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The UFFL is a Fantasy Football League comprised of 12 teams. It's members all came from a triple-wide trailer in the heart of Bristol, CT - where as young Sports Television (think 4 letters) Production Assistants, they battled for pride and very little money in the greatest fantasy football dynasty league...EVER.On the "UFFL: TOTAL NONSENSE PODCAST" you will hear behind the scenes stories and insider info about the league, it's odd owners, and the current fantasy football season. So stay tuned and learn from fantasy football legends (not really) about football (maybe), fantasy sports (possibly), life (doubtfully), and about the UFFL owners themselves (regrettably)!    It's the Ultimate Fantasy Football League...    in podcast entertainment form...    brought to you for F-R-E-E!!    By God, it's nearly worth every penny! East Division Draft Grades -Part 1______________________________________John, David, Chris, The Commish, Aladdin in the car (PLEASE DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME) and special guest, Jason –all on board to talk about the Division of Champions and their Grades!  We got song flashbacks, Aladdin flouting traffic laws, Scott quoting Jack Nicholson movies –we got it all!  PLUS more Total Jeopardy Nonsense!  It couldn't POSSIBLY go worse for our contestants than last ...well let's see.#Recorded Tuesday, June 8th_______________________________2021 East Division Rosters_______________________________Waiver Wire Heroes_______________________QBB. Mayfield/CLVM. Stafford/DETD. Lock/DENRBJ. Jacobs/LVC. Edwards-Helaire/KCJD McKissic/WSHD. Booker/NYGC. Patterson/ATLA. McFarland/PITWRB. Perriman/DETM. Pittman/INDJ. Guyton/LACC. Sutton/DENT. Patrick/DEND. Robinson/KCH. Ruggs/LVZ. Pascal/INDA. Humphries/TENTEH. Hunter/NED. Parnham/LACD. Knox/BUFT. Moss/CINK. Granson/INDKW. Lutz/NODEFDallasNew York JetsPRAXWR Johnson/TBQB Book/NODRAFT1 WR Chase/CIN3 WR St. Brown/DET4 WR Palmer/LAC4 TE Long/MIA5 WR Wallace/BLT5 RB Doaks/MIA_____________Mutt & Jeff_____________QBJ. Herbert/LACD. Carr/LVD. Jones/NYGT. Bridgewater/DENM. Trubisky/BUFRBE. Elliott/DALJ. Taylor/INDT. Coleman/NYJJ. Williams/DETW. Gallman/SFJ. McKinnon/KCWRAJ Brown/TEND. Samuel/SFB. Cooks/HOUM. Jones/JAXD. Mooney/CHIJ. Reagor/PHLJ. Reynolds/TENM. Valdes-Scantling/GBTEZ. Ertz/PHLA. Firskser/TENR. Seals-Jones/WSHKJ. Sanders/MIADEFWashingtonSeattleLA ChargersPRAXTE Bryant/CLVTE Yeboah/NYJDRAFT1 RB Williams/DEN2 WR Toney/NYG3 TE Jordan/HOU4 TE Tremble/CAR5 WR Williams/DEN______________________Gurley's Gone Wild______________________QBA. Rodgers/GBT. Tagovailoa/MIAR. Fitzpatrick/WSHJ. Winston/NOT. Heinicke/WSHRBM. Sanders/PHLM. Gordon/DENM. Davis/ATLT. Gurley/FAB. Hill/TENP. Lindsay/HOUM. Gaskin/MIAR. Armstead/NYGWRM. Evans/TBDJ Moore/CARM. Williams/LACJ. Schuster/PITA. Isabella/ARZKJ Hamler/DENTEG. Kittle/SFT. Tebow/JAXL. Thomas/WSHJ. Graham/CHIDEFAtlantaTampa BayPhiladelphiaPRAXQB Love/GBWR Peoples-Jones/CLVDRAFT1 WR Waddle/MIA2 RB Gainwell/PHL3 RB Hawkins/ATL3 WR Atwell/LAR5 WR Schwartz/CLV

Giannis said shooting three are an instinct like drinking coffee. What? The show figures out what bad instincts they have. Did Russell Wilson provide somewhat of a blueprint for Aaron Rodgers to return? Possibly. The week wraps with Hot & Cold.

Chinuch is sometimes translated as education or discipline, but neither do justice to the term; however how to be a mechanech requires education and discipline - on the part of the parents! Chinuch really means inauguration - and when we are blessed with a child we are given the ability to prepare him or her for their future role as members of Klal Yisrael.Possibly the most lasting legacy one can create is forging the future link to continue the seamless chain of Klal Yisrael. This series of shiurim will explore the principles and applications of raising the next generation of Avdei Hashem. This is the thirteenth shiur in this series

Isaiah 13–17 Isaiah 13–17 (Listen) The Judgment of Babylon 13 The oracle concerning Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw. 2   On a bare hill raise a signal;    cry aloud to them;  wave the hand for them to enter    the gates of the nobles.3   I myself have commanded my consecrated ones,    and have summoned my mighty men to execute my anger,    my proudly exulting ones.1 4   The sound of a tumult is on the mountains    as of a great multitude!  The sound of an uproar of kingdoms,    of nations gathering together!  The LORD of hosts is mustering    a host for battle.5   They come from a distant land,    from the end of the heavens,  the LORD and the weapons of his indignation,    to destroy the whole land.2 6   Wail, for the day of the LORD is near;    as destruction from the Almighty3 it will come!7   Therefore all hands will be feeble,    and every human heart will melt.8   They will be dismayed:    pangs and agony will seize them;    they will be in anguish like a woman in labor.  They will look aghast at one another;    their faces will be aflame. 9   Behold, the day of the LORD comes,    cruel, with wrath and fierce anger,  to make the land a desolation    and to destroy its sinners from it.10   For the stars of the heavens and their constellations    will not give their light;  the sun will be dark at its rising,    and the moon will not shed its light.11   I will punish the world for its evil,    and the wicked for their iniquity;  I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant,    and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless.12   I will make people more rare than fine gold,    and mankind than the gold of Ophir.13   Therefore I will make the heavens tremble,    and the earth will be shaken out of its place,  at the wrath of the LORD of hosts    in the day of his fierce anger.14   And like a hunted gazelle,    or like sheep with none to gather them,  each will turn to his own people,    and each will flee to his own land.15   Whoever is found will be thrust through,    and whoever is caught will fall by the sword.16   Their infants will be dashed in pieces    before their eyes;  their houses will be plundered    and their wives ravished. 17   Behold, I am stirring up the Medes against them,    who have no regard for silver    and do not delight in gold.18   Their bows will slaughter4 the young men;    they will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb;    their eyes will not pity children.19   And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms,    the splendor and pomp of the Chaldeans,  will be like Sodom and Gomorrah    when God overthrew them.20   It will never be inhabited    or lived in for all generations;  no Arab will pitch his tent there;    no shepherds will make their flocks lie down there.21   But wild animals will lie down there,    and their houses will be full of howling creatures;  there ostriches5 will dwell,    and there wild goats will dance.22   Hyenas6 will cry in its towers,    and jackals in the pleasant palaces;  its time is close at hand    and its days will not be prolonged. The Restoration of Jacob 14 For the LORD will have compassion on Jacob and will again choose Israel, and will set them in their own land, and sojourners will join them and will attach themselves to the house of Jacob. 2 And the peoples will take them and bring them to their place, and the house of Israel will possess them in the LORD's land as male and female slaves.7 They will take captive those who were their captors, and rule over those who oppressed them. Israel's Remnant Taunts Babylon 3 When the LORD has given you rest from your pain and turmoil and the hard service with which you were made to serve, 4 you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon:   “How the oppressor has ceased,    the insolent fury8 ceased!5   The LORD has broken the staff of the wicked,    the scepter of rulers,6   that struck the peoples in wrath    with unceasing blows,  that ruled the nations in anger    with unrelenting persecution.7   The whole earth is at rest and quiet;    they break forth into singing.8   The cypresses rejoice at you,    the cedars of Lebanon, saying,  ‘Since you were laid low,    no woodcutter comes up against us.'9   Sheol beneath is stirred up    to meet you when you come;  it rouses the shades to greet you,    all who were leaders of the earth;  it raises from their thrones    all who were kings of the nations.10   All of them will answer    and say to you:  ‘You too have become as weak as we!    You have become like us!'11   Your pomp is brought down to Sheol,    the sound of your harps;  maggots are laid as a bed beneath you,    and worms are your covers. 12   “How you are fallen from heaven,    O Day Star, son of Dawn!  How you are cut down to the ground,    you who laid the nations low!13   You said in your heart,    ‘I will ascend to heaven;  above the stars of God    I will set my throne on high;  I will sit on the mount of assembly    in the far reaches of the north;914   I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;    I will make myself like the Most High.'15   But you are brought down to Sheol,    to the far reaches of the pit.16   Those who see you will stare at you    and ponder over you:  ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble,    who shook kingdoms,17   who made the world like a desert    and overthrew its cities,    who did not let his prisoners go home?'18   All the kings of the nations lie in glory,    each in his own tomb;1019   but you are cast out, away from your grave,    like a loathed branch,  clothed with the slain, those pierced by the sword,    who go down to the stones of the pit,    like a dead body trampled underfoot.20   You will not be joined with them in burial,    because you have destroyed your land,    you have slain your people.   “May the offspring of evildoers    nevermore be named!21   Prepare slaughter for his sons    because of the guilt of their fathers,  lest they rise and possess the earth,    and fill the face of the world with cities.” 22 “I will rise up against them,” declares the LORD of hosts, “and will cut off from Babylon name and remnant, descendants and posterity,” declares the LORD. 23 “And I will make it a possession of the hedgehog,11 and pools of water, and I will sweep it with the broom of destruction,” declares the LORD of hosts. An Oracle Concerning Assyria 24   The LORD of hosts has sworn:  “As I have planned,    so shall it be,  and as I have purposed,    so shall it stand,25   that I will break the Assyrian in my land,    and on my mountains trample him underfoot;  and his yoke shall depart from them,    and his burden from their shoulder.” 26   This is the purpose that is purposed    concerning the whole earth,  and this is the hand that is stretched out    over all the nations.27   For the LORD of hosts has purposed,    and who will annul it?  His hand is stretched out,    and who will turn it back? An Oracle Concerning Philistia 28 In the year that King Ahaz died came this oracle: 29   Rejoice not, O Philistia, all of you,    that the rod that struck you is broken,  for from the serpent's root will come forth an adder,    and its fruit will be a flying fiery serpent.30   And the firstborn of the poor will graze,    and the needy lie down in safety;  but I will kill your root with famine,    and your remnant it will slay.31   Wail, O gate; cry out, O city;    melt in fear, O Philistia, all of you!  For smoke comes out of the north,    and there is no straggler in his ranks. 32   What will one answer the messengers of the nation?  “The LORD has founded Zion,    and in her the afflicted of his people find refuge.” An Oracle Concerning Moab 15 An oracle concerning Moab.   Because Ar of Moab is laid waste in a night,    Moab is undone;  because Kir of Moab is laid waste in a night,    Moab is undone.2   He has gone up to the temple,12 and to Dibon,    to the high places13 to weep;  over Nebo and over Medeba    Moab wails.  On every head is baldness;    every beard is shorn;3   in the streets they wear sackcloth;    on the housetops and in the squares    everyone wails and melts in tears.4   Heshbon and Elealeh cry out;    their voice is heard as far as Jahaz;  therefore the armed men of Moab cry aloud;    his soul trembles.5   My heart cries out for Moab;    her fugitives flee to Zoar,    to Eglath-shelishiyah.  For at the ascent of Luhith    they go up weeping;  on the road to Horonaim    they raise a cry of destruction;6   the waters of Nimrim    are a desolation;  the grass is withered, the vegetation fails,    the greenery is no more.7   Therefore the abundance they have gained    and what they have laid up  they carry away    over the Brook of the Willows.8   For a cry has gone    around the land of Moab;  her wailing reaches to Eglaim;    her wailing reaches to Beer-elim.9   For the waters of Dibon14 are full of blood;    for I will bring upon Dibon even more,  a lion for those of Moab who escape,    for the remnant of the land.16   Send the lamb to the ruler of the land,  from Sela, by way of the desert,    to the mount of the daughter of Zion.2   Like fleeing birds,    like a scattered nest,  so are the daughters of Moab    at the fords of the Arnon. 3   “Give counsel;    grant justice;  make your shade like night    at the height of noon;  shelter the outcasts;    do not reveal the fugitive;4   let the outcasts of Moab    sojourn among you;  be a shelter to them15    from the destroyer.  When the oppressor is no more,    and destruction has ceased,  and he who tramples underfoot has vanished from the land,5   then a throne will be established in steadfast love,    and on it will sit in faithfulness    in the tent of David  one who judges and seeks justice    and is swift to do righteousness.” 6   We have heard of the pride of Moab—    how proud he is!—  of his arrogance, his pride, and his insolence;    in his idle boasting he is not right.7   Therefore let Moab wail for Moab,    let everyone wail.  Mourn, utterly stricken,    for the raisin cakes of Kir-hareseth. 8   For the fields of Heshbon languish,    and the vine of Sibmah;  the lords of the nations    have struck down its branches,  which reached to Jazer    and strayed to the desert;  its shoots spread abroad    and passed over the sea.9   Therefore I weep with the weeping of Jazer    for the vine of Sibmah;  I drench you with my tears,    O Heshbon and Elealeh;

Possibly the dumbest question ever, asked about Disney?? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Captain Jim Lovell has travelled further into space than any other person and is one of only three to travel to the moon twice. Possibly even more profound, he has witnessed more than 260 sunrises from space.  Infamously the mission meant to be his third trip to the moon, Apollo 13, was cut short when a tank exploded. When I first spoke to Jim in July of 2018, I was in awe – he has been a hero of mine since I was a boy. Today, I revisit parts of that historic conversation because it has never been more relevant. As we're each faced with our own unique challenges today, let Jim's guidance on staying mentally strong in the face of unforeseen adversity inspire you. SHOW NOTES: When the odds are that long, how do you respond? “We thought about what we had to overcome, specifically: We had to figure out how to get back on course to get home. We had to decide what we had to turn off to save critical energy. We had to realize that each time we, we were slowly poisoning ourselves with carbon dioxide. We had to learn how to connect our current system to the old one because they weren't built to connect. Did you enjoy Jim Lovell's adventurous spirit? Listen to our entire conversation including what inspired his dream of going to space, meeting his wife and so much more on Live Inspired Podcast ep. 90.

Photo: 1818 Pinkerton Map of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Sudan, Nubia  This fascinating hand colored 1818 map by Edinburgh cartographer John Pinkerton depicts Abyssinia, Sudan and Nubia.  Covers from the Great Desert of Selima south to Donga and west through the “Dominons of a Princes called Ibbe”, Caffa (a Christian State), Bali and the Gulf of Aden. Covers the modern day regions of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and southern Egypt (Nubia). The whole offers beautiful and fascinating notations such as “The Supposed Ancient Island of Meroe”, inexplicable comments such as “Here the Portuguese found King David Encamped in the year 1520”, caravan routes and desert oases, and religious comments. Also includes details of the politically and socially volatile regions of Darfur (Darfour) and Kordofan in modern day Sudan. Possibly the finest map of the Abyssinia to appear in the 19th century. The map comes from the scarce American edition of Pinkerton's Modern Atlas, published by Dobson & Co. of Philadelphia in 1818..  ..  ..  CBS Eye on the World with John BatchelorCBS Audio Network@Batchelorshow1/2: Ethiopia moves to reunite with Eritrea to build a power of 120 million in the Horn of Africa. Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairshttps://www.theafricareport.com/93867/eritrea-ethiopia-a-string-of-near-chances-to-fully-normalise-relations/

Steve has a 15-minute rule. You have got to give a film 15 minutes to prove itself. If after 15 minutes you can easily walk away, then do it. Don't waste your time on a movie, if after 15 minutes you haven't connected with the characters, or the story hasn't drawn you in. Don't worry. The Peanut Butter Falcon is not a bad movie. JJ and Steve agree that the beginning may not draw everyone in. Give it time. By the time the paths of our two main characters cross you will likely be invested in them enough to want to watch the rest of their journey. Is there magical realism woven into the end of this film? Possibly. Will kids want to carve watermelon helmets after watching this? Maybe. Is this a film that the whole family can watch together and enjoy? Steve and JJ disagree. Listen in to find out why. Join the conversation with movie lovers from around the world on [The Next Reel's Discord channel][discord]! ### Film Sundries Thank you for supporting The Next Reel Film Podcast on Patreon! * Watch this film: [JustWatch][justwatch] * [Script][script] * [Original theatrical trailer][trailer] * [Original poster artwork][pinterest] * [Flickchart][flickchart] * [Letterboxd][letterboxd] [script]:https://www.scriptslug.com/assets/uploads/scripts/the-peanut-butter-falcon-2019.pdf [trailer]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNl9RqjLCwc [pinterest]:https://www.pinterest.com/thenextreel/the-next-reels-poster-collection/ [flickchart]:https://www.flickchart.com/movie/6B3CC28D44 [letterboxd]:https://letterboxd.com/film/the-peanut-butter-falcon/ [justwatch]:https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-peanut-butter-falcon [discord]:https://discord.gg/yW72E6M

Steve has a 15-minute rule. You have got to give a film 15 minutes to prove itself. If after 15 minutes you can easily walk away, then do it. Don't waste your time on a movie, if after 15 minutes you haven't connected with the characters, or the story hasn't drawn you in. Don't worry. The Peanut Butter Falcon is not a bad movie. JJ and Steve agree that the beginning may not draw everyone in. Give it time. By the time the paths of our two main characters cross you will likely be invested in them enough to want to watch the rest of their journey. Is there magical realism woven into the end of this film? Possibly. Will kids want to carve watermelon helmets after watching this? Maybe. Is this a film that the whole family can watch together and enjoy? Steve and JJ disagree. Listen in to find out why. Join the conversation with movie lovers from around the world on [The Next Reel's Discord channel][discord]! ### Film Sundries Thank you for supporting The Next Reel Film Podcast on Patreon! * Watch this film: [JustWatch][justwatch] * [Script][script] * [Original theatrical trailer][trailer] * [Original poster artwork][pinterest] * [Flickchart][flickchart] * [Letterboxd][letterboxd] [script]:https://www.scriptslug.com/assets/uploads/scripts/the-peanut-butter-falcon-2019.pdf [trailer]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNl9RqjLCwc [pinterest]:https://www.pinterest.com/thenextreel/the-next-reels-poster-collection/ [flickchart]:https://www.flickchart.com/movie/6B3CC28D44 [letterboxd]:https://letterboxd.com/film/the-peanut-butter-falcon/ [justwatch]:https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-peanut-butter-falcon [discord]:https://discord.gg/yW72E6M

Sprinkling on the "pure" of the altar - the Gemara puzzles out what this pure is. Possibly, the midpoint of the altar wall. Possibly, an indication of revelation, as the prooftext of a verse in Exodus suggests. Also, what happens when a Tanna changes his mind to agree with a different Tanna...?! Plus, what happens to the blood that runs off, into the Kidron River, no less? And if one uses that blood - as gardeners were said to do - how much so they have to worry about me'ilah (misusing that which was consecrated)?

David Ferrell pastors in Perth Andover, New Brunswick Canada. In this Episode he shares important wisdom that will truly be transformative to every listener no matter what your walk with God consist of. If you have ever wondered about time running out on your life, or wonder what in the world is God doing? Possibly even stress over the constant unknown in your relationship with God. This episode is exactly what you have been looking for. Enjoy!

Check out our sponsors: Butcher Box: Bacon for Life is back! New members get a package of FREE bacon in every box for the life of the subscription at ButcherBox.com/impact MindPump: Download their FREE guide at fatlossimpact.com Audible: Start listening with a 30-day free trial, one free audiobook and access to the Plus Catalog. Visit audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY or text IMPACTTHEORY to 500-500 Ten Thousand: Go to tenthousand.cc and enter code IMPACT to receive 15% off your purchase! When you think of empathy you may think of being overpowered with feelings and emotions for someone close to you that is having a response to something. Possibly you lump sympathy in the same basket with empathy and toss kindness in for good measure. Stanford professor and psychologist, Jamil Saki, joins me to not only break down the distinction between empathy and sympathy, but also explains the reason that empathy is critical to success and achieving goals. Understanding how empathy is so closely connected to how we advance as communities and build stronger relationships is life changing.   Order Jamil Zaki's new book, The War for Kindness: https://www.amazon.com/War-Kindness-Building-Empathy-Fractured/dp/0451499247   War For Kindness Empathy Gym: https://www.warforkindness.com/challenges   SHOW NOTES: War For Kindness | Jamil explains the oxymoron and the need to fight separation [0:26] Darwin Debunked | Jamil on how much more successful species are working together [2:26] Kindness Wins | 2 ways kindness is proven to be evolutionary winner & key to success [4:04] Collaborative Intelligence | Why humans have evolved intelligence to collaborate and win [6:10] Cooperation | Jamil on the effectiveness of cooperation to advance culture and society [9:24] Empathy | Jamil on why empathy is a vital skill for relationships and achieving goals [10:34] Defining Empathy | 3 parts that define the full range of empathy for connecting to others [11:56] Empathy & Kindness | Why you can have one without the other and how it's less healthy [13:00] Sympathy | Why Jamil avoids this term and feels the word has been compromised [14:19] Helpful Empathy | Jamil explains why certain parts empathy are not always useful [20:13] Survival Skill | How Jamil landed on his passion for exploring empathy as psychologist [21:57] Parochial Empathy | Jamil on how conflict leads us to selective empathy [26:24] Train Up Empathy | Jamil shares ways to build and improve empathy [30:08] Rwanda Genocide | How story-telling is being used to heal and finding empathy [34:27] Contact | How prejudice & hatred are easiest at a distance and how Tony found empathy [38:33]   QUOTES: “empathy is actually a vital skill that allows us to accomplish a lot of our goals” [10:47]   “sometimes I think people imagine that empathizing has to mean, I hurt when you hurt, and if we believe that then that can get get us into some cul de sac with our own process of empathy that we don't really need to go into.” [21:32]   “I think of my parents divorce as like an empathy gym.” [23:43]   “when we immerse ourselves in those stories, we can build our empathy towards real people, we can broaden our care towards real others, and that can be another really powerful way to practice this sort of personal growth” [38:05]   Guest Bio: JAMIL ZAKI is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Using tools from psychology and neuroscience, he and his colleagues examine how empathy works and how people can learn to empathize more effectively. His writing on these topics has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two daughters.   Follow Jamil Zaki: Website: https://www.warforkindness.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamil-zaki-b0b4a9192/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jazzmule Twitter: https://twitter.com/zakijam  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, co-authors of the upcoming book Just Evil Enough. We talk about the changing role of marketing and how companies can subvert systems, undermine industry norms, and get platforms to behave in unexpected ways that tilt the scales to generate attention and demand. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, Co-authors of Just Evil EnoughBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have some amazing guests. Today we have Alistair Croll and Emily Ross authors of the new book, Just Evil Enough, which is a book about getting noticed in this noisy environment and subversive go-to market strategies. Welcome to the show guys. Alistair Croll: Thanks for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks a million. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm super excited to have you on this call to give our audience a little bit of a sneak preview of the upcoming book. But first let me give a little bit of background. So, Emily Ross, you are a founder of a tech marketing consultancy company called Ink Vine based in Ireland. So we appreciate you coming across the pond to give us some insights on what's going on. And Alistair and I go back a long time back in the days of Lean Startup. And he's the coauthor of Lean Analytics. We brought him back to Nebraska about six or seven years ago, I guess it was, when I was working with Nmotion to help with our startup teams in that. So thank you for both being on the show. The title of the book, Just Evil Enough. How'd  you come up with that  and what's it all about? Alistair Croll: So I'll tell you a quick story. We ran an accelerator in Montreal called Year One Labs. And one of the companies in Year One Labs was a company called Local Mind. And Local Mind was a platform for asking people questions, asking strangers questions about an area.It was later acquired by Airbnb and Lenny Rachitsky,  the CEO ran supply-side growth there. And he's now the author of one of the most prominent newsletters for startup growth marketing, Lenny's Newsletter. And in the early days they were doing what every startup does, which is building lots of stuff. But because we were very Lean Startup focused, we have them ask what the biggest risk was.And it turns out the biggest risk was that whether people would answer questions from strangers. So they ran a very quick study, which we talk about in Lean Analytics. And they found that 94% of people on Twitter would answer a question from a stranger. But this happened because I had been asking Lenny, are you being evil enough?And they were like, we're not evil. And I said, yeah, but just a little evil, because it turns out that people answer questions, but people on the platform won't ask questions. The real risk is the supply of questions. And so they actually built a system that would ask fake questions of new users. So they get in the habit of asking questions. Now you can debate the means versus the end, but what we have found ever since that time is that almost every startup that's successful has some little dirty secret in their background, where they were able to take advantage of an emerging technology or subvert the way a platform is supposed to work and turn it to their advantage.And so the basic idea behind Just Evil Enough is that almost all the time, the problem isn't whether or not you can build something it's whether anyone will care. So your job should be creating attention you can turn into profitable demand. Emily Ross: I think the subversive word is really, really important because we want to clearly differentiate between nefarious, which is downright evil and subversive, which allows you to think a little bit differently.And it's very hard for people who've been conditioned to think a certain way, to try and think differently.  So the book is about trying to teach people how to think subversively, and to show examples and frameworks in order to do that. And I remember working at a platform years ago and one of the engineers said, right, I'm going to put this button on the website to test if people will click it.And my instant reaction was, but it doesn't go anywhere. That's a terrible idea. They're going to have an awful experience and that's bad for them. And he's like, no, but I don't want to build something unless I know they're going to need it. So I'm just going to put that button there and yeah, I'm going to burn a few thousand clicks and they're gonna have a terrible experience. I don't care. I'll learn something. And he was prepared to be disagreeable in order to learn something different and to save an awful lot of time and money. And it was funny. It was like, okay. I need to think a little bit differently about how we're treating users sometimes. Alistair Croll: Yeah, we did a similar thing at Gradient. We had a reporting feature. Gradient was a startup that I launched in 2001. Eventually got acquired by BMC, their TrueSight product line. And we were about to launch reports in the product. And so we created our reports tab, and the reports tab went to a survey page. It says, we're going to do reports soon, what would you like to see?And people put in their email address and the report they'd like to see. And of course we were building a generic reporting tool. So what we did is we then generated like the top 20 requested reports. Made them defaults and then mailed those people saying we loved your feedback. Thank you so much. We've built the report you're looking for. Forget about the fact that 40 other people ask for the same report. Every one of them felt like they were a unique and special snowflake. And so we were exploiting the asymmetry between what we knew, which was 20 people asked for it and what they knew, which was, Hey, look at this, I'm special. You listened to me. And the customers loved it. Right? Is that evil? Well, it meant that we were able to build the default reports people wanted, which made the product better, but it's a little subversive. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think part of that learning is the fact that I think a lot of people think that they need to build the entire thing, because that's what shows the value. But, you know, again, you have to incrementally de-risk some of these new startup ideas. And so how do you do that with building just enough to get the learning that you need so that you can move it to the next level and build it out if you need to? Alistair Croll: Well, I would say that the problem's not minimum viable product, it's minimum viable attention.Emily Ross: Yeah. And actually, if you think about, and this is the one thing that the book, I suppose, hammers home, is that getting your go-to market strategy right, is as important, if not more important than getting your product right. Because if you can't capture attention and turn it into profitable demand, then no one's going to know about your product. And it's all about various different approaches that you can use to figure out how to do that. And  asymmetry being just one of about 10, I think that we cover. Brian Ardinger: So, is it a form of customer discovery almost so rather than the traditional customer discovery interviews there, you're looking for different ways to engage with a marketplace, engage with a customer to get that understanding of what their demand is and where they want to go from there?Emily Ross: Well, it's really interesting. Some of the examples in the book are not business examples. There's a lot of historical stuff in there, right back from Machiavelli,  all the way through to The Godfather. There's businesses, oh, tell the Genghis Khan story. I love that one. Alistair Croll: So I mean, the idea behind a lot of this is that if you know something to be true, that other people discount, you can take advantage of that. And there are many times where people knew they could do something better, but didn't Genghis Kahn, for example, knew that women could be very effective rulers. This was something that was not widely held. And so he would conquer a city, marry one of his many, many daughters off to the leader of that city. Send that leader off to war, he'd promptly get killed. Now you have a blood relative in charge of that city. Was that evil? Well, Genghis Khan did a lot of nasty things, but he did have a decent amount of respect for women's ability to run cities, which was something nobody else was factoring in. And this was an unfair advantage. Right. And I think, I mean, we're getting a little ahead of it. One of the things that Emily talks about a lot, is the idea that you need to know the norms of your system in order to subvert them. So do you want to talk a little about the water stuff? Emily? Emily Ross: Yeah so normative versus formative is like super interesting. So there's a story of by two fish and they're swimming along, and a much older fish is swimming the opposite direction. And this is from... Alistair Croll: it's a commencement address, right?Emily Ross: That's it, the older fish says, Oh how's the water? And the fish swim on a little bit and they turned to each other and go, what the hell is water? So, you have to be able to recognize the fact that you're swimming in the medium. And the best way to do that is to use external viewpoints to help recognize what you're swimming in or downing  in.I also use a log jam metaphor, which works as well. And this is a one I use all the time for teaching for problem solving, but it's really, really applicable as well too, to recognizing the difference between normative and formative. So when these to say a logs down the river, to ship them to the log yard, And they would occasionally get tangled up and a team of river pigs used to have to surround the problem really quickly because it's obviously getting worse and worse all the time, and figure out which was the one key log that you could extract to unlock the whole problem.And the only way they could do it really, really well, was through diversity of thought, opinion, and perspective. By surrounding the problem, by sharing ideas, by looking at it from lots of different perspectives. And that's why diversity in your teams, that's why diversity of perspectives is so important so that you can actually recognize what you're swimming in, whether it's water or something, a little bit stinkier. And also getting the sense of looking at it from outside, what you're used to. So ideas from different verticals, from different walks of life. That's going to help you think subversively. Alistair Croll: And that's kind of the supervillain stuff. I mean, Brian, I'll give you an example, that's a concrete example from when I came to visit you .One of your startups was making a rotary sprinkler solution.So to recap, rotary sprinklers, when they're lateral to a strong wind, get blown over and this costs a lot of money to fix. And so they built a thing that could measure the weather and the incoming winds and rotate the sprinkler downwind kind of like a wind sock, so it wouldn't fall over. And they're having a hard time selling. And what the startup revealed to me at the time when we were meeting, was that there's this weird existing system between farmers, farm subsidies, insurance, salespeople, and the makers of those sprinklers.They don't really mind when it gets knocked over because everyone makes some money and then they use that money to go on a fishing trip. If you don't know that you're in that water, all your efforts to sell are going to fail. You've got to recognize that and then go, huh? Maybe this is something I can sell through the maker of the sprinklers, or like maybe I can, you can subvert that system.Maybe you have to create an awareness campaign that farm subsidies being wasted and they could be spent on something else. But if you don't know that strategy, you can't subvert it. And that word subvert just means find another version. By definition, the hardest problems we face are the ones for which we don't have an obvious solution, because the normal approaches don't work.Which means you've got to find an unusual approach and that's normally called hacking, right? Hacking is getting something to work in a way it wasn't intended. Whether you're using a Pringle can to focus wifi signals, or you're getting a computer system to throw an error, so you can own a system. The problem with hacking is that in startups, hacking has a horrible polar reputation. Growth hacking is a bag of cheap tricks.Brian Ardinger: Talk about some of the examples in the book that maybe some people have heard of or can get a visual around. I know you've mentioned in past talks and that I've seen around this is like things like Peloton or Burger King.  Can you give examples from that? Emily Ross: I would quite like to talk about one of the ones that I had the hardest time with is about being disagreeable. And we talked about it slightly there in terms of doing things that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being quite right. But as a woman, I have been raised to be polite, to be agreeable. And actually, if you look at some of the most innovative, interesting entrepreneurs in history, quite a lot of them have been profoundly disagreeable.They've been prepared to be unliked or unloved. And this is something, a behavior that you can adopt or think about as a means to finding new ideas, or it means of finding new ways of doing things. One of the examples that we talked sports a little bit earlier, but Wilt Chamberlain was arguably one of the best basketball players of all time. He has on more than one occasion scored over a hundred points in a single game. But he had a problem. He couldn't shoot free throws to save his life. Back in college, he had a really high score, but over his career, it went down and down and down and he had a career low of like, I think 26% success rate.He was a star player. He got fouled a lot. So this was a really big problem for him. So he went to see Rick Barry. Rick Barry was the guy who could not miss. He actually had a career average of 89.3% and he got better and better as his career progressed in the last two years of his career, he had a 94% success rate from free throws. But he actually threw in a really interesting way. He threw underhand, which is actually kind of a cool word for the, Just Evil Enough book, because he shot underhand. But he was the best at shooting. But this was called the Granny Style. This is, you know, if you throw like a girl, you throw under hand. He didn't care. His father had drummed it into him from a very young age, how to shoot underhand, overhand, underhand, overhand, and he could just nail it every single time.So Chamberlain went to see Barry learned to shoot underhand and his performance doubled. He went from a career low, to a career high, in that same game where he scored a hundred points. So it turns out it's a much better approach. However, Chamberlain didn't have the guts to keep shooting underhand because he cared too much about what people thought. His career best was 61% from the line in 1961, he sank 28 of 32 free throws against the New York Knicks.So after a while, though, he reverted to shooting the way he knew, and his percentages  plunged. And he admitted that he felt like a sissy. He worried too much about what other people thought. And unlike Barry who was rational, Chamberlain was being agreeable and wrong. Barry meanwhile said he could be as selfish as he wanted to without hurting his team. So being a little bit disagreeable or asking yourself what you're prepared to do is a really good first start. Alistair Croll: Just to chime in quickly, we've all heard of growth hacking right? Growth hacking is these little tricks that get people to click a button or move down a funnel or whatever. The problem with any of these known tricks is that they're known.  Andrew Chen talks about the law of shitty click-through rates, which is simply the idea that as you find a vulnerability, if you will, a way to change the market, it becomes widely known immediately.So the first click-through ad on Hot Wired had an average of 44% click-through rate. Some people say it was as high as 70% for a banner ad. What's that at now? Emily? Brian Ardinger: Well, industry averages will tell you, or they'll tell you it's 0.1%. But in my opinion, it's closer to 0.02%, if you're lucky. Alistair Croll: So that's a huge decline. Same thing happened with email and so on. And so there are these known hacks that are the sort of marketing equivalent of a script kitty, who's running an attack on WordPress. And if you haven't patched your site, you'll be selling Viagra off your website. What you should be doing is trying to find the marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit.So in security a zero day, is an attack that nobody knows about yet. And they're incredibly valuable. Two of them were used to retard the Iranian nuclear program and damaged centrifuges. The marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit, we call this zero day marketing, is finding a new way to get a platform to behave in an unintended manner, with which you can create attention you can turn into profitable demand. And there's some amazing examples of like Farmville, for example. When Farmville's app would send you a message saying, Hey, Brian, Alistair's cows need some grain. And you'd click on it. Now you're a user. Well, they got to 30 million users before Facebook went, Whoa, we maybe don't want apps posting to people's friend feeds.There are so many examples of this, and we can tell you those examples. But the point is you can't use those examples because they've already been done. Right? What you have to do is devote much more of your time to inventing your own zero day marketing exploits. Brian Ardinger: So from that perspective, is it a series of experiments that you just have to run? You, you come up with some ideas and you run them like that, or is this, talk me through the process of how you get better at it? Emily Ross: One of the examples that I like to share, if you see it often enough, you begin to understand how you can apply the thinking. It's a model and you just try and apply it to your own environment. So if we take the information asymmetry, and example, the idea of subverting, one thing for another. Or a bait and switch. The idea of you're selling one thing, but actually getting another and Tupperware parties did this, you know, you think you're going for dinner and you end up getting guilt ridden into buying a load of plastic.But when I was working in a comparison platform, we subverted the PR channel for the generation of white hat backlinks. So PR is generally around building brand and brand awareness. But one of the side effects of PR was the generation of backlinks. So this is back in like maybe 2013. So what we did was we mined data. We attached big data trends to celebrities, pushed out, press releases to high value domains, and pretty much one in five hit would generate a backlink. When we started. We had about 1400 high quality backlinks. And we were generating about 60,000 non-brand organic visits to site per day. And after three years of pushing out two releases a month, month in, month out, we had over four and a half thousand unique domain backlinks and almost 200,000 non-brand organic visits per day.And this was a platform that turned traffic into money. I won't tell you how, but what we did for example, was we mined hair transplant trends and prices. And one example of the many, many crazy pushes we did was the Jude Law index of baldness. So here's a scale up from Colin Farrell all the way up to Dr. Evil,  of how bald are you? And you find yourself on the index and you see, Oh, this is how much it would cost for me to have hair transplants. It was a price comparison website for private health clinics. And this was a fun, interesting way to attract attention and turn it into traffic to the sites. But actually it wasn't really about traffic. It was always about the backlinks. So one in five hits generate a backlink, but again, it was channel burnout. It was a zero day exploit because you know, over the course of the three years, the number of backlinks that were being generated, went from maybe one in five to one in 10, because the platforms themselves started to recognize the value that they were accidentally giving away.So naturally you get published in a paper. If there's an online version of it, they print it online and they put a backlink out. It was a side effect of the real, a pure PR. And channel burn happened, those backlinks are no longer as readily available as they were. But it worked for about three years, four years. It was a fun time. Brian Ardinger:  You have to have a continuous funnel  yourself of new things that you need to explore it. Emily Ross: Exactly.  Exactly. So that was a, we had a good run, but it's about thinking about, well, what is the channel? What is the platform? So PR was the channel and we used it in a way. It wasn't intended to be used for our benefits. And so what are your channels? How can you use them differently? And that's a really great question to ask of yourself, no matter what you're doing. Alistair Croll: One of the things we often do is. What has changed in a technology platform. So for example, Travis Kalanick has this new startup Cloud Kitchens. What has changed in restaurants? Well, first of all, there's a huge abundance of restaurants that I could order from. Far more than I would know about. So I'm already overwhelmed with selection when I go to order food, because we're all at home, in a pandemic, ordering food. And second of all, The fact that the storefront is virtual, it means one kitchen can have many restaurant front ends. And so Cloud Kitchens will set you up with brands and their brands have games like Fucking Good Pizza, My Pasta, Dirty Little Vegan Bitch, Don't Grill My Cheese. None of these tell you about food, but when you're overwhelmed, and you have that sort of paradox of choice, you go, no, I'll just order it from that one. That sounds fine. Right? That's only possible because that brand is part of an experiment. You're ordering from an experiment. And they're constantly testing, which ones get more attention and then the restaurant can deliver all of those things that might be the same kitchen. And so Cloud Kitchens has taken advantage of an exploit within the traditional model of food ordering. So it's looking at, you know, what technology changes or combinations of technology, makes something possible that wasn't possible before that you can then subvert to your ends. Brian Ardinger: How do you go from not just creating a gimmick or how do you, I guess also approach being wrong, like trying these things and, and being wrong?Emily Ross: Growth hacking is gimmicks. Growth Hacking is doing something that maybe it's a publicity stunt or, I mean, one of the examples that we use in the book is pairing two things unexpectedly together. That's a great way to draw attention and Heineken did this really well in the UK just last week, where they put out a mobile hairdressing units and bar, so you could get a free haircut and a pint together.So this generated publicity and it's nice, but it's gimmicky, right? Is that really going to move their needle? You know, for the year? Possibly not. It's a nice story. So, but if you look at governments have been doing this for years and they've done it so well, there's a really good example in the book, which I won't go into now about how the government shamed people into stopping spitting in the twenties, as they tried to fight TB. Instead of just saying it's bad to spit, they actually made people feel bad, and socially, and vulgar  by spitting because before that it was perfectly normal.And if you look at the Chinese government, they use Fapiao.  Fapiao  are receipts. And they use Fapiao  as a lottery to fight corruption. So this is really interesting. In China, corruption can be rampant. Merchants will give their customers a discount, if the customer doesn't ask for a receipt.So the merchant doesn't have to report the income and like just pockets to the savings. The government used an incentive to combat this called Fapiao, which is a receipt  from the merchant. And there's a couple of hacks in here that are super clever. So the merchants have to buy the receipts beforehand and then hand them out to customers in return for payment.So the first one is the merchant has to pay tax before the transaction. That's really smart. And then customers demand their Fapiao, because there's a scratch and win lottery element. And then the government runs the lottery and customers can scratch off the panel to see if they've won anything. And so the second hack there is create demand for a receipt by making it a game.And then of course the government can also adjust the prize amount of each lottery to create just the right amount of incentive. So they're literally able to alter the rewards of the game to like tilt the Nash equilibrium, which is just like super smart. So you can do this at a macro level and absolutely get away with it.Alistair Croll: I want to just make sure we address your question about gimmicks. One of the big differences between a Zero Day Exploit and traditional Growth Hacking is that it's not known. But another is that it is intrinsic to your business model. The haircuts aren't intrinsic to Heineken's beer, but when Dropbox launched, they were the first to pioneer this, both of us get something. I invite you, we both get storage. That's built into the product, right. That's intrinsic to the system itself. And I think what it means is that you're factoring in Zero Day Exploits, marketing exploits, to your business model and your product roadmap. Not just to your marketing campaigns. I mean, Genghis Khan's  a good example, right?It wasn't just a tactic. It was a fundamental change in how he thought that societies could be ruled. So the real lesson here is, I'll give you one more example. There's a company that makes software called Energage  and they make workplace surveys. So they would sell to an enterprise and the enterprise would survey their employees and do  360 stuff. And so on. But the way they go to market is they launched this thing called the top workplaces project in concert with the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News and so on. And they run this survey and they say to these newspapers, Hey everybody, here's the survey. We'll take care of it.So now you go do it. And like, Whoa, isn't this great. My company is one of the best workplaces. I'll buy an ad in the newspaper. Everything's wonderful. And then Energage can go back and go, Hey, congratulations on being the third best workplace in Nebraska. Too bad about the other results. And you go what other results? Well, you know, we got more data than that, would you like to see it? Okay. And now you have a new customer, right? It's intrinsic to the business model, right. Rather than just being a little trick or hack. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point. And it also goes to the point where you see a lot of these examples in startups, because you can build it early on into the business model and that. How does this play out for a large existing company that wants to try to use some of these tactics?Emily Ross: So big companies really need to think about reframing and they also need to give themselves permission to think in ways they're not used to. One of the exercises I like to recommend is called a pre-mortem. And you basically give them permission to imagine the worst possible outcome. You invite them to invent the worst, worst, worst thing that could possibly happen and then work backwards from there.And it's amazing what happens in an environment like that, because that group think is real. That tribal behaviors of wanting to be agreeable and wanting everyone to pull together is very much a systematic thing that you see in large organizations. So giving them permission to think disagreeably.  Giving them methods to reframe where they are, what they do. These are all great frameworks for them to try and think subversively. Alistair Croll: First of all, I think that it's really important. I mean, I would consider a marketing department, have a Red Team. Have a second group, hmm, that has the same product and resources, but their job is to put the first group out of business. What do you do? Right. That's just hypothetical. You're going to think better. We Red Team on security. We Red Team on PR. Why don't we read team on go-to-market strategies.  And the second thing is, if you look at great brands that changed how people discussed a product or a service, they found a frame of reference that favored them. For decades we used to talk about electric cars. We would talk about sustainability and range. Pretty boring stuff, right? Lots of hippies sitting around going let's save the planet and look at my Prius. Elon Musk put one of them on a race track against supercar and beat it. And all of a sudden the conversation on electric cars was performance. He'd reframed the discussion about electric vehicles to performance, right?When Gmail first launched, your inbox on Hotmail or Yahoo mail had 10 mgs. That's like one photo, right? We don't remember that. My daughter doesn't believe this. When Gmail came along, Google knew that they did not have strength in folders and archiving and hierarchy and export, but they were good at with search and storage.So they said, Hey, email's not about your ability to manage your folders and your inbox and organization and management. It's about abundance storage. And they reinforced that so much that they actually had a counter showing you how much storage you get. Salesforce, when it first launched, was a web based CRM, but web-based CRMs had very few features compared to Siebel and Vantive and Clarify, companies that you don't see anymore.So they said no CRM is about not needing IT. In fact, their logo was no software. They had us the word software with a slash through it, despite the fact that they own their own programming language called Apex. Right? And so each of these companies found a way to reframe things, even like Listerine. Listerine was this clinical health thing. And then along comes scope and says, Hey, you know what? Mouthwash is actually about being attractive and sexy, not about clinical health. One action that a lot of big brands should take is to step back and say, what is a new frame that favors us and disadvantages our competition. And then what is it about that frame of reference that we can do to prove it that will then allow the customer to find a different way of valuing the product?Emily Ross: I would also chime in there and talk about generally large marketing teams will have, they'll have done their marketing degrees and their MBAs or masters on they'll turn out the four P's from, you know, the 1960s or the seven P's of service. And like there's too much P. Just stop peeing. Guys just stopped doing it.Right. Chuck, all of that in the bin and start thinking about creating attention. And it's as simple and as complicated as that. We talk about human motivation and Alistair  I think coined laid, made, paid, afraid. I tidy that up a bit to the piratey AARG. Which is appeal, authority, risk, and greed. So think about your customers. Think about your competitors. Think about the marketplace through the lens of human behavior and whether you're selling radiator bits or cars or Cola, people have all those very basic triggers. They want to be liked that's appeal. They want power that's authority. They want to feel safe. That's the risk lens.And then greed, you know, people want the things that they want. So. We're just human meat bags, right? We're just walking bags of meat with emotions. We have very simple motivations at the end of the day. And in a B2B setting for a big organization, the AARG framework is a really useful function. Like, so throw out the P. Think about AARG.And if you're trying to convince people to act, you need to appeal to base emotions more than you do plain reason, because most people really aren't very rational. There's also really a good examples of the seven deadly sins. If you look at the big, big enterprises, I think Chris Pack said this on Twitter.I thought it was really, really good. Uber and Amazon are slough. Instagram and Tik Tok are pride. Door Dash is gluttony. Tinder is lust. Pinterest is envy. Twitter is rath. And Bitcoin is greed. So think about the fundamentals. Just think about the basics. We haven't changed all that much. Alistair Croll: But I think the biggest thing here is that big brands haven't realized that the biggest risk they face is that someone else will subvert attention that they could otherwise be getting and turned into their profitable demand. And so if you don't do that, you're going to get eaten alive. If we can get the world to realize that the biggest risk is not whether you will build something, but whether anyone will care, we've already given people a huge headstart.Brian Ardinger: Well, and the fact that the world is changing so fast on the fact that you can go from company like Airbnb in 12 years to being, you know, one of the most recognizable brands, you know, overnight effectively from what used to be to build a business. New technologies, new marketplaces, new access to talent. All of that is just accelerating the opportunities to be disrupted. Alistair Croll: We used to have a new platform come along. You know, we had writing that took a few thousand years. Then we got to radio. It took a few hundred years. And then we got to television that took a decade, the rate of introduction of new platforms. And therefore, if you're thinking like a hacker new attack surfaces, Is incredible, right? The Cloud Kitchens example happened because of the pandemic and the rise of Uber Eats and Door Dash, and so on. The pace at which new exploit opportunities appear is very, very fast. And as a result, there are far more opportunities to subvert the status quo or the norms of your industry with one of these new platforms.So we're trying to get people to be much more opportunistic. And part of what we do, like I said I can't tell you do this thing, because if I tell you, then it's already been done. What we can do is we can say, here are some ways to think about it. You know, is there an innovation that happens? Can you reframe things? Can you do a substitution where people think they're getting one thing and they're actually getting another. Can you appeal to the foibles of human psychology? Emily Ross: Don't be afraid to be disagreeable. Alistair Croll: It's weird because in the past I've written books that are very technical. There is a right answer. And Emily's written lots of articles on like how to do stuff. This is a more subjective thing and candidly more uncomfortable for us as writers, because we want to make sure that there are applicable lessons, but it's almost like, you know, teaching someone Zen. I can tell you what it is, but you're going to have to go sit on a rock and figure it out for yourself.But once you start thinking this way, everything becomes a subversive opportunity. And once you have that subversive lens, you're not being evil, you're just being just evil enough. Opportunities are everywhere. Emily Ross: And actually, if you think about it, just coming back to your very first question, which is a nice cyclicity.  The title of the book is exactly what we set out to do, which is we got your attention and we're turning it into demand. So the book title is a really, really simple and effective way to showcase the thinking. And I think if you take one thing away from it, it's change what you spend your time on. So building a subversive go-to market strategy is just as important as thinking about your product. And if you get the balance, right, you're going to be unstoppable. Brian Ardinger: Well, and you've also from the book perspective, the book's not out yet, but you're doing things to grab attention differently than a lot of, I mean, I get pitched every other day by a book author trying to get their book noticed and that. But I know that you've been doing some things as far as live online course that's leading up to the book. And you have a interesting little survey. I don't, if we got to talking about any of the things that you're doing from a attention perspective to, about the book. Emily Ross: Well one of the things I love, this was so much fun, is that you can't just order the book. You can't just pre-order it. You have to take a quiz so that we can decide if you're evil enough. So you take the quiz and if you're not evil enough, we think, you know, you're not going to be able to handle the book. And if you're too evil, then this book could just perhaps be too powerful. So we have gamified the experience of the pre-order function, which was a lot of fun. And we've done a ton of tons of things, just mostly because we'd like to mess around, but that's just one of the things we've done so far. Alistair Croll: It's also great that Emily has like a whole team of web developers that stand up.  Emily's business is actually, she's like the SWAT team or the MI6 for some very advanced tech brands, who can't really explain what they do well. And Emily figures out how to do that. So she has a team of people to build stuff. So a good example of that is we wanted to do a survey to see whether people would take our cohort based course, which we're going to be running with Maven, the founders of  Alt MBA and UDemy,   set up this new, online cohort based course program. But we wanted to get people to take the survey. So we told them one lucky winner will get a free workshop or talk from us for their organization, which is usually something we charged a lot of money for. But we also wanted to make sure they shared the survey, which is a paradox because I want the greatest odds of winning. So I'm not going to tell my friends, right?So we made two surveys. One was Team Orange, one was Team Black. And we say, we'll choose the winner from the survey that has the most responses. That's a bit subversive. Right. And we found some funny things about people getting kind of tribal and like I'm Team Black and so on. We even did things to tweak the survey questions a little bit between the two.So we ran like six or seven social experiments in the survey. But would you buy a book from people who weren't thinking subversively? I mean, I wouldn't buy a book on subversiveness for someone who went through normal tactics. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you both coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share some of this subversiveness and hopefully get more folks to be Just Evil Enough. People want to find out more about yourself or the book itself, what's the best way to do that. Emily Ross: Just Evil Enough.com and I'll actually, I landed Alistair in it on a talk we did last week because we were live Tweeting. They wouldn't let us take live questions. So we just got everyone to jump on Twitter and ask us questions there.And I promised everyone lives that if they hashtag Just Evil Enough that Alistair would read out whatever they wrote. And they all said smart, intelligent things. And I was like, I can't believe none of you are like trying to flog a course or a book or promote something. Like he will have to say anything you like. So people should...Alistair Croll: I think one guy had me mention his podcast, but there's a good example where like, Oh, you think you're getting free promotion in this thing we're recording, but you're actually following the Just Evil Enough account. Emily Ross: But yes, Just Evil Enough.com is where you can take the quiz. You can hear about the cohort class. You can, pre-order the book and there's an Evil Enough Twitter account too. You can check that out. Brian Ardinger: Well Emily, it was great to meet you for the first time here and Alistair. Always good to catch up with what's going on in your world. So appreciate you both for being on here and looking forward to the conversation in the future.Alistair Croll: Thanks so much for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, co-authors of the upcoming book Just Evil Enough. We talk about the changing role of marketing and how companies can subvert systems, undermine industry norms, and get platforms to behave in unexpected ways that tilt the scales to generate attention and demand. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, Co-authors of Just Evil EnoughBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have some amazing guests. Today we have Alistair Croll and Emily Ross authors of the new book, Just Evil Enough, which is a book about getting noticed in this noisy environment and subversive go-to market strategies. Welcome to the show guys. Alistair Croll: Thanks for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks a million. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm super excited to have you on this call to give our audience a little bit of a sneak preview of the upcoming book. But first let me give a little bit of background. So, Emily Ross, you are a founder of a tech marketing consultancy company called Ink Vine based in Ireland. So we appreciate you coming across the pond to give us some insights on what's going on. And Alistair and I go back a long time back in the days of Lean Startup. And he's the coauthor of Lean Analytics. We brought him back to Nebraska about six or seven years ago, I guess it was, when I was working with Nmotion to help with our startup teams in that. So thank you for both being on the show. The title of the book, Just Evil Enough. How'd  you come up with that  and what's it all about? Alistair Croll: So I'll tell you a quick story. We ran an accelerator in Montreal called Year One Labs. And one of the companies in Year One Labs was a company called Local Mind. And Local Mind was a platform for asking people questions, asking strangers questions about an area.It was later acquired by Airbnb and Lenny Rachitsky,  the CEO ran supply-side growth there. And he's now the author of one of the most prominent newsletters for startup growth marketing, Lenny's Newsletter. And in the early days they were doing what every startup does, which is building lots of stuff. But because we were very Lean Startup focused, we have them ask what the biggest risk was.And it turns out the biggest risk was that whether people would answer questions from strangers. So they ran a very quick study, which we talk about in Lean Analytics. And they found that 94% of people on Twitter would answer a question from a stranger. But this happened because I had been asking Lenny, are you being evil enough?And they were like, we're not evil. And I said, yeah, but just a little evil, because it turns out that people answer questions, but people on the platform won't ask questions. The real risk is the supply of questions. And so they actually built a system that would ask fake questions of new users. So they get in the habit of asking questions. Now you can debate the means versus the end, but what we have found ever since that time is that almost every startup that's successful has some little dirty secret in their background, where they were able to take advantage of an emerging technology or subvert the way a platform is supposed to work and turn it to their advantage.And so the basic idea behind Just Evil Enough is that almost all the time, the problem isn't whether or not you can build something it's whether anyone will care. So your job should be creating attention you can turn into profitable demand. Emily Ross: I think the subversive word is really, really important because we want to clearly differentiate between nefarious, which is downright evil and subversive, which allows you to think a little bit differently.And it's very hard for people who've been conditioned to think a certain way, to try and think differently.  So the book is about trying to teach people how to think subversively, and to show examples and frameworks in order to do that. And I remember working at a platform years ago and one of the engineers said, right, I'm going to put this button on the website to test if people will click it.And my instant reaction was, but it doesn't go anywhere. That's a terrible idea. They're going to have an awful experience and that's bad for them. And he's like, no, but I don't want to build something unless I know they're going to need it. So I'm just going to put that button there and yeah, I'm going to burn a few thousand clicks and they're gonna have a terrible experience. I don't care. I'll learn something. And he was prepared to be disagreeable in order to learn something different and to save an awful lot of time and money. And it was funny. It was like, okay. I need to think a little bit differently about how we're treating users sometimes. Alistair Croll: Yeah, we did a similar thing at Gradient. We had a reporting feature. Gradient was a startup that I launched in 2001. Eventually got acquired by BMC, their TrueSight product line. And we were about to launch reports in the product. And so we created our reports tab, and the reports tab went to a survey page. It says, we're going to do reports soon, what would you like to see?And people put in their email address and the report they'd like to see. And of course we were building a generic reporting tool. So what we did is we then generated like the top 20 requested reports. Made them defaults and then mailed those people saying we loved your feedback. Thank you so much. We've built the report you're looking for. Forget about the fact that 40 other people ask for the same report. Every one of them felt like they were a unique and special snowflake. And so we were exploiting the asymmetry between what we knew, which was 20 people asked for it and what they knew, which was, Hey, look at this, I'm special. You listened to me. And the customers loved it. Right? Is that evil? Well, it meant that we were able to build the default reports people wanted, which made the product better, but it's a little subversive. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think part of that learning is the fact that I think a lot of people think that they need to build the entire thing, because that's what shows the value. But, you know, again, you have to incrementally de-risk some of these new startup ideas. And so how do you do that with building just enough to get the learning that you need so that you can move it to the next level and build it out if you need to? Alistair Croll: Well, I would say that the problem's not minimum viable product, it's minimum viable attention.Emily Ross: Yeah. And actually, if you think about, and this is the one thing that the book, I suppose, hammers home, is that getting your go-to market strategy right, is as important, if not more important than getting your product right. Because if you can't capture attention and turn it into profitable demand, then no one's going to know about your product. And it's all about various different approaches that you can use to figure out how to do that. And  asymmetry being just one of about 10, I think that we cover. Brian Ardinger: So, is it a form of customer discovery almost so rather than the traditional customer discovery interviews there, you're looking for different ways to engage with a marketplace, engage with a customer to get that understanding of what their demand is and where they want to go from there?Emily Ross: Well, it's really interesting. Some of the examples in the book are not business examples. There's a lot of historical stuff in there, right back from Machiavelli,  all the way through to The Godfather. There's businesses, oh, tell the Genghis Khan story. I love that one. Alistair Croll: So I mean, the idea behind a lot of this is that if you know something to be true, that other people discount, you can take advantage of that. And there are many times where people knew they could do something better, but didn't Genghis Kahn, for example, knew that women could be very effective rulers. This was something that was not widely held. And so he would conquer a city, marry one of his many, many daughters off to the leader of that city. Send that leader off to war, he'd promptly get killed. Now you have a blood relative in charge of that city. Was that evil? Well, Genghis Khan did a lot of nasty things, but he did have a decent amount of respect for women's ability to run cities, which was something nobody else was factoring in. And this was an unfair advantage. Right. And I think, I mean, we're getting a little ahead of it. One of the things that Emily talks about a lot, is the idea that you need to know the norms of your system in order to subvert them. So do you want to talk a little about the water stuff? Emily? Emily Ross: Yeah so normative versus formative is like super interesting. So there's a story of by two fish and they're swimming along, and a much older fish is swimming the opposite direction. And this is from... Alistair Croll: it's a commencement address, right?Emily Ross: That's it, the older fish says, Oh how's the water? And the fish swim on a little bit and they turned to each other and go, what the hell is water? So, you have to be able to recognize the fact that you're swimming in the medium. And the best way to do that is to use external viewpoints to help recognize what you're swimming in or downing  in.I also use a log jam metaphor, which works as well. And this is a one I use all the time for teaching for problem solving, but it's really, really applicable as well too, to recognizing the difference between normative and formative. So when these to say a logs down the river, to ship them to the log yard, And they would occasionally get tangled up and a team of river pigs used to have to surround the problem really quickly because it's obviously getting worse and worse all the time, and figure out which was the one key log that you could extract to unlock the whole problem.And the only way they could do it really, really well, was through diversity of thought, opinion, and perspective. By surrounding the problem, by sharing ideas, by looking at it from lots of different perspectives. And that's why diversity in your teams, that's why diversity of perspectives is so important so that you can actually recognize what you're swimming in, whether it's water or something, a little bit stinkier. And also getting the sense of looking at it from outside, what you're used to. So ideas from different verticals, from different walks of life. That's going to help you think subversively. Alistair Croll: And that's kind of the supervillain stuff. I mean, Brian, I'll give you an example, that's a concrete example from when I came to visit you .One of your startups was making a rotary sprinkler solution.So to recap, rotary sprinklers, when they're lateral to a strong wind, get blown over and this costs a lot of money to fix. And so they built a thing that could measure the weather and the incoming winds and rotate the sprinkler downwind kind of like a wind sock, so it wouldn't fall over. And they're having a hard time selling. And what the startup revealed to me at the time when we were meeting, was that there's this weird existing system between farmers, farm subsidies, insurance, salespeople, and the makers of those sprinklers.They don't really mind when it gets knocked over because everyone makes some money and then they use that money to go on a fishing trip. If you don't know that you're in that water, all your efforts to sell are going to fail. You've got to recognize that and then go, huh? Maybe this is something I can sell through the maker of the sprinklers, or like maybe I can, you can subvert that system.Maybe you have to create an awareness campaign that farm subsidies being wasted and they could be spent on something else. But if you don't know that strategy, you can't subvert it. And that word subvert just means find another version. By definition, the hardest problems we face are the ones for which we don't have an obvious solution, because the normal approaches don't work.Which means you've got to find an unusual approach and that's normally called hacking, right? Hacking is getting something to work in a way it wasn't intended. Whether you're using a Pringle can to focus wifi signals, or you're getting a computer system to throw an error, so you can own a system. The problem with hacking is that in startups, hacking has a horrible polar reputation. Growth hacking is a bag of cheap tricks.Brian Ardinger: Talk about some of the examples in the book that maybe some people have heard of or can get a visual around. I know you've mentioned in past talks and that I've seen around this is like things like Peloton or Burger King.  Can you give examples from that? Emily Ross: I would quite like to talk about one of the ones that I had the hardest time with is about being disagreeable. And we talked about it slightly there in terms of doing things that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being quite right. But as a woman, I have been raised to be polite, to be agreeable. And actually, if you look at some of the most innovative, interesting entrepreneurs in history, quite a lot of them have been profoundly disagreeable.They've been prepared to be unliked or unloved. And this is something, a behavior that you can adopt or think about as a means to finding new ideas, or it means of finding new ways of doing things. One of the examples that we talked sports a little bit earlier, but Wilt Chamberlain was arguably one of the best basketball players of all time. He has on more than one occasion scored over a hundred points in a single game. But he had a problem. He couldn't shoot free throws to save his life. Back in college, he had a really high score, but over his career, it went down and down and down and he had a career low of like, I think 26% success rate.He was a star player. He got fouled a lot. So this was a really big problem for him. So he went to see Rick Barry. Rick Barry was the guy who could not miss. He actually had a career average of 89.3% and he got better and better as his career progressed in the last two years of his career, he had a 94% success rate from free throws. But he actually threw in a really interesting way. He threw underhand, which is actually kind of a cool word for the, Just Evil Enough book, because he shot underhand. But he was the best at shooting. But this was called the Granny Style. This is, you know, if you throw like a girl, you throw under hand. He didn't care. His father had drummed it into him from a very young age, how to shoot underhand, overhand, underhand, overhand, and he could just nail it every single time.So Chamberlain went to see Barry learned to shoot underhand and his performance doubled. He went from a career low, to a career high, in that same game where he scored a hundred points. So it turns out it's a much better approach. However, Chamberlain didn't have the guts to keep shooting underhand because he cared too much about what people thought. His career best was 61% from the line in 1961, he sank 28 of 32 free throws against the New York Knicks.So after a while, though, he reverted to shooting the way he knew, and his percentages  plunged. And he admitted that he felt like a sissy. He worried too much about what other people thought. And unlike Barry who was rational, Chamberlain was being agreeable and wrong. Barry meanwhile said he could be as selfish as he wanted to without hurting his team. So being a little bit disagreeable or asking yourself what you're prepared to do is a really good first start. Alistair Croll: Just to chime in quickly, we've all heard of growth hacking right? Growth hacking is these little tricks that get people to click a button or move down a funnel or whatever. The problem with any of these known tricks is that they're known.  Andrew Chen talks about the law of shitty click-through rates, which is simply the idea that as you find a vulnerability, if you will, a way to change the market, it becomes widely known immediately.So the first click-through ad on Hot Wired had an average of 44% click-through rate. Some people say it was as high as 70% for a banner ad. What's that at now? Emily? Brian Ardinger: Well, industry averages will tell you, or they'll tell you it's 0.1%. But in my opinion, it's closer to 0.02%, if you're lucky. Alistair Croll: So that's a huge decline. Same thing happened with email and so on. And so there are these known hacks that are the sort of marketing equivalent of a script kitty, who's running an attack on WordPress. And if you haven't patched your site, you'll be selling Viagra off your website. What you should be doing is trying to find the marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit.So in security a zero day, is an attack that nobody knows about yet. And they're incredibly valuable. Two of them were used to retard the Iranian nuclear program and damaged centrifuges. The marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit, we call this zero day marketing, is finding a new way to get a platform to behave in an unintended manner, with which you can create attention you can turn into profitable demand. And there's some amazing examples of like Farmville, for example. When Farmville's app would send you a message saying, Hey, Brian, Alistair's cows need some grain. And you'd click on it. Now you're a user. Well, they got to 30 million users before Facebook went, Whoa, we maybe don't want apps posting to people's friend feeds.There are so many examples of this, and we can tell you those examples. But the point is you can't use those examples because they've already been done. Right? What you have to do is devote much more of your time to inventing your own zero day marketing exploits. Brian Ardinger: So from that perspective, is it a series of experiments that you just have to run? You, you come up with some ideas and you run them like that, or is this, talk me through the process of how you get better at it? Emily Ross: One of the examples that I like to share, if you see it often enough, you begin to understand how you can apply the thinking. It's a model and you just try and apply it to your own environment. So if we take the information asymmetry, and example, the idea of subverting, one thing for another. Or a bait and switch. The idea of you're selling one thing, but actually getting another and Tupperware parties did this, you know, you think you're going for dinner and you end up getting guilt ridden into buying a load of plastic.But when I was working in a comparison platform, we subverted the PR channel for the generation of white hat backlinks. So PR is generally around building brand and brand awareness. But one of the side effects of PR was the generation of backlinks. So this is back in like maybe 2013. So what we did was we mined data. We attached big data trends to celebrities, pushed out, press releases to high value domains, and pretty much one in five hit would generate a backlink. When we started. We had about 1400 high quality backlinks. And we were generating about 60,000 non-brand organic visits to site per day. And after three years of pushing out two releases a month, month in, month out, we had over four and a half thousand unique domain backlinks and almost 200,000 non-brand organic visits per day.And this was a platform that turned traffic into money. I won't tell you how, but what we did for example, was we mined hair transplant trends and prices. And one example of the many, many crazy pushes we did was the Jude Law index of baldness. So here's a scale up from Colin Farrell all the way up to Dr. Evil,  of how bald are you? And you find yourself on the index and you see, Oh, this is how much it would cost for me to have hair transplants. It was a price comparison website for private health clinics. And this was a fun, interesting way to attract attention and turn it into traffic to the sites. But actually it wasn't really about traffic. It was always about the backlinks. So one in five hits generate a backlink, but again, it was channel burnout. It was a zero day exploit because you know, over the course of the three years, the number of backlinks that were being generated, went from maybe one in five to one in 10, because the platforms themselves started to recognize the value that they were accidentally giving away.So naturally you get published in a paper. If there's an online version of it, they print it online and they put a backlink out. It was a side effect of the real, a pure PR. And channel burn happened, those backlinks are no longer as readily available as they were. But it worked for about three years, four years. It was a fun time. Brian Ardinger:  You have to have a continuous funnel  yourself of new things that you need to explore it. Emily Ross: Exactly.  Exactly. So that was a, we had a good run, but it's about thinking about, well, what is the channel? What is the platform? So PR was the channel and we used it in a way. It wasn't intended to be used for our benefits. And so what are your channels? How can you use them differently? And that's a really great question to ask of yourself, no matter what you're doing. Alistair Croll: One of the things we often do is. What has changed in a technology platform. So for example, Travis Kalanick has this new startup Cloud Kitchens. What has changed in restaurants? Well, first of all, there's a huge abundance of restaurants that I could order from. Far more than I would know about. So I'm already overwhelmed with selection when I go to order food, because we're all at home, in a pandemic, ordering food. And second of all, The fact that the storefront is virtual, it means one kitchen can have many restaurant front ends. And so Cloud Kitchens will set you up with brands and their brands have games like Fucking Good Pizza, My Pasta, Dirty Little Vegan Bitch, Don't Grill My Cheese. None of these tell you about food, but when you're overwhelmed, and you have that sort of paradox of choice, you go, no, I'll just order it from that one. That sounds fine. Right? That's only possible because that brand is part of an experiment. You're ordering from an experiment. And they're constantly testing, which ones get more attention and then the restaurant can deliver all of those things that might be the same kitchen. And so Cloud Kitchens has taken advantage of an exploit within the traditional model of food ordering. So it's looking at, you know, what technology changes or combinations of technology, makes something possible that wasn't possible before that you can then subvert to your ends. Brian Ardinger: How do you go from not just creating a gimmick or how do you, I guess also approach being wrong, like trying these things and, and being wrong?Emily Ross: Growth hacking is gimmicks. Growth Hacking is doing something that maybe it's a publicity stunt or, I mean, one of the examples that we use in the book is pairing two things unexpectedly together. That's a great way to draw attention and Heineken did this really well in the UK just last week, where they put out a mobile hairdressing units and bar, so you could get a free haircut and a pint together.So this generated publicity and it's nice, but it's gimmicky, right? Is that really going to move their needle? You know, for the year? Possibly not. It's a nice story. So, but if you look at governments have been doing this for years and they've done it so well, there's a really good example in the book, which I won't go into now about how the government shamed people into stopping spitting in the twenties, as they tried to fight TB. Instead of just saying it's bad to spit, they actually made people feel bad, and socially, and vulgar  by spitting because before that it was perfectly normal.And if you look at the Chinese government, they use Fapiao.  Fapiao  are receipts. And they use Fapiao  as a lottery to fight corruption. So this is really interesting. In China, corruption can be rampant. Merchants will give their customers a discount, if the customer doesn't ask for a receipt.So the merchant doesn't have to report the income and like just pockets to the savings. The government used an incentive to combat this called Fapiao, which is a receipt  from the merchant. And there's a couple of hacks in here that are super clever. So the merchants have to buy the receipts beforehand and then hand them out to customers in return for payment.So the first one is the merchant has to pay tax before the transaction. That's really smart. And then customers demand their Fapiao, because there's a scratch and win lottery element. And then the government runs the lottery and customers can scratch off the panel to see if they've won anything. And so the second hack there is create demand for a receipt by making it a game.And then of course the government can also adjust the prize amount of each lottery to create just the right amount of incentive. So they're literally able to alter the rewards of the game to like tilt the Nash equilibrium, which is just like super smart. So you can do this at a macro level and absolutely get away with it.Alistair Croll: I want to just make sure we address your question about gimmicks. One of the big differences between a Zero Day Exploit and traditional Growth Hacking is that it's not known. But another is that it is intrinsic to your business model. The haircuts aren't intrinsic to Heineken's beer, but when Dropbox launched, they were the first to pioneer this, both of us get something. I invite you, we both get storage. That's built into the product, right. That's intrinsic to the system itself. And I think what it means is that you're factoring in Zero Day Exploits, marketing exploits, to your business model and your product roadmap. Not just to your marketing campaigns. I mean, Genghis Khan's  a good example, right?It wasn't just a tactic. It was a fundamental change in how he thought that societies could be ruled. So the real lesson here is, I'll give you one more example. There's a company that makes software called Energage  and they make workplace surveys. So they would sell to an enterprise and the enterprise would survey their employees and do  360 stuff. And so on. But the way they go to market is they launched this thing called the top workplaces project in concert with the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News and so on. And they run this survey and they say to these newspapers, Hey everybody, here's the survey. We'll take care of it.So now you go do it. And like, Whoa, isn't this great. My company is one of the best workplaces. I'll buy an ad in the newspaper. Everything's wonderful. And then Energage can go back and go, Hey, congratulations on being the third best workplace in Nebraska. Too bad about the other results. And you go what other results? Well, you know, we got more data than that, would you like to see it? Okay. And now you have a new customer, right? It's intrinsic to the business model, right. Rather than just being a little trick or hack. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point. And it also goes to the point where you see a lot of these examples in startups, because you can build it early on into the business model and that. How does this play out for a large existing company that wants to try to use some of these tactics?Emily Ross: So big companies really need to think about reframing and they also need to give themselves permission to think in ways they're not used to. One of the exercises I like to recommend is called a pre-mortem. And you basically give them permission to imagine the worst possible outcome. You invite them to invent the worst, worst, worst thing that could possibly happen and then work backwards from there.And it's amazing what happens in an environment like that, because that group think is real. That tribal behaviors of wanting to be agreeable and wanting everyone to pull together is very much a systematic thing that you see in large organizations. So giving them permission to think disagreeably.  Giving them methods to reframe where they are, what they do. These are all great frameworks for them to try and think subversively. Alistair Croll: First of all, I think that it's really important. I mean, I would consider a marketing department, have a Red Team. Have a second group, hmm, that has the same product and resources, but their job is to put the first group out of business. What do you do? Right. That's just hypothetical. You're going to think better. We Red Team on security. We Red Team on PR. Why don't we read team on go-to-market strategies.  And the second thing is, if you look at great brands that changed how people discussed a product or a service, they found a frame of reference that favored them. For decades we used to talk about electric cars. We would talk about sustainability and range. Pretty boring stuff, right? Lots of hippies sitting around going let's save the planet and look at my Prius. Elon Musk put one of them on a race track against supercar and beat it. And all of a sudden the conversation on electric cars was performance. He'd reframed the discussion about electric vehicles to performance, right?When Gmail first launched, your inbox on Hotmail or Yahoo mail had 10 mgs. That's like one photo, right? We don't remember that. My daughter doesn't believe this. When Gmail came along, Google knew that they did not have strength in folders and archiving and hierarchy and export, but they were good at with search and storage.So they said, Hey, email's not about your ability to manage your folders and your inbox and organization and management. It's about abundance storage. And they reinforced that so much that they actually had a counter showing you how much storage you get. Salesforce, when it first launched, was a web based CRM, but web-based CRMs had very few features compared to Siebel and Vantive and Clarify, companies that you don't see anymore.So they said no CRM is about not needing IT. In fact, their logo was no software. They had us the word software with a slash through it, despite the fact that they own their own programming language called Apex. Right? And so each of these companies found a way to reframe things, even like Listerine. Listerine was this clinical health thing. And then along comes scope and says, Hey, you know what? Mouthwash is actually about being attractive and sexy, not about clinical health. One action that a lot of big brands should take is to step back and say, what is a new frame that favors us and disadvantages our competition. And then what is it about that frame of reference that we can do to prove it that will then allow the customer to find a different way of valuing the product?Emily Ross: I would also chime in there and talk about generally large marketing teams will have, they'll have done their marketing degrees and their MBAs or masters on they'll turn out the four P's from, you know, the 1960s or the seven P's of service. And like there's too much P. Just stop peeing. Guys just stopped doing it.Right. Chuck, all of that in the bin and start thinking about creating attention. And it's as simple and as complicated as that. We talk about human motivation and Alistair  I think coined laid, made, paid, afraid. I tidy that up a bit to the piratey AARG. Which is appeal, authority, risk, and greed. So think about your customers. Think about your competitors. Think about the marketplace through the lens of human behavior and whether you're selling radiator bits or cars or Cola, people have all those very basic triggers. They want to be liked that's appeal. They want power that's authority. They want to feel safe. That's the risk lens.And then greed, you know, people want the things that they want. So. We're just human meat bags, right? We're just walking bags of meat with emotions. We have very simple motivations at the end of the day. And in a B2B setting for a big organization, the AARG framework is a really useful function. Like, so throw out the P. Think about AARG.And if you're trying to convince people to act, you need to appeal to base emotions more than you do plain reason, because most people really aren't very rational. There's also really a good examples of the seven deadly sins. If you look at the big, big enterprises, I think Chris Pack said this on Twitter.I thought it was really, really good. Uber and Amazon are slough. Instagram and Tik Tok are pride. Door Dash is gluttony. Tinder is lust. Pinterest is envy. Twitter is rath. And Bitcoin is greed. So think about the fundamentals. Just think about the basics. We haven't changed all that much. Alistair Croll: But I think the biggest thing here is that big brands haven't realized that the biggest risk they face is that someone else will subvert attention that they could otherwise be getting and turned into their profitable demand. And so if you don't do that, you're going to get eaten alive. If we can get the world to realize that the biggest risk is not whether you will build something, but whether anyone will care, we've already given people a huge headstart.Brian Ardinger: Well, and the fact that the world is changing so fast on the fact that you can go from company like Airbnb in 12 years to being, you know, one of the most recognizable brands, you know, overnight effectively from what used to be to build a business. New technologies, new marketplaces, new access to talent. All of that is just accelerating the opportunities to be disrupted. Alistair Croll: We used to have a new platform come along. You know, we had writing that took a few thousand years. Then we got to radio. It took a few hundred years. And then we got to television that took a decade, the rate of introduction of new platforms. And therefore, if you're thinking like a hacker new attack surfaces, Is incredible, right? The Cloud Kitchens example happened because of the pandemic and the rise of Uber Eats and Door Dash, and so on. The pace at which new exploit opportunities appear is very, very fast. And as a result, there are far more opportunities to subvert the status quo or the norms of your industry with one of these new platforms.So we're trying to get people to be much more opportunistic. And part of what we do, like I said I can't tell you do this thing, because if I tell you, then it's already been done. What we can do is we can say, here are some ways to think about it. You know, is there an innovation that happens? Can you reframe things? Can you do a substitution where people think they're getting one thing and they're actually getting another. Can you appeal to the foibles of human psychology? Emily Ross: Don't be afraid to be disagreeable. Alistair Croll: It's weird because in the past I've written books that are very technical. There is a right answer. And Emily's written lots of articles on like how to do stuff. This is a more subjective thing and candidly more uncomfortable for us as writers, because we want to make sure that there are applicable lessons, but it's almost like, you know, teaching someone Zen. I can tell you what it is, but you're going to have to go sit on a rock and figure it out for yourself.But once you start thinking this way, everything becomes a subversive opportunity. And once you have that subversive lens, you're not being evil, you're just being just evil enough. Opportunities are everywhere. Emily Ross: And actually, if you think about it, just coming back to your very first question, which is a nice cyclicity.  The title of the book is exactly what we set out to do, which is we got your attention and we're turning it into demand. So the book title is a really, really simple and effective way to showcase the thinking. And I think if you take one thing away from it, it's change what you spend your time on. So building a subversive go-to market strategy is just as important as thinking about your product. And if you get the balance, right, you're going to be unstoppable. Brian Ardinger: Well, and you've also from the book perspective, the book's not out yet, but you're doing things to grab attention differently than a lot of, I mean, I get pitched every other day by a book author trying to get their book noticed and that. But I know that you've been doing some things as far as live online course that's leading up to the book. And you have a interesting little survey. I don't, if we got to talking about any of the things that you're doing from a attention perspective to, about the book. Emily Ross: Well one of the things I love, this was so much fun, is that you can't just order the book. You can't just pre-order it. You have to take a quiz so that we can decide if you're evil enough. So you take the quiz and if you're not evil enough, we think, you know, you're not going to be able to handle the book. And if you're too evil, then this book could just perhaps be too powerful. So we have gamified the experience of the pre-order function, which was a lot of fun. And we've done a ton of tons of things, just mostly because we'd like to mess around, but that's just one of the things we've done so far. Alistair Croll: It's also great that Emily has like a whole team of web developers that stand up.  Emily's business is actually, she's like the SWAT team or the MI6 for some very advanced tech brands, who can't really explain what they do well. And Emily figures out how to do that. So she has a team of people to build stuff. So a good example of that is we wanted to do a survey to see whether people would take our cohort based course, which we're going to be running with Maven, the founders of  Alt MBA and UDemy,   set up this new, online cohort based course program. But we wanted to get people to take the survey. So we told them one lucky winner will get a free workshop or talk from us for their organization, which is usually something we charged a lot of money for. But we also wanted to make sure they shared the survey, which is a paradox because I want the greatest odds of winning. So I'm not going to tell my friends, right?So we made two surveys. One was Team Orange, one was Team Black. And we say, we'll choose the winner from the survey that has the most responses. That's a bit subversive. Right. And we found some funny things about people getting kind of tribal and like I'm Team Black and so on. We even did things to tweak the survey questions a little bit between the two.So we ran like six or seven social experiments in the survey. But would you buy a book from people who weren't thinking subversively? I mean, I wouldn't buy a book on subversiveness for someone who went through normal tactics. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you both coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share some of this subversiveness and hopefully get more folks to be Just Evil Enough. People want to find out more about yourself or the book itself, what's the best way to do that. Emily Ross: Just Evil Enough.com and I'll actually, I landed Alistair in it on a talk we did last week because we were live Tweeting. They wouldn't let us take live questions. So we just got everyone to jump on Twitter and ask us questions there.And I promised everyone lives that if they hashtag Just Evil Enough that Alistair would read out whatever they wrote. And they all said smart, intelligent things. And I was like, I can't believe none of you are like trying to flog a course or a book or promote something. Like he will have to say anything you like. So people should...Alistair Croll: I think one guy had me mention his podcast, but there's a good example where like, Oh, you think you're getting free promotion in this thing we're recording, but you're actually following the Just Evil Enough account. Emily Ross: But yes, Just Evil Enough.com is where you can take the quiz. You can hear about the cohort class. You can, pre-order the book and there's an Evil Enough Twitter account too. You can check that out. Brian Ardinger: Well Emily, it was great to meet you for the first time here and Alistair. Always good to catch up with what's going on in your world. So appreciate you both for being on here and looking forward to the conversation in the future.Alistair Croll: Thanks so much for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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What's more awkward than starting a podcast while eating ice cream. Or going maskless if no one else is. How do we talk to people? Is it safe? Possibly stranger danger? Everyone is socially awkward these days. #newnormal

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Having helped to bring big data to genomics through the lab techniques he invented, such as RNA-Seq, the Stanford molecular biologist Michael Snyder is focused today on how to use data from devices to increase the human healthspan. Some cars have as many as 400 sensors, Snyder notes. "And you can't imagine driving your car around without a dashboard...Yet here we are as people, which are more important than cars, and we're all running around without any sensors on us, except for internal ones." To Snyder, smart watches and other wearable devices should become those sensors, feeding information to our smartphones, which can then be "the health dashboard for humans and just let us know how our health is doing."  (You can sign up to participate in the Snyder lab's study of wearables and COVID-19 at https://innovations.stanford.edu/wearables.)Snyder has been chair of Stanford's Department of Genetics since 2009 and is director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. He has a BA in chemistry and biology from the University of Rochester (1977) and a PhD from Caltech (1982), where he studied with the molecular biologist Norman Davidson. He did a postdoc at Stanford from 1982 to 1986 and then went to teach at Yale in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from 1986 to 2009, when he moved back to Stanford. At Yale, Snyder and his lab helped to develop many of the tools undergirding functional genomics, including RNA-Seq, one of the two pillars of transcriptomics (alongside microarrays). Snyder is also known in the world of personalized medicine for having discovered through genomic analysis of his own blood that he was at high risk for Type 2 diabetes, which he later did develop, but controlled through exercise and diet. That work to create an “integrated personal omics profile” (iPOP) was later described in a 2012 Cell article. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute called it “a landmark for personalized medicine” and an “unprecedented look at one person's biology, showing what can be accomplished in the future.”Snyder is the author of a 2016 book from Oxford University Press called Personalized Medicine: What Everyone Needs to Know. And he has founded or co-founded numerous life sciences companies, including:Personalis (precision oncology through liquid biopsies of tumors)SensOmics (genomics + machine learning to screen for childhood conditions such as autism)Qbio (membership-based access to “BioVault” platform gathering numerous biomarkers to predict health risks and recommend healthy habits)January Therapeutics (albumin-encapsulated nanoparticles to deliver drug molecules to tumors)Filtricine (cancer management through “Tality,” a line of foods that cuts off amino acids needed for tumor growth)Mirvie (formerly Akna – blood tests to predict pregnancy risks such as preeclampsia, preterm birth, gestational diabetes)Protometrix (maker of protein microarrays, acquired by Thermo Fisher)Affomix (maker of technology for high-throughput screening of antibodies against human proteins; acquired by Illumina)Please rate and review MoneyBall Medicine on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:• Launch the “Podcasts” app on your device. If you can't find this app, swipe all the way to the left on your home screen until you're on the Search page. Tap the search field at the top and type in “Podcasts.” Apple's Podcasts app should show up in the search results.• Tap the Podcasts app icon, and after it opens, tap the Search field at the top, or the little magnifying glass icon in the lower right corner.• Type MoneyBall Medicine into the search field and press the Search button.• In the search results, click on the MoneyBall Medicine logo.• On the next page, scroll down until you see the Ratings & Reviews section. Below that, you'll see five purple stars.• Tap the stars to rate the show.• Scroll down a little farther. You'll see a purple link saying “Write a Review.”• On the next screen, you'll see the stars again. You can tap them to leave a rating if you haven't already.• In the Title field, type a summary for your review.• In the Review field, type your review.• When you're finished, click Send.• That's it, you're done. Thanks!Full TranscriptHarry Glorikian: I'm Harry Glorikian, and this is MoneyBall Medicine, the interview podcast where we meet researchers, entrepreneurs, and physicians who are using the power of data to improve patient health and make healthcare delivery more efficient. You can think of each episode as a new chapter in the never-ending audio version of my 2017 book, “MoneyBall Medicine: Thriving in the New Data-Driven Healthcare Market.” If you like the show, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review at Apple Podcasts.Harry Glorikian: Michael Snyder says his life is all about using big data to understand things.He's a molecular biologist, genomics expert, and life sciences entrepreneur based at Stanford University. It's partly thanks to Snyder's work that genomics is a field defined today by big data. In an earlier phase of his career, when he was at Yale, he and his lab members invented some of the fundamental technologies behind functional genomics, that is, the study of gene transcription and regulation, and also transcriptomics, which focuses on the RNA transcripts genes produce.At Stanford he's focused on using big data to transform the healthcare industry, so that it focuses less on reacting to illness and more on proactively lengthening people's healthy lifespans.Snyder is like me in that he's convinced that smartwatches and other wearable devices are going to be an important source of health data. If everyone had one, we could probably detect health problems a lot earlier and make better lifestyle decisions. In fact, about halfway through the interview you'll hear Snyder explain how his own wearable devices have gotten him out of some personal health scrapes. In the middle of one flight to Norway, Snyder says his heart rate went up and his blood oxygen went down. Before his flight even landed, he'd correctly diagnosed himself with Lyme disease and was able to get an antibiotic that quickly cleared out the infection.Later, during the height of the covid pandemic in the U.S., Snyder's lab proved that about three-quarters of the time, they could predict which FitBit users would develop covid symptoms based solely on heart rate data from their devices.The medical establishment hasn't always been receptive to this kind of science. And the era of data-driven collaboration between patients and their doctors has been a long time coming. But thanks to better technology and the impact of the pandemic, Snyder thinks it's finally arriving now.Harry Glorikian: Dr. Snyder, welcome to the show. Michael Snyder: Thanks for having me. Harry Glorikian: It was funny cause I was reading your background and I was like, wow. I mean, so many different aspects of your background, both, you know, from a scientist and an entrepreneur from, you know, helping start, like, I was going through the list of the companies. It was longer than, than I remember. Like, I know quite a few of them, but not all of them. And so I just thought like from a high level, like, how do you explain to someone what you do and why you do it? Michael Snyder: Okay. Well, we're all about big data. We like to use big data to understand things. And these days we want to use big data to transform health. And really that's what my career has kind of been built around. So over the years, we've invented technologies for collecting big data and then we've implemented them. For a long time, when I started out, it was really to try and understand biological systems. People use to study genes one at a time, for example, and proteins, one at a time, we came up with a way of studying them all at once. And that hadn't been done before. And then try and understand them in a systems context so that you weren't really just looking at, you know, if you have a jigsaw puzzle, look at one or a few pieces of the time, we wanted to see the whole puzzle at once as best we could. And so that's really been the philosophy. As I say, it was first choosing to study basic cell biological problems. And then I moved to Stanford now about 12 years ago. And the goal there really was to bring it to medicine see if we can understand medicine, you know, at a holistic level, not just, you know, if you've got high sugar that, you know, you're diabetic. Sure. But are there other things going on as well? Like other metabolic conditions? And that's really the philosophy. Let's look at the whole system, better understand what's going on, and see if we can come up with solutions. Now, the thing, I think that's been a big shtick of ours and at least in the recent years has been focused on keeping people healthy, extending the healthspan as opposed to just doing sick care, which is where medicine is today. So we really want to transform medicine. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. It seems that, you know, health span has become the, the big shift.  And if you look at where we're going from the Affordable Care Act and everything, it's better to, it's more profitable actually to keep someone healthy than just treat them when they're sick. So I like that shift because it brings technology more into the forefront. Michael Snyder: Totally. Yeah, no. And it's going to require a lot of changes and a lot of levels, the whole payment level in the United States is broken. People often only get paid when sick people go in to see them like hospitals, you only get paid to show up when you're ill. We don't put enough emphasis on keeping people healthy because people have said, well, you know, show me it saves money, show me it does it. But until you run those studies, it's hard to do that. So I think the incentive systems are changing. That's slow, but it's also getting  you know, physicians and others used to this concept of bringing in big data to better understand people's health. And maybe to elaborate a little more on this. You know, if you walk into a doctor's office today, it looks pretty similar to the doctor's office of 40 years ago, you know, a few gadgets are updated, but otherwise the same. And guess what the number one user fax machines is in the U.S.? It's the healthcare system. My daughters don't even know what a fax machine is.Harry Glorikian: Yes, yes. It's true. Somebody did ask me the other day, like, can you fax it to me? I'm like, yeah. I think my scanner might, but I don't think I've got a jack that I can actually plug it into to actually send it. ‘Cause I don't do that anymore. Michael Snyder: Nobody does that except for the medical system pretty much. Yeah.Harry Glorikian: So, you know, you've had you, you mentioned it, you had a hand in, in, you know, developing these foundational ideas and technologies in functional genomics, such as, you know, high throughput protein sequencing techniques, you know, known as RNA-seq and then making transcriptomics possible. Like, can you talk about what it's been like to sort of, you know, develop those technologies and then, you know, be at the forefront of trying to answer these big molecular biology questions and, and what in your mind, what came first? Was it, I gotta answer this molecular biology question so I'm actually, I'm going to develop this instrument and then be able to answer that question. Does that make sense?Michael Snyder: Yeah, it's a little of both to be honest. Often we develop technologies out of need or out of observations. We have, so for example, in RNA-seq, we were trying to map where all the transcribed regions were, where all the genes were in yeast, which was the organism we were studying at the time. And we tried this one now very outdated method that just work miserably and we just stepped back a minute, said there's gotta be a better way. And so that's how we came up with, we thought about it, came up with a way and then implemented it and, and showed it worked. And then of course if it works, it takes off quickly, very much like CRISPR. And that's been true for other things. In some cases as we'll make an observation like when we first  invented a way to map the targets of key regulatory proteins called transcription factors there, we saw that these things were, were giving these dots in what's called the nucleus of the cell. And we said, well, where are those dots located? And so we came up with a method for figuring out where are all the, where all the binding sites for our, for these key regulatory proteins. So it's, it's been a variety of ways. And then when it's come to medicine, we, once we invent the technology, so well, people will say, well, well, how can we use these now in other ways that would be beneficial. And I'm not sure what you know, but I was at Yale for a long time, and I had a great time, it was fantastic place, but I was more on the main campus and it was just harder to implement them into medicine. And then about 12 years ago, I moved to Stanford and I'm right in the heart of the medical school where there's all these clinicians and very eager, beavers around, trying to figure out how to better, you know, do medicine these days. And so it's just been easier as we've implemented technologies to roll them out and see how they might work in the clinic. And so I think one of the biggest projects we launched when it came to Stanford was we call it personal 'omics profiling. The idea, you collect a lot of deep data around a person and you do it longitudinally. So we'll, we'll sequence their genome we'll look at all the molecules we can in their blood and urine, meaning their RNA and their proteins and their metabolites. We, we do deep questionnaires and clinical tests on people. And then, and then, yeah, about eight years ago, we sort of got into wearables back when they were just fitness trackers, realizing they would be powerful. So the idea was to collect data on people—while they're healthy, by the way, not while they were sick, while they were healthy—and do it longitudinally, do it every three months and see how they change. And if they got ill, then we collected more sample. And that was the idea. That's turned out to be a really flagship project, I think, for just how we might better implement health. And you raise the issue about starting companies. So a little of my philosophy is I think academics are great at discovery. They're great at proof of principle, but they're not good at scaling. They think they are, but they're not. And this is what companies are just fantastic about. So we've spun off, we think some, what I hope will be powerful companies. One was a DNA sequencing company called Personalis. They've done very, very well.Then we've spun off Qbio, which is doing sort of a, you know, a more commercial version of this personal 'omics profiling, as I mentioned, but they added on whole-body MRI and have some other things that are pretty powerful. So they've, they've got a medical version of, a more actionable version, again, our academic lab is doing this research for us and trying to figure this out, but the company can do it, implement it.And then we have another company, January AI, it's doing continuous glucose monitoring for trying to better control diabetes. So again, we figured out some things in the lab and then it made sense to commercialize it. So, so it all goes kind of hand in hand to me. It all makes sense. And it's very satisfying by the way to do stuff in the lab that, that we think is impactful and then try and get it out there to a broader group. We think that's how you scale. I don't think academics are capable of scaling. Certainly not very well, whereas companies are. Harry Glorikian: Well, yeah, I mean, I, you know, quite some time ago being a product manager, I mean, you, you, you had to like your biggest accomplishment was getting that thing from the bench right out into somebody in the field and, oh my God, it actually, yeah, it did something. Right. And that was the exciting part. Stopping at the research, I would have been like, “That's it? Like, all I got was all I got was a paper out of it?” Like, no, no. I want to, you know, I know that that's always the beginning. Michael Snyder: Yeah, we got excited about the papers, absolutely. But we're very also, it's just fun to see it get out further. Totally. And again, so that's literally all the companies, maybe with one exception have spun off of the things we were doing in the lab said, all right, we get it. Now it's time to scale this out and develop it into something people would be interested in. And it is very satisfying, as you say.Harry Glorikian: So, so, you know, I mean the genome has come down in cost. I mean, a lot of other analytic technologies have come down in cost. I mean, I know the latest thing that Illumina has said is they want to get the genome down to like $60 to do the functional work. Not necessarily the analytics or analyzing part of it. How do you see that changing what you're doing and the impact? I mean, you've got a lot of data, so I feel like you can almost. paint a picture of the evolution of a person.  If you could sort of see the initial traces, how do you see this playing a role in what you're doing and the impact that it's going to have on where it's going next?Michael Snyder: Yeah. I think getting the cost down is a big deal because when we set this up as research, it was very, very expensive. And so  getting it out there will help, especially when you're talking about keeping people healthy because people don't want to dump a lot of money into a healthy person. 'Cause they don't know that—here's a problem with our healthcare system. Most people will shift every 18 months, that's the average time people stay with their provider and then they'll shift to a new one. And that may be because their company's shifted. Not necessarily they did, but their company may have done it. And sometimes they change their job, they shift. So  that's whyIt's a barrier then for, for providers, healthcare providers put a lot of money into you, when 18 months later you're going to be with somebody else. But if the costs are pretty cheap, like the genome sequences, let's say, but the interpretation is $200. It's worth it to you because then it's a lot easier to execute preventative medicine, get your genome sequenced, predict what you're at risk for, and with a fairly low cost. But if they're going to dump $2,000 and you're going to be with somebody else, there's a lot more balking, if you know what I mean.So I think, I think keeping the costs down is a big deal. Qbio, for their exam, they charge $3,500, and on one hand that's a lot of money and we, we like people to do it two months. You get a whole-body MRI and other things. On the other hand, we would argue for it. It should save and already has. We found like early prostate cancer, early ovarian cancer, early   pancreatic cancer, which is a big deal and some heart things and stuff like this is from the first a hundred people that we did. And it's more now. So, so we show it has utility. And of course, if you're one of those people, it's a big, big deal. So, and, but by getting the cost down, it just gets the whole barrier away. Right now you have to pay out of pocket because there is no reimbursement. So the cost gets down and I think people would reimburse because there'll be willing to run trials to show it does work and saves money. So I, I think the whole thing will go together as costs drop, and we can expand this out and show utility. Harry Glorikian: Well, and you know, if you think about the implementation of technology, like if you could carry it around on your iPhone, when you go to your next physician, and you've got it with you right at that also brings the cost down rather than have to do everything all over again.Michael Snyder: Totally. Yeah. In the future. And I think physicians are just warming up those. There's an education side of this from the physicians, you know. When we first got involved in the wearable space, they would tell us how inaccurate it was. And they didn't like the idea that your iPhone would be so powerful. Possibly more powerful than they are. There was a threatening aspect of the whole thing. And I think they're now reassured that, first of all, they're very important. They're not going away. There's these technologies to augment what they're already doing. And, and it's, there's an education side. I remember when genome sequencing first came out, even at an enlightened place like Stanford, I would talk to some of my colleagues and they'd say, well, nobody shows that really worked, you know, and it's got a lot of errors. They just think about the negative. The instant reaction is, you know  we don't really know how to do it. You might tell people something they're not going to get. That's harmful and, and try to tell them, well, look, you have just educate people and educate the physicians. And now, when we first started actually, you know, cancer, even people were pushing back  and cancer is a no brainer. You need genetic tests or sequencing. But for elderly people, it was a strong pushback, right? Everybody's telling you, Mike, what you're doing is really harmful to people. You're going to get people to turn them into hypochondriacs when you sequence their DNA. And now there's some, some people feel that way, but most people have kind of warmed up or at least maybe it's 50-50 are receptive to the idea. Maybe it is a good idea to get a, to find these risks. From our standpoint, just from the first 70 people we sequenced the genome, we found someone's BRCA mutation. And now that person out of mutation suggests they might have certain kinds of cancer. They did a whole-body MRI that early thyroid cancer, we caught that had it removed, saved their thyroid, the rest of their thyroid. That is, you know, very, very useful. Another person, a very young person had a mutation in a heart gene and would have been at risk for cardiomyopathy. It turns out his father died young of a heart attack. And so he had this mutation, we saw this thing and sure enough, he had a heart defect. Didn't even know it. He's on drugs now. So, so these technologies can be very, very useful, very, very powerful. But you have to show physicians that, and then they sort of go, “Oh yeah. Now I get it. We kind of get it.” They may say, well, show us the evidence. And so that's what we're trying to do. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I mean, I just. I've got a book coming out in the fall and I just interviewed somebody who had done participated in BabySeq. Robert Greene's thing, right? And identified an issue  that had a profound effect actually on the decisions of the mother, not the baby.  And so it's an interesting story when she went through it, I was like, wow, that is super impactful. You know, it adds a lot of, you know, it is funny. She said, you know, we did this and I was not expecting this. Right. So it was an eye opener, but it's affected her decision-making going forward.  And it's along the lines of BRCA, what she was informed of, but  I'm sort of saving it for the book. So when it comes out in the fall. Harry Glorikian: But you know, you wrote a book back in 2016, that introduces non-experts to personalized medicine. You know, you covered everything from how DNA works to the applications in genomics, in cancer. So. I almost think like that might need a refresh or at least the publisher might want to put it out again, because I think people are more interested now. But if you were writing that book from scratch today, you know, five years later  would you write it at all? Would you, the field is, I feel like it's exploded in the last five years on the one hand. On the other hand, I still feel like I talk to people that still don't understand the impact of it. So I feel like I'm talking to both sides sometimes, but. How do you think the field has changed in the last five years? And where do you see it going next? Michael Snyder: Yeah. Great question. So when we wrote the book, you know, people really didn't like this area. They didn't like it, sequencing genomes and things. They thought it was harmful.  And the same idea where, I mean, we literally collect millions of data points. Every time we sample someone, then people still bring it up. And so it was really, the goal there was to educate people about what the technologies are, what they're capable of, and this sort of thing. So I think we have come a long ways since then, where the field was mostly against. I asked people to raise their hand. How many of you want to get their genome sequenced? Usually there's a small fraction, even in an educated group. Now it's probably the majority. If they haven't even done it already—they may have already done it. So  I think the world has changed. I think what I would do is update the power of the new technologies. New technologies have come out, even since we first put that book out.So I'd add more. Expand the wearable space. I just think we can put a smartwatch on every person on the planet. If we wanted to a very inexpensive one that would be a health monitor for people. And, and there would be a no better time for that than this pandemic that's going on now, because we actually can show, we can tell when people are getting ill prior tosymptoms from a smartwatch, from covid and other infections. So we can talk about that more if you like, but it's a pretty cool study. We can show again, 70% of the time, we can tell when you're getting ill, because your heart rate jumped up, and we pick it up with a smartwatch. So imagine putting that on everyone in the planet and just letting them know, “Look, we can tell when you're getting ill.” You know, even if it's not perfect, a bunch of the time that we think would be very useful. They don't send their kids who are sick to school, affecting everyone, or it shows up in a nursing home and, you know, you flag it right away. And that would be, we think very, very powerful.I view it as analogous to, you know, a car. A car usually has several sensors. Some have as many as 400 sensors on them. And you can't imagine driving your car around without a dashboard, the gas gauge or, you know, a speedometer or an engine light or all these things on we've gotten so used to this is what you do when you drive a car.Yet here we are as people, which are more important than cars, and we're all running around without any sensors on us, except for internal ones. They're okay. But they're kind of slow. And I just, to me, it's just totally logical. We should all have our own, you know, sensors on us. It's the car health dashboard. Our smartphone will be the health dashboard for humans and just let us know how our health is doing. And it doesn't mean when you see a light go off that for sure something is wrong, but it gives you a heads up. And it has, you know, in, in some cases our profiling has really had life-saving consequences.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. And I'm, well, I mean, it's funny cause I think about these things and I look at a lot of these technologies and. You know, it's always a single biomarker of some sort, right? That that's, you know, a heartbeat or temperature or something. And then I think about, well, the next level has got to be a combination of them, which makes the predictive power that much better. Michael Snyder: That's right. Yeah. We call that multivariate, yeah, where you bring in several features. So you start seeing it enlarge something or a thing on an image, and then you see that those biomarkers of those. That's how we discovered someone with an early lymphoma in our study that had an enlarged spleen, and then we saw certain markers are up in their blood and said, something's not right here. And then they did follow up and sure enough had early lymphoma, no symptoms yet. So again, caught it early, a lot easier to manage just much better off. We have a number of examples like that. So the combination tells you. And the other thing that's very under appreciated is the longitudinal profiling.  People don't realize that if you go in and get tested now, and they rarely look at your old measurements. And so they just see if you're in the normal range and you can be at the high end of the normal range, but you're still “No, all right, you're fine. Don't worry about it.” But if you look at your trajectory, you know, maybe you've been running kind of normally in the low normal range and suddenly this one jumped up, you know 50%. You can still be in the normal range, up 50% and something's headed in the wrong direction and you would be ignored for that. Whereas if we just had very simple algorithms that can flag that sort of stuff. “Look, you're not only up in this marker, but you're up in that one too, which is related, you know, maybe something's going on early.” Let's see what's going on there a little better and catch things earlier again when you can manage it better. So, so I think we ought to bring in longitudinal information again, to me, that's why the wearables are so powerful because they measure it 24/7. Harry Glorikian: Well, I do that with my, my physician. I walk in, I'm like, okay, here's my data for the last, you know, X amount of time. And it's funny because even I've noticed, like during covid, cause I was much more sedentary, like certain things were going in the wrong direction. And I was like, oh no, no, no, no. I got to get those, those back in line. If I didn't have the ability to look at it over time. And I was only looking at that one point, you know, how am I going to see where it's going? Michael Snyder: Out of context. Yeah. Here's another thing that's wrong with medicine today. It's all population-based, so they will make every decision about your health based on population averages and hence that normal range. But again, you may not at all be like normal population levels. And so you've been told, and here's my favorite example, you've been told since day zero that your oral temperature, when you put it thermometer in your mouth is 98.6, but it turns out, first of all, that number is wrong. Yeah. Average temperature is 97.5. But more importantly, there's a spread. So the what's called the 25th quartile is 94.6. So four degrees below and the 75th quartile, 99.1.So in today's world, if your normal baseline temperature is 94.6, that's your healthy temperature, and you walk into a physician's office at 98.6, they'll tell you, “You're healthy. Everything's great. What are you doing? Go home.” But you're at four degrees Fahrenheit over your baseline. I guarantee you're ill.  This is just, it's not healthy. So you got to know your baseline. And for me, by the way, mine is 97.3 and it's been dropping a little bit over the last 10 years. Which is, there's some studies suggesting that is the case actually, so that people do drop a little bit as they get older. But the point is that, you know, my baseline is not 98.6, if I am at 98.6, I am ill. [music interlude]Harry Glorikian:I want to pause the conversation with Michael Snyder for a minute to make a quick request. If you're a fan of MoneyBall Medicine, you know that we've made more than 60 episodes of the show. And you can listen to all of them for free at Apple Podcasts, or at my website glorikian.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.There's one small thing you could do in return, and that's to leave a rating and a review of the show on Apple Podcasts. It's one of the best ways to make sure that other listeners will find and follow the show.If you've never posted a review or a rating, it's easy. All you have to do is open the Apple Podcasts app on your smartphone, search for MoneyBall Medicine, and scroll down to the Ratings & Reviews section. Tap the stars to rate the show, and then tap the link that says Write a Review to leave your comments. It'll only take a minute, but it'll be a huge boost for the show.Thank you! And now back to the interview.[music interlude]Harry Glorikian: You know, just talking about the wearables, because I noticed like earlier you had at least four devices and I think an Oura ring, or maybe… Michael Snyder: I lost it recently, but yes, I normally wear, I normally wear eight of these devices. An Oura ring and four smart watches. I have a continuous glucose monitor and environmental sensors. I've got all kinds of gadgets. Harry Glorikian: Oh Jesus. Okay. Well, so tell us where you see the overlap of these digital devices and the personalized medicine sort of coming together, because I feel like one is much earlier warning system or could be an earlier warning system of what may come in the future. And one is a current monitoring system, of how the machine is working. Michael Snyder: Yeah. I mean, I do think they're an integral part of personalized medicine.   Only now I think people are realizing the power. The pandemic, I hate to say it, helped with that because remote monitoring is now become popular and the concept that you can start managing people.So, a little background, we started on this about eight years ago, when the Fitbit was out there. And people are using these fitness trackers. We thought, well, gosh, these are pretty powerful health monitors because they're measuring your heart rate and they measured 24/7. In fact  you know, the first device we used doesn't exist anymore, a Base watch, it takes 250,000 measurements a day. Now some of them will take 2.5 million measurements. They really follow you in a deep way and they'll measure heart rate, variability, skin temperature. Those can all be pretty accurate, by the way. It depends on the device. Some will measure blood oxygen and even blood pressure. Those are less accurate, but their deltas are pretty good, meaning the changes. And then there's other things out there too, something called galvanic stress response. So they can measure all kinds of things. They're always following you. So we think that's super powerful. Now when we first started, again, physicians pushed back and said, well, you know, everybody knows they're not accurate and we actually want paper coming out. Very soon [they started] saying, well, actually they're more accurate for some measurements, like heart rate than what you measure in a physician's office. My heartbeat can vary by as much as 40 beats per minute, depending whether I drove their biked there. Even if I rest at 15 minutes, it's still different and whatever's going on in my life.And, but if I pull my resting heart rate off in the morning, first thing it's pretty constant, unless I'm either stressed or ill. So you actually have better measurements from some, for certain kinds of measurements from these devices. So that's the first thing you have to show, show them they are accurate and things. So we think we've done that in some cases for some kinds of things. So I think we now just need to get physicians to start thinking about that more and get them as an integral part of your healthcare. That when they show up, they don't have to take your heart rate anymore. They'll just read it from, it'll already be pumped into the system. You can already have it there, and they can follow your trajectory. Since the last time they saw it last, whatever month, six months, two years, what have you, and see what's going on much, much better than these static measurements that they take every few years when you're healthy.So I just think they're going to be super powerful for following your healthy physiology. And then when you get ill, it's all about the delta, the shift from your personal baseline. And what's powerful is because we all have different baselines, different heart rate, different blood oxygen, just what have you. When you shift up, you can figure it out. And the way we got in the most was from our first work, we actually showed a, I actually figured out my Lyme disease. I picked it up from my smartwatch. I suddenly got a pulse-ox, a blood oxygen. And it was because my, my heart rate went up. I was flying to Norway, of all things, and my heart rate went up much harder than normal. And my blood oxygen dropped much lower than normal. And I saw it on the airplane and it didn't return to normal after I landed. And I knew something wasn't right. I thought it was Lyme disease, because two weeks earlier, I was in a Lyme-infested area helping my brother put a fence in in Massachusetts. Most places are Lyme-infested in Massachusetts.And then I saw this and I, I warned a doctor there. It might be, that's a classic case, I warned him, it might be Lyme because of the timing. And later got, by the way, I didn't have symptoms. That was a key. I saw these things before symptoms. I later had symptoms, went to a doctor in Norway. He pulled blood said, yep. My immune cells are up. I've got a bacterial infection. And he wanted me to take penicillin. I said, no, I should take doxycycline. The classic case of, you know, you have to take charge of your own health. He pushed back, but he did give in, in the end  And, and it turns out it cleared it up. I took it for two weeks and when I got back, I got measured. Sure enough, I was Lyme positive, by a sero test and I give him blood right before I left I was negative, so I seroconverted, a very well controlled experiment. The point of all of this aside is, I can figure out my Lyme disease from a simple smartwatch and a pulse-ox. And so that showed the power of these smartwatches for doing this sort of thing. And then that's how we got, we looked into the data and saw every time I got ill from respiratory viral infection, including asymptomatic time, I could see the jump up in heart rate. So we knew it would work for infectious disease. And then when the covid pandemic came, as you might imagine, we just ramped up or really scaled out that study.We are device agnostic. So we rolled out the study in a two part manner. So meaning we first wanted to show that our algorithms and perfect algorithms for detecting covid-19. So we partnered with Fitbit  but also talk to other groups as well, pulled in data. We started with Fitbit, we could, right away, we got 32 people who had been covid-infected  with their Fitbit watch still running. Some people let them burn out.  But we, we, and we had a diagnosis date and a symptom date. And so we could actually show, we initially showed that for 26 of 32, we could see a jump up in resting heart rate from a simple smartwatch, in this case a Fitbit. And we had several different algorithms, both steps and a resting heart rate. We, we showed the algorithms work and then we built what we call it a real time alerting algorithm, actually two of them, we tested them out and they seem to work. So then in December—and we love all of you listening to this to enroll in our study at innovations.stanford.edu/wearables—anyway, what we did in December is showed, we rolled out a real time alerting system that will actually send off a red alert when your heart rate jumps up. It works about  73% of the time. We have 60 people have gotten ill, a little over 60, and we can see those red alert will go out before at the time of symptoms in 73% of cases. And we even now caught two asymptomatic cases where their heart rate went up. They had no symptoms but they happened to get tested and they were positive. So we can show that this thing really does work.  And so now we're trying as the say we are building an infrastructure to roll this out for millions and millions of people.Harry Glorikian: That's good because I was just thinking it would be great if these things would proactively ping you and tell you there's a problem rather than you have to look at them all the time and see where you are compared to baseline.Michael Snyder: Yeah. The one minus is you have to open your app and sync it, and we're trying to do exactly what you just said, set it up so you don't even have to open the app. You probably have to leave it open, but we want to be able to ping you. We have to get IRB approval. That's our review board approval, but we want to do exactly what you just said. So right now you just have to check it out every day. You open your app and you'll see, oh, do I have an alert or not, when you wake up. Do it first thing in the morning. And if you have an alert. We're not allowed to give a medical recommendation but we could say, look, you have a jump up a resting heart rate and I'll let you figure out how to interpret it. But ultimately the plan would be to say, you know, Gosh, maybe you don't want to go to that party tonight or go to work and maybe you want to go get tested for that. Something could be up. That's ultimately where we want to get to with this alerting system. So, and I don't think it will be too far away where we're showing it, where it's going to pull in more kinds of data. So we can get that 73% up to 95%. That's our goal. Harry Glorikian: Yeah, it's interesting. Cause I was talking to just the other night to a friend of mine who's a primary care physician and she was saying, “Well, you know, these things are not very accurate and you know, people are going to come in for problems.” I'm like, okay, hold on. They're, they're actually pretty accurate. They take a lot of data over a long period of time. So, you know, those blips, I can sort of, you know, wipe them out if it's a truly a blip and I can see a lot of information. And it's more accurate than me coming in that one time you'll see me. But the other thing I said to her was, you know, you realize like this is just going to get better. Like the more and more data we have, the better and better these things get. And at some point it is going to be like the standard of how things are done. And it's, I think it's difficult for people to understand that more data, better algorithms. You know, better equipment, all of them coming together. You just end up at a place where you're going to, this is going to be the standard.Michael Snyder: A hundred percent agree. A good case is, imagine if we told people you can't own a thermometer. They're medical devices, nobody should have a thermometer. That means that, you know, nobody would be taking their kid's temperature. By the way, a thermometer is a terrible way to tell if you're getting ill. It's an okay way, I should say. Your resting heart rate is way better. When you show that, that it's kind of funny. A thermometer is a 300-year-old technology, very ingrained in our medical system, and it has some value. Don't get me wrong. But it's not as good as any of these other technologies. We can pull off a smartwatch like resting heart rate and other signals and soon respiration rate, all that stuff you can pull off and you'll have a much better signal for when you're getting ill than a simple, stick a thermometer in your mouth.And it's going to go way beyond infectious disease. One thing we can show, we can get a signal for something called a hematocrit and hemoglobin from a smartwatch, and we can, and that actually can be an early sign that following those levels can give you a clue as to whether you're getting anemia.We have another signal coming from a smartwatch about diabetes, something called insulin resistance with diabetes. So we can get, they're not clinically diagnostic tests. So that, and they're just, they're kind of hints if you know what I mean, but very valuable hints. We think, oh, you see this and you see this change, maybe you should go to a physician and follow up on this. And there's some measurements from a wearable that there isn't even a clinical correlate for. There's something called galvanic stress response, which is conductance on your skin that you know, there is no medical, typical medical correlate for that yet that's a valuable measure. If you're stressed, you will sweat more. If your diabetic you'll have drier skin, it'll give you a signal towards diabetes.So these measurements we think are going to be very, very powerful. No one measurement, it comes back to what you were saying earlier. Multiple measurements together will help give you a better idea of what's going on and clues that something may be up that alert you while you're still in this, you know, fairly healthy state, we hope and can then take the right course, the right intervention course Harry Glorikian: You almost wish there was a spider graph that had your normal, and then show deviation from normal on these multivariates. So you could evaluate it over time. I mean, I find myself having to go, I have to go to that one and I have to go to that one. Then I have to go to that one and it would be a whole lot easier if it was in one format or one graph that could show me where things are. Let  me ask you a question…   Michael Snyder: By the way I think those integrated systems will happen. Yeah. And your car dashboard is a good example, right? There's aren't usually single or single sensors that are triggering. Sometimes they're integrating multiple sensors to set up a signal and that'll be true for your health. And just the way the data is organized again, in our antiquated healthcare system, it comes back because to these individual measurements, whereas instead, you want this as well here, here's your cardiovascular panel, you know, with the five measurements all together and these other panels around systems to tie and even some broader panels besides that, so that you can see things in this more holistic fashion. And another analogy might be, you know, when a pathologist reads images, they write up a report which they give to your physician. Hour physician can't read a pathology image slide to see if you have cancer not, but they can read the report that pathologists get. And so I think that's how we need to integrate these data. To put it in a usable fashion. To be honest, it's not just for the physician, but for the consumer, because they're the ones who can act on it most quickly. They're the ones who are going to have the most time to think about the information. Again, another flaw, and it's, it's no negativity to the physician, but they only have 15 minutes to spend with you. At least in the U S you know, you get a half hour appointment, the physician's only there 15 minutes, they glance at your chart. They do a few things. They make a quick assessment and they're off to the next patient. Then they have to write it up manually. Ironically.  And then  you know, you have a lot more time to spend thinking about what's going on. So if you have this information accessible to you, something doesn't look right. I think it's a better chance for you to take control. It's like me and my Lyme disease, you know, if I wasn't watching what was going on, I don't know what would have happened. It was very valuable for me to have that information. Harry Glorikian: No, no. I mean, I, you know, it's funny because I was, you know, we're using these machines all the time and  you know I try to be as deep in the space as I can be. But if there was an algorithm or a series of algorithms, looking at different data streams that are coming off of me and can sort of be like  my friend, right? Whether it's weight or heartbeat or blood ox or something else that could sort of highlight it for me and then put it into a format that is easy for me to digest. Either graphically or, or a few words. I mean, it would be a lot easier for me to manage myself. Michael Snyder: Yeah, it's coming. I think it will hit, but you're right. I mean, again, medicine's conservative. If you do belong to, you know, Fitbit, or there are certain programs. Or Apple. They'll ping you, you know, here was your weight this week, you get these, but we're just at the trivial stage of what can come. Obviously I think what you're saying, where you would integrate different data types and then see these, and again, in this paper we'll have coming  out soon weshow that you can actually follow people's trajectories and set up AI systems, artificial intelligence systems, follow people's trajectories to look for these deviations. It's still very, very at the early phases. I think they're going to be super powerful for managing chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity. There's something called chronic fatigue syndrome that a lot of folks have, and they have crash days and good days. And to be able to tell all these things are associated with your crash days, watch out for those trying to avoid those. These are your good days, do more of those. It's very, very true in the glucose monitoring space, diabetes. People don't realize it's the next endemic, if you don't realize that. 9% of the us population is diabetic 33% are pre-diabetic. And 70% of those are going to become diabetic. By 2050, they estimate half the population can be diabetic if we keep going the way we're going. So  we need new intervention plans while people are healthy. Don't wait until they're already diabetic and have problems.And this is where the continuous glucose monitoring technology I think is going to be really powerful. Figure out what spikes you. It's very personalized. What spikes you is very different from what spikes me. Right. And be able to see that. I don't know if you've ever worn one, but they're just very, very powerful. And so it's, again, one reason why we formed a company called January AI to help help with that. Harry Glorikian: Well, it's funny because my wife was asking me, she goes, you know, I'm wanting, I'm thinking I want to wear one of these so that I can see what I eat, sort of how it affects me, but it's all by physician prescription. Go and convince your physician, you know, Hey, by the way, I need a script for this. Michael Snyder: Yeah. So  two comments there. One is in Europe there is no prescription, you can get over the counter. So there's less regulation. So they're ahead of us on that. I think it'll happen in the U.S. Right now you do need a physician, but there are studies, there are groups rolling out. So again, I mention ours, but there are others as well. But with January AI, their case. They'd take it even further and you get this continuous glucose monitor for, for 28 days and do the program longer. But you can, it not only shows you what spikes you, but they also train you a little bit, meaning you eat, you know, your favorite food or it could be rice, what have you. Rice, by the way spikes almost everybody. And then the next day you did the same thing. You do it for breakfast, you do the same thing and take a 15 minute walk and it shows how it suppresses your spike. So it's a, it's a behavior intervention program as well. So it teaches you. And we think that's kind of powerful as well. You not only want to get the data in and have people learn from it. And this thing does food recommendations as well.  You want to be able to teach people how to live better, healthier lives as well, doing an intervention, as they say, Harry Glorikian: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, some seeing it so that the data convinces me and then understanding what I need to do to fix it is also very useful. Right. So. Do you think we're ever going to get to? You know, I know that we have data-driven healthcare. Everybody always likes to say we are data-driven, but I mean, truly, like I don't make decisions on businesses without really understanding their profit and loss where their costs are, what their spent. I mean, very detailed analysis. Do you think that we're going to get to this point of [going] beyond hunch-driven medical decision-making? What was that show, oh my God, where the doctor would sort of put all these pieces together and then come out, with a famous actor, I forgot the name of it, but—House yes, yes. House. That was it. I mean, do you think are going to get to more data-driven. I feel like we should be there already in some way. Michael Snyder: Yeah. So, you know, I'm very Pollyannaish. I believe the answer is going to be yes.  I'm like you, I feel like we should be a lot further along and I just think that's the conservative nature of medicine. People think, you know, do no harm. And so they do nothing. And I would argue that doing nothing is harmful.  So I do think we need to get these, the, you know, this data integrated better. I think the best way is to roll out studies like the ones we're doing and others that can show it has power has impact. And that's how you convince people.I'd love to come up with a way to accelerate it. I think programs like this are a really great way to do it. A lot of this stuff is going to be consumer driven. I mean, people are now wearing smartwatches not just for fitness tracking, but for health devices, which is itself now the new concept.So it's coming. And luckily they're fairly inexpensive. I think that's the way it'll happen at, you know, when a lot of new technologies roll out, they are pretty expensive and then only the wealthy can have access to it. But the hope is that as the wealthy uses these and shows it has utility, then the price drops and they get out to everyone. Certainly that's how genome sequencing started. And I think it will be true for a lot of these other technologies. Luckily, smartwatches are pretty cheap to begin with. So even a hundred-dollar smartwatch is a pretty powerful health device, I would argue. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I mean, you know, if, if Illumina achieves its $60, right, for the function—I've been looking at an analytics approach that will bring down whole genome sequencing to $60. So if it's $60 to do the actual work, the wet chemistry, and then $60 to do the analysis, I don't think there's many barriers in the way anymore. Michael Snyder: Yeah,totally, and we're not so far away where people will they'll get their genome sequenced, but now there are technologies to look for early cancer by sequencing DNA in blood, and you knowHarry Glorikian: Liquid biopsy.Michael Snyder: So GRAIL and Gaurdant are leaders there. My company, Personalis is, I think, doing all right. So anyway, that's a, those are areas that we think are going to be powerful and soon they'll become routine tasks, once you show utility. But no company pays for it right now until you show that gee, you do this on healthy people and it doesn't cost the company $5 billion to find three cases, which I won't  yeah, that then it'll roll out.So right now, and the way this works too, for the liquid biopsies, it's looking for, they use it for cancer recurrence, if you've had cancer, you try and see if it'll appear again. And that's very logical. They'll demonstrate utility there. They already are. And then soon it'll be early detection and that'll go to the high-risk families. And it always comes down to who pays and insurers won't pay unless you're at high risk generally. And then soon if it's cheap enough, comes back to your point, if it's cheap enough. It'll be there for everybody. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I have this vision that you're going to go into your CVS or your Walgreens and you, you know, once a year or whatever, and we're going to see things so early that, I'm hoping one day in my lifetime that people will be like “Cancer. What, what, what, what happened?” Like you were able to get so far ahead of it, that it stops becoming an issue. Michael Snyder: “What do you mean you detected cancer only when you saw this giant lump what's that all about?” Harry Glorikian: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Michael Snyder: Yeah. I'm a hundred percent with you. Yeah. Harry Glorikian: So let's say we start, I mean, implementing this at a much larger scale, and broader than what we have now, because I think you and I are probably way ahead of a lot of others on these things. But do you see that effecting a longer life, or do you see it—like, I'm trying to weigh healthspan and lifespan, right?Michael Snyder: Well, it's all about healthspan, yeah. It's all about healthspan. You want to extend the healthy life.  You don't want people hanging on in miserable fashion for years. I think anyway, that's, that's my own view and I think it'll definitely extend healthspan because you'll catch things while people are healthy, not once they're ill, and then you take corrective action and keep them healthy. I think it'll totally extend the healthspan. And the goal is to do that. You know, you want have people that have held a healthy life and then just die. That's how it should go. Harry Glorikian: That's yes. My, my grandmother used to say that when I was younger and I thought it was morbid. And then now as I've gotten older, I'm like, Nope, Nope. That's, that's a good way to go. Like if you're just going to go go, Michael Snyder: Yeah, I think so too. We all know cases where people say, well, at least they died quickly. And we all know cases where somebody is hung on for three years and a lot of pain and very miserable fashion. And I don't, again, at least my own personal view is that that's just certainly not what I want. And those probably should be personal decisions, but minimally, regardless, everything we've been talking about should extend the healthspan, catch things while people are healthy, see these trajectories heading in a bad direction and then take corrective action. And that will have the desired impact. Harry Glorikian: So, one, one final question, before we go. Who do you think  is going to drive that? Is it going to be the healthcare life sciences world, or is it going to be the technology world? That's quickly encroaching. Cause it's, it's not Pfizer that's making this device on my wrist, right? It's, you know, all the other companies you can name. Michael Snyder: Yeah, no, I think it's kind of, ideally it would involve everybody partnering together, but you're right. Technology is having a big impact because consumers are eager for this information, as they often are. And especially as the word gets out and people like you and me start, you know, espousing the wonders and the power of those, these technologies.So I think there's that part. I do think we've got to get all the shareholders aligned, meaning I think employers as well should be big incentivizers of this. Meaning it pays for them to have their employees healthy. And that could be a plan I offer. If you're a big employer, maybe you have your folks enroll in one of these, you know, preventative plans, a hundred bucks a month, keep them healthy. You save a lot of money. I do think it helps to incentivize the users as well. I think people are often lazy. But they're, they're all concerned about their pocketbook and their loved ones.So I think the two ways to incentivize people are give them, you know, discounts on their insurance if they walk their 10,000 steps and you got to come up with ways for them not to cheat  or, or do various things. But  I, I do think that will help. Or you relay their family members who like egg them on a bit. It's because sometimes that's very incentivizing. So I think we need, we need to have good incentive ways to do that.I think financial incentives are one of the better ones. And again, that can relay back to the employer. The employer can offer these plans and then give people bonuses if they do, they're supposed to, you know, if you, if you are overweight and lose weight you know, maybe that would, well, you don't want to be able to get overweight and then lose weight, but you want to incentivize people to lose weight.Anyway, you come up with the right models for incentivizing folks. So, so we need to get the financial models in place. We need to show the stuff works and the technology is going to keep improving, getting cheaper, et cetera. So it's all going to go together, I think, in parallel. And then people like you and me will be out there saying, man, this is amazing. Everybody should be doing this sort of stuff. Harry Glorikian: I say it now. It's just tough to get everybody on board. Michael Snyder: Yeah. People are still scared. Yeah. But that'll go away. Harry Glorikian: I hope so. I hope that physicians get less scared. That's my biggest hope. Michael Snyder: Yeah. We've got to educate them. And those folks, you have to show that it works, that it has power. But they do have these refresher classes, they call them continuing medical education, and a lot of physicians do that. And I think it's a great way. I give a lot of talks at those, as a way to try to, I think, at least show the potential of what we're trying to do. And I think some of them buy it and some of them don't. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. And, and, you know, I think it needs to be integrated into their technological solutions to make it easier for them to sort of absorb it. And the current systems suck. Michael Snyder: That's true. Very true. Yeah. Yeah. They say, well, how do I have time to learn this and know if it's working, I'm too busy taking care of my patients. Yeah. Your point's well taken. Harry Glorikian: So great to speak to you. I look forward to continuing to read all the stuff that you produce and all these amazing, you know, technologies that you're constantly prolifically seem to be putting out there. And I'll let you know when the, when the, when my book is out, Michael Snyder: I definitely want to see it. Thank you. Harry Glorikian: Take care. Bye-bye.

3 times the danger. 3 times the terror. 3 times the podcast. It's time for ReconCinemation's annual look back at the ALIEN franchise and this year's installment might be the most interesting story of them all! Possibly one of the greatest What-If's in Hollywood history, the Boys are diving into everything from the aftermath of ALIENS to the many different script iterations over the course of 1987-1991, to the various directors attached (including Renny Harlin), to the vision of Vincent Ward's version of the story & more! Plus, how Sigourney came back to the franchise, what this film did to Michael Biehn's career, when David Fincher came into the mix, our early memories of the film, whether it's truly deserving of the negative reviews & so much more!   In space, no one can hear you podcast......it's ALIEN 3!!   Twitter/IG: @reconcinemation facebook.com/reconcinemation Cover and Episode Art by Curtis Moore (IG: curt986) Theme by E.K. Wimmer (ekwimmer.com)

Good morning, RVA! It's 70 °F, and it looks rainy out there, y'all. You can continue to expect a chance of rain, on and off, for most of the day. Saturday and Sunday, though, look beautiful if rather hot. This weekend, enjoy some time outside, stay hydrated, and get some rest.Water coolerAs of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports the seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as: 229, 31, and 9.1, respectively. VDH reports a seven-day average of 28.7 new cases in and around Richmond (Richmond: 7.3; Henrico: 5.9, and Chesterfield: 15.6). Since this pandemic began, 1,329 people have died in the Richmond region. 43.8%, 54.8%, and 51.1% of the population in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Here's this week's stacked chart of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, and you can, finally, really, totally, see a drop off in COVID-19-related deaths across the state. These are truly low numbers that we haven't seen since last July. Now, with the power of a ton of folks being vaccinated, I'm hoping we'll see those number fall even lower and stay there.Speaking of the power of vaccines! I know that's a lot of numbers up there to throw at you before you've had a sufficient amount of coffee, but I do want to point out that both Henrico and Chesterfield now have more than 50% of their population with at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Possibly related, or at least worth bringing up in that conversation, Sabrina Moreno at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the low vaccine uptake among Black Richmonders who, at this point, make up the largest share of positive COVID-19 cases—75% of the city's cases from April to May. It's complicated stuff why a person may or may not choose to get vaccinated, and I encourage you to tap that link and read through some of the reasons.Whittney Evans at VPM scored an interview with Richmond Police's Chief Smith, which you should definitely read in its entirety. Actually, give the audio at the top of the page a listen so you can get a feel for the tone, which sounds a lot less defensive than the text reads. Evans asks if RPD has made any new policy changes since last summer's protests, to which Chief Smith responds: “A few…You're gonna have to give me a chance to go back and pull some of those. We changed the chemical munitions policy. The way chemical munitions are used and when they are used…You're asking very specific questions that you did not prepare me to go get—I would have to get the policy.” I have a lot of thoughts on that, both policywise and PRwise. Mostly about that latter though: The Chief is the face of the Police Department and one of the top four or five public figures in the entire City. Part of that job is being prepared, taking interviews, and building trust with the public. Again, please listen to the audio to get a feel for the Chief's tone—but that you need the audio to clarify these pretty bad quotes is not great. I'm thankful that VPM decided to include the audio (and RPD should be, too).The RTD's Michael Phillips reports that the Washington Football Team will bring its summer training camp back to Richmond, but with one big change: “the city will not be asked to make a $500,000 contribution to the team for its appearance. Instead, the team will rent out the Leigh Street facility for the week at a cost of $100,000.” Not having to pay the richest NFL team in the country, but having them pay us seems like the right order of things.Mike Platania reports in Richmond BizSense that Leek & Thistle will open down in the Bottom this weekend. This spot will sell mostly frozen to-go meals that you reheat at home, and it's another one of those pandemic-inspired changes that I'm interested to see if/how it sticks around. For whatever reason, maybe a year of not going to restaurants, but picking up a frozen meal seems way more appealing to me now than it did in 2019.This is an actual headline in the actual New York Times newspaper website: “U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can't Rule It Out, Either.” OK.For anyone keeping track, Sunday is the five-year anniversary of me shutting down RVANews. It makes me sad to think about, but I love doing what I'm doing now. It is wild, though, to think that some readers of this newsletter have never even heard of RVANews!This morning's longreadOur Digital Pasts Weren't Supposed to Be Weaponized Like ThisI specifically remember having conversations a decade ago about how leaked nudes or embarrassing social media missteps wouldn't be a thing in the 2020s. How could they with whole generations of people growing up on the internet while documenting and sharing more and more of their lives publicly? Turns out, I was way, way wrong.Ms. Ball thought so too. She lost that long-ago Congressional race and is now a media commentator and the author of a book about the new political age. She said in a recent interview that she thought her so-called scandal would be a temporary blip before society adjusted and “that people would grow more accepting” of photos or problematic comments from the past. “It's the polar opposite,” she said. “It's more reactionary and judgmental than it's ever been.” Why haven't repeated calls to replace digital shaming with empathy and compassion resonated? Or at the very least, why hasn't a fear of mutually assured destruction set in?If you'd like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol' Patreon.Picture of the Day

Possibly the biggest consideration when taking on a rehab project is how to finance the deal. We’ve all considered hard money, FHA has their 203K loan program, and we’ve probably seen a late night commercial or two. Perry Farella of Prime Lending talks us through a loan program which is a cross between a conventional loan and hard money, something that you don’t even need to refinance out of once the property is stabilized. Listen in as Perry tells us more about this product and how it can be best used to fund your next Chicago rehab. Connect with Mark and Tom: StraightUpChicagoInvestor.com Email the Show: StraightUpChicagoInvestor@gmail.com Guest: Perry Farella of Prime Lending Sponsor: ChicagoREIA   Sponsor: Appeal.tax   Link: How 2 Fund Renovation Blog   Link: Be Your Own House Contractor: Save 25% without Lifting a Hammer   ----------------- Guest Questions Background 5:00 How do you qualify for rehab loans? 9:45 How do you determine and support the ARV? 11:30 What is the closing timeline for these loans? 13:45 How does the draw process work for construction? 17:45 Do you need to refi out of this loan product? 21:00 Are there price thresholds these loans work best for? 22:00 What goes wrong? 27:00 Hot investment neighborhoods? 31:00 What would need to happen for credit to tighten? 38:45 Competitive advantage? 42:45 What is one piece of advice you’d give a new investor? 43:50 Wrap Up Questions What do you do for fun? 44:20 Self development recommendations? 45:20 Quality resources? 47:20 How can we learn more about you? 48:00 That’s our show! Thanks for tuning in! If you want to make the most of your investment, connect with us at https://www.gcrealtyinc.com/. ----------------- Production House: Flint Stone Media Copyright of Straight Up Chicago Investor 2021.

Last but not least, the Cardinals, Rams, 49ers, and the Seahawks go under the microscope in the NFC West divisional preview. Each team is given an outlook for the 2021 season along with a couple bold predictions. Possibly the heaviest division in terms of competition in the NFL. What do we expect to happen in 2021? Listen to find out. Enjoy!

A young man of only 20 years, Magomed is already making lasting change for his minority Dagestani language group, the Kaitag. Most people have never heard of the 20,000 speakers of Kaitag, and yet Magomed is advocating on the international stage to get his language officially recognized. Possibly most instructive is the way Magomed has … Continue reading "CT99 – Kaitag: In Their Own Words | Endangered Languages | Dargwa Dialects of Dagestan | Achieving International Recognition of a Language"

Another Hiatus Hit from the world of Lumis, one of the Endless Realms In a strange place, known as the Endless Realms, the boundaries and divisions between worlds grows thin. Many peoples and creatures here meld and create new ecosystems - but now a group of adventurers and mercenaries have appeared on Lumis, at the centre of these blendings.  Yet here, they face many new dangers. New creatures. New foes. Possibly even some new friends. If they survive long enough to meet them, of course...   A bestiary episode, hosted and edited by Dragon with inspiration and creatures from the Endless Realms RPG Creature Compendium by Lunar Games Inc. You can find it on DriveThru RPG or on Amazon. Some aspects were altered and adapted to allow the blend of a d20 homebrew system with the published material.   Learn more at Penancerpg.com Support us on Ko fi and Patreon Come talk with us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram  Visit our Teespring Storefront for awesome merch! Listen on Google Play, iTunes,  Spotify, Stitcher, Youtube, Podchaser, podcastaddict

This month's Patron-funded story is "It Came from Beneath" by Louis Evans, narrated by Meredith Matthews. When the clitoris rose more than two stories high from the San Francisco Bay, someone called the National Guard. The fighter jets screamed out of the southeast, and sonic booms rippled across the city skyline. The clitoris rippled too. Possibly with pleasure? Colonel Buck Harder, who was watching the clitoris through binoculars from an emergency command post atop the TransAmerica pyramid--San Francisco’s tallest building, and also, fortuitously, its most phallic--had no idea what the spasms meant. “God damn it, men,” he screamed at his all-male staff, “what is that thing?” It was obviously a clitoris. I mean, obviously. It was, at this point, nearly fifteen stories tall, largely erect, and completely well defined. Aside from its size, it could have come right out of an anatomy textbook, or a pornographic photoshoot with those uncomfortably invasive camera angles. Any human being with eyes who was familiar with the appearance of a clitoris would have gotten it instantly. They would have said, “oh, yes, that’s a giant clitoris.” “For the love of god, what is it?” the colonel cried.  The men muttered, sounding collectively like a failing outboard motor. The California National Guard was stumped.

  Welcome, junkies! We've got three crazy shorts this week! First, a mannequin follows two opera singers around a mall in "Possibly in Michigan." Next, Jim Van Bebber returns as an acid-loving cult leader in "My Sweet Satan." Finally, a kid heads to Shinjuku to find noodles for his grandma in "Ramen Baka Ichidai." All this plus theater chat, nerd news, DVDs, Eye-popping regrets, Sean's new favorite movie, the new Kyle, junk mails and so much more! Donloyd Here!

Possibly even the existence of everything.

About ChaddChadd Kenney is the Vice President of Product at Clumio. Chadd has 20 years of experience in technology leadership roles, most recently as Vice President of Products and Solutions for Pure Storage. Prior to that role, he was the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the Americas helping to grow the business from zero in revenue to over a billion. Chadd also spent 8 years at EMC in various roles from Field CTO to Principal Engineer. Chadd is a technologist at heart, who loves helping customers understand the true elegance of products through simple analogies, solutions use cases, and a view into the minds of the engineers that created the solution.Links: Clumio: https://clumio.com/ Clumio AWS Marketplace: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-ifixh6lnreang TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. As basically everyone knows, trying to do log analytics at scale with an ELK stack is expensive, unstable, time-sucking, demeaning, and just basically all-around horrible. So why are you still doing it—or even thinking about it—when there’s ChaosSearch? ChaosSearch is a fully managed scalable log analysis service that lets you add new workloads in minutes, and easily retain weeks, months, or years of data. With ChaosSearch you store, connect, and analyze and you’re done. The data lives and stays within your S3 buckets, which means no managing servers, no data movement, and you can save up to 80 percent versus running an ELK stack the old-fashioned way. It’s why companies like Equifax, HubSpot, Klarna, Alert Logic, and many more have all turned to ChaosSearch. So if you’re tired of your ELK stacks falling over before it suffers, or of having your log analytics data retention squeezed by the cost, then try ChaosSearch today and tell them I sent you. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you’ve built anything from serverless, you know that if there’s one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it’s that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications.It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You’ve created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. Periodically, I talk an awful lot about backups and that no one actually cares about backups, just restores; usually, they care about restores right after they discover they didn’t have backups of the thing that they really, really, really wish that they did. Today’s promoted guest episode is sponsored by Clumio. And I’m speaking to their VP of product, Chadd Kenney. Chadd, thanks for joining me.Chadd: Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.Corey: So, let’s start at the very beginning. What is a Clumio? Possibly a product, possibly a service, probably not a breakfast cereal, but again, we try not to judge.Chadd: [laugh]. Awesome. Well, Clumio is a Backup as a Service offering for the enterprise, focused in on the public cloud. And so our mission is, effectively, to help simplify data protection and make it a much, much better experience to the end-user, and provide a bunch of values that they just can’t get today in the public cloud, whether it’s in visibility, or better protection, or better granularity. And we’ve been around for a bit of time, really focused in on helping customers along their journey to the cloud.Corey: Backups are one of those things where people don’t spend a lot of time and energy thinking about them until they are, I guess, befallen by tragedy in some form. Ideally, it’s something minor, but occasionally it’s, “Oh, yeah. I used to work at that company that went under because there was a horrible incident and we didn’t have backups.” And then people go from not caring to being overzealous converts. Based upon my focus on this, you can probably pretty safely guess which side of that [chasm 00:02:04] I fall into. But let’s start, I guess, with positioning; you said that you are backup for the enterprise. What does that mean exactly? Who are your customers?Chadd: We’ve been trying to help customers into their cloud journey. So, if you think about many of our customers are coming from the on-prem data center, they have moved some of their applications, whether they’re lift-and-shift applications, or whether they’ve, kind of, stalled doing net-new development on-prem and doing all net new development in the public cloud. And we’ve been helping them along the way and solving one fundamental challenge, which is, “How do I make sure my data is protected? How do I make sure I have good compliance and visibility to understand, you know, is it working? And how do I be able to restore as fast as possible in the event that I need it?”And you mentioned at the beginning backup is all about restore and we a hundred percent agree. I feel like today, you get this [unintelligible 00:02:51] together a series of solutions, whether it’s a script, or it’s a backup solution that’s moved from on-prem, or it’s a snapshot orchestrator, but no one’s really been able to tackle the problem of, help me provide data protection across all of my accounts, all of my regions, all of my services that I’m using within the cloud. And if you look at it, the enterprise has transitioned dramatically to the cloud and don’t have great solutions to latch on to solve this fundamental problem. And our mission has been exactly that: bring a whole bunch of cool innovation. We’re built natively in the public cloud; we started off on a platform that wasn’t built on a whole bunch of EC2 instances that look like a box that was built on-prem, we built the thing mostly on Lambda functions, very event-driven. All AWS native services. We didn’t build anything proprietary data structure for our environment. And it’s really been able to build a better user experience for our end customers.Corey: I guess there’s an easy question to start with, of why would someone consider working with Clumio instead of AWS Backup, which came out a few months after re:Invent, I want to say 2018, but don’t quote me on that; may have been 2019. But it has the AWS label on the tin, which is always a mark of quality.Chadd: [laugh]. Well, there’s definitely a fair bit to be desired on the AWS Backup front. And if you look at it, what we did is we spent, really, before going into development here, a lot of time with customers to just understand where those pains are. And I’ve nailed it, kind of, to four or five different things that we hear consistently. One is that there’s near zero insights; “I don’t know what’s going on with it. I can’t tell whether I’m compliant or not compliant, or protecting not enough or too much.”They haven’t really provided sufficient security on being able to airgap my data to a point where I feel comfortable that even one of my admins can’t accidentally fat-finger a script and delete, you know, whether the primary copy or secondary copy. Restore times have a lot to be desired. I mean, you’re using snapshots. You can imagine that doesn’t really give you a whole bunch of fine-grained granularity, and the timeframe it takes to get to it—even to find it—is kind of a time-consuming game. And they’re not cheap.The snapshots are five cents per gig per month. And I will say they leave a lot to be desired for that cost basis. And so all of this complexity kind of built-in as a whole has given us an opportunity to provide a very different customer experience. And what the difference between these two solutions are is we’ve been providing a much better visibility just in the core solution. And we’ll be announcing here, on May 27, Clumio Discover which gives customers so much better visibility than what AWS Backup has been able to deliver.And instead of them having to create dashboards and other solutions as a whole, we’re able to give them unique visibility into their environment, whether it’s global visibility, ensuring data is protected, doing cost comparisons, and a whole bunch of others. We allow customers to be able to restore data incredibly faster, at fine-grained granularities, whether it’s at a file level, directory level, instance level, even in RDS we go down to the record level of a particular database with direct query access. And so the experience just as a whole has been so much simpler and easier for the end consumer, that we’ve been able to add a lot of value well beyond what AWS Backup uses. Now, that being said, we still use snapshots for operational recovery at some level, where customers can still use what they do today but what Clumio brings is an enhanced version of that by actually using airgap protection inside of our service for those datasets as well. And so it allows you to almost enhance AWS Backup at some level if you think about it. Because AWS Backups really are just orchestrating the snapshots; we can do that exact same thing, too, but really bring the airgap protection solution on top of that as well.Corey: I’ve talked about this periodically on the show. But one of the last, I guess, big migration projects I did when I was back in my employee days—before starting this place—was a project I’d done a few times, which was migrating an environment from EC2-Classic into a VPC world. Back in the dark times, before VPCs were a thing, EC2-Classic is what people used. And they were not just using EC2 in those environments, they were using RDS in this case. And the way to move an RDS database is to stop everything, take a final snapshot, then restore that snapshot—which is the equivalent of backup—to the new environment.How long does that take? It is non-deterministic. In the fullness of time, it will be complete. That wasn’t necessarily a disaster restoration scenario, it was just a migration, and there were other approaches we theoretically could have taken, but this was the one that we decided to go with based upon a variety of business constraints. And it’s awkward when you’re sitting there, just waiting indefinitely for, it turns out, about 45 minutes in this case, and you think everything’s going well, but there’s really nothing else to do during those moments.And that was, again, a planned maintenance, so it was less nerve-wracking then the site is down and people are screaming. But it’s good to have that expectation brought into it. But it was completely non-transparent; there was no idea what was going on, and in actual disasters, things are never that well planned or clear-cut. And at some level, the idea of using backup restoration as a migration strategy is kind of a strange one, but it’s a good way of testing backups. If you don’t test your backups, you don’t really have them in the first place. At least, that’s always been my philosophy. I’m going to theorize, unless this is your first day in business, that you sort of feel the same way, given your industry.Chadd: Definitely. And I think the interesting parts of this is that you have the validation that backups occurring, which is—you need visibility on that functioning, at some level; like, did it actually happen? And then you need the validation that the data is actually in a state that I can recover—Corey: Task failed successfully.Chadd: [laugh]. Exactly. And then you need validation that you can actually get to the data. So, there’s snapshots which give you this full entire thing, and then you got to go find the thing that you’re looking for within it. I think one of the values that we’ve really taken advantage of here is we use a lot of the APIs within AWS first to get optimization in the way that we access the data.So, as an example—on your EC2 example—we use EBS direct APIs, and we do change block tracking off of that, and we send the data from the customers tenancy into our service directly. And so there’s no egress charges, there’s no additional cost associated to it; it just goes into our service. And the customer pays for what they consume only. But in doing that, they get a whole bunch of new values. Now, you can actually get file-level indexing, I can search globally for files in an instance without having to restore the entire thing, which seems like that would be a relatively obvious thing to get to.But we don’t stop there. You could restore a file, you could go browse the file system, you could restore to an AMI, you could restore to another EC2 instance, you could move it to another account. In RDS, not an easy service to protect, I will say. You know, you get this game of, “I’ve got to restore the entire instance and then go find something to query the thing.” And our solution allows you direct query access, so we can see a schema browser, you can go see all of your databases that are in it, you can see all the tables, the rows in the table, you can do advanced queries to join across tables to go [unintelligible 00:10:00] results.And that experience, I think, is what customers are truly looking forward to be able to provide additional values beyond just the restoration of data. I’ll give you a fun example that a SaaS customer was using. They have a centralized customer database that keeps all of the config information across all of the tenants.Corey: I used to do something very similar with Route 53, and everyone looks at me strangely when I say it, but it worked at the time. There are better approaches now. But yeah, very common pattern.Chadd: And so you get into a world where it’s like, I don’t want to restore this entire thing at that point in time to another instance, and then just pull the three records for that one customer that they screwed up. Instead, it would be great if I could just take those three records from a solution and then just imported into the database. And the funny part of this is that the time it takes to do all these things is one component, the accidentally forgetting to delete all the stuff that I left over from trying to restore the data for weeks at a time that now I pay for in AWS is just this other thing that you don’t ever think about. It’s like, inefficiencies built in with the manual operations that you build into this model to actually get to the datasets. And so we just think there’s a better way to be able to see and understand datasets in AWS.Corey: One of my favorite genres of fiction is reading companies’ DR plans for how they imagine a disaster is going to go down. And it’s always an exercise in hilarity. I was not invited to those meetings anymore after I had the temerity to suggest that maybe if the city is completely uninhabitable and we have to retreat to a DR site, no one cares about this job that much. Or if us-east-one has burned to the ground over in AWS land, that maybe your entire staff is going to go quit to become consultants for 100 times more money by companies that have way bigger problems than you do. And then you’re not invited back.But there’s usually a certain presumed scale of a disaster, where you’re going to swing into action and exercise your DR plan. Okay, great. Maybe the data center is not a smoking crater in the ground; maybe even the database is largely where; what if you lost a particular record or a particular file somewhere? And that’s where it gets sticky, in a lot of cases because people start wondering, “Do I just spend the time and rebuild that file from scratch, kind of? Do I do a full restore of the”—all I have is either nothing or the entire environment. You’re talking about row-level restores, effectively, for RDS, which is kind of awesome and incredible. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone talking about that before. How does that map as far as, effectively, a choose-your-own-disaster dial?Chadd: [laugh]. There’s a bunch of cool use cases to this. You’ve definitely got disaster recovery; so you’ve got the instance where somebody blew something away and you only need a series of records associated to it; maybe the SQL query was off. You’ve got compliance stuff. Think about this for a quick sec: you’ve got an RDS instance that you’ve been backing up, let’s say you keep it for just even a year.How many versions of that RDS database has AWS gone through in that period of time so that when you go restore that actual snapshot, you’ve got to rev the thing to the current version, which would take you some time [laugh] to get up and running, before you can even query the thing. And imagine if you do that, like, years down the road, if you’re keeping databases out there, and your legal team’s asking for a particular thing for discovery, let’s say. And you’ve got to now go through all of these iterations to try to get it back. The thing we decided to do that was genius on the [unintelligible 00:13:19] team was, we wanted to decouple the infrastructure from the data. So, what we actually do is we don’t have a database engine that’s sitting behind this.We’re exporting the RDS snapshot into a Parquet file, and the Parquet file then gets queried directly from Athena. And that allows us to allow customers to go to any timeframe to be able to pull not-specific database engine data into—whether it’s a restore function, or whether I want to migrate to a new database engine, I can pull that data out and re-import it into some other engine without having to have that infrastructure be coupled so closely to the dataset. And this was, really, kind of a way for customers to be able to leverage those datasets in all sorts of different ways in the future, with being able to query the data directly from our platform.Corey: It’s always fun talking to customers and asking them questions that they look at me as if I’ve grown a second head, such as, “Okay. So, in what disaster scenario are you going to need to restore your production database to a state that was in nine months ago?” And they look at me like I’ve just asked a ridiculous question because, of course, they’re never going to do that. If the database is restored to a copy that backed up more than 15 minutes or so in the past, there are serious problems. That’s why the recovery point objective—or RPO—of what is your data window of loss when you do a restore is so important for these plannings.And that’s great. “Okay then, why do you have six years of snapshots of your database taken on an interval going back all that time, if you’re never going to ever restore to any of them?” “Well, something compliance.” Yeah. There are better stories for that. But people start keeping these things around almost as digital packrats, and then they wind up surprised that their backup bill has skyrocketed. I’m going to go out on a limb presume—because if not, this is going to be a pretty awkward question—that you do not just backup management but also backup aging as far as life cycles go.Chadd: Yeah. So, there’s a couple different ways that are fun for us is we see multiple different tiers within backup. So, you’ve got the operational recovery methodology, which is what people usually use snapshots for. And unfortunately, you pay that at a pretty high premium because it’s high value. You’re going to restore a database that maybe went corrupt, or got somehow updated incorrectly or whatever else, and so you pay a high number for that for, let’s say, a couple days; or maybe it’s just even a couple hours.The unfortunate part is, that’s all you’ve got, really, in AWS to play with. And so, if I need to keep long-term retention, I’m keeping this high-value item now for a long duration. And so what we’ve done is we’ve tried to optimize the datasets as much as possible. So, on EC2 and EBS, we’ll dedupe and compress the datasets, and then store them in S3 on our tenancy. And then there’s a lower cost basis for the customer.They can still use operational recovery, we’ll manage that as part of the policy, but they can also store it in an airgap protected solution so that no one has access to it, and they can restore it to any of the accounts that they have out there.Corey: Oh, separating access is one of those incredibly important things to do, just because, first, if someone has completely fat-fingered something, you want to absolutely constrain the blast radius. But two, there is the theoretical problem of someone doing this maliciously, either through ransomware or through a bad actor—external or internal—or someone who has compromised one of your staff’s credentials. The idea being that people with access to production should never be the people who have access to, in some cases, the audit logs, or the backups themselves in some cases. So, having that gap—an airgap as you call it—is critical.Chadd: Mm-hm. The only way to do this, really, in AWS—and a lot of customers are doing this and then they move to us—is they replicate their snapshots to another account and vault them somewhere else. And while that works, the downside—and it’s not a true airgap, in a sense; it’s just effectively moving the data out of the account that it was created in. But you double the cost, so that sucks because you’re keeping your local copy, and then the secondary copy that sits on the other account. The admins still have access to it, so it’s not like it’s just completely disconnected from the environment. It’s still in the security sphere, so if you’re looking at a ransomware attack, trust me, they’ll find ways to get access to that thing and compromise it. And so you have vulnerabilities that are kind of built into this altogether.Corey: “So-what’s-your-security-approach-to-keeping-those-two-accounts-separated?” “The sheer complexity that it takes to wind up assuming a role in that other account that no one’s going to be able to figure it out because we’ve tried for years and can’t get it to work properly.” Yeah, maybe that’s not plan A.Chadd: Exactly. And I feel like while you can [unintelligible 00:17:33] these things together in various scripts, and solutions, and things, people are looking for solutions, not more complexity to manage. I mean, if you think about this, backup is not usually the thing that is strategic to that company’s mission. It’s something that protects their mission, but not drives their mission. It is our mission and so we help customers with that, but it should be something we can take off their hands and provide as a service versus them trying to build their own backup solution as a whole.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn’t translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that’s not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Corey: Back when I was an employee if I was being honest, people said, “So, what is the number one thing you’re always sure to do on a disaster recovery plan?” My answer is, “I keep my resume updated.” Because, on some level, you can always quit and go work somewhere else. That is honest, but it’s also not the right answer in many cases. You need to start planning for these things before you need them.No one cares about backups until right after you really needed backups. And keeping that managed is important. There are reasons why architectures around this stuff are the way that they are, but there are significant problems around how a lot of AWS implements these things. I wound up having to use a backup about a month or so ago when some of my crappy code deleted data—imagine that—from a DynamoDB table, and I have point-in-time restores turned on. Cool. So, I just roll it back half an hour and that was great. The problem is, there was about four megabytes of data in that table, and it took an hour to do the restore into a new table and then migrate everything back over, which was a different colossal pain. And I’m sure there are complicated architectural reasons under the hood, but it’s like, that is almost as slow as someone who’s retyped it all by hand, and it’s an incredibly frustrating experience. You also see it with EBS snapshots: you backup an EBS volume with a snapshot—it just copies the data that’s there. Great—every time there’s another snapshot taken, it just changes the delta. And that’s the storage it gets built to. So, what does that actually cost? No one really knows. They recently launched direct APIs for EBS snapshots; you can start at least getting some of that data out of it if you just write a whole bunch of code—preferably in a Lambda function because that’s AWS’s solution for everything—but it’s all plumbing solution where you’re spending all your time building the scaffolding and this tooling. Backups are right up there with monitoring and alerting for the first thing I will absolutely hurl to a third party.Chadd: I a hundred percent agree. It’s—Corey: I know you’re a third-party. You’re, uh, you’re hardly objective on this.Chadd: [laugh].Corey: But again, I don’t partner with anyone. I’m not here to shill for people. You can’t buy my opinion on these things. I’ve been paying third parties to back things up for a very long time because that’s what makes sense.Chadd: The one thing that I think, you know, we hit on at the beginning a little bit was this visibility challenge—and this was one of the big launch around Clumio Discover that’s coming out on May 27th there—is we found out that there was near-zero visibility, right? And so you’re talking about the restore times, which is one key component, but [laugh]—Corey: Yeah, then you restore after four hours and discover you don’t have what you thought you did.Chadd: [laugh]. And so, I would love to see, like, am I backing things up? How much am I paying for all of these things? Can I get to them fast? I mean, the funny thing about the restore that I don’t think people ever talk about—and this is one of the things that I think customers love the most about Clumio—is, when you go to restore something, even that DynamoDB database you talked about earlier, you have to go actually find the snapshot in a long scroll.So first, you had to go to the service, to the account, and scroll through all of the snapshots to find the one that you actually want to restore with—and by the way, maybe that’s not a monster amount for you, but in a lot of companies that could be thousands, tens of thousands of snapshots they’re scrolling through—and they’ve got a guy yelling at them to go restore this as soon as possible, and they’re trying to figure out which one it is; they hunt-and-peck to find it. Wouldn’t it be nice if you just had a nice calendar that showed you, “Here’s where it is, and here’s all the different backups that you have on that point in time.” And then just go ahead and restore it then?Corey: Save me from the world of crappy scripts for things like this that you find on GitHub. And again, no disrespect to the people writing these things, but it’s clear that people are scratching their own itch. That’s the joy of open-source. Yeah, this is the backup script—or whatever it is—that works on the ten instances I have in my environment. That’s great.You roll that out to 600 instances and everything breaks. It winds up hitting rate limits as it tries to iterate through a bunch of things rather than building a queue and working through the rest of it. It’s very clearly aimed at small-scale stuff and built by people who aren’t working in large-scale environments. Conversely, you wind up with sort of the Google problem when you look at solving it for just the giant environments. Great, that you wind up with this overengineered, enormously unwieldy solution. Like, “Oh yeah, the continental saw. We use it to wind up cutting continents in half.” It’s, “I’m trying to cut a sandwich in half here. What’s the problem here?”It becomes a hard problem. The idea of having something that scales and has decent user ergonomics is critically important, especially when you get to something as critical as backups and restores. Because you’re not generally allowed to spend months on end building a backup solution at a company, and when you’re doing a restore, it’s often 3 a.m. and you’re bleary-eyed and panicked, which is not the time to be making difficult decisions; it’s the time to be clicking the button.Chadd: A hundred percent agree. I think the lack of visibility, this being a solution, less a problem I’m trying to solve [laugh] on my own is, I think, one area no one’s really tackled in the industry, especially around data protection. I will say people have done this on-prem at a decent level, but it just doesn’t exist inside the public cloud today. Clumio Discover, as an example, is one thing that we just heard constantly. It was like, “Give me global visibility to see everything in one single pane of glass across all my accounts, ensure all of my data is protected, optimized the way that I’m spending in data protection, identify if I’ve got massive outliers or huge consumers, and then help me restore faster.”And the cool part with Discover is that we’re actually giving this away to customers for free. They can go use this whether they’re using AWS Backup or us, and they can now see all of their environment. And at the same time, they get to experience Clumio as a solution in a way that is vastly different than what they’re experiencing today, and hopefully, they’ll continue to expand with us as we continue to innovate inside of AWS. But it’s a cool value for them to be able to finally get that visibility that they’ve never had before.Corey: Did, you know, that AWS users can have multiple accounts and have resources in those accounts in multiple regions?Chadd: Oh, yeah. Lots of them.Corey: Yeah. Because—the reason that you know that, apparently, is that you don’t work for AWS Backup where, last time I checked, there are still something like eight or nine regions that they are not present in. And you have to wind up configuring this, in many cases, separately, and of course, across multiple accounts, which is a modern best practice: separate things out by account. There we go. But it is absolutely painful to wind up working with.Sure, it’s great for small-scale test accounts where I have everything in a single account and I want to make sure that data doesn’t necessarily go on walkabout. Great. But I can’t scale that in the same way without creating a significant management problem for myself.Chadd: Yeah, just the amount of accounts that we see in enterprises is nuts. And with people managing this at an account level, it’s unbearable. And with no visibility, you’re doing this without really an understanding of whether you’re successfully executing this across all of those accounts at any point in time. And so this is one of the areas that we really want to help enterprises with. It’s, not only make the protection simple but also validate that it’s actually occurring. Because I think the one thing that no one likes to talk about in this is the whole compliance game, right? Like—Corey: Yeah, doing something is next to useless; you got to prove that you’re doing the thing.Chadd: Yeah. I got an auditor who shows up once a quarter and says, “Show me this backup.” And then I got to go fumble to try to figure out where that is. And, “Oh, my God. It’s not there. What do I tell the guy?” Well, wouldn’t it be nice if you had this global compliance report that showed you whether you were compliant, or if it wasn’t—which, you know, maybe it wasn’t for a snapshot that you created—at least would tell you why. [laugh]. Like, an RPO was exceeded on the amount of time it took to take the snapshot. Okay, well, that’s good to know. Now, I can tell the guy something other than just make something up because I have no information.Corey: So, you’d have multiple snapshots in flight simultaneously; always a great plan. Talk to me a little bit about Discover, your new offering? What is it? What led to it?Chadd: I love talking to customers, for one, and we spend a lot of time understanding where the gaps exist in the public cloud. And our job is to help fill those gaps with really cool innovation. And so the first one we heard was, “I cannot see multiple services, regions, accounts in one view. I had to go to each one of the services to understand what’s going on in it versus being able to see all of my assets in one view. I’ve got a lot of fragment reporting. I’ve got no compliance view whatsoever. I can’t tell if I’m over-protecting or under-protecting.”Orphan snapshots are the bane of many people’s existence, where they’ve taken snapshots at some point, deleted an EC2 instance, and they pay monthly for these things. We’ve got an orphan snapshot report. It will show you all of the snapshots that exist out there with no EC2 instance associated to it, and you can go take action on it. And so, what Discover came from is customers saying, “I need help.” And we built a solution to help them.And it gives them actionable insights, globally, across their entire set of accounts, across various different services, and allows them to do a whole bunch of fun stuff, whether it’s actionable and, “Help me delete all my orphan snapshots,” to, “I’ve got a 30-day retention period. Show me every snapshot that’s over 30 days. I’d like to get rid of that one, too.” Or, “How much are my backups costing me in snapshots today?”Corey: Yeah, today, the answer is, “[mumble].”Chadd: [laugh]. And imagine being able to see that with, effectively, a free tool that gives you actionable insights. That’s what Discovery is. And so you pair that with Clumio Protect, which is our backup solution, and you’ve got a really awesome solution to be able to see everything, validate it’s working, and actually go protect it, whether it’s operational recovery, or a true airgap solution, of which it’s really hard to pull off in AWS today.Corey: What problem that’s endemic to the backup space is that from a customer perspective, you are either invisible, or you have failed them. There are remarkably few happy customers talking about their experience with their backup vendor. So, as a counterpoint to that, what do the customers love about you, folks?Chadd: So, first and foremost, customers love the support experience. We are a SaaS offering, and we manage the backups completely for the end-user; there’s no cloud infrastructure the customer has to manage. You know, there’s a lot of these fake SaaS offerings out there where I better deploy a thing and manage it in my tenancy. We’ve created an experience that allows our support organization to help customers proactively support it, and we become an extension to those infrastructure teams, and really help customers to make sure they have great visibility and understanding what’s going on in their environment. The second part is just a completely new customer experience.You’ve got simplicity around the way that I add accounts, I create a policy, I assign a tag, and I’m off and running. There’s no management or hand-holding that you need to do within the system. The system scales to any size environment, and you know, you’re off and running. And if you want to validate anything, you can validate it via compliance reports, audit reports, activity reports. And you can see all of your accounts, data assets, in one single pane of glass, and now with Clumio Discover, you get the ability to be able to see it in one single view and see history, footprint, and all sorts of other fun stuff on top of it. And so it’s a very different user experience than what you see in any other solution that’s out there for data protection today.Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about Clumio and kick the tires for themselves, what should they do?Chadd: So, we are on AWS Marketplace, so you can get us up and running there and test us out. We give you $200 of free credits, so you can not only use our operational recovery, which is, kind of, snapshot management, similar database backup, which is free. You can check out Clumio Discover, which is also free, and see all of your accounts and environments in one single pane of glass with some awesome actionable insights, as we mentioned. And then you can reach out to us directly on clumio.com, where you can see a whole bunch of great content, blog posts, and the like, around our solution and service. And we’re looking forward to hearing from you.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, throw links to that in the [show notes 00:29:57]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it.Chadd: Well, thank you so much for having me. I had an awesome time. Thank you.Corey: Chadd Kenney, VP of product at Clumio. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a very long-winded comment that you accidentally lose because the page refreshes, and you didn’t have a backup.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

We're calling this series Trivia In Purgatory. This is our show from April 2nd. We'd been on lockdown since December 23rd, and were able to open up again for a single week. This evening was bitter sweet, but we were promised it was just going to be another 2 week thing. Posting this May 26th, and us still being in the same boat, I realize that didn't hold any water. The province just announced that indoor dining can open again at a reduced capacity at August 2nd at the earliest. Possibly. I'm not really sure what to expect anymore. I pray our friends and venues can survive that long, and hope that you're doing well wherever you are, and that we'll see you on the other side of this. Our next online show is June 4th at 8 PM. Thanks most of all to you, our dedicated friends and fans, every like, kind word of encouragement, or private message telling us to eat a penis have helped us trek through this mentally. We love you all dearly, far, far, far more than you know. Thanks for your ears, please don't forget about us, and hopefully we'll see you again soon. Koal and Kevin.

In the final hour, Danny Parkins and Matt Spiegel listened back to audio from Hit & Run this past weekend in which Spiegel and Marquee Sports Network analyst Carlos Pena tried to "fix" baseball via the launch angle. Then, we had a discussion about the difference in the effort exerted in the NBA playoffs compared to all other professional leagues. And is Score midday host Dan Bernstein trying to cheat our home run pool? Possibly! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We have doomed ourselves. And we wouldn't have it any other way. Possibly the worst movie we've ever watched. And there's 2 more! Hope our misery is your enjoyment!!! Email: roughnightpodcast@gmail.com

Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a "TAMO Cloud" - which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred". It indicated an area of tech that was inscruitable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in it's output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO Cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys - both technical and theological - and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. This episode features my talk with my friend and frequent Technically Religious guest, Keith Townsend. Listen or read the transcript below. Into music (00:03): [Music] Intro  (00:32): Welcome to our podcast, where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT, we're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. TAMO intro (00:53): Did you ever wonder why it diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside that was originally called a TAMO cloud, which stood for then a miracle occurred. It indicated an area of tech that was inscrutable, but nevertheless, something we saw as reliable and consistent in its output for IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO cloud where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting, to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the it community to explore their journeys, both technical and theological and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today and where they see themselves in the future. Leon Adato (01:39): My name is Leon Adato, and the other voice you'll hear on this episode is long-time technically religious, uh, contributor, Keith Townsend. Keith Townsend (01:47): How's it gone. Leon Adato (01:48): It is going great. It is so good to have you back on the podcast this year. Um, before we dive into any of these conversations, I've been waiting to have this one with you for a long time. Um, I want to give you a moment of shameless self promotion, where you can talk about anything and everything that is particularly Keith and CTO advisor and stuff like that. So where can people find you? What are you doing these days? All that stuff. Keith Townsend (02:12): All right. So you can find me, uh, easiest. Wait, you know what, there's a new website that we did this year. So let's Hawk that the CTO advisor.com has been a completely revamped. It's a completely new platform and, and sculp. Uh, we did it. We're pretty proud of the work there. Leon Adato (02:30): Awesome. So we'll check that out. Fine. And how about on the Twitters? Which we like to say to horrify your daughter? Keith Townsend (02:35): On the Twitter? Because you know, my daughter loves that it's @CTOadvisor. Leon Adato (02:42): Perfect. Um, anything else that you want us to pay attention to where people can find you and what you're working on? Keith Townsend (02:48): Well, what I'm working on is a, you know, we've been in the throws of cold COVID just. Leon Adato (02:54): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (02:54): Before the, you hit the big red button. We talked about just the impact of, uh, looking for the vaccine. What we're looking for at the CTO advisor is looking beyond that, we're going to do a road trip in which we're going to hit 12 cities over three month period. Me and Melissa driving around the big Ford pickup, pulling a Airstream and talking to people who listen to this podcast. So people in technology and, uh, technology vendors, we're we're going to have a good time over the three months. So keep checking the website, check the Twitter feed on for our travels. Leon Adato (03:33): Fantastic. Okay. And the last thing is, um, just briefly your religious ethical or moral point of view. Keith Townsend (03:39): So, you know, uh, this is a big, uh, questionmark for a lot of people, but I think I have it down pat, I'm non-denominational, Leon Adato (03:50): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (03:50): However, I'm from a branch of the Chicago, I mean of, uh, the churches of Christ. So if you're a Christian and you think of the churches of Christ as a denomination there, that's where I'm at. Leon Adato (04:03): Fantastic. Okay. And if you're scribbling any of the websites or stuff down, this is just a reminder to keep your hand on the wheel, pay attention to the road. Don't worry about it. There's going to be show notes that come out the day after this podcast drops. So anything that Keith and I are talking about here is going to be written down there for you. You do not need to make notes. With that said, I want to start off with the technical side. So CTO advisor doing road trips, like what, what is your day to day technical life look like? Keith Townsend (04:32): Well, you know what? I was just sharing with my wife, Melissa, that that has become a lot more blurry. So I can identify religious, really religion, really easily compared to what I do technically anymore, because I spent so much time as a business owner on the administrative parts of busy, of the. Leon Adato (04:51): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (04:51): Business, when I'm not spending time on the administrative parts of the business, selling product, creating product, et cetera, I'm doing analyst work. So I get briefed, I disseminate that information from technical folks. I create content around that and help, uh, decision makers, make decisions around purchases. And occasionally I'll take the advisory role and advise a company on their hybrid infrastructure journey. Leon Adato (05:19): Got it. And, and I know that you do a lot with, you know, basically in the cloud space, uh, you have a couple of opinions about Kubernetes. You, um, may even dabble in building data centers for yourself for fun. Keith Townsend (05:36): For fun, or for profit. Yes, I, so I do, uh, I have the CTO advisor hybrid infrastructure, which is, you know, we, this whole Kubernetes thing and all of the journeys we talk about moving from public, from private data center to public cloud, very abstract terms, the CTO adriser hybrid infrastructure is a concrete something I can put my finger on and say, this is what their journey from private data center to hybrid infrastructure looks like. This is what it tastes like. This is what it feels like. Here's the pain points, the gadgets. So we built a data center with the intent of showing the journey from private data center to hybrid infrastructure. Leon Adato (06:20): Very cool and nice that, that you have a visceral sense of what that looks like, and you can convey that. That's really cool. Okay. So I'm going to presume that you were not born with a silver keyboard in your mouth, that you were not that upon your birth, your mother didn't look at you and say, yes, let's call him CTO advisor. That's what we will do. Where did you start off in tech? What was your, your, you know, rough beginnings? Keith Townsend (06:42): So rough beginnings, the, uh, old man, as you know, we like to call them, uh, bought me a color computer 2 a tan TRS 80 color computer 2, for those of you that were born after the year 2000, this machine from, uh, I bought a car from somebody that was born in 20, in 2000 last night. So that was a really interesting experience. Leon Adato (07:06): Wow. Keith Townsend (07:06): But, uh, uh, in 1984, 1983, my dad bought me a color computer 2, uh, Leon. We're both of an age group that we remember war games, Leon Adato (07:18): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (07:18): The great geek movie of all the greatest geek movie of all times, Leon Adato (07:23): Possibly yes. Keith Townsend (07:23): And I had in my mind, you know what, I'm going to go play TIC TAC TOE on a, the color computer. And that started my love for technology. Uh, you know, and then you forward through the hobbyist phase to, when I actually started to get involved in tech, it was post, uh, my initial con uh, career in hospitality. I always had the bug for tech and I got a job, uh, pre year 2K when you had a win, if you had a pulse and could spell windows, you could get a job in technology. I parlayed that into a job working in the help desk for a, uh, commodities data provider, uh, commodities trading, uh, data provider, uh, for the third shift. And that's way back in 1997, I think. Leon Adato (08:14): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (08:14): So that's, that's the start. I just supporting commodity traders, trying to get real time data feeds off of our product. So that was a really interesting experience, uh, trying to, uh, explain to somebody with an Indian accent, what a Tilda was. Leon Adato (08:30): What a Tilda Yeah, What does that exactly look like? Keith Townsend (08:33): What is a Tilda? Leon Adato (08:33): And also on their keyboard, where would you find it possibly nowhere? Keith Townsend (08:37): Exactly. Leon Adato (08:37): Um, yeah. And, and I've commented a few times on the show that that help desk is for many of us, one of the formative experiences that we have that either show us that we never ever want to work in tech ever again, or that there is so much richness and so much, you know, to learn and so many different directions to go in that we just can't ever get away from it. Um, all right. So then the next question is, you know, started off post TRS, you know, color to TRS 80, uh, post that into the help desk. How did you get from there to where you are today? What was that progression like? Keith Townsend (09:18): Wow, that's a, that's a really great story, uh, or, or question, and it was a lot of, uh, just excellent people throughout my career and grit. The great thing about starting out and learning about technology, of a passion for it. This is one of those industries where you can make a really great living for your family and not have a degree. I don't have one, at the time. I did not have a degree in computing. I didn't even have a degree. I only had maybe six months of community college under my belt from a, from going to community college for two years. I'll probably only hit six months of credit. So, uh, the third shift job, I grabbed a MSCE, MS, MCSE, and then, Leon Adato (10:08): MCSE. Yeah, I have to say it really fast to get it right. Keith Townsend (10:10): MCSE certification guide. And I went down the journey of consuming every bit of information I can around certification. Uh, I'm super proud that I took the windows 95, uh, certification test, which was way harder than a windows NT4 old test. And I got like 98% on it. And I was super geek because I studied for it for months. But, you know, I use that certification path as a way to elevate myself into my next career opportunity, which was again, working at the help desk. But this time at the, at the Chicago Tribune making 20 grand more a year, Leon Adato (10:48): Whoo. Keith Townsend (10:48): Uh, the going again that self study route, uh, mentors, et cetera, moved on to network administration, not even a year after taking the job at, uh, the Tribune, still at the Tribune moved from that to a low dip. I started this brand called Townsend consulting. It's still part of my email address. I can't, uh, but I was super naive as many 20 or 20 something year olds are at the time, uh, thinking that I knew enough to actually advise and consult people on, on how to deploy windows technologies. I guess I was as knowledgeable as anyone, uh, took a hard turn in my career, actually, uh, personally I had to file bankruptcy because it was a very, very bad career move. Uh, I should have, uh, stuck with a full-time employment, uh, but, uh, this is around 9/11. Uh, so I spent, uh, think about six or seven months unemployed, uh, because I made wrong turn in my career. Uh, we, we re, recouped, spent a bit of time, uh, and a mid size organization doing again, network administration where, uh, did a lot of really cool projects like, uh, deploying a backup system, deploying my first sand storage area network, Leon Adato (12:15): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (12:15): Uh, just cutting the next five or six years, just really earning my stripes in IT around the 10, 11 year point of my career. Uh, I finally finished my degree and, uh, computing BA in computing from DePaul university. We, uh, moved to Maryland because we were in and yet a, another recession. This is around 2008, 2009. Leon Adato (12:43): Right. Keith Townsend (12:43): Uh, we moved to Maryland where I took a job at Lockheed Martin, which completely, uh, changed my career. Uh, uh, telemetry. Leon Adato (12:52): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (12:52): I went from very engineer focused. This is if people have ever followed me throughout my career, I was virtualized geek back then, uh, moved from, uh, being kind of an engineer to an architect, a lot more customer facing, uh, uh, roles and opportunities, managing projects. I finished up my Master's in IT project management, uh, that opened the door for me to, uh, move to PWC, which where I became the CTO advisor, the conversation has changed from, should I, you know, use I scuzzy versus NFS versus fiber channel to, you know, what should we outsource all of IT? Uh, the, so that's where, you know, I stepped away from the keyboard. This is circa 2012, 14, and ever since I've been kind of, you know, that's been the brand and the focus of my career, not necessarily, uh, I'm, I'm a management consultant. Not necessarily I am a management consultant necessarily, but I'm a management consultant with deep technical chops. So I can talk, you know, everything from, uh, file systems to storage technology, and other storage technologies to, uh, EBGP all the way to "Should, uh. we, you know, use OPEX versus CapEx for a purchasing decision is how I, how I landed here. Leon Adato (14:25): Got it. That is so what's wonderful about that, that narrative is that I think a lot of people who've been in it for a while can say, Oh, I, I can see myself in that journey. Again, a lot of us have gotten our start in or near the help desk. A lot of us have made several, um, you know, career or company changes, which led to career changes, or at least technical pivots and what we did. So, um, it's really nice to hear that story validated in your experiences. Um, you know, that, that there is a pattern to it. So many people come to it from so many different directions that sometimes you feel like, yeah, it doesn't matter what you do. It's and I, you know, who knows where it's going to end up? No, there really is. There really is sort of a path to it, even though it may not be as formalized as say, you know, a trade or, you know, one of the, we'll say the higher, How do I want to say this, one of the more traditional degreed paths, like, you know, get, you know, being a physician or a lawyer or whatever. Um, okay. So that covers the, the technical side of it. I want to flip over to the religious side and, Keith Townsend (15:40): Uh huh. Leon Adato (15:40): I always like to make the caveat that, um, labels are challenging in a lot of cases, you said that you had a very easy time sort of identifying yourself, but I know that a lot of folks, when they say, when I say, what are you, they're like, well, I'm a, I'm kind of this, but not that, not that part of it. I, one person on a earlier show identified themselves as a kicking and screaming Christian. So, you know, stuff like that. So I want to start off by saying, how do you identify religiously today? Tell us a little bit more about, um, where you place yourself religiously today. Keith Townsend (16:14): So, you know, it's really interesting because, um, I think when most people, um, for those who you can't physically see me, I've never physically seen me and can't tell by my voice, cause voices are hard. I'm an African-American. And when most people think of African-American Christians, I think they have this image in their head of Baptist, Leon Adato (16:35): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (16:35): uh, traditional soulful worship type of church. Nah, I go, I go to a multi-national I'm in a multi-national, uh, congregation. Leon Adato (16:48): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (16:48): And, um, community. So there's a bit of everything. So you can kind of think of it as a little bit more reserved, which has some really interesting, um, uh, I think impacts because traditionally I think you would think of the churches of Christ as more of a Evangelistic. Leon Adato (17:11): Ok. Keith Townsend (17:11): Movement. So when you think of the Evangelistic movement, you think of the politics around that today. And I'm very much not of the politics of the evangelistical movement, uh, and that creates some really interesting conflicts within our, uh, with our, within our multi-national multi-racial community, because you have a lot of that culture mixed with a whole lot of black folk. So, uh, if, if for those who need a point of reference, you'll think of the traditional evangelical, uh, doctrine, Leon Adato (17:53): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (17:53): But mixed with a lot of, uh, multi-racial, uh, congregation and you get the complexities and the flavor of that, but bubbling, bubbling up. Leon Adato (18:06): Yeah. It's, it's never as simple as I think the media, or, you know, a quick, you know, three inches of a New York times article wants to make it sound, there's always nuances. There's always, you know, people are complicated and they bring themselves to everything that they do. So it's, it's never, never a simple thing. So, um, that is interesting. And again, as I said, with the, with the tech, you probably weren't born as a multinational multicultural, uh, church of Christ evangelical, but not that kind, kind of a Christian. So you know, where do you start off? What was your home life? You know, what was your home religious life like growing up? Keith Townsend (18:48): So the, one day, if my mother was in tech, uh, she make a amazing, uh, guests because she kind of covers the, the spectrum. Uh, we, my mom specifically, my father was not religious. Uh, much of all, he has Christian, like many Christians are like many religions. If you're, if you're culturally a Christian, you know, you identify as Christian, but you're not really practicing. Leon Adato (19:13): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (19:13): So my father was a non-practicing Christian, just, you know, uh, but my mom, uh, when we were in, around, when I was in junior high, basically, uh, became a Jehovah's witness and my mom is now a Muslim. So, Leon Adato (19:32): Ok. Keith Townsend (19:32): That is, that has been quite the journey. And it's always an interesting conversation, uh, with her. And we'll get into that, I think, in, in another podcast or another date, but it's an amazing, uh, conversation, but which makes it really, which has made my Christian journey, my religious journey really interesting. Uh, what is common between events, if Jehovah's witnesses were, uh, political at all, I think their politics were probably lean towards what the evangelical churches will will, Leon Adato (20:04): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (20:04): But more importantly, culturally they're very similar. Faiths might be slight doctrine may be slightly different, Leon Adato (20:12): Sure. Keith Townsend (20:12): But culturally they're very, very similar. So I'm finding that a lot of the, of what I remember in my childhood as worship and as, uh, meeting and community is very similar in my, uh, religious experience today. Leon Adato (20:29): Got it. Okay. So yeah, so the, the, the feeling of it was the same, even if the, the particulars of the expression of it may have been slightly different, so that's. Keith Townsend (20:40): Yes. Leon Adato (20:40): Okay. Very cool. And so having grown up in a Jehovah's witness house, even though your mom herself went through her own religious journey, what was yours like from, from that, to this, to where you are today? Keith Townsend (20:53): So, what's really interesting is that I, I, uh, I wholeheartedly believe than the, uh, Jehovah's witnesses doctrine when as a, as a teen, as a, uh, fairly young adult, when my mother, uh, uh, faith changed so that mine's. Mines didn't change to the extreme that my mother's did, where she, uh, where, uh, where she went with a completely different lineage of faith, Leon Adato (21:25): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (21:25): Mine's changed in the fact that, uh, it wasn't as strong as I thought it was. Uh, I was sound in, um, the beliefs of Christianity, that I don't think has changed. Leon Adato (21:38): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (21:38): What had changed was whether or not I become, whether or not I was a practicing Christian or not, and that I was not. So in my early twenties, uh, from my post high school to my early twenties, right before I started my, uh, technology, my career in technology, I was not a, a practicing Christian. I did not, my life did not meet up to what my religious beliefs were, you know, so, you know, you're Jewish and you're Orthodox Jewish. So some of the stuff we can easily relate to because we're, uh, uh, I think, you know, Orthodox Judaism may be one of the most disciplined faiths you can, uh, go down. And when you come from a Jehovah's witness background is a very disciplined faith. Leon Adato (22:27): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (22:27): So there's strict, uh, beliefs around things like sexual immorality. So the fact that me and Melissa, who I've been with since I was 20, Leon Adato (22:38): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (22:38): That we were living together and not married, bothered me, uh, uh, from a faith perspective. Leon Adato (22:46): Got it. Keith Townsend (22:47): So I didn't reconcile that until, uh, I started to study the Bible again, uh, with the churches of Christ and become a baptized Christian around age 25. Leon Adato (23:00): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (23:00): Or so. And that kinda got me from, you know, kind of Jehovah's witness, uh, uh, on the verge of becoming a Jehovah witness to kind of stepping away from Christianity, to re-engaging in the faith in general. And then, you know, I, you visually morphed into, you know, as you think through kind of the entire journey from age 25 to I'm now 47. So a 22 year, uh, Christian journey, you know, it went from being, uh, you know, that fiery early Christian, uh, going out and preaching on the, uh, on the street corners to having teenage children and trying to, uh, help them with their own religious journeys and understanding life just isn't as black and white, as we all would like to think. Leon Adato (23:54): Right. Keith Townsend (23:54): You know, it's, it's just, it's an amazing, like, if, once you start the pull part, the details of it, and we'll talk about things, some of it, and some of your next questions, but you know, things about, uh, things about my faith around, uh, uh, taboo topics, such as sexual orientation. Like once you become a full realized adult, and you have queer friends, how do you reconcile having queer friends? But your faith is saying that, uh, the doctrine of your faith is saying that this is something not acceptable. So. Leon Adato (24:32): Right. Keith Townsend (24:32): Separating the two or reconciling the two has been just a really interesting journey as I've matured. Leon Adato (24:38): Yeah. And, you know, friends or relatives, you know, to that. Keith Townsend (24:42): Yeah. Leon Adato (24:42): To that matter. Keith Townsend (24:42): I have a niece that I love to death and she's engaged to another woman. So, you know, we had them over to dinner before COVID, we had them over to dinner and we had a great time, but it is, it's some really tough questions that you, you end up, uh, just dabbling with. Leon Adato (25:02): Right. And if you're reconciled to it, to those things, to those contradictions, which I think, I think the tension, the, the religious and Holy tension, I think is where the excitement is the, the, the work, the introspection, the, the, again, as an adult, as a fully realized, mature, adult, and I recognize that as I say this, uh, if my wife or children listen to this podcast, they will laugh hysterically at my believing myself to be a fully realized mature adult, but that aside, um, I think that figuring out those things about what, what I believe and what I practice and, um, how I reconcile, what my, both, what my religious peers, my co-religionists are saying, and all those things, that's where a lot of the really interesting, dialogue can be found. Um, you know, I don't mean arguments, but I mean, real dialogue, like, you know, what do we mean when we say this? Um, and I will say that, you know, as, as IT people, I'm not trying to diminish it, but as IT people, I think we're used to, those hard conversations, those challenging conversations of, no, I really think this is the way we need to fix this, or this is the way we need to build this. No, that's not it, I think this is how we need to build it based on my experiences or my understanding of the facts on the ground. And I think that that's, that's part of the thing that makes, uh, folks with strong religious identities who work in it. I think that's where we find those, those overlaps. And that sort of takes us to the next, the next part of the, of the episode, which is when, as a person with a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, who works in IT, I'm curious about how those two things overlap, you know, has it created any friction and how have you overcome that, but also have there been any, you know, wonderful discoveries, delightful discoveries, I like to call them where you didn't think that being religious was going to help your tech, or you didn't think that being technical was going to enhance your experience of your faith. And yet it happened. So let's start off with the, well, we'll start off with the not so great stuff. And we'll end on a high note. So was, have there ever been moments when your faith caused friction with your tech or vice versa? Keith Townsend (27:35): So that's a really interesting question, I think, and this is not just, I think, unique to tech. I think the science is there's two areas. There's kind of work-life balance that category that we put in work-life balance and tech is unique in a sense that we don't ask our payroll people to run payroll at 10 o'clock at night. Leon Adato (27:58): Usually not unless something's going really wrong . Keith Townsend (28:02): But when, you know, when people are looking at me funny, and you don't have this problem because of, uh, your faith, but you have the conflict, uh, the, when people are looking at me funny, because I step out of service because I got a text, is weird. That was early on like, Oh, I get the servers down on a Sunday afternoon and I'm doing service. I think Orthodox Jews kind of get this part, right. Uh, you know what? You won't get that text because you don't have a pager on. So the, uh, the, uh, that's one aspect of it, but there's the second part of that, which is the work-life balance is when you need to push back, uh, from that the computers don't care that you go to service Wednesday nights and on Sundays. So I remember, uh, very vividly one night I was getting off of work at five o'clock and my, uh, I get a page, uh, right before I leave. And the former CEO of the Tribune is now, uh, running the, uh, back then, once you became the former CEO of the Tribune, once you retire from that, you became the CEO of Tribune's, uh, uh, charity, whatever that was named the, Leon Adato (29:28): Oh ok. Keith Townsend (29:28): Uh, and they had a problem and it was my job to troubleshoot that problem. So, you know, there's this super important person and the organization I'm working the help desk, I'm on call. I get a page that this senior executive has a problem, but I have church service. And that I can't that mentally I, in my mind, I cannot Miss Church service. So I have this conflict. Do I go help the executive? Or do I go to church in which you know, is so for me, it was really a question of faith and I chose to go to service. And this is just a good piece of advice for work-life balance. In general, I always always push against deadlines that conflict with my personal life. Leon Adato (30:17): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (30:17): I've done enough stuff to know that most deadlines are autofit are artificial. Someone somewhere said that this has to be done by a date unless we're talking about, Oh, VMworld is scheduled on the 19th of September, and this presentation will be delivered. And it has to be in by the morning of 19th of September, then everything else is negotiable. If it's not a written. And even then, you know, we get these weird deadlines and it, and in business in general, thou shalt have their, your presentation in a month before the thing. And I kind of just brush all that stuff off. I try, I tried to respect it if I can, but if I have conflict, I manage that conflict. The second thing is by definition, and I'm sure people who listen to this podcast struggle with this. When I read the old Testament and I see that Joshua prayed and the sun stopped in the middle of the sky, I simply don't believe it like, and you can, you can kind of water over your faith if you want to and say, Oh, you know what? I'm just being unfaithful. Or, and yes, I will believe this theme that I don't believe. I try to be as honest as possible when it, when it, when my, my semi scientists technical, technical brain can't reconcile something that I read in my religious texts, I don't cover it up. Like, I don't believe Adam and Eve, I don't believe the, I don't, I'm a Christian, but I don't believe the creation story as written and the texts that we read today. And those are the things that I truly struggle with. I don't struggle with, you know, um, again, I'm, I'm a mature adult. I have plenty of years of experience. I know how to push back on areas of conflict when it comes to scheduling. But as a, even as a 22 year old Christian, 22 years of my faith, I still struggle with reconciling what my technical brain tells me and what my faith wants to, uh, what my faith teaches. Leon Adato (32:35): Right. And, and that is actually a topic that we're going to cover, uh, In a future episode, which is this idea of proof and how do we reconcile our, you know, fact-based, don't go with your gut, say it with data, or don't say it at all, kind of 9 to 5 lives with our, uh, again, you know, biblically found, biblically founded ideas of how the world works and how it's structured and things like that, um, at the same time. So I want to just highlight the idea that, yeah, deadlines are artificial. If you're on call the challenge I think, again, as a, as a, another religious person, the challenge isn't reconciling your faith with on-call, it's reconciling your organization with on-call, that is being done by a human. Because, okay, you had church service, you could just as easily have had bath time with the kids. I'm sorry, I'm elbow deep in a bathtub with a two year old. I'm not turning around to go fix the server right now. It's going to wait another 10 minutes or 15 or whatever it is. You know, I have family emergencies. I have all those things. How does an organization handle the fact that on-call is a point of, you know, if the emergency is so bad that my not responding to it in the first 15 or 20 minutes caused it all to die, all to go away, Then there were some pretty fundamental problems with the system that had nothing to do with my failing on-call. Keith Townsend (34:13): Yeah. You have to be able to triage. Leon Adato (34:15): Yeah. Keith Townsend (34:15): You have to be able to say, you know, what is this really? I know I got a page for it, but is this really important because, uh, both of us have older children, mine are a bit older than yours, but there are times where I just simply can't get back. Leon Adato (34:31): Yeah. Keith Townsend (34:31): And I think back, wow, was getting that, uh, was getting that CRM system up in 2 hours versus 6 really worth missing that game. Hmm. Leon Adato (34:44): Right. Keith Townsend (34:46): Retrospect, maybe not. Leon Adato (34:47): Yeah. And I will say, I am absolutely a workaholic. I am. I mean, at this point in my life, I'm 53, I've been in IT for 30 years. There is no getting around it and there's probably no solving it. I am, I, I enjoy my work so much that it is very hard for me to walk away from it at the same time. Um, I've had some very hard conversations with my family who said, of course, you worked 12 hours to get that thing done. And you got the kudos. All we got was not having you. That's all we got out of it. And that, again, this is apropo of nothing that we're talking about in terms of tackle religion. It's just one of those life lessons that, you know, old tech dudes, you know, are sharing, but you really have to think, you know, not only is the applause you're going to get from your company, fleeting, you know, are you going to get a, an attaboy and that's it ain't worth it. Ain't worth dropping date night with your wife or your significant other isn't worth, you know, it's not worth dropping it for Oh, wow. That was really good. Thank you. It's not worth being asked to do it again. It's not worth thinking you will always be there and it's also not necessarily worth the frustration and the anger that you may see long-term in your family's faces when they start to hate your job. Keith Townsend (36:17): Yeah. The, uh, I love it. That my kids have memories of jobs that I had, that they loved. They were like, Oh, I love that job that you would take me to. And they don't. Leon Adato (36:28): Ahh. Keith Townsend (36:28): Know what I did, but they say, Oh, I love that job that you did, and there was the refrigerator full of soda and I can get free soda. And we, you know, we stop in and then we go, and then afterwards, we go across the street to, you know, one of my favorite stories is recently, my son said he took, uh, he took his girlfriend to the restaurant that was across the street from that job. Leon Adato (36:53): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (36:53): And he said he was so disappointed and heartbroken when his girlfriend just said, Oh, it was okay. And, uh, he said, I have some of my best memories of being with my dad and my family after he, you know, take us, uh, to work at the, he did a server upgrade or whatever. He take us across the street in, have this place in. And he said the other day, Oh, and to boot is now closed in. So there's this thing that you have to balance. We have tough jobs and information technology. And as, as, and most faiths have this thing, uh, and I think it's pretty consistent that pride is a sin. Leon Adato (37:37): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (37:37): And there's no better job than being an, IT Ex that feeds your pride. Leon Adato (37:44): Yes. Keith Townsend (37:44): Then what we do, the ability to be the superhero, the person who saw, saved the day, uh, I got, I had a CEO, tell me, Keith, you took us out of the stone age, et cetera. We get all the kudos in the world. And it feeds that pride. Leon Adato (38:01): RIght, right. Keith Townsend (38:02): At the end of the day, we have to ask the question and we'll get into this, in one of your, uh, next series of questions around, you know, what pride is a horrible thing for both your career and your personal life. Leon Adato (38:15): Yeah. Um, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna quote her correctly, but Charity Majors, who's the, I think she's still the CTO of honeycomb IO. She is still part of honeycomb, but she has gone from, I think the CTO to one of the engineers or back again, she founded the company, but she gets to have whatever job she wants in it. And she said, she's very much anti firefighting. She said, I actually do not give anybody credit in our company for fixing a problem that blew up. I want to give credit to the person who found the problem before it occurred, who did the steady, regular testing and, uh, quality control so that the problem never occurred. And I think IT is horrible at that as a, uh, as a industry where we lionize the 2:00 AM firefighter while completely overlooking the person who shows up at 9 leaves at 5 does good, solid, reliable work that is consistent,and has few, if any flaws, that person never gets a bonus. That person. I mean, in terms of like, when we think about, you know, bonuses for saving the day, that person never gets it because yeah. They just showed up. They just did their job. Yeah. They just did their job. Perfect. You know, uh, consistently all the time. That's the part that we should be holding up as the example. Um, but we don't. So you're absolutely right. And I actually made a note that, that, uh, we definitely need to do an episode on pride goeth before the fall, for sure. To talk about like what that means in tech and religion. Okay. So we've talked about some of the challenges. Are there any moments, uh, as I said before, this delightful discoveries, any times, when you're you realize that your faith was really a asset, a benefit to your technical life or vice versa, where you were at church, and you realize that being an IT person was really, and not just, I'm going to go back to an earlier episode, we had where it was like, Oh, Keith can fix, it keeps the AV guy, not the, again, that lionizing the problem solving. But anytime when you realize that, that your technical mindset created a deeper or more powerful connection to your faith. Keith Townsend (40:29): So let's talk about how the faith has, uh, impacted my work life and techno, uh, as a technologist, uh, you know what we, we'll talk about it, I think in a future episode and we'll address the, in the proof piece of it, but sometimes somethings just take faith, true story. Uh, the, I was on call and there was the help desk reporting system was running on NT 4.0 server when NT 4.0 was the latest OS from Microsoft out and available, Leon Adato (41:02): Right. Keith Townsend (41:02): But it was still then a horrible OS, and I was in there to do, uh, updates that you get in via CD back in, back in that time. And I came to it, hit the KVM. It was blue screened already. Like even before I touched anything, it was blue screened hours later. The, and this is, this has been a system that had been giving, uh, uh, problems. I called the director. He said, look, Keith, if this thing isn't up, by the time we get back into the office in the morning, we both might as well go out looking for new jobs. So I'm like, Whoa, hold on. I was just coming in to do updates. So how did I get lumped into this whole losing your job thing? It got to the point that it had to be about three o'clock in the morning. I literally got in the middle, on the middle of the data center floor. I got on my knees and prayed. Because I had no idea how you guys have to remember this. This is 1998, 1999. There is no internet blogs that you can just go to Google or AltaVista and Google and find. Leon Adato (42:09): Right. Keith Townsend (42:09): The solution to the problem. If you get on the phone with Microsoft, you're going to be on the phone for hours before you. Leon Adato (42:16): Yeah. Keith Townsend (42:16): Can get to someone who can help you, Leon Adato (42:19): Help you through it. Keith Townsend (42:19): So my only main line, my Google was just praying. I got some crazy idea to do it. So I've never, I've never shied away from my faith and my job. And I've taken principles from my Christian faith and apply them to my approach to work. I'm ethical. I, I'm moral, and I'm a better leader because I embrace the love of Christ in my approach to my job. I, uh, literally do not approach my job as I'm working for, uh, the Tribune or Lockheed Martin it's, I'm working for God and is what my is, is my work acceptable? Is this something that I can present to him? Is my leadership something that I can present to him? Uh, is it something if, uh, I, my, am I taking credit where I don't deserve to take credit? Leon Adato (43:20): Um hmm. Keith Townsend (43:20): That's how I approach my work because of my faith and people, uh, people give me kudos about it all the time, and I don't always succeed in doing this, but I am who I am because of my faith. You take away my faith from who I am as a person. And I'm pretty unlikable. Leon Adato (43:43): Got it. Yeah, it's, uh, it, it definitely is a, uh mitigating factor for a lot of us. Um, I will say also, just having known you for a while and worked with you in, uh, several different, um, venues that you, you bring that perspective to, is it worth doing? And, you know, you'll look at projects that I think a lot of folks in your position would say, I know that's not worth it. No, no, no. There's, there's a message here that I want to deliver. There's a, you know, there's a conversation I want to have. That's worth being part of or whatever. You, you value things in a way that, um, is not, is not necessarily business like or business centric, but it is, um, humanity centric. And it is really about, you know, what can I do to help? In a lot of ways. Keith Townsend (44:38): Yeah. I remember what it was like too. So my brother is also a business owner. My youngest brothers are business owners. He had a, Leon Adato (44:46): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (44:46): Uh, he had a employee. Uh, he was thinking that, you know what? I think I might be overpaying this particular employee. No, not overpaying, He said, you know I think I might be underpaying this particular employee, I really need to consider this. And then in a casual conversation, a week later, the employee said, you know what? I was at the grocery store, my wife, and it was the first time in our lives. And this person is over 40. Uh, this is the first time in our lives, where we went into the grocery store and we weren't worried about our checking account balance, and what we were buying for and being able to buy groceries. So IT technology has transformed my life from a, Leon Adato (45:32): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (45:32): From just a privileged perspective, you know, I'm, I, the, my wife got tagged in a photo of a billionaire. We're not rich, but we have access and privilege that the 12, 16 year old Keith could never even. Leon Adato (45:51): Yeah. Keith Townsend (45:51): Fathom. I just did not know this world existed. So when, whether it's your day job, or you personally, or someone comes with an opportunity for me to open that door to other people to have similar transformative experiences, why would I want to pull that ladder up from them and not give them the same opportunities? As I mentioned, it was grit partially that got me here, but it was also people willing to extend a hand. Leon Adato (46:19): Yeah. Keith Townsend (46:19): And help me up that ladder. Leon Adato (46:21): Very nice, Keith, it is always a privilege and a pleasure to talk to you. Uh, this is the lightning round. Any final thoughts, anything that you want to share with folks, um, just to think about on their way. Keith Townsend (46:34): So you know what the, I think if you can take anything from this conversation, it's don't be fearful of your faith. Um, people are people. There are some of them, there are truly jerks out there. One of our fellow contributors get challenged because of his faith on Twitter, but overall you impact way more people positively by sharing your faith, whatever that faith is. I'm not in a position to judge what you, how you choose your relationship with your God or your spiritual being. But what I am saying, the positivity from that will positively impact your career and others, way more than the pain for the most part inflicted upon us, because we're open with our faith. Leon Adato (47:20): Right? The, yeah. The benefits outweigh any of the challenges and sometimes the challenges are there to be overcome. Keith Townsend (47:26): Yes. Leon Adato (47:27): Um, I like it. Uh, fantastic. One more time for people who want to find you online, who want to see what you're working on, um, where can people get in touch with you? Keith Townsend (47:35): Yeah. So as CTO visor is the easiest way to get in contact with me. DMS are open, but don't send me anything weird, cause I will block you. Uh, and theCTOadvisor.com is how you get to me professionally. And I post a lot of stuff to LinkedIn because it's a very powerful platform. Leon Adato (47:53): Yeah, you, uh, you, you have a lot of nice talks on there too, that I've noticed, uh, from time to time you give a, it's almost like a mini podcast there. So. Keith Townsend (48:01): Yeah. Leon Adato (48:01): That's another thing to check out is that LinkedIn link. Well, uh, thank you again for taking some time out of your day. It's actually the middle of the day for both of us. And, uh, I look forward to seeing you back on the show. Keith Townsend (48:11): All right, Leon, I'll I'll hopefully I'll see you in person. When I visit you via the road show. When I visit Cleveland, Leon Adato (48:18): If the roadshow is coming to Cleveland, then we are absolutely going to do a tour of every kosher restaurant. I will weigh 900 pounds when we're done with it. Keith Townsend (48:25): I love me a kosher hot dog. Leon Adato (48:27): Perfect. We'll get you one, take care. Keith Townsend (48:30): Take care. Speaker 6 (48:30): Thank you for making time for us this week, to hear more of technically religious visit our website at technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions or connect with us on social media.  

OK, here's the scene:A flight is heading from Greece to Lithuania, flying over Belarus. The pilots get notification of a bomb threat. A fighter jet forces the plane to land. A couple of passengers are then detained by Belarusian authorities.This isn't a plot point in an action film. And there was no bomb.Related: Belarus opposition figure demands 'new, democratic, open country'Yesterday, Ryanair Flight 4978 was intercepted and one of the passengers detained was 26-year-old Belarusian dissident Roman Protasevich. The operation was reportedly approved by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a man referred to as "Europe's last dictator."Related: Belarus targets journalists, activists in new raidsThis evening in Belarus, a new video was released of Protasevich after his arrest, posted initially on a pro-government Belarusian channel.In the video, Protasevich says he is in good health and is being treated well. Possibly under duress, he also confesses to plotting riots in Minsk — crimes that carry a 15-year penalty. His forehead appears bruised in the video.Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian human rights activist and politician who ran as the main opposition candidate in the 2020 Belarusian presidential election, shared the video on Twitter: The regime's propaganda channels posted a video of arrested Raman Pratasevich, saying that he is treated lawfully in the Minsk Detention Center №1. This is how Raman looks under physical and moral pressure. I demand the immediate release of Raman and all political prisoners. pic.twitter.com/zdolsbp6m5— Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (@Tsihanouskaya) May 24, 2021The European Union has found itself at the center of this situation. RyanAir is headquartered in Ireland. The plane was registered in Poland. The flight was going from Greece to Lithuania. Today, heads of EU states met to discuss potential sanctions.Katia Glod, a Belarus analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis, joined The World's host Carol Hills, from London, to share the latest insights on this operation and what it means for global politics. Carol Hills: First of all, who is Roman Protasevich?Katia Glod: Roman Protasevich is a Belarusian journalist, the famous blogger. Roman is a founder of the very popular Telegram channel, which is called NEXTA, which was behind mass protests in Belarus, which erupted last August. And Roman Protasevich, at the time, he was part of this NEXTA team. Nowadays, he is the editor of another very popular Telegram [messaging app] channel called "Belarus of the Brain," which has several hundred thousand subscribers, and is also very widely read in Belarus.Why did Alexander Lukashenko approve this brazen operation?Well, first of all, we have to realize that Lukashenko is a very revengeful person. He has been well-known for taking revenge against his opponents. And NEXTA, obviously, displayed Lukashenko and the regime, the security services, to a great extent, because, as I've just said, they mobilized people to organize protests. Another reason is an attack on mass media, which we have seen in Belarus basically since last summer. Now that Protasevich is in Belarusian custody, what is likely to happen tohim?Well, he's likely to face up to 15 years in prison. The likely charges are [going] to be organizing public disorder and also stoking social strife. So, that means that he's currently somewhere at the KGB prison or one of the detention facilities in Minsk. We know that his girlfriend was transported to one of the detention facilities in Minsk, the so-called Okrestina prison, which became very famous during the August protest, because this is where tortures and beatings of many protesters happened.You mentioned the mass protests against Lukashenko last summer. They were followed by a harsh government crackdown that continues to this day. Does this arrest change anything for Belarusians who oppose Lukashenko?Unfortunately, it doesn't change much for Belarusians inside Belarus. It's that perhaps more people will be thinking about immigrating, and leaving the country obviously creates another international precedent. It puts the Belarusian regime onto a new level of priority. If, for example, we can say that before, Belarus has been more of a moral issue, a moral dilemma, particularly for the European Union, it was not nice that human rights have been abused in Belarus or that the elections were rigged, but it has not really until now affected directly the rights of European citizens. Yesterday's incident has shown that now Lukashenko's regime became a real threat to international norms, and real threats to European security. And Belarusians inside Belarus do hope that the West could take tougher sanctions against the regime.It's interesting, President Lukashenko had to know that the world would harshly condemn him for doing this. And he knew of this and he did it anyway. What does that tell you? Well, it tells us that the regime has lost control of political thinking, that the regime is really waging a war because its goal [is] only to stay in power, regardless by which means. It tells us that the regime is not prepared to negotiate with the opposition or with the West and that it's not backing off.What role might Russia have here? Do you think Russian governmentofficials were in the loop on this?We do know that there were actually four people who did not board the flight back to Vilnius. And apart from or Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend, there were two Russian citizens. And the speculation is that either they were Belarusian KGB or that they were Russian FSB agents. And perhaps that Russia lent a helping hand to Belarus. Well, either way, Russia would not be the country that would try to punish Belarus or would try to tell it that that's not the right way forward.How do you think the United States should respond to this event?So far, we have seen only a statement of Mr. Blinken, who obviously condemned the situation and said that there should be given an adequate response. I think it will be a real test to the unity between the US and the European Union — whether the US will join the European Union in offering a very tough stance against the behavior of the Belarus regime.This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Another solo trip in Luke land in episode 110. Join me as I do a little introspection with the aid of twenty key questions. Possibly one of the trickiest episodes I’ve ever done. There’s also a little story about a chub of shit.

You can be forgiven for thinking this sounds like one of those episodes that was recorded late in the evening, after we had both taken a drink. 'Possibly because this is one of those chapters of TCD that didn't quite go to plan. To start with the sketchy bit of research Ant had done proved to be of no great worth, so we ended up waffling and giggling. Then we lost the zoom feed, and we didn't manage to re-connect until three days later. Now of course we are ever the professionals (as you know) so we may have put a good shine on it. But just in case we didn't (there are some things you famously can't polish) I am putting my cards on the table. Ah - a straight flush! Love'n'Rasputin (wasn't HE deaf in one ear?) h https://www.marillion.com/shop/corona/index.htm (TCD Merch Store) https://www.patreon.com/coronadiaries (Become Purple and support the show) http://marillion.com/shop/merch/hogarthbook01.htm (The Invisible Man Volume 1: 1991-1997) http://marillion.com/shop/merch/hogarthbook02.htm (The Invisible Man Volume2: 1998-2014) https://www.facebook.com/IceCreamGenius/ (Facebook) https://www.instagram.com/stevehogarthonline/ (Instagram) http://www.stevehogarth.com/ (Website) Support this podcast

We're redoing the Patreon -- for now watch the Twitch replay on twitch.tv/muckvilleradio   He's back! Muckville Season 3: The Summer of Muck is here! Comedian/animator Anthony Massa is joined by Co host Ben Davis (Host of Laugh Attic at Strangebrew Tavern in Manchester NH) with a call in from Comedian and Artist Will Pottorff   This episode is DARK! Anthony instills a fear of WINDOWS into the listeners! Metal Gear! Israel Vs Gaza? Tomato Tomata! WAR! Problematic disgusting fetishes! Never sleep again, or you'll get EYE CHECKED! Ben almost got rich without even knowing! Book Talk, Tig Notaro is SO BEAUTIFUL!  Nick Assad POOPS! Gross! Dylan J. Negri gets MAD A LOT! Dylan vs Muckville! With much more! Enjoy!   all related muckville links and feeds here: linktr.ee/muckville   Intro Theme by @Possibly on Newgrounds   FAIR USE!   Imagine having a PROMO CODE for something! CRINGE!

Jersey Devil and Stunt Pilot is testing.. but only one will we POSSIBLY ride in a few weeks. Of course, Stunt Pilot is close as well along with Indiana Beach making headway on their transplant. That, park openings and changes, fan questions, and much more in the latest episode!

These are the top stories the Cheat Sheet team is watching: There will finally be a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine; Top-quality vaccines are hard to come by in developing countries; A man dies in police custody after officers dogpile on top of him; Chris Cuomo apologizes on air for his role in New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s sexual assault scandal; Possibly the largest van Gogh painting has been found. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today on the Rundown: Lidia Curanaj is joined by Congressman Peter King. Masks Off? Possibly? Maybe? Are you guys ready to shed the masks and return to normalcy?

Possibly the worst A-lady demo in the history of the multiverse today. A Martian could have done a better job…

Jonny is back!! Almost got banned to the Patreon but somehow squeaked through. Possibly the funniest episode yet!

Today we are discussing the future of filmmaking post COVID. Will we ever see another blockbuster like Avengers: Endgame? Possibly not.Pod Decks is the sponsor for this video. Check them out and use the promo code CinemaGold for 10% off your order. https://powered-by-pod-decks.peachs.co/a/larry-leaseParamount+: Join Today and Get First Month Freehttps://paramountplus.qflm.net/QOPqmAFollow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cinemagoldshowSend us a tip @ www.streamlabs.com/cinemagold

It's time to get personal. Today I'm talking about my recent struggle with apathy and all the things I had to do to return to my usual state of creative inspiration. Tune in to hear me dive into: Energetic Alignment, Lifestyle Creation, Stepping into the new Paradigm, How to clear space in your energetic field by purging emotions, Self expression and communication as an experiment, channeling your content from the present moment, spiritual awakening & shadow healing &  Collectively creating a new reality. Possibly my most important episode yet.   Come kick it with me on Insta & YouTube   Work With Me | 30 Day Scripting Mentorship   Get My Book | Her Feminine Frequency

In this episode, we’re delighted to be interviewing the phenomenal Martha Beck. For those of you who do not know Dr. Martha Beck, she is a New York Times bestselling author, a speaker, and a life coach, with an infectious humor. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey once called her the smartest woman she knows.Martha is passionate and engaging, and she is well known for her unique combination of science, humor, and spirituality.Having a son with Downs syndrome caused Martha to really consider what human life was about and set her off on “a lifetime adventure of breaking the rules”.To quote Martha Beck “Emmerson said Beauty is its own excuse for being, and I decided that joy is the felt equivalent and the only real reason to be here”.In her new book, “The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self,” Martha explains why integrity, or being in harmony with ourselves is the key to a meaningful and joyful life, which is what we discuss in today’s episode.Martha perfectly helped us understand integrity beyond a virtue to strive for: “the word Integrity comes from the Latin integer, which means whole or intact, undivided”. We need integrity to function as a whole being. In the same way that an airplane needs to be in structural integrity to fly, we need to be true to ourselves in all situations and with all people to be wholly intact, to be in integrity.Possibly our favorite part is when Martha life coaches Jeni on navigating climate change activism, so make sure to listen out for that!We also talk about how social pressure can be a benevolent problem for entrepreneurs – “it’s forcing us to find ourselves”. We delve into what we can learn about mentorship from the hero’s saga, and how committing to your integrity can be a force for social change. Finally, the vital importance of self-care, which Martha sees as radical action.This is a remarkable interview with a world-renowned sociologist about what you need to do to find your integrity and, with it, a sense of purpose, emotional healing, and a life free of mental suffering, so make sure not to miss this episode!Here’s a peek at what else we discuss: An introduction to Martha Beck, from her formal education to her pursuit of joy. Learn about integrity, which Martha describes as a feeling of being whole or intact. Hear what Martha has to say about overcoming self-doubt, finding your truth, and then walking your talk. The idea of being at odds with culture for the sake of individuality rather than conformity. The different social pressures that men and women experience and how they affect us. Find out how entrepreneurs are affected by conflicting value systems and social pressure. What the hero’s saga has to teach us about change and receiving a mentor. How Martha found her way through conflict when she was pregnant with her son, Adam. Whether or not integrity coincides with happiness; turning suffering into joy. How going into your integrity relates to social activism; activating positive, not righteous anger. Martha emphasizes the idea that self-care in and of itself is radical action. Why self-help should not be about ‘fixing’ yourself but rather about letting the mess that culture has made of your mind fall away. Resources Martha Beck on Twitter — https://twitter.com/MarthaBeck Martha Beck on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/themarthabeck/ Martha Beck — https://marthabeck.com/  The Way of Integrity — https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08HY3F9BH/ The Divine Comedy — https://www.amazon.com/Divine-Comedy-Inferno-Purgatorio-Paradiso/dp/0451208633 The Hero with a Thousand Faces — https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Faces-Collected-Joseph-Campbell/dp/1577315936 Tao De Ching — https://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-Laozi/dp/1535229330 Jennifer Barcelos on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenibarcelos/ Sandy Connery on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-connery-b29b1a18/ Marvelous — https://www.heymarvelous.com/ Marvelous on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/hey.marvelous_/ This week’s Joy: Pretty much everything in Martha's life brings her joy and talking to other people is certainly a part of it.This week’s Hustle: Martha’s hustle is attention without effort - she goes in whatever feels like it’s pulling her and right now she has no idea why it is but it’s painting — she’s always been doing a lot of art. And she has noticed that “people who just go with their fascination end up creating things that sell well.” According to Martha, “When you are doing something you love in a place you love with the people you love in a way you love, love sells better than hate. So do whatever pulls on you, do it. See what happens.”Know Your NumbersIn our business, we're big fans of financial literacy and accountability. Knowing your numbers is an essential aspect of building a successful business and inherent responsibility for any entrepreneur. What you focus on grows, so pay attention to your money. We use Bench for our bookkeeping. It's simple, elegant, and saves us so many hours that would otherwise be spent neck-deep in receipts on the other side of a spreadsheet. Each month our transactions are automatically imported into Bench and we get on-demand financial reports. We even enjoy opening up our profit and loss statement to review each month. When tax time comes around, we are up to date and ready to go. And this is what Financial Empowerment feels like.Use this link to save 20% off your Bench Accounting plan for the first six months!This podcast is brought to you by the Marvelous online teaching platform.Marvelous is an easy-to-use platform that helps you build and sell your own courses memberships and live-streamed programs. Go from idea to open for business in just minutes. Unlike other startups, Marvelous was created by women for women. If you're looking for a simple, streamlined way to build and grow an online business. You can learn more at Marvelous.

This is the 2nd half of our Dear H.H. Holmes episode. Meet Almeda Huiet, of Wabash County, Indiana. Possibly the first Chicago victim of infamous serial killer H.H. Holmes. Visit us online at itshometownhistory.comSupport our show by becoming a Patron! Episode Sponsors:Get your new wireless plan for only $15 a month (with FREE Shipping!) at MintMobile.com/hometown Hire the best candidates and get a FREE $75 credit at Indeed.com/hometown 

With family: Numbers 24; Psalms 66–67 Numbers 24 (Listen) Balaam’s Third Oracle 24 When Balaam saw that it pleased the LORD to bless Israel, he did not go, as at other times, to look for omens, but set his face toward the wilderness. 2 And Balaam lifted up his eyes and saw Israel camping tribe by tribe. And the Spirit of God came upon him, 3 and he took up his discourse and said,   “The oracle of Balaam the son of Beor,    the oracle of the man whose eye is opened,14   the oracle of him who hears the words of God,    who sees the vision of the Almighty,    falling down with his eyes uncovered:5   How lovely are your tents, O Jacob,    your encampments, O Israel!6   Like palm groves2 that stretch afar,    like gardens beside a river,  like aloes that the LORD has planted,    like cedar trees beside the waters.7   Water shall flow from his buckets,    and his seed shall be in many waters;  his king shall be higher than Agag,    and his kingdom shall be exalted.8   God brings him out of Egypt    and is for him like the horns of the wild ox;  he shall eat up the nations, his adversaries,    and shall break their bones in pieces    and pierce them through with his arrows.9   He crouched, he lay down like a lion    and like a lioness; who will rouse him up?  Blessed are those who bless you,    and cursed are those who curse you.” 10 And Balak’s anger was kindled against Balaam, and he struck his hands together. And Balak said to Balaam, “I called you to curse my enemies, and behold, you have blessed them these three times. 11 Therefore now flee to your own place. I said, ‘I will certainly honor you,’ but the LORD has held you back from honor.” 12 And Balaam said to Balak, “Did I not tell your messengers whom you sent to me, 13 ‘If Balak should give me his house full of silver and gold, I would not be able to go beyond the word of the LORD, to do either good or bad of my own will. What the LORD speaks, that will I speak’? 14 And now, behold, I am going to my people. Come, I will let you know what this people will do to your people in the latter days.” Balaam’s Final Oracle 15 And he took up his discourse and said,   “The oracle of Balaam the son of Beor,    the oracle of the man whose eye is opened,16   the oracle of him who hears the words of God,    and knows the knowledge of the Most High,  who sees the vision of the Almighty,    falling down with his eyes uncovered:17   I see him, but not now;    I behold him, but not near:  a star shall come out of Jacob,    and a scepter shall rise out of Israel;  it shall crush the forehead3 of Moab    and break down all the sons of Sheth.18   Edom shall be dispossessed;    Seir also, his enemies, shall be dispossessed.    Israel is doing valiantly.19   And one from Jacob shall exercise dominion    and destroy the survivors of cities!” 20 Then he looked on Amalek and took up his discourse and said,   “Amalek was the first among the nations,    but its end is utter destruction.” 21 And he looked on the Kenite, and took up his discourse and said,   “Enduring is your dwelling place,    and your nest is set in the rock.22   Nevertheless, Kain shall be burned    when Asshur takes you away captive.” 23 And he took up his discourse and said,   “Alas, who shall live when God does this?24     But ships shall come from Kittim  and shall afflict Asshur and Eber;    and he too shall come to utter destruction.” 25 Then Balaam rose and went back to his place. And Balak also went his way. Footnotes [1] 24:3 Or closed, or perfect; also verse 15 [2] 24:6 Or valleys [3] 24:17 Hebrew corners [of the head] (ESV) Psalms 66–67 (Listen) How Awesome Are Your Deeds To the choirmaster. A Song. A Psalm. 66   Shout for joy to God, all the earth;2     sing the glory of his name;    give to him glorious praise!3   Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds!    So great is your power that your enemies come cringing to you.4   All the earth worships you    and sings praises to you;    they sing praises to your name.” Selah 5   Come and see what God has done:    he is awesome in his deeds toward the children of man.6   He turned the sea into dry land;    they passed through the river on foot.  There did we rejoice in him,7     who rules by his might forever,  whose eyes keep watch on the nations—    let not the rebellious exalt themselves. Selah 8   Bless our God, O peoples;    let the sound of his praise be heard,9   who has kept our soul among the living    and has not let our feet slip.10   For you, O God, have tested us;    you have tried us as silver is tried.11   You brought us into the net;    you laid a crushing burden on our backs;12   you let men ride over our heads;    we went through fire and through water;  yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance. 13   I will come into your house with burnt offerings;    I will perform my vows to you,14   that which my lips uttered    and my mouth promised when I was in trouble.15   I will offer to you burnt offerings of fattened animals,    with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams;  I will make an offering of bulls and goats. Selah 16   Come and hear, all you who fear God,    and I will tell what he has done for my soul.17   I cried to him with my mouth,    and high praise was on1 my tongue.218   If I had cherished iniquity in my heart,    the Lord would not have listened.19   But truly God has listened;    he has attended to the voice of my prayer. 20   Blessed be God,    because he has not rejected my prayer    or removed his steadfast love from me! Make Your Face Shine upon Us To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments. A Psalm. A Song. 67   May God be gracious to us and bless us    and make his face to shine upon us, Selah2   that your way may be known on earth,    your saving power among all nations.3   Let the peoples praise you, O God;    let all the peoples praise you! 4   Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,    for you judge the peoples with equity    and guide the nations upon earth. Selah5   Let the peoples praise you, O God;    let all the peoples praise you! 6   The earth has yielded its increase;    God, our God, shall bless us.7   God shall bless us;    let all the ends of the earth fear him! Footnotes [1] 66:17 Hebrew under [2] 66:17 Or and he was exalted with my tongue (ESV) In private: Isaiah 14; 1 Peter 2 Isaiah 14 (Listen) The Restoration of Jacob 14 For the LORD will have compassion on Jacob and will again choose Israel, and will set them in their own land, and sojourners will join them and will attach themselves to the house of Jacob. 2 And the peoples will take them and bring them to their place, and the house of Israel will possess them in the LORD’s land as male and female slaves.1 They will take captive those who were their captors, and rule over those who oppressed them. Israel’s Remnant Taunts Babylon 3 When the LORD has given you rest from your pain and turmoil and the hard service with which you were made to serve, 4 you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon:   “How the oppressor has ceased,    the insolent fury2 ceased!5   The LORD has broken the staff of the wicked,    the scepter of rulers,6   that struck the peoples in wrath    with unceasing blows,  that ruled the nations in anger    with unrelenting persecution.7   The whole earth is at rest and quiet;    they break forth into singing.8   The cypresses rejoice at you,    the cedars of Lebanon, saying,  ‘Since you were laid low,    no woodcutter comes up against us.’9   Sheol beneath is stirred up    to meet you when you come;  it rouses the shades to greet you,    all who were leaders of the earth;  it raises from their thrones    all who were kings of the nations.10   All of them will answer    and say to you:  ‘You too have become as weak as we!    You have become like us!’11   Your pomp is brought down to Sheol,    the sound of your harps;  maggots are laid as a bed beneath you,    and worms are your covers. 12   “How you are fallen from heaven,    O Day Star, son of Dawn!  How you are cut down to the ground,    you who laid the nations low!13   You said in your heart,    ‘I will ascend to heaven;  above the stars of God    I will set my throne on high;  I will sit on the mount of assembly    in the far reaches of the north;314   I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;    I will make myself like the Most High.’15   But you are brought down to Sheol,    to the far reaches of the pit.16   Those who see you will stare at you    and ponder over you:  ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble,    who shook kingdoms,17   who made the world like a desert    and overthrew its cities,    who did not let his prisoners go home?’18   All the kings of the nations lie in glory,    each in his own tomb;419   but you are cast out, away from your grave,    like a loathed branch,  clothed with the slain, those pierced by the sword,    who go down to the stones of the pit,    like a dead body trampled underfoot.20   You will not be joined with them in burial,    because you have destroyed your land,    you have slain your people.   “May the offspring of evildoers    nevermore be named!21   Prepare slaughter for his sons    because of the guilt of their fathers,  lest they rise and possess the earth,    and fill the face of the world with cities.” 22 “I will rise up against them,” declares the LORD of hosts, “and will cut off from Babylon name and remnant, descendants and posterity,” declares the LORD. 23 “And I will make it a possession of the hedgehog,5 and pools of water, and I will sweep it with the broom of destruction,” declares the LORD of hosts. An Oracle Concerning Assyria 24   The LORD of hosts has sworn:  “As I have planned,    so shall it be,  and as I have purposed,    so shall it stand,25   that I will break the Assyrian in my land,    and on my mountains trample him underfoot;  and his yoke shall depart from them,    and his burden from their shoulder.” 26   This is the purpose that is purposed    concerning the whole earth,  and this is the hand that is stretched out    over all the nations.27   For the LORD of hosts has purposed,    and who will annul it?  His hand is stretched out,    and who will turn it back? An Oracle Concerning Philistia 28 In the year that King Ahaz died came this oracle: 29   Rejoice not, O Philistia, all of you,    that the rod that struck you is broken,  for from the serpent’s root will come forth an adder,    and its fruit will be a flying fiery serpent.30   And the firstborn of the poor will graze,    and the needy lie down in safety;  but I will kill your root with famine,    and your remnant it will slay.31   Wail, O gate; cry out, O city;    melt in fear, O Philistia, all of you!  For smoke comes out of the north,    and there is no straggler in his ranks. 32   What will one answer the messengers of the nation?  “The LORD has founded Zion,    and in her the afflicted of his people find refuge.” Footnotes [1] 14:2 Or servants [2] 14:4 Dead Sea Scroll (compare Septuagint, Syriac, Vulgate); the meaning of the word in the Masoretic Text is uncertain [3] 14:13 Or in the remote parts of Zaphon [4] 14:18 Hebrew house [5] 14:23 Possibly porcupine, or owl (ESV) 1 Peter 2 (Listen) A Living Stone and a Holy People 2 So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. 4 As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, 5 you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For it stands in Scripture:   “Behold, I am

Long time no see pal. Let us catch up on the news of the past and complain about stuff in true Robbie fashion. There will be some changes to how often new content is released to accommodate my schedule and frankly mood to record content.  Expect at least ONE new episode once a month every month. Possibly two or three depending on how much creative juices I got flowing but my promise to myself and to you is at least ONE new episode once a month. That being said, here is your 1 episode for the month of May. Also I will be doing away with having "Seasons" of my podcast. It will literally just be in simple numerical order. Enjoy!Artwork by Brittany Fitzpatrick  

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Episode 3 - Find Out Why Chapter 5 Is Fitzgerald's Favorite Chapter! Hi, I’m Christy Shriver, and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.    And I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to love lit podcast.  This is our third episode featuring what some people consider to be THE Great American Novel, and after two weeks of symbolism and irony and politics and layers and layers of imagery and meaning, I am starting to see why people are so fascinated with this book.  It’s so dense.  There are so many ways to read it, and I guess that’s what’s kind of fun about it.  I liked reading it for the story, and I loved the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, although I know there are so many hard core Robert Redford fans out there that have taken me to task for that.  But, as I’ve read it this time, I’ve really enjoyed reading it for the political commentary.  I loved the discussion of the values of Thomas Jefferson and all the distortions or really perversions of the American Dream.    An idea that we mentioned and will come back to- although like I said, I don’t really like the term- American Dream because it seems to me to imply the notion of possibility or  self- improvement on the basis hard work, personal sacrifice and merit as uniquely American, which is most definitely is NOT.      Well, I won’t disagree with that.  Of course, that’s the dream of all the world.  We can look at the life of Paulo Neruda and his hope for Chile for an example we’ve featured on the podcast as well as Julia de Borges although very differently expressed.  But from a political standpoint,  what Fitzgerald criticizes is less the idea itself, as I told you, he’s a Thomas Jefferson fan as well, but, he challenges this myth that there is a place on earth that is free from the corruption innate in the human heart- that the United States of America is such a place. Regardless of the system of checks and balances inherent in any system, it is an illusion to believe that those who make it to the top of the social, economic and political worlds escape the damaging mercenary temptations inherent in those positions- whether they are born there or whether they build their wealth themselves- and, as I see it, as we read through this book- we see very clearly the lines blurring between right and wrong- legitimate and illegitimate- reality versus illusion and ultimately even good vs evil, if you want to see it in those terms.    And he does it so artfully.  He uses colors, and cars and geography and symbols of all sorts and throws all of these into a glamorous setting of his day.  The original readers saw this book as being modeled after their own modern moment.  This story, if it were set today, would include characters modeled after Kanye West, Tom Brady, Beyonce, and Bill DiBlasio, the music would likely be rap music- the technology would likely include tik tok, iphones, and Zoom.  In fact, if you really want to make a good comparison, F. Scott Fitzgerald was sort of the Shonda Rhimes of his day.      If you don’t know who that is, Shonda Rhimes, may be the most accomplished television producer and author of our day.  She is the head writer, creator and executive producer of shows everyone knows: Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, How to Get away with Murder and Scandal.  She wrote Crossroads the debut film of Britney Spears , her most recent being Bridgerton.    And Fitzgerald was like that.  Between 1919 and 1934 he made $400,000 mostly from short stories- think of that like tv episodes.  His work was fun, popular and glamorous, like Shonda Rhimes, so when the Great Gatsby came out- it wasn’t taken as the serious work of literature he meant it to me- and if you don’t get the meaning, the story in many ways falls flat.  One newspaper called it, ““Fitzgerald’s latest a dud” Ruth Hale of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle said, “Find me one chemical trace of magic, life, irony romance or mysticism in all of The Great Gatsby, and I will bind myself to read one Scott Fitzgerald book a week for the rest of my life.”    Ouch, that sounds like one of those Edgar Allen Poe Reviews.      Well, it does, and the money speaks for itself.  He only made $7000 from the two printings of the book combined.  He himself knew it was a masterpiece and believed that all the way til his death.  He set out to write, using his own words, ‘something new, something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.”  And he absolutely did every bit of that.  In fact that was one of the things the critics didn’t like about it- it was too geometric to be a great novel- in their estimation.    What does that mean?  How can you be geometric?    Well, things in this book are just too tight- there is even one theory that he modeled the entire thing after a vaudeville show (which normally has 9 acts- and he has 9 chapters)- but in each act there’s a theme modeled after what the corresponding Act would be if it were a vaudeville show.      Do you think there is any validity to that? For those of you who are unfamiliar with that term- during the early part of the 20th century, America had these variety shows called Vaudveille that were really popular.  They basically were little circus like shows- with crazy characters and lots of music.  In a way, I can see it.  We’ve seen crazy characters for sure as well as lots of music.    I really don’t know.  Vaudeville was extremely popular at the time, and if you read the literature they make that case, but honestly, I have no idea, but it woldn’t surprise me.  Everything in this book is just so deliberate.  If you follow the vaudeville pattern- this week we’re going to look at chapters 4-5 which in Vaudeville world should include the act with absurd characters and chapter 4 does fit that bill.  Act 5’s by the way are characterizized by near misses and that works too, as we’ll see. But another remarkable thing about the structure of this book is that the moment when Gatsby and Daisy meet is exactly the smack dab middle of the book.      Are we ready to jump into the weeds of chapters 4-5?    Absolutely, the beginning of chapter  really introduces a long cast of characters, in fact the first two pages are nothing but names.  The most interesting to the story is Klipspringer who stayed at Gatsby’s so long he was nicknamed “the boarder”.  But the really interesting characters are not the guests or even the gangsters although meeting anyone who’s jewelry is made from human molars would generally draw my attention- but in this case, the mafioso is displaced by the deputant.    No doubt, and I know we don’t have time to get into the real colorful men of history who inspired these hilarious descriptions but if anyone is interested, look into the life of Herbert Bayard Swope who’s parties inspired Gatsby’s parties and the bootlegger Max Gerlach who is the model for Gatsby and George Remus who Fitzgerald actually met in Louisville- any Google search is just  fun  if you enjoy those kinds of things.      And Louisville is where we’re landing today- and it is in chapter 4 that we go back in time to meet  Daisy Fay of Louisville, Kentucky- a place where you’ve actually visited many times because it was also the location the College Board selected for many years for AP readers to congregate and grade the hundreds of thousands of essays from around the world every year.    So true, Louisville, Kentucky the fictional hometown of Daisy Fay, is a Southern City, today famous for the Churchill Downs, Kentucky Derby, and Kentucky bourbon.  Louisville is charming, historical and mythological and right in the middle is the Seelbach hotel-  The hotel Tom Buchanan descended upon from Chicago with an entourage 400 people on the weekend of his wedding.    Fitzgerald, and this is where you’re going to see a LOT of overlap between fiction and non-fiction, like Gatsby, was a soldier during WW1 and stationed, albeit only for a month near Louisville.  On the weekends, he, like a lot of soldiers, would escape Camp Zachary Taylor in his impeccable uniform he had tailor made from Brooks Brothers, enter into the Seelbach hotel as the handsomest man in the room and seek to charm and seduce.  Zelda, his wife, is not from Louisville, she’s from Alabama, another city, so you can see how he plays around with his past.  But she, like Daisy, refuses to marry him because “rich girls don’t marry poor boys.”  To quote Tom Buchanan.  Fitzgerald was stationed near Louisville in 1918, prohibition didn’t start until 1920 so he made good use of the opulent Seelbach bar so much so that he was thrown out of the Seelbach bar at least three times in the four weeks he was there.    Good Lord- well – Fitzgerald in his sober state, sets Jordan Baker’s retelling of Daisy’s past in October of 1917.  I want to point out a couple of things here which I find very interesting and things to think about.  So far, we’ve talked about Fitzgerald’s criticism of corruption and the American dream, we’ve talked about colors and irony, and dust and existential atheism- and all that is in this book- but now I want to change directions and talk about time and personal history, nostalgia and all those things that are beyond politics.  There is a lot of emotional content in this story, this bittersweet feeling of lost opportunity that everyone experiences as they get older in some way or another.  This is set up in the first four chapters with a lot that is happy and exciting- happy nostalgia so to speak- it really peaks in the famous fifth chapter, which was Fitzgerald’s personal favorite and the one he rewrote the most- and kind of turns to negative feelings for the rest of the book- I heard it described as a nostalgia hangover one time and that’s a funny but appropriate metaphor.  It also becomes extremely evident, if it hasn’t been before, that there is no attempt to be chronological – this chapter is very cinematic as it creates these montages of the past and present- New York and then Louisville.    I also want to point out that Fitzgerald, very progressively, changes narrarators and when we hear Daisy’s story, it’s not from the perspective of Nick- a female, Jordan, tells what some would call the female version of the Gatsby story.  Garry read how Jordan first meets Gatsby,     The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay’s house.  She was just 18, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville.  She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night.  “Anyways, for an hour!”  When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen before.  They were so engrossed in each other that she didn’t see me until I was five feet away.  “Hello, Jordan,” she called unexpectedly. “Please come here.”  I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the other girls I admired her most.  She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages.  I was.  Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t come that day?  The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at  some time, and because it seemed romantic to me I remembered the incident ever since.  His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t lay eyes on him again for over four years- even after I’d met him on Long Island I didn’t realize it was the same man.”    It’s so easy to reduce Daisy to the materialstic skank that stays with an awful man for the money because Nick looks at her like that by the end of the book, but I want to suggest, Fitzgerald is doing something so much more interesting than that.  She has a white childhood- nothing the color- but Daisy is Fitzgerald’s doppelganger.  I want to point out something many people have observed- neither Daisy nor Gatsby are every described physically.  Gatsby is described by his dress- Daisy is described by her voice- everything else we have to create in our imaginations.  They aren’t real- they are both dreams.  But while Gatsby goes away and keeps the dream alive for five years- Daisy’s dream of Gatsby dies early.  Notice that as she sits in that car, Jordan remembers it becaue of the way Gatsby looks at her- in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at some time.” What’s more dreamy than that- but the very next paragraph Daisy’s dream is over.  Read what Fitzgerald says,     “Wild rumors were circulating about her- how her mother had found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say good-by to a soldier who was going overseas.  She was effectually prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for several weeks.  After that she didn’t play around with soldiers anymore, but only with a few flat-footed short-sighted young men in town, who couldn't get into the army at all.  By the next autumn she was gay again, as gay as ever.  She had a debut after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans.  In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before.  He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three-hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”    BTW- I looked up how much that would be today- and the estimates started around 4 million.    True- but the next part is what I want to highlight.  Let me read what Jordan says, “I wa a bridesmaid.  I came into her room half an hour before the b ridal dinner, and found her lying on her bad as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress- and as drunk as a monkey.  She had a bottle of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other. “Gradulate me,” she muttered.  “Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it.”  What’s the matter, Daisy” I was scared, I can tell you; I’d never seen a girl like that before.  “Here, deares”She groped around in a waste-based she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. “Take ‘em down-stairs and give ‘em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ‘em Daisy’s change her mine. Say “Daisy’s change her mind. “  She began to cry- she cried and cried.  I rushed out and found her mother’s maid, and we locked the door and got her back into a cold bath. She wouldn’t let go of the letter.  She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up with a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.  But she didn’t say another word.  We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress, and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over.  Next at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months trip to the South Beach.  I saw them in Santa Barbar when they came back, and I thought I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband.  If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily, and say, “Where’s tom gone…….let me skip down to the end of the paragraph…skipping over the part where Daisy spends hours rubbing fingers over his eyes…after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and ripped a front wheel off his car.  The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, becaue her arm was broken- she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.    Wow- well, there are eyes, cars and a lot of the stuff we’ve talked about before.    True- but there’s another really important thing to notice- WATER.  Water plays a huge role in the book- it’s between the eggs, in chapter 5 we’ll talk about the rain, but what does it mean- well- we’ve talked about this in several books- but water is the most primal of archtypes- it’s important in every religion as a sign of rebirth and renewal- which is what’s going on here.  Daisy got baptized the night before her wedding- she went under that icey water and let her letter from Gatsby disintegrate and she came up the ice princess- a woman so devoid of feeling that she exist in a world where she knows she’s nothing both an ornament,  a statue or a collector’s item- the golden girl.  Gatsy founded his vision on Daisy Fay- the fairy- the girl he described as “gleaming like silver safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor”. We’re going to see in chapter 5 that he literally glows in her presence.  But that girl came down to reality well before Gatsby every did.  You’re going to see next week that Gatsby has two baptisms himself, and one is in his backyard in the swimming pool.      Yikes- well after Fitzgerald destroys Daisy’s dream- he goes after Gatsby- at the end of chapter 4, Fitzgerald gives the narrator role back to Nick.  Jordan finishes her story by talking about how Gatsby’s house is across the water from Daisy’s house.  “But it wasn’t a coincidence at all. “Why not.” “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”  Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night.  He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.  “He wants to know , “continued Jordan” if you’ll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.”  The modesty of the demand shook me.  He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths- so that he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.”  …Jordan ends her chat with Nick telling him he’s supposed to set it up but Daisy isn’t supposed to know about it…then Nick and Jordan make out in the car in quite possibly the most unromantic love scene I’ve ever read, “Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms.  Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.    Isn’t there a cliché- if you can’t be with the one you love- love the one you’re with.    This is even worse than that- if you can’t find someone to love- be with a disembodied face.    Chapter 5 is the big meeting- the middle of the chapter- the chapter Fitzgerald told Max Perkins his editor, he loved the most.     It’s also where, from my perspective, this is where we see a lot of the mythical qualities stand out which makes me think Greek- as you know because Shakespeare did a lot with this- Empedocles, the Greek philosopher came up with the famous four-part theory kind of saying everything comes from air, water, earth and fire- and as we see Fitzgerald play around with all the traditional colors, I can’t help but see him play around with the traditional basic elements that the ancients thought created the world.      Great point- there everywhere- Daisy floats around, the valley of ashes is the earth, Manhattan is fire hot, and then there is all this emphasis on water- which we’re going to see water play such an important role in the most important parts of the story-.here in chapter 5, after Gatsby tries unsuccessfully to recruit Nick to work for the mob- which was a kind of funny exchange- we arrive at the famous moment where Gatsby and Daisy meet- and it is “POURING RAIN”- and rain means rebirth, regeneration- Gatsby- it’s also blistering hot- there are references t “pink clouds” after Daisy visits the mansion.  It’s all there all the elements that make for recreating the world- except as we know- this is all an illusion.   It’s all fake.  But let’s walk it back and go through this scene- with the archetypes in the back of our mind with the colors and the Greek elements- but they are the supporting details- the real focus of this chapter is on Gatsby’s absolute determination to walk back time.  Matthew Bruccoli wasTHE premiere American expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald, he died in 2008, but he wrote the preface which is in the authorized version of the book that most students at least in this country use- it has the blue face with eyes in the middle of the cover and red lipstick with the fire of the city below.  Anyway, in his preface, he says that Fitzgerald references time 450 – 87 direct references to the word itself- never mind the constant use of time symbolism.  That is really what I want us to focus on for the rest of this discussion because at the end of the day- what Gatsby wants to do is stop time.  He wants to walk back time.  When he walks in with his white suit and gold tie- he wants to recreate the moment Jordan told us about when he met Daisy this first time- except this time he’s an version of himself that would have been competitive with Tom or whatever image he has made up in his nmind.  Daisy with her “clear artificial note” says, “I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.”  And what does he do, he leans his head so far back that it rest against the face of a defunct mantlepiece clock.  As Gatsby talks the clock tilts dangerously at the pressure of his head and he has to turn and catch it before it crashes and breaks.   When Gatsby says, “I’m sorry about the clock.”  He IS sorry about the clock.  He’s sorry about the lost five years.     For Gatsby, his body is in the present but his mind is five years in the past.  I don’t really want to get Freudian but this does remind me of a Freud quote, Freud says, ““We call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation” (Freud, 1962, p. 28)   Yes, and for Gatsby this is something money can buy- time is something you can create; something you can buy- like everything else that is for sale in this world.  If you’re rich enough you can buy everything- even time- even Daisy.      The scene where Gatsby takes Daisy over to his house in the movie version with Leonardo DiCaprio is so memorable.  And now that you mentioned colors- I tend to notice them.  There is a gold odor- whatever that could be- and a lot of purple which is made from blue and red- this scene is about the illusion of love.    Yep- now you’re tracking with Fitzgerald.  Here’s a good line, they are in Gatsby’s bedroom and he is evaluating everything in his house according to the measure of Daisy’s response to it.  Then it says this, “After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence.  He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity.  Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.” Now that is poetic language if you have ever read it!!!     The funniest scene to me is the one with the shirts.    I know.  It’s funny and I think we should keep reading.      Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which help his massed suits and dressing gowns and ties, and his shrits, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.  “I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes.  He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each seasons, spring and fall.”    He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray.  While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher- shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange,with monograms of Indian blue.  Suddenly with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shrts and began to cry stormily.  “They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such- such beautiful shirts before.”    Why do you think she cries?  I have always found this strange.      Well, of course, I don’t know.  But it could be a couple of things- you know, like you mentioned about Daisy, the ice queen from the previous chapter- Daisy may be understanding what Gatsby doesn’t- that this is an illusion their relationship isn’t real.   It could be that Daisy is regretting marrying Tom and thinking about having a life with Gatsby.  But honestly, when I put on- my historical lens, I remember that this is the 1920s, WW1 destroyed for the people, and not just American people, but people in England, Germany, France and Spain- it destroyed for so many the values on which they had created their whole culture and identity. if I look at this book the way you’ve been wanting us to look at it- full of symbolism, mythology and meaning- I land on the idea that for many people up to that point, and even today, we believe that love and materialism are not connected.  People won’t love you because of your money, not really, and you can have love even if you don’t have money.  I mean, we can subscribe to those ideas- but what we see in Daisy is someone who, in her own words, is cynical- that’s the first thing she told us about herself.  This is the woman who literally wants her daughter to be a beautiful fool- and here’s she’s crying.  In general, cynical people don’t cry.  So why is she crying, one idea is because Daisy, like so many of her generation, finds the shirts and the materialism they represent the substitute for the innocent fulfilling love of her white past- the one she doesn’t believe in anymore- the one that doesn’t exist- it’s a beautiful moment that she shares with Gatsby- but she believes the shirts are safe real thing in the room- and that would make me cry too.      Well, it’s certainly possible that this encounter with the real Daisy instead of the one Gatsby had made up in his head is having a similar effect on Gatsby himself.  He says this, “If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay.” “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”  Remember Green is the color of growth but also the color of money.    Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said.  Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.  Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemd very near to her, almost touching her.  It had seemed as close as a star to the moon.  Now it was again a green light on a dock.  His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.      Daisy calls then to the window just a little while later and we see that the rain is still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.  “Look at that” she whispered and then after a moment, “I’d like to just get one of those pink could and put you in it and push you around.”    And this chapter which at face value is absolutely as romantic as this book will ever get ends with such cynicism, such irony- it’s very much the nihilism and post modernism so often seen in the 1920s.  Klipsinger is playing two songs that were super popular in the 1920s, you can listen to them on youtube.  The love nest was a very popular song about a house.  It literally says that the love nest is a small house on a farm but filled with warmth and love inside and is better than a palace with a gilded dome- yikes- this house is the gilded one.  The second song, the one actually quoted in the text is from a song called “Aint’ we Got Fun”.  The lines in the book read this, “One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer the rich get richer and the poor get- children”.      Both Daisy had Gatsby pursued love in their youth-  but they aren’t those people any more.  Daisy is the ice queen, and Gatsby created his own Daisy something he can literally purchase- and  that’s not love either, not really.  Fitzgerald’s sarcasm is in the song choice.  The chapter ends like this, “As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of Bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness.  Almost five year!  There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusions.  It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.  He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way.  No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.  As I watched him he adjust himself a little, visibly.  His hand took hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion.  I think that voice help him most, with it fluctuating, feverish warmth because it oculdn’t be over-dreamed- that voice was a deathless song.    And of course Nick leaves them to go walk in the rain.    What do you think?   You don’t have the Jane Austen happy ending feeling do you?    No.  You really don’t.   

Social audio company Clubhouse finally launches in Android, but faces an uphill climb around moderation and trolls. Hubspot makes a brilliant move in starting a podcast network. Could it be a glorified sponsorship package? Possibly. But it's still brilliant. And we finally know why YouTube has been fiddling with their short-form video advertising...they are launching a $100 million dollar creator fund for short-form video creators. There you go. And yes, social media platforms are starting to look the same. Who could be the winner? The boys think Twitch. Joe's commentary includes book publishers working to establish direct-reader relationships. Robert rants about making a big deal about CMO term length, and raves about Signal's outing of Facebook. ------ Catch past episodes show notes at ThisOldMarketing.site. Get your .site domain today.

EP263 - Amazon Unbound Author Brad Stone  In 2014 Brad Stone wrote the seminal biography of Amazon, "The Everything Store." In it, he discovered Jeff Bezos birth father, and even earned a negative review on Amazon, from Amazon's co-founder Mckinsey Scott (then McKinsy Bezos). Brad is also a Senior Executive Editor with Bloomberg News, and can be found at his personal website brad-stone.com. This year Brad followed it up with Amazon Unbound, which released on May 11, 2021. Chronicling the dramatic growth of Amazon and Jeff. Bezos (now the richest person in the world). In this episode we interview Brad to find out all about the Amazon Unbound. Episode 263 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday May 13, 2021. Disclosure: Links are affiliate links http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 263 being recorded on Wednesday May 12th 2021 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Well Jason had would not be a Jason Scott show if we didn't talk a little bit about Amazon and for all you Amazon lovers out there this whole episode is a hundred percent Amazon in fact when you think of Amazon V book that is the defining book about Amazon is called the everything store one of my favorite books and it's by this dude I know bradstone well we have some exciting news Brad has a follow-up book called Amazon Unbound and we are really excited to have him on the Jason Scott show to talk about the book and all things Amazon welcome to the show Brad. Brad: [1:16] Thank you guys it's great to be here. Jason: [1:19] Oh my God we are thrilled to have you I'm pretty sure that when we put together the show schedule for the year Scott circled this date on his calendar back in back in January he's so excited about Amazon books. Scot: [1:33] Close to me fourth which is also one of my. Brad: [1:35] Let me just say also you know I've been covering Amazon for you know probably 20 years to date all of us and you know through the years I can count on one hand like the people who've been like my guides and you both you guys have been like tremendous sources of insight over the years Scot like when I was at the times I would always bug you for insight and Jason and I think you were at retailgeek the same and so it's just great to great it's I've been a fan of the podcast and it's great to now be a guest. Jason: [2:09] We are thrilled to have you we're I want to jump in but for. The the Casual with our core listeners are super familiar with you to be quite honest bread but for the Casual listener who maybe isn't familiar with you when you are not writing Amazon books what is your day job can you give. Brad: [2:31] I am an editor at Bloomberg News and I actually run the technology team at Bloomberg and so that's 65 journalists around the world who cover the big tech companies and the disruptive startups and venture capital and cybersecurity and cyber crime and it's a great gig Bloomberg's a great organization I've written three books while I'm there they're really supportive and we have a TV show we do a podcast we do a newsletter you can find it all at bloomberg.com Tech and it's a really great team. Jason: [3:07] That is awesome and can you tell us how you sort of got the original Amazon bug that I assume triggered the first book. Brad: [3:15] So you know I'm at the New York Times in the late mm first decade of the 2000s what do we call that the two thousand owes and I'm writing about the Kindle and I'm calling up you know Scott Wingo every time they have earnings or some announcement to try to make sense of it all and and then eventually I think I sort of decided. [3:41] I was looking for another book I had written one book that was not well received it was about robots and I was looking for like the you know the the the makeup project the dignity restoration project and I just you know saw that there were Facebook books and Apple Books and Google Books and and no one had I felt it done a great job with Amazon and I was the Amazon reporter at the times and the Kindle had had kind of upended the book publishing industry and Amazon maybe for the first time since the.com boom was sort of seen as interesting and disruptive. [4:18] And I had no foresight that this was like the defining Juggernaut company of our time or that Bezos would be the wealthiest person in the world it was it was simply like it it felt like a little bit of a clear Avenue for me to try it again to be an author and and to take on this really complicated company so that was the inspiration for the first book and you know and then I know you're probably wondering like why why the heck am I such a glutton for punishment that I would do it again and simply the story just kept on evolving and you know I'd written about the Kindle company, but it was the Alexa company and the 100 billion dollar company was the trillion dollar company and the marketplace have been globalized and they had bought at Whole Foods and acquired a transportation arm built a transportation arm I should say and and it's just seemed like chapter to Scotts a big Star Wars fan and you know I had written Star Wars and I felt like okay it was time for The Empire Strikes Back. And that was kind of the inspiration. Scot: [5:18] Yeah you could you could squeak at work Trilogy out of this and maybe even a saga if you keep going. Brad: [5:23] Yeah that sounds painful right now but the metaphor does suggest that at some point there needs to be Return of the Jedi. Scot: [5:29] Yeah one of when you I remember you know when the first book came out you know you broke some news you had discovered Jeff's biological father and that was kind of a really big breaking news and today actually the timing is perfect because you had breaking news and that you discovered something about a tiny little boat that Jeff was was was buying tell us more about this I think it's called a dinghy is that right a dinghy. Brad: [5:55] Exactly well as I was sort of like charting his personal transformation you know the guy who you know. I had interviewed and who was the leader of Amazon 2010-2012 you know he never really went for big extravagant personal Indulgence has a lot of his a lot of his like assets or you know luxury is tended to be like time-saving things a home in New York so he could crash there when he was on the East Coast or an airplane a personal jet you know as one has to to save himself time but he wasn't a boat guy and and so. A couple things happened which may it just made me sort of wonder if he was embracing the lifestyle he was photographed on David Geffen's yacht or maybe was Barry Diller Jack probably both and you know and of course. Lauren Sanchez his new partner you know moved in those circles and at the same time I saw a Facebook post from Ocean actually with someone observing an ocean Co yacht and it was like the whole of what they described as like the largest sailing yacht in existence and that sent me down this path of wondering well I should say people were speculating that Bezos had bought another boat. Now and I was looking into that and that proved to be incorrect but yes he he has he is spending hundreds of billions millions of dollars to build a one of the. [7:20] Biggest sailing yachts in the world and part of the Revelation and the book is it has a support yeah because you can't land a helicopter on the sailing yacht because of the mass so. PCS gotta is building two boats. Scot: [7:33] It's tonight so it kind of brings another boat just to hold the helicopter kind of a think very cool wonderful and smart rockets on there at some point. Brad: [7:41] I wonder if any of us will be invited to the party on the boat it's probably not I would think. Scot: [7:48] Jason because of the successful podcast we have a jet and that the hardest part about it is sharing it with Jason you always he spills the Starbucks on their his kid comes on and makes a mouse so so if you're going to get a jet like get your own it's not really nice to share this. Huh. Jason: [8:05] It's a good goal for Scott to be successful enough to not have to share my jet anymore Brett I have to be honest like when I first read the yacht thing I assumed it was a hoax and. And I don't mean that like I don't mean to be light of that but there actually was. I want to say like a almost equally credible news organization the Telegraph and London like into 2020 reported that Bill Gates had bought like a 650 million dollar yacht, I don't know if you remember this but it was kind of like a meme for for a month and it turned out to be totally untrue. Brad: [8:48] Hmm. Jason: [8:49] Um and so when I and a largely like in the past Bill Gates had talked about like. What atrocious thing it is for the earth and the planet for one you know human being too. To own a half billion dollar yacht and so it seemed wildly out of character for him to have bought one so then fast forward in this year and I like we're maybe jumping way ahead but I it kind of feels like there's a little bit of a Jeff Bezos reputation. Repair program underway an element of which went live today I think he announced a billion-dollar Earth Earth fund and you know for sure in the shareholder letter he's weaning heavily into. For a well wellness and all these things it just seems like buying a half billion dollar or more yacht like. Is not does not fit very well in that neck. Brad: [9:45] It doesn't do wonders for the for the reputation and and yeah the the accumulation of wealth is so controversial and polarizing these days that you know time of like income inequality and suffering through the pandemic but this is the transformation this is why the book I think is in it cat tries to tell an interesting story because it's not just as a business story you know a small or a big company getting bigger it's the story of a person changing and and like a human right who is. You know probably vulnerable to you know everything that you know from flattery to the attention that comes with being really famous to the luxuries that come with extravagant wealth and he didn't start out as a boat guy but he seems to have ended up as one and so that is you know I hope that that runs that theme runs through the book that getting getting into Hollywood. You know bringing Amazon to Hollywood owning The Washington Post fighting with Trump fighting with MBS and Saudi Arabia that these are always stations on like an incredible transformation of one of the most famous business people in the world that's been happening really before our eyes. Jason: [11:03] Yeah and I mean just side know like if you're gonna pick enemies I feel like president of the United States and like Sovereign leader of Saudi Arabia are like the perfect two guys to make enemies I do want it you alluded to it I want to jump right into the structure of the book so it's interesting this time you you sort of broke the narrative up into these three big chunks you have the invention chunk The Leverage Chunk in the inventor, invincibility chunk can you kind of walk us through the thought process there and what readers should expect. Brad: [11:38] Yeah sure I mean one it was an incredibly challenging book to organize because as you guys can appreciate it's all happening at once right Marketplace and Alexa and India and Hollywood and groceries Transportation advertising and then the personal stuff blue origin Washington Post, HQ to the personal Scandal I mean you know and readers want to read a chronological story and if you're going to. Describe a story of change you know you started the beginning and you know the caterpillar morphs into the butterfly and so that was a useful way to organize it um I kind of fit into a narrative chronology but invention is essentially the new stuff it's the story of Alexa the the retail technology is like the ghost or the expansion into India and Mexico and then Hollywood and also Jeff's. Ownership of the Washington Post a little bit of AWS and I and that's like or I think of that is fundamentally 2010 to 2015 with a lot of fast forwards leverage or really operating Leverage is the acceleration of the Core Business and how. [12:52] You know Bezos and his lieutenants built these platforms at where the revenues were able to grow as they slow down the growth of the fixed cost and they did that by building these Self Service platforms. Like Marketplace. [13:08] Or you know the automation the Fulfillment centers or the algorithms that govern the drivers or the ad system you know that lead to tremendous growth but also have some really significant unintended side effects. Exploding hoverboards or fraud in the ABS system or. You know accidents on the road so that's that's part two and then invincibility for part 3 are sort of trying to come up with a way to describe the last part of the book which includes hq2 and the National Enquirer drama an antitrust in the pandemic. And I probably cycled through a bunch of names and I thought you know what these are all great stories but none of it's slow to Amazon down at all you know the the company if anything grew more in the past four years than at any time in its history at least in terms of economic growth and market cap and sales growth and so I can't I just struck upon like in this company's Invincible they keep making mistakes and keep steering into controversy and it never seems to hurt them so that's where I that's where I kind of gave up with that. Jason: [14:14] That makes total sense and I really enjoyed that structure I have to say because I probably. Open the book expecting sort of a chronology of everything that happened since the last book but I found myself really enjoying. Being able to follow each each individual thread in its entirety sometimes going back further than than I expected and kind of giving you the whole story. I like to think I follow the company pretty closely but I still, you connected a bunch of dots for me though there was interesting and useful and at one point during the book I kind of said like man this is a little bit like I'm horrible at American history but I imagine the people that are well-versed in American history like still read David McCullough. 1776 and and find it enjoyable and dramatic and in the same way like I knew most of the facts but like. Still like putting it together in a cohesive story was was sort of fun for me it made me remember a bunch of things and then for almost every story you uncovered new things that I didn't know so that I thought. Brad: [15:22] Well I was joking about Star Wars but sometimes I thought of it really is like The Godfather Part 2 which is like it continues the story picks up from the last book continue to the story but I do have flashbacks like the early years of Dave Clark in the Operations Division or Bezos ripping up a document in 2009 and chucking it down the table at an employee to illustrate how dramatically his his Co style has changed so yeah flashbacks and flash-forwards. Scot: [15:55] One of the so I've worked with a ton of large companies and the thing that always amazes me is even as Amazon's gotten so big you know they just passed like a million people I think in the company they're still so agile and they can still invent at scale and you know when you did that kind of kind of married invention and invincibility you know that that's kind of you know having watched them they just don't really miss a step they make some mistakes but it doesn't seem to hurt him I think a lot of it is this culture that they've built what are some of the cultural elements you've picked out as you've written both books that you think. Anna and and then my follow-up I'll go and ask my follow-up is you know with with Bezos leaving do you think that's so baked in that it will continue or do you think that that he's kind of the core of it. Brad: [16:41] Yeah it's interesting you know basis particularly lately is likes to call himself an inventor and he is an inventor he's come up with you know we talked about Alexis kind of springing from his mind and and some bad ideas like the fire phone too but what he's really created is a system of invention. Like a culture that seems to to be fertile enough that you know lots of decentralization. Lots of employees or teams moving quickly sometimes in competition with another and. He's he's put together a lot of the building blocks and you know yeah people talk about the 14 leadership principles and folks are probably familiar with those but it's also you know the gist the customs and the rituals of Amazon starting every meeting with the meditational reading of a six-page document. Or you know the quarterly business reviews and the opieop 1 and op2 and the fact that senior Executives can kind of hover above everything but then audit individual business units when they get an email from a customer complaining about a problem and the idea single-threaded leaders or a sort of team leader whose sole responsibility is the success of that team was kind of the CEO of their own fiefdom and all this stuff. [18:03] You know the culture can be kind of criticized as mean and I think sometimes it is but it has been remarkably effective right and and they've the reason I call it Amazon Unbound is because Amazon's been kind of. [18:16] Immune from the laws of gravity that can often bring down or slow down large companies and it's it's Unbound from that and those sort of playing with that and I think it's the culture that bezos's invented and they answer the second question. It's a it's a it's like the great Challenge and question for Andy Jassie you know because Bezos made it work because people respected and admired and maybe feared him a little bit you know and he could keep the plates spinning and then return to them and you know spin him again disappear for a while come back. Now he's not going anywhere he says he's going to be executive chairman so you know maybe it doesn't make a difference I think eventually he does drift away slowly but you know Jesse doesn't have the same Founders magic so yeah I can't answer it so I'll just say it's a good question does the culture work as effectively when the the magic of the founder isn't isn't you know, present as it is now. Scot: [19:13] Yeah I kind of wonder if he'll be able to keep his hands out of there that's you know I've done the same thing on a very very tiny set scale and it's it's a hard discipline to kind of it's almost like putting on your kids up for adoption or something there hark there's not a great analogy for you know think of all the time and effort he's put in to hold those. Brad: [19:29] Why you didn't even have a luxury yacht to go Retreat to you know. Scot: [19:33] True yeah. Brad: [19:34] Yeah or 10 billion dollar philanthropy so I don't know it'll be interesting will be and also a reputation on the line with the space company that hasn't produced anything so there's a lot of other stuff that could draw Bezos away. Jason: [19:49] Yeah side note on now that one you know people are always I get asked these questions all the time like what what event how does someone eventually beat Amazon. And in they ask in the context of retail and one of my hypothesis is always that that retail gets to be too irrelevant and uninteresting for them that you know that they it just doesn't get the attention anymore because so many of these new things become so successful. Brad: [20:20] Yeah I think that's true and and also you know they get so big and they have so many constituencies that they need that they have to make choices and I think a good example is how you know the retail you know the consumer division has really tilted towards Marketplace and and the opportunities of third for third-party Sellers and Global Sellers and one of the things that suffered a little bit I think is Amazon's relationship with brands and Brands feeling like Amazon can be a safe space to sell you know we've seen that with Nike Etc and that has created an opportunity for you know companies like Shopify and you know and and like those competitors don't can't take on Amazon you know the whole thing but there's a lot little. Avenues of opportunity for competitors who want to focus because Amazon's doing so much it it can't satisfy everyone. Jason: [21:14] Yeah no I for sure one of the the big topics in the book that was kind of fun to have laid out was the whole invention of the Alexa and I'll confessed I wasn't quite aware of how directly Jeff was involved in the original ideation so that was fascinating and and frankly at the very beginning when Scott asked if you broke any big news in the new book, I was expecting you to say that you you uncovered the voice actress behind Alexa. Brad: [21:49] Well I thought he was going there but then he brought up the yacht but I'm happy to tell that's I'm happy to tell that story. Jason: [21:55] Yeah yeah please do. Brad: [21:56] Okay well actually it sort of started with me thinking for this book How will I ever top the the discovery of the biological dad from the first book and if you guys remember and of course you can't top that and sadly there no there no hidden long lost relatives to an earth and but I thought you know I remembered that Susan Bennett was the voice actress behind Siri. And that was a big Revelation in 2013 and no one had ever asked the question well who the heck is coming out of the echo speakers and you know long story short so I put that as one of my goals to figure that out. [22:36] And in the in the in my research and yeah Alexa was totally Jeff's idea it was an email to Executives can we create a 20 dollar computer whose brains are in the cloud that's completely controllable but by voice in the book I have is first whiteboard sketch of a of an echo speaker and but one of the things they did early on was they bought a Polish company called a vona. And that was the let me get this right the text-to-speech engine so they created synthetic voices and you know so I was like okay I'll start there in trying to figure out who the voice is. And I learned that actually they had contracted with the same studio in Atlanta that did the Siri voice company called GM voices and I spent you know months trolling LinkedIn and figuring you know trying to contact people in who work there who knew people who work there and I heard little tidbits she'll never find out it's a closely guarded secret but she's a singer and she lives in Colorado. And then finally I got a couple of more clues and I found I found I got her name Nina Raleigh and I went to her website. [23:48] I wasn't completely sure but I went to her website and she had a clips of herself doing advertisements from years ago before she started working for Amazon and I clicked play on a couple of them and I was like my God that is the voice of a all right. And I called her up and she you know immediately like you know awkwardness like felt like High School and she said she wasn't allowed to talk to me and you know in some. Weird awkward way it was like the final bit of confirmation that I needed but and then I asked Amazon if I could talk to her and they said no and you know you could kind of put the pieces together. Jason: [24:27] Yeah and side note how the heck did you get that diagram by the way. Brad: [24:31] I asked Amazon for it and they give it to me. Jason: [24:34] Now that's a clever way yeah I ask them for things all the time and they almost never give up. Brad: [24:40] You know and I interviewed Greg Hart who is just hiei and who built the Alexa business in the early years and you know he was he was he had never given an interview before I think about the early days of Alexa and it was it was a lot of the I think the untold story there and yeah a lot of it maybe yeah was actually like credit to Amazon right. They decided that it was you know better to work with me and to tell some elements of the story I think I think big tech companies realize now that you know when they when they shut the door to everyone you know the depictions aren't you know let's put it this way if they cooperate at least they're relaying their side of the story and things are likely to reflect their point of view. And so on this one they agreed to cooperate. Jason: [25:27] Very cool and another thing that I learned in that version of the store a the original Kindle had a microphone in it that wasn't used. Brad: [25:39] Books like the second or third I can't remember the maybe the third version yeah yeah. Jason: [25:44] But it sounds like the germ of the idea was starting to form like even in this this vestibule vestigial feature in the Kindle and it sounds like Jeff fought for that feature women when the product team wander accent. Brad: [26:02] Yeah yeah I mean he's a Star Trek fan like like Scott and he you know he always thought that we would talk to our computers one day like like the Star Trek computer and that was like a big part of the vision and the reason why he fought for it to be more conversational and not just the music player or a thing that recites the whether he really wanted a conversational agent and actually today I would say Amazon is not eat not even there yet I mean my and about your guys Alexa but mine is dumb as a rock so you know they still have a lot of work to do there. Scot: [26:36] Yes still still still working the so folks if you haven't read the first book so go go get that one so go get the anything store in the the thing I always enjoy about Brad's writing is its kind of see your tech-savvy so you kind of you're not afraid to go into some of the technology side of it but then you're also an investigative reporter and that's where you find all these really cool tidbits and the real story behind so always enjoy you doing that on that side you cover in the book you cover a bunch of the rough spots which of those do you think has been has had any impact so the ones are kind of the antitrust which is Jason Jason's favorite con that kind of thing to talk about losing the Jedi you know kind of over politics I think. The hq2 thing was I think everyone agrees was a bit of a debacle that kind of over overplayed that are any of those things unraveling them at all or bother them at all or just doesn't seem to bother me at all. Brad: [27:31] The three you listed I mean the antitrust threat is still in the future HQ to they suffered some bad press and it went away quickly. What was the other thing that you. Yeah Jedi they might the government might reward that contract a judge ruled that the legal scrutiny will continue and we might see the Pentagon basically just start the process all over again so none of those things so far I would say antitrust maybe the most but I would put. The controversy over the quality of work in the Fulfillment centers and the unionization effort even though Amazon one that in Alabama that to me feels more impactful because really you know none of these things make a difference unless people start to feel or think twice or feel ambivalent about clicking the buy now button and I look the the results in the last quarter were Stellar so clearly it's not having much of an impact but you do see mostly I think because of the labor tangling. Some stain on the Amazon reputation and I think the labor stop is more important and has had more of an impact in the other things that you mentioned. Scot: [28:47] Yet I think the ultimate play is they'll eventually be able to get rid of the labor with robots and that oddly that maybe a the best political move you know even though there be a lot of jobs lost it you know robots don't pee in bottles and. Brad: [29:01] Isn't that years off I mean how long before robot before you can have a ghost fulfillment center with no workers. Scot: [29:09] Well you can get it down to Cuba system gets it down to just the pickers and Packers which is which is a very small fractional I think it's like a quarter Jason fact check me like 25% of the. The people footprint which is funny it goes back to your first book and I just saw today maybe it was yesterday that Amazon's investing a fair amount in a robot Factory which I kind of made my Spidey Sense tingling little bit that's the. A it feels a little bit like the Terminator but then be you know you don't start building a factory for these things until you unless you're going to really start scaling them up so, most of the see if they'd go that way. Brad: [29:46] Yeah well though there will be another political storm that just as there were for the cash earless robots right the cashier Le stores you know yeah the that's going to make Amazon a Target in the different way. Jason: [30:00] Yeah it is into I think there are parts of their business that will you know the Amazon could certainly automate a lot of Labor out of pretty quickly but there are other parts of their business that that that's not in the short term Horizon right like I I'm a big believer in driverless cars but driverless Last Mile. Or you know human let's last mile is going to be a long time and at this point like the labor force in last mile is growing faster than the the Fulfillment center labor force. Brad: [30:33] Yeah and we'll all we should say write a contract labor force and that's another threat to Amazon like well it's another critical decision at what point you know do they feel like those drivers need to be employees or do they do this the criticism get much louder because you know they can't control the last mile or they're exerting so much control over those drivers in terms of the uniforms and the surveillance cameras and the rules that ultimately you know the lawsuits basically I mean FedEx fought these battles for years but ultimately a judge somewhere says you know. Like if they have with Uber drivers these are employees you got to start treating them like like employees. Jason: [31:14] Yeah although Uber found a way out of that is it if you spend 200 million dollars you can just make your own laws. Brad: [31:20] All right. Jason: [31:21] And Jeff has that kind of money but I did want to ask you a question about that because you you kind of painted a picture that like anti-union is much more in Amazon's DNA than. Then maybe was like. Super obvious right in you you highlighted that like they made decisions about how to scale their their last Mile in their Logistics. Based on you know avoiding the traditional fulfillment model which like is heavily unionized right. And I'm kind of curious if you have a hypothesis why I like you you had an interesting sentence in the book that kind of you know made me think for a second. I'm not sure Jeff is just like fundamentally unions are bad for America and I don't want unions because then I can't exploit the workers the way I want like I almost wonder if it goes back to his day one. Philosophy and just this fear that if you. If you you know get this a large entrenched Workforce you know which is often epitomized by unions that it reduces your ability to be as agile as. He aspires to be. Brad: [32:42] There's a canonical story inside Amazon I tell this in the in the day of Clark Logistics section of the book of like. You know one of the early fulfillment centers 2001 2002 and Dave Clark and the colleague named Arthur Bell devs are like themselves in a Ryder Truck delivering the last batch of packages to the UPS facility and I think it's Lexington through a snowstorm eating Burger King on the way and they get there you know with Christmas in the back of this truck and the and the the teamsters at UPS won't let them in because they're not union workers and eventually they get managers to allow them to come in and the union guys are banging it on the truck and and yelling at them and that is is a you know a story that's passed on like lure at Amazon because yeah what you were saying Jason it's like they want to be flexible the customer is Almighty they want to fulfill their promises to customers and they view you know an inner mediating Force like a union as as you know interfering with that and and I and Amazon fire me bitterly on this because I quote Jay. [33:57] Jeff saying to a colleague an HR colleague in the book one of the greatest dangers to Amazon is an entrenched and hourly work force and he was looking at the the auto makers and other you know manufacturers and and concluding that you know the unions were really impeding their ability to be flexible and to innovate and their little things that he encoded in the worker relationship and Amazon for example you know you the raises stop after three years unless you're promoted. That doesn't get a lot of attention it seems really unfriendly frankly but he does doesn't want employees sticking around getting entrenched getting comfortable. Possibly organizing and you know and and it's maybe a little bit lacking in empathy but it's just a brutal kind of Ruthless tactics tactical decision that Amazon is better off having a direct relationship with its employees. Scot: [34:54] One one question I wanted to just kind of explore is in lately here on the show there's been an increased tension between Shopify and Amazon did you pick up on any of that as you're writing the book. Brad: [35:06] You know I didn't really Veer in that direction I would say that you know the the the tent and you know now I'm like in the territory where you guys are probably you know much more deeper you know than I am but I what I sense was that Brands felt increasingly uncomfortable and the detention is between Western brands and a Marketplace that seems to favor, overseas Sellers and scrapping newcomers and people with lower cost structures and and you know the brands on Amazon are like crazy right it's like sometimes you feel like maybe there's some software coming up with some of these names and the and the big Brands you know who may be charged a premium. For their label I don't feel comfortable there and they don't feel like their brand is protected and they don't feel like their prices are protected and that's maybe more the tension and Shopify has come in you know to take advantage of that and Amazon which you know fights on all fronts all the time you know has identified the competitive incursions try to do some things to kind of shore up that flank I haven't spent enough time looking at Shopify and I'm looking forward to doing that a little bit more but that seems like a tremendous success story and the virtue for Amazon is that when they get hauled in front of. Congress you know to get the Jason's favorite topic you know they can point to. [36:31] Strong competitors on all fronts and it's not just Google and Microsoft in the cloud or Walmart in retail but now it's a company like Shopify which is a real competitive threat when it comes to you know online retail and representing Brands online. Scot: [36:47] Yeah it's funny you mentioned the brand thing because we've also followed on the show really closely and we've had a couple folks representative of this is there's these new kind of like super combinations of FBA sellers they call them that if you know like thrashy oh and. I think what are they raised Jason like two billion dollars globally were tracking no to go yet to go buy these little micro brands that are kind of born and on Amazon's that that's kind of yeah if anything that's going to accelerate it. Excuse me how about you mentioned ads anything interesting going on in the Amazon ads world. Brad: [37:24] I am so in Amazon Unbound I tell the story of the ad business and you know so interesting how they started out a decade ago and they were bands also skeptical of ads you know he thought it could interfere with the customer experience that it could jeopardize you know the the main. Revenue model of you know selling things on amazon.com and they experimented they went through banner ads they went to. Sponsored links that send you off the site to like Nordstrom you know or another retailer and then finally they kind of ReDiscover the Google gold mine and start search. Advertising and first it's the bottom of the search page and then it's on the side of the search page and here's the interesting point Bezos himself. Makes a decision to start toying with them at the top of search results and they study it and they determine that there is a decrease in customer satisfaction and in customers purchasing items the. [38:28] The app the tabs on the top of search results are meaningfully like harmful to the customer experience small but but trackable. And this is a little bit of a turning point in the book I think because basil says you know this impact would have to be implausibly large to really outweigh the gold mine the new Revenue source and he agrees to do something that you know arguably is not a great customer experience if you look at, searches the search results on Amazon it's kind of you know I'm over merchandise like it's ads and private label stuff and. You know pay-for-play but the revenue stream is so enticing to him because he can invest in movies and TV shows you can build the next Alexa he can expand internationally and maybe that is the Turning Point the inflection point and Amazon being fully customer-focused and really compromising a little bit on the customer experience to pursue these grander goals of world domination. Jason: [39:32] Yeah it was interesting too well a on the I did want to touch on one thing on the add thing first the we get asked all the time you know we do all these Amazon talks and and we still have to debunk that Amazon's not profitable and so we talked about you know obviously the marketplace is overwhelmingly profitable and and AWS but I have a hypothesis that the ad business is now as much or more profitable than a WS. Brad: [40:03] Yeah yeah. Jason: [40:05] And I. You know it's interesting that that Jeff is like accepting the revenue even at the expense of customer when you think of kind of the original premise that will be the most customer-centric. Brad: [40:19] I mean when just on that point Jason like AWS profits go into building more aw s right you have to keep building data centers advertising like what are the fixed costs right they built an auction system and they basically you know I call that chapter the gold mine in the backyard because it's there all along and they just have to go kind of dip into it. Jason: [40:39] Yeah I was there's one Inconvenient Truth in that like in general I like to say like oh gosh that ad business is 96 percent margin for them because there's no. There's like you know there's almost no costs against it the one Inconvenient Truth in that fact as Amazon is also the largest Advertiser on Google so like there's a way in which you can almost think of it as Arbitrage that. Did they buy 11 billion dollars worth of customers from Google and then sell it for 20 billion dollars on Amazon. Brad: [41:08] Right right. Jason: [41:09] Um what yeah so it is interesting I a couple of the things that also jumped out at me you. Wait I know Scott wants to go deep into the antitrust story and obviously you know Amazon you know. Often says like hey we don't see search we would never you know play games with prioritizing Surge and we never use. Brand sales data to inform our own private label but you had people go on the record in both cases that are X Amazonian saying we absolutely did do that. Brad: [41:45] I mean I think yeah the truth is the Inconvenient Truth for Amazon is that it's a decentralized place. And employees are given ambitious goals and they're trying to keep their jobs and the safeguards the guardrails weren't there for a couple of years and it's not just my book yes in my book and I've got I had employees showing me the data the spreadsheets that they took. You know from looking at third-party sellers to go build private Brands but it's also been reported elsewhere and frankly I think Amazon said in DC that they were going to study it. And I've never seen anything I don't know why they are incapable of admitting an error and announcing maybe a new set of precautions because it really does call into question The Trusted third-party sellers have in the marketplace but no clearly you know they had they were exploiting their data Advantage I don't know if it was that significant I mean what they might say is that look every retailer has the data at their disposal and you don't necessarily need the third party sales data to go you know look at Nielsen report or whatever to see you know what the customer trend is but. Clearly for a Time gave Amazon at an advantage and building that private label business and and in prioritizing their private label Brands giving them a head start in search results. Scot: [43:11] Yep another one of my favorite topics is fulfillment and you and I have had this conversation probably for 20 years and I've every year on this podcast we do a prediction and I've historically predicted that old Bill compete more directly with with FedEx and UPS is taking longer than I thought it would but I think I think most people can kind of see that did you get any any kind of Vibes off of what's going on in the Fulfillment side. Brad: [43:37] I don't I don't see that in the short-term just because their own needs are ramping so quickly that you know it's hard to imagine them being able to kind of offer turn around and offer that, the third parties and if they did they get into the awkward situation of you know Peak comes along and will absolutely of course Amazon's going to start prayer you know prioritize its own packages particularly you get closer to Christmas and. You know in suddenly UPS runs out of capacity or FedEx and you know that would be just awkward right so I don't. I don't know that I see that in the near future I think Amazon. Yeah is its own biggest customer for its Logistics arm and I don't you know and it's only customer I don't necessarily see that changing in the short-term. I don't know maybe we settle that in five years. Jason: [44:34] Yeah that that that's going to be an interesting one I mean even if ba which is I would argue wildly successful for them you know you still see like them them strain to scale that and you know kind of curtail the amenities that they offer to have ba. Brad: [44:52] And during the pandemic they did that right yeah. Jason: [44:55] Yeah absolutely the. We are running up on time I want to make sure that we get all the good stuff in are there any favorite stories or topics you have from the book that we failed to ask you about. Brad: [45:13] There's one okay here's the here's the one of the stories I like the most the story of the single cow Burger you know we talked about Bezos the inventor you know his love for new technologies but he really is like this maniacal sponsor of. Of all sorts of bizarre wacky ideas and basically in like 2050 nereids a Washington Post article about how a burger can contain the meat from like a hundred cows and the article says that making burger from a single cow would be hard and expensive and those of course you know those are the keywords for Bezos and he authorized the see the creation of a single cow burger inside Amazon Fresh and then he like he taste test the early burgers and he'd like rejects them for being too fatty here heard the grill and and he makes everyone's life miserable on the team. [46:08] And you know and illustrates a couple things one you know as he has gotten wealthier maybe he like has a little bit lost the the touch in the taste of the Common Man dare we say but that it's not just technology like he says advocate for all sorts of new things inside Amazon and he is kind of capable of turning up you know like like Samantha and bewitched I guess Rick did she twinkle her nose I can't remember you know at the desk of any unsuspecting employee and suddenly their life is you know they're they're off searching for a single cow Burger so to speak and to me it was like this weird bizarre wacky delightful story oh and by the way that thing is still for sale and that hasn't certain been a game-changer and yet you had the CEO of the company and probably at the time one of the wealthiest people in the world spending all this time trying to advocate for it. Jason: [47:02] Yeah I have to say though just like superficially it sounds like a brilliant idea we my family rushed out to try the single cow Burger I have to admit. Brad: [47:10] How was it how was it. Jason: [47:12] It was good and you know I'm not I can't remember if you mentioned this in the book or not but. You know people have different preferences for their temperature of meat and and like traditionally you have to cook ground beef much higher than other flavors of beep because of the risk of mad cow because. Of all those cows in there so you can actually it's safer to eat that single cow Burger more rare of that sir. Brad: [47:37] Yeah I mean he he looked at all that stuff and he he advocated for a couple different varieties of it and I you know it is a little distillation of Life at Amazon. Jason: [47:47] Yeah you well the distillation of me was like you relayed the conversation when he was you know he's like how hard could it be and I might thinking like that's got to be the worst question to ever get from Jeff Bezos. Brad: [47:58] Totally totally. Jason: [48:00] Well you also during that story you kind of highlighted his increasingly exotic taste you talked about the iguana and whatnot and it reminded me of a story in your first book. Of the Blackhawk ink octopus breakfast which was also a fun. Brad: [48:16] Oh that's right wasn't that the CEO of woot Maybe. Jason: [48:19] It was Matt Rutledge yeah yeah I talked to him occasionally and I always remind him of that story because of you. We'll listen Brad we could talk all night but it is happen again we have used up all of our allotted time so we're going to have to leave the audience wanting a little bit more. As always if folks enjoyed this show we sure would appreciate that five-star review on iTunes and if you have any questions or comments about the show please hit us up on Twitter or Facebook. Scot: [48:52] Yeah the name of Brad's book is Amazon Unbound it's available now your favorite book sellers and hardcover it's on e-readers and then also the audio book is available for those of you that like to listen to things while you commute Brad if you working obviously people can find you at Bloomberg so you're right there on their TV but but do you where is your favorite place to kind of for people to check what you're up to is it Twitter or. Brad: [49:16] Brad Brad - stone is my website at bradstone on Twitter and let me just thank you guys you know you both have been sort of mentors to me and the in the wild. World of Amazon e-commerce and it's like a pleasure to be on this podcast. Scot: [49:32] Thanks Brad we really appreciate you taking time to join us. Brad: [49:37] Okay thanks guys. Jason: [49:38] It was entirely my our pleasure and until next time happy Commercing.

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