount. But a lot of children sometimes say, “Well that's equally interesting.” That means it's similarly or kind of, or like, but not exact. So, sub-technical might qualify as “equally.” Everything else in the story problem is non-technical: sharing and glitter, art students, each student, how much they would get. I want the teachers to go through and ask a few questions here that we have. So, for example, the teacher can think about starting with sub-technical and non-technical, right?  Aina: Do students understand the meaning of each of these words? Which of these could be confusing to them? And get them to think about the story, the context and the problem. And then see if they understand what the grams are, and 8 and 3. And what's happening. And what do those words mean in this context? Once you have done all this work with children, children are now in this context. They have situated themselves in this. “Oh, there's glitter, there's an art class, there's a teacher, they're going to do a project.” And so, they've discussed this context. Stay with it as a teacher and give them another problem that is the same context. Use as many words from the first problem as you can and change it up a little bit in terms of mathematical implication or mathematical solution. For example, I can change the same problem to be, “Mrs. Tatum needs to buy 3 grams of glitter for each of her 8 art students. How many grams of glitter does she need to buy?” So, the first problem was [a] division problem now becomes a multiplication problem. The context is the same. Children understand the context, especially children like myself, who are ELL, who took the time to process to learn new words, to understand new context, and now they're in this context. Let's use it. Let's now use it for the second piece. So, Mike, you've been talking about two things going on. There's a context, and then there's problem-solving or mathematical problem-solving. So, I believe posing the same question or kind of the same story problem with different mathematical implications gets at the second piece. So, first we make sense of the problem of the context schema. The second is, we make sense of that problem for the purpose of solving it.  Aina: And the purpose of solving it is where these two problems that sound so familiar and situate in the same context but have different mathematical implications for problem-solving. This is where the powerful piece, I think, is missing. If I give them a division problem, they can create a multiplication problem with the same Mrs. Tatum, the art students, the glitter. But what I'd like for them to do and what we've been discussing is how are these two problems similar?  Mike: Uh-hm. Aina: This kind of gets at children identifying some of the technical. So, the 3 is still there, the 8 is still there, you know, grams are still there. But then, “How are these two story problems different?” This is really schema-mediated vocabulary in the context where they now have to get into sub-technical and non-technical. “Oh, well there there's 3, but it's 3 per student. And this, there were 8 students, and they have to all share the 3 grams of glitter.”  Aina: So, children now get into this context and difference in context and how this is impacting the problem-solving strategies. I'd love for the teachers to then build on that and say, “How would you solve the first problem? What specifically is in the story problem [to] help you solve it, help you decide how to solve it, what strategies, what operations?” And do exactly the same thing for the second problem as well. “Would you solve it the same way? Are the two problems the same? Will they have the same solutions or different? How would you know? What tells you in the story? What helps you decide?” So, that really helps children to now become problem-solvers. The fun is the mathematical variations. So, for example, we can give them a third problem and say, “I have a challenge for you.” For example, “Mrs. Tatum needs to buy 3 grams of glitter for each of her 8 art students for a project, but she only has money today to buy 8 grams of glitter. How much more glitter does she need to still buy for her students to be able to complete their art project?” Again, it's art, it's glitter, it's 8 students, there's 3, the 8. I didn't change the numbers, I didn't change the context, but I did change the mathematical implication for their story problem. I think this is where Julia and I got very excited with how we can use schema-mediated vocabulary and schema in context to help children understand the story, but then really have mathematical discussions about solutions.  Mike: What's interesting about what you're saying is the practices that you all are advocating and describing in the podcast, to me, they strike me as good practice helping kids make meaning and understand and not jumping into the mathematics and recognizing how important that is. That feels like good practice, and it feels particularly important in light of what you're saying.  Julia: I agree. It's good practice. However, what we found when we reviewed literature, because one of the first steps that we took was what does the literature say? We found that focusing instructional practice on teaching children to look for key mathematical terms tends to lead to frequent errors. Mike: Yep. Julia: The mathematical vocabulary tends to be privileged when teaching children how to make sense of and solve word problems. We want to draw attention to the sub-technical and non-technical vocabulary, which we found to be influential in making sense of. And as in the examples Aina shared, it was the non-technical words that were the key players, if you will, in solving that problem.  Mike: I'm really glad you brought up that particular point about the challenges that come out of attempting to help kids mark certain keywords and their meanings. Because certainly, as a person who's worked in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, I have absolutely seen that happen. There was a point where I was doing that, and I thought I was doing something that was supporting kids, and I was consistently surprised that it was often like, that doesn't seem to be helping.  Julia: I also used that practice when I was teaching second grade. The first step was circle the keywords. And I would get frustrated because students would still be confused in the research that we found. When you focus on the keywords, which tend to be mathematical terms, then those other words that are integral to making sense of and solving the story problem get left behind. Mike: The question I wanted to ask both of you before we close is, are there practices that you would say like, “Here's a way that you can take this up in your classroom tomorrow and start to take steps that are supportive of children making sense of word problems”?  Julia: I think the first step is adding in that additional lens. So, when previewing story problems, consider what schema or background knowledge is required to understand this word, these words, and then what students would find additional schema helpful. So, thinking about your specific students, what students would benefit from additional schema and how can I support that schema construction?  Mike: Aina, how about for you?  Aina: Yeah, I have to say I agree with Julia. Schema seemed to be everything. If children don't understand the context and don't make sense of the problem, it's very hard to actually think about solving it. To build on that first step, I don't want teachers to stop there. I want teachers to then go one step further. Present a similar problem or problem that includes [the] same language, same words, as many as you can, maybe even same numbers, definitely same schema and context, but has a different mathematical implication for solving it. So maybe now it's a multiplication problem or addition problem. And really have children talk about how different or similar the problems are. What are the similarities, what are the differences, how their solutions are the same or different? Why that is. So really unpack that mathematical problem-solving piece. Now, after you have made sense of the context and the schema … as an ELL student myself, the more I talked as a child and was able to speak to others and explain my thinking and describe how I understand certain things and be able to ask questions, that was really, really helpful in learning English and then being successful with solving mathematical problems. I think it really opens up so many avenues and to just go beyond helping teachers teach mathematics.  Mike: I know you all have created a resource to help educators make sense of this. Can you talk about it, Julia?   Julia: Absolutely. Aina and I have created a PDF to explain and provide some background knowledge regarding the three types of vocabulary. And Aina has created some story problem examples that help to demonstrate the ways in which sub-technical and non-technical words can influence the mathematical process that's needed. So, this resource will be available for educators wanting to learn more about schema-mediated vocabulary in mathematical story problems.   Mike: That's fantastic. And for listeners, we're going to add this directly to our show notes. I think that's a great place for us to stop. Aina and Julia, I want to thank both of you so much for joining us. It has absolutely been a pleasure talking to both of you.  Aina: Thank you.  Julia: Thank you. Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling all individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability. © 2024 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org

Rounding Up  Season 1 | Episode 16 – Math Talk in Kindergarten & Beyond  Guest: Dr. Hala Ghousseini  Mike Wallus: Kindergarten is a joyful, exciting, and challenging grade level to teach. It's also a time when  educators can develop a set of productive norms and routines around discourse that can have long lasting effects on students. On today's podcast, we talk with Dr. Hala Ghousseini, a professor at the  University of Wisconsin, about building a solid foundation from math talk in kindergarten and beyond.   Mike: Welcome, Hala. We're really excited to have you on the podcast today talking about math talk in  kindergarten.  Hala Ghousseini: Thank you very much for having me. This is exciting. I love this topic, and the chance  to really talk about this with you is great.  Mike: Well, I feel the same way. I spent eight of my 17 years teaching kindergarten, so I've been  dreaming about a podcast like this for a long time.  Hala: ( laughs ) I can imagine the magic of kindergarten just because it's a time where people think that  they know what to expect, but literally you don't know what to expect with children in kindergarten.  Mike: You started to hint at the first thing that I hope to talk about. I would love to talk about norms. This  feels so important because the norms and the culture that we set in kindergarten, from my perspective,  those might be some of the first messages students receive about what's valued in a mathematics  classroom. And I'm wondering if you could talk just a bit about the norms that you think are important. I  mean, perhaps what it looks like to support them in kindergarten.  Hala: Absolutely. And I just want to situate a little bit some of the things that I have been studying and  thinking about. When I think of math in kindergarten, it very much exists within the learning altogether  that happens in kindergarten; whether it's social-emotional skills, whether they're learning about other  subject areas. So, when I think about the norms, I think often of them as embedded within the fabric of  what's happening in kindergarten. In the research that we've done, we've seen it happening at two  levels. One in relation to what we would call ‘norms related to what's conceptual,' or what [people  might] call more like the disciplinary aspects of norms. So, some of the things that we've seen is, first of  all, centered on children's thinking. The idea that first as an individual in class, that I'm a contributor to  everyone's understanding. So, the way that is typically continuously communicated by the teacher, in the  sense that it's important to share our thinking. And it's important to share it, not just because I'm the  teacher and I asked you to do it, but because it's going to contribute to everyone else's learning.  Hala: My learning as the teacher, others learning in the classroom. And we've seen examples from  teachers where often, as they're asking students to get ready to go into their small groups, they would  always say, ‘Remember, it's important to show our thinking and our work because we want to help  someone else learn it.' You want to help the class understand this idea better. And even with the use of  representations, resources, those were all really in the service of helping someone make their thinking  explicit so that someone else is going to understand it or use it or build on it. So, I'll give you another  example. The idea of saying, ‘Remember, we want to listen now to Hala share her thinking because we want to think how we make sense of it, what Hala is helping us think about. So, those were the typical  expressions or things that teachers would say in building these norms in the classroom.  Hala: The other norm, when it comes to the social aspects of the norm, was really this explicit work on  the sense of the collective as an intellectual community. The idea that we are in this together. It's not  about me and you as the teacher, but it's about the us. What do we make of it? How do we really flag  certain things that may help the group process and think about something? And those were also done  constantly across the times we've spent in these classrooms, in the way teachers would really point to  something that may help us as a group later. ‘Hey, look at this, this might help us later in the way we're  going to work on certain ideas together.'  Mike: Well, I do want to ask you about something else that really struck me when I was reading the  article. So, you and your co-authors talked a great deal about orienting students to and then encouraging  the use of resources to communicate their thinking. That really hit me as a person who used to teach  these young kiddos. Can you talk a little bit about what this looks like?  Hala: Yes. This drew our attention, given where kindergartners are in their language development. They  bring a lot of language from home that actually is going to be essential to build on in explaining the  reasoning, talking about their thinking, reacting to someone else's thinking. So, we started thinking  about the way students' thinking, the way their language that they bring with them, becomes a resource  that they could use. So, encouraging them that ‘Yes, that is one way you can explain your thinking,' so  that really they find that language that is going to give them an entry point into the collective as an  intellectual community. The second thing in relation to resources, also availing in the classroom. We've  noticed these teachers that—besides the fact that you have, like, a number line or a hundredth chart  displayed on the board or even the physical tools that usually typically students play with—how those  become things that the teacher points to and says, ‘Wow, you know what you're doing.'  Hala: This might help us think about this idea. So, let's remember that what struck us was that, when  students were explaining their thinking, we rarely saw a student asking for permission to go and use  something to come and support their thinking. We saw that they were really going to things and bringing them. So that was a norm in that class. That kind of intersects with the idea of normative ways of  working. You can just go and reach it. You don't have to get that teacher's permission to do it. I think one  more thing I'll say about resources. We've noticed the teacher, typically if a student used a particular  resource that supported them in their thinking, when they're sharing, they make sure to actually  highlight it, lift it up in what the student is saying so that others see that those resources could be  contributions to supporting the reasoning in this class.  Mike: So, boy, there's a lot there. I think the first thing that really hits me is this idea that part of the  culture that you want to establish, is that the resources are available and it's contingent on the teacher  saying, ‘Yes, you can go get that right now.'  Hala: Absolutely. And it's a way of socializing the students to be aware of what's in their classroom that is  actually part of what's supporting their learning. You know, there is a thing that I always work in when  I'm working with teachers, this idea that, you know, children are sense makers. And we tend to think of  children as sense makers beyond just mathematics. Of course they are, but also they're sense makers as  learners in general. So, we treat them as sense makers in the way as teachers. We owe it to them to  explain to them why, for example, we're asking them to do something. And we say, ‘So, I want you to  show your work—not just to please me, because this contributes to the collective work in this way.' And we reinforce this message continuously. Similarly, the idea of what's in our class, like, when we see, for  example, base ten blocks. I have a few things in this corner. The idea that these are there to also support  our learning. So, we treat them as sense makers in the sense, these are all shared tools for our  classrooms. So, that's kind of how we think about it in relation to the orienting to resources.  Mike: I want to check my own understanding. I was struck by the way that you talked about the way that  the teacher positions the materials. It seems like a pitfall, I know that I have fallen into at different points  in time is: Using the materials to set a conversation up in a way where children might come away  thinking, ‘Oh, that's the way to do it,' which is very different from, I think the way I heard you describe it. It was more like, this is a tool that can help us think about for future reference. I just wanted to call that  out because I thought I heard that, but I wasn't exactly sure if I was interpreting that accurately.  Hala: Thank you for mentioning that. I think what you're really referring to is what often happens,  especially when we use some manipulatives, let's say, or resources or tools. Where the idea becomes  that the tool equates what it means to do or to reason, like, as if the idea is within the tool and/or the  representation, uh, et cetera. And I think the idea that there is a lot of choice. So, one of the things for  example, that we are currently studying is in kindergarten classrooms, the nature of the use of multiple  representations. There's one question, ‘How often can students come up with their own  representations?' They invent the representations. How often can they go on their own to draw on  certain tools to represent an idea? Those say something when it's actually coming from the student, where you can follow up with questions and say, ‘So, tell me why you use this? Like how do you see it in  this one?' And that's the work that we saw teachers do often, is that they're orienting the resources but  then they're orienting to resources as supporting reasoning.   Hala: And there is the question of why, pressing students. There is a nice example that I always love to  think about, especially with kindergarteners using multiple representations and their own choices. Of  course, students come to class with various fluency in academic language, vocabulary, et cetera. So, there was an instance where the teacher was asking the students, ‘If we've been in school for 129 days, in how many days like that number 29 is going to, we are going to get another 10?' And they were  working with bundling sticks and other things. They focused on the number 9 as nine ones. And how  many more ones till we get another 10? Then the teacher asks the class, ‘Well, is there another way we  can think about how many more days till we get to another 10?'  Hala: ‘Can we use the number 29 altogether?' And a student raises her hand, we call her Gloria, and  actually points to the number line above the whiteboard and says, ‘One twenty-nine, 130.' And the  teacher says, ‘What do you mean by those two?' That literally points to it: 129, 130. So, what the teacher  does, she presses Gloria to explain more and says, ‘Tell us a little bit more. What do you mean by 129  and 130?' Then Gloria actually sees that just looking at the number line as a representation—we call it a  language proxy—to help her really explain her thinking, according to Gloria, wasn't enough for her. She  actually goes back to the hundreds chart. She points at 29, makes a hub, and says, ‘One jump and we get  to 30.' So, we see this is just as a small example of where the student is really using their agency in  deciding on the representation, and the teacher then helps the class try to see the connection that  Gloria was trying to make between this representation. We think this is important for not only this grade  level, but whenever we use multiple representations. The power of multiple representations is in helping  the students see the conceptual connection between them. So, that's where I would caution all of us  when we are doing this, to try to make sure we are focusing on the conceptual piece that the  representation is allowing us to see. Mike: I think part of what you had me thinking about is The Math Learning Center and Bridges. We have  kind of hung our hat on this idea that visual representations are a powerful tool. But the caution that I  always feel is, if those visual representations just turn into another version of an algorithm that's more  like geometric or visually laid out, then we are not advancing the kind of classroom culture or discourse  or thinking that we want, right? That it really is to expose the big ideas. And I think that's what I take, particularly from that example is, the visual actually served as, like, a tool that helped them find the  language to describe the concept rather than just as, like, a here's how you do it. Does that make sense?  Hala: Exactly. I think the tool here is a way for them … the difference is that they're using it not to apply  the reasoning, it's not an application. That's kind of where I see it. Don't just come and show me how  like, like base ten blocks can represent a number. Base ten blocks are used as a way to support a  mathematical idea, not just to apply, like, to show you and show you how something looks like on a hundreds chart. Actually going back to the hundreds chart, to the hub between 29 and 30, was in the  service of really explaining what they meant by 130, 129, 100, there is a hub. That's what they were  talking about in class that when you, you're counting by ones, you're actually now, you got no more 9,  10—9 ones—you actually have one more. And now you could bundle it, and it's your extra 10. So, it's all  couched in the history of working with these representations, like how these students experienced the  work as to not just, ‘Hey, come, let's represent the numbers.' Or there was more talk about, like, those  key ideas that the students were talking about.  Mike: What you're making me think about is that there's an overall pattern that I want to explore in the  context of kindergarten, which is that, as a field, in my mind, one of the things that I wonder about is  whether we have almost explicitly thought about communicating our thinking as something that  happens in the verbal realm. And the more that I've been in the profession is, that we need to broaden  that, particularly when we're talking about young children in pre-K and kindergarten. And I'm wondering, in your mind, what broadening out communication might look like, particularly in kindergarten?  Hala: That's a great question. And I would link it again, like, whenever I think about the norms, the  resources, I see them literally as a triangle with other things working together. Especially critical at this  young age is verbal and non-verbal communication; or really, assets for the students to express their  thinking and communicate with others. And that's where, in a way, the resources become the mediators  of this, with non-verbal—we call them language proxies—is that they become ways of helping the  communication without necessarily waiting for that correct vocabulary or the specific language. And I  think the more we honor various ways of participating and contributing to the learning of the collective,  the more students are going to be able to make improvements, and to make connections, and to show  us what they know, rather than thinking it's too difficult for them to do something maybe because they  don't have that particular, specialized language that someone is looking for.  Hala: We actually think of kindergartners in the way they're really acquiring this new—not only the  verbal language, so that they become more proficient in it—the academic language. And actually, if you  come to think of it, every student in math class, in a way, is a language learner, especially the idea of  what does it mean to explain one's reasoning? And when we are thinking about certain ways that  schools go, they want to follow, for example, the Common Core standards and what they expect in terms  of providing evidence, supporting it. That's actually a language learning process. And there is actually the  literature about supporting bilingual students and multilingual students in classrooms, helps us a lot  think about how we could support learners in the early childhood span. And most recently I was reading  an opinion piece by Tim Boals at the WIDA at the University of Wisconsin. I just actually highlighted a few things in what he said in his opinion piece, which is basically about what it takes to make sure that  multilingual students encounter opportunities to learn.  Hala: So, in a parallel way, it makes me think what it takes for opportunities for early childhood learners  and kindergartners to learn. I just highlighted a few elements that might be one of the resources I share  with you in the end, in case someone is interested in them; about what school programs could do to  ensure that multilingual learners have opportunities to learn. One of them is actually the idea that  always encourage the can-do kind of stance, that you can do it. It's not too difficult for you, like, even in  the choice of tasks. How this guides us for kindergartners is tha,t let's not just give tasks that allow  kindergartners even to skip count on a number line. Actually using tasks where they can reason and  think about why something is true, would be something they can do. So, thinking about not what they  can't do because they're restricted with what they know with numbers, et cetera, it's actually what they  can do.  Hala: So, the idea of designing tasks that leverages what they know, that they could really show you the  way they're reading a situation, what they know about the situation, and really leverage the resources  they have to explain their thinking. My favorite in terms of what he lists in terms of opportunities for  multilingual learners, is this idea of building academic identities, where he says that ‘this is much more  than merely teaching content knowledge and skills. It's about learning to communicate and think like  people who work in those academic or vocational areas.' That's all of this can do. And opening  possibilities for reasoning helps our kindergartners develop really mathematical identities early on that  we know are going to impact their opportunities to learn later. And that's what research shows.  Mike: So, in the third part of your article, you talk about the idea of narration. And I'm wondering if you  could explain narration in this context and then talk a little bit about why it's particularly helpful for young learners?  Hala: So, let me explain what we meant by it in that article. It's literally when, because students may not  have that facility to explain their thinking articulately, elaborately, it's when the teacher actually supports  them by recapping what they said to the class. And on top of it, building on it and setting it up for further   articulation or investigation. So, we try to distinguish here, that's why we're trying to revisit the word  ‘narration' because, we don't think of it just as revoicing. We think of it as a way where the teacher is  highlighting something the student did and, often, we see it in exchange. It's highlighted not only in  terms of the verbatim words that they used or the actions that they took. Highlighting why this is really  helping in the task that we are working on together, and then follows it. It positions it in a way where, now this is what Gloria did.  Hala: So, really it positions the student in a way where other students are now listening, are trying to see  what the student is doing and saying, and then it sets the stage for further focus or deeper conceptual  exploration of particular ideas. So, an example of that would be when Gloria went from 129 to 130 and  went down to the hundreds chart and said, ‘You know, there is a hop from 29 to 30.' So, the teacher may  say, ‘OK, here's what Gloria said so far. She picked those two numbers, she saw that they follow each  other. Actually we're going to get to 130. Then she went down to the hundreds chart to really focus on  that jump of one from 29 to 30.' And then she would immediately go on with a question to the group.  ‘Now what do we do?' I think that makes it more ambitious than just simply revoicing or appropriating  something that the student said, or trying to put words that they may not have used. I think positioning  it for further and deeper conceptual work takes us a bit away from that. Mike: That's really helpful. You started to address the question that I was going to ask next, which is  what's the sweet spot for what you described in the article as narration? It struck me, at least as I was  reading it, that over narrating, if we were defining it as kind of revoicing for kids, might impact kids in  ways that are not productive. But what I hear you saying is, narration is much more than revoicing.  Hala: Absolutely. And that sweet spot that I think you are getting at is really knowing when do you do it  and when do you hold off. In the sense, I don't think there is a rule, but it all goes to the teacher's ability  to know: ‘Is there a shared language here that the students can access through what a student said?' So,  knowing your students in terms of, is this something that I need to further articulate so that now they  could engage productively with someone's idea? And if it's not, then actually it's just highlighting; pulling  from what a student says, the valuable pieces that you think are going to be important for the continued  work of the class, rather than, literally, a student says something, you say verbatim, and then you ask  more questions. It's really tracking what seems to be important for the development of everyone's  thinking, that collective as an intellectual community that's working together.  Mike: That's really helpful. And I think what I heard are simultaneous things that are happening. One is  attending to the ideas that you want to position as important. And the other thing that really jumps is this idea that we're also positioning the child as the author of the ideas.  Hala: Yes. And you know, in later grades we've seen teachers being able to do this in grades 1 and 2, is  often—especially when we are working early on to build that classroom talk community, that math talk  community—is encouraging students as listeners to someone to say, ‘Did you hear something that you  think is important for the way we are really working on this problem in what Mike said? So, let's listen.  Was there something you have a question about, you're not certain about?' Also, distributing the work of the narration, if we want to call it that way, so it's distributed. It's not just about me, but now the class  is listening and trying to pull what's important and worthy of focusing on.  Mike: I love that. Particularly that idea that you can in fact distribute the idea of narration to the class, and it doesn't just live with the teacher. It also advances that broader cultural goal that you have, which  is that the students are actually sense makers, which is the thing from the very beginning of this  conversation.  Hala: Again, it goes back to the way I think about all the practices that we've talked about, to be very  interconnected. It's not like we know you set up norms, you put them on a chart. You know, norms are  reinforced, are renegotiated with your students through the work that you do. And there's a lot of  socializing that you're doing while you're working on content. It reinforces certain ideas, it reintroduces  certain ideas for others to see how they're able to access them and be part of them. So yes, I agree with  you. They're all connected in that way.  Mike: Well, Hala, before we close the podcast, I'm wondering if you could share some resources with  listeners who might be encountering some of the ideas we're talking about for the first time. Is there  anything that you might suggest for a listener who just wants to keep thinking about this and perhaps  learn more?  Hala: So, if they're interested in thinking a little bit more about representations, there is a recent article that I published with Dr. Eric Siy, who is currently at Boston University, in relation to what multiple  representations mean. And how different they are from just using different representations. Mike: Yep. We could absolutely put a link to that on the podcast notes.  Hala: Yeah. And I find the work of Dr. Amy Parks at Michigan State University. You know, she has this  book called ‘Exploring Mathematics Through Play in the Early Childhood Classroom.' [It] has wonderful  pieces that really could support this work in relation to the idea of reasoning in kindergarten, discourse  in kindergarten. And it could happen during play. It doesn't have to happen necessarily only during  academic tasks that are, like, problem-solving situations or worth problems.  Mike: We could absolutely add a link to that. And I think that's probably another great podcast that we  should do relatively soon.  Hala: Yes, I find you really connecting wonderful, cohesive dots together here, which I think is really  going to be helpful to the listener.  Mike: Well, I want to thank you so much for joining us, Hala. It's really been a pleasure talking with you.  Hala: Thank you very much. And it's been a great opportunity to talk about these ideas with you, and the  questions are on target in terms of the things that we have to pay attention to.  Mike: Oh, thank you so much.   Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence  and ability. © 2023 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org   

Rounding Up  Season 1 | Episode 7 – Cognitively Guided Instruction: Turning Big Ideas into Practice  Guest: Dr. Kendra Lomax  Mike Wallus: Have you ever had an experience during your teaching career that fundamentally changed how you thought about your students and the role that you play as an educator? For me, that shift occurred during a sweltering week in July of 2007, when I attended a course on cognitively guided instruction. Cognitively guided instruction, or CGI, is a body of research that has had a massive impact on elementary mathematics over the past 20 years. Today on the podcast, we're talking with Kendra Lomax, from the University of Washington, about CGI and the promise it holds for elementary educators and students. Well, Kendra, welcome to the podcast. It's so great to have you on.  Kendra Lomax: Well, thanks for having me.  Mike: Absolutely. I'm wondering if we can start today with a little bit of background; part history lesson, part primer to help listeners understand what CGI is. So, can you just offer a brief summary of what CGI is and the questions that it's attempted to shed some light on?  Kendra: Sure, I'll give it my best try. So, CGI is short for cognitively guided instruction, and it's a body of research that began some 30 years ago with Tom Carpenter and Elizabeth Fennema. And there's lots of other scholars that since then have kind of built upon that body of research. They really tried to think about and understand how children develop mathematical ideas over time. So, they interviewed and studied and watched really carefully what young children did as they solve whole-number problems. So, you may have heard about the book ‘Children's Mathematics,' and that's where you can read a lot about cognitively guided instruction and [it] summarizes some of that research. And they really started with whole-number computation and then have kind of expanded into areas like fractions and decimals, learning about how kids develop ideas about algebraic thinking, as well as early ideas around counting and quantity.  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: So, there's a couple of books that are kind of in the CGI family. ‘Young Children's Mathematics' includes those original authors, as well as Nick Johnson and Megan Franke, Angela Turrou, and Anita Wager. That fractions and decimals work was really led by Susan Empson and Linda Levi. And then, like I mentioned, ‘Thinking Mathematically' is the text by the original authors that kind of talks about algebra. So, in all of those texts that summarize this research, basically, we're trying to understand how do children develop ideas over time? And Tom and Liz really set an example for all of us to follow in how they thought about sharing this research. They had a deep respect for the wisdom of teachers and the work that they do with young children. So, you won't find any sort of prescription in the CGI research about how to teach, exactly, or a curriculum. Because their approach was to share with teachers the research that they had done when they interviewed and listened to all of these many children solving problems, and then learn from the teachers themselves. What is it that makes sense to do in response to what we now know about how children develop mathematical ideas?  Mike: I mean, it's kind of a foundational shift in some ways, right? It reframes how to even think about instruction, at least compared to the traditional paradigm, right? Kendra: Yeah, it's less a study of how best to teach children and really a study and a curiosity about how children bring the ideas that they already have to their work in the math classroom, and how they build on those ideas over time.  Mike: Definitely. It's funny, because when I think about my first exposure I think that was the big aha, is that my job was to listen rather than to impose or tell or perfectly describe how to do something. And it's just such a sea change when you rethink the work of education.  Kendra: Definitely. And it feels really joyful, too, right? You get to be a student of your students and learn about their own thinking and be really responsive to them in the moment, which certainly provides lots of challenges for teachers. But also, I think, just a sense of genuine relationship with children and curiosity and a little bit of joy.  Mike: Definitely. So, I'm wondering if we could dig into a little bit of the whole-number work, because I think there's a bit that we were talking about with CGI, which is really the way in which you approach students, right? And the way that you listen to students for cues on what they're thinking is. But the research did reveal some ways to construct a framework for some of the things you see when children are thinking.  Kendra: So, if you read the book ‘Children's Mathematics,' you might notice or recognize some of those ideas, because CGI is one of the research bases for the Common Core state math standards. So, when you're looking through your grade-level standards and you see that they're suggesting particular problem types, number sizes, or strategies that children might use, much of that is based on the work of cognitively guided instruction, as well as other bodies of research. So, it might sound familiar when you read through the book yourself. And what CGI helps reveal is that there's a somewhat predictable sequence: That young children develop strategies for whole-number operation for working with whole-number computational problems.  Mike: Yeah. Can you talk about that, Kendra?  Kendra: Yeah. So, young children are going to start out with what we call direct modeling, where they are going to directly model the context of the problem. So, if we give them a story problem, they'll act out or model or show or gesture, to show the action of the problem. So, if it describes eating something ( makes eating sounds ), you can imagine, right, the action that goes along with eating? And we're all very familiar with it. So, they're going to show maybe, the cookies, and then cross out the ones that get eaten …  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: … right? So, they're really going to directly model the action or relationship described in the problem. And they're going to also represent all the quantities in the problem, which is different. What they learn over time is to count on or count back. So, some of the counting strategies where they learn, ‘Gosh, I don't want to make all the quantities in this problem.' It becomes too difficult, too cumbersome. And they learn that they could count on from one of the quantities or count back. So, in that cookie example, maybe there are seven cookies on a plate, and I have two of them for dessert, right? ( makes eating sounds) They go away. So, in direct modeling, they're going to show the seven cookies. They're going to remove those two cookies that get eaten, and then count how many are left. Where in counting on—so they have had lots of experiences of direct modeling—they can say, ‘Gosh, I don't really want to draw that seven. I'm going to imagine the seven … ‘  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: ‘ … And I can maybe count backwards from there.'  Mike: So, like, 7, 6, 5.  Kendra: Yeah. Right. So, I don't have to make the seven. I can just imagine it. And I keep track of those two that I'm counting back.  Mike: That totally makes sense. And as a former kindergarten and first-grade teacher, it's an amazing thing to actually see that shift happen.  Kendra: Right? And it's really specialized knowledge that teachers develop to pay attention to that shift. It's easy for everybody else to kind of miss it. But for teachers, it's a really important shift to pay attention to.  Mike: I used to say to parents, when I would try to describe this, it's something that we almost aren't conscious of being able to do. But it's a gigantic step to go from imagining a quantity as a set of ones to imagining a quantity that is a number that you can count back from or count forward from. It's a gigantic leap. Even though to us, we've forgotten what big of a leap that was because it's been so long since we took it.  Kendra: Yeah. That's one thing I love about studying children's mathematics, is, like, you get to experience that wonderment all over again …  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: … in the things that we kind of, as adults, take for granted in how we think about the world.  Mike: Yeah. I think you really clearly articulated the shift that kids make when they move from direct modeling, the action and the quantities, to that kind of shift in their thinking and also their efficiency of being able to count on or count back. Is there more to, kind of, the trajectory that kids are on from there?  Kendra: There is, yeah. So, after children have had lots of experiences to direct model, and then learn to become more efficient with that, and counting on or counting back, then they might start inventing. We call them invented algorithms, which is a fancy way to say that they think about the relationship between quantities and start putting them together and taking them apart in more efficient ways. So, they might use their understanding of groups of 10, right? So, in that example, with the cookies—seven cookies and eating two of them—I might know something about the relationship with fives …  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: … Five and two make a seven. So, they start to develop some sense of how numbers go together, and how the operations really behave. So, in addition, I can kind of add them in any order that I want to, right? So, we see these called in the Common Core standards, Strategies Based on Place Value, Properties of Operation, and the relationship between addition, subtraction, or multiplication, division.  Mike: That's super helpful to actually connect that language in Common Core to what you might see, and how that translates into, kind of, what one might read about in some of the CGI research.  Kendra: Right. It'd be lovely if we all had the exact same ( laughs ) names, wouldn't it?  Mike: Definitely. One of the questions that I suspect people who might be new to this conversation are asking is, what are the conditions that I can put in place? Or what are the things that I might, as a teacher, be able to influence that would help kids move and make some of these shifts. Knowing that the answer isn't direct instruction. I could get a kid to mimic counting on, but if they're still really thinking about numbers in the sense of a direct modeler, they haven't really shifted, right? So, my wondering is, how would you describe some of the ways that teachers can help nudge children, or kind of set up situations that are there to help kids make the shift without telling, or …  Kendra: ( chuckles)  Mike: … like, giving away the game?  Kendra: Totally. Yeah. That's one takeaway that I'm always on the lookout for when people hear about CGI and this trajectory that's somewhat predictable.  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: Let's just teach them the next strategy then, right?  Mike: Right.  Kendra: And what's important to remember is that these are called invented algorithms for a reason.  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: Because children are actually inventing mathematics. It's amazing. Kindergartners are inventing mathematics. And so, our role is really to create the right opportunities for them to do that important work. And like you're saying, when they're ready for the next ideas that they're building on their existing knowledge, rather than us kind of coming in and trying to create that artificially.  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: So, again, like, Liz and Tom really kind of taught us to be students of our students as well as students of teachers.  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: So, what we've learned over time … some of the things that teachers have found really productive for supporting students to kind of move through this trajectory, to create increasingly efficient strategies, is really about thinking about carefully choosing the problems that we've put in front of students.  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: So, paying attention to the context. Is it familiar to them? Is it reasonable for the real world? Are we helping kids see that mathematics is all around them.  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: Paying attention to the quantities that we select. So, if we want them to start thinking about those relationships with five and 10, or as they get older with hundreds and thousands, that we're intentional about the quantities that we choose for those problems.  Mike: Right.  Kendra: And then, of course we know that students learn a lot from not just us, but their relationships and their discussions with their classmates. So, really orchestrating classroom discussions, thinking about choosing students to work together so that they can both learn from one another, and really just finding ways to help students connect their current thinking with the new ideas that we know are on the horizon for them.  Mike: I would love for you to say a little bit more about number choice. That is such a powerful strategy that I think is underutilized. So, I'm wondering if you could just talk about being strategic around the number choices that you offer to kids. Can you say more about that?  Kendra: Sure! It's going to depend on grade level, of course, right?  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: Because they're going to be working with very different quantities early in elementary and then later on … One thing I would say, across all of the grade levels, is to not limit students whenever possible. So, sometimes we want to give problems that kids are really comfortable with, and we know they're going to be successful. But if I'm thinking of how they develop more efficient strategies, sometimes the growth comes in making it a little tricky. So, giving quantities that are just a little bit beyond where they're counting as young children, so they develop the need to learn that counting sequence. Or, as we're working with older students, if we know that particular multiplication facts are less familiar to students. Giving them that nudge by creating story context, where they can really make sense of the action of the relationship that's happening in it, but maybe choosing that times seven that we know has been tricky for kids, right?  Mike: Yep.  Kendra: So, I would just encourage people to not shy away from problems that we know pose some challenge to students. That's actually where a lot of the meat and the rigor happens. And, but then we also want to provide support inside of those, right? So, working with a partner.  Mike: Definitely. Kendra: Or making sure they have access to those counting charts. That's one thing I would say across grade levels.  Mike: Yeah. So, you made me think of something else. It's fascinating to have this conversation, Kendra, 'cause it reminds me of all the things that I had to learn over time. And I think one of the things that I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about is, the types of problems and how the problem that you choose for a given group of students might influence whether they're direct modeling or they're counting on or whether they're using invented algorithms. Because I think, for me, one of the things that it took a while to make sense, is that the progression isn't necessarily linear, right? Like, if I'm counting on in a certain context, that doesn't mean I'm counting on in all contexts or direct modeling or what have you. So, I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about problem types and now how those influence what things students sometimes show us.  Kendra: Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. When we describe, kind of, that trajectory of strategies, it sounds really nice and tidy and organized and like it is predictable in some ways. But like you're saying, it also depends on the kind of problem and the number size that we're putting in front of children. So that trajectory kind of iterates again and again throughout elementary school. So, as we pose more complex problem types … so, for example, the cookies problem where I have seven cookies, I eat two of them and the result is what's at the end of the story, right? The cookies left over.  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: If I now make that problem, I have some cookies on a plate. I ate two of them, and I have five left over. All the kindergarten teachers, actually all the elementary school teachers …  Mike: ( laughs ) Yes.  Kendra: … can automatically recognize that's going to be a more tricky problem, right?  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: Where do I start!? Especially if I'm direct modeling, right? We know they start and follow the exact action of the story.  Mike: Absolutely ( chuckles ).  Kendra: So, as we pose more complex problem types, you're right. You're going to see that they might use less efficient strategies because they're really making sense. They're like, ‘Wait, what's the relationship that's happening in this story? Where do I begin? Where are the cookies at the beginning, middle, and end of this story?' So, we see that happen throughout elementary school. So, it's not that direct modeling is for kindergartners. And that invented algorithms are for fifth grade. It's that as new ideas get introduced, as we make problems more complex, maybe increasing the number size or now we're working with fractions and decimals …  Mike: Uh-hm. Kendra: We see this happen all over again. Kids begin with direct modeling to make sense of the situation. Then they build on that and get a little bit more efficient with some counting kinds of strategies. And then over time with lots of practice with that new problem type, those new numbers, um, they develop those invented algorithms again.  Mike: So, this makes me think of something else, Kendra. How would you describe the role of representation in this process? That could mean manipulatives that students choose to use. It could mean things that they choose to draw, visual models. How does representation play in the process?  Kendra: Yeah. So, oftentimes I hear people say, ‘This student used cubes. That was their strategy.' Or ‘This student used a drawing. That was their strategy.' And that's really not enough information to know the mathematical work that that child is doing. Did they use cubes as a way to count on?  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: Are they keeping track of only one of the quantities but using cubes to do so? Are they doing a drawing that actually represents groups of 10? And they're using ideas about place value inside of it, which is different than if they're just drawing by ones, right? So, there's lots of detail inside of those representations that's important to pay attention to.  Mike: Yeah. I'm thinking about one of my former kindergartners. I remember that I had some work that she had done in the fall, and then I had another bit of work that she had done in the spring. And the fall was this ( chuckles ) very detailed drawing of, like, a hundred circles. And then in the spring, she was unitizing, right? She had a bunch of circles and then within [them] had labeled that each of those were 10. And it just struck me, like, ‘Wow, that is a really tangible vision of how she was drawing in both cases.' But her representation told a really different story about what she understood about math, about numbers, about the base 10 system.  Kendra: Right. And those might be very different starting points. As you, the teacher, you walk over and you see those two different kinds of drawings …  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: … your conversation or your prompt for them … your next step for them might be pretty different.  Mike: Absolutely.  Kendra: Even though they're both drawing.  Mike: Yeah. Well, let me ask you this, 'cause I think I struggled with this a little bit when I first started really thinking about CGI. I had gone to a training and left incredibly inspired and was excited. And one of the things that I was trying to reconcile at that time is, like, I do have a curriculum resource that I'm using, and I wonder how many teachers sometimes struggle with that? I've learned these ideas about how children think, how to listen … what are some of the teacher moves I can make? And I'm also trying to integrate that with a tool that I'm using as a part of my school or my district. So, what are your thoughts about that?  Kendra: That makes a lot of sense. And I think that happens a lot of time in professional learning, where we learn a new set of ideas and then we're wrestling with how do they connect with the things I'm already doing? How do I use them in my own classroom? So, I really appreciate that challenge. I guess one way I like to think about it is that the trajectory that CGI helps us know about how children develop ideas over time is a little bit like a roadmap that I can use regardless of the curricular materials that I have in front of me. And it helps me understand what is on the horizon for that child. What's next for them and their learning? Depending on the kind of strategies that they're using and the kinds of problems that we're hoping to be giving them access to in that grade level, I can look at my curricular materials in front of me and use that roadmap to help me navigate it. So, we were talking about number selection. So, I might take that lens as I look at the curriculum in front of me and think about, ‘Are these the right numbers to be using? What will my students do with the problem …  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: … that is suggested in my curricular materials?' To anticipate how my discussion is going to go and what kinds of strategies I might want to highlight in my discussion. So, I really like to think of it as the professional knowledge that teachers need in order to make sense of their curriculum materials and make informed decisions about how to use those really purposefully.  Mike: Yeah. The other thing that strikes me, that I'm connecting to what you said earlier, is that I could also look at the problem and think about, ‘Does the context actually connect with what I know about my children? Can I somehow shift the context in a way that makes it more accessible to them while still maintaining the structure, the problem, the mathematics, and such?'  Kendra: Right. Yeah. Are there small revisions I can make? Because, uh, I don't envy curriculum writers ( chuckles ) at all because there's no way you can write the exact right problem for every day, for every child across the country. So, as teachers, we have to make really smart decisions and make those really manageable. Because teachers are very busy people.  Mike: Sure.  Kendra: But those manageable, kind of, tweaks or revisions to make it really connected to our students lives.  Mike: Yeah. I think the other thing that's hitting me is that, when you've started to make sense of the progression that children go through, it's a little bit like putting on a pair of glasses that allow you to see things slightly differently and understand that skill of noticing. That's universal. It doesn't necessarily come and go with a curriculum. It's something that's important. Knowing your students is always going to be something that's important for teachers, regardless of the curriculum materials they've got.  Kendra: Yep. That's right.  Mike: So, here's my, I think my last question. And it's really, it's a resource one. So, if I'm a listener who's interested in learning more about CGI, if this is really my first go at understanding the ideas, what would you recommend for someone who's just getting started thinking about this and maybe is walking away thinking, ‘Gosh, I'd like to learn more.' Kendra: Sure. Well, I mentioned the whole laundry list of great texts that you can dig into more. So, ‘Children's Mathematics' being the one on whole-number operation across grade levels. I find that, like, preschool through first- or second-grade teachers have found ‘Young Children's Mathematics' incredibly impactful. It helps connect ideas about counting in quantity with these ideas about problem-solving and operation. And then kind of connects them and helps us think about how to support students to develop those really important early ideas.  Mike: Uh-hm.  Kendra: Anybody who I have talked to that has read ‘Extending Children's Mathematics: Fractions and Decimals' has found it incredibly impactful.  Mike: I will add myself to that list, Kendra. It blew my mind.  Kendra: Yeah, us, too! Everybody who read it was like, ‘Ohhh, I see now.' It points out a lot of really practical ways for us to pay attention. It offers a trajectory much like whole-number about how children develop ideas and also kind of suggests some problems that will help us support students as they're developing those ideas. So, [I] definitely recommend those. And then, ‘Thinking Mathematically' is another great text that helps us connect arithmetic and algebra, as we're thinking about how to make sure that students are set up for success as they start thinking more algebraically. And [it] digs into a little bit of—I talked about young children inventing mathematics—I think even further describes the ways that they invent important properties of operation that can be really interesting to read about.  Mike: That's fantastic. Kendra, thank you so much for joining us. It's really been a pleasure talking to you today.  Kendra: Thanks for having me.  Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability.  © 2022 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org

Rounding Up Season 1 | Episode 3 – Recording Student Thinking During a Mathematics Discussion Guest: Dr. Nicole Garcia Mike Wallus: If you're anything like me, learning to record students' mathematical thinking might best be described as on-the-job training, which meant trial and error, and a lot of practice. Our guest on today's podcast is Nicole Garcia, the co-author of an article, published in Mathematics Teacher, that explores the practice of recording student thinking, and offers insights and some principles for making them as productive as possible. Welcome to the podcast, Nicole. Nicole Garcia: Thank you for having me. Mike: So you and your co-authors start the article by acknowledging that representing and recording student thinking—when you're in the moment, in a public space, with students—it's challenging, even for veteran teachers. And I suspect that most teachers would agree and appreciate the recognition that this is a skill that takes time and it takes practice. What makes this work challenging and why is it worth investing time to get better at it? Nicole: Well, so I think you said a lot in your question that points to why this is really difficult work, right? First of all, it's in the moment. We can't predict what students are going to say. We can do some anticipatory work. We might have guesses. And as we move along in our careers, we might have gathered some really good guesses about what students might have to say, but you never can tell in the moment. So unexpected things come up. Students' phrasing can be really different from time to time, even if we're familiar with an idea. And we're also standing in front of a room full of children, and we're trying to manage a lot in the moment—while we're listening, while we're interpreting those ideas. And then we're trying to figure out: What do we even write down from this mass of ideas that was shared with us? So that's a lot to coordinate, to manage, to think about in the moment. But it's really critical work because part of our goal as mathematics teachers is to build collective knowledge, to support children in being able to listen to, make sense of, interpret one another's ideas, to learn from each other, and to build on one another. And so if we want to make that happen, we need to support making students' ideas accessible to everyone in the room. Mike: Hmm. Nicole: And listening is only one part of that, right? If you think about what it takes to make sense of ideas, it takes multiple representations—those are things that we're working on in math. So we need the kids in classrooms to have access to the words that children are speaking. We need them to have access to visual representations of the ideas that are being shared. We need them to have access to the ways that we typically record those things in mathematics—the symbolic notation that we typically use. And we need that to happen all at once if we want kids to be able to unpack, make sense of, and work with others' ideas. So it's really important work. And I think it's worth investing the time in to get better at this because of the power of having children learn from one another and feel the value of their mathematical ideas. Mike: You know, as you were speaking, part of what I was doing is making a mental checklist from principles to actions. And I felt like, check one: asking purposeful questions. Check two: connecting mathematical representations. I mean, as you describe this, so much of what we see as really productive practice is wrapped up in this event that takes place when teachers get together and listen to students and try to capture those ideas.  Nicole: And that capturing is really important if we want those ideas to stay with us, right? Like, I think about the number of times that I've been in a discussion with a group of people—it may have been in a class, it may have been in another space—and the whole thing happens. And when I leave, sometimes I wonder, ‘What just happened? What did we think about together? What ideas did we engage in?' And I can't hold onto them. And recording on the board in the public space offers an opportunity for those ideas to stay with us, for us to hold onto them, for us to revisit and come back to them. So it's critical for continued learning and mathematical growth.  Mike: Absolutely. So this particular part of the article that you wrote—as I was reading it, and you were describing the challenge of recording student thinking during a discussion—this particular statement really struck me, and I'm just going to read it as it was in the article. ‘The thinking being recorded is not the teacher's own, requiring the teacher to set aside their own strategies and interpretations of the math work, to focus on representing student thinking.' I would love if you could talk about why you felt like it was so important to explicitly call this out in the article.  Nicole: Yeah. So I think that there are a couple of things here that are important. One is that, as a teacher, you're thinking always about the trajectory of your lesson, the trajectory of student learning, where you want to be and steer. And so a lot of times, when we're listening, we're listening for something in particular, right? We have a plan in mind, we have an idea, we know where we want go, and we're listening really carefully for a catchphrase, a vocabulary word—something that we recognize, that we can pick up and pull into the discussion and move forward, right?…and march on, and accomplish our lesson. And a lot of times that kind of natural way of listening is not aligned with what students are actually trying to communicate, because the ways that children express themselves—in particular around mathematics—are really different than the ways that adults, who know math well, express their ideas about mathematics. So there's a lot to hear in the language that they're using, in the trajectory of their talk, that's both difficult to follow and difficult to figure out what the big idea is that they're communicating. And when we're listening for our own understanding, our own ways of working, our own strategies, we often miss what children are actually bringing to the discussion, to the conversation. We miss their thinking.  I think about the number of times where I've been a student in class and I've said something and the teacher rephrases it in the way that they really wish that I would have said the thing.  Mike: Yes.  Nicole: And it's not, like, it's not even my idea anymore, but you kind of nod and you go along with it. And so I think, you know, as a teacher, you get those cues that, yes, you did just rephrase what the kid said. They just said, ‘OK.' And you record that thing and you move on. And so I think reflection—checking back in with children about whether or not you heard their idea, whether or not the representation that you're putting on the board actually matches what they were thinking about—is really, really critical. Because it isn't your thinking. It's the child's thinking and we want to make sure that that's what we're representing. Mike: Yeah. I read this and I will confess that a part of me thought back to the points in time when I was teaching kindergarten and first grade. And I suspect anyone who's taught and tried to record students' thinking has been in a spot where you have kind of a pathway that you're thinking the learning will follow. You have an idea of how the big ideas might roll themselves out.  Nicole: Um-hm.  Mike: And I think what I found myself thinking is, there are certainly many, many times where I felt like I was true to student's ideas, but I was really conscious that there were definitely points where, what I heard and what I represented differed, probably because I was thinking to myself, ‘Gosh, I really want this model to kind of come forward.' And the truth was, the kids weren't taking me there and I was trying to force it. I guess what I'm saying is, it really caused me to think back on my own practice and really kind of reconsider—even when I'm doing professional learning with other adults and children—the need to listen, as opposed to kind of have the path sketched out in my own mind.  Nicole: Well, it's really difficult to do, because sometimes as a teacher, you really do need the lesson to go in a particular direction. There are all kinds of constraints around teaching. And I think what's important is knowing that you've made that decision. ( laughs ) Right? Because sometimes you might. You might…  Mike: Yes!  Nicole: …rephrase it a particular way because that's the move that you need to make in that moment. And I think that sometimes that can be OK. We need to give ourselves permission as teachers to make the best choices for our whole class and the students whose ideas are being shared in the moment. But I think knowing that that's what you're doing is really important,  Mike: Right. Like, it's a conscious decision to say, ‘I've heard that. I'm going to take this in a different direction.' Rather than just imagining, ‘I've heard that. I'm going to represent it.' And not kind of questioning whether what's being represented is the student's thinking or your own thinking.  Nicole: Right. Or even better, making the decision that, ‘I heard, what that child said. And I'm going to say back to them,' for example, ‘so I think what I heard you say is…bop, bop, bop. Can I try an idea out?', and actually sharing the idea that you have on tap. Or saying something like, ‘You know, I've heard some of my students in the past say something really similar. Can I share that idea with you? And let's see what's similar or different.' So thinking about how can you get that idea out there, that you really wanted to record, that the student didn't say, in a way that isn't totally disingenuous—pretending you heard something that you didn't hear.  Mike: Right. You're kind of acknowledging that they said something and you're…. It's powerful; the language you used is really subtle. But it's essentially saying, ‘I've got something that I'd like to contribute that your idea made me think about,' or…  Nicole: Um-hm.  Mike: …that you want to also put out there. And I think that subtlety is important. Because as you were describing that feeling of, ‘I said something. Teacher revoiced it in a way that was totally different,' and kind of the bad aftertaste that that left. Nicole: Yeah.  Mike: You know, that subtle ask—of the child—for permission, really kind of shifts that dynamic.  Nicole: It's saying, ‘I value your idea and let's consider this other idea.' It's OK for teachers to put ideas out in the space.  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: But acknowledging that that isn't what you heard and you're going to record this other thing, or maybe you record both of them…  Mike: Right!  Nicole: …and talk about the similarities and differences.  Mike: So I'd love to shift just a little bit and talk about the role that recording can play in developing students' mathematical vocabulary. And I'm wondering if you could talk about the ways that recording can help students make connections between their informal language and the more formal mathematical vocabulary that we want them to start to be able to use. Can you talk a little bit about what that might look like?  Nicole: Yeah. So I think that there are a couple of ideas to be thinking about. One is that we actually know a lot about how children develop vocabulary. We know that that's a progression and that students need opportunities to play around with ideas, to have something to hang that vocabulary word on.  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: Once they have the kind of core idea and they have some informal language—some way to describe that idea—that's the prime place to be able to introduce the formal mathematical vocabulary. They're able to make connections to that big picture, that core idea that they've come up with. They have some informal language to go around with it. And now they have a real name for it—the formal mathematical name for it. We also know that one of the ways that students remember and are able to recall—and use appropriately—vocabulary is by having a visual representation that goes along with that mathematical vocabulary.  Mike: Hmm.  Nicole: So one way that representations and recordings can support students in learning that vocabulary is first, by having them build some representations that go with that vocabulary word, but then also having those labels on the representations that make their way onto our boards.  Mike: Ah, yep.  Nicole: In addition, you know, when we do things like dual labeling, um, where maybe in our classroom space, we've named something with someone's name, right? As we're beginning to talk about an idea, we might call it Diego's idea, Diego's strategy. Then when it makes our way onto the board, we can label it with ‘Diego's strategy' and the formal mathematical name for it so students are able to connect the of things. But even if it's not a student's name as the name of the strategy, there's lots of informal language that students bring to mathematical ideas. They have to have a way to talk about things. And so we can dual label those ideas on our board to help students make that connection and to let them walk between using their informal language and using that formal mathematical language, and being OK with that.  Mike: So just to go back… Describe dual labeling again, because I think I've got an idea of it, but I want to make sure in my own mind I've captured that correctly. How does that work?  Nicole: Let's imagine that we have a strategy—a student has shared a subtraction strategy in our discussion, and I've represented that strategy on the board, say, using a number line.  Mike: Okay.  Nicole: And, say, the kids are calling it scooting—they're scooting the numbers to make this subtraction problem. So I might actually write on my board, like, on the left hand side of the strategy ‘scooting,'…  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: …and then on the right hand side, label it ‘shifting the numbers' or whatever our formal mathematical language is going to be for our classroom. So we have both of those things labeled on top of the strategy. And I might even draw a double sided arrow between the two to help…  Mike: Oh! OK. Nicole: …[undecipherable] that the strategy that's there has these two names and I can use those names interchangeably. But over time, we get to a place where we're calling it by its formal name. And kids also have the idea that, ‘oh, that's the one that's the scooting strategy.' They have their own name that they gave that idea. Mike: That is really helpful. And I think the example you shared really kind of shows how dual labeling kind of progresses and there's almost kind of a fade out at a certain point. Not that you're purposely not permitting kids to use ‘scooting,' but that a certain point you're kind of fading and you're starting to use the more formal name. They can use it,…  Nicole: Um-hm.  Mike: …but that you're really kind of trying to help them make a transition to the formal vocabulary.  Nicole: Um-hm. And if you think about, you know, kids are really used to using multiple names for things.  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: They have nicknames that they use at home,…  Mike: Yep.  Nicole: …they have their home name, they have their school name, they have their friend name. There are lots of different labels on the same kind of thing. So that's a natural progression of language for them. And it doesn't cause complications to have, like, these multiple names for this idea. And we can shift toward using the formal language once everybody has that tied up.  Mike: Yep. So as I was preparing for this interview, and even as I was reading the article, I found myself thinking about my life as an elementary school teacher. And I think what I found myself thinking was, is that I learned how to facilitate and record math discussions—like a lot of folks—trial and error and a heck of a lot of practice. And I think what I really appreciated about what you and your co-authors put together is that you actually laid out some principles for recording that support mathematical understanding. And I'm wondering if you could just unpack some of the principles that you think are important, Nicole.  Nicole: Yeah. So as we… as we were working on these principles, we were trying to think about, like, what are the big ideas of what gets recorded, right?, and how we record in a classroom. What are the big things that we want to make sure get attention in that work? And so we kind of organized under three big umbrellas of principles, one being around advancing mathematical ideas. Because the goal of discussion in mathematics is to build ideas together and to move the mathematics forward using student ideas. So when we think about what gets recorded, we want to record in ways that are helping us build those mathematical ideas together. So in that area, we'd really be thinking about recording the core ideas, deciding, like: What's important enough to get on the board? What do I want to make sure gets up there that's going to help push people's thinking forward? And then at the same time, thinking about: What's the right level of detail?  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: Sometimes you look at a board recording… If you walked out of the room and you came back in and you looked at it, you would have no idea what happened…  Mike: ( laughs )  Nicole: …what had gone on, right?  Mike: Yes!  Nicole: Like, there's not enough there to really, like, get a sense of what happened. But sometimes there's so much there that it's a jumble and you can't discern, like: What's important here? So that ‘just right' space of managing the detail—so there's enough that you can make sense of it when you come back the next day, you get what happened; it's enough to prompt your memory, but it's not overwhelming—um, is really important because we want kids to be building on those ideas over time. So we want those recordings to be in that kind of level of detail.  And then thinking about that arrangement. Where am I going to put things so that I can help students make connections between the ideas that have been shared? Right? Do I want kids' strategies to be next to each other? Are there particular strategies that, if I stack them on top of each other, kids are going to be able to see different kinds of connections,…  Mike: Um-hm. Nicole: …similarities, or differences? Like, where they are in relation to each other, if you think about how we make sense of space, matters.  Mike: Yes.  Nicole: So that was… that's one kind of bucket. A second bucket is really respecting students as sense makers. And this comes back to what we were talking about earlier, with really paying attention to: What were students trying to communicate? So, ‘Did I actually record what the student said it or did I write down what I wish they had said?' But trying to stay true to: What was the core of that student's idea? And am I representing that correctly? But then also adding enough detail so that the other students in the class can figure out what that student's idea was about. And we can do that through questioning, but part of that has to come out in the recording as well, because we want that record to be like the full representation of the ideas that students are communicating. And then labeling those ideas so that we're able to talk about them easier, right?…  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: …that we're not just like pointing to a general space, but we have some language, we have some vocabulary, we have some kind of label to be able to talk easily across those ideas.  Mike: I had a follow up that I wanted to ask you. So, again, I'm paraphrasing, but one of the things that really stood out for me in the way that you unpacked the principles was: Our recording should show the thinking behind the idea rather than the steps in the solution alone. I would love for you to expand on that a bit.  Nicole: Yeah. So the thing that we're trying to get out when students are sharing strategies in class, when they're sharing the ideas in class, is in some ways the generalizability—to use my big math vocabulary. We want to get to what is the core of the idea that they're sharing that can be used across multiple kinds of problems in lots of different ways. And so recording just the steps that get followed, may show—or it may not—the steps that somebody followed for that particular problem, but doesn't show the thinking that could be used to solve other similar or different kinds of problems. Right? So we will want to be able to record in a way that gets to the heart of the thinking. So if you think about a student, for example, using counting up to solve a subtraction problem,…  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: …then I might think about what's important are the steps that a student is taking to count up. So they're either thinking about it on a number line and they're hopping along the number line to count from one number to another. And so on the board, I would actually want to record those hops because that's the underlying idea—is that we're looking at the repeated unit distance between those two numbers.  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: OK? If a student is counting up using their fingers,…  Mike: Um-hm. Nicole: …then I might want to actually record a hand on the board and the count that the student is doing, so that other students in the class are able to try out that strategy, use that strategy, and think about when it's useful. But if all I've recorded on the board, are the words ‘counting up' and then the problem that they solved, that doesn't necessarily support other people in being able to try out that strategy or that idea, or even think about when would it be useful or not.  Mike: That's super helpful. I love the idea of generalizability. If I've done recording well, allows other kids to have access to the strategy that's being highlighted, rather than simply putting together the steps that showed how a person came to this individual answer, at this particular task, at this particular time. That's a really helpful clarification, I think—in my mind.  Nicole: If you even think about things like annotation and the power that annotation on a recording can have. And we think about the U.S. standard algorithm for addition,…  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: …where students are… they're adding and when they get a number that's greater than nine, they're making groups and carrying that group, right?, to the next place value. If we're actually annotating that process with what each of the numbers means as we're doing that work together, that can really support students in continuing to make meaning. I think that one of the things that often happens is, we make meaning when we're introducing the algorithm, we do some work together. Students are really in a place where they're understanding place value, they're understanding making groups, they get what that recording means. And then we kind of say, ‘Great, then we're just going to record this way from now moving forward.' And we continue to do that recording without the kind of reinforcement about, again, what are… what are we saying these numbers mean? What are we actually doing here? And so we move from meaning toward this recording without meaning?  Mike: Sure. That absolutely makes sense.  Nicole: Very quickly for children. And then, you know, too… I know that, for example, my fifth grade teachers would say that oftentimes their kids come to them and… and can't explain what's happening when kids do that addition. They do the work—they know how to do the work—but they can't say what it is that they're doing. Right? And so annotation can really support that, that remembering of what have we…? What kind of collective understanding have we come to?  Mike: Sure. That totally makes sense. So I wanted to ask you a bit about guidance that you'd offer to teachers. I suspect there's a fair number of people who are listening, who are really thinking about their own practice and are wondering: What steps might I take as a teacher—or maybe within the team of folks that I work with—to really try to attend to the principals and the practices that we've talked about? What's your sense of how teachers can support one another in, kind of, practicing the principles that that we've unpacked today?  Nicole: So I think there are lots of options for what it might look like to focus on and practice this work together in a teaching community. I think one way that we talked about in the article—and it's not the only way—is using video. There are lots of videos that are available on YouTube, on TeacherTube, etc., of classrooms where people are leading discussions, are recording student thinking. There are lots of videos of student thinking out there where—in a pretty short amount of time—I could, with my peers, watch this video and practice recording—either on a board, on a chart paper, on paper in front of me—recording what I'm hearing from students. And then afterwards comparing our recordings together and talking across them. What are the features that each of us has picked up on? In what ways were we in line with what the student was sharing? Where are there differences in how we interpreted what a student was sharing? And that's a pretty quick activity. I can find a five minute video. We can do that work together, talk about it in, like, tops 20 minutes, really, to do that kind of activity together. We can also do work where we're visiting each other's classrooms.  Mike: That's what you had me thinking, Nicole.  Nicole: Yeah  Mike: Yeah, absolutely!  Nicole: I can go to somebody's classroom. I can—on my lap—have my piece of paper where I'm trying to record as students are talking. And after that lesson, debrief with a teacher that I'm observing, about, ‘What was it that you decided to record? How did you make that decision? Here's what I had.' And really talk across those ideas because it's small changes in practice over time. This is an overwhelming set of work, this recording work. And it's going to get better by increments, but it's going to take practice, talking with colleagues, and really coming back to these principles and thinking about: Am I adhering to these things? Where is it that I really want to work and I improve my practice? Because I would encourage people to pick one—to start with—that you really want to get better at and focus on that one.  Mike: Yeah. I think what's powerful about this too, is that I would imagine you could certainly do some of the things that you described if you were the only teacher at a grade level.  Nicole: Yeah.  Mike: But gosh, when you put other people together and think about the ability to help one another raise your consciousness about why you made a particular decision or why you chose to go in a certain direction with a representation… That's kind of that intricacy where teachers can really help one another. I mean, we are keen observers of behavior. That's… ( laughs ) that's kind of the bread and butter of a lot of what we're doing when we're talking about differentiation. It's really powerful to think that teachers could help one another build their craft around this.  Nicole: Um-hm. Well, and it's… it's a really interesting practice, I think, in that there isn't one right way. ( laughs ) Right? There isn't a right way to represent a particular idea. Um, there are lots of really good features of different kinds of recordings, and so there's lots to discuss and… and a lot to learn from each other. And your… your comment about the being alone had me thinking about the work that you can do just by studying student work…  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: …and thinking about: How are students inclined to represent their particular ideas and how might I translate that into how I represent things for the class on the board? Because students do a lot of their own translation of their thinking into representations on their homework. We can pull student work sets. You know, if we look at Inside Mathematics, there are lots of student work site, sets up there on that site that you can pull and study and look at how children are inclined to show their thinking.  Mike: So I'm going to back up and just ask if you can identify and source that resource that you just shared about Inside Mathematics. Would you… would you mind—for people who might not be familiar—just unpacking what that is and where folks can find it?  Nicole: Yeah. So, Inside Mathematics is a really great resource for teachers. It came out of a project funded by the Noyce Foundation. The website is insidemathematics.org, and it's currently housed at the Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin.  Mike: Gotcha.  Nicole: Great resources for teachers. There are videos of lessons. There are problems. There are assessments. There are lots of resources up there, but one of my favorite resources is that, with each of the problems, they have student work samples. And so you can really see a lot of student thinking inside of those.  Mike: That's fantastic. You really answered my last question, which was going to be: For folks who, again, are listening to this conversation and thinking about steps, they might take… resources that you would recommend to someone who's really wanting to think more deeply about representation and the practice of representing student thinking.  Nicole: So I think the big three are ones that we've covered and that would be visiting your colleagues classrooms—  Mike: Um-hm.  Nicole: …whether in person or via video—depending on what the setup of your school is; visiting sites of video, right?, so going to YouTube, TeacherTube—seeing how people are representing that work and then comparing how you might choose to represent that work; and really digging into student representations of their own thinking.  Mike: That's fantastic. Nicole, thank you so much for joining us today. It has absolutely been a pleasure to talk to you.  Nicole: Thank you so much for having me. It's been really fun.  Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability.  © 2022 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org

Letitia Shelton, founder of City Women in Toowoomba, Queensland calls in from Australia to discuss the ministry God gave her more than 20 years ago. City Women goes into strip clubs and brothels in Australia, ministers to the sexually abused, and leads a campaign called "A City Free from Porn" that includes billboards. From Letitia: “If you want to find Jesus, you go to the broken. I think I've learned more from them than from a trillion sermons.” "We (the church) are going to have to step out and take some high level risks." “I'm just so thankful that God saved me from a boring Christian life.” Podcast Transcript: ANNOUNCER: This radio program is PG-13. Parents strongly cautioned - some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13. Jesus's mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound. For those who want more than status-quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung: Mike Genung, Host, Blazing Grace Radio: Hey, Mike Genung here, and welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. A couple of months ago, I ran into a news story on an Australian news website, and the title was "Disruptive Women Leave the Church World to Reach the Brokenhearted", and that caught me. I'll read you a couple of paragraphs from it. It says, "You might think the last place you'd find a Christian anti-porn campaigner is in a brothel. But Letitia Shelton regularly visits the brothels and strip clubs in her hometown in Queensland, Australia. In fact, she's been visiting sex workers for years. For the past 22 years, Letitia Shelton has been leading a radical movement. It's a movement made up of Christian women from different denominations who, together, are ministering in the same way Jesus did, moving beyond the four walls of the Church to serve those in need in their local communities". They quote Letitia, saying, "If you want to find Jesus, you go to the broken. I've learned more from them than from a trillion servants". We're blessed to have today Letitia calling in from Australia. Letitia, thank you so much for doing this. Welcome to the program. Letitia Shelton, Founder, City Women: Hello, Mike. Thank you for having me. Mike: So I want to invite you to share your story, stories about your ministry, and what you see there. Letitia: Well, that's a huge open-ended question. [laughs] We've been on a journey for the last 20 years. How do we, together as churches, reach our city? How do we pastor a city? We've got to do these things together. We always say, "It takes a city-wide church to win a city-wide battle". So 20 years ago, when we became aware of some of the issues in our city, I thought, "We've got to work together as churches." The biggest sin in the city is the disunity of the Church. The most dysfunctional family in a city is the Church. We compete. We don't join together. We work against each other. So we've been on a journey of "How do we not only move into our community, but how do we work together in that way?". So I started the organization "City Women" 20 years ago to mobilize women across the churches to work together into our city. So not only have we been involved in strip clubs and brothels, but we've been in our schools. We've been helping refugees, kids in care, pregnant women, women on drugs, the whole range. So it's just been an exciting journey. Mike: The article mentions where you took 20 girls away to the mountains and five of the girls were sitting around a table and sharing about [being] sexually abused. Talk about that. Letitia: Yeah, that was one of the catalysts that really kicked it off for me. That was our very first camp - back in 2001, would you believe? - after the mayor of our city had challenged us to get outside church and do something for the young people of our city. So we took away 20 girls up to the mountains, just 2 hours from where I live, and had these five girls sitting around the table. On the second night they're still sharing their abuse stories, and so it was, I guess, a bit of an epiphany for me that night, realizing, "What the heck are we doing?" We are so busy inside our church, but we've got to get outside and move the Church into the pain. I think quite often we expect the world to come into the Church but that's not going to happen... it certainly won't happen in Australia. People don't come just to do religious duties. So it's been a continued journey of, "How do we mobilize people?" and hearing those girls stories that night certainly woke me up to the fact that we have got to be a lot more, I guess, on the front-foot and running into the pain, instead of expecting it to come to us. Mike: Here in the US, we see numbers of two-thirds of Christian men in the church, and 30% of women in the church, viewing pornography. 74% of youth viewing porn, and sexting is blowing up in our youth. What do you see there in Australia? Letitia: Yeah, exactly the same. It's a worldwide culture, unfortunately. We've all got access to the same mobile phones, don't we? Have access to the same garbage. I've just been in a little country called Fiji, little Pacific island off the east coast of Australia. Population is only a million people, but they rate fourth highest in the world for googling porn. And 64% of their nation attends church! So these same issues are everywhere, unfortunately, because it's a global culture that are seeking to destroy lives. So we decided in our city about five years ago that we would address the issue of pornography, and we launched a campaign called "A City Free From Pornography". Now that might seem like a bit of a crazy title, or an impossible goal, which in the natural it probably is, but the kingdom of God coming to my city looks like a city free from porn. I think it's important that we declare something that is different. We've been just wanting to highlight and really educate our city on the harms of porn, especially the parents. I think so often they don't have a clue what is going on, and kids are into it, but parents don't know how to speak to their kids. So part of our campaign has been to do billboards, which happens around a lot of cities. But we've done radio ads, television ads, school presentations, church talks... and I'm just actually, today, heading off right up to the top of Australia to cycle my bike 1000 km - which I don't know how many miles that is, sorry - but I'm raising money to get a book into homes in my city. It's a book on how to speak to your kids about pornography. So I'm doing this cycling trip and I've raised $107,000 so far, and we've been able to deliver 19,000 books into homes. So trying to get on the front-foot and give parents of our city a resource. Even though it's available online and they could get it for free, I just want a hard copy of a resource that fits in their home, maybe for years, and makes them think about pornography and what it's doing to their children and how to speak to their kids. So we're just having a go and doing what we can with the limited resources we have. But yeah, it's fun. Mike: What we see here is that kids are getting smartphones as early as age six, and then we have people come people come to us for help, and it's a parent and they're saying, "My nine or ten year old is addicted to porn, what do I do?" So that connects with what you're saying about parents haven't gotten a clue. Is that what you're seeing there? Letitia: Absolutely, yeah. And again, parents parenting is hard enough without having to keep up to date with the latest pornography, and where it's coming from, and how it's affecting our kids. But unfortunately, you can't parent without talking about pornography these days, and it's damaging effects. Our Australian government surveyed Australian parents, and 77% of parents believe it's their job to speak to their kids about pornography, but less than half actually do, just because they don't know what to say or how to say it. So we're trying to take away any excuses by putting a resource into their hands. So anyway, I'll be cycling for the next two weeks. Mike: You must be in great shape then. That's 650 miles on our side. Letitia: Okay, you've done a good job. I might be by the end of it, because I've been overseas the last month. I have some limited training. But anyway, I hope for the best. Mike: So tell us what you encounter in the way of spiritual warfare. Letitia: Yeah, there's always opposition, but I've got to be honest, a lot of things... I don't know, I just feel the grace of God in a lot of what we do, and we experience a lot of favor. Yes, there's opposition and I've got some great prayer teams, but I don't make it a big focus. You just got to keep going and keep walking, all that God has called you for, the long term. We've been at this for over 20 years now and we're not going away anytime soon, so it just takes a long term obedience in the same direction, doesn't it? Mike: Yes, it does. Letitia: Making sure you got good prayer teams, you walk in wisdom, you have good people surrounded by you. But I think as we've worked together as churches, the Bible says God commands a blessing, and you really experience a different grace and joy that you don't when you're just doing it on your own. I think a lot of our spiritual warfare comes because we're trying to fight alone, and the Enemy can pick us off easily. But fighting together is God's way, and it brings a lot of fruit and joy in that. So I don't want to make light of the work of the Enemy, but he's not my number one problem. Mike: Well, when I go and speak, sometimes I'll ask the audience to raise their hand if they meet with another believer consistently for the purpose of prayer and support. Usually only about 15% put their hands up. Letitia: Yeah. Mike: So that goes back to what we see here, is most Christians are isolated. Letitia: Yep. No, they can be. Most churches are isolated, and most ministries are isolated. When you think that God has called us to be one body, there's one body in each city. There will be many congregations, but we're the Church of Jesus, and the sooner we can find each other, the more powerful, and can make a greater impact. Mike: One quote from something you said in the news article was, "If we can have less porn, we'll have less domestic violence, we'll have less rape, we'll have less abortions, we'll have less broken marriages". So it's really preventative. Talk about that. Because I think a lot of people think, "Well, porn is just... we're just looking at pictures, we're not really hurting anyone". Letitia: Yeah. This is why I started our campaign in our city, because when you look at all the research, pornography fuels all those things you just mentioned. While we work with vulnerable women and girls - and we'll continue to pick up the pieces and help those suffering - you want to prevent and get to the bottom of what is causing a lot of this pain. I'm not sure what it's like in your nation, but our nation has a huge domestic violence problem, and we spend billions of dollars per year trying to fix it. But no one wants to address the issue of pornography. Not that porn causes every bit of domestic violence, but it sure does a lot, and shapes those violent tendencies within - especially young boys - from a young age, and their ability to look at girls and women as human beings. So, yes, we've got to begin to speak up and it's not always a popular discussion. But especially as I keep it focused on our children, no one disagrees that kids should not see pornography. If we can stop them from seeing it and ending down roads and years of addiction, hopefully that will stop them from acting out in ways that could end them up in prison and with criminal charges. In the nation of Fiji, where I've just been, I've got a friend who works in the prison in the capital city, and his job is to interview sex offenders as they come in, and he said 100% of them have been addicted to porn. 100% of the sex offenders. So is that a coincidence? No, not at all. So that's why we stand up, and not just to stop these evil things from happening, but we want to see beautiful marriages, beautiful relationships, beautiful intimacy and sexuality. So we've got to fight for the beauty of all that God has created, don't we? Mike: Amen. So on a nationwide basis in Australia, do you see pastors talking openly about porn and equipping people on how to overcome and break free from it, or what do you see? Letitia: The by and large, no. I mean, there will be little pockets, and maybe the youth pastor will do one or two talks a year. But generally, no, it's not on their radar. Again, it depends. Some are brilliant. But that's not really the majority, and that's why they have me come and speak. It's hard for them to keep up to date with where it's all at - not that they need to be up to date - but look at a big rate to see the church engage in a lot more of the cultural issues, not just porn. And not just speak about them, but actually come up with solutions in their cities, really. Because yes we need to talk to our people, but we're also here to pastor a city. That's why I just didn't start a campaign to the churches in my city. I started a campaign to the city, because actually Jeremiah 29: says, "When you seek the welfare of the city, you will be blessed." So it's amazing that as you look at the bigger picture first, it trickles down into the churches as well. Very few pastors think city-wide and think with the big vision like that. And that's okay. They're not all wired that way. But there's people - that's why we need the body of Christ - because there's people in our cities who think bigger, and we need to tap into each other. Otherwise we're going to get nowhere, and we are getting nowhere. Look at our nations, your nation and my nation. If only we'd stop and go, "Is that really working as churches? No. What does the Bible say?" But we continue on thinking that we've got the latest and greatest, don't we? Mike: The early Church was devoted to prayer, fellowship, and teaching, and they changed the world. And we focus on the worship band and the teaching, and we're crumbling. Letitia: Yeah, well, when you look at the books of the Bible, Corinthians was written to one church in Corinth. Philippians was written to one church in Philippi. So they weren't all these little denominations there that were competing against each other. They were devoted together in unity, meeting together daily, and the Spirit of God fell upon them and they turned the world upside down. Mike: You're quoted, and this really resonated with me, "I'm so thankful that God saved me from a boring Christian life", and I can relate to that because I'd rather be right in the thick of the fight than sitting on the sidelines and watching. Letitia: God calls all of us into an adventure with Him, and I've just been called to the vulnerable in my city. But wherever people find themselves - we're all missionaries, aren't we? Mike: Yep. Letitia: Whether we're a truck driver, or mother at home, we're on the street with neighbors. Whether we're a school student, we're at school. So we're meant to be a missionary. And again, I think most... 99% of Christians want to wake up every day going, "I'm going to the mission field today". They think it's a boring life. So they're not engaging with the Spirit of God to see his kingdom come, where we find ourselves, the missionaries, each day. So we just allow the boredom of life, rather than stepping out and seeing what God wants to do, where he's placed us, and taking some risks. Every time I take a risk, yes, it's scary, but I find that God is out there in the unknown. He's waiting for me to step out. He needs us to move. We're his plan A for his kingdom come. I don't know who else we think is going to do it, but when God decided that he wanted to populate the Earth, he put us, human beings, and Adam and Eve were given a job right at the beginning. So I think we don't have an understanding of what our role is on Earth, and we live just like the rest of the world, and it's boring. And just going to church every week is boring, too. Maybe not your church [laughs] but mine can be, sometimes. So I'm thankful that God gave me a bigger vision than even just pastoring my own church. He gave me a bigger vision that we're here for the city, that we've got to do it together, and that we're going to have to step out and take some high-level risks, which are exciting. Mike: I couldn't agree more. I also agree with what you said about sometimes church can be boring, because we've been looking for a new church here for the last two years. Sometimes it just feels like there's too much of an emphasis on comfort and making people feel good, but not challenging them to take those risks like you're talking about. Letitia: You know that you're following Jesus and he can... obviously, he's got you on a journey that's exciting as well. Mike: We're doing a billboard campaign ourselves in Las Vegas beginning the end of next month. So we're right there with you. Letitia: Good on you. Yeah, keep going. Mike: How did your billboard campaign go? Letitia: Yeah, we just kind of do them every... probably twice a year. I'm in - compared to las Vegas, I'm in a tiny little city, called Toowoomba with about 150,000, so we're nothing like you guys. But we've got some big digital billboards in the middle of town which we use, and whenever we put them up there there's always a greater foot traffic to our website. We always get more letters of abuse. Conversations are happening in workplaces. The local newspaper usually picks up on it. So to me, it just keeps creating conversations, and if you can send people back to our website where we have a lot of information and resources and just local people speaking. So, again, it's not going to change the world, but it's just kind of something to keep a pebble in your shoes to make you feel discomfortable and get the conversations happening. Again, this is long term stuff, so one billboard campaign's not going to win the day, but I just got to keep going for many years from different angles, I think are really important. Mike: Yeah, it's "planting seeds" is what I would call it. Letitia: Yep. Mike: So talk about City Women. I think we have about a minute left here. Talk about City Women. So who's coming to you to help out? What does your organization look like? Letitia: Yes, we're an umbrella for about ten different ministries that are helping different people in the city. I mentioned before, we're out there with the sex workers, the refugees, kids in care, school kids, pregnant women, a whole range. So each of those ministries have different leaders over them, and our job has just been to make women across the city aware of these ministries and how they can get involved. Generally, I find that women really want to do something; they feel the pain of a city, they want to get involved, they're happy to work together, they don't have so many hangups. So, yeah, it's just great to see them come forward and want to volunteer, in whatever area they're passionate about. As we've work together, we've been able to accomplish a lot more than if we do this work by ourselves. So that's the general gist of how it works. It's been an exciting journey, and it's changing. Things start and then they stop. There's seasons for different ministries that we've run, but it's just been an exciting journey as we've tried to look at how we can meet the needs. Mike: Well, we're out of time and I want to thank you very much, Letitia, for joining us and calling us. I know it was five in the morning, your time when you called. Letitia: Yeah. Mike: I love what you're doing, and I love the impact you're making. So thank you for joining us, and we'll talk to you next time. Letitia: My pleasure, Mike. Thank you so much. ANNOUNCER: Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung's books, groups, counseling, or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can email us at email@blazinggrace.org or call our office in Chandler, Arizona at (719)-888-5144. Again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, email us at email@blazinggrace.org, or call the office at (719) 888-5144.

Mike DeHaan is an electrical engineer-turned-real estate investor in Spokane, Washington. He began his business in early 2018 with the goal: Everyone begins with to have passive income and fell in love with the process of improving the neighborhoods in his hometown. Since he began, he had been a part of over 60 transactions either through flipping, renting, or assigning the contract. He didn't come from a Real Estate family. The growth and development of his business have come entirely from self-education through podcasts, books, mentors, and a ton of trial and error. His goal is simple, he wants to be a driving force in the growth and reparation of the Inland Northwest. When he first moved to Spokane in 2009, there was more run-down neighborhoods than thriving ones. Over the past decade that's changed, but there's still a lot left to do. In this episode, Mike will share with us his extensive experience in real estate investing, and how he became an engineer to a full-time real estate investor.   Episode Links: https://inwproperties.com/ https://music.amazon.de/podcasts/ef9a0c7d-eb7f-4725-b7b0-72387434d143/collecting-keys---real-estate-investing-podcast? https://collectingkeyspodcast.com/ https://www.instagram.com/mike_invests/ https://mikeinvests.com/ --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by Mike DeHaan, who's got a really interesting wholesaling business and he's gonna tell us how he got there and what it is he's doing today. So let's get into it!   Mike, what's going on man, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for taking time to hang out with me, I appreciate it.   Mike: Yeah, absolutely thanks, Michael. Glad you have me on.   Michael: Oh man, my pleasure. We're gonna have a lot of fun today. I know a little bit about your story, your background, but I would love if you could just jump right into it and share with our listeners. who you are, where do you come from? And what is it that you're doing real estate today?   Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So I live in Spokane, Washington, so east side of Washington state, it's kind of the forgotten side of the state up here. Everyone always knows about Seattle, but people never really seem to remember Spokane.   Michael: No love for Spokane.   Mike: No no, man. Like get a little bit of love a little bit of hate, you know, once a year during the basketball tournament because the Gonzaga University's here.   Michael: Oh yeah, if you felt like crap talking.   Mike: Yeah, exactly. Everyone always says we're the, the overrated teams. We haven't won a championship yet, but we usually do okay.   Michael: Good deal…   Mike: But, uh, yeah, so right on Idaho border. Um, I grew up out in Montana and then I moved here to start going to school at GU, I moved out here to go to school at Gonzaga, I kind of went the traditional route when got an electoral engineering degree, you know, parents super proud, got a good degree was very hirable. Going through that process, it never really sort of fit my personality, I guess. But I was sort of, of the of the viewpoint that, you know, once I graduate, I'll find a job that I like, and then I'll sort of create my passion from there.   Michael: Well, the fact the fact Mike, that you and I are sitting here having a conversation means that you shouldn't have been an EE to begin with, so…   Mike: Absolutely, yeah. You don't have to have my head define myself a little bit first, I guess. But yeah, right, right. After college, I went and got a pretty good job out in the Seattle area. I'm working at a consulting company for two years. And then I worked at Boeing for a few years. I really, you know, but Boeing was, was kind of a tough one because it's like a dream job for so many people. And I just hated it, like, from the first day I walked in, I was like, oh, no, what have I done? This is absolutely not what I should be I wish I should be doing.   Michael: What did you hate about it?   Mike: Just like the whole corporate bureaucracy, you know, I realized pretty quickly that I'm not cut out to sort of be a number, and just sort of go through the motions of this giant machine and also inefficiencies right. And all the time through my career in jobs. I'd always had this issue where I would get assigned a, a project or whatever and I would figure out the most efficient way to do it as quickly as I could. And it was always just being, you know, before the before the deadline, right? So I had six weeks, I forgot how to do it in like a week. And then I would be like, can I need something else to do and all the other engineers back, no, that's not how it's supposed to work. You're supposed to take the entire six weeks, you know, so I immediately just wasn't cut out for that. And that was a really big problem. And I was at the consulting company two weeks they sell time. Yeah, you know, so I got me slapped pretty hard. Anyway, fast forward. I left Boeing, I moved back to Spokane to work at the utility here for a year. That was my fourth job, including my college internship in a matter of, I guess, what, four and a half years. And at that point, I was like, alright, this this career path is not for me, I need to do something different. So at the end of 2017, I guess being in 2018, I decided enough is enough and I just quit being an engineer. Everyone thought I was silly. My you know, that was probably the hardest conversation ever had to have in my life was calling my parents to tell them that hey, you know, that fancy degree I got I'm not going to do that anymore.   So yeah, it's funny, everyone I was asked like, what my wife and stuff thought and honestly, she was just like, well, if you're not going to be a miserable prick anymore, I guess it's okay for you to…   Michael: Step into the right direction.   Mike: Exactly. Even though we were losing 70% of our income, you know, it was, was worth it to take the risk. Yes, that was yeah, that was early 2018. I spent the next I guess like four or five months, trying to find myself you know, reading a lot of self-health books, business books, my wife and I travel a little bit. We went down to New Zealand for about three and a half weeks and traveled around and just did some soul searching. I, you know, originally wanted to get into tech sort of dabble in that and realize how huge that bear entry was, the actual development side of it, I was able to sort of grasp but you know, living where I'm at, you know, you being in the Bay Area, you can probably sympathize to how important connections are. And we don't necessarily have those here. And that's why people move to places like the barriers to be around people that are doing that.   So anyway, as a side note, I started getting into passive income and generating wealth. And that's what led me to real estate, which is, is brought me to kind of what I'm doing now as a full time real estate investor.   Michael: So I've been I love your story, it's an I think it's one that a lot of people can, can, can relate to, and that they get into this role that they think is going to be awesome and then it just turns out not to be at all what it is they're looking for. And you tried that, you know, like you said four times, and none of it was working out. So how did you get involved with your first deal, with your first real estate investment?   Mike: Yeah, so, you know, I spent the first little bit when I decided I was going to invest in real estate, I guess, backtrack a little bit, I had a local friend section on my business partner who was dabbling in investing. So that kind of planted the seed. And, you know, I spent the first little while just listening to every podcast, every book, you know, everything BiggerPockets pretty much that I could sort of start with, that's kind of where everyone starts, I feel like and, you know, I was like, okay, cool. So actually did basically just go and start offering on properties. But at same time, I was like, a little bit risk averse, I don't want to do a whole lot of work, like, what can I find that would be easy? And so I found actually, right around the corner, from where I live, there was a new development going on where they were building new construction ranchers. And friend of a friend, I was able to connect with the builder and I basically came into an arrangement of, hey, I'll pay, you know, $200,000 for each of these ranches, owned by two of them, and I was getting the money, I basically liquidated my corporate 401k and I was like, that mean, I paid all the fees and everything. It's funny, in hindsight, it was kind of a rash decision but I was how like, deep down, I was kind of like, I need to separate every part of this coast, this corporate past life that I hated.       Michael: So you're drawing a line in the sand…You're burning the boats.   Mike: Exactly. So I paid massive fees to plot this money. But it was a pretty generous amount since I had been out to get South couple of years, pull that out, use that to buy these two properties. And it's funny, like, in hindsight, in hindsight, when I signed the dotted line, they weren't great investments, right because I kind of had the mortgage payment, and I basically went like: Okay, so the mortgage payments gonna be $1,100 a month on really renting for $1,500 a month. You know, I'm gonna, like, cashflow $14 a month, you know, right. But of course, that's not how it works when you account for vacancy, maintenance, all that sort of stuff.   Michael: Oh, you mean there is other expenses… Mortgage payment. Oh…   Mike: Exactly. But I also looked out too, because I kind of signed up for these properties, I signed documents for them, while they're still being built, they were still holes in the ground and then by the time they actually closed, they were worth about 20- $30,000 more each than I paid for them.   Michael: Wow, that went well…   Mike: I accidentally walked into some equity there. And then, as they, they continued to sort of increase in value over the next little bit, I was able to actually cash out refinance some of that money as well. This helped me rebuild that nest egg. So pure, dumb luck, I'm not gonna lie. But I mean, at the same time, dumb luck comes from taking massive action and that's kind of how I got started, so…   Michael: Totally, okay. And so you learn from the, you know, those two deals, and then went on to do some other stuff, tell us about that.   Mike: Yep, exactly. So I learned from those ones. After that I had kind of had my confidence up a little bit. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do like a value add sort of deal now, like you hear starting like the proper first strategy, not the I got lucky with the first strategy. So I went and I bought a fixer duplex. Me and my wife, we fix that up ourselves, cash out, good amount of our money, then that was like the end of 2018. Then going into early 2019. I was like, hey, I need more capital, so I started flipping houses. I didn't have a huge amount of experience and money. So I basically was like, hey, find someone that's experienced, that has money and just basically doesn't want to do any work but doesn't mind telling me what to do… Partnered with a couple that was local here and we flipped a few houses together and would split the profits 50/ 50. So got that going use those profits to buy another property, which is a triplex. And then after that, it started to get more and more difficult to find opportunities, both with the partners I was flipping with and for myself, so I decided, hey, I need to start sourcing my own deals. You know, especially I started to connect with wholesalers and like other people that were marking their own deals, and I was like, you know, they're obviously doing something. There's no reason I can't do that. So at the, I guess, January of 2020 I officially started the business of what I'm doing now, which is a full time off market real estate investment business.   Michael: So good.   Mike: And then, yeah, so that was feeding 2020 survive through COVID, that sort of stuff took us a little bit to get going. But as of right now, we've done… total off market about, about 85/ 86 deals since being a 2020. Also sourced off market and I have nine, nine staff that worked for me, so three of them that are local to the US, and then a handful of virtual staff that handles a lot of our more administrative processes in cold calling, all that sort of stuff.   Michael: So that is amazing, Mike. And so you know, of those 80 deals that you've done, are those all deals that you're doing, or you're taking on the ones that you like, and kind of wholesaling, and outsourcing, you know, passing on to the other ones you don't like?   Mike: Yep, so it's kind of a mix of, you know, keeping the properties that we like as rentals, predominantly a lot of the multifamily as we keep. So our total portfolio now is I think, 43 doors. So that's across, like 20 to 22- 23 properties, the rest of them, we've either been wholesaling or we've been flipping, it really just sort of depends on the scale of the work that's involved in the neighborhoods, and also the needs of the business at the time. You know, sometimes there's one that would be great to flip, but it makes more sense to wholesale them and you know, make half as much money. But that's like a 20 day transactional process instead of a three month transactional process.   Michael: Right, so okay and where is your geographical footprint?   Mike: So we have done predominantly in Spokane, and Spokane area, Eastern Washington in northern Idaho. But we also started doing some stuff remotely last year, just for scale. So last year, we did eight deals that were all over in Knoxville, Tennessee, that we did completely virtual, one flip and seven assignments and those ones, we would, we did all the negotiations and closings, virtual, and we would just work with a local runner on the ground over there to go and verify the conditions and grab photos and all that sort of stuff.       Michael: Awesome, and are you do you have I said on any other markets in the near future?   Mike: Yeah. So that we recently brought on a professional sales manager to start helping us optimize our sales process in our teams. And working with our sales guys just to learn how to do the full sales process themselves, because… How we kind of built it cuz we bootstrapped this whole thing is, you know, we kind of hired and built systems as you know, need arose for them, right. So it wasn't a very holistic process. So we kind of have like a lot of like patchwork things in there, you know, for like, how we run us… around appointments, right, or like how we make offers things like that there wasn't a good cohesive process, it was almost lead by lead, which made it extremely time consuming for people for all of our sales guys. So we're working with him to iron those out and then once we have that process more streamlined, I mean, we should be able to drop in any market that we want and do pretty well.   So yeah, we're looking there, we're looking at we have Knoxville, we're looking at the outskirts of Chicago right now. We're looking at a few places in Ohio, we're looking at a few places in Texas. And really, as long as you're able to find the staff, we have the marketing systems out down and once you have the sale system, if we can find a good sales guy should be pretty much copy and paste. So that's kind of what we're hoping to do this year.   Michael: That's so awesome. Mike what I love about your story is that you've done like so much of all of the things like all the real estate investing things, you started very traditionally a single family than multifamily than flipping then burr you know, now you're wholesaling. What have you found to be the most fun?   Mike: Yeah, so I love I mean, engineering is mine, I love building the marketing system and like solving the strategies of some of the more complex, you know, deals that come through, like the ones that the ones that we come in, get a contract signed, we close it our assignment and goes all smooth, those are awesome, like, you can't complain about easy money. But the ones that I find the most fun are like, okay, so we have a deal that's kind of tight, you know, we got to like work with the seller to solve their needs, you know, that means, you know, helping them find a place to go like working with attorney stuff like that. They're really sort of deep dive into some of these complex deals that are, you know, they require like an investigation, I find those to be really fun, and they're more satisfying when they're completed. Even if you do sometimes make less money, it's just like, it's more interesting.   You know, I…we've started doing a lot of stuff like subject twos or we have one that we're signing, we got sent around today actually, it's a Novation agreement. So basically, we're partnering with the owner of the house to flip the property and then we give him like a baseline sale price. Everything above that will collect his profit.     Michael: Oh my gosh, so cool…   Mike: So we've never done one of those before and ultimately, that came around like he's a rational seller, he's willing to work with us, we were off by about $18,000. On our what we could mat ask what we're willing to pay versus what he was asking and we did the math, and we're like, well, that gap is, you know, still less than what our total loan costs would be. So what if instead, we just like met in the middle, gave him some extra money, we were still close to where we needed to be. And we don't have to go get a hard money loan, we can instead as part within the flip the deal.   So working, strategizing, things like that. And, you know, one of the biggest things we found is that if somebody is willing to sell their property, there's almost always a mutually beneficial arrangement, you just have to work with them to solve their needs. You know, I think that's one of the biggest things that people don't understand or they kind of discount with, you know, off market real estate is it's not a real estate company, honestly, it's a marketing business, people business. And if you're willing to listen and get creative with people, and build that trust, and, you know, just like, think outside the box, there's opportunities that can be found everywhere, that are, you know, oftentimes even more lucrative than just like a cash offer, which is what everyone else shows a look for.   Michael: Totally, totally. Wow, that's so cool. That's so cool. Mike, I want to ask you, because you did something and ran into a problem that almost every real estate investor that I've spoken to, either inside the academy or outside of the academy comes up against, and that's, I'm running out of money, or I've now run out of money. And so you mentioned taking on some business partners, we need to start doing some flipping, but what advice, what recommendations would you give to people that are kind of hitting this wall? Where should they be turning?   Mike: Yes, so if you're brand new, it's gonna be a little different than if you're somebody that's trying to scale. So for when I was brand new, I was able to find that money by finding people that, you know, had more money than they had time. And I basically created the time that they needed, right? And I put in the hustle, and I, you know, did what I would do what needed to be done to do the deals and at the end of the day, there was people with the cash that wanted a more passive income opportunity.   Michael: It sounds so mafio, I did what needed to be done, you know… Whatever it took…   Mike: Off market, sometimes it's like that.   Michael: It's great. Mike: But, uh, yeah, so if you're getting started, I think that's kind of the easiest way to go and especially if you show that you have some level of organization and commitment, like I mean, if you show up in your kind of grungy, and you have literally no expansion of nothing about real estate, you're probably not gonna be able to get that. But if you show up, and you're like, hey, I put a lot of thought into this, I think I can pull this off, this is what we're going to do and you come up with a strategy to somebody with money, they'll give you a shot, you know, so even the guys that work for me, now, they all want to get into flipping their own houses, like cool, you're showing that you can work you're showing hustle for me every single day, you bet that when you want to flip this property, I'm going to be happy to partner with you on it, you know, and you're going to go and you're going to make your money, I'm going to make my money and they're going to be able to get off the ground.   If you're more established, where we've started to get cash. I know a lot of people look at like raising money from private investors, and those sort of things like how funds are, are those arrangements. We haven't necessarily look towards that instead but we've honestly relied on like lines of credit that are leveraged on the properties that we've accumulated. And surprisingly difficult to get those when you're trying to scale a business until it's funny until you kind of get your first one and like once you find the first credit union or bank that's willing to give you a line of credit on your, on your property, the other ones seem to be like, oh, well, you know…   Michael: They gave…   Mike: Mainstreet bank or whatever gave it to you like you must be okay and then they sort of build that way. And that is slightly risky, because they contend technically call the debt and things like that. So I wouldn't use that to buy like an entire property. But it does allow you to bridge the gap with like, you know, hard money loan down payments or renovation costs, things that you're going to have a quicker turn time on. And yeah, those are those are kind of the main methods that we've used, I know other people, other people raise private money, but we just haven't necessarily gone down that route yet.   Michael: Yeah, no, that's great, that's great. And then another question, I get from a lot of the folks I speak with are, how do I figure out what's a fair partnership arrangement or a fair Partnership Agreement? Do you have any thoughts there?   Mike: Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is being explicitly specific about what the roles and conditions are, of your arrangement. So how me and my business partner we've basically divided our roles is: Everything before, like we close on a property that's kind of my world. So I manage the sales team, I manage the marketing, you know, I manage the day to day sort of operations.   Once we close on a property, that's his world, right. So he handles the contractors, he handles the renovations, he handles, you know, make sure the mortgage payments are paid all that sort of stuff, and having that firm agreement and that complete understanding that he's gonna do what I need to do, I'm gonna do what I need to do. It works out very well, because there's never any, you know, head butting, there's never any conflict. And also too, it's, it's allows us to scale very quickly, because we kind of each have our own business distributors, like reliant on each other, right. And so we're not trying to manage two very separate roles. We're not like really double dipping in anything. So that I think, I think that is very, very important and whether, you know, it doesn't have to necessarily a split like that, but whether you know, one partner is the sales guy, one partner is the marketing guy, like, just be super explicit on what that means and just try to stick to your roles as best you can.   Michael: Love it, love it. Totally shifting gears here, Mike, what kind of properties are you targeting for your personal portfolio? Are you doing more flipping? Is it long term buy and hold, is it multifamily? Talk a little bit about that.   Mike: Yeah. So our favorite for holds is like small multifamily, duplexes, triplexes quads. We have some single family stuff. But I mean, the cash flow that you get off of like duplexes, triplexes, and quads you really like, we really prefer those as right now, as opposed to like larger multifamily, just because it's so easy to get financing, and there's so much more liquid. You know, if you have a duplex that you decide you want to sell, it's a lot easier to offload that than like an 18 unit apartment complex.   And, yeah, that's kind of what we're, we're targeting everywhere that we're going right now for our own portfolio. And then the half in terms of like renovations and flips, we're kind of looking at everything, we've, we've flipped everything from mobil homes, to we flipped a seven unit apartment complex, so you know what we'll be willing to take on anything like that but…   Michael: That's awesome, that's awesome. Having done so many different things and start, you know, at different stages in your journey, what do you recommend people get started with? If someone's brand new real estate investing? Like I want to do real estate investing, everyone's talking about it, I have to do this thing, where should I start?   Mike: So I would say if you're really serious about it, honestly, the best thing you could do is find someone that has a business like mine and go work for them.   Michael: Hmm. Are you hiring?   Mike: Oh, well, we are hiring sales guys, we're looking to go into new markets.     Michael: What's the website called Mike?   Mike: Yeah, so like, ehmm to reach out to us? Yeah, if you go to: https://inwproperties.com/ , you can send me a message on there for our business. But uh, yeah, I think that that would be the like, if you're really, really serious that you want to be a professional real estate investor go work for people that are professional real estate investors, you know, ideally in a role where you are getting to be a part of the deals and the negotiations.   You know, I think that big sort of asterix there, when you're talking to people like that, make sure that they are actually walking the walk themselves. Because there's a lot of people that will be looking for cheap labor to kind of do like the, you know, the bottom of the barrel work they don't want to do, but they're not actually having that much success themselves. So you might not have that much knowledge to gain. I know, we are one of our most recent employees, who's our he was our transactions, our transaction coordination, or dispositions. It's like a 23 year old guy and he said, he talked to a handful of different people before he found us. And he's like, yeah, I kind of went in and found out they were only doing like, seven or eight deals a year and that wasn't like going to give them enough chances at bat, sort of like learn what they're doing. But yeah, and I'd say, if you want to be super serious, do that. If you want to be more of a casual investor, and you have a WT that you like, or you have a job that you like, honestly start going to meetups and just meeting people. And not only go to the meetups, meet people, but identify the key players at those meetups and follow up with them on a very regular basis.   You know, and try to bring them value in some way. Because so many people, they go to those meetups, and they never reach out to somebody again, or they never actually try to bring value to any of the people they meet there and then surprise, it doesn't actually lead anything.   Michael: A deal didn't fall in my lap, it sucks...   Mike: Exactly. Yeah, that's what they're thinking, you know, you go and you find that heavy hitter at the real estate meetup and you, you know, call him every once in a while send him attacks, like you know, just try to engage and try to build a friendship, opportunities will come to you at the end of the day. You know, even if you do I'm a little bit crazy in the middle, they're eventually going to warm up to you know, the average person is gonna do that.   Michael: You can wear them down.       Mike: Exactly. Honestly, though.   Michael: Oh, I love it. And I'm like, I agree with you 1,000% like find ways to bring these people value. I think for so many listeners who are just getting started, like, that's sounds like Greek to them and so what are some ideas? Or maybe like speaking for yourself what would you be receptive to if someone came to you as like, hey, I'm new, I'm trying to get started, this is what I'm going to help you with? And what are some actionable steps or some ways that people can actually bring value to some of those heavy hitters?   Mike: Yeah, so it mean, it can be things as large as bringing them a deal, bring them an opportunity. It can be things as small as like making connections, you know, so you like, let's say, you meet with one of these, you know, larger investors, and they're like, oh, you know, I've been, I just had this big, like, roof job. And one of my properties, you know, it was a real pain, whatever and then it's like, okay, so maybe what you do is you go out, and you find them a better alternative for that in the future. And you say, like, hey, I remember you said that you, you really overpay for this roof, you know, I met this guy, um, you know, I talked to this guy, he has a similar, here's a business that could do that, probably for cheaper, right?   Something like that. Or it can be as simple as you know, doing day to day work in one of their transactions if they need it. Like if someone's complaining about a tenant, or you know, somebody who's residing in a property they're working on, maybe offer to do the cash for keys conversation for them, see, if you if you volunteer to go and pay that person to leave for them, and just relieve some of their headache, like anything that you can find that could make their life a little bit easier, especially if they're a full time investor, and there's busy as a full time investors are, they'll remember that, and that will carry a lot more weight than you think it would.   Michael: Totally. No, those are both great suggestions, I love that. I remember hearing um, one of the BiggerPockets podcast, it might have been Brandon Turner, David Green, one of the hosts know, like, if you're trying to get someone help you like, don't go ask them like, oh, what do you need help with?   Because then that means they have to spend their mental capacity thinking of other things that you could do for them, as opposed to you coming to them saying, hey, I heard you had this problem, let me help solve it for you.   Mike: Exactly. I mean, it's a people business, like I said before, you know, the other investors are people too and even when you're finding your own deals, when you're looking to wholesale those deals or pair that, you know, pair them with other investors, listen to what the investors want, I guarantee you'll make more money. If you find the deals that that specific investor wants, you know, and same thing, if you want partnerships, you want to find private lenders, you want to find contractors listen to their needs as a business. Everyone always thinks about money and a lot of times it is but everyone always has a deeper route than just pure money, you know…   Michael: We hope… if they you know, some people, maybe not.   Mike: Yeah, that's true. That's true.   Michael: Mike, this was awesome, man, thank you so much for spending some time with me today. If people want to learn more about you, take advantage of your wholesale business, you know, off market deals, what's the best way they get in touch?   Mike: Me and my business partner, we started our own podcast, I guess about four or five months ago. It's called: Collecting Keys - Real Estate Investing Podcast. It's kind of like a in the weeds sort of podcast about how to be a full time investor and sort of like the ins and outs of running a business like ours. So we get pretty in depth about different marketing strategies, things that have gone right with our business, things have gone wrong with our business. Our most recent episode that we just released, as this one came out was talking about a… oil spill that we had in one of our Airbnbs, or an oil furnace exploded.   Michael: Oh, you're not talking like olive oil?   Mike: No, no, no, no, this is yeah, this is Diesel fuel that flooded one of our properties. You know, so we talked about, like how you deal with that situation, which, you know, you have enough properties that eventually going to happen… So you can go check me out there. You can reach out to us through that website at https://collectingkeyspodcast.com/ . You can also hit me up on Instagram, which is @mike_invests, people feel free to shoot me a DM on there, I love to chat with people. Between those two things, you will get a pretty deep insight into what being a full time investor is actually like without all the fluffy stuff that you necessarily hear everywhere else. Michael: Love it a day in the life.   Mike: Exactly.   Michael: That's great but Mike, thank you again for hanging out with me. I really appreciate you and I'm sure we'll chat soon. Mike: Awesome. Thank you so much, Michael. I Appreciate it.   Michael: Alright, you take care.   Alright, well, that was episode, a big thank you to Mike for coming on. We definitely look forward to having him back on the show to do a deep dive into how to…: behind some of the strategies he talked about in the show today. As always, if you liked the episode, please feel free to leave us a rating or review wherever it is you listen to our podcasts, and we look forward to seeing the next one. Happy investing…

What happens when you combine two of the biggest brands of the early 1980s? You get RadioShack's TRS-80 Whiz Kids comics, with special guest stars from the DC Universe. Marvel at snarky teens sassing the Man of Steel, then laugh at how he makes them perform complex math with mediocre computers! ----more---- Episode 16 Transcript Mike: [00:00:00] I used to go into an office, and when I did that, I had a dog that everybody loved and I baked cookies every day. Hello, hello, hello, welcome to Ten Cent Takes, the podcast where we sell out as superheroes, one issue at a time. My name is Mike Thompson and I am joined by my co-host, the talk show host of terror, Jessika Frazer. Jessika: Bwahahaha! I like when you give me nicknames that are a little mischievous and/or villainous, by the way. Mike: I mean, villains are always the most fun. Jessika: They really are. They get to do all the cool shit.  Mike: Yeah. You need a strong villain in order to have a good story. Jessika: Absolutely.  Mike: The purpose of this podcast is to look at notable moments in comic book history. [00:01:00] They can be big or they can be small, but we always hope that they're interesting, and we like to talk about them in ways that are both fun and informative. Today, we are going to be going back back back to the eighties and talking about the time that Superman sold computers for Radio Shack. Jessika: Fucking sellout.  Mike: Man, I don't. Can you blame him though? I mean, he was a reporter, like he needed the extra cash. Jessika: That's true. That does not pay all that much, from my understanding  Mike: Uh, speaking as someone who worked as a journalist for a decade, I can tell you it does not.  Jessika: Confirmed, everyone.  Mike: Confirmed. Before you freak out and think that you've missed an episode or that things are airing out of order, we are actually still doing the Sandman book club series, but we have decided to break it up, so it's not just one giant slog for people who aren't interested in Sandman. So that way there's a little something for [00:02:00] everybody, even as we're doing that prolonged experience. So every other episode will be the Sandman book club. Before we get to that though. What is one cool thing that you have read or watched recently? Jessika: Just last night, I watched the first episode of the Amazon Prime, let me just say it's 18+, animated series, Invincible.  Mike: Hmm.  Jessika: Have you seen that yet?  Mike: I haven't, I read the comic for a while and I really liked it, but then it just kind of felt very repetitive. And also, I didn't like how the comic got very women in refrigerator-y. Jessika: Oh, okay, fair enough.  Mike: Like yeah. Um, I hear it's great. I just, it's kind of, it's kind of like The Boys where like, I read the comic and, and then when they announced they were making a TV [00:03:00] show, I went, eh don't know. I like, I'm not sure. I really want to see that translated to the screen and then it was great. And so I'm sure that Invisible will be great. Jessika: I will be talking about The Boys later, in fact.  Mike: Oh okay. Well, then. Jessika: But for now, yeah, I know, spoilers. So for those of you who hadn't seen it yet, it's about a teenage boy whose father is a famous superhero and the kid himself has also potentially expected to get powers, which he, not spoiling anything, he does, and very early on in this episode. And when this happens, his father starts teaching them how to use them properly, even though he seems a little disappointed, even, that his really did have powers, which was kind of strange, but we'll see where that goes. But what I really liked about this series, is that they make fun of our well-known superheroes with a character like Batman and one that's very much like Wonder Woman, et cetera. And again, I don't want to give too much away, but the ending is [00:04:00] super intense, and I'll definitely be watching more of it tonight after we've finished recording this.  Mike: Yeah. And I will say that the comic itself has moments that are shockingly intense too. And it's really interesting because there are these moments that feel very wholesome and playful, and then there are other scenes that are complete 180 and it's really, it's kind of whiplash.  Jessika: That was how it felt in the show as well. So I mean, that translated definitely.  Mike: Yeah, it's one thing that's actually really neat is that it's the guy who wrote the comic, Robert Kirkman, is also the guy who created the walking dead.  Jessika: Hm.  Mike: So, you know, dude knows how to write a hit.  Jessika: Yeah.I guess so, huh. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: Well, what about you? What have you been reading or watching?  Mike: You mentioned a couple of weeks ago that you had read the first issue of a series called Die, by Kieron Gillen.  Jessika: Yeah.  Mike: I'd heard about it. I thought it looked [00:05:00] interesting. And then you mentioning that, threw it back on my radar, and so I found the first three volumes on Hoopla and I wound up bingeing through all of them in a couple of hours. And it's really good. I really like how it matches up a bunch of D & D tropes along with other things. And I just, I really, really enjoyed it. And so I want to say thank you for putting that on my radar. Jessika: Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, absolutely. You're welcome. And I'll have to go on Hoopla and check out more myself because I'd been wanting to, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.  Mike: No, shall we, uh, shall we mosey along?  Jessika: Mosey let's do it.  Mike: What do you remember about Radio Shack when you were growing up? Jessika: Good old Radio Shack. Radio Shack was huge, when I was growing up. It was [00:06:00] definitely a household name and it had a reputation that it carried most electronics related items that you may want or need to purchase. So just on my memory block here in particular, they used to carry a radio that was pretty easy to alter, to be a scanning radio, to use for ghost hunting. And for a while, it was a great cheap alternative to buying something made for that purpose. And it was priced really low and like affordable versus like buying something that was made for that purpose.  Mike: Mm. Jessika: And I've trying to find one of those radios for years now, but honestly, it's probably a dead end at this point, and I should just pony up the money to buy actual ghost hunting equipment. I mean, honestly, I should probably, if I want it, like I'm a full ass adult, I can afford the expensive things, maybe.  Mike: We have credit cards now, Jessika. Jessika: Just charge it.I say I can afford the expensive things, like I really can, which isn't actually true.  Mike: All right.[00:07:00]  Jessika: I can afford the mid-level things.  Mike: Yeah. I dunno. We used to have money and then we got air conditioning, and we're poor now. Jessika: I'm safe. I'm squirreling it away, man. Trying to buy a house, it's expensive.  Mike: Yeah. Especially where we live. Jessika: I don't recommend it. Folks.  Mike: Yeah, no, just. Jessika: Just stay away.  Mike: Yeah. Welcome to the Bay Area. The dystopian capitalist apocalypse. Jessika: Everything is overpriced, and on fire.  Mike: We're not making this up. Everything is literally on fire these days.  And, and over priced, but that's just California in general. Yeah. Well, I mean, I had a similar experience to you, in different ways, but like, you know, it was the same brand awareness of Radio Shack. I didn't realize until I was doing the research for this episode, that Radio Shack is actually a hundred years old [00:08:00] as of this year. Jessika: What? How? Mike: Yeah. It was founded in 1921 by these two brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutchman. They set up a mail order business and a single retail location that was focused on providing parts for ham radio, which was a field that was still pretty new back then. And they wound up doing pretty well for a while, but they basically were bankrupt by the early 1960s. But you know, like 40 years is not a bad run. Jessika: Yeah.  Mike: And then they got acquired by the Tandy corporation in 1960 for $300,000. Up until this point, Tandy had been this leather goods company and they were looking to basically get into the business of appealing to hobbyists, which they felt Radio Shack would be able to do. So, in order to do this, Tandy basically performed a complete overhaul of the unprofitable company it had just acquired, and the Wikipedia page has a really solid [00:09:00] summary of what happened. Jessika: Tandy closed Radio Shack's unprofitable mail order business, ended credit purchases, and eliminated many top management positions eating the salespeople, merchandisers and advertisers. The number of items carried was cut from 40,000 to 2,500, as Tandy sought to identify the 20% that represents the 80% of sales and replaced Radio Shacks handful of large stores with many little holes in the wall, large numbers of rented locations, which were easier to close and reopen elsewhere if one location didn't work out.  Mike: Yeah. So basically they were just going for a strategy that made Radio Shack into a much leaner, more nimble operation, which that's like the goal these days, those are kind of the golden buzzwords, but they were actually trying to do that. Charles D. Tandy, who was the guy who actually ran Tandy corporation back then, said that they were [00:10:00] basically not looking for the guy anymore, who wanted to spend his entire paycheck on the sound system, and instead they were looking for customers who wanted to save money by buying cheaper goods and then like improving them through modifications and accessories. So now they were really appealing towards nerds, and aiming at kids who are going to like work on stuff for the science fairs. And honestly it, it worked. I mean, when I was growing up Radio Shack was that store you went to, when you needed some small part a replacement, there was always one nearby. And even if they didn't have a name brand part, they usually had an off-brand version of whatever you needed. And, I never went there thinking that it was going to break the bank. It was always a fairly affordable thing. Jessika: Yeah. Agreed. I can think of like four different locations where they had a Radio Shack, just like in our area here.  Mike: Yeah. And I mean, like, I grew up in San Francisco in the eighties, and they were all over the place.[00:11:00]  So now, what's interesting is that the whole rise of personal computers happened to coincide with this period of success for Radio Shack. The late seventies was when personal computers with microprocessors started to actually be a thing on the consumer market, but typically if you wanted one, you had to build them from a kit. Like you, you physically had to, like, buy the kit and then assemble it, following the instructions, which, I mean, I'm not going to lie. That is terrifying to me. Jessika: That is terrifying. And it's total nerd shit too. They were right.  Mike: Right. Fucking nerds. Jessika: Nerd bait. Mike: Radio Shack actually wound up introducing the TRS 80 in 1977. And it was a game changer for the company because it was one of the first pre-built computers. And it was simultaneously backed by a national retail chain.  It was this super basic computer that sold for $600, which adjusting for inflation is like $2,700 nowadays. [00:12:00]  Jessika: Holy shit. There's no way. There's no way the average family is like, let's get one of those right away. Mike: No, it was, I mean, you know, this was for people who were super enthusiast, or had a lot of disposable income, which the middle-class used to have back then.  Jessika: Different times.  Mike: The salad days. But yeah, so the TRS 80, even though it had a fairly high price point sold like hotcakes, like gangbusters. I found this book and it's called, Priming the Pump: How the TRS 80 Enthusiast Helped Spark the PC Revolution, by Teresa Welsh and David Welsh. It has this really interesting history about that point in time, which, I mean, I'm not going to lie, I was waiting for her to be really dry, but it's full of a lot of really personal stories and anecdotes and it's cool, I really dug it. Basically, when they started manufacturing this computer, they were only expecting to sell 50,000 units. There's this great quote, talking about how [00:13:00] much of a surprise the first TRS computer sales were. Jessika: Both Charles Tandy and John Roach may have been skeptical about such a large. But it turned out to be an underestimation. When the first anniversary of the products came, the company found the, had sold many more than the prediction and taken a whopping 250,000 orders for TRS eighties. Most of them still undelivered. Actually we've seen various numbers in different sources, so we can't verify this number, but they certainly sold considerably more than 50,000. Don French said they received a number of threatening phone calls from people who demanded delivery of their TRS 80 right away. Ooh! Mike: Yeah, so after this huge success, they then ended up following the TRS 80 with the TRS 80 Color in 1980. And basically the first TRS computer was kind of like a full, complete unit with a built-in monitor and everything. [00:14:00] The TRS 80 Color, in turn, was just the computer itself, and then you would plug in a color TV instead of using this built-in monitor. The TRS computers wound up selling well enough that Radio Shack really leaned hard into the computer business, and they even started offering computer camps for pre-teens in the early eighties, which was kind of an extension of that mission that they wanted to appeal to kids who wanted to excel at science fairs, because I mean, you know, those were the new nerds. So if you want to learn more about the TRS computers, by the way, there's this really great site called MatthewReadsTRS80.org. That helped me kind of learn about a lot of this stuff. I'll put it in the show notes, but it's really kind of an interesting walk-through, this particular venue of history. Anyway, this was the high point for Radio Shack, to be perfectly honest. By September of 1982, the company had more than 4,300 stores just in America and [00:15:00] more than 2,000 independent franchises and towns that were not large enough to have a company owned store. So, for comparison, there are fewer GameStops worldwide today than there were Radio Shacks in the early eighties.  Jessika: Wow.  Mike: Like, I realized that GameStop has been having a rough go of it lately, but there's still a lot of them around. Jessika: Yeah. Huh. Mike: And during this period of unmitigated success, that's when the Whizkid's started to show up in comic books. The early eighties were right around the time when computers were starting to get a lot of prominent, you know, quote unquote roles in media. If you're listening to this and you want to learn more, there is a site dedicated to media prominently featuring computers and storylines, and it's called Starring the Computer, that tracks stuff like this all the way back to the fifties. It's an incomplete list, but it's really interesting, and they have a whole section devoted to Tandy computers.[00:16:00] Like, I remember there was an episode of Murder, She Wrote very early on where she moves to New York and there's this whole plot about how she's gotten a computer to write her novels on. And then evidence is falsified with a modem. It's really interesting. And you know, the computer was this suddenly viable object that could play a part in people's everyday lives and could serve as a driving narrative device. But as far as I can tell the first time anyone made comics specifically focusing on educating people about personal computers was when Radio Shack started to do these comic books. And I think that's just because it was such a new thing, especially on the personal consumer market, because, you know, up until recently computers had been these huge things that took up buildings on their own.  Jessika: Yeah. And they had to be, like cooled, professionally, and I mean, it was just this whole thing.  Mike: Yeah. I mean, there [00:17:00] is a movie right now on Disney plus called The Computer That Wore Tennis Shoes.  Jessika: Oh, yeah! Mike: A very early Kurt Russell, and it's one of those things where the whole he's in college and he winds up getting shocked, I think, and there's this whole thing, this computer gets basically downloaded into him. So he has the processing power and knowledge of this computer, but they show you the computer and it like, it is a giant monstrosity of a thing that takes up, I think, an entire lab.  Jessika: It does. I remember that movie. Mike: And I mean, our phones, these days are more powerful than those. So RadioShack started making comics in 1971. They were putting out a series of educational comics called the science fair story of electronics via the Radio Shack education comic book program. But, then in 1980, they pivoted and they started giving away these new comics in stores. You could also, [00:18:00] if you were a teacher, you could send in a request to Radio Shack on school letterhead and get a free pack of 50.  Jessika: Oh, wow. Mike: And yeah, like, you know, they were really pushing that hard because these comics were educational, but they were also advertisements.  Jessika: Very much so. Oh, that was something I messaged you earlier,  was like, wow. I was reading just an ad there, wasn't I?  Mike: But, I mean, I will say they were, they were educational.  Jessika: Yeah, absolutely.  Mike: Yeah, so the Superman Radio Shack giveaway comics starred the aforementioned Whiz Kids, Alec and Shanna, along with their teacher Mrs. Wilson, but for the first three issues, which were published in 1980, 81 and 82, they also starred Superman and other characters from the DC Universe.  Jessika: I need to correct you for a second, because you said Mrs. Wilson, and it definitely was Ms. Wilson.  Mike: Oh, I'm sorry. That's right.  Jessika: It was Ms. Wilson, and I think that will come into play [00:19:00] later.  Mike: That is true. She did not have a ring on her finger. Jessika: She did not. She looked a little close to all the superheroes that waltzed right up in there, half naked into her classroom.  Mike: I mean, can ya blame her? Jessika: No, she was hot too.  Mike: Right? We're going to talk about each of these specific issues, but first up is the Computer That Saved Metropolis, which was published in July of 1980. So, even though this was a promotional giveaway, DC committed some pretty serious talent to the book. The first two issues were written by Cary Bates, who was this long-term writer for DC. He wrote a ton of action comics, Superman, and the New Adventures of Superboy, as well as being the head script writer for the live action Superboy series in the 1980s that we discussed a couple episodes back.  Jessika: Totally. Mike: He also worked as a script writer for various cartoons, including Gem and Gargoyles.  Jessika: Oh, hell yeah.  Mike: Right. [00:20:00] But then also his name might sound familiar to some people listening to the show because we mentioned him on the New Guardians episode where, it turns out he wrote issues two through 12 of the New Guardians. The art for this issue, meanwhile, was handled by Jim Starlin and Dick Giordano. Both of them are pretty big deals too. Starlin became a big name in comics during the seventies. He garnered a lot of acclaim for his cosmic space opera stories. He co-created characters like Shang-Chi and Thanos. Giordano in turn was an artist who had recently come back to DC comics and was serving as the Batman editor at the time. He actually got promoted shortly after this to be the company's managing editor in 1981. And then he was promoted again to executive editor in 83, and then he stayed with the company until the mid nineties when he retired, after his wife died. And then, aside from being a giveaway issue, this comic actually ran as a backup story in the July, 1980 ssues for Action [00:21:00] Comics, Legion of Superheroes, House of Mystery and Superboy. So Superman schilling Radio Shack computers, and forcing children to perform complex math for him, and definitely, probably schtupping Ms. Wilson, like, I think we need to agree that, that those two totally smashed. Jessika: Oh, absolutely. And I have my theories about her and Supergirl as well.  Mike: Yeah. Yeah.  Jessika: They had a moment.  Mike: Right? Jessika: We both took the same picture of that same shot and I sent it to you and you were like, no way. Mike: I thought that was so funny.  Jessika: Don't worry, we'll post that one.  Mike: I, oh God. Like, I just, that was great. It was like great minds think alike. But yeah, all of this is officially a canon part of DC comics lore, which is wild. Like [00:22:00]  Jessika: It's bat shit bananas.  Mike: Yeah. Now weirdly it looks like this is the only issue that actually made it into other DC comics. So, you know, the other two or their own standalone things. And aren't officially cannon, I guess. All right. How would you describe the 1980 issue? The Computers That Saved Metropolis? Jessika: Well, these were like both very advertisey and complex at the same time in their narrative, which was interesting. So, this first one, I'm going to give you a little bit of backstory about these bitches. I say these bitches, because I'm going to be talking about a whole classroom full of children. So I obviously really like children. I have a bachelor's in French and everyone's like, you should teach. And I'm like, no, I shouldn't.  Mike: Oh, oh no. Let's talk about that for a sec. I majored in history my first time through college, and everyone also said I should teach. And I was like, I fucking hate [00:23:00] children. I worked at Disneyland it poisoned me again. And don't get me wrong. I have, I have two stepchildren now. I love them. I would die for them. They're great. But kids in general, not a fan. They're sociopathic little monsters. Jessika: Mm hmm. So the comic starts off with Superman doing patrols around Metropolis, and apparently he just does that. And he just jets off to a sixth grade classroom at the whim of Ms. Wilson.  Mike: I have my own theory about this. Jessika: Oh my goodness. He's supposed to be a guest teacher about computers, apparently. Like, First of all, for some reason, along with his super abilities, he's also a super computer genius. And is he accredited? Like is he allowed to be teaching students?  Mike: No. Okay. There, there are two things to discuss here. So you have [00:24:00] to remember that Superman from the Golden Age through the modern age was largely a weird sci-fi series where the main character was this alien who had all these powers that constantly changed. There wasn't really any editorial control until they streamlined it with Crisis on Infinite Earths. But on top of that, he was generally shown to be an amazing genius, like just whenever they needed it. But ,he built the Superman robots. He. I can't remember if he made the Phantom Zone Projector or if the Phantom Zone Projector was on artifact from Krypton, he was constantly trying to restore the city of Kandor, which was basically shrunk down to the size of a bottle, and it was a Kryptonian city, to restore it to its full size. Like in that issue of Super Boy, we read, he like put all those chemicals together and created the pools that granted the dogs, various powers.  Jessika: Yeah, no, I guess you're, I guess he's always been [00:25:00] smart.  Mike: Yeah. But then the other thing is that Superman is a little bit too earnest in this issue. Like, he shows up exactly on time. And then he is clearly trying to impress these kids to make a good impression with Ms. Wilson. And everything about this reeks of a dude who had a one night stand and is now desperate to hook up again. So what he's doing is he's trying to prove that A) he is reliable and B) he is good with kids. Jessika: Yep. No, that's totally how it felt.  Mike: I'm not speaking from experience. Jessika: Oh, so anyway, Superman creepily knows all the students' names, I guess, because he used his x-ray vision to look at the teacher's seating chart, even though that's not how x-rays work. That's always bothered me. I'm sorry, we don't have time for this.  Mike: [00:26:00] Thomas Edison would like a word. Jessika: Seriously. Also, I have to mention that the whole class was bored as fuck even after Sups flew in. And I don't know about you, but every kid I knew, wanted to know about computers and have a turn on the computer when we got them in the library at school or when someone got one at home.  Mike: Oh, yeah. Jessika: So the idea that one of the kids in his class is being dismissive of the whole idea of not doing normal schoolwork and just doing computer class instead with fucking Superman of all people. It's just ridiculous.  Mike: Oh yeah. And that kid actively shit talked Superman repeatedly.  Jessika: Oh, he's a shit heal. Oh. And he still gets to be the fucking like, protagonist. Fuck. Mike: Oh, it was so funny. I like, my favorite was when he beats Superman at a math problem later on and like the shit talking starts immediately, and I'm like, my dude, this is possibly not a good move to irritate a guy who could literally vaporize you with a [00:27:00] glare. Jessika: That's just it. That is just it. Yeah. No. Why would you try to piss this guy off? And then Shanna's like, Ooh, Superman. You better tell him. I was like, dude, Shanna, you, you need to shut the fuck up immediately and not goad this situation.  Mike: You know, that was probably the most realistic part of this entire comic, because speaking as someone that lives with an 11 year old, they are shit stirrers. Jessika: Oh my gosh. So, Supes takes the kids up to the roof because of course he does, and he proceeds to give the class some very long-winded exposition about the history of computers and their size and what they do and how they've evolved from the first computers, and moving into how they're used in society today from space travel to transistor radios, which what a time capsule of a callout.  Mike: [00:28:00] Yeah. Jessika: This whole thing was a whole time capsule.  Mike: Yeah. Very much is. Jessika: Of course, there was also some lovely product placement throughout and some not-so-subtle comments on affordability versus common household items. Tangent that always cracked me up to say, this computer is less expensive than a TV. Well, okay, but maybe I need a TV and I don't need a computer. They do vastly different things, or they did at that point.  Mike: Yeah. Jessika: It kind of reminds me of saying like this China set costs less than a month of gross. Okay, well, I need to eat and I don't necessarily need a China set, so.  Mike: Yeah, I mean, he was hard selling those kids. Jessika: Oh yeah. He was like, you should ask your parents to go out and buy you one.  Mike: Yup. Jessika: So, of course, Supes hears with his super hearing a tornado and he like jets the fuck out of there. And, he defeats it by [00:29:00] blowing the wind or something like that. And then he feels all sick and shit, and comes across a villain named Major Disaster who, you know, just as his name implies, causes quote unquote natural disasters like there's floods and shit. It was a little ridiculous.  Mike: Yeah, he was always kind of like a C- to D-list villain who would use weapons and equipment to make natural disasters. My knowledge of this character is hazy at best, but I think eventually he gained the ability to manipulate probability. He didn't appear a lot and he's been dead for a while, I think. Cause I remember him showing up as a zombie in Blackest Night. Jessika: Oh.  Mike: But, I mean, I remember reading this stuff and I was like, this is kind of a cool, like off-the-wall villain. I dig him. You know, I certainly liked them a lot better than other villains that I've seen in Superman books where it's like, you know, generic alien warlord number five. Jessika: Seriously. Well, and when I read the name, Major Disaster, I was like, [00:30:00] same, girl. So, of course Superman needs the help of these children that he like, makes them perform these, like, high-stress situational calculations on the computer for him. Instead of like asking the adult he's banging in the room. Mike: I mean. Jessika: Honestly, come on, like, get the adults involved, like, Alec and Shanna don't need to save the day. They're supposed to be in sixth grade, even though they look way older than that. Mike: Like, yeah, they looked like kind of like eighth or ninth graders. Like they were a little bit older, it seemed.  Jessika: The second one, they looked older than that, they looked like they were teenagers in the second one, for some reason, I was like, what's that? And then the third one, they got young again. And I was like, I don't know what's happening with you guys, but. Mike: Yeah. I mean, I will say that I was willing to believe that Alec was in sixth grade just because he had that awful fucking bowl haircut that like.  Jessika: My brother had that.  Mike: Right. Yeah. But [00:31:00] when did he stop having it? Jessika: No, no, you're right. Probably after he was like in, probably after middle school.  Mike: Yeah. It's, you know, it's that thing where suddenly you realize, oh, I can go to a barber instead of having my parents cut my hair.  Jessika: Oh. So the kids basically do a bunch of calculations, and they double check each other's work by doing the same calculation on two separate computers that Supes and flown in prior and just left there. Apparently.  Mike: Yeah. And there's a whole thing about how Major Disaster had knocked out all the other computers in town, but he didn't know about these two personal computers because personal computers were a new thing. And that's the other reason that they're the ones who were performing the calculations and then they're on radio headsets with Superman providing this information. Jessika: I still say you're in a school that has way more adults than just the one standing in that room, and even that one's not involved. So. Mike: I mean, well, and the other thing is that the math equations that he's throwing at them are like this jet is falling out of the sky at this speed. [00:32:00] The wind is this fast. They're going at this angle. How fast do I need to go to catch them without doing damage to the plane or the people inside. And it's like, first of all, of course, yes, as you said, it's high stress, but second, like I still don't know how to do that math equation. I don't know how these sixth graders did because they looked like they were in a pretty shitty school that Superman made worse at one point when he liked tunneled up through the floor and just left a giant hole. Jessika: He was like, I'll fix that later.  Mike: Sure you will, sure you will, Clark. Jessika: It's awful. Uh. So he finally of course finds the villain, defeats him, whatever. Then the kids are hailed as heroes and as a reward, I guess they get to be at a Radio Shack commercial about the computers they used. I mean, cool. I guess.  Mike: Yeah. It was kind of a, a, meh ending, but, but yeah. Like, I dunno. Did you [00:33:00] like the issue overall? I'm curious. Jessika: It got really in the weeds playing up the computer aspects, which okay. I get it. You know, again, I get it. This is an advertisement, but dude, snooze fest, I put it down a few times and had to pick it back up, during those computer exposition parts. And you know, I'm slightly bothered by a vague plot line, but all in all, like it was, it was fine.  Mike: Yeah. Jessika: To use your line.  Mike: Yeah. I mean, reading through it, some of the computer history stuff I thought was actually pretty interesting  Jessika: Yeah. Yeah.  Mike: Like, when they went up on the roof and he was saying, you know, so the space that we're sending in actually is the size of what computers used to fill. And yeah, it does get a little too in the weeds because they're trying to get a little too much exposition in there at the same time. I felt like overall it walked a relatively fine line of providing action that was kind of [00:34:00] interesting. And, and the plot line of, oh, well, yeah, his powers were on the fritz because there was microscopic kryptonite particles in the tornado and he inhaled them when he was getting ready to blow it out. Like, I thought that actually was surprisingly well thought out for basically a licensed advertisement. You know, this was, this was effectively a full length version of one of those like hostess, Twinkies ads that they used to do.  Jessika: Right?  Mike: Yeah. But like, I didn't hate it. I found it charming. Jessika: It had its moments.  Mike: Yeah. I'm not going to lie, I found the undeniable sexual attention between Superman and the kid's teacher really entertaining. Jessika: Yeah, definitely it was palpable. I thought it was even funnier too, that the kids were even, like Ms. Wilson, how do you know Superman?  Mike: And she doesn't answer! Jessika: And she was like, She like side eyes.[00:35:00] How do I know Superman?…Biblically.  Mike: Well, and that was the funny thing was when we were talking about this ahead of the episode, I was like, so yeah, they, they totally smashed, right? Like, like that's not up for debate. Jessika: No, it's really not. It happened.  Mike: All right. let's move on to the next issue. So. Clearly, this was a successful marketing tool because in 1981, DC and Radio Shack released a brand new book that was called Victory By Computer. So this time the main story was illustrated by a couple of legendary artists. There was Curt Swan and Vince Colletta. Coletta started as an artist and anchor from the Silver Age of comics. He frequently collaborated with Jack Kirby who is known as, you know, the king of comic books, and a lot of folks considered their run on Thor to be the definitive take on the character.  Kurt Swan's involvement, on the other hand, is especially noteworthy. [00:36:00] He is considered by many comic book artists to be the Superman artist. He started penciling Superman and Superboy comics in the late forties. And he didn't stop until DC put them out to pasture in the mid eighties because they were rebooting Superman via Crisis on Infinite Earths.  Arlen Schumer, who's this major comic book historian, says Swan penciled over 19,000 covers and pages of interior art for Superman comics.  Jessika: Whoa! Mike: Yeah. Like again, they were putting some serious talent behind these books. Jessika: They were pumping out a lot of content, to be fair.  Mike: Yeah. How would you summarize Victory By Computer? Jessika: We find ourselves, yet again at the elementary school, I put in heavy quotations of kids that look like they're about 17 years old, this issue. So Shanna and smartass Alec are back at it. This time, Supergirl joins the class to [00:37:00] teach them about the pocket computer. What a fucking throwback.  Mike: Like, that's something that we need to explain. Like the pocket computer was, basically kind of like a smart calculator that could perform basic functions and had a little keyboard in there. And I don't know how much they sold for, but they couldn't have been cheap. Jessika: I can't imagine so, yeah. Well, and by the way, at this point in the scene where Supergirl pulls out, her pocket computer, she pulls out of a pocket on her cape. So canonically, there are pockets in the capes. Mike: Yeah. They can't get them on the rest of their costume, but they can get them in their capes.  Jessika: Which means that there's just stuff like weighing down the cape, so it shouldn't even be moving like it does.  Mike: I remember in an early issue of Superman, the eighties series that John Byrne was doing, there is a bit where he stops by a balloon vendor because he's got a drone pursuing him and he winds up like [00:38:00] thinking, oh, it's lucky that I always carry a few spare dollars in like my belt buckle because he had that yellow belt back then, which side note I miss the yellow belt. I don't know if it's back, cause I haven't read any Superman comics for a while, but they got rid of it for quite some time. Like, I mean, you know, it's the Henry Cavill look now or it's the full blue suit. I miss the red trunks in the yellow belt. Jessika: Yeah. the good old days. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: So Supergirl decides to use her super powers to show the class they are able to find information on the TRS 80's as fast as she was able to find it, like physically with her super powers looking for it. And it was like, okay, sure.  Mike: Yeah.  Jessika: When an odd comparison, but fine.  Mike: Yeah, it was really weird, there was a bit where they, like, it almost felt like they were hacking into the newsfeed of, I think the Daily Planet to get headlines, even though I'm sorry, but like, come on really, you think that a [00:39:00] print journalistic outlet is going to have top of the line technology back then come on. Jessika: No they're not putting any of that into a computer. They're still handwriting everything.  Mike: Yes. I think back then they were still using, the electric typewriter that had like the built-in, it was quote unquote memory, but it was, you know, not really. Jessika: Not as we know it now, at least. And there was some definite sexual tension with Ms. Wilson at Supergirl as well. We will post the picture. Um.  Mike: Right. It's this whole bit where Supergirl is like, oh, don't worry. I'm a school teacher in my secret identity. And I'm like, I don't know. Like, Are you just trying to impress her with this? What's the end goal of revealing this crucial information about your secret identity, Supergirl? Jessika: I know, right. She's just trying to connect with another human. She's like I'm also a school teacher. We should talk about it over dinner sometime.  Mike: And then maybe move in together after three weeks of dating, and adopt three cats. Jessika: Oh, my gosh. So, Super girl basically [00:40:00] teaches the class and then she I'll bet she just left those fucking pocket computers too, because you know, just like Superman just left the computers there. He was like, have fun kids.  Mike: Okay. Yeah, but here's the thing, like, you really think that some middle school kids or elementary school kids, however old they fucking are. You really think that they're going to sit there and try to steal the computers that the literal alien gods from other planets dropped off and taught them about? Jessika: Oh, I'm not, I'm not worried. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, no, I'm not worried about them stealing it. I'm just like Superman just apparently has like the extra spending cash that he can just like drop off two computers to a school and just like fuck off. Like really?  Mike: No, I mean, I, I viewed it the other way of just like, they're like, they're not worried about it. They're like, yeah. We'll, we'll get those back. Don't worry.  Jessika: Oh, so Supergirl apparently gets asked to go on [00:41:00] patrol by Superman and she spots something fishy. And so she goes to check it out, but it was a trap, of course. Mike: Yeah, but I mean, it wasn't even a very good trap. Jessika: Is a stupid trap. It was like, if you're a superhero and you happen to get curious, because you happen to be going near this location, maybe. And she like fell right into maybe a four foot by four foot hole in the ground. So I'm not really sure how that worked either. They just were like, nah, she's going to fall right here.  Mike: Yeah. Like she fell through the skylight after getting hit with like a blast of red sun radiation, or whatever it is.  Jessika: You know what it was, they used their TRS 80 to calculate where she was going to fall. So she gets stuck in what's basically like, it's like a lounge. It's like somebody's living room, and they have a computer there with a phone. So it's like, they weren't even trying that hard to keep her [00:42:00] there.  Mike: No, it was, it was absolutely the, like what a seventies swinger house looks like in all the movies that we see now where you're just like, oh, oh, okay. Jessika: It basically had a conversation pit.  Mike: Yeah. Jessika: Yeah. So of course, she remembers the phone number from Ms. Wilson's classroom. Mike: Yeah, because the rotary phone had the phone number printed on the front of it, because that was a thing that used to happen. Jessika: I feel like that's a little more explaining than she needed to give. I think she is making up for the fact that she just knows that number by heart.  Mike: I was going to say, I think she really wanted to get Mrs. Wilson's phone number, and then it just happened to actually be helpful in a way other than getting her a date. Jessika: Gosh, Ms. Wilson, man. And canonically bisexual? Question mark? Mike: I don't see why not. I think we can, I think we can [00:43:00] officially declare it. Jessika: Someone's going to @ us, I hope they do. So at any rate, she gets in touch with the class. She makes them do all these weird wacky calculations, has some get in touch with Superman. And by the time Superman gets there, like she's gotten out of it because she also used the computer to find out that there were like underground tunnels. And so she's like, I'll just walk out of these tunnels.  Mike: Yeah, basically it turns out it was like an old mob hide out and the students were able to look up some articles, which again, like, I don't know, because I was born in 81 and I don't have a good idea of what computer and internet adjacent technology was like back then. But they apparently look up articles about this hideout that got busted and they learned from the articles that there were underground tunnels that. Whatever, it was dumb, they don't even show her getting out. It was dumb. Jessika: No, she's just like walking out afterwards and Superman's, like, [00:44:00] oh, I was here to save you. And she's like, I just took the tunnels dude. And then like the bad guys are just, they just happened to be driving by. So they were like, well, let's just go get the bad guys. What do you think? It looks like, oh those are Lex Luther's dudes. Let's just go get the bad guys.  Mike: Yeah. And there's a whole thing where like, Lex Luther has announced from jail that like Superman is going to break him out and it's a much looser plot than the first issue was. Like the first issue, there was like, I felt like a much tighter story, you know, in between the educational bits, this one, it felt like they were kind of stretching to figure out a way to connect all this stuff. Jessika: For sure. Yes. Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So I think we can safely say that this was not our favorite of three books. Jessika: No, this one was so ridiculous. I mean, I loved the heavy, heavy [00:45:00] gay overtones. Mike: I mean, when do we not love the heavy gay overtones? Come on. Jessika: It's the agenda after all: brunch for everyone.  Mike: Yeah. So like, do you have any final thoughts on this, or should we move on to the last of the three books? Jessika: Ugh. That's just once mosey.  Mike: Okay. All right. So 83 was when we got the final book, which is the Computer Masters of Metropolis. So, this time Paul Kupperberg wrote the script for the comic. Kupperberg, he's not exactly a household name in terms of comic books, but he is actually pretty prolific. He's written over a thousand comics during his time as a writer, including the first appearance of He-Man and then he wrote the subsequent Masters at the Universities for DC. Yeah, like, you know, so I've read some of his stuff and I didn't even realize it. Also like, this is actually my favorite factoid about him. He served as the senior editor of the Weekly World News shortly [00:46:00] before it got shut down in 2007. Jessika: What? Mike: Yeah. And like that automatically makes me like the dude, because the Weekly World News was one of my favorite things when I was in college, and because I was so good at Photoshop in high school and college, and I was interested in journalism, but I also love the weird stuff, I actually wanted to apply to the weekly world news for a job just for like a little while. And be like, yeah, like I Photoshop pictures of bat boy. Like, I really was hoping that that would be a thing, and then they shut down right after I graduated college and broke my cold black heart. Jessika: It's a damn shame.  Mike: But yeah. So, meanwhile, the art was handled again by Curt Swan and then he was also assisted by Frank Chiaramonte. Chiaramonte was Swan's regular anchor on the main Superman book from 1978 to 82. And then this is one of his last books that he worked on because he died really young in January of [00:47:00] 83. He was only 40 years old. Like.  Jessika: Oh.  Mike: Yeah, it's really weird too. I was trying to figure out what happened and all I could find was that just, he died young. But, he was regarded pretty well and he worked on a lot of stuff. So I think if he hadn't died, he probably would've, you know, gone on to great things. But the Computer Masters of Metropolis doesn't have a publish date other than 1982, which means it came out less than a year before his death, because he died in January of 83.  Jessika: Oh, dang.  Mike: Yeah. All right. So what happened in the Computer Masters of Metropolis?  Jessika: So, those are some lucky kids studying at whatever outskirts elementary school this is. Cause it's not in Metropolis proper, it's like in the suburbs of Metropolis somewhere.  Mike: Yeah. You know, it's superhero-adjacent to the city. Jessika: Yeah. Yeah. Right. And again, not sure why Ms. Wilson seems to be on really, really [00:48:00] friendly terms with all the superheroes in the area, but Wonder Woman shows up to take them to the World's Fair, which of course is being held in Metropolis.  Mike: Yeah. Which I mean, okay. Why, why not?  Jessika: Exactly. Meanwhile, Lex Luther was salty about being denied entry for an exhibit for the World's Fair because the organizers didn't want to encourage his villainy.  Mike: It's so good. It's so good. Jessika: And so Luther decides to try to blackmail a way in, but that didn't work. So, of course he decides the thing to do is to threaten, to like completely destroy the fair, and ultimately creates another red solar radiation trap. This time, luring Superman into a room, rigged with explosives and bathed in red solar radiation, dun, dun, dun. So once again, there are computers in the room, I think, so. So he reaches out to [00:49:00] Alec and Shanna who are told that Wonder Woman should also be at the fair and to page page her. And she's basically like, okay, why are children paging me right now? But finds out that Superman is being held at the plantarium. She lassos the whole damn building and whips it around and it somehow deactivates the red solar radiation beam? Question mark? Mike: I don't know, man, I was pretty checked out when I was reading this. Like. They reused a lot of the same stuff, too. Like the same art where they were showing the computer chip, getting threaded through the needle, the bit where the kids are all walking on the giant demo version of the TRS,  Jessika: Oh, and those kids were being very nice because they acted surprised and very impressed to see that same damn exhibit for a second time.  Mike: Yeah. Which previously had showed up in the last issue. And I mean, like, it was a lot more exposition this time around too.  Jessika: It was.  Mike: [00:50:00] Anyway, sorry. Jessika: No, not at all. So Superman escapes and they catch Luther and the day is saved. And the end scenes were particularly silly. The mayor I'm assuming goes to thank Wonder Woman for saving the day. And she's like, but also these children, who just happened to be standing on the stage, like right behind her anyway, like the mayor, just, wasn't going to say anything about those kids on the stage, too, apparently. And they had a computer on stage with them? They were like, and this is the computer, let it hold the key too. And you got to know that like both Wonder Woman and Superman have to have entire rooms dedicated to the key to Metropolis that they get every time they save some damn building or something, they're all like, chuck another one in there. No, no, no. You kids keep that one.  Mike: It's fine. I've got 12 at home that are much nicer. Jessika: They're hanging on a wall around in a study.  Mike: They just use them as like coat racks. Jessika: [00:51:00] So Alec and Shanna, once again, saved the day, I guess.  Mike: Yeah, I mean, this was actually my least favorite of the three comics, because again, it was recycling art or, or using very similar art. It was making a lot of the same points, but it felt a lot more telling, not showing. And while I was really happy to see Lex Luther being next level petty, which, these days, you know, Lex Luther is a billionaire CEO, scientist who also has like armies of underlings performing super science for him that he's able to utilize. He's basically he is a more-  Jessika: Jeff Bezos.  Mike: Yeah, He is He is a, I was going to say, he's just, he's a more nakedly transparent, Jeff Bezos.  Jessika: Oh, you actually were going to say that. I'm sorry. I stole that right from out from under you. Mike: [00:52:00] No. I mean like it's, I'm sorry, like Jeff Bezos exploits his workers and use the money that he got from that to take a rocket ship and play astronaut, which side note, one of my favorite things about that entire story is that NASA at the last minute redefined, I think it was NASA, redefined what constitutes the definition of an astronaut, so he couldn't get an astronaut patch or pin. An astronaut pin, I think. Jessika: Which, again, the level of petty, but this is what I need. This is what I need to see, because it can't always be fucking Lex Luther winning.  Mike: Yeah. But anyway, like I really appreciated that we got to see Lex Luther being a super villain goon, like very flamboyant, flying around with his own little personal jet pack or jet boots, whatever they were like, they were like, it was like little rockets that he had attached to like his. I'm I'm struggling to remember if it was on his boots or on his waist. It was one or the other, right? Jessika: Yeah, I think it was [00:53:00] on his, I think you're right about the boots. And then he also had those fancy power gauntlets.  Mike: Yeah. And I mean, the other thing is back in this era, Lex Luther actually had a couple of different costumes that he wore that were very colorful and over-the-top, and it was like green and purple. So it kind of was that, that Joker color motif again, you know, it was really striking. And so he had that outfit of kind of the purple and green spandex that we saw in this issue. But then he also had this really baller set of green power armor that he used to really make Superman's life miserable for awhile. Like I said, after 1983, Radio Shack stopped with the Superman comics, but they didn't actually stop making comics. They kept on doing these comics with the Whiz Kids, but they instead moved over to Archie comic publications. I haven't been able to find out why the partnership's stopped. There's very little actual [00:54:00] documentation about these comics outside of a bunch of articles saying, oh yeah, they happened. Like they were a thing. They were dumb. And then pretty much all I've been able to find otherwise is people selling them. Cause there's still a lot of them around. And if you're looking for a fun piece of comic book history, these aren't very expensive, even in mint condition. That said the Tandy brand was starting to fall out of popularity by 83. For some perspective, it's estimated that Tandy controlled up to 60% of the personal computer market in the late seventies, which is like an astronomical market share. However, and this is from an article by a guy named Ron White, that he wrote for a magazine called 80 Micro in 1987, and you can now find it on a site called Vintage is the New Old, and we'll put this in the show notes again, Tandy's market share was down to 25% by 86. So it's a pretty fast fall from grace. Jessika: Yeah.  Mike: And then, even though Archie was publishing the comics, [00:55:00] none of the Archie characters actually showed up in any of these books with the Whiz Kids, although Radio Shack did publish Archie in the History of Electronics separately.  Jessika: Oh. Mike: Like, yeah. But based on that, my guess is that Radio Shack was looking to save some cash and Archie was probably a much better deal. I'm guessing it costs a lot more to license DC superheroes than it does to just make a comic without any big name characters. Jessika: Oh, I am sure.  Mike: Yeah. And then shortly after Archie took over the publication duties, the TRS computer line got rebranded to the Tandy computer. So it makes sense that the comic was rebranded from the TRS Whiz Kid's to the Tandy computer Whiz Kids. And that's actually, when I first became aware of this whole venture, because Nostalgia Alley, which is the local retro game store up in Petaluma, has a copy of one of the Tandy Whiz Kids comics on the shelf behind the counter. And so I [00:56:00] spotted that one time and I was talking to Jason, the owner, and he let me check it out for a couple of minutes. And that's when I started looking into this whole thing, which, per usual, led us down a rabbit hole. Jessika: Love these rabbit holes of ours.  Mike: Yeah, they're fun. Anyway, the Tandi Whiz Kid's comics kept on coming out until 1992. And based on what I understand, they featured the Whiz Kids solving crimes, using Tandy computers and other Radio Shack products. I haven't read them. I do really want to track down a copy of the Computer that Said No To Drugs though. Jessika: Who was offering computers drugs? They are expensive! Mike: I, I don't know. I'm really curious about everything about that. Jessika: Hey man, you want to hit this? It's just a fucking computer. And it's like, what are you talking about, dude?  Mike: Oh, I'm having flashbacks now of that episode of, uh, Futurama where Bender gets hooked on electricity. Jessika: Oh, hahahaha. [00:57:00]  Mike: They keep on referring to it as jacking on anyway. Yeah. But the early nineties were when things really started to go downhill for Radio Shack and they never really stopped, because stores like Best Buy and Walmart just started to really eat their lunch. And then, it got to the point where they've had to declare bankruptcy twice in the past five years or so. Like they also declared Nick Cannon as their chief creative officer around the time of the first bankruptcy. Yeah. And now they've been bought by some shady sounding company out of Florida. So the brand is still around, but it's not really the company that we grew up with. And I don't know, I'm honestly not sure what's worse, like partnering with Nick Cannon, or being this pale reflection of your former glory. They both sound pretty bad. Jessika: Yeah.  Mike: But yeah, that's the story about Superman, and how he wound up acting as a computer salesman for [00:58:00] a couple of years. You got any final thoughts? Jessika: So I'm just shaking my head over here. Like my nostrils are flaring.  Mike: How was that different from any other conversation I lead though? Jessika: I literally prepare myself for these, cause I'm like, all right, you can get angry, but don't get too angry. My secret is I'm always angry.  Mike: Dun dun dun. Jessika: Hmm. So you know, it's really interesting to see how very far we've come since these issues came out in the early eighties. Like, we're sitting here on small laptops, I've got a phone and a tablet right here in front of me as well, and you and I are basically sitting across from each other, having a conversation, even though we're not even in the same physical location.  Mike: Yeah. Jessika: It blows my mind how amazing things like high speed trains and basic information [00:59:00] searches seemed back then, when they're so commonplace now. Like, I seriously Google everything. I would be nowhere without Google.  Mike: Yeah. My career is because of the internet. Jessika: Yeah. Yours, yours sure, is absolutely that's, yeah. That's a wild thing to think about too. And it's also wild to think about how much more advanced technology has become even in just, I had to do the calculations 40 years time, which I about had a panic attack when I mathed that out because. Ha ha ha. We're almost 40. Mike: Yep. Actually this episode is going to air right around the time that I'm going to be turning 40. Jessika: Yup. Happy birthday, to Mike.  Mike: Thanks, I hate it.  Jessika: No, Yeah. Right. At least you're not my mom giving my dad a [01:00:00] vulture piñata for his 40th birthday. Mike: No, Sarah has declared that she wants my 40th birthday to be a super soft birthday, which if you've ever watched Letterkenny.  Jessika: Yes! I was hoping You were going to say that. There has to be a unicorn.  Mike: I know, I think it's going to be put on hold until we're all vaccinated, but we might do a belated super soft birthday. Jessika: Yeah, okay. I figured you guys are going to have a family super soft birthday. But, if you want to have a super soft after birthday, when things clear up, I am, I am there and I will be eating some lovely pink frosted cupcakes with you.  Mike: You're on, big shoots. So we are now at the point of the episode where we're going to wrap things up with our Brain Wrinkles, which is when we discussed the one thing that is comics or comics adjacent that we just can't get out of our head. So you want to start things off? Jessika: Oh sure. [01:01:00] As I promised, I just finished watching the latest season of The Boys, which is season two. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. That show is bat shit wild. Mike: Yeah.  Jessika: And what's been sticking in my head is the abuse dynamic between Homelander and mean, anybody he deals with, really? Mike: I was gonna say, everybody? Jessika: Yeah. And it's so interesting, cause as he was growing up, he was taught that not only is he more powerful than any person, he has been told that he is special and is entitled to do whatever pleases him. Which is really scary to see him manipulating others, using fear as a motivator to encourage them to comply. And honestly, the reason it scares me the most is just the powerlessness that these people, and most often women, are terrified into just following through with Homelander's whims.  Mike: Yeah. yeah. There's a lot of really [01:02:00] uncomfortable moments in that show. But I like the show, which I didn't expect. Jessika: Well, I do like that it's putting a spotlight onto that dynamic, cause that's a dynamic that we show is very one-sided, usually a little victim blamey.  Mike: Mmhmm.  Jessika: You know, why didn't she just leave kind of a narrative, which we all know it's not that easy.  Mike: Yeah. Jessika: And I think this is a really good example of why it's not that easy, in a very powerful way. And, it does remind me of people who are stuck in abusive households or relationships and are in different ways, powerless to leave their situations. So, hopefully it sparks some conversation.  Mike: Yeah. Jessika: Well, but what about you?  Mike: Mine is also TV related, but it's not quite as topical as your thoughts. So, I actually was trying to show my stepson[01:03:00] some X-Men cartoons the other day. And as we started to watch the first episode of Wolverine and the X-Men, he started to ask me all these questions about who the different characters were, because they basically start the show off assuming that the audience knows who all of the X-Men are, because at the time when it launched, the X-Men were a major brand, and then Disney acquired Marvel right before this. And then, they kind of made mutants personas, non grata, and, the mutants have not been featured in Disney programming up until the point where basically for the past 10 years, major media representation for kids of characters, like the X-Men, aren't all that common. And so it was just kind of a really thoughtful moment for me, where I realized I had to start them over from the beginning with an earlier X-Men cartoon, where he gets all these introductions. And I think there's going to be this generation that is going to grow up learning who the X-Men are a lot later than a lot of us [01:04:00] did. Like I knew all of the X-Men by the age of nine and I suspect. Jessika: Oh, yeah. Mike: Yeah. And so I think it's going to be really interesting to watch a generation of teenagers discover the X-Men really for the first time outside of, you know, Wolverine and Deadpool, because everybody knows who they are. Jessika: Yeah, of course. Hm. Mike: But yeah.  Jessika: That's wild.  Mike: Yeah. It's kind of one of those surreal moments of realization. Yeah.  Jessika: Hmm.  Mike: So, in two weeks we will be back with our next installment of the Sandman book club, which is going to be volumes three and four. And then until then we'll see you in the stacks. Thanks for listening to Ten Cent Takes. Accessibility is important to us, so text transcriptions of each of our published episodes can be found on our website.  Mike: This episode was hosted by Jessika Frazer and Mike Thompson written by Mike Thompson, and edited by Jessika Frazer. Our intro theme was written and performed by Jared Emerson Johnson of Bay Area Sound, our credits and transition music is Pursuit of Life by Evan [01:05:00] MacDonald, and was purchased with a standard license from Premium Beat. Our banner graphics were designed by Sarah Frank, who you can find on Instagram as @lookmomdraws. Jessika: If you'd like to get in touch with us, ask us questions, or tell us about how we got something wrong, please head over to tencenttakes.com or shoot an email to tencenttakes@gmail.com. You can also find us on Twitter; the official podcast account is tencenttakes. Jessika is jessikawitha, and Jessika spelled with a K, and Mike is vansau, V a N S a U.  Mike: If you'd like to support us, be sure to download, rate and review wherever you listen. And if you like, what you hear, tell your friends. Jessika: Stay safe out there.  Mike: And support your local comic shop. Lfa66XA001sq2SOSeOU7

Today we're checking out a couple of Jessika's latest estate sale finds: Superboy 109 & 110. Are these swingin' sixties stories about the Boy of Steel any good? Well, no. Not really. But they certainly gave us something to talk about! ----more---- Episode 13 Transcript Jessika: [00:00:00] Dude. It's always fucking Florida, Mike: I can't think of anything that comes out of Florida that's good. Jessika: Hello. Welcome to Ten Cent Takes, the podcast where we traverse tumultuous time continuities, one issue at a time. My name is Jessika Frazier and I am joined by my cohost, the dastardly dog dad, Mike Thompson.  Mike: That's a fair description.  Jessika: That was a segue. We need to talk about your newest acquisition.  Mike: What, Mo?  Jessika: No. We've talked about Mo. What was your newest acquisition in relation to the squad?  Mike: Oh, right. We bought a dog wagon over the weekend.  Jessika: Yeah, you did! Mike: And then, uh, already busted it out and taking them all over the neighborhood [00:01:00] and to the beach. I think it was proven to be a wise investment when this neighbor who we'd never seen before stopped his car in the middle of the road and yelled at us about how cute he thought it was. He was like, “that's the cutest thing I've ever seen!” He was this big old dude. I'm like, alright, I'm on board with this. All right. Success.  Jessika: Amazing.  Mike: It was very wholesome.  Jessika: Well, I think Mike'll have to post at least one or two pictures of the dogs  in this week's transcript. Mike: Yeah, no, we  can absolutely post photos of the dogs in this episode's transcript.  Jessika: Yes. Mike: Yeah.  Jessika: Well, the purpose of this podcast is to study comic books in ways that are both fun and informative. We want to look at their coolest, weirdest and silliest moments, as well as examine how they're woven into the larger fabric of pop culture and history. Today we'll be discussing the boy of steel, Superboy. While there are many variations of this character, we are going to be focusing on the OG [00:02:00] comics from 1944 to 69 as the ones that we talk about, but we will also just briefly touch upon the other comics, TV shows, and movies sporting the same character, as well as touch upon the absolute nightmare that is the timeline continuity, or lack thereof, that is Superman's life story. But before we do that, what is one cool thing that you've read or watched lately?  Mike: Sarah and I have been watching a show called Motherland: Fort Salem. Have you heard of this?  Jessika: I have, I was interested. Should I start it?  Mike: Yeah, we really dig it. It's on FreeForm, but it's streaming on Hulu. It takes place in this world where the United States stopped hunting witches 300 years ago and there was something called the Salem Accords signed. So now we have a world that's dominated by the USA and witches make up, as far as I can tell, the entirety of its armed forces. Jessika: [00:03:00] Oh, snap.  Mike: It's really cool. And the whole thing is magic is based on sound and resonance. And it's really a unique spin on things, but the show follows these three young witches who are recruited into the army and then start navigating their way through it. And the larger society, that's a part of the military and it's very comic book-y in terms of its plotting and character development and then the meta narrative as well. It's really cool. And it's really diverse in terms of casting. The storylines are really thoughtful in a lot of ways, and it's very queer. Like, extremely queer.  Jessika: Yes.  Mike: And the shows in the middle of its second season. And it's gotten much better. Like, I mean, it was already, it was already very good, but it feels like the second season, they really got the kick things up and they've really upped the creep factor. There's a whole thing about witch hunters re-emerging in kind of striking back at witches and riling up public sentiment. It feels very topical. [00:04:00] And then the whole thing is that because which is get their powers from the sound of their voice, what these witch hunters are doing is they're actually like cutting out witches' voice boxes and then weaponizing them. It's really cool and really creepy. And I really like it. Jessika: Oh, damn. That is like horrific. And like wow, that's an interesting concept.  Mike: Yeah. Sarah and I have been really, really enjoying it. And it's definitely something that we put on when the kids aren't around obviously, but,  Jessika: Oh, yeah.  Mike: but it's really solid. So yeah, not a comic book this time. But certainly something that I think a lot of comic book fans would enjoy.  How about you? Jessika: Well, once again, Lauren from Outer Planes in Santa Rosa comes through on the recommendations. Because she suggested the Image series, Man Eaters: The Cursed.  Mike: Hm.  Jessika: It's so fun. It starts off with 15 year old Maude being forced to go to summer camps. So her parents can go on this romantic vacation by themselves without her.  Mike: [00:05:00] Relatable.  Relatable, mom and dad.  Jessika: Absolutely. Well, and it's so funny because they put these fun little, like. It's almost like little artifacts in there , for you. So they have the registration card where they're registering her. And so it's like, will you be on vacation while your child is at camp? And it's like, YES. Like it literally asked that as a question like it's expected.  Mike: Good.  Jessika: It's pretty funny. Another thing I found that's really funny is they have the campers have these buttons. They're like warning buttons for insurance purposes. And they say things like sleepwalker or lice, or like Gemini. Which like big Gemini myself, like absolutely issue some warnings.  Mike: I love it. Jessika: And I love that there is one male character so far in this, and he's the least prepared for everything and Maude totally [00:06:00] roasts him a couple of times.  Mike: Again, relatable. Because the one who does all the home repairs around here, it ain't me. Jessika: Oh my gosh. So yeah, no, I added that to my pull list.  Mike: Yeah, that sounds great. Jessika: All right. Well, welcome to another episode of Jessika's estate sale fines. This week we'll be looking at Superboy, the comics, and I'm going to run us through the timeline of the comics as they came out, along with the TV shows and movies that were associated with those. So a lot of this is going to be like informational about when the comic came about and the character, Superboy  as Kal-El Mike: I'm super excited.  Jessika: there was a lot to it. And actually there was a  lot of different weirded consistencies that we're definitely gonna get into. As I've already hinted at that, I think you'll find very [00:07:00] funny,  Mike: I'm so excited.  Jessika: Okay. before I get too deep into this topic, I want to give a shout out to the resources that I use to compile my information today: An article from DC on DC comics.com fan news blog by Megan Downey, titled “Reign of the Superboys: The strange history of the Boy of Steel,” the Wikipedia article on Superboy, a blog post on captaincomics.ning.com in a forum called the comics round table by username commander Benson titled “deck log entry, number 176 Superboy: the time of his life,” and IMDB. for those of you who are. For those of you who are somehow unfamiliar with the basic storyline of Superboy's origins. not to be confused with Superman's origins, which he swoops in a little bit differently initially in the comics than this. but Kal-El in this instance was sent to earth by his parents before their home planet of Krypton [00:08:00] was destroyed. He was discovered in the crater left by his arrival by locals Martha and Jonathan Kent, who adopted him, raising him as their own son and naming him Clark. At age eight, Clark is told how he was found and finds out more about his origins from Krypton. Martha makes him an indestructible suit out of a blanket that he was found with one that came from Krypton and is imbued with the same powers that he himself holds. And it's basically just like Superman fucking around and not being in school.  Mike: Yeah, it almost entirely takes place in Smallville, which… it's kind of like the DC universe version of Cabbot Cove from Murder, She Wrote, where you're just like, how many fucking people die in this town? You know, in Smallville, it's, it's more along the lines of how many fucking supervillains hang out in this town in the middle of nowhere, Kansas,  Jessika: That's just it. What is it? A convention?  Mike: I guess. Jessika: Oh, so Superboy as a character was created by Joe Schuster and [00:09:00] Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel in 1938, but was rejected twice by Detective Comics before the growing popularity of the comic Robin, the Boy Wonder, finally convinced them to change their stance and they then decided to use it to try to relate to a younger readership with a younger character, which makes sense. Thus, Superboy made his comic debut in 1945, but just as a feature in the anthology, More Fun Comics issue 101. Now, of course, it wouldn't be comics without a little bit of drama. Schuster had assistance from Don Cameron instead of Siegel, as Siegel was serving in World War II and stationed in Hawaii. And he actually had to hear about Superboy's and inaugural publication through a letter from Schuster. DC didn't send them any notification nor was he able to actively participate in the trajectory of the plot line  since he was serving. It [00:10:00] was kind of a fuck you.  Mike: considering how heavily Superman was a part of propaganda. There is literally a cover of Superman running a printing press that says, I think it says, like, “help slap a Jap.” Jessika: Oh, that hurt me.  Mike: Yeah. Like, I mean, Superman was very much part of World War II propaganda, and that's insane that they wouldn't let one of his creators participate in the storylines because he was serving in the, uh, okay. Whatever. Jessika: Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty, it's pretty rough. So apparently there was already a rift in Siegel and Schuster's relationship. And so this just increased that strain. After that first issue, Superboy appeared in More Fun Comics, bimonthly issues through number [00:11:00] 107, but was picked up by Adventure Comics debuting in April of 1946. So he was bouncing around, that was issue number 103. And he was the lead feature for the anthology on this one Mike: Hm  Jessika: and remained the headlining feature for over 200 issues and continued being featured in Adventure Comics until 1969.  Mike: That's such a huge, just, that's an incredible run. Jessika: Yeah. It's a ton of time. And especially considering like he had, this was just like a side gig for Superboy. Really. He had other stuff going that he was doing.  Mike: Yeah, I do know that at one point in the sixties, Superboy was I believe the number two comic in America and the only one that was doing more than that was Superman. Jessika: It's like you were reading ahead. No, seriously. That's in my notes.  Mike: Oh, really? Okay, cool.  Jessika: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, no. And actually was frequently number two. We'll just  get to it now. It was frequently number two for a lot of it's run.[00:12:00]  So notable storylines that we got from Adventure Comics were intro to Krypto, the super dog, the origin story of his rivalry with Lex Luther, which that continues pretty far. So it's interesting that they, like, created the origin story.  Mike: Yeah. They had like teenage Lex Luther show up in Smallville, right?  Jessika: Yeah, yes, yes. Correct.  Mike: I think he had hair  Jessika: Back when he had hair, yeah.  Mike: Yeah. And that's something that's continued up until modern times as well. Mark Waid's Birthright, I know, did that… where it basically revealed that Clark Kent had been for a short time friends with Lex.  Jessika: Oh, wow. Of course. They had to be friends before they were enemies. Frenemies. There was also the the debut of the 30th century superhero team, the Legion of superheroes.  As Superboy, continue to frequent the pages of anthology comics in April of 1949, he became the sixth superhero to get his own comic book. and was the first new superhero [00:13:00] title to succeed after World War II. Mike: Oh, wow. That's crazy.  Jessika: Right?  Mike: I had no idea that there were only six superhero comics back then. Jessika: Yeah. Not with our own titles.  Mike: I mean, that's wild.  Jessika: Totally. I didn't realize that either.  Mike: yeah Jessika: notable storylines from this namesake comic were intro to Ilana Lang and Pete Ross, the storyline of the first Bizarro and first appearances of Legion of superheroes characters, Mon-El and Ultra Boy.  He also appeared in Legion of superheroes volume. One, which was printed as an anthology. Superboy itself continued until 1976 when the comic was renamed Superboy and the Legion of superheroes. Superboy was involved in the storyline until issue number 2 59. When he leaves after learning new information regarding the death of his parents.[00:14:00]  Dramatics. Mike: Yeah, I haven't read a lot of those, but the idea is that he's displaced through time and he winds up hanging out with the Legion for a while. And then if I remember right, Supergirl winds up joining the Legion after a while, too. Basically, so they can have kind of a headliner. Jessika: I smell them trying to fix a time continuum. But that's maybe I'm biased. Based on the research I've been doing,     The series was then retitled Legion of superheroes volume two, and ended with issue number 354 and 1979. There was also a three-part mini series called Secrets of the Legion of Superheroes that was published in 1981. And despite the general decline of superhero readership, Superboys' popularity continued to grow and adventure comics and Superboy frequently sold over a million copies combined.  Mike: That's an insane amount of comics these days. You know, back then that [00:15:00] was wild. Jessika: I mean, it definitely groundbreaking for its time. I would say it was, it sounded like it was huge. The popularity may also have been due to the fact that Superboy was found on more than just comic book stands. He was also on the TV and in the movies, he appeared in a 26 minute movie called the Adventures of Superboy and multiple six-minute episodes airing with the New Adventures of Superman, which aired for 1966 to 70, the Superman Aquaman Hour of Adventure from 67 to 68 and the Batman Superman Hour 68 to 69. All of which were just continuations are within that same world as the initial comic book.  Mike: Right. And those were all animated series too, I think, right?  Jessika: they were. They were. And here's something fun for you to watch if you wanted to click on that link.  Mike: Okay.  [Superboy INTRO AUDIO PLAYS] I love the image of like infant CBRE, boy, just lifting a piano. All right.  Jessika: Very patriotic.  Mike: Yeah. I love the fact that they have Krypto in there. Like I've always had a soft spot for Krypto. I am a little offended that his cowlick isn't in the shape of an S though. Come on guys. You know, this is an amateur hour.  Jessika: Missed opportunity. Mike: Right. But yeah, that was super cute.  Jessika: Wasn't that fun? Yeah. So I can,  I could see kids get getting really excited about seeing that. And then they walk by the newsstand and they go, I just saw that on TV.  Mike: yeah, exactly.  Jessika: [00:17:00] So I think they had a good thing going with that at that point. Mike: Oh, a hundred percent. So that was in the sixties, you said, right?  Jessika: Yes.  Mike: So that was right when television was becoming the dominant form of entertainment in the United States. I think by 1959 or 1960, it was something like 90% of households in America had televisions. And Saturday morning cartoons were starting to become a thing, which by the way, you guys should go back and listen to that episode about Saturday morning cartoons. It's our first episode. And we talk all about the evolution of that and how it connected with Comics. Jessika: It was a fun one. So pretty much right after the Legion of Superheroes volume two ended, the New Adventures of Superboy was published in 1984. That had 54 published issues,  Mike: Okay. That's a respectable run.  Jessika: Yeah. It's not anything too wild. Yeah. In 1985, DC tried to tie up some of those pesky plot holes that we're going to discuss later [00:18:00] on, for sure, by creating a comic that told the story of Clark Kent's transitional years in college at Metropolis University, going from Superboy effectively to Superman. And while this was supposed to last for 12 installments, they only ended up publishing six, mostly due to the fact that Crisis on Infinite Earths was published  Mike: I was about to ask. Yeah.  Jessika: Yep. That actually featured the eraser of Superboy  and yet another attempt to correct a timeline.  Mike: Well, Crisis on Infinite Earths was the first real attempt by DC to sit there and stream everything into a coherent timeline. And at the same time they had John Byrne's The Man of Steel, which came out I think right after. Crisis on infinite earths. And that also streamlined Superman's very convoluted history. The problem is is that by that point in time, you had almost 50 years of continuity, which made no fucking [00:19:00] sense. Jessika: And we'll discuss it later, but there wasn't necessarily a need for continuity back in the day. I mean, they didn't have to have it. They were just there for like, we're doing this adventure. This is fun. They're going to enjoy it. And there wasn't a feeling that you had to necessarily link it with what came before it or what was going, coming after it in the same way that we want now as readers and as fans, we want everything to make sense because we want more of the story in that  way. Mike: We want that overarching meta plot. Jessika: Exactly. Exactly. So despite DC's attempt to write Superboy out of the universe completely, he appeared once again in Legion of Superheroes Volume Three, which ran from 86, 87 and while Crisis on Infinite Earths had erased Superboy. To some extent in other time, continuations, they now needed to recreate him in order to have a cohesive storyline for [00:20:00] Legion of Superheroes. Mike: God. Jessika: So they were like, what are we going to do? Oh, I know pocket universe.  Mike: Why not?  Jessika: Why not? So in this version, it's set in a pocket universe created by the villain Time Trapper.  Mike: I think the Time Trapper… so the Time Trapper is like a villain who has had multiple identities. It's the same villain ultimately, but it's different people wind up becoming the Time Trapper. And I think, Superboy became the time trapper point.  Jessika: This doesn't surprise me at all. What the hell?  Mike: Yeah, don't, don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure that it happened, uh, during one of their big, crossovers,  Jessika: Oh, no, Mike: Comic books are dumb and I love them.  Jessika: I do, too. This is actually part of the  reason I really do like them. Because I like seeing all of these little differences. It doesn't make me mad. I just find it very funny.  Mike: Yeah. so the Time Trapper created a pocket [00:21:00] universe and then they used him to bring Superboy back.  Jessika: Yeah, exactly. And so he, but here's the funny part. He was really just like a sideline character in this. He came in and issued 24 and he was killed off in 38. Mike: Superboy was going. Okay. I'm not going to ask question.  Jessika: Yeah. Cause he had to like sacrifice himself to save the world. I mean,  that's, you know, common trend in these, right.  Mike: Of course.  Jessika: Yeah.  It was convenient. If not obvious.  Mike: Okay.  Jessika: Superboy apparently would not, could not be stopped. As was apparent in 1988 with not only a comic publication, but also a TV appearance. Once again, this time live action.  Mike: I remember that show.  Jessika: Yeah, it was here and that was gone.  Mike: It lasted for a couple of seasons, but I think they had a couple of different actors play Superboy. Jessika: They did. Yeah. So it was four seasons and it started out starring John Hames Newton for season one [00:22:00] and then recast replaced for the remainder of the four seasons. So the rest of the three by Gerard Christopher.  Mike: Oops.  Jessika: So that was a 22 minute runtime, pretty normal for that time. but there again, it went along with the same year that the Superboy volume two hit shelves. You know, they did another one of those timing things thinking, Hey, it worked what? 30 years ago.  Let's do it again.  Mike: Yeah. It's that whole transmedia thing. Jessika: Yeah, exactly. the show ultimately lasted until 1992, the same year a one-shot comic called the last Superboy was published. But that seemed to be the last dying ember from the fire that is Superboy, as we've talked about up until this point, except one thing. And I know that we want to talk about it a little bit, which is Smallville. And I know we've mentioned it, but I didn't watch that. Did you watch that show?  Mike: Oh, yeah. Are you kidding me? I, I was all over that show for the first few seasons. Jessika: Okay. I [00:23:00] just really, it was just cause I had a crush on Kristin Kruek, but unfortunately she got involved with that horrific NXIVM cult.  Mike: I thought It wasn't her. It  was the… Jessika: It was Alison Mack, but  like, but  she was involved for a few years,  unfortunately. Big. Yikes.  Mike: I don't know too much about it. I just know that Alison Mack was one of the big ringleaders for it and it was wild. Jessika: She was, yeah.  Mike: Like she, I think she left Smallville to like devote herself full-time to that cult.  Jessika: That sounds right. Yeah, she was, she was definitely a big part of it. yeah, it was rough. I've been following it.  Mike: I really liked Smallville when it first came out. I remember getting so excited when they had a little teaser ad for it where I think it's Krystin Kreuk is wandering through the darkness and she hears something and turns and then you see Tom Welling step out of the shadows and he says something along the lines “Oh, Hey, it's just me. It's it's Clark.” and then it just says Smallville, and I was like, oh mother fucker. That's amazing. [00:24:00] And yeah, it was, it was fine. It was very teen angsty, but they had a lot of deep cuts for comic fans. And, I think I stopped watching around season four  because it just started to, it felt like it really sort of jumped the shark,  Jessika: Oh, okay. Yeah. I was going to, ask if it's  something I should rewatch. I don't know. Stuff from that. Timeframe is so cringey these days.  Mike: A lot of it's cringey. I remember a whole thing with his heat vision was tied to like him being horny.  Jessika: No. Why do you have to do that?  It's so unnecessary.  Mike: But you know, what's funny is they actually brought Tom Welling back in the whole DC Arrowverse recently where they have a version of Lex Luther. Who's traveling the multi-verse and he shows up at, he shows up at the Kent farm and Tom welling is there. I thought it was just, it was great. It was, it was just, it was a really cute little nod. Jessika: That is pretty cute. I do like that.  Mike: And then he got all mad because he was trying to suck Superman's powers [00:25:00] away. And then it turns out Superman gave up his power so that he can have a family and a normal life. And then the now powerless Superman pops him in the nose. It was kind of good.  Jessika: That is cute.  Mike: I was fine with this. It was very, it was very wholesome. Jessika: So there are other iterations of Superboy, but they're not necessarily Clark Kent and some of them are, but they kind of stray off into different timeline. And I could have gone down that rabbit hole, but Mike: Yeah.  Jessika: you know, I didn't. Here we are.  Mike: that's fine.  Jessika: So I also know that I, more than hinted, we've talked about a little bit, uh, the continuity troubles that plagued Superboy.  Mike: Right,  Jessika: I, I gotta say some of these transgressions are just capital B A D bad. But they get a bit of a pass again, you know, like I said, because Comics at that point [00:26:00] really didn't hinge on a time continuum.  Mike: Right. That wasn't a thing.  Jessika: No, it wasn't. So, we got to give them a little bit of credit except when they actually started figuring it out and they still did absolutely nothing about it, which is what we're going to talk about. Mike: Okay.  Jessika: Because after Superman, they kind of figured out, oh, people are wanting more of a storyline and we've already given Superman kind of a timeframe. And now this has to be Superboy. So it needs to be earlier. So they were like, Okay. Superboy is from the 30s.  Mike: Right.  Jessika: But Superman at that time, I think was supposed to be set in the 60s or the 50s. And the math did not add  Mike: Right.  Jessika: at all to get to that point. So right off the bat. You've just you're wrong about the dates. what's even more funny to me is that in the first iterations of the Superman comic, the origin story is always [00:27:00] that the first time he came to earth was when he came to metropolis, like as a full ass adult.  Mike: Right.  Jessika: So what's, what's up, you know, so that's where it's like, all Right. this is already… Mike: This is convoluted. Yeah. Jessika: exactly. So you and I read a couple of comics from the time period of those original comics, and we read them from specifically from 1963. What I love about these is you could actually, at that, I don't, maybe they still do this. I haven't seen it yet in my Comics. You could write in and they would publish the comments and the editor … Mike: they still do this.  Jessika: Okay, cool. So the editor writes a comment back,  Mike: Yeah.  Jessika: So we have a few of these.  Mike: Okay.  Jessika: And I would love for you to read them for us.  Mike: Okay. So we have a few of these here. the first one says dear editor, since Superman was a Superboy before World War II and television sets, weren't perfected and [00:28:00] sold to the public until after World War II. How come you show TV roof antennas, and Superboy stories. Kevin Herron, Tiffin, Ohio. And the editor responded with you're right, Kevin, we're wrong. We made a booboo. Editor. Jessika: Okay. Mike: The next one is dear editor. How come in Superboy comics. You illustrate such modern inventions as a bombs, atomic subs, jet planes, television, et cetera, all devices, which weren't invented until 1945 for later. And which certainly weren't around when Superman was born, Ken parent Wheaton, Illinois. The response is historians refer to such inconsistency as anachronisms. They are a necessary form of literary license required to achieve dramatic effects. Movies exercise this option very often. For example, the first umbrella was invented in 1740 yet numerous period films devoted to the life in the middle ages have shown heroines protecting themselves from the sun with a parasol. Editor Jessika: I love how he's getting like a little salt here with his answers.  Mike: Just a little bit. [00:29:00]  Jessika: He's like, but Webster's dictionary says…  Mike: God. Yeah. I don't miss those days. These days. Usually when you see the letters section of a comic, it's usually people talking about how much something meant to them, or at least in the ones that I read it. It's always really nice. So.  Jessika: That's sweet.  Mike: All right. So the last one: dear editor in the recent story, the amazing bizarro you had Superboy dropping an atomic bomb on bizarro. How is this possible, as Superboys adventures. They're supposed to have happened before 1945 and scientists had not perfected the H-bomb until  1945. Steve Spangler, Sonoma, California,  Jessika: Boom representation. That's right down the road from us.  Mike: the response is “we goofed! From now on no more a bombs in Superboy. Editor.”  Jessika: Well, that's easy.  Mike: Oh, that's great. At some point it's like, come on guys, it's a comic book.  Jessika: Yeah,  Mike: I think it's, are you [00:30:00] really expecting the science fiction comic, starring an alien who just happens to look exactly like a human, but has more super powers than God is going to be historically and scientifically accurate all the time. Okay. Whatever. I don't…  Jessika: I know. I know. I know. I hear you. I do well. And what's funny too, is at one point, Lana Lang is in a beauty competition and it says 1952.  Mike: Well, it's reassuring to know that nerds were always this nitpicky. Jessika: Absolutely. That really is.  Mike: Yeah. Jessika: So the time in consistencies didn't end there. As I mentioned, there have been multiple timelines that have been created and destroyed to ensure some kind of consistency in the Superman universe. But whether or not that was actually a success is really anybody's opinion. It's up to the listener. [00:31:00] But if you're interested in finding out more about this travesty of a timeline, go check out that blog post I mentioned at the top of the episode, I'm on Captain Comics Presents, it's got a lot more examples of the inconsistencies from those OG comics. Mike: Yeah. Well, okay. One thing I will note is that DC kind of figured this out recently where they, ran a series called doomsday clock, and it's Dr. Manhattan from the Watchman universe with Superman. And the very end of it is revealing that there is now a “metaverse” in DC. Where it's like, oh yeah. So Superman arrived in the 30s and started being a superhero, you know? And then also he also arrived in the 60s and then he also arrived in the 80s and so on and so forth. And so it,  it sort of makes sense of that for those people who care. Jessika: Well, and it's like the same kind of Marvel multi-verse that we have going on with that, with the  Spider-Man is pointing to each other.  Mike: Yeah. It [00:32:00] basically, it takes the concept of a multi-verse and then it adds another layer and it does it in a way that feels, hm, I'm not going to say plausible, but it just, it kind of works and, you know, I actually liked it, but that's just me. Jessika: Yeah. you know what, and what's funny about Superman is I don't like Superman, so it's funny that we're doing this whole episode. I just thought it, was interesting. These Superboy comics when I saw them, well and I picked them up because like, honestly, like the titles were horrific and I will have some very liberal things to say about them, but yes, I, you know, but honestly, what's very funny, even though I hate Superman, I don't know what it was about the Superman symbol that I used to love.  And I didn't read the comics. I'd watch the show from the eighties. And I'd seen the Christopher Reeves movies. We loved those. But other than that, I wasn't like huge in the Superman, but if I had gotten a tattoo, when I was 18 years old, it would have been a Superman symbol. So I'm very glad my mom never, she never [00:33:00] listens to this. So she will never know that I'm confessing that, she talked me out of making a very bad tattoo decision because she doesn't need any more gloating rights,  Mike: Yeah. I don't know. I kind of viewed him like Captain America, where I thought he was really boring. And then I realized that if you find the right writer, Superman really, really works. I've come to really enjoy a lot of Superman stories, but you know, it depends.  Jessika: And I think you're right. That I, I probably just haven't found the right writer or the right style. And I did recently start do I start birthright? I started something recently.    Mike: I think it was  Birthright, based on our conversations. Jessika: yeah. So I will get back into that at some point in time. I just have such a stack now will obsessed. Oh no. Mike: Oh no,  Jessika: Oh, no. more Comics. So Mike, you and I read a couple of these issues that I found at that estate sale. That was Superboy boys. Numbers, 109 [00:34:00] and 110. So do you want to recap 109 us?  Mike: Yeah. Okay. You've mentioned that these are anthology comics and so Superboy at this point in time, apparently was having two or three storylines per issue. based on the two that we read, each one had two different stories in it.  Superboy 109 has the first story is the Super Youth of Brozz. The title story about the rival super dogs doesn't show up until later, which that always surprises me, when the cover action isn't the first story and everything else is in a backup, but whatever.  Jessika: It's a little confusing.  Mike: the Super Youth of Brozz is about how a young Clark Kent winds up sort of becoming friends with another teenage orphan in Smallville named Fred who's, quote, timid that's his like defining character trait. That's all that anybody used to describe him. And he gets picked on by the towns in crowd of teenagers. It's revealed that he lives in the [00:35:00] Smallville orphanage, which okay. He literally walks back to the orphanage and then Superboys spies on him and he's crying because he overheard people talking about how they didn't want to adopt him  because he was too much of a wimp I'm just like, oh, okay.  Jessika: Thanks for being super toxic Superboy. That's so great.  Mike: Superboy winds up deciding to give him confidence. And so he takes him to a planet called Brozz where Fred gains super powers from the atmosphere. And then Superboy actually loses his overtime for reasons that are not really well explained because you know, Superboy, he gets his powers from the yellow sun. And then later on, he gets his powers back sort of from the little spacecraft that they brought Fred over in, because it had some remnants of Earth's atmosphere, which that's not how science works. I was a history major and even I can tell you that. Superboy has this whole convoluted plot about how if he can get Fred to have super power's he'll gain confidence, which Fred sort of does. He eventually saves Superboy's life and then decides to stay on the planet and be a superhero. And he gets offered to be adopted, but he declines the offer for some bizarre reason, something about like, you know, basically he doesn't want to put his, foster parents at risk. And Superboy heads home to earth and has a final thought about how he wouldn't be the person he was, if it hadn't been for the Kents. The end. Jessika: Yeah. Yup.  Mike: Yep. But the title story, which is the Super Dog That Replaced Krypto is basically at some point, Superboy rescues a dog named Swifty, which looks like a Greyhound. Swifty winds up months later, tracking down Superboy in Smallville, which means that Superboy didn't [00:37:00] even drop this dog off at a shelter. Apparently he just got him out of harm's way and then just left him. So strike one, Supes.  Jessika: Yeah. It's not.  Mike: Then Superboy winds up temporarily granting Swifty the same powers that Krypto has. And then it seems like he's testing them out, but it doesn't quite work out that way. Swifty loses his powers and then he's, again, I guess, left alone. He's just as far as I can tell, he's a homeless dog in Smallville. Jessika: Yeah. There's  a lot of orphans in the story.  Mike: after his powers fade some villains who were trapped in the Phantom zone, but crossover and are sort of the Phantom zone wind up trying to take mental control of Superboy and Krypto, they don't have any luck. They are able to influence Swifty. And then they guide him through a process that grants him super powers. And then I think it also makes them evil, but it's not really well explained.  Jessika: Oh, it's because the Phantoms were  influencing him. [00:38:00]  And so their intentions were like his intention. So  because they had negative vibes against Superboy. That's what I got out of it, but it's, it's really vague.  Mike: Super vague.  Superboy decides to randomly hold a series of tests for Swifty and Krypto to be the new super dog. And like, he does this as opposed to like, just like letting  them both help him out. Jessika: that's what I'm saying. Like, it wasn't even to like, be the next super dog. It was like to  go be the ambassador on this trip  Mike: Oh, is that it? Okay.  Jessika: yeah. And then , why wouldn't  you want like an entourage of fucking, like super dogs with you? Why would you two super dogs is way better than one super dog. Like, I don't know what the fuck his problem  was Mike: 100%. So anyway, the Phantom zone criminals helps Swifty, win the contest, Swifty becomes the super [00:39:00] dog for at least this instance. And then he leads both Krypto and Superboy into a kryptonite death trap. Like there's literally a spring that like hurls kryptonite at them. And then at the last second Krypto manages to blast Swifty with the duplicate Ray, which creates a bizarro Swifty, who's good as opposed to the original version. Superboy comes up with a potion or, sorry, the Bizarro Swifty saves them. And then Superboy comes up with a potion that strip Swifty's powers and restores his good nature. And then he creates a collar that repels the Phantom zone ghosts so they can't control the dog again. And that's it like, Swifty's apparently the sad homeless dog in Smallville who just gets sad every time that he sees Superboy and Krypto fly by. And he thinks about how he wants to be Superboys' dog again. Jessika: It's really depressing. And I would never do that to Carl for the record. I would never. Okay.  Mike: I mean, [00:40:00] yeah, this, this issue definitely rubbed me the wrong way. Just for that, where I'm like, God, Superboy. it couldn't even find a home for the dog who tracked you down across the country and just wanted to be your friend. Jessika: You're fucking Superboy have two fucking dogs. Like, I don't know how difficult this is. Like, well, where Martha. Martha is like, no, we've already gotten one super dog in the house.  Mike: Yeah, right.  Jessika: No, this one's just normal, now! I swear. Mike: between the two of us, we have four dogs. So, I  mean, we're definitely the wrong audience for this, Jessika: for sure. And I bought this comic for the fact that there were like super dogs on there. I got very excited.  Mike: yeah. And the thing is, is that there's a whole menagerie, a super pets like you eventually get like Comet the super horse. Like it's no, there, there was a monkey. There was, I think, I think it was Streaky the super cat too.  Jessika: Oh, no.  Mike: It's not like, you know, [00:41:00] there wasn't a whole collection of super pets. But whatever.    Jessika: Yeah. What did you think of this since you haven't told, since you haven't started telling me already. Mike: It reminded me that Superman and Superboy stories from this era just a lot of times don't make any sense.  I have a collection from the late eighties called the Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told, and It's got stories from the forties to the eighties and even those early great stories, in quotes, they're pretty out there. And neither of these stories are anywhere close to what's contained in that book. I don't know. My biggest complaint is how Superboys' logic is always terrible. Like why does Fred need to be made into another version of the Superboy in order to gain confidence? Why not just help them with the core issue, which is that nobody wants to adopt them  from the Smallville orphanage, which again, lawl. Jessika: Yeah. Like what does it have two orphans in there?  Mike: It just, it seems like helping them find a [00:42:00] family would do a lot more good. And likewise, why not just adopt Swifty too? Like  it's shitty and it's dumb, but all of this reminded me of the site called Super Dickery, which I showed you.  Jessika: Yes.  Mike: It was the site that's originally focused on the absolute insanity of Superman comic covers. So many of these comics would feature things like Superman, just fucking over his friends. That was a repeated theme for years. There's one where he has Lois lane strapped to the grill of a truck and he's flying out after he drove it off a cliff. And just saying something to the effect “I'll see you later, Lois.” Jessika: Holy shit.  Mike: And there's another one where Aquaman, Jimmy Olsen are dying of thirst in the desert and Superman's just lording over them with this pitcher of water. the site was around at least in 2005, which is when I first came across it. It's kind of defunct. Now. I don't think has been updated for a couple of years, but you can go back on archive.org and just scroll through all these things. The [00:43:00] tagline was Superman's a Dick and here's the evidence and it's great. Like that is a way to kill an afternoon. Let me tell ya. Jessika: Oh, I definitely checked out a few of those today and I was  rolling. Rolling. He definitely came off  as an asshole in this comic. Like, no question, no question.  You know, what makes me the most mad is that he has the ability to give Swifty super powers. He has the ability to make both dogs talk.  Mike: Oh my God. Yeah. Jessika: What the fuck are you doing?  Mike: there was a cover on Super Dickery where it's young Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, and they've created a computer that lets them see the future and like, Hey, we're going to grow up to be crime fighters and superheroes. So we're going to be best friends. It's like cool. You know, what also would be useful? I don't know. Maybe telling Bruce Wayne that his parents are going to get murdered and it can be avoided.  Jessika: Seriously. Holy shit. Oh my God. Yeah. But then he wouldn't have his [00:44:00] homie. Superboy's  just all in it for himself.  Mike: Yeah.  Jessika: And like, why does he just have something lying around the  has fandoms as I can get out? Why does he have that? Doesn't make any sense. Mike: We don't have another two hours to discuss the Phantom Zone. Jessika: Kal-El you silly boy. So let's, let's move on to the other comic we read, which, uh, we're just be just as angry about, by the way. Spoiler case you were wondering. So what happened in issue? Number 110? Cause I did get sequential ones, which is great, kind of.  Mike: Right. Okay. So again, we have two stores. We have the Surrender of Superboy and the runt of steel, the surrender of supervise story is the one that we actually get on the cover. It's Superboy in Krypto losing a tug of war match to some old man. And we're basically told, well, you won't believe who the old man is. In the Surrender of Superboy, Clark [00:45:00] Kent, and Lana Lang traveled to South America to accompany her, I guess he's a college professor, dad on an archeological dig. One of the flowers recovered is this legendary hate flower, which causes any living, being that smells it to hate the first human they see after smelling it. They're like very specific that it's, you will hate the first human. Jessika: Yeah.  Mike: When they get back to Smallville, Lana smells the hate flower by accident. She sees Superboy flying outside and then dun, dun dunnnn winds up developing an intense hatred for the boy of steel. She grabs. I think it's like, it's… do we ever get a name for this thing? It's like a devil's mask? Jessika: I think she just calls it devil's mask. Cause it's a devil's witch mask or something like that on the wall. It's very vague again.  Mike: So she's in this museum, she grabs this thing off the wall because there's no fucking security anywhere. And it specifically says what it does, where it's says the person who wears this can summon souls , or spirits from the past and have them obey them for an hour. And then she [00:46:00] starts using it to cause trouble. Sir Lancelot and then George Washington are her first minions, but they refuse to help because they claim that they've heard about Superboy's heroic  deeds and even in the past, which Jessika: No, no, no, It's not a thing. No.  Mike: I just, I can't, man, it's so dumb. Jessika: When I read that, I was like, what, what is actually going on right now? I literally stopped reading for a few minutes.  Mike: Everything about the story it feels like monkeys at a typewriter.  Jessika: Yes,  Mike: So then she summons Merlin to humiliate Superboy at this super strength exhibition that he's doing in order to benefit the old folks home and Merlin, it turns out is the old man who beats him in the tug of war on the cover. Which by the way, this is like three panels in the comic. And it's not that big a deal.  Jessika: it's really not.  Mike: yeah, after that she summons Edgar Allen Poe and [00:47:00] Sherlock Holmes. She says they're the two greatest detective minds of the past. So they help her solve a jewel highs that Superboy can't and then she framed Superboy by having Hercules, Samson, and Atlas tear apart the Smallville Scientific Institute. Um, let's see, she summons Venus, Helen of Troy, and Juliet to basically seduce Superboy. And then she spurns him at a dance. And also I'm sorry, but really? JULIET? Like, come on. Jessika: Juliet was a child who fell into a situation and was a tragic  figure.  Mike: Juliet was a stupid teenager. Like, I can't, I can't even,  I'm sorry.  Jessika: She probably had acne and Superboy definitely had that hair where it was brushed forward and then spiked up in the front. Mike: Yep.  Jessika: Absolutely. Yep.  Mike: Yeah.  Jessika: Fuckin' assholes. All of them, Mike: So she [00:48:00] spurns them at this dance and her dad gets mad at her. He's like, I heard you were very rude to Superboy.  Jessika: Which by the way, the fact that he wears that fucking suit to every occasion, like,  come on, dude.  Mike: I just love that idea. Jessika: Can you have like a literal suit, like, a super suit. That actually looks nice?  Mike: Just get something, like, get a nice Navy blue, kind of slim fitting suits have an Ascot popping out with your Superman logo.   All the girls would be all over you. It'd be great. Jessika: Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine the Kent's first trip to a fancy restaurant where they have to like, get the borrow jacket, like the  loaner jacket from the restaurant, because he's wearing his stupid ass suit and they're  like, Oh, Sir, excuse me.  Mike: He's just walking around with his Cape, sticking out from under the jacket. I would read that  comic.  Jessika: I would too. [00:49:00]  Mike: Anyway. So finally Lana decides to pull Jor-El, Superboy's dad from the past, in order to help her discover Superboys' secret identity. Instead of, I don't know, reuniting Jor-El with his son who he never got to see, but whatever. Okay. Jor-El gives you this device that's supposed to detect Kryptonians. It leads her to a closet where Krypto the Superdawg is Krypto shakes himself, and basically gives off a bunch of dust. Actually counteracts the flowers' hate pollen. And it turns out that Superboy and Lana's dad switched the mask with a dummy, once they realized what was going on and then her dad disguised himself as GRL and then everything just  goes back to normal and nothing matters. Jessika: Yeah, we're again, they have access to these devices that are like powerful and they like have instructions on the wall, but don't use them. Like he literally says to his daughter at one point like, oh, well stay away from the superstition side of things. It's quite dangerous. And she's like, oh, what's that?[00:50:00]  Let me check out this mask. So fricking ridiculous.  Mike: So then we get the second story, which is the Super Runt of Steel, which is about a criminal named Peewee Reagan, who we don't know who this dude is, but he shows up at this dilapidated house, he pays some amoral super scientist to grant him super powers. Peewee goes on a crime spree that even Superboy can't stop because Superboys' powers are weirdly fading for no real reason. Peewee flies away to a distant planet because he spotted treasure inside it. He gets to the planet, he wrecks a bunch of the alien robots that are there and then goes inside this vault that's full of space gems and minerals, and he winds up screaming in pain. Superboy finds out the scientist it turns out leached his powers and transfer them over to Peewee. And he's able to track the criminal to the aforementioned planet. And it turns out Peewee died because the vault also contained kryptonite and then Superboy [00:51:00] buries Peewee and flies away the end. Jessika: Because he somehow gets his powers back by just being around him. It was weird.  Mike: Everything about this issue just made me roll my eyes. And a lot of the stories from this era, if you go back and read a lot of these things, they had those kinds of surprise endings. That just feel so dumb these days. Like it was that weird, ironic twist. They're not really ironic because they don't really make a lot of sense.  Jessika: Yeah, they're just kind of like a left field thought.  Mike: Yeah, there's a lot that just doesn't work. And it's like if you go down this very specific logic train that these writers force you along, it's like, you know, the whole thing. Having Lana's dad disguise himself as Jor-El, like Superboy, just, knew that this was going to be the next step. You're like, all right. Well, I don't know, and then also, I'm sorry. But she's supposed to be calling all of these characters from history, all these spirits or people from history and then it's gods and fictitious characters like [00:52:00] Lancelot and Juliet and uh, whatever. Jessika: No, they were really contrived figures. I mean, even when they had real people in there, they weren't used to their purpose.  Mike: No, and it's one of those things where you read it and you're like, this is just, this is so dumb. Oh, it's Samson and Hercules. Okay. Whatever, why not? Random characters from the Bible and Greek mythology. Why not? Jessika: Dude, where do I even start on this issue though?  They had so many problems. The beginning, when the scientists negate the word of the locals as superstition, even though it actually did have dangerous poisonous properties to it. They're like, oh, it's just a myth.  Mike: Because there's a whole thing where one of the boroughs winds up attacking a guide and then when they sit there and say, oh, it must have like gotten near the hade flower and they're like, oh no, it just got bit by a fly. All right.  Jessika: Yeah. And the scientists are like, I mean, gosh, darn. How big of a [00:53:00] supremacist asshole do you have to be to not trust the people who live there to know anything about the plants that they have been living with their whole lives. I truly don't understand that.  Mike: Yeah.  Jessika: Then the scientists were like, oh, woopsie, Daisy. I guess they were right. Chuckle, chuckle. Mike: This was also still a period in time where anyone who was not white, especially native populations were viewed with a healthy degree of just kind of, well, like you said, it like supremacy. Like if you go back and read those old Tintin books, woof.  Jessika: Oh,  yeah. I've read someof those in the original French and they're... Yeah.  Mike: Yeah. And if you go back and read those and then like up until really, I want to say the 70s or 80s was one thing started to get a little bit better, but even mainstream in the 60s were still pretty awful when it came to depicting people who weren't [00:54:00] white. Jessika: Yeah. There was that whole segregation thing. You know, just that.  Mike: Yeah. Jessika: Yeah, I, it was really gross when the quote unquote historical women came to give her beauty advice so that she could do seduce Superboy, like that was so contrived and odd and sexist and strange,  Mike: Yeah.  Jessika: Or the part where Superboy is not only supposed to be earning money for an old person's home. He's also making agist jokes about the quote unquote old man that ends up beating him. Both him and his dog, a tug of war.  Mike: Yeah.  Jessika: But  then the comic itself is so obviously like they so obviously made it agistly clear that this man only be Superboy because he was Merlin, the wizard, which yikes guys,  I know people way older than me that could kick my ass at most anything. So that's pretty [00:55:00] ridiculous.  Mike: yeah.  Jessika: Oh. Or the fact that the little guys or men that are like smaller and stature or timid, they are constantly the ones that need quote, unquote saving by Superboy in these really odd, like vague ways. Like they need to get physical strength to be appreciated.  And it's super toxic.  Mike: Yeah. And I mean, that kind of hinges on the old ideas of masculinity as well. Jessika: Oh, and I'm sorry, why Lana's dad keeping again, keeping legit magic items where people can access them. It just, I can not get past that because they just have all this shit sitting around where people are like, oh, let me touch it. Mike: look, here's the thing, like gun control, wasn't a thing back then you think they're going to seriously guard supernatural weapons of destruction. Jessika: that is a valid point. That is so valid.  at least he wasn't mistreating his dog in this issue, I guess.  Mike: I guess. I don't know. He locked him in the closet for a few hours.  Jessika: Shit. That's right. [00:56:00] Nevermind. Fuck. So that wraps up our Superboy conversation.  Let's move on to our brain wrinkles. And this is the one thing comics are comics adjacent that's just been rattling around in your brain. Since the last time we talked.  Mike: Yeah. So I was going to talk about free comic book day and how I was originally pretty excited about it. But now, we're recording this a couple of weeks before free comic book day is going to happen. And we are still in the middle of a pandemic when we record this, the Delta strain has started to rear its ugly head and lead to cases spiking all over the place, including here in the Bay Area. So, As someone who has immunocompromised kids who are too young to get the vaccine still, we're not going to be able to participate. Um, so yeah, I don't know. I think I'm instead going to talk about The Suicide Squad and actually how I'm really [00:57:00] excited about that movie. And it's getting rave reviews and it's opening this week on HBO max and in theaters. And then, because people can't leave shit well, enough alone, David Ayer, the director of the original Suicide Squad movie talked about how this one is great, but then he proceeded to shit all over Warner Brothers and talked about how the version of just Suicide Squad that got released back in 2016, was not his version of the film and how it's terrible. And he wants, vindication now. And I just, I can't go through another Snyder Cut. I just, I don't  have… Jessika: Alright like, you know, at least, okay. At least it's not the Justice League.  At least it's Suicide Squad,  Mike: But like the Snyder Cut almost broke me. Jessika: No, I hear you. I already don't like, I already wasn't like on board and I had to watch like so much Justice League that weekend.  Mike: I remember.  Jessika: Then I had prequel films I had to [00:58:00] watch. No, I don't want to do this again. I don't. Mike: I can't.  I am happy to talk about Suicide Squad. And I'm pretty sure there'll be jazzed up to talk about it after this movie. But I just, I can't bring myself to care about these auteur directors who are just… when I was working in the video games industry, we had this term that we used for certain people who were on the development side, who were all about their vision and how, they wouldn't compromise anything. And we, we just refer to them as the genius babies, because they would have these ungodly meltdowns. I can't bring myself to just, I can't bring myself to care about another genius baby throwing a temper tantrum. Jessika: I don't want it.  Mike: How about you?  What is, uh, what is sitting in your head these days? Jessika: I've been thinking a lot about representation in the media, including comic books. [00:59:00] And that's partially because we've been reading all these old comics where we don't see a lot of different representation. Versus the comics that I'm drawn to, which are full of representation, because that's what I prefer to read. I want to see everyone and it's been really nice to read destiny, New York and some of these other recent comics that actually show different types of bodies, different skin tones, different sexualities and genders. But I think there's so much more that we need to do, and that can be done to add and continue to build upon that representation. Like just in general, it's 2021. And we're still shaming people for being a certain size and, you know, airbrushing people who are already considered to be the epitome of beauty in our society. Like what is it going to take for us to allow people to just exist as we are. I mean, you know, besides the whole capitalist bullshit [01:00:00] game, telling women, they need more and more products to achieve beauty. But aside from that, but it's giving me, it's definitely making me feel better to see all of the representation, but there, again, it just reminds me that we need more. Mike: I was gonna say, it's that reminder of we've come a long way, but we need to go further. Jessika: Yep. It is. It is. You had mentioned, your inability to go to free comics day. and I feel like there are probably a lot of people who had a really difficult time getting anywhere. To go to something like that, you know? And so thinking about accessibility in that way of, what about those readers? Like what are we doing about them? So you know, it's just something I think about I've worked at social services too. I mean, I'm just, I'm a bleeding heart, but we need people like me or else, I don't know, get rid of that. We don't need people like me. So that's, that's, what's been rattling for me. [01:01:00] It's just more of a continuous disappointed buzz in my brain that we don't respect all people.  Mike: Yeah. Well, we do on this podcast.  Jessika: So on that uplifting note, that's it for today, but stay tuned for another episode in two weeks and until then we'll see it in the stacks.  Mike: Thanks for listening to Ten Cent Takes. Accessibility is important to us. So text transcriptions of each of our published episodes can be found on our website. Jessika: This episode was hosted by Jessika Frazier and Mike Thompson, written by Jessika Frazier and edited by Mike Thompson. Our intro theme was written and performed by Jared Emerson Johnson of Bay Area Sound, our credits and transition music is Pursuit of Life by Evan McDonald and was purchased with a standard license from premium beat. Our banner graphics were designed by Sarah Frank, who goes by. Look, mom draws on Instagram.[01:02:00]  Mike: If you'd like to get in touch with us, ask us questions or tell us about how we got something wrong. Please head over to Tencent takes.com or shoot an email to Tencent akes@gmail.com. You can also find us on Twitter. The official podcast account is Tencenttakes. Jessika is Jessika with us, and Jessika is spelled with a K and I am Vansau: V A N S A U Jessika: If you'd like to support us, be sure to download, rate and review wherever you listen.  Mike: Stay safe out there.  Jessika: And support your local comic shop  . 

About MikeBeside his duties as The Duckbill Group's CEO, Mike is the author of O'Reilly's Practical Monitoring, and previously wrote the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and hosted the Real World DevOps podcast. He was previously a DevOps Engineer for companies such as Taos Consulting, Peak Hosting, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and many more. Mike is originally from Knoxville, TN (Go Vols!) and currently resides in Portland, OR.Links: Software Engineering Daily podcast: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/category/all-episodes/exclusive-content/Podcast/ Duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. As basically everyone knows, trying to do log analytics at scale with an ELK stack is expensive, unstable, time-sucking, demeaning, and just basically all-around horrible. So why are you still doing it—or even thinking about it—when there's ChaosSearch? ChaosSearch is a fully managed scalable log analysis service that lets you add new workloads in minutes, and easily retain weeks, months, or years of data. With ChaosSearch you store, connect, and analyze and you're done. The data lives and stays within your S3 buckets, which means no managing servers, no data movement, and you can save up to 80 percent versus running an ELK stack the old-fashioned way. It's why companies like Equifax, HubSpot, Klarna, Alert Logic, and many more have all turned to ChaosSearch. So if you're tired of your ELK stacks falling over before it suffers, or of having your log analytics data retention squeezed by the cost, then try ChaosSearch today and tell them I sent you. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I spent the past week guest hosting the Software Engineering Daily podcast, taking listeners over there on a tour of the clouds. Each day, I picked a different cloud and had a guest talk to me about their experiences with that cloud.Now, there was one that we didn't talk about, and we're finishing up that tour here today on Screaming in the Cloud. That cloud is the obvious one, and that is your own crappy data center. And my guest is Duckbill Group's CEO and my business partner, Mike Julian. Mike, thanks for joining me.Mike: Hi, Corey. Thanks for having me back.Corey: So, I frequently say that I started my career as a grumpy Unix sysadmin. Because it isn't like there's a second kind of Unix sysadmin you're going to see. And you were in that same boat. You and I both have extensive experience working in data centers. And it's easy sitting here on the tech coast of the United States—we're each in tech hubs cities—and we look around and yeah, the customers we talked to have massive cloud presences; everything we do is in cloud, it's easy to fall into the trap of believing that data centers are a thing of yesteryear. Are they?Mike: [laugh]. Absolutely not. I mean, our own customers have tons of stuff in data centers. There are still companies out there like Equinix, and CoreSite, and DRC—is that them? I forget the name of them.Corey: DRT. Digital Realty [unintelligible 00:01:54].Mike: Digital Realty. Yeah. These are companies still making money hand over fist. People are still putting new workloads into data centers, so yeah, we're kind of stuck with him for a while.Corey: What's fun is when I talked to my friends over in the data center sales part of the world, I have to admit, I went into those conversations early on with more than my own fair share of arrogance. And it was, “[laugh]. So, who are you selling to these days?” And the answer was, “Everyone, fool.” Because they are.People at large companies with existing data center footprints are not generally doing fire sales of their data centers, and one thing that we learned about cloud bills here at The Duckbill Group is that they only ever tend to go up with time. That's going to be the case when we start talking about data centers as well. The difference there is that it's not just an API call away to lease more space, put in some racks, buy some servers, get them racked. So, my question for you is, if we sit here and do the Hacker News—also known as the worst website on the internet—and take their first principles approach to everything, does that mean the people who are building out data centers are somehow doing it wrong? Did they miss a transformation somewhere?Mike: No, I don't think they're doing it wrong. I think there's still a lot of value in having data centers and having that sort of skill set. I do think the future is in cloud infrastructure, though. And whether that's a public cloud, or private cloud, or something like that, I think we're getting increasingly away from building on top of bare metal, just because it's so inefficient to do. So yeah, I think at some point—and I feel like we've been saying this for years that, “Oh, no, everyone's missed the boat,” and here we are saying it yet again, like, “Oh, no. Everyone's missing the boat.” You know, at some point, the boat's going to frickin' leave.Corey: From my perspective, there are advantages to data centers. And we can go through those to some degree, but let's start at the beginning. Origin stories are always useful. What's your experience working in data centers?Mike: [laugh]. Oh, boy. Most of my career has been in data centers. And in fact, one interesting tidbit is that, despite running a company that is built on AWS consulting, I didn't start using AWS myself until 2015. So, as of this recording, it's 2021 now, so that means six years ago is when I first started AWS.And before that, it was all in data centers. So, some of my most interesting stuff in the data center world was from Oak Ridge National Lab where we had hundreds of thousands of square feet of data center floor space across, like, three floors. And it was insane, just the amount of data center stuff going on there. A whole bunch of HPC, a whole bunch of just random racks of bullshit. So, it's pretty interesting stuff.I think probably the most really interesting bit I've worked on was when I was at a now-defunct company, Peak Hosting, where we had to figure out how to spin up a data center without having anyone at the data center, as in, there was no one there to do the spin up. And that led into interesting problems, like you have multiple racks of equipment, like, thousands of servers just showed up on the loading dock. Someone's got to rack them, but from that point, it all has to be automatic. So, how do you bootstrap entire racks of systems from nothing with no one physically there to start a bootstrap process? And that led us to build some just truly horrific stuff. And thank God that's someone else's problem, now. [laugh].Corey: It makes you wonder if under the hood at all these cloud providers if they have something that's a lot cleaner, and more efficient, and perfect, or if it's a whole bunch of Perl tied together with bash and hope, like we always built.Mike: You know what? I have to imagine that even at AWS at a—I know if this is true at Facebook, where they have a massive data center footprint as well—there is a lot of work that goes into the bootstrap process, and a lot of these companies are building their own hardware to facilitate making that bootstrap process easier. When you're trying to bootstrap, say, like, Dell or HP servers, the management cards only take you so far. And a lot of the stuff that we had to do was working around bugs in the HP management cards, or the Dell DRACs.Corey: Or you can wind up going with some budget whitebox service. I mean, Supermicro is popular, not that they're ultra-low budget. But yeah, you can effectively build your own. And that leads down interesting paths, too. I feel like there's a sweet spot where working on a data center and doing a build-out makes sense for certain companies.If you're trying to build out some proof of concept, yeah, do it in the cloud; you don't have to wait eight weeks and spend thousands of dollars; you can prove it out right now and spend a total of something like 17 cents to figure out if it's going to work or not. And if it does, then proceed from there, if not shut it down, and here's a quarter; keep the change. With data centers, a lot more planning winds up being involved. And is there a cutover at which point it makes sense to evacuate from a public cloud into a physical data center?Mike: You know, I don't really think so. This came up on a recent Twitter Spaces that you and I did around, at what point does it really make sense to be hybrid, or to be all-in on data center? I made the argument that a large-scale HPC does not fit cloud workloads, and someone made a comment that, like, “What is large-scale?” And to me, large-scale was always, like—so Oak Ridge was—or is famous—for having supercomputing, and they have largely been in the top five supercomputers in the world for quite some time. A supercomputer of that size is tens of thousands of cores. And they're running pretty much constant because of how expensive that stuff is to get time on. And that sort of thing would be just astronomically expensive in a cloud. But how many of those are there really?Corey: Yeah, if you're an AWS account manager listening to this and reaching out with, “No, that's not true. After committed spend, we'll wind up giving you significant discounts, and a whole bunch of credits, and jump through all these hoops.” And, yeah, I know, you'll give me a bunch of short-term contractual stuff that's bounded for a number of years, but there's no guarantee that stuff gets renewed at that rate. And let's face it. If you're running those kinds of workloads today, and already have the staff and tooling and processes that embrace that, maybe ripping all that out in a cloud migration where there's no clear business value derived isn't the best plan.Mike: Right. So, while there is a lot of large-scale HPC infrastructure that I don't think particularly fits well on the cloud, there's not a lot of that. There's just not that many massive HPC deployments out there. Which means that pretty much everything below that threshold could be a candidate for cloud workloads, and probably would be much better. One of the things that I noticed at Oak Ridge was that we had a whole bunch of SGI HPC systems laying around, and 90% of the time they were idle.And those things were not cheap when they were bought, and at the time, they're basically worth nothing. But they were idle most of the time, but when they were needed, they're there, and they do a great job of it. With AWS and GCP and Azure HPC offerings, that's a pretty good fit. Just migrate that whole thing over because it'll cost you less than buying a new one. But if I'm going to migrate Titan or Gaia from Oak Ridge over to there, yeah, some AWS rep is about to have a very nice field day. That'd just be too much money.Corey: Well, I'd be remiss as a cloud economist if I didn't point out that you can do this stuff super efficiently in someone else's AWS account.Mike: [laugh]. Yes.Corey: There's also the staffing question where if you're a large blue-chip company, you've been around for enough decades that you tend to have some revenue to risk, where you have existing processes and everything is existing in an on-prem environment, as much as we love to tell stories about the cloud being awesome, and the capability increase and the rest, yadda, yadda, yadda, there has to be a business case behind moving to the cloud, and it will knock some nebulous percentage off of your TCO—because lies, damned lies, and TCO analyses are sort of the way of the world—great. That's not exciting to most strategic-level execs. At least as I see the world. Given you are one of those strategic level execs, do you agree? Am I lacking nuance here?Mike: No, I pretty much agree. Doing a data center migration, you got to have a reason to do it. We have a lot of clients that are still running in data centers as well, and they don't move because the math doesn't make sense. And even when you start factoring in all the gains from productivity that they might get—and I stress the word might here—even when you factor those in, even when you factor in all the support and credits that Amazon might give them, it still doesn't make enough sense. So, they're still in data centers because that's where they should be for the time because that's what the finances say. And I'm kind of hard-pressed to disagree with them.Corey: While we're here playing ‘ask an exec,' I'm going to go for another one here. It's my belief that any cloud provider that charges a penny for professional services, or managed services, or any form of migration tooling or offering at all to their customers is missing the plot. Clearly, since they all tend to do this, I'm wrong somewhere. But I don't see how am I wrong or are they?Mike: Yeah, I don't know. I'd have to think about that one some more.Corey: It's an interesting point because it's—Mike: It is.Corey: —it's easy to think of this as, “Oh, yeah. You should absolutely pay people to migrate in because the whole point of cloud is that it's kind of sticky.” The biggest indicator of a big cloud bill this month is a slightly smaller one last month. And once people wind up migrating into a cloud, they tend not to leave despite all of their protestations to the contrary about multi-cloud, hybrid, et cetera, et cetera. And that becomes an interesting problem.It becomes an area—there's a whole bunch of vendors that are very deeply niched into that. It's clear that the industry as a whole thinks that migrating from data centers to cloud is going to be a boom industry for the next three decades. I don't think they're wrong.Mike: Yeah, I don't think they're wrong either. I think there's a very long tail of companies with massive footprint staying in a data center that at some point is going to get out of a data center.Corey: For those listeners who are fortunate enough not to have to come up the way that we did. Can you describe what a data center is like inside?Mike: Oh, God.Corey: What is a data center? People have these mythic ideas from television and movies, and I don't know, maybe some Backstreet Boys music video; I don't know where it all comes from. What is a data center like? What does it do?Mike: I've been in many of these over my life, and I think they really fall into two groups. One is the one managed by a professional data center manager. And those tend to be sterile environments. Like, that's the best way to describe it. They are white, filled with black racks. Everything is absolutely immaculate. There is no trash or other debris on the floor. Everything is just perfect. And it is freezingly cold.Corey: Oh, yeah. So, you're in a data center for any length of time, bring a jacket. And the soulless part of it, too, is that it's well-lit with fluorescent lights everywhere—Mike: Oh yeah.Corey: —and it's never blinking, never changing. There are no windows. Time loses all meaning. And it's strange to think about this because you don't walk in and think, “What is that racket?” But there's 10,000, 100,000 however many fans spinning all the time. It is super loud. It can clear 120 decibels in there, but it's a white noise so you don't necessarily hear it. Hearing protection is important there.Mike: When I was at Oak Ridge, we had—all of our data centers, we had a professional data center manager, so everything was absolutely pristine. And to get into any of the data centers, you had to go through a training; it was very simple training, but just, like, “These are things you do and don't do in the data center.” And when you walked in, you had to put in earplugs immediately before you walked in the door. And it's so loud just because of that, and you don't really notice it because you can walk in without earplugs and, like, “Oh, it's loud, but it's fine.” And then you leave a couple hours later and your ears are ringing. So, it's a weird experience.Corey: It's awful. I started wearing earplugs every time I went in, just because it's not just the pain because hearing loss doesn't always manifest that way. It's, I would get tired much more quickly.Mike: Oh, yeah.Corey: I would not be as sharp. It was, “What is this? Why am I so fatigued?” It's noise.Mike: Yeah. And having to remember to grab your jacket when you head down to the data center, even though it's 95 degrees outside.Corey: At some point, if you're there enough—which you probably shouldn't be—you start looking at ways to wind up storing one locally. I feel like there could be some company that makes an absolute killing by renting out parkas at data centers.Mike: Yeah, totally. The other group of data center stuff that I generally run into is the exact opposite of that. And it's basically someone has shoved a couple racks in somewhere and they just kind of hope for the best.Corey: The basement. The closet. The hold of a boat, with one particular client we work with.Mike: Yeah. That was an interesting one. So, we had a—Corey and I had a client where they had all their infrastructure in the basement of a boat. And we're [laugh] not even kidding. It's literally in the basement of a boat.Corey: Below the waterline.Mike: Yeah below the waterline. So, there was a lot of planning around, like, what if the hold gets breached? And like, who has to plan for that sort of thing? [laugh]. It was a weird experience.Corey: It turns out that was—was hilarious about that was while they were doing their cloud migration into AWS, their account manager wasn't the most senior account manager because, at that point, it was a small account, but they still stuck to their standard talking points about TCO, and better durability, and the rest, and it didn't really occur to them to come back with a, what if the boat sinks? Which is the obvious reason to move out of that quote-unquote, “data center?”Mike: Yeah. It was a wild experience. So, that latter group of just everything's an absolute wreck, like, everything—it's just so much of a pain to work with, and you find yourself wanting to clean it up. Like, install new racks, do new cabling, put in a totally new floor so you're not standing on concrete. You want to do all this work to it, and then you realize that you're just putting lipstick on a pig; it's still going to be a dirty old data center at the end of the day, no matter how much work you do to it. And you're still running on the same crappy hardware you had, you're still running on the same frustrating deployment process you've been working on, and everything still sucks, despite it looking good.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. As basically everyone knows, trying to do log analytics at scale with an ELK stack is expensive, unstable, time-sucking, demeaning, and just basically all-around horrible. So why are you still doing it—or even thinking about it—when there's ChaosSearch? ChaosSearch is a fully managed scalable log analysis service that lets you add new workloads in minutes, and easily retain weeks, months, or years of data. With ChaosSearch you store, connect, and analyze and you're done. The data lives and stays within your S3 buckets, which means no managing servers, no data movement, and you can save up to 80 percent versus running an ELK stack the old-fashioned way. It's why companies like Equifax, HubSpot, Klarna, Alert Logic, and many more have all turned to ChaosSearch. So if you're tired of your ELK stacks falling over before it suffers, or of having your log analytics data retention squeezed by the cost, then try ChaosSearch today and tell them I sent you. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io.Corey: The worst part is playing the ‘what is different here?' Game. You rack twelve servers: eleven come up fine and the twelfth doesn't.Mike: [laugh].Corey: It sounds like, okay, how hard could it be? Days. It can take days. In a cloud environment, you have one weird instance. Cool, you terminate it and start a new one and life goes on whereas, in a data center, you generally can't send back a $5,000 piece of hardware willy nilly, and you certainly can't do it same-day, so let's figure out what the problem is.Is that some sub-component in the system? Is it a dodgy cable? Is it, potentially, a dodgy switch port? Is there something going on with that node? Was there something weird about the way the install was done if you reimage the thing? Et cetera, et cetera. And it leads down rabbit holes super quickly.Mike: People that grew up in the era of computing that Corey and I did, you start learning tips and tricks, and they sound kind of silly these days, but things like, you never create your own cables. Even though both of us still remember how to wire a Cat 5 cable, we don't.Corey: My fingers started throbbing when you said that because some memories never fade.Mike: Right. You don't. Like, if you're working in a data center, you're buying premade cables because they've been tested professionally by high-end machines.Corey: And you still don't trust it. You have a relatively inexpensive cable tester in the data center, and when—I learned this when I was racking stuff the second time, it adds a bit of time, but every cable that we took out of the packaging before we plugged it in, and we tested on the cable tester just to remove that problem. And it still doesn't catch everything because, welcome to the world of intermittent cables that are marginal that, when you bend a certain way, stop working, and then when you look at them, start working again properly. Yes, it's as maddening as it sounds.Mike: Yeah. And then things like rack nuts. My fingers hurt just thinking about it.Corey: Think of them as nuts that bolts wind up screwing into but they're square and they have clips on them so they clip into the standard rack cabinets, so you can screw equipment into them. There are different sizes of them, and of course, they're not compatible with one another. And you have—they always pinch your finger and make you bleed because they're incredibly annoying to put in and out. Some vendors have quick rails, which are way nicer, but networking equipment is still stuck in the ‘90s in that context, and there's always something that winds up causing problems.Mike: If you were particularly lucky, the rack nuts that you had were pliable enough that you could pinch them and pull them out with your fingers, and hopefully didn't do too much damage. If you were particularly unlucky, you had to reach for a screwdriver to try to pry it out, and inevitably stab yourself.Corey: Or sometimes pulling it out with your fingers, it'll—like, those edges are sharp. It's not the most high-quality steel in some cases, and it's just you wind up having these problems. Oh, one other thing you learn super quickly, is first, always have a set of tools there because the one you need is the one you don't have, and the most valuable tool you'll have is a pair of wire cutters. And what you do when you find a bad cable is you cut it before throwing it away.Mike: Yep.Corey: Because otherwise someone who is very well-meaning but you will think of them as the freaking devil, will, “Oh, there's a perfectly good cable sitting here in the trash. I'll put it back with the spares.” So you think you have a failed cable you grab another one from the pile of spares—remember, this is two in the morning, invariably, and you're not thinking on all cylinders—and the problem is still there. Cut the cable when you throw it away.Mike: So, there are entire books that were written about these sorts of tips and tricks that everyone working [with 00:19:34] data center just remembers. They learned it all. And most of the stuff is completely moot now. Like, no one really thinks about it anymore. Some people are brought up in computing in such a way that they never even learned these things, which I think it's fantastic.Corey: Oh, I don't wish this on anyone. This used to be a prerequisite skill for anyone who called themselves a systems administrator, but I am astonished when I talk to my AWS friends, the remarkably senior engineers I talk to who have never been inside of an AWS data center.Mike: Yeah, absolutely.Corey: That's really cool. It also means you're completely divorced from the thing you're doing with code and the rest, and the thing that winds up keeping the hardware going. It also leads to a bit of a dichotomy where the people racking the hardware, in many cases, don't understand the workloads that are on there because if you have the programming insight, and ability, and can make those applications work effectively, you're probably going to go find a role that compensates far better than working in the data center.Mike: I [laugh] want to talk about supply chains. So, when you build a data center, you start planning about—let's say, I'm not Amazon. I'm just, like, any random company—and I want to put my stuff into a data center. If I'm going to lease someone else's data center—which you absolutely should—we're looking at about a 180-day lead time. And it's like, why? Like, that's a long time. What's—Corey: It takes that long to sign a real estate lease?Mike: Yeah.Corey: No. It takes that long to sign a real estate lease, wind up talking to your upstream provider, getting them to go ahead and run the thing—effectively—getting the hardware ordered and shipped in the right time window, doing the actual build-out once everything is in place, and I'm sure a few other things I'm missing.Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, you have all these things that have to happen, and all of them pay for-freaking-ever. Getting Windstream on the phone to begin with, to even take your call, can often take weeks at a time. And then to get them to actually put an order for you, and then do the turnup. The turnup alone might be 90 days, where I'm just, “Hey, I've bought bandwidth from you, and I just need you to come out and connect the [BLEEP] cables,” might be 90 days for them to do it.And that's ridiculous. But then you also have the hardware vendors. If you're ordering hardware from Dell, and you're like, “Hey, I need a couple servers.” Like, “Great. They'll be there next week.” Instead, if you're saying, “Hey, I need 500 servers,” they're like, “Ooh, uh, next year, maybe.” And this is even pre-pandemic sort of thing because they don't have all these sitting around.So, for you to get a large number of servers quickly, it's just not a thing that's possible. So, a lot of companies would have to buy well ahead of what they thought their needs would be, so they'd have massive amounts of unused capacity. Just racks upon racks of systems sitting there turned off, waiting for when they're needed, just because of the ordering lead time.Corey: That's what auto-scaling looks like in those environments because you need to have that stuff ready to go. If you have a sudden inrush of demand, you have to be able to scale up with things that are already racked, provisioned, and good to go. Sometimes you can have them halfway provisioned because you don't know what kind of system they're going to need to be in many cases, but that's some up-the-stack level thinking. And again, finding failed hard drives and swapping those out, make sure you pull the right or you just destroyed an array. And all these things that I just make Amazon's problem.It's kind of fun to look back at this and realize that we would get annoyed then with support tickets that took three weeks to get resolved in hardware, whereas now three hours in you and I are complaining about the slow responsiveness of the cloud vendor.Mike: Yeah, the amount of quick turnaround that we can have these days on cloud infrastructure that was just unthinkable, running in data centers. We don't run out of bandwidth now. Like, that's just not a concern that anyone has. But when you're running in a data center, and, “Oh, yeah. I've got an OC-3 line connected here. That's only going to get me”—Corey: Which is something like—what is an OC-3? That's something like, what, 20 gigabit, or—Mike: Yeah, something like that. It's—Corey: Don't quote me on that.Mike: Yeah. So, we're going to have to look that up. So, it's equivalent to a T-3, so I think that's a 45 megabit?Corey: Yeah, that sounds about reasonable, yeah.Mike: So, you've got a T-3 line sitting here in your data center. Like that's not terrible. And if you start maxing that out, well, you're maxed out. You need more? Again, we're back to the 90 to 180 day lead time to get new bandwidth.So, sucks to be you, which means you'd have to start planning your bandwidth ahead of time. And this is why we had issues like companies getting Slashdotted back in the day because when you capped the bandwidth out, well, you're capped out. That's it. That's the game.Corey: Now, you've made the front page of Slashdot, a bunch of people visited your site, and the site fell over. That was sort of the way of the world. CDNs weren't really a thing. Cloud wasn't a thing. And that was just, okay, you'd bookmark the thing and try and remember to check it later.We talked about bandwidth constraints. One thing that I think the cloud providers do—at least the tier ones—that are just basically magic is full line rate between any two instances almost always. Well, remember, you have a bunch of different racks, and at the top of every rack, there's usually a switch called—because we're bad at naming things—top-of-rack switches. And just because everything that you have plugged in can get one gigabit to that switch—or 10 gigabit or whatever it happens to be—there is a constraint in that top-of-rack switch. So yeah, one server can talk to another one in a different rack at one gigabit, but then you have 20 different servers in each rack all trying to do something like that and you start hitting constraints.You do not see that in the public cloud environments; it is subsumed away, you don't have to think about that level of nonsense. You just complain about what feels like the egregious data transfer charge.Mike: Right. Yeah. It was always frustrating when you had to order nice high-end switching gear from Cisco, or Arista, or take your pick of provider, and you got 48 ports in the top-of-rack, you got 48 servers all wired up to them—or 24 because we want redundancy on that—and that should be a gigabit for each connection, except when you start maxing it out, no, it's nowhere even near that because the switch can't handle it. And it's absolutely magical, that the cloud provider's like, “Oh, yeah. Of course, we handle that.”Corey: And you don't have to think about it at all. One other use case that I did want to hit because I know we'll get letters if we don't, where it does make sense to build out a data center, even today, is if you have regulatory requirements around data residency. And there's no cloud vendor in an area that suits. This generally does not apply to the United States, but there are a lot of countries that have data residency laws that do not yet have a cloud provider of their choice region, located in-country.Mike: Yeah, I'll agree with that, but I think that's a short-lived problem.Corey: In the fullness of time, there'll be regions everywhere. Every build—a chicken in every pot and an AWS availability zone on every corner.Mike: [laugh]. Yeah, I think it's going to be a fairly short-lived problem, which actually reminds me of even our clients that have data centers are often treating the data center as a cloud. So, a lot of them are using your favorite technology, Corey, Kubernetes, and they're treating Kubernetes as a cloud, running Kube in AWS, as well, and moving workloads between the two Kube clusters. And to them, a data center is actually not really data center; it's just a private cloud. I think that pattern works really well if you have a need to have a physical data center.Corey: And then they start doing a hybrid environment where they start expanding to a public cloud, but then they treat that cloud like just a place to run a bunch of VMs, which is expensive, and it solves a whole host of problems that we've already talked about. Like, we're bad at replacing hard drives, or our data center is located on a corner where people love to get drunk on the weekends and smash into the power pole and take out half of the racks here. Things like that great, yeah, cloud can solve that, but cloud could do a lot more. You're effectively worsening your cloud experience to improve your data center experience.Mike: Right. So, even when you have that approach, the piece of feedback that we give the client was, you have built such a thing where you have to cater to the lowest common denominator, which is the constraints that you have in the data center, which means you're not able to use AWS the way that you should be able to use it so it's just as expensive to run as a data center was. If they were to get rid of the data center, then the cloud would actually become cheaper for them and they would get more benefits from using it. So, that's kind of a business decision for how they've structured it, and I can't really fault them for it, but there are definitely some downsides to the approach.Corey: Mike, thank you so much for joining me here. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?Mike: You know, you can find me at duckbillgroup.com, and actually, you can also find Corey at duckbillgroup.com. We help companies lower their AWS bills. So, if you have a horrifying bill, you should chat.Corey: Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to join me here.Mike: Thanks for having me.Corey: Mike Julian, CEO of The Duckbill Group and my business partner. 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 and then challenge me to a cable-making competition.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Mike C-Roc Ciorrocco is the CEO of People Building, Inc., and the powerhouse behind the "What Are You Made Of?" movement. He is a performance coach, author, dynamic public speaker, visionary, and thought leader. He has been featured by Yahoo! Finance as one of the Top Business Leaders to Follow in 2020 and is on a mission to build people. He is driven to inspire others and he measures his success on how he is able to help others achieve greatness. C-Roc had a fire lit in him at an early age. That fire has ignited him with a fierce desire to compel people to see the greatness inside themselves using past life events to fuel their fire. Past hardships can be a powerful gravitational force that keeps you down and forces you to think small. To get out of orbit you need Rocket Fuel. Mike "C-Roc" Ciorrocco shows you how to convert past adversity into ROCKET FUEL to break free from the negative pull of pain and despair. In his new book, C-Roc offers life-changing lessons in personal transformation by asking yourself What Are You Made Of? This powerful question will ignite within you a thrust to greatness! Learn how to overcome painful past obstacles and achieve a fulfilling life where you're in command of your future. If you're ready to shoot for the stars, C-Roc says, "Thrust is a must!" Strap in and get ready for the ride of your life. Mike's latest book: https://amzn.to/3wwkTX5 CEO - People Building, Inc. C-Roc's Website: https://www.mikecroc.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikeycroc/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mikeciorrocco YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGWHuKojqZfcXmvGCAi_t1Q LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-ciorrocco/ Email: info@peoplebuildinginc.com Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: Ok, welcome, everybody. Today, my guest is Mike "C-Roc" Ciorrocco. I'm really excited to have this talk with him and I know you're going to enjoy this. Mike, thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it. Mike: Thank you, Joe. I'd like to start every interview that I go on with gratitude and just really express that to you for allowing me to come on and share with you. And thank you to your audience for listening and showing up. Joe: Absolutely, man, I love that gratitudes a huge thing in my life, so I'm right there with you. I appreciate it. I think it's important that everyone has their back story makes up sort of what they've become in life. You know, it doesn't define who they become. But there is something about what has happened throughout your life leading up to where you are now that has molded this person that you've become. And I Mike: Right. Joe: Am interested in that. And and I always start with this, just like you always start. What is it? What are you made of? Right. That's what you Mike: They Joe: Start Mike: Had to turn your head sideways, I love Joe: perfect! Mike: It, you know, now, you know, I came from a broken home. I don't remember my parents together, Joe. I grew up around a lot of broken people, alcoholics, drug addicts, people suffering from anxiety, depression. My grandmother committed suicide after taking too much anti anxiety or depression medication. You know, a lot of things I went through as a kid just watching just destruction. And, you know, I think that decisions we make and Focus's that we have either go towards living and surviving or destruction. And I was seeing the destruction part and I wasn't OK with that. And I didn't want to accept that. So I would always try to help people switch around even from a young age. I was just not OK with what I was seeing. And, you know, my mom when I was three or four years old, I just remember her always telling me that I inspired her and I was going to be a leader. And I think subconsciously, subconsciously, she was doing that because she knew what was going on in the family and knew that I was gonna have to deal with some things. And so I had that programmed into me. So I was always just looking for people to help, looking for people to show them a better way and not buying into what they were telling themselves. And so, you know, that's just something I experienced at a young age. And really when it came down, what lit my fire and what I made of, I would say, is rocket fuel. Because when I was eight, my mom was moving on to her third marriage and I wasn't really up for going into another man's house and learned another man's rules Joe: Hmm. Mike: And but decided to give my dad a try who was moving on to his second marriage. And at that time, you know. I broke my mom's heart by doing that. I didn't know that at the time, but she told me later on that, you know, she cried herself to sleep at night when I left and I was our first child, you know, and when I moved to my dad's, everything seemed fine at first. But after three years, you know, during that three years, there was a lot of conflict. You know, there's a when you had step parents into the mix, any time that stuff happens. The kid is the only link between the past relationship and so a lot gets taken out on the children and anybody that's been in a broken home that dealt with child support, custody battles every other weekend, things that parents jealous, things like just everybody that's been through that knows what I'm talking about. And so a lot of that time they're in from eight to 11 hours, experience a lot of emotional, psychological abuse threats, things like that that were really probably not directed towards me, but came my way. And at nine years old, I would sleep with my baseball bat a lot of nights Joe: Wow. Mike: Because I was scared. And no kid should have to go through that, through that, of course. But that's what went into making me look. I went through these things. I went through court, child psychologists, to see if I was mature enough that at a young age to figure out who I wanted to live with, like all that kind of stuff Joe: Make Mike: And. Joe: Your own decisions, all of that, that crazy. Mike: Yeah, Joe: Yeah, yeah, Mike: Yeah, Joe: Yeah, Mike: And seeing parents fight Joe: Yeah. Mike: And, you know, just just not not happy environment, and so that's what went into me. But the thing is, is that I was always on the right side of the track. Thank God. I was always looking at how can I be better not being accepting of it. Let me look at the bright side of things. Let me look at, OK, what is this doing and how can I take advantage of using this to a better life? So one weekend I was coming home from my mom's house Joe: And Mike: And Joe: So Mike: I Joe: I don't mean to interrupt. Was this Mike: Noticed Joe: All Mike: For. Joe: In Maryland or all back on the East Coast or. Mike: This is in Pennsylvania, outside of Philly. Joe: Ok, cool. Mike: Yeah, Joe: Ok. Mike: So so my mom was living in Maryland, and you know what, I got to about 10, some 10 years old, give or take. I was coming home from my mom's house one day, one weekend after being there and my stomach was in knots. I was anxious. I don't want to go back. And my mom was saying something was wrong. She questioned me and I told her, you know, when you go through abuse, anybody that's been through abuse, you can probably relate to this. That one you don't just like to share because you're afraid that people won't believe you, too. You kind of you're so accustomed to going through it, you're not sure how bad it really is. Somebody on the outside would be like, holy cow, you're dealing with that really. Joe: Yeah. Mike: But as you're going through it, you just think it's ordinary. Another thing, maybe you're embarrassed that you let it go on for that long. And then the weirdest thing is that you're actually concerned with your abuser. You're like, what will happen if I share this to them? Joe: At. Mike: You know, just a weird thing. So I finally came came to the realization that I need to share that my mom said, you know, I'm going to get you out of there. I'm going to file court papers. You don't need to be going through that. That's not ordinary. You need to, you know, in a better situation, she said. But if you do if I do this, you need to stick to your guns. You've got to be like really, really firm because they're going to try to talk you out of it. And in life, when you believe in something, you've got to stick to your guns, man, because people will have agendas and they're going to try to talk you out of it, move one way or the other. And at the end of the day. If you do that, you're not going to live the life you want to live, so she reminded me that, you know, 10 years old, you know, filling my head with great stuff, you know, and I went back home that day and waited and waited weeks went by and waited for those court papers to be delivered. You know, I just knew it was going to happen. And I didn't tell my dad about it, of course. And then finally, one day I come home from school and the tension in the house, you could feel it like it was something was up. And I knew what the deal Joe: Mm Mike: Was. Joe: Hmm. Mike: I had to feel the first. I thought I did something wrong. You know, I'm looking around like, what did I do today? He had his papers in his hand. My dad did. And I knew, like, oh, here we go. And he told me to go to my room. Now, my dad was my hero. He had a successful masonry business, very hard worker, big forearms, rough hands. Joe: Yeah. Mike: You know, you tell he's a hard worker and he always cared a wad of hundred dollar bills in his pocket. And I thought that was the coolest thing and had a rubber band around Joe: So Mike: It Joe: Did Mike: And. Joe: My partner, it's so buddy. Mike: Yeah, yeah, it must be the last thing Joe: Yeah, and. Mike: He would always show me the money, and I thought it was a cool hundred dollar bills, Joe: Yeah. Mike: You know, so he came back in front of me and I didn't get into the discussion with him because my mom said, stick to your guns. So he proceeded to tell me how my mom would have guys coming in and out. Why would you want to go there? You have it made here. You have everything you need. They're poor. They don't have anything. You know, my mom was I mean, we look at the houses. Twenty five, thirty thousand. Our house broken down cars in the driveway. You know, we went on vacation to the Jersey Shore. Joe: Yeah. Mike: But we stayed in a rundown motel, one room for kids, two adults, and we were I just remember just the other day, we were actually able to bring some friends with us sometimes, which just makes it like just I don't even remember how that worked. And we would take black trash bags as a suitcase. So, you know, share my story. By the way, back in the day, I was kind of embarrassed by that. I just didn't like to share that, you know. Joe: Yep. Mike: But I started to realize that the more you share your story, the more impact you can have and the more people that can relate to it and maybe change your life for two Joe: Yep, Mike: Or millions, Joe: Yep. Mike: You know. So I started sharing that. But just to wrap it up real quick, so when I did confirm that my dad took that wad of hundred dollar bills out of his pocket, peeled one off, crumpled it up and threw it at me and said, if that's the case and you want to move there, you're going to need this when you're living on the street with your mother one day. And I remember that 30 some years I lived off that spark that was lit right there because I'm stubborn, my shirt that I think is, say, Joe: And. Mike: Stubborn, perversely unyielding, it's a good thing when it's on the right thing. But, you know, I was like, I'm not going to let that happen. And so 30 some years, I was driving off that spark until two years ago. I really subconsciously I was doing that. I really realized two years ago, wait a minute here, there's something magical that's going on. My life keeps going on its upward trajectory. No matter what happens, no matter screw ups, let downs, disappointments, what is happening here and what I found, which I wrote in my book that's coming out Monday, May 3rd on Amazon Rocket Fuel, I was taken everything that would stop normal human beings or slow them down, store it in my fuel tank instead of my truck, would weigh you down and converted it into rocket fuel for my future to become unstoppable. And I found that and I realized, wait a minute, this is not just a concept. This is an this is a law. If you do this, you really are unstoppable to live in the life of your dreams until you're plucked from this planet. So that's why I decided to write this book that Grant Carter wrote the foreword because it was so powerful. I got to get this message out to people. So that's a little bit about the story. There's you know, that's the short version, actually. Joe: No, that's all good. That's exactly what I wanted, the only piece that I still need to figure out is what did you do? How did you figure out what you wanted to do in life in that middle section of where people go to college or they get a job? Or what Mike: Yeah. Joe: Did you do during that time? Mike: Well, I played football and I didn't drink any alcohol or party all through high school, I played football, baseball wrestled, but football was my love Joe: Mm hmm. Mike: And I just I always thought about I want to go to Ohio State, play football, because I just love their team. I watched them play Michigan all the time growing up. And I never grew tall enough, never grew fast enough Joe: I feel your pain. Mike: That. Yeah. So five, six and three quarters, you got to be really, really fast if you're five, six Joe: Yeah. Mike: And three quarters. So I decided to go to Division three. I played football in college study business. But when I got to college, Joe, I lost my focus and I started chasing girls and party in which I never did before. And it was like Disney World first, you Joe: Yeah, Mike: Know what I mean? Joe: Yeah. Mike: And I just lost, man, I four, five, six, seven years in that range. I was just it's all I cared about was parties where the girls at and I need to be around people. And so that's that's the lead up to that. And then eventually I met my wife, who just the commitment to my wife straighten me up. And I was off to the races. I think that my thing with my wife right now, I joke with her all the time, is I have to outsource. I have to earn her spending on Amazon and deliveries to the house. So it's constantly like this. The other day she's like, I look I go up in the kitchen and there's a piece of decking, like the composite decking. Joe: Oh, you know Mike: We Joe: That Mike: Have Joe: That's Mike: A wood Joe: Going Mike: Deck. Joe: To be redone. Mike: And I'm like, I already told you, oh, not right now. It seems like I already had somebody come over measured Joe: Oh, Mike: On my car and drive back down into the cave. Joe: That's Mike: I call this my studio, my cave. I got to go make some money now. Joe: That's so Mike: A Joe: Funny. Mike: Great motivator. Joe: That is awesome. All right. Well, that's where and was college. Mike: Salisbury University in Maryland. Joe: Ok, and then ever since you've stayed in Maryland, Mike: Yeah, Joe: But Mike: I Joe: Now Mike: Moved Joe: You're Mike: To Joe: In Mike: Connecticut Joe: Ocean City, Mike: For a period of time, Joe: Yep, Mike: But we moved to Ocean City Joe: Yep. Mike: Now. Yep. Joe: Which is beautiful. I love it there. OK, cool. Yeah. And I'm Mike: Thank Joe: On the East Mike: You. Joe: Coast. I'm originally from New Mike: A Joe: York. Mike: Cool, Joe: So. Mike: Cool. Joe: So this leads right into the question that since you're going to do the decking, are you still doing. Are you still in the mortgage business because that's your. Mike: Yeah, Joe: Yeah, Mike: Yeah, Joe: Ok. OK. Mike: Yeah, we have a have a division that I run with three best friends, they take care of the day to day operations Joe: Yep. Mike: And it's a large division under our nation's lending. And we run it like our own business. And it's great people, great culture. It's just phenomenal. Joe: And Mike: So. Joe: You've been doing that quite a long time, right? I've saw Mike: Yet. Joe: You've gotten rated as number number one in Yahoo! Finance are right. I mean, you have. Mike: Yeah, so 2006, I got into it and started as a loan officer and just went from two employees and started a branch and vision and two employees up to 40. Joe: Wow, that's incredible. OK, cool. So when did you make this shift of and you talk about this in one of your videos about sharing your story and you share. You also mentioned it when you were giving your story, how important that is. And when did you make this when did you allow yourself to say, OK, I have this business and I have great partners and people to run this business? When did you decide to at least start your company now with what you're doing with your podcast, in your book and everything? What was the trigger for that? Mike: Yes, so early, twenty, nineteen, my stepfather, George, she took over from my dad when I was 11. He was a great guy and he passed away in twenty eighteen and a heart attack suddenly. And I wrote about this in the book, the story about how he found out and everything. It's it's you know, but but at the end of the day, he had a passion when he was passionate about something like football, baseball, hunting, fishing. He would get up and just go nuts, like deep voice, like everybody couldn't, like, really understand him. He was like so passionate, like they would be taken aback by him. And when he passed away, you know, a couple of weeks after he passed away, I had this passion or energy, something spirit come inside of me. Like, I just felt different. And I realized that I wasn't playing a big enough game in life. You know, I was doing well in the business and the mortgages and all that. But it just that's not the game that I was designed for. I was playing small and I started to realize, wait a minute, I need to open myself up to other opportunities, because if I just focus here, this is where I'm going to stay. And I was having truths that I was telling myself and beliefs that I was telling myself is that this is it for me. This is I'm stuck, you know, Joe: Mm Mike: And Joe: Hmm. Mike: I don't necessarily love the mortgage business. It's great and all that. But the end of the day, I just had a bigger, bigger calling. And so I started trying to figure out, OK, how can I get known in this calling of building people? Because that's what I actually do at the mortgage business. It wasn't the mortgage business. It was I was building people. I was helping develop people. And so I said, how can I get known more in a bigger, bigger scale mystate instead of just my town? Then I was like, that's not big enough. I'll come up short. How about the country and then the globe? And then I was like, you know, what? If I start really expanding my mind, I'm like, if there's aliens, which I've never seen one, but if there is, let me see if I can get aliens to know who I am and really go for that and then come up a little short and I'll be all right. And that's the way I started thinking about things and started trying to impact and share my story with tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people. How can I do that? And I started to obsess about that. And that's when the podcast came. The book idea came and and I just started networking like an animal and going on. You know, I've done three hundred interviews in the last year. Joe: Oh, that's crazy. Mike: So just really lean into it and that's how it all started, and then now I'm into tech, into the tech world where I'm developing a tech product. I co-founded the company. And also we have other we're creating a tech portfolio of other co-founders, non tech entrepreneurs that have ideas that think that they can never do it. They usually go to the grave with those Joe: Mm Mike: Things. Joe: Hmm. Mike: We're bringing them into the world and giving them the resources they need to actually co-found their companies and creating unstoppable people. Because my mission, Joe, is all people are unstoppable to live in the life of their dreams. And so everything I do, I filter through that mission. Joe: It's so cool, man, and it's so funny because you hit it right on the head with with the same thing with me, it's like you don't have a successful business. But I know it's not my calling. It's not what I was put here to do. And and everything that I do should be so much more impactful and so much bigger. And I've had this I had the conversation with David Meltzer. And at the same Mike: Yeah. Joe: Time, he brings you back in focus and he's like, yeah, but you should know that you you have everything you need. You just got to get out of your own way. It's not a matter that you should focus on wanting more. You have it all. You're just Mike: Yep. Joe: You're literally getting in your own way of getting it done. Mike: Yeah, and that's the thing, it's the truths that we tell ourselves we're living an illusion, we let the illusions that we have based on our beliefs and past experiences, and we let that affect us and limit us and block us. And really, at the end of the day, you know, we'd rather explain our life instead of actually intervening in it. We'd like to explain with excuses, you know, and justify things and, you know, at the end of the day, man, we just tell ourselves what we can tell ourselves that helps us survive. And to me, that's not good enough, because you're going to always come up a little short, so why not thrive and really go after it? And, you know, there's not everybody that's going to be able to do what we do. So why don't we take it up a notch and get get really abundance, like go after abundance so that we can help other people and distribute this information to other people. So that's the kind of things that I started thinking. I started hanging around people that coach and mentor me the right way, thinking big, you know, also, you know, still like Dave Meltzer talks about, you've got to be happy now. It's not like later, Joe: Yeah, Mike: So. Joe: Yeah, so I don't want to go down the current path, I follow him, I love the stuff that he does. I know that it fits the mold for a lot of people that are in the real estate world. And but Mike: Yeah. Joe: I also know that he's doing a lot of other things. But how he wrote the foreword to your book, which is amazing, how how much did he influence you making this jump to doing what you're doing now? Mike: So when George died, my stepfather, my brother was read in the next room and he said, Mike, you've got to read this book, this guy sounds just like you. I'll take a look at it. I started I saw Grant before and like pictures, but I thought he was like a real estate. Joe: Yep, Mike: I thought he trained realtors, Joe: Yep, Mike: I wasn't even sure, Joe: Yep. Mike: Right, so I read the book and I'm like, holy cow, this guy speaking to me, he's going through similar situations that I've been Joe: Yeah. Mike: Through. Like, I can totally relate. And I but but the big thing was about it was I've always had this big think, but I got cocooned for a while by people that I surround myself with that were broken thinkers, broken mindset, people, people that didn't fit my culture, but they produce. So I kept them around and people that quit on me. And I let that affect me personally. And I got into this situation where I was invalidated, me myself. I felt invalidated on being the animal that I actually am. And so when I was reading that book, I'm like, wait a minute, this this shows me something. I'm not the crazy one. Those people are the crazy ones. I have an animal. So I did unleash it. So I was able to unleash the beast and that's what it did for me. And then I just immersed myself in this content, hung around with all these people, build relationships inside his company, because I just want to be around those types of people. Joe: Yep. Mike: Great, great friendships. Like I said, Jerry Glantz, a friend of mine, I just you know, I'm proud to have them in my in my circle. And so when when I wrote the book, the book actually came from an idea that I got while I was interviewing grad on my podcast about I asked him the question, what would it take to get into outer space? Not like literally, but figuratively speaking, getting away from all the gravity and negative suppressors of people and things that can mess with you. When can you get that amount of money or that amount of whatever it is? And he said people aren't ready for that discussion. He said that's just something the answer doesn't people don't like the answer to that question and I'm like, well, what would it take? You know? And I started thinking about rocket fuel. Rocket fuel is what it would take. Take it all that stuff, converting it and fuel your way up there. And then once you do that, you remove all that stuff out of your way. There's nothing to stop you and you become unstoppable and indestructible. And that's the thought that started going through my head and I started obsessing about it. I'm like, I got to write this. So when I did that, I'm like the only person that would make sense to be writing the forward for this book is Grant. I don't know if he does afterwards. I don't know if he charged me. I don't know anything. I'm going to make it happen, though. And that's what I started thinking all the time. I just dwelled on it, wrote it down and. Book is almost done, and I made a phone call and there are some details that went into doing that and I just got done and his name is on the cover of the book is for Written Joe: Yeah, Mike: By Grant. Joe: Yeah. Mike: So that adds to credibility that I may not have had before, but the content in the book is just so powerful, man. It's just I actually can be honest with you about something like like I'm always honest, but like just totally transparent. I read that book over and over again during the editing process. Right. And I got so sick of it and because I've read it so much, but then I haven't read it in a while and I went back and my team, we go through in the morning and we'll pick a passage to read out of it just to see what what we come upon. And I don't even remember writing some of the stuff. I'm just like, wow, this is like this is really good stuff. Joe: That's cool, Mike: So it's a weird Joe: Yeah. Mike: It's a weird mind game when you're writing a book and then to see the actual finished product. It's a good time. Joe: That's really cool, yeah, I look forward to reading it, I it's, you know, just talking with you, I can tell we're in sync on a lot of this stuff. You're ahead of me because you wrote a book and I haven't done it yet, but I know that it's a good process to go through. Where did you figure out where you wanted to start in the book in regards to your life? Mike: So, you know, I started share my story that I share with you and I have other parts of my life in there, too, that are just crazy, blew people's minds. But I really what I did was I started writing in my phone while I was on airplanes and I would just write ideas in my phone and and I would write stories that happen in my life. And then my podcast, we transcribe the podcast episodes, the first few that were a monologue style, and we just created a framework. And then it doesn't look anything like it started. That's how I got started with it and just started, you know, what kind of what went into me, what am I made of? And I just went into that and started sharing it. And then the lessons that broke off from each of those things, because, you know, a lot of people have been through there's people that have been through a lot more than I have. But my story is pretty crazy. Like there's some stuff that happened to me that nobody could imagine going through. But I'm still here, brother, and I'm still going hard. Joe: I hear you. I see that and you brought up a good point and one of the videos that I watch where you said people discount their story, right? They don't think, why would anybody care? It's not that Mike: Yeah. Joe: Special. Well, when were you able to actually take your own thoughts as part of your own story and make that switch where you said, wait a second, you know, what I've gone through is important. If it can help one person in the world, that's value enough. I mean, when did you or did you not ever doubt that your story was powerful? Mike: No, so I would I never shared it and I saw Pete Vargas share his story on the 10x growth conference stage in twenty nineteen, I'm sitting there watching and this is the first big stage, I think, that Pete was on. He was nervous and scared and his face, you could tell, is sweating and he would tell you this. I'm friends with Joe: Mm Mike: Him, so Joe: Hmm. Mike: It's not something I'm talking about. Joe: Yeah, no, no. Mike: But I thought to myself, I'm watching that. I don't know who he was at that time, but he was telling a story about his father and he was like really connecting with me and the relationship and how he grew up in a rough spot. And then they came back together and how it all worked out. And I'm like, wow, this is just like powerful. I felt like everybody else disappeared in the place and it was just him talking to me. And I'm like, I need to learn how to do that. And if he can do it, I know I could do it. That's what went through my head. And I told the guys I was with when we got in the car afterwards, I'm like, I'm going to be on that stage. I'm going to share my story one day and I know I can do it. And so then I started sharing the story of one person, two people, five people. And they were like, that's all. I really can relate to that. Then I said, Well, shit, I need to go to ten million people Joe: Mm hmm. Mike: If I could do it and how can I do that? And that's when I started obsessing about getting known and sharing that story. And, you know, I was able to talk to Pete after that and actually learn from him how to share your story. And but I shared that that that story about seeing him in the audience and how everybody just disappeared and how he connected with me. And so it's pretty powerful stuff, Joe: Yeah, Mike: Man. Joe: That's really powerful, but that's got to be a little eerie to just be sitting there Mike: The. Joe: And all of a sudden it's just like a movie where everything around you blurs out and it's just Mike: Yeah. Joe: The two of you. Yeah, Mike: Yeah. Joe: That's incredible. Something real light like question I have for you. The logo is it is a logo. And I'm going to take a guess and I'm probably going to be wrong. And you're going to say, well, nice try, Joe, but does it have anything to do with the Lynch? Mike: So the sirocco, the blue. Joe: Yeah. Mike: Yeah, so it's just upside down, see, and in two hours that are, you know, for Cerak and then it just has a little dude in there holding up the world, if you can see him. That's what it has now. It doesn't. I Joe: Ok, Mike: Didn't see that. So linchpin, Joe: Only because Mike: Huh? Joe: When I read some stuff from you talking about, you know, in some of the verbiage that I read about you and on your website, you mention Mike: Yeah. Joe: The word linchpin. I can't remember the context, but it was. Mike: Yeah, no, you know what, I. Joe: And then when I looked at a picture of a lynchpin, I was like, wait, it is Mike: I Joe: Round. Mike: Got to Joe: And Mike: See what a picture of a linchpin Joe: You Mike: Looks like Joe: See Mike: Because Joe: Now Mike: Because, Joe: I have Mike: You know, Joe: You thinking. Mike: Like that's. Yeah, I got to look at this because maybe maybe, yeah, maybe it does, Joe: The. Mike: So I didn't design the logo myself I had professionally done, and maybe he had that in mind as well. Joe: Only because it's mean you could kind of say it a little bit. I don't know. Mike: Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying, Joe: Right, Mike: Yeah, Joe: It's Mike: No, Joe: Round Mike: I didn't Joe: With Mike: Have Joe: The Mike: That. Joe: With the thing through it, and I'm thinking, OK, well, maybe it's kind Mike: Yeah. Joe: Of hinting towards it and and I Mike: Now, Joe: Said, Mike: It was really just the sea Joe: Yeah. Mike: And the two hour and holding up the world and helping lift up the Joe: That's Mike: World, Joe: Cool, Mike: That's what Joe: That's even cooler, so you can Mike: The. Joe: Throw my idea right out the window, Mike: Now, Joe: But Mike: I Joe: I Mike: Like that, I like that. Joe: Do I do some upfront investigation of the person I'm talking to in the life and all of that stuff. And I saw that, you know, because you're doing your mortgages. And I saw that Jennifer is in real estate and I don't Mike: Yeah. Joe: Know if she still is, but. Mike: Yes, yes. Joe: So that's a really cool synergy between the two of you, first of all, I think that probably works really well. But just for the people in the audience who had a great relationship with their significant other, how important has that been in the balance of your life, especially what you went through as a young, you know, a young man being able to have that support in and you found the love of your life and it's you know, there's that whole synergy there between you. Mike: Yeah, I mean, it's it's everything, I mean, like I said, I made a joke about trying to earn her spending with that, but then on the day she does a great job, she did she was a stay at home mom for a while until our youngest was in school. And then I said, you know what? I'm going to try to you know, we've got to figure out something because I'm giving deals away Joe: Uh huh, Mike: To people. Joe: Yep. Mike: And, you know, it would be great if you get a license and she ended up doing it. And she's just the type that if she gets into something, she goes hard with it. And she did great the first two years, just fantastic. I didn't even realize how much money she made last year until I saw ten ninety nine. I'm like, wow, you did great. But she's just phenomenal and aligns well with our business. Obviously I don't do mortgages much anymore. Joe: Yeah. Mike: I don't do it all. I just I work on the business maybe an hour a day. My team runs the day to day. They do a fantastic job. And so but it aligns well, obviously in a lot of our people, their spouse got their real estate license, too, because it aligns so well. Joe: Mm hmm. Yeah. Mike: So, yeah, but but at the end of the day, we are you know, I'm very clear with what I'm trying to do, my dreams. And she is clear on the fact of her dreams and the fact that she's willing to support me and run through fire for me. And Joe: Yeah. Mike: It's just a great feeling because I can't do it without her, obviously. Joe: Yep, yep, I just wanted to sort of bring that up, because I think it's important I have the same sort of relationship with Joel Mike: And Joe: And Mike: It's Joe: My significant Mike: Awesome. Joe: Other. So it's Mike: Yeah. Joe: To me, it's super important. And with what happened with covid, you know, a lot of things just stopped. Right. And Mike: Mm hmm. Joe: Changes were made. And so she got furloughed from doing her day to day job and has not been brought back. But she's always had this dream of doing photography. And so now I basically have said to her, you are not going back and you are going to from this point forward until whenever the world ends for you, you're going to follow your dream. So I Mike: Awesome. Joe: Think it's important. Right. And to Mike: Yeah. Joe: Support each other and it's nice to see that you have that same relationship. Mike: Yeah, so, so, so important that it aligns I mean, so much conflict comes from just not being aligned with the mission, Joe: Yep, Mike: You know, Joe: Yep. Mike: And I think that people need to realize that their personal dream, their mission, I call it their purpose, their mission. It's it's more important than anything when it comes down to it really is. Joe: Yeah. Mike: And that's why it's so important to share that with your partner, to make sure that they're on the same page with you. Joe: So let's talk about that. I'm sure I'm probably older than you at this point, but we're Mike: Yeah, Joe: At Mike: Definitely, definitely. Now Joe: The. Mike: I'm 40, I'm 40 for some, I'm Joe: Oh, Mike: A Joe: My gosh, I'm so Mike: Young Joe: Old, Mike: Pup, Joe: I can't. Mike: But I am going on 18 years of marriage. This May so. Joe: Congratulations, that's awesome, yeah, Mike: Thank Joe: Joel Mike: You. Joe: And Mike: Thank Joe: I Mike: You. Joe: Are 20, I think, at this point. Mike: Ok, cool, congrats. Joe: Yeah, I turned fifty nine this past February, so, Mike: Oh, man, I Joe: You know. Mike: Can't tell. I really can't Joe: Yeah, Mike: Tell. Joe: Well thank Mike: Maybe Joe: You. Mike: That's why that's why you shave your head, because that way you can't see any Joe: That's Mike: Gray hairs. Joe: Exactly, exactly right. They got my eyebrows Mike: Hey, Joe: Are still dark, Mike: Look, I'm with you the way the. Joe: So do you ever look at where you are now and you look back and go? I mean, and I think we've talked about this with some of the great people, like, you know, we can bring up David Meltzer again because he's just he's like one of my mentors. I love the guy at the Mike: Is Joe: Death. Mike: Awesome. Joe: You know, what is what's the saying? Something like the the teacher. The teacher appears when the student is ready, Mike: Yeah. Joe: Right? Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah, teachers. Joe: Yep. Mike: Yep, exactly. Joe: And it's the same thing with life. Like things come when the time is right. And some people would argue against that. Some people would say whatever. But you just started on this path now, right. Something flipped when you're 40, when your stepfather passed away, it said there's you know, and you might have felt that your whole life because you people like you and I always were pulled towards something. Right. We're entrepreneurs. We've always worked towards a greater goal of whatever. Do you ever look back and go, God, I wish I had started this sooner? Or is it like, no, it's this is the time. This is the right time. It's happening now. You know, I'm interested in what your thought process is on that. Mike: Well, I'm curious, asking the question, you must have felt some kind of feeling about that in the past, maybe. Joe: I constantly go like I had, I chased another dream up until this point, and that Mike: Yeah. Joe: Dream didn't happen for me and I openly admit all the time that I didn't put in the work to make that dream happen. I'm Mike: The. Joe: I'm a trained you know, I went to college for music. So my whole life has been surrounded by music. And one day I was going to tour the world and be this famous drummer for and I always use the example because I love his music. John Mayer. Mike: Yeah. Joe: That never happened for me because I know now I can look myself in the mirror and go, You didn't put in the work. You didn't put in the Mike: Yeah, Joe: Tent. Mike: The commitment, Joe: Yeah. You Mike: Yeah. Joe: Didn't do the ten thousand hours. You Mike: Yeah. Joe: You would rather had gone down to the college campus bar and had a bunch of beers and chicken wings with your buddies Mike: Yep. Joe: Instead of going back into the practice room and spending another four hours at night. So I am fine with I get it now, but now Mike: Yeah. Joe: I'm trying to take like the rest of my life and make it amazing and live much Mike: Yeah. Joe: Bigger. And so I am at the stage right now doing that change, shifting Mike: Mm hmm. Joe: My my frame of mind. I know the world is abundant. I know that everything you know, I just have to look towards the good of everything. And the more I focus on the good and the abundance and the gratitude, more of it just keeps coming in. In the last two months, it's been incredible for me. And so and it's I always was the oh, woe is me. Like I work my ass off. Why am I not getting that? Why am I not Mike: Yep, Joe: Doing that? So Mike: Yeah. Joe: That's why I asked you this question Mike: Yeah, Joe: When that, Mike: Yeah. Joe: You know, was the shift with your with Mike: Yeah. Joe: Your father, your stepfather passing away and you just saying when you said you felt it in your heart, you were like, I need to do something bigger. Was that the pivotal point for this? Mike: Yes, it was, and I did look back and be like, man, I cannot believe when I started finding out things and becoming aware of things, I cannot believe I didn't start this sooner. I didn't know that. Like, I just felt like I had wasted I went through a period of time where I felt like I wasted time and time is so valuable. And I said, you know what? I don't know how much longer I have on this planet, but you know what, at this point, the window keeps shrinking. I got to pick up my urgency. I got to move faster. I got to demand more and be louder and be more impactful and be just more intense than I would have had to if I started a long time ago, that's all. And so at first I did look back and with some regret. But then I quickly got out of that and said, OK, what have we got to do to get this done in the window that I do have left? So, yeah, I definitely and that was the pivotal, pivotal point, of course, working towards it my whole life, not knowing it. Joe: Yeah. Mike: You know, there's a story in the Bible and they made a movie about it with Steve Carell about Noah's Ark. You know, it was told over some years he took to build this big arc and he didn't really know why he was doing it, he was just being told to do it by God. If you believe in God, Joe: Hmm. Mike: Which I do, or if it's intuition or whatever. And he got these animals and people were laughing at him and discouraging them and he just kept doing it anyway and building a ship in a place where there's never rain. Joe: All right. Mike: And did it make sense, it didn't seem to make sense at the moment, but he kept doing it and he kept being committed and doing it and doing it and doing it before you know it. The rain came, washed everybody away, and he survived with all the animals that he had and his family. And so I look at that lesson and I started to see this now. I started to see that the things when I'm committed and obeyed to my purpose, my mission, and I filter things through that, whether it's the people I hang out with, my actions, my words, my thoughts, my environment, when I start to filter through that mission. I'm obeying what I'm supposed to be doing and things just magically work out and I start to see opportunities everywhere, but when I don't do that, they're missing. And so you don't need to know what the end game is necessarily. You should be shooting for something, but just be looking for the opportunities. As long as you're obeying your mission and filtering everything through your purpose or mission or whatever you want to call it. Joe: Yeah. All right, well, that makes me feel good that I'm not the only one that had some regrets, so thank Mike: The. Joe: You for being vulnerable and saying that because I definitely have gone through it and I have like I said, I'm older than you. So I think, you know, think, Mike: None of us are alone, Joe. None of us are, you Joe: Ok. Mike: Know, I've anything that you go through, there's somebody else out there experiencing it for sure. Joe: Right, and I think that's what you're a lot of what you talk about is it's so important to share your story because it literally could help one person, which would be a huge help. You never know where they are in their state of mind. And if it lifts them, that's awesome. But imagine being able to help tens of thousands of millions of billions of people. Right. So I understand that's what the goal is for people like us who want to do that. So I I wish you the best of luck in doing that. And and same Mike: Thanks. Joe: With myself. Mike: Yeah, Joe: They've Mike: You, Joe: Got Mike: Too. Joe: To get it done. Mike: That's right, Joe: Ok, Mike: That's right. Joe: So you said something earlier about the book, which is the name of the book is Rocket Fuel. And you said it's May, May 3rd. Mike: Yeah, May 3rd, Monday, May 3rd, it's coming out on Amazon, and, you know, it should be a best seller based on we have we presold it. So I'm thinking that it's not going to have a problem being a best seller, number one best seller. Joe: Yep. Mike: What we shall see. But I'm going to do a bunch of lives that day, Instagram and Facebook lives, and just have some fun with it Joe: Cool. Mike: And celebrate. Joe: Ok, cool, so let's talk about it a little bit. Mike: Sure. Joe: You said something earlier that I thought was really cool, which was taking you said something about taking whatever comes in and not putting in it in the trunk, but putting it in the fuel tank and making rocket fuel. So explain Mike: Yep, Joe: That again Mike: Very Joe: To me, because Mike: Good. Joe: I I loved Mike: Yeah. Joe: It when you said I was like and I didn't even write it down. Mike: Yeah. Joe: I was like, no, that's got to go up here in my brain. So I would love to Mike: Well, Joe: Hear that again. Mike: Well, when you want something in life and things come your way to stop it or slow you down, if you remove a one thing, obviously that's going to help. But removing is not good enough for me. So I take all that stuff. Haters, people that discourage me laughed at me. What I'm trying to do, screw ups of my own people trying to screw me, all that stuff I just stored in my fuel tank. And usually people put it in their trunk and that weighs them down. You know, most people quit on their dreams because other people are talking Joe: Mm hmm. Mike: About them and saying, no, you're not the same. Why are you doing that? In all kinds of different things? I take all that and say, you know what, like here's an example, by the way, I stored in my tank, my fuel tank, to convert it into rocket fuel rather than my trunk, where it weighs me down. And some of the people closest to me, you know, like some of my business partners and friends and they know who they are. I talk to them about it. And I said, you know what? You keep saying the stuff like, hey, why don't you go do your podcast? Hey, you know, just this stupid digs like that, right? At the end of the day, they're trying to get at me, but they're really just talking about themselves, reflecting upon themselves and the fact that they should be doing that and they're not. And so I know that. And I tell people, you know, you want to say that, great, you're not going to achieve what you think you're going to achieve because all you're doing is giving me more fuel and I'm going to push it even harder. So when somebody says that to me, I'll do it on purpose, where I'll push harder and then I'll show it up in their face a little bit more to about. They're seeing so many posts on Instagram, I'll make sure I send it to them in a direct message, because that way it shuts them Joe: Yeah, Mike: Up Joe: Yeah, Mike: For Joe: It's weird, I don't Mike: Not Joe: Understand, Mike: Being. Joe: I don't understand, like people want to bring you down to their level, right? We deal with that all the time. And and social media has done so much to expose those people. And I just don't understand why they can't be happy for you. But they. Mike: Well, they can't because so I've already realized this in my mind now I know this, it's not them personally, it's their mind. And what it's happening is they just the subconscious mind just justifies where you are. It's trying to justify the truths that you told yourself and when something comes in to threaten that. You have to basically there there things fire off to protect their subconscious beliefs, and so it's not really them personally that's doing it and that's why you can't take it personal. You need to understand it. And then when they're doing it, you need to lay it out to them and let them know, hey, listen, I know what's going on here. I get it. You're where you are and you're trying to justify where you are. And you're saying this stuff to me. I don't take it personal, by the way. I use it as fuel. So thank you. And if you want to say more, continue to give me fuel. Great. But I would rather be able to help you. On break the like, just open up your truths and change them, change your beliefs. And expand your mind and see what you can achieve instead of worrying about what I'm doing and that's the way I handle it, I don't really get fired up or angry or take it personal. It's just a situation where they're going through it. And I think we've all been through it Zoom. I think I'm more understanding of it, Joe: Yeah. Mike: But I will not. But if they don't listen to me when I talk about that, I will not spend time with them because I'm not going to spend time with people that don't align with the mission. Joe: Totally agree. So the book Rocket Fuel coming out May 3rd on Amazon, who is this book for? Mike: Specifically, this is for people that have gone through things in life. And they feel like they keep getting held back or slowed down by things are stopped and they're just they're just done with it. They're they're at the point right now where they've had enough. They're getting sick of where they are and they want to do something about it. And they are looking for that breakthrough that that that superpower, because really it is it's like John Maxwell, House leadership, because this thing is so powerful. And I validated it so, so thoroughly that it's a law, it's the Rockefeller law. And so it's for people that are just sick and tired of being where they are. And they want to advance. They want to have a better life, life of their dreams. And I believe, like I said, my mission is all people are unstoppable to live in a life of their dreams. And so that's what's for. Joe: Yeah, and I saw that it seems like part of the focus is about past pains and obstacles and how you you basically help with the book to to change, take people and turn it around and say, you know, like you're saying, use those things as rocket fuel to get you to the next level. So don't lean on them. Don't have them in the trunk, don't have them as baggage, but instead take what you've learned, take what has happened and convert it to rocket fuel by doing whatever you talk about in the book. Mike: Yeah, Joe: Right. Mike: Yeah, the magic, the magic, here's the magic, right? The magic is when you have something happen and you get that feeling in your chest, that's where it hits me, by the way, like something Joe: Hmm. Mike: Bad happens and like this speed to which you can recognize that and convert it and look for opportunity. That's when you master the Rockefeller law. That's what it's all about, the longer time it takes, the more doubt creeps in, Joe: Yeah. Mike: A more negative energy creeps in, the more victimhood creeps in. And the missed opportunities happened during that period. So you want to shrink that window to as little as short as possible because we all feel it. We're all going to still feel it when something bad happens at first, but recognize it as fast as possible and start to look for the opportunity, not play the victim role, take responsibility for everything. Joe: Yeah, that's great. OK, I want to honor the time we have that we so we're going to do an hour or so. I want to just go through this real quick. So you have your own podcast, which is what are you made of? Which is on the wall behind you, where you interview. I assume, you know, other entrepreneurs and people that have amazing stories to tell and share. You release one week, twice a week with a human. Mike: Well, it started out once a week and then I had so many that I was doing, I had to do two weeks. Right now we're on a two week schedule. Joe: Ok. Mike: So, yeah, I just load up. I go hard, man. Like, if I see somebody I want to show, I go after him like an animal. I get them on the show and I don't care how many I've already had in the can. I just still just keep loading them up Joe: That's awesome. Mike: And uh. Yeah. So. Joe: Ok, cool. Besides that, you are you do some performance coaching, correct? You do some coaching in general, you Mike: Yeah. Joe: Are doing some speaking. You're going to continue to to build that Mike: Yeah. Joe: That part of your career. You're going to be on stage with Grant one of these days. Mike: Well, yeah, but so the coaching part, I want to do, the coaching part of switching that into, you know, I still have a couple of clients, but really focusing on the tech side of things and developing these entrepreneurs and young entrepreneurs into this tech world and using my specialty performance and business coaching and what have you into that, not getting paid directly for it. But but from the companies that I'm developing, Joe: Yeah. Mike: I'm really focused on that. And then I was on a 10x growth stage this past March. Joe: Oh, congratulations. Mike: Let me tell you, it took me two years to step on that stage. Joe: Hey, Mike: Thank you. Joe: That's awesome. The tech thing is it is there more that you can tell us about it or a way that people can find out about it or a. Mike: Yes, so the best thing to do, really, I mean, if you if you message me and follow me on Instagram, you're going to see all kinds of stuff coming out here very shortly on it. But I have a tech product called Blueprinted. It's being printed. This is my the one I co-founded. And this product basically, I looked at digital training and video training and I saw, like, how ineffective Joe: Mm Mike: It was Joe: Hmm. Mike: And the fact that only 20 percent of people actually complete the courses. So that means the people that are marketing these courses that are good at marketing are making money without concern for the Joe: Correct, Mike: Success Joe: Yeah. Mike: Of their student, their clients. And I thought that was an ethical problem. And I looked at why people get bored. They don't finish it, they get distracted, they don't retain the information. Or when they get done, they're like, what's the next step? Like, what am I supposed to do? Where do I put that Joe: Mm Mike: And Joe: Hmm. Mike: Where where do I take that and how long do I do that? And so I thought to myself, what if there's a way to have a project management based software technology that has a marketplace where people that have had success can come in and algorithmically step by step, put the success steps to what they've done, whatever vertical, Joe: Mm Mike: And Joe: Hmm. Mike: Build that blueprint in our platform and then sell it on the marketplace to to people that want to know how to be successful in that area. So it could be anything from a business to a podcast to digital marketing agency, whatever it is. Because if you look if you're going to build a house, you wouldn't want to watch a YouTube video. And on building that house, Joe: All Mike: You'd want the blueprints. Joe: Right. Mike: So this is a market disrupter, industry disrupter. And I can also see another industry being created from this, like there's web designers when websites came out. Well, there's going to be a lot of people that don't want to build their own blueprints. They want to take the content and give it to somebody and have them do the blueprint for Joe: Mm Mike: Them. Joe: Hmm. Mike: So there's going to be a whole industry just on blueprints. And so, yeah, this is a phenomenal thing. And it's coming out hopefully in the next 60 days, give or take. And I'm just fired up to get it in people's hands, man. Joe: That's great, man. You got a lot of irons in the fire. I like Mike: Yeah, Joe: It. Mike: But Joe: That's Mike: Thank Joe: Awesome. Mike: You. Joe: All right. So I want everybody to go and check out your podcast. The book is released on May 3rd called Rocket Fuel. Get in touch with you on on any of the social media. What's the best way to get in touch with you Mike: Instagram, Joe: On. Mike: Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, either one, but Instagram, it's Michy Cerak. Joe: Like you see rock on Instagram. Mike: Yep. Joe: Perfect. All right, man, this is a pleasure for me. I love talking Mike: Metohija. Joe: To another person Mike: Yeah, buddy. Joe: And it was great. And I really wish you a ton of luck with the book. I'll make sure when this episode gets released, I'll have a cover of the book. This will also go like you do on your podcast, will go to the YouTube channel so people will Mike: Thank you Joe: Be able to Mike: To. Joe: See it. I'll put the link to the Amazon in there. Anything else I can do to help? Let me know. But it was a real pleasure to speak with you. I appreciate Mike: Well, Joe: Your time Mike: Thank Joe: And. Mike: You. Thank you, Joe, I appreciate it was a great interview. Great questions and I really enjoyed it. Joe: Thank you, ma'am. You take care. Good luck with the book. Good luck with the podcast. Good luck with the tech software and Mike: Thank Joe: Everything Mike: You. Joe: Else. And just have an amazing year. Mike: Thank you, you, too, bye. Joe: Thank you.

Show notes:Links:Mike MondragonCRDTShip of TheseusExceptional CreaturesShiba Inu Full Transcript:Ben:I'm just gonna dive on in there. I'm so eager. I'm so excited. It's actually weird because Starr is the one that typically starts us off. Josh:Yeah. I thought we were just going to start with our just general banter, and then not introduce the guest until 30 minutes later.Ben:By the way.Josh:It is also our tradition.Ben:Yeah. Well we're getting better at this thing.Josh:Where we say, "Oh, by the way, if Starr doesn't sound like Starr..."Ben:Right, yes. Today Starr doesn't sound like Starr because today's star is Mike Mondragon instead. Welcome Mike.Josh:Hey Mike.Mike:Hey.Ben:Mike is a long time friend of the show, and friend of the founders. Actually, Mike, how long have we known each other? It's been at least 10, maybe 15 years?Mike:Probably 2007 Seattle RB.Ben:Okay.Josh:Yeah. I was going to say you two have known each other much longer than I've even known Ben.Ben:Yeah.Josh:So you go back.Ben:Way back.Mike:Yep.Josh:Yeah.Ben:Yeah.Josh:Because I think Ben and I met in 2009.Ben:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:Or something.Mike:Okay.Ben:Yeah, Mike and I have been hanging out for a long time.Mike:Yeah.Ben:We've known each other through many, many different jobs, and contracts, and so on. It's been awesome.Josh:Yeah, Mike, I feel like I've heard your name since... Yeah, for the last, at least, 10 years just working with Ben. You've always been in the background. And we've realized this is the first time we've actually met face to face, which is crazy. But it's great to... Yeah.Mike:Yeah.Josh:... have a face to put with the little... What is it, a cat avatar? Is a cat in your avatar? You've had that avatar for a really long time I feel like.Mike:Yeah, that's Wallace.Josh:Okay.Mike:So I'm Mond on GitHub and Twitter, and that cat avatar is our tuxedo cat, Wallace. And he is geriatric now. Hopefully he'll live another year. And if you remember in that era of Ruby, all of the Japanese Rubyists had cat icons. And so that was... I don't know. That's why Wallace is my icon.Josh:Yeah. Nice.Ben:So, so do Wallace and Goripav know each other?Mike:No, no, they don't. They're like best friends, right? They had to have met at Seattle RB.Ben:Yeah. Internet friends.Mike:Internet friends, yeah.Ben:Yeah. So, Mike is old school Ruby, way back, way back, yeah. But the other funny thing about the old Rubyists, all those Japanese Rubyists, I remember from RubyConf Denver... Was that 2007? Somewhere around there. I remember going to that and there were mats and a bunch of friends were sitting up at the front, and they all had these miniature laptops. I've never seen laptops so small. I don't know what they were, nine inch screens or something crazy.Mike:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben:I was like, "How do you even type on that thing?" But it's a thing. So I guess... I don't know. I haven't been to Japan.Mike:There are laptops that you could only get in Japan and they flash them with some sort of Linux probably.Ben:Yeah. Yeah.Mike:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:Okay. I wonder how long it took them to compile C on there.Mike:Yeah. So, about the orbit with the founders. So, I think I'd put it in my notes that I... And I consider myself a sliver of a Honeybadger in that I did have a conversation with Ben about joining the company. And then in 2017, I did do a little contracting with you guys, which is ironic in that... So we're probably going to talk about cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. So the Bitcoin protocol is, essentially, on a four-year timer. And in 2017 was the last time that we were building up to, I guess, an explosive end to that cycle. And I had just been working at Salesforce at Desk.com, And I left because of Bitcoin. And then this year, four years later, I, again, just left Salesforce, but I just left from Heroku. And I didn't leave so much because of Bitcoin, I just got a better opportunity, and I'm a principal engineer at Okta, and I'm in the developer experience working on SDKs, primarily, the Golang SDK.Mike:So I think one of the things that they were happy about was that I had experience carrying the pager, and knowing what that's like, and they wanted to have an experienced engineer that would have empathy for the engineers to main the SDK. So I'm really excited to be here, because I'm not going to be carrying the pager, and it is the fun programming. What I imagine, listening to the founders, about the kind of fun programming that you guys get to do, working with different languages and whatnot. So, obviously right now, I'm starting out with Golang. We don't have a Ruby SDK, because OmniAuth provider is the thing that most people use. But, there's also PHP, and some Java, so I'm just looking forward to being able to do a bunch of different languages.Josh:Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. We don't know anything about SDK teams, Honeybadger. But yeah, it sounds like we have very similar jobs at the moment. So that's cool. We'll have to trade tips at some point. Yeah.Ben:Yeah, I'm excited that you're there, because I'm definitely going to hit you up on the SAML stuff, because SAML's a pain in the tuchus yeah, I'm sure you'll have some insights from your time there.Mike:Well, that was how I was even open-minded to talking to Okta, was the recruiter had contacted me and I think actually it was the recruiter... I don't know the structure of how this works, but a lot of companies have a prospecting recruiter. And I think that a veteran oriented prospecting recruiter contacted me. And so being a veteran, I'll usually entertain those cold calls. And so then when I was at Desk, I wrote... So Desk was a big Rails monolith. I wrote a microservice to break some of the SSO off of the monolith itself. And in writing the API documentation that was on desk.com, I actually used Okta as one of the examples as a SSO identity provider using SAML. So yeah, I have had a little bit of experience from the outside of Okta with SAML. And so maybe I'll have more experience here to answer your questions.Ben:Yeah. We'll have to have you back and we can just do a whole hour on that. It's a fun world.Josh:After we do an hour on SDKs.Ben:Yeah, and your code that you wrote for us still lives on in Honeybadger.Josh:Yeah. Was it the webpack? That was some of the work, right?Ben:Some of it, yeah.Mike:Yep.Josh:Yeah.Ben:And some GitHub integration work.Josh:And the integrations, yeah.Mike:Yeah, well if I remember correctly with the GitHub integration, I did do some GitHub integration, and it tickled your enthusiasm, Ben, and then I think you went in and like refactored that a little bit.Ben:Well, if you have a monolith like Redo that's been around for as long as ours has, things don't... It's like, what was that Theseus' ship, it's goes around the world but you replace things as it goes, and it's never the same app, right?Mike:Yeah, that's the thing, we had discussed this in the prelude around just software engineering in general and how hard it is to maintain a monolith, especially as a company grows and as developers come rolling into a project, you get all of these... Over time you get engineers with different goals, different techniques, different styles of touching your code base, to the point that it becomes very hard to maintain a project. And I think, I don't know if we're going to talk about Heroku at all, but I think that Heroku suffers from a little bit of that, where there's very few original Heroku that are involved in the runtime at least. And I just came from being on the runtime in the control plane. And, definitely, the code base there is... There's maybe one or two people that are still around that have touched that code base from the beginning.Ben:Yeah, let's dive into that, because that's fascinating to me. I know that there's been chatter on Twitter recently that people feel that Heroku is stagnated. That they haven't really brought a lot of innovative stuff to market recently. I remember, actually a funny story, I'm going to tell it myself. I can't remember what year this was, it were way... I don't know, I don't know, early 2000s. I was sitting as part of a focus group, and I can't reveal a lot of information because secrecy and stuff. But anyway, I was part of this focus group and I was asked as part of this group, what as a developer working on Ruby applications and Rails applications, what I thought about this new thing called Heroku. And had it explained to me, "Oh, you just get push", and "Blah, blah, blah", and I poo-pooed the idea. I was like, "Nah, I'm not interested", because I already know how to deploy stuff. I've got Mongrel, I got a DVS.Josh:Say Mongrel.Ben:I know how to use SEP, why do I need this? Like Math, never going to catch on. And so don't follow me for investing advice.Mike:Yeah, totally.Josh:I got my Linodes.Mike:Yeah. Or even back then, I wrote all of my own chef, so I got my own recipes I can-Ben:Right, exactly.Mike:... bare metal at will.Ben:Exactly. So, what do you think, you've been at Heroku, you've seen this process of people having to maintain this code base over a long period of time. What are some tips for people who might be a little earlier on the process? Looking down the road, what do you suggest people think about for having a more maintainable application?Mike:That's interesting. I really think that there is not one size fits all, and actually some of the things that are specific to Heroku, and actually to desk.com when I was there previously, that some of the issues actually stem from Salesforce culture and the way that Salesforce manages its businesses. And so, I guess the thing that I've always liked about Rails, specifically, is that the conventions that are used in Rails, you can drop an experienced Rails developer pretty much into any Rails app and they're going to know the basic conventions. And that saves you so much time to ramping up and bringing your experience into a project. Whereas when you get into bespoke software, then you run into well what were the architectural design patterns 10 years ago compared to now? How much drift has there been in libraries and the language, depending.Mike:And so that is... I don't... That's a very hard question to nail down in a specific way. I would just say in spit balling this, conventions are very important, I would say. So as long as you have a conventions using a framework, then I think that you'll get to go a long ways. However, if you start to use a framework, then you get the everything is a nail and I'm going to use my hammer framework on that. Which is its own thing that I've seen in Ruby, where if you start a project with Rails, I don't think everybody realizes this, but you are essentially going to be doing a type of software development that is in the mindset of Basecamp, right? And if you have an app that is not quite like Basecamp, and then you start to try to extending Rails to do something different, then you're going to start running into issues. And I think that... It makes me sad when I hear people talk poorly about Rails, because oftentimes people are just pushing it into a direction that it's not built to do. Whether they're, like in the old days, like monkey-patching libraries, or whatnot.Ben:Yeah, I think we saw that with the rise of Elixir and Phoenix, right? José just got frustrated with wanting to do some real time stuff. And that really wasn't the wheelhouse for Rails, right? And so he went and built Elixir and Phoenix, and built on top of that. And that became a better hammer for that particular nail than Rails, right? So now if you come into a new project and you're like, "Well, I'm going to do a lot of highly concurrent stuff", well, okay, maybe Rails isn't the best solution. Maybe you should go look at Elixir and Phoenix instead.Mike:Yeah. Yeah. So, with Heroku, I just want to say that it was so awesome to work at Heroku, and the day that I got a job offer to work there, it was like... I still, if I'm having a bad day, I still think about that, and the... I've never used hard drugs, but I would think that somebody that was cocaine high, that's probably what I was feeling when I got the offer from Heroku. I started using Heroku in 2009, and it has a story within our community, it's highly respected. And so I just want to say that I still think very highly of Heroku, and if I was to be doing just a throwaway project, and I just want to write some code and do git push main, or git push Heroku main, then I would definitely do that.Mike:And we were... And I'm not very experienced with the other kinds of competitors right now. I think, like you pointed him out, is it Vercel and Render?Ben:Render. Mm-hmm (affirmative).Mike:Yeah. So I can't really speak to them. I can really just speak to Heroku and some of the very specific things that go on there. I think one of the issues that Heroku suffers from is not the technology itself, but just the Salesforce environment. Because at Salesforce, everything eventually has to be blue, right? And so, Heroku, I don't think they ever could really figure out the right thing to do with Heroku. As well as, the other thing about enterprise software is that if I'm selling Salesforce service cloud or whatever, I'm selling, essentially, I'm selling seats of software licenses. And there's no big margin in selling Compute, because if I'm buying Compute, I expect to be using that.Mike:And so, as a salesperson, I'm not incented to sell Heroku that much because there's just not margins for me in the incentive structure that they have at sales within Salesforce. So I think that's the biggest thing that Heroku has going against it, is that it's living in a Salesforce environment. And as, I guess, a owner of Salesforce being that I have Salesforce stock, I would hope that they would maximize their profits and actually sell Heroku. Who knows, maybe a bunch of developers get together and actually buy the brand and spin that off. That would be the best thing, because I think that Salesforce would probably realize a lot more value out of Heroku just by doing that, even if there's some sort of profit sharing, and then not have to deal with all the other things.Ben:Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. The thing about billing, and then selling per user, versus the compute- That's definitely a different world. It's a totally different mindset. And I think Josh that we have now been given a directive step. We should acquire Heroku as part of Honeybadger.Josh:I was going to say, maybe we can acquire it with all of our Doge profits in five or 10 years from now.Mike:Well, yeah. Somebody spin a Heroku coin, a ERC20 token on Ethereum and get everybody to dump their Ethereum into this token.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Mike:Get that pot of money together. And then that is the Heroku Foundation. Yeah, exactly.Josh:Okay, yeah.Mike:The Heroku Foundation that buys the Heroku brand. I know that we're laughing about it, but actually this is what is possible today. And, I was telling Ben... Well, let me just say a couple of things about the FounderQuest and how it relates to me, is I've been listening to FounderQuest from the first episode, and I'm an only child, and I like to listen to podcasts. So I'll be on my afternoon walk, and I'll be hearing you guys talk, and I'm having this conversation along with you guys listening to the podcasts.Mike:And so, I think, in January, you guys were talking about, or maybe Ben was talking about, $30,000 Bitcoin, and you guys just had your yucks and laughs about it. And it actually made me think critically about this, because I've been involved with Bitcoin since about 2012, and it's like, "Do I have a tinfoil hat on?" Or what do I think? And so, I'm not joking about this, listening to you guys actually has helped me concretely come up with how I feel about this. And first off, I think, I'm bullish on technology. And this is the first epiphany that I had, is all of us have had a career close to Linux, close to Ruby, building backend services, close to virtualization and orchestration. Fortunately, that's been my interest, and fortunately that's been where our industry has gone. And so, when Bitcoin came out, as technologists, all you ever hear, if you don't know anything about Bitcoin, you just hear currency. And you're thinking internet money, you're not thinking about this as a technologist.Mike:And so that was the thing. I wish that Bitcoin had been talked about as a platform, or a framework.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Mike:And not even called it coin. Because that confuses the issue-Josh:The whole coin thing, just... Yeah.Mike:Yeah, totally. And mining the metaphors-Josh:That alone.Mike:... just totally throws everything off. Because we are talking, we're laughing about it, but this is really possible today. We could come up with a Foundation to buy Heroku with a cryptocurrency, and it would... Yeah. So that's one thing that Ben helped me realize in my thinking around Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. And I think I'm just bullish on technology. And so to me, again, across our career, there's been so much change. And why would we look at Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies any differently than any other kind of technology? Even a hundred dollar bill with all the holograms on it, that is a kind of financial technology. And so we're just talking about a digital technology, we're not talking about coins I guess.Josh:That's the appeal, a lot of the Altcoins, right? They give everyone a way to invest in those companies, whereas before you would have to... Whatever, be an accredited investor or something to be able to get involved. Is that part of the appeal? I'm probably showing what I know about crypto, which is very little, but I'm excited to... Yeah, maybe you can...Mike:Yeah. Yeah, so I feel like these projects are... I'm not a VC, and I'm not an insider, but from what I can see from afar, in Silicon Valley there's a close group of people that have access to all of these ideas. And there's Angel clubs, and VC clubs, and whatnot, that are funding these startups. And to me, I feel like these crypto projects are the same kind of thing, except for they're just available to the public. And so, I think if I was speaking to another technologist that was interested in cryptocurrencies, is you probably need to get your hands on some of the technology in order to get experience with it.Mike:And so if that means you figure out how to maybe mine some coin on your laptop, or whatever, or you actually pay for it, you should at least have some in your possession, and at least learn about the custodial part of it. Also, there's different software libraries now to actually do programming against it, and platforms, I believe. So that'd be another way to at least tickle your curiosity, is by actually touching the technology and not thinking about the value. So yeah.Ben:Yeah. That, to me, that's one of the most interesting things about the whole coin thing. My younger son is really interested in the crypto space, in the coin and in the other parts of a distributed ledger, and what does that mean, and how does that work? And before I heard about NFTs, he was talking about NFTs. And so it's really interesting to me to see this coming from him. Just yesterday, we had a conversation about CRDTs, right? Because we're talking about how do you merge transactions that are happening in distributed fashion? Right? I was like, "Oh yeah", and it's so weird to have my teenage sons' world colliding with my world in this way.Josh:Yeah.Ben:But it's a lot of fun. And I've got to say, Mike, I got to give you back some credit, talking about the whole coin thing. As you've heard, we're pretty coin skeptical here at Honeybadger, the Founders, but you made a comment in our pre-show conversation. And maybe you didn't make this explicitly, but maybe it's just a way that I heard it. But I think... Well what I heard was, and maybe you actually said this, was basically think about this like an index fund, right? You put dollar cost to averaging, right? You put some money into coin, you put a little bit, it's not going to be your whole portfolio, right? But you don't treat it like a gamble, and you just treat it like an investment, like you would other things that may appreciate in value. And of course you may not.Ben:And so, as a result, I decided, "Okay, I can do that. I can put a little bit of my portfolio into coins". So just this week, and this is the funny part, just this week-Josh:I'm just finding this out now, by the way.Ben:Yeah, yeah. Josh is like... I told my wife about this last night and she was like, "What's Josh going to say?" "Like, I don't know". So anyway, just this week I put a little bit of money into Bitcoin and Ethereum. And that was... When did Elon do his thing about Bitcoin? Was that Thursday morning?Josh:Oh yeah.Ben:I bought, two hours before Elon did his thing, and Bitcoin lost 15% of its value.Mike:That's awesome.Ben:I'm like, "It's okay. It's okay, I'm just putting-Josh:Yeah, you don't sell, it doesn't matter.Mike:What was your emotion? What was your emotion?Ben:Yeah, totally. Yeah. In fact, my first buy, I used Coinbase. And Coinbase was like, "Oh, do you want to do this periodically?" I'm like, "Yes, I do. Every month". Boom.Mike:Oh.Ben:I went ahead and set that up like so, yeah.Mike:Oh, I did not know you could do that.Ben:I'm in it to win it, man.Mike:You should get a hardware wallet. That's the next thing, is you need to learn how to handle your own custody, so-Josh:Right, yeah. You got to... Yeah.Mike:Not leave it on the exchange. Interesting.Josh:Get those hard drives.Mike:Yeah.Josh:Yeah. Ben's a veteran indexer though. So you can handle some dips. Some volatility.Ben:Yeah. Yeah.Josh:I actually, I did make some money off of Bitcoin back in the day, and probably if I would've just held onto it, I would've made a lot more, of course.Mike:Same.Josh:So I accidentally... Back, I don't know when this was, it was maybe five years ago or something, when Bitcoin was going through one of its first early hype cycles, and I was like, "I'll check it". I was learning about it, of course. And so I went and bought some and I think I ran a blockchain Elixir app that someone made, to see how the transactions work and stuff. Read some books on Bitcoin. But I bought some Bitcoin, I can't remember how much, but just left it. I think this was after Coinbase had launched, I'm pretty sure I bought it through Coinbase. But yeah, I just left it, and then that was when it was in the first huge push of Bitcoin where it went up to 20,000 or something. And I remembered that I had it, and I went and looked and oh yeah, I made five grand or something. I put hardly anything into it initially. So I forget what I actually bought with that money. I just sold it and it's like cool, free money.Mike:So you just sold it this year? Or you sold it...Josh:No, I sold it back-Mike:In 17?Josh:I think I sold it at 20... Yeah, this would have been at 17 that I actually sold it, probably.Mike:Did you report it on your taxes, your capital gains?Josh:I did, yes. Yeah, I did.Ben:That's the benefit of having an accountant, because your accountant reminds you, "You know what? You did have some Bitcoin transactions, you should probably look at those".Josh:Can I say on here that I actually put some of it through a Bitcoin tumbler though, just to see how those work?Mike:Yeah, I mean...Josh:And that was a very small amount of money, but I didn't actually report that on my taxes. Because I think I actually forgot where it was or something.Ben:You'll have to explain what a Bitcoin tumbler is.Josh:So a Bitcoin tumbler... Well, I'll try, and then maybe Mike might explain it better, but a Bitcoin tumbler is basically how you anonymize your Bitcoin transaction. If you have some Bitcoin and you want to buy some drugs on the dark web or something, you go and you send your Bitcoin to this tumbler, and then it distributes it to a bunch of random Bitcoin addresses that it gives you. And then you have those addresses, and they're anonymized, because they've been sent through a bunch of peoples' wallets, or something like that.Mike:Yep. That's basically it.Ben:So it's basically money laundering.Josh:Yeah, it's laundering.Mike:Yeah. But if your privacy... I mean, okay-Josh:Yeah, no, I get it. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Because part of the appeal of Bitcoin is some people are just like, "Oh yeah, good money, credit card transactions are so... The governments are recording them and stuff, the NSA probably has a database of them". So Bitcoin is anonymous, but it's not. It's not anonymous. And yeah. So that's why people do this, right?Mike:Yeah. Well that, to me, that's if you want to... So the value of Bitcoin, if you want to get bullish on the value of Bitcoin, the traditional outlook is yeah, the silk road was going on and there's all this illegal stuff going on. Therefore it must be bad. But actually, to me, that's the thing, you know it's good if there's illicit stuff going on, because what's the number one currency that's used right now for illicit transactions? It's dirty US dollar bills. And if you're a drug dealer in central South America, you are collecting, dollar bills United States. You're paying some sort of transport probably at 10, 15% cost to get those dollars back to wherever you're going to hold them. And so, if you're using Bitcoin, you're probably not going to pay that fee. So, to me, it's like okay, that actually proves, at least in my mind, that there is value. That it's being used, right?Josh:Yeah. And you also, you don't want to see... Some people are fanatics about cash going away, even just because as more people move to digital transactions, whether it's just through, whatever, traditional networks, or through crypto. People are using less and less cash. And I feel like, whatever... Like Richard Stallman, he pays for everything in cash though, because he thinks that cash is going to go away someday. And that's a problem for privacy, because you do want a way to pay for things in private in some cases.Mike:Yep. I agree.Josh:Yeah.Ben:My only real beef with Bitcoin, well, aside from the whole requiring power plants just to do a transaction, is that there is Badger coin. This company that is named Honeybadger, it's all about Bitcoin. And they have these ATM's in Canada, and we constantly get support requests from people.Mike:Oh really?Josh:Is this the reason that we've been so down on cryptocurrencies in the past?Ben:I think so.Josh:Because ever since the beginning, since people started making coins, Badger coin came out and then it's been our primary exposure to be honest.Ben:It has been, yeah.Josh:Throughout the past... I don't know how many years it's been. Has it been six-Ben:Yeah, six-Josh:... to eight years?Ben:Yeah, something like that. It's been nuts.Josh:I'd say.Mike:You should send them an invoice, and they actually-Ben:Yeah, so what happens is they had these kiosks where you can buy Bitcoin, right? You put your real money in, and you get your fake money out, right? And the name on the top of the kiosk is Honeybadger. So, someone puts in some money, real money, and they don't get their fake money, then all of a sudden they're upset, right?Mike:Yeah.Ben:And so they... For whatever reason, it doesn't go through, right, I don't know how this works, I've never bought Bitcoin at a kiosk. But so, they're like, "Okay, Honeybadger". And so they Google Honeybadger, and the first result for Honeybadger is us. And so they're like, "Oh, here's a phone number I can call". And they call us. And they're like, "Where's my Bitcoin?" That's like, "Uh, I really can't help you with that".Josh:They do.Ben:"You stole my Bitcoin". It's like, "No, that's not us".Josh:Something just occurred to me. I wonder how many of them are just confused over the fact that Bitcoin transactions can take a while to arrive now, right? It's not always instantaneous, where it used to be a lot faster, but now I know that it can take a while to clear. So I wonder how many of those people are emailing us in the span... Maybe that's why they eventually always go away and we don't hear from them again. Maybe it's not that they're getting help, but it's just that their Bitcoins are arriving. Yeah. I have a feeling that there's some sort of... I'm guessing these are mostly regular normies using, and interacting with this very highly technical product and experience, and even if you're walking up to a kiosk, but there's still a highly technical aspect of it that, like you said Mike, people are thinking coin, they're thinking... The way this maps to their brain is it's like dollar bills. So they're looking at it like an ATM. Yep.Mike:Yeah. When it comes to cryptocurrency and the technology, I don't want to have to think about custody, or any of that other kinds of stuff. It'll be successful when it just is happening, I'm not thinking about it. They're already... In some... I don't know all of the different mobile devices, but I do carry out an iPhone. And so, the wallet on iPhone is pretty seamless now, right? And so I'm not thinking about how that technology is working. I had to associate an Amex with it originally, right? But once I've done that, then all I do is click my button to pay. And there you go. And so I do think that the cryptocurrency technology has a long way to go towards that, because if normal people, the non nerds, have to think about it, then it's not going to be useful. Because in the end-Josh:Yeah.Mike:... humans use tools, right? And so, whatever the tool is, they're going to use it especially if it's easy and it makes their life easier.Ben:So what I really want to know, Mike, is what are your feelings about Dogecoin? Are you bullish on Doge?Mike:Well, I'll answer that, but I wanted to come back to the bit about the NFT, and just talking about the possibilities with technology. And I think that you guys could profit from this.Ben:I like where it's going.Mike:You'll have to do some more research. But I think what you could do... See, I love the origin story of Honeybadger. And maybe not everybody knows about the Honeybadger meme from what is... When was this, two thousand...Ben:2012? 2011?Mike:Yeah, okay. So not everybody... Yeah, bot everybody knows about the meme. I guess, just go Google-Ben:I can link it in the show notes.Josh:It's long dead. This meme is long dead.Mike:Is it? Well it's still awesome. I still love it.Josh:It is.Mike:So, there's so many facets of this that I love. The first one is that... Can I name names on competitors-Ben:Of course.Mike:... in the origins? Okay. So the first one was is that Airbrake, an exception reporting service, was doing a poor job with their customer service. And you guys were like, "We're working on this project, we need exception reporting. It's not working". It's like, "Well, can we just take their library, and build our own backend?" Right? And to me, that is beautiful. And in thinking about this episode, in Heroku, the same opportunity lies for an aspiring developer out there where you could just take the Heroku CLI and point it at your own false backend until you figure out all of the API calls that happen. And I don't know, you have that backed by Kubernetes, or whatever orchestration framework is...Mike:There is the possibility that you could do the same Honeybadger story with Airbrake SDK, as there is with the Heroku CLI. So that's the first thing I love about the Honeybadger story, and the fact the name goes along with the fact that Airbrake had poor customer support, and you guys just were like, "F it, we're going to build our own exception reporting service". Now, in the modern context with NFTs is... I have old man experience with the NFTs in that GIFs, or GIFs, and JPEGs, this is BS that people are gouging for profit. However, the technology of the NFT... This is the thing that I think is beautiful, is that... And I'm not sure which of the NFTs does this, but there is the possibility that you could be the originator of a digital object, and then you sell that digital object. And then as that digital object is traded, then you, as the, I guess, the original creator, you can get a percentage of the sales for the lifetime of that digital asset.Ben:Yeah.Mike:And, I'm not sure which of the NFTs allows that, but that is one of the things, that's one of the value propositions in NFT. So what I was thinking is if you guys did an NFT on the shaw of the original Honeybadger Ruby SDK check-in, that this could be the thing that you guys have an experiment with, is you have real skin in the game, you're playing with the technology and see if that works. And, let me know if you do that, because I might try to buy it. So, we'll see.Josh:Well, we've already got a buyer, why wouldn't we?Mike:Yeah, so..Ben:Indeed, yeah.Josh:See I was thinking maybe you could own various errors or something in Honeybadger.Mike:Yeah, I mean... Whatever digital signature you want to... Whatever you want to sign, and then assign value to.Josh:Yeah, we could NFT our Exceptional Creatures.Mike:Yeah.Josh:Have you seen that, Mike? Have you seen that project?Mike:Yep, yep.Josh:Okay.Mike:I'm well aware of that. Yep.Ben:Yeah. I'm thinking what about open source maintainers, right? Let's say you have this project and someone really wants a particular feature, right? Or they're really happy about a particular feature that you've already done, right? You can sell them that shaw, that commit, that put it into name, right?Mike:Yeah, totally.Ben:You are the proud owner of this feature. Thank you.Mike:Yeah, totally. Yeah, I was hoping that I would come with some ideas. I hope someday in the future that I run into somebody and it's like, "Oh, we heard that podcasts were where ideas were free ideas that were worth a lot of money were thrown about. And I did this project, and now I'm retired. Thank you, Mike". Honeybadgers.Josh:Wait, so Ben are you saying that, so as a committer, so say I commit something to Rails, submit a PR, so then I own that PR once it's merged and it would be like I could sell that then to someone? Is that along the lines of what you're saying?Ben:No, I'm thinking the owner of the project. So, if you commit something to Rails, and you're really excited about it, and you for some reason want to have a trophy of that commit-Josh:Right.Ben:... on a plaque on the wall, right? Then the Rails core group could sell you that token.Josh:Okay. Gotcha.Ben:That trophy, that certificate, like, "Yep. This is your thing. Commissioned by..." It's like naming a star, right?Josh:Yeah.Ben:You buy the rights to a star, and it's fake stuff, right? We're naming stars. But that's the same idea.Josh:Yeah. So you could use that same idea to incentivize open-source contribution. So if you make the PR to Rails and it gets merged, you get this NFT for the PR merge, which you could then actually profit for if it was... Say it was, I don't know, turbo links or something, whatever. Years later, when it's a huge thing and everyone in Rails is using it, maybe Mike's going to come along and be like, "Hey, I'll buy... I want to own the PR for turbo links".Ben:Right.Josh:Yeah. And of course then, you, as the owner, would also profit from any sale between parties later on too. You'd get that little percentage.Mike:Yeah. Well, so when somebody comes up with committer coin, just remember me, I want to airdrop of some committer coin.Josh:We have a name. We've got a name for it. Commit coin.Ben:I've got a new weekend project ahead of me.Mike:Yeah.Josh:Cool. Well, that helps me understand NFTs.Ben:Yeah, I really like the idea of being able to sell ownership rights to a digital asset. That I think a good idea. I don't know that the current implementation that we see on the news is a great implementation of that idea. Buying the rights for a copy of a JPEG, it feels kind of sketchy to me. But maybe there's some sort of, I don't know, PDF document that has some sort of value for some reason. And you can give that, sell that to someone. And to me, it's not so much about the profit, or the transaction, it's the ownership. You can say I am the owner of this thing. Yeah, there can be copies all over the place, but I'm the person that has the ownership, quote unquote, of this thing.Josh:Yeah, yeah. But then you've got to define value Ben. What is value? Okay, so, what makes a PDF more valuable than a JPEG?Mike:Yeah. Yeah. Bring this back to Dogecoin, and value propositions, and whatnot. What is valuable? When you're talking about the value of a JPEG, this reminded me of a conversation I was having with my son. He's 10 years old and he wanted some money to buy, I don't know what it was, and old man voice came out of me and it's like, "That's BS. I don't think that's valuable". And he looked at me and he was like, "It's valuable to me". And it's like, "Oh, you just put a dagger in my heart. I'm killing your dream". And one person's value may not be another person's value. So, on the Dogecoin, that's interesting. Dogecoin is very interesting to me, because I feel like I'm in a quantum state with a Dogecoin where it is a joke, but at the same time it apparently it has value.Mike:And I don't know where I stand on that threshold. I know how to trade Dogecoin. And I know the behavior of Dogecoin, and the behaviors, from a trading standpoint, has changed substantially in the last six months. Before it was a pump and dump kind of thing. Well, actually, you know what? When Dogecoin was first created, its purpose was highlighted by the community. People in podcast land don't realize this, but I'm wearing a 2017 Dogecoin shirt from when the Dogecoin community sponsored the number 98 NASCAR. And the thing of the community was like, "Oh, we have all this money, and we're just being altruistic and we're giving it away". And so they were exercising their belief with this currency, right?Mike:And from then, till now, there was a bit of a cycle to Dogecoin where you could, if you acquired Dogecoin for say under a hundred Satoshis, this is the Dogecoin BTC pair, that was actually a good buy. Just wait for the next pump when somebody does something, and Dogecoin goes over 200, or 300 Satoshis, and then you dump it. And that's basically what I did on this in the last six months. I had a small bag of Dogecoin waiting for the next pump and dump. And I actually did that, but it kept on getting pumped, and then it would stabilize. And then now we're at the point where apparently Elon Musk and Mark Cuban are saying that there's value to it.Mike:And to me, I actually put a lot of credence to that, because these are two public persons that they cannot... If they're pumping things in the public domain, then they have risk, right? And so you can't be those two people, and be pumping, and not run the risk of the FTC of the United States government coming in and saying, "Hey, why were you doing this?" So there's the, I guess for me, a small bit of a guarantee that maybe there is something to Dogecoin.Josh:Yeah. See, the way I think, when you first started you were saying it is a joke, but you're in this dual state, and my initial or immediate thought was it is a joke, but this is the internet, and the internet loves to make silly things real.Mike:Yeah, yeah.Josh:Especially these days.Ben:Yeah. It's pretty funny for all those people that made a bunch of money on GameStop, right? Yeah.Mike:Yeah. Well that's the thing, is in Dogecoin, Doge is, of itself, from a meme from the same time period as Honeybadger, right? The Iba Shinu doggie, right? So, the other thing I don't understand, or the thing that I understand but I don't know how to quantify it for myself, is that, to me... So there's no pre-mine on Dogecoin. There's no one person that owns a lot of Dogecoin from the beginning. Whereas if we're talking about Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, the founder, or one of the founders of Ethereum, they pre-mined Ethereum, and there's a ton of Ethereum that's owned by the founders. Whereas you compare that to, say, Litecoin, Charlie Lee cloned Bitcoin and created Litecoin. He sold all of his Litecoin. I believed in him when he said he's sold it all. He's a software engineer, just like us. He was Director of Engineering at Coinbase.Mike:He doesn't seem like he's wearing tinfoil hat out there, doing conspiracies. So when he says that he sold his coin in 2017, all of his Litecoin, I totally believe that. Yet today, he is the chairperson of the Litecoin foundation. And so, to me... I actually do have, I placed some value in the benevolence of Litecoin and Dogecoin, because there's not any one person that actually controls it. I guess Charlie Lee, he probably has a stronger voice than most. But he doesn't control the levers.Josh:Not financially.Mike:Yeah.Josh:Yeah.Mike:Yeah. And so then with Dogecoin... So Dogecoin, it'll be awesome if it gets above a dollar, but the structure of Dogecoin will be such as they cannot maintain that.Josh:Right.Mike:Because it's an inflation-Josh:There's no cap, right?Mike:Right.Josh:Yeah.Mike:It's inflation. And so, I don't know the number, I think it's a million Dogecoin are minted every day. So, 10 years from now, if Dogecoin is worth a dollar still, then that means Bitcoin will be worth a lot more than that. So I guess that'd be awesome if Dogecoin stays a dollar. However, the point I'm trying to make is actually there is value in having an inflationary currency, especially if we're talking about living in the structure of our current financial... The way that our current financial markets work, where there is an inflation.Mike:And so if I want to be transacting with a digital currency, I don't want to have to be, say, like having an Argentina kind of moment where my one Dogecoin is worth $5 American today, and then maybe only $3 American a week from now. So to me, I think there is value in Dogecoin in that it's inflationary, and that it will not be as susceptible to speculation bubbles as other currencies. And so, I don't know if that answers your questions on the value of Dogecoin, but those are a couple of reasons why I think that Dogecoin is valuable. Now, am I going to be holding a big bag of Dogecoin in 2022? Probably not. Just to be honest.Ben:We're all about honesty at Honeybadger. I love the episodes where we have to have a disclaimer, this is not financial advice. Please consult competent professionals before investing, et cetera, et cetera. Mike, it has been a delight to have you with us. We appreciate your counterbalance to our coin pessimism that we have amongst the Honeybadger fan base.Josh:Yeah, I think we needed this.Ben:Yeah.Josh:We really needed this.Ben:We really did.Josh:So thank you.Ben:It's been good.Mike:Yeah. Oh, I got one more idea out there. Hopefully, somebody can run with this, is I've been trying to get motivated to do some experimentation with the Bitcoin lightning network. We didn't really talk about these a layer two solutions for scaling, but I think that there is a lot of potential in coming up with an interesting project that lays within the Litecoin* network, it has its value in and of itself, but there's a secondary value of being a note on the Litecoin* network where if there's transactions going through your node, let's say, I don't know how you'd instrument this, but let's say that Honeybadger actually was... That you guys were taking your payments across your own lightning node, then all of the transactions that are going across the lightning network, you're getting a small fee, right? So I think that there's the possibility of a micropayments kind of play there, like for instance, paying by the exception. I mean, literally-*Editor's note from Mike - "in my excitement talking about the Lighting Network I slipped and said Litecoin a couple of times between Lightning Network. Lightning Network is a layer 2 protocol that is primarily intended for scaling Bitcoin and that was what I meant. However, Lightning can be implemented to run on top of Litecoin and Ethereum."Josh:That has come up that has come up in the past, I think at one point.Mike:You can't do micro payments on a credit card.Josh:Yeah.Mike:Right? But you can do micropayments on lightening network. And I'm not selling you guys on this, but I'm saying that there's going to be some nerd out there that it's like, "Oh my God micropayments are here, I can do micropayments on lighting network". And then they're going to do well on that product, but then they're also going to do well on the commission that they're earning on payments going through their node.Josh:This could be used for usage base software as a service billing model.Ben:Totally. And then you get the skim off the top, just like a good affiliate does.Mike:Yes.Ben:I love it.Mike:Yes.Ben:I love it. All right. All right, Mike, we're going to have to do some scheming together. Well, any final words, any parting words besides go by all the Dogecoin that you can?Mike:Yeah. Don't put all your money into the cryptocurrencies. Yeah.Josh:Seems like good advice.Ben:Be smart

If you have ever browsed the Roofstock Marketplace, you will be familiar with the neighborhood scores used for risk assessment. If you have ever wondered what goes into the calculation of these scores, join Tom and Michael as they interview the Head Data Scientist at Roofstock, Mike Polyakov, about what exactly goes into these values.  --- Transcript   Tom: Greetings, and welcome to the remote real estate investor. On today we have a special guest, Mike Polyakov, who is the head data scientist at Roofstock. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about the Roofstock neighborhood score. What goes into it? How is it updated? And what makes it special? All right, let's do it.   Tom: Mike, thank you so much for coming on to the episode. You are the lead data scientists at Roofstock.   Mike That's correct. Oh, yeah. Happy to be here.   Tom: Excellent. So before we get into the specifics of the episode, which is going to be on the neighborhood score, I'd love to learn a little bit more about yourself before you got to Roofstock. What were you doing? And then now that you're being at Rootstock for a little bit of time, what's your kind of day to day like, like, so let's start at the beginning. What were you doing before you came to Rootstock and to be the lead data scientist?   Mike: Sure. I have kind of an unusual background. So which combines political science. I have a PhD in political science from Berkeley, which I got in 2014 in computer science, which I guess, which is the kind of before a PhD, and then sort of went back after I finished the PhD, right before coming to Rootstock. I worked at crowd pack, which is a political crowdfunding startup, I believe they're still going. And there's some different leadership there in San Francisco, I was there for almost three years. Also doing data science there, since I joined Roofstock in 2017, worked on a variety of projects. Some of it is kind of typical data science things. So things like analyzing users trying to understand accorded the best leads, doing a bit of marketing work, and also more Roofstock specific things. So things like estimating rents, valuating variations of properties, and of course, the neighborhood score that we'll talk about here.   Tom: Super interesting.   Michael: Well, this is gonna get so off the rails so quickly. I mean, I would love to know what a PhD you know, what, what in most your classmates do after getting their PhDs,   Mike: So it's going to be like a Stuff You Should Know. So it really varies. A lot of them actually stayed in academia in political science. One guy from my class went to back to Singapore, where he was from, and he's kind of a middle level bureaucrat there, some folks have teaching jobs, others just went back into the world and two totally random things.   Tom: What brought you to getting into FinTech?   Mike: It wasn't FinTech specifically, but that summer 2017 crowd pack was, you know, a little bit on the rocks. And I was looking around, and I was actually interested in investing in real estate, didn't know a whole lot about it had invested at that point, and kind of find out about rootstock through one of my alumni connections, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity.   Tom: What better way to to learn than just jumping right in? Go ahead, Michael.   Michael: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I was gonna ask Mike, since learning about it, have you then since started investing in real estate?   Mike: Yeah. So I'm a little embarrassed to say that for the last year and a half, I've been in sort of analysis paralysis, where I've been wanting to, but our sport is the market selection for me. I've done the Academy of both these most of the lectures. So I'm all ready to go except I need to start.   Michael: Yeah, anytime you want. we'll hop on a coaching call. And we can talk through some of that analysis paralysis.   Mike: Sounds great, man.   Tom: Excellent. Excellent.   Michael: We could go on forever, I'm sure. But let's talk about the neighborhood score, Tom.   Tom: I know, I know. So first, I have a couple questions related to the neighborhood score. Let's start out with what are the different variables involved with it? And, you know, actually, I'm going to even take a step further back. Is there a general thesis of the neighborhood score of what we're trying to solve for? And how did it like internally on the data science team? What do you what is like the kind of the overarching goal when you think of the neighborhood score?   Mike: Yeah, absolutely. It's best to start at the beginning. Yeah. So in the real estate world, and you've probably touched on this in some of the lectures, there's this notion of a neighborhood class, right, you might assign letter grades ABCD a being the best. And from investor's point of view, this is the mechanism to account for risk associated with location, right, so that for an investment, you can compare returns versus the versus the rest. Typically what those letter grades capture is both operational risk and the expectation, appreciation or decline of an area.   And operational risk includes things like turnover evictions, effective age, rents, vacancy, all that stuff. The downside of that traditional neighborhood class notion is that one, there's no formal definition, right? It's kind of I know, when I see it sort of thing. And so when investors see might be not going to speed will vary even within the same market. But the other big issue is scale. Right. So most investors are focused on a single market. And so they lack national perspective, right, they might be assigned, might be able to assign some very accurate grade, so to speak with an Atlanta weather base, but really struggle to do the same thing as Charlotte. And so what the neighborhood score tends to do is to serve, operationalize it, make it scalable across the country, and use data to make it objective. So specifically for Rootstock neighborhood score, the goal is still to assign location based risk to properties, and specifically operational risk.   So that's the start. Another important thing to say is kind of at the outset is what is neighborhood mean, for us, right? Because it's very fuzzy term. People mean different things when they say neighborhood, in our case, neighborhoods pretty large. Specifically, it's the census tract. So the US Census divides the entire country into tracks. And each track should be roughly the same number of households, it's about 1500. In a metro area like Atlanta, it's going to be comparable to a zip code. So you know, it's not going to be your block, or what some people might sort of colloquially refer to a neighborhood. So a little larger than that, but it allows us to get a lot of statistical power when we look at the data. And so what data do we use a lot of is actually what would be the same as what the real estate professionals would looked at. So it's things like information about the housing stock, but the individuals in the area, but the households, school scores are going to be pretty important and crime data, high level that that's what goes into score.   Tom: Got it and on the size of the area. So you had mentioned like the census track is kind of a moving target based on how dense the area. Am I understanding that correctly?   Mike: Well, no. So the idea of a census tract is that it should be roughly the same population. So any track Yeah, they're not gonna be exactly equal, but they're gonna be pretty similar.   Tom: Does it relate to zip codes, or zip code plus two, or zip code plus four? And, and what does that mean zip code plus two plus, plus four?   Mike: Yeah, so it doesn't, they're completely separate in all ways, except that in certain areas, there will be roughly comparable size, like in Atlanta, I just happen to know that a lot of the zip codes are about the same geographical size as the census tract when you say a zip code plus two, which is pretty uncommon, zip plus 4 is a little more common. So the USPS separates, basically cuts up any given zip codes into these little areas. And simple plus four is basically a nine digit number. It's your five digit zip code plus four more digits, which usually identify your specific block. So it's block level, geographic region.   Tom: I'm already learning things. I always thought the neighborhood score was related to the zip at some level. So already as an employee, since for a very long time learning some stuff about the neighborhood score, and belaboring the point, but the size of the neighborhood is based on the census tract.   Mike: Well, it is the census, it is the census track.   Tom: Okay, got it. Yeah. You probably said that two times.   Mike: It's just yeah, I mean, you know, for sure, the simple reason for that is, that's where most of the data, most of the reuse is assigned at that level. Right. So most of our inputs come from the US Census. And they usually deliver it in multiple levels. So you could also get some of these inputs at census block level, which is literally your street block, but it's much more sparse, and it's much less exact. So a good balance of kind of precision. And also coverage is at the census tract level.   Michael: And Mike you touch on something there that I want to circle back to and make sure that I heard you right. In our listeners, we clarify for our listeners, did you say that the information that's going into the algorithm that builds the neighborhood score is coming actually from US Census.   Mike: Not all of it. So most of it comes from census. The other components are a school scores, which we get from a vendor and crime data which we get from different vendors.   Michael: Okay. So I think that's a question I get, oftentimes in the academy is where is this information coming from? Is it Zillow? Is it Redfin? Is it? Is it individually collected? So that's really interesting now that a lot of it comes from from the census itself.   Mike: Yep.   Tom: So we've had the neighborhood score out for a couple of years, has the waiting in the way that we weight different variables that go into it changed it all over time? And is there this kind of concept of like, I don't know, is it learning and getting smarter over time, I guess is another way to put it.   Mike: Yeah. So it's a great question.   Michael: It's becoming sentient.   Mike: Yeah.   Tom: I hope not just we have to worry about AI and what's what's it called?   Mike: The singularity.   Tom Yeah.   Mike: Not at Roofstock, it won't happen here first. So that's a good question. And I think a lot of people have that question of, you know, how do we come up with the weights? And so I'm going to kick out a little bit. I'll try to keep it high level.   Tom: Geek out away, geek out a little bit. And Michael, and I will raise our hands when we're drowning.   Mike: Yeah, no, it's fine. It's fine. So the neighborhood score is not a supervised learning model, which means that so for a lot of models in AI and machine learning, generally, they're supervised in the sense that you have a training set that's labeled, right. So if you think about training model to recognize hot dogs, you have a bunch of pictures which are labeled hot dog or not hot dog right. That's your label training data set. You're trying to get the model to learn something that you can sort of look at and know immediately, right, because we know how to do this, right? So you try and get them all to replicate something that you know how to do it when that score is an unsupervised model in sense that while So, you could imagine having a professional, you know, going through 100 or 1000 neighborhoods and saying this is A this is B this is C you could approach it that way.   What we chose to do instead is to say, look, this is the data that we know should determine the quality of this neighborhood. This is the inputs that I mentioned, we apply a process, that's known as dimensionality reduction, which takes all these different inputs, and then extracts a single number out of them. And the way it works is that imagine going to a doctor and getting your temperature measured, and maybe your heart rate measures, maybe your weight. And you can imagine all those measurements, giving you sort of an overall health score. Right? So having all those numbers, the doctor can say, Are you really good health, you create a health, or maybe not quite so well, maybe you're a grade B or C. The idea being that there's some underlying, sort of not objectively real, but an intuitive notion of health of a person that can be measured in these different signals. The same thing works for neighborhood score, you can imagine there's a kind of underlying quality of neighborhoods, which we're trying to get by these different measurements, looking at the school scores looking at, you know, household incomes, or percent owner occupied homes. These are all individual measures, which we combine them we can extract an overall quality, if that makes sense.   Michael: That makes total sense. And such a great way of explaining it. As a total side note, tangent there actually isn't this app, it's called I think fingers are hot dogs. And you like hold your fingers up, and it has the apple guess whether if they think it's a finger or a hot dog?   Mike: Yeah, well, that's from Silicon Valley, right?   Michael: Yeah.   Tom: Like Michael said, you did a really good job, like talking about the concept of unsupervised data versus supervised data in kind of understanding and how it is evolving in that way. So on the notion of evolving, how often are the variables that go into it being updated? Mike: Right, so to get to the more precise career question or that part, so the data itself changes on various time scales. So the US Census releases their data every year, and we're using the American Community Survey, which is part of the US Census, and they redo the survey every year. So that's updated annually, the schools personally, updated monthly, right now, for various reasons, we haven't been updating the score very much. What's important to know is that we've done some analysis to see how how much you would change year to year. And it's actually very little. So to give you a sense, from one year to another, I think less than 5% of census tracts, which change half a star or more. So most of them are quite stable.   Michael: And kind of getting back to Tom's question a little bit, Mike, the weighting of the different factors that go into it. Can you talk to us a little bit about how that looks?   Mike: Yeah. So the reason I brought up the unsupervised learning bit of it, it's that the weights are learned by the model? Well, so I think the back is, I wouldn't say that they're learned by the model, but they're assigned by the model. In other words, when the model looks at all the inputs, so going back to the doctor analogy, right, so maybe your your heart rate and your weight, and I don't know what what's another, another thing that they measure, blood pressure. Yeah, so maybe all of those are kind of pointing in one direction. So they're all correlated, but then your temperature is really low, unexpectedly low. So there's something going on that the other signals aren't picking up, but temperatures picking up really strongly. So what the model would do in that case, it would assign greater weight to the temperature than to the individual other inputs, because it thinks that temperature is showing you something that's not present in the other three signals. So in other words, if you have those four measures adopted, you could say that there is kind of two separate things going on in your body. One of them is picked out by heart rate, blood pressure, weight, and one of them is picked out by temperature. Interesting.   So similarly, with the real estate case. So we don't want all those inputs. And I think there's nine, nine or 10 different inputs, the ones that have sort of more information than the others, like more distinct information is going to weigh those higher. So given that the inputs don't change very much here a year, the weightings aren't going to change very much year to year.   Michael: But so, in theory, or maybe in reality, we could have different weightings for different markets based on the data set that's being provided.   Mike: Um, so yes, we could so one step that I didn't mentioned this kind of the Emperor script before, once we collect the inputs from these different sources, we do some normalization to the values across markets. So that I mean, what you want ultimately, in your score, is for it to mean the same thing in different markets. So for certain planet, in terms of things you care about, like all the operational risk factors I mentioned before, so a 4 star in Atlanta should be similar to  4 star in Rochester, New York. And to allow that to happen. We do some normalization inputs before we run the model on.   Michael: So that way you You shouldn't end up with a situation where a Atlanta market is more heavily weighted towards crime versus your neighborhood score. And Rochester is more heavily weighted towards, I don't know, appreciation potential, something like that.   Mike: Yeah, that's sort of handled in the pre processing stage.   Mike: Got it.   Tom: If I was to look at all of the properties that have a neighborhood score wouldn't form like a bell curve where the majority of them are in the middle like this three star in just a few of them have five star and very few have one star, how is this kind of the shape? If you looked at the full data set, look at me sending like a data scientist?   Michael: Great question.   Mike: And yeah, that's a great question, Tom. Right on? Um, yeah, so it's actually it's a slightly right shifted bell curve. So what you find is that about a quarter of properties in the country, or single family homes are less than three stars, about a third, or three, three and a half stars. And the remainder, which is a little more than a third is going to be four stars and above. So it looks kind of like a bell curve, but it's a little bit shifted off center to the right.   Michael: And is that properties in the nation or properties on Roofstock?   Mike: Properties in nation?   Michael: Wow, what about properties on Roofstock? Do we know what the data set looks like there? R   Mike: Roofstock have a look at the curve recently. But it tends to be a little bit more left shifted? I think our me, our average is probably a little less than three, or maybe three,   Michael: Which makes sense, because those are cash flowing properties.   Tom: So my less last question for you is, how do you see the neighborhood? And do you see it evolving over time? Like, is there a roadmap for ways that we're working with the neighborhood in the future? I'd love to hear your input?   Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So there's still like significant issues with the current input score. One is that we do have some areas which don't have any score at all. And this happens, because some of the inputs are missing. Sometimes it's from the census, we don't have a value for given track. Sometimes there's no school scores at the track level. So we're using, we're doing some work right now, to address this by improving our statistical methods, it should be more complete. In the near future. The other kind of issue more visible probably to the to the user browsing a website is going to be that you're coming back to this idea of neighbors corners being at the census tract level, that's a really pretty big region, right. So it's a very coarse scoring. And that also means you can have sharp boundaries. So it's not unusual to have with a two star neighborhood, adjoining a forced neighborhood, which, you know, looking at the census tract level, it may be fine. But around the border, there's likely going to be some inaccuracy. So if you pick up a property that's close to that border, but it's on the 2 star side, it's likely going to be a little bit in terms of separations, it's likely going to be a little bit more like a three star and vice versa.   And so we're our next step, which you know, because for a while, but may actually happen next year, is we're going to move down in geographic granularity down to census block group level, which is a division of a track, it's about a one third of the size of a census tract. So it's not a huge improvement, but it's going to be helpful. And then we have some other things that we're going to do to address this short boundary issue.   Tom: Excellent. Michael, do you have any any final questions for Mike?   Michael: No, I mean, Mike gave me the punch, I was going to ask how folks should be thinking about or working around markets that have kind of a block by block change, where you know, you have a really good block and a really rough block. But I think the answer to that question kind of addressed it, and that it's going to be up and coming. But maybe add on maybe the question is still relevant? How should folks be thinking about and evaluating properties in those neighborhoods that really are sparked by block or street by street changing?   Mike: Um, yeah, so a good rule of thumb. And actually, Tom can probably chime in on this as well. But a good rule of thumb is to look at rents. So at least within say, census tract, rent is going to be a pretty strong predictor of what actually sorry, so rent over price. So if you like, go on Zillow, and you look at the rent for property, and then it's so surprised, you can figure out the yield. And so within at tract properties that are more high yielding, will tend to have lower neighborhood scores. So for example, you know, you got a whole tract, that's a three star and then on the right, maybe it's closer to the highway. And you see, there's kind of like, if you look at a couple homes, that you kind of see a pattern of higher yields than the rest of the track, that's probably a slightly worse area.   Michael: That makes total sense. So Mike, I'm curious to know, because on Roofstock, we have the neighborhood score in stars. And then we also have the school score as its own category in stars as well. But you mentioned that the school score is actually one of the inputs into the neighborhood score. So just curious why we have separate and distinct call outs. And, you know, why is the school score included in the neighborhood score, and also on its own called out?   Mike: Yes, another great question. So it's including the input score, because, well, it's an important input, right? It's important signal of the socio economic index, which is what sort of neighbors score is, right? It's not necessarily entirely separate. So for example, if you took out school scores, and you kept all the other inputs, most scores won't change very much. So it's not contributing a whole lot of information. But it is useful as to why if we have the score, why do we have a separate school score? I think probably two reasons.   One, I think people just have a very strong intuition that they want to look at school scores in an area, right? That's just information they want to see. And then it does in search for certain buyers, depending your investment thesis, it provides information that's not so relevant or not really communicate, but neighborhood score. So for example, you know, if you have a family, or if you want to rent to families, school scores are going to be probably more important than if you want to rent to young professionals.   Michael: It makes total sense.   Tom: My last question, not necessarily neighborhood related, talking about some of the other projects that you're excited about that or the data science team is in science is excited about anything, any specific project that's you think particularly interesting that you're working on right now? Outside the neighborhood?   Mike: Yeah. Well, I'm hesitating because I'm sure, like any intellectual property, or what I'm trying to figure out, like, what yeah, exactly what what I should be revealing here. But I'll tell you one thing that's, you know, definitely not controversial. I think right now, we're not doing a great job helping people understand markets. I know because I need some help understanding markets. So we do have some work going on. In that respect. Some of it is more than short term. I think in the next month or two, we're going to have some market pages with better information, you know, it's going to help people make those choices and further down the road. Expect we're going to do more work on more machine learning and forecasting to help people understand markets now just as they are now but where they're going and how to think about that.   Tom: Beautiful. Awesome, Michael, any final questions from you?   Michael: No, this was super insightful. Mike, I kind of have my mind blown. This is this was awesome.   Tom: I know, we got to have another episode and got editor, PhD political science.   Mike: Yes. Absolutely.   Michael: Want to both sides of the science, the political science, the meeting of the minds.   Mike: Yeah, totally.   Tom: Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And I have a feeling we'll probably be asking you to jump on again in the in the near future. super interesting.   Michael: Great stuff.   Mike: Yeah. Anytime. My pleasure. Thanks, Tom.   Tom: Thanks, Mike.   Michael: Thanks, Mike.   Tom: Thank you so much to Mike for coming on today and telling us about the neighborhood score and a little bit about his background, looking forward to having him on again in the future. And if you like this podcast, like this episode, we would love it if you would subscribe, give us a rating, and all of that good stuff. All right. Happy investing.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: Mike, you're giving tips about weight training and we've talked about upper body. Now what about lower body and legs? I actually don't want to lift weights with my legs. I just... It is OK if I just skip it?Mike: Well, you should do your legs because you should get a full body workout because if you just do one part of your body it affect the other parts of your body as well, so you need to be balanced.Todd: OK, so I'm convinced. I'm gonna work on my legs. What's the most basic exercise I should do?Mike: I think you should start off squatting. That's where you put... make sure you have a squat rack, and you put the bar behind your head on your shoulders and you just squat as if you are sitting on a bench and come back up.Todd: Now often I see guys in the gym that do that. They have the big weight belt. Do I need to get a weight belt?Mike: It would be good, that if you're just starting off to use the weight belt but once you get the motion I would advise you to to not use the weight belt so that it forces you to keep good posture yourself.Todd: Now, when you do the squat, like how low should I go. Should I go until I'm almost sitting on the floor?Mike: As is there was a bench underneath your.....Todd: Bottom?Mike: Bottom.Todd: Right. Yeah, right. So basically, your legs and your knees should be about 90 degrees.Mike: Yeah.Todd: OK, so that's... that will work out all my legs? That's all I have to do is squats?Mike: Yeah, that's probably the best one you can do.Todd: OK, and that is for my calves and my hamstrings too?Mike: Not your calves but for your hamstrings and your bottom.Todd: OK. So what should I do for my calves?Mike: You can do calf raises, which is... you can do it on a squat rack, and you just hold the bar in the same position as you would a squat and just raise your legs up on your toes.Todd: OK, so in terms of how... of sets, like how many sets should I do of the squats?Mike: I think you should start of with three sets.Todd: Three sets.Mike: The same as the other exercises.Todd: And about ten reps?Mike: And about ten reps, yes.Todd: So do I always keep the weight constant? I don't have the weight go up or down?Mike: Well, once you get used to the motion and the position that you're in, then you can start increasing the weights as you go.Todd: OK, but I mean, each set should be the same weight.Mike: Yeah, when you're starting off.Todd: OK, yeah. And also just for the calves, just do three sets?Mike: Yep, just do three sets.Todd: Alright.Mike: Well, thanks a lot, Mike. I'm gonna get started.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: Mike, you're giving tips about weight training and we've talked about upper body. Now what about lower body and legs? I actually don't want to lift weights with my legs. I just... It is OK if I just skip it?Mike: Well, you should do your legs because you should get a full body workout because if you just do one part of your body it affect the other parts of your body as well, so you need to be balanced.Todd: OK, so I'm convinced. I'm gonna work on my legs. What's the most basic exercise I should do?Mike: I think you should start off squatting. That's where you put... make sure you have a squat rack, and you put the bar behind your head on your shoulders and you just squat as if you are sitting on a bench and come back up.Todd: Now often I see guys in the gym that do that. They have the big weight belt. Do I need to get a weight belt?Mike: It would be good, that if you're just starting off to use the weight belt but once you get the motion I would advise you to to not use the weight belt so that it forces you to keep good posture yourself.Todd: Now, when you do the squat, like how low should I go. Should I go until I'm almost sitting on the floor?Mike: As is there was a bench underneath your.....Todd: Bottom?Mike: Bottom.Todd: Right. Yeah, right. So basically, your legs and your knees should be about 90 degrees.Mike: Yeah.Todd: OK, so that's... that will work out all my legs? That's all I have to do is squats?Mike: Yeah, that's probably the best one you can do.Todd: OK, and that is for my calves and my hamstrings too?Mike: Not your calves but for your hamstrings and your bottom.Todd: OK. So what should I do for my calves?Mike: You can do calf raises, which is... you can do it on a squat rack, and you just hold the bar in the same position as you would a squat and just raise your legs up on your toes.Todd: OK, so in terms of how... of sets, like how many sets should I do of the squats?Mike: I think you should start of with three sets.Todd: Three sets.Mike: The same as the other exercises.Todd: And about ten reps?Mike: And about ten reps, yes.Todd: So do I always keep the weight constant? I don't have the weight go up or down?Mike: Well, once you get used to the motion and the position that you're in, then you can start increasing the weights as you go.Todd: OK, but I mean, each set should be the same weight.Mike: Yeah, when you're starting off.Todd: OK, yeah. And also just for the calves, just do three sets?Mike: Yep, just do three sets.Todd: Alright.Mike: Well, thanks a lot, Mike. I'm gonna get started.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: OK, Mike, you are fit, and you got me motivated. I want to work out, so I thought I would ask you about a work out routine, so first let's talk about upper body? What should I do for my chest and shoulders?Mike: Well, the first basic chest work-out is the bench press, where you use the straight bar, and you should probably do three sets, if you're starting out: three sets, doing ten reps each set.Todd: OK, three sets would mean I do it three times with rest in between, correct?Mike: Yes.Todd: And how much time should I rest between each set?Mike: Maybe a minute-and-half, two minutes.Todd: OK, and then when I do each set, so you say I do ten reps, that means I lift the weights ten times?Mike: Yes.Todd: OK, and I should do heavy enough weight that I can only do it ten?Mike: Yeah, you should lift weight that is heavy enough to where you can only do it ten times.Todd: OK, so, that's gonna build my chest and my shoulders?Mike: That will build your chest.Todd: OK and then what about my shoulders? What can I do for my shoulders?Mike: Well, a good one is the military press which, there's usually good machines for that, where you sit down and you just press the bar above your head.Todd: OK, so you think it's better that I do this on a machine than free weights?Mike: Yeah, if you're just starting out, I think you should do it on a machine. It's probably safer. You can get the motion down and then it puts less strain on your back.Todd: OK, and when I do this, again I should do it about ten reps?Mike: Yeah, about the same.Todd: OK, now when I lift should I do it like really quick and fast or like slow?Mike: You should bring weight down slow and explode up.Todd: Oh, so I lower the bar slowly and then push up as quick as possible?Mike: Yeah, and you do that ten times.Todd: OK, so we've got my chest workout, we've got my shoulder work-out. What about my arms? I want big arms, Mike. I want guns.Mike: Well, for arms, there's a lot of good exercises, usually for your biceps, the basic would be dumbbell curl, or straight bar curl, which you use the large straight bar, so you just stand and hold the bar in front of you, and just bring it up towards your chest.Todd: OK. Is there any dos and don'ts about lifting the bar, like things I should be careful of?Mike: Just make sure that your back is straight and that your stomach muscles are tight so that it keeps you solid.Todd: So, I need to keep my torso, my chest, very straight and not move to much?Mike: Yes. Yes.Todd: OK and the same as before: ten reps?Mike: Yep, that's the same as well.Todd: OK, so do the curls. Alright. I'm set. I hope I'm gonna get pumped, MIke.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: OK, Mike, you are fit, and you got me motivated. I want to work out, so I thought I would ask you about a work out routine, so first let's talk about upper body? What should I do for my chest and shoulders?Mike: Well, the first basic chest work-out is the bench press, where you use the straight bar, and you should probably do three sets, if you're starting out: three sets, doing ten reps each set.Todd: OK, three sets would mean I do it three times with rest in between, correct?Mike: Yes.Todd: And how much time should I rest between each set?Mike: Maybe a minute-and-half, two minutes.Todd: OK, and then when I do each set, so you say I do ten reps, that means I lift the weights ten times?Mike: Yes.Todd: OK, and I should do heavy enough weight that I can only do it ten?Mike: Yeah, you should lift weight that is heavy enough to where you can only do it ten times.Todd: OK, so, that's gonna build my chest and my shoulders?Mike: That will build your chest.Todd: OK and then what about my shoulders? What can I do for my shoulders?Mike: Well, a good one is the military press which, there's usually good machines for that, where you sit down and you just press the bar above your head.Todd: OK, so you think it's better that I do this on a machine than free weights?Mike: Yeah, if you're just starting out, I think you should do it on a machine. It's probably safer. You can get the motion down and then it puts less strain on your back.Todd: OK, and when I do this, again I should do it about ten reps?Mike: Yeah, about the same.Todd: OK, now when I lift should I do it like really quick and fast or like slow?Mike: You should bring weight down slow and explode up.Todd: Oh, so I lower the bar slowly and then push up as quick as possible?Mike: Yeah, and you do that ten times.Todd: OK, so we've got my chest workout, we've got my shoulder work-out. What about my arms? I want big arms, Mike. I want guns.Mike: Well, for arms, there's a lot of good exercises, usually for your biceps, the basic would be dumbbell curl, or straight bar curl, which you use the large straight bar, so you just stand and hold the bar in front of you, and just bring it up towards your chest.Todd: OK. Is there any dos and don'ts about lifting the bar, like things I should be careful of?Mike: Just make sure that your back is straight and that your stomach muscles are tight so that it keeps you solid.Todd: So, I need to keep my torso, my chest, very straight and not move to much?Mike: Yes. Yes.Todd: OK and the same as before: ten reps?Mike: Yep, that's the same as well.Todd: OK, so do the curls. Alright. I'm set. I hope I'm gonna get pumped, MIke.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: Hey, Mike, I heard that you went back to Canada and you had surgery.Mike: That's right. I went back to Canada and I had an eye operation.Todd: Get out of here!Mike: Yep. I'd had complications. I'm diabetic, and I had complications with my vision, and so...Todd: With both eyes?Mike: Well, yes. Originally, seven years ago, I had an operation on my left eye, and following that operation, they couldn't save the eye so basically, I can't see anything out of my left eye.Todd: Really.Mike: Yeah.Todd: I've known you for like five years. I had no idea.Mike: Yeah, yeah. Well, you can't really tell. yeah.Todd: You don't have to a patch or anything. You know.Mike: Yeah, I don't have a hook on my right arm either. But, yeah, I'd lost my vision seven years ago but you can't tell.Todd: I'm sorry. Man, I had no idea.Mike: No, hey. It's all good. In fact, I was rather lucky because I lost my vision because of diabetic complications. As I said, I'm diabetic, and I was lucky because the vision in my left eye went but the vision in my right eye, the right eye was fine, so in fact they couldn't save my left eye but I still have completely good vision in my right eye and so this summer I went back to Canada to do an operation on my right eye and that operation was basically just to save the retina, the part of the eye that was affected, to save it from complications and the same thing happening that happened in the left eye.Todd: Oh, well good to hear that things went well.Mike: Yeah, things went great actually. Like I said, I was really lucky I think in many ways, but yeah, so now I can see, you know, according to the doctors, my vision with my right eye will be fine. There might be minor things. I might need to get, you know, whatever, adjusted or whatever, but in general, my eyesight will be here to stay, so I'm really lucky.Todd: Wow, that's good news.Mike: Yep.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: Hey, Mike, I heard that you went back to Canada and you had surgery.Mike: That's right. I went back to Canada and I had an eye operation.Todd: Get out of here!Mike: Yep. I'd had complications. I'm diabetic, and I had complications with my vision, and so...Todd: With both eyes?Mike: Well, yes. Originally, seven years ago, I had an operation on my left eye, and following that operation, they couldn't save the eye so basically, I can't see anything out of my left eye.Todd: Really.Mike: Yeah.Todd: I've known you for like five years. I had no idea.Mike: Yeah, yeah. Well, you can't really tell. yeah.Todd: You don't have to a patch or anything. You know.Mike: Yeah, I don't have a hook on my right arm either. But, yeah, I'd lost my vision seven years ago but you can't tell.Todd: I'm sorry. Man, I had no idea.Mike: No, hey. It's all good. In fact, I was rather lucky because I lost my vision because of diabetic complications. As I said, I'm diabetic, and I was lucky because the vision in my left eye went but the vision in my right eye, the right eye was fine, so in fact they couldn't save my left eye but I still have completely good vision in my right eye and so this summer I went back to Canada to do an operation on my right eye and that operation was basically just to save the retina, the part of the eye that was affected, to save it from complications and the same thing happening that happened in the left eye.Todd: Oh, well good to hear that things went well.Mike: Yeah, things went great actually. Like I said, I was really lucky I think in many ways, but yeah, so now I can see, you know, according to the doctors, my vision with my right eye will be fine. There might be minor things. I might need to get, you know, whatever, adjusted or whatever, but in general, my eyesight will be here to stay, so I'm really lucky.Todd: Wow, that's good news.Mike: Yep.

Mike North: @michaellnorth | mike.works Show Notes: 00:51 - Transitioning from CTO to Independent Trainer 03:37 - Customizing Content and Developing Curriculum 06:37 - Bringing a Developer Into the JavaScript Ecosystem 12:47 - Training Developers with Non-Traditional Backgrounds 16:56 - Keeping Up with “Fifth Gear” 19:27 - Developing Frontend Masters Courses 22:40 - “Progressive Web Apps” 34:37 - Web Security Resources: LinkedIn's REACH Program IndexedDB Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 79. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer at the Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. With me today is Elrick, also at the Frontside. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on? CHARLES: Today, we are going to be talking with Mike North, who is doing all kinds of interesting stuff as per the usual so we'll jump right in. Hey, Mike. MIKE: How is it going? I'm glad to be here. CHARLES: Last time that I saw you, I think it was about a year ago at the Wicked Good Ember Conf and we were standing on the beach, drinking scotch and talking about Fastboot but you were doing something completely and totally different then than you are now so I was wondering, we were talking the conversation before we started rolling, that your role nowadays is independent consultant and personal dev trainer. I was wondering if you talk a little bit about that move from the CTO role that you're playing at your old company to kind of moving into that independent trainer, like why and how. MIKE: Yeah, I do remember talking about Fastboot at Wicked Good Ember. It feels like things have moved quite a bit since then. I have always loved teaching developers. When I've been a team lead, it's the favorite part of my job just because I get profound satisfaction out of helping people get over these hurdles that most of the time took me a much longer time with blog posts and podcasts and incomplete examples and libraries that were out of date and Stack Overflow with half answers. I've decided to dedicate myself to trying to make it easier for people in an increasingly complex web development world to wrap their head around everything. While I was a tech lead or a CTO, I always had to split my focus between helping developers grow and something else. Oftentimes, that something else was where the deadlines were and the time pressure was. It felt a little bit like I was driving a car that only had first and fifth gear where you're like on the bleeding edge of open source and what was the latest commit to master and [inaudible]. Then like, "Oh, let's be extremely patient with this person. They've never seen promises before because they came from another programming language. Let's help them digest this at their own pace." It's this slow and patient process of building up from the fundamentals and then the bleeding edge is like, "Let's use Babel Stage 0." It was very hard for those two aspects to exist at the same time in myself so I decided I'm just going for the training side. That's really all I do these days. CHARLES: It was so, but now would you qualify that as the first gear or the fifth gear? MIKE: That's the first gear. It gets you off the ground. It takes you from stop and gets you moving and then you have to develop your own expertise beyond that. But I like to think I'm developing a really, really excellent first gear. Today for example, I'm converting a bunch of Python developers at LinkedIn who are basically the ops team. I'm teaching them Ember and JavaScript at the same time through a series of about 20 exercises over three days. That process is many weeks long without assistance so this is like, "Let's get rolling much more efficiently and quickly," than via DIY approach. CHARLES: Now, do you find you have to custom-tailor for the environment or the developers moving from like someone coming from, say C# would have a different experience than someone coming from Python? MIKE: Absolutely. When I have my material, I have sections that I can drop. If you are a C# developer, I do not have to explain conceptually what 'async' and 'await' mean. You've been working with that for a while. I probably throw up a little example in C# and then the equivalent in JavaScript to sort of create a bridge from your existing expertise into the JavaScript world. Another one -- this is very true -- is teaching Ruby developers how to use Elixir. You don't have to say, "This is a router. We have controllers. There are actions and controllers." There are so many parallels that really it's more useful to help, rather than teach things from scratch to create connections back to the expertise they already have so they're not starting from zero and they can say like, "In the Ruby world, I would think of doing XYZ." Now, I have a map in between that and this new thing. CHARLES: Obviously, there's a lot, a lot, a lot of languages and environments that you could transition to, probably more than matches your own personal experience, in doing that frontline development. What kind of research do you have to do to develop a curriculum for, say someone coming from Clojure or someone coming from Scala or something like that? Maybe that never happens. MIKE: I have a pretty, pretty broad background. My entry into programming was a subset of C and then I graduated to C++ and Java and Ruby and I used to do ASP stuff. I've written iOS apps. I feel like I have enough of a foothold into various areas like I know one JVM language. That is usually enough. If you're running a lot of Clojure, I can at least speak Java to you because odds are, you're working with that and you're seeing that and you know it. Oftentimes, I have what I need. There are situations where I can borrow something in a very cursory level. Not to rip on Scala but I have not found it valuable to make connections to that particular language for clarity and [inaudible] but I have used Haskell before and I'm not a Haskell developer but it is a pure functional language. When trying to help people understand how is this different, then the JavaScript got them running where the Ruby ends up running. It's useful to use something like that. It's a very small language, very simple and you can wrap your head around the basics. ELRICK: What are some of the particular challenges that you face when bringing in a developer outside of the JavaScript ecosystem into JavaScript since JavaScript is kind of the Wild West that you can do everything in JavaScript? What are some of the challenges you face in bringing in a new developer from Python or C or whatever that may be? MIKE: You put it very well. It is definitely the Wild West. You can do anything if you have enough [inaudible] yourself and enough power to get serious stuff done. Really, it's like the explosion in number of choices and tools, the explosion of complexity. I learned JavaScript when it was something that you sprinkle on top of your Rails app for a little interactivity, a little animation on a screen or something like that. I was lucky to learn it at that point in time when that was the norm because I've been able to gradually accumulate for more than ten years now. The tooling like using Grunt, using Golf, using Brunch and then stepping up to other more sophisticated build tools. I learned those one by one in the context of real projects. Now, it's like the mountain is so high, people don't know where to start so that's a big challenge for developers. To throw them into a meaningful project like if you asked a mean JavaScript developer, not angry but the average JavaScript developer, they're like maybe -- CHARLES: I should dare to say that the average JavaScript developer is mean. MIKE: A little bit and probably maybe [inaudible] with me as well, depending on [inaudible]. But they're going to spin up some project with webpack and Babel and all of these tools. If that's your first exposure to the language and to working with the language, you're operating in an environment that you don't understand. Research shows that is the less effective option there to slowly building things up over time. I spend a lot of time going back to the basics and making sure we're not working with promises until we've explicitly focused on them, chained a couple together, managed errors and then now, we can work with Fetch. We're not going to jump into that and throw ourselves into this deep end of the pool. We want to incrementally build up skills. It takes a little bit longer but when you have that understanding as you're learning, you get a lot more out of it because anything that you can't get a grip on to as you learn it, it sort of just evaporates into thin air and don't retain that, even if you kind of fill in those holes later. CHARLES: Yeah, it could be so hard too. Actually, this has been an experience that I've been having, I would say almost for the past two years, as the tools advance, not only you are starting from a place of not understanding but the tools themselves do not teach you. I've had two moments where I got really mad. One actually was on an Ember project and one was a project using webpack but it was the same fundamental problem where in one I was actually working with someone who was very new to JavaScript and an error happens and the stack trace was some just big bundled garbage that gave no insight at all. MIKE: In vendor.js. CHARLES: Yes, in vendor.js or in bundle JS. It was like, "How is anyone supposed to learn?" The most fundamental thing about working with Ruby or working with Node or working with anything is you get a stack trace. MIKE: Debugging is really hard. I think it just takes a little time reaching out to people who are experiencing the Stockholm Syndrome like most of the time, JavaScript developer. We all are working with Ember CLI and webpack. I'm not ripping on these tools but we're used to that complexity in our lives. When we see that stack trace, we're like, "Oh, well. I probably need a source map. I'll make sure that that's there. It's natural that I'm debugging a file that the browser is not really seeing like it mapped back to my source code debugging." This is natural to us. But if you put that in front of a developer who hasn't been living under those circumstances, the number of times they raised their hand is like, "What the hell is this?" It is just amazing and it really helps. I've reset my expectations to what a normal programming experience should be and JavaScript does not provide that today. That is really challenging to keep someone in the midst of all that. CHARLES: I feel like it's hard and do you think we'll ever achieve that? Or is it just going to be a constant hamster wheel of progress versus the tooling to educate what progress has been made or to communicate what progress has been made? MIKE: I think the tooling is fine but it's just that we have a gap in terms of learning experience. We just need really -- I'm not voluntary here because I've got a ridiculous backlog -- a couple long tail horses working with vanilla JavaScript, rendering some stuff on the screen, maybe a course of React but no JSX yet, just create component. A couple of things to fill in a gap between where maybe code school leaves off and where you are expected to be by the time you start interviewing for a spot as frontend developer on a team but there's a huge chasm right now. There's the intro guides and then there's professional life and trying to bridge the gap between those is ridiculously a challenge right now due to the huge ramp up of complexity from like, "Let's do some stuff in the console," to, "Running transpile JSX code with async [inaudible]. We've got regenerator in there to polyfill generator functions." There's so much in your average JavaScript at these days. CHARLES: Your work that you're doing at LinkedIn, part of it is trying to bring and train developers who come from more nontraditional backgrounds, including a lot of things like boot camps. What is your experience of their experience coming in? Are boot camps doing the right thing? Are they teaching the right things? Are they trying to kind of parachute them on top of that mountain? Or do you find that they're just at the base camp, so to speak? Because it sounds like your approach is like you've got to really start from fundamentals so that you can understand the layers of complexity if you're going to, someday stand on them. MIKE: I think a lot of the boot camps are doing an excellent job. These days, the employees we have at LinkedIn who come from boot camps, I would bet on them against your average MIT grad every time, just because their education is so practical. It's amazing that in the world of computer science, the stuff that you're taught in school is a little bit farther removed than one would expect, compared to the stuff that we do every day in our jobs -- building real apps. I do not need to know in my day-to-day work at LinkedIn how an operating system works or how to build a device driver. This is a little bit too fundamental. It's the wrong abstraction for practical everyday work for most people. Where in these boot camps, they focus completely on the practical. In fact, I've been fortunate enough to get involved with the REACH program here at LinkedIn, where we hire explicitly people from nontraditional backgrounds like boot camps. They're not all from boot camps but many of them are. We just hired 30 of them in March. The pilot program, I think we've hired two or three in our New York office and it just went really well. It started like, "Let's double down and double down again and double that again." This time, we're doing 30 and I expect there will be a new round next year where we poll even more. The idea is we take these REACH candidates and pair them with a mentor engineer for six months. At the end of that six months, we had to make a decision as to like this person at the level we expect of an entry level software engineering hire. From what I've seen, we're doing really well at preparing these folks and they're unbelievably valuable to the teams that they've been placed in. ELRICK: That's amazing. That's very interesting. Is there a standardized curriculum thing that each mentor will follow to get this person after they entered his REACH program and then ramp them up or is it like each person just goes and looks at what the person knows and then ramps them up accordingly. MIKE: I'd say, it's a mix of both. We have a set of technical trainings for them or we'll have a testing expert from within the company and teach a little testing seminar to them. There's that standardized curriculum there. But the nature of being taught by boot camp or teaching yourself is that you're going to have holes in your knowledge and it's not often predictable where those holes will be. That's why we make sure we do this mentorship very explicitly and over a long period of time so that if it turns out that you never learned about how to work with tree-data structures. That was not part of the go-no/go decision that brought you on but we should probably, at least get you there. At least to the point where if you're traversing a down tree and you're like parent and child, what is this, what do you mean by leaf-level node. This is stuff that is actually meaningful for web developer in some cases. CHARLES: In the context of the work that you're doing with the REACH program but also touching on something that we talked about at the beginning about the first gear and the fifth gear, part of generating a curriculum is still being in contact with what's up in the fifth gear right because ultimately, what you're trying to do is you're working with people who are in first gear or looking to get a smooth transition in the first gear but at the same time, you want to set them up and you want to be in contact for what's in fifth gear now is going to be first gear in five years. How do you feed that in? MIKE: I'm fortunate to have a great team that I work with here. This group that I roll up to in LinkedIn, they're experts and you probably know of like Chris Epstein and Tom Dale and Steph Petter. A 15-minute coffee break with one of these people is enough to keep [inaudible]. Sometimes, it's a little bit like drinking from a fire hose because it's like I spend an hour with a student trying to help them understand like, "This is why a Promise is useful. Here is the callback equivalent," and then now, "Let's dive in to Glimmer. Why this track annotation is the right way to go for automatic updating." It sends me for little bit of a loop sometimes but it is definitely keeping me up to date. The other factor, of course is when you've been doing this for a while. History sort of repeats itself so a lot of the patterns that we're seeing today, I've seen somewhere else. I was working with code splitting when I was writing Dojo JavaScript code years and years ago. I was defining my module layers in a very explicit way. I had to do that. I didn't have done a webpack that would figure out, put these splits are. But I have that experience to look back to and for that reason, it is not often that an entirely new concept comes along. Oftentimes, they're like amazing refinements on things that how to smell like stuff that we've used before in the software engineering world. CHARLES: Yeah or here's something that has never been used, is very prevalent in these other context which we're going to apply here. MIKE: Exactly. CHARLES: And like, "Oh, my goodness. It's a perfect solution." In addition to the work that you're doing with LinkedIn and developing those training curricula and stuff, you're also doing some work for Frontend Masters in an area that's very exciting, I think to me. I'm sure it's exciting to you because you decided to throw a whole lot of time into developing a course for it. That's in the development of progressive web apps, which for me has been like this thing that I'm so curious about but I'm like a kitten playing with a little yarn ball. I want to dive in but I'm just going to tap it with my paws right now. MIKE: Yeah, it's a really interesting area and I think that even if you're not using progressive web technologies today, it's one of these things that sort of reinvigorates your energy for JavaScript's future and what may be possible soon. Steve and I have put together this amazing progressive web app course, which has I think like 18 short examples of iteratively building up a grocery shopping app. If you've used InstaCard or something like that, we start out with app already built and it's like a single-page app as doing everything that you would expect. After a few of the exercises, it works offline. After a few more, you can add stuff to the card and background sync, push it to the API when you come back online. We get deep, deep, deep into service workers. That's one of the areas that my work at LinkedIn and my teaching with Frontend Masters overlaps really well because I've been heavily involved in creating our service worker for LinkedIn.com. I may be able to take some of what we've learned here and disseminate it a little bit so that, hopefully fewer people have to learn the hard way. It's best to keep things simple at first and add on functionality. I'm about to cross like the [inaudible]. This is my favorite just because the example turned out to fit so well and in particular, on Frontend Masters, I think Steve and I have had contrasting teaching styles but they complement each other so well because I'm like the 'melt people's brains' instructor. I love to throw people exercises that are like 120% of what they can do and it's going to hurt, just like when you're lifting weights at the gym, like you're going to beg for mercy but we're going to make you strong. Then Steve, just listening to him, even with I am in the classroom and he is teaching me Electron. He's so energizing and he's really funny too but not in an overtly cracking jokes kind of way. He's just so fun when he teaches. I think it is a really good combination just because things lined up just by luck and through hard work and just the right way out of a couple of important areas. CHARLES: Now, just for people who might not be familiar with the term progressive web apps, what does it encompass? Do people actually call them PWAs? MIKE: No. I'm going to start, though. I like that. That carries very well over a video chat or something. Nobody knows how to spell that: P-U-A? P-W-U-A? It is a rejection of the old idea that in order to take advantage of some web technology, it has to be supported in all of the browsers that we need to support. The idea here is to hold as a core tenet of our design practices, the idea of progressive enhancement, meaning we serve up a basic experience and where we can take on these superhero features, like the ability to work offline, the ability to receive push notifications, we go ahead and do so. If your browser doesn't support this, that's unfortunate. No big deal. You still get a good experience. But if you're using a very recent version of Chrome or Safari or you have a new Android device, these browsers can take advantage of sophisticated metadata or sped up a background process that can serve up data to your app and your app doesn't even know that there's something between it and the API. That is the idea of progressive web apps -- apps that become superheroes where possible and they still work and provide a great basic experience for antiquated browsers like IE8 and Safari. CHARLES: The idea theoretically, you could work without any JavaScript or whatsoever. What's the ground floor there? MIKE: That is ideal. I think server-side rendering, which is what you're talking about there, even if JavaScript is not working, just HTML and CSS will provide a basic experience. That's great but that's not a modern browser technology thing. If you have JavaScript turned off in today's Chrome, like Chrome 60, versus IE9, both of them working with them without JavaScript. What we're really talking about here is app-like characteristics, where we are pushing web technology to the point where you will swear that this came from an App Store. It's on your home screen. It's running in the full screen. You're getting push notifications. It works offline and you can store a large amount of structured data locally on the device. All of the stuff sounds like the list of reasons to reach for native mobile technology because the mobile web is not good enough. But in fact, it has a feature set of this family of progressive web technologies. It's really like a web app that is so good and so modern that it feels and looks just like a native mobile app. CHARLES: That sounds so hard to do right. MIKE: Well, it is now, just because what we have to work with can be thought of it like a basket of ingredients, rather than a solution that we drop in. But over time, as more people start working with these ingredients, I think we're going to see a lot of consensus around the best patterns to use and boilerplate code will fall away as we can identify that the set is in fact commonly needed and not a beautiful and unique snowflake. CHARLES: Because it seems like the thing that I always struggle with is not wanting to put the critical eggs in the basket of a superhero feature or have you being able to provide an alternative if the superhero feature doesn't exist. Some features, if you just don't have it, that's fine. You can turn it on if the capabilities available but certain features are very critical to the functioning of your application. I'm casting about for an example and I'm not finding one immediately but -- MIKE: Offline is a great one. That fits pretty neatly. If you're using an older browser or if you're using Safari, which by the way, I should stop ripping on Safari. For the listeners out there, we saw a commit lend in webkit, where service for APIs are beginning to be stubbed out. No longer do we have to look at length. Service worker, enthusiasm and Safari has got it in the five-year plan. There was motion last week. We haven't seen motion in ages so thank you Safari Team. Thank you. Keep up the good work. CHARLES: Is there a discipline of Safari-ologists who monitor the movement of Safari to bring this news? MIKE: Of course, we monitor it because right now, Chrome and Firefox, they are pretty much hopeful in terms of supporting this modern stuff. Opera supports this modern stuff. Samsung's fork of Chromes support this modern stuff. Especially when we think about the mobile web, you got to worry about Android and you got to worry about iOS Safari and right now, like we've talked about these progressive web apps, you don't get that superhero experience on an iPhone or an iPad. Once we crossed that threshold, this is going to have a breakaway level of adoption because there are no more excuses. Essentially, for a mobile web experience, you can send push notifications to the user. That is huge. That is probably at the top of the list for why some people use native apps, instead of mobile web. The more we can do that, the more we can make it so that a great LinkedIn experience can be delivered to your phone without having to install a binary. I just have to update Facebook the other day and it was over 100 megabytes. Why do we need to do that? You should be able to make it work with less. I'm sure that there's some great stuff in there. Apparently, Snapchat filters are popular but I don't need this. Can we code split that away or something because I don't want to have to download that? I can't even download it on the cell network because it's over 100 megabytes. It's really exciting to see the web start to compete with this heavy mobile experience because now I think is ready. CHARLES: Now, when you talk about push notifications, you're talking about being able to send things to my lock screen. MIKE: To your lock screen while the browser is not on the foreground, while the app is not open. Essentially, you're installing a lightweight process that runs in the background. It receives events that originate from your server and the user can tap on them and then your little lightweight worker process in the background decides what to do when that tap happens, like open up the app, take them to this URL or something like that. That is a game changer. That's huge. Or background sync like the user added some items to their cart and then they lock their phone and now, their plane has landed. That's why they were offline and they get back on the internet and without them having to touch their phone, now we can push that data to the server and everything's in sync, rather than like, "Please revisit your app. We need to run some JavaScript code to flush IndexedDB or API." It still feels like a hack at that point. This is a fluid experience. ELRICK: Wow. This is exciting for me as I don't have any more space on my cellphone, thanks to all the apps that I have to install to do various things on the web. MIKE: You're not alone. CHARLES: Yeah, it's crazy and just the amount of code sharing that you can have, I guess that doesn't happen much these days on the web where you've got these popular libraries out on CDNs so that the chances are that you've got jQuery 1.2.1 on your cache, you've got 16 versions of jQuery so most of your web applications don't have to do that. I guess we kind of do the equivalent of statically linking everything. MIKE: There is a benefit near that where we have imperative code managing our cache, instead of just relying on the HTTP cache or app cache, if you have a vendor.js file that is not changing over six months, there is no reason you should be re-downloading that every time you deploy your app or letting the browser evict that, just because memory pressure is high from Google image search results or something like that. We really don't have much control over it. But with a service worker, we can say, "Hold on to this," or maybe like prefetch the next version of the app so that we're going to show you the old version now but the next time you refresh, here's the new version available instantly. It's downloaded in the background and it's like click to update your version, like it's already here waiting for you. That's huge. That's amazing. CHARLES: That is amazing. Although the complexity skeptic in me is thinking, "Oh, my goodness. Now, we've got all this state that we're storing on the server. We have to have data migrations." We need some sort of migration mechanism for our clients-side state and perhaps some transaction and rollback in case you're not able to successfully migrate your data. It sounds like a lot of fun but I'm just imagining we really are getting started here. Has there been any work on that aspect? MIKE: If you've ever worked with IndexedDB, it does have a concept of migrations. Basically, the data you store on a device has a version and when you read in what's called a file but it's a database, when you read that in, the first thing you do is you basically bring it up to date incrementally. You'll bring it in, you're looking for version nine like your code wants version nine. What you see is version two because your user hasn't been at your site for six months and you're going to take it from two to three to four to five to six. Each of those, essentially constitutes a migration. We just have to apply the same principles of forward-compatible changes. The escape hatch here is remember it's progressive enhancement so if we had to destroy everything, fall back to a basic experience and start from scratch, like discard all of our data, it's really being held there as an optimization. Some people use this immutable caching strategy or basically, like rolling out a new service worker version constitutes for the most part. Any data that wasn't created by a user you're going to discard that and you're going to fetch it new. You don't have to worry about like, "Crap. This six month-old thing is still plaguing half our users and we can't get rid of it," like you can have [inaudible]. But you should really check out this course. It is simpler than you think and what we demonstrate is not a trivial like hello service worker. It is taking in a classic single page app, making it completely offline, having it exist on the home screen and I think the service worker ends up being no more than 100 lines of code. It's not too bad. ELRICK: I'm definitely going to check that out because my progressive web app journey is still on just service workers. MIKE: That's very [inaudible], though. ELRICK: Yeah. I'm definitely checking it out. Sounds like a really fantastic course. MIKE: I've been focusing a lot on this area and another one is security. The reason I picked these two is because developers are not really going to learn about these on the critical path to [inaudible] plus they learn about them the wrong way. As the JavaScript world is becoming radically more complex with each passing year, I've tried to target some of my efforts towards areas where they are not getting as much attention as I'd like to see, just because we have to focus somewhere. Obviously, getting the app out and figuring out how to make the build tools work for us. Without that, we can't do anything at all. One of the courses that's coming in September for Frontend Masters is a one-day web security workshop or we'll do with like cross-site scripting, how to work with certificates because if you start playing with HTTP/2 -- the next generation of HTTP -- you will need to generate some certificates for development at least today you need to. I've seen some amazingly smart developers get this dangerously wrong to the point where they compromise their own machine and anything that's on that machine, just by trying to set up dev environment. Typically, I'm an optimist but when it comes to this PWA stuff and security, I am paranoid. I feel like, we as a community need to get together and have the discipline to brush up in these areas so that as we introduce all of this new stuff, we don't end up opening a bunch of holes. Nowhere near the same rigor as put into frontend compared to backend and now, the line is blurred. Right now, we're server-side rendering so our code is running on the backend somewhere so injecting something can really mess things up in a bigger way. ELRICK: Yeah, I think that's a fundamental characteristic of someone does going to be involved in security paranoia. You have to be paranoid about everything. MIKE: Yep. I don't trust anything. CHARLES: It's important to make those things easy because I'm definitely fall more into the hippie camp like, "Everything is going to be fine. Let's trust everybody," which is I know is totally unrealistic. But then you get into these secure technologies and you learned enough of it just to get the task that you're going to do and then you forget. SSL is a great example. Over the course of my career, I've learned how SSL certs have worked probably, at least 10 times. ELRICK: Right, [inaudible] you had to set it up in production. CHARLES: Yes, exactly and then I promptly forget about it, never worry about it again and then the next time I'm like, "How did that work? What's this trust chain? What?" ELRICK: Exactly. I read a study from Carnegie Mellon a couple of years ago that showed developers observe security best practices dramatically less than the general public and the general public is not good. Do you know what I'm talking about when I say a certificate warning and a browser, there's big scary red screen saying like something is wrong here? Before the Chrome team put some effort into improving that, 70% of people would click through those and proceed anyway. After their improvements, over a third of people still clicked through and that number when you just look at Canary versions of browsers, that number is actually considerably higher close to 50% of our developers. We're trained by every broken certificate system that exists on the internet like the legitimate ones or maybe some things just expired. They're training people to just click straight through these things and as a result, it is terrifyingly easy to mess with people. We have to remember as developers, our machines, those have the private deploy keys and those have the SSH keys to commit code to GitHub, we have to treat that like it's a private data. It's really, really important that we make it easy and that we make sure that that easy path is also very safe. CHARLES: Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you so much Mike for coming by and talking with us. We touched on a lot of subjects but I feel like I certainly learned a lot. MIKE: Yeah, thanks. It's been so much fun talking with you this morning. CHARLES: Anybody who wants to go and check out those courses, they're on Frontend Masters. Now correct me if I'm wrong, you've obviously got the one on progressive web apps or PWAs. If it doesn't work offline, it's faux-PWA. MIKE: Yes, I like that. That's going to become a t-shirt sometime soon. CHARLES: The fundamentals of progressive web app development, which is now released if I understand correctly. MIKE: Members have access to everything, you can watch the raw video now. The edited course will be available later this year. CHARLES: Okay, and that's with Steve Kenny. I am very much looking forward to looking at that and learning more about it. Then you've also got ones coming up in September on TypeScript web security in Visual Studio Code. MIKE: Yep and members can watch that as a live-streamed event. Frontend Masters even ask people to watch the comment stream so you'll have a proxy question asker or hand raiser in the room. It's really a great experience to be part of a live thing. CHARLES: Oh, man. That sounds awesome. Then if you are obviously doing your independent consulting and if people want to get in contact, how would they do that? MIKE: You can find me on Twitter, @MichaelLNorth or you can visit my website, Mike.Works and I have all of the courses I teach and outlines and I can just open up a little chat bubble on the lower right, ask me any questions that you have. I am really passionate about teaching people. If you like that's useful for your team, please reach out and I'd love to talk. CHARLES: Fantastic. Thanks, Mike and thanks everybody for listening to us. If you want to get in touch with us, you can always do that. We're on Twitter at @TheFrontside and email, Contact@Frontside.io. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Elrick and I will see you all later. MIKE: Thank you so much. ELRICK: Bye.