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Hello and welcome back to A Wasteland Story. The procedurally generated audio drama where we aren't at all afraid to kill off very potentially important characters and relationships at the drop of a dice.  After one such important character was gunned down in the last episode, the heroine of NuArk turned scapegoat, SosKaid finds herself locked up in a tiny cell awaiting a breakout.  Can she trust Youthful Corey to crack her out of there like an accidentally mutated extra rib? Or is there more betrayal on the horizon ?(almost definitely) And after all is said and done....who's a good boy? - PJ   You can get in touch with me on: awastelandstorypodcast@gmail.com   Links & Recs If you would like to check out the Fallout 2D20 system for yourself you can visit the Modiphius website.   Creators that helped me discover this weird and wonderful hobby: Man Alone Boardgames with Thomas - Fallout Series Geek Gamers The Dungeon Dive Lords of the Dungeon (The Secret Cabal) Girls Who Don't DnD Me Myself & Die   Reading Materials that helped me figure out what the hell I am doing: Mythic GM Emulator 2E Solo Game Masters Guide - geekgamer   Music and Sound Effects in this series are credited to: Epidemic Sound Archive.org (public domain) Fallout: Cascadia (see individual composers below)   And a special credit to the wonderful talent of Mark Morgan who composed the original (Fallout 1&2) soundtracks, and Inon Zur (New Vegas, Fallout Tactics, etc.) which are also available on Archive.org   Fallout: Cascadia Composers Alex Catana - https://soundcloud.com/alexcatana Garrett Beelow - https://soundcloud.com/garrettb Jaimy Kortenhoff - https://soundcloud.com/see4urself Sylwester Faustmann - https://soundcloud.com/sylwester-faustmann Sergey Neiss - https://soundcloud.com/sergeyneiss Kalle "TheSurpriser" Nilsson

RESILIENCE IS ALWAYS A CHOICEWelcome to another inspiring episode of The Resilient Dad Show. Today we speak with PJ, an award-winning authority on resilience and overcoming obstacles. In the context of survival, PJ shares how he overcame the limitations of his disability and his learning that commitment is what gives birth to resilience.PJ talks about being free versus being a slave and how controlling your unconscious mind is what frees you. Pat then shares how his relationship with his former spouse and son has been tested by unconscious reactions, and how he learned to be gentle as an expression of true strength. PJ differentiates between leading with spite and leading with values and how to break this pattern that makes you feel stuck. He suggests moving in stages, from negative to neutral and then to positive, to avoid being reactive and having to clean up after the mess that the unconscious mind makes.WORDS OF RESILIENCEResilience begins by choosing to commit to it - PJ: "You're only as resilient as you think, and then I always follow it up with because resilience is a choice. Now here's the thing, what are you thinking about? Are you thinking about what you're committed to? Or are you thinking about what you're resistant to? And the thing is that you're committed either way. You're committed to something that you want in the future."A free person chooses how they respond instead of reacting - PJ: "I believe there are only 2 kinds of people in the world. There are free people and there are slaves. Free people operate from a conscious response. They consciously choose how they're going to respond to a situation. When you're in reaction mode, remember that reaction is a slave action."Connect with PJ:WebsiteConnect with Pat:Pat Di Domenico | About Resilient DadIf you liked this episode and were inspired by the journeys it shares, or you have suggestions or your own stories to share, subscribe to the Resilient Dad podcast now and leave us a comment!

Description: For CECA's Star Club's July addition of ArtBeatRadio, we wanted to celebrate the Fourth of July with what we consider to be patriotic songs. We recorded our voices and our instruments, rewrote lyrics, and discussed and altered the creative direction of various songs. We hope this episode makes you feel at home and ready to P-A-R-T-Y.  Your hosts and producers, Jenny, Jesus, PJ, Kyuta, Michael, Maria, Drea, and the CECA groupTranscription:ALL: Welcome to CECA's Star Club.  JENNY: On ArtBeatRadio.JESUS & PJ: You are listening to CECA's American Birthday Episode.MICHAEL: We hope you had a nice 4th of July.MOLLIE: We do hope you had a nice 4th of July filled with good food--JESUS: I ate some Chicken tacos and S-O-D-A, mmmmmmm.MOLLIE: And maybe fireworks. KYUTA: Wow fireworks! JENNY: We wrote some fun songs for America that we're excited to share with everyone! MOLLIE: Our first song is an acappella Version of the  MICHAEL: Star Spangled Banner!  MOLLIE: We hope you enjoy!  KYUTA: Enjoy! STAR SPANGLED BANNER PLAYS JESUS: Wow! Fun! PJ: Up next is our version of “America” by Simon and Garfunkel  AMERICA PLAYSAH: Fine. MOLLIE: That was fine! Up next, we have Surfin' USA by the Beach Boys! SURFIN' USA PLAYSPJ: Fun in the sun! Our last song for you guys is our rendition of “Friends in Low Places” by Garth Brooks  FRIENDS IN LOW PLACES PLAYSMICHAEL: I love that song.MARIA: Wow! JENNY: Thank you all for listening! We hope you enjoyed our songs. Until next time!  PJ & JESUS: Goodbye!

For our first Q&A interview for 2022, I figured it was time to sit down with Phillip Jensen and have a chin wag. As is usually the case when we get together, the conversation bounced here and there, covering everything from why the resurrection is the climax of the gospel, to why our preaching should be more like an exposé than an apology. The audio version of the conversation goes for about 40 minutes. The edited text version below doesn't cover the whole thing—but I figured that 3000 words of transcript was enough!Enjoy.TPTony: So there are all kinds of things I was going to talk you about today. But you just were mentioning before that you've started work on another book—on evangelism. Why do we need a book on evangelism?Phillip: Well, the book that's been a great help to people was Chapman's Know and Tell The Gospel. But a generation has risen up that has never heard of Chappo, and people read books that are current rather than what is really best. So I think we just need another book that is currently teaching people about evangelism, encouraging them to do it.TP: What's the outline of it?PJ: Part 1 is on the who, why, what, when kind of thing—who evangelises, why do you evangelise? Part 2 then works through the gospel itself (I'm going to use Two ways to live as the summary) showing the kategorics of it rather than the apologetics of it. Because I think in our evangelism, we are too defensive and not... What's the alternate word for defensive that's nice?TP: Positive?PJ: Well … we're not telling the world that the world is wrong. But if the end point is that want to ask people to repent, you've got to point out what's wrong with your life that you need to repent from. And so, it's showing the implications of creation and rebellion and judgment in terms of how the world is operating in blindness and ignorance. So it's the accusing of the world by the gospel. And then, Part 3 of the book is about the spiritual nature of evangelism. Because it's about prayer. It's about the work of the Holy Spirit in changing people's lives. It's about our need to beg God for the mercy that is really required. We need to be more encouraged, I think, that this is not an impossible task because we have God doing the task. The Holy Spirit in the end is the evangelist.TP: In talking about ‘kategorics' in Part 2, are you saying—if repentance is a turning from and a turning to, what are you turning from? Like turning from idols to the true and living God?PJ: Yes that's right. Think how the Bible treats idolatry. It really says that it's foolishness; it's an absurdity. To worship things that are less than yourself as if they are God, is just an absurdity. And likewise, the fool says in his heart, there is no God. But we say, “All of the most educated, wise, sensible people in all the universe are saying there is no God. And so we've got to answer their accusations.” Now, the fool of Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 is a moral fool—but then that's the point.TP: So ‘positive' is not the right word. We're not trying to be positive about the world, but expose the folly of the world through shining the light of the gospel on it. But I was going to ask you: how do we do that in a way that doesn't come across as the Nasty Party or as a negative, unattractive kind of presentation?PJ: Well, personally, it's simple. Because personally, it's so easy to love people. And in the context of your genuine care and concern and love for them, the negative things that you say are part of that expression of love. But media-wise and in a book, it's much harder to do.What I am trying to emphasize is that the thing that connects us with people in the world is not culture studies, and so on. The thing that connects us is creation. We're humans, we have babies, we're in love, we live in a magnificent creation. And so, try and say the positive things that are part of the way in which God has made us and which work and which we enjoy.But having said all that, no matter how hard you try, in a hyper-sensitive age, as soon as you say, "Yeah, but we're all liars" …  It's offensive.TP: Are you saying that if we get too apologetic or defensive about the gospel, we don't expose people to truth about themselves?PJ: Yes, absolutely. And in fact, I looked at apologia in the New Testament. It's never used of intellectual defence. It's always used of what you say when you're dragged in front of the court.TP: Like when Paul making his defence before...PJ: Festus or Agrippa or people like that. That's when you use the word. There is the reference in 1 Peter 3 about giving the defence for the hope that lies within you. But that's in the context of being accused of being immoral and then being dragged off and persecuted. So it always seems to be in the persecution context.And kategoria (to accuse, to convict) is used almost twice as often as apologia. But hardly anybody talks about that—about ‘kategorics'.The other good word, which we don't know how to translate, is the one in John 16 about Holy Spirit convicting the world of sin and righteous and judgement. And in that sense, while I need to point out what's wrong with the world, it's the Holy Spirit who does that work of conviction.I wonder if the best word is ‘exposé'. We're trying to do an exposé of the world. A bit like how the ICAC in NSW ‘exposes' corruption but doesn't actually do the prosecuting. It's the Holy Spirit who prosecutes.TP: So as part of this book on evangelism, you're going to be talking about what the gospel actually is, the gospel that we preach, and you're going to use Two Ways To Live as your summary or framework—which is a convenient segue to one of the things that I wanted to ask you about.With this new version of Two Ways To Live—one of the things that it's managed to successfully convey is the centrality and importance of the resurrection of Jesus.Most people don't think of it that way. In fact, most of us would probably say the cross is the centre or the nutshell or the climax of the gospel, and the resurrection is kind of the denouement, the wrapping up of the loose ends. So why do you say that the resurrection is the climax of the gospel?PJ: When you analyse the New Testament and its gospel preaching, it nearly always features the resurrection. And I think in the Book of Acts, it always is on the resurrection. And what is interesting in the Book of Acts is that it's never on the atoning work of the cross. Luke knows about the atoning work of the cross, because Paul speaks about it in Acts 20 to the Ephesian elders. It's not as if it's a theologically unknown thing. But that's not what they preached when they were speaking to the Jews in the synagogues, or the Gentiles in the synagogues, or the out and out Gentiles in Athens. But they always preached the resurrection.It's slightly astonishing when you first see it, because most gospel preaching in my lifetime has been about Jesus dying on the cross for my sins—which I believe and the New Testament believes. But then the resurrection is, “Oh and by the way, he's not dead; he's alive.” It has no theological place. It's just a kind of an end point somehow.But that's not how it was in the New Testament. As you explore the word ‘gospel', it means ‘the great declaration'. And the great declaration is that Jesus is King. Which explains why in the Gospels, when Jesus preaches the gospel, it's all about the kingdom of God. It's not about the crucifixion there either. And so the opening gospel reference is Jesus in Mark 1:14-15: "The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel." It's about the coming of the Kingdom. And with the resurrection of Jesus, the kingdom of Jesus, the kingdom of our Lord has arrived. And so, that's the announcement, the King has come.But when you come to the answer, “the King has come”, you find out that the way he came, was by conquering the enemy. And he conquered the enemy by his death and resurrection—not that I want toreplace Penal Substitutionary Atonement with Christus Victor. But Christus Victor is there. It's just not the alternative to Penal Sub. How did he conquer the enemy? Well, by paying the penalty for us and turning aside God's wrath—so that the outcome is you can preach to those who repent and acknowledge the King that you'll be forgiven, you'll be pardoned, because he became King by his atoning death and resurrection. But resurrection is a key element to it.Once you notice this, you also begin to notice all the other NT gospel summaries in which the resurrection is central. For example, much of Romans is an exposition of the propitiatory redemption by Jesus, but it starts with Paul talking about the ‘gospel of God', and summarizing it as: “concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 1:3-4).  2 Tim 2:8 is much the same: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel”.Now, none of this means that the atoning work of the Lord, His death on the cross is an irrelevance! It is absolutely fundamental to his resurrection. Without it, there would be no resurrection. The two go hand-in-hand, but the thing you say to the outsider first is resurrection. The thing that you then say is forgiveness through the death. That would seem as the pattern in the New Testament uses.TP: It's like that verse in Acts 2 when Peter gets to the climax of his sermon and he says, "Therefore let all Israel know that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified."PJ: Yes, and then they're cut to the heart. And ask what can we do?TP: Repent and be forgiven.PJ: Yes.TP: So, in Two Ways To Live you get to the resurrection at point five of the six points. It's the climax, and point six is the response. And in this new edition, we've put the offer of forgiveness of sins into point five, into the resurrection box for this reason—to capture the sense that we're at the climax and the offer of the gospel. Everything has now been said. We've understood the death of Jesus, because we've understood the judgment of God, because we've understood sin, because we've understood creation, and so then you get to the climax in the resurrection where the gospel declaration and offer is.PJ: Yes. In Luke 24, in the upper room where he's speaking to the apostles in his resurrection, he says: "It was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise from the dead, and repentance and forgiveness of sins to be preached to all nations” and so on. I think most of the community's evangelism in my lifetime has been “Christ suffered for your sins … and repentance and forgiveness of sin should be all preached to all nations”. You leave out the resurrection phrase—whereas the resurrection is the effective solution, and the effective consequence, of him dying for our sins, which enables repentance and forgiveness now to be preached to all nations.TP: And to go further, I'd say the gospel I've heard for most of my lifetime in evangelical churches is: he died for our sins so that you can be forgiven and receive eternal life through that atonement. Virtually full stop. ‘Repent' is often not there.PJ: Yes. And why is that so? It can be lots of reasons. One is we don't like to say anything negative to people about their lives. Another is that we're so committed to the idea that gospel is ‘good news', rather than ‘great news' that we don't want to say anything that has any negative element to it at all. We just want to tell the good news that you're forgiven, you're forgiven, you're forgiven.TP: And if you don't talk about Jesus as the Risen King, then there's nobody really to repent before.PJ: I spent many, many happy years at Katoomba Convention. And I was a young fellow when I was involved in the Council there. And there are a lot of really great old men of evangelicalism in Sydney, who shared with me lots of stories and episodes of life. I heard many times about the famous evangelists who came to Sydney in the 1930s and 40s and 50s.  Billy Graham (in 1959) was just the end one. There was Hiram Appleby, and all kinds of people. But they said that the one who had the smallest number of converts, but the highest rate of retention was WP Nicholson, the great Irish evangelist. Not many people got converted by his preaching, but the people who got converted were really converted. The jungle doctor, Paul White, was one of them. And one of the distinctive things of WP Nicholson's evangelism was that he used to ask for repentance and restitution. "If you really are repentant, well then go and pay back what you've done." He preached restitution, which limited the number of people who signed the decision cards! But those who did, really repented.TP: As I've read about the gospel and controversies about the gospel over the last 25 or 30 years, there's been this fight between two groups—the forgiveness-cross-penal substitution people, and the resurrection-kingdom people; almost like there are two gospels. And the resurrection-kingdom gospel is often about the renovation and renewal of the world, and it becomes an atonement-less, cross-less kind of gospel.  And I can understand why many good brothers  don't want to go there, and so are a bit reluctant to give the resurrection too much play in case it becomes this kind of kingdom gospel.PJ: Yes you have to keep the two together. It's also like that gospel where you can supposedly have Jesus as your Saviour and then some other time have a second kind of blessing of his Lordship. But, the only way he saves you is by being your Lord. You have to keep the two things together.TP: The other really unique thing about Two Ways To Live as a gospel outline is that it talks about creation, and hardly any other gospel presentations do that.PJ: No, they don't. And hardly any in the New Testament do either. Adam is hardly mentioned in the Old Testament once you get past Gen 1-3. But creation is the backdrop to everything that happens in the selection of Abraham and the history of Israel. And it's a part that I think the Jews didn't quarrel about. The Sadducees and the Pharisees fought over the resurrection and over angels and over prophets. They didn't fight over creation; that was just a given. And so, there was no reason for Paul to particularly preach in the synagogues about creation or for Jesus to preach about creation. However, it is striking that when Paul goes to Lystra and he's talking to pagans and when he goes to Athens and he's talking to idolaters, then he begins with the one God, who is the creator of all and to whom we are answerable—and so worshipping men in Lystra, and worshipping idols in Acts 17, is totally inappropriate. This is critical to understanding their situation and need of forgiveness and the need of the Christ.And that I think is true in our context. In one sense, previous generations accepted creation. But we've now lived through this great fight over evolution and intelligent design, where atheists use evolution to argue against God's existence, and Christians use intelligent design to argue for God's existence, and neither are listening to each other at all.The opposite of creation is not evolution. The opposite of creation is accidentalism; it's naturalistic materialism and atheism. That's why the Christians are right in feeling that evolution is on the side of the atheists because the atheists use evolution in that way. But we mustn't get ourselves hung up with the mechanisms. The issue is accidentalism, as opposed to purposeful personal creation. You get rid of creation and the creator, you then change the doctrine of sin, because sin is no longer humans' rebellion against their creator; sin now becomes breaking rules and regulations. And so, instead of being people who place themselves outside the law, and people who make their own laws, as the essence of sin, we become law breakers as the essence of sin. And so, we then move to solve the problems by attending to the symptoms, rather than attending to the disease. And if you've got a wrong diagnosis, just attending to symptoms for example, you'll never solve the problem.PJ: You've got to diagnose what the disease is. And the disease is our rebellion against God—which means you can be a highly moral person, and totally godless. Whereas the highly moral person doesn't feel like we are preaching to them because they are moral.And so, without a proper doctrine of creation, I don't think you've get a proper doctrine of sin. And without a proper doctrine of sin, the reason for judgment seems weird. Because, I mean, why do you get sent to hell for eternity for telling lies or stealing from Woolworths. It seems disproportionate, somehow. But that's because you're thinking just of the symptoms; you're not thinking of how you have put yourself in total opposition to God.And so you don't understand, "How did Jesus dying on the cross actually pay for my sin?" It all becomes de-personalized, de-relationalized and symptomatic, rather than disease-oriented. So we need to re-introduce creation into our understanding, so that people will understand what sin is, what God's judgment is, and how Jesus' death pays for it.TP: I think that's very true. I think some of the other gospel presentations I've seen recently focus on the problems we have—our lack of meaning, our lack of purpose, the things that we desire and seek, and so on. These are symptoms. But if we don't penetrate further down to the underlying problem, which is a rebellion against God, it's very hard to see then why death is God's judgment against us, and why Jesus' death is the answer.PJ: And it lacks the eschatology too, doesn't it? It speaks of the damage that we do to ourselves, each other and the world (as our new version puts it), but doesn't go further than offering to fix that damage. If I can fix the damage, then I've helped you. And so, Jesus loves you, and he's shown he loves you by his death, and has risen from the dead. And so now turn back to him, and you will have a fulfilled, happy, satisfied life. But the eschatology of the gospel has just completely gone.So I think the creation background is an important one for our understanding.Hope you enjoyed that. I'll be back next week, God willing, with another instalment from the Two Ways to Live evangelistic book that I'm writing. I'm up to chapter 4 on the death of Jesus, and plan to send at least some of that chapter out to the whole list next week. If you'd like to get every edition of The Payneful Truth every week, become a subscriber. Here's a free trial link: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

How can you leverage new tech to ride the personalization wave into a best-in-class swell of engagement? Taylor "The Creator" Gibb and Jaz "Personalization Queen" Noble join me to discuss the future of personalization and how to make it work at scale.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ: Hi again and welcome back to Brace for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest and today I have two very, very esteemed colleagues with me both from the Success Org to my right Taylor Veronica Gibb and to my left Jaz Victoria Noble. It's good to have you guys here with me.   [0:00:37] Taylor: Well it's great to have you here as well. PJ, the Victor Jay-   [0:00:44] Jasmine: Let's give him a V, yeah.   [0:00:45] Taylor: Maybe a V, to fit in here.   [0:00:45] PJ: You guys missed it, we opened with talking about the origin story of both these lovely women have V middle names and so we were just kind of like hearing a little bit about their ancestry.   [0:00:54] Taylor: Absolutely. As we start every podcast with deep personal questions to the guests in the room really gets those creative juices flowing.   [0:01:02] PJ: Exactly. Tries to get us in the zone.   [0:01:04] Jasmine: I'm real excited to be here, you guys.   [0:01:06] PJ: Yes, Jaz is back. She was on our very first podcast, which was merely a hackday project about six months ago and now finally we have her back for another one.   [0:01:17] Jasmine: I'm micced up. I have headphones. It's official.   [0:01:19] Taylor: Much more official.   [0:01:21] PJ: It's official.   [0:01:21] Taylor: If I remember correctly, the first podcast, everyone was kind of talking very close to PJ's laptop.   [0:01:26] Jasmine: Yes.   [0:01:28] PJ: No headphones. Didn't know what we were doing.   [0:01:30] Taylor: Nope.   [0:01:30] PJ: Picking up a lot of ambient noise. We've gotten a little bit better and it's good to be here.   [0:01:34] Jasmine: Hilarious, though. I was very funny in that.   [0:01:36] Taylor: Hilarious. That's a great one.   [0:01:37] PJ: You were very funny in that one.   [0:01:38] Jasmine: Yeah.   [0:01:38] Taylor: I think we need to release that someday. Like a little bonus track.   [0:01:42] PJ: For all you listeners out there. Our listeners will receive a special Easter egg treat of the hackday first ever podcast.   [0:01:49] Taylor: For those of you who pledge a certain amount of money we'll be sending to you with a set of Ginsu knives.   [0:01:56] PJ: Absolutely. Well, you know we're a big family.   [0:01:58] Jasmine: Make those checks out to Jasmine Victoria Noble.   [0:02:01] PJ: It has to be in full. It's the only way they'll pay it out.   [0:02:03] Jasmine: Get the V.   [0:02:04] PJ: Well, we're fresh off a 4th of July break. Hope you guys had a lovely time. Go America, Women's national team winning the World Cup. A lot of cool things have happened, but today point break personalization. I mean, I'm thinking of the movie obviously because I loved it and not only that, this week is the 28th anniversary of when Point Break was released.   [0:02:26] Taylor: Oh my God.   [0:02:27] Jasmine: Oh really.   [0:02:27] PJ: It is.   [0:02:27] Taylor: Point Break could rent a car. Point Break, you know is getting settled in the world, like Point Break is-   [0:02:33] Jasmine: Finally making some money.   [0:02:35] Taylor: ... 28, yeah, 28 years old is a good time to be around. But I was actually just asking PJ before we got on the air here. I'm like, I love Point Break. I love personalization. What does Johnny Utah have to do with Braze and personalization here?   [0:02:50] PJ: I'm so glad you asked. So really we're thinking the movie fantastic, but we're thinking more about the concept of point break and what point break is, it means the wave, it gives you enough time to spend the most possible time on the board standing up. So a point break is what surfers really look for because it gives you the perfect ride, and that's what we're talking about. Personalization being the perfect method because as you move forward with your marketing initiatives, there's going to be more and more competition. People get overloaded in their inboxes every day. How can you stand out amidst the crowd and make your message heard? Personalization is the number one way and it doesn't have to be perfect today. It doesn't even have to be perfect next week, but a more perfect campaign will help you stand out amidst the crowd and call out your users by name and let them know that you know them.   [0:03:41] Taylor: I'm glad you cleared that up. I actually came in a president mask today ready to rob a bank with my surfboard. For those of you-   [0:03:49] PJ: Are you Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter?   [0:03:50] Taylor: Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter.   [0:03:53] PJ: And if you haven't seen Point Break for the love of God, please go see it. We won't really talk any more about Point Break during this podcast. It was just kind of-   [0:04:01] Taylor: That's a you thing.   [0:04:02] PJ: But yeah, I mean what the first thing and last thing that I'll say about Point Break is it was really lauded for the relationship between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. This like, you know, bros for life. It was a heterosexual chemistry that could only have been created during that time, if it was accompanied by guns and waves and all these manly things. It's like through that atmosphere, it's okay to show a nice heterosexual close, intimacy between two men.   [0:04:32] Taylor: The origin of the bromance is what I'm hearing. All right.   [0:04:37] PJ: Yeah, jeez.   [0:04:37] Taylor: All right, well I think we've got to spin off podcast at the ready.   [0:04:40] PJ: I think we do.   [0:04:40] Taylor: But let's talk a little bit now about personalization.   [0:04:44] PJ: Actual personalization. When we say personalization, my God, you must've heard it a million times already just in the-   [0:04:50] Jasmine: It should be a drinking game at this point.   [0:04:51] PJ: ... Last five minutes.   [0:04:51] Taylor: Yes.   [0:04:51] PJ: Yeah, exactly. If you're following along at home, you should be wasted. But personalization at Braze, it means being able to email out a huge campaign to all these individual people and within the campaign have texts, call out users by name or reference specific things about those users based on their behavior in app or on the website. The way we use personalization is through a template language called Liquid. And this was created by Shopify and it helps us input things like first name, the very common one that I'm sure you've all seen. Hello Taylor, hope you're having a good day. Here's some deals relevant to you. And those deals can be in a specific category that Taylor has been known to search very often. More complicated examples is like dynamically pulling in content or materials or thumbnails based on information that they're collecting about how you interact with the brand. Do you guys have any examples of really smart personalization that you've seen? You know, being in the Success Org, these two are in the weeds of campaign creation day in and day out.   [0:05:54] Taylor: We're in the trenches as you mentioned, and it's kind of fun be able to be a part of a lot of our client's planning, about getting strategic about the personalization that they use. I'll probably bring up a couple examples as the podcast goes on, but off of the top of my head, I work with a dating app and they started using personalization with Braze using Liquid and connected content. By the way, shameless plug, go check out the lab course on this, if you guys are interested in learning more about these things. PJ is featured as well. But they use this to essentially customize the version of an email you get based on if you're a man or a woman, based on if you're looking for a man or a woman or maybe none of the above, you'll get a different personalized email for you with different content and different styling. So they're doing a little bit of this kind of micro personalization and getting really down to exactly what you're looking for and it's something that's so simple and seamless. You may not even realize that it's personal to you, but it just feels like you.   [0:06:56] PJ: Jaz, do you have any?   [0:06:57] Jasmine: I definitely do. So we talked about how Liquid allows you to insert dynamic variables. The simple example of the first name, we also touched on how you can pull in dynamic URLs, right, image URLs, things like that. One of my favorite ways to use Liquid is actually what we call conditional logic. So I can start saying within my message, if X equals Y, send this message to my user. If A equals B, send this other message, right? So I can start to build these conditional statements, if you will. And one of my favorite ways to use this is actually with weather. Braze is really flexible in that we can connect to external weather APIs. And quite literally say if it's raining right now, send this email and this is one thing, one of our customers does, is send out an email to say it's raining, why don't you order it. Or it's sunny, so get outside and make that reservation, I should say. So I really appreciate the conditional logic and think weather is a cool example of that.   [0:08:00] Taylor: And Jaz for all of you listening in is actually the queen of connected content here at Braze. Taught me everything I know, but she is your-   [0:08:08] PJ: Is that official?   [0:08:08] Taylor: ... Personalization wizard. She is. She doesn't always wear the tiara, but for special occasions she will dawn the crown and connected content queen.   [0:08:17] PJ: Where's the sash though?   [0:08:19] Taylor: Ooh, next time.   [0:08:20] PJ: Scepter?   [0:08:21] Taylor: Scepter, we'll see. We'll see.   [0:08:23] PJ: Conditional logic, that's all happening in the same campaign. Even in the same like text field. Right?   [0:08:29] Jasmine: Exactly. So quite literally you're putting in the different versions of the copy depending on what variables you have in place. So using that example of weather the conditional Liquid statement in the Liquid logic language would say, if degrees equals below 50 send, "hey, it's cold, grab a coffee." Alternatively, if the weather is higher than 50 degrees, send this generic message that I was planning to send to the user anyway.   [0:08:59] PJ: Cool. That's just a little sample of what you can see as far as personalization in the Braze platform. Conditional logic using Liquid. If you have access to Lab, please check out our Liquid course. Also, there's plenty of free resources on Liquid online, so just do some searching. Now let's jump into some other articles that are going to help us understand a little more about personalization in terms of what the future looks like and how you can do personalization at scale. The following articles were provided to us by McKinsey. McKinsey, thank you so much for your research and all you do. So this first one, let's jump off Tay Tay. What do you got?   [0:09:34] Taylor: Oh, hey there. Well, not only do I have this article, but I went ahead and brought along my crystal ball here cause we're going to be taking a look into the future of personalization. That was a terrible dad joke, but moving on. First-   [0:09:48] PJ: I can add like kind of like...   [0:09:50] Taylor: Like crystal ball.   [0:09:50] PJ: Sound in the background.   [0:09:51] Taylor: Ooh, I love that. All right, well then perfect. Well we'll edit it in the future of personalization. Physical spaces will be digitized. We've seen this a little bit. Jaz, you and I, I think are both Sephora fans, so you may be familiar with this already, but essentially the fact that when you walk into a physical store space, brick and mortar, what you see is going to be personalized to you. Some of the examples pulled out in the article were places where you could try on makeup or clothes just by standing in front of a mirror. In the future it could be that you'll see on screens around the space, places where you can try on clothes just by looking in the mirror, things that recommend a color for you based on your skin tone or things that you like. And I thought this was particularly interesting because I feel like just a few years ago we were talking about the fact that brick and mortar is on its way out, especially with the rise of Amazon. So can you see this as being maybe the resurgence of brick and mortar just by using this idea of personalization?   [0:10:48] PJ: I mean, you hit the nail on the head with the rise of Amazon and all this stuff, it seemed like physical is on the way out. But with all of these things, fad or not, it always feels like there's some sort of pendulum at play, where the pendulum goes to one side as we do more and more online purchasing. I'm not going out of my apartment. I don't need to go try things on. Like I know this brand, I know their sizes. And now I think we're starting to see the pendulum go the other way because physical storefronts are still going to be a part of the business, especially living in New York City, what is it, Sixth Avenue that's just a mecca for storefronts and for a brick and mortar businesses. So I think the secret sauce is being able to capture all that information in the store front and tether it to all these other touch points and this is not my idea or a nuanced perspective on it, this is something we've all been talking about for awhile. So I don't think brick and mortar is on the way out. I think this is a way to bolster or supercharged that brick and mortar experience when you're in front of one of those mirrors and you have that try-on experience probably makes you want to go back again.   [0:11:55] Taylor: How about you, Jaz.   [0:11:56] Jasmine: I actually just recently had an opportunity to visit Amazon HQ and hear from some of their panel of leaders that work there. And one of them was brought on to bring Amazon back into the brick and mortar space. You guys have seen these Amazon stores popping up.   [0:12:11] Taylor: The Four Star Store.   [0:12:13] Jasmine: He admitted, they're not necessarily profitable yet, but the company that really closed down a lot of brick and mortar spaces is now recognizing, realizing the value of bringing these experiences to your point outside of someone's apartment and off of their couch and in physical spaces. I think the challenge that Amazon and other companies who are rethinking about how they approach brick and mortar is in what ways do the digital and the traditional shopping experience play together and how do they play nicely and where does digital enhance. I mean, Taylor you mentioned Sephora, by the way, I just became a rouge member.   [0:12:46] Taylor: Oh, congratulations.   [0:12:47] Jasmine: Which means-   [0:12:48] PJ: What does it mean.   [0:12:48] Jasmine: It means I spent a lot of money at Sephora. But anyway, I was in the Sephora store and online you have the opportunity to kind of, they have some new technologies that we can try on different shades, but one of the hard things as a women is, especially with summer, we're trying to tan right? And now my foundation color has changed because my face color has literally gone several shades darker. Thank you Bahamas. And so I had to go into the store because I trust them to kind of match that. And they have face matching software, like a program where you sit in the chair and they quite literally scan your face and then tell you, okay, here is your color profile and here are the different foundations that match that and they direct me to the place in the store where those are found so I can pick them up, hold them, look at other aspects of marketing. Right. The bottle, is it pretty, right? There's a lot of things that go into that purchase decision, but it started with a digital experience, a technology coming into play to, essentially pull out where I should start.   [0:13:45] Taylor: And you brought something up earlier. Maybe a quick segue into another point that the article made. Talking a little bit about both with Amazon and in your Sephora experience, kind of that end to end personalized experience. And it's interesting to think, I would hope in Sephora, we'll see this some more, it sounds like Amazon's focusing in on it, that your experiences in the store don't end in the store. So if I go in on the store, I try on a certain shade of lipstick, maybe that will follow me and I'll see an ad later or I'll see an in app message that says, you looked really great in this shade of lipstick earlier. Would you like to order, there's a sale. Things like that that make you feel like you're understood and you're seen as a person both in and outside of the store. That's all personalization at work. And one other thing that I wanted to kind of bring up in this article before we transition over to Jaz's article that she looked at, is something I thought was interesting. They pointed out that empathy will scale within personalization. Now at Braze, our favorite besides personalization drink, our other favorite hot button topic is humanization, right? Making it feel like a brand not only knows you, but that they understand you as a person, that they empathize with you. And it sounds like brands again, like Amazon, are starting to think about becoming more human. One thing that was brought up in this article was the fact that they've patented technology. We're in the future. Voice recognition devices. We'll realize if you sound different than usual, so let's say you've got a stuffy nose, you can begin getting deals or outreach for brands of cough drops, for chicken noodle soup recipes, things like that, that it'll know that you're not feeling well. It's interesting and something that I want to hear from you on, first of all, is that creepy or caring?   [0:15:33] PJ: I don't know if it is creepy just because you know what is creepy is when you say something out loud amongst your friends and then you look at your phone and there's an advertisement for something you said audibly, that creeps me out, right?   [0:15:44] Taylor: Oh, big time.   [0:15:45] PJ: But, to introduce this intuitiveness into technology, I think it's definitely going to be considered creepy to some people and it's going to be a learning curve, I think for us. But that is the exact kind of humanization in technology that I want to see more of. That doesn't feel like they've captured something that I've said, or they've captured an action that I've done and it's like, we all know it, right, when you see something in your phone like, oh, I know exactly where this came from.   [0:16:09] Taylor: Right.   [0:16:10] PJ: Either something I said, or something I clicked on. But then when a computer program offers you cough drops because it can hear your voice a bit hoarse, you're going to have a moment of like how, you know. And I think that almost introduces a little bit of magic until the whole relationship with the brand. That's one that I'm really excited for. Jaz hot takes?   [0:16:28] Jasmine: One thing I will share is we were just talking about Sephora, still top of mind, because did I tell you guys, I'm a rouge member.   [0:16:35] PJ: You said rouge, right?   [0:16:36] Jasmine: Oh yeah, rogue, in case I didn't already mention it.   [0:16:39] PJ: That's like red.   [0:16:40] Jasmine: Yeah, red, rogue. So a recent experience I had shopping with them to actually, this is the experience where after I did it, I got the confetti lipsticks that said I made rogue, right? I shopped for several things, I needed a new makeup brush. I needed like setting powder, a few things, right. Sent them all to my house. One did not arrive.   [0:17:03] Taylor: Nightmare.   [0:17:03] Jasmine: And each item is north of $50 so I wasn't going to just let that go. And this is, I think, where companies, we haven't seen a huge shift necessarily is when it comes to customer service, right? So I missed this brush and instead of being able to, like right now with an Amazon app, I know we're talking about Amazon and Sephora quite a bit, but clearly I shop there a lot. With Amazon, if something didn't come in my order, I just like go through this tool where I say, I select options from a list. It didn't arrive, what didn't arrive, it gives me the list of things in the order. I click that. I click the one it wants. Where do you want it shipped? I click my address. I'm never talking with someone, or it doesn't feel like I'm talking with someone. With Sephora, they encouraged me to send an email to a customer service representative and that might never be their real name, but like a Stacey B emailed me back, right. To say that she was so sorry that I had that experience, wanted to make it right, like using words like that and that's where you feel the human piece of that brand as well. Both are good experiences. I think with Amazon it happened instantaneously, within five seconds, within five clicks, I was able to get that piece that they had missed sent to me. With Sephora, I had to talk with someone, but at the end of the day I kind of felt like Sephora was sorry about what happened.   [0:18:15] PJ: That's a really great point. Like when does the initiative bubble up where customer service has to meet the same high standard that our personalization tech does?   [0:18:25] Taylor: Well, and that's where personalization tech can shine, right? Because it makes empathy and it makes humanization scalable so everybody can feel like Stacey B is paying really close attention to them. That knows is exactly what you're talking about. I mean to avoid a bit of a Her scenario if those, if you guys have seen that movie. Maybe there's a point where it goes too far, but I personally really love the fact that when you have a customer support experience, when you have a shopping experience and it feels like they know you, exactly. That's that hyper personalization.   [0:18:59] PJ: Well, until it does go too far. Stacey B, thanks for all you do.   [0:19:03] Taylor: Stacey B this one goes out to you.   [0:19:05] Jasmine: Shout out Stacey, pour one out.   [0:19:07] PJ: Jaz. What do you got from me?   [0:19:09] Jasmine: We've talked a lot today already about the tools that Braze has, right? Which are really just vehicles for providing the personalization. Taylor touched on strategies and why you'd actually want to use some of these tools to put those programs in place, but now we need to talk about a team that's actually going to action on them, right? If a company decides they want to care more about personalization, they want to provide more personalized experiences, how do they do that, particularly if their tech stack isn't in a super fluid place where everyone's playing nice in the sandbox. And one of the ways that McKinsey talked about it and one of their most recent articles called Marketing's Holy Grail, Digital Personalization at Scale really talked about building a war room of people. Because at the end of the day, this is going to be a marketer, this is going to be a data engineer, this is going to be a software engineer that's going to help you bridge these gaps, get the data where it needs to be to ultimately action on things like including first name, including previous shopping behavior. All of the amazing examples that we walked through today would be nowhere without having the data and infrastructure in place. And so that's one of the things that this article touched on and it kind of reminded me of some of my own client experiences working here at Braze, as a CSM, I got a chance to see the types of teams that our customers are bringing together to ultimately action on this. And I would say it's interesting how some are very nimble and small, while others more at maybe enterprise sized corporations are thinking about, no, it's actually doesn't end here. Let's pull in an agency, right? Let's outsource some of this. Let's fill our stack with a bunch of tech partners including a Braze who can help us achieve all of these things. Like creating that right lineup of a team doesn't necessarily have to be someone at their own company. It could be outsourcing some of that talent, bring it in to be able to action on it.   [0:20:56] PJ: And also even with the enterprises, right? They think, you know they have agencies, they got a really souped up tech stack. They're outsourcing a lot. But I think the key here is having that small group of decision makers. So even though you have this monster stack and you have all these different moving pieces, you still have that core group of decision makers that can move quickly. So even though you have this big group and you have all these resources, you have the right people that can flip a switch, shoot out a campaign and do something. Because that, you know, I'm sure we see that right, the bigger the company, the more red tape, the more approvals. So how can you stay nimble as you expand?   [0:21:34] Taylor: Absolutely, and interestingly enough, this kind of very digital idea of this digital marketing personalization takes a lot of humans to make it run and to make it feel human. So maybe the robot uprising is farther off than we thought.   [0:21:48] PJ: Skynet we're looking at you.   [0:21:51] Jasmine: I mentioned kind of pulling together this team of specialists that could be people within your own organization with the ideas. You could also be bringing people outside from agencies, et cetera to for that strategy, right? The core group of people who are deciding how do we actually action on this, provide personalized user experiences. One of the things that you have to think about is what stack do you have in place? What technologies do you have at your fingertips to be able to action on this? And one company that I think did an excellent job at this and I actually had the pleasure of working with closely is Burger King. Fernando, their CMO talks extensively about this in an AdWeek article about how he assembled a stack. He knew that when they wanted to do and roll out this detour campaign that they were going to need someone to be the action layer. That's Braze actually getting these messages out to people. They are going to need someone to do location. That's Radar. They were going to need someone to connect their POS purchasing to user profiles and making sure that brick and mortar restaurant data actually got to a place where they can see the conversions, right, that's mParticle. And then they also have Branch, encouraging people to get those app downloads from an attribution standpoint. There are others obviously who played a piece in this tech stack that allowed detour to happen, but I think it started with Burger King saying, we can't do this alone. We need to assemble the right players who are flexible enough to play nicely with each other to allow that data to come back and forth and ultimately deliver on this user experience, which ended up being people downloading their app, going to a McDonald's, saying they were at McDonald's, and then getting a one cent whopper. How do you deliver on all of that? And that's one of the things that I thought they did a really good job at was actually thinking about rewiring and hard-wiring.   [0:23:37] Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. And I would hope that the great success and the story of working together with this Avengers of a stack that you just mentioned, will kind of help other large enterprise size companies to realize that they may need to take another look at what they've set up over time and do a little bit of reworking. So many of the teams that Jaz and I work with are working with outdated software. Something that was best in class 10 years ago for this personalization to really work seamlessly and to make these great experiences. You need the best in class right at the bat.   [0:24:10] PJ: Right on the money. So take advantage of personalization tools at your fingertips.   [0:24:15] Taylor: That's us.   [0:24:16] PJ: Pay attention to the tech, to the team. Make sure it's the right people that can move nimbly. As far as the tech, always be reworking, always be focusing on the right tools that allow your teams to move faster. And that's about it for Point Break Personalization. Taylor, Jaz, thanks so much for being here.   [0:24:34] Taylor: Hang loose.   [0:24:35] Jasmine: I thoroughly enjoyed my time with you both.   [0:24:37] PJ: And thank you as well for being with us. Take care. [0:24:40]

Jesse Halpert from our Sales org and Taylor "The Creator" Gibb from Success join me to discuss the recent acquisitions of data visualizations tools Looker (by Google) and Tableau (by Salesforce). How do these products stack up? What does this mean for the martech landscape? Listen in to learn more!       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. And this week I am accompanied by two very special guests returning for her third or fourth I think from our success org, Taylor Gibb, welcome.   [0:00:34] Taylor Gibb: Well thank you so much. Happy to be here. I didn't know if you guys knew its National Eat Your Vegetables Day.   [0:00:40] PJ: Oh really?   [0:00:41] Taylor Gibb: So I just assumed I was going to be talking vegetables. Is that not the case today?   [0:00:46] PJ: I think there's always room to fit vegetables-   [0:00:49] Taylor Gibb: Okay.   [0:00:49] PJ: Into the talk track-   [0:00:50] Taylor Gibb: All right.   [0:00:50] PJ: And I think you're good at finding creative ways to segue. So...   [0:00:53] Jesse Halpert: Solid plug.   [0:00:54] PJ: Absolutely. To my left, I have a very good friend Jesse Halpert from our sales org. He's joining us today. Jesse, how are you?   [0:01:03] Jesse Halpert: I'm doing great BJ. Thanks for having me, first time in a long time.   [0:01:06] PJ: Yeah, first, I mean I literally came to him this morning and was like, hey would you be willing to jump in here? And the reason I did that is because today's podcast is all about two companies that got acquired recently, both data visualization companies, Tableau getting acquired by Salesforce, and then also Looker getting acquired by Google. Jesse Halpert previously worked at Tableau. Isn't that right Jesse?   [0:01:28] Jesse Halpert: Sure is.   [0:01:29] PJ: So Jesse's going to be here to be able to give us the inside scoop. Tell us a little bit more about, you know, how they frame the selling of Tableau and maybe how it stacks up against Looker. But yeah, pretty pumped for this one. Me and Taylor had to do a lot of research on data analytics for this.   [0:01:44] Taylor Gibb: Oh yeah. Boned up big time on my understanding of Tableau as well as Looker, which we use here at Braze. Shameless plug there and I'm a big evangelist for Looker across my clients, but obviously want to hear more about Tableau as well. Both are great tools, much like eating your vegetables. It's certainly not as much fun but very good for your organization to have a great data visualization tool. So always love to learn a little more about that.   [0:02:12] Jesse Halpert: Were you paid off by the vegetable lobby prior to this podcast?   [0:02:15] Taylor Gibb: I actually was under the table. Sesame Street is paying me big time.   [0:02:19] PJ: We're two minutes in and you already had a vegetable comment, so pacing well for the day.   [0:02:24] Taylor Gibb: Brace yourself.   [0:02:27] PJ: All right, cool. Let's jump into this first article. Salesforce buying data visualization company Tableau for 15.7 billion dollars on the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for 2.6 billion. Salesforce announced a big piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization, and more generally tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass. And also, I hear now that they're going to be taking over Tableau's HQ in Seattle as well.   [0:03:00] Jesse Halpert: HQ2!   [0:03:02] PJ: HQ2, which a I guess has been kind of coined by Amazon when they were doing their search in New York for their HQ2. Yeah, I mean it's pretty cool. I mean, I guess the idea is the West Coast is really getting beefed up for tech and we kind of like have New York as this lone capitol of the tech world on the East Coast. Yeah. I'm interested to hear a little bit more. Jesse, when were you there at Tableau?   [0:03:25] Jesse Halpert: I was there for nearly two years and I finished up in March prior to Braze. But you know, worked primarily as an account executive and account manager there.   [0:03:36] Taylor Gibb: Jesse, would you have been swept up in all of this Tableau, you know, purchase excitement had you been there or are you getting a little FOMO right now?   [0:03:44] Jesse Halpert: Definitely a little bit of FOMO when I read it and definitely wish I had held onto more of my shares. But yeah, it's you know, incredibly exciting for, you know, people that have been there for awhile.   [0:03:54] PJ: But Tableau, it has a more of a beefed up product suite than Looker. Is that, is that right?   [0:04:01] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I'd say beefed up in a sense. I think what was always a big value prop that I would communicate at Tableau was the ease of use and you know, like intuitiveness that it would take to really use the product because they have a patented drag and drop technology that makes it really easy to take the different, you know, attributes or events that you want to measure and you know, put it right into a canvas to view.   [0:04:23] Taylor Gibb: Wow. Oh, that's interesting. That sounds a little bit familiar here at Drew's events canvas. [crosstalk] You just slid right into our lingo. And I'd also be interested to hear a little more about that just because Looker, I think touts itself perhaps even more so as being an accessible kind of platform. And I know at least some of my friends who work with Tableau and their suite, it's oftentimes kind of a point of pride to be able to navigate. So, you know, I'm very good at Sequel. I can use Tableau very well, is something that you see pretty frequently on Linkedin, on a resume as a skillset.   [0:04:55] Jesse Halpert: It's like a cert almost.   [0:04:56] Taylor Gibb: You can take classes for it. Yeah. Oh 100% whereas I feel like, I mean I'm going to be shooting myself in the foot here a little talking about how little I know, but Looker I think is intuitive for someone like me to be able to pick up on and to use pretty effectively and I know that our data BI team right now is face-palming because they think of how many questions I asked them on a daily basis. But still, did you find though that when you were at working with accounts, when you're selling into these accounts that there was a general consensus that this was the easiest way to be able to query and use your data?   [0:05:30] Jesse Halpert: If you're in any of those organizations, I think you get exposed most to your product and you get comfortable and familiar, so I think it's easy to say. I haven't used Looker enough frankly, to really give that impartial of an opinion on that.   [0:05:45] PJ: Fair.   [0:05:46] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, a very-   [0:05:47] PJ: You don't want half-informations here. It's like eating half of your Brussels sprouts.   [0:05:52] Taylor Gibb: No, not something that we do here at Braze.   [0:05:54] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, we go full sprout.   [0:05:55] Taylor Gibb: Full sprouts 2019.   [0:05:57] Jesse Halpert: I mean another aspect to this is, you know them moving into Seattle and the West Coast, obviously something that I hadn't really thought much about before until the whole Amazon thing is like, you know with that comes certain tax breaks and with that comes the expectation of giving back to the community in some way.   [0:06:15] Taylor Gibb: That's interesting.   [0:06:17] Jesse Halpert: And so, I mean traditionally Tableau and Salesforce, they're pretty philanthropic. They're kind of like all about giving back to the areas that they have offices. So I'm actually interested to see how that unfolds in the coming months and if there'll be any big initiatives. Mr. Benioff I'm sure has some big plans for Seattle.   [0:06:37] Taylor Gibb: I'm sure, whether Seattle wants it or not, maybe. One thing I was going to say, but maybe it's a segue for another time here is I'm interested just in the fact that salesforce already had an in-house BI tool and SBI suite that they were using that they were all about, right? This was what they built their data systems on and as a company that typically does buy and, something we've said before, "Frankenstein" in software, interesting to make this move for a completely outside data tool when they've already got this built in house. So one thing I'm curious about, other than whatever Seattle kind of grabbed that they're making there, do you suppose that this is coming mostly as table stakes for Google having purchased Looker?   [0:07:24] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I think a lot of it, they probably had plenty of time to self reflect and see that either the tool wasn't beefed up to the point that they needed it to be, that they weren't seeing themselves in a lot of competitive situations, or probably a combo of both. And I think a lot of that might be similar for what Google went through too. I think they both had, you know, some sort of, I don't want to say half baked, I don't think that's a good way to put it, but probably not like to the full power of something like a Tableau or a Looker or even, you know, Microsoft has Power BI, which they're able to sort of throw in a with their Microsoft suite. And I think by way of Google purchasing Looker by way of a Salesforce purchasing Tableau, it probably will make it a bit more of an arms race between those three, you know all having something that's a little bit more powerful to sell to their clients.   [0:08:15] PJ: Yeah, good point. And you know what we're going to do is we'll get into kind of the details of each one and obviously we're not here to rip on any products, but well more just kind of like highlight the benefits of each. But before we get down and dirty with that, Taylor, you want to take us into the Looker situation?   [0:08:32] Taylor Gibb: Just in terms of the purchase of Looker? How Looker works? Our use of looker? I mean, I'm ready to speak to all of it from a very-   [0:08:41] PJ: You gotta be more specific.   [0:08:42] Taylor Gibb: Come on, man. You coming at me with Looker. Alright. Again, BI Team, I apologize, I may butcher it. But I want to first of all frame this as coming from someone who uses Looker who benefits greatly from Looker and our team using it. And my use, as you know, I'm a Success Manager is primarily being able to share with our clients the results that they're getting from campaigns that they send out. So it's so easy to be able to use things like Look ML, which is kind of the Looker language, to share things that others have built to be able to visualize. So Google to acquire analytics startup Looker for 2.6 billion... Basically Thomas Kurian, who's the man who was handed the reigns to Google Cloud at the end of last year, sees the two companies bringing together a complete data analytics solution for customers. So it's end-to-end analytics platform to connect, collect, analyze, and visualize data across Google Cloud as your AWS on-premises databases. So one thing that I took away from this, from this quote that they've decided to pin their PR on is that they're looking to make this a connective kind of grab, right? So they've got Looker now and they're doing so because it's a tool that allows you to connect all sorts of different data. I think that's important when you're thinking Google Cloud, because so often the pain points with a big juggernaut like Salesforce are that you're having to go through crazy hoops and loops to be able to get all of your products to mesh together seamlessly. Google is saying, don't even worry about that pain point. We've picked Looker specifically because it makes it easy to connect to what they need. And so I think that that's something that really stands out. Google was also the first in this... You know, arms race was a good way to put it, earlier. They were the first to make this acquisition. I think that it really frames them as being a forward thinking organization and it'll be interesting to see kind of what comes of this in terms of the Google suite, in terms of what we as consumers are able to glean from Looker, but also what they do with their data internally.   [0:10:43] PJ: I'm interested to see how that will affect Looker's company in general. Kind of like their, you know, product roadmap, their priorities and stuff. Like I'm sure Google have big plans for them.   [0:10:53] Taylor Gibb: Big time.   [0:10:54] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I think that's a big piece of it too, the data consolidation. I think it'll just make it really, really easy for any company regardless of the size to just be able to take all of their data and put it into a visual analytics platform, which was probably a little bit more of a difficult process, you know, prior to these purchases I think. So I think at the end of the day it's gonna benefit the end user and the companies that are, you know you're a Google house or Salesforce type of house.   [0:11:18] Taylor Gibb: Totally. And I love that all of this is about the demystification of data to your average user. They're saying that they want everybody from their actual BI analytics team to people like myself, a Success Manager who may not be as in the weeds with data, to be able to glean the important information from the data that's being pulled in. Because so often you see with these older legacy, some of my clients working with a ton of super valuable data but like unable to do anything with it because it's hidden in all these folders that only certain people know how to access and use and pivot on. So definitely a good thing for the end user, if anything.   [0:11:55] PJ: Well the end user is the real winner today, I think. All right, now the Looker versus Tableau smack down, all this information has been helpfully provided to us by SelectHub. Thank you, SelectHub. And so now we're just going to go over some of these different facets of the product to give you their perspective on which company has the advantage. So data visualization, you know, data is presented visually for easy interpretation. The winner there, Tableau over looker. I'm sorry, Looker, and I thought that was actually Looker's big.   [0:12:28] Taylor Gibb: That's what I thought too going into this. But again, we could see that in the Google acquisition, that wasn't necessarily what they pinned everything on, but I'm with you. I thought that Looker, I mean it's about looking at things. So you would think visualizations.   [0:12:43] PJ: Well you know what they do have the edge on, though? Analytics. Information is quantified and evaluated for a portrait of company trends and future possibilities.   [0:12:52] Taylor Gibb: Future possibilities.   [0:12:54] PJ: Point to Looker. Very nice. This next one, online analytical processing. This is OLAP.   [0:13:02] Taylor Gibb: Shout out to OLAP.   [0:13:03] PJ: Shout out to OLAP.   [0:13:03] Jesse Halpert: People don't talk enough about OLAP.   [0:13:04] Taylor Gibb: Maybe you should talk more about it Jesse.   [0:13:06] Jesse Halpert: I'm good.   [0:13:09] PJ: OLAP functionalities provide access to databases and web based analysis, and so this goes to Tableau.   [0:13:15] Taylor Gibb: Not only does it go to Tableau, but apparently Looker, at least at the time of this publication, had no means of OLAP-ing.   [0:13:22] Jesse Halpert: It's daunting.   [0:13:23] PJ: Yeah, that's a big, big... But it's also, you mentioned that it's kind of an old school...   [0:13:28] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, it's probably more of like a box checking thing.   [0:13:31] PJ: Yeah. Gotcha. And then next up, document management. Convert reports into different file formats and share analytical findings, both very strong there, which is nice.   [0:13:42] Taylor Gibb: And this is something that we do with our clients fairly frequently. Again, democratizing data across both processes and companies. So the ability to send a PDF of a certain chart that we've created to an end user, a marketer who just wants to have something on their boss's desk to say numbers are up, it's huge to be able to just press a button and do that export. Cause I know so many other times I would even have to go into something like Keynote and create a separate chart. So not sure what tableau has to offer there, but I can say it's a simple but super effective tool for again, someone like me who's an end user but not necessarily savvy enough to be doing a lot of this stuff my own.   [0:14:19] PJ: Yeah. And that's a big pattern we see right, with democratizing these tools and making it easy for a marketer to really get their hands dirty into data. And so looking forward to seeing how Tableau continues to push the envelope on that. I think Looker is already on a great path for it.   [0:14:33] Jesse Halpert: Yeah. I think one thing you'll see in each is that it's really easy for somebody who's a power user to, you know, again like you said, democratize the data and share it with people who are end users and don't have that type of analytical savvy and just make it really easy to serve up like one off visualizations and reports that they might receive regularly.   [0:14:50] PJ: Just like some veggies.   [0:14:52] Taylor Gibb: Just like veggies, you knew it! PJ just gave me this look like don't you dare mention vegetables again.   [0:14:58] PJ: Serving it up hot. Next, decision services. So financial management features provide analysis of monetary information. Both also very strong in this area. Integrations, the ability to connect with other systems provides multiple sources and functionalities.   [0:15:15] Taylor Gibb: Big win fir my buddy Looker and remember, that's what they were saying at Google. That's why they purchased this solution in the first place, which is really huge in terms of like market value for Google in general, that they're thinking about things like this. Because Salesforce does everything and they do it pretty well, but when you're trying to get data from one point to another? It's difficult.   [0:15:36] PJ: It's all about making that a fluid process and like, and that kind of lends itself as well to like future-proofing, right? Because you know, we talk a lot about being channel agnostic. If you have that kind of flexibility, I think you're, you're opening yourself to the future and you're giving yourself the ability to be agile, whatever channel should show itself.   [0:15:53] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely. It's that- [crosstalk 00:15:55].   [0:15:58] Jesse Halpert: So motivational.   [0:15:59] Taylor Gibb: At this motivational podcast, listen to it before you go to sleep and you will be successful. But it's like that Woody Allen quote, right? That's like "relationship is a shark; if it's not moving forward, it's dying." This is another thing, right? Google is like, we got to keep buying more stuff like, and Salesforce of course has to follow suit, but maybe more thoughtful on-   [0:16:16] PJ: I have been called the Woody Allen of Big Data, so.   [0:16:18] Taylor Gibb: I knew it.   [0:16:19] Jesse Halpert: I don't know if that's something you really want to hang your hat.   [0:16:21] PJ: Yeah, you're right, you're right.   [0:16:25] Taylor Gibb: Gonna take that out in editing, you think?   [0:16:27] PJ: Hey, Midnight in Paris, shout out to y'all. It was good! Owen Wilson!   [0:16:32] Jesse Halpert: Wow.   [0:16:33] Taylor Gibb: Wow.   [0:16:35] PJ: Wooooow. Last one, Big Data integration. Access to Big Data programs for comprehensive analysis. And this ad goes to Tableau. So thanks again SelectHub for facilitating the Looker v. Tableau smack down. It sounds like a WWF event. [inaudible] Oh, it literally is. That's right.   [0:16:58] Taylor Gibb: Speaking of vegetables, PJ, I got one more hot take to kind of take us out here. So we've been speaking in a very high level, obviously, again kind of a layman's view of these very powerful data tools and these very powerful companies, right? Salesforce and Google. We've been talking about these bigger companies and the ways that they're going to be using, the ways that this gives a competitive advantage. There's also a take to be made here that a few pundits are talking about and that this feels almost like an act of desperation, right? Because this is a hot sector right now. Data visualization, data in general as it becomes more and more accessible for people like us, it really sets your company apart as being future proof, something that you said earlier "a forward thinking company." Could it be that this grab wasn't so much, you know, thinking about the best ways to be using tools like this, but was perhaps an act of desperation, a grab for table stakes here?   [0:17:54] Jesse Halpert: I don't even know if it's a hot take.   [0:17:57] PJ: Yeah, I think it's a lukewarm take.   [0:17:59] Jesse Halpert: Its a lukewarm take. Yeah, I think they were just able to see that their products weren't as strong in this market and this is a market that applies to every line of the business. Not only is it future proofing companies, but it's something that, again like we talked about earlier, democratizes the data across an organization. And they were losing ground and they were able to acquire two really forward looking products and were able to bolster their line a little bit in a place where they were probably hurting.   [0:18:29] PJ: Yeah, I think we can call it like casual desperation if that is a thing and makes sense, you know? Because they're at the top of their game, right? It's like, like let's look at the cautionary tale of Blockbuster. If you're not like looking ahead to like either your business and how it will evolve or potentially other businesses that you can loop into your revenue streams, then you know you're really not thinking about the future health of your business.   [0:18:55] Taylor Gibb: You're gonna get Blockbuster-ed.   [0:18:56] PJ: Don't get Blockbuster-ed, y'all. Come on, now.   [0:18:59] Taylor Gibb: Look into OLAP, don't get Blockbuster-ed   [0:19:02] PJ: Exactly. Good for them acquiring Looker. I think Looker has a bright future, but I wonder what they stand to lose by trying to assimilate Looker into their product suite. Because looker is so good right now at what they do, when you try to, we said it on a previous podcast, you mentioned it again, Frankenstein-ing products-   [0:19:24] Taylor Gibb: I'm gonna trademark that.   [0:19:25] PJ: We need to, because you know, Salesforce is just creating the Frankenstein of all these products and as long as you can do it in like an agile way and really mold them together in a way where they speak well and it's architecturally enabling, as long as you can create it in that way, I'm all about it. But if you're just purchasing to stay relevant and slap-sticking it together, you know, Looker's got a lot of fanfare as far as our industry goes right now. If you're just doing it for that and you haven't thought about the execution, maybe rethink that bad boy.   [0:19:55] Taylor Gibb: Oh yeah. At the cost of several billion, I mean worth a second look.   [0:20:00] PJ: I think that was a steal, 2.6 billion. Like I think Looker is going to be, I mean it generates a ton of money.   [0:20:06] Jesse Halpert: I do think the integration will be fairly seamless for companies that already do have Google cloud.   [0:20:12] PJ: Yeah, good for them. So you companies that have Google cloud, you are in luck.   [0:20:17] Taylor Gibb: Oh very good point. And actually I really liked that as well.   [0:20:21] Jesse Halpert: And I think that's what both organizations are ultimately looking to do. Kind of you know, push this new product on them.   [0:20:28] Taylor Gibb: That's exciting news for my clients. You guys out there like using Looker? Good news! I have a feeling there's going to be some announcements on the books here.   [0:20:35] PJ: Absolutely. And for those listeners out there that aren't as familiar with the MarTech landscape, do some research. There's all sorts of products from engagement tools to attribution tools and you could say the analytics portion of that is like eating your vegetables. You get to eat your vegetables first and then you get the steak. Getting into visualizations and data and having it inform your strategy, that's just how you move forward. That's how you improve.   [0:21:02] Jesse Halpert: What's the baked potato in this analogy?   [0:21:04] Taylor Gibb: Attribution, I think.   [0:21:06] PJ: Yeah. Cause that's like nice. And I mean, I love a baked potato with a little butter on it.   [0:21:10] Taylor Gibb: You're telling me. Well, you know, after you've had this potato, this steak, these veggies, you know what these companies got to do, don't you? They gotta get that bread.   [0:21:18] PJ: Oh ho-ho!   [0:21:19] Jesse Halpert: I thought it was going somewhere else and, yeah.   [0:21:22] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:21:23] PJ: On that note, do your research. Look into both of these companies, both doing fantastic things. Eat your veggies, eat your bread, eat your baked potato. And for those of you who don't know, we are Braze. Braze is a customer engagement platform. If you don't know what that is, head to braze.com. I'd like to thank my guests Jesse and Taylor. Thank you guys so much for being here.   [0:21:45] Jesse Halpert: Thanks for having us.   [0:21:46] Taylor Gibb: Anytime!   [0:21:48] PJ: And you too. Thanks for stopping by guys. Take care. [0:21:50]

Self-proclaimed scooter experts, Cody Thornton (Digital First AE) and Pat Forquer (Enterprise AE), give myself and Spencer Burke (VP of Growth) their views on the proliferation of e-scooters in major cities, the safety risks involved, and the competitive landscape for micro-mobility talent.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your mar-tech industry discuss digest. I'm thrilled today to have with me Spencer Burke, VP of growth. Spence, how we doing?   [0:00:28] Spencer Burke: Doing Great, thanks PJ.   [0:00:30] PJ: Also, Patrick Forquer from our sales org here in the east. Pat?   [0:00:34] Patrick Forquer: Oh, PJ. Doing excellent. Thanks for having me.   [0:00:37] PJ: And first time ever having a remote guest in from LA from our sales org on the west coast. Cody Thornton. How you doing buddy?   [0:00:45] Cody Thornton: PJ, I'm fantastic. Thanks for having me. Excited for this.   [0:00:50] Spencer Burke: Coast to coast.   [0:00:51] PJ: Coast to coast. It feels good. I mean, also this is the scooter episode. We have a lot of articles that we're going to digest today all around scooter sharing companies. Cody Thornton is a big scooter guy.   [0:01:03] Cody Thornton: Big. I am so pro scooter. It's not even funny.   [0:01:06] PJ: One of the biggest. Before we jump into the content, let's just start with a little disclaimer. The company Braze, we work with plenty of scooter sharing companies. All the comments you're going to hear today are just personal opinions. Braze does not promote or disparage any scooter app. We are advocates of all of them. So Patrick, I feel like you have a strong opinion perhaps.   [0:01:27] Patrick Forquer: Ugh, love scooters. Like I'm so onboard with scooters. I'm fully ... I don't know how you call being on a scooter, but I'm on scooter on board.   [0:01:37] PJ: Both.   [0:01:37] Patrick Forquer: Both feet. Left foot, right foot, gripping tightly signaling with traffic, the whole thing. I'm onboard.   [0:01:45] PJ: Spencer, where do you lie?   [0:01:46] Spencer Burke: I have a confession. I've never ridden a scooter.   [0:01:49] PJ: Wow.   [0:01:49] Spencer Burke: Escooters are brand new to me, so I'm a blank slate. I am happy to hear PJ's perspective. Cody and pat, try and convince me. All righty. So Cody, you are a huge advocate for the scoot scoot. Am I right?   [0:02:01] Cody Thornton: Yes. I am a major advocate. I feel like ... I'm from Los Angeles, live in San Francisco., I feel like two great markets for the scooter industry and these companies. I'm just a big fan of micro mobility from the accessibility and practicality of it to the environmental benefits. I think there's a lot of short distance transportation that is much easier and quicker with, per se, a scooter rather than using an Uber, driving your car, filling parking garages. So I will admit I think there's a lot to figure out from safety to legislation in the space, but overall I am a big fan of scooters. I think it's pretty promising.   [0:02:44] PJ: Well, let's just kick it off. Our first article of the day, Byrd is launching a two seater electric vehicle to become more than a kick scooter startup. Byrd has just unveiled the Byrd cruiser, an electric vehicle that is essentially a blend between a bicycle and a moped. The Byrd cruiser can seat up to two people, and depending on the market, the cruiser will either be pedal assist or just have a peg. Also equipped with hydraulic disc brakes. Very exciting. They can stop. 52 volt battery, and many ebikes have it as well. It's designed to handle hills. So off-roading is an option. I mean it gets pretty hilly out in SF, so you must be thrilled about it, Cody.   [0:03:24] Cody Thornton: The two things I'm most excited about are definitely the hills and the hydraulic disc brakes. I was in Austin last week riding a scooter that the brakes were definitely not working, so I was worried I would end up in one of our later articles about injuries, but yes. San Francisco being quite hilly., I think this is a big opportunity. Honestly, it's pretty interesting as well. I think too Byrd launching this cruiser has been able to categorize it as an ebike rather than a scooter, so they've been able to avoid a lot of the local legislation and government policies and politics around it. So, I'm personally super excited about this. I cannot wait to throw Patrick on the back of my Byrd cruiser and just launch up these SF hills man.   [0:04:09] PJ: What a dream. It reminds me of Dumb and Dumber. I can get 70 miles to the gallon on this hog.   [0:04:16] Cody Thornton: We are going to be the first people that take a Byrd to aspen.   [0:04:19] PJ: We can only do it in Aspen. That's the best obviously. I mean does this open the door for like other vehicles where they're going to come out with a whole like series?   [0:04:28] Spencer Burke: I think we will continue to see more diversity because to Cody's point right now it's scooters are fantastic for like last mile delivery of like point A to point B, you know, 10 minute ride, 15 minute ride, but you're not going to be doing your daily commute unless you live and work in Santa Monica where Byrd is located, which is my dream, just saying. It's like taking a scooter to work. I mean, [crosstalk 00:04:50].   [0:04:50] Cody Thornton: I don't know. Once they're in New York why wouldn't you?   [0:04:53] Spencer Burke: I mean can you imagine riding a scooter in New York? That is literally my nightmare.   [0:04:57] Cody Thornton: Oh my gosh.   [0:04:58] Spencer Burke: I'm so scared. I can barely ... I'm afraid to walk in New York [crosstalk 00:05:00].   [0:05:01] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, you got to wear a helmet while you're walking in New York.   [0:05:05] PJ: You got to wrap yourself in bubble wrap to get on that scooter. There's a lot of precautions.   [0:05:10] Patrick Forquer: Is that a thing yet? Is there an aggressive scooting community?   [0:05:14] PJ: In?   [0:05:15] Patrick Forquer: Anywhere? Like you know ...   [0:05:17] Cody Thornton: You're talking to it right now.   [0:05:17] Spencer Burke: Yeah, I was about to say exhibit A over here. Cody I think is the president of a local advocacy groups for scooters.   [0:05:24] PJ: Let's talk a little bit more about Byrd because Apple announced his support for Apple Pay and this is relevant to Byrd as well as Bonobos and a handful of other companies. Cody, you want to, you want to speak to this one a little bit? I know you were pretty jazzed about it.   [0:05:37] Cody Thornton: Yeah, definitely. I thought this was really interesting. I actually recently got a new iPhone, had to go through the whole registration process for Byrd again and when I went through you buy it and pretty much the number of rides you want right now, so they have a 20 package ride. If you want to buy, that's their most popular one. You click it, you go through the checkout process, etc. I'd like to think I'm a little bit more technically savvy than the mass market out there, so just going through this process, I saw a larger opportunity for them to make this more seamless. From firsthand experience when I was in San Diego last year, I had a really interesting epiphany I guess. Because I was there around Memorial Day weekend and there was a ton of people who I'd say not your target demographic for scooter riders, older men and women, younger girls and boys, etc. But everyone was just wondering how to get onto the scooter. So I haven't had to download the app. And you know, I just saw it as a big organic growth vehicle for them. So I think partnerships like this with Apple Pay's NFC technology only lower the barrier of entry for all these people that are trying to figure out how to get on these scooters or ride and conversely in San Francisco right now, Lime and Byrd are not allowed in San Francisco. So I believe it's Spin, Jump, and Scoot are the three brands there, right? So most people, if you're an avid scooter goer like myself, Patrick, etc, you're most likely going to use a variety of different services depending on the city where you are. So I think technology like this, partnerships, just makes it way easier to get up and running and ultimately become a user of these different companies' services, or the scooter.   [0:07:22] PJ: So Cody, what is the reason that like Byrd and Lime are barred in SF versus these other companies?   [0:07:28] Cody Thornton: To my knowledge, it is all local legislation. So it was a pretty guerrilla-esque marketing tactic when these companies first started going. So you would just wake up one morning and there was just dozens of these scooters on the street and no one had any idea of where they came from, what to do with them. And again, these thoughts are our own and I am not entirely sure, but I'm pretty confident that Byrd and LIme were two of the first that went out to market in San Francisco specifically. So these scooters just were all over the street. And I remember it was a mess honestly. It was crazy. You all know San Francisco is a relatively condensed city. So you were just walking to work. There's scooters everywhere, scooters in trash cans, scooters all over the sidewalk, scooters leaning up against buildings. So, they wanted to put some legislation in place, one, to have a little bit more of a framework to operate in the cities specifically, but also limit the amount of sheer scooters that were there. I'm not sure exactly what the process was of how they determine the three vendors that were for the initial shared scooter rollout in San Francisco, but Scoot, Lime, and Spin were of the first three that got rolled out. So I'm speaking with various people that work at these organizations. They are extremely optimistic that they will be back in San Francisco sooner rather than later, but they're just going through the necessary to making it "more legit" if you will.   [0:08:59] PJ: Got you. Got to make it legit.   [0:09:01] Cody Thornton: Too legit to quit.   [0:09:02] Spencer Burke: Obviously. I mean that does kind of speak to one of the articles we're going to talk about later, PJ, about around the consolidation and kind of like partnerships happening within the scooter industry right now. It makes sense for someone like an Apple who maybe doesn't know excel in scooter production, right, to partner with someone like Byrd, just to kind of get their foot in the door so to speak, but also lead to a better overall user experience. So I use the Apple Pay on the Byrd app as well. It works. It's incredible.   [0:09:29] Cody Thornton: Nice.   [0:09:29] PJ: Have any of you guys a bit the dust on a scooter yet? Pat, Cody?   [0:09:36] Patrick Forquer: I'm clean. My record's clean so far. I'm going to LA tomorrow, so check back with me in a couple of days.   [0:09:43] PJ: Yeah, Spencer, I know you have yet to ride. So I think we know your answer. Cody, what do you have over there?   [0:09:51] Cody Thornton: Oh, I most definitely have. I have a few battle wounds that I'm quite proud of myself. Can't wait to tell my kids about these one day. Some pretty awesome scars. But no, in all seriousness, it happened in the time that I actually fell in Santa Monica. I'd like to think I'm ... You know, I like to snowboard, I like to skateboard, I like to surf, all that jazzy stuff. So I feel like I'm inclined to riding these things more than your average consumer, if you will. And so I was riding one morning in Santa Monica, I'm still not quite sure what happened to be completely honest, but it just beeped twice, went, "Beep, beep," real quick and just ejected me over the handlebars. And luckily I didn't get to seriously hurt, but I was honestly laughing. I looked like Gabby Douglas in the Olympics just mounting the handlebars. I had a puffy jacket on. I slid for like 20 feet. People ran over to make sure if I'm okay, I'm just laying there hysterically laughing. I'm like, "How did this just happen?" But yeah, I got a nice little raspberry on my hip, on my elbow. And so you know, I'm kind of in this weird middle ground of the injury topic we will talk about because it's inevitably dangerous. You can move quickly, very nimbly. People do not obey the sidewalk laws, the bike lane laws, random freak of nature accidents similar to the one I went through. That said, I mean I could wholeheartedly say I fell because of an issue with the scooter. I think most of the time in a lot of the injuries that are happening, they are rider induced so people are not riding responsibly. They're potentially under the influence of, say, alcohol potentially. But yeah, I guess we can get into that. But that is my story of how I really ate it on a scooter.   [0:11:51] PJ: I mean, why don't we just get into right now? This next article here is the boom in electrical scooters leads to more injuries and even fatalities. So as stand up electric scooters have rolled into more than 100 cities worldwide, many of the people riding them are ending up in the emergency room with serious injuries. Others have been killed. There are no comprehensive statistics available. But a rough count by the Associated Press of media reports turned up at least 11 electric scooter rider deaths in the U.S. since the beginning of 2018. Nine were on rented scooters and two were on ones the victims owned. Spencer, you have some thoughts on this [crosstalk 00:12:34].   [0:12:32] Spencer Burke: Yeah, this article is pretty frustrating for me because it doesn't add any context. They're clearly trying to sensationalize the fact that people have been hurt and killed, which is terrible. Don't want to minimize the impact of that to anyone. But I think there's a bigger picture issue here that it's really challenging to be a pedestrian, to be a cyclist, now to be a scooterist, or whatever the official term is, in really dense cities. It's not safe. In New York City, in many cities in the U.S. there's something called vision zero which is getting pedestrian deaths to zero as a result of traffic fatalities. So I've got some stats here that I pulled up, but every year 4,000 New Yorkers are injured and 250 are killed as a result of traffic crashes. And it's the leading cause of injury related death for kids under 14, so cars in cities are dangerous and people who are not in cars tend to get hurt. Even people in cars get hurt. So I would have liked to see in an article like this, and generally in the coverage, it is not just unique to this one article, more of an understanding of what it's like to be someone who's commuting not in a car and not in public transit, and how we can make that safer and more accessible.   [0:13:50] Patrick Forquer: Yeah. I think when you look at it to this articles from the Santa Monica Daily Press, which if you've ever been to Santa Monica scooters are a very polarizing topic there. Just like they are my hometown of Atlanta. When I go home, people are either ... It's very polarizing, one side or the other. You either love them or hate them. And what I don't understand about the hate part, especially in a place like Atlanta where if you need to go half a mile, you get in your car and drive there, right? It's like, they're all over the sidewalks there, you know, people are just leaving them parked.   [0:14:24] Spencer Burke: When was the last time you were on the sidewalk?   [0:14:25] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, exactly. Like when was the last time you walked anywhere in Atlanta? Zero times have you walked anywhere that wasn't like your backyard. But the interesting stat to me from this article was a vast majority of the injuries were after, I think, 6:00PM or 7:00PM so I think we can all use our imagination there.   [0:14:44] Cody Thornton: People are just super tired, just crashed on the scooter after a long day.   [0:14:48] Patrick Forquer: Right, exactly.   [0:14:49] Cody Thornton: Exhausted, 6:30, just exhausted. But I think we will continue to see like a maturation of the regulatory environment around this, which is probably warranted and needed, but at the same time, I think if it was kind of wild west to start, we're kind of moving towards a place that's much more controlled in a safer environment. So hopefully you get some kind of guardrails in place and people can scoot and peace.   [0:15:13] Spencer Burke: It's the same for bicycles. Like this hate isn't unique to scooters. People get upset that they're building bike lanes in their neighborhood and it's taking away parking. So bikes have been around for a couple of hundred years. I think that the regulatory environment could maybe be improved. But I think we're just seeing the repeat of some same problems people have with making dense, urban areas less car friendly.   [0:15:36] PJ: Do you think they're gonna start making it legal in New York City? Do you think that's going to happen?   [0:15:41] Cody Thornton: I sure hope so.   [0:15:42] Spencer Burke: Yeah, I feel like New York is such a interesting market because it's so crazy. Could you imagine just an onslaught of scooters just coming into Manhattan? Oh my gosh.   [0:15:52] PJ: I mean where I live-   [0:15:55] Spencer Burke: The Santa Monica Daily press will have a few thoughts about it.   [0:16:00] PJ: I mean in Brooklyn where I live it would be fine, right? But like midtown Manhattan on a scooter-   [0:16:04] Spencer Burke: Like where we work, yeah.   [0:16:05] PJ: Yeah.   [0:16:06] Spencer Burke: It would be a nightmare.   [0:16:06] PJ: Like where we are right now would be tough.   [0:16:10] Cody Thornton: Yeah. I had a interesting ... Because that was actually one of the primary storylines out of South be y Southwest this year in Austin, Texas was the number of emergency room admissions they had or scooter related injuries and it was a pretty interesting thread on Twitter that I was following about all these injuries and different people that were there covering the conference that were going into the emergency room for scooter related accidents. Yeah, I think to Spencer's point, there definitely needs to be, whether it's better onboarding ... In San Francisco there's the service, Scoot, if anyone is familiar with that. So it's similar to the Byrd scooter we talked about, but they're more moped like so I'm not sure what they top out at miles per hour, but they have a helmet in the back you get on, you can take them up hills, you can ride them across the city. It's like an electric moped. But prior to getting access to the application once you go through onboarding, it requires you to watch a 20 minute video. So I don't know if something like that will happen with these scooter companies in terms of like educating their riders more. But back to the Austin point and South by Southwest, similar to what Patrick said, 90% of the injuries were reported to be after 6:00 PM, so again, we can use our imaginations of what is happening then. Like Spencer said, bikes have been around for hundreds of years. We see the Go bikes popping up everywhere, the Jump bikes, like we're not just going to get rid of bikes. Bikes are inevitably dangerous as well, but I think we just need to have a little bit more understanding on both sides. But yeah, it's a complex issue and I don't have the answer. I'm just going to go ahead ride with my AirPods in and let my hair flow in the wind on those bad boys.   [0:17:54] PJ: Cody. I don't have the answer. I'm just a dude.   [0:17:57] Spencer Burke: Just a guy.   [0:17:58] PJ: Wait, Cody, do you need to wear a helmet or is that not even a thing?   [0:18:03] Cody Thornton: Man, you're really hitting all my scooter knowledge today. That's another a soft spot for me that you do not need to wear a helmet. I will not disclose which one, but I personally worked with one of the scooter companies to bring them on board to become a customer Braze. And the example that I gave them is last year in 2018 Memorial Day weekend in San Diego, I was riding and my friends and I around eight in the morning were ushered over to the side of the road by a group of police officers. And we were cited for not riding with helmets. We had no idea that you even had to wear a helmets when you were riding these scooters at the time. So we get our citations. It was very, you know, cordial, fine experience, frustrating to say the least. But we go away and this older woman says, "Haven't you been watching the news? They have been handing out tickets to everyone not wearing helmets on the scooters." And I'm like, "No, I'm not watching the San Diego Daily News on my vacation. I'm sorry." But so we talked about using geo-fencing technology that we have here at Braze to run a notification to these people saying, "Hey, they're issuing citations in this area. Make sure you're wearing a helmet." Since then, I believe it was January 1, 2019 a statewide law has been passed that helmets are no longer required to ride scooters in California. I don't know how I feel about that. I don't want to wear a helmet when I wear these things.   [0:19:29] PJ: Based on personal experience.   [0:19:30] Cody Thornton: I also want people to be safe too.   [0:19:32] PJ: That's so California. "Hey man, you going to ride a scooter?   [0:19:36] Spencer Burke: No helmet needed. Just a slip tank in the summer months.   [0:19:40] Patrick Forquer: For what it's worth ... This doesn't apply to scooting since you're not doing any work, but I think there have been some studies in Australia where they looked at the net benefit between the increase to injury of not riding with a helmet and the health benefit of riding your bike every day for commuting, and on the whole it's better for you if you're every day riding a bike, getting to work, getting some exercise. So, that's been a lot of the influence for just increasing people's mobility, giving them access to these kinds of things, even if they don't require a helmet, which is the same for city bikes here in New York.   [0:20:13] PJ: All right, well you guys one more to go left. We're tight on time, but let's get to it. So scooter sharing startups slug it out in a war for niche talent. On demand scooter sharing startups are competing to hire from one another as they struggle with a limited talent pool chasing niche skills. These startups fast emerging as alternatives to last mile mobility require people with experience around internet of things based supply chain, design, and manufacturing. These are specialized skills as the technology itself is relatively new. So, it sounds like there's just not enough people to go around that know how to do this stuff right now, especially in your-   [0:20:49] Cody Thornton: Yeah, I mean, they know where to find me. [crosstalk 00:20:52].   [0:20:54] Patrick Forquer: The one thing that surprised me most when I first rode a Byrd was just how like the product is great. It looks great, it works really well. The check-in process, seamless. Offline, online, the whole thing was fantastic. So, I could imagine this like this is a booming space. Five years ago, no one was talking about last mile scooter delivery. So, not surprising and it's like that's the most kind of Silicon Valley thing ever is like competing for scooter talent.   [0:21:27] Spencer Burke: What about all those guys at Razor that were in the market 10 years ago?   [0:21:31] PJ: Razor. Throwback.   [0:21:34] Patrick Forquer: Getting crushed   [0:21:35] PJ: Yeah. Where's razor and all of this? Huge missed opportunity Razor.   [0:21:38] Patrick Forquer: Totally.   [0:21:39] PJ: To Pat's point, I thought it was pretty interesting when working with a few of the scooter companies myself. I didn't really realize it either until like ... In all seriousness, like five years ago, no one was talking about like this mass mobility or the scooter phenomenon that is going on, right? And to Pat's point as well too, I think from the onboarding experience and signing up and aside from realizing how great of a product it was, obviously first and foremost, how liberating riding a scooter is. Like that is just the greatest feeling in the entire world. I felt like I was a 10 year old kid, again. It's interesting. They're pretty well built products honestly. And you know, they have a very functioning mobile application that's powering these things. They have the actual physical scooters themselves. A lot of these companies are poaching talent from the likes of Lyft and Uber that not only from, you know, like on the mobile side of things but also from the legal side. Like these companies have massive battles in front of them on local government, statewide government, federal government and having experience with that. So I think, one to, obviously the consolidation aspect is pretty interesting from a manufacturing and supply chain perspective as well. But also I'm sure there's going to be a lot of acqui-hires in this space as well by these companies that will emerge as the juggernauts and I guess it's yet to be determined who those companies will be. And to anyone out there looking to have a career change, maybe look into last minute mobility tech. I don't know. It sounds like there's a need. Spencer, Cody. Patrick, thanks so much for being with me, you guys.   [0:23:13] Spencer Burke: It's my pleasure, PJ.   [0:23:14] Patrick Forquer: Thanks, Peej.   [0:23:15] Cody Thornton: Yeah, it's my pleasure. Be safe out there people. Don't be afraid, but be smart while being dumb.   [0:23:20] PJ: Absolutely, and for all those first time listeners out there, we are Braze. Braze is a customer engagement platform. If you don't know what that is, go to Braze.com. Find out. Thanks again for being with us.

Longtime buddies Will Crocker (Senior Director of Customer Experience)  and Spencer Burke (VP of Growth) chat the return of Game of Thrones, a ban on the government from creating free tax-preparation software, and a potential ban on crypto mining in China. Also, Prince Harry calls for a ban on Fortnite?!        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest. This is PJ Bruno, and I'm thrilled to have with me two very close buddies. I have Will Crocker, senior director of CX, that's customer experience. Hi, Will.   [0:00:32] Will: Hey, how you doing, PJ?   [0:00:33] PJ: And also, of course, my good friend Spencer Burke, the head of the House Growth. He's here with us today.   [0:00:40] Spencer: Hey, hey, it's good to be back.   [0:00:42] PJ: It is good to be back.   [0:00:43] Will: You guys grew a house?   [0:00:46] PJ: I'm just trying to rewatch more Game of Thrones, and I had that moment where Melisandre's like, "Robert of the House Baratheon." And I wanted to do something similar for Spencer, but I don't know if it hit.   [0:00:57] Spencer: PJ of the House Bruno.   [0:00:59] PJ: Exactly. Just makes you sound more special, I think.   [0:01:02] Will: So Game of Thrones is coming back real soon, right? What do you guys think?   [0:01:06] PJ: Oh, yeah. Sunday night. I'm thrilled. I'm gonna be in the UK, so I'm trying to find people there that ... For a watch party, because as you know, Game of Thrones takes place in England. Or so it may seem. I'm pumped. I'm so freaking pumped for the last season. Spence, any predictions?   [0:01:25] Spencer: I feel so far behind. I'm up to date, but my wife, Jenny, like you, is rewatching. She rewatched everything.   [0:01:33] PJ: You have to.   [0:01:33] Will: Everything? That's a lot.   [0:01:35] Spencer: Over the past couple months. Yeah. And so I'm going through, and I'm like, "All right, who's this again? What did they do?" And since she's been rewatching it, I'll come in at season four and be like, "Oh yeah, that's the guy who ..." And she's like, "No, that hasn't happened yet." And then when she got [inaudible], I was like, "Oh, but that's the guy who did this." She's like, "No, that was three seasons ago."   [0:01:54] PJ: Right.   [0:01:54] Spencer: So I'm just totally discombobulated, but I know once it gets started, there's the action, there's the dragons. We have a big battle coming. Gonna get straight into it.   [0:02:03] Will: Yeah, and you have a cheat sheet that's going to tell you what's going on in the new episodes.   [0:02:07] Spencer: Exactly.   [0:02:07] Will: Meanwhile, I am my girlfriend's cheat sheet, and I am in the same place as you, so I'm just gonna start making things up. I'm just gonna go out there and just say, "That's the secret Stark over there, that one. Just pay attention."   [0:02:21] PJ: They're gonna need to level up those recaps. That's gonna become a five to 10-minute thing of just, "Okay, wait, what ... There's all the sub-threads."   [0:02:30] Will: I'm actually shocked HBO didn't release a pre-episode which was a condensed, 30-minute explainer of what happened in the last season. They should've done that this week. They could've gotten a ton of views on that.   [0:02:40] PJ: Dude, tell me about it. I really ... I need something like that. I need-   [0:02:43] Spencer: That must exist somewhere. A supercut.   [0:02:45] Will: I'm sure YouTube has created that.   [0:02:47] PJ: There's a fan out there that's made that, for sure.   [0:02:49] Will: My main prediction is that HBO is gonna make a lot of money.   [0:02:52] PJ: And then they're gonna go back, they're gonna do a prequel, right? I think there's already talk about some sort of ... Around the time of Aegon and the Mad King. [crosstalk]   [0:03:01] Will: There are apparently four or five in production right now.   [0:03:04] PJ: Jeez.   [0:03:04] Will: Yeah.   [0:03:05] Spencer: Wow.   [0:03:05] PJ: It's a cash cow. What're you gonna do?   [0:03:07] Will: Got to milk it.   [0:03:09] PJ: That's what you do with a cash cow, man.   [0:03:11] Spencer: Did you guys watch SNL this past weekend?   [0:03:13] PJ: I didn't, no. Was there-   [0:03:14] Spencer: Kit Harington was the host.   [0:03:15] PJ: Oh, nice.   [0:03:16] Will: Yeah, he looked like he's 12 years old when I saw that ... The photo. It was really weird.   [0:03:20] PJ: When he's clean-shaven, he does look very young.   [0:03:22] Spencer: He also has a very laddish accent compared to his Jon Snow character. But they had a skit that was a parody of all of the spin-offs, so they had a Game of Thrones that was a Law & Order ripoff, just all of these different versions taking characters and then putting them into a sitcom or a drama or whatever. It was really funny.   [0:03:41] PJ: Classic. Yeah, I mean, I wonder ... Those guys ... You would think you just have a calling card to any job you want after you were on Game of Thrones, but I don't know. It's tough to break out of that when you've made a role for yourself.   [0:03:54] Will: Yeah, you can get pigeonholed pretty easily, I think. I think some of the other characters like that, like Robb Stark, who died seasons ago, what's he been in? Who knows?   [0:04:03] PJ: I don't know. I just see flashes of his face in different-   [0:04:06] Spencer: Actually, I do know.   [0:04:06] PJ: You do know?   [0:04:06] Spencer: He's in that Bodyguard show.   [0:04:08] Will: Oh, really?   [0:04:09] Spencer: I forget what ... Is it Netflix?   [0:04:12] Will: Is Sean Bean at a Starbucks now, shilling coffees? Is that where he is after he said "No, I need more money," and they were like, "Well, we'll kill you in season one. It's fine."   [0:04:20] Spencer: Yeah, he was in the Bodyguard on Netflix. Check it out.   [0:04:24] PJ: Check it out. We're plugging it. Plugging it here. All right, guys, we could talk about Game of Thrones forever, we might as well move on. But in light of Game of Thrones coming up and all the exiles that happen throughout Game of Thrones, this is the Banishment Episode-   [0:04:40] Speaker 8: You are banished!   [0:04:42] PJ: -of Braze for Impact.   [0:04:46] Spencer: Dun dun dun.   [0:04:47] PJ: Exactly. Dun dun dun dun dun dun ... We're really thrilled about it. We're gonna talk about some bans and some tentative bans that are on our radar right now. Starting off with number one, the House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that includes language that would permanently bar the Internal Revenue Service from creating a free, electronic service for Americans to file their taxes, advancing a primary objective of the industry of for-profit companies like Intuit and H&R Block. Companies like Intuit, which produces TurboTax, which I use, and H&R Block allow most Americans to file for free as long as they earn less than $66,000 for the year, but most eligible Americans don't take advantage of that, with just three percent filing for free. Are you guys TurboTaxers? Do you-   [0:05:37] Will: TurboTax, yeah, regrettably.   [0:05:38] Spencer: TurboTax.   [0:05:39] PJ: We subscribe over here. TurboTax. Yeah, I was one of those late bloomers for doing my own taxes. It was kind of like you'd check off things as becoming an adult. "Oh, got to do this. Got to do this." Taxes was the last thing. It was like my dad did it, and I paid a guy to literally handle all of it. Now I'm TurboTax-ing, and I'm a grown, grown man now.   [0:05:58] Spencer: Consider yourself an adult?   [0:06:00] PJ: I thought ... For me, that was the last bit of criteria to say, "Okay, I've made it. I'm an adult."   [0:06:05] Will: It's truly ridiculous that we have to file like that. It's crazy. No other country in the world does it that way. Apparently, I think, in the UK, you have to make ... This number might be a little bit wrong, but it's something like 125,000 pounds a year to have to file. Other than that, what happens is the government just mails you your tax return, because they've got all the data like the IRS does. And they say, "If you want to contest this, go for it. Otherwise, here's your check."   [0:06:32] Spencer: Good to go.   [0:06:33] PJ: Yeah. Super easy. Why are we making it so hard on ourselves?   [0:06:37] Will: It also really screws poor people as well, here, because people have this idea in America that paying taxes ... You are always paying your taxes, right? Filing taxes your taxes is synonymous with paying your taxes. When in reality, if you make $30,000 a year, you're almost certainly going to get a refund. They're leaving money on the table, and if the IRS isn't automatically doing it, they don't get the refund, and IRS doesn't call them to complain, either.   [0:07:03] PJ: Yeah.   [0:07:06] Spencer: They have the information. Especially for a simple filer. You're just getting your deductions, you worked at the same place, you've lived in the same state. They know ... They know it. They could just do it. Estonia does this. Estonia. But apparently, I was reading-   [0:07:24] Will: They have e-citizenship, too, though.   [0:07:25] PJ: It just would ... Is it ... What's the reasoning? It's just it would take a lot of work for that to happen?   [0:07:30] Spencer: Well, there's a couple of reasons. One, these companies spend a lot of money lobbying our Representatives.   [0:07:35] Will: Tens and tens of millions of dollars every year.   [0:07:38] Spencer: The second is the party that prefers to remove taxes, they tend to do it for the people with the most money. But that aside, they think that if it's too easy ... Too easy to pay your taxes, it'll be as a result too easy for our Congress to increase taxes. So they try to make it harder so that people have to go through the pain and we all hate taxes. So there's-   [0:08:08] PJ: So wait, the thinking is that taxes will be increased if we did less work?   [0:08:13] Will: They want you to associate misery and pain and nonsense with taxation every year, and they've been highly successful, I would say.   [0:08:21] PJ: Yeah, tell me about it.   [0:08:23] Will: So, it's ... I don't know. I hope that someday we get there, but this bill that's about to go through with the tax free preparation software, banning all that stuff, it's, I believe, a bipartisan-supported bill, which just makes me really, really ask virtually everyone in Congress, "Guys, what the hell's going on?"   [0:08:49] PJ: I mean, it's just they're making money, right? Is it just-   [0:08:52] Will: Yeah. I think it costs the IRS more money to deal with these external agencies, too. Because you have to imagine on the technical side, they're building integrations and accepting all these form factors from all these different places. If the IRS just built this internally, or some other service built it that was easy to use and free, everyone would start using that, and then all of a sudden all of the overhead costs and all that starts to go down, too.   [0:09:20] PJ: Well, let's hope there's a different future for us, because I think that should be a free tool, hands down.   [0:09:26] Spencer: For sure. Have any of you guys had to deal with cryptocurrency and paying taxes on that?   [0:09:33] Will: I have, yes. It was pretty damn confusing. That might be the exception for where you might have to file something yourselves.   [0:09:43] Spencer: Yeah, right. Here's this new, sketchy asset that I made some money on.   [0:09:47] Will: Yeah, I made ... Not, I would say, a well-informed investment on it, because I don't think virtually anyone's investment on it is well-informed, unless you're a Ph.D. Mathematician who's dug into the source code. But yeah, I'd go as one of the lucky ones and got out while I was sensible, so I had to figure out where the hell to put that in TurboTax. It was weird.   [0:10:06] PJ: I'm sure it was. Did you, as well, or-   [0:10:08] Spencer: Yeah, this year. I'm almost embarrassed to admit it now, but-   [0:10:13] PJ: Well, since you're mentioning crypto ... Nice segue. Appreciate it. Onto our next ban. China considers ban on cryptocurrency ... Mining, that is, because it's a stupid waste of energy. Regulators in China are considering a ban on cryptocurrency mining as an undesirable economic activity, according to a government document released Monday. Basically, the whole thinking is that it's a huge waste on valuable resources because it takes so much energy to do this crypto mining. According to a recent report in Nature Sustainability, crypto mining emits anywhere between three million and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide globally. China making a decision that's good for the environment? I'm a little confused.   [0:10:59] Will: Yeah, although they've actually been getting a lot better about that. I think they won the race to the bottom in terms of environmental impact, and then realized how awful the bottom was and are trying to desperately claw up the other side now.   [0:11:12] Spencer: Yeah, I think with the Olympics, when they had to just close factories so that it wasn't so polluted that people were hacking up a lung while running a marathon.   [0:11:21] PJ: Jeez.   [0:11:21] Will: Yeah. It's still not good there, but they're doing a lot more, I think. Anyway, on the crypto subject, I just don't know. It's just like ... I see the potential, maybe, of something like this in the future, but right now, I read some article ... This was a year ago, that said that a year ago, Bitcoin itself was taking as much electrical energy every month as the nation of Germany.   [0:11:51] Spencer: I think it's one percent of global energy consumption is going to Bitcoin mining.   [0:11:55] Will: Yeah, and they kept saying that it's gonna go up. And that's only Bitcoin, too. There are, what, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies? If you assume Bitcoin is maybe half the market, probably? Something like that? Or maybe it's a third. Who knows? Anyways, that means a huge portion of global energy is essentially right now going to give people another store of money. Banking's a hell of a lot cheaper. Do you know how much energy J.P. Morgan probably spends? I don't know what it is, but I guarantee you it's not one percent of energy.   [0:12:31] PJ: Right.   [0:12:31] Spencer: Especially since most of the mining happens in China, and they're still pretty reliant on coal for a lot of that energy consumption, so not great with the whole global warming thing and the future of humanity, but who knows?   [0:12:44] PJ: Yeah, but I mean, you mentioned it, Will. Maybe sometimes you need to hit the bottom first to know that you need to dig yourselves out.   [0:12:52] Will: I just want to thank you guys as the hosts of this podcast for picking really uplifting topics. [crosstalk]   [0:12:57] Spencer: Do you have a story about hitting rock bottom you'd like to share with us?   [0:13:01] Will: No, that's coming in an upcoming episode of When Shift Hits the Fan.   [0:13:03] PJ: That's true. Look forward to our Rock Bottom Episode, starring Will Crocker.   [0:13:07] Spencer: Will, didn't you ... You were telling me before the show a little bit about graphics cards and how the changing and use in mining was affecting the prices.   [0:13:17] Will: Oh, yeah, there was a point where I ... I play computer games, so I own a graphics card, and there was a point where I bought a graphics card, and usually any piece of technology you buy depreciates over time. It's just because newer stuff comes out, and it gets better. But the market for GPUs, which are graphical processing units, was so nuts because of Bitcoin a couple years ago that I realized my graphics card had appreciated almost 50% at one point. And there just came a point when I was like, "Should I just sell this thing and wait for a while and get out of the market?" But it's absolutely insane how much the prices were fluctuating based upon that. If anybody who's an nVidia stockholder, you rode that wave right with everyone else.   [0:13:59] PJ: The graphics card biz. I see you, Will.   [0:14:03] Will: I'm long on the graphics card biz. They have real applications, too, like neural net processing and a lot of the kind of things that you see people doing, like libraries like TensorFlow to do understanding complex deep learning problems in computer science. All of that requires GPUs, essentially, so it's gonna come forward, but it's gonna fall a little bit for the crypto.   [0:14:26] PJ: Will, since you are such a gamer, and I am as well ... Spencer, were you a little bit in your heyday, probably?   [0:14:32] Spencer: A little bit.   [0:14:33] PJ: I mean, I think given that, Will, you should probably take some beef with Prince Harry, because this next article: Prince Harry calls for a ban on Fortnite. I know that's not your top game, but still, I mean, let's take a look at this.   [0:14:47] Will: Yeah. Fortnite's all right.   [0:14:49] PJ: Ahead of one of the biggest nights in the gaming industry, Prince Harry has called for a ban on Fortnite due to its supposed addictive qualities. Harry said, "That game shouldn't be allowed." In a British accent, of course. "That game shouldn't be allowed. Where's the benefit of having it in your household?" And then, also, Harry suggested Fortnite, a shooter game focused on survival, was responsible for tearing families apart. "It's like waiting for the damage to be done and kids turning up on your doorstep and families being broken down."   [0:15:24] Spencer: Is this real?   [0:15:24] PJ: This is real. This is a legitimate quote.   [0:15:26] Spencer: No.   [0:15:26] PJ: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.   [0:15:27] Will: You're tearing me apart, Lisa!   [0:15:30] PJ: "You're tearing me apart, Prince Harry!" Yeah. So that's where he stands on it. Ironically enough, he feels the same way about social media, feels like it's real poison in general. And I guess a day later, him and Meghan Markle started their own Instagram page, so you can follow them on that, which is nice.   [0:15:51] Will: Oh, yeah, which also isn't destroying society at all, right? That's just totally fine that everyone's addicted to Instagram and those things.   [0:15:58] PJ: Exactly. I mean, ban on addictive substances, i.e. Video games. This is ... We're addicted to our tech, obviously, right? But thoughts on video games? To me, my argument was always: video games, yes, they can suck time and everything, but to me, it was always ... It's like an interactive art form. I'm witnessing somebody's art they've put together. Especially MMORPGs, massive multiplayer online role-playing games. Anything that has a big, big, huge world, and I just want to run around all of it, I just really appreciate the design and thought that goes into all of it. That's my feeling.   [0:16:33] Will: It's like a concert in some ways, right? Like at a concert, you're coming to watch music, but you're also coming together to experience that with everyone else around you, and I think multiplayer games are the same way. You're creating that human interaction, which creates the art around it.   [0:16:44] PJ: Yeah.   [0:16:46] Will: Yeah, I don't know about this. I wonder if EA bribed Prince Harry to pick on Fortnite. It was like, "Epic Games needs to be taken down a notch." Because couldn't you just make this claim about most games?   [0:16:58] Spencer: Yeah, why Fortnite, Prince Harry?   [0:17:01] Will: Just because it's the big target. I don't know.   [0:17:03] PJ: Yeah, that's probably what it was. He was thinking about it, and it's just-   [0:17:06] Spencer: It's the only video game he's heard of.   [0:17:07] PJ: I mean, for a guy who smokes as much pot as Prince Harry, I would've thought that video games would be right ... What do you do, then, when you're stoned?   [0:17:13] Will: Is he a toker? I didn't know that.   [0:17:15] Spencer: Yeah, if we want to talk about tearing families apart, how about the royal family of the British Empire?   [0:17:20] PJ: Oh, man. Dude. Counterargument in your face.   [0:17:24] Will: Whoa, guys. Whoa, guys. We have EMEA customers here.   [0:17:28] PJ: Of course, we're just playing. This is all in jest. But no, I think it's a genuine thing. I'm sure plenty of parents are concerned when their kids are spending hours and hours in their room. I'm sure they also don't understand how social gaming actually is.   [0:17:42] Spencer: Especially Fortnite.   [0:17:43] PJ: Especially Fortnite. But what I will say, if you want to ban Apex Legends, you can just go ahead and do that as far as I'm concerned, because I can't even get in a session without throwing the remote against the wall, everyone's so good.   [0:17:54] Spencer: Talk to this guy.   [0:17:55] Will: It's just because you're bad. But it's just the ... Real talk. I'm sorry. Don't just run around in the open and just flail about. Hide behind things. Shoot people.   [0:18:04] Spencer: You should get a lesson from Will.   [0:18:05] PJ: I thought that when you run out in the middle of the board and you kind of scattershot and spin in circles-   [0:18:10] Spencer: He can't be taught.   [0:18:11] Will: I need clay to mold.   [0:18:14] PJ: I'm too old. I'm too old. This old sponge is dried up. There's not much I can learn left.   [0:18:18] Spencer: "This Old Sponge," that's our new show.   [0:18:21] Will: On the subject of ... "This Old Sponge," with PJ Bruno. But on the subject of addiction and games, I do think it's a problem. It is something that ... it's not great for kids to spend infinite hours on these sort of things, but I think there's some interesting, far less intrusive ways than banning the stupid thing. I think ... I've seen some things I think in Vietnam or China, somewhere in Asia, there're some countries now which have stipulations that if somebody has n hours of consecutive play time, that they then have to pop up a message that says, "Hey, are you sure you want to keep playing? Maybe it's time to go take a break or go outside."   [0:19:00] PJ: That's pretty cool.   [0:19:00] Spencer: I like that.   [0:19:00] Will: Or I think some of the games also have something where you have to ... you get reduced experience or something like that after you play for too many consecutive hours.   [0:19:10] PJ: Interesting.   [0:19:11] Spencer: In-game punishment.   [0:19:12] Will: So the game ... Yeah, so you basically get decreasing rewards in the margin.   [0:19:17] Spencer: That's smart.   [0:19:18] PJ: That is really smart. Or if they could have a feature that causes your parent to care more and actually put some restrictions on how much you're playing the game. That's just me. Anyways, we're at our time. Will, thank you so much for being here.   [0:19:35] Will: Thank you, PJ. I hope you find yourself in the game someday, and stop hating the game. Hate the player.   [0:19:43] PJ: That's true. And I'll never stop searching for myself in-game. Spencer, thanks for coming along for the ride.   [0:19:48] Spencer: Thanks, Peej.   [0:19:49] PJ: And you, too. Thanks for joining us, guys. You take care. [0:19:52]

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Charles Max Wood Special Guest: PJ Evans In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more? 1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course. 2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about. 2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state.  2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node? 3:20 – Aimee. 3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course! 4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the... 4:13 – Chuck. 4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell. 4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node! 5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess. 5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is? 5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right? They are arguing about how to implement it.  6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are! 6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there. 7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it. 7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it? Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard? 7:38 – PJ. 8:11 – Panel. 8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though! 8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please. 8:30 – PJ. 8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it. 9:05 – PJ. 9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side? 9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are. 9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from... Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea. 10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!” 10:52 – Panel. 11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well. 11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users... 11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS. Chuck asks two questions. 12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled. 13:22 – Chuck: What are those things? 13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics. 15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do. 15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space. 16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE. 17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more. 18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs. Aimee mentions Vanilla Node. 18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM. 19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug. 20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE. 20:56 – Aimee. 21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch. 22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level. 22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working. 23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were. 24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend. 24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended. No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions... To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly. 25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that... 26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly. There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article! 28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article. 28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now. 29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday. 29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course. 29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck? 30:00 – PJ answers the question. 30:23 – Aimee. 30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days. 31:20 – Aimee. 32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight. 32:18 – Aimee. 32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for... 32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to? 33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals. It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course. 34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node? 34:38 – PJ answers the question. PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms. 35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other? 35:31 – PJ answers the question. PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge. 36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express. Google Classroom and Google Calendar. 39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below. 40:09 – Node can be used all over the place! 40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space. 40:31 – PJ: Yep! 40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you? 40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog! 41:04 – Picks! 41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Node Security Project Node Security Project - Medium Manning Publications: Course by PJ Evans PUG JSConf EU – talk with Philip Roberts Medium Article by David Gilbertson Hackster.io – Pi Car Pi Moroni Holding a Program in One’s Head PJ Evans’ Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Paul Graham - Blog AJ Rust Charles Tweet Mash-up The Diabetes Code PJ Music - Max Richter

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Charles Max Wood Special Guest: PJ Evans In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more? 1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course. 2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about. 2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state.  2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node? 3:20 – Aimee. 3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course! 4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the... 4:13 – Chuck. 4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell. 4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node! 5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess. 5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is? 5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right? They are arguing about how to implement it.  6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are! 6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there. 7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it. 7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it? Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard? 7:38 – PJ. 8:11 – Panel. 8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though! 8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please. 8:30 – PJ. 8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it. 9:05 – PJ. 9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side? 9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are. 9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from... Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea. 10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!” 10:52 – Panel. 11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well. 11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users... 11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS. Chuck asks two questions. 12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled. 13:22 – Chuck: What are those things? 13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics. 15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do. 15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space. 16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE. 17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more. 18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs. Aimee mentions Vanilla Node. 18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM. 19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug. 20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE. 20:56 – Aimee. 21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch. 22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level. 22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working. 23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were. 24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend. 24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended. No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions... To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly. 25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that... 26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly. There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article! 28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article. 28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now. 29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday. 29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course. 29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck? 30:00 – PJ answers the question. 30:23 – Aimee. 30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days. 31:20 – Aimee. 32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight. 32:18 – Aimee. 32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for... 32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to? 33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals. It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course. 34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node? 34:38 – PJ answers the question. PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms. 35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other? 35:31 – PJ answers the question. PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge. 36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express. Google Classroom and Google Calendar. 39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below. 40:09 – Node can be used all over the place! 40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space. 40:31 – PJ: Yep! 40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you? 40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog! 41:04 – Picks! 41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Node Security Project Node Security Project - Medium Manning Publications: Course by PJ Evans PUG JSConf EU – talk with Philip Roberts Medium Article by David Gilbertson Hackster.io – Pi Car Pi Moroni Holding a Program in One’s Head PJ Evans’ Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Paul Graham - Blog AJ Rust Charles Tweet Mash-up The Diabetes Code PJ Music - Max Richter

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Charles Max Wood Special Guest: PJ Evans In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more? 1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course. 2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about. 2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state.  2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node? 3:20 – Aimee. 3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course! 4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the... 4:13 – Chuck. 4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell. 4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node! 5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess. 5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is? 5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right? They are arguing about how to implement it.  6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are! 6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there. 7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it. 7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it? Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard? 7:38 – PJ. 8:11 – Panel. 8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though! 8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please. 8:30 – PJ. 8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it. 9:05 – PJ. 9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side? 9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are. 9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from... Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea. 10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!” 10:52 – Panel. 11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well. 11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users... 11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS. Chuck asks two questions. 12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled. 13:22 – Chuck: What are those things? 13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics. 15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do. 15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space. 16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE. 17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more. 18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs. Aimee mentions Vanilla Node. 18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM. 19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug. 20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE. 20:56 – Aimee. 21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch. 22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level. 22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working. 23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were. 24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend. 24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended. No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions... To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly. 25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that... 26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly. There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article! 28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article. 28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now. 29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday. 29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course. 29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck? 30:00 – PJ answers the question. 30:23 – Aimee. 30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days. 31:20 – Aimee. 32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight. 32:18 – Aimee. 32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for... 32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to? 33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals. It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course. 34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node? 34:38 – PJ answers the question. PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms. 35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other? 35:31 – PJ answers the question. PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge. 36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express. Google Classroom and Google Calendar. 39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below. 40:09 – Node can be used all over the place! 40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space. 40:31 – PJ: Yep! 40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you? 40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog! 41:04 – Picks! 41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Node Security Project Node Security Project - Medium Manning Publications: Course by PJ Evans PUG JSConf EU – talk with Philip Roberts Medium Article by David Gilbertson Hackster.io – Pi Car Pi Moroni Holding a Program in One’s Head PJ Evans’ Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Paul Graham - Blog AJ Rust Charles Tweet Mash-up The Diabetes Code PJ Music - Max Richter