Podcasts about right uh

The Chicks are chatting with Birch Gold about the failure of Republic First, the potential for more bank failures, and the potential for big bank bailouts.  The conversation also highlights the importance of gold as a safe haven investment in the current climate.

Will and Chris sift through the media's disinformation on the CHIPS bill and the new Manchin-supported bipartisan spending bill—hilariously titled “The Inflation Reduction Act—” giving you the ins and out of the bills' policies and politics.

Artist and baker Andrew Hawkes talks about bouncing around pixelated mansions. ABOUT THE GUEST Andy Hawkes is an interdisciplinary artist based in Harlem. He creates performances, videos and baked goods that interrogate intimacy, aspirational domesticity and desire. Hawkes has presented his work at Museum of the Moving Image,Present Company, and Secret Project Robot. For more information Andrew-hawkes.com or IG @Andyawesomepants. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as “tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny.” His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he’s a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE’S A TALKER was the name of Neil’s first video project. “One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate’s cat and found myself saying the words ‘She’s a talker.’ I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying ‘She’s a talker.’” A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund.  Producer: Devon Guinn  Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue  Mixer: Andrew Litton  Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver  Theme Song: Jeff Hiller  Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnoc TRANSCRIPTION NEIL GOLDBERG:  I was going to say you were a former student of mine, but let’s get real here. ANDY HAWKES:  Almost student. I came so close. NEIL:  What happened? Why did you drop my class? ANDY:  Because they told me I had to. NEIL:  Who told you that? ANDY:  The people. NEIL:  The people. You’re putting it on someone else. ANDY:  No, I was… NEIL:  What went wrong? ANDY:  What went wrong was I was a first year sculptural student and I wanted to take a class with you in graphic design and the class was full and I think I was told I could take it if no one else in graphic design wanted to take the class so I got bumped out, but I did do the first assignment, but then I never got to show anyone. I think it wasn’t meant to be. NEIL:  Here we are today though. ANDY:  Here we are today. I think it’s change and it’s something different and special. NEIL:  Hello, I’m Neil and this is She’s A Talker. Today I’ll be talking to artist and baker, Andy. If this is your first time listening, here’s the premise of the podcast. I’m a visual artist and for the past million or so years I’ve been jotting down thoughts, observations, and reflections often about things that might otherwise get overlooked or go unnoticed. I write them down on index cards and I’ve got thousands of them. I originally wrote the cards just for me or maybe to use in future art projects, but in She’s A Talker I’m using them as prompts for conversations with some of my favorite artists, writers, performers, and beyond. NEIL:  These days the cards often start as recordings I make into my phone here and there over the course of the day. Each episode I start with some recent ones. Here they are. Animals are so straight edge. When you shake hands with somebody just after you’ve washed your hands and they’re still wet and you have to say, “I just washed my hands.” Photography is like taxidermy. I’m so excited to have as my guest Andy. Andy is an interdisciplinary artist who lists his mediums as performances, videos and baked goods. He’s presented his art at the Museum of the Moving Image and a bunch of other art venues. He also works as a coordinator of public programs at the Whitney Museum. NEIL:  We talked in January at a recording studio at the New School in New York City.    NEIL:  I’m sitting here with Andy Hawks. I’m so happy to have you here today.  ANDY:  I’m happy to be here.  NEIL:  Um, Andy, what’s your elevator pitch for what you do?  ANDY:  I would say, and it’s changed a lot since I’ve moved to New York, which is five years ago, I would say I am. I’m a performance artist and a video artist that’s interested in. Food consumption and labor and whiteness and those sorts of things. Yeah. I just recently accepted to myself that my kitchen is my studio or an extension of my studio, and so I think my time since graduate school has been learning to unlearn that art happens when you make a concerted effort in the studio and you know, to realize that. I can make art when I’m not sitting at a desk saying, okay, this is the time in which I will make art, you know? So I say I’m interested in food and interested in cakes and baking and things like that because I am still coming to terms :with like, that is, I think, a big part of the materials I want to work with. Yeah.  NEIL:  I am blown away by the gorgeousness of these cakes that have appeared on your social media feed.  ANDY:  Thank you.  NEIL:  It seems to me like in what the last year possibly?  ANDY:  In the last year? Yeah,  NEIL:  And it’s like zero to 60 I don’t know what the term is, but they’re, they’re so exquisite looking and came to me as a really big surprise. But perhaps not for you or, or, or was this something that you’ve been working towards?  ANDY:  It was a big surprise for me. I started baking a year ago when I started posting.  NEIL:  Fucking A!  ANDY:  So what happened was, you know, uh, my partner really wanted to take a cake decorating class. And so for Christmas I signed them up for one and we did it together and he did not like it,  But we had all this stuff and I wanted to use it. We had all this butter and all these bags and things, and I was like, well, I want to figure out how to use this. And I kind of got interested in it as a sculptural material and wanted to… explore it. And I started making cakes and seeing cakes on the internet and bringing them into work. And a big part of this was I started working in an office where it was, you know, predominantly white women who, you know, would bring in baked goods and stuff. And it was such a language of power play of like, “Oh, I baked these this weekend”, or “I bake these with the kids.” And I realized it was sort of like a… an interesting flexing that all these women were doing with each other. And I was like, well, I want to be a part of this. I want to like somehow get into this sort of like, “Oh, I made these cookies and they’re really good”. You know? And, and present them really prettily. So then I started trying to learn how to make them as beautiful as possible, which is something I’d never been interested in, which was beauty.  Explain that for people who. Rightly are blown away by the idea of an artist who heretofore, was not interested in beauty.  I think beauty in a way, to me means resolved in a certain way and a certain aesthetic and a certain kind of finish. And as an artist, I was never interested in…  No, I was interested in things aesthetically making sense to me, but I was never interested in them aesthetically being at a resolved point where… It’s sort of like drag makeup in a way, right? Like, you know, to have the idea that there’s like a, a flawless application of, of eyeshadow or something, or like a flawlessness to it. And I was never interested in making something that was flawless. I had never really thought about that. And you know, I, I learned a lot of this to this school to YouTube, and there’s so much conversation with these people who are making cakes about, like, how to make sure that your buttercream is perfectly smooth and how to make sure you have the perfect icing and making sure that you have the perfect, like the word perfect kept coming up so much because it was like, “Oh, this is about being perfect,” you know? So I had never used the word perfect, or use the word harmonious, and in a way, you know. But that’s something that I am interested in with like how something tastes or how something looks now. Yeah.  NEIL:  This perfection thing is really coming up for you, huh?  ANDY:  I guess so.  Yeah. Does it in any way feel like it may be a response to Yale where perfection is questioned? It is. Question there. I came from mid Michigan, small school, you know, by a corn field. I remember in one of the critiques, one of my first critiques in Yale, one of the faculty members said, Oh, it’s such an object as a critique. And I was like, and my head spin spun around and I was like, “Oh my, what? I thought we were supposed to be doing that here.” Yeah. I thought we were supposed to be making objects, what am I doing? And so I, I know that like one of the things that I felt was that, that, you know, and I loved the program and I learned so much, I have to say that. But you know, one of the things that when I left, it was like I had completely abandoned making anything tangible or physical or like, an object. And so like maybe in a way, you know, I am striking back. I mean, a cake is an object. As long as you don’t eat it, you know, as long as you don’t cut it. So, you know, maybe, maybe it is a reaction against that and maybe there’s some little trespassing, you know, it’s a little naughty exploring perfection. Are your parents still in the world?  Yes. They both are. Yeah.  Oh, a little question mark.  Yes. Both of my parents are alive. Yes. Yeah.  NEIL:  Um, how do each of them describe what it is you do to their friends?  ANDY:  Oh. So I work at the Whitney museum and I, uh, work with a small team to produce, um, programs for adult audiences. So I think that they don’t think of me baking as, as an artistic practice. My mom probably would say that I am, you know, an arts administrator in New York.  NEIL:  Mhmmmm.  ANDY:  That’s, I think as much as she would describe it. And I don’t know if I’ve articulated to her that I think of what I’m doing. A sculpture,  NEIL:  Arts administration – as sculpture? Or baking as…  ANDY:  Baking as sculpture, not art. If arts administration is sculpture, my gosh, I have built the pyramids. Um,  NEIL:  How about your dad?  ANDY:  Ah, well my dad is, um. He’s a.. He had a closed head injury a few years ago, so he.. That’s why, you know, when you were like, “Oh, your parents..”  My dad’s alive, but he’s not, um, he has a lot of memory loss and a lot of difficulty. So he’s in an, um, in a nursing home. So he remembers me if I’m there in person, but I don’t think on the day to day he thinks about it. If I call him, he’ll be kind of confused.  Right. Yeah.  So that’s why I said it with a question mark cause it’s like, Oh well hmm…. NEIL:  I hear you. I’m sorry to have been so, um.. uh, cavalier about that question. ANDY:  But when he has a with us, I mean, you know, before his accident, I think he, I know he would describe me as an artist and he was very, he fancied himself an artist. And he took me as a kid, actually, is one of the reasons why I became an artist. As a little kid. He would take us the DIA, Detroit Institute of the Arts, you know, like once a month. And we were members. And I remember just having really formative experiences there. And when I turned like 13, he gave me his SLR, like film camera from, you know, he had since the 80s. And, and that sort of opened, I think the door to me being an artist. And he was a truck driver. But you know, he painted and he took photographs and he played the flute and he was a person that, you know, I think in a lot of ways I’m a lot like him. That if he took an interest in something, he fully committed and did a 0 – 60 so seeing him obsessively buy gadgets and obsessively commit to learning something was sort of really impactful for me. NEIL:  What’s something that you find yourself thinking about today?  ANDY:  Oh, today specifically? Or today is like a concept, huh?  NEIL:  What is today as a concept. Oh, like, like kids today?  ANDY:  Yeah. That sort of thing.  NEIL:  Take your pick. I love it.  ANDY:  I’m thinking a lot about, this is going to sound crazy. Watching ‘Let’s Play’ videos.  NEIL:  What are they called, lip play? ANDY:  Let’s play. NEIL:  Let’s play? ANDY:  It’s when people play video games and record them.  NEIL:  Oh, right. Yeah, thats a thing huh? ANDY:  Yeah. And I’ve been watching the Tomb Raider ones from like 1996 you know, with the… the worst resolution graphics on earth. And its just a very surreal experience to watch someone who’s perfected playing Tomb Raider. It’s just a really interesting, um, meditative kind of thing to watch. NEIL:  Weird.  ANDY:  Yeah. It is weird.  NEIL:  Do you play video games?  ANDY:  I don’t.  NEIL:  Me neither. You don’t like playing them but you like watching other people play?  ANDY:  Yeah.  NEIL:  Huh. ANDY:  I was a very scared child. I grew up with the PlayStation and I was always too stressed out to ever play past the first level of anything. And so now that I’ve discovered that you can just watch someone else play and be able to see again, I guess it’s like I said, perfect. Again, like perfectly played Tomb Raider.  NEIL:  What was it as a kid that scared you back over to the next level?  ANDY:  I was afraid of the conflict. There’s always a first boss that you have to fight, right?  NEIL:  Oh, is that what happens in a video game?  ANDY:  Oh  yeah! With any video game you get to a part and you have to fight some sort of like guy who throws bricks at you or something or you know, some sort of like mushroom monster or something. And I, um, never wanted to do that. I was like, well, that’s okay with me. I’ll just play the first level again where you just, you know. Don’t deal with that. So, you know, I, my favorite part of tomb Raider was there was a part where you could just play in Laura’s house. The, the main character is like a millionaire and you could just like jump around her mansion and I, that was enough for me. And so it’s nice to see.. to watch something that isn’t just bouncing around someone’s pixelated mansion I guess.  NEIL:  Right, isn’t that what we’re all doing? Bouncing around our respective pixelated mansions.  ANDY:  Well, or pixelated apartments or pixelated hovels in my case.  NEIL:  Let’s go to some cards I curated for you.  ANDY:  Okay.   (Card Flip sound)  NEIL:  First card is the profound thing about cooking show competitions is that the sense of taste is invisible. You can’t know what they’re tasting except in how it registers on their face or in their words.  ANDY:  That’s really true. In a way, that’s what I’m interested in, like trying to make, I’ve been trying to make more elaborate kind of baked goods, uh, different kinds of sponges and things like that, so I can actually know what they taste like. And actually experience that. And I think that in a lot of ways when you watch these shows we’re there by proxy. We’re there by what someone is what someone’s facial expression is. What someone says about it. The camera. The music. The response of the other contestants. And we’re never actually there. Sort of a mirror to a lot of… we’re increasingly removed from most experiences, you know? NEIL:  For sure. But I think about like baking shows in particular, or cooking shows are different from, let’s say, a singing competition where you can experience it.  Yeah. And how that shapes cooking shows, you know? So there’s like, for me, I’m really interested in like the, the fetishization of the bite, you know, the, the ways of telegraphing this experience that you don’t have access to in the same way that you would have it if it were someone singing and you could hear them sing.  ANDY:  Or America’s next top model, and you can see them posing.  NEIL:  Exactly. Exactly.  ANDY:  Right.  NEIL:  You had said earlier, um, a cake is an object unless you eat it. How does, how does that figure into it? Like is a cake that you’ve cut into. Is that a? Is it still a cake? Is it an object? Is it… ANDY:  I think it’s still an object if you cut into it? But I’ve noticed the fun thing about baking cakes is that you can’t eat them alone, right? I mean, you could, but you would be sort of a monster if you baked the cake and ate it by yourself. NEIL:  Right.  ANDY:  And so I started baking cakes for everyone’s birthdays and so many people said, “Oh, it’s… I don’t want to cut it. It’s so pretty. I don’t want to cut it. I don’t want t  ruin it.” And you know, it’s, it’s interesting because like, if there’s like one little tiny piece of cake left, it’s no longer, it’s no longer something that I made. It’s participatory at that point, right? Like every little cut, every little licking of the frosting, like people are changing it and it’s actively changing shape and changing form. And, um, I love when you, when, when, when it’s sort of that wedge missing and it’s full of crumbs and it’s full of. You know, things falling over and, um, people scraping up the pieces with a knife and it become something that’s kind of on one side. Literally on one side, it’s really pretty. On the other side, in the front, it looks broken. It looks damaged. It’s, uh, been affected by other people, you know, and that’s, that’s interesting to me to look at that. And I find myself always documenting the completed cake before it’s cut into and not taking pictures of the half consumed cake. But I think that, you know, it’s interesting when they are in the process of losing their objectness and the process of becoming, I guess just food, you know? And the in-between between a work of art and just food is interesting for me. And that’s something that I haven’t figured out how to, how to cement that moment. Cause I. I dunno. I feel like I’m, I, I’ve not seen other people work with cakes as a material. So I’m trying to figure out how do I make this art? How do I prove to everyone that I’m actually making her? And I’m not just baking, you know? But. I, I believe that I am making art when I’m doing this.  NEIL:  Oh my God. If you ever have doubt, you can definitely text me.  ANDY:  Okay.  NEIL:  But I do think the question you’re dealing with is so fucking deep, which is, yeah, we can say what you’re doing is hard, but where is the art?  ANDY:  Right. All right. You know, I’m also interested in things that I, I feel like are, this is almost art.  NEIL:  Almost art is so much better than art.  ANDY:  I think so too.  All the possibilities! One of my friends, I Simon Wu. I’ll ll send him things that I think are, “Oh my God, this is almost art.” You know, and there’s like a, there’s, there’s this, um, like two hour. And I’m not lying. It’s like a two hour YouTube compilation of, of women in anime saying, “Oh, ho, ho, ho ho ho ho ho” like this, like specific anime laugh. It’s like two hours long. And I’m like, this is almost art. I think that if you just put this on a screen, I think it’d be art. But then I, then I asked myself, well, is it art now? If it’s art on YouTube, but I don’t know. Or, um, those things… If I can get spicy? NEIL:  Oh, please do, on she’s a talker.  ANDY:  Those, um, those poppers training videos, have you seen those?  I haven’t seen them?  They’re, they’re, they’re  po… po… porn… porno… pornographic.  They’re, they’re pornographic adult films. And for those of you who don’t know, poppers are a… I actually don’t even know how to explain what they are, but they are a, they are a tool. They’re a tool to get you where you need to go.  And there are these videos that like, it’s like these super cuts of intense pornographic hardcore gay scenes, and there’s like at the bottom it tells you like, start doing your poppers now and then stop doing your poppers. NEIL:  Oh, really?  ANDY:  Yeah. And it’s supposed to train you to like. I dunno. It’s some sort of like tantric poppers sort of thing. Oh yeah. I don’t, I, I’ve watched them. I’m not going to say if I’ve like participated in the exercise, but I think that that’s like a thing that I’m like, this seems like it’s almost art. NEIL:  Almost art.  (Card Flip sound)  Next card. I was watching ‘The Great British Baking Show’ and they were making a self saucing sponge. Okay. I don’t know if that means anything to you. ANDY:  I think I’d know what that means. NEIL:  But the card I wrote in relationship to that is you don’t know how it’s going to turn out until the end. You can’t taste it as it goes.  ANDY:  Yeah.  NEIL:  It’s inscrutable past a certain point. You can’t, well, you can’t take taste, for instance, batter and know what it’s going to taste like, or can you? ANDY:  You can taste batter, but it isn’t baked.  NEIL:  Right. ANDY:  You can certainly tell if it’s, if there’s something wrong with it. But it won’t taste good. Yeah. One of the interesting things that I’ve been doing is because I’ve been making multiple component cakes, you know, so it’s  like… NEIL:  MCCs? ANDY:  Oh yeah. Maybe that. Um, you know, so it’s like, Oh because you know, I’m trying to do that whole ‘British Bake-Off’. Like, Oh, it’s a brown butter vanilla sponge with a white chocolate ganache inside with a raspberry reduction, and it’s covered in Italian merengue buttercream, you know?  NEIL:  And take your  poppers now  (Laughs)  ANDY:  And start poppers now.  (Laughs)  Um, no, but so you can taste each individual component, but you don’t actually know what a slice will taste like. You don’t know this small section of this greater whole. How much of everything do you get? How much in every forkful do you get? Does it actually make sense together? You can never really know until you cut into it unless you’ve made something a hundred times and you’ve kind of memorized it.  (Card Flip sound)  NEIL:  Okay. Next card, Andy.  ANDY:  Okay.  NEIL:  I think my favorite kitchen tool might be the spatula. Very Virgo tool. I’m talking about the kind of spatulas, not like that you use to flip a burger, but that you use to kind of like… ANDY:  A rubber spatula? NEIL:  A rubber spatula!  ANDY:  Or that sort of like scrapey-scrapey. NEIL:  Yeah, perfection of scraping. ANDY:  I love spatulas. I also hate bad spatulas.  NEIL:  Oh yeah, like where they’re too stiff.  ANDY:  They’re too stiff or they’re too, I mean,  the two stiff, a bit too limp or they’re afraid to commit. You know? I watched a spatula review video recently. NEIL:  Really?  ANDY:  Yeah. And I bought the top rated spatula and I love it.  NEIL:  Really? Tell me about it. ANDY:  I forget what it’s called, but it’s silicone. The whole thing is silicone, so there’s no wood on it. And so. It, you can go, it can go on the dishwasher. It’s safe up to 450 degrees so you can’t melt it. And unless you put an oven that’s 500 degrees and it’s, it’s stiff but not too stiff and it’s wide but not too wide and it fits in the hand perfectly. I dunno. Spatials are an interesting thing cause they’re sort of like, when you have idea of like you cupping your hand in a, I mean the goal of any good kitchen tool is that it feels like it’s just your hand just doing something different.  NEIL:  Yes. That’s so true.  ANDY:  That’s my relationship to spatulas I suppose. NEIL:  Is it? Do you have a favorite kitchen tool?  ANDY:  My favorite, favorite, favorite thing is the, is this French tip. A piping tip. It’s, it’s open star tip and it’s got a lot of little, it’s really small. Like if it’s just, it just makes these really pretty dollops that have these like really architectural pretty lines incised in them. And I just, I just like it cause it makes everything look instantly fancier.   (Card Flip sound)  NEIL:  Next card, the experience of eating berries that are fleetingly in season. Something about grasping or attachment or something is what I wrote about the experience of like now is cherry season and it’s fleeting and so you get the cherries and they’re delicious and sweet and it creates in me a type of like disconnect actually.  ANDY:  That’s like, I feel like. Is a problem is that we never really know when something is in season because something is more often than not always available and it’s just a few, a few weeks or months, or it, no, it doesn’t taste like trash. One of the things that I used to work at the Brooklyn museum, and there was this, um, still life painting by an American artist and I, I don’t remember his name, but I remember looking at it and not understanding why it was remarkable and it was because it took him a year to paint it because it depicts all these fruits, you know, strawberries, blackberries, watermelons, pumpkins, every kind of conceivable fruit, fresh at the same time. And you know. To a person living before mass supermarkets and things like that, you would never see a blueberry at the same time that you see a cabbage. You know, it’s interesting because like, Oh, I read the wall label and we, I talked about it with a coworker and it’s like, Oh, it actually took him a year because he had to like. Wait until something was ripened, paint it and make a composition based on things that he has that he knew would be in season later that he would put someplace else, you know? NEIL:  Well, so he did the thing that supermarkets do today.  ANDY:  Yes. And it was magic at the time.  NEIL:  Wild!  (Card Flip Sound))   Next card, Andy.  ANDY:  Yes.  NEIL:  Leftovers as a kind of embodied memory. ANDY:  That makes me think about meal prep. You know, when you’re making the same thing and eating the same thing over and over and over again, and that there is no leftovers, that you’ve made it all at once and you’re eating the sort of copies of the same meal, right? You cook a bunch of chicken breasts and broccoli, you know, there was never the original meal. There was never a leftover. But I do think it is interesting thinking about leftovers as like as some sort of analog to memories of a previous experience. The soup always tastes different the next day. It always tastes better. The flavors get to know each other more. It’s telling you a different story. You know, the act of measuring something disrupts what you’re measuring, the act of remembering something changes what you remembering. Right? Uh, Thanksgiving leftovers aren’t Thanksgiving. They’re something different, but it is in a way, a memory or some sort of, um,remnant or some sort of a shadow of what there was before,  NEIL:  But, but to your point, it often tastes better.  ANDY:  I think it does.  NEIL:  I agree completely. And I think there’s two parts to that. One is the way certain foods. Yeah. Get to know each other, but also it’s like you’re not at fucking Thanksgiving. ANDY:  No!   (laughter)  Socialization and all of the, the experience is not there again. NEIL:  And that’s, that makes it taste better. In other words, in fact, knowing Thanksgiving is over. That you got through it that it’s done  ANDY:  You got out  NEIL:  Makes that taste better. You got out. Exactly. Exactly. I think that’s a key to why Thanksgiving leftovers taste better. I love Thanksgiving with my family. Do I love it more than Thanksgiving being over? I dunno. What would you choose? Well, you’re getting both.  ANDY:  Yeah. You can get both.  NEIL:  You have Thanksgiving and then you have the pleasure of Thanksgiving being over.  (Card Flip Sound)  The next card. Confusion as a working method.  ANDY:  Yeah, yeah. Doubt I think is pretty, it’s pretty generative, right? Someone told me once, I think it was, um, Miss Kaufman who was my photography professor in undergrad, and she told me, if you’re ever comfortable with the work that you’re making, you probably should be doing something different. I think if you’re so confident in something, then like you need to shake it up a bit. And I think that being confused is a useful space to, to be trying to orient yourself somewhere .It’s a useful thing. And I remember you… you’re the one, you photographed people coming out of the subway.  NEIL:  I did. Yeah. ,  ANDY:  I remember that! It meant a lot to me. I think about it a lot sometimes. Oh, I love it. Um, I think I’ve articulated enough in this interview that I’m a little bit unsure of what I’m doing. Um, so I think that, um. Orienting yourself is a useful place to be in. I think confusion is important.  NEIL:  I love it. That’s so deep. Your take, it starts from really different take from mine. This card came from, um, almost as a methodology. Like when I’m getting feedback about a piece of art, I like to get a lot of feedback about a piece of art feedback and kind of get myself kind of confused about it through these different voices that are weighing in on it and added that confusion I wouldn’t say a certainty of emerges, but like a direction forward does. There’s a place where both of our thoughts meet.   (Card Flip sounds)  Okay. What keeps you going? ANDY:  The desire to learn? I think wanting to, um, yeah. Wanting to learn . Both in like my, you know, trying to learn how to do drag makeup, trying to learn how to tap dance, how to try and to learn how to bake a cake and my relationship learning, you know, more about my partner and learning how he feels and how he thinks and things like that. And, um, you know, my job, my day job, you know. Um, learning about art and learning about a collection of art and learning about different artists. And yeah, I’d say learning. And I think that, you know, that’s what keeps me going in the. In the, um, in that field also. Um, I’m very passionate about having insurance. I’m passionate about eating, um, and paying my rent somewhat on time. So that is also what keeps me going in that job. NEIL:  It’s good that you have passions.   (Card Flip Sounds)  Andy on that note. Huge thank you for being on ‘She’s a Talker.’ I’m so grateful.  ANDY:  Thank you for having me. It’s been so much fun, I hope I talked enough. NEIL:  Oh my God. Gems. It was like an embarrassment of riches.  ANDY:  Thank you.  NEIL:  Uh, we’ll do a version where there’s like the popper instruction part that goes with it too. ANDY:  Popper training!  NEIL:  Popper training.  (Chuckles)  ANDY:  It’s like, you train for a marathon. You don’t need, you know… NEIL:  You don’t get instructed.  ANDY:  Yes.  NEIL:  All right.       Thank you so much for listening to She’s A Talker. Before we get to the credits, we have something new this season. A lot of people have been writing in with their own responses to the cards and we’d love to feature yours in the show, so please send them our way at shesatalker@gmail.com or via Instagram at shesatalker. Jonathan Taylor wrote in with a question about drag, which I thought would be perfect to ask Andy given his own use of drag in his art. Here it is. In an earlier episode with the choreographer, Miguel Gutierrez. He was at the Whitney biennial a few years ago. I love him. One of the cards I had there was, I don’t like any of the art forms that are built around the uncanny, like animation, puppetry and impersonations, and a listener wrote in and asked, “What about drag? Does drag play on the uncanny?” What’s your answer to that? ANDY:  I think there’s a difference between drag and female illusion. I think a good drag queen or a drag queen that I appreciate, not a good drag queen, isn’t one that’s trying to look like a woman whereas I think female impersonation is the whole entertainment aspect is that this person looks so much like a woman, but they’re not. I’m thinking of the uncanny valley where something hits that wall where it’s too realistic but not realistic enough at the same time. And I think that drag at its heart is critiquing what gender is and exaggerating and there’s a level of camp to I think drag, the makeup is so distinct and so exaggerated. It’s stage makeup. It’s almost Kabuki. NEIL:  But that really aligns with what might’ve been my take. My take would have been less articulate. Thank you Andy for answering that listener question. ANDY:  Thank you. Thank you for asking. NEIL:  This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Devin Guinn produced this episode. Andrew Lytton mixed it. Molly Donahue and Aaron Dalton, our consulting producers, Justine Lee handles social media. Our interns are Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert and Jesse Kimotho. Our card flip beats come from Josh Graver and my husband Jeff Hiller sings the theme song you’re about to hear. Thanks to all of them and to my guest, Andy and to you for listening.

Hunters HD Gold is the Official Eye Wear of USPSA and Steel Challenge anecdotally I have seen their eyewear showing up all over competition shooting starting with where I first saw them at the PCC and Rimfire Championships. If you are aware of Hunters HD Gold odds are you have met my guest Brian Conley. Speaker 1: [inaudible].  Speaker 2: Hey everybody, and welcome back to the Cindy cast on this episode we've got Brian Connolly from hunter's HD gold. They're the official eyewear of USPSA and still challenged. And anecdotally I've been seeing their eyewear showing up all over competition shooting, starting with where I saw them first at the piece of seat and rimfire championships. If you're aware of hunter's HC gold, odds are you've met Brian.  Speaker 3: He's joining us now. How are you doing Brian? Hey, what's going on? Gosh, it's been a, it's been too long since we've been in the dirt together. It's been over a year at this point. It has and I'm have not been back to, um, where we met and um, it, Lucas all arranged so far yet this year. That was a pretty long ago. Yeah. I mean, just to be straight, I don't think anybody has, I mean, I went there twice last year, so I'm not missing, I logged 21 days in that house last year. Well, I never got the pleasure of I'm staying in the house. I had to drive to Warsaw every day, so I got it. Yeah, it's um,  Speaker 4: I, oh, sorry. I got my dog, Lucy here. Who is going to come here? Cool. Get in there. You're going to take a little break. Come on. Oh, you're all over my stuff and we're going to have to drop an edit in here. You're working loose Kendall up. There you go. All. Alright. She is a  Speaker 3: business associate and my secret lover, but um, she's a pain in the ass sometimes. All right, so here we go. So yeah, you know, Lucas, um, it's an interesting thing. They, um, you know, I was involved. So last year I was involved with um, strategic mash design and a couple of other companies that were doing major events and um, I got into it on the, well they wanted me to do media, which translated to, would you also do our prize tables? Wow. Yeah. So I did six last year and um, and then, you know, and it was, I learned a ton. It was totally worth the, the mental exercise. And at the same time, I don't think you'll see me doing that again. I can understand that. I actually had to, um, had the joy of walking a prize table for somebody this year when they weren't gonna be able to walk it.  Speaker 3: And I decided that was the first and last time I want to do that as well. So yeah, I definitely have my, I want to talk about prices with you a little bit cause you guys have been really gracious, but you also have kind of a spin on that that I really like. Um, so then we can talk about a little bit later in the cast as we get deeper into, um, hunter's ht gold specifically. But tell me before we do that a little bit about you, like you started out in insurance, is that what I've, I'm gathering, I've been in retail management since I was, um, 21. Okay. And I, I'm 48 now. Got It. I used to tell everybody I sold everything buddy insurance back. And then I had a friend of mine who was, um, owned an insurance company and he says, Hey, well go get your, go get your license and everything and this and this. He had a  Speaker 5: practice. He was starting up an insurance. I was like, well sure, why not? So 50 exams to the hardest test. I still keep those. I'm insurance licensed current today. He'd taking the ced seat CD be correct. Can't talk, taking the credits every two years to keep my license current in the state of Alabama. So I've got a backup plan. If I ever got to go back and sell insurance, I'm not going to lose my license cause I think now they're requiring a lot more to get your license and insurance, everything else. So every couple of years I walked back into a classroom and take eight hours of credits and um, fulfill those. But based on how everything is going now, I don't really think I'm gonna have to go back down that path. And You Thompson know you guys are having a great run and uh, well so tell me like how do you go from now you, you were born and raised in Alabama, right?  Speaker 5: Yeah, I was born in Tuscaloosa and in 92, um, moved up in Birmingham. I had been in Birmingham area every since. And, um, you know, I got, you know, like I said, I went to school and, um, at the university and, um, when in criminal justice and had a path set there for me but never really finished. Once I get into retail sales, um, got a call from the local police department that I was gonna go work for. And um, they tell me my starting salary, I think back there was going to be 16, five, and at that time in retail management as a young manager at 21 years old, I'd made I think 30 something thousand dollars. So I might've, I made a commitment in our decision and saying, well, I'm not gonna, um, turn around and look back. I can make this much more money and not get shot at.  Speaker 5: And, um, then that's kind of the path that shows every since I got that. And I would, I would imagine there's more than one human being that made that calculation in their lifetime between laundry is one of those things that, um, I've never been in a situation where I haven't had gainful employment based on being in that kind of environment. Had to change jobs a lot because in retail management, the way you may got a pay raise was getting recruited by somebody else certain or changing in a career path to sell something different. So, um, lots of, um, lots of training through that, through the years being able to go from different positions. I've managed and sold everything from, um, let me see, you know, video contents backward guy started in 92 selling big springs and camcorders and after five years that company closed up, they wrote about Tandy Corporation went to go manage your radio check and then I didn't like selling the parts that made the big screens when I was selling the big screen.  Speaker 5: So I got out of that and went to another type of sales. But I've managed everything from targets to the best buys to being in the wireless industry for multiple years. And then, um, then I was in of course like we just talked about selling them insurance with a, um, insurance agency. And then, um, my current wife's ex husband at the time, you know, called me about wanting to do their marketing and, um, stuff for the lab that I worked for now. Yeah. And, um, that was kind of an interesting blend, but we had a great working relationship and, um, started doing marketing in the lab business. So I went from the selling retail to, I'm talking directly to ophthalmologist, not Tom Matricis about how to, um, improve their sales in their field and quote unquote selling the accessories that were up. Because in the optical world, the essential, these are, you know, ars photochromics colors, tans, anything, you know, something besides just the normal thing that insurance is going to cover.  Speaker 5: And I did that for four years and then, um, got involved with, um, I'm all over the place. But then I got involved with, um, two other friends that were, one was a Napkin kinda strain. One was an older gentleman that I've known forever or 15 years now that was in the wireless industry. And we went together and bought some hunting property. And that was in back in, um, 2013. Um, place called triple forks hunting. We do executive hunts and stuff like that. So I had all these tools at the lab and I wanted to make myself a hunting lands and I wanted to, you know, something to enhance my hunting, you know, for what I was doing. Cause I had, um, prescription outwear and I kinda had all the, all the fun toys to play with at the lab to design something. And that's Kinda, you know, the beginnings of where I've got, you know, where I am now.  Speaker 5: So it really cool. So that's optical prescription lab, which is the, the lab, correct? That's correct. And incorrect. Triple fork hunting LLC was something you created in 2013 it looks like. Yup. Yup. That's correct. And that's where we basically, we didn't just want anybody with a hunting license and you know, a gun to come hunt. We wanted to open it up to corporations or a place for them to bring their employees and um, and really have a place to, you know, bond and um, team build based on the, you know, you know, to build the relationships with either their clients or their employees and works extremely well. And one of my business partners is still running that more. I'm not running it as much based on where hundreds HD go does that now. So I'm lane is really stepped up and made a difference for that, keeping it going on the side.  Speaker 5: So cool. I'm always curious about something. So you're, you're, I mean at this point, whether you intended to or not, you're heavily involved in the firearms industry. Um, and so, well you're not selling guns. You're definitely directly marketing to that group with both the hunting and the, the, the hunters HD gold. So did you grow up with guns? Did you, how'd you fall out? This is, my dad had guns and um, we always use, I mean, we used to only brought them out. Usually when we traveled, it was kind of the time he put the gun in the, you know, in the trunk. And we traveled to Texas to see his family and my mom's family in Fort Worth, you know, Dallas area. And that's how I remember about growing up with the guns that don't really have the history of out shooting guns myself. I just remember my dad would always take guns out there and trade with some relatives and stuff like that. Um, October of 2011, my, um, father passed away and we stayed with him the last two years of his life. I'm helping him. He died of, um, cancer and he was in a situation where, um,  Speaker 1: yeah,  Speaker 5: that's where I inherited, you know, seven guns that he wanted me to have guns. You know, why? Um, grandfather was the mayor of, um, Bessemer, Alabama for 18 years. So he had these guns that bought a shot, guns and um, all these 11 Remington, 11 hundreds that were, um, back from the fifties and sixties. And how all these pictures with, um, local, um, celebrities, we'll call it the, um, bear Bryant's and stuff like that of shooting these guns and out shooting together and doing a bunch of 'em dog hunting and stuff. So there's a lot of history with these guns that I inherited. And that's Kinda what got everything started. Cause every time I look at sharing, we're talking or something, I always like, you know, you realize your fathers, you know, started this back in 2011, just had no idea where I was going to go. Yes.  Speaker 5: So that kind of got me involved in, you know, collecting guns and um, and getting started there in 2011. And that's what caused me that, you know, back here in the, um, previous presidency where I was wanting to say anyway, he bought some property and, you know, I have a place to shoot this and train and you know, hot and, you know, and everything else that was being, you know, jeopardize back in the, um, the 2000, you know, late 2000. Yup. Years of that. And, um, that's kind of where everything got started. And then when I actually had a gentleman, when we were building the lake at, um, triple forks hunting and, um, had a gentleman, Marketo bulldozer, it, it was moving dirt for the lake and he comes up to me and goes, hey, I need you to get me some more of this wasp spray.  Speaker 5: Um, that looks like it's in Pelham, Alabama. And I was like going, Huh, it's in my backyard. Sure. I go and look into it. Yeah. And, um, so I took this can, it was, um, kind of rainbow wasp spray. So I took it to the building and um, had to be buzzed in. They weren't open to the public and I was like, I walked to the door and I was like, Hey, I want to buy this wash spray. And I'm like, well, we really don't sell to the public, but hold on one second. And they went back in the back and then gentleman came out and he was like, where'd you hear about this? And I want it just to go on a bulldozer and I'm no, Port Alabama handed it to me and said, you know, come get some. He goes, well, we really don't.  Speaker 5: Some of the public, you know, but, but however, you know, here's the icing on the land of Basaam and you know, so forth and I'll let my business card with you before it's hunting. And he gave me his, um, and um, I went off on my merry way and went online and ordered some. And um, then about, yes, about a week later, if not yet, not that long. Um, the one of the owners of Rainbow Technologies, Larry Joe steely junior called me up and says, you know, hey, I see that you have a hunting camp and, um, so forth and tell me about that. When did that process, and he actually booked a hunt with his brother and one of his employees to come out there during hunting season. And then, um, we become a cane. You know, Franz went after, did the hunt together in the early fall, late fall season when the hunting season was starting.  Speaker 5: And, um, he saw the lenses there that I had used. I'd made up some just some demo stuff there as you want to use tested with, um, you know, people that were coming to hunt. I'd already was testing the lens with some game wardens, stuff like that. You know, just trying to get their feedback and stuff cause I was made a lens that, you know, allowed me to see a lot earlier in the mornings to hunt and in the state of Alabama hunting hours of defined 30 minutes before sunrise and 30 minutes after sunset. These were actually bringing in enough light to be able to hunt during those hours when it's pretty dark. So having the hunting property, I'd already made friends with a bunch of the game wardens cause I wanted them to be, you know, the places, two hours from where I live. So I always wanted them around the property to be able to keep watching what was going on and gave them full rights to come out there anytime they wanted to.  Speaker 5: They saw some suspicious, you know, come hang out at the place and you know, using this, it's kind of your home base. So that met Larry and Larry come out there and did a hunt and he got me involved in them. He goes, you ever do any competitive shooting or anything? And I was like, no. And um, he was doing cowboy action shooting and not a time slap, you know, single action shooting to Saudi SAS. And he got me involved in that and I was pretty intrigued cause I always, you know, like I said, I was collecting guns that look like this was going to give me another reason to, um, to buy some more guns, which I was all about. So got my cowboy outfits together and um, we got me at, um, an 1873 navy arms of Winchester that had been ridden and um, couple of Ruger voke heroes that we'd set off to have tripped out.  Speaker 5: Um, stoker double barrel shotgun and I wish you can. Cowboy action shooting was a blast. And I've had these lenses I've made there and I'm using them. And couple of locals there were like, what are you wearing? It's awesome. And made Larry Joe some of course, and he was all about it. And Larry Joe steely, if you don't recognize that name, he's the gentleman that now alone still target paint. Oh Man. That's the correlation there. This is before still target pink was even created. Yes. So if this time, you know, he was telling me, you know, I'm thinking about making a paint for the steel targets, he saw a need there. And um, the locals were all kind of intrigued about what I'd done with these. Lindsay goes, I really think you got something here. You gotta to see what you can do with it. And I started getting more intrigued cause I was already, I was kind of, you know, thought about going down the hunting road and I was doing a couple of, I didn't do any shows.  Speaker 5: I was visiting a couple of 'em, you know, directs expos and stuff like that. Just trying to see what was going on and made it a couple of visits to shot show with, um, some of my friends that start arms, they're hearing best from Alabama, about 20 minutes away and became good friends with them. So I was, you know, intrigued in what was really happening around the lands and what kind of feedback I was going to get. So I went to shot show a couple of years before it was, um, anything just to see if anybody was offering something I'd already created in the lab and make sure I wasn't walking into something that was already there. So why create something that somebody else is already putting out there? And there's already a market that's already been exposed to it.  Speaker 5: Um, come to find out there was nobody that was putting a traffic's lands together with a photochromatic combination. And, um, so I was even more intrigued to see where this would really go. And then I guess about a year later, Larry Joe Staley Jr was running, you know, had his thing going with still target paint. And he had called me up and says, I think I found a way pressed again and the competitive shooting, I was like, what do you mean? You know, everybody, you know, Sass already knows about it locally. You talked about something that goes, no, no, I think it's something bigger. Even with this thing called steel challenge. He goes, he had met a, he had met a competitive shooter named Steve Foster out of Georgia and was thinking about putting a team together. And um,  Speaker 1: okay,  Speaker 5: he asked me if I wanted to, um, sponsor the team. I was like, well sure, what does that, what do you want? What do you want to do? He goes, well, I'm just very, we put them all in hunters, HD gold. Well I'll put a Jersey together and we'll get your, you know, logo on the Jersey. And I said, sure, why not? Sounds great. And um, that's Kinda how I got involved with, um, steel challenge. Really cool. Wow. Oh my goodness. An interesting, you know, why do you get into it? Cause I had no idea what I was doing and I was, you know, I knew what I was doing on the land side, but I had no idea what the, um, competitive shooters of steel challenged was. I knew about Calloway shooting cause I've been doing that for about, you know, six or eight months, you know, once or twice a weekend.  Speaker 5: And I had a lot of fun with that. I didn't really think it was going to go much farther. And I was focused on the hunting side. So we were already testing a lot of products at triple forks hunting. I was obtained up with, um, Pradco, they're here in Birmingham as well and they all, they all Moultrie summit on tree stands Code Blue Night and hell game calls a lot of other brands. Yeah, I had come pretty close with veil and still close with them. Today. I'm testing their products out in the field and I'm had a lot of those guys, you know, helping me. Um, did some testing with hunters HD going and having some other avenues with on the hunting side. You know, with, I'm trying to get a hundred HD go to see what kind of um,  Speaker 5: way I could break into the industry. You kind of see what that looks like with my, with my lenses, but I'm meeting, I'm stay, you foster kinda change that entire direction. I kind of told the hunters I'll be back with you later. This is something that's really happening now. And Steve Foster had actually told me that um, he was always finished in second and third and once he got a hold of the 160 go and he was actually finishing first, that's the only thing he changed. Found that kind of, you know, intriguing because I didn't realize, you know what, I was really opening up to the competitive shooters to find them a shooting at vantage. I knew we had one in cowboy action shooting, but the targets are a lot closer and there's not much distance involved. It was just about more of transitioning and being able to work a leap or action and reloading your shotgun fast regardless,  Speaker 3: regardless of the platform, regardless of the game. I think Jerry Mitchell, he says it best is like you can see it fast, you can shoot it fast.  Speaker 5: Yup. And that's what [inaudible] when we were thinking about slogans, we were going through that, my wife and um, we were going back and forth cause one of the things she said is you can only shoot as fast as you can. See that's what it is. That's what it is. She always wants to put something together with the lenses being able to change in the eye. And she actually came up with a slogan as well. They changed so you don't have to. So that was kind of, you know, that kind of told a story about you know, the land without, you know, getting too much into it just because I have a lot of people would still walk up to the tent today when I traveled and I go, what is this? They changed it. I'll have to, and it just opens up the story. So it's working real well.  Speaker 3: That's really good. Well, okay, this is like, you just opened up like a bout a thousand conversations. Okay, good. So first thing I want to say is, is I've been, I've been in the firearms industry now for Ah, well, let's see. I've been really engaged as a consumer for about seven or eight years now and I've been engaged as a service provider for let's say five or six of those years. And I can't tell you how many people stumble into their careers. Like I just was looking for something for myself that worked better. Alex gun works. Great example. That guy just wanted a gun that worked better for himself, made a gun work great, kept making him. Um, you know, I'm here, I hear this over and over and it's really interesting to me how few people in the modern games are, um, on the gaming side of things.  Speaker 3: Uh, started with hunting and started a lot. I mean like, you know, you and I both grew up, like I didn't grow up around guns and sound like you, you know, you had him in the House, dad had him, but no, it wasn't like you grew up shooting every weekend or he lived on the farm shooting all the time. Um, and just how many people have like really who have really advanced the sports significantly come from like a whole different world of um, you know, uh, firearms used to saw post 18, you know, um, it's fascinating. But let's do this. I um, so when you were starting to develop this lens, so let's just explain this to those who you know, I'll give the simpleton. So for those of you who aren't watching this on video or you've never seen 180 gold lens is a essentially a very bright yellow lens, not unlike what you've seen in inexpensive, um, lenses.  Speaker 3: Like, if you just saw somebody walking by, you know, you find that like you buy the three pack, there's the smoke, there's the red and there's the yellow and you throw away the yellow and you take the smoke and the red with you out to the right, you know? Um, and so it looked kind of like that, but then you put them on and instead of it just liking everything, like super vivid and uncomfortable. Cause when I wear yellow lenses, I'm just like, I mean it's just like I'm being assaulted by light. I don't like it. You put these on and it takes a second. Especially if you haven't worn them before and then you sort of like, I don't know, you're like relax into this. Just sort of flow a light into your eyes all day. And what you don't notice is they're photochromatic so they're adjusting and the amount of light they're letting in based on the conditions outside, which is something like, you know, if he told me his photochromatic I immediately would be thinking of my brother's like 1978, you know, a glasses that he wore that were just not cool by even 1978 standards does that.  Speaker 3: But as a shooter, as a competitor outside all day long and all kinds of different light, you know, light's always changing and you're either switching lenses all day long or your, you know, you could wear these and they give you that all day sense. And I, I use them all the time. Um, I have them, I mix them with a couple of other things and I want to talk about that with you in a second. Cause I've recently gotten into this tactical games thing and um, I think I need a specific set of la or like frame for that. I got it. I'll talk to you about that, maybe offline, but like, um, cause I've got, I w you know, you made me, you gave me a set of the archers right away, the day that we were out there and um, at, I think that was PCC championships, there's a PCC roll championship.  Speaker 3: Give you a pair of orange shoes to wear around. I wore, Oh man, I wore them all. I wore them for the two days of the event. And see for me the biggest issue I have is I'm always transitioning back and forth between shooting the guns and dealing with cameras and electronics when all that kind of stuff. So like I'm changing things now. My eyes have gotten a little a showing off my, you know, readers right now, but my eyes in the last couple of years have significantly, um, diminished and quality. But I'm, I'm always switching back and forth between glasses, between what I'm shooting with when I'm working with, you know, polarized glasses, make my screen look like crap. Um, you know, there's a lot, whatever you go back and forth. So like I where it's just become kind of a thing for me. I've always got three or four pairs when I'm going to shoot and do cameras.  Speaker 3: I always just wear the eight hundreds HD gold now cause they just worked perfectly for both. Um, and the only negative is occasionally I've got to flip them up so that I can like make sure my color balance is correct before I start filming something. I have on a couple of occasions gotten an under saturated shot cause my lenses were exaggerating the Co, you know, so much the color richness. So, um, and I just, so I use them all the time and you've got a couple of friends here up in town now. Like A, Dustin Sanchez is one who is wearing your lens now and um, and they're released. We made him a pair of custom pair as well. Yeah, I know. I know we're all were us three gunners or a bunch of premadonnas or like I can't possibly wear  Speaker 5: in shooting sports offhand. That I think I learned that the hard way at the PC works with PCC world championship and everybody goes, Oh, all righty.  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well look, I mean, and I, you and I had a pretty cool interview. If you go to the huck origins youtube channel, there's an interview of the two of us that I did, um, at the PCC champion. No rimfire we met at PCC, but we did that when it rimfire and I'd had some experience then with your lens and that's when you made me the ones in the Oakleys. I was like, I love these lenses. I don't like the frames. Okay. Whatever. So, and we've had this conversation, we don't need to rehash this, but um, so you made me a set of Oakleys I took a set up. Yeah. I think I took a set out of my car and sent him with you. And you made a set of Oakleys for me with these lenses. And those were the ones that were, I mean, I literally wear 'em all the time.  Speaker 3: That where I'm driving around I where I'm there, they're kind of my constant rotation. If I'm wearing black boots, I'm wearing my hunters h g gold for wearing brown boots. I'm probably still wearing my Oakleys, but you know, so, um, so that's Kinda like I'm a pretty simple guy. It's like my glasses go with my boots. Um, but, um, and then I wear them, you know, all summer. I am also setting up matches I'm doing. And then I shoot the match and they work all day for all of that. And we run right up until nine o'clock here in Minnesota, which this time of year we're getting to the point where it's almost dark and I'm not switching to clears, which is just huge. Um, I can't, I wouldn't tell you if there's an advantage per se, um, in my shooting, but I'm not at the level where like any, especially any more where like you, I would notice such a subtle difference.  Speaker 3: Right. You know, not, not a hundred thought at first place, you know. Um, and so, but I will say that just from a personal comfort level, they're fantastic. And then I wear 'em all the way home in the car because I have like a blue light thing. It's like I tried to get my s I'm really conscious of my sleep and um, and they block some of the blue light from my car all the way home, but I could still see and drive and they blocked glare. So they just kind of cover me from the moment I leave the house till the moment I come home and I never, the glass is just managing that. So that's kind of like the layman's term of what they're doing. But I'm curious from your standpoint, like what was the design philosophy like? I mean, I know you tried a bunch of different things, but what did you finally end up with? Well, there was a lens that came out  Speaker 5: how many years ago? Back in the light, I guess early two thousands and then went through the probably 2010 or left. And that was a, um, company that had put out a actual actual shooting and hunting lands that had been discontinued. And that gave me an idea where to start at, because when I was talking to my wife about what I wanted to do, she goes, I think there's already something like this out there. I said, well, why is it not being, you know, talked about? And she was like, well, doctors don't, the aren't talking about it because they aren't asking their patients lifestyle questions. They're just trying to get through as a general thing. They're just trying to get through and do the eye exams and try to control what insurance is going to pay him. But they're not selling multiple pairs of glasses. Right. And that's something we deal with every day still today in the optical industry.  Speaker 5: You know, trying to get doctors to talk about more lapdog questions. Because when you get into people's, you know, what they do besides, you know, just going to work every day, you know, they need glasses for different things that they do. And if you're on a computer all day, there's a computer lands. If you're playing golf, there's a golfing lens. If you need no shooting and hunting, we now know there's a hunting lands. If you are driving, there's a driving lens that helps out for different things. And I'm fishing of course you need Polaroid polarized lenses and fishing and you need prescription polarized lenses and you know, you can find that by actually talking to people. And that's what I kind of brought to the optimum industry with all my years of experience in retail was qualifying a customer to really, you know, talk to them and find out what other needs they may have than just needing quote unquote glasses.  Speaker 5: And that's what gave me the idea of running into so many different things, whether it be with a hunting lands, because you know there's a lake, I don't know how much you want to remember. I'd probably do somewhere, but going through all the R and d of the one away lenses that this thing I'll work cause I know work. Yes, I like this, but no I don't like this. And then, you know, we, we threw away a lot trying to find the right combination of what we wanted to do and, or what we wanted to accomplish and what we wanted to accomplish was, um, one, we knew that the base of being tribex was superior to plastic or polycarbonate hands down because tribex by itself is lighter and stronger than plastic or polycarbonate, and also allows 43% more light to pass through the lens than polycarbon now.  Speaker 5: Okay. Wow. We knew the only other optics that are better than tribex is glass. And we didn't want to have glass anywhere around any including my own, anywhere near around our eyes as something catastrophic happen because glass, you know, shards and just is a disaster for your eyes. Yeah. That's not that dog will hunt. But believe it or not, I still see people wearing Kostas every day when they go shooting. And that's just, you know, I like coach. I, there's that role with that coach is a great brand. So [inaudible] jams. There's a lot of great brands out there in the [inaudible] industry, but those are fishing glasses. And that's how they marketed. But people still use them today because they want the, you know, the big C on there, you know, they're on their truck when they go hunting. That's just part of it. Totally. But if you stand around any three gun match, you rimfire match anything where the steels be in shot, you're going to eventually end up a wipe and blood off your face from a frat.  Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly. And when I went to my, when I went to Sherri and I said, this is where I'm wanting to go with this, I really think I've got something. And um, she goes, well, where the hell is our liability? I'm not taking a company. We started back in 1977 and gets screwed up or something. We just coming up with and I was like, oh, well that makes sense. I said, hell no, I'll get back with you. So about two days later, I got back with it. I said, I figured it out. We're gonna do everything. And um, OSHA safety frames and all the lenses. We're going to do an ansi standard 2015 cause most of the cyclins that are out there, only 2000, three, 2010 and we're going to take it all we 2015 and she says, well get me the OSHA certificate and you can go from there.  Speaker 5: And um, about six months later I got everything approved going through a lot, some more trials and this working and not working and paying a lot of money to have a bunch of lenses come back to me and didn't pass and trying to figure out why and put other coatings together and other solutions together to finally get the certificate. And um, we move forward at that point. And that's what informed the original selection of frames. Correct. Is the ocean rating. That's, you know, that's why we have the frames we have, cause they're all Ziad, seven plus one and z 87 plus two for prescriptions. And that's the difference than our frames are. And you should have saw the frames that were out when we first got started. We'd come along on frames because you know, there's no such thing as a sexy safety frame. And now wife to this day still hates these frames as a huddle.  Speaker 5: And the new velocity that we just came out with was another frame style that finally came out that we worked with the manufacturer to get some that were listening to us to try to get some things like we want. And that's kind of where we're at now. And I've got some, still have some frame manufacturers I'm working with up in New York area that are, you know, tried to design more and more stuff. That is, I'm quote unquote getting more of a more photo friendly. Here's your commitment. Those to stay OSHA approved with all of your frames. It is okay. And the reason being is is it's about safety. We're talking about safety, we're talking about protecting the only two eyes you're gonna have period. And you know, do we have some stuff out there? What? You've got one that's not us framing. We have the conversation, it's got the same properties, it's got the same thickness, it's got the same everything. But you've got to remember, I can't put an anti rated frame and a non safety frame. So conversation I have with you, you got the same thing. It just doesn't have the Ansi markings. Correct. It won't, you know, based on what OSHA has put in front of us, it will not, you know, provide the same protection. But conversation is, is this the same thickness as the same everything you know, it should, you know, just don't have the same, you know, Angie ratings on, yeah.  Speaker 3: So does that, does that make it impossible to have a, a lens that has no w you know, sorry I say this better. Does that make it impossible to create an OSHA rated lens that doesn't have any frame around like the bottom half for example?  Speaker 5: Not at all. There's one thing about it, there's not an interchangeable lands out there that is OSHA approved. I got now. Now that was saying that we are working on some things now on a model that's going to roll out if everything still goes as planned in January of 2020 yeah. So we have been, we've got some things in testing. We're still waiting to get some stuff back from, um, the writings. But there is that OSHA approved, you know, rimless frame that we are working on. That's going to be a game changer for almost to get into the shotgun world more. And also to get in a situation where we can deliver what you and all the other shooters you're telling me, you know, hey, what can we do to get nothing at the bottom? What can we do to get nothing, you know, there, so we're working on that.  Speaker 5: Um, that's gonna be a whole different, um, level of taking it to the next level for hunters HD because one of those things that's going to be, you know, we've still got to worry about the, um, the safety, but we're trying to listen very diligently to every, you know, shooter we can to get the feedback. Cause when I do demo days, I do it for two reasons. One is to go out there and use the Lens, you know, I know what they're going to like about it, but I want to, I want to hear more from the shooters that don't like it. Yes. Can I tell them that? Because if this is where I can take the brand in the future, does it mean it's going to happen tomorrow? No, but if I get enough feedback on a certain area, just like we were talking about now with rem lists, then guess what?  Speaker 5: The future is bright. We're going to have a rimless site, the frame going as planned. And when you talk about that then you're talking about different shapes and different things best. Let's make clear, it's not going to be just a one piece frame. We've talked about one piece lands, we talked about that before, that that's an injected molding process and it's all, you know, call the carpet. There's a lot of things there that, you know, we're limited to the blanks of the, of the, of the lands itself at 80 millimeters. You know, it's gonna have to still be two separate lenses, but it's going to be something that is going to be, you know, lighter and uh, keep the same strength as well.  Speaker 3: Well let me, let me dig into this a little bit cause this is like really interesting to me personally. And I, you know, and I don't know if others will enjoy it. And that's not really why I do this. Um, so, so really cool. So like I would say, you know, arguably, well first of all, there's, there's a lot of great conversations and I want to exclude a handful of things to begin with to make life really easy and fair for us to have a conversation. So, um, I let me say this anecdotally, I am standing at Ahrens and arms, which is an awesome gun shop here in town. We sell lots of high end equipment, lots of high end guns. If you want three gun gear, you're probably coming or USPSA gear, you're probably coming to us, right? And they'll, um, I can't tell you how many people are like, like, I mean, just like, uh, obsessing about the details between two or three, $2,000 optics for their rifle.  Speaker 3: And then they tell me that and I asked them what shooting glasses they're wearing and they're spending about $45 over the counter. And I'm like, ew, this doesn't matter. Get the cheapest thing possible. Cause you know, if you're not gonna look through a good lens. So we can, we're excluding everything in the, in the lower cost categories for the most part in this conversation. Right. And I say that because, you know, this is one thing about a hundred days she called. This is not an inexpensive lens, right? That's correct. Yeah. And so this is somebody who's looking for a very high end, very tailored lens specifically for what they're up to. Now you go into rim fire or steel challenge shooters, they're always living with a single focal point with their eyes or sh or directly through the glass and they're making small adjustments, right? They're not having to like calculate targets, you know, 90 degrees to their left in order to see where that's happening before they break a shot and move.  Speaker 3: Right? There's certainly not dealing with what we're dealing with, whether they're looking through the top of their eyes and the bottom of their eyes, depending on the angle up and down, they're dealing with [inaudible] long range rifle shooting. So, um, then we kind of get into like what's out there in the, you know, premium marketplace and really there's only a couple. And I would assume you hear a lot about Oakley in your world, right? Just cause the Oakley's the, um, the painless, you know, there's a lot of ranger arms, there's a lot of Nice stuff. Yeah. And they make two lenses. We specifically see a lot of in our world, which is the flax, which is a two lens interchangeable model. And then the tombstones, they have a couple of versions of the wraith and whatever. Um, and I have a set of the tombstones that I use.  Speaker 3: Those are my primary, if I'm doing lots of shooting on multiple angles at different, you know, targetry and all kinds of stuff, that's one of my go to lenses because it's lightweight wraps around the head and I've got completely unobscured vision anywhere. I might, you know, angle the gun short of like shooting down through my feet, which doesn't happen very often. Oh yeah, it has happened, but it doesn't have ever happened. That's usually a result of some sort of catastrophic mistake. On my part where now the only way that you can engage the target is on my back through my legs. Um, but that's a hasn't happened. It has. Um, and that's, I go to that Lens for that very specific reason. So big terrain matches lots of running, lots of open space. That's something I'm wearing. Um, that's the only other shooting lens that I wear besides the HD Gold's now.  Speaker 3: And, um, and so for me, that's the one thing about these glasses that I, you know, and even with my Oakleys, which are perfect, um, that's the one time that I don't wear them. And that's just because I just don't have the Mo. I mean those, I think the wraith and the, the tombstone line has got arguably the most field of view available without obstruction on the marketplace. So I'm not sure where I'm going with this other than to say like, how are you dealing with that? Um, cause you're, you're convincing three gunners, slowly but surely, I'm starting to see these things show up. Um, you know, obviously it's an objection you're dealing with. What is the conversation like around that?  Speaker 5: Um, take them to trial. Yeah. Really, really tight. Come and try him. Um, cause I, and I've had this conversation with some shooters, I won't mention their name, but because they are very, they do a lot of training and they're very specific in what they do. And I don't want to get involved in some detailed conversations. Yeah. When the, when you try them and you use them and you put yourself in a, and when I, I'll back up 20 seconds, I'll tell you, I'll tell them to take them with them off the stages. Yeah. Well the walk that, you know, they got to 10 minutes so I'll take, take them with the law at this stage. No, I can, when I did a lot of matches, especially three Golytely, they've all been championships. Nobody likes to change gear in the middle of the match. Correct.  Speaker 5: I get that they're already there. They're there to win. They'd been practicing. So take them and try and when you want the stage. And that's my soft approach to saying, put them on, see where the contrast is and when you walked the stages, you know, walk and see exactly what's happening when you move your head with these lenses. Um, come to find out with the new velocity that we have, um, that we just came out with in January for USPSA Ayers gives a lot wider view than people imagine with a smaller lands. And that's a little bit more wrap on it. But  Speaker 1: yeah,  Speaker 5: people are finding out, you know, when they, when they see me at the [inaudible] that can put them on, they're like, well I can see this. I can see that. Well of course you're not engaged in high heart rate, high situation, the timer's not going off and your focus is not where it needs to be, which is through your optics, where your sides, um, when this happens for lack of a better vision, for lack of better words, tunnel vision and your direct focus has taken over. Yup. You don't notice anything but what you're looking at and what's your end game? 100% I call alligator brain. There, there is transition period where you have to cut your eyes and be ready for the next target. But it doesn't really affect that either. On some of the frame styles we have, there are some, we had their closed off and that's, you know, it's not good.  Speaker 5: But I always tell people, you know, we have the discussion when I go to these matches, you know, they say, well, what's the difference? I was so, all the lenses are the exact same. So the only differences yet and what we're looking for in a frame, they pick this up. I'm like going, that's not gonna work. Try this one. And I'll put them in. I push towards the gauge, the aviator, um, for the, for the 70s, you know, look, or the either the velocity because I know the rat allows a lot more. Yes, you can get it. I have fun with all these, you know, [inaudible] it doesn't bother me when people say, well, I look like a, you know, an old, you know, seventies, you know, you know, porn star, it doesn't bother me. You know, it's not my fault. They have a mustache. That's right.  Speaker 5: But oh wait, we have a lot of fun with it. But truth be told, it's once we get past the vanity, which is not easy to do. I want, I want people to focus on the lens. And when people try and when they go out and use them, they're like, you know, they come back going, well I didn't notice any of the sides. You know, I don't want to look at somebody and say, well you're not gonna notice that when you shoot, cause I don't shoot myself. I just know based on what the eyeball does, I don't want to get in people's, you know, I not tell them what they're gonna say or how they're going to see it go track theirself. And I guess getting back to the answer, your question specifically is just go demo it for yourself. Go try it. Um, does it work every time?  Speaker 5: No, but I get the feedback I need where I can take it to the next level. And, um, when, you know, like I said, what's going to happen come January is going to be, you know, a lot of people coming back around and saying it's time for me to try it again. Well that's really good. So let's transition just a little bit. I mean the one thing I've really noticed cause I, I did a little dive on like the overall like um, know like I would for any company that solicited my business, the marketing firm, right. This is just do a little dive in like what, where you are, where you're out there in the digital space and all that. And you know, I mean you have a decent presence on several sites but I mean the main thing that you've seem to be doing is you're out there every weekend at the match, putting the glasses in people's hands.  Speaker 5: Is that the last year primary strategy for the company? It's, it's one of those things where when I talk to Sherry about it, I said I've got to go educate people on lenses and technology. You can't do that. You can, but nobody's going to just take the time to go to the benefits page 160 and go and study that. I mean, it's there, everything's there. But to be able to actually talk to somebody about it and actually say, well, why is it doing this compared to this? And I get to talk about the technology to people and educate when I go to these matches. I'm not, you know, this sounds crazy. I've been in, I've been in sales my whole life. I'm not there to just sale. I'm there to educate and build relationships. Yup. That's what it's all about. I've been doing, you know, I have so many people don't have some people walk up that are in sales saying, why didn't you ask for the order?  Speaker 5: I'm like going, they're not ready to buy yet. They're going to let you know. I can get, don't get me wrong, I can sell it better. I've been doing it all my life, but I go out there and I start selling and promoting and putting somebody in a position where they're going to go home and go, what the hell did I just buy? Right? Then you have buyer's remorse that for sure in the social media world that we live in today, you know, that can kill your writings real quick. You don't want that. And that's one reason why when I do demo days, there truly is no pressure. My job is to educate, let people experience it. And even on the prescription side, I actually make your prescription before you buy it and you get to demo with your prescription as well. There's nobody ever heard of this before, and my wife goes, you've lost your mind. I've got doctors that don't pay their bill. I said, you don't these shooters, myself being a shooter when I got started. Yep. The, we're different and we're not going to be known as that individually. We're not gonna be known as that guy or that person that didn't pay for something. And especially Zuni world. It's a very, it's a, it's an amazingly huge shooting world, but it's a small world when it comes to somebody doing something or not supposed to do  Speaker 3: blows me away. I, it's one thing, I mean obviously you've gotten to know a lot of shooters now and you've, you've come to a conclusion that um, that many do. I mean, I take a, I'm like the only game in Minnesota that'll take a credit card for a matching and I don't ask people to sign, which is obviously a, a liability from a business standpoint. Never even crossed my mind. I'm like, we don't, we don't  Speaker 5: either. It's just one of those things that, you know, I always have people ask me all the time, you know, especially I get a lot of emails and everybody goes, what's the warrant? I'm like going, well, what it a warranty warranty? A warranty is nothing but a state of mind. Correct? Correct. Okay. I've sold extended warranties to all the places I worked. I've sold warranties, I've sold, I've sold people a state of mind. And the reason being that there's no actual warranty listed on the website is because warranties don't have to really be curated until somebody take it takes advantage of something. Now let me tell you what I mean by that. My philosophy, when somebody catches a frag or something happens, they contact me. I'm just gonna replace the Lens. Yep. No questions asked. Um, if somebody sends me a pair of glasses that have had, um, I can, I can we say lenses every day by our doctors that returned stuff for warranty.  Speaker 5: It's where the manufacturer, we are the warranty. We handle everything. Yep. So seeing lenses come every day, I can tell when a lens has been abused. You know what I mean by abused is leaving it just on the dash your car in extreme heat, um, cleaning it, um, and causing scratches because of clean. Um, we see everything and that people try to put my people a lot smarter than me in the lab here. You know, we know how to identify things. So when I talk to people about, you know, cleaning, you know it with, they come with cleaning instructions, like they come with a, they come a z clear, which is a cleaner, an atoll fogging agent, you know that, you know, we try to do anti fogging in house. I have all the tools to do it in the house, but there's another heating and cooling process that causes us to fail Ansi standards.  Speaker 5: So we had to find an outside source and I met up with um, Chris Ward who owns z clear and then that's why we package everything and hunter's HD go. Was he clear? There are specific things we put in place with every part of the process to be able to try to overcome the objections before they become objections. And I've had people that have brought me lenses before saying I've got this stuff in here. I can't get it off the lens. Am I going? Yeah, this is where pretty much you cleaned your lenses with your jersey, where your shirt, which is the worst thing to do because every bit of dust and dirt that's on that Jersey is going to get in there. And that's what scratches and this, it's when you're using that, I'll talk to them. I say, well take them back. I'm still replace them for weed because I'm here to, I mean I'm not here to sell another pair of lenses every time someone has a problem or I'm here to, you know, build customers for life.  Speaker 5: So I'll tell them, you know, well next time before you clean your lenses, take whatever liquid you have, be it, um, water, kool-aid and Gatorade poured on lenses cause there's a hydrophobic top coat that's not gonna allow anything to stick to them. Then clean them with the stuff that we provided. And then, you know, here's a new, you know, here's your, here's a set of lenses and replaced no charge. If this happens again, I'm gonna charge you $2,000. So it's just, you know, cause we've had, you know, it's all a part of training happens. Um, so, you know, we, I have fun and I'm not just dealing with, you know, if somebody has a problem, it's just not a customer. I said it's a person. I've met some person I've come to know and we have, we have a real life conversation just like we just had, you know, she's like, this is, this is how you, how you can overcome this in the future.  Speaker 5: Don't do that. It's so clear. Cause I see you out there and there's just, there's always a line of people to come talk to you and check them out and figure it out. And part of that is, I also have been, I don't know if you're still doing this, but at least the last season you were doing like a custom set of glasses for each, for each. Yes. I still, I still do that. Getting Ready to, you know, not when I'm sure this podcast is going to be produced, I mean published, but I'll be somewhere else this weekend with another custom pair everywhere I go. And um, that's, that's part of the fun because it does two things. One, it brings people to the tent to see what I've got. Cause I don't ever release any pictures of it until the day of. So people want to come see what I've put together and I gathered their email address for any kind of, you know, a future marketing's or any new product releases.  Speaker 5: What's a good way to, you know, the catcher that on the business side, I'm always have people all the time ask me, you know what, they email me all the time. I said, I don't have time that, you know, so you may get an email once or twice a year about product, you know, a new product update or something that's happening in the, in the, in the honey hundreds HD gold world. But, um, those are mine to keep and I'm not going to sell in anybody. So, um, I've had people ask me in the industry, you know, hey, can I get, you know, have some email addresses for this and this? And I'm like, no, I can't do that. Just like the, when I became part of the USPSA I talked to them and I said, do y'all have an emails out there that can market to, and it's actually in their bylaws, the answer's no, which is fine.  Speaker 5: So I still had to create a way to, you know, build my own list and um, my list I feel in some cases is better than their list because um, if they're not at the award ceremony, the only way I'm going to contact and let them know is through email cause I'm not collecting phone numbers or anything else. So they, they're, you know, they're inclined to give you their correct email address. So when I do have time to send out an email about a product release or what we're doing on youtube or whatever we're doing, um, which has happened, not all think, but once this year when our first time I contest the beginning of the year that lasted out the entire year, they actually emailed everybody. And when are, when I sent out that email, I had a pretty high, I mean, think my open rate was like 80 something percent. So that's pretty high based on talking to other people that are only getting 20 or 30% of their open rates. So kidding. When I email somebody, it's like, hey, you know, it's not very often and you know, we all get those emails two or three times a day from the same company and we, you know, they just become like, I just need to go away. They just see everything and you stuff  Speaker 3: that's a real markable number. Right? That's like, I mean, when we were marketing my mom, uh, my family's been residential real estate for a very, very long time and she was very early on in the email marketing and when we were sending out emails, you know, like 2005 to 10, somewhere in there, 70 to 90% open rate was like pretty awesome. Right? Uh, but now 70 90% is like three x. They did not it. Like I told you, when I go meet all these people, what am I doing? I'm, I'm making friends, I'm building relationships. How many times you open an email from your friend [inaudible] it's all about building that relationship. Well, the other thing too is, I mean, I don't know if you're aware of this, but like I, you know, if you went to American Express and you asked them for email addresses that were as fine tuned as humanly possible to get, um, to get like the right client, right?  Speaker 3: You'd pay like five to $10 per email address. Wow. And that's nothing compared to how refined they are when they opt in directly to your company. Right. So when I tell my clients, for example, is like on your website, wherever you're at, consider that every time someone gives you an email address, it's like they handed you a $5 bill and that's on the bottom of the value of it, right? And you start looking at these assets. I mean, we've got companies that have 10, 12,000 email addresses. I mean, that's a 50 or $60,000 minimum asset that people have built up over time. Um, you know, look, I mean you're not in a position where tomorrow going to come along  Speaker 5: and say you can't market anymore on Facebook because you're a, you know, you're in the protective. Oh really? Some of the tags I've done, I've had some stuff taken down before. Just people shooting competitively based on maybe a Hashtag. I don't know what it was, but they said it was something I promote. Um, firearms or something I liked going and actually challenged it. I'd actually challenged it one time when I tried to boost a post that was um, nothing but the um, it was a youtube page when I looked at that. When I do now, I go around and I, when I'm doing everything, when everybody is shooting, I'm just sitting in a tent. Yeah. I have chosen to go out there and get videos of people shooting and capture like you to use your words that I heard you use a year ago. They're Disney world moment.  Speaker 5: Yeah. And I took that from you, kind of go capture, I take videos of people and at the end of the end of that day, I go put on a youtube page for free. I'm not making money off of Youtube. They're there for them to download their self. Yup. It's a way, you know, to do, you know, promote that. But when I promoted at one time on the 160 go youtube page, they shut it down. And based on my, um, promoting the sh, promoting ammunition and stuff like that, it was weird. So I counteract it and came back and said, I'm promoting safety prescription. I'm promotion to safety, protective eyewear, just like the list that eight other companies that were same thing. And it came back. And finally, you know, I, I won, I won my, uh, you know, I've had my problems too. Robin had the same problems over the hour.  Speaker 5: But when I, you know, I'm very careful on what my hashtags are now. I can't put certain hashtags on there when I want to boost something. But it's one of those things that, um, I'm waiting for the day and I'm always out there looking for something that is, we're not being shadow banned. We're not being, you know, I can go type in, you know, looking for certain companies out there and I actually have to type in the company. Exactly right. Or it doesn't even pull up anymore. He used to get tight, hey, and there's angle lamination and all these other companies at Chi, everybody's right there now. It's like you type I and it's like, nope, nope. You have to type them specifically what they are to get them to pull up now. Yeah. Is that the answer? Is that the way they're doing it now? I guarantee you that's what they're wanting to happen. It could be. It could be either. So my philosophy on all this stuff is I don't get romantic about any of it. I just look. The fact is, is if I had a new company tomorrow that sold guns and I could get away with two months of Facebook advertising before they shut me down, I do it in a second. Um, it was earlier this year actually, that for whatever reason, because we run tests pretty much monthly. Yeah. On Google, on Facebook and places like that.  Speaker 3: Or I just, I've got a couple of hundred bucks this kind of rolling all the time to see if I can get ads through and Google all of a sudden just all my gun ads got through. So we just quintupled down on that for like, I don't know, three or four months. Then all of a sudden we started getting disapproved, disapproved, fine, whatever. I made like 300 grand in the process. I'm not for the companies that I, so I'm just, I just don't get romantic about it. Cause the truth is, is that's just what, where we're at. What we're dealing with and still today, Facebook is, is one of the great arbitragers for your dollar in advertising. And, um, the one thing I'll tell you though is you can get a f an advocate at Facebook. So you've, if you got a couple of ads that have been knocked down, you can apply for an advocate.  Speaker 3: And once you have an advocate, if you're a proven product, they go through and do all the research and you guys aren't selling anything. What you want to make sure is there's no, like there's no, you know, like right now, uh, if I go to your page, I'm at a hunter's ht gold and I go to your, uh, ba Ba ba Ba ba. I was at your testimonials where, yeah, you've got your gold team partners and I can link right to a Chi, for example. And he sells guns. So what you might want to do there is if you were to, it's like one degree of separation you've got to put in place, right? So you could create a page for your website, for each of your, where you give it, like, uh, so the click through goes for a Chi, goes to a page on your site that has what you think of, you know, stuff about a Chi.  Speaker 3: And then there they can click over and go to your, um, to their page instead of having just directly to the correct. And if you do that and the advocate clears all that, then you probably will be okay. And you can run ads all day long and you can still do what you want to do, which is promote your, you these companies, right? And so, um, and you get that in place. Uh, you know, there's some like kayaks holster companies, technically holsters or not banned on Facebook, but try to get an ad out on a, on a holster. It's like fricking impossible. So you got to go through the process and get an advocate and go through the whole thing. And the problem is most holster companies spend a lot of time promoting guns and they don't realize they're doing it. And all they have to do is just do a little clean up and get their house in order. Now look, I don't want it to be that way. Right? But who gives a damn what I want. No, my job is to make money for my and see. Right?  Speaker 3: So, so, you know, and I, I just don't get too romantic about it. And the thing is, if, you know, my competition out there is going to be upset about it all day long and just not pay for advertising on Facebook, they're welcome to do that. But the truth is, is I'm gonna win right at the bottom line. And so I just don't. So are they shadow banning? Probably. Are they making life more difficult for us? Probably, but I don't spend any time thinking about it. Right. You know, and do I want to give my money to a company like that? No. But the truth is, most of the companies I work for are well south of $10 million a year. So, even if you had a $10 million company, your ad budget being 1%, it's gonna be, you know, that's a hundred grand, right? Right. If your ad budgets 3% is $300,000, tell me where you can buy that kind of exposure for 300 grand.  Speaker 3: And I'll do it. It's certainly not the backpage at USPSA front sight magazine. That's correct. So that's where I started to, you know, I start to look and I'm like, well, in the, in the big cost benefit analysis of marketing, um, I just bet ponies and I'll bet whatever pony is gonna win the best of my ability. If I have an option between a winning pony and another winning pony that doesn't, you know, um, put us in third gear all the time. Um, then I'm going to, I'm going to pay for the one that's open throttle. Right? But, but at the same time they don't exist. Right. So it's interesting. Okay. So, look, we covered a lot of stuff and I got a couple of things I just got to ask you because one thing we do a lot on this show is, um, is we talk about how we get our business done and you are traveling like basically every weekend, nine months of the year from what I can tell. What's your, what's your like, what's your key, like what do you like, what are your go to things to like, you know, keep your life in order to keep your business in order. Any tips or tricks, you got hacks we like to call them. Um, it is to, um, one, stay real with yourself. Really good.  Speaker 5: And that's what I mean by that is not just with business but with, with home and everything else with life. Um, Sherry is, um, very, very supportive and everything I'm doing, I

Join Ken McElroy as he interviews Tom Hatten, owner of Mountainside Fitness as he reflects on founding and growing a fitness empire.   Full Transcript: Ken McElroy: 00:00 So what did you learn from, you know, losing everything, almost losing everything. Tom Hatten: 00:05 Yeah, I think, you know, I actually ended up at one point filing for bankruptcy is they're all LLC chapter eleven's. I, uh, finished it all off right before my birthday in 2000, I think 12 a file on my own, chapter 11, because at that point I had just under $100 million in personal guarantees on real estate. So just say that out loud. Right? Uh, so that had to happen. So that kind of just put everything at the baseline of, you know, what was going wrong in the, in the economy was truly effecting, you know, certainly me and, and I was trying not to let it affect the business because it was just a real estate issue. I was tough and a lot of lessons learning that. Ken McElroy: 00:44 Welcome to the real estate strategies podcast. I'm Ken McElroy and I'm here to give you creative ideas on how you can get started or continue your journey in real estate. Each week, we will bring you inspiring and informative conversations with successful people and their path to obtaining or investing in real estate. Enjoy the episode. Ken McElroy: 01:10 Hey everybody Ken McElroy here again, I'm with my good buddy Tom Hatton. Hey Tom, Tom Hatten: 01:12 How are you doing Ken? Ken McElroy: 01:13 So Tom and I have known each other a long time. Uh, we're in YPO (Young Professionals Organization) together. We were an EO together. We've got lots of mutual friends together and, we get together from time to time. He's a very busy guy. He's got a, a rags to riches story, just like a lot of us and just like myself and, and Tom. Welcome. Tom Hatten: 01:31 Thank you. Ken McElroy: 01:31 Yeah. So, and also I want to chat about your new book dream on, so I can't wait to dig into that a little bit. So, well let's talk about your story because I was always intrigued with that. Obviously, we had property now in Turkey. Yeah. Not just down the road. And I think that story, um, is the epitome of an entrepreneur. You know what I mean? When you were like sitting there and you go, well, what about this? Do you cut the deal and even I think the guy even got bought your, your your equipment. Tom Hatten: 01:58 Yeah. Yeah. There was a, that was just a really kind of a magical time, if you can even use that term when the opportunity just kind of presented itself with the right people and, and I was pretty hungry. Ken McElroy: 02:08 Yeah. But the, then you go to the owner of the center yeah. And a which was called mountain side plaza. Tom Hatten: 02:15 Yeah. And I asked him to, he did all the ties. He invested 70,000. I was 22 years old, so with no balance sheet, no credits, nothing. You know, I had a car loan and he invests, he put in 70,000 on the tees and then, he paid for the sign, our actual sign on the building and then helped me with some of the equipment. He ended up giving me a loan, um, for like 10 grand that he never asked for back when I wanted to pay him back. He said, don't pay me back. Ken McElroy: 02:39 How great is that? Tom Hatten: 02:40 Yeah. He had lost the center to, um, at that time they needed to be 92% lease. When, uh, when, uh, the ohs boy is 1993 when that crash happened and he was at 88% with two leases in tow and they said, nope, we're taking the center back. Oh, just don't worry about paying me the 10 grand. I'm like, Ken McElroy: 02:57 Wow. I don't think I knew that. So from there, right. Yeah. So tell me about that first year because I don't think I dug in on that now. Now how many, how many members do you have? Tom Hatten: 03:09 Well, we have 18 locations. 1400 employees and just under a hundred thousand members. Ken McElroy: 03:14 Yeah, well, congratulate. Tom Hatten: 03:16 Thanks. Thanks. Ken McElroy: 03:16 So let's talk about that first year. Tom Hatten: 03:18 Yeah. That was, I remember not sleeping, that was not part of the deal then. And then trying to figure out how to run a business because I'd never had done that before. How to be a boss, um, how to understand what it meant to build a culture and a product and all that was happening simultaneously while trying to, um, work on the side. I still painted houses on the side because I couldn't draw any money out of the business. Um, and because the business was open 17 hours a day, there wasn't a lot of downtime. So it was just an interesting time, but it was so full of energy. There was just a lot of good things happening all the time. And I think that's what kind of fueled getting through all that. Ken McElroy: 03:54 Good things happen in gyms, you know, people are generally trying to be healthy. And so I would imagine that's a pretty cool environment. Tom Hatten: 04:00 It is. And back when I started, it wasn't nearly like it is today. You know, the, the world changed and fitness right in the early two thousands and, uh, it was more of a, it could it be a fad? Is this a real business kind of a thing? But people were happy. And I think if we created a culture that made people feel comfortable and it wasn't just about how you look, it's about how you felt. I think that was part of the basis of our culture and how we be able to grow. Ken McElroy: 04:22 So thank you for that. Um, I know, uh, you know, then you started to expand. Obviously you're like, okay, this works, so let's go to two. Let's go to three and now you have 18. Um, and most of that you've done on your own, right? You had some investors on the real estate along the way. Tom Hatten: 04:37 Yeah, we have built about 25 altogether. Some have moved or, you know, I moved out because of the leases were up and stuff. But, uh, I learned pretty quick when I was so young that nobody was really going to keep allowing me to build bigger clubs because our balance sheet just wasn't big enough. Uh, so it was probably about five years after I opened, four years after I started looking at SBA loans and seeing if I could do that in owner occupied deals. And it did, it worked. 1996 I did my first SBA loans. So about five years after I opened the first, you know, club, um, and built an 18,000 square foot club on two and a half acres and got a million dollar SBA loan. And that's changed the game because then I did, I started to learn about sale leasebacks and that's what my partner was, you know, it was really the real estate equity flipping into another. Ken McElroy: 05:23 Yeah, that's a really smart cause. The SBA is a small business administration and they have these loans that they give up and coming entrepreneurs. But I think the rule is you have to own it. You have to occupy 51% Tom Hatten: 05:35 51% of the building and now and then have more than a majority share of the operation. Ken McElroy: 05:40 Right. What you did. So I did. That became your model. Tom Hatten: 05:43 That became my model. Yeah, it was interesting. That is something I learned from my father when we were growing up with, with houses. He would live it, we live in a house and then he would go, that's enough of this and he would sell it and trade up and that's the way we kind of did it. And I'm like, well this can kind of work in my business. And it was easier because I would say the company was the talent. So we always had that tenant ready to go in there and in that tenant would stay and we would divide, you know, define that lease and then I'd sell it, sell the building. And that worked in the tenant stayed. Ken McElroy: 06:09 So fast forwarding to today now, so you have the real estate, right? And then you have the Mountain Side, business, right? The kind of occupies the real estate. Is that how it's all set up? Tom Hatten: 06:20 It is how it was all set up. And then, you know, probably a lot of the emphasis in the book, what a life changing kind of thing. In 2008 happened and we were building six clubs, three in Arizona and three in Colorado all at the same time. And, and a whole bunch of, you know, stuff going on with that and how he, you know, got the debt and all this kind of stuff. And when everything came crashing down, when all that kind of the dust settled, it took about four years, uh, for all the subtle, that was it. I was done. I kept one building, just, uh, cause they had a lot of meaning and I talk about in this book, but everything else I sold, you know, off and said, that's it. We're, we're done on your real estate because that was just its own functioning beast on it. And it was out of my control how values would go and those things. And I didn't want that anymore. I just wanted to have the business and you know how that would work. Ken McElroy: 07:07 So that's like the perfect segue for where we are right now. Yeah. Right. Because what's happening in my space is there's a lot of people going out and expanding like you did and they never had ever, never been through a correction. You know, and they're, they're getting bank loans and they're getting equity and all that kind of stuff. And you know, I've been through it too as you know. And uh, so you got all the way down to one property, right? Tom Hatten: 07:35 One that I own. Ken McElroy: 07:36 One that you owned back in 2012. Tom Hatten: 07:38 Yeah, I kept that one. I bought that one. We built a short story here. We built, we were into it for a total of 23 million, appraised at 27 the day we broke ground, a year later we completed the project and it was 2009 that same valuation came in at 14 million. Ken McElroy: 07:55 Yeah. Tom Hatten: 07:55 And then it fell all with eight (million). Ken McElroy: 07:58 This can happen folks, you know, like right Tom Hatten: 08:00 It's insane! Ken McElroy: 08:00 Tom, I mean you've been through it. I've been through this, you know, and I think what's happened is, you know, a lot of the people listening here, um, you know, our real estate folks are entrepreneurs and a lot of the guys like you who have been through it, you just come into this next cycle. A little bit more wise. Tom Hatten: 08:15 Yes. Oh yes. Oh my gosh. Those scars are still there and how all that worked. And you know, how many people were affected down line, whether it was banks, businesses, and so, you know, you name it, people just in general, you know, my best friend killed himself. Ken McElroy: 08:31 Oh no. Tom Hatten: 08:31 So it was, uh, it was everything that you could imagine that could come out of all that turmoil happened. Yeah. Ken McElroy: 08:37 That's horrible. Sorry to hear that. So what did you learn from, you know, losing everything, almost losing everything. Tom Hatten: 08:45 Yeah. I think, you know, I actually ended up at one point filing for bankruptcy is they're all LLC chapter eleven's. I, uh, finished it all off right before by birthday in 2000, I think 2012 a file on my own, chapter 11, because at that point I had just under $100 million in personal guarantees on real estate. So just say that out loud. Right. Uh, so that had to happen. So that kind of just put everything at the baseline of, what was going wrong in the, in the economy was truly effecting, you know, certainly me and I was trying not to let it affect the business because it was just a real estate issue and I was tough and a lot of lessons learned. Ken McElroy: 09:24 I've been there. I tell you, I talk a lot about these personal guarantees with people they don't understand. So you may know, I think we've talked about this before, but I have no personal guarantees anymore anymore on anything on $800 million worth of stuff. Because of that, you know, because of having gone through that, you go in and I think what's happening right now is that I just talked to a guy yesterday, you know, he's doing, he's sold priceline.com and um, you know, they're doing mez lending and all this kind of lending. I'm like, dude, like you gotta be careful because you know, like, like this is, this is recourse debt. They're going to come after you and trust me though, they will. And, um, you know, those real estate values are, he was doing it in Austin, Texas. I'm like, Austin is pretty hot right now. So, so, you know, uh, those real estate values can go up and down pretty quickly. When you were talking about those valuations of $27 million, I went down to 14. Right. That happened in just a few months probably. Yeah. So people don't, haven't been, a lot of people haven't been through this cycle yet. I think it's a very, very important lesson. And thank you for bringing it up because it's a lot of people don't talk about that pain and those scars and, and those, the, you know, I call them, you know, a little hurdles. Tom Hatten: 10:48 Yeah. Little hurdles. Yeah. I hope people don't have memory loss. Cause I feel like that, especially in this state where we are back rolling again and you know, our growth is so much determined on credit and certainly housing, it's a little bit tweaked nowadays I think. But with that, I hope people have, Ken McElroy: 11:06 Yeah. And then, so really you've grown to 18 locations in six years. Tom Hatten: 11:12 Yeah. I think that we really hit our stride again in 2012 when the, when the dust settled, I sold my clubs in Colorado. I had, you know, the ones here that we had opened up. And then we said, okay, we're through this let's go. And we went differently. There's a different route that we took to kind of get where we are today. Certainly a lot more solid, you know, definitely based on the business, certainly increasing the brand and so forth. And I think that was the big game changer. You know, learning everything from eight to nine where I was super aggressive and didn't ever think something would happen like it did. Now that still plays in my mind and we'd go out at a different for you. Ken McElroy: 11:45 Yeah, that's exactly how I approach things now too is we were just had our investor conferences, I was telling you last week and these guys are like, what you going to buy more deals? I said, guys, we are peaking or not right. Tom Hatten: 11:57 Sometimes the best things to say no. Ken McElroy: 11:59 I know. It's hard though. It's hard with all these people. You see these cranes and everything going on. I see your gyms all over the place and congratulations on just incredible brand. You've built incredible culture. 1400 employees. Um, that's not an easy thing to do. Um, what uh, what is, uh, what, what is the best thing about owning a gym? You know, and the, the facilities that you have. Tom Hatten: 12:22 I think it's the culture. I think it really became, we're really lucky because a lot of things happen either through the, through just social media, certainly through the crash and then evolution of good health is it became a mainstream business, a real business. And I say because of the crash, because big boxes started to die and retailers started to die, Amazon started to grow and so on. So that left, you know, major boxes available to grow into its created different health club models. But it also said, hey, it's a sustainable thing. People want this, they want to go to a, you know, health clubs and do that. So I think that progression's been really nice to the sustainability of the business. And then to know if you do it right, where people truly look at it like in the crash, what we learned is that man is there stress reliever. It's, their places that are placed that they can bring their kids, they kids have fun or they can just say, hey, I'm just going to get away from everything for a minute. Where you know, I'm in a class or you know, working out. Ken McElroy: 13:18 What are you guys doing differently in the club? Because I tell you what, here locally in Arizona, you're definitely heads above any other club. Tom Hatten: 13:26 Well, thank you. I think what we learned along time ago through the, for the first days when I opened up the you and my first little club, it was how do we create a pack as much value as we can in the box. So we don't really sell price, you know, I don't sell high end, you know, let's say tennis courts or swimming pools. What we'll do is to say on a 40,000 square foot box, how can we make it feel like the highest end facility United States, by the way it looks, how can we give you the kind of amenities that you would get if you went to a specialty yoga or you know, a high performance, you know, club with your strength equipment. So we've had a smashed all that together into this box. It looks and feels very high end, but gives you all these different amenities plus a 4,000 square foot childcare that we changed diapers and you know, don't all that stuff to where say man for $44, this feels like I'm getting a deal everyday that I walk in. Ken McElroy: 14:17 Is that what it is now? 44 bucks. 44 times... Tom Hatten: 14:20 That is the highest price. That's it. That's a top price. It goes down from there. You know, couples are less stuff like that, families are less. Ken McElroy: 14:27 Well think about that. $44 times 100,000 people. Tom Hatten: 14:32 Yeah. It's okay. Ken McElroy: 14:33 Not Bad. Not a bad job buddy. Tom Hatten: 14:34 Thank you. That's good. Ken McElroy: 14:36 So what are some of the downsides of owning in a gym? Tom Hatten: 14:39 Well, I think in this day and age, it's funny, there's not a day or a week. I, oh, I that doesn't go by that I don't worry about liability. You know, when you, when you're smaller, you know, it's Kinda round front of you. But now when there's so going on, I mean will, I was like, today's Day is Wednesday, right? So we'll put in, I don't know, 22,000 workouts today will happen through the cloud. So that's 22,000 possibilities. She hasn't mentioned the kids in the childcare, which we average about 75 an hour in there. So you think of all the moving parts that could go wrong. You know, that's what Kinda keeps me up at night and I'll, thankfully we've done great. Ken McElroy: 15:14 With all your folks. Tom Hatten: 15:15 All the folks. Yeah. So, uh, and we keep the facilities really maintaining clean, but that's a worry. Yeah. People getting injured. Ken McElroy: 15:22 So, you know, we talk about a lot about this reoccurring revenue model. How great is that now? That's financeable. Tom Hatten: 15:29 That's financeable. You Bet. Yeah. It's a, you know, the old days where it used to be a contract, now it's an agreement, right? Yes. People can cancel, but it is a subscription base. But that's everything. Netflix, the HBO, and that's the way the world is. We held clubs were in front of it. Yep. Thankfully, uh, it just takes a lot of bodies, especially if you have a, you know, more expensive building to, to get to that break even. But once you do, it's really nice. Ken McElroy: 15:50 You know, it's interesting. When I in my apartment business, I used to go to health clubs and hire the salespeople. Tom Hatten: 15:56 Smart! Ken McElroy: 15:56 Well because they were always amazing. They were always incredibly well trained, and so you guys, honestly, the health club business has been way ahead of the curve in my opinion in many, many, many ways. Tom Hatten: 16:09 It's interesting, we try to sell information based and in the product, so when you come on in, you see everything that's in front of you and then we're going to inform you all the things that you're going to get and then along the way you're being sold. So it's not feeling like we're out in your face, you know, selling, you were doing it through a process the whole way through. Um, and I think that's worked really well for us. You know, we have a good closing percentage when people come in. We have a good prospect percentage and then I think everybody's kind of, everybody's a salesperson in there. Like literally from my main maintenance guys to the girls in the childcare to the my instructors. They're selling all the time. And not necessarily because there's saying that, but because of the way they're functioning. Ken McElroy: 16:49 Yeah, for sure. Well, I do want to talk to you in the next podcast about your book dream on because, um, and we've talked a lot about this and when you are writing it and there's a lot of incredible stories in here. So, uh, with that, Tom, uh, thank you for this interview and I want to dig into the book next. Tom Hatten: 17:07 You Bet. Thanks Ken.

Have you heard about this new abortion law hullabaloo setting the American South on fire? As Christians—specifically Catholics—we know what the Church teaches about abortion. But do specific circumstances (rape, incest) alter the argument? Listen to us try to sound intelligent about the whole thing. Then, we talk about doubt. Surprise, all Christians struggle with doubt now and then! I mean, they do, right? Right? Uh...

It's the -$700 Billion Episode- episode! This time around we tackle bailouts, tax breaks, ladylove economy, and what it all means for the little people. Hey, finances = fun in our book! Right? Uh, right? Guys? This episode is almost exactly 60 minutes long. The song at the end is -Folsom Prison Blues- by Johnny Cash. Have something to say to us? Email jackasses@chickenfriedrad.io or leave us a voicemail at 781-FOWL-YAK. Visit our subreddit at reddit.com/r/chickenfriedradio to meet other peckers!

This episode, there's "Knife Talk", some actual serious talk about guns, the magic of Orlando Bloom's nakedness, Bells and Becky give The Perfect Pour some constructive criticism,  Chew Your Beer gives us a call and plenty of Or Game questions to CHEW on (with a epic Bells rant), plus, greatest Little Rascal of All Time!Click to listen: DorktownORlandoBloomers.mp3Fonzy Eyyyhhh to YOU for listening!PODCAST LINKS-You can also find this pod on iTunes and Stitcher. Like our Face and Tweet us.-Dorktown Podcast blog. Mikey’s blog.