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 This is just a teaser from a bonus episode for our subscribers. If you'd like to become a Restaurant Guys' Regular and listen to the entire episode and other commercial-free episodes, subscribe herehttps://www.buzzsprout.com/2401692/subscribeThis is a Vintage Selection from 2005The BanterThe Guys discuss the inequities in Father's Day and Mother's Day as well as pairing strawberries with the perfect sparkling wine. The ConversationThe Restaurant Guys want to speak with writer Sam Gugino after reading his fantastic article about coffee. They talk about its journey from farm to roasting to brewing. After his deep dive, Sam shares five criteria for making the best coffee. The Inside Track The Guys chat with Sam about quality coffee and, in typical Restaurant Guys fashion, they don't choose the lesser variety.Sam: There are actually two basic different kinds of coffee, Robusta and Arabica. The robusta, the cheap stuff that goes into the cans and supermarkets, actually has more caffeine than the more expensive stuff. So if you really want that caffeine jolt, get the cheap stuff.Mark: I'd rather have two cups of something good. Is that okay? Sam Gugino on The Restaurant Guys Podcast 2005InfoSam's websitehttps://www.samcooks.com/(Sadly, the coffee article is no longer available)Sam's newest book (2025)Eat! You'll Get Hungry, A Family Food SagaBy Sam Gugino On Friday, June 27 Come see The Restaurant Guys LIVE with Chef Andrew Zimmern at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center in New Brunswick, NJ. VIP tickets include a Meet & Greet After-Party with Andrew. Restaurant Guys Regulars get a discount so subscribe https://www.buzzsprout.com/2401692/subscribe Tickets https://www.restaurantguyspodcast.com/Our Sponsors The Heldrich Hotel & Conference Centerhttps://www.theheldrich.com/ Magyar Bankhttps://www.magbank.com/ Withum Accountinghttps://www.withum.com/ Our Places Stage Left Steakhttps://www.stageleft.com/ Catherine Lombardi Restauranthttps://www.catherinelombardi.com/ Stage Left Wineshophttps://www.stageleftwineshop.com/ To hear more about food, wine and the finer things in life:https://www.instagram.com/restaurantguyspodcast/https://www.facebook.com/restaurantguysReach Out to The Guys!TheGuys@restaurantguyspodcast.com**Become a Restaurant Guys Regular and get two bonus episodes per month, bonus content and Regulars Only events.**Click Below!https://www.buzzsprout.com/2401692/subscribe

Buckland Wood is no ordinary wood. This is magical temperate rainforest, a rare habitat not just in the UK but in the world. Cloaked in lush lichens and mosses, dotted with stone walls and bridges and with a beautiful river rambling through, it already looks and feels like a special place. But the Trust has big plans for its future. Join us to explore with rainforest guru Sam, who tells us about the bid to restore this globally important site and its huge potential to connect people with nature, store carbon and boost biodiversity. Hear why temperate rainforests are so special, along with pine marten reintroductions, backpacks on beetles and much more! Don't forget to rate us and subscribe! Learn more about the Woodland Trust at woodlandtrust.org.uk Transcript You are listening to Woodland Walks, a podcast for the Woodland Trust presented by Adam Shaw. We protect and plant trees for people to enjoy, to fight climate change and to help wildlife thrive.  Adam: For today's woodland walk, we are heading into the rainforest, but I am not going very far. Well, I'm going quite far, but not to the Amazon, or South America. I'm going to to the temperate rainforest, which isn't as well known, but is actually even rarer than the tropical rainforest. It's also known as Atlantic or Celtic rainforest. And as I said, exceptionally rare. You do find it on the West Coast of Scotland, North and West Wales, Devon, Cornwall, Cumbria, parts of Northern Ireland, which sounds like a long list, but it really isn't. And what's wonderful actually is that Britain is really the place in the world to find these things. We have a very high proportion of the global area of temperate rainforest. I'm heading to Devon to see some temperate rainforests. Anyway, enough from me. Let's go talk to an expert about Devon's temperate and exciting rainforest.  Sam: So I'm Sam Manning. I'm the project officer for the Woodland Trust Rainforest Recovery Project. We are here in Buckland Wood, which is a new Woodland Trust acquisition on Dartmoor in the Dart Valley.  Adam: Fantastic. And it's it's super new because the place we came down didn't seem to have a sign on it or anything. So when did the Trust acquire this?  Sam: So we've literally just acquired this this month and it's an extension really of two other sites that we own in the Dart Valley, Ausewell Wood, which we bought about five years ago and Grey Park Wood, which we've owned for a couple of decades.  Adam: Right. And and what are we gonna do? Where are you taking me today?  Sam: So we're going to have a walk around the wood and I'm going to show you some of the aspects of the restoration work that we have planned here, we're going to go down to the Dart River, which is a really special river. It's 26 miles long. Very, very ecologically biodiverse, very important for, in terms of temperate rainforest, and look at how we can restore that through various different natural flood management methods.  Adam: Right. Lead on, Sir. So you already mentioned the keyword temperate rainforest. Is that what this is?  Sam: Yeah. So this is sort of prime what we call hyper-oceanic temperate rainforest.  Adam: You just have to say that slowly. Hypo what?  Sam: Hyper-oceanic.   Adam: Hyper-oceanic, OK.  Sam: Yes. So there's there's two different kinds of temperate rainforest broadly. There's southern oceanic, which is any rainforest woodland that receives over 1.5 metres of rainfall a year.  Adam: Right.  Sam: Or hyper-oceanic and that is 1.8 metres of rainfall and above, so slightly techy and scientific. But what it means is is that you get two distinctly different communities of lichens or lower plants, which is what makes these woodlands particularly special.  Adam: Sorry, I've already forgotten. Are we in the rain type of temperate rainforest that gets more rain or less rain?  Sam: More rain.  Adam: More rain.   Sam: Yeah it rains a lot here.   Adam: So that's the the non-oceanic one gets more rain.  Sam: The hyper-oceanic gets a lot of rain, yeah.  Adam: Hyper-oceanic. OK, so you can see I'm a poor student. OK. So, but luckily extraordinary, I mean, it's a bit there's a chill, but it's it has been lovely weather and it's definitely dry today.  Sam: Hmm yeah, this is this is quite strange for Dartmoor really, I think this is sort of the driest March in 60 years or something. So we are we are beginning to experience much, much drier springs and summers, but one of the functions of these rainforests is they are very, very good at producing their own rain and and in 2020, during the COVID lockdown, there was a real blue sky dry sort of drought level day in that March-April period. And I remember walking through this valley in the middle of the day and there was a thunderstorm and that was occurring nowhere else even in Devon or the wider country. And that's because they're effectively these sponges that accumulate a lot of rain in winter, store them, and then produce them more in summer.  Adam: Wow. And and I mean also we we think of rainforests as basically Brazil I suppose. But but we have temperate rainforests in the UK and my understanding is, I mean, they're extraordinarily rare on a, not just the UK, a global level. Just give us a sense of how special and unusual these environments are.  Sam: Yeah, that's right. So they're they're found only on 1% of the earth's land surface. So they are rarer by area than tropical rainforest.  Adam: Right. Do you happen to know? Sorry, are we going down there?   Sam: Down there yeah.   Adam: OK, so 1% temperate rainforests. Do you know what tropical rainforests are to give us a sense of proportion?  Sam: I actually don't know that, but I suspect it's probably around somewhere between 10-15%.  Adam: OK, well, I'm not gonna hold you to that *both laugh* but but that gives us a sort of sense of just how rare these are and tropical rainforests are fairly rare anyway, but OK. So these are very, very unusual environments. And what are you trying to do here then?  Sam: Well, a lot of these temperate rainforests are ancient woodlands, but they are plantations on ancient woodlands, so they are woodlands that have existed in perpetuity for as long as records go back. But a lot of them, as you can see here, have been coniferised, so they would have been cleared of their native tree species like oak, to be replaced by non-native timber crops from places like the Pacific Northwest, which which that's also ironically a temperate rainforest landscape, but those species are not co-adapted to the species we have here. So you you get these plantations that are very, very unbiodiverse, very dark, very shading and really don't work in tandem with a lot of the light-demanding rainforest species that we have, like rowans, hawthorns, oaks, that kind of thing. Of those sites I've talked about, almost half of it is conifer.  Adam: So your your first job, ironically, is to take trees out?  Sam: Well there'll be a sort of two-pronged approach really of using natural processes to diversify the forest, make it more structured, diverse. But we will need to intervene at certain times, particularly if we have really, really rare species. So in Ausewell for example, there's a species of lichen called bacidia subturgidula, so it's got a mad Latin name,   Adam: Wow, OK I'm definitely not saying that *laughs*  Sam: *laughs* But that species, for example, we have a quarter of the entire world's population of that species of lichen in Ausewell.  Adam: Right in Ausewell, which is quite a small place.  Sam: Yeah, exactly. That's about 100 hectares, so...  Adam: And that's a quarter of the global population of this lichen is in that...  Sam: Of that species, yeah. So when it comes to that, it's really about almost surgically intervening.  Adam: That's interesting. Let's let's carry on, you you better lead on, I've no idea where I'm going. So but that's interesting because I I can see planting trees, I've never heard of people actually planting like them, I didn't think that was even possible.  Sam: Yeah. So we call it translocation and and that's really only a last a last sort of nuclear option really when it comes to lichen conservation, if we have a tree where they have a really, really rare form of, a rare population of a species, then moving that to another tree may be the difference between that going extinct or not. But here now we've had this happen, what we're going to be doing is seeding it with those rainforest tree species to start to get that regeneration and there's loads over here.  Adam: What I'm still not clear about is why is the rainforest so special? It might be, oh it gets a lot of rain, who cares? A place gets a lot of rain, so does Wales, so does a lot of bits of London. It's clearly something special, it's not the trees, so what, why is having a temperate rainforest actually a good thing, what makes it special?  Sam: Well, there's there's there's a few different things. One of them is, and this is the real key one we focus on, is the biodiversity value. So the real bad, Britain in general is quite a wildlife poor place. We have quite a low species diversity, but these rainforests are absolute wells of biodiversity globally. The key ones are these epiphytes, so we're talking about lichens, bryophytes, so those are the mosses, liverworts and hornworts. Britain has over 2,000 species of lichen, it's one of the most biodiverse places on Earth in terms of lichen species, so we're really punching above our weight in terms of biodiversity in that sense, and they're only really found in these temperate rainforest habitats.  Adam: And lichen, I love lichen, and it's a real sign of air purity and everything, they're beautiful. How much do they support, like wildlife? I'm not aware of animals feeding off lichen very much, I don't think it has much nutrients in it?  Sam: Not too much at a macro level, but if you were to delve into that microscopic world, they are absolute keystone species in terms of forming the bedrock for so many invertebrates for so much sort of microbes. But they're also functionally, and this is something I'm I'm really passionate about, is looking at these forests in terms of what they can give to us functionally and the environment functionally, they are really good at fixing nitrogen. They're very, very good at fixing carbon, but but so in terms, that's what that's what makes temperate rainforest really good in terms of climate change mitigation is they hold that water, but they also are incredible carbon stores far more carbon is stored in these forests than traditional forests in the UK.  Adam: And that's lichens playing a big role in this?  Sam: A huge part, yeah, because of the pure, like the biomass of those lichens and mosses.  Adam: Ohh interesting. OK, so where are we going?  Sam: So I would quite like to go down to that river.  Adam: I'd love to go down to the river! Can I just ask, we're not going that way, are we??  Sam: No, I think we're gonna, that's one we may drive down, I think.  Adam: Drive down there?? No no we're not going to drive down there, that's not possible! *both laugh*  Sam: Yeah, we might have to go to a scenic detour around.   Adam: OK, well, there let's go down to the river. You have to lead. You look like...  Sam: So I think if we head up back to the car, shoot down, yeah.  Adam: OK. Ohh I see. OK, OK. But we're not driving down this this hill.  Sam: No, no, I think let's go down to the main Dart actually and then you can...  Adam: OK. And then get and get back, OK. Brilliant. We have come down to the river, remind me what the river is called?   Sam: This is the Webburn.   Adam: The Webburn, which leads into the Dart. We are on proper Hobbit territory now. A moss-covered stone bridge over the Webburn. We passed a little a beautiful little cottage, actually there's a number of beautiful cottages here. So explain a bit about where we are.  Sam: So we're stood on the Webburn, the Webburn watercourse and just behind us is the confluence of where it enters the Dart River and this kind of where it feeds into our aspirations for the restoration of the site. It's what many people would consider to be quite a natural looking river or natural looking watercourse. But this really as you can see it's very straight, it's very cut down into into the ground. So we call that incision and that's a product of centuries of draining and of artificial domestication of this watercourse to allow the land around it to be drier, which makes it more kind of productive for forestry.  Adam: So that's not natural?   Sam: No.  Adam: Are you gonna do anything about that? I feel like a teacher, ‘are you going to do anything about that?'!  Sam: *laughs* That that is the plan.  Adam: How how do you change, I mean, the river has cut, therefore quite a a deep edge into the land. What would you be able to do to to change that then?  Sam: Yeah. So a couple of years ago I went out to the Pacific Northwest, Canada, Vancouver Island to see their temperate rainforest and have a look at how old growth sort of ancient temperate rainforests function, but also how they restore them. And they, I asked them to take me to a river that was their best example of a really healthy rainforest river with really good salmon populations with great biodiversity that would have been unaffected by humans. And they took me to a place called Lost Shoe Creek. And and from the bottom of the watercourse where it entered the sea to the head waters, it was, you couldn't see the water. It was absolutely covered in wood, so huge trees that had fallen in, trees bank to bank, pinned against the bank. And what that does is it creates a much more dynamic river system that doesn't go in a straight line, but also holds back a lot of the gravel with the sediment and the silt that in this kind of river is making its way to the ocean. And causing a lot of damage.  Adam: So it's allowing or maybe placing actual dead trees into into the water and we can see one tree's already there, presumably that just naturally fell in.  Sam: That's right. Yeah. So if we left this for 1,000 years, it would fill, it would be effectively be a giant log jam, and we'd start to get a lot of that naturalised process happening. And then you get much more biodiversity because there's more invertebrates in the river, there's more shelter for fish and birds, there's more habitat. But what we're effectively planning on doing is is doing something what people call stage zero restoration, so taking,  accelerating that that thousand-year process and taking it back to a more naturalised river.  Adam: It's such a a spot. I think it's time for a bit of social media video, so I'll film that and you can see that on the Woodland Trust and my sites, and then we'll crack on. Sorry, I know this is really important, but this is an amazing fallen tree over a drystone wall covered in moss, I mean, I just had to stop for a moment. Look, you talked about lichen. I know, I ask you a question then stop you answering it *both laugh*. I love this lichen, it's all on this tree. It is really, really beautiful.  Sam: So this is called seastorm lichen which is one of the few lichens that has actually a romantic sort of English name that isn't Latin.  Adam: Wow. Well, very cool. Whilst you're talking, I'm gonna take a photo. OK. Yeah, go on, seastorm lichen.   Sam: Yeah, and and so a lot of the lichens will, as you can see, grow on the branches where the light is greater. So there's almost a canopy world of biodiversity up there, and what we're doing by increasing the light levels is, is drawing these lichens down to the forest floor by increasing the light levels. But this is a really, really good example of the kind of levels of deadwood we actually want to aspire to. So in, as you can see, in most of the forest, it's completely denuded of deadwood. So we'd be lucky if we get sort of 5 cubic metres of wood per hectare. In the forest of, the temperate rainforests of Canada, they have sort of 600 cubic metres a hectare of deadwood. So you you could barely even move through their forest.  Adam: And that's super, because often people want the deadwood cleared cause you go, ‘oh well it's untidy', but that's a sort of oasis of of biodiversity.  Sam: That's right. It's a whole layer of ecology that we're missing from our forests. And we recently did a study on something called the blue ground beetle, which is a an endemic rare species to temperate rainforests. We didn't know where they went in the day, so we didn't really know anything about them, they're very elusive. They come out at night, walk up the trees, and they reflect the moon off of their blue, kind of shiny carapace. They're our biggest beetle. So we did a study with Exeter University where we put GPS tracking backpacks on them.  Adam: On a beetle?  Sam: On a beetle, to find out where they went. And lo and behold, we found that they were going into these deadwood habitats and so it just it just shone a light on how important increasing deadwood in these forests is for all of those species.  Adam: Amazing. All right. I I do encourage you to follow the Woodland Trust's social media, Insta and all the rest of them and my Bluesky and Twitter or X or whatever it is you wanna do. And I'm now gonna take a photo which hopefully you'll see on any of that social media. So do follow them all. And we're going to take a pause as I pose *laughs*. Right, I'm back from my photographic expedition. Right. So you can answer the question again now about this public debate about access and and what have you. Go on, you lead on whilst we're talking.  Sam: So yeah, Dartmoor is really kind of the centre of gravity for a wider story around public, an increasing demand from the public to access land for wellbeing, recreation, connection to nature, that has been kind of growing here, particularly in this area.  Adam: Right.  Sam: There are, I think we actually sorry, we do need to go that way, I think they've blocked the path.  Adam: OK fair enough.  Sam: We're not having to scramble.  Adam: And I think we're going back to where we came from. Alright. Although that path there looks blocked.   Sam: This one looks good. Yeah.  Adam: Oh OK.  Sam: Go through this end.   Adam: Through the little stone wall. OK. Ruby's following doing social media. Ohh OK. Yeah, sorry, carry on.  Sam: So, I suppose the concern of some people might be that increasing footfall, public access to these really important fragments of temperate rainforest, it could have a damaging effect on the biodiversity here. But the reality is that in order for people to connect with, understand and care about nature, they need to have access to it. And so we need to bring people into these habitats in a sensitive and considered way to educate people about them, but the other key thing is we need to expand these habitats. So we're part of something called the South West Rainforest Alliance. And our goal collectively is to increase the amount of temperate rainforest in Devon and Cornwall, to triple it by 2050.  Adam: OK. I mean that's worth pausing on that for a moment. That's an extraordinary task. I mean it sounds a bit, I have to say I'm a bit sceptical about that, it sounds like you plucked that out the air. How on earth would you get to tripling the cover you've got?  Sam: Well, we think we can do that mostly through buffering existing temporate rainforest, so planting around them which can then make those bigger, better, more connected, but also just by introducing trees into farmed landscapes but not in a way that damages the farming. So agroforestry. But also the inclusion of hedgerows that connect up those fragments and there's been a lot of work that's being done currently in partnership with Plymouth University to model how we would do that effectively.  Adam: And the other thing that strikes me when we talk about ancient woodland, we're talking about, well, we can't create ancient woodlands, the clue's in the name, it's got to be ancient. It is different for temperate rainforests, isn't it? These things which I've heard about are achievable in a relatively short period of time. Is that right?  Sam: That's right. So we think we can create new temperate rainforest within our lifetime. So within a kind of 40-50 year woodland establishment phase and as part of the Rainforest Recovery Project, we have a strand of work that we're calling the temperate rainforest creation trials and that includes long term scientific research to tell us how best we can create rainforest the quickest. So is it doing closed canopy woodlands like this or is it individual trees in farmland? Or is it open space woodlands or maybe even natural regeneration?  Adam: Amazing. We're by the river. Let's move on with our tales from the riverbank. One thing I I wanted to ask you, I arrived here last night. And I met well, an old friend of mine called Chris Salisbury, who runs a local sort of adventure, an ecological company, taking people for adventures in the woods and telling stories and all sorts of really interesting things, and he was telling me two things that he's noted. One is the reintroduction of pine martens which I think is talked about, but also he's seen wild boar in these woods and I've never heard of that. Are those, have have you come across those stories?  Sam: Yes, so we were actually involved in the reintroduction of pine martens last year and that was a partnership between us and Devon Wildlife Trust and various other charities. And and that was a sort of very controlled planned, strategic reintroduction of a species that's been really successful. We've brought the public along with us, and they're now part of that increasingly biodiverse and resilient temperate rainforest landscape.  Adam: Right before we move on to wild boar, just educate me, what is a pine marten? Not sure, not entirely sure I know what one is.  Sam: A pine marten is a mustelid, so it's in the same family as sort of the badger, the stoat, the weasel.   Adam: Right, what's it look like?  Sam: It's it's sort of the size of a small cat, it's brown with a white bib and it looks quite a lot like a weasel, but it's larger, but they're very much arboreal mammals, so they spend most of their time in the trees.  Adam: And were they native to this land?   Sam: Yes they were.  Adam: Hunted out were they?  Sam: Hunted to extinction for their pelts and and things like that. Yeah.  Adam: So you're reintroducing them. How successful has that been?  Sam: That's been really successful. So we've reintroduced 15 animals to Dartmoor last year and we think that that will be enough of a seed population for them to start spreading naturally now.  Adam: OK. And I've heard about what, the reintroduction in other parts of the country of pine martens. Wild boar. A a harder issue I would have thought ‘cause these are quite big beasts?   Sam: Yes.  Adam: Did, did any, presumably the Trust didn't introduce them? No.  Sam: No. So they haven't been, in the same way as pine martens were, formally introduced. There's been more of a sort of natural creep, or in some cases, so there's a term that people use now called ‘beaver bombing', which which people use completely straight faced in a lot of circles now. And that is effectively guerilla reintroduction of species.  Adam: Right. OK. So these are just people who feel that they should be rewilded and just did it without any any authority or talking to the local community they just brought them in?  Sam: Exactly without going through that sort of more defined process.  Adam: And and look, clearly this is not a Woodland Trust policy, so I'm not asking you to defend it, but but the effect of that, I mean, have you noticed anything?  Sam: I think, I mean, it's a huge subject, but I think in general, if you don't bring communities along with you by educating them, by mitigating the effect of a species, it it can damage the movement in in the longer term. The other thing I'd say about boar and those larger sort of herbivores, which would have been a really important part of our ecosystem for diversifying them and keeping that process going, they will really struggle unless we have bigger, better, more connected woodlands that are more natural anyway.  Adam: Right. I understand. So we're just going through talking about this being the rainforest, but it has been amazingly dry in the spring and now you can hear that in the crunchy undergrowth of very dry leaves. You're gonna, I'm I'm an idiot anyway, but I'm concentrating on too many things so I've forgotten the name of the river for the third time *laughs*.  Sam: It's the Webburn.  Adam: The Webburn, why can't I remember the Webburn? All right. We've come down to the Webburn, to the riverbank side. It's beautifully clear this water, isn't it? There I mean it, it's it's wonderful clear. I so want to stand in that and then I'll have wet feet for the rest of the day and the journey back to London. So I'm not going to do that. How much of a threat is this sort of environment under?  Sam: So temperate rainforest once covered about 20% of the UK and they would have clothed our western seaboard which receives that amazing sort of oceanic rainfall and temperature we've been talking about. That's been reduced now to about 2% in the UK.   Adam: OK, from 20 to 2%?  Sam: From 20 to 2, so 90% loss.   Adam: Over what sort of period?  Sam: So we're talking about millennia really. So this is they would have been at their zenith about 5,000, 6,000 years ago during the Bronze Age and that progressive multi-generation story of increasing farming, of draining, of forestry, has led to the fragmentation that we see today. In Devon and Cornwall, we think it would have covered about 75%. That's now been reduced to about 8%. So a similar 90% loss both regionally and nationally.  Adam: And are you optimistic that that's about to change? Are we now seeing a different story?  Sam: I feel really optimistic, but mostly that's because I think we're facing a lot of these holistic problems at the moment around the biodiversity crisis, around climate change, and I think rainforests are an actually incredibly cheap, scalable way of restoring nature, which will help us with the biodiversity crisis, but also protect communities from climate change. By doing some of this rewetting work, by increasing increasing tree cover, we can massively reduce flooding and massively mitigate the effect of drought on our farming and on our communities as it gets worse. We are hoping to raise £2.8 million to help us achieve the goals we have here and and the site will be open once we've achieved that goal towards the end of the year. And people can go to woodlandtrust.org.uk/southwest to find more about that appeal.  Adam: So just repeat that website again so if people want, if they, if you've got your pen or your computer keyboard ready, here is the website to go to.  Sam: Thats woodlandtrust.org.uk/southwest  Adam: And they can learn learn more about it, but also contribute there can they?  Sam: That's right. Yeah. And if they want to learn more about the Rainforest Recovery Project, we are launching a website this week called rainforestrecovery.org.uk.  Adam: So by the time you hear this podcast, all of that will be available to you at the moment I can edit it all together. It is an amazing, amazing site. I am really privileged to be here. What a wonderful place. Sam, thank you very much indeed.  Sam: You're welcome.  Thank you for listening to the Woodland Trust Woodland Walks. Join us next month when Adam will be taking another walk in the company of Woodland Trust staff, partners and volunteers. And don't forget to subscribe to the series on iTunes or wherever you are listening. And do give us a review and a rating. If you want to find out more about our woods and those that are close to you, check out the Woodland Trust website. Just head to the visiting woods pages. Thank you. 

Sam woke up one day and thought this is gonna be my summer! I'm gonna pursue my passions and meet new people. This is gonna be the... "Summer of Sam" There's a serial killer on the loose. But, more importantly, there's a dork with a fake English accent being all punk as can be and humping pillow dolls on a stage. There's also a guy who's real mean to his wife. Will they be murdered???? No. But there is a talking dog. Find out if it's worth watching, cause we're gonna tell you.

“In this country, because someone has a lot of money, we treat them like they have the right to tell us what to do.” Sam Jean returns for the Season 3 finale, picking up where he and Michael left off in the previous episode's discussion about the border crisis, the latest stirrings in Congress, and of course, Donald Trump. It seems Republicans will blame non-Americans for everything. While they continue to promote division in this country by treating immigrants to the U.S. as a threat, they also blame the sending foreign aid to places like Ukraine to excuse wealth inequality, disparity of healthcare and underfunded social programs. With so many perceived injustices, it's no wonder Trump's voting base is so enchanted by his crude and racist remarks—they see them as his sticking it to the man, despite, of course, Trump being the man.  Conservative leaders are playing college students as pawns. They used the recent congressional hearing involving the presidents of three Ivy League universities as another means of denigrating institutions of higher education, particularly elite institutions, as indoctrination camps. Nevermind that many conservative leaders themselves are products of elite universities. They discourage students from speaking out for fear of missing opportunities and at a time and place in life where those students are meant to be exchanging ideas freely.  It's no wonder so many unqualified people feel they are fit to run for office. Vivek Ramaswamy continues to troll his way through his campaign, modeling his approach after Trump's. Meanwhile, a new law threatens to erode what's left of the Voting Rights Act, affecting those citizens historically most discriminated against, but no one is really paying attention.  Quotes: “You do hear Americans say, ‘I'm all about supporting Ukraine…' and so forth, but the government seems to always have money to provide aid to foreign crises, but at home when the price of goods and services keep going up, and inflation—although it's coming down–people still say, ‘What about here at home?' So, that's a fair critique.” (7:08 | Michael) “What you get from Trump is the power of celebrity. That's what you get from Trump, this idea that this is an important person. People believe that Donald Trump is an important person who tells it like it is. He's not the most couth person. They ignore the fact that almost everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie, but they like the fact that Trump can vocalize the things that they've been told they aren't allowed to say. ” (13:54 | Sam) “There is a character–even if I disagree with you politically–there's a certain character that we believe a person should have in order to represent us in government. That's the myth we've been told.” (18:36 |Sam) “The presidents of the universities were giving lawyerly answers in an environment where they were supposed to give social media-worthy answers, because that's what the hearing was about.” (20:01 | Sam)  “In this society, we venerate people who make a lot of money and we treat their intelligence in making money as if it is some moral good. What people like Vivek demonstrate is you can be smart, you can make a lot of money but it doesn't make you a good person and it also doesn't mean that you're smart enough to do other things.” (39:09 | Sam) Links cuckoo4politics.com https://www.instagram.com/cuckoo_4_politics/ https://www.facebook.com/Cuckoo-4-Politics-104093938102793 Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Hello hello! Today I've got for you another between-season bonus episode. This time we're breaking format to talk about i know the end, a module I published earlier this year about going back home after a long time away and all the horrors that entails. Because if you can't occasionally publish something self-indulgent in your podcast feed, what's even the point of having one?My cohost for this is my friend Nico MacDougall, the current organizer of The Awards, who edited i know the end and had almost as much to say about it as I did.For maximum understanding of this episode, you can pick up a free copy of the module here and follow along (or skim it in advance).Further reading:The original i know the end cover artThe “oops all PBTA moves” version of i know the endThree of my short filmsMy previous written designer commentaries on Space Train Space Heist and CouriersJohn Harper talking with Andrew Gillis about the origins of Blades in the DarkThe official designer commentary podcasts for Spire and HeartAaron Lim's An Altogether Different River, which comes with a designer commentary versionCamera Lucida by Roland Barthes, a photography theory book that we talked about during recording but which I later cut because I remembered most of the details about it incorrectlyWhat Is Risograph Printing, another topic cut from the final recording because I got basically everything about it wrong while recording (the background texture of the module is a risograph printed texture)Before Sunrise by Richard LinklaterQuestionable Content by Jeph JacquesSocials:Nico's carrd page, which includes links to their socials, editing rates, and The Awards.Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.The Dice Exploder logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Transcript:Sam: Hello and welcome to Dice Exploder. Normally each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic, bait our lines with it, and cast them out to see, to see what we can catch. But you hear that different intro music? That means this episode I'm doing something much more self indulgent, a designer commentary on a module I released earlier this year called I Know the End.And just a heads up here at the top, to get the most out of this, you probably want to have at least read through the module in question before, or as, you're listening. I threw a bunch of free copies up on itch for exactly this purpose, so feel free to go run and grab one. I'll wait.Anyway, I love designer commentaries. You can find a few of my old written ones, as well as links to a few of my favorites from other people, in the show notes. But I wanted to try releasing one as a podcast, because one, that sounds fun, and two, what's the point of having a podcast feed if you can't be ridiculously self indulgent in it on occasion?And I picked I Know The End to talk about because it is... weird. I don't know. It's weird. I describe it on itch as a short scenario about returning home and all the horrors that entails. But you'll hear us take issue with, I don't know, maybe every word in that sentence over the course of this commentary. It was a strange experience to make this thing, and I figured that might be interesting to hear about.It was also the first time I ever worked with an editor Nico MacDougall my friend and the organizer behind The Awards since 2023. Nico was excellent to work with and you can find their rates and such in the show notes and they are with me today to talk through this thing in excruciating detail as you probably noticed from the runtime we had a lot to say. Definitely contracted two guys on a podcast disease. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. But regardless, I'd love to hear what you think of it. Should I do more? Never again? Want to organize the Dice Exploder Game Jam we mused about doing at the end of this? Hit me up! I'd love to hear from you. And now, here is myself, I guess, and Nico MacDougall, with a full designer's commentary on I Know The End.Nico: Well, Sam, thanks for being here on your podcast to discuss your... adventure.Sam: You're welcome.Nico: Yes.Sam: for having me.Nico: Very first question is adventure: is that really, like, the right term for this?Sam: Are we really starting here? Like, I, I don't know. I, I feel like I got, I really went into this thing with true intentions to write a proper module, you know? Like I was thinking about OSR style play for like the first time in my life, and like, we were both coming out of the awards 2022 judging, and a lot of the submissions for 2022 the Awards were modules. I thought that was great but it really was sort of like opening the floodgates of this style of play that I knew basically nothing about. And, at the same time that we were reading through all 200 submissions for the awards, I was also reading Marcia B's list of 100 OSR blog posts of some influence.And so I was really drinking from the fire hose of this style of play, and also, I wasn't playing any of it. Like, I was experimenting with Trophy Gold a little bit, which is this story game that is designed to try to play OSR modules and dungeons as, like, a story game kind of experience. And I was kind of figuring out how it works and like how I wanted to run it and how to make it go And Joe DeSimone, who was running the awards at the time was just encouraging everyone to make weirder shit and like, that was his ethos and those were the people that he got to submit to the awards. Like, it was just the weirdest stuff that I had ever read in the RPG space and... That's probably a lie. There's some weird stuff out there.It was just like so much weird stuff. It was like stuff on the bleeding edge of a whole side of the hobby that I didn't participate in in the first place. My intro to this part of the hobby was the bleeding edge of it. And I was like, alright, I, I just wanna make something there, I wanna try playing around there and see what happens.And Joe tweeted out the tweet was like, Now we're all making modules based on songs that make us cry. And I was listening to the Phoebe Bridgers album Punisher on loop at the time to inspire a screenplay I was working on. And the last track is called I Know the End, and just ends with this, primal scream.And it was, it was a hard fall for me, at the time. And the primal scream felt really cathartic. And I was spending a lot of time in the, small town where I grew up. And, this horror monster idea of a town that is, itself, an entity and like is a whole monster, and like, what does that mean exactly? I don't know, but intuitively, I like, understand it, and we're just gonna kind of drive... towards my intuitive understanding of what this thing is supposed to be. I just decided to do that and see what happened. And did that give us an adventure in the end? I don't know. Did that give us a 32 page long bestiary entry in the form of a module? Like, that sounds closer to right to me, but also, taxonomies are a lie and foolish anyways.I don't know, I made a weird thing, here it is. Nico: Yeah. So I was scrolling back in our, in our conversation to where you first shared this with me, and I... I would like to share with the audience the text that accompanied it. It was the Google Doc, and then it said, This might be completely unplayable, it might actually be a short story, or, like, a movie, but I'm gonna publish it anyway, and, you know... If that isn't exactly it, like...Sam: Yeah I like that stuff. I don't know, another thing I've been thinking about a lot this fall is writing by stream of consciousness. Like, I realized that I don't have a lot of confidence in any of my work that I feel like I created quickly. Like, the RPG thing I'm most well known for, I think, is Doskvol Breathes, which I just pumped out in an afternoon. It was just a thought that I had on a whim about how you might play blades in the dark maybe. And I finished it and then I released it and people were like, this is amazing. And I still get complimented on it all the time. I'm still really proud of it, but it, I don't have any confidence in it because it came so quickly.And, like, I know that this is something I need to, like, talk about in therapy, you know, about, like, It's not real art unless I worked on it for six months straight, like, really worked my ass off. But this process, I sort of looked back over my career as a screenwriter, as a short filmmaker, as a game designer, and started realizing just how many of my favorite things that I've made came from exactly that process of the whole idea kind of coming together all at once in like one sitting. And even if it then took like a bunch of months of like refining like it's wild to me How much of my favorite work was created by following my intuition, and then just leaving it be afterwards.Nico: Yeah, I actually did want to ask about the similarity between your, like, process for TTRPG design versus screenwriting, cause... While I have read, you know, edited this, but also, like, read your your game design work and know relatively well your thoughts on, like, you know, just game design sort of theory and stuff in general, I have never read any, like, screenwriting stuff that you've done. Although, lord knows I hope to see it someday. Sam: Well, listen, if anyone listening to this wants to read my screenplays, I'm on Discord. You can find me and I'll happily share them all. My old short films are largely available on the internet, too. You know, maybe I'll link a couple in the show notes.Nico: oh yeah,Sam: But I I think of my process for screenwriting as really, really structural.Like, I, I'm a person who really came out of needing a plot and needing to know what happens in a story, and to really especially need to know the ending of a story so I know kind of what I'm going towards as I'm writing the thing. I outline like really extensively before I write feature or a pilot, like there's so much planning you have to do, I think it is really, really hard to write any kind of screenplay and not have to revise it over and over and over again, or at least like plan really carefully ahead of time and like really think about all the details, revise a lot, run it by a lot of people for feedback over and over. But especially for me that, that having an ending, like a target in mind when I'm writing is so important. I just don't know how to do it without that.Except occasionally when I get some sort of idea like this one where I have a feeling of vibe and I just start writing that thing and then eventually it's done. And I, I've never had that happen for a feature film screenplay or like a TV pilot kind of screenplay.But I have had a couple of short films come together that way where I don't know what the thing is, I just know what I am writing right now, and then it's done, and then I go make it. And I I don't know why that happens sometimes. Nico: Yeah, I mean I would imagine length plays a factor in it, right? Like a short film, or, I mean, gosh, how many pages did I know the end, end, end up being? Sam: 36. Nico: But I find that really fascinating that, too, that you say that when you're screenwriting, you have to have it really structural, really outlined, an end specifically in mind, when, to me, that almost feels like, well, not the outlining part, but having an end in mind feels almost antithetical to even the idea of, like, game design, or, I guess, TTRPG design, right?Even the most sort of relatively pre structured, Eat the Reich, Yazeeba's Bed and Breakfast, like, Lady Blackbird games, where the characters are pretty well defined before any human player starts interacting with them, you can never know how it's going to end. And it's kind of almost against the idea of the game or the, the sort of art form as a whole to really know that.Even games that are play to lose, like, there are many games now where it's like, you will die at the end. And it's like, okay, but like, that's not really the actual end. Like, sure, it's technically the end, but it's like, we have no idea what's gonna be the moment right before that, or the moment before that. As opposed to screenwriting Sam: yeah, it's a, it's a really different medium. I still think my need to have a target in mind is something that is really true about my game design process too.Like the other game that I'm well known for, well known for being relative here, but is Space Train Space Heist, where I was like, I have a very clear goal, I want to run a Blades in the Dark as a one shot at Games on Demand in a two hour slot. And Blades in the Dark is not a game that is built to do that well, so I want to make a game that is built to do that well, but like, captures everything about the one shot Blades in the Dark experience that I think is good and fun .And that may not be a sort of thematic statement kind of ending, like that's what I'm kind of looking for when I'm writing a screenplay, but that is a clear goal for a design of a game.Nico: Yeah. even In the context of I know the end, and to start talking a little bit about my role in this as well, as, as the editor, I think the point of view, the vibe, the, like, desired sort of aesthetic end point Was very clear from the start, from the jump. And I think that in many ways sort of substitutes for knowing the end of the story in your screenwriting process.So that really helped when I was editing it by focusing on like, okay, here's the pitch. How can I help sort of whittle it down or enhance it or change stuff in order to help realize that goal.And sometimes it kind of surprises me even, like, how much my games shift and change as they reach that goal. Like, sometimes you can, like, look back at old versions of it, and you're like, wow, so little of this is still present. But, like, you can see the throughline, very sort of Ship of Theseus, right? Like, you're like, wow, everything has been replaced, and yet, it's, like, still the thing that I wanted to end up at.Sam: Yeah, another thing that is, I think, more true of my screenwriting process than my game design process is how very common that in the middle of the process I will have to step back and take stock of what was I trying to do again? Like, what was my original goal? I've gotten all these notes from a lot of different people and, like, I've done a lot of work and I've found stuff that I like.And what was I trying to do? Like, I have, all this material on the table now, I have, like, clay on the wheel, and, like, I just gotta step back and take a break and refocus on, like, what are we trying to do. I Think it's really important to be able to do that in any creative process.To Tie together a couple of threads that we've talked about here, talked at the beginning of this about how much this felt like a stream of consciousness project for me, that I really just like, dumped this out and then like, let it rip.But also, I mean, this was my first time working with an editor, and I think you did a lot of work on this to make it way better, like really polish it up and make those edges the kind of pointy that they wanted to be, that this game really called for. And that makes this, in some ways, both a really unstructured process for me, and then a really structured process, and... I don't know what to make of that. I think there's something cool about having both of those components involved in a process. Nico: Yeah, it is. I I very much agree that like, yeah, most of my sort of design stuff have, has proceeded very much the same way of just kind of like sporadically working on it, changing stuff, like revamping it, whatever. And it's like, it's sort of, yeah, in a constant state of fluxx up until the moment where I'm like, okay, I guess it's done now.What I was gonna say, I was gonna jump back just a point or two which is you mentioned Clayton Notestein's Explorer's Design Jam. And I was curious, like, what was your experience, like, using that design template? Sam: Yeah I really enjoyed it, I really had a good time with it. I had already gotten really comfortable with InDesign just teaching myself during lockdown. Like, that's what I did for 2020, was I, like, laid out a bunch of games myself and they all looked like shit, but they all taught me how to use InDesign as a program.And I think templates are really, really valuable. Like it's so much easier to reconfigure the guts of another template than it is to create something from scratch.And I like Clayton's template. I think it's nice and clean. I think you can see in all the publications that have come out using Clayton's template, how recognizable it is. How little most people stray from the bones of it, and on the one hand, I think it's amazing that you can just use the template and go really quickly and like, get something out.And also I just want to push on it a little bit more. I want something, like the template is designed to be a template. It is not a suit tailored to whatever your particular project is. But also, I think if I had tried to lay this out without a template, it would look substantially worse, and there are a few notable breaks here and there that I, you know, I enjoyed experimenting with. I like the use of the comments column for little artwork. I think that was a nice little innovation that I added.And, you know, I didn't write this originally to have that sort of commentary column as a part of it. Like, all of the text was just in the main body of it. And I like the way it turned out to have that sort of, like, director's commentary thing hanging out in the wings. lot of people have talked about how much they like that in Clayton's template. so I, I don't know, like I, think that on the one hand a template really opens up a lot of possibilities for a lot of people and really opened up a lot of possibilities for me, and on the other hand I do still look at it and I see the template And I'm like, I hope this doesn't look too much like every other person whoNico: Right, right. I mean, that is definitely the difficulty of providing those kinds of tools, because like, it makes it very easy to make things especially if you're sort of just getting started, or if you don't have a lot of confidence or familiarity with it inDesign or anything like that. But ultimately, I feel like Clayton himself would say that the Explorer's Design Template is not intended to be, like, the final template, right? It's intended to be, like, a tool that you can use to varying effects, right?Yeah, I was thinking about it when I was going through this earlier, and I was like, Oh, yeah, like, you only use the comments, column a few times, and then I literally only realized maybe five minutes before you said it, I was like, oh, wait, all the little artwork is also in that little column thing, like you just said, and I was like, oh, that's like, that's actually a really cool way to use the template, because that space is already provided if you include that column, but just because you have the column that's, you know, quote unquote, intended for commentary, doesn't mean you have to use it for commentary, doesn't mean you have to put text in there.Sam: Yeah, you definitely like learn a lot of stuff about the guts of the thing as you start playing with it.Nico: Yeah. is probably getting on the level of, like, pretty pointless, sort of what ifs, but I'm curious... If Clayton hadn't done the Explorer's Design Template Jam, or if you had, for whatever reason, like, not been inspired to use that as the impetus to, like, make this and get it edited and laid out and published or whatever, like, Do you think you still would have tried to use that template, or would you have just tried to lay it out yourself, like you've done in the past?Sam: Honestly, I think without the jam this wouldn't exist. I have like a long to do list of things at any given time, like creative projects I wanna on, youNico: Oh, yeah,Sam: know? And the thing that brought this to the top of that to do list was just wanting to have something to submit into that jam. You know, I wanted to work with you as an editor. I Always want to clear something off the to do list. I always want to have some kind of creative project. And, I wanted to submit something to that jam, but I think if you took any one of those away, I might not have put the thing out at all. Nico: Yeah, that's really interesting. But I guess that's also, again, kind of what a good template or layout or just tool in general can help is actually get these things made. Sam: That's what a good jam can do, too, right? I mean, there's a reason the Golden Cobra contest is something that I love. It's like 40 new LARPs every year and they only exist because the Golden Cobra is throwing down the gauntlet.Nico: That's very true. Well, maybe it's time to move along to more practical concerns Sam: Maybe it's time to do the actual commentary part of this episodeWe've done the waxing philosophical part, butNico: we, yeah, checked off that Dice Exploder box. Now it's time to do the actual game talk.Sam: your bingo cards Nico: Yeah, Sam: Yeah, so let's start with the cover.Nico: Yes, the cover, which I only realized it was a teeth, that it was a mouth with teeth open when you said in the outline, ah yes, it's a mouth with teeth. And I looked at it and I was like... Oh my god, it is. Like,Sam: I did my job so well. I wanted it to be subtle, but I always like looked at it and was like it's so obviously teeth, I'm never gonna get this subtle enough. But I'm I'm glad to hear that I succeeded.Nico: I truly don't know what I thought it was before, but it definitely wasn't teeth.Sam: Yeah. Well, it started as I'll share this in the show notes. It started as this image. It was like a 6x9 layout, and, the teeth were still there, and it was like, all black, and the teeth were this much wider, gaping maw, like, inhuman, unhinged jaw kind of situation. And then, in the middle of it, was a, like, live laugh love kind of Airbnb sign with I Know The End on it. It was like the mouth, like, eating the sign.And I liked that. I felt like, the problem with that was that... As much as creepy, live, laugh, love sign is kind of the like, vibe of this, I didn't really want to bring in the like, kitsch of that at all, like, I felt like that kitschiness would hang over the whole thing if I made it the cover, and I mean, this whole thing is just about my own personal emotional repression, right? And my feelings about my small town that I'm from, andabout like, my ambition, and, exactly, yeah.But I, I write a lot, and I make a lot of art about emotional repression , and I think the particular vibe of this game's repression doesn't have space for irony, or satire, or like, Do you wanna live, laugh, love? Like, I don't know how else to put it. Like, it just felt really wrong.It was like, if you put that into the space at all, it's gonna curdle the whole feeling. Nico: it's about the framing of it. I, know that Spencer Campbell of Gila RPGs has written something about this on his blog. I don't remember specifically what the context is, but he's a psychologist by training and is talking about how, like, the way that you frame something matters a lot to how people respond to it, right?So you like, if you're framing it as like, oh, you have, twelve things and I take away six from you, versus like, oh, you have nothing and then you are given six things. It's like, both scenarios, you like, end up with six but Sam: One feels like a letdown and one feels great. Yeah,Nico: yeah, and so I think in his article he was talking about in the, yeah, you know, tying that into the game design context, obviously.And I think it matches here where like, sort of runs the risk of like, priming people to expect kitsch, and I don't think that that's really present in the rest of the game. And that kind of mismatched expectations could really, like, lead to some problems when people are trying to, like, play the game.Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean this cover is just kind of like, oh. Like, it doesn't it doesn't really tell you much other than just like there's something back there that's maybe vaguely menacing, and that's kind of it. That's kind of Nico: Yeah.Sam: Alright, speaking of which can we, can we talk about my favorite interaction between the two of us as we were working on this?Nico: Oh, yeah, I was not sure how to bring that up. yes, please do. Now that we're moving on to... For everyone following along at home, we are proceeding to the credits page.Sam: The comment I got from you while you were editing this was, IDK if it would look different in print, but having the text so close to the edge of the page is activating my fight or flight response. And I just replied, working as intended.Nico: It yeah, I had the feeling, I think, even when I sent that, I was like, this, this is not like an accident. Like, like, like no one makes this like no one does this by accident. But, yes, truly, I hope that you are following along at home because I believe that Sam generously gave a whole bunch of community copies of this game, or made them available. Sam: I believe it was 42, 069 I'm usually doing some number like that. This game, I might have done a different number, but that's, the other games that I've done.Nico: So, but the text on this, for credits page specifically, it's truly, like, at the edge of the page. Like, it looks like it could be cut off. It's like, in print, it would be like, cut off by the process of actually like, making it. In fact, feels like if you try to send it to a printer, they could almost send it back and be like, you've gotta give us some space there. Like, you simply can't do that. There needs to be a gutter, or bleed, or whatever the term is. Like, Sam: I love it. maybe one day I will print this. Honestly, like if I become a super famous game designer or something, like, this is one of the ones that I Nico: screen, slash screenwriter.Sam: yeah, yeah. This is one of the ones I'd like to go back and hold in my hand, but I also I don't know, I just love it. I, I love designing for digital as, like, a primary thing, because I just feel like most people who play the thing are gonna play it out of digital.And I don't know if that's, like, the primary audience for a lot of modules. Like, I think there are a ton of people out there who just, like, buy the zine and hold the zine in their hand and probably never get around to playing it. But I, I love the digital. I've always loved the digital. I don't know, I just like making for it.Nico: Well I mean I was even thinking about it in the context of like, you know, how you talked about how you changed the aspect ratio, I was like thinking about that and I was like, I mean, it's not like that would be impossible to print, but like, most standard commercial printers operate in like, one of the more standard like, page sizes. Even the risograph you said is what it's called, right?Sam: The, the RISO. Yeah, I don't know if it's Rizzo or RISO, but I'm gonna sayNico: The RISO background also makes the, again, just from like a fully practical point of view, it's like you're adding color to the whole thing,Like there are many potential barriers to this as like a physical product that would, that are simply not there when you're designing for digital, so like, it is nice to have that sort of freedom, like, when you're thinking about how to lay this out or, or put stuff on here, it's like, you're freed from a lot of those practical considerations.Sam: There's a few other details I want to talk about on this page just kind of like references I'm making that are not obvious.So the first is that the header font and title font of I Know The End is a font that I ripped from Lilancholy, which is this amazing book by Snow, which is ostensibly a game, but but also a reflection on childhood and personal relationship to emotions and trauma.And I love the look of the font, but I also intentionally wanted to reference that game while I was making something that felt really personal in a similar vein. And another another reference here is that the color of the whole game, like this red, is pulled from the cover art for the Phoebe Bridgers album Punisher that I know the end is off of. I, I just found the, like, most saturated red pixel that I could on the album and was like, that's the color! I love hiding little references in every little detail that I can. Nico: Yeah, it's so interesting because I did not know any of that, you know, prior to this conversation or seeing that stuff on the outline. What did you sort of hope to achieve with those references, right? Because I can't imagine that you're plan was like, for someone to look at it and be like, oh my god, that's the Lilancholy font, and that's the Phoebe Bridgers album Sam: that's one pixel from that album cover.Yeah.What am I trying to achieve? I don't know, like there's, so the Paul Thomas Anderson movie Phantom Thread Is an amazing movie, and it's about Daniel Day Lewis being incredibly serious, scary Daniel Day Lewis, making dresses, being a tailor, and an element of the movie is that he hides his initials inside the dresses, like, when he's making them, he, like, sews his initials in.And that's a real thing that, that people did, and maybe it's just for him. It's also kind of an arrogant thing to do, you know, that all these, like, women are gonna be walking around wearing these dresses with, like, his initials kind of, like, carved, it's like this power thing. But my favorite part of it is that Phantom Thread is PT, also known as Paul Thomas Anderson.Nico: Ha Sam: And, like, like, I, I just feel like when you're doing that kind of thing, it's just, what an act, it's just so beautiful and arrogant and satisfying. Like I think doing that kind of little reference and joke for myself brings me into the mindset of what I am trying to convey with the game.Like, if I'm thinking in the detail of the font selection, what do I want to reference? What do I want to bring to this game? Then, I'm gonna be I'm gonna be thinking about that in every other choice I'm making for the game, too. And even if half of those choices end up being just for me, I will have been in the headspace to make the other half that are for everyone else, too.Nico: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. like, You could almost even call these, like, Easter eggs, right?But it also made me think about, I had to look this up actually as you were talking, because I was like, about that, the CalArts classroom number that like all of the animators that studied there fit into like Pixar movies and stuff, like, A113, A113. And I think that's also sort of a good example of it in some ways, because it's like now, with the advent of the internet, and you know, and a certain way of engaging with media, like, everyone knows what that, what that means now, or they could if they just looked it up, or they just see some BuzzFeed, you know, article that's like, you know, 50 easter eggs that you missed in the latest Pixar movie.But yeah, it's like, it's very interesting because it kind of asks who is the movie for? What's the intended or imagined audience for all of these things? And it sort of shows that, like, you can have multiple audiences or multiple levels of engagement with the same audience, like, at the same time. Maybe, I would say, it's very unlikely that any random person would just like, look at the cover of I Know The End and be like, oh, that's the Lilancholy font, but,Sam: I have had someone say that to me, though. Yeah.Nico: but, so, what I was just gonna say is like, but I don't think it's hard to imagine that like, the type of person who would, who would buy, who would be interested in I Know The End or Lilancholy, I think there's a pretty decent chance that they would be interested in the other if they're interested in one of them, right?And so it is interesting as well, where it's like, I am often surprised by like the ability of people to sort of interpret or decipher things that far outweighs my sort of expectations of their ability to do so.If only just because I have the arrogance to be like, well no one could ever have a mind like mine. Like, no one could ever think in the specific bizarre way that I do. Then it's like actually a surprising number of people think in a very similar way. Sam: Another thing I think about with making these really, really tiny references, easter eggs, it's the, not making a decision is making a decision, right? CentrismNico: Oh,Sam: Like, if you have literally anything that you have not made a choice about with intention, that is a missed opportunity, I think.And... I have so much respect for people who will just pump something out, like, write a page of a game and, like, upload as a DocX to itch. Like, Aaron King is a genius, and I know a lot of games that are put out that way, and I love that stuff. But for me, like, the kind of art creation process that I enjoy and like doing is so based on finding meaning in every crevice, finding a way to express yourself in every detail. just love doing it.Nico: you are the English teacher that the, the curtains are blue meme is referencing, in fact.Sam: Yes.Nico: The curtains are blue in I Know The End because,Sam: Well, and I know the end they are red, but Nico: yes.Imagine that being the new version of the meme: the curtains in this are red because there's a Phoebe Bridgers album that has a single pixel that is that color.Sam: Yeah, I don't know. It's true, though.Nico: Exactly. it is in fact true. But so would, in some ways, any other interpretation of...Sam: Yeah.Nico: of the red color, right? It's like you picked it because of the association with the album cover. Someone else could be like, Oh, it means this otherthing. And like that interpretation is correct. Sam: Yeah, I mean, I also picked it because of its association with blood, you know, like I, I wanted to kind of evoke that feeling too, so.Shall we do the table of contents? HehNico: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the most interesting thing to talk about, and I want to know when this entered the sort of the design process, is the blacked out Table of Contents entry which corresponds to an almost entirely blacked out, or in this case, redded out,Sam: Yeah, Nico: messily redacted,part of, the book,Sam: Yeah, I think this was always there, I think I started writing a list of locations very early on, and on that list of locations was, like, I work in Google Docs to begin with for most of my stuff, and it was a bullet pointed numbered list, and the last list item was struck through, and it was your mom's house.And I just thought that was a funny little joke. It's like really dark? Another, just like a little detail, I have such a great relationship with my parents. Like really just a better relationship with my parents than anyone I know. And, so much of my art ends up with these like, really bad, fucked up relationships with parents, and I don't know what that's about.But, there's, there's something about, there's a piece of your hometown that is like so traumatic that you can't bring yourself to look at it. There's a piece of yourself, or your childhood, or like, where you came up, there's something from your origin story that you can't bear to face is a lot of what this is about. And even as the climax of this thing is I think in a lot of ways turning to face everything that you left behind.I mean the whole module is about that but I think fact that even when you are doing that, there's one piece of it that you can't bear to look at is really tragic and a mood to me. You know, it really felt right. Nico: it's sort of like, yeah, I'm finally gonna stand my ground and face my fear, or whatever, except for that thing. That thing, that part over there, for whatever reason, because I'm actually just very afraid of it. It really, as always, is sort of like the exceptions to the rule make the rule, or emphasize the rule. You're kind of carving out the negative space around it. And it makes it clearer in so. so Well, Yeah, so like, then the first thing of the game text itself, so to speak, is like the front and back of a postcard. And where's the picture from? It looks kind of old timey in a sort of non specific way.Sam: It's from Wikimedia Commons, I believe. I was looking for pictures of old postcards, and I wanted a small town, and, this is what I found.The postcard image is actually like a hell of a photo bash too. The stamp on it is from a real postcard I received from my cousin. The handwriting was me on just like a piece of paper that I scanned, and then the postcard is another like open source postcard image.Nico: Yeah. I am, once again, sort of showing, showing a lot of my bias here. I am often kind of against a lot of little, like, accessories, or sort of, like, physical things that are often part of crowdfunding, like, stretch goals, you know, like, it's, I don't know. I don't think it's, like, ontologically evil or anything like that, it's just, I understand, it's part of the reality of crowdfunding, and, like, attracting attention, and yada yada yada, I just personally don't love that reality. Which, of course, is easy to criticize when you're not part of a project is trying to do that, but that aside, I think it would actually genuinely be very cool to have, like, this postcard as, like, a physical object like, if the game were to be printed.Sam: You gonna make me like, handwrite every one of the postcards too? Cause that isNico: I did not say that. Oh, is that really? Well, but then, then you have it already, you can just print it off, like, or you make that the, like, I don't know, the hundred dollar stretch goal, you know, they back it at that level and then the postcard just appears inside their mailbox. Like,Sam: That wa that is creepy. I will tell you that,Nico: You say that as though it's happened to you before. You're like, well, let meSam: well, I'm not, I, I revealing nothing. How autobiographical is this? Nico: Yeah. so I guess, yeah, so getting, So this is the introduction page, the background, the introduction, giving the context to what this module, extended bestiary, what have you, what it is. My question here from a sort of meta perspective is like, how much are you trying to sort of give away at the start of this? How do you pitch this to , like to someone you know?Sam: that's a great question. I'm pretty proud of the execution here. I think I do a good job of, like, leaving some juicy hints here as to what might be going on without giving anything away. Like, the fact that I advertise this as maybe closer to a bestiary entry than a module, like, uh, what? Like, like you, you have an idea of what that means, but also like, where's the monster, what is the thing that I'm looking like, that is kind of planted in your mind in a way that I think is intriguing and sets expectations without giving the whole thing away.And, also, this is just me, like, trying to figure out how to describe this thing in real time as I'm writing. It really came from intuition. Nico: yeah. I know that, you know you're on, very much on record talking about how, you know, like, taxonomy is fake and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Sam: As much as I love it.Nico: right, right, exactly, I mean, I feel the same way, but I, I am curious as to like if you were trying to sell someone on the idea of even just playing this game, like, how effective do you think it is of like communicating whatever this is, you know, like, is it effective to say it's kind of this, or it's not this, or maybe it's this, like, Sam: I think this is going to be really good at reaching the kind of person who will love this, and really bad at selling this to like a mass audience, you know? But luckily, I'm not trying to sell this to a mass audience. I'm like trying to make Joe Dissimone proud, you know? Like I'm trying to make like something as weird as fucking possible.and I think there's a kind of person who really appreciates that and this struggle to define what this is using existing terminology, I think is going to really appeal to the people who like this.Nico: yeah, I agree, I think it signposts well hey, you, there, like, look at this thing. Isn't that interesting. And if they're like, If they're like, no, that's confusing and I don't know what to do with it, and they go somewhere else, in some ways, it could be argued that that is like, working as intended, right, likeSam: I kind of find it interesting in the sidebar here to watch me sort of like struggle with how you're supposed to play this game, like what rule system are you supposed to use?I do think with some distance from this, the best way to experience this is as a solo game. Like to just read the thing but pause and journal about your character's experience as you sort of walk through it. I have started playing more solo games since I wrote this in preparation for a Season 3 episode of the show, and I think this would serve that experience really well.I considered even, like, rewriting this to be more of explicitly a solo experience, but I, ultimately was really happy leaving it in its sort of nebulous, provocative, what if, is this, what is this sort of state. Nico: Yeah. I would genuinely be interested to have like, the two of us play the game, like this game, like one running it, one as the player, because I don't necessarily disagree with what you said, might be better suited as a solo game, but I really do think that there is something that can be gained about, like being in a room with, like, one other person, or, you know, being on a call with one other person, or whatever and going through this,Sam: Yeah, yeah, I can feel the intensity of that as you describe it. And it sounds harrowing and... Amazing. I do, I do have this dream of like running a Mork Borg dungeon, like over the course of like three sessions, and then like taking one of the players who survives and being like, I've got another module that I think we should play with the same character. Nico: yeah. Anyways, you go home and you think you're safe, but actually, like, Sam: I do think that this as a response to OSR play is really an interesting way to try to play the game, like to Nico: just sort of experienceSam: Yeah, to try to take the kind of character that you would have coming out of that and the experience you would have coming out of that and then like get tossed into this, like that disorientation I think would serve this really well and would do something that I found I really like to do with the OSR kind of play of like finding ways to bring in more character stuff, to just have people to reflect on their person, rather than on the logistical problem solving.Nico: Mm hmm. Which, of course, in some ways also is like, I don't want to say direct contradiction, but like, moving perpendicular to a lot of the sort of OSR principles, rightSam: But yeah, I mean, fuck em. Nico: exactly, I mean, I'm not, saying that to discourage you from doing it, I'm just saying, like, I just think it's an interesting for those to come into sort of, conflict or, or whatever in, in that specific way.Sam: I mean, that's what the bleeding edge of something is all about, right? It's like, what are our principles? What if we throw them out? What does thatNico: Right, right. What if we smash things together that, like, should sort of repel each other like magnets? Like,Sam: Yeah.Nico: Let's move on to the town?Sam: Yeah. So this is the, like, GM spoiler page.Nico: Right.Sam: I don't know that I have a lot to say about this particular page. It's, it's the town. There are, like, two suggestions in the first chunk of this book that came from you that I think are really valuable to this. Like, the first is that the town is always capitalized throughout. Which I like sort of was doing, but you really emphasized, and I think was a great decision.And, the second is that there aren't any contractions in this book except for possessives. And, that was another suggestion that came from you, to have this sort of stilted, formal, slightly off kind of language of not having contractions, that I think serves it really well and is just really cool.Nico: Yeah, I have to give credit for that, to the Questionable Content webcomic, which is a webcomic that has been running forSam: God, is it still going?Nico: oh, it very much is still going, I, it updates Monday to Friday, and I, am reading, I am seated and reading,Sam: stopped reading that like a decade ago.Nico: It is officially 20 years old. It started in 2003.but so one of the characters in that she initially never uses contractions. It is always, it is, it is never, it's. Do not, not, don't, you know, is not, not, isn't and over time, as the character sort of gets more comfortable and starts to open up about her kind of mysterious past, and they'll deal with a lot of the sort of like, serious emotional turmoil that is present in the character, she like, starts to use contractions.And so, it's a specific device that is very weirdly ingrained in my head at this point, because I remember, like, realizing that when it was called out the first time, and then I will fess up and say I have re read the webcomic from the beginning several times. I have a lot of time on my hands sometimes. And it is always kind of a delight to go back to the beginning and see this character and to really notice that device because you know where she ends up and how much more comfortable she is and so to see that difference in the beginning makes it very effective on a reread in a way that is sort of present in the maybe subconscious the first time on the way through.Thank you. And I feel like it's similar here, not quite the same because I don't know if you would ever necessarily actively realize, like, oh, there are no sort of contractions here.Sam: and the town is never gonna stop being a entity of repression.Nico: Yeah, exactly. And so it's giving this like underlying anxiety kind of like,like, you're just like, Ooh, this is Sam: Yeah. It's like, what is going on? What's wrong with the language here?Nico: Yeah. And you might not even really be able to, articulate it because it's sort of hard to articulate the absence of somethingSam: And like, that's the feeling of the whole module. yeah, It's, it's just, it's a great decision. Nico: Yeah. And then of course, capitalizing town, you know, are you even really a game designer if you're not capitalizing some random words in Sam: yeah. gotta have one at least, come on.Sam: I will say I really enjoy the fact that I give no origin story for the town. I think that's also really powerful, of leaving a hole that people can fill in if they want.The mom repression stuff is kinda like that too, the like, the blacking out sharpie. Of like, that's a hole you could fill in in play if you wanted to, but I, I'm not going to. I'm gonna intentionally leave that hole there.Nico: It also is the kind of thing, right, of like, oh gosh, Nova was saying this in the Dice Exploder Discord recently, where like, part of the reason the OSR can be so sort of rules light and stripped down is because like, it is relying a lot on the sort of cultural script of like, what is a fantasy role playing game, or even just like a fantasy story in general, you know? What your knowledge of an OSR game is.And this, in a similar way, is sort of like, you know what a hometown is. Like, you know, I don't need to tell you what the backstory of this is, because you know what it's like to be from somewhere. Cause it's also worth saying, like, this game does not give any character creation instructions, right? I mean, actually, I guess that's not entirely true, because underneath the postcard, you know, it just says, A decade or more gone since you fled the small backwater town that spawned you.And it's like, yeah, that's basically all the sort of character creation information you need, like,Sam: yeah, yeah, like wait, gonna play yourself and you're gonna be sad about this, like uh, Nico: Right, or, like, or if you're not playing yourself, you are playing a person who's sad about it, like, you know, it's like, it's kind of all you really need, Sam: you have internalized the tone of this thing, like, your character is in ways the negative space of the voice of the text. Nico: Like, a weird relationship with your small hometown, we just don't need to spend very much, time covering that broad background. It's much better spent covering the specific, like, locations and people in this town that also sort of help to convey that, feeling, that information.Sam: Temptations and terrors?Nico: Yes, probably The closest thing to a system that is in here, inasmuch as it's taken roughly verbatim from Trophy Dark Sam: yeah, I do think it is notable that when I wrote this I had not played Trophy Dark, and Trophy Dark is the one where you definitely die,Nico: Right. Right. Sam: My intention was not that you would definitely die in this. I really want escape to be a big possibility at the end and so it's interesting that I went with Trophy Dark as, like, the obvious system.Yeah, I like these lists. This is just a lot of tone setting, basically, right? I don't have a lot to say about the details here. The first terror, a children's toy, damp in a gutter, is a reference to another song that makes me cry. The Rebecca Sugar song for Adventure Time, Everything Stays.But most of the rest of this is just, vibes. Here's some vibes. I don't know, I re read these lists and I was like, yeah, they're fine, great, next page. But I don't know, is there anything that stands out to you here?Nico: I mean, I think the most important thing about these lists, these kinds of things, you could maybe even sort of broaden this to like pick lists in general, is that, they kinda need to do two things, like they need to both give you a good solid list of things to pick from, if you're like, at a loss, or if you just are like, looking through it, and you're like, this is good, I want to use this.Or, the other purpose of using it is to have it sort of identify the space that you're playing in to the point where you can come up with your own thing that like, could just be the next entry on that list, right? For me at least, the whole point of like, buying a game is like, I want something that I like, can't essentially come up with by myself, you know? Because I like to be surprised, I like to be sort of challenged, I like to be inspired, and so I think a really good game is one that you sort of like, read it, and you're like, okay, like, there's great things to use in here that I'm excited to use. I also, after having read this, am coming up with my own ideas. Like, equally long, if not longer, list of things that like, fit into this perfectlySam: Bring the vibes of your small town. Nico: Yeah, exactly, that I could also use. It's like, and so it's like, it's kind of funny that like, for me at least, the mark of a good game is like oh yeah, you both want to use everything that's contained in it, and also you immediately get way more of your own ideas than you could ever use when you're running the game.Sam: Yeah. Next?Nico: Yes. Act 1. Sam: I love this little guy, I love Wes he's just kind of a pathetic little dude, and I feel sad for him.Nico: It's so funny, too, because this particular little guy, like, doesn't look very pathetic to me. Like, he looks like he's kind of doing okay. Sam: I definitely like drew, like all the art in the book I drew, and I did it by just drawing a lot of little heads, and then assigning them to people. Like, there were a couple where they were defining details about how the people looked, that I knew I needed to draw specifically. But in general, I just drew a bunch of heads and then doled them out, and like, this is the one that ended up on Wes. And, I think that the contrast between, like, in my mind, Wes is this skinny, lanky, little kid, you know, he's like early 20s, finally making it on his own, and he has no idea what the hell's going on with the world, and he always looked up to you, and he's finally getting out of town. And then he's, he's like overcompensating with the beard for the fact that he's like balding really early, and like, you know, he's, I don't know, like, I think the contrast is just fun.Nico: I love this whole life that you have for this, this little, this little guy, like, which is, I can't stress this enough, mostly not contained in the text,Sam: Yeah. yeah. I think a good NPC is like that. I think it's really hard to transcribe the characters we get in our heads.Nico: yeah, Sam: I really like the, the pun in the Town Crier, I mean like the Town Crier feels like a horror movie trope, like the old man who's gonna be like, You got don't go up to the cabin! But it's also, like I wrote that down first and then just started describing this Wes guy and then I was like I'm gonna just like make a pun out of this.This is something I did all the time while writing this, was I had, like, a little oracle going, actually, at a certain point, like, in the same way that you would in a solo game with an oracle. Like, if I was stuck for an idea, I would just roll on the oracle table and then, like, fill in a detail that was somehow related to the oracle. Nico: Mhm. Sam: That, that didn't happen here, but the idea of, Oh, I want a little bit more description for this guy, like, what should I do? I, like, pulled the word crier, and then was like, Oh, that's really interesting, like, when would this guy have cried? Like, oh, that's a great question, let's just, like, put that to the player. I'm always, like, a thing in screenwriting that is really hard to do, and that I'm always looking for is, like, really good, pithy character descriptions.Like, a friend of mine loves the one like, this is a woman who always orders fajitas at a Mexican restaurant because she loves the attention that she gets when the fajitas come out.She hates fajitas. And that description just says Nico: That's Sam: much. It's so good, right? And that one's even a little bit long for like a screenplay, but it'd be great for like an RPG thing, right?And something about like Here's a little bit about this guy. You remember when he was crying once, like a baby? What was the deal with that? Like, it's such a, like, defines everything else about him. Like, I, I, I'm really proud that.Nico: Yeah. No, that's, that's how I felt a little bit with I ran Vampire Cruise at Big Bad Con this year. And that game has some of, like, the best random NPC generating tables that I've, like, ever seen and played with.I remember one specifically, it was, like, I was like, rolling to generate a passenger, and I think it was like, the secrets part of the table, or something like that, and what I rolled was like, regrets that she never got to see the dinosaurs, and it's like, what does that mean?Like, like, Sam: She had a traumatic experience at a science museum as a kid, or maybe she's like 10 million years old, like, I don't...Nico: or, yeah, or she's just like a weirdo who like really loves dinosaurs? It's like, it's, Like, it really gives you sort of what you need to just sort of like, spin a world out of that specific detail. Sam: It's weird because I like completely agree with you, and you know, I was tooting my own horn about like this question about Wes sobbing and also like, in every single spread of this thing, I'm taking like two full pages to talk about like one or two NPCs, which is a terrible way to do the thing that we are talking about doing. Like,Nico: That is true, that is, it must be said,Sam: it makes it feel so much more like a short story, or maybe like a solo game, right? It's like, eh, spend two pages, like, getting to know this guy. Nico: who won't come up again, spoiler alert, Sam: Yeah, it feels like the right call for this thing where like, I mean it's like the text is forcing you to sit with the memory of this guy, it's like forcing you to come in and like spend more time than you would like to like back at home with these people.And there's some like location context built into all these descriptions too, and we like learn about the bakery thing here and like old stories and stuff. And like, already it's like, do we need that shit to run this game? Like, absolutely not, like, get, get out of the way, like, but also, I don't know, it feels right?And it's one of the things that makes all this weird and, you know, unrunnable.Nico: Which is of course the goal, we don't want people to run this. Yeah, no, that's something that I've thought about in my own games as well, is, is, and just sort of like, my life, I guess, is sort of like, what makes a place that place, you know, like, what makes a town a town, what makes a city a city, like, is it the people who live there? Is it the places? Like, again, kind of back to the sort of Ship of Theseus metaphor, it's like, if everyone you know leaves, and a lot of the stores turnover, like, is that still your hometown? Like... Does your relationship to it change?And so I, in defense of, of what we're doing here, it makes a lot of sense to spend so much time thinking about the people and the places that are here because that also basically is the game, right?Like, like, this is not a dungeon crawl, right? Like, this is not a hack and slash thing, It's not a dungeon crawl, like, Sam: it's a person crawl. Nico: Yeah, exactly, you're yeah, the point of you coming home is you're trying to find Sidra, the person who sent you this postcard, asking you to come home, and yeah, you're basically doing a point crawl, trying to find this person.And then there are various conditions that need to be in place for you to actually find them = And yeah, so it's like, using more words than a sort of your standard OSR like dungeon crawl or point crawl or whatever, or hex crawl, but like, it's kind of the same way where it's like, yeah, but like, that's the game, that's the adventure, like, Sam: yeah, yeah. Another detail here I'm really proud of is the like, offhand remark about how Wes and Sidra aren't talking for what are probably romantic reasons. Because the implication, there's like a strong implication that you, player, have some sort of romantic history with Sidra, like, whether it was ever consummated or not. And I love the just sort of, like, offhand, Wes and Sidra had a thing that didn't work out, because it both... leaves open your potential romantic relationship with Sidra, but also like complicates it and like darkens it from whatever sort of nostalgic quote unquote pure like memory of it you had.And I love that it just sort of brings a little complexity into what happens when you leave for 15 years. And then like what it feels like when you like, hear, oh yeah, your ex has been like, dating someone for a couple years. What were we talking about? Like just that, like sometimes like a bolt of like, information about like, someone from your past that like, you care a lot about will just hit you and you'll be like, oh, wait, what? And we're just I'm supposed to just like, take that and move on? Like, yeah, yeah, Nico: It's also a very small town, right, where it's a sort of like, oh yeah, passing reference to this because everyone knows this already, right? Like, this is old news as well as, like, in a small town, it's like, there's a small pool of people your age that you're interested in, so, not like you're gonna get with all of them inevitably, but it's like, yeah, there's a pretty high chance that you might.Last thing I did wanna say on this, do you wanna share what Wes's name was in the first draft of this that I received?Sam: What was it? I don't rememberNico: It was Glup Shitto. It was, it was one of the first comments I left! It was one of the first comments I left! I was like, Sam, you've gotta know this can't be the final thing, right?Sam: knew it couldn't be the final name. But there was something really funny to me about like the one person who like doesn't fit into town, like this little fucking Star Wars fanboy like schmuck kid is just Glup Shitto. And he's leaving town cuz like when you got that name, it doesn't fit anymore. You gotta get the fuck out of there.No wonder the town couldn't absorb him. His name was Glup Shitto.Nico: I want to say, like, I might have, like, made my first round of comments because I was, like, yeah, feeling the same way of, like, okay, obviously this is not the finalSam: yeah, yeah, I just didn't change it and you were likebruh Nico: and then, yeah, and then you, like, made changes based on the comments that I left, and I went back to it, and I'm like, it's still Glup Shitto. Like, it simply can't be this! It's not allowed! It's, it's not legal! Like, Sam: there ought to be a law.Nico: yeah.Sam: Alright, let's do Act 2 gosh.Yeah, so I made this little map. I like the little map. This is just my hometown, incidentally. Like, there's so much in this that is just, like, pulling details directly from my hometown. That oracle that I mentioned earlier, like, Northfield, Minnesota was, like, one of the things on the oracle. And you can see that here in like, the riverwalk and this little bridge over it was very Northfield. the Rube, which we're getting to next, these two bars, the kind of cowboy themed bar thing was a thing.Nico: Again, it's a very small town of just like, no sort of reasonable business person would have these specific Sam: yeah, but they, they exist here for some reason Nico: it almost feels like the kind of thing where it's like, like they can exist in a really small town, because it's sort of like, well they're the only things here, and they can exist in like New York City Sam: yeah. Nico: everything's in New York city, and like every kind of place is there, but like anywhere in between, people would just be like, I don't understand, and then it goes out of business,Sam: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, doctors always also a big portion of my childhood and my past always coming up in my stuff just because I spent so much time in hospitals as a kid. So the, inclusion of a doctor here is also very much something coming out of my hometown.I like the little mechanic here of, like, rolling and you, like, add one every, every time. I think that's a nice sort of way to handle trying to find Sidra. Nico: as like a classic Nico mechanic 'cause I simply haven't made and published that many things. But in my mind, my narcissistic fantasy, it is a classic me mechanic.Sam: I believe that came from you.Nico: I fucking love a table that like evolves over time.And it's not like I invented it, but like, I think my more standard thing is sort of like you have a table of like 12 things, and then you change which die you roll on it, you know, it's like, oh you can do like a d4 through d12 or whatever and that's like, I really like the ability to sort of go back to a table and, like, use it multiple times as opposed to, like, Okay, we have one table for this, we have a different table for that, you know.Sam: Additional persons. I really like this format for sort of generic NPCs, like, I'm not gonna tell you anything about this person, but I am gonna tell you what you think about them and your relationship to them.I think it's a really cool way of doing... Oh, do you just need to, like, bring someone in? You, like, met someone on the street or whatever? In a lot of other settings, you would just have, like, a random person, and it would be, like, the Vampire Cruise thing. If you give them an interesting detail in here, it'd be a cool thing.But I think, especially in, like, a small town format, the, like, here's your relationship to this person, because everyone knows everyone, and, every character that comes in, like, is gonna have to inspire some kind of feeling and past in you. I think this works really cool, reallyNico: It also feels very sort of true to life in terms of, at least, how I often GM things. Someone will be like, hey, can I, like, ask just, like, the next person I see on the street what they know about this thing? And I'm like, I mean, I fuckin I guess, like, it'll shock you to learn I don't have a name for that person, but, you know, I just have to, like, come up with, like, here's a weird voice, and like, a random thing they know, and like here's a name, Sam: This is a great way to turn that experience back on the player.Nico: exactly, yeah, there's this random person, you're like, alright, this is someone who owes you an apology, why is that?Like, Sam: yeah, Nico: I also wanna say that I feel like this was actually a relatively late addition to theSam: Yeah, it was. I always intended to write these, but it was like the last thing that I wrote.Nico: Yeah.Sam: Yeah.Nico: There was definitely some time when I sort of came back and looked at it, and all of a sudden there was this relatively large additional persons section in here, and I was like, huh, interesting.Sam: Yeah. I'm happy with how it came out. I think these are my best little guys. Nico: Oh yeah, Sam: I really like the unfinishedness of these little guys that you can project a little bit of yourself onto them while there's still some, like, major details there. This someone you seek vengeance upon looks a lot like a penis, and I don't know how I feel about that one, butNico: I was gonna say, I find that one fascinating as the ide

Thomas Manuel of the Indie RPG Newsletter and the Yes Indie'd podcast joins me to talk about Secondary Missions, a mechanic from Band of Blades by Off Guard Games.In Band of Blades, a grim military fantasy forged in the dark game, you and your party go off and do missions. Meanwhile, there's a whole other squad out there doing a whole other mission! What's up with them? This mechanic tells us. It's such a change in the mouthfeel of Band of Blades compare to other forged in the dark games.We get into how it supports the genre and themes of the game, all the tough choices it puts in front of players, and how mechanics like this one that couldn't exist in any other game are often our favorites.It's a classic Dice Exploder deep dive this week. Enjoy.Further reading:* Blades in the Dark* Malazan Book of the Fallen* Band of Brothers* Darkest Dungeon* The Watch* Dream Askew // Dream ApartSocials:Thomas on itch and Twitter.Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Transcript:Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and have its back as we head behind enemy lines. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my co host is Thomas Manuel. Oh, so exciting. Thomas is an Indian playwright, journalist, and game designer. He runs the Indie RPG Newsletter, for my money one of the best sources of IndyRPG news on the internet and an easy subscribe. Plus he's the current host of the excellent Yes Indeed podcast. He's also the designer of This Ship is No Mother, a card based take on the kind of Mothership genre that's very much worth your time. Thomas is great, And he brought on a mechanic from Band of Blades, a grim military fantasy forged in the dark game from Off Guard Games and Evil Hat. Specifically, Thomas brought secondary missions.In Band of Blades, while you and your party are off doing one mission, there's a whole other squad over there doing a whole other mission's worth of stuff. What's up with them? This mechanic tells us.Secondary missions, have a deceptively big impact on the mouthfeel of Band of Blades. We get into how it supports the genre and themes of the game, all the tough choices it puts in front of players, and how mechanics like this one, that couldn't exist in any other game, are often at least my favorites. It's a classic Dice Exploder this week, a deep dive at its very best. Here is Thomas Manuel with Secondary Missions.Thomas, thanks for being here.Thomas: Thank you for inviting me. I'm so excited to talk about Band of Blades.Sam: Hell yeah. What is Band Blades?Thomas: Band of Blades is a sort of dark fantasy military take on the forge in the dark framework. Sam: Yeah. A band of Blades kind of play on Band of Brothers is where the name is coming from. Right?Thomas: Yeah, I, I assume it is a play on that, but it is also different enough from that show that I don't think people should use it as a touchstone. The premise of the game is that you play The Legion, which is an army that has just lost the decisive battle for the fate of humanity.There is an undead horde that is an existential threat to humanity. And we fought that battle and we lost it. And now the legion is in retreat. And it ends up being a kind of a point crawl where you're retreating from the location of the battle to a fort where you hope you can hold up there and figure things out and, you know, other pockets of the legion might end up there as well and that could be the last stand.Sam: Yeah. So we, before we get into specifics of what mechanic you brought from this I just wanna say, first of all, this game has like six different mechanics in it that I would be excited to do episodes on. Like truly there's so much innovative design in this game.And also I. I, I think it's okay. Like, I think it's a great game that was like an okay experience for me. It was like a little dark, like parts of it didn't quite, quite fit with me. Like, my experience with Band of Blades was that I'd started running a campaign in January of 2020 and it was going okay. We were like, kind of getting a feel for it when you know uh, March happened of 2020 and we were all like, this might be a little crunchier and darker than like, we wanna play right now.And I, I never really felt like it was something I was super drawn back to because I prefer a little bit more at that like minimalism level and there's, there's just so much game in this game but I, I really love so much of, of the innovation that went into this game.Thomas: I, I also think that this game is extremely innovative, like has, really interesting design. I think Off Guard Games, uh, Stras and John kind of have done so many interesting things that I am constantly coming back to it and learning stuff about design and like getting inspired by it. I ran, I think this is probably 2021. I, I ran the whole campaign uh, sort of reskinned for Malazan: Book of the Fallen and kinda set in that world if that, which, you know, I'm a big fan of that series. It's also sort of military fantasy and we ran the whole campaign and I, I really enjoyed it. I think it is, yeah, it does have some crunch. It does have some darkness, but I think it kind of balances it out really well for me. And yeah. I'm, glad we picked this one because this is in the spirit of taking something small that is not particularly discussed in the text and then kind of exploding it like, this is a great choice. Sam: Yeah, totally. So let's get into it. So what mechanic specifically did you bring?Thomas: So, yeah, we are gonna talk about secondary missions which I think in the text might be, you know, a page at most. And the idea is that like Blades or other games, one of the phases of play is a mission phase where you are going to take your player character and go out and do a mission that is going to help the legion.And then you come back and there's a second mission. There's a second mission that is other members of the Legion people you aren't controlling, what they did while you were out. And that is resolved with one dice roll. It's basically just the engagement roll. It's the same procedure as the engagement roll for the primary mission. You're gonna roll that engagement role and then just based on the result of that, of that one role, you're going to narrate how the secondary mission went. And yeah, it often goes really badly.Sam: Yeah, I mean, you have to do really well for like many people to not die. And band of Blades like has troupe play, so you're constantly rotating between characters. So you're often like sending out some of your faves onto this secondary mission. And whether or not they fucking die is gonna be determined by a single die roll.It's, it's hardcore.Thomas: It is. It is. And you know, I think it brings in that... like a war game needs to have a certain level of gravitas. And I think that's what the secondary mission is, is bringing.Sam: Yeah, totally. So, yeah, why did you bring this? Like what is it specifically about this that really made you wanna bring it on the show to talk?Thomas: Okay. So I have not seen a mechanic like this in another game. That isn't to say that it doesn't exist, but my experience of the secondary mission was that we would go on this primary mission ,and because this is a forged in the dark game, like our characters are awesome. We are going to go up against impossible odds and we are going to somehow, pull success out of the jaws of victory. And we are going to come home battered and bruised, but triumphant.And then we come back. And then we'd roll the secondary mission and we'd be like, fuck. War is hell. War is hell, and we can't save everybody. And it was often really powerful moments that led to things like, people like talking about like mourning and like how, you know, a character just died. Like how do we, how do we respond to that? Like what are the traditions around that stuff? Like in the Legion, it led to some really great moments. Yeah.Sam: Yeah. Another thing that it does with that sort of, you go off and like kick ass, then you come back to camp, is it gives you that feeling of you can't be everywhere at once. Like the Legion is bigger than just your playgroup. Like what? Any four of you, they're out on a mission or whatever. That there's all of these other people, like both doing their best and succeeding at times away from you and coming back victorious, but also often failing without you, and you just have to... it, it makes you feel small in this way that I think is really appropriate to that war setting.Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I think through play is again, one of those other things that we could have been talking about today. And this is, yeah, it, it slots into troupe play like really well. And what it does and what true play really does is it makes this the story of the Legion.Sam: Yeah,Thomas: Like every individual character is, their own saga, living and dying. They have all the humanity that we associate, you know, that we want to inject into them and all of that stuff. But the story is the story of this Legion, which is, something greater than any individual.Sam: Yeah. You know, I was just in the Dice Exploder discord, hashtag Dice Exploder discord, this afternoon. We were having this like long conversation about the crew sheet in Blades and whether or not it's effective at what it's doing. Because a lot of people I think feel like the idea of the cruise sheet is really great and also people get attached to their own characters and don't want to... like you're focused on your character. You're not focused on the crew in the way that like Blades, I think, wants you to focus more on the crew at least according to my reading of the text.And I think Band of Blades really succeeds through troupe play explicitly and through mechanics like secondary missions at really doing the thing you're saying at, at foregrounding the story of the legion of the crew more than any individual in it.And that's really impressive.Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. I think that sort of gentle confusion about Blades as priorities is a part of the text. I think John Harper leaves the door open for troupe play but is also like, you know, people like to play their characters. So I'm gonna, I'm not gonna take a strong stance on that.But Band of Blades is like, there's a role called the Marshall, and they decide who goes on the mission, and they decide who's playing who.And I'm like, amazing.Sam: Well, it's, another thread from this conversation from this afternoon was like, a lot of people feeling like a lot of the mechanics on the Blades crew sheet are a bit unnecessary or just like not their favorite or a little bit more like paperwork like, as opposed to the mechanics on the playbooks. And band of Blades actually, like this is another mechanic from this game we could have spent a whole episode on like it's dividing up like the GM role in some ways and like all of this paperwork stuff among different roles at camp that all the players get to play like the Marshall, like you're saying. But somehow like bringing in even more crunch to that the, that crew role basically it, instead of feeling like, oh my God, I'm like drowning in the crunch, it, it really does pull you up into that Marshall level, that bird's eye view of the legion as a whole, as opposed to being down with your individual guy or, or whoever.Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, in terms of GM load, Band of Blades is doing something amazing with that restructuring that we're talking about. And in that sense, the secondary mission roll is also a part of that because what, what the secondary mission does, it takes the pressure off you as the GM to drive home a kind of misery in the primary mission.Like if you as the GM are like, I'm playing a war story. I need to bring these elements of tragedy into it, like the primary mission, players should and can succeed. And because the secondary mission and the design of the game is going to help you hit those notes and that is such a huge relief that the game allows you to simultaneously be a generous and a fan of the players while still still able to experience those themes, you know.Sam: yeah, yeah. Yeah. Another thing I like about it is how the choice of what mission is going to be the primary mission, what mission is going to be the secondary mission. And sometimes you have like a third mission that you just can't do because you don't have the people and you automatically fail it.And that choice of which of these are we gonna prioritize is a really interesting choice every time. I think a lot of that theme that we've been talking about of this being a game of is clearly a game about war and making almost like resource choices almost that like the kind of cold math you have to do in war with human life, I think it, is really highlighted every time you have to choose what mission is gonna be primary and what's gonna be secondary.Thomas: Yeah, I think there are a series of games, especially video games that have this trend of what you're actually doing is you're playing the world's worst HR manager. You know what I mean? Like, like Darkest Dungeon is a good example, right? Like, you are just sending these folks into a bad situation and then you're like, putting them in a, in a bar a church and saying, deal with your stress and come out and then you go back in.And there is a certain kind of inhumanity in that, that that cold calculating thing that you're doing. And I think Band of Blades for me specifically does a better job of that than those games. Like there is in some sense because it's a role playing game. Like you are never really treating anybody as a pawn, like you're feeling their feelings. And it is always like this hard choice to be like, Um, the most common result of the secondary mission roll is the four to five, right? Like that is, you know, it's very common to get one to three, but maybe six. And the critical result is the only result in which nothing bad happens. So, on the four to five, you are given this difficult choice of saying either fail the mission and all the troops return unharmed, or you succeed the mission, two squad members die and all the specialists take some harm. Which are wounds.And what is interesting is while so much of the game is very clear about who makes what call - Commander, you decide whether the Legion moves. Marshall, you decide who goes on the mission - the question of how the table decides this call is not explicit. The only way for us to decide, you know, it isn't the Marsh's decision, it's we all sit and we go like, oh my God, if we succeed, who is dying? And everyone has to kind of like have that thing of like, I don't, I, I don't know. And sometimes it's fine. Like it's a really important mission. You're like, we have to succeed. But sometimes you are like, nah, let's, let's fail this. Like we can eat the failure, but you know, we can't lose people.Sam: I will not have my wonderful bug man die. Like I'm too in love. Like... and no, that's, that's a great observation about Not having a specific person make this choice, unlike a lot of the rest of the game. It almost feels like you all have to get your hands bloody in this choice. Like, it's not letting anyone off the hook. You all have to put your stab into the murder victim's back, like,Thomas: Oh, that is so good. Yeah.Sam: It's, yeah, no one gets to sit this one out.Thomas: Yeah. And yeah, often you fail and then you just feel that failure. And that's, in some sense, that's easier. It's, it's simpler. It's simpler than the four to five, likeSam: If everyone is just sad, at least they're alive. But like sometimes, sometimes also the mission is like save a small town from being eaten by zombies and you're like I mean, they're probably gonna die when the zombies get here anyway. We'll save our two guys. Let's, let's move on. Let's move on. And it's, it's like, it's hard. It's hard choices.Thomas: Yeah, it is. It is. I think that is... a lot of this game is supposed to be hard choices, but I think there are various kinds of hard choices. There's the tactical choices, which is, you know, a lot of the crunch of the game is like, let's make cool tactical decisions about, you know, setting us up for success when we reach our, our destination, which is Skydagger Keep.But a lot of the, the decisions are also just emotional you know, just in terms of like what narrative we want and we've talked about like not letting people die. There's also this moment of your like, I think it's this character dies and I think that is appropriate. I think there's a moment in the Band of Blades actual play on the Actual Play channel where I think they fail a secondary roll or they get a four, five or whatever and they, two, two characters just had a fight in the, in the previous session, in, in the downtime phase or whatever, and they're like one of them died and the other person is going to have to live with the fact that the last thing that they interacted with this person was a fight. Sam: Yeah. Thomas: You know, and I'm like, awesome.Sam: We touched on this, but I really wanna highlight explicitly how this mechanic forces you into the position of doing the math with human life, but it does it without dehumanizing people. That the exact moment you just described is always the thing that you're thinking about as you make this decision that largely comes down to numbers.I, I also wanna say like, I think fundamentally the most interesting part of roleplaying games, oh, story games for me is characters making hard decisions. And not just this mechanic, but this game is absolutely riddled with hard decisions. You also were just saying that, but I, I just think it's so cool to see a mechanic that is so explicitly and reliably, that's the other thing, reliably putting a hard decision in front of people.Thomas: Yeah. You can play Band of Blades and you will have the experience that this game wants if you're willing to engage with the game on its terms and like treat these characters like as people and all this stuff, which most people playing this game will do.But that hard decision stuff, like, yeah, I think it's perfectly fine to flag that that can become grinding down. Like I know some people, Paul Beakley, I think on the Indie Game Reading Club has an article about Band of Blades. He describes how at the end of the campaign, everyone was kind of tired. And that was not my experience, but I, I get it. Like, I guess, you know, that is something that can happen both thematically and mechanically Sam: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. That's like in a lot of ways that exhaustion I think is part of what the game is about.Thomas: But I, I mean, I think it's still supposed to be fun.Sam: Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is. And we did a whole episode in season one on The Watch. Right? Which is also, I think a lot about not like, can you win the war. But what is the cost of war? How do you live with the cost of war? And, and this is another game that is even more explicit about that, I think, than The Watch is, which is already pretty explicit about it.Like, you, you're not winning. You lost, like, what, cost are you gonna pay?Thomas: Yeah, I think if you are making a war game, you have to be really conscious about, you know, what you're saying about war. And yeah, both of these games, I think The Watch is, kind of using war as, as metaphor and Band of Blades is again, sort of like, very consciously stripping the glory out of this.Like, this is not that game. Which Band of brothers to some extent does have, right? It's, it's a show that it know, you know, war is awful, but like these characters are, are noble and brave and righteous and all of that to some extent. And this game is like, if we focus on the fact that it's a retreat, we can tell an interesting and sometimes under explored facet of war stories.Sam: Yeah, I should state for the record, I've never actually seen Band of Brothers, so I, I, I cannot actually speak to it, but but the, the other thing I wanted to just touch on in all that is just how brutal this game can be and like, very clearly and, and intentionally. And this particular mechanic as we've kind of discussed, I think is especially about brutality. Like when you fail, just three people die. And like several more are like critically wounded. Like you could just wipe out and every person who dies like Thomas: half a squad. Sam: And like the morale is hard to keep up in this game. And you fail one secondary mission and you're just, the whole legion is in so much trouble.It's a hard game. There's a, but you know what? You know what rule we really should have done a whole episode on is the single sentence in Band of Blades "this is a game you can lose." Like it's, yeah, it's a lot.Thomas: Again, like why is that sentence there? Why is this game that you can lose when role playing games usually aren't? And I think, again, that all flows from the decision to make a game about war. And you touched upon this adjacent mechanic, which is morale, which we should clarify that. Like, anytime a member of the legion dies, the legion loses morale and, you lose enough morale, you lose the game.Sam: Yeah. Yeah.Thomas: And other things also, but like yeah. Worse situation. Yeah. The game's over. And yeah, one failure can demoralize the squad in a huge way. And also like if you lose three squad members, a, a squad is like five people. They've lost more than half your squad. All your specialists are, you know, who went on the mission are beaten up. Yeah, it is. It is awful. And so what usually happens is that people will look at the primary mission and say, okay, we are going on this, so we failed the resource here. The fact that we are awesome and we can do stuff, let's load out the secondary mission with the best, best, you know, assets we can give it like Quartermaster, can we send them with like extra supplies? Like, you know what, what do we have to like, increase the odds there? And, and I think that is also like a kind of fun and meaningful choice. Yeah.Sam: There's something really nice in that, about how this mechanic is sort of indirectly encouraging you to be empathetic to that secondary squad. It's like, don't you love them? Don't you like feel for what they're about to go through? Like you should care about them, you should give them the extra ammo.Yeah, Is there anything about this mechanic that you have trouble with or that bumps you?Thomas: It can, if your primary mission has gone badly, it can be a second punch in the face. Like, I think, I think that is that is a thing. But otherwise nothing specifically that I can, that I can think of that is like an issue I have with it or I will change the design or something. Sam: Yeah. Thomas: Yeah. Sam: Another thing, look, one of the first things you said on this episode was that you've never seen another mechanic like this one. And I think that's a testament to how specific to the setting and genre and story that Band of Blades is telling this mechanic is.And I always love it. I love it when I see mechanics like that because I literally just before this recording, moments before this recording, wrapped up a forged in the dark Pirates campaign with one of my home groups where we just weren't using an established setting. We just like have played a lot of Blades and we were like, eh, I'll make up some special abilities and go. And it worked totally fine and for a lot of ideas I can just do that.But it, it takes. Like the new systems, the new games that are really interesting to me are the games that have mechanics like this one that are so bespoke, so tailor made to what this game is doing. And I really love that. I really really respect mechanics like that.Thomas: Yeah, and it is again a testament to band Blades, good design, and why I want to talk about, 'cause I think it's completely like under-discussed. I think we should all be talking about it all the time, is the fact that all of this is so like, enmeshed together. Right? In some sense the secondary roll is necessitated because forged in the dark is such an empowering framework for players.Right. Like, how do I tell a war story with this? And you, and you started that question and then something like this is almost, almost required. I would, I wouldn't have thought of it, but it does, it does like something like this is needed once you decide to go with this framework. And I think, yeah, it is, It does feel like something bespoke and tailor made that has then through play testing kind of integrated into everything smoothly and perfectly.Sam: Yeah. So after you've made the secondary mission roll and you've kind of determined the results of it, there's then this moment that the book encourages of you to sit at the table and sort of flesh out the story of what happened on that secondary mission. Like, you know what the goal of the mission was and you know how many people got fucked up and or died on the mission.But there's a lot between point A and point B there. So it kind of sets you up to devise this short story together of what happened on this secondary mission.And I think it does a good job of giving you enough handholds of what was the beginning and what was the end of that story, to kind of flesh it out such that it doesn't really need a framework of doing that in between. And that in itself is like pretty impressive to me.Sometimes you'll be given a mechanic as you're playing a game, like the game will present you with a mechanic where it, it has a little bit of that, like now draw the rest of the owl feeling to it. Where, where it's asking you to, fill in the blanks on something that it has not set you up well enough to fill in the blanks on. And this moment of fleshing out what happened on the secondary mission in some ways feels like drawing the rest of the owl, but in a way where like I feel empowered to draw the rest of the owl. And that's, that's cool.Thomas: And you know, one reason is that as a GM, before the Commander makes the decision of which is the primary and secondary mission, you fleshed out both equally, right? Like you have as much information on one than the other. So you're starting off in a good place, you're not taking it lightly.And then, yeah, when we get to the result, like there is this question like immediately that comes to mind of like, how did this happen? Like, you know we chose that as a secondary mission 'cause maybe we thought it was safer. And you know, we have to now, now sort of at the table discuss and figure it out because also we might be in the next primary mission playing the people who went on this mission, right?Like, we want to, we want to reflect the fact that, you know, I just broke my shoulder like last time and I'm coming like half patched up into this one. Stuff like that, like, yeah.Sam: Maybe we encountered like a new type of zombie for the first time. And so Thomas: Mm. Sam: that specialist is the only one who's seen that type of zombie before and that's gonna come up next time. They can be the person who's like Uhoh on the next mission and, and do that foreshadowing, but all that, all that.And they can also be like the person telling the horrible war story, like around the campfire, like the ghost story almost of what happened. That can be in itself, a cool downtime scene.Thomas: Yeah, I think that is actually a thing that comes up regularly often where you want to contextualize what happened on a mission to the other characters, not necessarily the players. So you wanna see it through one character's eye, like what they experienced and stuff like that. 'cause if you're going to limp home limp back to camp, you know, half your squad gone, people know it went horribly wrong. And you know, there is like, there is just this sense of like, you know, at some point we need to know why. And often it's at like the Commander Marshall level where, you know, you might role play like having a character debrief the senior officers going like, this is, this is what happened. And the senior officers had to sit around going, Yeah, it's our fault, you know, like, we made that call and we have to settle with it. Yeah.Sam: Yeah. Or like maybe you decide that one person who came back alive really was at fault and you hold a disciplinary meeting for them. Right? Like Thomas: Oh, wow. Yeah. Sam: Um, a specialist who comes back injured and carrying tons of guilt, like, yikes, I, let's do it.There's another line at the end of the procedure here that is, if any squad members died, ask someone what they remember most about one of them, which is really just like sticking a finger in the wound. Right. It, it, it's making sure if it wasn't clear enough already, like you are supposed to feel these deaths.Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It is again, just and, and if people are sort of hearing this and going, oh, this is a bit, this is a bit much like I cannot overstate how much the primary missions can be just a joy, like a complete, like you can, you can be in this dark fantasy world of zombies. And you know, the humanity has lost the war.But like when you start a primary mission, like when I was playing it very often my players would absolutely flub the engagement roll. And they would start in like a desperate position and I'd really kind of revel in like, how screwed they were. And then they would just go, okay, flashback, this was the plan all along, this is the diversion. I'd be like, shut the.Sam: Flashback this, resist that. Yeah. I've got some explosives in my back pocket. It's all fine. There's, you, you say there's a broken themselves, one of the head zombies coming in to kill us? Like that's fine. We'll just collapse a church on their head. It'll be fine.Um, Thomas: We prepared for this all along.Sam: Yeah. Yeah. It's cool to have both of those dualities in the game, like to have the wild successes. 'cause that also feels like a part of war is like sometimes you do get those miraculous victories too.Thomas: Yeah, I will say that, and this is something that I'm still unpacking, but it can't be overstated how much culturally we have this fantasy, especially for young men of like the greatest destiny being that you gave your life on the battlefield, right? Like that you took a bullet for your comrade.Like that is such a powerful you know, cultural feeling, I think. So And it is hard to sort of have that feeling in games that don't, at the end of it, make you go, okay, yeah, I think we might have glorified war there.Sam: Yeah.Thomas: and it is this game this game lets you do that.So I am, I am going to unrelentingly recommend this to folks even though it can be dark. Like I think you have control of that dial to a huge extent. And you can You can make sure that this is a fun and pleasurable experience.Sam: All right. What mechanic from Band of Blades should I do an episode about next?Thomas: I mean, I think the immediate one that comes to mind is the idea of roles. That the one thing that players have continuity on is that they're either the Commander or the Marshal or the Quartermaster or optionally the spy or, and the Lorekeeper, I think.And yeah, they just, they just divide the GM role in a nice way. Primarily because like, those are now player responsibilities, right? It's the Marshal's responsibility to name every member in the squad as in when they need a name. It's not the GM's job, you know. And that you know, you might think that a small thing, but it's, it's a big thing.So I, I think that's an obvious other thing to kind of discuss all the ways in which Band of Blades gently and, sophisticatedly kind of divides that, GM experience.Sam: Yeah. It both distributes all the paperwork and bookkeeping that the GM or someone would have to be doing among several people so that no one person is fully responsible, and by doing so, it puts more hard choices into the hands of each player.Thomas: Yeah, and it also facilitates their mutual cooperation, right? Like when, when you have a sense of like, whose final call this is, like that doesn't mean you're not gonna discuss it. You're gonna discuss it and then someone has final call and you're going to respect that. And that does a lot for having straightforward and fluid like conversations.Sam: Yeah. Well maybe I'll have you back in a year or two uh, to do that one. Um, But uh, this was excellent. This was great. Thanks for for being here and talking about secondary missions with me.Thomas: Thanks so much. I am thinking about Band of Blades like all the time, you've just given me an opportunity to like talk about it, but if you had it, it'd just be me in my head thinking about it.Sam: Thanks again to Thomas for being here. You can find him on socials at chaibypost, C H A I B Y P O S T, but in my opinion, you're better off just subscribing to the Indie RPG Newsletter and the Yes Indie'd podcast. Links for all that in the show notes. As always, you can find me on socials at sdunnewold, bluesky, and itch preferred, and there's a Dice Exploder Discord! Come on by, talk about the show, and if you've backed the Kickstarter, claim your fancy pants roll. Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray.Thanks, as always, to you for listening. See ya next time. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit diceexploder.substack.com

“Growing up, there was an idea that some people just were not going to serve in public office,” says Sam Jean, who returns to resume the discussion about the results of the US midterm elections. This week, he and Michael discuss the “celebrification” of American politics. It's evident in candidates like former football player and recent Republican candidate for the state of Georgia, Herschel Walker, and former news anchor Kari Lake who recently ran on the Republican ticket for Governor of Arizona. Taking leaves out of Donald Trump's playbook, these candidates trade charisma for competency. This is only successful, Sam and Michael point out, because Republican voters like candidates who behave in a mean, mocking manner toward the Democratic party. This voter base sees themselves as victims under the thumb of liberal policy and conspiratorial liberal media. So, they prioritize the satisfaction they feel in seeing liberals “get owned” over sound policy and practices. They present Florida governor Ron DeSantis as another example of this, a figure whom, Sam points out, has never actually had to prove his mettle. Also part of the discussion is the state of Louisiana which is the only state to vote to maintain slavery and involuntary servitude as a means of punishing criminals. This brings up issues of privatized prisons and for-profit incarceration. Michael's closing statement analyzes the new lines along which voters are divided. Quotes “The problem that Republicans ran into is when people are accustomed to having a right, and having that right taken away in the way that it was taken away, the real life ramifications don't play out well.” (4:43-5:05 | Sam) “When we were growing up, there was an idea that some people just were not going to serve in public office. ‘Oh, this guy can't run for public office, because he's not smart enough, or this guy can't run for public office because he's got too many scandals.” (19:00-19:21 | Sam) “There's a significant portion of the Republican base, who feel that conservatives are victims. That conservatives are being victimized by this wild, lawless, liberal society, and its agents in the media. And so they say that they're victims. Kari Lake speaks to that.” (22:14-22:39 | Sam) “All he's doing is smacking liberals around, they need a good smacking. And Republican voters love that. My thing about Ron DeSantis, however, is you don't know a candidate until the candidate has to deal with an adverse situation, something they're not prepared for, some crisis. How does the candidate deal with that? How does he or she handle that? And I have not seen Ron DeSantis be put in a position to do that.” (32:26-32:57 | Sam) “As we know, they call it the prison industrial complex because private prisons were being fabricated or created, in order to incarcerate more people in order to go to the nearest bidder as far as to make goods.” (38:13-38:29 | Michael) “In short, the people have spoken and Americans prefer a divided government. However, the division seems to transition not just from left or the right. It's becoming literally more black and white, female versus male, and those who have a higher college education versus those who reach a certain level in education.” (49:04-49:25 | Michael) Links cuckoo4politics.com https://www.instagram.com/cuckoo_4_politics/ https://www.facebook.com/Cuckoo-4-Politics-104093938102793 Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Subscribe/Rate/Review to Up On Game Presents on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts! WATCH FULL EPISODES ON THE UP ON GAME NETWORK YOUTUBE CHANNEL JUST SEARCH UP ON GAME NETWORK “In my opinion, there's no such thing as failure. Everything is a blessing. And everything is a learning experience. And if you look at everything in that lens, then whatever blessing and lesson that you can take from that experience, you can utilize it as additional fuel in order to move in the correct path.” - Topeka K. Sam Welcome to Stay a While with Tommi Vincent! Imposter syndrome. Anxiety. Fear of growth. We have all faced opposition, within ourselves, at some point in our lives. Second-guessing yourself is the hallmark of an identity crisis. So how do you overcome self-doubt, and breakthrough to putting it all on the line to bet on yourself? Today's guest, Topeka K. Sam, takes her seat at the table to help us to tap into the queen within all of us. Topeka K. Sam is the Founder and Executive Director of The Ladies of Hope Ministries– The LOHM – whose mission is to help disenfranchised and marginalized women and girls transition back into society through resources and access to high-quality education, entrepreneurship, spiritual empowerment, advocacy and housing. She is also the co-founder of Hope House NYC - a safe housing space for women and girls. Topeka serves on the board of directors for Grassroots Leadership and is now the first formerly incarcerated person on the board of The Marshall Project.  She is a Beyond the Bars 2015 Fellow and a 2016 Justice-In-Education Scholar both from Columbia University, a 2017 Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow working on Probation and Parole Accountability, a 2018 Unlocked Futures Inaugural Cohort Member, 2018 Opportunity Agenda Communications Institute Fellow, Director of #Dignity Campaign for #cut50, Host of “The Topeka K. Sam Show” on SiriusXM UrbanView Channel 126 Sundays 9am est., and has recently signed a development deal as Executive Producer for a scripted and unscripted series inspired by her fight to change the many problems that plague female incarceration with 44 Blue Productions. Topeka has been featured in Vogue, SalonTV, Vice, New York Times. She has been featured in Glamour Magazine and Black Enterprise for being “The Black Woman behind the video that led to the Trump Clemency of Alice Johnson.” She has spoken at the 2018 United States of the Woman Conference, 2018 Women in the World Conference, 2018 White House Prison Reform Summit and is a TedxMidAtlantic Superheros Presenter. She has worked and continues to work selflessly and relentlessly in her fight for the dignity, decriminalization, and decarceration of women and girls. Topeka hasaccomplished this and more since her release from Federal Prison in May 2015. In this episode we cover [00:01 - 04:15] Serving Up Self Care and Mental Wellness[04:16 - 12:08] Getting to Know Topeka K. Sam[12:09 - 25:31] Step Out of Fear and Reject World Worthiness[25:32 - 42:14] Break Away from the Prison of Our Own Minds[42:15 - 49:15] Closing Segment   Key Quotes “When we're little girls who haven't gone through that healing process, we become grown women who are still living in that. And it just hurts, like it breaks my heart.” - Topeka K. Sam “There are times that we just don't know, because we're not exposed. But I also know because we are creatures of God, the Divine, the Creator, that there is something inevitable in our spirit that will tell us what feels good and what does not feel good, what feels right and what feels wrong. And that's when you smoke about fear. It's to decide whether or not you want to continually live in that mess.” - Topeka K. Sam “But if you know leaving with nothing will be better than staying with whatever you have been, that is your strength and you use your point, those obstacles as stepping stones and not barriers.”- Topeka K. Sam  Connect with Topeka K. SamInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/topekaksam Website: https://thelohm.org/  Connect with Me! You can reach Tommi on Instagram @cheftommivVisit https://vincentcountry.com and get connected with us on Vincent Country's Instagram @vincentcountry  Music By: Stichiz - Big T. Music /Roj&TwinkiE LEAVE A REVIEW + and SHARE this episode with someone who wants food for the soul, and the key ingredients to embracing their true, authentic self. Listen to previous episodes on the iHeartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“This is why I'm becoming more and more cynical every day. Because none of it is making any sense to me,” says Sam Jean, Michael's friend, and frequent guest, about the constant hypocrisy and double standards practiced in the world today, by Republicans in particular. Republicans only need one example to paint all Democrats with the same brush, but the same rules never apply to them. Republican sex offenders in high political positions are the quickest to call other people sexual predators or dangerous to children. He discusses the double standards held by which white people and people of color are held to—including an example of Black families fleeing Ukraine only to be told to turn back. Sam also considers that Trump supporters—separate from regular Republicans—meet the criteria for a cult. One major problem, he says, is many people only utilize one news source, particularly ones that are a feedback loop. Join Michael and Sam to discuss why Sam was right about Dr. Oz, who makes Sarah Palin look like a Rhodes scholar, and the story behind the podcast's name. Quotes • “I'm not sure if someone other than Will Smith had slapped someone, that they would have continuously played the slap over and over again.”(5:22-5:33 | Sam) • “There's also a lack of critical thinking going on. People are being told this is what's happening, and they don't even do the basics of trying to understand what it is they are claiming is happening.”(29:09-29:22 | Sam) • “These people have been living under their version of the truth for so long that when the actual truth is revealed to them, they're shocked.(30:11-30:20 | Sam) • “It is now illegal for a pregnant woman to have an abortion, even in instances of rape in certain states. However, that same woman can easily purchase an assault rifle, carry a concealed pistol and pick her child up from a public school.”(55:17-55:33 | Michael) • “The word ‘woke,' most of the people who use it don't even know where it came from… you don't want to have a discussion about my position. That's all.” (13:42-14:29| Sam) Links cuckoo4politics.com https://www.instagram.com/cuckoo_4_politics/ https://www.facebook.com/Cuckoo-4-Politics-104093938102793 Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

On this episode of Cuckoos 4 Politics, Sam Jean returns for the second half of the conversation about the many issues currently going on in the state of Florida. Conservative canvassers are going around to elderly and Hispanic communities, changing their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. This leads to further discussion about how Republicans project their machinations onto Democrats as part of a strategy, including assuming that any election loss is a result of voter fraud, or of flooding the polls with Democrat-voting undocumented immigrants. Another element of Republican strategy is one of demoralization, sending a message that there are more of ‘us' than ‘them,' so don't bother voting against us. This is in lieu of any concrete plans or proposals. When one boogeyman doesn't work, like Black Lives Matter, Republicans put the blame on ANTIFA. Sam also blames the media for its complicity in perpetuating the message. Listen to the two friends discuss why Trump is still a likely Republican nominee despite being twice impeached, and further instances of hypocrisy on the part of Republicans. Quotes • “The strategy is, if they're accusing you of doing something, they're doing it.” (7:13-7:18 | Sam) • “It's not designed to be true, it is just designed to be part of a message that is designed to keep them in power perpetually.” (13:02-13:10 | Sam) • “There isn't any symmetry in how the media treats messaging from Republicans, which become standard media talking points, and messaging from Democrats, which is always presented as ‘Democrats say.'”(14:44-15:02 | Sam) • “Overall, Florida has bigger problems that will have more repercussions than this sole politician.” (29:11-29:17 | Michael) Links cuckoo4politics.com https://www.instagram.com/cuckoo_4_politics/ https://www.facebook.com/Cuckoo-4-Politics-104093938102793 Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Sam Koon is a guitarist, songwriter & powerhouse vocalist. Originally from Central Florida with roots also in Georgia, Sam originally performed out of Nashville as the lead singer for touring act & country crossover artist, Jessta James ...but it wasn't until just a few years ago Sam decided to release his own original music. As a songwriter, Sam received his first major label cut with Sony/RCA recording artist Andrew Jannakos' single “Somebody Loves You” which debuted as the #1 trending TikTok sound in May 2021. Sam also has 2 recent cuts with “Running Out of Roses” & “Somebody's Gotta Do It” landing on Big Yellow Dog's Brandon Davis' debut album “Hearts Don't Rust”. “I'm so excited to continue to release original music”, says Sam, “I have several songs I've written in the past few years & I can't wait to continue to release more. As an independent artist, I'm thankful for some of the opportunities that have come my way & look forward to sharing more.” Sam continues to grow his audience and plans on releasing several songs this year in hope of a full-length project So strap up your seatbelts and let's take a ride to Georgia on this episode of the dHarmic Evolution podcast. As a Preview: In this episode, we speak to rock turned country music rising star Sam Koon. We explore everything about Sam from his time as rock lead singer for Jessta James, his personal writing process detailing from song conception to completion and how he got into co-writing. Also, we touched on Sam's experience in vocal training, its importance for other artists and his vocal influences. Finally, we had  a quick story of James doing a gig with his son Trevor, all here on the dHarmic Evolution podcast. More about Sam Koon Find out more about Sam and hear his music through different platforms. All the links are provided below! Check out his website, social media pages and music platforms that you can visit. Quotes: “I think I've always written ever since I picked up the guitar when I was fifteen”-Sam “It was a pleasant transition to country music for me”-Sam “Don't get me wrong, coming from rock, I like having some loud guitars but the dynamic of the song, I like those choruses because they really can soar”-Sam “The song seems to always have a mind of its own”-James “‘Cos a lot of time you can get boxed in your head, and can't break through to the second verse”-Sam “No matter what you do and how bad you think it is or how bad you think you are, like it's really gonna be alright. It happens to the best of us; we're all human. We should love each other and support each other.”-Sam “It's worth it to me, even losing money because I like to go out there ‘cos of the experience and the potential that one day something could happen”-Sam “When I get an idea, I like to start at the last line of the chorus that's the tag”-Sam “There are so many techniques, ideas, tricks and hacks of songwriting… it's one of the most freeing and creative things you can ever do”- James  Time Stamps: 00:56 Introducing the country star, Sam Koon 04:10  How Sam got to join Jessta James 06:02 How Sam almost got arrested 06:37 How Sam discovered his song-writing ability 06:56 Sam's short stint in Rock n Roll 08:28 Behind Sam's debut country song, “If Heaven has a backdoor” 09:56 How Sam got into co-writing 11:57 Best of us starts playing 15:22 How Sam created Best of us 18:23 Which performance does Sam prefer: Solo or Band? 19:09 How Sam got connected to writer's round 21:50 Sam's experience opening for big acts with a band 23:48 Sam's vocal training 24:43 James' self-consciousness during vocal training 26:12 Sam's writing process 29:15 Every other weekend from Sam Koon starts playing 33:06 Sam's vocal influences 35:45 How vocal coaching was important for Sam 37:14 What is Sam's favorite thing to do at chill time 37:58 What does the future look like for Sam 39:48 Two Dads hitting it off together 41:12 What is Sam's band support structure 42:08 What is Sam's favorite band set up, four-piece or five-piece? 43:06 Sam's closing statement 44:26 Listen to Ride On from James Kevin O'Connor   Spotify Playlist:   Make sure you're not missing out on all our “Rising dHarmic Stars Spotify Playlists”. We already have four (4) playlists where you can find over a hundred songs from our very own dHarmic Evolution alumni .Don't forget to share them with your family and friends as well and let the world support these amazing indie artists! Check out the links here:   dHarmic Rising Stars: Aquila   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4loDaYF0OuWRjZeMXvEjK4   dHarmic Rising Stars: Orion   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5CnL9tl0xbU4oDh6jtJBZx   dHarmic Rising Stars: Lyra   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ov0OqNMJmPhHrxZjsXthS   dHarmic Rising Stars: Scorpius   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5oQ4Sc4LAJSexsDgDcixt8   dHarmic Evolution links:   Stay up-to-date with our new releases! You just simply need to go to dharmicevolution.com and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform – there are a lot to choose from! Let me know what you think as well by leaving comments or reviews! And if you're digging this show, please share it with somebody either on social media or just forward it to a friend and let them join the growing community of dHarmic Evolution!   Hey, do you know someone who is suffering from anxiety and depression? Please help them out by suggesting the book “7 Steps to Mental Freedom.” It will be a great read for them. You can easily find it as well on the main page of the website or you can just send them to https://tinyurl.com/yc4wuwbf   Keep yourself updated with what's going on with dHarmic evolution; check out our Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dharmicevolution and, if you are an artist, an author, or a keynote speaker, who is trying to find a safe place to post your content to, you can check out our own Facebook community page and let the world support you! Check out the link here: dHarmic Evolution Community.    Special Links and Mentions   Jessta James  If Heaven has a backdoor by Sam Koon Co-writing Best of Us Alex Smith Jeffrey Steel Writer's Rounds  Cadillac3 Dave Matthews Steven Tyler Every other Weekend by Sam Koon Ride On by James Kevin O'Connor   Connect with Sam Koon   Website   Facebook   Instagram

Today, I'll be speaking with Samantha Kellgren about how to have a fantastic day outdoors around one of the most admired spots in the United States – Asheville, North Carolina. Join Sam and me as we bike, hike, kayak, and tube all around this part of North Carolina known for delicious beer, stunning nature, and attracting visitors far and wide. About Samantha Kellgren Sam is a wife, mom, business owner, and marathoner. She runs her own health and mindset coaching business called Simply Well Coaching, which helps Type-A women change their life by changing their minds. Learn more about Sam's coaching business at Simply Well Coaching or check out her Ambitious Women: Less Hustle More Flow Facebook group.   What We Cover in this Episode What makes Asheville, NC, worth visiting. The best and worst time of year to visit Asheville, NC. A beautiful outdoorsy lodge deemed the best spot to stay in Asheville. What the Asheville Airbnb scene looks like. A fantastic breakfast destination, known for fresh coffee, homemade donuts, and large servings. The best spot in the area for mountain biking. The most gorgeous waterfall trails in the area. The superior taco spot in Asheville, NC. Some of the most fun shops in Asheville, NC, including one that sells plants, coffee, and used books! Kayaking and tubing options throughout town, and why those are the best ways to arrive at New Belgium Brewery. Which of the many breweries in western North Carolina should not be missed. Where to get excellent burgers and views for dinner. The sense of community in Asheville and why it's calling to city folk from all around. Two ice cream destinations that should be on your itinerary. The two most picturesque spots in town. An overrated brewery, restaurant, and hike, and recommended alternative destinations.   Quotables “We [were] ready for something different. We were ready for mountains. We say we were nature starved. And anytime you say that in Chicago, people will mention like one place, you can go like out in the suburbs. It's like, no, no, we want like real nature that is accessible. We wanted to be able to get out for a hike whenever we wanted, not to have a drive to do it and make it a big thing.” Sam “I mean, once you come here, we've gone on so many, you know, either like a camping trip or something, or we're just out for a drive, and we're driving back, and I'm like, this would be our vacation. This is where we would vacation. We would vacation in this area, and we get to… every day like I'm so… I feel so lucky to live here.” Sam “Well, if you like beer, it is definitely a beer city. I don't remember the like, you know, per capita breweries, but I think there's over 50 breweries at least at this point. So… you're always within walking distance. But it's really a small town, but still a city.” Sam “What does my husband say?… He says it's the most you will see of drinking in moderation. It's like, everyone's drinking, but you don't witness a lot of like insanity. People are out at breweries, but it's a real family-oriented event, you know, to like hang out at the brewery or out of the park.” Sam “But I think what a big draw is, is that you can be staying downtown and be hiking in under 20 minutes. And if you want to go real far up the Blue Ridge, you can feel like you're in a different state, and that's 45 minutes away. The accessibility of everything, I think, is really a huge draw for here.” Sam “There's a lot of good food. I think that when, when we first moved, people were like, oh, you're gonna miss the, you know, Chicago food and drink, like, oh my God, it's known for it! And I don't miss it.” Sam “New Belgium is the place to be, I'd say for that post kayak kind of beer and entertainment. … I mean, it's amazing there. They've got this huge lawn. They just reopened it. They were the first to close during COVID, but they've just now reopened it, which to me signifies, like, okay, things are okay. Cause it is where you go to meet up with people, hang out on the lawn. “ Sam “It's community. I mean, all of these, any place by the river, any of these breweries, ends up just being like a fun place to hang out and meet people.” Sam “And I laugh when I say, oh, it's all drinking in moderation because my husband and I are back home by eight, cause we have a toddler. So I'm like, what do we know? Maybe it does get like debaucherous after eight pm. But it's not what the town's known for. It is perfectly fine and acceptable; we had our two-year-old's birthday party at Asheville Brewing. Like that's, that's kind of the vibe here. It's very family-friendly. It is very much open to just meeting and connecting.” Sam “I feel like it's this little pocket. It's not too overrun. There's, like you said, there's alternatives for everything. There's the New Belgium and the Sierra Nevada, which are bigger names, or there's these smaller breweries that you would not have heard of unless you have someone that lives here, that you would not seek out on its own. There's plenty to do, a mix of, do you want to walk around downtown or River Arts District, or do you want to go out and not see anyone and go on a hike? So it's going to be whatever you want to make your trip. You can make it totally downtown and people-friendly, or you can be like, I want a peace out and be by myself and go kayaking where I'm not going to see anyone, and you can do both of those trips.” Sam   Links to Places Mentioned in this Episode Where the Locals Stay: Bent Creek Lodge Airbnbs: Sam's Asheville Airbnb The Asheville Airbnb Barrett and I stayed in years ago with Pinball Machines Outdoor Destinations Mentioned in this Episode's “Perfect Day”: Blue Ridge Parkway DuPont State Recreational Forest Ridgeline Trail Hooker Falls Triple Falls Trail High Falls Trail River Arts District Kayaking or Tubing on the French Broad River with French Broad Outfitters Catawba Falls Trail Skinny Dip Falls Trail Get the best deals on outdoor adventure tours in the Asheville area on Viator.com Restaurants & Breweries Mentioned in this Episode: Ivory Road Cafe & Kitchen Taco Billy New Belgium Brewing Wedge Brewing Sierra Nevada Brewery Burial Beer Green Man Brewery Wicked Weed Brewing Hi-Wire Brewing The Funkatorium Smoky Park Supper Club Sunshine Sammies Ultimate Ice Cream Company Shops Mentioned in this Episode: Whist Flora Instagram Photo Spots Mentioned in this Episode: The Biltmore The Omni Grove Park Inn Thanks for Listening! We love our listeners! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a comment below and let me know about your favorite part! If you've been enjoying the show, please also consider leaving me a review in Apple Podcasts. It's super easy; click here and go to “ratings and reviews.” I read and appreciate every single one! Each review helps new listeners find the podcast. Thank you!! Follow Cinders Travels on Facebook or Locals Knows Best Podcast on Instagram for Locals Know Best updates. 

Sam Heath and I worked together at McKinsey many many years ago. He is now responsible for marketing Tim Horton's in Canada (where it is by far the largest quick service restaurant chain), and Timmie's fledging business of selling its product in grocery stores. Last year, out of nowhere, Sam's heart stopped and he “died”. We explore how that event affected him and his overall career in this episode. Next week we dive into Tim Horton's - both the stores and the CPG products - and how he is growing the two inter-related businesses. You can also listen to these interviews in your podcast player of choice: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. Private Feed (for premium episodes).Sponsor MessageGet paid for your feedback, join Wynter's research panelWant to give back to the community while having a low-key side hustle to fund your habit? Provide feedback on product messaging for industry-leading B2B companies, be compensated every time you do it ($15-$50 per survey). Takes ~10-15 min to take one survey, low-key time commitment.Transcript:Edward: My guest today is Sam Heath, head of retail for Restaurant Brands International. That's the CPG group for Tim Hortons. Today, we cover Sam's path to overseeing the restaurant chains, the entire CPG business—Brown, McKinsey, OLG, Burger King, and Tim Hortons. I worked with Sam when we were both at McKinsey Canada. I'm excited to chat with him today. Sam, in 2015, you were the Senior Director of Innovation for Burger King, but then you left that to run all of marketing for Tim Hortons Canada. You've never had a marketing title before. How exactly did you get that role? How did you jump from running innovation to running marketing? Sam: At the time, Burger King was a little bit crazy in a way that I describe match my type of crazy. They took people that had done well in whatever roles that they'd had and gave them more stuff to go do. I'd look at marketing. I've done analytics. I've done other things like that, but I'd never done the actual direct-to-consumer go get impressions, sell the product, sell the brand marketing. It was a really pretty big jump. It was taken by the people I work for on faith that I could do a good job at it. Edward:At that time, Burger King owned Tim Hortons. It was one organization.Sam: When I joined, it was just Burger King, but when they moved me up, it was about a year after the merger had happened. Edward: You had delivered for them around innovation. They said, hey, we trust you to run innovations. Now, we're going to trust you to run marketing. Sam: For the most iconic brand in all of Canada, yes. Go from this team of six people that are sampling hamburgers in the test kitchen. Why don't you take over this team of 70 with a $300 million marketing budget up in Canada?Edward: Why did they think you were capable of doing that? I know you're capable of doing that, but why did they think you were capable of pulling that off? That seems like a big risk. Sam: It is a big risk, but it was taken by people who had taken risks like that at Burger King and seen them paid off. They also were willing to replace me if it didn't look like it was working.Edward: You said they took risks like that before with you, or are they just risk-takers in general?Sam: Just risk-taking in general. It was very much the culture of the organization. This was a bunch of people who looked at Burger King and said, this is a good brand—it's just clearly not doing well back in 2011—bought it and said, we need to change everything to turn this around. They went from a 300-person organization in 2011 when they acquired Burger King, I think about 20 of those people were left when I had joined 2½ years later.Edward: When that opportunity came up, did you put yourself forward for it, or did they come to you and say, hey, we have these gaps. Sam, can you step into it?Sam: It was very much the second. They said, we have this gap. The semi-annual upside is what's happening. I got invited there under the pretense of making a presentation on something else. When I met with the President, Tim Horton, he said, congratulations, we've got a new role for you. It was a jump of a couple of levels, at least, and an order of magnitude more responsibility.Edward: What do you think when you do that? Did you think you had the marketing skills to do this? Did you think you're going to figure it out as you go along? What was going through your mind?Sam: I've always been interested with everything that's going on around me. It's not like I was ignoring the media advice and the creative that was happening while I was designing hamburgers or working on pricing. I just liked to see how things plug together and organize, and I trusted myself to learn the pieces that I didn't know. Also, as you get more senior, you trust yourself not to need all the details and build a team that's capable of filling in for your own gaps. Edward: What skills did you think you were missing going in? What did you think that, hey, these are the things I need to figure out fast if I'm going to be successful on this job?Sam: Honestly, all the pieces that people traditionally think about as marketing—creative review, creative design, how do you translate what the brand stands for into what you're actually saying in the advertising, going from overall marketing strategy down to campaign, sliding down to briefs, down to approvals of the creative that's going out on television, digital, and other places.Edward: Now you think you know what you don't know. How do you go about getting those skills? What did you actually do to be ready?Sam: The previous CMO did a great job of setting me up for that. I had his team to rely on. Clearly, Tim Hortons was a brand that had had a positive store sale count for over 20 years. They had a team that knew how to do this. Just being gentle and being careful. Just being given a job doesn't mean you need to change anything. Often, you're a caretaker for what came before. It's a mistake marketers make to say that, well, I'm here now. I need to change everything. Rule number one should be first, do no harm.Edward: It's interesting. Oftentimes, when things are going well, that's not when they replace the head of marketing. Here's a place where they replaced the head of marketing. They brought you in but things were already going really well. It feels like that's a time when you hire someone who is a caretaker marketer, but you're in a place where they brought in somebody who wasn't even a marketer at all. That almost feels like they want to shake things up, but in this case, they didn't want that. Sam: There was, again, that culture piece from Burger King of risk-takers, people who want to be bold and change things up. They wanted to put that culture in place at Tim Hortons. They wanted to maintain the results but still move over to what is now the RBI culture of being a bit more bold and taking a few more risks. Ultimately, if you look at the performance of Tim Hortons in the few years after that happened, there was a bit of a stumble. It was a bit of a mismatch for the brand. We can talk about strategically, whether that was the right choice, but that's the position that I was placed in.Edward: That's interesting. I'm thinking about you, particularly, rather than the company. How do you think about changing things up and making things better when you don't have a lot of expertise? You're reliant on the team because they're the experts on this, but at the same time, they hired you on to change things. How do you make those changes without messing things up?Sam: If you have learned how to do a new job enough times, you start to get an idea of what it feels like to learn a new job. You know that there is a structure that you're trying to understand, a set of processes, a set of routines, and things that are done for particular reasons. You have an idea of what that wheel looks like once you do understand it as you're trying to figure out. Taking that meta approach to learning a new job while trying not to disturb things, what I try to bring to that was I like to measure everything. I like to have a bottom-up roadmap or scorecard of how things fit together so that we can see whether things are going well or not. Often, that type of high-level organization, that connective tissue that plugs together all the little bits and pieces that marketers are doing every day, every week, every month, that I found is where I can usually add value and help people see what they're doing better.Edward: I want to go back and talk a little bit about the path that got you there. What were you passionate about when you were 12–14 years old?Sam: I was passionate about Space Lego and role-playing games, whether computer games or specifically, Dungeons & Dragons. Edward: Do you think diving into Lego, diving into D&D affect your later life at all? Did you develop skills there that play out today or was it a one-off and it didn't really matter? Sam: I'm not sure that I developed skills during Lego and D&D that changed me. I think it's more that I chose the things then that I liked doing and I honed skills that I may have already had. Lego is a lot of organization, seeing how things get put together, and being patient as you meticulously follow these rules to achieve a great product. D&D is just a really interesting game. It lets you explore everything from how rules create conduct in the world to all sorts of other things that are useful for managing around the management table. Edward: Let's go forward a little bit and talk about your first job. In your first job, you were a bike courier? Sam: Pretty much, yes.Edward: Talk to me a little bit of what you learned as a bike courier and how that affected things later. Sam: First, just to set the stage, in the 90s, there were a lot more bike couriers hopping around than there are now. You've probably seen a few in cities but they have largely been replaced by Adobe Acrobat, esigning, and things. There were hundreds in Vancouver. Edward: This was not a food delivery. You aren't Postmates of the 1990s?Sam: No. I was doing bank deposits, getting documents signed, dropping off documents to be signed, everything else. At one point, I showed up at the bank and realized I've been riding around with $40,000 cash in my backpack for the previous 1½ hours. People would hand you deposits. It was interesting, which was for some reason really motivating and inspiring for me. It felt like I was the grease that was helping the wheels of commerce keep turning. I was helping real estate deals get signed, seeing big contracts get closed, seeing how and why people were soothing each other for different things because these were the documents I was carrying around. Edward: You became aware of that stuff or was it a matter of, hey, Sam, take this piece of paper and get it across the street? It was like you've learned what the pieces of paper were for and the impact of your decisions were.Sam: You do because people don't call a bike courier when a document needs to get there eventually. I would show up at offices seven minutes before a bank six blocks away was going to close and something you needed to get to the back before close. They wanted me to know how important it was. There were times I was delivering legal depositions or summons and I couldn't deliver it. I would go back and give a statement that would get taken down and taken to court.People would talk to me. People like talking to people. I was friendly and personable. I learned a lot more of how these businesses were running and people would think I would. Edward: It's almost like those stories of the guy working in the mailroom who learns how the CEO operates and then moves up to the ranks. Sam: The secret of my success. Edward: You got your PhD in Computer Science. What were you planning to do with that before you actually left the world of academia?Sam: I planned to leave the world of academia since I realized that I was in the world of academia pretty much. I thought that getting a PhD in Computer Science would be a good way of getting a good-paying job as a teacher. I like teaching people. I like helping other people understand problems and dive their way through things. Once I realized that all I had to do was research and that was what I've built myself a path to, I got out as fast as I could. Edward: You went to McKinsey. Why did you end up in McKinsey?Sam: I ended up at McKinsey because they dropped off a stack of brochures in the mailroom of the computer science department where I was at. A friend of mine said that one of his high school friends went there. They were smart, liked it, and so would I. It was no more strategic than that. Edward: On that note, I want to jump ahead a little bit. In 2013, you joined Burger King to develop their pricing strategy. After spending a bunch of time doing strategy at McKinsey's, strategy at OLG, you're doing more strategy at Burger King, but then you left a year later to run product innovation. That seems a pretty big switch for someone who had been spending their career doing strategy. How did that happen?Sam: One thing, you may have guessed from why I decided to leave academia, every time I've tried to make a strategic choice or plan out who I want to be in five years, I've been spectacularly wrong in my career. A decent explanation of what strategy works is the questions that clients don't know even where the question fits. It's not even that they have a question they don't know how to solve. They don't even know where it fits. They go, oh, it's not operations or it's not marketing. It's a strategy. Let's call in somebody.Edward: It's the other.Sam: It is really the other bucket. After a career literally of answering the random questions that nobody could figure out how to answer, I got pretty comfortable with just jumping into, this topic looks interesting. I'll go do that now.The opportunity came up in Miami to go do pricing for a year. I did that. Because I correctly guessed that Burger King was a company with a culture that was pretty well-attuned to how thought, after a year of doing pricing, they said, hey, why don't you move to the test kitchen and figure out what sauces we should put on our original chicken sandwich and extra-long cheeseburger? You seem like you might be good at that. I'm like, okay.Edward: It is interesting the way you describe it because it feels like coming from a career in strategy, people think of strategy as, hey, what's the five-year plan? What's the 10-year plan? But for your own career, you're saying that strategy is the last thing on your mind.Sam: It could sound like that, but in my experience, strategy isn't a bottom-up, let's think about what we should be doing in five years. It's more a matter of, we're doing a bunch of stuff and we don't know how it fits altogether or we don't know that it all makes sense. Can you come in and take a look at all the things we're doing and make sure that there is a connection to our underlying core of who we are as a company?I think of strategy not as a bottom-up, high-level thinking but more of an organization, seeing how things that a company is already doing fit together. I think that's similar to how I've thought about my own career. We can figure out how it fits together afterwards. It's more a matter of making sure that the individual ideas make sense at the time.Strategy is looking across things going on and plugging them together. Career decisions are doing things and figuring out how they fit together afterwards. You've probably got a pretty good intuitive idea of what you want to do next.Edward: It almost sounds like strategy is story-telling.Sam: I think that's very, very much the case. You need to help senior executives figure out how to tell the story of who they become as a company.Edward: Your career is almost the same idea. You do the things. You take opportunistic chances. Then, after the fact, you can go back and tell a story about how it all fits together.Sam: Which interestingly, if you go back to when I was 13 years old and running a Dungeons & Dragons game, sometimes, your players just do stuff. You go, yeah, that makes sense. I can fit that together into the story I'm telling. It's not that it was pre-planned. You're just working with what exists.Edward: Sam, what were the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?Sam: I think if you look at any of the times I've switched companies or switched careers, that's when I realized that the current plan that I was on wasn't working anymore. I [...] those things as failures. I spent five years getting a PhD that I realized four years in I did not want. At one point, I realized that I didn't want to be a consultant anymore.There haven't been any spectacular failures where people have come to me and said, you've really disappointed us and we're going to fire you now. Instead, I'm more a matter of the thing that I thought was interesting. It evolves or changes in a way that I no longer like or I evolve and change in a way that I'm no longer interested in. That happens every 3–5 years. We just change.Edward: Sam, you're now a head of the retail of Restaurant Brands International. I want to cover more of that in part two, but I want to touch on an experience you had last summer, if you're comfortable talking about it. Tell me, about 40 minutes last summer, you died and they managed to bring you back to life. In a movie, that would cause you to reevaluate everything in your life and change who you are and what you think about. Did it do anything like that for you? How did you change after that event if at all?Sam: That's a really good question. For anybody thinking about business was spectacular, it would be like a scene from the most over-the-top hospital drama you've seen. The first defibrillator did not work on me. They had to go find an antique one that happened to put out more power. That's what eventually restarted my heart back to life.I thought about this and I still think about whether I should be reevaluating my life, but my approach of, am I happy with what am I doing right now and if not, then I'll go find something else to do has served me pretty well. I haven't spent 10 years chasing a goal that's 10 years down the road in the hopes that once I achieve it, I'll be happy. I try to make sure that I've enjoyed what I'm doing along the way.I came out of that. Actually, the first thing I did was send a selfie while I was still intubated to my Microsoft Teams group at work saying, don't think I'll be in at work today. I was back on the job within 8 weeks of meeting 39 minutes of CPR with a very talented team at the Toronto General Hospital.My reevaluation of my life ended up not really being one. I'm still pretty comfortable with the choices I've been making.Edward: Sam, what are your productivity tricks? What do you do to be productive that most people don't do?Sam: You're either doing things or you're not doing things. If you're doing things, it's less of a worrying about focusing on staying on one task or focusing on the highest priority item, than continuing to work on it until you lose momentum, you lose steam.I would rather finish 60% of one task, get distracted, go to 50% of another task, go back to the first one, and then force myself to finish something after I lose interest. As long as I am being productive, I don't really worry necessarily whether it's my top priority item or third or fourth in my priority list. I just enjoy the fact that I'm getting things done.Edward: There's something about that. Like prioritization is overrated in that you're much better just be getting something done than spending a lot of time trying to optimize for the right thing to do.Sam: Things are either important or they're not. If they're not, they shouldn't be on your list. If they're important and they're on your list, as long as you're doing anything, you're doing well.Edward: I read somewhere—I can't even remember who it was—their model of as long as your distractions are also something you want to get done, then you're fine. If you stop doing what you want to do because you go and spend time on Facebook, that's not so good. But if you're stopping doing project A because you're distracted to do project B and then you get distracted and start working on project C, you're probably going to be in a good place by the end of the month.Sam: Yeah. That's exactly right.Edward: Sam, this has been fantastic. We're going to pick this up next week under my new publishing model. We'll pick up with part two. We're going to dive into Tim Hortons' business.Sam: Right. Thanks, Ed. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

“In my opinion, there's no such thing as failure. Everything is a blessing. And everything is a learning experience. And if you look at everything in that lens, then whatever blessing and lesson that you can take from that experience, you can utilize it as additional fuel in order to move in the correct path.” - Topeka K. SamWelcome to Stay a While with Tommi Vincent! Imposter syndrome. Anxiety. Fear of growth. We have all faced opposition, within ourselves, at some point in our lives. Second-guessing yourself is the hallmark of an identity crisis. So how do you overcome self-doubt, and breakthrough to putting it all on the line to bet on yourself? Today's guest, Topeka K. Sam, takes her seat at the table to help us to tap into the queen within all of us.Topeka K. Sam is the Founder and Executive Director of The Ladies of Hope Ministries– The LOHM – whose mission is to help disenfranchised and marginalized women andgirls transition back into society through resources and access to high-qualityeducation, entrepreneurship, spiritual empowerment, advocacy and housing. She isalso the co-founder of Hope House NYC - a safe housing space for women andgirls. Topeka serves on the board of directors for Grassroots Leadership and is nowthe first formerly incarcerated person on the board of The Marshall Project. She is a Beyond the Bars 2015 Fellow and a 2016 Justice-In-Education Scholar both fromColumbia University, a 2017 Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow working on Probation andParole Accountability, a 2018 Unlocked Futures Inaugural Cohort Member, 2018Opportunity Agenda Communications Institute Fellow, Director of #Dignity Campaignfor #cut50, Host of “The Topeka K. Sam Show” on SiriusXM UrbanView Channel 126Sundays 9am est., and has recently signed a development deal as ExecutiveProducer for a scripted and unscripted series inspired by her fight to change themany problems that plague female incarceration with 44 Blue Productions.Topeka has been featured in Vogue, SalonTV, Vice, New York Times. She has beenfeatured in Glamour Magazine and Black Enterprise for being “The Black Womanbehind the video that led to the Trump Clemency of Alice Johnson.” She has spokenat the 2018 United States of the Woman Conference, 2018 Women in the WorldConference, 2018 White House Prison Reform Summit and is a TedxMidAtlanticSuperheros Presenter.She has worked and continues to work selflessly and relentlessly in her fight for thedignity, decriminalization and decarceration of women and girls. Topeka hasaccomplished this and more since her release from Federal Prison May 2015.In this episode we cover[00:01 - 04:15] Serving Up Self Care and Mental Wellness[04:16 - 12:08] Getting to Know Topeka K. Sam[12:09 - 25:31] Step Out of Fear and Reject World Worthiness[25:32 - 42:14] Break Away from the Prison of Our Own Minds[42:15 - 49:15] Closing Segment Key Quotes“When we're little girls who haven't gone through that healing process, we become grown women who are still living in that. And it just hurts, like it breaks my heart.” - Topeka K. Sam“There are times that we just don't know, because we're not exposed. But I also know because we are creatures of God, the Divine, the Creator, that there is something inevitable in our spirit that will tell us what feels good and what does not feel good, what feels right and what feels wrong. And that's when you smoke about fear. It's to decide whether or not you want to continually live in that mess.” - Topeka K. Sam“But if you know leaving with nothing will be better than staying with whatever you have been, that is your strength and you use your point, those obstacles as stepping stones and not barriers.”- Topeka K. Sam Connect with Topeka K. SamInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/topekaksam Website: https://thelohm.org/ Connect with Me! You can reach Tommi on Instagram @cheftommivVisit https://vincentcountry.com and get connected with us on Vincent Country's Instagram @vincentcountry This episode was Produced By: Tommi Vincent, Tanner Vincent, and Skai Blue MediaMusic By: Stichiz - Big T. Music /Roj&TwinkiELEAVE A REVIEW + and SHARE this episode with someone who wants food for the soul, and the key ingredients to embracing their true, authentic self. Listen to previous episodes on Spotify, Spreaker, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Something different, something special when it comes to to leadership - and that's hacking your own health. I'm very excited to have my friend Dr. Sam. Some quick tips from Dr. Sam: + There are functional tests to discover if you are actually able to absorb your vitamins and supplements. + For intermittent fasting: Skip dinner, not breakfast - skipping breakfast is burning out your adrenal glands + Most of the benefits of fasting happen after 12 hours DR. SAM SHAY helps entrepreneurs reverse burnout and improve higher performance through functional tele-medicine. Learn more: www.drsamshay.com/biohacker ALEX SALINSKY works with CEO's, CTO's, COO's and team leaders who want to expertly manage the work and teams https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsalinsky/ **************************** FREE DOWNLOAD Get The QUadrant Guide to Strengthening Your Team FIND US ON SOCIAL Podcast: https://anchor.fm/techandstartups Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechNStartups Instagram: https://instagram.com/TechNStartups LEADER TOOLS Dubsado my favorite proposal and invoicing software - get paid on time! https://www.dubsado.com/?c=tas Get a savings on your first AirBNB provides and easy way to create receipts for business travel https://www.airbnb.com/c/asalinsky?referral_share_id=48e45c8b-d520-4249-b7e9-a3cbab97cb73 Try Canva For quickly creating YouTube thumbnails, Instagram visuals, infographics and more https://www.canva.com/join/owner-beech-mime #techandstartups #leaderhealth

“I can readily admit that I have been scared to break the firewall between where I stand socially and politically in my private life, with my friends and family and stuff, and this sort of professional, polished persona that I've had, that I've built my livelihood on. And one of the really significant things that is different for me personally about the latest sort of, like, unprecedented wave of national interest in supporting black lives and being anti-racist is that I, among many others of my colleagues, have really started to knock down those walls and be much more public and much more vocal.”    In these week’s episode of the Control the Room podcast, I am so excited to speak with Startup Patterns Founder Sam McAfee. Sam is a Silicon Valley veteran of 20 years and has worked with companies such as Adobe, Teach for America, and PG&E. Sam and I speak about how a Craigslist posting launched his tech career, how the internet changed the way companies are shaped, and how he is working to be a better ally to people of color in his professional communities. Listen in to find out how he is tearing down the firewall between his personal values and professional persona.   Show Highlights [2:35] A Craigslist resume & the beginning of Sam’s career in tech [8:14] Startup Patterns: Sam’s first book [12:14] How the internet changed the way companies are shaped [19:30] Building the next generation of leaders [24:35] The critical role of purpose in change processes [31:55] Time & space for reflection [41:05] Being a good ally & anti-racism policies   Links | Resources Sam on LinkedIn Startup Patterns   About the Guest Sam is the founder of Startup Patterns, a company that helps organizations build and scale new digital products, find product-market fits, improve software development processes, and master teamwork while scaling. He has worked in Silicon Valley for 20 years; some of the companies he has worked with include Adobe, Teach for America, and PG&E. A community activist, he is committed to making the world a better place to live.   About Voltage Control Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.  Share An Episode of Control The Room Apple Podcasts Spotify Android Stitcher Engage Control The Room Voltage Control on the Web Contact Voltage Control   Intro: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Douglas: Today I have Sam McAfee, founder of Startup Patterns, where he helps companies build and scale digital products, and recently has been helping teams through leadership development. Welcome to the show, Sam.  Sam: Thanks, Doug. Great to be here.  Douglas: Absolutely. So I'd like you to start off with a little bit about Sam and how you got to where you are today.  Sam: Sure. So, yeah, it's a fairly circuitous route, but, basically, I grew up on the East coast of the U.S. and came from a fairly social activist kind of background. One of my family members and friends were kind of in that scene around the Boston area. And I went to school originally in social sciences and had no idea that I would end up in tech. I did not do C.S. as an undergrad. It wasn't really my plan.  I came out to California after graduating because California seemed like a cool place to do some sort of social-impact work, looking at a lot of the organizing that was going on out here around climate and sort of prison reform and all kinds of other subjects that I was into. And so I came out here and kind of knocked around for a while at the end of the ‘90s, trying to figure out what I was going to do. And all of my friends that I made socially here, they were all engineers, and they were all here for the dot-com boom that I was sort of only dimly aware of. I was like a starving B.A. graduate trying to find a job with nonprofits and stuff like that. And they were all making three times as much as I was, running code for all the crazy startups that were going on here. They were like, “Hey, Sam, if you just learn a little bit of web programing, you can get a real job, and then it won’t be, like, scrimping and scraping.”  So it was really out of economic necessity that I grudgingly picked up a couple of books on web design and hashed together a couple of toy websites over a weekend. And I put my resumé on Craigslist with HTML under “Skills.” The next morning, I had 50 emails from recruiters. And I'm not really exaggerating. It was that crazy.  So I consider it beneficial that I kind of got sucked into the demand for technical labor that was going on at the time. I had no idea what I was doing at first. As I started out, I was a freelance web developer, picking up contract jobs here and there. But I did learn fast, and I learned on the job. And I'm sort of a book learner, so I bought all the books on full-stack web development, such as it was in those days, and very quickly became a pretty proficient contractor. And I managed somehow to survive the dot-com, initial dot-com, crash.  Gradually, my freelancing work turned into setting up a little agency. So I found that my people skills were good enough that I could talk to clients and customers and get work, be able to translate that layer between the sort of the business and the client and the technology. So there was a comfort level with working with me. So before long, I was bringing in more work than I myself could do. And so I started recruiting some of my friends who were other engineers to work on projects with me. And that just kind of organically grew into an agency that I ran for about 10 years, from 2002 to just the end of 2011, where a lot of changes were taking place. So during that time, technology scene changed a lot. You know, Cloud and mobile and lots of things kind of grew up during that decade. I also went back to graduate school to fill in my C.S. gaps that I was really insecure, that I didn't really have, like, data structures and algorithms and distributed programing and all that stuff. So I did some grad work to fill in those gaps. And, you know, I also consider myself fortunate that by the time I was putting a team together to work on projects and had to look up on the Internet, “How does one organize a software project?” that was when Agile was really gaining steam. So I didn't unlearn any previous methodologies. Agile was the thing right from the beginning for me that was the go-to methodology that was really becoming more popular for really good reasons. So I've been kind of steeped in the Agile knowledge base and community, really, since, let's say 2003 or 2004, somewhere around there. And so that for me really was the way that I learned to build projects and the way that I learned to write code, and all the way from the technical practices of test-driven development, etc., etc., to the process approaches.  And so we built really great software in my agency for many, many clients over those years, and one thing that really I noticed a lot was that clients would actually ask me to go out to their team and help them with their process as well. So I ended up sort of farming myself out a little bit as a coach or consultant as well on top of the work that we were doing in-house. Somewhere along the line, I got exposed pretty early on to the lean startup stuff. I had a buddy who had been reading Steve Blank’s book. And this is back when Eric Ries was really just blogging at the time. And that stuff really blew my mind because by that time I’d had enough experiences of building software that nobody really wanted so many times. And granted, we were an agency, so usually it was our client who lost money. We were sort of mercenarial. We still got paid, but it really felt crappy to make stuff that nobody used or wanted. And so I'd had that experience. And so the idea of testing your concept before investing a lot of time in building the code made a lot of sense to me viscerally. So I really got involved with the lean startup kind of community pretty early on, started going to the conferences and meet ups and stuff like that. That stuff really resonated with me.  Eventually, the recession really caught up with us and just kind of slowed business gradually year over year until about 2011 or so. I was pretty burnt out on running my own agency. And so I went off and had a series of adventures as a senior technical person of one sort or another in a couple of different companies in a row. I ran the engineering team at change.org for a while as they were in a period of growth. I was sort of co-founder in a couple of small startups that went the way that startups typically do. I got a chance to work for what was a much more real and polished consulting agency called Neo. A lot of my colleagues these days are sort of alumni from Neo from those days where I sort of learned a lot about how to be a real consultant, how to be kind of polished in front of executives from bigger brands like Adobe and Toyota and places like that, sort of bigger fish than I had been working with myself in my earlier agency. So the Neo days are really great. And then, basically, in 2016, I went back out on my own and had been working ever since. Startup Patterns actually is my book that while I was at Neo, a number of the folks there were writing books, and they formed a little book writers kind of club to keep us going. And I heard about the club, and I’d always wanted to write a book. That was sort of my trigger to start writing the book. And so the book was self-published, and it took me about two years to finish, and it was called Startup Patterns. And so when I went out on my own, the book title seemed as good a brand as any to use as my company name. So that's why the book and the company are named the same thing.  And so I just have been doing my own sort of coaching and consulting since 2016. And whereas I initially started out really focusing on process on coaching teams, either as startups or bigger companies that were doing innovation labs around how to ship digital products quickly, how to do sort of the Agile-delivery stuff, and how to incorporate that successfully into lean startup, build-measure-learn-style customer-development approaches, that gradually shifted about a year and a half ago more and more into leadership stuff, which I think we'll probably end up talking about a bunch more, which is that no matter how good these teams got with coaching, when you're trying to really be successful in building digital products, the barriers that I kept running into as a coach and as a consultant were in the structure of the organization, in particular the leadership, and whether the leadership of the organization, whether that's middle management or the senior executives, really support the kind of transformation and change that is required for an organization to fully embrace digital and fully embrace Agile leadership was constantly the barrier there. And so I just got more and more interested in putting my attention on, why is it so hard for these organizations to change? And so since then, I've pretty much been focused almost exclusively on working directly with technology managers who are trying to effect change in their organizations and how to kind of become better leaders and all that that entails. So that's what brings me here. Douglas: Excellent. Well, I want to dig in a little bit there on this concept of structure and how that plays a role and kind of stifling change or, like, embracing change, and you mentioned that in passing as you were starting to talk about this new leadership work that you're doing. So I'm curious to hear how structure plays a role specifically and what leaders can do or what they should be thinking about as it relates to the structure. Sam: Yeah, absolutely. The structure of the organization is really important. So when you look at—just kind of stick with Agile, but I mean sort of digital-product-development methodologies broadly, but let's kind of hang it on Agile for a bit. There's sort of this notion of the cross-functional, self-organized team that's building software that the customer wants and able to kind of ship things reliably with high quality and sort of business success. And so a lot of—in the early days of Agile, we were talking a lot about, well, if you want a cross-functional team, you have to break down silos. So, like, you've got sort of design in one area. You've got product management in another area. You've got the business units that are sort of the stakeholders. You've got the engineering or developers in sort of a different area. And how you sort of get across that.  And I think what I found is that those silos are very rooted in sort of a legacy of the corporate culture in most organizations. So you can kind of draw a line at where the Internet becoming a big thing, where companies are sort of digitally native, that came up after the boom of the Internet—so the late ‘90s, early 2000s—tend to be shaped differently than more traditional, older industrial or consumer or financial companies that have been around for a while that are really only trying to go digital now. And I think what we need to understand is that there's sort of like a couple of major legacy—let's just call it baggage—organizational baggage that's been around since the early days of the 20th century, with Taylorism and Ford, that there's sort of this notion of a very top-down command and control style of organization, where the people at the top are making all the decisions, and the people at the bottom are just doing the stuff that they're told. So clearly, you can't really have a self-organizing team that's embracing agility or trying to move toward agility if they're being told what to do all the time. So there's sort of this conflict between a command-and-control culture and the levels of autonomy that are necessary for a team to be self-organized. And then with the cross-functional stuff, what you end up having is I.T., as we think of it in generic corporate terms, really grew up out of the finance department. Like, we started using computers in corporations because we needed to crunch numbers. So software development emerging necessarily out of an I.T. function, that is really different from a tech company that was sort of natively starting with a cross-functional team as a startup and sort of grows from there. You know, now with startups, you do have to fight against the sort of silos that grow organically. But I think for big companies that have been around for a while, that are struggling through transformation, what is happening is just the whole structure of the company has to change. And that's really scary for people who have been in an organization for a long time, you know, run a particular department, a lot of their identity is wrapped around, “Well, all these people report to me. I'm the V.P. of whatever it is. So my sense of self and my value as a person in this company is based on my authority, that people will do what I say, and that I have this big department of people that report to me.” And so we really have to unlearn that stuff if we want to build an organization that's more flexible, that's more resilient, and that can adapt to change in the way that a digital or agile or lean sort of transformation would require. Douglas: What are some of the signs that you might see that an organization is not autonomous enough, or they might be trying to make some of these changes, but they're just not successful? Sam: There's an interesting set of patterns that I do see. One in particular springs to mind as you ask the question, which is that even in organizations where—so there’s sort of like two things that can happen, I think. One is the organization doesn't really want to change from being top-down command-and-control style but still wants the Agile teams to deliver or wants the product teams to build the right thing. And so you've got a culture where the folks on the ground who are doing the work are used to being order takers. Like, there's a big difference between being a sort of short-order cook and being a chef. Like, being someone who is just sort of following instructions, you get one style of work coming out of that. And folks who are making a lot of decisions on their own and being more collaborative, you get a different result.  And then, also, I think you have times where the leadership team maybe suddenly becomes enlightened. I don't know if they read a book about autonomy on the airplane ride back from wherever, and they decide, like, “Okay, we have to announce that we're going to do all these new innovative things.” And so, you know, I've seen it where the top leadership says, “Okay, everybody, we're taking off the shackles. You're all now free to innovate. Please go forth and innovate.” And what you have is an organization full of people who just yesterday were being shouted at and told what to do and are now suddenly being told that they need to be free, independent thinkers. And it's a really abrupt shift in the culture. And so that shifting to an autonomous kind of organization takes time and patience and requires a lot of support and a lot of, what would you call maybe, baby steps. Like, small wins and gradual sort of earning of trust. You can't just sort of like throw everybody free and expect them to know how to operate collaboratively when they're used to being told what to do for years on end. So I think that creates a lot of challenges.  By the time I get there, it's usually because things are broken or something's on fire. So, like, a lot of time—and I'm sure I'm not the only consultant that feels that way. You know, it's like often it can be a rescue job. But what has often happened is that somebody’s made the decision to go sort of go Agile, if you will, and they got some shiny consulting company to come in and give them a diagram of how you do it. They try it for a year or two. It doesn't really work. It doesn't really stick. Things are broken and on fire. And then, I show up and I look around, and I realize that it's really because there's not the shift in values from top to bottom in the culture. There's not a shift to—it's like we want the fruits of autonomy, but we don't necessarily want people to really have say over their work. And that just creates a lot of froth and friction. And then people say like, “Oh, well, we tried Agile, and it didn't work.” Douglas: Let's talk a little bit about the shift of values. And so what does it look like when it's done correctly? And I imagine it's somewhat driven around the fact, the notion, that, well, as a leader, this notion of, well, what is my responsibility as a leader now? What does it mean to even be a leader in this new world? And also, I'm on the hook for making sure that the numbers come out correctly in this quarterly report and that we meet expectations for shareholders, etc. And so how do we balance giving over control with being responsible for outcomes? I'm pretty sure that aligns with what you're talking about around this, like, the shared values not being met. So just kind of curious to understand that more. Sam: Yeah. I think that's really important. If you look at where the leadership literature is going these days, like if you did a search for top leadership books in the last 10 years or so, there's a really consistent pattern, and that pattern to me is a focus on relinquishing control of all the decisions and focusing instead on the leader acting as a coach to grow other leaders. So, like, the real hallmark of a good leader is that they can build the next generation of leaders below them to take their place, that they're focused on succession, they delegate well, and they help solve problems without directing and without micromanaging, but giving people room to grow. So we can actually connect it directly to say Carol Dweck's Mindsets, this concept of a growth or fixed mindset in an individual extends for sure to the organization and its culture as a whole.  So I think when it's done well, people are approaching coaching teams and coaching new leaders that are emerging with really a growth mindset and with a focus on having some space to experiment and some safe-to-fail constraints. So you can draw a line around these experiments. You don't want to make them too big that, as you said, you're in danger of missing your numbers. So, like, we're talking primarily about businesses here that have to ship products and make customers happy and increase their market share and post earnings and post profits.  And so there's always going to be that pressure to perform economically. I think that where the old style of leadership is falling away is that the world has become so complex and even the internal aspects of companies have become so complex that you can't be directive and prescriptive in the way that you can if you're sort of running a more traditional brick-and-mortar, manufacturing organization. In the world of digital in particular—frankly, let's face it. All companies are basically going to have to be digital now—the complexity is massive, and workers are doing work that's much more creative and knowledge work than moving widgets around, and so that kind of work has to be more emergent and collaborative. It's a team sport, especially in design and product development. And so you can't lead that kind of effort with commands. It has to be more like coaching.  Frankly, I use a lot of parenting metaphors. When you think about what you do with your kids, I definitely had experiences myself with, my son’s trying to learn how to tie his shoes or something, and I'm sitting there, having to bite my tongue and not just reach over his shoulder, like, “No, give me that. Here's how you do it.” It takes a lot of patience for a leader to sit back and watch the people that report to them struggle. But if they don't struggle, they're not going to learn. So that's sort of where this growth-mindset stuff is really critical. Douglas: So, let's go back to some of these baby steps. You talked about it being an anti-pattern to just read the book and to come in and say, “We're going to go autonomous. There's a new way of working, and we need to adapt or we're going to fail.” So what are some of the things that folks can do to get started, and how do they move more intentionally? And I know you get pulled in a lot to kind of fix the fires, but how can they avoid the fires in the first place? How could they do this more intentionally? Sam: I think that it requires really acknowledging where you are, right? So it's critical to take stock of the current state, and that's the current state of, like, really, for me, that's typically three big pillars in my head of the technology, the process, and the people, the culture, the sort of communication styles and values, and really understanding what the current state is and having some idea of, if we're in a place that has rigid process and a culture of fear or toxicity or even just kind of like polite, passive aggressivity, which I actually see more often than anything else, and we have technology that's legacy and hard to change and brittle and antiquated, it’s really going to be dangerous to just dive in and try to change all of those things wholesale all at once. And so we can have a vision, we have to have a vision, for what we want our organization ultimately look like, or at least what we want it to feel like to work there. And I think that's actually a really important distinction. You know, people focus a lot in tech on sort of the left brain. They’re like, let's draw a diagram, and let's have maps and charts and spreadsheets.  But I think there's a lot to be said about getting in touch with how we want to feel as a team. Like, what does it actually feel like to come into work every day? Are these people we want to work with? Is this work we want to do? Is there meaning and purpose to what we're trying to accomplish? Are we committed to being in this organization, given its stated mission and values? So I think they, like, having some vision of what the future looks like is really critical for any kind of change process.  And then I think that we have to really only bite off as much as we can chew. Like, this is something, I'm almost saying this to myself because this was a hard lesson for me to learn even as a coach or consultant, where like, look, man, I live in Silicon Valley, and I've been in startups a lot of my career, and I've seen what a small cross-functional team of super smart, fast, flexible people can do in the marketplace. Going from a big old-fashioned organization to that sort of sexy-startup-looking organization is not an overnight thing. And I think I, maybe when I was first doing this work, was really impatient with my clients. I'm sort of like, “Look, I'll tell you how it's done, and I'll show you what good looks like. Let's just go, go, go.” And it's been a process for me to learn how to actually be really patient as well, that it's going to be a long road, it’s going to be very challenging, and all of those little steps are meaningful along the way.  So if you have a manager, for example, like an engineering manager who's got a bunch of engineers that report to them, and they're trying to work with those people, just getting that engineering manager to think about and embrace their own fears and hopes and dreams and aspirations and think about what kind of leader do they want to be and just having them learn how to, okay, so you're going to have a one on one with your people. How do you make that one on one structured so that the person who reports to you is getting the most value out of it as possible and growing as an employee? So talking to an engineering manager who’s a client of mine for an hour about how to have a good one on one and how to start that process seems like a small thing to do in the context of a huge organization, but it's incredibly meaningful, and it's incredibly impactful. And now I've changed the way that engineering manager is thinking about leading their people forever, you know? It's like they'll never look at a one on one the same way. They'll always have a different, more valuable set of conversation.  So for me, that's an example of a baby step, because really, like when we're in an organization, organizations are made of people, and people interact through conversations. And so you can think about like, oh, we're going to change the process or we're going to import this new shiny technology or we're going to make org-chart changes. But really what happens is organizations, as they're more fluid and they're more like squishy tribes or villages where the real work happens often one on one or in small groups of people having real conversations with each other and making decisions about what they believe is true and what they believe is not true and what they're willing to commit to in terms of change. Douglas: Yeah. I once heard this quote that goes along the lines of, if there's more truth in the hallways than there is in meetings, and it kind of comes back to the point you were just making and- Sam: Oh, for sure. Douglas: I'm always curious to hear from folks, if you could change one thing about meetings, what would you change? Sam: Oh, man. Boy, I think that—so with a little context, there is a lot of anti-meeting sentiment in my field, in tech, and I think it's misplaced, and I think it's probably because people just had a lot of bad meetings. I actually really enjoy bringing a small group of people together to have a conversation. That is typically what we might term a meeting. So I think the concept of having group conversations of some sort or another, there's nothing wrong with that. I think that, you know, where it runs all crazy is when, like, people are there that don't even need to be there. It's not clear why we’re there. You know, somebody thinks it's a discussion, and someone else thinks it's a one way update of information.  So I think that it’s really hard to pick one thing, but I think that if everyone who came to a meeting decided when they were showing up that they were going to be totally honest and authentic and transparent in their communication at that meeting, like, just, say what is on your mind, if people could be really real in those conversations, it sure would change the tone of a lot of meetings. You know, because I think the opposite is what we're used to, which is everybody's kind of not sure if they should speak up. Maybe they're sort of issuing platitudes. Maybe they're kind of speaking out of one side of their mouth. Like, if all that stuff—that could all go away if everyone's like, “I'm just going to say 100 percent of what I believe 100 percent of the time. And then we'll negotiate the rest,” meetings would be a lot more—I mean, some of those conversations would be tougher, but we have better outcomes at the end of the day. Douglas: That's right. And I think that's very, very possible, when you take a facilitator approach when you think about, like, never starting without a clear purpose, and being really intentional about how you structure the meeting, and you hold space for people to behave those ways. I think it's all possible. And it makes me think about the point you made earlier about in order to identify or prescribe those baby steps that are necessary, we have to take a close look at our current state and just get honest about where we are. I think that is an opportunity for starting the work that needs to be done. So if we're going to be more collaborative, more autonomous, why not create a collaborative group to do this current-state analysis? Let's launch off with these behaviors that we want to model and start doing them organically and build from there, and then the output of that yields more opportunity. It's almost like the kata in a way, right? Like, we're going to take a small incremental step, and then it builds on the next one and builds on the next one.  Sam: I think piggybacking off of that reminds me that one of the things that's really missing in a lot of organizations is time and space for reflection. Whether it's collective or individual, I think that you can't really be aware of your current state unless you can sort of slow down, put the tools down for a minute, and look around and have some reflection time. And as an individual, I know that certainly the people that I coach, the number one problem that most of them have is that they don't have time or they don't demand time—they don't take enough time. Let's put it that way—in their schedules for reflection. All the leadership books are like, leaders got to take an hour and block off their calendar and sit and stare at a blank piece of paper or go for a walk or whatever just to let the brain catch up with what's been going on. Like, the neuroscience is well established. Reflection is critical. So is rest, you know?  And so I find that as individuals, we’re so rushing through the rat race, that is our economies all the time and under so much pressure to perform and give in and show up, that taking a little reflection for yourself, it feels selfish, it feels irresponsible, and it's completely the opposite. It's critical. You know, that phrase, like, look, when you're on the airplane, they say put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others. Like, that's a good metaphor for thinking about leaders needing to take some time, really anyone, but certainly folks who are in a leadership position, to look back at how we're doing and also for the organization itself, kind of back more specifically to your point, having group or organizational reflection time. I think that if we want to enact change, we need to be able to stop sawing—to take a page from Stephen Covey—and sharpen the saw a little bit. That requires a slow down and reflect. So I think if we were to build that into our company cultures and our values more explicitly, I think it would have a huge impact, a positive impact. Douglas: Yeah. You know, it definitely resonates with me. We often think a lot about even moments of reflection, debrief, when we’re designing meetings and workshops, because that's the moment where people integrate. Like, if we just teach, teach, teach, teach and cram stuff in, well, that's just horrible anyway, but there's no moment for them to really integrate what they've learned. So ideally, there's a lot of practice. They're going to hands on and doing things. But then we want to have them take a step back and go, “What does this mean? How do we make sense of all this?” and then translate it in, into the work at hand. And so I think not only when it's about picking up new skills or coming together on a challenge or some sort of opportunity, it can be everyday work, but taking a chance to reflect. I think for a lot of us, the drive home or the subway ride home after work was that moment where we could do that, and now we don't have that affordance, and so being, especially in this time of the pandemic, let's be intentional about these reflection times and moments.  Sam: Yeah. That's created a lot of pressure on people, I think. It's interesting to look at the required remote work that we're all doing. I mean, I definitely, like, I have an economics background, like a political-economy background. And so I remember back in the day, a lot of people really being worried about, oh, your work is bleeding over into your personal time. The boss is able to call you at night or send you an email, and we all got our smartphones. And so the line between work and life outside of work is really blurry. And actually, I think that there's a huge risk, despite a lot of probably warranted cheerleading about how cool remote work can be and that people are learning how to be distributed teams, and I think a lot of that can be great, and it's really great for the business to not have as much pressure on maintaining an office space like they used to. But for the individual folks doing the work, do they actually feel like they can turn the machine off and have their own lives? And so I do worry about that blurry line, I guess, where we sort of, the diplomatic way to talk about it in Silicon Valley would be work-life balance. There are other more sharp ways of saying that.  But I think that's really important that when you think about reflection time, the conversations in the hallways rather than the meetings, or often at conferences, it used to be that you go to all these talks, and it’d be really interesting one-way communication, but the real cool stuff would be at lunch or outside or on walks or in the hallways between sessions. That's people talking to each other and processing what they just learned and figuring out how to integrate it, as you said. And that integration is really critical, and so if we were actually able to build reflection time more intentionally into our workflows, in our process, and our company culture, that would, I think, soak up a lot of that need that people have to chat with each other and process and have that moment of reflection, that sharpening the saw that we all need to do both as individuals and as organizations.  Douglas: Yeah, I think it's interesting, this notion of not only reserving the personal time, but accounting for and reserving time for the group to do it so that there can be a group synthesis. It reminds me of the Agile retrospective. I think if you really get down to the principles behind it and why we do it, I think there is very much one and the same with what we're talking about right now. I think the problem that I see that’s super pervasive and pathological, really, is that people use the retrospective as a way to just address problems that have arisen, and they don't actually do it on a frequent-enough basis to where they are celebrating the wins, integrating the wins, realizing when they slip through by the skin of their teeth and being able to make incremental change. That's one of the things I can easily get on a soapbox about. When I’m working with teams, it’s like, man, you got to do this frequently, and it can't be just a tool that you pull out when something goes wrong.  Sam: Yeah, absolutely. And it can be a forum for a lot of blame and shame, too, like, whether it's explicit or just kind of under the covers, the idea of not taking responsibility ourselves for what we want to do better or want to make better. And I think there's a lot of pressure on a facilitator for sure, retros probably more than anywhere, except maybe like an actual conflict resolution, that facilitator to make sure that people are learning how to listen as much as they're learning how to express. And I think that's a big thing we're also missing in corporate culture.  I make it a big part of the sort of the curriculum and coaching work that I do in leadership is around empathy and learning how to listen and learning how to listen in a way where it's not just waiting for the other person to finish talking, but actually trying to put yourself in their shoes and hang on their every word and really integrate what's being said, like, really build some empathy there. That's real listening. And so I think the onus is on us, as coaches and consultants and facilitators, to teach people in our organizations how to do that. You know, that's something that doesn't come out of management school, doesn't come out of technical school, barely comes out of social sciences, if at all.  Douglas: That's a nice segue because I was going to mention we've had discussions over the past few weeks just about the social unrest in America and how we play our part in breaking the silence and not being complicit and trying to be anti-racist as much as possible. And I remember in those discussions, whether at—various books came up, and you make comments about, “Oh, I read this in school.” And so it makes so much sense now that you studied social sciences and were really focused on kind of social justice, social-good-type work before you got into tech. And so I just wanted to touch on this because I know that we've both been grappling this and figuring out how to engage in anti-racist policies and just bring that into the work we do, port it, and just be good allies. I'm just wondering what you’ve found to be successful and what you might have to offer others that are listening and are just looking to add to their toolkit. Sam: Yeah, yeah, definitely something that's really important to me. I mean, I think that my perspective has really shifted over time but also in these last few weeks. I read a lot. In college, I studied social sciences. I read a lot about social issues like racism and sexism and other isms in school. And I think that when I got into the tech scene in my mid 20s, I was doing organizing and stuff when I first came out to California. I was kind of a rabid activist, if you will. And when I got into the tech scene, I think that a transformation happened where I erected a firewall between my personal and political and social values and my professional persona. And so for many years, and I've been in tech for 20 years, so let's just say for 20 years, I've experimented with ways of getting involved in merging sort of social-impact stuff with tech. Working at change.org was one way. There were a couple of other examples of sort of trying to figure out a way to bridge those two worlds.  But I really know that I stand on a mountain of privilege, right? So, like, I'm a white guy. I'm hetero. I’m in tech. I work for myself. Like, you could just pile it on, right? And I think that what this latest wave of organizing, you know, and I don't even really necessarily like the term social unrest so much. I think it's sort of maybe accidentally demonizes what is a long tradition of grassroots organizing to change things in this country, whether it's the civil-rights movement or the anti-war movements or the labor movement. I mean, there’s a rich tradition of people coming together across many social lines to change things in the conscious. Really, ideally, I mean, really, that's the only way change has really happened for real.  And so for me, I think that what I've been really grappling with the last several years as there's been increasing polarization in the country, is how do I leverage my privilege and my platform to weigh in on the conversation. And I think that I can readily admit that I have been scared to break the firewall between where I stand socially and politically in my private life, with my friends and family and stuff, and this sort of professional, polished persona that I've had, that I've built my livelihood on. And one of the really significant things that is different for me personally about the latest sort of, like, unprecedented wave of national interest in supporting black lives and being anti-racist is that I, among many others of my colleagues, have really started to knock down those walls and be much more public and much more vocal.  And so I've been trying to do that, and I've been trying to be fairly deliberative and careful about how I do it. One of the things, I think—I’ve never seen so many people in my professional circles grappling with, how do we as white people support movement for black lives? You know, how do we be good allies? And people are really trying to learn, really trying to be sensitive, knowing that it's uncomfortable and making a lot of mistakes. And I've been really impressed, to be honest, with how much the folks that I spend my time with are embracing the challenge of fighting against racism as white people who, let's face it, it's our problem. It's our responsibility, and we benefit from it, and to sort of say, “Look, we're not going to do it right. It's going to be hard. Not to guilt, shame, embarrassment, all that stuff. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to put your foot in your mouth. You’re going to have—people are going to criticize you no matter what you do.” And that's part of the process. That just has to be okay.  And so I think the big shift for me internally is I'm not scared anymore. I don't really care anymore. This is—I'm seeing now how important it is for people like me to really say something and take a stand. And I feel like I've got to a point, not just professionally, but in my life, sort of personally, morally, spiritually, whatever you want to say, where I'm going to say the right thing, and I don't care what anybody thinks, you know? And I think that really—I'm fired up. I want to try to contribute in whatever way I can. And I am happy to join up with other people that want to have these difficult discussions and figure it out. I'm a little dismayed in some ways that more folks from the tech community, the innovation community, the sort of Agile groups in the world haven’t readily come out and been more vocal about these sort of social issues. For folks who really purport to be all about data and continuous improvement and a growth mindset, like, the writing is on the wall. It’s right there. Why those folks can choose to be silent, it boggles my mind.  So I'm pretty committed to being out there and being a lot more noisy in support of anti-racism and in support of Black Lives Matter for sure right now, among a number of other social forces that are changing our world right now. So this is a new time, and I’m really embracing it. Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. I think to your point, whether it's intentional, people are afraid of those firewalls, or definitely afraid of dismantling them. And they're put there. And I’ve been talking a lot with folks around this notion of professionalism and what it means to be professional. And I think that we've created this dynamic where it's unsafe to be human. Like, we’re not supposed to bring our emotions. We're not supposed bring “politics.” And sure, we don't want to get in massive debates over who we’re for, etc. But I think caring for our neighbors and making sure that we create a safe environment that's inclusive and supportive of everyone goes beyond politics, and that's just human decency, and I don't see why human decency is unprofessional. And so I'm with you in solidarity on tearing down these firewalls. I've been actively working on it as well.  And, you know, I'd like to say thanks for joining me today. It's been a real pleasure. I'd like to just wrap with any—well, I want to make sure that the listeners know how to find you, and you mentioned your book. And then if there's anything you want to leave us with, a parting message. So how can they find you, and what do you want to leave them with? Sam: Sure. So I'm easy to find. Two different ways. You can search for Startup Patterns, startuppatterns.com. We'll come right up in the search results. That's my site. A big LinkedIn user, Sam McAfee. It’s very easy to find on LinkedIn. I really encourage people to reach out to me there, connect with me. let's have a conversation. So there's just are the two easiest ways to get connected with me.  I think that what I would want to leave people with is this is a time that we are in that is unlike anything the world has ever been through before. And it's there for a number of reasons. The pandemic, for sure, is a giant change. It's sort of incomparable to historical events. The sort of associated economic turmoil that comes with it. And now this major social movement that was a long time in the making, but it's really broken the surface. And I think people are thinking and rethinking how they feel about what we want, what kind of world we want to have in ways that they've never been doing before. And I think for me, the personal is political and the political is personal. So there's a lot of internal and individual transformation work that goes along with changing the world. And I just don't want people to forget that. It's not all about going out there. It's not all about the public conversations, and going and being at the rallies and writing and reading and posting and discussing are really important. There’s also a lot of internal grappling that we all need to do and just know that you're not the only one. And a lot of us are going through this major reckoning with things that we thought we believed or we thought we valued and really thinking about transforming ourselves from the inside. And so that's a lot of what I focus on, the folks that I work with and friends of mine, around, how do we support each other through that very challenging but necessary personal transformation so that we can really build a world that we all really want to live in? Douglas: Awesome. Thank you for being on the show, Sam. It's been a great opportunity to talk with you. And I really enjoy the conversation. Sam: Thanks. Me, too. This has been really great. Thanks for having me.  Outro: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don't forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

01:50 - Jess’s Superpower: Being a Property of a Situation Karl Popper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper) 04:25 - The Interpretation of Luck and the Psychology of Scarcity 08:17 - Physics; Physics and Software 12:06 - Conference Speaking 15:53 - Undervaluing Code 22:13 - Defining ‘Done’ in Software Development We don’t want to define “done.” In an ongoing system, a symmathesy, there is no “done” except death.Instead, define “better.” Then you can know you accomplished something.— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) February 6, 2019 Email is like laundry. There is no such thing as "done."My job is not to do the laundry, it is to keep the laundry moving.Nor to answer all the email, but to keep some correspondence flowing.— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) February 11, 2019 25:51 - TDD, the notion that “Coding is easy!”, and Resilience to Failure Smart Kid Syndrome (https://www.theodysseyonline.com/smart-kid-syndrome) Pairing with Bunny (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrlq1XOiSijrMGWbBlKo2Eg) 42:04 - Learning While Teaching Others Programming Avdi and Jess stumble through modern web development (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8yWDfDip1o) JessiTRONica on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/jessitronica/videos) Aikido (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aikido) Reflections: Jamey: Things never being “the end”. Finite and Infinite Games (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476731713/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1476731713&linkId=44899b02c0c5d4e52df176aa684e6138) (print) Finite and Infinite Games (http://wtf.tw/ref/carse.pdf) (pdf) Sam: There might be an ending for you, specifically, but it’s not really an ending for anyone else. Jacob: Figuring out problems by vocalizing them. Jessica: Check out recent works from Karl Popper. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode). To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Jacob Stoebel.

Guest: Saron Yitbarek: @saronyitbarek | bloggytoons | CodeNewbie | @CodeNewbies In this episode, Charles and Sam talk to Saron Yitbarek about her idea of mentorship, ideas for distributed learning for businesses to promote individual and company growth, and why it's important to take "digital sabbaths" on the regular. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: SAM: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 110 of The Frontside Podcast. My name is Sam Keathley. I'm a developer here at the Frontside and I will be your episode host. Today, we're here with Saron Yitbarek, discussing mentoring. She is the founder of CodeNewbie and the host of the CodeNewbie Podcast. Also with me as a co-host is Charles Lowell, who is also a developer at Frontside. Welcome Saron and welcome Charles. How are you guys doing? SARON: Thanks for having me. I'm doing pretty well. CHARLES: Hello. SAM: Today is going to be an interesting take on the mentoring talk. I mostly want to know first off, Saron, how do you feel about mentoring? What are your opinions on the mentor-mentee relationship or the value there? SARON: Yeah. I have lots of opinions on this topic. I think that the traditional structure of mentorship was usually looks like someone with less experience going to someone who has a lot more experience and say, "Will you be my mentor?" kind of like the children's book, 'Are You My Mother?' like 'Are you my mentor?' and then that person, that mother figure, that mentor looks after them and checks in on them and they have regular coffees and lunches and kind of steers them in the right, usually career-related direction. I don't think that's very realistic, to be honest. I think about why that might be. There's many different reasons. I think the fact that we're so, so, so networked and there's just so many different ways to get in contact with people and build relationships is a big reason but I think that that traditional mentorship model, that kind of one directional way of doing things is just not really needed and kind of overrated. I think that mentorship nowadays looks more like a mutually beneficial relationship, where I might reach out to someone who has more experience than me, for example in drawing, in art, not something I want to get to do but I know a crap-ton about podcasting, so I help you, you're my mentor in this specific area, in this specific topic but then, I get to be a mentor in this other thing that I'm really good at. I think it's those types of very focused topic-oriented, ideally two-way relationships that are more accurate and frankly, a more effective way of doing mentorship. SAM: Yeah, I actually agree with that. I am pretty new myself to development, only really been in this career for about a year now and I always kind of consider that mentoring relationship as a regression back to school days, where you have these -- SARON: Yeah, yeah. SAM: -- considered superior over you in some way, well, that's really not true in this community of developers and no matter where you are in development, it's all about working together and pairing. Working here has really showed me that value in paring, rather than like I have to look up to someone and regress back to feeling like a teenager in high school, like this person so good at this thing and they're the only one who can teach me. I definitely share that view of mentoring. I went to a boot camp one day when they were telling you like, "Oh, you got to find a mentor. You got to find a mentor," and I was like, "Well, but why? Why do [inaudible] together?" SARON: It's also a huge responsibility, a huge burden on the mentor too. Having to be, in a lot of ways, responsible for someone's career and trajectory and direction, that's a big responsibility. We don't have time for that, you know? On both ends, whether it's feeling like you're back in school or feeling like you have this huge responsibility, I think the traditional model isn't really the best model for either party. I think this idea of let's all learn together, let's be really focused on topics and problems that are very particular to what I'm doing, what I'm learning, what I'm trying to do. I think that works out. It feels healthier for both people. SAM: Absolutely. CHARLES: I wonder also too, it seems like it might be a little bit of a throwback to the days when people would spend 30 years in a single company or 30, 35 years in a single career where you have these people who are really these reservoirs of this intense tribal knowledge. It seems like people move around a lot more in their careers, not only in the company that they work for but also in the things that they're literally doing. I might be podcasting one day and producing a bunch of content and then, I might move into music or writing or other things like that. The careers seem to be broken apart a little bit more is one of the reasons why older models of advancement in those careers might not be as good a fit as they once were. SARON: Yes, absolutely. I'm obviously very biased because I'm in tech but when you think about the different roles that people have in tech, I feel like we're always wearing so many different hats. We have to, obviously code and be technical in that sense but we have to be really good communicators, a lot of us are speakers, we host podcasts, we organize conferences, we go to meetups, we're bloggers, we do so many other things, that this idea of, "I'm going to have a mentor who can help me in my role of being a developer," is just too big. You kind of meet people who are good at those individual pieces and those individual skills to get me to where I want to go. SAM: The whole idea of mentoring to me always reminded me of that whole Mr Miyagi relationship where you have this master of something and you're trying to learn from them. But in software development, I've learned that really no one is a master of anything because it's just changing so much and everything is so different. SARON: Yup, absolutely. CHARLES: The question is obviously, it seems like the idea that you're going to find one person who's going to represent the ideal confluence of every single skill set that you could hope to want, to be at some point in your career. That's looking more and more ludicrous. Is there a model where you can try and distribute those things, where you single out a large range of individuals? I guess the kind of what you were hinting at the beginning is that it is a lot more broken up, a lot more distributed but how do you pursue that, even if it is in a distributed manner? SARON: Yeah, that's a great question. One of the moments where I realize that the distributed model is really the only way that makes sense is, I think it was three years ago maybe. We thought about doing some kind of mentorship program in CodeNewbies, some type of way for people to link up and find people who can be there and guide in a way and we had people fill out this survey that basically said what do you want out of a mentor, what do you look for, what do you hope for to achieve but also asked how do you see yourself. Do you see yourself as a mentor, a mentee or both? It was really surprising that most people checked off both, which I thought was so interesting. It was so interesting to me that the same people who said, "I need help," with the same people who also said, "I also have help to give," and to me, that was such an amazing moment because I said, "Wow, it really isn't about this idea of I am the guide and I'm going to guide you." It's really about, "I have information expertise in one area and not in others." What I realize is there really isn't a mentor model. I think it's more of a culture of being helpful, which probably sounds really cheesy but it's true. I really think it's about saying, "I know how to do a thing. I'm going to go on Stack Overflow and answer questions. I'm going to go on Twitter and answer questions. I'm going to write blog post and share with the world." I think the real model, the real distributed mentoring model is us as individuals saying, "I just learned how to do a thing," or, "I just figured out how to do a thing well. Let me capture that. Let me capture it in a response, in an answer, in a forum, in a post and let me share that," and the more we do that as individuals, the more we have this huge amazing aggregate of knowledge that can serve as mentorship for all of us. SAM: I like the touch on that. That's kind of the idea behind Codeland Conference, where everybody thought they might be new to development and everyone is just sharing their knowledge. You might feel you really knew about it but you know a lot more than you think you do and you could still help. SARON: Yup, exactly and that's the whole idea, even the Twitter chats. When we first started, I don't have all the answers, I don't claim to, I don't really want that responsibility but I know there are a lot of people who do and I know a lot of people who have resources and opinions and who can help out. One thing that people do is they'll DM us and say, "I'm having a hard time with this." Sometimes, it's a very technical problems. Sometimes, it's a general 'I'm having a hard time getting a job,' which I do like high level question and I never answer them. I always say, "Tweet us and we'll retweet it and we'll get the whole community involved and we can have a rich conversation around it," and that's really been our motto, our philosophy. I see what they do with mentorship. If you have a mentor, you're not obligated, I guess to listen to them but the idea is kind of that you should. There is one person and you should listen to them because they know more than you. I think that's just not really fair and instead, I like to think that there are lots of different ways to do things and it's up to you to decide what's best for you and in order for you to decide, you have to have a lot of options. With Codeland, with the Twitter chats, no matter what skill level you're at, no matter how confident you feel in your coding abilities, you do have something to offer. Let's pull that out. Let's put it on the table and let's see who you can help today. SAM: That's a perfect way of introducing someone to the idea of helping or getting help from a community, rather than an individual because you never want to take one person's word as gospel on something you just know nothing about. SARON: Yeah, exactly. SAM: You can sound confident talking about something and it can be the total wrong answer but if you're seen as someone superior or someone who knows what they're doing -- SARON: And you can sell it. SAM: Yeah. You can be the best snake oil salesman in the world. SARON: Absolutely. For the CodeNewbie podcast, we do short questions at the end of each episode and one of the questions -- my favorite question -- is what's the worst advice you've ever received. I love that question because I started by saying, I think that people love giving advice. I think people love asking for advice and the assumption again is if I give you advice, then I probably know more and you should probably listen to me but that's not always true. I want people to be comfortable making their own decisions and deciding for themselves. "This may sound like it could work and this may sound like a good idea, generally speaking, but for me, it's probably not a good fit. It's probably not what's best for me," and to be comfortable rejecting advice and that was kind of the reason why I started that question, it's my favorite question and it's so interesting how much advice is good. It's kind of generic but it's a good advice. It's an advice like, "Don't quit. Keep going," which maybe a good idea and maybe you do need to quit, so being open to rejecting advice, I think is really important and that one of my favorite questions. SAM: In your experience, what is the best way to reject advice? Because when you're a new developer, when you're new at anything and you're seeking advice from a community or from a person, you don't want to come off as rude or maybe you're feeling... I don't know, not very confident but you think the advice that you were given is just bad advice. What would your advice be? I guess, what would your advice be on this advice? For your perspective, what would be a good advice to reject advice that you think is just wrong? SARON: Number one is when I ask people for advice, I try to think about and try to know upfront, do they have the same values that I do? Do they have the same worldview? Do they have the same goals? Because that's the thing too. Oh, my God, I got so much unsolicited advice. It's amazing. I've actually stopped just saying to people my ideas or what's on my mind because I know as soon as I say, "I'm thinking about this," I'll get a whole slew of unsolicited advice and I'm like, "I didn't ask for that." What I've learned is first to kind of figure out are we even on the same page because if my goal is to be a developer, if your goal is to be -- the only thing I could think of is a juggler, I don't know why -- a juggler and I ask you for a career advice, I'm going to go ahead and safely assume that what you have to say is probably not as applicable to me and so, number one is kind of identifying that. But number two is if they say something that just I know is not going to work or I've already tried, I'll just nod and say, "Thank you very much," and kind of go about my day. I don't think you have to declare whether or not you going to take it. I think just acknowledging and I think the people that give advice, I think they're trying to be helpful, they have good intentions, usually. Usually it's, "I'm trying to save you from making mistakes that I made and I'm trying to help you get to learn a little faster." I always appreciate it but knowing that I can say, "Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your perspective," but know that I don't have to go off [inaudible]. SAM: That's actually very similar to my tactic. Just not like, "Thank you. Thank you so much. Don't talk to me ever again." No. SARON: And disappear, yeah. SAM: I'm like the wind. With this pressure that either new developers or seasoned veterans are feeling about the mentor relationship, because I feel like a lot of senior developers that I've spoken with or people who've been in the business for a long time, feel like they should be mentoring or they need to take on that responsibility but there's always that hint of dread in their voice when they say about like, "Oh, I should be doing this." I always feel like it's okay to not do that. I never really understood why it was so high value to have this one-on-one relationship with an individual when you're not in school because it just feels so like... Not childish but childish. SARON: Yeah, that's one of things, frankly that I love about the tech community and also do not understand about the tech community. It's such a giving knowledge sharing community, whether you do it in a tactful way or not in a tactful way but the idea of giving back and paying it forward is just so deep. It's so, so deep that even when I've been coding for only a couple of months, I still felt this, I don't want to call pressure because pressure kind of sounds a little negative but I definitely felt this expectation that I was supposed to be blogging, supposed to be sharing and shouting and helping and doing these pay it forward type things. I don't really know where that comes from. Maybe that comes from the culture of open source, maybe that's where it kind of penetrate. I'm not sure but there's this huge need, desire, idea that we're supposed to be giving back and for that, I am very, very, very grateful. But I think that acknowledging that if you're someone who wants to be a mentor that you can do it simply by being available, literally being available, the going to be hashtag is super, super active even when we're not doing our Twitter chats and people use it to ask for help, they used it to ask questions. If you're feeling particularly giving or extra helpful that day, go on Twitter and check the hashtag and see what questions people are asking. Things like that or just super helpful and don't require a huge amount of time and effort. There's a lot of small ways to help out. That may not seem like a big deal to you but for the person who's asking for help, who has been banging their head against the wall, it's hugely valuable. SAM: Yeah, absolutely. Up until I went to my first conference this year, I didn't realize how supportive and important Twitter is. You know I always kind of considered it to be like another social media platform that I don't understand because I'm 84 years old and I just don't get it. It's been so uniquely helpful and in ways like Stack Overflow or even issues in GitHub, it just aren't. You can get so many more perspectives, so many different perspectives from people. SARON: Yeah, absolutely. Twitter has been amazing exactly for that. It's just an efficient way to crowdsource opinions and crowdsource perspectives and when you get your question answered and someone else answers it, it doesn't only benefit you the way it would if you email someone but it benefits anyone else who comes across that page, so yeah, it's hugely valuable. CHARLES: I remember the first moment I had kind of like that, a light bulb went off in my head where I was working on some really weird project that was using some strange wiki for its content storage and I was getting frustrated and I just tweeted about it and then the CTO of that company just immediately answered my question and I was like, "What?" You know, it was years ago and definitely, I was like, sound of explosion, that is where my mind exploded. I was not seeking help. I was just literally being kind of a jerk and venting frustration and lo and behold, the answer for my problem descended from the Twitter clouds. It was incredible. SARON: The Twitter clouds are the best clouds, usually CHARLES: Twitter is very... What's the word? It's very split down in the middle. SARON: Noodie? Yeah, there you go. SAM: There's this live feedback, so there's no buffer of emotion there, you know? SARON: Yeah. SAM: It's like, "Oh, this thing that you said, it made me mad. I'm going to tell you about it right now." Charles, I know that you had mentioned before that you think mentoring would be a good idea for Frontside and then, after all this discussion, have your views stayed the same? What are you feeling about that? CHARLES: As kind of the person who's like the grizzled veteran in the software world, it's definitely something that I've kind of whipped myself over the back. It's like feeling like it's something that we should do but I think it comes from the idea that people come here and we want to make sure that they're getting access to the learning that they need and the ways, in which they can level themselves up that they need, that's the kind of the prime motivator there. I always perceived mentorship as some vehicle through which to achieve that. It's something that I've heard. Obviously, we don't have a mentorship program at our company. It's something I felt that we should always be investigating. I've always felt maybe a little bit bad that we didn't have it but it's also something that I really struggled with in my career because I can't really say that I've ever had a mentor, so I don't really know what that relationship would look like but I do have a lot of people that I learned a lot of critical things from. I can look at it as kind of these seminal moments in my career, where like light bulbs went off and a lot of the time, they're associated with an individual and that individual and the thing that they taught me or multiple things that they taught me, are still with me. I have those experiences, which have been phenomenal and critical to my development as a software developer, so I guess it's just part and parcel of that impulse that you're describing to pay it forward, to realize that when you walked into the building, the lights were on and the walls were standing and the air was at a comfortable climate temperature. As you live there, you realize that there are people involved in actually, doing that maintenance and providing the building for you and the space for you to become aware of your world and then, when new people walk into the building, you want to provide them the same experience that you had. I guess that's my take on. That's the kind of thing that I would want to provide, so the question is like what does mentoring or mentoring 3.0, as we're maybe talking about in this conversation, how does that fit into that? How would you implement something like this, some sort of distributed learning in a company? I don't know. Maybe, it's not worthwhile. Maybe it is. SAM: I think it focuses more on that pair programming because when you're thinking back and you have all these people, like you have names of people that taught you something, it's multiple names. It's not just this one guy taught me all of these things. Actually, within a company, that mentoring just comes from pairing with your coworkers, seeing what different hats everybody wears and then, trying them on every now and again but not necessarily taking that individual's word as gospel, you know? CHARLES: Right and hopefully, that's not something that we've advocated for. Maybe, it's how do you introduce structure around that, to make sure that the proper ferment is happening, so that you have novel pairings and make sure the ideas that are flowing are flowing around the entire company and not just through certain set channels. SARON: Yeah. The other part of that is if you create structure around what it looks like to share outside. You know, pair programming is interesting because it's kind of one-on-one and it's hopefully, I have something important or bright to say in our pairing session. Maybe, I don't. Maybe I'm having a dull day. Maybe, I'm having a bad day but this really give you the same opportunity to take a moment and say, "What do I know? What do I want to share? What do I want to put together?" It does really give you a chance to prepare and gather yourself. It's kind of in the moment. I think having another opportunity where you can gather yourself is important and so, that might look like brown bag lunches, where everyone takes a turn and has to do a little lightning talk. That's usually the opportunity to say, "I have five minutes. I'm going to share something." Everyone has a turn, which means that the company's literally saying everyone has something to say. It's only five minutes, only a few minutes, so hopefully it won't be too terrifying if you're not big on public speaking and it's your co-worker so hopefully, it won't be terrifying because it's people you know and not total strangers. You know, a format like that, where there's structure but the company is saying, "We're going to give you time to think about what you're good at and what you know and to share that is good." I think another way to do that is by setting time aside for blogging. If your company can say, "Thirty minutes out of the week, we're going to take some time to write down five things I learned, to write down one cool thing I learned, post it publicly, post it internally about this expectation that everyone should be writing, everyone should be sharing, which also says everyone has something to share." I think those are two ideas and two ways that we can create a culture of sharing and a culture of distributed mentorship, where everyone has an opportunity to find the thing that they're excited about and specific ways to share it. SAM: Yeah, that's excellent. CHARLES: I hope you're grinning as much as I am, Sam because at least in the first half, you basically described our Lunch and Learn process. It's a little bit more than five minutes but I think another thing that clicked for me there is making sure that having a variation of expectations of quality or something like that because I feel like where we do really well is in the Lunch and Learn thing. We have a process very similar to what you describe but where we're not so good is maybe with blogging. I wonder if part of that is we just hold ourselves to such a high standard of what it is. The idea that we could throw together a blog post in 30 minutes, I love that idea but it means you really have to be willing to just say, "You know what? We're going to get it out there and we're going to make it bite-sized and the expectation is that we're not going to be writing some gigantic essay that's going to shake the industry to its core every Friday at three o'clock." There are things and if we can, I shouldn't say a reduction in quality but maybe a reduction in scope so that you can say like, "We're going to carve out 30 minutes or an hour and we're going to pick a topic that scope-appropriately for that." SARON: Absolutely and I think that knowing that you only have 30 minutes or maybe it's an hour -- an hour is probably a little bit more realistic -- but knowing that you only have an hour also forces scope. You can't write a book about JavaScript in an hour. You just can't, so the fact that by the end of that hour, you have to have something to turn in is a great way to force people to focus and do something really small and really bite-sized. The other thing is I don't think that after the hour, you need to publish it publicly. It could be, you need to turn it into someone else, to edit and look over for you and give you feedback. It's not quite ready yet but it's a solid first draft and the ideas that after that first person edits it, then it's on its way to being published. I think there's different ways to manage a scope without also making this scary thing where I have to say something for the Earth to shake. There's different things that we can do around that. CHARLES: I'm wondering what other forms of sharing that we can fit into our workday. I guess, the other baseline is just making sure that you're always... What is it? ABT -- always be tweeting. It's so easy to be write-only, not even engaging conversations but just throwing ideas out into the void. SAM: I think holding a discussion with your coworkers like if you're in an environment where you can work face to face or are constantly online, if you're more of a remote worker, I think just having a conversation with anybody, rather than just putting your idea out there, putting it out there with someone who can actually provide real time feedback in a more friendly way, then I think some people on Twitter could be. Because they're your coworkers and they're not going to call you rude names, you know? CHARLES: Right and you're also going to know, hopefully the whole trust and intent and 'are we on the same page?' that question is answered even before the text is written. SAM: Right. SARON: Yeah, absolutely and with those conversations, this actually mean [inaudible] that we do. We do like a show and tell every week and the idea is that we're both always learning random things, usually related things but sometimes, totally random but still very interesting and it will take 30 minutes to just share what we've learned. Sometimes, they'll also turn it into a blog post. Sometimes, it's just a knowledge sharing opportunity. I'm not really sure but it's a good window of opportunity to say, "We are learning and we're sharing and we have something of value to bring." The great thing about something like a show and tell is that it doesn't necessarily have to come from my brain. It doesn't have to be like, "I have a great idea that I'm going to share." It could be, "I read about this cool idea." It can be, "I heard about this cool thing that we can try and we can apply," but I still kind of credit, you know? Like I get credit for being the value bringer but the burden isn't on me every week to come up with the idea. That's a nice balance, to kind of create space to share and to promote this knowledge share and if it comes from you, it's great but if not, you're still helping other people. CHARLES: I have a question that may or may not be related in here. This has just kind of occurred to me because this is definitely something that I experienced, where I get into a mode where I become overwhelmed by the ideas that people are sharing and so, what's the balance? Because usually, we're out there searching for ideas and we're searching for novel things so that we can include them in our work, in the things that we want to do and accomplish, whether be that in tech or elsewhere. What's the balance of being heads down and being like, "You know what? I'm going to be closed to new ideas right now." Because they can be distracting, right? The [inaudible], that's actually a phenomenon and so, how do you protect yourself from sharing? What's the balance? SARON: My solution was to move to San Diego. That was my solution to that. I actually moved from New Jersey and I worked in New York City... How long has it been? Was it only been a year? Oh, my goodness, and now, I'm in San Diego and it was so interesting because that ended up being a really nice side effect. I didn't move specifically for that reason but when you are commuting in New York City every single day, there's so much going on all the time. There's just so many ideas and events and meet ups and companies and people. It's just so much. I think that it was a great place to be in my early 20s when I really just wanted to soak up everyone else's ideas and I didn't really have opinions of my own at that point and it's a great way to just kind of absorb and be this awesome sponge in the big city but after a while, I kind of realized, maybe I have my own ideas and my own thoughts, so moving to San Diego, which is a much, much, much quieter place, has been a really great way to reflect and sit with my own thoughts and feelings and opinions and just kind of focus on that. I understand that everyone can move to San Diego, although I highly recommend it but I think in that way of carving out like... What do they call it? Do they call it a tech sabbath? A digital sabbath? Am I saying that right? CHARLES: Yeah. Maybe. It sounds about right. SARON: Yeah. I came across that term recently but this idea of one day out of the week, I'm not going to be on the interweb. I'll just not going to do it. Maybe, even the whole weekend, oh, my goodness and saying, "I'm just going to stay away from things. I'm just going to create a little space for me to think and reflect." I think when I don't have the whole day and what I need is just like a moment, I find that writing things down is a great way -- a really, really good way of doing it -- even if I'm taking notes or from doing a strategy session or if I'm trying to make a decision. Usually, I'll start typing and what I've started to do recently is to say, "I'm not going to type. I'm going to plot in a notebook and I'm just going to write things down," and because writing is slower than typing, it forces you to just think. It forces you to be alone with your thoughts, for better or worse and it forces you to really just to think about what you're doing or what you're saying and reflect. It's a really, really great meditative exercise that I found. You know, finding little ways to build in an escape from the noise, ideally on a regular basis, I think is a really healthy thing to do. SAM: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. My normal method of sort of closing everybody off is I just sketch out ideas because I'm an artist. I come from that sort of perspective as I can make a drawing out of feelings more so than I can write them out. If I'm feeling really overwhelmed or if I'm trying to make sense of some information that people have given me, I just sketch it out and I think that's something that doesn't really get talked about a lot in the whole community because sometimes it's always about eat, breathe, live, code, you know? We have different skills. You have other things that you're good at that's not just code. When I was at React Rally, a lot of people were in the music and then finding a way to separate yourself from the entirety of it is definitely one of the better ways to make sense of your situation. SARON: Yup, absolutely. CHARLES: Yeah. Sleep? It's a great way to take a break. SARON: Sleep is so good. SAM: On my top three things: sleep. CHARLES: Yeah. SARON: Yeah. As a kid, I never ever thought I would look forward to my bedtime ever. You know, it's my favorite part of the day. CHARLES: Yeah but like sleep, writing, drawing, I always forget. Like when I'm caught up in a problem, I always forget that engaging in some other activity -- I like to walk in the place next to my house. I like to play my ukulele. Engaging in those activities is almost on the critical path to solving the problem and I always forget it. I think we always forget it but sometimes, you can be so frustrated and you can just shut it off, be completely alone and there is some magical process that's probably going on in your brain. I don't know exactly what it is but you come back and the answer is just sitting there, waiting practically on your desk. SARON: Absolutely. One thing, we recently moved a couple of weeks ago to a new place and it's a little bit bigger and so, I had the opportunity to unpack boxes and buy furniture that we didn't really need before or just trying to make it more of a home. I've been using it as a really great opportunity to be productive and to feel productive but not be in front of a screen. Sometimes, I even like save tasks for myself like, "I'm going to wait till the evening to put together this shelf because I'm going to need a moment to just be away from my computer." I have a plan around it so it ended up being such that, I think about every day, there's one little home activity thing that I can do, whether it's cleaning or cooking or assembly or movie or something with the home, that allows me to, because I'm not really a hobby person. I don't really do hobbies because it just feels, like no judgment on people who do. I know people get really into their hobbies but it just feels like, "Why?" You know, like, "Why?" like, "For what?" But when I put a shelf together, it's like, "I'm going to use this for books." You know what I mean? Like you're very purposeful, so home activities has been my way of carving out that space away from the screen but also feeling like I'm doing something productive, I'm getting things done. SAM: Something that I would recommend to anybody who doesn't really have that, I'm going to step away from the computer and do this thing. Something that's kind of helping me was the Pomodoro Technique, which if you're not familiar with that, it's basically a time management thing where you set your timer for work like for 25 minutes, 30 minutes or whatever and then, when the timer goes off, you take an allotted break for five minutes, 10 minutes, just so you're not doing the thing that you've been doing for the last 30 minutes. SARON: Yes, absolutely. That's a great one. SAM: My advice is to implement that if you don't have a thing, that you use for your cleaner, I guess. SARON: Oh, you want to hear some really terrible but effective advice? SAM: Yes. SARON: And this is what I found out very accidentally is if you have a really, really crappy office chair that hurts -- CHARLES: Oh, man. I'm sitting in one right now. It's literally a rocking chair from the 1800s. SARON: That sounds awesome. CHARLES: Yeah, it does sounds awesome. SARON: But if you have a crappy office chair, that can be a really great way to get away from your screen because after about an hour, your thighs will hurt and your back will hurt and you will be forced to get up and walk around. It's so funny because I have a pretty crappy office chair and my back has been hurting for so long and I just thought, "That's life." That's like my [inaudible] for myself. I'm like, "That's just how life is, my backs hurt," and then it got to a point where I was like, "I need to go and talk to someone," and as soon after that, I spoke to a conference and I was basically up and down away from any type of chair for like four or five days straight and magically, my back pain went away and I was, "Oh, my God. It's that freaking chair," and ever since I realized it, I started noticing it. I would sit down and I would go, "I'm nearing the one- Oh, there are my thighs. There they go. They're in pain." There's another great cheap life hack: get a crappy chair, after about an hour, everything will hurt. You will be forced to go do some jumping jacks for about five, 10 minutes and there's your additional sabbath. There you go. SAM: In Charles' case, probably a haunted office chair. Yeah, that's an excellent advice. I never really noticed that. Now, I'm going to. CHARLES: You know what funny is, I actually didn't even notice it but I do. I never used to get up and go on walks before or spend as much of the day standing as I do and I'm actually completely and totally oblivious to it but I think, I realize like I can attribute a lot of that to the terribly, uncomfortable chair, in which I sit on every day. SARON: I have this awesome habit of sitting cross-legged, which apparently is a very, very bad idea, my physical therapist told me, so I make it worse for myself. If you don't feel like you have enough screen time, just sit cross-legged and that will accelerate the pain process. SAM: As you said that, I am currently sitting cross-legged in my desk chair. SARON: Yeah! SAM: That's just how I sit in chairs. My legs are too short to reach the floor. SARON: Me too. I just find it so comfortable. I don't know and I'm so happy to hear that you also do this because I'm like, "Am I just weird?" because I love sitting cross-legged. It's so comfortable. It makes me really happy. SAM: No, I verified 100%, that's how I sit in all chairs. SARON: Yeah, the same. CHARLES: I can do one leg. SARON: Only one? Man, you need to work on that. SAM: -- [inaudible]. That's going to be the end of our podcast. Again, thank you Saron for coming on and having this awesome conversation about mentoring. Definitely check out the website CodeNewbie.org. We are the Frontside. We build software that you can stick a future on. Hit us up if you're looking for help building your next big thing and also, hit us up on Twitter. Hit Charles, myself, Frontside and Saron on Twitter. SARON: Thank you so much for having me. This is awesome. This is fun. SAM: Also, I want to give another thanks to Mandy, our producer for producing this lovely episode and all of our episodes. If you have any questions for us, hit us up on Twitter. Any ideas for future topics, any thoughts you have on this great conversation, let us know and we'll talk to you all later.

Learn 17 potential places to invest a small amount of money. It’s listener question day! Here is our question: Linda, I only have a small amount to invest, about $300 to $500. Where should I start? Sam There are many options you have. Since I don’t know anything about your circumstances, I’m going to give you a list of choices. Assuming all your consumer debt is paid off. If not, start there to get back to stability. 1. Start an emergency fund. Keep it in a separate (no-fee) checking or savings account, if possible. 2. Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA) are both great ways to reduce your income taxes by paying for medically-related expenses with pre-tax money — that is, money deducted from your paycheck before income taxes are calculated on your pay. You put money into that you use to pay for certain out-of-pocket health care costs. This means you’ll save an amount equal to the taxes you would have paid on the money you set aside. 3. Pay 1/12 extra on your mortgage to pay it off faster and save thousands of dollars in interest. 4. Invest in an ETF or mutual fund. ETF’s are passive, mutual funds are actively managed, but more expensive. Spyder S & P 500 fund (SPY, .09% expense ratio) or Vanguard All Market Index (VTI, .05% expense ratio). Dividend Aristocrats – 25 years of consecutive increasing dividends (NOBL, .35% expense ratio). 5. Term insurance. Creates an immediate estate in case of your untimely death. Can buy $100k to $500k depending on your age, health, gender, smoking, dangerous hobbies, etc. 6. Silver coins, still about $25 a piece. 7. Shares of stock. One share of Disney to get the special stock certificate, or Starbucks, etc. 8. REIT. Vanguard REIT (VNQ, .12% expense ratio) Now for some ideas outside of the box… 9. Bitcoin 10. Hire a CPA – to help you reduce your taxes if you make $75k + 11. Subscription to IBD, WSJ or Kiplinger’s 12. Condo down payment fund 13. Start a business 14. Have a garage sale to raise more funds 15. Hire an organizer 16. Buy a bus pass 17. Invest in a computer to start an online business Although you can consider all of these, if you are around age 30 or under, making your first real investment, I’d start with the Vanguard All Market Index ETF.

Sam Cates: @SamCates | GE Ventures Show Notes: 02:01 - What Corporate Investing Looks Like 03:48 - Presenting Ideas For Funding 09:01 - Democratizing Venture Capital 10:17 - ICOs and Cryptocurrency 13:53 - Evaluating Companies to Fund 21:09 - Investing in Potential Competitors 24:42 - Looking For Funding as a Company 28:04 - “Mentoring” Ideas/Companies 30:07 - Monitoring/Evaluating Company Metrics 32:47 - Putting Together a Basic Business Plan 36:05 - Making Choices: Investor and Company-wise Resources: Resin.io Series A, B, C Funding Angel Investor Seed Money Initial Coin Offering (ICO) AngelList Crunchbase Fred Wilson's Blog: (AVC.com) Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 92. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside and I am your podcast host-in-training kicking it off in 2018. [Inaudible] of our first episode. We've got Elrick also joining us. Hello, Elrick. ERICK: Hey. How you doing, Charles? CHARLES: I'm doing well. I'm doing well. You having a good new year so far? ERICK: Yeah, it's great. There's a snowstorm passing through today. So, I'm going to break in the New Year shoveling. CHARLES: Let us know if we need to parachute in some shovels for you. ERICK: [Laughs] CHARLES: And then with us today, we have Sam Cates on the show who is… a lot of times we have developers on the show. He's actually a venture… what would you describe yourself as? SAM: Yeah, I'd say I'm a venture investor with GE Ventures. So, on the corporate investing side. CHARLES: Okay. Now, I didn't even know that GE actually had a corporate investing side. Is that pretty common for a large company? SAM: You know, it's becoming increasingly common. I think in 2015 there was actually a peak of activity coming from corporate venture capital groups. And I've only seen the number of firms escalate since then. Although the dollars invested stays pretty consistent. But if you look at a lot of big companies, particularly in the common tech world like Cisco, Google, Intel, they have historically had large venture firms inside of themselves. And then GE and a lot of other industrials have since followed suit. We've been at it for about five years and we see it increasingly. CHARLES: And so, have you been with them since the beginning? SAM: Yeah, just about. I've actually been with GE for about nine years now. So, I was on the operating side in a number of the industrial businesses before I joined GE Digital and then GE Ventures. And so, it was just after GE Ventures got kicked off. CHARLES: Oh, that's exciting. So, what is it… now, we actually got connected to you through one of the companies that you actually invested in. It's something that we use and we're very interested in. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what your job looks like on a day-to-day basis and what companies you invest in? SAM: Sure. I really focus a lot of my time on Internet of Things companies. So, that's a really big trend that GE has been a part of and a leader in over the past few years. And so, we spend time investing in companies that are directly working with GE or playing in similar spaces to us. And so, Elrick and I actually met at a hackathon for one of those companies. And I always like to use that as an example because it's a good one, to demonstrate the kinds of investments we make. And that's Resin.io. I know you guys have done an episode or two talking with them. But that for example was a ‘Series A' investment that we made about two years ago. And then company essentially helps developers build connected products. And so, that's something that GE cares a lot about. We had people inside the company who found the product and loved it and that's actually how we met. CHARLES: When you say ‘Series A', can you give a brief overview of what the different stages of funding of a startup might be? SAM: Yeah, yeah, certainly. So, maybe if I take a step back and answer your original question on what I do on a day-to-day basis. A lot of my job is meeting with all kinds of new companies, whether they be early stage, usually things that would be seed funding – and we'll go into what some of those things mean – all the way through the late stage which would be companies that are maybe on the border of going public or are already profitable. And so, if we go into what kinds of investors there are, I think that's probably an interesting subject to talk more about. But they're a whole wide variety. When I said ‘Series A' I just meant a company that was at what we would call the ‘Series A' stage, and the letters act just like you'd expect. So, there's ‘Series A', ‘Series B', ‘Series C', and so on. And they all, they tend to look similar at those stages in terms of sizes and progress. But there is a range, and no two company is the same. ERICK: In today's world, it's very easy for people to create a startup. They can write some code and they can either come up, get a Raspberry Pi or some microcontrollers or whatever it is, and either do an IoT startup or a software startup. Now, when you get to the point where you have an idea and you kick it off initially, how do you go about then saying, “Let me get some funding.” How do you even get funding? SAM: Sure, yeah. And to your point, there's a huge range of technologies that are making it easier to start almost any kind of company. It's a great time to be an entrepreneur, whether it be 3D printing for hardware products, all the technologies that you were mentioning, AWS, all this stuff is contributing to reducing the cost to allow companies or people to create companies. And so, once people have gone out and experimented with some of these things and built what they think is a product the market wants, often if they require more money which may be for acquiring customers through things like Facebook Ads or simply doing further product development to make sure the product is somewhere that more customers could use it, often they can't finance it just through their own revenue. And so, there are typical stages and types of investors that people go approach looking for money. ERICK: Okay. What are those Series? I remember you mentioned something like a ‘Series A' investment. So, initially when you're looking for an investment, is that where you would… category you would be in as a startup looking for investment? They would consider you a ‘Series A' startup? SAM: Well, I want to caveat and just say every company is different. So, I see companies that… ERICK: Gotcha. SAM: Start out at a much later stage because they're able to bootstrap to that point. And bootstrap is the word that I use for a company that funds its own investment. They get paid by customers and they use that money to continue building the product. But if I talk about the range of types of financing a company may go for, I think the way that most people categorize this, first people often raise from friends and family or angels. And so, it's just money to get off the ground and maybe to pay the rent while you're doing some of that experimenting we were talking about. And then commonly after that is a seed round. And a seed round tends to be a little more institutional. So, it's maybe a more formal set of funds who exclusively invest in companies that are often pre-revenue but they have a product, or at least the beginnings of a product. And so, that's a really common category of investors. And then you get to ‘Series A' and the letters can escalate from there to the point where… ERICK: Gotcha. SAM: There can be some later rounds when they'd be ‘Series F' or even beyond, I guess. CHARLES: Right. So now, what are generally the terms on these? So, for my angel investments or my seed investments, I assume what distinguishes these is essentially how much ownership of the company you're getting for how much money. And those kind of, those change as the product solidifies. SAM: Yeah. CHARLES: And the potential becomes more visible. SAM: Yeah, it's a wide… and again, these are all… the venture is a world of ranges. There's a really wide difference between the two ends of any spectrum. So, I'll just talk in generalities though. So, I think the latest report that I've seen at least for an annual basis was PitchBook's 2016 report. And they were laying out some of the medians. So, for seed stage deals I believe it was something like one and a half million dollars raised was the median on a pre-money valuation of six and a half million. And that just means the company is worth, investors say the company is worth six and a half million dollars today. And we're going to give you a million and a half dollars invested at that price. CHARLES: So roughly, a sixth… they would take a sixth of the company then in return? SAM: Yeah. CHARLES: Okay. ERICK: Ah. CHARLES: Okay. ERICK: Okay. CHARLES: I see. That makes sense. So now, back to Elrick's original question. If I'm, I've got my product. Or I've got this idea. I've written some code. I've turned it into a prototype product. Maybe I'm moving through these various stages. What type of VC am I going to be looking for? How do I actually find the right type to be talking to? I guess what types are there even? SAM: Yeah. And one part… we mentioned a lot of the technologies that are making it easier to start companies. One part that also makes it easier is the proliferation of financing options, whether it be even more investors in these traditional structures we talked about like seed and A. And then there are other options that are emerging, things like you see a lot of people raising through what they call Initial Coin Offerings or ICOs. And then there are also things like AngelList which are attempting to democratize the investing process, make it more accessible. So traditionally, a lot of the seed A, B investors, they tend to be network-based, which can be a challenge for a lot of people that are maybe not in Silicon Valley or not a part of that network already. And so, one thing you can do is obviously go search databases that are on the web, things like Crunchbase. It's a free resource. It has a lot of deal history for investments that people have made. And it's a great resource for knowing, “Okay, this investor cares about these things.” And then in addition to that, there are also platforms that people can put their companies on. Like I mentioned, AngelList. And that's somewhere that you can list your company, you can meet investors, and they actually have some backend to actually support the investing process as well. CHARLES: So, there were two acronyms in there, or two specific technologies. [Chuckles] CHARLES: You talked about ICOs which I assumed that you said it was Initial Coin Offering. Not like insane clown offering. [Laughter] CHARLES: Which I would love to see. And then AngelList. So traditionally, these had been very network-based which brings to mind the capitalists of Old England or whatever where there's a bunch of people with cigars in a room and I realize it's not actually like that. What are each of these things? The AngelList and the ICOs? And how do they democratize that process? SAM: It's funny you should mention the old times. I think a good example of that is there are a lot of stories about the founding of General Electric. It's a 126-year-old company and back then it was largely, it was Thomas Edison working with I believe was JP Morgan to get it off the ground. And so, today there's still a bit of the network piece you're mentioning. But I think of AngelList as a place that you can essentially market to investors. If you think about the types of people that are on there, it's people that are looking to invest money in early stages in startups. And I'm not a big user of AngelList because I tend to be investing a little bit later. So, I really recommend anybody who's interested, just go check it out. It's I believe just Angel.co. CHARLES: And what about an ICO? SAM: So, an ICO is a more modern one. And it's kind of fraught with some concerns around regulations and transparency today. But I think since Thanksgiving there's been a massive wave of conversation about cryptocurrencies. And an ICO is essentially a way of creating your own cryptocurrency. The way I always explain to people, I love the analogy that people make around, think of it like I want to go build an amusement park. And in that amusement park, everything, rides, food, everything, is going to be denominated and payable in Sam-bucks. CHARLES: Ah, right. SAM: And… [Chuckles] And so, my options… CHARLES: [Laughs] That makes sense. SAM: Yeah. And my options are I can go to a bank and borrow money, I can go to investors and say, “Hey, give me the 10 million dollars it's going to take to build it,” or I can just go to the people in the place where I'm building it and say, “You want this amusement park to exist? Why don't you pre-buy these Sam-bucks?” And each one is going to cost a dollar today. And we create this universe of Sam-bucks and they're essentially valuable once you can use them in the park. And there are certainly exceptions. There are other versions of cryptocurrencies and other uses for them. But that's a conversation for another day. CHARLES: Ah, mm. SAM: I think that's just a good, easy way to understand it. CHARLES: Oh no, I like that. It's like, well not quite like carnival tickets. But yeah, that's something that everyone's familiar with. Same thing as the Xbox Marketplace. Very similar thing. So, the idea is you would buy a bunch of Sam-bucks… you would get them at pennies on the dollar, so to speak, today. SAM: Yeah, right. By the time it opens, maybe a hotdog would cost just one Sam-buck. CHARLES: Right. SAM: Whereas, when it's coming in, we'd have to spend five dollars to get that one Sam-buck. Right, the idea being those people who got in early will be rewarded. And you can see it's like a further extension of a Kickstarter or something else that you're allowing people to pre-buy into a network. CHARLES: Right. Right, okay. I can see that. ERICK: That's very interesting. [Laughs] CHARLES: And so, it's got a range of options too, because if you're really interested in the services you can go ahead and spend them on the services and get a lot of value that way or you can actually trade for someone who does want the services if you don't. SAM: I think that's exactly right. And it's just, the one that I think I would just caveat is there is a huge amount of concern at the moment, and maybe concern is too strong a word, but uncertainty around one, what are the value of these coins, these tokens? And two, how will governments react to something that looks potentially like a security or a currency? And so, that's something that still is being worked through. And even though they haven't figured that out there's still a massive amount of money being raised through these ICOs. CHARLES: [Laughs] So, it does beg the question. Why is a cryptocurrency necessary? Why not just use Xbox Marketplace points? Why not just say, “Here are Sam-bucks.” SAM: [Chuckles] CHARLES: And there's a row in my database. [Laughter] CHARLES: That's your balance of Sam-bucks. SAM: So, I think we're about to get way beyond the [inaudible] [Laughter] SAM: But I think the argument would be that some of these things are better decentralized. So in my example, you're right. That might just make more sense. But I think there are some examples around cryptocurrencies that are supporting a network of decentralized services where a centralized database historically was inconvenient or didn't provide the amount of transparency that people were looking for. CHARLES: Right, right. SAM: And so, that's a topic for a whole other podcast. CHARLES: Yeah, right. No, it makes sense. SAM: [Laughs] CHARLES: I think it's a matter of scale, right? If you're going to be just buying services but if you're going to have secondary markets where you're trading in this currency, I can see that. So, let's… [Chuckles] We'll reel that back in. SAM: [Chuckles] CHARLES: And ask a question that occurred to me. So now, we talked about your day-to-day. What exactly, when you're looking at a company to basically give money to, what are you looking for? What are the things you're like, “Oh man, I want to throw dollars at this company,” versus, “Mm. I'm going to keep them and give them some feedback and send them on their way.” SAM: There's always a set of factors that we evaluate. And I think the waiting is probably different for different types of investors. And then there's I'd say for me as a corporate VC being a part of GE, there's an extra lens which is, how is this relevant to GE? What does it mean for GE to be an investor? But if I think about just the kind of general industry lines it's: team is a really big one. So, who's building this company? Do I believe in their ability to reach this vision that they're laying out for me? Another one would be technology. What have they actually built? Is that hard to build? Do the things they want to build in the future, will those be hard to build? And do they have the skills and the people to do it? Then their technology, maybe an extension of that would be intellectual property. And besides intellectual property, just defensibility of a business in general. So then, you start thinking about, can somebody else just come along and to the same thing? Because if so, then maybe there's not a strong advantage in what the company has done so far. And then lastly, it's also just traction. How far along are they? How much have they proven the ability to execute on the plan that they're laying out? CHARLES: Right. ERICK: So, you're a corporate investor. So, there's other types of investor like an institutional VC? What are the differences between an institutional VC and a corporate VC and the other types of VC? Potentially what they'd be looking for, in terms of what they wanted best. SAM: Yeah. So, I think generally I categorize investors as institutional or corporate. And corporate [inaudible]… ERICK: Yeah. SAM: Corporate or strategic. And then there are people who exist on a spectrum there. But generally, an institutional means this is a group that is raising money from a set of limited partners who are the people who invest in the fund that are pension funds or wealthy individuals. They're large pools of institutional capital and their pure purpose is to earn return. And they may have a certain focus because they believe in this part of the market, or they like this kind of company or the stage of company. But essentially, their job is to return more money to the limited partners of that fund that were put in. That's their role in the world. And then on the corporate side, if we go the most extreme version of corporate VC, this is a group that is a part of a larger corporate. They're investing that company's money. So, in this case for me it's GE. I'm investing GE's money into these startups. And that means that I only have a single backer being GE. And I also maybe have a different lens, because my purpose is one, to earn financial return. I want to go out and I want to find good companies. I want to earn returns just like the other institutional venture capitalists. But I also have the goal of, and the strategic goal may differ by company, but for me it's about how can I help GE advance? How can I help GE understand a market? And how can GE be helpful to this company in achieving their goals? And so, for each company we use that lens as well, as a corporate. CHARLES: What I'm hearing is that you want to invest… I guess the thing is you can experience return that's not just cash. It's not just dollars. You'll experience return in raising the ocean of the business that GE is in, right? So… SAM: You said it much better than I did. [Laughter] CHARLES: Well, it's all… paraphrasing is actually easy. [Laughter] ERICK: Oh, yeah. SAM: An important skill. CHARLES: That makes a lot of sense. So, the question I have then is, you said you were looking for companies that kind of swim in a specific ocean. And each company is farther along. Are you usually finding this company I want to work with, like you are going out and finding them? Or they're coming to you looking for investment? Or is it really just, depends. SAM: So, we call that part of the process sourcing, sourcing investments. And they come from all over. So for us, there are a few different ways. One is we tend to be thesis-driven. Meaning we go out and we say, the world is changing in this way and therefore we're interested in this kind of company. And so, we'll proactively go out and research. We're also, I mentioned, a little later stage. So, I don't tend to do seed investments. I tend to do ‘Series A' and more often ‘Series B' and later. So, companies that have often already raised a seed round or raised a ‘Series A' round. So, I can actually search databases to say, “Okay, in the last two years who has raised a seed round or ‘Series A' round and these other things I'm looking for whether it be location or tied to investors or other things.” So, that's one way of being proactive is saying I want to go out and look for companies in this space that look like this. And that can be either like I mentioned, desktop research like searching the web, searching databases. Or it can be just going to conferences, right? So, on thing we spend a lot of time on in the IoT world is artificial intelligence and machine learning. It's been a big, big topic over the last year that a lot of people have invested in. So, we may go to different conferences that focus on that topic, meet lots of people that are working on it. Some companies, some individuals that are either investing in or advising their companies. And we'll talk to them. What companies are rising out of that space that we should be looking at? What technologies are changing in that space that we should be thinking about? And just trying to get smarter so that we can make the right investments and help the right companies find their way to work with GE and make our products better and help them advance their own enterprise. CHARLES: Are you investing with a mind that eventually GE might acquire this company and integrate it into GE itself? Or is it really just, “Hey, we're just going to take a part of it. We're going to have maybe a seat on the board to be able to steer a little bit. But we're pretty much going to let it be its own thing with its own autonomy and go where it was and just benefit through those secondary and tertiary effects.” SAM: Yeah, acquisitions from our portfolio by GE happened. But they're certainly not the explicit goal or our focus. I know we've had one, maybe two of our portfolio companies acquired by GE, one that I was directly working with called Bit Stew. So, we made the investment in the company. It was with the goal of using their data management platform for a lot of our applications. And at some point in working with GE and GE Digital, they decided, you know, this would make sense to be a part of GE. That wasn't why we made the investment. But it did end up being acquired by GE. And I know the team is doing really well. And it's been at GE for about a year now. So, it does happen. But when I said one or two, that's versus a portfolio of a hundred plus companies. CHARLES: Right. SAM: Since we started investing. And so, that's not what we're looking to do every time. Much more often it's about again, how does the company make GE more competitive and a better company, a better place to work. And then how do we help them advance their goals? Whether it be bringing them developers, or finding them other routes to market, or just being a customer. CHARLES: Right. SAM: So, that's really how we think about strategic value. There's a lot of different ways to create it. CHARLES: Yeah, I'm curious. Because it seems like also in a lot of these companies you're investing in potential competitors. Extensively you're operating if not in the exact same market, maybe very similar markets. There's a little bit of overlap. And so, you're kind of investing in potential competitors, right? So, where's the balance of here we're funding our competitors versus we're going to move into these markets ourselves. SAM: Yeah, and funding of “competitors” can happen. I think that we talk about that more in theory and say, “Oh sure, we'd be willing to fund a company that's out disrupting the space that we're playing in.” And we do that. It's rare that you see startups that are directly head-on competing with much more established companies like GE or other industrials or even other consumer companies. They don't take these companies head-on because that's not a way that startups have been successful in the past, right? We talk much more about disruption and saying, how is this company doing something that may indirectly compete with GE? So, you think about things like, for anybody that's not familiar with GE… actually, a lot of people associate us with our appliances which we actually don't manufacture anymore. That's [inaudible]. [Chuckles] SAM: We sold that business a few years ago. Almost everything we sell is like big, heavy industrial equipment. So, we sell aircraft engines, locomotives. We sell gas turbines, wind turbines. So, here and there a couple of things that do power generation. One trend that's affecting that industry is distributed generation of energy, energy storage. And those are parts of the market that are a less significant part of GE's business than say, heavy-duty gas turbines that sit in a power plant and generate a massive amount of power. And so, if you look at that and say, “Wow, GE Ventures is out funding storage companies. Does that mean they're funding competitors?” Well, it means that we're funding innovation that may disrupt the future of our business, but that's part of being a VC and that's part of the value that GE Ventures brings to GE. CHARLES: Right. SAM: We're out there looking at markets before they're large enough or in scope for GE. CHARLES: Mmhmm, right. And so, yes you're disrupting the space but then you're going to be a part of that disruption and have strong connections to those markets if you need to actually migrate your business completely over to them. That's kind of what I'm hearing. SAM: Yeah, absolutely. Better to disrupt yourself, right? CHARLES: [Chuckles] SAM: And be a part of the ecosystem in the future because I think the future happens with or without you. And it's really key that we get out in front of it and a part of that, a part of that discussion, a part of that process. CHARLES: And so now, you've been saying that this is, GE, this has been pretty explosive? There's a lot more happening through GE Ventures. There's a lot more happening in other companies globally, having these corporate ventures. Where do you think the balance is going to lie to say, “Hey,” I'm just going to throw out some numbers, just for theory here, it's like, “10% of our business is essentially this distributed network of semi-autonomous or mostly autonomous startups. And then we have our core business.” Does that stabilize at 50/50? Does it stabilize at 75% the other way with GE essentially becoming a capital management company? Or is it somewhere in the middle? SAM: So, GE Ventures will never be a meaningful part of GE's revenue, a meaningful part of its business as a percentage. The overall venture industry is full of funds that are on the order of like, bigger funds are on the order of, in the billions. The single-digit billions. And GE itself is a much, much larger company. Well over a hundred billion dollars in enterprise value. So, I think GE Ventures will always be a small part of the company financially. And the impact will be largely felt through how we help the rest of GE navigate the future. ERICK: You said that sometimes you go and look for companies, startups to invest in or sometimes startups come to you or come to a VC looking for funding. Now, I'm a developer or a startup founder. And I'm going to look for funding. What are some of the mistakes or pitfalls that you see that startup founders or people with an idea fall into when looking for funding that you can help them avoid? SAM: Yeah, and we do see companies that come to us. So, I mentioned a lot about how I go out looking for companies based on a thesis or a set of relevant factors or relevant things for GE. But we do have a number of inbound requests. People know some of the bigger VC brands. They know GE the big company. So, we do get inbound interest and we also get referrals from networks of VCs and some are employees and other things. But for the companies that are seeking us out, the ones that are going out looking for funding, there are some things that are really well-known in Silicon Valley and other places, or you could research online and find, but may not be obvious at first. And so, I think the first one is, who are you talking to? What investors are you seeking out? Depending on what stage you're at, what kind of business you're in, you have to understand what the landscape of potential investors are and which ones might be interested in a company like yours. So, I think there are tons of good mentors that can help people navigate that. Maybe less commonly outside of Silicon Valley, in Boston, New York, in the places where you have traditional venture ecosystems. But you see a ton of resources available online whether it be things like Fred Wilson's blog, AVC.com, or Crunchbase, TechCrunch. You can read and understand and from headlines tell what people care about. And I think that's fundamentally a really important first step. You don't want to waste an hour talking to somebody who will never… this is somebody that invests in really late-stage growth equity companies and I'm coming to them for my first investment. That's not going to work. So, I think finding the right people, step one. I think when you're going through the process of pitching and talking about your business, the pitfalls are all about understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your business and where you are today. And so, for every company, that's different. But I think just being open and honest versus glossing over a lot of the risks, these are all really risky companies. If they were easy, then you'd have a lot more competition. And so… [Laughter] SAM: I think that's one thing that I see, too. You have some company that comes in and say, “Look, here are the parts I've figured out and here are the parts I still have to figure out.” And that's a really good conversation to have. There are other companies where they say, “Look, we've figured the whole thing out. We just want you to give us some money.” And I don't think a lot of investors necessarily buy into that. And certainly, there are investors of every stripe. So, I may be speaking too broadly. But I think that's a really important part of the venture investment process, right? You're looking not just for money but also for counsel and for somebody that you're going to work with over the next, sometimes seven years or longer. CHARLES: Yeah. SAM: [Inaudible] going to be on your board and participating. So, it's a really important part. CHARLES: So, you're looking, you're actually looking not necessarily for all the answers but you're looking for the questions that they're asking, too. SAM: Yeah, absolutely. And demonstrating they understand the ins and outs of the business. And that they have the capacity to carry this onto that next stage and hopefully beyond. CHARLES: Mmhmm. So, now you said something that caught my interest there that you work with some people sometimes seven years. You enter into these long relationships. Do you generally ever do any type of, I want to say almost like… mentoring might be too strong of a word, but in the pre-investment, in other words before you actually invest in a company, do you ever work with them to prepare them for investment to say, “Hey, I think there's potential here. Work on A, B, and C and then let's talk.” And you have this image in your mind. You go, you pitch to an investor, and it's either thumbs up or it's like thumbs down and you never talk to them again. Versus, is there some ground in between where there's a conversation that evolves that eventually ends up in an investment being made? SAM: Absolutely. I think one of the parts of this industry is even when I'm not an investor in a company, I may know a company and say, “It's not a fit for me for GE Ventures but I still think that we can provide help.” It's one of the things I love about tech and about venture in general, is that people are often willing to pitch in, even when they don't have a direct financial incentive. And so, I see that a lot whether it's helping a company where we've met them and we later see an opportunity and say, “Oh, you should go and talk to this company or that company.” And then often, we may see a company that's pitching us ahead of where we would typically invest. Maybe they're looking for a ‘Series A' but given the space that they're in or what we're doing at the moment, it may not be the right time for us. And so, we'll continue to track along and keep up and get updates. Some companies do a really good job of actually providing proactive updates and sending out monthly or quarterly reports to investors they've met with before. I think there's a wide range of ways that founders do this. But it is a really good way to keep people interested in the prize. And then when you come back and say, “Hey, now I'm out raising my ‘Series B',” that's not a surprise. I knew that you were hitting these milestones, that you were doing everything you said you were going to do. And you've demonstrated a level of credibility that really adds to the pitch that you made the first time around. ERLICK: You said something, metrics. So, a venture capitalist, after they make an investment, what are some of the expectations that they may hold this startup that they just invested in… what are those expectations that they may hold them accountable for? Or those metrics that they'll be looking at? SAM: Yeah, so I think some of the really high-level ones that are common across businesses, generally growth is a really big one. So, I almost said revenue. But I wanted to caveat… [Laughter] SAM: And say growth could mean different things. It could mean number of developers. It could mean number of downloads if you're an app. It depends on what the business is. But I think growth is a huge one. Growth is a really important, that top line, that's what's going to drive a lot of the value in the business. And then below that, demonstrating that you can hit the milestones around things like margins. So, how profitable is each unit you're selling? Or how profitable is each customer? And lastly, how are you doing managing your spend? So, that's great that you're earning the right amount of money for each customer, but are you doing it by… do you have a massive number of employees and offices and all the things that are too expensive to allow you to use your money wisely as you reach the next stage? And so, those are the big milestones. It's really just growth, margins, and operating cost or burn rate as we call it. CHARLES: Mmhmm. So, that sounds like a lot of work to actually evaluate these companies. Do you do your due diligence once you've already moved in pretty solidly into the process? SAM: Yeah, these processes can move really fast. And depending on the timing, generally it's, you jump in, you learn as much as you can, as fast as you can, and you make a decision so the company can move on. I'll say there's a lot of work that goes into considering and deciding which companies to spend more time on, both for us and for them. We don't want to waste a company's time evaluating, going through more meetings, if it's not a really strong candidate for us. Because they could be spending that time better with other investors who are a better fit. And I'm not going to pretend to like the evaluation part. I have a lot of respect for the amount of not just work but of a person's energy and really, their life goes into these companies. And so, I think the hard part is building the company. And so, it's hard for me to say that evaluating is a hard part. I'm trying to understand as much as I possibly can in a month or two. I'm not going to know as much about the business as the founder does. And I'll be wrong a lot. I may miss something and not understand, whether it's because I don't see the market but it's there or because I have some underlying assumption about the way things should work that they don't meet. And I think that that's something that investors have to come to grips with. You try and get as smart as you can as fast as you can, but you're not always going to get to the right answer. ERLICK: You said that it was growth, spend, and profits were some of the metrics. That is almost all of the essential components of a business plan. I remember one time, one of our previous conversations, you emphasized how important it was for companies, or even at just a simple startup, to put together a basic business plan. Is that something that you can elaborate on a little? SAM: Yeah. So, most companies show up with a pitch deck. So, they have a set of PowerPoint slides and then they have a set of materials behind that where if you go deeper into an area they may have a white paper about their technology and they may have an Excel financial model that explains why they have these expectations about what growth and margins and all those things will look like. So, there are all of those pieces that come together into a business plan. The business plan could be written or it could be that PowerPoint. But very traditionally, it's a PowerPoint or some kind of presentation that is shared in person. There's usually a version that's sent in advance to confirm that the company and the investors should meet. And then once you clear that bar, there's a deeper presentation that often you'll give to either one or a set or a whole team of investors. And you'll go through and explain why it is you think this is a good investment opportunity for them and why you'd like to work together. And then you have a discussion about whether that's a good fit, about some of the underlying assumptions, and come to either a set of next steps for the diligence or a decision that it's not the right fit, it's not the right time to take the relationship further with more diligence and that kind of stuff. ERLICK: Yeah, because I see… well, I know a few people that have startup ideas and they kind of put the business plan on the back burner and put the actual prototype more at the forefront. They say, “Oh, we can worry about the business plan later.” [Laughs] SAM: [Chuckles] Well, I think… there's something to be said to that. There's something to be said for product and growth winning. So if you… Let's start at the early stages. If you have something that's working and that's really obvious, you may not need a… ERLICK: True. SAM: To go raise money. It all comes down to, do you have enough to get enough investors interested to raise the round that you want to raise? Because you want to have enough investors involved, enough demand, that you can be selective about who you want to work with and on what terms, right? So, what valuation and how much of the company am I giving them, and all of those things. So, if you can do all of those things with nothing but an app and one chart that shows a hockey stick of growth, that's awesome. CHARLES: You're hot. [Laughter] SAM: Often it does require much more and a much longer plan. So, even if you say, “Look, it's growing like crazy,” there's usually some set of questions behind that. So, that's great. Your free app is growing like crazy. How are you going…? [Laughter] SAM: To get paid for that? And you'll talk about that. And you'll say, “Here are the things we're planning on doing,” or here are the assumptions that we're making. And the more original, the more unique the business model is, the more discussion and explanation that may require. And that's where the business plan and a pitch deck come in handy, because it's a really good presentation aide or pre-reading to get to that answer faster. ERLICK: So, this evaluation it seems, is a two-way street. The VCs evaluating the company and also the company or the startup evaluating the VC to know whether it's going to be a good relationship. SAM: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, the best companies have choice. They have a number of investors who are interested in funding them. And certainly, that might be different at different stages or at different times, depending on what's going on in the economy and in tech and in other places. But generally, VC is a very competitive industry. I'm trying to sell my money and services as an investor versus other options that you have. And so, while it's maybe not as competitive as only one of us can buy the company like in an M&A situation. There are often more than one investor. There's still a very intense set of competition around, okay, who's going to be involved in the deal? How much money will they be able to invest? So, that's something that really can come in handy for founders. ERLICK: And what was that you just said there? M&A situation? SAM: Oh, sorry. When a company is being bought. So, when a company is being bought, it can look kind of like a fundraising process, but instead of selling a part of a company, you're selling the whole thing. And so, in that case, obviously it's a competitive situation where there's only one winner. And this is a different process. Often, the rounds that we're a part of, we're not… we're buying a minority stake just like any VC. We may be buying 5% of a company, 10% of a company. And often we're being joined by other venture investors. We really actually commonly partner with the institutional firms and they'll take a board seat. We'll invest alongside them and be an observer on the board and provide counsel. And so, it is a very competitive process. And that, while M&A is a winner-take-all, there is one buyer who is ultimately going to own this company going forward, the investing process for a venture is much more collaborative. But it is still competitive, because there can only be so many investors in one company. CHARLES: And you want to choose the right one on both… the right set. Alright. Well, I think we're running up against time. This has been a fascinating conversation into an aspect of our industry that really is providing the fuel that drives so much of this forward. So, I guess I'll close by asking you, already talked about Resin. We had them on the podcast. We love them. Are there any conferences or products that you're investing in that you feel like our audience might want to know about or anything like that? SAM: Well one, you mentioned Resin. CHARLES: Yeah. SAM: I know you guys have been a good friend to them and Elrick and I met at their hackathon. I would recommend to anybody, go try it out. It's a really cool way to play with hardware products. I am not a developer and I required a lot of help from Elrick at the hackathon. [Laughter] SAM: But at the same time, it is something that almost anybody can pull out of a box and start playing with. So, I think that's a great one. The episode you did on them were fantastic. So, I really enjoyed those ones. I'd say in general, I'm always out looking to meet new companies that are going to benefit from working with GE. I spend a lot of my time not just trying to invest but also trying to find partnerships for companies that we're looking at within GE, either selling to us or working with us. And so, if somebody thinks that there's an opportunity to do that, then I encourage them to reach out. Because I think there's a ton of opportunity. It's a really big company that really has a ton of opportunity for other partners. CHARLES: Alright. If they wanted to reach out, how would they get in touch with you? SAM: Yeah, I think maybe the best way to initially make contact, I tend to be pretty active on Twitter. So, my handle is just @SamCates. S-A-M-C-A-T-E-S. And you can also learn more through our website. If you're curious about some of the businesses I mentioned, so just GEVentures.com. And it's about to go through a whole refresh. So, go check it out. CHARLES: Alright. Well, fantastic. We will definitely look for that. And for everybody else, you can get in touch with us on Twitter at @TheFrontside or send us a line at info@frontside.io. Thank you everybody for listening. Thank so, so much Sam, for being on the podcast. SAM: Yeah, of course. It was a blast. I'm a big podcast fan and I've really enjoyed catching up on your episodes. CHARLES: Ah, and thank you Elrick, always. ERICK: It was great. SAM: Elrick, when you finish building your Raspberry Pi Battleships, I want to play. CHARLES: [Laughs] ERICK: Oh, yes. Yes. It's in the works, man. It's in progress. SAM: Alright, I'm waiting. CHARLES: Alright. Well, take it easy, everybody.

Learn 17 potential places to invest a small amount of money. It’s listener question day! Here is our question: Linda, I only have a small amount to invest, about $300 to $500. Where should I start? Sam There are many options you have. Since I don’t know anything about your circumstances, I’m going to give you a list of choices. Assuming all your consumer debt is paid off. If not, start there to get back to stability.   1. Start an emergency fund. Keep it in a separate (no-fee) checking or savings account, if possible. 2. Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA) are both great ways to reduce your income taxes by paying for medically-related expenses with pre-tax money — that is, money deducted from your paycheck before income taxes are calculated on your pay. You put money into that you use to pay for certain out-of-pocket health care costs. This means you'll save an amount equal to the taxes you would have paid on the money you set aside. 3. Pay 1/12 extra on your mortgage to pay it off faster and save thousands of dollars in interest. 4. Invest in an ETF or mutual fund. ETF’s are passive, mutual funds are actively managed, but more expensive. Spyder S & P 500 fund (SPY, .09% expense ratio) or Vanguard All Market Index (VTI, .05% expense ratio). Dividend Aristocrats - 25 years of consecutive increasing dividends (NOBL, .35% expense ratio). 5. Term insurance. Creates an immediate estate in case of your untimely death. Can buy $100k to $500k depending on your age, health, gender, smoking, dangerous hobbies, etc. 6. Silver coins, still about $25 a piece. 7. Shares of stock. One share of Disney to get the special stock certificate, or Starbucks, etc. 8. REIT. Vanguard REIT (VNQ, .12% expense ratio) Outside of the box… 9. Bitcoin 10. Hire a CPA - to help you reduce your taxes if you make $75k + 11. Subscription to IBD, WSJ or Kiplinger's 12. Condo down payment fund 13. Start a business 14. Have a garage sale to raise more funds 15. Hire an organizer 16. Buy a bus pass 17. Invest in a computer to start an online business Although you can consider all of these, if you are around age 30 or under, making your first real investment, I’d start with the Vanguard All Market Index ETF.   I'm having a summer giveaway through the end of September...you could win: 6 awesome prizes: 5 of The Wealthy Mindset Blueprint (audio course): Learn how millionaires think the right thoughts for wealth before it happens (value $197)                                    OR 1 Wealth Journal (book): Learn the 6 Steps to Wealth (value $67) Here's what you need to do: 1. Leave the "Be Wealthy & Smart" podcast a review on iTunes (or Stitcher Radio for Android). 2. "Like" my Facebook Fan page at http://facebook.com/lindapjonesfanpage (if you're on FB, if not, that's ok). 3. "Follow" me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lindapjones 4. "Follow" me on Instagram @LindaPJones 5. Send me an email @ lpjhome@gmail.com and let me know you did this! (If you're not on FB, TW or IG, that's ok, just send me an email @lpjhome@gmail.com and let me know you left a review). If you've already done all 4 above, great! Thank you! No need to do them again! Just email me @ lpjhome@gmail.com and let me know. All names will be dropped in a hat and a drawing will be done in early October for winners!  Move your net worth in the right direction by getting “11 Quick Financial Tips to Boost Your Wealth” at www.lindapjones.com.  

Caroline's interview with Sam Yong, Apparition Media 30-year-old artist and designer of the Spider-Man: Homecoming mural at Melbourne Central. CAROLINE: Congratulations on your big commission! SAM: Thank you. CAROLINE: Can you tell us how you got the gig? SAM: I work part time at Apparition Media, and I’m an artist and a designer there as well. Tyson (Hunter), one of the founders, he pitched me as an artist to do a custom design for the Spider-Man mural. Sony likes my work so they said “we’ll have you do the artwork for us”. CAROLINE: Spider-Man is such an iconic Marvel character. Were you briefed to stay true to the original, or were you allowed to have creative freedom in the design? SAM: They were pretty strict on keeping it to the new Marvel cinematic universe design because they wanted it to be set apart from the classic comic book costumes and also to keep it apart from the past Spider-Man franchises that have been done before. CAROLINE: And how is this reflected in the art, in the mural itself? SAM: I kept the design from the new Marvel cinematic universe, the costumes and stuff, I kept it all the same as they were going to be in the movie. So it didn’t change too much. I didn’t change too much of the design, I just did my own layout. CAROLINE: And Knox Lane is such an iconic laneway in Melbourne. Can you tell us how you made use of the space available to reflect this? SAM: It’s quite a long and narrow wall, I think it’s about 28 metres long in total. So instead of just one big image, I broke it down and I treated it more like a storyboard, or a comic book strip. So I can have multiple scenes in the same artwork. So I kind of treated it like an action set piece, fight scene rather than just one piece of art. CAROLINE: I noticed when I walked past it you had Spider-Man in different positions. SAM: It’s meant to play out like one little scene. CAROLINE: Many thousands of people would’ve walked past your mural this week and it looks amazing. What is it that you want to draw their attention to? Is it the story you’re trying to create from the mural? SAM: I didn’t really want to just slap movie artwork onto the wall. So I wanted to make a little cohesive comic book, something that would hold interest as you walked past it, so tell a little story about it as well as inform people about the new movie coming up. CAROLINE: And are you a Marvel fan? SAM: Yeah, actually comic books kind of got me into drawing as a kid, so it’s nice to have gone full circle again to go from copying comic books when I was about 11 or 12 I guess. That’s how I got into drawing, and then now that I’m a painter, as a career, and now I’ve gone back to painting for some of the stuff that got me into art, so that’s pretty cool. CAROLINE: Can you tell us a little bit about your own art and style and how you combined it with what Sony Pictures wanted you to create? SAM: I started as a commercial illustrator and graphic designer when I first got out of uni and then I slowly moved away from commercial stuff and then moved into painting and art. And I’ve been oil painter for the last coupe of years, and then working at Apparition doing the murals part-time and learning how to paint a bit more. And that’s gotten me into the commercial side of things again. And then so that’s informed how I’ve painted this a little bit, like, I bought an Ipad and I did all the paining digitally. CAROLINE: How does that work? SAM: There’s an app called Procreate and it works with an Ipad and the Apple Stylist Pin. So it’s pretty much like painting. It does feel quite like traditional painting except everything is done digitally, which is pretty cool. CAROLINE: So it’s very much a New Age way of doing art isn’t it? SAM: Yeah, it’s the easiest for the commercial kind of stuff. If there’s changes by the client, it’s easier to go back. So, really hard to make changes to a physical painting once it’s, like, once you've kinda painted it. It’s just a faster work flow. CAROLINE: And I’d like to go back to the film. The Australian premiere is very highly anticipated. Was there any pressure for you? SAM: This is probably one of the biggest commercial jobs that I’ve had before. And I felt a lot of pressure to make it good, especially because I really wanted to do the character justice because I like Spider-Man so much and been a big fan of the comic books for a very long time. I wanted to do a really good job, do the movie justice and everyone involved justice for giving me the job. Image from Sony Pictures Entertainment IncSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SAM: It is of supreme importance -- Luke: that we get our image of Jesus -- BOTH: RIGHT! SAM: There are too many blithering idiots - LUKE: Well meaning people! SAM: Religious nuts! LUKE: Church leaders – denominational and institutional hierarchies! SAM: Conservatives & Literalists! LUKE: Bleeding Heart Liberals and Socialists SAM: Political Elitists LUKE: Wacko revolutionaries! ALL: Who are leading people ASTRAY!! SAM: So listen carefully – JESUS ALL: As we ALL know LUKE: Came from a model family -- SAM: What?! His mother was pregnant when she got married! LUKE: And lived in a secure and loving home. SAM: They were refugees – his parents had an arranged marriage! LUKE: He had a wondrous childhood… SAM: About which we know nothing! LUKE: He was mild and obedient – a holy child! SAM: He ran away when he was 12… was gone for 3 days – and didn’t feel much remorse! LUKE: He spoke with love and compassion to all. SAM: He was rude to his mother more than once – and said “You’re not my father” to his step-father. LUKE: Jesus was the model working man. SAM: Doing what? He was impoverished, never held a job that we know of. Ran around with the wrong crowd and kept company with sinners and criminals! LUKE: He was a model capitalist and encouraged entrepreneurship in others. SAM: He told Peter, Andrew, James, John and Matthew to give up their jobs and leave their families. LUKE: He kept good company SAM: I think we’ve been around this bend! LUKE: He had a good word for everybody. SAM: If you think “vipers, blind guides and “hypocrites” are compliments! LUKE: His conversation was deep and centered on the finer things in life, SAM: bread and dough, sheep, pig farming, prostitutes for dinner, tax collectors for lunch. LUKE: He never dabbled with controversy. SAM: He just claimed to be the Son of God – and urged people not to support their government or obey their parents or their religious leaders! LUKE: Jesus never upset anyone! SAM: with the simple exception of priests, Pharisees, pigeon sellers, the wealthy, the religious, the Roman government, and anyone who suggested that they might know how to live a pious life! LUKE: He was respected in religious circles SAM: Which must be why they plotted to have him arrested and killed! LUKE: Jesus was a man among men SAM: And women! LUKE: He was a man of God. SAM: He was a man who called himself the Son of Humanity! LUKE: In his majesty we see God at work SAM: In his humility we see God in person! LUKE: That’s why he was worshipped and adored! SAM: That’s why he was tortured and crucified! LUKE: Jesus isn’t here now SAM: He rose on the third day. LUKE: So we have to wait until he comes again. SAM: But he sent his example to guide us. LUKE: He will bring the Kingdom of God with him. SAM: We have to celebrate his love and acceptance! LUKE: We have to save souls and tell people where they are sinning! SAM: We need to look at our own lives and find the path to good and grace. LUKE: We need to be religious leaders! SAM: We need to be faithful followers! LUKE: We need to stand up and be counted! SAM: Humbly! LUKE: Onward – Christian soldiers! SAM: Onward – Peaceful servants! LUKE: We are a mighty army! SAM: We are the Body of Christ! LUKE: It is of supreme importance -- SAM: That we get our image of Jesus – ALL: RIGHT