Podcast appearances and mentions of steve they

En el podcast the hoy, hablaremos del juego vs Real Salt Lake, juego atipico, injugable como lo describe Steve Cherundolo, derrota por demàs sorpresiva. Ryan Hollinsghead junto a Steve nos Dan sus impressions del juego, ademas Eduard Atuesta nos cuenta como se sintìo en su debut con LAFC la semana pasada. In today's podcast, we will talk about the game against Real Salt Lake, an atypical game, unplayable as Steve Cherundolo describes it, a very surprising defeat. Ryan Hollinsghead with Steve They give us their impressions of the game, and Eduard Atuesta tells us how he felt in his debut with LAFC last week.

Steve Brobeck served as the executive director of the Consumer Federation of America from 1980 to mid 2018. Steve now holds the position of senior fellow where he has researched real estate issues since the 1990s.Victoria Ray Henderson is the owner and broker of HomeBuyer Brokerage in the Washington D.C. area. Victoria is the producer and host of the podcast, Listen Up Home Buyers! with the National Association of Exclusive Buyer Agents Victoria: Hello and welcome to the podcast, Listen Up Home Buyers. I'm Victoria Ray Henderson, and today's guest is Steve Brobeck. Mr. Brobeck served as the Executive Director of the Consumer Federation of America from 1980 to mid-2018, and he now holds the position of Senior Fellow, where he has researched real estate issues since the 1990s. Steve, welcome to Listen Up Home Buyers.Steve:  It's great to join you, Vic.Victoria:  Yeah, thank you. So we have so many things that we could talk about and that we have talked…But the one thing I'd love to talk about today is the Real Estate Agent Commissions, and specifically that recent verdict by the Federal Jury in Missouri, which ruled that the National Association of Realtors and several brokerages had conspired to fix prices by setting a standard where seller pays the listing agent a commission. And that is split with the buyer's agent. And that decision found the defendants liable for $1.8 billion in damages. And of course, this verdict is just sweeping through the country, could dramatically change the real estate industry. So, I'll start with what are your thoughts on the verdict?Steve:  Well I'm not surprised at all; the jury hardly deliberated at all. When they went into that jury room, they had made up their mind. They spent a couple of hours deciding on the damages. Yes, they decided on 1.8 billion, but in fact, with the trouble damages, the cost to the industry could be over $5 billion. And that is just essentially in the State of Missouri, if you project it out to the whole country, you're looking at awards that would bankrupt the industry two or three times over. But that is not what the industry eventually is going to have to pay.Victoria:  Yeah. When you heard about this verdict, what did you hope would come from it?Steve:  Well, essentially, prices have been set by the industry for 80 to 90 years. And what we'd like to see, and what we believe in at CFA is price competition. And we believe that if there were effective price competition, you would see a much more diverse marketplace. The commissions on average would come down. We predicted 3 to 4%, but just as importantly, there would be different rates for different agents. Those that are really good at what they do, have a lot of experience would be able to charge more than those who just received their license. I just in fact, received a sales license in DC, and I do not deserve 3%, you know, for facilitating a sale.Victoria:  Congratulations. And you're always welcome to join my brokerage if you…We offer a great training program. But the reason that I bring that point up is because you mentioned that 3%, or whatever the commission would be. And you know that you as a newbie; newbies never make their full commission, they're always either working on the team, under the tutelage of, you know, somebody and they should be supervised and should be getting some training.Steve:  Well, the thing is, yes, maybe they're only receiving one and a half percent. Two reports on this whole problem of training. It's very easy in almost every state for someone to get a real estate license. Yet, this is actually…Practicing brokerage is complicated or it should be complicated and demands a lot of skill and knowledge. And unfortunately, one of our reports documented how incompetent so many agents are. They're often bailed out either by their broker or in many cases they're bailed out by the agent for the other party in the sale. That's just not the way an industry should function. You have to go back historically. Back in the 1920s, even earlier, the industry tried to set prices and force all members of the industry to charge the same price. The Department of Justice in the 1940s sued them about that, and they retreated and they made those price schedules voluntary. The Department of Justice sued them again, and they backtracked again. Then they engaged the industry in widespread collusion. Discounters have tried to offer lower rates and they failed. What the litigation tries to do, and what the jury clearly understood the industry is trying to do is, or should do, is to completely separate the listing agent and the buyer agent commissions. And if that's done, there actually is a chance for there to be real price competition, which by the way we believe would help the most confident agents. Right now, there's a glut of agents. Our current research shows that nearly half of all agents sold no or one property in the last year, and that essentially then puts huge pressure on the successful agents to continue and maintain the 5 to 6% rates.Victoria:  I often find, and the reason that many of these newbies don't have sales is because they're working as secretarial duties. They're on teams where they're following people around, and so they won't have a lot of sales. Now, I'm not arguing for…You know, I agree with you there are a lot of agents, and too many, but so many of them are used as support staff. So, I think, you know…Steve:  That's right. But remember, their aspiration is to be an agent; to sell property and collect commissions. And when they can, yes, some of them, and we've actually documented in the study that we're going to release early next year, but they end up working as admin staff to successful brokers. That's true.Victoria:  Yeah. Just in the beginning of the month, The Association of Independent Mortgage Experts, they release this open letter, and they're really concerned about the decoupling of the commissions. And the main reason is, you and I have discussed this before about putting additional finances onto the buyer, and specifically they're talking about vets; veterans, and first time home buyers, and they're saying that they could be adversely affected. VA guidelines, they prevent people from being able to finance a buyer's agent. So what we would end up doing in that situation, if it was decoupled, is asking the seller for a credit to pay the cooperative commission or the commission for the buyer's agent. And then there's the issue of the appraisal. What happens if to the appraisal when, you know, if the mortgage industry did end up being able to do this, which I don't think that they're going to agree to, the home value would then be impacted. So what are your thoughts on that?Steve:  If the industry decided that they wanted to remove those barriers, and I've talked to many people in the industry about this, it could get fixed and it could get fixed without even going to Congress. If, in fact, the real estate industry, and I think the mortgage industry and the consumer groups and housing groups would join them as well and go to the regulators and said, look, you've got to tweak these regulations to allow essentially a price competitive market to take place lowering the costs for buyers and sellers that would occur. Vic, I have talked to hundreds of realtors over the last 30 years, all of whom I consider to be professionals; they're the full-timers with experience. And quite a few of them complain that the industry will never be a profession until you have professional standards, which would greatly reduce the number of agents and give exclusive buyers like yourself a better opportunity to recruit clients.Victoria:  I agree with you that real estate standards need to be higher. And I will say that the National Association of Exclusive Buyer Agents, are specific real estate brokers and agents who are consumer oriented with a focus only working with buyers. What is your opinion of exclusive buyer brokerage in general?Steve:  Well, I'm glad you asked me that question because I am a strong believer in exclusive buyer brokerage. What the exclusive buyer brokers recognize, and I understood this when I first started to study the industry back in the nineties, is they recognize there's a fundamental conflict of interest in the industry. You basically cannot, without exposing that conflict of interest, list properties and sell properties. So you list properties and then you have a buyer. Now, who's your obligation to, is it to the, the sellers whose properties you've listed to show them the properties first? If not, then you are actually violating your fiduciary duty to the buyer. And if, in fact, you just honor that fiduciary ability and you ignore all of your listings and look for the property that would best suit the buyer, you're then violating your fiduciary responsibilities to the seller. Exclusive buyer brokerage has recognized that conflict of interest. And so people like yourself  who said, look, we can't really represent both, so we're just going to represent buyers. And I very much hope that in the future, exclusive buyer brokerage will stabilize and grow, and that buyers end up routinely using exclusive buyer brokers. That's my hope.Victoria:  Yeah, and I appreciate that. With the decoupling of commissions, I am really worried about a couple of people that I'm thinking of that I helped this year. She was scraping money together, borrowing money from parents, and pulling it together. And I got, you know, a condo for her under list price with a 3% seller subsidy to help with closing costs. And I was overjoyed, you know, I was just so elated to be able to do this. This woman would not have been able to pay my co-op, my commission out of pocket. My concern is that, you know, that the unintended consequences of decoupling the commissions could have ramifications that could impact the industry for decades.Steve:  I think that to preserve exclusive buyer brokerage and to rationalize the market, you're going to have to allow the buyers to finance the buyer agent commission. But what people are talking about right now, and you actually alluded to it ear early in our discussion, is a concession by the seller. And I think that that's what we're going to see as a transitional stage. And that eventually will lead to the mortgage financing of the commission. But that's the way to basically ease this transition.Victoria:  How is what you're suggesting different from what's already in play? How is it that in this whole scenario the person who, or the real estate agent, and in my case, the exclusive buyer broker who is essentially doing, I think it's well understood that the person who represents the buyer is doing a lot of work. How is it that this person has become the bad guy in this whole scenario? Steve:  They're not. Well, they're not the bad guy. I mean, the listing agent is really the one who was discussing the compensation and justifying the 5 to 6%. It's not the buyer agents because we're, with a few exceptions, the buyers and the buyer agents aren't having that conversation. You know, it's true. The system has existed basically for 80 to 90 years, and it functions to the extent that homes get sold and purchase. But the problem is the industry is very inefficient; consumers overpay, or at least quite a few of them, overpay. There's no relationship between agent compensation, or very little relationship between agent compensation and the services that they provide.Victoria:  As an exclusive buyer broker, I want people to be educated. I want buyers to understand this whole process. And I also know that I can speak for the members of Neva in saying that, you know, we advocate for buyers a hundred percent, we could probably be making double what we make if we did listings and if we worked for buyers, and if we did dual agency and designated agency, but we drew a line in the sand and said, we're not functioning that way.Steve:  Well, CFA has recognized that for decades, and we commend exclusive buyer brokers who really are trying to offer good value to consumers without the kind of conflicts of interest that exists throughout the rest of the industry. So, more power to exclusive buyer brokers.Victoria:  Yeah. We appreciate your support. Steve Brobeck, has served as the Executive Director of the Consumer Federation of America from 1980 to mid-2018, and now he holds the position of Senior Fellow at CFA and he's been researching real estate issues since the 1990s. Steve, you know, it's such a pleasure to always talk to you, and I'm inviting you back because we've only scratched the surface in this particular podcast.Steve:  Well, thank you, Vic. Victoria:  Thank you. Listen Up, Home Buyers! The podcast offering advice and tips from true buyer agents. Host and Producer, Victoria Ray Henderson is the owner and broker of HomeBuyer Brokerage in the Washington D.C. area. Victoria is and a member of the National Association of Exclusive Buyer Agents.

We are running an end of year survey for our listeners. Let us know any feedback you have for us, what episodes resonated with you the most, and guest requests for 2024! RAG has emerged as one of the key pieces of the AI Engineer stack. Jerry from LlamaIndex called it a “hack”, Bryan from Hex compared it to “a recommendation system from LLMs”, and even LangChain started with it. RAG is crucial in any AI coding workflow. We talked about context quality for code in our Phind episode. Today's guests, Beyang Liu and Steve Yegge from SourceGraph, have been focused on code indexing and retrieval for over 15 years. We locked them in our new studio to record a 1.5 hours masterclass on the history of code search, retrieval interfaces for code, and how they get SOTA 30% completion acceptance rate in their Cody product by being better at the “bin packing problem” of LLM context generation. Google Grok → SourceGraph → CodyWhile at Google in 2008, Steve built Grok, which lives on today as Google Kythe. It allowed engineers to do code parsing and searching across different codebases and programming languages. (You might remember this blog post from Steve's time at Google) Beyang was an intern at Google at the same time, and Grok became the inspiration to start SourceGraph in 2013. The two didn't know eachother personally until Beyang brought Steve out of retirement 9 years later to join him as VP Engineering. Fast forward 10 years, SourceGraph has become to best code search tool out there and raised $223M along the way. Nine months ago, they open sourced SourceGraph Cody, their AI coding assistant. All their code indexing and search infrastructure allows them to get SOTA results by having better RAG than competitors:* Code completions as you type that achieve an industry-best Completion Acceptance Rate (CAR) as high as 30% using a context-enhanced open-source LLM (StarCoder)* Context-aware chat that provides the option of using GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 2, GPT-3.5 Turbo, Mistral 7x8B, or Claude Instant, with more model integrations planned* Doc and unit test generation, along with AI quick fixes for common coding errors* AI-enhanced natural language code search, powered by a hybrid dense/sparse vector search engine There are a few pieces of infrastructure that helped Cody achieve these results:Dense-sparse vector retrieval system For many people, RAG = vector similarity search, but there's a lot more that you can do to get the best possible results. From their release:"Sparse vector search" is a fancy name for keyword search that potentially incorporates LLMs for things like ranking and term expansion (e.g., "k8s" expands to "Kubernetes container orchestration", possibly weighted as in SPLADE): * Dense vector retrieval makes use of embeddings, the internal representation that LLMs use to represent text. Dense vector retrieval provides recall over a broader set of results that may have no exact keyword matches but are still semantically similar. * Sparse vector retrieval is very fast, human-understandable, and yields high recall of results that closely match the user query. * We've found the approaches to be complementary.There's a very good blog post by Pinecone on SPLADE for sparse vector search if you're interested in diving in. If you're building RAG applications in areas that have a lot of industry-specific nomenclature, acronyms, etc, this is a good approach to getting better results.SCIPIn 2016, Microsoft announced the Language Server Protocol (LSP) and the Language Server Index Format (LSIF). This protocol makes it easy for IDEs to get all the context they need from a codebase to get things like file search, references, “go to definition”, etc. SourceGraph developed SCIP, “a better code indexing format than LSIF”:* Simpler and More Efficient Format: SCIP utilizes Protobuf instead of JSON, which is used by LSIF. Protobuf is more space-efficient, simpler, and more suitable for systems programming. * Better Performance and Smaller Index Sizes: SCIP indexers, such as scip-clang, show enhanced performance and reduced index file sizes compared to LSIF indexers (10%-20% smaller)* Easier to Develop and Debug: SCIP's design, centered around human-readable string IDs for symbols, makes it faster and more straightforward to develop new language indexers. Having more efficient indexing is key to more performant RAG on code. Show Notes* Sourcegraph* Cody* Copilot vs Cody* Steve's Stanford seminar on Grok* Steve's blog* Grab* Fireworks* Peter Norvig* Noam Chomsky* Code search* Kelly Norton* Zoekt* v0.devSee also our past episodes on Cursor, Phind, Codeium and Codium as well as the GitHub Copilot keynote at AI Engineer Summit.Timestamps* [00:00:00] Intros & Backgrounds* [00:05:20] How Steve's work on Grok inspired SourceGraph for Beyang* [00:08:10] What's Cody?* [00:11:22] Comparison of coding assistants and the capabilities of Cody* [00:16:00] The importance of context (RAG) in AI coding tools* [00:21:33] The debate between Chomsky and Norvig approaches in AI* [00:30:06] Normsky: the Norvig + Chomsky models collision* [00:36:00] The death of the DSL?* [00:40:00] LSP, Skip, Kythe, BFG, and all that fun stuff* [00:53:00] The SourceGraph internal stack* [00:58:46] Building on open source models* [01:02:00] SourceGraph for engineering managers?* [01:12:00] Lightning RoundTranscriptAlessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO-in-Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol AI. [00:00:16]Swyx: Hey, and today we're christening our new podcast studio in the Newton, and we have Beyang and Steve from Sourcegraph. Welcome. [00:00:25]Beyang: Hey, thanks for having us. [00:00:26]Swyx: So this has been a long time coming. I'm very excited to have you. We also are just celebrating the one year anniversary of ChatGPT yesterday, but also we'll be talking about the GA of Cody later on today. We'll just do a quick intros of both of you. Obviously, people can research you and check the show notes for more. Beyang, you worked in computer vision at Stanford and then you worked at Palantir. I did, yeah. You also interned at Google. [00:00:48]Beyang: I did back in the day where I get to use Steve's system, DevTool. [00:00:53]Swyx: Right. What was it called? [00:00:55]Beyang: It was called Grok. Well, the end user thing was Google Code Search. That's what everyone called it, or just like CS. But the brains of it were really the kind of like Trigram index and then Grok, which provided the reference graph. [00:01:07]Steve: Today it's called Kythe, the open source Google one. It's sort of like Grok v3. [00:01:11]Swyx: On your podcast, which you've had me on, you've interviewed a bunch of other code search developers, including the current developer of Kythe, right? [00:01:19]Beyang: No, we didn't have any Kythe people on, although we would love to if they're up for it. We had Kelly Norton, who built a similar system at Etsy, it's an open source project called Hound. We also had Han-Wen Nienhuys, who created Zoekt, which is, I think, heavily inspired by the Trigram index that powered Google's original code search and that we also now use at Sourcegraph. Yeah. [00:01:45]Swyx: So you teamed up with Quinn over 10 years ago to start Sourcegraph and you were indexing all code on the internet. And now you're in a perfect spot to create a code intelligence startup. Yeah, yeah. [00:01:56]Beyang: I guess the backstory was, I used Google Code Search while I was an intern. And then after I left that internship and worked elsewhere, it was the single dev tool that I missed the most. I felt like my job was just a lot more tedious and much more of a hassle without it. And so when Quinn and I started working together at Palantir, he had also used various code search engines in open source over the years. And it was just a pain point that we both felt, both working on code at Palantir and also working within Palantir's clients, which were a lot of Fortune 500 companies, large financial institutions, folks like that. And if anything, the pains they felt in dealing with large complex code bases made our pain points feel small by comparison. So that was really the impetus for starting Sourcegraph. [00:02:42]Swyx: Yeah, excellent. Steve, you famously worked at Amazon. And you've told many, many stories. I want every single listener of Latent Space to check out Steve's YouTube because he effectively had a podcast that you didn't tell anyone about or something. You just hit record and just went on a few rants. I'm always here for your Stevie rants. And then you moved to Google, where you also had some interesting thoughts on just the overall Google culture versus Amazon. You joined Grab as head of eng for a couple of years. I'm from Singapore, so I have actually personally used a lot of Grab's features. And it was very interesting to see you talk so highly of Grab's engineering and sort of overall prospects. [00:03:21]Steve: Because as a customer, it sucked? [00:03:22]Swyx: Yeah, no, it's just like, being from a smaller country, you never see anyone from our home country being on a global stage or talked about as a startup that people admire or look up to, like on the league that you, with all your legendary experience, would consider equivalent. Yeah. [00:03:41]Steve: Yeah, no, absolutely. They actually, they didn't even know that they were as good as they were, in a sense. They started hiring a bunch of people from Silicon Valley to come in and sort of like fix it. And we came in and we were like, Oh, we could have been a little better operational excellence and stuff. But by and large, they're really sharp. The only thing about Grab is that they get criticized a lot for being too westernized. Oh, by who? By Singaporeans who don't want to work there. [00:04:06]Swyx: Okay. I guess I'm biased because I'm here, but I don't see that as a problem. If anything, they've had their success because they were more westernized than the Sanders Singaporean tech company. [00:04:15]Steve: I mean, they had their success because they are laser focused. They copy to Amazon. I mean, they're executing really, really, really well for a giant. I was on a slack with 2,500 engineers. It was like this giant waterfall that you could dip your toe into. You'd never catch up. Actually, the AI summarizers would have been really helpful there. But yeah, no, I think Grab is successful because they're just out there with their sleeves rolled up, just making it happen. [00:04:43]Swyx: And for those who don't know, it's not just like Uber of Southeast Asia, it's also a super app. PayPal Plus. [00:04:48]Steve: Yeah. [00:04:49]Swyx: In the way that super apps don't exist in the West. It's one of the enduring mysteries of B2C that super apps work in the East and don't work in the West. We just don't understand it. [00:04:57]Beyang: Yeah. [00:04:58]Steve: It's just kind of curious. They didn't work in India either. And it was primarily because of bandwidth reasons and smaller phones. [00:05:03]Swyx: That should change now. It should. [00:05:05]Steve: And maybe we'll see a super app here. [00:05:08]Swyx: You retired-ish? I did. You retired-ish on your own video game? Mm-hmm. Any fun stories about that? And that's also where you discovered some need for code search, right? Mm-hmm. [00:05:16]Steve: Sure. A need for a lot of stuff. Better programming languages, better databases. Better everything. I mean, I started in like 95, right? Where there was kind of nothing. Yeah. Yeah. [00:05:24]Beyang: I just want to say, I remember when you first went to Grab because you wrote that blog post talking about why you were excited about it, about like the expanding Asian market. And our reaction was like, oh, man, how did we miss stealing it with you? [00:05:36]Swyx: Hiring you. [00:05:37]Beyang: Yeah. [00:05:38]Steve: I was like, miss that. [00:05:39]Swyx: Tell that story. So how did this happen? Right? So you were inspired by Grok. [00:05:44]Beyang: I guess the backstory from my point of view is I had used code search and Grok while at Google, but I didn't actually know that it was connected to you, Steve. I knew you from your blog posts, which were always excellent, kind of like inside, very thoughtful takes from an engineer's perspective on some of the challenges facing tech companies and tech culture and that sort of thing. But my first introduction to you within the context of code intelligence, code understanding was I watched a talk that you gave, I think at Stanford, about Grok when you're first building it. And that was very eye opening. I was like, oh, like that guy, like the guy who, you know, writes the extremely thoughtful ranty like blog posts also built that system. And so that's how I knew, you know, you were involved in that. And then, you know, we always wanted to hire you, but never knew quite how to approach you or, you know, get that conversation started. [00:06:34]Steve: Well, we got introduced by Max, right? Yeah. It was temporal. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a no brainer. They called me up and I had noticed when Sourcegraph had come out. Of course, when they first came out, I had this dagger of jealousy stabbed through me piercingly, which I remember because I am not a jealous person by any means, ever. But boy, I was like, but I was kind of busy, right? And just one thing led to another. I got sucked back into the ads vortex and whatever. So thank God Sourcegraph actually kind of rescued me. [00:07:05]Swyx: Here's a chance to build DevTools. Yeah. [00:07:08]Steve: That's the best. DevTools are the best. [00:07:10]Swyx: Cool. Well, so that's the overall intro. I guess we can get into Cody. Is there anything else that like people should know about you before we get started? [00:07:18]Steve: I mean, everybody knows I'm a musician. I can juggle five balls. [00:07:24]Swyx: Five is good. Five is good. I've only ever managed three. [00:07:27]Steve: Five is hard. Yeah. And six, a little bit. [00:07:30]Swyx: Wow. [00:07:31]Beyang: That's impressive. [00:07:32]Alessio: So yeah, to jump into Sourcegraph, this has been a company 10 years in the making. And as Sean said, now you're at the right place. Phase two. Now, exactly. You spent 10 years collecting all this code, indexing, making it easy to surface it. Yeah. [00:07:47]Swyx: And also learning how to work with enterprises and having them trust you with their code bases. Yeah. [00:07:52]Alessio: Because initially you were only doing on-prem, right? Like a lot of like VPC deployments. [00:07:55]Beyang: So in the very early days, we're cloud only. But the first major customers we landed were all on-prem, self-hosted. And that was, I think, related to the nature of the problem that we're solving, which becomes just like a critical, unignorable pain point once you're above like 100 devs or so. [00:08:11]Alessio: Yeah. And now Cody is going to be GA by the time this releases. So congrats to your future self for launching this in two weeks. Can you give a quick overview of just what Cody is? I think everybody understands that it's a AI coding agent, but a lot of companies say they have a AI coding agent. So yeah, what does Cody do? How do people interface with it? [00:08:32]Beyang: Yeah. So how is it different from the like several dozen other AI coding agents that exist in the market now? When we thought about building a coding assistant that would do things like code generation and question answering about your code base, I think we came at it from the perspective of, you know, we've spent the past decade building the world's best code understanding engine for human developers, right? So like it's kind of your guide as a human dev if you want to go and dive into a large complex code base. And so our intuition was that a lot of the context that we're providing to human developers would also be useful context for AI developers to consume. And so in terms of the feature set, Cody is very similar to a lot of other assistants. It does inline autocompletion. It does code base aware chat. It does specific commands that automate, you know, tasks that you might rather not want to do like generating unit tests or adding detailed documentation. But we think the core differentiator is really the quality of the context, which is hard to kind of describe succinctly. It's a bit like saying, you know, what's the difference between Google and Alta Vista? There's not like a quick checkbox list of features that you can rattle off, but it really just comes down to all the attention and detail that we've paid to making that context work well and be high quality and fast for human devs. We're now kind of plugging into the AI coding assistant as well. Yeah. [00:09:53]Steve: I mean, just to add my own perspective on to what Beyang just described, RAG is kind of like a consultant that the LLM has available, right, that knows about your code. RAG provides basically a bridge to a lookup system for the LLM, right? Whereas fine tuning would be more like on the job training for somebody. If the LLM is a person, you know, and you send them to a new job and you do on the job training, that's what fine tuning is like, right? So tuned to our specific task. You're always going to need that expert, even if you get the on the job training, because the expert knows your particular code base, your task, right? That expert has to know your code. And there's a chicken and egg problem because, right, you know, we're like, well, I'm going to ask the LLM about my code, but first I have to explain it, right? It's this chicken and egg problem. That's where RAG comes in. And we have the best consultants, right? The best assistant who knows your code. And so when you sit down with Cody, right, what Beyang said earlier about going to Google and using code search and then starting to feel like without it, his job was super tedious. Once you start using these, do you guys use coding assistants? [00:10:53]Swyx: Yeah, right. [00:10:54]Steve: I mean, like we're getting to the point very quickly, right? Where you feel like almost like you're programming without the internet, right? Or something, you know, it's like you're programming back in the nineties without the coding assistant. Yeah. Hopefully that helps for people who have like no idea about coding systems, what they are. [00:11:09]Swyx: Yeah. [00:11:10]Alessio: I mean, going back to using them, we had a lot of them on the podcast already. We had Cursor, we have Codium and Codium, very similar names. [00:11:18]Swyx: Yeah. Find, and then of course there's Copilot. [00:11:22]Alessio: You had a Copilot versus Cody blog post, and I think it really shows the context improvement. So you had two examples that stuck with me. One was, what does this application do? And the Copilot answer was like, oh, it uses JavaScript and NPM and this. And it's like, but that's not what it does. You know, that's what it's built with. Versus Cody was like, oh, these are like the major functions. And like, these are the functionalities and things like that. And then the other one was, how do I start this up? And Copilot just said NPM start, even though there was like no start command in the package JSON, but you know, most collapse, right? Most projects use NPM start. So maybe this does too. How do you think about open source models? Because Copilot has their own private thing. And I think you guys use Starcoder, if I remember right. Yeah, that's correct. [00:12:09]Beyang: I think Copilot uses some variant of Codex. They're kind of cagey about it. I don't think they've like officially announced what model they use. [00:12:16]Swyx: And I think they use a range of models based on what you're doing. Yeah. [00:12:19]Beyang: So everyone uses a range of model. Like no one uses the same model for like inline completion versus like chat because the latency requirements for. Oh, okay. Well, there's fill in the middle. There's also like what the model's trained on. So like we actually had completions powered by Claude Instant for a while. And but you had to kind of like prompt hack your way to get it to output just the code and not like, hey, you know, here's the code you asked for, like that sort of text. So like everyone uses a range of models. We've kind of designed Cody to be like especially model, not agnostic, but like pluggable. So one of our kind of design considerations was like as the ecosystem evolves, we want to be able to integrate the best in class models, whether they're proprietary or open source into Cody because the pace of innovation in the space is just so quick. And I think that's been to our advantage. Like today, Cody uses Starcoder for inline completions. And with the benefit of the context that we provide, we actually show comparable completion acceptance rate metrics. It's kind of like the standard metric that folks use to evaluate inline completion quality. It's like if I show you a completion, what's the chance that you actually accept the completion versus you reject it? And so we're at par with Copilot, which is at the head of that industry right now. And we've been able to do that with the Starcoder model, which is open source and the benefit of the context fetching stuff that we provide. And of course, a lot of like prompt engineering and other stuff along the way. [00:13:40]Alessio: And Steve, you wrote a post called cheating is all you need about what you're building. And one of the points you made is that everybody's fighting on the same axis, which is better UI and the IDE, maybe like a better chat response. But data modes are kind of the most important thing. And you guys have like a 10 year old mode with all the data you've been collecting. How do you kind of think about what other companies are doing wrong, right? Like, why is nobody doing this in terms of like really focusing on RAG? I feel like you see so many people. Oh, we just got a new model. It's like a bit human eval. And it's like, well, but maybe like that's not what we should really be doing, you know? Like, do you think most people underestimate the importance of like the actual RAG in code? [00:14:21]Steve: I think that people weren't doing it much. It wasn't. It's kind of at the edges of AI. It's not in the center. I know that when ChatGPT launched, so within the last year, I've heard a lot of rumblings from inside of Google, right? Because they're undergoing a huge transformation to try to, you know, of course, get into the new world. And I heard that they told, you know, a bunch of teams to go and train their own models or fine tune their own models, right? [00:14:43]Swyx: Both. [00:14:43]Steve: And, you know, it was a s**t show. Nobody knew how to do it. They launched two coding assistants. One was called Code D with an EY. And then there was, I don't know what happened in that one. And then there's Duet, right? Google loves to compete with themselves, right? They do this all the time. And they had a paper on Duet like from a year ago. And they were doing exactly what Copilot was doing, which was just pulling in the local context, right? But fundamentally, I thought of this because we were talking about the splitting of the [00:15:10]Swyx: models. [00:15:10]Steve: In the early days, it was the LLM did everything. And then we realized that for certain use cases, like completions, that a different, smaller, faster model would be better. And that fragmentation of models, actually, we expected to continue and proliferate, right? Because we are fundamentally, we're a recommender engine right now. Yeah, we're recommending code to the LLM. We're saying, may I interest you in this code right here so that you can answer my question? [00:15:34]Swyx: Yeah? [00:15:34]Steve: And being good at recommender engine, I mean, who are the best recommenders, right? There's YouTube and Spotify and, you know, Amazon or whatever, right? Yeah. [00:15:41]Swyx: Yeah. [00:15:41]Steve: And they all have many, many, many, many, many models, right? For all fine-tuned for very specific, you know. And that's where we're heading in code, too. Absolutely. [00:15:50]Swyx: Yeah. [00:15:50]Alessio: We just did an episode we released on Wednesday, which we said RAG is like Rexis or like LLMs. You're basically just suggesting good content. [00:15:58]Swyx: It's like what? Recommendations. [00:15:59]Beyang: Recommendations. [00:16:00]Alessio: Oh, got it. [00:16:01]Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:16:02]Swyx: So like the naive implementation of RAG is you embed everything, throw it in a vector database, you embed your query, and then you find the nearest neighbors, and that's your RAG. But actually, you need to rank it. And actually, you need to make sure there's sample diversity and that kind of stuff. And then you're like slowly gradient dissenting yourself towards rediscovering proper Rexis, which has been traditional ML for a long time. But like approaching it from an LLM perspective. Yeah. [00:16:24]Beyang: I almost think of it as like a generalized search problem because it's a lot of the same things. Like you want your layer one to have high recall and get all the potential things that could be relevant. And then there's typically like a layer two re-ranking mechanism that bumps up the precision and tries to get the relevant stuff to the top of the results list. [00:16:43]Swyx: Have you discovered that ranking matters a lot? Oh, yeah. So the context is that I think a lot of research shows that like one, context utilization matters based on model. Like GPT uses the top of the context window, and then apparently Claude uses the bottom better. And it's lossy in the middle. Yeah. So ranking matters. No, it really does. [00:17:01]Beyang: The skill with which models are able to take advantage of context is always going to be dependent on how that factors into the impact on the training loss. [00:17:10]Swyx: Right? [00:17:10]Beyang: So like if you want long context window models to work well, then you have to have a ton of data where it's like, here's like a billion lines of text. And I'm going to ask a question about like something that's like, you know, embedded deeply into it and like, give me the right answer. And unless you have that training set, then of course, you're going to have variability in terms of like where it attends to. And in most kind of like naturally occurring data, the thing that you're talking about right now, the thing I'm asking you about is going to be something that we talked about recently. [00:17:36]Swyx: Yeah. [00:17:36]Steve: Did you really just say gradient dissenting yourself? Actually, I love that it's entered the casual lexicon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:17:44]Swyx: My favorite version of that is, you know, how we have to p-hack papers. So, you know, when you throw humans at the problem, that's called graduate student dissent. That's great. It's really awesome. [00:17:54]Alessio: I think the other interesting thing that you have is this inline assist UX that I wouldn't say async, but like it works while you can also do work. So you can ask Cody to make changes on a code block and you can still edit the same file at the same time. [00:18:07]Swyx: Yeah. [00:18:07]Alessio: How do you see that in the future? Like, do you see a lot of Cody's running together at the same time? Like, how do you validate also that they're not messing each other up as they make changes in the code? And maybe what are the limitations today? And what do you think about where the attack is going? [00:18:21]Steve: I want to start with a little history and then I'm going to turn it over to Bian, all right? So we actually had this feature in the very first launch back in June. Dominic wrote it. It was called nonstop Cody. And you could have multiple, basically, LLM requests in parallel modifying your source [00:18:37]Swyx: file. [00:18:37]Steve: And he wrote a bunch of code to handle all of the diffing logic. And you could see the regions of code that the LLM was going to change, right? And he was showing me demos of it. And it just felt like it was just a little before its time, you know? But a bunch of that stuff, that scaffolding was able to be reused for where we're inline [00:18:56]Swyx: sitting today. [00:18:56]Steve: How would you characterize it today? [00:18:58]Beyang: Yeah, so that interface has really evolved from a, like, hey, general purpose, like, request anything inline in the code and have the code update to really, like, targeted features, like, you know, fix the bug that exists at this line or request a very specific [00:19:13]Swyx: change. [00:19:13]Beyang: And the reason for that is, I think, the challenge that we ran into with inline fixes, and we do want to get to the point where you could just fire and forget and have, you know, half a dozen of these running in parallel. But I think we ran into the challenge early on that a lot of people are running into now when they're trying to construct agents, which is the reliability of, you know, working code generation is just not quite there yet in today's language models. And so that kind of constrains you to an interaction where the human is always, like, in the inner loop, like, checking the output of each response. And if you want that to work in a way where you can be asynchronous, you kind of have to constrain it to a domain where today's language models can generate reliable code well enough. So, you know, generating unit tests, that's, like, a well-constrained problem. Or fixing a bug that shows up as, like, a compiler error or a test error, that's a well-constrained problem. But the more general, like, hey, write me this class that does X, Y, and Z using the libraries that I have, that is not quite there yet, even with the benefit of really good context. Like, it definitely moves the needle a lot, but we're not quite there yet to the point where you can just fire and forget. And I actually think that this is something that people don't broadly appreciate yet, because I think that, like, everyone's chasing this dream of agentic execution. And if we're to really define that down, I think it implies a couple things. You have, like, a multi-step process where each step is fully automated. We don't have to have a human in the loop every time. And there's also kind of like an LM call at each stage or nearly every stage in that [00:20:45]Swyx: chain. [00:20:45]Beyang: Based on all the work that we've done, you know, with the inline interactions, with kind of like general Codyfeatures for implementing longer chains of thought, we're actually a little bit more bearish than the average, you know, AI hypefluencer out there on the feasibility of agents with purely kind of like transformer-based models. To your original question, like, the inline interactions with CODI, we actually constrained it to be more targeted, like, you know, fix the current error or make this quick fix. I think that that does differentiate us from a lot of the other tools on the market, because a lot of people are going after this, like, shnazzy, like, inline edit interaction, whereas I think where we've moved, and this is based on the user feedback that we've gotten, it's like that sort of thing, it demos well, but when you're actually coding day to day, you don't want to have, like, a long chat conversation inline with the code base. That's a waste of time. You'd rather just have it write the right thing and then move on with your life or not have to think about it. And that's what we're trying to work towards. [00:21:37]Steve: I mean, yeah, we're not going in the agent direction, right? I mean, I'll believe in agents when somebody shows me one that works. Yeah. Instead, we're working on, you know, sort of solidifying our strength, which is bringing the right context in. So new context sources, ways for you to plug in your own context, ways for you to control or influence the context, you know, the mixing that happens before the request goes out, etc. And there's just so much low-hanging fruit left in that space that, you know, agents seems like a little bit of a boondoggle. [00:22:03]Beyang: Just to dive into that a little bit further, like, I think, you know, at a very high level, what do people mean when they say agents? They really mean, like, greater automation, fully automated, like, the dream is, like, here's an issue, go implement that. And I don't have to think about it as a human. And I think we are working towards that. Like, that is the eventual goal. I think it's specifically the approach of, like, hey, can we have a transformer-based LM alone be the kind of, like, backbone or the orchestrator of these agentic flows? Where we're a little bit more bearish today. [00:22:31]Swyx: You want the human in the loop. [00:22:32]Beyang: I mean, you kind of have to. It's just a reality of the behavior of language models that are purely, like, transformer-based. And I think that's just like a reflection of reality. And I don't think people realize that yet. Because if you look at the way that a lot of other AI tools have implemented context fetching, for instance, like, you see this in the Copilot approach, where if you use, like, the at-workspace thing that supposedly provides, like, code-based level context, it has, like, an agentic approach where you kind of look at how it's behaving. And it feels like they're making multiple requests to the LM being like, what would you do in this case? Would you search for stuff? What sort of files would you gather? Go and read those files. And it's like a multi-hop step, so it takes a long while. It's also non-deterministic. Because any sort of, like, LM invocation, it's like a dice roll. And then at the end of the day, the context it fetches is not that good. Whereas our approach is just like, OK, let's do some code searches that make sense. And then maybe, like, crawl through the reference graph a little bit. That is fast. That doesn't require any sort of LM invocation at all. And we can pull in much better context, you know, very quickly. So it's faster. [00:23:37]Swyx: It's more reliable. [00:23:37]Beyang: It's deterministic. And it yields better context quality. And so that's what we think. We just don't think you should cargo cult or naively go like, you know, agents are the [00:23:46]Swyx: future. [00:23:46]Beyang: Let's just try to, like, implement agents on top of the LM that exists today. I think there are a couple of other technologies or approaches that need to be refined first before we can get into these kind of, like, multi-stage, fully automated workflows. [00:24:00]Swyx: It makes sense. You know, we're very much focused on developer inner loop right now. But you do see things eventually moving towards developer outer loop. Yeah. So would you basically say that they're tackling the agent's problem that you don't want to tackle? [00:24:11]Beyang: No, I would say at a high level, we are after maybe, like, the same high level problem, which is like, hey, I want some code written. I want to develop some software and can automate a system. Go build that software for me. I think the approaches might be different. So I think the analogy in my mind is, I think about, like, the AI chess players. Coding, in some senses, I mean, it's similar and dissimilar to chess. I think one question I ask is, like, do you think producing code is more difficult than playing chess or less difficult than playing chess? More. [00:24:41]Swyx: I think more. [00:24:41]Beyang: Right. And if you look at the best AI chess players, like, yes, you can use an LLM to play chess. Like, people have showed demos where it's like, oh, like, yeah, GPT-4 is actually a pretty decent, like, chess move suggester. Right. But you would never build, like, a best in class chess player off of GPT-4 alone. [00:24:57]Swyx: Right. [00:24:57]Beyang: Like, the way that people design chess players is that you have kind of like a search space and then you have a way to explore that search space efficiently. There's a bunch of search algorithms, essentially. We were doing tree search in various ways. And you can have heuristic functions, which might be powered by an LLM. [00:25:12]Swyx: Right. [00:25:12]Beyang: Like, you might use an LLM to generate proposals in that space that you can efficiently explore. But the backbone is still this kind of more formalized tree search based approach rather than the LLM itself. And so I think my high level intuition is that, like, the way that we get to more reliable multi-step workflows that do things beyond, you know, generate unit test, it's really going to be like a search based approach where you use an LLM as kind of like an advisor or a proposal function, sort of your heuristic function, like the ASTAR search algorithm. But it's probably not going to be the thing that is the backbone, because I guess it's not the right tool for that. Yeah. [00:25:50]Swyx: I can see yourself kind of thinking through this, but not saying the words, the sort of philosophical Peter Norvig type discussion. Maybe you want to sort of introduce that in software. Yeah, definitely. [00:25:59]Beyang: So your listeners are savvy. They're probably familiar with the classic like Chomsky versus Norvig debate. [00:26:04]Swyx: No, actually, I wanted, I was prompting you to introduce that. Oh, got it. [00:26:08]Beyang: So, I mean, if you look at the history of artificial intelligence, right, you know, it goes way back to, I don't know, it's probably as old as modern computers, like 50s, 60s, 70s. People are debating on like, what is the path to producing a sort of like general human level of intelligence? And kind of two schools of thought that emerged. One is the Norvig school of thought, which roughly speaking includes large language models, you know, regression, SVN, basically any model that you kind of like learn from data. And it's like data driven. Most of machine learning would fall under this umbrella. And that school of thought says like, you know, just learn from the data. That's the approach to reaching intelligence. And then the Chomsky approach is more things like compilers and parsers and formal systems. So basically like, let's think very carefully about how to construct a formal, precise system. And that will be the approach to how we build a truly intelligent system. I think Lisp was invented so that you could create like rules-based systems that you would call AI. As a language. Yeah. And for a long time, there was like this debate, like there's certain like AI research labs that were more like, you know, in the Chomsky camp and others that were more in the Norvig camp. It's a debate that rages on today. And I feel like the consensus right now is that, you know, Norvig definitely has the upper hand right now with the advent of LMs and diffusion models and all the other recent progress in machine learning. But the Chomsky-based stuff is still really useful in my view. I mean, it's like parsers, compilers, basically a lot of the stuff that provides really good context. It provides kind of like the knowledge graph backbone that you want to explore with your AI dev tool. Like that will come from kind of like Chomsky-based tools like compilers and parsers. It's a lot of what we've invested in in the past decade at Sourcegraph and what you build with Grok. Basically like these formal systems that construct these very precise knowledge graphs that are great context providers and great kind of guard rails enforcers and kind of like safety checkers for the output of a more kind of like data-driven, fuzzier system that uses like the Norvig-based models. [00:28:03]Steve: Jang was talking about this stuff like it happened in the middle ages. Like, okay, so when I was in college, I was in college learning Lisp and prologue and planning and all the deterministic Chomsky approaches to AI. And I was there when Norvig basically declared it dead. I was there 3,000 years ago when Norvig and Chomsky fought on the volcano. When did he declare it dead? [00:28:26]Swyx: What do you mean he declared it dead? [00:28:27]Steve: It was like late 90s. [00:28:29]Swyx: Yeah. [00:28:29]Steve: When I went to Google, Peter Norvig was already there. He had basically like, I forget exactly where. It was some, he's got so many famous short posts, you know, amazing. [00:28:38]Swyx: He had a famous talk, the unreasonable effectiveness of data. Yeah. [00:28:41]Steve: Maybe that was it. But at some point, basically, he basically convinced everybody that deterministic approaches had failed and that heuristic-based, you know, data-driven statistical approaches, stochastic were better. [00:28:52]Swyx: Yeah. [00:28:52]Steve: The primary reason I can tell you this, because I was there, was that, was that, well, the steam-powered engine, no. The reason was that the deterministic stuff didn't scale. [00:29:06]Swyx: Yeah. Right. [00:29:06]Steve: They're using prologue, man, constraint systems and stuff like that. Well, that was a long time ago, right? Today, actually, these Chomsky-style systems do scale. And that's, in fact, exactly what Sourcegraph has built. Yeah. And so we have a very unique, I love the framing that Bjong's made, that the marriage of the Chomsky and the Norvig, you know, sort of models, you know, conceptual models, because we, you know, we have both of them and they're both really important. And in fact, there, there's this really interesting, like, kind of overlap between them, right? Where like the AI or our graph or our search engine could potentially provide the right context for any given query, which is, of course, why ranking is important. But what we've really signed ourselves up for is an extraordinary amount of testing. [00:29:45]Swyx: Yeah. [00:29:45]Steve: Because in SWIGs, you were saying that, you know, GPT-4 tends to the front of the context window and maybe other LLMs to the back and maybe, maybe the LLM in the middle. [00:29:53]Swyx: Yeah. [00:29:53]Steve: And so that means that, you know, if we're actually like, you know, verifying whether we, you know, some change we've made has improved things, we're going to have to test putting it at the beginning of the window and at the end of the window, you know, and maybe make the right decision based on the LLM that you've chosen. Which some of our competitors, that's a problem that they don't have, but we meet you, you know, where you are. Yeah. And we're, just to finish, we're writing tens of thousands. We're generating tests, you know, fill in the middle type tests and things. And then using our graph to basically sort of fine tune Cody's behavior there. [00:30:20]Swyx: Yeah. [00:30:21]Beyang: I also want to add, like, I have like an internal pet name for this, like kind of hybrid architecture that I'm trying to make catch on. Maybe I'll just say it here. Just saying it publicly kind of makes it more real. But like, I call the architecture that we've developed the Normsky architecture. [00:30:36]Swyx: Yeah. [00:30:36]Beyang: I mean, it's obviously a portmanteau of Norvig and Chomsky, but the acronym, it stands for non-agentic, rapid, multi-source code intelligence. So non-agentic because... Rolls right off the tongue. And Normsky. But it's non-agentic in the sense that like, we're not trying to like pitch you on kind of like agent hype, right? Like it's the things it does are really just developer tools developers have been using for decades now, like parsers and really good search indexes and things like that. Rapid because we place an emphasis on speed. We don't want to sit there waiting for kind of like multiple LLM requests to return to complete a simple user request. Multi-source because we're thinking broadly about what pieces of information and knowledge are useful context. So obviously starting with things that you can search in your code base, and then you add in the reference graph, which kind of like allows you to crawl outward from those initial results. But then even beyond that, you know, sources of information, like there's a lot of knowledge that's embedded in docs, in PRDs or product specs, in your production logging system, in your chat, in your Slack channel, right? Like there's so much context is embedded there. And when you're a human developer, and you're trying to like be productive in your code base, you're going to go to all these different systems to collect the context that you need to figure out what code you need to write. And I don't think the AI developer will be any different. It will need to pull context from all these different sources. So we're thinking broadly about how to integrate these into Codi. We hope through kind of like an open protocol that like others can extend and implement. And this is something else that should be accessible by December 14th in kind of like a preview stage. But that's really about like broadening this notion of the code graph beyond your Git repository to all the other sources where technical knowledge and valuable context can live. [00:32:21]Steve: Yeah, it becomes an artifact graph, right? It can link into your logs and your wikis and any data source, right? [00:32:27]Alessio: How do you guys think about the importance of, it's almost like data pre-processing in a way, which is bring it all together, tie it together, make it ready. Any thoughts on how to actually make that good? Some of the innovation you guys have made. [00:32:40]Steve: We talk a lot about the context fetching, right? I mean, there's a lot of ways you could answer this question. But, you know, we've spent a lot of time just in this podcast here talking about context fetching. But stuffing the context into the window is, you know, the bin packing problem, right? Because the window is not big enough, and you've got more context than you can fit. You've got a ranker maybe. But what is that context? Is it a function that was returned by an embedding or a graph call or something? Do you need the whole function? Or do you just need, you know, the top part of the function, this expression here, right? You know, so that art, the golf game of trying to, you know, get each piece of context down into its smallest state, possibly even summarized by another model, right, before it even goes to the LLM, becomes this is the game that we're in, yeah? And so, you know, recursive summarization and all the other techniques that you got to use to like stuff stuff into that context window become, you know, critically important. And you have to test them across every configuration of models that you could possibly need. [00:33:32]Beyang: I think data preprocessing is probably the like unsexy, way underappreciated secret to a lot of the cool stuff that people are shipping today. Whether you're doing like RAG or fine tuning or pre-training, like the preprocessing step matters so much because it's basically garbage in, garbage out, right? Like if you're feeding in garbage to the model, then it's going to output garbage. Concretely, you know, for code RAG, if you're not doing some sort of like preprocessing that takes advantage of a parser and is able to like extract the key components of a particular file of code, you know, separate the function signature from the body, from the doc string, what are you even doing? Like that's like table stakes. It opens up so much more possibilities with which you can kind of like tune your system to take advantage of the signals that come from those different parts of the code. Like we've had a tool, you know, since computers were invented that understands the structure of source code to a hundred percent precision. The compiler knows everything there is to know about the code in terms of like structure. Like why would you not want to use that in a system that's trying to generate code, answer questions about code? You shouldn't throw that out the window just because now we have really good, you know, data-driven models that can do other things. [00:34:44]Steve: Yeah. When I called it a data moat, you know, in my cheating post, a lot of people were confused, you know, because data moat sort of sounds like data lake because there's data and water and stuff. I don't know. And so they thought that we were sitting on this giant mountain of data that we had collected, but that's not what our data moat is. It's really a data pre-processing engine that can very quickly and scalably, like basically dissect your entire code base in a very small, fine-grained, you know, semantic unit and then serve it up. Yeah. And so it's really, it's not a data moat. It's a data pre-processing moat, I guess. [00:35:15]Beyang: Yeah. If anything, we're like hypersensitive to customer data privacy requirements. So it's not like we've taken a bunch of private data and like, you know, trained a generally available model. In fact, exactly the opposite. A lot of our customers are choosing Cody over Copilot and other competitors because we have an explicit guarantee that we don't do any of that. And that we've done that from day one. Yeah. I think that's a very real concern in today's day and age, because like if your proprietary IP finds its way into the training set of any model, it's very easy both to like extract that knowledge from the model and also use it to, you know, build systems that kind of work on top of the institutional knowledge that you've built up. [00:35:52]Alessio: About a year ago, I wrote a post on LLMs for developers. And one of the points I had was maybe the depth of like the DSL. I spent most of my career writing Ruby and I love Ruby. It's so nice to use, but you know, it's not as performant, but it's really easy to read, right? And then you look at other languages, maybe they're faster, but like they're more verbose, you know? And when you think about efficiency of the context window, that actually matters. [00:36:15]Swyx: Yeah. [00:36:15]Alessio: But I haven't really seen a DSL for models, you know? I haven't seen like code being optimized to like be easier to put in a model context. And it seems like your pre-processing is kind of doing that. Do you see in the future, like the way we think about the DSL and APIs and kind of like service interfaces be more focused on being context friendly, where it's like maybe it's harder to read for the human, but like the human is never going to write it anyway. We were talking on the Hacks podcast. There are like some data science things like spin up the spandex, like humans are never going to write again because the models can just do very easily. Yeah, curious to hear your thoughts. [00:36:51]Steve: Well, so DSLs, they involve, you know, writing a grammar and a parser and they're like little languages, right? We do them that way because, you know, we need them to compile and humans need to be able to read them and so on. The LLMs don't need that level of structure. You can throw any pile of crap at them, you know, more or less unstructured and they'll deal with it. So I think that's why a DSL hasn't emerged for sort of like communicating with the LLM or packaging up the context or anything. Maybe it will at some point, right? We've got, you know, tagging of context and things like that that are sort of peeking into DSL territory, right? But your point on do users, you know, do people have to learn DSLs like regular expressions or, you know, pick your favorite, right? XPath. I think you're absolutely right that the LLMs are really, really good at that. And I think you're going to see a lot less of people having to slave away learning these things. They just have to know the broad capabilities and the LLM will take care of the rest. [00:37:42]Swyx: Yeah, I'd agree with that. [00:37:43]Beyang: I think basically like the value profit of DSL is that it makes it easier to work with a lower level language, but at the expense of introducing an abstraction layer. And in many cases today, you know, without the benefit of AI cogeneration, like that totally worth it, right? With the benefit of AI cogeneration, I mean, I don't think all DSLs will go away. I think there's still, you know, places where that trade-off is going to be worthwhile. But it's kind of like how much of source code do you think is going to be generated through natural language prompting in the future? Because in a way, like any programming language is just a DSL on top of assembly, right? And so if people can do that, then yeah, like maybe for a large portion of the code [00:38:21]Swyx: that's written, [00:38:21]Beyang: people don't actually have to understand the DSL that is Ruby or Python or basically any other programming language that exists. [00:38:28]Steve: I mean, seriously, do you guys ever write SQL queries now without using a model of some sort? At least a draft. [00:38:34]Swyx: Yeah, right. [00:38:36]Steve: And so we have kind of like, you know, past that bridge, right? [00:38:39]Alessio: Yeah, I think like to me, the long-term thing is like, is there ever going to be, you don't actually see the code, you know? It's like, hey, the basic thing is like, hey, I need a function to some two numbers and that's it. I don't need you to generate the code. [00:38:53]Steve: And the following question, do you need the engineer or the paycheck? [00:38:56]Swyx: I mean, right? [00:38:58]Alessio: That's kind of the agent's discussion in a way where like you cannot automate the agents, but like slowly you're getting more of the atomic units of the work kind of like done. I kind of think of it as like, you know, [00:39:09]Beyang: do you need a punch card operator to answer that for you? And so like, I think we're still going to have people in the role of a software engineer, but the portion of time they spend on these kinds of like low-level, tedious tasks versus the higher level, more creative tasks is going to shift. [00:39:23]Steve: No, I haven't used punch cards. [00:39:25]Swyx: Yeah, I've been talking about like, so we kind of made this podcast about the sort of rise of the AI engineer. And like the first step is the AI enhanced engineer. That is that software developer that is no longer doing these routine, boilerplate-y type tasks, because they're just enhanced by tools like yours. So you mentioned OpenCodeGraph. I mean, that is a kind of DSL maybe, and because we're releasing this as you go GA, you hope for other people to take advantage of that? [00:39:52]Beyang: Oh yeah, I would say so OpenCodeGraph is not a DSL. It's more of a protocol. It's basically like, hey, if you want to make your system, whether it's, you know, chat or logging or whatever accessible to an AI developer tool like Cody, here's kind of like the schema by which you can provide that context and offer hints. So I would, you know, comparisons like LSP obviously did this for kind of like standard code intelligence. It's kind of like a lingua franca for providing fine references and codefinition. There's kind of like analogs to that. There might be also analogs to kind of the original OpenAI, kind of like plugins, API. There's all this like context out there that might be useful for an LM-based system to consume. And so at a high level, what we're trying to do is define a common language for context providers to provide context to other tools in the software development lifecycle. Yeah. Do you have any critiques of LSP, by the way, [00:40:42]Swyx: since like this is very much, very close to home? [00:40:45]Steve: One of the authors wrote a really good critique recently. Yeah. I don't think I saw that. Yeah, yeah. LSP could have been better. It just came out a couple of weeks ago. It was a good article. [00:40:54]Beyang: Yeah. I think LSP is great. Like for what it did for the developer ecosystem, it was absolutely fantastic. Like nowadays, like it's much easier now to get code navigation up and running in a bunch of editors by speaking this protocol. I think maybe the interesting question is like looking at the different design decisions comparing LSP basically with Kythe. Because Kythe has more of a... How would you describe it? [00:41:18]Steve: A storage format. [00:41:20]Beyang: I think the critique of LSP from a Kythe point of view would be like with LSP, you don't actually have an actual symbolic model of the code. It's not like LSP models like, hey, this function calls this other function. LSP is all like range-based. Like, hey, your cursor's at line 32, column 1. [00:41:35]Swyx: Yeah. [00:41:35]Beyang: And that's the thing you feed into the language server. And then it's like, okay, here's the range that you should jump to if you click on that range. So it kind of is intentionally ignorant of the fact that there's a thing called a reference underneath your cursor, and that's linked to a symbol definition. [00:41:49]Steve: Well, actually, that's the worst example you could have used. You're right. But that's the one thing that it actually did bake in is following references. [00:41:56]Swyx: Sure. [00:41:56]Steve: But it's sort of hardwired. [00:41:58]Swyx: Yeah. [00:41:58]Steve: Whereas Kythe attempts to model [00:42:00]Beyang: like all these things explicitly. [00:42:02]Swyx: And so... [00:42:02]Steve: Well, so LSP is a protocol, right? And so Google's internal protocol is gRPC-based. And it's a different approach than LSP. It's basically you make a heavy query to the back end, and you get a lot of data back, and then you render the whole page, you know? So we've looked at LSP, and we think that it's a little long in the tooth, right? I mean, it's a great protocol, lots and lots of support for it. But we need to push into the domain of exposing the intelligence through the protocol. Yeah. [00:42:29]Beyang: And so I would say we've developed a protocol of our own called Skip, which is at a very high level trying to take some of the good ideas from LSP and from Kythe and merge that into a system that in the near term is useful for Sourcegraph, but I think in the long term, we hope will be useful for the ecosystem. Okay, so here's what LSP did well. LSP, by virtue of being like intentionally dumb, dumb in air quotes, because I'm not like ragging on it, allowed language servers developers to kind of like bypass the hard problem of like modeling language semantics precisely. So like if all you want to do is jump to definition, you don't have to come up with like a universally unique naming scheme for each symbol, which is actually quite challenging because you have to think about like, okay, what's the top scope of this name? Is it the source code repository? Is it the package? Does it depend on like what package server you're fetching this from? Like whether it's the public one or the one inside your... Anyways, like naming is hard, right? And by just going from kind of like a location to location based approach, you basically just like throw that out the window. All I care about is jumping definition, just make that work. And you can make that work without having to deal with like all the complex global naming things. The limitation of that approach is that it's harder to build on top of that to build like a true knowledge graph. Like if you actually want a system that says like, okay, here's the web of functions and here's how they reference each other. And I want to incorporate that like semantic model of how the code operates or how the code relates to each other at like a static level. You can't do that with LSP because you have to deal with line ranges. And like concretely the pain point that we found in using LSP for source graph is like in order to do like a find references [00:44:04]Swyx: and then jump definitions, [00:44:04]Beyang: it's like a multi-hop process because like you have to jump to the range and then you have to find the symbol at that range. And it just adds a lot of latency and complexity of these operations where as a human, you're like, well, this thing clearly references this other thing. Why can't you just jump me to that? And I think that's the thing that Kaith does well. But then I think the issue that Kaith has had with adoption is because it is more sophisticated schema, I think. And so there's basically more things that you have to implement to get like a Kaith implementation up and running. I hope I'm not like, correct me if I'm wrong about any of this. [00:44:35]Steve: 100%, 100%. Kaith also has a problem, all these systems have the problem, even skip, or at least the way that we implemented the indexers, that they have to integrate with your build system in order to build that knowledge graph, right? Because you have to basically compile the code in a special mode to generate artifacts instead of binaries. And I would say, by the way, earlier I was saying that XREFs were in LSP, but it's actually, I was thinking of LSP plus LSIF. [00:44:58]Swyx: Yeah. That's another. [00:45:01]Steve: Which is actually bad. We can say that it's bad, right? [00:45:04]Steve: It's like skip or Kaith, it's supposed to be sort of a model serialization, you know, for the code graph, but it basically just does what LSP needs, the bare minimum. LSIF is basically if you took LSP [00:45:16]Beyang: and turned that into a serialization format. So like you build an index for language servers to kind of like quickly bootstrap from cold start. But it's a graph model [00:45:23]Steve: with all of the inconvenience of the API without an actual graph. And so, yeah. [00:45:29]Beyang: So like one of the things that we try to do with skip is try to capture the best of both worlds. So like make it easy to write an indexer, make the schema simple, but also model some of the more symbolic characteristics of the code that would allow us to essentially construct this knowledge graph that we can then make useful for both the human developer through SourceGraph and through the AI developer through Cody. [00:45:49]Steve: So anyway, just to finish off the graph comment, we've got a new graph, yeah, that's skip based. We call it BFG internally, right? It's a beautiful something graph. A big friendly graph. [00:46:00]Swyx: A big friendly graph. [00:46:01]Beyang: It's a blazing fast. [00:46:02]Steve: Blazing fast. [00:46:03]Swyx: Blazing fast graph. [00:46:04]Steve: And it is blazing fast, actually. It's really, really interesting. I should probably have to do a blog post about it to walk you through exactly how they're doing it. Oh, please. But it's a very AI-like iterative, you know, experimentation sort of approach. We're building a code graph based on all of our 10 years of knowledge about building code graphs, yeah? But we're building it quickly with zero configuration, and it doesn't have to integrate with your build. And through some magic tricks that we have. And so what just happens when you install the plugin, that it'll be there and indexing your code and providing that knowledge graph in the background without all that build system integration. This is a bit of secret sauce that we haven't really like advertised it very much lately. But I am super excited about it because what they do is they say, all right, you know, let's tackle function parameters today. Cody's not doing a very good job of completing function call arguments or function parameters in the definition, right? Yeah, we generate those thousands of tests, and then we can actually reuse those tests for the AI context as well. So fortunately, things are kind of converging on, we have, you know, half a dozen really, really good context sources, and we mix them all together. So anyway, BFG, you're going to hear more about it probably in the holidays? [00:47:12]Beyang: I think it'll be online for December 14th. We'll probably mention it. BFG is probably not the public name we're going to go with. I think we might call it like Graph Context or something like that. [00:47:20]Steve: We're officially calling it BFG. [00:47:22]Swyx: You heard it here first. [00:47:24]Beyang: BFG is just kind of like the working name. And so the impetus for BFG was like, if you look at like current AI inline code completion tools and the errors that they make, a lot of the errors that they make, even in kind of like the easy, like single line case, are essentially like type errors, right? Like you're trying to complete a function call and it suggests a variable that you defined earlier, but that variable is the wrong type. [00:47:47]Swyx: And that's the sort of thing [00:47:47]Beyang: where it's like a first year, like freshman CS student would not make that error, right? So like, why does the AI make that error? And the reason is, I mean, the AI is just suggesting things that are plausible without the context of the types or any other like broader files in the code. And so the kind of intuition here is like, why don't we just do the basic thing that like any baseline intelligent human developer would do, which is like click jump to definition, click some fine references and pull in that like Graph Context into the context window and then have it generate the completion. So like that's sort of like the MVP of what BFG was. And turns out that works really well. Like you can eliminate a lot of type errors that AI coding tools make just by pulling in that context. Yeah, but the graph is definitely [00:48:32]Steve: our Chomsky side. [00:48:33]Swyx: Yeah, exactly. [00:48:34]Beyang: So like this like Chomsky-Norvig thing, I think pops up in a bunch of differ

Rose Plate Special: Charity, Week 9 Here's what we'll say about the finale: Kudos to the producers for faking out Sammi fairly effectively, but is it even a fakeout when she was operating on little sleep and lots of pinball on the brain? Hard to say. See you all for a bonus episode of Jilly Box opening before Season 16 of our podcast launches at the end of September! Transcription Please forgive minor typos! Sammi: And you're listening to Rose Plate Special, the most dramatic googly eyeingist I have nothing for this because everything we said. Steve: Was going to happen, happened. Sammi: Paradise promoing us recap podcast of The Bachelorette ever. Sammi: Yeah, it was so bad. Steve: Ever. Steve: Sammi. Steve: Are you the bachelorette? Steve: Nostradamus perhaps. Sammi: Maybe. Sammi: But here's the thing that's interesting. Sammi: So first of all, sorry this is late everyone. Sammi: I was on vacation and I actually took a break, which I never do, and so you should all be proud of me. Sammi: But here we are also. Sammi: Okay, so a couple of pieces of news. Sammi: So yes, I was on vacation and that was fun. Sammi: That's not really news. Sammi: Second piece of news that is news. Sammi: The jilly box is coming probably in the next day or two. Sammi: So if you are interested, we can do another special we'll do between now and like The Golden Bachelor. Sammi: We can do a special jilly unboxing for. Sammi: Oh, and then yeah, here's what's interesting about this. Sammi: Also, my notes are a little spotty, so I may need you to fill in because I watched this. Sammi: So I was just telling Steve that one of the things that we did on vacation is we went to this retrocade and we played all you can play Pinball until like, I don't know, almost two in the morning. Sammi: And we got home and we started talking about the top 100 pinball games and we were talking about what we would want in our basement and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sammi: And then I was like, oh s***, I got to start watching The Bachelorete in case we decide we want to record. Sammi: So I went to bed at four in the morning. Sammi: This is not like me. Steve: And we're recording late anyways. Sammi: Yeah, I was up until four in the morning watching it and then I woke up the next day and finished it. Sammi: So I might have missed some key things because I was all jacked up about pinball. Sammi: Like I literally had maybe two drinks the whole night. Sammi: It wasn't like, oh, it's partying hard. Sammi: I was like really trying to crack the game. Sammi: Barbed wire. Sammi: Could not get it. Sammi: Oh wow, not get it. Sammi: But medieval madness. Sammi: I had a really good round. Sammi: Yeah, it's one of my favorites. Sammi: Anyway, so that's what I was doing when I was taking notes. Sammi: But yeah, so what's interesting though is despite knowing everything that happened, they tricked me. Sammi: I got tricked because I was like, oh my God, maybe it is going to be Joey. Sammi: And I was like, wow, everything I thought was wrong. Sammi: And I was like so shocked. Sammi: And I was like, no way. Sammi: So they fooled me hard. Sammi: I really just was like, oh, this is how everyone's leaning and this is what's going to happen. Sammi: And last week I was like, datten is a sure thing, he is a sure thing. Sammi: And then I was like, I'm just not so sure. Steve: So we've been in this game long enough. Steve: Sammi, this is the trickery. Steve: Because they knew that we knew that to was going to run away with this thing, so they had to throw us some swerves. Sammi: I got so fooled. Steve: Well, one thing's for sure, because this episode starts off on Aaron, nobody in the entire universe thought that Aaron was going to be sticking don. Steve: I don't think they do Vegas odds for the Bachelor or the Bachelorete. Steve: But if they did, you wouldn't even be allowed to bet on Aaron because that's how bad of a shot he. Sammi: So yeah, it was just so basically and also they do this thing at the very beginning and, like, dawn gets claps and Joey gets claps and Aaron got nothing. Steve: No, and it's not because he's a bad guy. Steve: He's the most uninteresting man in the world. Sammi: They were just did something. Sammi: Did you just say Aaron? Sammi: Oh, I missed it. Sammi: I was thinking about something. Sammi: So and then when they're like, we're going to do a thing that's never happened. Sammi: Okay, this was my guess, which I think is funny. Sammi: Like Charity's brother is going to come on and propose to a long term partner on the show. Sammi: But that didn't happen. Sammi: But that's what I thought because I was like, bring nehemiah back. Sammi: But that's not what happened. Sammi: So this is the best part, too, is Aaron. Sammi: So she's like, obviously this is what was going through Charity's mind. Sammi: I'm thinking is she was probably like, he came all the way to Fiji. Sammi: What am I going to do, say go home? Sammi: She's like, I have to make it feel like he has somewhat of a shot or like something could happen. Sammi: But I love that she was like, this is giving me acid reflux. Steve: Yeah, it's like, bro, you flew probably like 14 hours just to get dumped, which is real sad. Steve: And if someone in production had half a heart, they would have told you to stay at home, but they didn't. Steve: And then it's also sad because it's like, I mean, we all knew you had to know deep down that she didn't have a shot. Steve: And then when she's finally and you know, she walks about and everything, he's just like, well, it's okay. Steve: I'm still in your corner. Steve: It's like, dude, she doesn't need you and you don't need to be here. Steve: What are you doing here? Steve: What's going on, Aaron? Sammi: Come on. Steve: Come on. Steve: I don't know. Steve: And then he's such a dork and not in the fun way. Steve: It's just uninteresting. Steve: And then he's going to be on paradise and I could not find a shred of anything inside of myself that got excited for Aaron on. Sammi: Feel like I feel like you just like Aaron a lot more than I do. Sammi: But I just felt really bad for like I was just I mean, maybe this was something that raised his stock enough to make it worth it for him to be on paradise. Sammi: It gave him more of a story that's something that some of the women on the beach might be like, wow, that's so romantic. Sammi: You flew all the way to Fiji. Sammi: It could work in his favor, for sure. Sammi: But yeah, I was mean, I don't know. Sammi: And then he was like, the emotions I've always felt it's good to feel again. Sammi: And I was like, it's been like two days, Aaron. Sammi: I mean, it's not like it's been so long. Sammi: It's like maybe been a couple days. Sammi: But the best part about this whole thing was they get to the rose ceremony and Joey's like, am I on drugs? Sammi: He's like, blinking. Sammi: I don't have glasses to clean. Sammi: What's happening? Sammi: Wait, Aaron's here and Xavier isn't? Sammi: It was so sweet that he was like, what? Sammi: I don't even know. Sammi: And then as soon as she gave Joey a rose, I was like, well, Erin is going home because obviously Dotton's getting the other one. Sammi: That was really obvious. Sammi: And then she's like, Erin, can you come with me? Sammi: And he knew. Sammi: Then he's like, okay, yeah, Aaron is. Steve: In the top three because technically you have to have a top three. Steve: So what are you going to do? Sammi: I don't know. Sammi: I guess at the end I feel like at the end that we've had it before, where it's just like two of them, where one of them goes home early and then it's just the two of them at the rose ceremony. Sammi: It's like, well, you both get the roses. Sammi: No drama there. Sammi: Goodbye. Sammi: Yeah, but yeah, so that was inevitable. Sammi: It was just inevitable. Sammi: All my notes about Erin talking with Jesse afterwards were just that it was a generic talk and he's going to be in paradise. Sammi: And when they announced he was in paradise, I was like, that means he's not the bachelor. Sammi: And that's good. Sammi: Yeah, because that wouldn't be interesting unless they gave him his own camera. Sammi: Because I do think his insecurities would be interesting to watch. Sammi: His internal monologue would be interesting to watch. Sammi: But now we get the time with Charity's family and Joey is first. Sammi: And Joey had a terrible hometown date. Sammi: I mean, it wasn't like the worst hometown date, but it was just like awkward and lacking and he had the worst out of the four. Steve: I shouldn't say it was a B minus. Steve: It was not like a colossal faceplant like in the past. Steve: And many a man has gotten farther or as far as Joey with a worse hometown, but it was not yeah, yeah. Sammi: It just was like, oh, wow. Sammi: And so of course, then, so what's interesting is what I'm trying to say is Joey's hometown date was not very good. Sammi: But with Charity's family, it was like, he's the one and he's the best one, and don't let him slip away. Sammi: He's perfect. Sammi: And then, you know, Dalton's hometown, it was like, you are our family now. Sammi: You are stuck with us. Sammi: You two are soulmates. Sammi: This is happening. Sammi: And then yeah, it's like I can't really talk about this without comparing these right away. Sammi: But then Dalton's time with Charity's family was just kind of like I don't know, I mean like he's fine or whatever. Sammi: He's just familiar and he's just kind of like who she always goes for. Steve: And that's interesting too. Sammi: We want to see her shake it up a little bit. Sammi: And I was like, is this really the time to be like rolling the dice? Sammi: I don't know, it was just kind of a weird yeah, anyway just try. Steve: To commit to marriage. Steve: Yeah right. Steve: But like I don't like I like Joey. Steve: I don't think he's particularly interesting but he's a very nice young man. Sammi: I think he's very sweet. Steve: Yeah, but the thing that really stuck out to me, Dotton also very sweet guy. Sammi: Oh yeah. Steve: But when Charity was know, both these guys meet with her parents and they like both of them but they like Joey Moore. Steve: And her mom made the comment that Dotton was kind of like the guy she had dated in the past. Steve: Which is weird because she said that about Xavier. Steve: And I feel like in my head, aside from them being like African American men in their mid to late twenty s, I don't see a lot of similarities between Xavier. Sammi: They're very different I will say. Sammi: I mean they both have interest in the health fields. Sammi: I guess that would be a commonality but Dotton's coming at it from more of a coachee integrative health personal trainer. Steve: And that kind of an interest. Steve: It doesn't really inform their vibes or their personality. Sammi: Personalities are very different. Sammi: But that's the only other thing that at least what I could see. Sammi: They have that in common. Sammi: But Xavier's in a lab and datten's more like with so that's very mean. Sammi: Like their families were pretty mean. Sammi: I just don't get the think and maybe I could be wrong. Sammi: I don't feel like dunn's one of those go out with the boys kind of guys like oh well, if I'm out with my boys and something like I just would be surprised if he but I was surprised when Xavier said it, so who the h*** knows. Sammi: But I just don't get that feeling from him that that's something that's super important to him to be out with a bunch of toxic dudes. Sammi: I don't that's but it could just be know a first impression thing where it's like oh, this seems similar or whatever because Joey is so different that it's just like that's the only way she could compare it. Sammi: I have no like it's like who knows? Sammi: But I think they're both really good dudes. Sammi: But it was interesting and even though it's like I know what happens with production and editing and how they choose the stuff and whatever but still even though I know all that and I've been watching this show for 20 plus years, I was still like, oh, no, this is not good. Sammi: And I was like, maybe Danton's not as good as I thought he was. Sammi: Because also last week we were thrown for a loop. Sammi: So I was like, oh, maybe all the things that I was feeling about how good they were together are wrong. Sammi: And then they, of course, did stuff where it's like she's saying I love you to Joey, and then Dotton says I love you to her and she doesn't say it back, and you're like, oh, God. Sammi: Oh, no, what's happening? Sammi: This is so bad. Steve: I like a season designed around just, like, emotionally messing with basically well, that's how I felt. Sammi: I was like, what is going on? Sammi: And it's like, late at night and I'm tired and I'm watching this episode and I'm like, what is happening? Sammi: And then, yeah, gosh. Sammi: I don't mean I will say because I feel like the other thing that Charity's mom seemed to focus on was just like, how Joey is just googly eyed all the time. Sammi: But I feel like his I don't think he would ever be like, he is affectionate and whatever, but he's more like, I don't know, kind of secure and solid and whatever. Sammi: So I think the way they just look at someone they're interested in is different. Sammi: But anyway, it was an interesting juxtaposition, and I wrote wow a lot on my notes, apparently. Sammi: I'm like, wow, family thinks he's the one. Steve: Wow. Sammi: Okay. Sammi: And then this whole thing is, like, interspersed with this whole oh, well, one of you is going to date the bachelor, but you don't know which one of you it is. Sammi: But we invited you all here, so it's one of the people we invited here. Sammi: It's obviously not going to be some random person from the audience. Steve: Yeah. Sammi: And I was like, everybody stand up if you would like to date the Bachelor, like, what the h***? Sammi: This is not how this works. Sammi: And he interviews all these people. Sammi: This was one thing that I thought was weird, and I was trying to find some conversation about it online, and I could not because they had someone from Oahu get interviewed. Sammi: Right. Sammi: And Joey lives in Hawaii and everything and everything that happened in Lahaina. Sammi: Which happened in my family's neighborhood. Sammi: And luckily their house is still okay, but I don't know if they even know if some of their friends are alive. Sammi: It was very strange that they didn't did I miss it? Sammi: Because I'm like, I was tired and I did not watch this live. Sammi: They didn't say anything about what happened in Lahaina. Sammi: Did they? Sammi: I mean, I know it's a different island, but a lot of people got moved to, um, for safety and because of capacity and all that stuff. Sammi: And I was like, this is strange. Sammi: This is live. Sammi: So this already happened. Steve: Yeah. Steve: That you'd think that they would make some mention of it. Steve: Now, it was really entirely possible that I got up to get another slice of pizza or grab a drink or go to the bathroom or whatever. Steve: I have zero recollection of them saying anything. Steve: So if they said it, it wasn't a prominent point in the episode. Sammi: It was just weird that they focused so much on Oahu and where Joey's living, right? Sammi: Like, it's just so strange. Sammi: And I'm confused that they didn't mention anything. Sammi: And I feel like they've gotten better about stuff like that, where it's like, oh, this is something, even if the conversation is a little put on, where they're like, we're going to have a serious talk, and then they kind of talk about something, then they're like, we're glad we had this serious talk. Sammi: But I was like, this is weird that you're focusing extra on it, that you're bringing in somebody to be on the show who lives on Oahu, and then you don't bring it. Sammi: I don't know. Sammi: Anyway, if anybody else feels the same way, let me know. Sammi: But I thought that was OD. Sammi: That's all. Sammi: Totally. Sammi: Not that I think The Bachelor is great for that stuff in general, but it's like if you want to start changing your image and gearing towards a younger audience, you might want to, I don't know, be in touch with reality anyway, especially something like that, where it's. Steve: Like the thing dominating the news cycle. Steve: It's like, hey, you want an easy layup? Steve: Guys just say anything? Steve: Apparently not. Sammi: Oh, well, yeah, it's just really strange. Sammi: Anyway, I'll let you know if I find any conversations about it. Sammi: But I was, like, trying to Google it. Sammi: I was like, is anybody else frustrated about this? Sammi: But I didn't see anything. Sammi: But I also wasn't looking super duper hard. Sammi: I was looking half. Sammi: So charity's, mom. Sammi: Okay, so with datten yes. Sammi: She's like, he checks the boxes, right? Sammi: He's familiar. Sammi: Familiar is easy. Sammi: She wants Charity to have a hard time, I guess I don't. Sammi: And I wrote, well, maybe Joey Winston dotten's the obvious Bachelor, but that wouldn't necessarily make sense. Sammi: Dot, dot, dot. Sammi: I'm like, this is where I start to question myself. Sammi: Yeah, and Charity is having a hard time, too, because she's like, I just want to push. Sammi: I just want a little just a little nudge and like, a direct just tell me how you're feeling. Sammi: And, okay, this is the part where I felt like I was getting tired and I was getting confused, but I know at the very least, she asked her mom, tell me what you think. Sammi: And her mom's like, I'm not going to do that. Sammi: And she's like, why? Sammi: And she's like, I don't know. Sammi: I'm direct. Sammi: And she's like, but you're not being direct right now. Sammi: That's what I gathered out of it. Sammi: It was like her mom was like, well, you know, I'm direct, but I'm not going to do that for you at this moment. Steve: Yeah. Sammi: And she's like, don't you know what you want? Sammi: And Charity is like, no, that's why I am asking you. Sammi: And she's like, come on, you know. Sammi: Right. Sammi: You know, you know, she's like and then yeah. Sammi: So she goes so she's confused, whatever. Sammi: She has a date with Joey and he brought a very cute gift for Charity. Sammi: They both did a good job with the gifts. Sammi: And he gives her the poem that they got in New Orleans and that's very oh, she mentioned how the poem made the hairs on her arms stand up and they made the hairs on my arm stand up too. Sammi: So whoever's putting this season together, good job. Sammi: I was like, wow. Sammi: And then I was fully sold on at this point. Sammi: I was like, well, if Joey ends up with Charity, I'm okay with that. Sammi: That's good, I'm happy, that's fine. Steve: This is totally mission accomplished, right? Steve: What is the purpose of this episode? Steve: The purpose of this episode is twofold. Steve: One, to make us question what we know to be absolute reality, which is down, it's going to win. Steve: And two, to make us like Joey as much as humanly possible and potentially make him slightly more interesting than he is. Steve: So that when he is announced as the bachelor, we go, okay, I'm fine with that. Steve: I think they pretty much did it. Steve: And honestly, I don't know when Charity was announced. Steve: I'm sure you can go back to an old episode. Steve: I'll just be like, I don't know, no personality, didn't see anything, whatever. Steve: And she's amazing. Steve: She's like the greatest Bachelorete of all time, practically. Steve: Maybe, maybe this will work out. Steve: Maybe I've been selling Joey short. Sammi: Yeah, I mean that's what always I mean outside of like I feel like I always liked Katie before it was Katie's season, you know what mean? Sammi: Like that was kind of an obvious, like Ashley long time. Sammi: Like there's a few people that and I liked, you know, there's like a few people that I was always like, oh yeah, they're going to be good. Sammi: But there's some people we didn't see until the very end. Sammi: Their know, you get like little glimpses of, um, yeah, I think Joey could definitely be a good mean out of what happened. Sammi: Like everything that happened at the end, I was like, well, he's the only obvious choice. Sammi: Like if you don't choose him, you're going into a different season. Sammi: There's no way. Sammi: And anyway, I'm just like looking through the vulture recap to see if there's anything yeah, if there's any notes in there because I just saw something. Sammi: Sorry. Sammi: We're waiting to see if she's going to pick Joey or Don. Sammi: Right. Sammi: We obviously know what uh, and then we get into the then. Sammi: So Brooklyn and Kat are going to be in paradise and Braden's in the audience and they do this paradise promo and they're like four former bachelorettes are crashing the party. Sammi: There's a medical emergency I'm actually really excited about the nine days of no pooping. Steve: Yeah. Steve: I'm also excited about that because we got to hear the word poop baby. Sammi: On national television and a truth box. Sammi: I'm like, all right, okay, cool. Sammi: This sounds great. Sammi: And then there's someone getting married in paradise, and it's probably like an already engaged couple that comes down, like, has happened before, I would assume. Sammi: And then they're like, oh, are Rachel and Brayden going to get together? Sammi: And I got very upset. Sammi: Oh, my God, you better not. Sammi: That sucks. Sammi: And I was looking through this Vulture recap. Sammi: It says, Brayden is here sitting right next to Rachel rechia. Sammi: Get a job. Sammi: Stay away from her et. Sammi: Wait, hold on. Sammi: Wait, what? Sammi: Hold on 1 second. Sammi: Oh, my gosh. Sammi: How did I not know who Gabby was dating? Steve: Oh, yeah, so oh, my is this is something that I was hoping to bring up? Steve: Because I guess I'm dense and I didn't really understand or process or notice it, but it's like, oh, Gabby's dating a woman. Steve: I didn't know that. Sammi: H***. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: Gabby. Steve: Good job, Gabby. Sammi: Yes. Steve: We love I had I had no idea. Steve: And then I was just like, who's that? Steve: I was, oh, that's so cute. Sammi: And she even posted, told you I'm a girls girl. Sammi: Yes. Sammi: Gabby ayo so that's awesome. Sammi: And now I want to rewatch the finale because I was tired and I did not even oh, apparently. Sammi: Okay, so she was on The View, and in an Instagram post yeah. Sammi: She wrote, told you I'm a girls girl. Sammi: And yeah. Sammi: So it's Robbie Hoffman. Steve: He's a comedian, right? Sammi: Yes. Sammi: Comedians. Sammi: You should know, apparently. Sammi: And yeah, this was announced on August 2, but I didn't see it because I don't pay attention to this stuff. Sammi: But that's super great. Sammi: And yeah, I'm so happy. Sammi: So one of the things that this Vulture article talks about is, uh, they wanted to see, like, a Robbie cam the whole time, mic her up and then let's the whole the whole gimmick of, like, who's the bachelor and who's going to date him. Sammi: And also, maybe Rachel likes Braden. Sammi: I was like, I can't handle all this stuff right now, okay? Sammi: I'm tired, and I want to know what's in that truth box, and I want to talk more about that poop baby. Sammi: Those are the things I want to talk about. Steve: Yeah. Steve: Very interested in a poop baby. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: And then we find out. Sammi: September 20. Sammi: Eigth. Sammi: We're going to be playing double duty, so I don't know what we're going to do. Sammi: We'll have to see if we want to do extra long episodes or two separate Bachelor in paradise and Golden Bachelor episodes. Steve: We're going to figure it out. Sammi: We'll have to figure it out. Sammi: Stay tuned. Sammi: I'm thinking we'll do each one because some people might be interested in one and not the other. Sammi: Otherwise, we'll do, like, a little time stampy in the description. Sammi: So stay tuned for that, obviously. Sammi: Let's see. Sammi: Okay, so we have the last date with Don, and he's so sweet, and it was so cute, and he was like, I'm going to win over your mom. Sammi: Just don't even worry about it. Sammi: And it's like, he's a great guy. Sammi: He can definitely win over moms, so I totally believe that. Sammi: And his gift was very cute. Sammi: He was like, I made a treasure hunt, so how about that? Sammi: And I was like, that's pretty cute. Sammi: And he was like, here's my card, my resident alien card, like the s'mores and little memories of events that they did on their dates. Sammi: And then at the end, it was a locket with their baby faces. Sammi: And he's like, you are my treasure. Sammi: And that was very then. Sammi: But the thing that's weird is we see her. Sammi: Yeah, they really freaking tricked me because she's, like, bringing up Joey on this date, and he says, I love you, and she doesn't say it back. Sammi: And I was like, okay. Sammi: Then we get the Neil Lane scene, which wasn't like, that excessive this time. Sammi: Sometimes it's like, really long Neil Lane stuff. Steve: It's always weird to me because I feel like sometimes we get a lot of Neil Lane the man, and not just Neil Lane, the know, and other times you don't see Neil at. Steve: And this this was a Neil appearance season. Sammi: Yeah, it was a Neil appearance, but it was not as major. Sammi: I mean, usually I would say with The Bachelor, Neil is around more, but he was in the audience. Steve: It's just so funny to me because I'm sure in the jewelry world, he's a big deal, but if you're like, who's Neil Lane? Steve: I'm like, oh, that's the guy who gives the rings on The Bachelor. Sammi: I actually think that is the biggest deal. Sammi: Well, I think but I don't know. Sammi: Let's see if we can figure this out. Sammi: Hold on. Sammi: I feel like I looked this up before, and it was kind of like I thought that that was kind of the biggest thing. Sammi: I thought his name recognition did get bigger because of The Bachelor, and that propelled some of his career. Sammi: Oh, here we go. Sammi: Here we go. Sammi: Okay. Sammi: Reddit is all over. Steve: Always. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: But yeah, okay. Sammi: Apparently oh, interesting. Sammi: He turned them down for a while, and he doesn't watch The Bachelor, which I think we found out recently that he didn't watch The Bachelor, which I think is very funny. Sammi: So it's like his only frame of reference is getting flown in for these moments and these live appearances, and that's it. Sammi: And he doesn't watch the show. Sammi: That's kind of awesome. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: So someone said, okay, yeah, I think it's kind of like a Vera Wang type of thing at this point, you. Steve: Know what I mean? Sammi: Where it's like there is a prestige brand and then you can also go to Kohl's. Steve: Exactly. Sammi: You know what I mean? Sammi: I think it was kind of like and yeah, someone said, I went into Kate and his rings are ugly. Sammi: Lol. Sammi: I'm sorry. Sammi: Yeah, it's like, if you're going to get Neil Lane from K, I would assume that that's not the same as the other stuff he yeah, yeah. Steve: I would imagine he's got his higher tier stuff. Steve: I like the Vera Wang comparison. Sammi: That's the way I kind of always thought about Neil Lane. Sammi: And from these comments on Reddit, that's the impression I'm getting. Sammi: As I say about Kay, every kiss begins at the mall. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: And apparently oh, gosh, I didn't even realize that. Sammi: So this was like 2009. Sammi: Neil Lane feels so omnipresent that I did not realize it's only been Neil Lane for like, 14 years. Steve: Wow. Sammi: Yeah. Steve: Before that he was day one guy. Sammi: I know. Sammi: Before that it was Harry Winston. Sammi: Sorry. Sammi: There's a comment on Reddit that says, in the industry, neil Lane is considered to be a little goblin character. Sammi: And someone said, how so? Sammi: And then there's like some deleted stuff, so I don't know about that. Sammi: Anyway, yeah, someone said, okay, yeah. Sammi: Neil Lane for Celebs is high end. Sammi: Neil Lane at K is mediocre. Sammi: Yeah, same as Verawing. Sammi: I would yeah. Sammi: Very interesting. Sammi: He used to design customs for A list celebrities like Barbara Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor, and Angelina Jolie. Sammi: Interesting. Sammi: He's like mid tier, they say. Steve: Oh, man. Steve: You hear that? Steve: Neil Lane. Steve: You're just mid, baby. Sammi: You're mid. Sammi: You're mid, Neil. Sammi: Well, he's never going to listen to this. Sammi: He doesn't watch the show. Sammi: He's not going to listen to a random sorry, Neil, but yeah. Sammi: So very interesting. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: So we had a Neil Lane scene, and then Charity comes out in her dress and I started tearing up. Sammi: So again, I was tired, but I don't know, this finale really did a number on me. Sammi: And then she started to cry or almost cried. Sammi: And I was like, don't cry. Sammi: Your makeup's so pretty. Sammi: And then as soon as Joey gets out of the car, my stomach dropped and so do the audiences. Sammi: And I was like, you tricked me. Sammi: You tricked me, you tricked me. Sammi: And I was like, well, he's going to be a great bachelor. Sammi: And I cried so much during this whole interaction. Sammi: It was awful. Sammi: I was like, not okay. Steve: So emotion. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: The dogs came over. Sammi: They were like, do you need some support? Sammi: And I was like, I am not. Sammi: And like, Tuck was sleeping, obviously. Sammi: Well, this was like yeah, because this was in the morning by the time I watched this. Sammi: But he was like, in the other room with the dogs, and I'm like, crying. Sammi: And they come over and they're like, what do you need, mom? Sammi: And I was like, I am just not okay. Sammi: But what was really sweet was she did not cut him off, which was nice because I feel like a lot of the times the bacheloretes cut the men off. Sammi: Don't propose yet, but he kind of waited for a second anyway, like, should I keep going? Sammi: And then she did a little I thought it was nice that she had a speech for him because I don't feel like they always do that or it doesn't feel prepared or whatever. Sammi: And he was just like, It's okay. Sammi: He knew it was hard, and she's trying to get all this out, and she's upset. Sammi: And he was like, It's okay. Sammi: And she's like, Well, I got to do this. Sammi: I want to do the whole thing. Sammi: I want you to hear this whole thing. Sammi: It's important to me. Sammi: And then she's like, I found love that's deeper with someone else, and I'm crying. Sammi: I think she wins for the best goodbye speech ever to yeah, I was just, like, a f** mess. Sammi: And then Joey's in the audience, and then he gives the best bachelor audition in the car, and the audience is silent, and I'm just is really this is really great. Sammi: I don't know. Sammi: That whole moment was really awesome. Sammi: And then Zach's in the right, so, like, they go through this whole thing. Sammi: Like, Joey leaves, he's in the car, whatever, and at some point they pan to Zach, and I'm like, God, both of these guys are so much better than Zach. Sammi: And so really, there wasn't a bad direction for her to go, I don't think. Sammi: It's like she's just got to decide how she feels, and she's got to make that choice, which is always nice. Steve: Too, because sometimes I'm like, no, not him, and this time you're good. Steve: Anybody's fine. Steve: Well, not Aaron. Steve: And even Aaron. Steve: There's nothing wrong with him. Sammi: With Aaron. Sammi: If she liked Aaron the most, I'd be like, that's fine. Steve: That's okay. Steve: Some people have no taste, but that's all you. Steve: You do. Steve: You it's not harmful. Sammi: That just reminded me of I don't know why. Sammi: I'm, like, thinking about classic York. Sammi: Like, even Louis Vuitton makes so Joey is going to see Charity now. Sammi: He gives his little spiel with Jessie. Sammi: It's like all kind of the normal the. Sammi: I've done a lot of thinking and healing, and I'm on the other side, and I understand, and I just love and support her, and I just want her to be happy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sammi: And this is, like one of the most amicable reuniting moments, too, that I remember on the show, where it's just like, she looks sparkly and beautiful, and he's, like, giving her the biggest hug, and it was really sweet. Sammi: And he's still kind of, you can tell, emotional about it. Sammi: He's getting all twisty faced about it. Sammi: He's like, AW, shucks OD golly g whiz whatever. Sammi: They made him very likable. Sammi: They did a really good job because I was, like, a mess, and it was good, and then it's like, okay, now it's time for Dotton. Sammi: And I was so emotional about the Joey thing. Sammi: I was just kind of like, well, I knew this was going to happen, they tricked me, now I feel indignant and this all turned out just fine. Sammi: I think what it is, is they are both very comfortable with each other and that's like what you need for a normal relationship. Sammi: You should feel very comfortable with each other. Sammi: And so I think the familiarity is good here. Sammi: And it didn't feel like this with her and Joey. Sammi: I feel like it's a little more I don't know, there was more chemistry and an explosive exciting way. Sammi: But with her and Datten, it just feels very safe and comfortable in a very good way. Sammi: That's important. Steve: Yeah, she made the right call and it's the difference between maybe a sprint and a marathon here. Steve: And it's not to say that both these men would have provided her with plenty of happiness, but I think Datten is probably the better choice for something that you see as a long term relationship. Steve: And Charity was super smart about it and she dumped Joey in the best way possible. Steve: I don't know how she does it. Steve: It exceeds even the abilities of the editing on The Bachelor and the just she's got it down. Sammi: She handled everything perfectly the whole season. Sammi: I feel like we've watched so many seasons of Bachelors and Bacheloretes kind of like step in it and yeah, not a single flub. Sammi: Perfect season. Steve: It's kind of mind boggling, too, because it can be so stressful and emotional and god, breakups are f** messy. Steve: They're so messy. Steve: And the fact that she was able to not only every single guy leading up to Joey and those are probably easier because some of those guys were you get you get down to Joey who is a man that you could probably marry and probably be pretty happy with and to just let him down like that, it was like a master class. Steve: It was incredible. Steve: Never seen anything like ten out of ten. Sammi: Charity, yeah, she's extremely emotionally mature. Sammi: This is obvious, we know this. Sammi: And yeah, she did awesome. Sammi: Chef's kiss. Sammi: What a great season. Sammi: Very happy about it. Sammi: I thought it was really cute at the end that they showed that she was standing on a box. Sammi: I thought that was adorable. Sammi: I love little behind the scenes things like that. Sammi: And she's like, yeah, love just makes you so happy. Sammi: You get taller and then they just show the box. Sammi: I was like, that's adorable. Sammi: They're just very cute together. Sammi: And yeah, he can keep her safe from lizards or whatever. Sammi: It's good. Sammi: And his family is like, that's like winning the Jackpot. Sammi: They're a really cool family. Sammi: That's one of the best families I've ever seen be on the show. Sammi: And his mom being someone who's really hard to win over and going, yeah, you're my family now. Sammi: And Grandma being like, these two are joined at the soul, or whatever the h*** she said. Sammi: I'm like, yeah, I mean, I just feel like you can't get better than that. Sammi: As long as you like the family and you like him, you're in. Sammi: That's very easy. Sammi: Then some life coach started talking, and I was like, oh, god, I need food. Sammi: I need breakfast, because it was late in the day, and I just did not want to hear this. Sammi: Life coach chuck. Sammi: And then this was like one of the people. Sammi: I was like, are you going to date the bears? Sammi: And then mom we get to see charity's mom, and they're like, okay, how are you feeling? Sammi: She's like, I'm happy now. Sammi: Yeah, he's good. Sammi: I like him. Sammi: He's pretty good. Sammi: Or was. Sammi: She wasn't like, oh, my god, he's the like, yeah, I really like him. Sammi: I think at some point and again, I was tired. Sammi: Didn't we see Danton's family and his mom in the audience getting emotional over everything? Steve: I thought this audience was they were put through the wringer. Steve: I'm pretty sure they were there, too, but yeah, everyone was super emotion, including datten's people. Sammi: I was so emotional, I just stopped paying attention. Sammi: Yeah, it was so then and then she shows off her find that, personally, this is just personal. Sammi: I find the rings kind of boring. Sammi: They're just like one big rock. Sammi: Okay. Sammi: But I'm glad she likes it. Sammi: Okay. Sammi: This was interesting. Sammi: Do you think they're going to shoot the golden bachelor different the whole time? Sammi: Do you think the style of shooting is going to be different? Sammi: Because did you notice how soft they made it and the camera work was all different. Sammi: Is it just for the promo, you think, or what do you think? Steve: I think that is just for the promo, but it definitely has a softer, different look to it. Steve: It's almost like soap opera esque in its presentation, which I guess is appropriate. Steve: It is somewhat reminiscent of very early seasons of the bachelor. Steve: So if you go back to the first three seasons yeah. Sammi: Where it's like a little more like romanticy. Steve: Yeah. Steve: And I don't know if that is intentional or if I'm just like my brain has been permanently poisoned by watching the show for so many years. Steve: But I think based on the previews alone, it looks like it's going to have a slightly different aesthetic, and I am perfectly fine and open with that. Steve: Because if there's one thing that you can criticize about the Bachelor and honestly don't make it one thing, make it a million things, because there's plenty. Steve: But if there's one thing you can consistently criticize, is that they recycle the same ideas and visual cues and everything over and over and over and over again, so anything that can push them out of their comfort zone. Steve: And I do think that old people are going to help with this because, oh, my god, the kinds of problems and emotional issues and things that they're going to have to deal with are going to be totally different from the normal crap that comes up on the bachelor to bachelorette. Steve: And when it's not different, when it's like, oh, and so and so has an 80 year old husband back home, that's going to be even funnier and crazier, so bring it on. Steve: I'm here for it, whatever it is. Sammi: So and so has an 80 year old husband back home. Sammi: I like that idea. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: I'm kind of wondering if it's going to be messy in any way or if it is just going to be kind of like sweet and sentimental the whole time. Steve: I hope not. Sammi: I know you hope not, but I'm just kind of like not totally sure anymore. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: I'm interested to see what happens. Sammi: We don't have to wait super long. Sammi: We've got about a month and you'll hear from us at least one time in between then. Sammi: Do you think they're going to let the dog stay with him? Sammi: Because that dog is obsessed. Sammi: That was the cutest dog. Sammi: Oh, my god, don't tell me. Steve: In my heart, yes, but in reality, I think they're probably going to have. Sammi: To say no because who had their dog? Sammi: One of the bachelorettes, right. Sammi: Had their dog with them or bachelors. Steve: It just seems like a nightmare, like all the traveling they do and it's just stressful for the dog, too. Sammi: I think it was just domestic. Sammi: Do you remember wait, hold on. Sammi: Okay, let's see. Sammi: Golly, I don't remember. Sammi: There was one now. Sammi: I just found the rambo thing, but yeah, there was one where it was like, oh, my dog came with me. Sammi: Do you remember talking about anyway, whatever. Steve: Well, rachel lindsay's dog cooper appeared alongside her on the Bachelorete season 13. Sammi: I just tried to that's what it was. Sammi: Okay. Sammi: God, I mean, so much happened on rachel's season. Sammi: I forgot it was yeah. Sammi: Oh, my gosh. Steve: I had tried to forget rambo dog guy, but unfortunately rambo dog guy has now been brought back into my memory bank. Steve: So thank you, Sammi. Sammi: Yeah, I think it was just local, right? Sammi: It was just like when they were in the states, the dog was there, so I was just like, maybe that would be a thing that would happen again. Sammi: Because that was very cute and I really liked that. Sammi: That's all. Sammi: And then, okay, so there's no set date. Sammi: So we see charity and Dotton and of mean, I don't think there's ever at least I don't remember in the history of the show them being like, oh, and it's probably, are joe and serena married yet? Sammi: Because otherwise they'll be the ones I. Steve: Don'T know if they're married, but they did a commercial for concealer or something together. Sammi: They've been doing that a lot. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: Mark my words, they're going to be the couple in paradise that gets married. Steve: It seems. Steve: So their star is rising. Steve: Grocery store joe is the international commercial superstar. Steve: Honestly, grocery store joe, you're acting in these commercials. Steve: You got speaking lines. Steve: Are you SAG brother? Steve: Like, should you be on the picket line? Steve: Maybe, I don't know. Sammi: Oh, interesting. Sammi: Didn't think about that. Sammi: Anyway, so yeah, I think they're going to get married in paradise. Sammi: That's my I don't I can't remember any time where they're like, oh, yeah, we have a set know. Sammi: But they're like, we're enjoying the season of our she's going they're going to Greece. Sammi: She's always wanted to go to Greece. Sammi: And so she's going to get to go to Greece, which is sweet. Sammi: And then she's also going to be on Dancing with the Stars, which is like not shocking but cool. Sammi: And then Joey gets announced as the new bachelor and we kind of knew that. Sammi: And the first woman that we meet who lives on Oahu or well, she moved to La. Sammi: But she's from Oahu. Sammi: She's joining Joey. Sammi: And then yeah, so they're excited. Sammi: But then she gets an envelope. Sammi: It's not a date card, but we don't know what it is until night one. Sammi: And that's as much surprise as they can know because Jesse is like, well, you've never seen anything like this. Sammi: And I'm like, this is like a pretty normal season. Sammi: But you were like, we're going to give you a trip so we can say it was a surprise. Sammi: We're not going to tell you about Dancing with the Stars until here. Sammi: So it's a surprise. Sammi: Charity has got to be getting tired of surprises at this point because they also surprise her with a Bachelorete. Steve: Remember that's the theme for her series. Sammi: She's like, okay, here it goes. Steve: Boys under pressure. Steve: The charity story. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: I mean, for real. Sammi: She's like always handles surprises well but I don't know if she actually likes them. Sammi: We'll see. Sammi: Okay, let's see. Sammi: I'm looking through to see if there's anything else I missed. Sammi: That was kind of the big stuff. Sammi: I don't feel like there was just not a lot to say. Sammi: Somehow we filled 45 minutes, but there wasn't a lot to say about this episode except I cried a lot and it was good. Sammi: And I'm excited for the Golden Bachelor. Sammi: I'm excited for Bachelor in paradise and I'm excited for Joey being the bachelor. Sammi: And that's fun because when's the last time I got excited about a bachelor? Sammi: I don't know. Sammi: It's been a really long time. Steve: Yeah, it's been a while. Steve: But yeah. Steve: Kudos to production for, again, taking a foregone conclusion, making it dramatic and selling me on someone that I thought was fine but boring. Steve: So just high marks all around. Steve: Charity's great. Steve: Everything's great. Steve: Sammi stayed up too late, got super emotional. Steve: It's okay. Steve: Nothing wrong with that. Steve: There's nothing wrong with it. Sammi: I'm excited all of you. Sammi: I did it for all of you. Sammi: And then we got home last night at like 10:00 and I mentioned this off recording. Sammi: We played pinball until I don't know. Sammi: This is a problem. Sammi: We played pinball until bar closed and so, yeah, my mind's kind of fresh, but I'm just coming off vacation, so if I repeated myself a lot, you knew what you were getting into. Sammi: Okay. Sammi: You knew what this was also. Sammi: You're welcome. Sammi: I hope you got your dishes done or got to your workplace or cleaned your office or whatever it is you're doing right now. Sammi: And I'm so excited. Sammi: Yeah. Sammi: The jilly box has made it through customs. Sammi: It should be here in a day or two. Sammi: And the grand reveal is coming soon, so you'll get to enjoy that shortly. Sammi: And it'll be a nice break. Sammi: Hopefully we can get it done before school starts. Sammi: And then once I'm in the swing of things for school, we'll have the golden bachelor and bachelor in paradise to record. Steve: Love. Sammi: It's going to be great. Sammi: It's going to be great. Sammi: If you want to see my slow decline into madness, come back on or before the last week of September, and I'm sure that's what you're going to get to see. Steve: That's right. Steve: We're making q four. Steve: Every month of Q four is mental health awareness month on our podcast. Sammi: It's going to be like, why did I decide to do biostatistics and biochemistry in the same semester? Sammi: Why? Sammi: Anyway, so take care of yourselves, friends. Sammi: Take care of each other if you haven't had a chance. Sammi: I mean, we are in the last moments of summer. Sammi: I know a lot of us had a heat wave recently. Sammi: At least here it's broken. Sammi: Make sure you're getting outside. Sammi: Enjoy that weather. Sammi: Go for a nice long walk. Sammi: That's what I'm about to do when I get off of here and make jam as well. Sammi: And, yeah, just enjoy those last moments that you have before it gets cold and dark, if you're in a part of the world where that happens. Steve: Yeah. Steve: And you know what? Steve: I'm going down to the lake as soon as this call is done. Steve: I'm going to walk around. Steve: I'm going to probably eat a snack. Steve: I'm going to watch the sunset. Steve: It's going to be beautiful. Steve: You know what I'm not going to do? Steve: I'm not going to do needle drugs, because you shouldn't do needle drugs. Steve: Don't do needle drugs. Steve: You got to hit them with the triple because they going to hear from us for a little while. Sammi: We'll be back with a jilly box. Steve: And a double bachelor experience. Steve: Oh, lordy.

  I had a chance to sneak up on Vahe Torossian, a Microsoft Corporate Vice President and the man in charge of Sales for Microsoft Business Applications. While Vahe has been with Microsoft for 30 years, many of you may not know him, so I wanted to fix that. Vahe is no ordinary Seller; he's the “Top” guy who sets the sales strategy and motions for the entire global team. Vahe is also the guy who runs the really big enterprise customer meetings, and he's super-friendly, as you would expect for the Chief Rainmaker. We covered a lot of ground in this one, so enjoy! Transcript Below: Vahe: Hey, Vahe Torossian speaking. Steve: Vahe, Steve Mordue, how are you? Vahe: Hey Steve. In fairness let's say Charles mentioned that somehow you were going to call me. I didn't know when, but it's great to talk to you. Steve: After I interviewed him, I asked him who would be a good person to talk to? And he dropped your name. So it doesn't surprise me that he gave you a little heads up. Have you got a few minutes to chat? Vahe: Yeah, of course. Thanks Steve. Steve: Oh, perfect, perfect. So before we get into it, maybe we can tell the listeners a little bit about what your role is. I know you've been at Microsoft forever, I think like 30 years or something like that, and you've held a lot of different positions. But now you're in the business application space and that's been fairly recent. So there's probably a lot of folks that might not be familiar with you, who should be. Vahe: Oh yeah, thanks Steve. You're right. I've been celebrating my 30 years anniversary at Microsoft in April in 2022. I actually took the helm of the Biz Apps sales organization globally in late 2020. So basically I took my one way ticket to Redmond in December 2020. And the plane was almost empty, it was during the pandemic. And it was kind of a strange feeling for someone who has been traveling so much in the past. And of course, let's say I came with the lens of the business application, of course. Having led let's say Western Europe in my past role, having all the businesses of Microsoft. And I think Western Europe was quite successful on Biz Apps, our trajectory growth. And I guess that was also in fact the good match to some degree to try to take it at the global level. Steve: So is it a little easier to think about a smaller segment of the product mix, now really being able to focus like a business application? So I think before you were looking over all sorts of different things, weren't you? Vahe: Yeah, actually it's a great question. Because I think it's very different way of looking at the business. When you are, let's say almost you are the CEO of Microsoft in the countries that you are, let's say leading. You have all the levers to engage customers, partners, government, in different circumstances. And you try to leverage as much as you can the portfolio that you have to maximize the value. In the context of let's say the business application. I think it was, the interesting bet to some degree Steve, was to say, Hey, this has been a portfolio at Microsoft, whether you call it Dynamics 365 or Dynamics only as a brand in the past. And if you go back 20 years, let's say almost, with the Navision and Axapta, and Solomon Software and Great Plains. All these stories, all these product came together. And 20 years later, I think it has been part of a portfolio somewhere. Vahe: And you had almost what I will call the strong, let's say, portfolio of Microsoft, the platform, the modern workplace and environment. And I felt the work that James Phillips in the past, and with Alyssa, and Charles, and Amy here now on the marketing side. Have been a strong inflection point to bring together both the technology in the cloud environment. But at the same time, a market environment that requires very different, let's say tools to make the most of this transformation. And I felt that there's one piece at Microsoft that requires a huge catalyst leveraging the innovation. But responding as much as we can to what the customer need or even don't know yet what they need. And I think that's what I think to me was almost a bet. It's almost like all of a sudden you move to the little dog, if I may say. But with a huge potential of transforming something with great asset for Microsoft, and the customers and partners. Steve: Well I have to say, having been involved with Microsoft for a while, we have a phrase over here called redheaded stepchild, which is kind of what Dynamics was for many, many years. It was off campus, it was just this thing out there and under Satya, when Satya came in, he's the first one that I think came into the position that recognized this should be another leg on the stool, not some remote thing out there. And I think that's made a huge. Difference because I was involved in the years before Satya with business applications and they were not just something over here on the back shelf, and now they're right front and center. I think that between Dynamics and what's happened with the power platform, cloud in general. Microsoft's ability to get into and help customers is massively different than it used to be. And in your role now, you're dealing with a lot different type of customer. You're talking about Office 365 or Azure, you're dealing with IT. And now you're mostly dealing with business users. It's a completely different audience you're having to work with today, isn't it? Vahe: Absolutely. I think also you're right since Satya took the helm of the company, to some degree you of course we have seen how we tackle the cloud computing hyper-scale environment. But at the same time, in fact what happened with the Covid in the last two years, have seen an acceleration of what we call in the past, the productivity tools to become more and more collaboration environment. And from almost an application or a set of application, it became more and more a platform on its own. And so it's almost like when you think about where we are today and we were talking about the Covid, I don't think the Covid is yet over fully everywhere. But now everybody's talking about recession, right? And there's no one headline that you look, you say, oh my goodness, what's going to happen? Which just means in terms of planning for 22, 23. Vahe: So I think the assets that is now quite unique to some degree, or differentiated as you said, between the Dynamics 365 platform components and the Power Platform, it's almost bringing together. But I think, I don't remember Steve, in a few years back, I think Satya was talking about the mobility of the experience. And that was more from a device perspective initially. But actually what you see now is that with Teams as a platform, the system of productivity almost connect with the system of record more and more. And it's re-transforming the way you are thinking. It's almost like, you think about, you don't have to go to a CRM environment or ERP environment to get access to the data. It's almost like wherever you work, if you use an Excel or if you use Teams or whatever, you get access naturally, almost intuitively to your data set. And the data set are that's almost fulfilled naturally. And so we have no additional task. Vahe: And so I think that's the transformation world in which we are. Which connects cheaper well. We almost do more with less, right? And that's going to be almost the conversation we're going to have in the coming month. And it started already with many customers and partners. How we can optimize the assets that they have, how they can let's say increase the deep provisioning of some assets that they have. They are paying too much to concentrate a bit more, to get more agility. And I think this is where also, from a partner perspective, Steve, I see a lot of potential. You are referring to Power Platform, it's fascinating to see what it was in the very beginning, this notion of citizens developer, what does it mean? Vahe: People didn't know exactly what it is, we're quite afraid to touch it. But now when you see the shortage of developers in the market in general. And how you can make the most of some absolutely topnotch people who are not developer, touching the last mile execution challenges. Have been facing crazy environment and situation that they say, I can't believe how my IT guide doesn't solve these things. I've been telling them the customer pain point for so many years. And now with some, let's say [inaudible 00:08:45] place, let's say available for them, along with some let's say technical assets, you can really make the magic in the very, very, very time. Steve: Charles came up with a term on the fly, ambient CRM. Kind of where we're heading here when you talk about things like Viva Sales and some of these pieces that are really wiring all these components together. Covid was a terrible thing, but it certainly was a perfect storm for pushing the technology forward into a place that it's been fighting to get to, it's really been fighting to get to that point. And Teams was a great product. But certainly Covid created the perfect environment where Teams made insane sense for companies that were maybe just thinking about it or dabbling with it, and suddenly they're all diving into it. And you guys of course poured the investment on top of that. And I think that the silver lining of Covid, for technology, is how far it really allowed it to advance in that period of time. Maybe we just need a pandemic every five years to push a technology forward. I don't know. Vahe: No, but I have to say that even in my previous role when I was running Western Europe. Even the most skeptical people in regard to the cloud or the transition to a cloud environment. Having the one that rushed in the first, almost to a cloud environment, once the pandemic has been a bit of a real situation to face, and to drive the economy or the public services let's say on. So I think you're right, so you don't want to wish for another pandemic or whatever, but it has been absolutely a forcing function in many domains. And that's true. Steve: I think the challenge we have is particularly in the business application space. You guys have launched so many things in such a short period of time. And as you mentioned before, Power Apps, people picking it with a stick, they don't even know what it is. And there's also this first mover fear, I think. Microsoft has been, in my mind, kind of famous for coming to the game late and then just taking over the game. We were very late to the cloud, but once we got there we just took over the cloud, and it seems to be a pattern. But when you look back at the early days of cloud before you guys stepped into it, it was wild west. And all sorts of challenges with cloud. And I think that that gave a lot of people fear about, I remember I moved into cloud early and we got destroyed. Steve: And so I think there's a lot of folks out there, just from a technology standpoint, that have gotten their hands burnt by moving too quickly. And we're at that point with the platform and dynamics, where these are not new anymore. Relatively in history, they're new. But they're not new products and they're not built by some garage shop somewhere with a couple of developers. This is what 15,000 people building this stuff back there. This is professionally built, well built stuff, that is ready for prime time. So the first movers have already come through and they all survived. So I really feel like we're at that point where it should just take off now, it should just absolutely take off. And I'm sure you guys are seeing this. Vahe: Yeah. And Steve, I think one thing also is that you're right, there's a usual thing about let's say the first mover advantage. At the same time from a customer perspective, you don't want to be the Guinea pig, right? On any situation, especially from the technology standpoint. I think that increasingly what I see in the conversation is that there's almost now, because of the quality of the native integration of the several different applications. Whether you are in the customer experience environment, on the service side, on the supply chain, on the finance or the local no code or app. All these components are absolutely connected to each other. And basically whether you have Teams as a platform in your company, or Azure in environment, all these component are connected very, very easily to each other. Vahe: And so I would say that the beauty of it now is that you have all almost the notion of marginal cost. If you really want to leverage many of the assets that we can bring, and you don't have to take all of them at once, of course it has to be matching what you need now. But the right is that, let's say there's an almost fully integrated benefit all the connectors with the rest of the world outside of Microsoft environment, which is a great value for the partners, ISV and [inaudible 00:13:58], and at the same time to the customers. Who think now, hey I should do more with less. How should I think about my investments for the next, let's say five years? Most of the customers now are really thinking about the longer term relationship. And defining what's the value SLA almost that you're expecting both from the partner of the vendor and the vendor itself. Vahe: And so it's almost like, you remember when we transition from a world of build revenue and licensing, to now more consumption and usage. It's almost the user and consumption discussion is a forcing function about the customer success, how we align on the same definition of the customer success. And what's the time to value that you committed? What are the key milestones, in full transparency, that you need to bring in? And I think that's where we are now. And because Microsoft, I think overall as a company, have been increasing tremendously the level of trust. From the security standpoint, the compliance components, and so on, and the scalability. Vahe: I think that's the great leverage for us now in terms of the conversation and making sure that the customers are getting the value that we have been selling to them. How we show how much skin in the game we have to make them successful. And then it's a flying wheel. It's almost like the innovation will help you to bring new things, respond, anticipate, take the feedback of the customer to the engineering, develop new stuff quickly to the market. So I think it's what we are heading to now, Steve. And I think from a partner perspective you might even see and feel it, right, more and more. Steve: Oh yeah, I mean I think the sales motion has changed completely. Only a few years ago we go into a customer and try and convince them to replace Salesforce with Dynamics. And they'd say no, and we were done. We'd say okay, well we'll come back in a couple years and ask again. We had nothing else to sell them. And now today, I mean if they have Salesforce, fine that's great, keep Salesforce, let's add some things around it. Salesforce will work with Viva Sales, Salesforce will work with Power Platform. Steve: There's so many doors now, I think, for a seller to be able to get into a customer and solve problems for that customer without having to do the one big yank and replace. Which is very difficult to do, it's difficult to do on opposite as well. I mean once a customer gets a big solution like Salesforce or Dynamics 365 installed, those are very difficult to uproot, it takes a very long time. And you guys have created now, this product mix, where we don't have to uproot something to sell that customer and to get engaged with that customer. We can go all over that business without having to uproot something. And I think that's huge. Vahe: I agree Steve. And I think that it's almost this notion of rip and replace type of strategy, right? In some cases it works because this is what the customer wants. They are fed up about let's say competitive environment that didn't deliver on the expectation. And we should be ready to cope with that and respond, and we have a lot of this. But at the same time as you said, what we call the strategy of having a hub and spoke, let's say, almost environment, gives us for every line of business. That we decided as a company to go and have a significant acceleration of growth and market share, is very much to give that option to say, Hey, you know what, Mr. Customer, Mrs. Customer, you decide to be on that type of environment, who we are to ask you to change? Vahe: If you are happy that's fine. But what we can bring you is almost to enhance what you have with some component that absolutely will be transparently integrated to what you're using. And it's a great circuit, an additional circuit for the partner, it's a great value for the customer. We don't feel harassed to change something because we know the cost of transitioning from one to another one. And then it's up to us to demonstrate the value we can bring and eventually we can take from there to the next level in the future. Steve: It's got to put some pressure on the competitors also. I if think of, I might just use Salesforce because they've always been the big competitor. I'm sure that they were confident sitting there at their large customer when all we had was trying to replace their instance that was going to be difficult to do and then we'd go away and they didn't have to worry about us. Now we're coming in and we're circling around, and we're solving problems in this department, and we're building apps in this department, and we're literally bolting into Salesforce. And one potential outcome is that the customer decides over time that wow, all of this Microsoft stuff that we've brought in works really, really well. Steve: That's gotta put some pressure on the incumbent big application in there that hey, you're surrounded by a bunch of stuff the customer is very happy with, you better make sure they're happy with your stuff and they don't reach that point. Cause like you say, oftentimes when you see those rip and replace, it's because the product, or the company, or something hasn't met the expectation. And to be fair, that could actually happen with any of us, right? It has a lot to do with implementation, design, how thing was put together. Less to do with the application itself, that could happen to any vendor. But certainly raises the bar to some of these competitors when they're surrounded by well performing Microsoft products that are satisfying customers. Would you think? Vahe: Yes. Absolutely. And that's why there's a continuity between what we sell, how we sell, to who we sell, and how we drive the implementation. It's an ongoing wheel that is a very different mindset that we all learn in the transition to the cloud, let's say, environment. But absolutely. I think it's a good forcing function to raise the bar to some degree, raise the bar for the benefit of the customer. You mentioned the competitiveness of what this type of hub and spoke strategy can create. You're right. But in the end, the biggest, let's say winner, will be the customer, right? Which I think is always and should always be the north star for us and our partners. Vahe: And I would say the relevance of the innovation should be in fact the pressure that we put to each other to make sure that say we listen carefully to what the customer is facing as a challenge, but potentially to translate their current challenge into the future challenge, to push them also to think differently. Because I think the notion of rip and replace [inaudible 00:21:06] One of the thing was, I don't know if you remember that the initial issue and worry was that people were saying Oh, we are moving to the cloud, therefore we are transforming. Well it was not that tried and true. People were just keeping the same processes in the cloud and the one that they had on premise. Which was not benefiting at all of the scalability and the agility of the cloud environment. Yeah, you remember that right? Yeah. Steve: They just changed the way they were paying for it. Vahe: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think that's what we have seen on this application modernization, on some of the enterprise wide innovation also opportunities that we had discussed, is how much you can really say, in this new world of competitiveness, of un-expected challenges. How you can, let's say, keep your applications fitting always in fact proactively the challenges that you're going to have too. As opposed to keep going with a quite heavy code to maintain, with people who leave that cost you a fortune to maintain. So I think this agility that the power apps, [inaudible 00:22:22] to made, have been bringing I think is the reason why we have seen this huge acceleration of growth, which is today is six, seven times faster than the market growth of local no code. Vahe: So I think it's a great, let's say indication, of what people start to realize. And I think in the conversation that you had with Charles when he was referring to, hey some of the AI capability have been slower to be picked up by the vast majority of customers. And it's true because there's a level of, let's say, can I trust this thing? Am I going to lose completely ground and control of what I'm doing? All these natural thing. I think as we bring more and more, let's say tools, are manageable. The Power Platform environment, or let's say the device sales capability on top of the teams or Salesforce environment. That people will start to test this. Vahe: And I think we're going to be more and more advocate about Hey, what are the benefits of the organization that are using this technology and how we can trust them lean forward. And I think Charles was referring to our digital sellers. Their daily life is very much, let's say, using all these AI lead capabilities in terms of reporting, in terms of let's say incident management, in terms of even coaching for themselves to do a better call next time, is just fascinating to see. Maybe we should even do a kind of, let's say talk on this, once we have a bit more, let's say after the GA, maybe a few months after, we should have, let's say what the key learnings and [inaudible 00:24:00] from a customer standpoint. Steve: Yeah, it always makes a customer confident when they know that the vendor is using the product that they're trying to sell them. It's interesting, everything moving to a subscription has changed kind of the mindset, not just of you guys obviously, where there's no big sale. There's a sale of a big subscription, the revenue of which will come over a long period of time. But the customer has this option every month to say, you know what, I'm not happy, you're not solving my problem. In the old days they were kind of stuck, they bought all this stuff and they had to make it work. Now they don't have to make it work, we have to make it work, we have to keep them happy enough. Steve: We recently launched a professional services on a subscription, which is an interesting model, that I lay awake at night thinking about that same thing. That before a customer would pay you a bunch of money to a bunch of stuff and now they're paying you a little bit of money every month for as long as you keep them happy. And this bar of, I mean we've always wanted to keep customers happy. But it's never had the impact or importance that it does when you're on a subscription with that customer who can just any time say, “I'm not happy, goodbye.” It raises the bar I think for you guys to have to continuously innovate, what do you done for me lately? You got to continuously innovate and bring new things. And you've got more motivation probably than the company's ever had in history because of the subscription model. Do you feel that internally? Vahe: Yes, yes. As I said, it has been a great enabler to raise the bar. And it's almost like you know can have a beautiful slide deck and saying the right things, but the execution doesn't match what you are saying somehow, that you don't walk the talk. I think you could have been in that situation in a kind of on-premise environment. I think the cloud has been a forcing function to say, hey you know what, you can claim you are customer success, or you are customer first, or you are customer obsessed. But the reality is that if you don't deliver the service properly, if you are not as responsive timely, if you're not proactive, customer will say enough is enough, I can stop my subscription. Steve: I have options. Vahe: I have options. So I think it's a good hygiene, how it makes you having an embracing habits, that I would say are the natural thing when you engage with customer. But I think it's almost, let's say, for the one who might have forgotten that basics, it has been a great, let's say, opportunity to bring back the roots of what is it to satisfy a customer, right? And I think that's what the cloud licensing model helped put together. And I think there are still always room for improvement. Vahe: And similarly I would say, what you have seen on the collaborative applications, what we have seen on the low-code, no-code, you are going to see it now, also I would say on the supply chain environment, which is shipper, shipper at stress because of what we have seen on the Covid, but also in fact on the geopolitical aspect and some of the recession discussion. And also, on the overall, what I would say the contact center in our environment at large. How this world is going to change is going to be led a lot by the capability that technology can bring, and the ability to listen carefully to the strategies and the challenges of the corporation that are involved in. So it's quite exciting actually. Steve: I don't get involved a lot with the call center operations. But I picture the old call center is this massive building full of cubicles and people with headphones. And I picture that now that most of those people are probably working remote. A call center now could operate at my desk, just about, and have thousands of people all working from their home. So, that whole industry feels like it's changed significantly. And yes, I'm sure they're starving for the technology that fits the model that they're being pushed to adopt. Vahe: Yeah, yeah absolutely. I mean it's interesting, if you summarize some of the business challenges or the things that are coming from multiple conversation. We had the nuanced [inaudible 00:29:04] a few months back. And so it's almost the first fiscal year where we're going to be able to strategize, operate together as one organization. And it's great because somehow you take their own experience in terms of conversational AI and what they have been leading in for many years. And at the same time you hear both, let's say, the customer feedback when it comes to, as you said, the traditional contact center or call center evolution. How to translate this into a modern service experience, right? Vahe: And how AI can contribute to that on the seamless integrated way. How to think about customer retention in this world where people are a bit more struggling with their bottom line. How to protect the customer privacy as well. Because you talk about voice capability and recording, but how you cope with the privacy and the security during this service journey. So all these are absolutely great opportunities for us to combine what we're hearing, the technology and the acquisition that we did a few months back, to put that into a great component. And I would say the data analytics that the power Platform Power BI gives us on the back end, is going to be a great platform for us again to differentiate from the rest of the world. Steve: Well and it'll also help kind offset the fact that these people are all remote now, right? They used all be sitting in this big room. And people were standing up there looking over a rail at them making sure they were doing what they were doing and available. And you can't lose any of the customer service quality just because you've moved everybody out of the building and nobody can physically see them anymore. AI is the only way to plug that hole really of being able to know what's going on in this organization with all those people remote. In your day-to-day activities, I'm assuming that since you're head of sales that you get engaged with all of the big opportunities that come to Microsoft. And you're in there leading the charge to get them to make a decision for the services. What are the areas that you're seeing among those larger customers that they're really excited about? Is it the low-code stuff, is that very exciting to them? Or are they still wrapping their arms around that? Vahe: No, no. I would say that the notion of, let's say, application modernization, which doesn't mean I do the same thing I was doing before in the cloud. Really thinking about, what do I want to fix? And how much I can include some perspective about what could happen in some, let's say options or scenario? That capability that Power Apps has been giving them. And now we see that the corporations who are the most successful are the one who are almost creating a center of excellence within their own organization, that let's say help the IT to monitor someone, in fact the usage rate. But also to amplify the user experience and to spread it across the organization. And the ability to almost measure the positive impact. Vahe: The second thing I've seen is on the low-code, no-code, is the time to value. It's almost like you can almost now, and when I say “we,” it's almost we with the partners. We can almost say for this type of let's say expectation, or application, or challenge, it will take three month to be ready, not three years, two years. Or we have a heavy development environment. And so this center of excellence, let's say mindset or framework, is a very powerful one. Because it helps to almost create a concentration of hey, what are the most critical things to fix and how long it's going to take? Vahe: And people are almost, let's say very impressed, about how quickly you can have great quality because you bring both the expertise of, as I said, almost the person who is facing the challenge every single day. Being non-technical guy, we have in fact the support of IT. And I think that's the business decision makers along with the IT. I think to me, that's why we have been on this six, seven times faster than the market rate. We have huge ambition there. And be aware that we have also 20 million of users of Power Apps today that came from the city campaigns. So people are actively using it, not yet paying it. So that means that it's great, it's the future almost by, for us to go after. Because people are starting to use in fact at least the basic functions to get adjusted customers to and so on. Vahe: The second thing I would say is that people have realized how easy it is, and recognizing that Teams became a platform close to 300 million users. It started at 25 or 30 million almost pre-pandemic. And so that became, almost as you said, you are at home, or you are wherever you are and that's the interaction that you have with your customers, partners, ecosystem and employees. And so now it's a marginal component to say hey, can I have one tab that is going to do that type of task? My forecasting, my thing. So this is again the connection between what you use every single day at scale, and the marginal cost of bringing a component of Dynamics 365, a component of the application that you create quickly for Power Apps or Power Automate from the process, implementation, and automation. So I think that's what I see the two biggest part of the customer reaction, and I would say feedback for us. And encouragement to be fair, to keep going in that direction. Steve: We've got lots of examples that you guys have got out on the case studies of large companies that have really got in head first. And just thousands of apps in the organization solving thousands of problems. And just excellent, I mean you just have to almost grin when you look and hear about these things. But for every one of those there's still a bunch of them out there where, I don't know, IT maybe is still an obstacle. I mean IT has been, it's interesting because IT's been a friend of Microsoft for a long time because a lot of the products that they have engaged with were Microsoft products, servers, et cetera. They've had to make this transition to cloud, which was scary for them. But they ultimately did it for the most part, not all of them, did it. And now here comes low-code, no-code that's got to scare the bejesus out of a lot of IT folks. And how are you at that company size? Because frankly, we struggle with the same thing in the mid-market. How, at that big company size, do you deal with that occasional obstinance from it? Vahe: Yeah, it's a great point. You're right. I think Microsoft in general, I don't want to generalize, but in general have been for the last four years, very, very close to the IT decision makers. And rightfully so, because there were so many and still so many things to achieve in partnership with the IT and CIO environment. At the same time, when it comes to business applications or business process, I would say that you need to find the balance between the business decision makers, who are the ultimate decision makers when it comes to what is going to affect their business, or the way they work from a Salesforce perspective, or the way the marketing leaders wants to automate some of the processes that they believe is important. Vahe: And so that we probably are in a unique business case at Microsoft, where you have to talk to both. And the learning is that in the very beginning where you were only talking to IT, for example in the low-code, no-code, you could have signed a deal with IT, but then you know almost had to start to sell it again internally. Because you had to knock to all the doors of the business decision makers to say, Hey, do you know that you have this thing in your corporation, and anyway this is the thing that you can do, do you mind starting over there? Vahe: And so that was basically almost a waste of cycle. And so we said we have to do these two things together. We need to be able to articulate what is the value of low-code, no-code, maybe in FSI, financial service, or manufacturing, or in retail. And of course there's a strong common denominator. But there are some specifics that may resonate more for some industries more than others, and therefore the decision makers. And we have seen that when we do these things well together in parallel, when you sign the contract, or the deal, or the agreement, the time to move to usage or the business case implementation is much faster. Basically you bring more value both to IT and the business, and for Microsoft. And so I think that's the piece where I think it evolved on low-code, no-code, from being afraid in the beginning or skeptical, to a place where they are increasingly embracing this center of excellence environment. Where they own it as [inaudible 00:38:55]. It is connected to the business decision makers, therefore it brings value. Vahe: And so IT brings value to the business decisions or the business unit and the line of business. And then what was missing so far was, how can we give them the monitoring environment, almost the control board to manage the budget, to manage let's say, or having warning to say, hey, business A, you know are over consuming. Should we lower the investment or should we accelerate because of what you are doing? So I think that the kind of tools that we are bringing now to the IT, so that they are absolutely part of the success of the company and they are connected to the business decision makers. I think that's the best way for us to demonstrate value and keep it completely aligned with the business directions. Steve: And the opposite would be true also if you're going in trying to sell the line of business owner without talking to IT. And you convince the, now you got to go sell IT. So it's two cycles. Vahe: Absolutely. Steve: You have to somehow get them both in the same room and do it at once. So we've got so many products coming, we've got so many products here. And if you imagine a generic customer of a large size that you're going to be going to talk to next week about all the Microsoft has to offer. What are a couple of the key products that you're going to want to make sure you land in their head, that you feel across all companies are extremely high value or differentiators? The thing you don't want to walk out of that room without mentioning? Vahe: Yeah, I would say, and somehow you touch on it Steve, earlier on. As part of the transition that we are driving, one of the thing is also to simplify. To simplify the portfolio, to simplify the go-to market, to simplify the strategy. We discussed the hub and spoke, let's say strategy. And so I would say at the very beginning, what we said is that instead of saying, hey, there's a proliferation of products. And every year we add more and more and more. And at some point you confuse your own sellers, you confuse the customer, you confuse the product, it's super tough to digest everything, and even understanding what's the hierarchy across all these things? Steve: For licensing Vahe: And licensing on top all this complexity, right? I mean we have gone through it, and it's still not perfect. But at the same time I think what we said is that there are the categories, or the line of business, that we want to go in. We want to have a fair shot to take a leadership position in the next let's say years. And what it takes to get to that point, from an innovation perspective, from a go-to market perspective, from a part program perspective, from a sales and seller investment capacity perspective. And so on. And so I would say that's more the starting point Steve, where we say we define five categories, a fine line of business, where we believe we have a shot to become a leader. And these categories we need to be able to be clear on where the value that we bring. Vahe: For example, if you take the customer experience, let's say OLAP, which is more the connected sales and marketing, if I may summarize at the high level. It's going to be all the conversation about the collaborative apps, the customer experience transformation. You have already Teams for the vast batch of you, hey that's what you want to achieve. The Dynamic 65 sales is going to give you that capability, or the LinkedIn Sales Navigator on top of it is going to give you that type of insight. You know are not touching about AI, you think about almost sales automation, Salesforce automation. Let's show you how the AI infused capability within Dynamics 365 sales and marketing, give you that asset absolutely naturally integrated on your team's environment. Vahe: And same thing on Viva Sales, the sales productivity, we can measure it the way you want, and you're on control of that. And by the way, if it works on the environment that you are working, could be Microsoft, could not be as we discussed, that's more the conversation that we want to have. And of course on the back end you are going to have Dynamics 365 sales, and marketing, and Viva sales, most of the time for that line of business. If you think about let's say low-code no-code, I would say you will have probably three type of conversations. You know will have a conversation about hey, you're a large enterprise, multi-deals coverage. And basically the benefit of having an enterprise wide, let's say engagement, what does it mean? What's the framework for you to make the most of it? And how we commit with our partners to deliver you the value. Vahe: And so you can commit on five years maybe with Microsoft and how much value we can bring already to you. Or it's purely an application modernization. You move to a hyper-scale environment, but you have all these old fashioned applications. So basically, you are a platform that is modern but all your application are still old fashioned. How low-code, no-code is going to help you to accelerate that transition. And let's start with one company, one app. Pick one and let's do it right, and then replicate from there. And then potentially, in fact, the last one which I think is going to be the biggest one potentially, is the business process automation. Think about the forecasting process. I have to say that when I was running my business in Western Europe, we have been doing this traditional forecasting process, which in every company when we talk with business leaders or CFOs, that's the same thing. You ask the forecast at the lowest level of the organization, then the manager of that organization, do a judgment. That judgment moves to the next level of management. The management do another judgment. Vahe: So all the way up to the top level, who does a judgment anyway on top of it. Or they find, depending on who is doing the forecast, almost let's say a coefficient of let's say correction based on who is doing the forecast. When you start to do that thing into AI and you say what, we know the behavior of people [inaudible 00:45:26] potentially, you come after 18 months or one year to a trend of forecast that is so close to in fact what you were getting before. That you say how many hours, thousands and thousands of hours of productivity saving I'm going to have just because of this AI forecasting capability? That's the kind of example of it, for say an application for low-code, no-code, that is just checking in fact the behavior or the intelligence so far to help you to drive your business. Vahe: And so we have been running that internally as well and it's quite impressive. And so that's the kind of conversation that you want to have both with the IT, but you see this perfect example of hey, having that conversation with the CFO, or the sales leader, is a great one. Because it's a marginal cost again, to what you are using already. And the same thing happened on finance, and supply chain, and service when it comes to, all right so where you, what are you using? Are you still on-prem? The vast majority of ERP, the vast majority of contact center and call center are still on-prem. So you can think about hey, what does it take to move to a cloud and more agile environment? What are the best that you want to do? Which is the strategic partner or vendor, who are going to take this? Because you're not going to change this environment every two years. It's a 5 year, 10 year bets, right? Steve: The marriage. Vahe: It's a marriage. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean does it help Steve? Steve: Yeah. And I think interesting, one of the things I think about AI in forecasting, is it doesn't have any personal bias. And obviously in larger companies I'm sure there's a lot of checking and cross checking. In the middle market it's a bunch of optimistic sales people coming up with optimistic projections that have no basis in history or anything else that's going on, of what's going on. And I've been in meetings where we've been displaying some AI facts, or figures, or forecasts, or projections. And listen to senior people just adamantly disagree. That number is absolutely not correct. And I've had them tell me I've been doing this for 30 years, I know, I know. And then here comes next month and guess what was right? The AI model was right and the guy who's been doing it for 30 years is making up some excuses. Steve: So I think that the world right now is fraught with bad projections on everything. Cost projections, sales projections, there's too much personal bias involved in the process of creating those things. And as leadership of a company, you're relying on these things. They're going to drive you right over a cliff potentially, if you're not careful, if you don't have good information, if you can't get the bias out of it. And I think that's one of the big things that AI brings that I've found resonates with leadership sometimes, is kind of remove all the bias. I mean it's just removing all the bias. You don't want to hear smoke, you know want to hear reality so you can act accordingly. You're surrounded by a bunch of people who want to make you feel good, but AI doesn't care how you feel. It's going to tell you the truth, doesn't care if you get mad. Vahe: Steve also, it's interesting because sometime, you point to this that sometime when you are too early on the innovation, some people might be again scared or skeptical as we said. But I remember we were looking at let's say some numbers when it comes to, are we operating consistency, for example, in the world? Or there are some that say practices that are bringing more growth or more relevant than other places. And so, one thing was interesting was in the services line of business or category, you think of case management. And it's one of the opportunities. And you might say well case management is not super innovative. Well, it's something that is quite well known. But case management was one of the fastest growth in majors. And that was because it was responding to the fact that vast majority of the case management processes are still on-prem today. Vahe: And the one we're moving to the cloud, especially in public sector, to make sure that the queuing system is working, you have a full up, let's say email to tell you and tracing where you are on the request that you put in place. All these things we believe is generic everywhere, but it's not, it's by far not. And across mid-market, and large corporation, and private sector, and public sector. So it's not always innovation that drives in fact the next generation of work. It's also in fact the basics that are not fulfilled today and that create a bad customer experience. And that's interesting, in a way, to keep very humble about let's say what we still have on our plate. Steve: I can remember not that long ago, when you talk about customer service, the goal of many companies was to provide as bad as service as possible so they didn't have to do it. I mean it was a cost center for them. They hadn't come to the realization yet, this is decades, but hadn't come to realization yet that customer service is what drives future revenue. They just looked at as a cost center and figured the worst it is, the less people will use it and it'll cost us less, so that mindset has changed. You talk about fears that people have of technology. And so a lot of this is people self preservation fears. They see something coming, we saw it even in the partner channel, uh-oh here comes low-code, no-code, customers are going to be doing all the work themselves, they're not going to need us partners anymore. And it's like this first reaction that people have about anything new, is how's that going to affect me? And generally they're going to assume negatively. Steve: Our business is busier than we've ever been as a result of low-code. So it's actually been the opposite. But partners, and just like people, you know need to be prepared to pivot into that wind. If you're just going to stand there with your arms crossed and not move, yeah low-code's going to hurt you. You know need to lean into that. And the same thing with individuals that are looking at new technology. It's coming and you can either stand there with your arms crossed and let it knock you down, which is a foregone conclusion. Or you can bend with it. And to be honest, the younger folks are more flexible than us older folks. So they're not having any trouble with this technology at all. We recently signed a new customer, it's all young people and man they just get it. I mean there's no explaining anything. They understand every single thing you're talking about, why and what. And I mean they're born with a cell phone in their hand. None of this is foreign, but we still got to get rid of all of us old guys. Vahe: I agree, I agree. And time flies. And it's almost like, often, let's say, you need read to embrace that. Always a zero regret strategy in this type of, let's say, evolving environment. Anything that you postpone, to some degree, is almost let say a loss. And that has been proven in the technology run. And when I look at, we always have to be humble. It's a highly competitive market, and people are smart, and that's great. Cause as we discussed, it's all good for the customer. But I think that when I look back to the commitment of the company, the investment that we put in place last year with the support of Satya, Amy Hood, [inaudible 00:53:27]. With more than 1000 sellers injected in the marketplace, we keep going on the investment on the local no-code, even more so to drive the acceleration of the growth in addition to the Dynamic 365. Vahe: When I look at every category that we are in now, and I think it's a good confidence level that we on the path here. That first of all, we are between two times and three times the growth of the market for each of these category, that's a good indication. And I think that also raise the confidence level of the product sellers at Microsoft. To bring these different components together and add more value to the customer. So look, it's a journey Steve, and it's quite exciting to be on this. And people like yourself because we have been there also for a long time, and you know what it takes to transition. And you never fail, you learn always. And everything that you learn and that works, it's almost to think how we can scale and bring that to the mass as quick as we can so that people can benefit from it. Steve: Well success breeds success. And you know guys have got it going right now. I've taken up enough of your time. Anything that you want to get out there that I didn't ask or we didn't talk about? Vahe: No, I think, Steve, you did a good overview of let's say where we are, how we think. Again, I think that the simplification, the portfolio, the much more focused approach, the category, and more consistent execution on the go-to market is really the next level for us. And the hub and spoke strategy across all these categories gives much more room to increase the business opportunity for us and the partners. Steve: Yep, I think so, I think so. All right, listen, it was great talking to you, I'm glad you made the time. And I definitely hope to able to talk to you again in the future, get something new to talk about. Any time you want to reach out, and jump on, and talk about some stuff, let me know. We're happy to get you on. Vahe: We are all, let's say reading all these, let's say headlines on the recession. In a few months from now, between now and then of calendar year, we're to see a bit more clarity on how the planning is happening for the mid-market, large corporation, how the public sector is evolving in this dimension. And also, we'll have a few, let's say product launched that we talked about, Viva Sales, any learning from that, let's say maybe the first two, three months, would be interesting to see how people react. And maybe that could be a great opportunity for us to chat. Also what's going on the [inaudible 00:56:17] Steve: Yeah, yeah. Vahe: Plenty of things to talk, I guess. Steve: Sounds good. All right, well hey, thanks again for your time. Vahe: Thank you. Take care Steve, have a great day.

My conversation with Steve Sims is a testament of what someone can do if they put their mind to it. He has created an incredible company, TheBluefish.com by literally making what would appear to most as impossible, a reality, hence the title of his book - "Bluefishing: The Art Of Making Things Happen" He ever says during our conversation that he hopes the fact that a brick layer from London could accomplish all of this, that you too can accomplish whatever you set out to do. You're going to love his sincerity and how "real" of a person he is. Literally what you hear and what you get and no bullshit! Enjoy!!! Joe Steve Sims: Founder and CEO Bluefish The Man Behind All Things Steve Sims Website: https://www.stevedsims.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevedsims/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/stevedsims/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/stevedsims LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdsims/ Email: ask@stevedsims.com Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: Today, my guest is Steve Sims. Steve, welcome to the show.   Steve: Now, thanks for having me.   Joe: Very excited man, I I've been following you for quite some time now. Do you like the title, The Real Life Wizard of Oz? This do you like that? I just want to know because I don't.   Steve: Now, when it came out, when when folks wrote a big article on me and they named like Elon Musk and Richard Branson, the article was fantastic. You know, the article I couldn't have done a better puff piece in a show of piece if I had done it myself. But then then they came up with the idea of Titli Me as Steve Sims, the real life Wizard of Oz. Now, this got a lot of people's attention, but at the end of the day, he was some dodgy pervert that didn't do anything to hide it behind a curtain. So I thought to myself, I'm not quite sure I like that. But, you know, people people I'm proud to say see to the essence of the imagination and the creativity and not the fact that he was a big forward.   Joe: Right. I want to go back a little bit, if you don't mind, I know there's so much I have to ask you, but I also wanted to lay the groundwork. So when anyone listens to this, they understand who you are and what you're about, where you came from. So it can you give how you became who you are today and what you do.   Steve: Yeah, very simply, I'm the same as everyone else, every entrepreneur in the planet started off by being pissed off about something, whether it be their finances, their life or something, the way it was being done. But I believe the entrepreneurs were kind of aggravation and it's aggravated oysters to make pose with. First of all, got to be pissed off about something. I was kicked out of school at 15 straight onto the building site in London, and that was my life. And I thought, really, you know, this is my dad, my uncle, my cousins, even my granddad in his 80s was on this building site. And I thought, this is my life now. Of course, I didn't have Instagram to tell me how inadequate my life was at the time, so I had nothing to gauge myself by. But, you know, I just thought there's got to be something else. And so, like every entrepreneur, we jump out of the frying pan into the volcano, you know, we just like, well, let's try it. And then we fail. And then we try something else and we fail at that. We gain all this education. I realized one thing that was my my my true north is a site. I was in the wrong room now as a as a bold bloke, British biker, all those bees. I was in a room with all of those people. You know, I remember going into into the pub at night and throwing the money on the table, knowing exactly how many babies you could afford to.   Steve: And maybe if you scratch get hold, you got two pennies, get one more on each hand out between everyone else. And I said to myself, is this it? And so I had to change the way I had to go into a room where people would demand themselves demanding more impact, demanding more income. And so I didn't know how to do it, but I ended up building up this Trojan horse. I ended up as a doorman of the nightclub, knowing where all the nightclubs were. Then I started to own my own parties. Then I started throwing parties for other people. Then I started managing other people's parties. And I went from closing down clubs in Hong Kong to working with someone on his Oscar party, the Kentucky Derby, the New York Fashion Week, the Palm Beach Polo. I ended up working for the biggest events in the planet, and one single film I always had was I would only ever invite rich people to these events. Why? Because I knew what people were like, because I was broke and broke. People can't afford shit. So I only I would only invite millionaires and billionaires. So I changed the room I was in. And the only reason I did it was because I wanted to walk up to someone rich and go, Hey, how come your filthy rich and I'm not. So I created my own firm in order to be able to ask that question.   Joe: It's so cold, before we go any further, I have to tell you, now that I'm sitting here across from you even virtually, that I love the way you express yourself and I love dealing with people who are down to earth and honest and say what's on their mind. And as you know, and you even have some of this on your website, there's so much fluff in the world today and there's so much of the facade of I am this person and I do all of this and I do all of that. And it's just nice to sit with a successful real person. And I really mean that. It just it's it's truly an honor to be sitting here talking with you.   Steve: Isn't that a shame, isn't   Joe: It   Steve: It?   Joe: Is,   Steve: Now,   Joe: It is.   Steve: Really, isn't it a shame that if you if you if you rewind and listen to it, don't thank me for being real? And therefore, all you're doing is validating that the rest of the planet is not. So it should be it should be something we take for granted, we should make someone go. Well, I know what that is all about, but we don't because people spend so much energy trying to be someone that not you never get to meet them. You go of these shields and as you say, there's these facades to navigate through all of these Almaz. And you're like, well, what's really about I made it. I made a decision very early on and I will get experience three seconds after we needed it. But I remember there was one point in my life that I woke up and like all entrepreneurs, we had that little nagging doubt, oh, should I really be doing this? Should I really look like this? Should I really sound like this and like a moron? I listen to it. And so I changed my persona and she tried to use big words. You know, I, I wore suits. I took my earrings out. I covered my tattoos. I became someone that I thought would be easier for you. What I ended up doing was I made it harder for you to understand me. But he was the weird thing. I had an expensive watch. And if anyone knows me, I'm in a black T-shirt and jeans. Every single time in my life, I ride motorcycles. I do not own a car. I collect motorcycles. I bought a collar this time, I bought a car, I bought made suits, I bought an expensive watch, and then I realized these will for you, I was trying to impress you and all of those trappings and trinkets of, wow, look at me, I've got money gained me.   Steve: And this is the doll thing. A lot of clients. And I was making more money with a lot of people I didn't like, I didn't like and I couldn't connect with. So I realized very early on that and this put me actually on a serious note, put me into a mass depression. Thankfully, I came out of the other side so to watch, got rid of the suit, got rid of the car on motorbikes ever since. I want to make it impossible for me to be misunderstood by you. OK, I want you to never be able to sit on a fence and go, well, what's this Steve Sims about? I want to make it so simple that you can go like some people. I would imagine some people on this podcast have gone down on that guy. I'm gone. And that's fine with billions of people in the planet. If a few bugger off after 30 seconds, Mumolo, could you still. Fine, but I want to make it very easy for you to know what side of the fence you want to jump on my side, be part of family and community and grow and get uncomfortable or go go about your way. Either way, fine. But there's nothing in the planet today where some fence sitters and I decided I'm going to make it very easy for you to make sure you know which side of the fence to be on.   Joe: Yeah, and it's true, I know where I stand with you, I can make a comment on your social media that you always write back. You always say thank you. You always say whatever you whatever. It's just it feels like a real relationship and it's and it's awesome. And that's the way it should be,   Steve: It   Joe: I   Steve: Should   Joe: Think   Steve: Be, yes,   Joe: Should be.   Steve: And go good, so everyone out that all you can with your people is you are you connecting with people as the person you think they want to see? It's a deep question, but stop spending any effort on trying to be someone you know.   Joe: I love it. Perfect. OK, so I know this is going to sound like rush to the audience, but I have you for such a little bit of time and I have a huge sheet of notes and things, and I have to ask you. So the book deal, so blue fishing, the art of making things happen. How did that deal come about? Like you said, and I think 20, 16 is when that book deal happened. How did they come to you and say, hey, why don't you take all your experiences and what you do and write a book? Is that what they basically said?   Steve: No,   Joe: Ok.   Steve: When when you actually start hanging around with people, different people that do things differently and opportunities come at you, OK? And I was at a party up in New York and I'm at the bar doing what I do, drink in old fashions and telling stories. And this this woman was introduced to me and it was a case of Steve telling the story about you. But you and Alan Jonel when you did this with the pope. So I just told a few stories and she came back to me and she said, you know, you should buy a book. Now, we've all heard that before. And I'm like a few days later, she actually contacted me. She was part of Simon and Schuster, one of the largest publishing houses in the planet. And she said, no, Susie, we want you to buy a book. We want you to buy a book on all the rich and powerful people all over the planet you deal with and what you do. And I said, do you mind if I did that? I'd be dead by cocktail hour. So I can't do that. So then we got chatting and I did I did a speech for a friend of mine called Joe Polish at the Genius Network event, and it was like, hey, I got kicked out of school. But this is how I did this with the pope and Elon Musk. And they got wind of this this talk that I gave and came back to me about a week, like went, oh, hang on a minute.   Steve: We don't want you naming people. We want to know how a bricklayer from East London managed to do this, you know, and so was OK. That makes sense. So I did the book for a variety of reasons. One of them. Actually, both of them were completely selfish. Now that I think about it. Your kids are never impressed with you. It doesn't matter who you are. Your kids are never impressed with me being able to write a book. I'll be like, hey, kid, your dad's an author now, you know? And I just wanted to warn to book. So one of them was personal satisfaction to imitate the crap out of my three kids. The other selfish reason was to get people to stop thinking. Now, that seems the opposite of what everyone's trying to do. But haven't you noticed when someone said, hey, we should do this and they go, yeah, that's brilliant, let's build a business plan, let's do a vivid vision and let's do a forecast. Let's get an analytical survey. Let's do a crowdsourced. Shut up. Try it, see if you like it, see if someone wants to buy it. See if someone's got a problem that your mouth to try something. So I've always said, forget about you. I can't focus on you.   Steve: I can. And I thought to myself, if I can demonstrate in this book that a great line from London is doing this, then you're already out of excuses. So selfishly, I wanted to create a world that there were more doers than who is in the planet. There's a lot of who is out there. There's no substance. So selfishly, I wanted to piss the kids off on. I wanted to create more people to be aggravated enough to go. Well, I have it's dark. I can do it. And it came out, as you say, I got the deal in twenty sixteen book, came out in seventeen and I thought to myself, well and I got paid nicely so I thought, I don't know if anyone's going to believe it, I got to buy it. Because when you look at the industry of books, there's thousands of books coming out every week. And I thought and I know this is really going to appeal to anyone so suddenly. Schuster, they send me, which was weird because I'd always wired me my Bothaina, but they posted me a two and a half gram check and they said, we want you to go to Barnes and Noble and we want you to sit there with a pile of books and a couple of bottles of champagne and signed books. Now, is this is this a video podcast was just an audio podcast about.   Joe: It's both.   Steve: Ok, so for those people that don't have the pleasure of seeing me. Let's let's be honest, a Saturday afternoon when you're walking around with your kids, there is no way in God's green earth you're going to go, well, he looks nice and friendly. Let's go and find out while you're   Joe: The.   Steve: Going to avoid me like the plague. So I thought, I can't do that. I'm going to end up drinking. Champagne is all going to go well. So I thought to myself, no, not doing that. So I went down to a local whiskey bar and that that I happened to have frequented a couple of times. And I said, look, here you go. I'm going to sign this, check over to you and turn the lights on when we run out of money. And they went and saw I invited a bunch of my friends again, if you demand of you and your circle, you end up with pretty good friends so that everyone from like Jim Quico had a son and had a great, great and all. But Jesse and I had a whole bunch of really cool people that were in there that also have big followings and pretty well not invited to Lewis House, a whole bunch of people from there. And we literally just stuck a pile of books at the end of the bar because we were told we had to be a book launch and just basically go home for the night. And here's the funny thing. I never even had a website announced in this book, you know, because I've never done a book but called Insomnia Hotta, Sneaky Little Buggers that they are. They did a secret video of the night, which I was told was to get Bilo footage for a new video for Kolhatkar. They did this incredible, unbelievable video of my book launch and put into the music of Dreman by Eversmann is one of the best tunes in the planet and gave it to me. And it was tremendous. And what they did was they went around all of these people going, hey, what do you think of Steve doing this book? Now, if you go to Steve de Sims, don't come, you know, not trying to sell you anything.   Steve: But if you go to our website, we put the video on the front page of the website because Simon Schuster said you're not even not even promoting the book. You have to promote the book. So I went, oh, I'll stick this video up. Now, the video at the beginning, everyone's like, oh, it's such an honor to be here. Steve's done really well. He's what? It's all bullshit. It's all kind of like I'm sober and I'm on film, so I'm going to say something nice about him. And then as the video gets old, obviously the night gets old on the old fashions get going on and like with that bleep bleep bleep. Oh, bleep. And he's just to use it. And I just tell myself that's real. That's that's low people about a couple of drinks in him. And now that just kind of like screaming at me and swearing and I just thought, that's Leo. So I put that up. And the funny thing is that video. Launched it, people suddenly saw I wasn't trying to hide behind any kind of misconception of perfection, that this was as good as it gets. And now the book's been released and translated into Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Mandarin, Chinese, Korean. It's now Polish and it's now being translated into Russian. And it's called World Wide as a best seller. It's in credible how this is taken off and what it's done for me and for those people that I'm now able to communicate with, shake him up a little bit, get them uncomfortable, and then spit them out into the world to be more impactful.   Joe: Yeah, it's it's great and it's truly a Steve Sims book launch, like people should take note that that's why it's so cool to meet you and to be talking with you. It's like this real, real, real thing. And that's what I love. It's just it's completely refreshing. So ask why three times what does that mean?   Steve: We're in a world today where we're very scared of telling you what we want, you know, if you say to someone, hey, you win a million dollars this weekend, what are you going to do? They're going to go, oh, I'm going to get a Ferrari and I'm going to get a hot tub. And all of the Hawaiian Tropic goes are going to come and sit in the hot tub with me. And you gotta scrape. But three months down the line, what are you going to do? And then it's going to be things like, well, you know, my school, my kids school does no basketball court. I'd really like to help them. You see, people have a knee jerk answer and then they have the real core and people don't want to tell you what the core is. So this is what I do. People will say to me, and he's a chip on a trick for everyone out there, basic communication and in fact, is heavily used by the FBI. I know it sounds funny, but it is just the basics of communication. And when anyone ever says to you what they want, respond in the same right and tonality and speed that they've said. Now, let me give you an example. I really want to do this. And you go, oh, that's really fantastic. And then you drop it. You go, Oh, that's really fantastic. But why? And when you drop that tone.   Steve: They in their head, they go, oh, they recently bodily wise, if I sat in front of you, you know, the body language, you can see them like sink down a little bit more because the gods know up when the chest is out and it's all raw. But then they sink back and they go, oh, that's a good question. And they they then go, well, actually this happened. And in fact, probably rather than going on about that, I'll give you a story as an example, if I might. So I was working with John for about eight years, and we had an office at the time in Palm Beach and I wasn't in the office and I get this call come through to me from one of the team and they said, hey, Steve, we've got a guy on the phone from New York and he wants to meet some Elton John. You know, you need to speak to him because you're the one that's going over to be without one on that time. And I just found out what he wants. Right. So I answer the phone and I said, hey, hey, hey, hey. I want to get a picture out of John. Match the technology. Oh, that's fantastic, that's great. Why? So then he comes back with well, he's you know, he's one of the last living legends, he's an icon, he's brilliant. I want to get a photograph with him off my desk.   Steve: He's going to die soon. And, yeah, that's two things. One, there was no direct response to my question of why. And secondly, if, you know, if he never matched my knowledge, well, he carried on with his excitement. So I said to him, oh, that's fantastic. I'll come back to you. Let me see what I could do. And I hung up, never got his email, never got his phone number. There was no real driving call. It was all very superficial. OK, so then about a month later and we're about a month and a half away from the party now, one of the girls at the office contacted me. She said, hey, we got this guy from New York on the phone, wants to meet Elton John. I don't think it's the same guy as the other one because I already contacted him and said, we don't touch this guy. But I'm wondering if this is might this charter can I do it because you wouldn't respond to it? So in my head, I'm like, oh, well, I've got to get rid of this guy as well when I put me through New York and comes on the phone. Hey, how are you doing? I said, all right. You know, I hear you want to meet sound, John. He went, Yeah. What mean? So I want to have a chat with him. So I said, Oh, that's fantastic.   Steve: Brilliant. I said, Why? And he went, oh, and he had to think about it, but still had a bit of bravado about it, is that all? Well, he's a he's an iconic he's a legend. I want to meet him and have a chat. Going to get a picture with him. There's things. Now, I could see he was stumbling. So I said to him very quietly, and as Chris Voss says, you've midnight boys, I said to him. What things? And just shut up. And a different man came back on the phone. And this is all he said. So when I was a kid, my dad used to take me to school and he used to bring me back from school whenever my mom, it was always my dad, he'd take me to bring me back. Now, the car, we had a cassette player in it and the cassette was jammed and it was Elton John's greatest could play, but it couldn't eject. So all the way to school. We would be singing our lungs out to Elton John on the way back from school, we'd be singing our lungs out of Elton John now. Then he got a new column. This car had this CD player in it. So he bought Elton John's greatest hits. And again, we would sing our lungs out all the way to school and sing our lungs out on the way back. And then I started to get into high school for the first couple of years, he still had to take me and pick me up.   Steve: And I used to jump into that car so fast because he would have one job blaming before it even got in the car and I would stare out the window with mass embarrassment as my dad some his lungs out all the way home. And I would say to my mom, can you make you stop singing anyone jump a Clydeside just like she's thing and all the way to high school and all the way back, you will be like by sunlight, slam the door quickly so no one else can hear Elton John coming out of the door. He said that my dad died about twenty five years ago. I've got kids, I'm married, and I'll be traveling to work where we're going on a vacation, going down to take my wife out for dinner one night. He said the radio will be on, he said, and Elton John to come on the radio. You sit in for the next three and a half minutes, my dad is sat in the seat next to me blaring his lungs out to John. I want to thank him for bringing my dad back to me every now and then for three minutes at a time. That was it, there was the why, there was the call, he was too embarrassed to tell me that story at the beginning, so he hid behind the always great bring in all the bravado.   Steve: But you'd have never got to it if you hadn't have used you in a Sherlock and gone. Why what why is also the most aggressive, combative word out there? For some reason it pisses people off. I get people text me and DM me and Facebook message me and they go Sim's. I see you in L.A. I'm going to be in L.A. next week. We should get together for a beer. I want to buy you a steak and all I will respond with is why. And the amount of people get, well, I heard you acculturate the dick, you know, and they will get offensive and right. And then I'll get other people going. Good question. I wanted to discuss it. I want to talk about this. I wanted to bring this. I wanted to say thanks. And that is my wife. The older you get, the more you need the why. This guy was a perfect example without a job of what he's true. Why? What is true call was now with that. I was able to go to Elton John telling the story and got them to meet, and it was a very Tavey wonderful moment, this very powerful moment. But that was that was a perfect example of how the wide drives to the core. Without the coal, you haven't got a connection. It's all superficial.   Joe: Yeah, that's a great story. Gosh, the next one never be the first call.   Steve: Yeah, I'm really crappy introducing myself, and I also think it's pointless, so what I'll do is if I need to get in touch with you and I come in and I say, hey, you know, hey, how are you? My name's my name's Steve Sims. You know, we got a chat. I know the Pope and Elon Musk. Richard Branson. I'm a big deal. Can I be on your podcast? You're going to be like, this guy's a dick, you know, I want nothing to do with this guy, you're going to go straight past any of the information I've given you and just come to the assumption of a self promoting full of himself. Egotistical prick. Now, let's change it, let's say like next week, you're talking with one of your buddies and your buddy says, oh, have you heard about this guy called Steve Sims? He's worked with John Elon Musk. And the guy is a big deal. He says word for word what I said. But all of a sudden, you're now interested, you're kind of like, oh, you know, can you make an intro? And then when you do get to speak with me, I've already got all this credibility. So I haven't got to so much so I can be humble and sit and go, yeah, what do you want? Oh, I've got to focus. Well, let me see if I can do all of that shit, because I've already got the credibility. So I noticed years ago there is much more powerful and it's much more brief of a conversation if you're riding on someone else's credibility and connection and introduction.   Steve: So if I want to meet someone, I'll look at whoever else is in that circle, who do they respect and get them to make the introduction and then they will contact me. Oh, yeah. You know, Jimmy, tell me to call. You got you've done some weird things, though. Yeah, I have. But I want to do my next weird thing with you. I tell you what, so you can have that kind of conversation. If I'm at a party and someone stood next to me and they say, hey, what are you doing? Based on that body language, based on how they're asking the question will be based on how I respond. So I've said to people before, I own the valet company in this park and all the cars here, oh, I to work for the security. I'm undercover. I own a petrol station just down the road. I'll come up with all of those kind of things to find out. So did I want to stay there and still have a conversation? If they do, great. You know, but then is it something that I think I want to do business? I want to say actually, do you know the best thing? You know what? You over there. I'll get you a drink, you go nostalgia what I did. And then I'll get a job and of course, I want to be like, oh my God. And then of course, they'll be back down. Oh, yeah. And you'll have that kind of thing that I'm always very careful to be very calculated on how I get introduced and who introduces me.   Joe: Yeah, it's that theory of the circle of influence type thing, right, that for four, then three, then two, then one. And so the more you can have those people talk about you. By the time you reach the person in the middle that you eventually wanted to be, maybe introduced to or do business with you, you've been built up so big you don't have to say a word.   Steve: You have to say nothing. I've had people literally phone me going, Oh, Billy, Billy told me to give you a call and I'll be honest. How can I help you? And I haven't had to sell myself. I haven't had to talk about. I've had to do none of that. So if you become the solution to someone else's problem, you ain't got to worry about any of the shine.   Joe: Yeah, all right, so this is the last one of those three bullet points that I when I they caught my eye, I wanted to make sure I asked and you already alluded to this one, but you said, don't be easy to understand. Be impossible to misunderstand.   Steve: There's a confused client will never give you his checkbook, and so I noticed years ago that anyone that's ever heard the term, the big C. knows it stands for cancer. OK, the big C in business is confusion. So you say I alluded to earlier, you alluded it to even earlier than that.   Joe: Ok.   Steve: When you actually remove all the confusion with what it is you do and who you are. You make it very easy for the other person to now make an educated decision on whether or not you're the person they want to do business with, hang out with whatever. OK, so stop trying to confuse your clients. Here's the classic mistake. Hey, I've got a new business. Let me get a website. Let me get a guy to buy all the copy for the website with words that I could not even spell. I could not even say. But hey, they make me look smart and the person who reads it goes OK with this person's obviously ex a dictionary or, you know, was was was an English major in Oxford. And then they get you on the phone. You're like, Hello, Bob, how can I help you? And they go, well, hang on. I mean, there's a disconnect. And that's the problem. You want to make sure that you have full transparency, who you are, what do you stand for? What do you do? What is the solution that you provide to whose problem? So if you've got all of that transparency, you are impossible to misunderstand. But people try to be something they lean against cos they don't own. They take photographs on jets that have not left the runway. They talk a good talk of bullshit and bollocks and a distortion. And people look at you and here's the thing. You're never, never going to get someone phone you up. Hey, Steve, I was looking at your website. I'm really confused what it is you do. What is it you do? You're never going to get that.   Steve: People are going to they've got a problem. They need a solution. That's what being an entrepreneur is an entrepreneur. It's for people to outsource their problems to. And you then send them an invoice to do so. It's complicated, but that's the world of an entrepreneur. So if you make it very confusing as to who you are, what problems you solve, then you're not in business. And so that's why I'm a great believer that you've really got to focus on the clouting. I'll give you a classic one. People, if you if you open up your social pages, link to Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, whatever, and you look on there, you look on LinkedIn and you've got to you're going to sue on and you're all looking smart and debonair. And then you go over to Facebook and it's Girls Gone Wild, just sitting there with a mix on the edge of the beach. And, you know, your confusion people. And you never want to confuse people. And there's a lot of people out there I like to call them idiots. They look at LinkedIn and they go, well, you have to do that LinkedIn because it's more professional than Facebook. Facebook is the largest business advertising platform in the planet. So why is linked in the business, want to not know Facebook, that's the first thing. Secondly, because you are a genius and you think you have to be buttoned up on LinkedIn, but you can be in real bad Bahama shorts on Facebook. Why is it that Apple is not why is it that Nike is not, why is it the Samsung Chevrolet? Any brand out there is the exact same on thing as they are on Facebook as they are on Snapchat, as they are on Twitter? Why? Because you are who you are, why start confusing your clients by being two different people if you love wearing suits? I wear suits on all platforms.   Steve: If you love when Bahama shorts web Howard Schultz on a new platform, but don't be two different people. It breeds confusion and understand the social is nothing more than a platform of consumption. If I don't want to get too deep into it. But if you got 10 people together and you said, hey, what's the news tonight? And then we're going to talk about nine o'clock tomorrow. And nine o'clock tomorrow, you would still be talking about coronaviruses, potential riots. New laws coming in, you know, stimulus packages, the news would be exactly the same. But then if you ask those 10 people what news station did you look at that would go well, KTLA, ABC, CNN, BBC, these are all points of consumption for the same news as for social platforms or whatever you post on Facebook, post on LinkedIn, whatever is posted on LinkedIn, post on Twitter. This is nothing more than points of consumption. I know people that go, I don't want to watch Facebook, OK, whatever I'm posting on Facebook, I'm going to post on Twitter, so I'm still going to get you so. Don't change to be anybody, they're not the big brands don't do it, so why did your smart arse tell you that it's a good idea to do it makes   Joe: Right,   Steve: Them say.   Joe: And for everybody that's listening to this or eventually watching the YouTube video, the prime example is just go to your website, go to go to Steve's website, and you'll see that exactly the person you're seeing hearing here is exactly who's on that website. The tone of the copy that's on the website is you throughout the entire Web site.   Steve: And that's that's there's a lot of people that go and get copyright is OK. They miss the point and again, I don't want to get too deep into this, but they miss the point of what social and websites are for. That's a generally and ignite a conversation. So I thought I'd come to you and I start speaking Japanese to you, and you don't speak Japanese. End of conversation, if I get somebody to put together a copy onto my website that makes me sound articulate and overly smart and overly iino on everything, you may go or don't like the sound of this guy or worse, you might go. I like the sound of this guy. And then you reach out to me and you suddenly find that I am nothing like that person. So what you should do is download a copy, and I love copy, copyright is a great we going to copyright is not the time. I think everyone should look at copyrights in the future. But when you're doing basic critical copy for, like, your website. Puke, count your thoughts and then get somebody to tweak your thoughts, don't impose it, just correct the grammar, correct terminology, maybe reframing a bit, but that's what I did. I call it verbal puke. I will literally I'm one of the ways that I do it is I've got this thing like a smart phone, like everyone in the planet has one foot away from them. I record, I push the cord and I go, hey, welcome to the world of Steve Sims. I'm here to tell you about this. And I will talk it through and then I will send it over to one of my assistants to get it translated and then to adjust it for grammar and correction and flow that you should always leave your website, your most important initial point of conversation with words that came from your head, not somebody else.   Joe: Yeah, and your website is exactly the perfect example of that, so everyone has to go look at your website because I think it's refreshing. Again, everything about you is refreshing. So I have less than 15 minutes with you. So I want to just talk about a few things on your Web site so that the audience understands. So Sims distillery is the first thing, which is your online community, right?   Steve: It's my community, I wanted to build a community for people that wanted to ask me questions, ask a private community questions, we do live Facebook Amma's where people come in to answer that question. So if you're a member of seems to still be and you go, hey, I'm having a problem with problem of finding a good copywriter or what's been a tick tock of Instagram, or should I be doing more videos or should I be doing more static postings? I will literally bring one of my friends in and will do a forty five minute live AMA where you and the other seems to still be members can physically ask these people questions and get results out of your answers.   Joe: Awesome. OK, we don't have to go into this, but I know that you're a keynote speaker. I've seen different things for you, but I just want the audience to know everything about you. You also offer private coaching, OK? And then you also offer this private 30 minute phone call that you'll do with people. Right? OK, and then you have the same speakeasy, which is the thing that I think is really interesting, which to me it's like a two day roundtable mastermind. Is that a good description of it?   Steve: Now, how much do you know about it?   Joe: Well, I just I you know, from when I was going to maybe a 10 to one here in Scottsdale, that happened not too long ago, sort of looking at it, it was me. It felt like a master mastermind, like you were going to go around and everyone   Steve: But   Joe: Was   Steve: What   Joe: Going to   Steve: Information   Joe: Sort of.   Steve: Did you actually know about Scotsdale? And   Joe: Oh,   Steve: I'm putting you on the spot here, so   Joe: God,   Steve: Get   Joe: I.   Steve: All of the information and you knew for a fact about Scotsdale.   Joe: I think the only time when I looked at it, I just potentially knew the dates and the cost and that it was going to be capped, that I don't know if it was at the time that one might have been capped at like twenty five people or something like that. I don't think it was 40, but I don't remember.   Steve: So the point is that we actually we run these speakeasies as a reverse mastermind, so what we do is we tell you the city, as we did Scotsdale, we didn't tell you where it was going to be. We tell you it's two thousand dollars and we give you the dates.   Joe: Right. OK,   Steve: Then   Joe: Good.   Steve: We'll   Joe: So   Steve: Give   Joe: I passed because   Steve: You   Joe: That's   Steve: Pass.   Joe: All I knew. OK.   Steve: Yeah. And but we don't tell you who's going to turn out. We don't tell you what you're going to learn. We don't tell you any of those things. And the reason is because everyone signs up, we reach out to them and we would go, hey, thanks for joining up. Thanks for with the speakeasy. What's your problem? And we want to know what our problem is and if they come back and they go, well, I'm having a problem gaining credibility or I want to get more viewers or I want to, can I go into coach? You know, I want to do more speaking gigs. I want to when we can find out what our problem is, then I know who to bring in to actually teach and train Joe in that two day event to physically answer the problems they have. So I work in reverse. There's no point in me saying, hey, come to my event. I've got this person, this person, this person, because you may go, well, I like those too, but I have no idea who those three. I want to know your problem and then I'm going to bring people in. And by not telling anybody what who's going to be there, even the attendees. The whole speakeasy mentality is that you don't know what's going on, you just know that the people in there both teach in training and attend these. I've got to be creative disruptors of rock stars because it takes that mentality to come along to one of my events and we cap them all at 40. We capture one in Scottsdale at 40, although we only had thirty six turn up because there was some flight issues, because I think we had that big Texas storm coming through at the time. So sadly we lost about four people, but we capable of 40 next ones in San Diego, the 19th and the 20th of July. And that's all, you know. You know, that's that is literally a.   Joe: All right, cool, the deep dive is when you would come to somebody's organization and do a full day of onsite consulted,   Steve: Yeah,   Joe: Correct?   Steve: That's that's that's the that's the call where we actually go in and find out what's going on, it's very shaky, you know, it's very disruptive. It gets a lot of people uncomfortable because we really go in there and try and tear down, you know, why people are doing things, what they're looking for as an outcome and usually to see where the disconnect is on those.   Joe: Great, and then you also have your own podcast, which is the art of making things happen. And do you is most of the people, from what I can see in the sort of entrepreneurial space.   Steve: Yes, but not somehow you think you see, I've had priests, I've had gang members, I've had lifers, I've had prostitutes, I've had Fortune 500, I've had rocket scientists. I have many, many different range of people on there. But as I said at the beginning of the show, at one point or time, they were pissed off and they were aggravated and that's what caused them to then go into a different world. So, you know, we're all entrepreneurial, but I'm not running Fortune 500 companies or CEOs. They come from very, very wide and almost ran on. Something will happen to me. I saw that Megan Merkl interview recently a while ago, and I did a deconstructs on the power of branding that could have been done if we'd have had and still in the royal family and how brand wise it was a for and again with her leave in the royal family. So I'll often just go in there and spout about things that I'm up to that have come to my mind, of course, to piss me off. And I need to vent.   Joe: And then on top of everything else is if you didn't have enough to do you have Sim's media, which to me looks like you're basically helping anybody, any entrepreneur or any person with their branding, the PR, their marketing podcast book launches product launches. Right. So you because you've done all of this stuff, you're like, hey, I can help. So you have Sim's   Steve: Yeah,   Joe: Media as well.   Steve: I've done it for everyone from Piaget to Ferrari to major events to major influences, and I find the way people work media quite often is wrong. They have a Field of Dreams moment. Hey, I'm going to pay for an article in Forbes. They get the article in Forbes and then they sit there by the phone thinking, OK, Reinier, bugger. And it doesn't work like that. So I'm a great believe. Again, media is one thing, but what you do with it is everything. So the way I work kind of works. So now what we did was about three years ago, we started allowing clients to actually operate under the way that we worked. And then it was about six months ago that we physically launched Tim's media and able to get you to where you wanted to be given the message you want to be given.   Joe: Awesome. I love it. OK, Henry, your son, does he work with. Is he part of your team?   Steve: Yes, and he's branching out to a new thing, and I laugh because, again, your kids grow up going, Oh, Dad, you don't know day, you don't know I want to follow you. Yeah. And they love you. And then they go to school where for eight hours the school teaches them. There's only one answer. And if you don't get this answer and you don't take the white box, you failed. And then they come home to an entrepreneur who doesn't even know where the box is. And there's 20 different answers and each one of them is making them half a million dollars, you know, so it's a real disconnect. And he had trouble with that. And he was studying engineering, which was a very analytical profession. And then he would come on to his dad, who Cyprien old fashioned talking to someone in Korea and suddenly getting wired one point to be able to do something. He's like, how can this be? You know? So eventually he actually said he wanted to just flow around to a couple of the events that I was speaking at. And then he suddenly sort to see the world of entrepreneurial being a lot more challenging to him. And now he's actually gone out. And it's it's beautiful to see how he's come from the analytical world. And he's now taking what he knows about that. And he's very driven, focused on results. And he works in Sim's media and he's launching his own group. So I'm very proud of it.   Joe: Ok, so he's actually doing some of his own things. He's not just   Steve: He is, he   Joe: Got   Steve: Is   Joe: It, OK,   Steve: You   Joe: Call.   Steve: Want to you want to you want to basically build people up to be good enough that they can leave but treat them so well they don't want to. So it's good to see him out on his own. I'm   Joe: Perfect.   Steve: Happy with that.   Joe: Awesome. OK, so we're out of time. One quick question. If you only had one motorcycle, which brand would you choose?   Steve: Oh, that's the nastiest question   Joe: I   Steve: In.   Joe: Know, I knew I knew it was going to   Steve: Oh.   Joe: Because I see all your bikes lined up, I see because I see your Harley Norton, I'm like, Oh man, what's your what's his favorite?   Steve: Oh, this is kind of weird because if anything, it's probably the least exclusive exclusive of my bikes, but I bought a Harley Street glide about a year ago and it's the only comfortable to up bike. I've got Zoom. My others are single seat is all that will Elbaum comfortable. So this is the only one that my wife can come on. So I would probably say that one because it's the only one that me and her can actually get out and do. Our tacker runs up to Santa Barbara or.   Joe: Perfect. OK.   Steve: Tough question, tough   Joe: Hey,   Steve: Olival question.   Joe: I will I would have had another eight of those like I already you've already explained your favorite drink. It sounds like it's an old fashioned but   Steve: Yeah, it is.   Joe: But I would have a ton of I wish I had more time with you. I so enjoy this. I'm going to put all your links in the show notes so that anyone listening to the podcast will see them in the show notes and on YouTube. And I will make sure they know where to find you. This has been a complete honor for me. I again, to meet you even virtually, and to have a real person who's doing real things at a real honest level and not leaning against a Lamborghini that you don't own are sitting in a shell of a fuselage of a plane that doesn't even fly for photos. It just means a lot to me. There's something about it. And I hope to meet you in person sooner than later. I hope to attend one of your events, and I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for being here.   Steve: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Transcript Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit broadcasting from awesome, Southern... Are we southern or central area? Steve: Central? Jill: Excuse me. Awesome, Central Arizona. [inaudible 00:00:16] I have got to figure that out. Steve: Our elevation's 1500 here. In California, we were at elevation number... Like one foot. Jill: There we go. Steve: You know how you obsess on- Jill: I do obsess on that. Steve: On the weather and stuff? Jill: And GPS and all that. Steve: I have elevation issues. I put elevation in every single one of our land postings. Jill: [inaudible 00:00:38] you remember, you used to have that thing... And it was dialed into satellite stuff? Steve: Yeah, the weather... Jill: Yeah. And it would tell you all kinds of cool... The barometric pressure and things like that. I'm going to get one of those again for the new house. Steve: I think that you can get... I like the one that goes on the roof, where you don't need the internet. Jill: This one didn't need the internet too. Steve: So you install a little thing that goes... You ever see those little... Jill: A little gyro thing? Steve: Yeah. Jill: Oh, well you can do that if you want. I don't need that. Steve: [inaudible 00:01:09] Jill's out, if you have to install anything now. Jill: Exactly. Steve: Do you ever notice how girl products are just like open it and plug it in? And it's clean and pretty and simple and you don't really get any real information or the meat of anything? But- Jill: Why is this a bad thing? Steve: They're happy. Jill: It should work. I should open up and plug it in. Steve: I think I just described Apple computer. Jill: It's like a bathroom scale and should be able to just do it quickly. Not have to program the whole thing. Steve: Before Jill starts to talk about women's weight. Today, Jill and I talk about introducing Land Academy accountability and women's groups. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And if you're already a member, please join us on Discord. Jill: Okay. James wrote, "Hello. When filling in the red, yellow, and green tests in the equity planner, which filters are used for land and farm to get land postings and Redfin [inaudible 00:02:09] data?" Assume on Redfin for [inaudible 00:02:13] data, you only select land for the last three months. And for land and farm, no houses and undeveloped land. However, the numbers from these filters are very different than the numbers in the example Jack uses for the equity planner. And I want to make sure I'm doing this right. Steve: You're doing it right. James, I can tell you haven't filled this out before and by this question, you are going to be wildly successful at this. Whenever I get questions about equity planner, data scrubbing. Like yesterday, the school district thing yesterday was nothing short of amazing. I didn't make enough of a big deal about how positive that is like Jill did. So I'm doing it now. The answer is this. When you have a lot of data available, i.e. You have an urban county or a zip code that you're sending it to, then use it all in from one source, probably Redfin. You're not going to get the data that you need in realtor, all of it. And you're not going to get all of the data that you need in Zillow. You are going to get it in Redfin. The bad news is that Redfin's coverage doesn't... Rural counties are not a priority for them. So you're doing it right. I can tell. In three months is great, that's actually what I use. It's interesting that you say three months, because that just made sense to you and that makes sense to me. Jill likes 30 days, but there's not enough data. You can do it back three years if you want on Redfin, that's, that's not apples to apples. Because real estate market was not the same thre...

Introducing Land Academy Accountability and Women's Groups (LA 1425) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit broadcasting from awesome, Southern... Are we southern or central area? Steve: Central? Jill: Excuse me. Awesome, Central Arizona. [inaudible 00:00:16] I have got to figure that out. Steve: Our elevation's 1500 here. In California, we were at elevation number... Like one foot. Jill: There we go. Steve: You know how you obsess on- Jill: I do obsess on that. Steve: On the weather and stuff? Jill: And GPS and all that. Steve: I have elevation issues. I put elevation in every single one of our land postings. Jill: [inaudible 00:00:38] you remember, you used to have that thing... And it was dialed into satellite stuff? Steve: Yeah, the weather... Jill: Yeah. And it would tell you all kinds of cool... The barometric pressure and things like that. I'm going to get one of those again for the new house. Steve: I think that you can get... I like the one that goes on the roof, where you don't need the internet. Jill: This one didn't need the internet too. Steve: So you install a little thing that goes... You ever see those little... Jill: A little gyro thing? Steve: Yeah. Jill: Oh, well you can do that if you want. I don't need that. Steve: [inaudible 00:01:09] Jill's out, if you have to install anything now. Jill: Exactly. Steve: Do you ever notice how girl products are just like open it and plug it in? And it's clean and pretty and simple and you don't really get any real information or the meat of anything? But- Jill: Why is this a bad thing? Steve: They're happy. Jill: It should work. I should open up and plug it in. Steve: I think I just described Apple computer. Jill: It's like a bathroom scale and should be able to just do it quickly. Not have to program the whole thing. Steve: Before Jill starts to talk about women's weight. Today, Jill and I talk about introducing Land Academy accountability and women's groups. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And if you're already a member, please join us on Discord. Jill: Okay. James wrote, "Hello. When filling in the red, yellow, and green tests in the equity planner, which filters are used for land and farm to get land postings and Redfin [inaudible 00:02:09] data?" Assume on Redfin for [inaudible 00:02:13] data, you only select land for the last three months. And for land and farm, no houses and undeveloped land. However, the numbers from these filters are very different than the numbers in the example Jack uses for the equity planner. And I want to make sure I'm doing this right. Steve: You're doing it right. James, I can tell you haven't filled this out before and by this question, you are going to be wildly successful at this. Whenever I get questions about equity planner, data scrubbing. Like yesterday, the school district thing yesterday was nothing short of amazing. I didn't make enough of a big deal about how positive that is like Jill did. So I'm doing it now. The answer is this. When you have a lot of data available, i.e. You have an urban county or a zip code that you're sending it to, then use it all in from one source, probably Redfin. You're not going to get the data that you need in realtor, all of it. And you're not going to get all of the data that you need in Zillow. You are going to get it in Redfin. The bad news is that Redfin's coverage doesn't... Rural counties are not a priority for them. So you're doing it right. I can tell. In three months is great, that's actually what I use. It's interesting that you say three months, because that just made sense to you and that makes sense to me. Jill likes 30 days, but there's not enough data. You can do it back three years if you want on Redfin, that's,

I speak with Steve Walsh, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University about the quality of teacher talk and the effect this has on student learning. Steve talks with us about the questions that teachers ask as well as the rules and roles which influence how we interact with our students.Understanding Classroom Discourse (with Steve Walsh)Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." This week, we are looking at interactions that happen in the classroom. We're talking about classroom discourse.To help us do that, we have Steve Walsh, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University. Steve's written extensively several books and many, many articles about classroom discourse, how it affects student learning, and how teachers can use classroom discourse as a starting point for their professional development. I hope you enjoy today's episode.Ross: Hi, Steve. Thanks very much for joining us. To being with, Steve, what is classroom discourse?Professor Steve Walsh: Classroom discourse basically covers all the interactions which take place in any classroom. It's used interchangeably quite frequently in the literature. You'll see people talk about interaction. You'll see them talk about classroom discourse.Classroom discourse is the actual recording, the observation, the transcript. All of that constitutes classroom discourse. What we're really interested in ‑‑ certainly in my work, anyway ‑ are the interactions between teacher and students.The reason we're interested in it is because it shows us what's actually happening in a classroom. It gives us a clue as to whether anything is being taught or learned. You can't study learning by looking inside people's heads, but you can make a lot of influences, I suppose, by looking at what people do and what people say.That's the essence of classroom discourse and also, one of the reasons they're studying it.Ross: In terms of those interactions then, what do we know about what often happens? How do teachers typically interact with their students, and what are some of the common purposes that teacher talk for?Steve Walsh: We're interested in what you might call the teaching practices, which take place in the classroom, and all of these practices such as asking a question or correcting an error. These practices are encompassed in language. You can't do these things without using language.For example, in some of my work which I'll talk about later, we've identified a number of these practices, which are frequently occurring, which are found in any classroom anywhere in the world, which merit study. Let's take the most frequently occurring ones.This would be elicitation. Elicitation is about trying to get your students to say something by asking a question, for example, which is the most commonly used elicitation strategy.The second one would be repair, which would be the ways in which we correct errors. Something that teachers do all the time is error correction. There are huge debates, of course, around this as to whether we should correct every error or not.The third one, which is perhaps the most important one in many ways, is feedback. The feedback that we give to our students and that students give to us is hugely important because it tells us what's going on.Right now, for example in the current situation with COVID, we're all working online. We're teaching online, and we're not getting the feedback that we do depend on from our students.For example, if we don't get visual clues, if we don't get head nods, smiles, raised eyebrows, and these multi‑modal features, we don't know really whether they're actually understanding us or learning anything. Similarly, the feedback that we give to our students, the way is in which we acknowledge a contribution, for example.Typically, teachers say things like, "Yes. Good. Thank you. Excellent. Right." That kind of thing. These discourse markers. These simple single words. Although they're used to encourage and motivate, they can actually close the interaction down and signal the end of a turn.Although they are well‑meant in the work I'm doing, I'm suggesting that we need to push learners a little bit and say things like, "Oh. That's really interesting. Can you tell us a bit more about that?" We get what I'm calling pushed output using Merrill Swain's word ‑‑ output from our students.Finally, all the stuff that we do which is classed as management of learning, giving instructions, organizing, setting up pair work, bringing a task to a conclusion, all of these things are what we would call teaching practices, but they are absolutely interlinked with the language that we use.What's really important here is to understand that the language we use and the pedagogy goal that we're trying to achieve, the pedagogy goal of the moment, they have to work together. If my pedagogy goal is to promote fluency and I'm simply asking Yes/No questions, there's a mismatch between my language and my pedagogy goal.If my pedagogy goal is to give a grammatical explanation about a point of grammar, then it's absolutely fine to talk at length and have, what you might call, a high level of teacher talk. We're interested in the quality of teacher talk rather than the quantity. We're interested in the extent to which our language and our interaction promote learning.Ross: Maybe, we can drill down a bit deeper into some of those concepts then, Steve. Let's go back at questions for a second. Before, we've spoken on the podcast about how useful it is for teachers to ask questions to students that they don't know the answers to.Do you want to tell us a bit more about those kind of questions, and also display questions where teachers ask students questions that they already know the answers to? Are those sometimes useful or sometimes appropriate, or does it all really just depend?Steve Walsh: It depends. With regard to questions, we ask a lot of questions. There have been various studies on this to calculate the percentage time that teachers devote to asking questions. It's huge. It's enormous. One question for ourselves is perhaps, "Do we always need to ask a question? Are there other ways of eliciting a response?"When I first started teaching, we used to use flash cards to elicit responses. There are ways of doing this, but let's stay with questions for a minute. I would divide questions into two types ‑‑ display questions and referential questions.Display questions are questions that we use to get our students to display what they know. There are prompt. Display questions are questions that we, as teachers, know the answer to. They're not the kind of question you would ask your family or friends, because your family or friends would think you're crazy if you kept asking them question that you knew the answer to.In classrooms, it's OK to ask display questions because they prompt and they elicit. They try to encourage some kind of response. The problem is that we ask too many. In my work, we ask a lot of display questions where in fact, sometimes, we should and could be asking the other type of question, which are referential questions.Referential questions are simply genuine questions that we don't know the answer to. Questions, such as "What did you do over the weekend? How did you spend Saturday? Have you ever been to Paris?" These types of questions, which are genuine and real, are an essential part of human communication.What I'm suggesting is that we need to rebalance questioning, and perhaps try to incorporate more genuine questions of our students and fewer display questions. You'll hear people talk about these as open and closed as well.Some people, including my colleague at Newcastle, Paul Seedhouse, would suggest that every question in a classroom is some kind of display question because it's there for a purpose. It's designed to get a response from our students rather than the normal purpose of questions, which is to access information and find out about things.Some people would argue you can't actually ask a genuine question. I think you can and we should because it shows an interest in our students. It shows that we're listening to what they're saying, and we're interested. We're genuinely interested.Ross: You mentioned how your [laughs] friends and family would look at you very strangely if you ask them a display question. "What color is this pen? How many shoes are there?" That kind of thing. Obviously, that's true, but that suggests that there's a difference between how teachers interact with students inside the classroom, and how they interact with other people outside of the classroom.Can you tell us a bit more about that? Is it ever really possible for classroom interactions and classroom communication to be similar or to mirror what's going on in the real world?Steve Walsh: The simple answer is it can't. Interactions in the classroom are bound by rules. We're talking here to use a little bit of technical language. We're talking about an institutional discourse setting.An institutional discourse means any situation within an institution, which has got its own rules. For example, a visit to the doctor. You go into the doctor, it would be unusual for you to say to the doctor, "How are you today?" but it's absolutely fine for the doctor to say to you, "How are you?" and "What can I do for you?"These rules that apply restrict the interaction that we can have in the classroom. Some people say it's not genuine. The other way of looking at it is to say that the classroom is as much a social setting as any other. It's a place where people come. They have a goal.All institutional discourse is goal‑oriented. We have a purpose for being there. We have roles. In the roles that we have in the classroom, the roles are asymmetrical. They're not equal. The teacher is the authority figure, and they have control of the discourse, for example.These roles and rules, if you like, in the classroom, restrict the discourse that we're going to get. They limit us to certain patterns, but that's quite interesting because then we can say, "Well, what is an appropriate interaction in the classroom, and what is a less appropriate type of interaction?"Although on the one hand, classroom interaction/classroom discourse is not authentic and can never be genuine in the same way that an interaction with a friend can be. On the other hand, it's a social setting, which has certain norms and practices which can be studied. That's what makes it useful in terms of understanding teaching and learning better.Ross: You mentioned there the idea of rules and roles. Let's talk about the roles a little bit more. How set in stone are those teacher roles, Steve?They obviously must change a little bit depending on the culture, maybe the part of the world that you're teaching in. I wonder if they're also influenced by other things, like the expectations of students or even just influenced by what it is that the teachers are teaching.Steve Walsh: That's a good question. This is really very much about the socialization of learning that we're all socialized into behaving in certain ways in classrooms.Typically, we expect to answer questions rather than ask questions. We expect to sit quietly for much of the time. We expect to put our hands up when we want to say something or answer a question. These are the rules, if you like, the social rules of the classroom. Of course, these vary from one context to another.If you go to some parts of the world ‑‑ the Middle East, the Far East, possibly South America, places like that ‑ then the role of the teacher is very much seen as a traditional role in some people's eyes. In other words, they are there to impart knowledge.In other parts of the world, the role of the teacher might be seen in quite a different way as somebody who's there as a facilitator, as a catalyst, somebody who can help people learn but in a more possibly informal way. I don't think these two contexts that I've just described are mutually exclusive.In the work that I do, I talk about micro‑context, which vary as a lesson progresses. The teachers' role and the interactions that unfold have to vary according to what's going on in the classroom, according to the agenda, the teaching goals of the moment.At one point in the lesson, you might be dominating the interaction for 10 or 15 minutes while you've given explanation or give some instructions. At another moment in the lesson, you might be taking more of a backseat, letting the students get on with something, and interact together.But what's important for good teaching is to learn how to vary the role that you adopt and match the role according to what you're trying to achieve with the students at that point in time. Some people are good at this. I'm afraid some are not.Some people feel that they have to remain as the authority figure, what the literature would refer to as the sage on the stage, the one who has all the knowledge. Especially in language classrooms, it's probably a mistake to completely follow that rule.The other thing, of course, is that teachers are under pressure from outside the classroom. This perhaps influences their role very strongly as well. They're under pressure from parents, from head teachers, perhaps, the curriculum, assessment, and examinations. All these external, invisible or hidden factors have an important effect on how we behave in classrooms and the role that we adopt.Ross: One more time, everyone, that was Professor Steve Walsh. If you'd like to find out more from Steve, check out his books and articles. There's a list on Steve's University of Newcastle page, which I'll put a link to.If you'd like to find out more from us, please go to our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

Hello, how are you? Olá, como vai você? - Very well, thanks. Muito bem obrigado. - And you? e você? - Oh, I’m alright.Oh, eu estou bem. - What’s the matter?Qual o problema? - It’s Monday.The first day of the week. É segunda feira. O primeiro dia da semana. - I’m never well on Monday. Eu nunca estou bem na segunda feira. - Where’s the High Street please?Onde é a High Street por favor? - This is the High Street.Esta é a High Street. - Of course; Thanks very much. É claro. Muito obrigado. - Is that your car? Aquele é o seu carro? - My boss is still abroad. O meu chefe ainda está fora. - It’s his car. Este é o carro dele. - What’s that? O que é aquilo? - That’s the cassette player. Aquilo é o toca fitas. - And this is the cigarette lighter. E este é um acendedor de cigarros.- Very nice. - Muito bonito. - Is your boss often abroad? O seu chefe está frequentemente fora? - Not often enough. Não o suficiente. - Is his brother in yet? - O irmão dele já está aqui? - No, not yet. Não, não ainda. - I’m well. Eu estou bem. - We’re tired. Nós estamos cansados. - It’s Monday again. É segunda feira outra vez. - Sugar? Açúcar? - No thank you. Não obrigado. - This is enough. Isto é suficiente. - How is your sister? Como vai sua irmã? - Not very well. Não muito bem. ***** Introductions Apresentações - Steve, this is Bronwen Jones. Steve, este é Bronwen Jones. - Good evening, Bronwen. Boa noite, Bronwen.- Are you Welsh, by any chance? Você é gaulês, por acaso? - Yes, I am. Sim, eu sou. - So am I. I'm from Cardiff. Eu também. Eu sou de Cardiff (repete) Good morning, Bronwen. Bom dia, Browen. - I'm Welsh. Eu sou Gaules. (do País de Gales) - So am I. Eu também. - This is our school. Esta é nossa escola. - Is she Scottish? Ela é escocesa? - Yes, she is. Sim, ela é. - Steve's from Cardiff. Steve é de Cardiff. *******There’s a good programme on the television. Há um bom programa na televisão. - There are always good programmes on Saturday. Há sempre bons programas aos sábados. - There are always friends in the house. Há sempre amigos em casa. - Is Michael in his room? “Está” o Michael em seu quarto? - Probably, the door of his room is open. Provavelmente.A porta de seu quarto está aberta - Here is Peter. Aqui está Peter. - And his friend Anne. E sua amiga Anne. - This is her brother Paul. Este é seu irmão Paul. - Her brother is very clever. O irmão dela é muito esperto. - He’s an architect. Ele é (um) arquiteto. - Yes, but his clothes are terrible! Sim, mas suas roupas são terríveis. Yes, his taylor probably isn’t rich! Sim, seu alfaiate provavelmente não está rico. - .Where are Jim and Steve?Onde estão Jim e Steve? - They aren’t here yet. Eles ainda não estão aqui. - Well, there’s still time. Bem, ainda há tempo. - They’re very rude. Eles são muito mal educados. - They’re always late. Eles estão sempre atrasados. - Clever. Esperto. - Probably. Provavelmente. - Open. Aberto. ***** Time and numbers. Hora e números. - One o'clock. Uma hora. Five past one. Uma e cinco. - Quarter past one. Uma e quinze. - Half past one. Uma e meia. - Twenty past one. Uma e vinte. - Quarter to two. Quinze para as duas. Ten to two. Dez para as duas. - What time is it? Que horas são? -What time do you want breakfast? (bréquifas) Que horas você quer o café da manhã?I have a reservation for twelve o'clock. Eu tenho uma reserva para o meio dia. - Eleven. Onze. - Twelve. Doze. - Thirteen. Treze. - Fourteen. Catorze. - Fifteen. Quinze. - Sixteen. Dezesseis. - Seventeen. Dezessete. - Eighteen. Dezoito. - Nineteen. Dezenove. - Twenty. Vinte. - Thirty. Trinta. - Forty. Quarenta. - Fifty. Cinquenta. - Sixty. Sessenta. - Seventy. Setenta. - Eighty. Oitenta. - Ninety. Noventa. - One hundred. Cem. - Three hundred. Trezentos. - One thousand. Mil. - Ten thousand. Dez mil. - Two hundred thousand. Duzentos mil. - One million. Um milhão.

Alex Charfen is one of the very select few coaches I continually plug into...    I have wanted to get this individual on here for quite some time, and Alex Charfen has been one of the reasons why my stuff is blowing up so much.    I have learned that I need to listen to less people, and I'm very, very picky on those that I choose to dive deeply with…   So for marketing and sales, I've really dove deep with Russell, (obviously) and you all know that.    For systems and business systems, I've dove very deeply with Alex Charfen... he's the other coach that I pay a lot to and listen to as well.    ...and I have other various ones that are very carefully selected... and I don't listen to ANYBODY else!    I'm extremely careful about the content that I consume - so that I can spend most of my time just moving, rather than gathering MORE information…   ... which I don't think many of us need more of.    So anyway, I'm excited for you guys to understand more of why Alex Charfen, for me, has been so key…   So I asked him to come on the show and to teach a little bit more about the systems that all businesses need, regardless of whatever you're in.    A lot of these are the systems that a brand new entrepreneur needs when they finally get that revenue coming in.    ...and then there are systems that he creates for those who have an existing business and are ready to scale.    Alex answers the questions…     How do you know if you should be scaling or not?        What are the five reasons why most companies fail to scale?     If you guys like this interview, please reach out to him, (he did not need to do this) and say “Thank You!”    At the very end, we have a special little thing for you, and so we're excited!    Boom, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, welcome back to Sales Funnel Radio - we're really excited to have you guys here.    I'm with one of my good friends, who's become an amazing friend and definitely a mentor... I would call and consider him a brother as well.    I want to introduce everybody to Alex Charfen.   Before I really bring Alex on, I just want you all to understand, Alex Charfen was one of the guys that helped me understand why I am who I am... and that, it’s okay… and helped me lean into that.    I talk to you a lot about leaning into your obstacles, leaning into those things that have been crappy in your life…    … because they end up becoming your superpower.    You all know my story of going to the first Funnel Hacking Live, Alex Charfen was one of the first speakers, and I took so many notes…    I ran back home, I showed my wife and she goes "That's why you act the way you do?" And I was like "YES, it's because of this guy!”    He had a crazy deep gravelly voice and I loved it. He was the man!" ...and I'm so excited to bring him on the show here:   Guys, please welcome Alex Charfen, “How you doing, man?”   ALEX: Steve, it is so good to be here with you, man. Thank you, and I echo your sentiments completely, and I consider you a brother as well, man.   STEVE: Oh thank you so much, thank you so much.    You know it was like two weeks ago;  me and my wife were chatting about your material and going on through it, and she goes "Oh yeah, I have to remember this is how your brain kind of works."    I was like, "Really naturally, yeah! You should really know that" so we'll go back through your stuff.   You know, I've got that Capitalist Pig shirt that I wear all the time, but I really want one that just says, "Charfen will explain," or something like that, you know what I mean?    That should be the next shirt…   So much of what I do in this world just is NOT explainable without you.   ALEX: Yeah, it's unique, you know, Stephen…    I think when you characterize it that way, so much of what you do is different than what anybody in the world would ever expect... and that's what I've found from the day I met you.    I think I walked up to you and said something like:    "Hey man, I think we should talk. You're a really unique entrepreneur and I don't think you understand just how unique."   STEVE: I remember you said that.   ALEX: Or something like that.   STEVE: Yeah I remember, and I felt like, you know in the Matrix when he's talking to that lady with the spoon bend... I felt like I was talking to her, and I was like:    "What does he see in me? What are you looking at?" You know, and "Please dissect me!"    So anyway, I really am pumped for you to be here and just massive incredible love.    You have to understand, your name; it's NOT just a noun, it’s a verb in my vocabulary.    People are like "How did you do that?” "I just Charfenized it, baby!"    I say ‘Charfenation’ all the time.    I was hanging out with the other ‘Charfenites.’    I'm going over the ‘Charfenation.’    "How did you do that?" “Oh, I ‘Charfenized’ it, baby!”   Anyways, you're very much a verb in my vocabulary, and with my family... so it's really quite an honor to have you on, it really is.   ALEX: Thank you Stephen, it's an honor to be here man, this is awesome.   STEVE: This is really cool. Well hey, I wanna just start right out and just, I wanted to ask…    My audience has heard a lot about you. I've talked about you a lot because there’s so much that ‘veI learned.   Just recently, I was going through some of my old notes, from two years ago, from one of your events, and I was like "Gosh, you're so right, this is so cool!"    It really has created additional leverage for what I'm trying to do.   It works, it's real, and I want everyone to listen to this and listen to what Alex has to say here.   Understand that *this* is how I've been doing what I’m doing.   I learned marketing and a lot of sales from Russell... but how to have a life, systemize, and make my business an asset from Alex Charfen.    So, anyway, could you just tell us how you got into this? 'Cause I know you weren't always…   I mean I call  it entrepreneurial optimization, I mean it's really what you do - it's not just the systems, but like:    I'm wearing glasses now   I'm drinking more water than I ever have in my life    I'm doing all sorts of stuff I never would do, because of you    How did you get into this?   ALEX: - You know Stephen, I think if the question is, "How did I become an entrepreneur?”    I didn't find entrepreneurship, it found me.    This was really the only thing I ever felt comfortable doing in my life.    Ever since I was a little kid, I was always the kid that was different than everybody else, crazy socially awkward, like what you see today…    I don't try to be socially awkward, it's just natural.    I was always different than the other kids   I didn't really get along   I had trouble in school   All the systems in the world told me I was broken.    … and then, when I was eight years old, my family went through kind of a financial downturn; my father lost a company.    He didn't go bankrupt, but he went really close, and to make money for the family we were selling stuff in a swap meet on the weekends.    I remember going to the swap meet for the first time and standing behind a folding card table, and a woman walked up, and I sold her a pen that had an LCD clock in it…    (Like that was big time for 1981 or whatever or '78 or '79, or whatever it was).   Stephen I can remember thinking at that moment, "Holy crap, I'm good at this. This is something I'm NOT terrible at."    … because up until that point, I really hadn't found anything where it was like, "Hey, that was good."  It was always’ "Almost got it, kid. You don't suck as bad as you did yesterday."    I was the kid who consistently got *MOST IMPROVED* all the time, 'cause it's the award you give to ‘the kid who sucked the worst!’   And when that woman walked up, it was like "Hey, this is something I can do over and over again."    And the more that I worked with my Dad, and the more that I experienced business, I loved it.   The world is so random, but when you get into the world of business there are rules.   …. there's an outcome.    People are in it together, and you actually have to work together to accomplish and achieve.   …  if everybody cares about the outcome, it'll happen.    And so *this* is where I feel comfortable.    You know, it's funny, when I was a kid I used to create businesses, create business plans,  write out time cards and all this other stuff, and as an adult, I thought that was like ‘the weirdest thing.’    I would reflect back and think like, "Man, I was such a weird kid."    Now, that's exactly what my daughters do.    My daughter this morning was at the kitchen table for three hours writing out a schematic for a water park she wants to build one day.   STEVE: Wow!   ALEX: And you are who you are, and I think, from the very beginning, this is who I've been.   STEVE: That's amazing, and when did you decide to make a business around this and go actually help other entrepreneurs, like myself, who need these systems?   ALEX: Well, the business that I have today, we started…    So let me give you a little brief history.   So in my twenties, I was a consultant, and you know, a lot of people ask about that.    I did some consulting at a very high level at the Fortune 500 level...    I built a very large business that almost killed me.    And so I can tell the story really good...    I can give you all the highlights and make it sound great:   $250,000,000 company   I've worked with Fuji and TDK and Memorex and Logitech, and all international business.    Or I can tell you the other side of that coin…    I had a $250,000,000 company   I made less than $2,000,000 a year    my margins were razor thin   I had a bleeding ulcer   I was probably over 300 pounds    STEVE: Wow.   ALEX: And so when I got out of that business, I wanted to do something completely different.    So in my early thirties, I got into real estate, and we were taken out by the real estate market in 2007.    Cadey and I introduced our first information product, and that's how we got into this world.   We created a product called the Certified Distressed Property Expert Designation.    In 2007 we were bankrupt, we introduced our product at the end of the year:  In 2008 we did $500,000 in sales   The next year we did $7,000,000   The next year we did $10,000,000   Over the course of the life of that product, we did about $70,000,000    We went from bankruptcy to liquid millionaires in a year.    In 2013, the US Treasury came to our office and did a broadcast with us, where they said that, according to their research…    Our company had pulled forward the foreclosure crisis five to seven years   ….so it was intense.   STEVE: Oh, yeah...   ALEX: Really intense!   And what happened was, right around 2011…    A lot of our clients who were buying our product wanted help growing their business; so I took all of the stuff that I used to use as a consultant; the systems and structure Cadey and I used to run our business, and we started training it.    And so since 2011, we've been training it in classes/ courses.   In 2017, we started the products that we have today. So now we have :   An entry-level coaching program called Billionaire Code Accelerator - for people who are doing over 300k a year   A high-level coaching program called The Billionaire Code Grow and Scale - for people doing over 3,000,000 a year.    STEVE: That's awesome! That's so cool.   ALEX: Yeah it is the most fun I've ever had, Stephen…   It's like every day, I wake up and here's what I get to do:    I get to play in this playground with game-changing entrepreneurs that are starting businesses that are doing things that are just unreal.    ...and our systems, our structures are kind of the backbone for how they're doing things.    So on a daily basis, me and everyone on my team, wake up knowing that we are helping the game-changers change the world, and we recruit people who want to do that…    We recruit for people who are passionate about our mission…   Everyone on my team feels like their life's mission is being fulfilled through being in this business right now.    It's the greatest thing I've ever done.   STEVE: That's incredible, and I can tell everyone else who's listening and watching this now, it's exactly as he says it.    I think I've been to three of your events now, and they have just been life-changing.    I go through and it gives structure to the idea, but then, also, how I behave against the idea. So I can actually go in and breathe; I can live.    I watched my Dad create this awesome company when I was a young boy, but it took him too.   But everyone does that, it's super natural - so you to go in and…    Remove the entrepreneur   Create systems    Create processes and procedures, and people that actually push forward their vision even further.   ... it's incredible.    I know it's not magical, but it feels magical, to me! I'm like "Oh my gosh!"    I've actually had a tab open with your course open for like the last month and I'll just dive into another video, and I'm like "Oh my gosh! Back to the drawing board, that was so good!"    And I go back to it again and again and again... it's just always up, everybody who's listening to me, it's always up.    That's really what's teaching me how to run a company, rather than ‘me’ being the company, and I've loved that.    *Just so powerful*    I wanted to ask you kind of a key question here, and it's a question that I get asked a lot...    People come through my programs, I'll help them make money. They go and make a lot of cash, and it's awesome... but then after that, like what do you do?   What are the first systems that you find that new entrepreneurs with a sizeable amount of cash should actually go create first?    What are those first few moves?   ALEX: You know I think I definitely want to share a couple of systems Stephen, but first, I want to just share a thought process. ..and this is a tough thought process for most entrepreneurs to take on, and it's interesting 'cause I've watched you go through this shift too, right? '   Cause at the beginning, (and I just want everyone to know)...    When I met Stephen Larsen, he was ready to take on the entire world solo!   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: Like all alone, right?    And here's the thought process…    After you start making money, the next thing to ask yourself is:    How do I sustain this?    How do I make it real?    How do I make it last a long time?   How do I make it so that I'm not the only driver here?   when you get to the point where the momentum you're creating on your own isn't enough, and believe me, we all get there...    Like I know that if you're watching me, watching Stephen, you're one of those entrepreneurs... and in the back of your mind, you have this crazy voice that has always told you:    You're meant for more   You're gonna do more   You're gonna change the world   You're gonna make a massive impact   ... and if you've always felt that, then there's a shift you have to make in your thinking.    Because here's the issue for people like us; I call it the Entrepreneurs Dilemma.    For people like us…    We need far more help than the average person to reach our full destination, but any request for help or support that we have to make, leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed.    Stephen, you with me?   STEVE: Yes, yes, yes, yes, 100%!   ALEX: And so here's the shift…   We have to realize that if we're gonna change the world, that is a group activity, and leadership's a contact sport.    So we have to wake up to the fact that when we start to:    Build a team   Create a structure   Pour into the people around us    Invest in those people   Make them important   Build relationships with them   …. we will build the company that we have always wanted.    That's the only way it's ever been done.  The myth of the solopreneur who's changed the world is a myth - it's a joke.   STEVE: So true   ALEX: It's one of the most damaging things out there in the entrepreneurial world today.    Because the fact is…    Show me anyone that looks like they changed the world on their own, and I will show you a massive team behind them.   STEVE: So true!    There's this idea that gets pushed around now, and it's like, “I'm gonna go and be this person that does all this stuff. I'm the gift to the world...”   ...and it's like “Okay….” but you can't do that on your own.    In the last six months, I have begun to experience and feel burn-out.   ALEX: Yeah.   STEVE: I have never in my life experienced that, and it's been hard.  The only way I've been able to create leverage is by listening to what you say and create those teams.   ALEX: Yeah. Well then, Stephen, that's the thing…    Here's the deal I want everybody to understand this:   If you're an entrepreneur, you have a job, and that job is to…    Stay out of burn-out   Lower pressure and noise in your life   Increase the protection and support that you have around you.    Because if you don't work with that equation to constantly lower the noise and increase the support, lower the noise, increase the support…    Here's what ends up happening…     You are in an equation that doesn't work.    … and it's not like anyone can come and argue against me here because this is like gravity.    This is like you know the facts of life, this is like taxes. We're all gonna pay 'em. There's no way to argue against this, you're going to lose.    And so in that situation, as an entrepreneur, you have to be really cautious about doing too much yourself, and about loading yourself up, because here's our instinct…    (You know you have this, I have this, we all have it.)    If there's something to be done, the first thought we have is, “How do I just get it done without telling anyone else,” right? Oh yeah!   STEVE: Yeah   ALEX: And it's like "I'm gonna conquer!"   STEVE: Freedom baby!   ALEX: We forget that humans are tribal animals, man.    We are all terrible at most things. Let's get real…    If you're good at a lot of things then you have a liability because you're not gonna be able to choose what you shouldn't do.    I'm very fortunate, I suck at most everything, and that's like an honest reality.    Anyone on my team will tell you like "Oh man, don't let Alex fill out a form, use the calendar, "send emails. We keep him out of all of our systems."    Seriously my team actually knows when I have a password for a system and they monitor me using it, 'cause I'm so bad at that stuff.    But on that same token, I know what I'm good at.    I'm good at vision    I'm good at where we're gonna go   I'm good at putting the frameworks together    I'm good at assembling a team   … and by doing those things, we can grow a massive organization and have a massive impact.   So for every entrepreneur, the key is to figure out what you're good at and do that to the exception of everything else   ... and it's the hardest thing you'll ever do as an entrepreneur.    Here's why…   The second you start doing that you feel like you're being egotistical. You feel like you're being self-serving.    But here's the fact:    When you drive your business to get easier for you it will grow like crazy.   But driving your business to get easier for you will feel like you're doing the wrong thing.    It happens all the time.   There's a discussion right now on our Facebook group, one of the CEOs in our group made a post, and I'm paraphrasing, but she said something like :   "As I offload and reduce discomfort and get a team around me, I'm feeling less and less significant, am I doing this right?"   And my answer was "Yes! You're absolutely doing this right. That's exactly how it's gonna feel!"    Because we need to attach significance to the total contribution, NOT to your day-to-day activities.   STEVE: Mmmm, that's powerful.    You know it's funny I was It reminds me of …   You know when I first got to ClickFunnels, it was just he and I. There wasn't like a copywriter, a videographer... it was just he and I!    So we did every single role in getting these funnels out, occasionally there was an exception where he'd go "Oh someone's really good at X, Y, and Z,"  but then, by the time I left...   ALEX: - Probably design or something… but everything else was you guys?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right! I knew enough Indesign and Photoshop, I was the one doing it most of the time... and doing first copy rounds, and it like, it was nuts!    But by the time I left, it was funny because he had started implementing these types of things.    I remember watching him during these funnel launches just laying on the floor, bored out of his mind.    I've never seen him like that in my life, and he was almost going to a state of depression. He was like "I'm not needed in my own thing now. Ah no-one needs me anymore."    It's a funny thing to realize, we're just the orchestrators. We don't play all the instruments.   ALEX: We shouldn't, we shouldn't.    And so, you know, back to your question about what systems should an entrepreneur start looking at?   Now, I'm gonna talk high level, and I wanna share...    You and I are really close friends, and I wanna share the most critical content we have for entrepreneurs with your group.   STEVE: I appreciate that.   ALEX: This is what we normally share internally once somebody joins our program…    We share the five things that keep companies from scaling.    The reality is, there are really five things that keep companies that should scale, from scaling.    And here's what I mean ‘companies that should scale…’    You know, if you go talk to most consultants, venture capitalists, investment bankers, accountants, lawyers, whatever, they'll give you this laundry list of why companies don't scale:    They didn't have enough money   They didn't have the right people   They didn't do all of these things   The reality is, if you look at most companies that should scale, there are five clear reasons why they don't…    So let me share them with you, but let me give you this caveat…    Here's what I mean by "should scale..."    If you've got a market    If you're capable of selling   If you could do more    If you know you're leaving money on the table   …. you should be scaling.   If those things aren't there for you right now, go resolve that and then start scaling.  Far too many people try and scale before they actually have all the steps in place.    Then you just build infrastructure that does nothing.   So let me tell you what the five things are...    #1: So number one, first and foremost, absolutely most crucial, is…      Most businesses don't have any type of strategic plan.     So as a result, there's no go-forward strategy, and here's what happens in a business when you don't have a go-forward strategy.    If you don't know where you're going, neither does your team   ... neither does anybody around you   And so you will, by virtue of math, become the biggest bottleneck in the company.    Here's why…    If there's no forward plan where all of us can point at and go get it and help you chase it down, every time we want to know what to do we have to ask you, and we have to go to you... and it's a death of a thousand paper cuts.    You're literally in a place where you're:    Telling people what to do   Checking that it got done   Telling them what to do again.    And if you've ever been in that situation as an entrepreneur, you know that somebody only has to ask you twice before you're ready to flip out and lose it.    Am I right Stephen?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, usually once.   ALEX: Once, right, right, but by the second time you're like "Are you kidding me?"    And so the way we get past that is we create a clear strategic plan, we share it with our entire team…   ... and if the team knows where they're going, here's what happens.    I want you to understand something about the people coming to work for you.  If you're in a small business, you're hiring entrepreneurs.   I know that there's this saying in the market, "You're either an entrepreneur or you work for one."    I call complete and total BS - don't even bring that crap around me.   STEVE: Yeah!   ALEX:    Every person on my team is an incredibly talented, hyper-motivated, world-changing entrepreneur, they just choose to be part of a team.   And so you're gonna hire entrepreneurs, and the way you keep entrepreneurs absolutely and totally focused and excited, is you show them what they're hunting, you give them the kill.    You say:    Here's our plan   This is what we're doing   This is how you win.    And if you hire the right people, they will walk over hot glass to get to that destination for you.   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: But if they don't know where it is, you're gonna demotivate them and completely de-leverage them.    So number one, you have to have a strategic plan.    In my experience, less than 1% of businesses do. Also, less than 1% of businesses ever hit $100,000,000. In fact only 3% ever hit 1,000,000.   STEVE: Jesus. ALEX: So when you look at that, it's not 1% of businesses that hit 100,000,000, 0.01% of businesses ever hit 100,000,000,  and the reason is...    Most businesses don't know where they're going.    And Stephen, by you having the tools to build a strategic plan in your business, hasn't it changed how you approach things?   STEVE: Oh gosh, you guys remember when I tell you those stories of I left my job...    I created 200 grand of revenue really quick but there were no systems   I was the…    Support guy    Fulfillment guy   Sales guy.    I did every role, and I voluntarily, very painfully, had to turn down revenue to go build these structures.    And I want you all to know, it was Alex Charfen's stuff that helped me go in and actually set those systems in place... and so, please understand my affinity for this man and what he does.   About halfway through the year, I was only at like 300 - 400 grand, which is pretty good, but that last huge sprint came in because of the things that Alex Charfen and his team were teaching me.    All those planning things that I use, and all the things that I've just lightly mentioned, they've all come from Alex Charfen, and it helped scale me.   ALEX: That's awesome Stephen... Man, that makes me so proud.   This is so cool! Like there's only one Stephen Larsen in the world, and I told you that the first day I met you…    I'm like, "Dude you are completely and totally unique and I think I can help you build the company you really want."   STEVE: Yeah, you said   ALEX: And for us to be sitting here, and for you to say that, I got chills Stephen, that's so awesome. Thank you, man!   STEVE: Oh man, I'm so jazzed about what we do, but it's because of what you teach I'm like "I can do it... "    The first time I ever saw Stephen at an event, I did not leave the event until I'd cornered him and told him what I needed to tell him... because I knew you were gonna be exactly that type of person.    ...and here's why it's so important to me, Stephen.    I could tell the first time I saw you,  that you were gonna have a massive effect on the world.    But here's what I know about entrepreneurs; you're gonna have the biggest effect on the people closest to you - the people who are most proximal, your team.   And when I see an entrepreneur like you Stephen, I'm like:    "Man, if that guy builds a team he's gonna change hundreds of lives internally in his company. They're gonna change millions of lives externally, and I know those hundreds of people will build your legacy."    And when I see somebody like you, I'm like, “Man! That is the path, let me show you how to do this.”    The fact that it's working, is like, “Ah, it makes me so excited every day.”    This is why I get up out of bed every morning and do what I do.     STEVE: Ah, it's so fun man, feeling's mutual. You walked up, it was from that FHAT event that you were at.   ALEX: Ah ha.   STEVE: And you walked up and said, "There's a huge company in you and I don't think you know it, and I'm gonna help you pull it out of you."    I remember when you said that, I was so scared. I was like, "There's no way that this is real! I know who you are, are you kidding me?"    It freaked me out, and I had to own my own vision for a while. It actually took me a while to practice that.    Anyway, so much has gone on in mental clarity and development from what you've taught, not just these systems and things around, it's really cool.   ALEX: - So let's give the second one, Stephen   STEVE: Yeah, sorry, sorry.    ALEX: oh don't apologize, shit I love this part.    So first you have a strategic plan…    #2: Second, the thing that you need to have is      A system to communicate that plan.        Let me tell you something about us as entrepreneurs…    We think we're good communicators, but we're lying to ourselves.    The fact is, we are haphazard and emotional, and we're pumped one second and we're not the next, and we're all over the place…    Here's what happens…    When we have a team that has to deal with a personality like ours, and there's NOT a system for communication, it's random and haphazard and overwhelming... and it comes from all angles, and they're waiting for word from on high. Here's the fact, if you're the entrepreneur in charge, you're the MOST important person in the building all the time.    You're the most important person on the team, in the tribe, in the group, and they're all waiting to see what you say.    And if they're waiting for days and nothing's happened, they start thinking:    Is something wrong?    Did something go bad?    Did we do something wrong?    So you need a system.   As an example:    My team knows every Monday at 4:00, we're all gonna be on a weekly meeting together.  They also know every day at 9:27 a.m. we're gonna be on a daily huddle, and I'll be there.    They know that once a month we're gonna have a meeting where we show our strategic plan.    They know once a month we're gonna have a meeting where they all get the results.    So they all know when they're gonna communicate with me and how.    From the first day you're on our team there's a system that  controls how you hear from me.    Not just me pumping stuff out there haphazardly.    As a result, my team knows they're gonna hear from me, they trust it and here's what happens.    I set the expectations, I meet the expectations, we create trust. I create trust with my team every time I do that.    And here's the fact:   If your team trusts you, you get way more out of them.   If your team trusts you, they will do more for you.    If your team trusts you, you'll get discretionary effort   ... which means when they're driving, when they're showering, when they're doing something else, they're gonna be thinking about your business.  Why?    ...because it gives them momentum.    So if you have a strategic plan and a system to communicate it, you're ahead of 99% of companies out there.   And Stephen, same thing for you with the system, the structure?    Like…    We all fight structure, but once you put it in place, isn't it incredible?   STEVE: Oh, it's amazing! Stuff's getting done right now, that we set in place once. and then, I'll be like "Oh, podcast episode just launched,!Oh, what day is it? Oh, that's sweet! Everyone just put it out, all right, cool!"   ALEX: Right, I remember when I started getting messages like, "Hey, I love the new podcast!" And I'm like "Oh, we put a podcast out? Nice!"       STEVE: I didn't do that, what are you talking about?   ALEX: So you have  #1: a strategic plan, then #2: a system to communicate.    #3: Here's the third one, now this is BIG, really big, and most business owners just, they don't look at this ever and it's the biggest struggle is, or one of the biggest struggles is;      You have to have a system to consistently document the right processes in your business.     And by documentation, I mean having:    A flowchart   A process document   A checklist   Something that shows you how the important things in your business are done over and over again.    For example:    If you walk into a McDonald's, and you look above the fry cooker, there is a process to cook fries above that fry cooker.    Anything that happens in that McDonald's, there's a process for literally every single thing, including:    Unlocking the door   Turning off the alarm   Sweeping the floor   That's why there's a consistent experience at McDonald's; I'm not saying it's a good experience, I'm saying it's consistent.   In most businesses, in most entrepreneurial businesses, there's no process.    In fact, it's even scarier than that...    The process lives either in the owner's head or in an individual's head - so you lose a person, you lose the company.    You lose a person, you lose a big chunk of what you're doing.   STEVE: Hmm.   ALEX: So you have to have a system in a business to consistently evaluate what processes are in the company, and then on a monthly and weekly basis document the right ones.    The way that I would suggest you start, is you look at your customer experience:    What is the customer experience in your company?   What process documentation do you have to back it up to make sure that is completely consistent?    If you do that, you're gonna beat most people out there...   99% of entrepreneurial companies have little to nothing documented in any type of process.   STEVE: They're just shooting in random spots 24/7.   ALEX: Or they're doing stuff like, "Here's how we do our customer on-boarding…”    I trained Suzy   Suzy trained Annie   Annie trained Bob     John does it now   ...and you're like "Oh, cool! Let's go and see what John's doing?"    Well, John's doing nothing close to what Suzy and Bob and everybody else was originally doing, and so you have these degrading processes in your business.    And here's what happens…    When you look at entrepreneurial businesses, they tend to…    Go up in revenue   Come back down in revenue   Go up in revenue   Come back down.    If you're inside those companies, hundreds of times like I have been, here's what I can tell you…    Revenue goes up as the process is working, and then when it breaks, it comes back down.    *PERIOD*    That's why businesses don't continue to go forward - there are processes breaking in the business.    Whether it's marketing, sales, delivery, whatever it is there's a process breaking.    When you document your proceses, you make them bulletproof.    So in our business, we actually use:    Lucidchart Flowcharts   Sheets in Google Sheets    A new product called Process Street  -  a distributed, automated process document system, which is incredible.    So we have all of our processes in Process Street, and we have a distributed team around the world.   We have somebody in Ireland who can do their part of the process, as soon as they hit the last button it transfers to somebody here in the US who can do their part of the process.   STEVE: That's awesome.   ALEX:    Documenting your processes + Putting them in place = Game-changing   STEVE: Holy cow, okay I wrote that down.    I'm taking tons of notes so everyone knows, I hope they are as well…. And I'm not sharing! ;-) Process.st is the company, and we are so happy with it because... Stephen, here's what I want everyone to know,...   Cadey and I have had five businesses get over $10,000,000 a year, and all five of them ran them with paper checklists.   This is the first time we have automated checklists in Process Street.    The last information products business that we had, we literally had three-ring binders that we would carry around the office and check stuff off.    Having a three-ring binder with a process was so much better than having somebody trying to do it from memory.    Now with Process Street, we can distribute that three-ring binder, and I can get reporting on who's doing what.   STEVE: That's amazing.    Yeah, I've actually seen the three-ring binder and I've thought, "Holy crap, that really is how he's doing it.”    You would teach it and then I watched you actually do it.. 'cause you would record your stand up meeting calls in the morning   ALEX: Yeah.   STEVE: And I was, "Oh my gosh, that's so cool! I'm NOT doing that, interesting."    Then I’d go back and take notes and start it.   ALEX: And then implement.    Well, and you know, there's this phrase in the entrepreneurial world. Ah... I kind of get a little triggered, right!   STEVE: Let it out, baby!   ALEX: You know the thing that people say from stage:   "Here's what I want all of you to know. All you have to do is stop working in your business and start working on your business."    And I'm always like:    "Oh, good, thanks. Thanks for solving it all for us dude, that was awesome. You just solved all my problems with that really cliched BS thing that everybody tells entrepreneurs."     When I was in my twenties, my instant thought was like, "How do I get on stage to punch that guy in the face?"    And my then my second thought was like, "What a load of crap!  If I don't work in the business nobody's answering the phones, sucker."    Like, what's going on here? I don't know how to make that change.    And so the way you make that change is…    Working on the business means documenting processes.    By making it:    Clear   Repeatable   Real   And so you have…    A strategic plan that everyone understands   A communication system everyone knows is gonna happen    A system for documenting processes so everyone can repeat what's going on with your clients   #4: The next step,(and this is BIG), is..    A consistent system for identifying, documenting, and then prioritizing the right project in the business.   STEVE: Ah, this changed my life. *HARDCORE*   ALEX: Whoa, Stephen, you know how game-changing this is because, here's the problem in most businesses…    Projects are selected emotionally.    Period, I can't tell you that they're done any other way - they're emotional.    You go to an event and somebody says "I'm doing this thing," and then, the next day, you're doing that thing.    You listen to a podcast or you hear a webinar, and the person says "Hey, I added this thing to my business," and the next day, you're trying to do that thing.    In our business, if I have a really great idea that I want to implement today…    If I'm like, "Man, this is a really high sense of urgency, we should get this implemented."    It'll probably be somewhere around 45 days, and I'm totally okay with that.    That's the timing it should be in my business.    Now if there's an emergency we're gonna fix it that day, but if I'm like, "Hey, I see an opportunity here with something," it's probably a 45-day event…    Why?    I have a team and a structure, and a plan, and we have a system that's moving forward. We're already hitting our numbers, why would I mess with anything?    I actually protect what's going on in the business   I add things gently   I add things carefully   I make sure my team's into it too    I make sure we have consensus    In just in the last 60 days, we've gone from two million recurring to two point three million recurring,   STEVE: That's awesome!   ALEX: So why would I mess with what we're doing?   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: Yeah, so when somebody's like "Hey Alex, I got this "great idea for your business." I'm like "Awesome, get in line."    And we'll put it into our system to see if we want to actually do this…   Because the fact is…    If you're getting sold as an entrepreneur on what your next project should be, you're probably in the wrong place.    STEVE: Yeah, that's fascinating. I really agree with that.    It was your planning system for figuring out which projects, I still do it.    Top of every three months and it has guided everything we do.    And while I do follow a few rabbits and I'm practicing bringing it back in, we still largely follow the plan as to what the business needs, and that's ‘grow and scale’ rather than this impulse of like:    "Yeah, oh shiny object, shiny object, "that looks good, that looks good!"    And it's been that discipline, that's the other thing that's always up is my waterfall...   ALEX: Yeah, yeah, always! I mean mine's up right now. I mean I could share it right now.   And the reason is I always have my strategic plan pulled up in front of me, I'm looking at it every single day.    I'm asking myself:   Is the team doing what we need to do here?   How do I support people more?    How do I help them do this more?   Because when you look at our strategic plan, here's what it's made up of.    Our one-year outcomes   Our client-centric mission - which is our Superbowl, our hall of fame, the long term   The 90-day projects we're focusing on right now    What we're doing this month to hit those targets . So that waterfall of long term, to one year, to 90 days, to 30 days, I can see it all on one document and it tells me EXACTLY where I should be supporting the team and what we're getting done.    And so here's what happens…   I went to an event a couple of weeks ago, and I had an idea that was like "Oh man, we have to do this."    Then I come back to the office, I look at the waterfall and I'm like "What do I want to kill in order to do this thing over here?"    And you know what the evaluation was? *NOTHING* I'm not going to take anything off this, that would be crazy.   There's no way I'm gonna go to my team and say, "Hey guys, in addition to all the other stuff you're committed to, here's a hot potato."    I just backed down and I waited till the next time we had a planning meeting and I said, "Hey, there's this thing I think we should do."    We evaluated it   It went into the system   It went into the plan    There is very little knee-jerk reaction in our company because we are going so fast in a forward direction, that for me to challenge that in any way it has to be game-changing at a different level - so it rarely even happens.   STEVE: Yeah, black-ops right? Call them black-ops?   ALEX: Black-ops.   STEVE: No black-ops!   ALEX: No black-ops, baby!  If it's NOT on the plan, you don't do it... or it's black-ops.    And usually, the biggest creators of black-ops are guys like Stephen and I.    So my team has an open license to tell me if I'm doing black-ops.    They will actually call me out in a huddle, in a meeting, they'll be like "Ah, this sounds like black-ops," and then we'll make a note, we'll put it in a parking lot and do it later.    STEVE: Oh, that's so cool, okay.   ALEX: Yeah,  that's one of the most important things you can do when you have a team Stephen…    You train your team to criticize you and then you congratulate them when they do.   STEVE: That's really cool, then they have a license to actually flex their brain instead of feeling like they're in a box.   ALEX: Absolutely. You know I heard a story once about Larry Page, who runs Google,   He was in a meeting and he really strongly stated a point. and one of the team members got emotional about it and started yelling at him.    She was like, "I think you're wrong and this is why you're wrong," and Page was smiling…   Afterward, she asked somebody "Hey why was he smiling?"    ‘Cause she backed him down, and he actually said "You know what, I think this deserves more investigation. Let's do this."    She walked out and she was shaking and all adrenalized up, she had just yelled at the CEO of Google, like, “What the heck's gonna happen to me?”   She turned to somebody next to her, and was like "He was smiling, is that because he's gonna come down hard on me?"    And the person was like, "No, he was smiling because you confronted him, he loves it, he wants it.”    He knows that if people aren't confronting him, he's in a bad place.   So I look at it in my team and I'm like, "Hey, if my team's not challenging me a little bit, then we're all just marching behind a duck."    You know, I don't wanna have ducklings behind me. I want people who are saying:    Hey, this might work   This might not work   We might have a better idea   So you give your team license to criticize and license to call you on stuff.   STEVE:  Gosh, I love that.   #5: So here's the fifth one...    So we have:    Strategic plan   Communication system   Selecting and documenting the right processes   Selecting and achieving the right projects,   ….and then, this is *BIG*   Finding the right people     It's NOT just finding the right people, its…    Evaluating the company   Understanding what the company needs right now    What can you offload that is going to create the most momentum, not just for you, but for the team, for everything that you're doing together?    What is the position that you need to put in place next - so that the company moves forward the fastest?    And unfortunately, just like everything else I've named, planning, projects, process, all of those... people also become emotional.    An entrepreneur wakes up one morning and says, "I'm doing too much, I'm gonna hire an assistant."    Then they have the assistant sit next to them for three weeks, and they wonder why this doesn't work out?    It's because you had the thought to get help, (which by the way I congratulate you on), but there was no process there to actually make it work.    And so here's the process you need…   Evaluate what's going on in the company   Understand what the company needs   Turn it into a job description    Then you use it to recruit   You do tons of interviewing   You drive it until you have three people that you can select from    You hire one of them and then you do at least a 90-day onboarding, high-intensity onboarding.    When I'm onboarding an executive team member, I meet with them every day for the first month, three times a week for the second month, and two times a week for the third month.    People tell me, "Hey man, doesn't that "feel like overkill?"    I'm like:    You don't understand what it means to have an executive team. Your job is to build relationships with those people.    You want to know how you build relationships?    There's one commodity that builds relationships. One!    *TIME* - that's it.    And so when I'm onboarding, when I'm bringing somebody on, (whether it's on my executive team or anywhere in the business), somebody is doing that high-intensity onboarding with them…    Up close and personal every single day for the first 30 days making sure we have no drift.    And so, when you have a system to select the right people, bring them on and then onboard them the right way…    Here's what you avoid, (and Stephen this is like, Ah, this statistic drives me crazy)...    In corporate America, I know because I used to be a consultant there.    In corporate America, they would say things like, "Well we just hired so-and-so in that position so they'll probably be productive in four to six months."   The first time I heard that I was like "Did he just say four to six months? Does he mean four to six days, or does he really mean four to six months?"    Because in my business, even way back then), if I had to wait four months for somebody to be productive I would have been, “They're gone”!   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, they're gone!   ALEX: And so in our business, we actually have this experience right now.    We recently brought on somebody else, a new person to help us in marketing, and with our onboarding process, he was actually achieving products within the first five days of his first week.   STEVE: That's so cool!   ALEX: And that's how it should be.    You want somebody to come in, be effective and start contributing and creating momentum.    Because here's what will happen…    As an entrepreneur, if you're wired anything like I am, (and I know Stephen is), if you have somebody on your team that starts to feel like they're not carrying their own weight, you won't sleep.    You won't sleep, it will rip you apart, Stephen am I right?   STEVE: Yeah! ALEX: It will destroy you…    And so here's the question though…   Are they not carrying their own weight because:   They're lazy? They don't want to?   They aren't the right person?    Or is it because it's not clear what they’re doing?   STEVE: They have no idea what they're doing. They don't have confidence...I didn't help them!    ALEX: Right, 'cause here's the thing.    Your team needs three things in order to ultimately be effective and to be the type of team you want.    And here's what I mean by that…    As an entrepreneur here's what you want, you want a team that just does stuff and asks permission later.    You want a team that achieves and lets you know how things worked out.    That's it!  I just know this is how entrepreneurs work.    You want people who make really good decisions.    You want people who move things forward.    You want people who don't stand around waiting for stuff.    And if you want to have a team that actually moves things forward as an entrepreneur…    You gotta spend the time with them and let 'em know what your ethos is, and let 'em know how you make decisions…   That's how you duplicate decision making.   STEVE: Hm, gosh I love that. Okay, so…   Strategic plan   System to communicate   System to document processes that can be shared inside the whole biz    Documenting projects and the ones you're gonna work on   Finding the right people   ...and I actually personally just went through your onboarding training and it's so awesome!    'Cause it goes through and it's like this, you basically create a runway for 'em, right?   And if they don't land, don't worry you've got parachutes and there are jumpy cords all over the place...   - you're doing everything you can to help 'em win fast and lots of small tiny wins that build that confidence, and I was like:    "That is brilliant. 'Cause that is not the way you're taught anywhere else.”   ALEX: So Stephen, check this out, man.    We recently fell out of the lucky tree on recruiting and we hired this guy named Greg Duby and he is, ah, amazing.    He's like, he's just one of the most exciting guys I've ever worked with because he's so solid and so centered, and just so good at what he does.    Greg is a former nuclear propulsion tech in the Navy, so you know what that is, that's the guy who rides the bomb around in the submarine, okay?   STEVE: Yeah, that's amazing!   ALEX: Yeah, you have to have advanced degrees in Physics, advanced degrees in Math.   He's literally a rocket scientist.    So he worked in the Navy, then he worked at NASA, then he worked for some of the larger consulting firms out there…    I mean, he's done incredible stuff in his career.    He's just one of the most solid people I've ever worked with, and within about two or three weeks into our company, in one of our daily huddles, we said, "Who got caught being awesome?"    It's where we call each other out, and he said:    You know, I just wanna call this company out for being awesome.   “ I've been here for three weeks, I've never had an experience like this getting on-boarded anywhere...    I'm up and running, I'm excited. I feel like I'm really part of the team. I feel like I've worked here forever and I'm three weeks in."    And this is somebody who worked at some of the best consulting firms in the world, NASA and the Navy!    And our little tiny company has impressed him so much because we did onboarding because he knew what he was supposed to do.    And as a result, Greg, I think we're about three months in with him, and dude, there are projects that I thought were gonna take a year or two that are getting done this week.   STEVE: That's so cool!   ALEX: It's crazy.   STEVE: It's just a completely different way to do it. One thing I hated in the military, I love the military, but you know, some things that are rough and that is that there are no clear guidelines on how to win ahead of time.   The way you're instructed is by hitting barriers and then you get punished for it, and you're like:    "Just tell me ahead of time and I wouldn't do it! But all right, let's do more push-ups."    Anyway...   ALEX: Something tells me you did a lot of push-ups, Steve!   STEVE: I just want to say thank you so much for being on here.    I asked for 30 minutes and you just completely over-delivered, and I just really want to say thank you to you.    My audience already knows very well of you.    Where can people go to learn more about you but specifically also get your help inside the business?   ALEX: So the best place to learn more about us is to go to our podcast.    I publish a podcast four days a week, which is essentially a one-on-one conversation with an entrepreneur growing a business.    And the way that I create each one of those episodes is when a question or issue comes up in our coaching groups, I create an episode around it, we distribute it to the group.    But then also we distribute it to anybody who's listening, so you can get the same coaching that I'm giving my high-level clients right on our podcast…    It's called Momentum for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type, and you can check it out at momentumpodcast.com.    And then, if you want to understand more about our products, about our coaching groups you can go to our website charfen.com, but better is to just reach out to me or to one of my team members through Facebook.    The easiest thing, is just reach out to me, and I'll connect you with the right person in our company, and we'll go through a process with you to help you understand if we can help you.    You know Stephen, we're pretty neat, we don't sell everybody. We actually get on the phone with a lot of people who we sell later, but we won't sell you unless it's time.    We know exactly what solutions we provide, and if you have those issues and they link up, then we'll work together... but we go through a personal inventory in order to help you do that.    So if anybody's interested in getting on a call with a member of my team, you can also shortcut the entire process by going to billionairecode.com…    Answer a few questions and you can just set up a call link and you'll be on a call with one of my team members and they'll help you qualify and understand where you are.    And just so you know, we don't do sales calls, they are all consulting calls.    When you get on a call with my team, you won't ever feel like you're being sold, you'll feel like you're being helped.   STEVE: Which is exactly what I have felt when I started doing that as well.    Just so you all know he's very serious about that - that's very real.    I always feel like I'm being helped by anyone on his team.    ...and come to find out later, "Oh that was the sales guy!"    ...You know what I mean?    They dare to go in and actually they want to change the world and they're very serious about it.    So thank you so much, appreciate it.    Check out Billionaire Code.    The Momentum podcast is a goldmine, it is one of those gems on the internet that is actually worth all of your time and attention.    Thanks so much for being on here, Alex, I really appreciate you and love you, and thank you for being on here.   ALEX: Stephen, dude, this has been an honor.    I hope to be able to get invited back again, and as a Sales Funnel Radio listener, this is really cool. I appreciate you, man!   STEVE: Thanks, I appreciate it!    Hey, awesome episode right?    Hey, once I figured out the simple patterns and formulas that make this game work, I had a new problem…    Back when I eventually left my job and launched my personal business, I sold about $200,000 of product in around three months-ish…    And while I thought I was King Kong, a new problem started.    I was the business, there weren't any systems...   I was support   I was fulfillment    I was the one in charge of getting the ads around   I was the sales department    I was the marketing department    And I knew I wouldn't survive it alone…    Better yet, I knew I'd never seen a rich solopreneur.    This game takes a team.    Contrast that to now, and my company does tons of stuff that I don't know how to do...    What changed?    His name is Alex Charfen, check him out at charfenrocks.com.     So I usually don't bring tons of people on Sales Funnel Radio, but you should know that his programs, combined with my marketing skills, are why my business is killing it in revenue today, and NOT killing me personally.    Alex Charfen's programs and training have been life-changing for me and my family... and taught me who I really am and what I'm meant to be.    So when you're ready to build an actual business, an actual asset and NOT just make this another job…    When you're ready to keep the role of entrepreneur but learn the role of CEO, go get started with Alex Charfen at charfenrocks.com. That's C-H-A-R-F-E-N rocks.com.

3 Reasons We all Need a Great Land Engineer Jack Butala: 3 Reasons We all Need a Great Land Engineer. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: Jack Butala here for Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow for the Land show. In this episode Jill and I talk about the 3 reasons we all need a great land engineer. Here's a prelude. To make great and timely acquisitions decisions, that's number one. Create top notch pictures and maps and maybe most importantly, to call out presentation quality attributes in the property that you buy. You know how professional people see stuff that we don't sometimes see? Jill: Mm-hmm (affirmative) I do. Steve: I love this. Jill, I love quality map engineering. I think it's one of the focal points that makes or breaks a good operation. Before we get into the details let's hear a question from a caller. Jill: Sure. Okay, Fred from Indianapolis called in and asked, "I've been listening for awhile now and I'm looking for my cabin lot to retire. How can this help me?" He is ... we have a couple of people that are ... Steve: Yeah, we do. Jill: ... About our program and listening and learning this to be able to do that. Steve: Can I answer this? Jill: Yeah. Steve: We get enough calls and questions from people who don't really want to start real estate companies like our members now. They just want exactly what this caller wants, they want to really get a great deal on a primary residence or a property to build a cabin on at any point in their life. Hey Fred, don't wait for us. Jill and I have decided we are going to do an educational program that's very specifically for people who just want to do one or two deals. A way scaled down version of how to do a mailer and things like that. Don't wait for us to complete that, because lord knows it's kind of far down on the list of programs that we're ... upon request programs that Jill and I are creating. Yes, the answer is heck yes. When you really do the math, the price of the education and the price of the data to implement what you're talking about will save you times ten. Jill: That's true. Steve: If you save $10,000 and our stuff is way less expensive than that, but I'm just using that number. If you implement our program and you buy a lot of $10,000 less than you expected, I mean ... Jill: You've won. Steve: Like times 5, it's 5 times more than the education costs. Jill: Exactly. Steve: If you do it the way we suggest that you do it, you're more likely going to save $20-$30-$40,000. Jill: What I love, too, is I have had a number of people that said, "Wait a minute, so here's what I did, I had 4 lots in the area that really piqued my interest, so I bought all 4. I'm living on this one, I put my cabin on this one, I sold the other 3 and guess what, it paid for it times ... and then some!" I'm like, "Brilliant!" Then they're out, they're happy. Steve: Then you're not retired anymore, because this is your new business. Jill: Well, you could keep going, that's true. Steve: You realize how easy it is and how little time it takes after you know what you're doing. After the learning curve. Jill: Yeah, after you do a couple of deals, you're right. You get into it and it's not hard. You could just sit. In his situation you could just sit and wait for the home runs to land in your lap and only act on those. Steve: Yeah, we have members who do that all the time. "I want to make $10,000 on every deal I do and I don't need to do a lot of deals." So they let the little ones go. Jill: Exactly. Steve: They feed them to the rest our community on success plans. Jill: Kind of like I do sometimes. Steve: We have a deal board. We have this thing called Deal Board for our members...

3 Reasons We all Need a Great Land Engineer Jack Butala: 3 Reasons We all Need a Great Land Engineer. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: Jack Butala here for Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow for the Land show. In this episode Jill and I talk about the 3 reasons we all need a great land engineer. Here's a prelude. To make great and timely acquisitions decisions, that's number one. Create top notch pictures and maps and maybe most importantly, to call out presentation quality attributes in the property that you buy. You know how professional people see stuff that we don't sometimes see? Jill: Mm-hmm (affirmative) I do. Steve: I love this. Jill, I love quality map engineering. I think it's one of the focal points that makes or breaks a good operation. Before we get into the details let's hear a question from a caller. Jill: Sure. Okay, Fred from Indianapolis called in and asked, "I've been listening for awhile now and I'm looking for my cabin lot to retire. How can this help me?" He is ... we have a couple of people that are ... Steve: Yeah, we do. Jill: ... About our program and listening and learning this to be able to do that. Steve: Can I answer this? Jill: Yeah. Steve: We get enough calls and questions from people who don't really want to start real estate companies like our members now. They just want exactly what this caller wants, they want to really get a great deal on a primary residence or a property to build a cabin on at any point in their life. Hey Fred, don't wait for us. Jill and I have decided we are going to do an educational program that's very specifically for people who just want to do one or two deals. A way scaled down version of how to do a mailer and things like that. Don't wait for us to complete that, because lord knows it's kind of far down on the list of programs that we're ... upon request programs that Jill and I are creating. Yes, the answer is heck yes. When you really do the math, the price of the education and the price of the data to implement what you're talking about will save you times ten. Jill: That's true. Steve: If you save $10,000 and our stuff is way less expensive than that, but I'm just using that number. If you implement our program and you buy a lot of $10,000 less than you expected, I mean ... Jill: You've won. Steve: Like times 5, it's 5 times more than the education costs. Jill: Exactly. Steve: If you do it the way we suggest that you do it, you're more likely going to save $20-$30-$40,000. Jill: What I love, too, is I have had a number of people that said, "Wait a minute, so here's what I did, I had 4 lots in the area that really piqued my interest, so I bought all 4. I'm living on this one, I put my cabin on this one, I sold the other 3 and guess what, it paid for it times ... and then some!" I'm like, "Brilliant!" Then they're out, they're happy. Steve: Then you're not retired anymore, because this is your new business. Jill: Well, you could keep going, that's true. Steve: You realize how easy it is and how little time it takes after you know what you're doing. After the learning curve. Jill: Yeah, after you do a couple of deals, you're right. You get into it and it's not hard. You could just sit. In his situation you could just sit and wait for the home runs to land in your lap and only act on those. Steve: Yeah, we have members who do that all the time. "I want to make $10,000 on every deal I do and I don't need to do a lot of deals." So they let the little ones go. Jill: Exactly. Steve: They feed them to the rest our community on success plans. Jill: Kind of like I do sometimes. Steve: We have a deal board. We have this thing called Deal Board for our members...

In this episode we sit down with Centricity Music General Manager, Steve Ford. 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a:hover{color:#8f8f8f !important;} www.fullcirclemusic.orgFCM007_-_Relationships_with_Steve_FordDuration: 00:50:21You're listening to The Full Circle Music Show. The why of the music biz.Chris: Welcome back to the Full Circle Music Show, it’s Chris Murphy and I'm sitting right beside Seth Mosley. How are you buddy?Seth: I'm good man. It's a busy week, lots of good stuff going on over here at the studio. And I’m excited to take just a few minutes out of our schedule to talk to one of our favorite people in the industry, Mister Steve Ford.Steve has been a guy that I've known for a long time, was one of the people that I met moving to Nashville in the music business. And we've talked to a lot of people on the creative side so far but we haven't yet talked to anybody on the label side. So, you think of the guy that sits in a dark room with a suit in a corner office, that's this guy! Except for not, he actually sits in a what is a pretty awesome office, he's the general manager of a label company called Centricity Music; has been pretty massively successful in the past couple of years and really since they opened. But, he's a really great leader and speaks to what they look for in a good producer, in a good artist, in a good team member at their label.So, if you're wanting to get involved in the music industry, this is a great episode to listened to. I learned a ton and I think you will too.Chris: You know, being a podcast junky, it's nice to meet a fellow podcast enthusiast as well. We had some great conversations in the episode but also talked a lot about our favorite podcasts on and off the mic. He's just a great guy, great to get to know him and I really appreciate Seth you setting this up. Another great interview and I can't wait to listen to it.Seth: And you can check out his company at centricitymusic.com. They have a lot of great artists that I think you'll dig.Audio clip commencesHey podcast listeners, something is coming February 1st 2016. Have you ever thought about a career in song writing or music production? We have created a couple courses with you guys in mind. We've been getting a lot of feedback on people wanting to know more about how to become a song worker; how to become a professional music producer or engineer. These courses were designed to answer some of those questions. Go to fullcirclemusic.org and sign up there for more information.Audio clip endsChris: You were saying earlier before we started rolling that you were a podcast guy.Steve: Oh yeah, big podcast guy.Chris: And, you've heard this podcast before?Steve: Yeah. I've listened to the first three.Chris: Okay. So, can I ask you to go out on a limb and give us a grade so far?Steve: You know what? I'd give them a solid B+. I want them longer. That's my thing; I want to go into the background. I want to hear when you did Brown Banishers which is funny because I've worked a lot with Brown but you didn't get past Amy Grant.Seth: Sure.Steve: I mean, this is the guy who worked with from everybody from Third Day to Mercy Me to Why Heart, he's done everybody like come one there are stories there. I tell people I'm on the corporate side because of Brown Banisher because of how he worked. I was an engineer in LA for ten years and he would come out and mix records with us, it was at a little place called Mama Joes and I would see him on the phone going, “Happy birthday sweetie.” Later knowing that it was Ellie; missed her first walk and all of these other things. And when my daughter was born, I was like, I can't do this. I needed a life and so I started praying and Peter York calls. So it’s because of him so it's fun to hear some his stories. I did a lot of records win Jack Joseph Puig and–Seth: And you were engineering at the time?Steve: Yeah. I was an engineer at LA.Seth: And at the time that was really engineering?Steve: Oh my gosh.Seth: You were cutting tape and…Steve: Yeah! I've cut a lot of two inch tape, quarter inch tape, half inch–Seth: Stuff that I hope to never do.Steve: You don't have to, Jericho does it for you.[Laughter] Seth: I don't know if Jericho has ever cut tape? In school he did.Steve: Now, I feel really old.Chris: Is that kind of like when you're in a biology class and not in any other time of your life will you need to dissect a frog but you just have to do it for the experience of it. Is that what it's become cutting tape?Steve: I don't know if you have to do it even that. It's sort of like this legend of starting a fire with flint, you know? It's sort of like, “Yeah. I used to cut tape.”[Laughter] Seth: I mean there's probably a resurgence. I would imagine knowing the process of what coffee has become and how artists.Steve: Yeah.Seth: I think there's a big thing in maybe it's the millennial generation or whatever it is but I think people are drawn back to slower, older more hands on processes it seems like than just pushing the button or going through the drive through–Steve: And somethings, don't you think, in some things its like just give me the button. Give me the filter on Instagram.Seth: That is true! That's true but then you've got the whole wave of people roasting their own coffee beans now and then they're grinding the with a hand grinder, and then they're putting in a… And, I'm saying this because we have like three artists that we work with; that come in and they bring their whole coffee apparatus.Steve: And they measure how much coffee goes in, weigh it?Chris: Yeah.Steve: My son has one of those has a scale that weighs, how much coffee goes in. Oh yeah just …Chris: Yeah, I thought you were going to say some of the artists that you work with, they actually bring their own barista in the studio because–Steve: I'm sure that will happen.Seth: That’s kind of a prerequisite to be in a band. There has to be at least one barista.Steve: True.Seth: In the band.Steve: There has to be one business guy in every band and one guy who can make great coffee.Seth: And then the guy who can actually play the instruments.Steve: Yeah. Then the artist.[Laughter]Chris: And then the fourth guy on base who just knows how to shape everybody's beards. He's more of a grooming guy.Seth: And sometime there's a drummer.[Laughter] Steve: You don't need a drummer; there are machines for that now.[Laughter] Seth: Yeah. I mean, just take us through a little bit of your journey, you started in L.A.?Steve: I was born and raised in L.A.; read an article when I was 14 years old about this guy named Sir George Martin. And I was like, “What? You can do that for a living?”Seth: Who is George Martin?Steve: He produced this little band called the Beatles, probably never heard of…most 20 year olds haven't heard of them so…Chris: And then isn't true that he went on from there to write The Game of Thrones?Steve: Did he? I'm not a Game of Throne person–Chris: Okay that's R.R. Martin, sorry.Steve: Wrong one. But I mean, you read about these guys and you sort of open a door into a new world that you didn't know existed. And so, I was 18 years old, junior out of high school walked into the recording studios and started from there.Seth: So, you didn't wait to have some sort of a college thing to get internships?Steve: My mom was like Reeds parents which was like, “That’s a nice hobby but let's make sure you have a backup plan, a plan B.” And so, I still went to school, I still went to college did all of that. Don't ask me my grade point average because I was going home at 4 o'clock in the morning, waking up at 8 to crawl into my first class, it was terrible. But yeah, my first job in the recording studio, I was making $500 a month from 6 o'clock to 3 o'clock in the morning.Seth: Living in L.A?Steve: Living in L.A.Seth: And that probably paid for a tenth of the rent?Steve: Maybe.Chris: Or, just the gas to get around?Steve: But I loved every second of it. And then from there you sort of work your way up. So, I did that… Like I said earlier my daughter was born and I was like an engineer’s life is a hard life in LA especially. Those were the days when you'd pay $1,500 a day block booking a studio; you booked a studio and you're paying $1,500 if your there six hours or eight there 24 hours. And a lot of them stayed 24 hours, and you just have next, next, next, next.Chris: And you've got to be the first guy there.Steve: First guy there, last guy out, yeah. You're sitting there winding tables at 6 o'clock in the morning going, “I just want to go home.”Chris: When the bug caught you, from that point until the time that you walked into that first studio and got a job, what skills were you harnessing?Steve: None.Chris: Just reading liner notes?Steve: Yeah. Lying in the floor, reading and going, there's one in North Hall and I'd write it down on a piece of paper because I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and start looking for them. Hey man that where Bill [inaudible 8:50] studio is or whatever the studio was and start. There wasn't really a whole lot you can do to prepare for it. It's no like in high school you go, “I wonder what class…”  I was in all the choirs and all the music stuff and that didn't prepare you for it. Probably the greatest skills for a studio engineer especially a starting one is being attentive, being hungry, being prepared and that depends on who you're working with.When you working together with somebody so well, I'm sure you and your team, they know what you want in advance and plugin something in before you even have to ask, that’s just working together. I've told a lot of wannabe engineers who want to go to some of these very expensive schools, don’t do it. Take that money, live on it for two years and go give yourself away for free for two years. You learn more two years in a studio than you will however long you go to one of the expensive ones.Chris: Yeah.Steve: It's just doing it. Just aligning the tape machine which is once again, it's like starting fire with flint again, knowing the lines taped but you learn by doing that.Chris: Absolutely.Steve: You learn by making a lot of mistakes. I recorded a lot of bad drum sounds.[Laughter] It just happened and then you go, “Oh if I do this, its better.” And 10,000 hours man, it takes 10,000 hours.Chris: Again, I think that it's not that schooling is necessarily a bad thing but the way that you learn in life versus the way that you learn in a classroom is different because for the most part, a classroom will deduct points for the stakes and if you’re in the–Steve: That's true. Good point.Chris: Yeah. I heard that -actually going back to our love of podcasts here- I heard Tim Farris on his podcast talking about the fact that he was going to go to, was considering something like Princeton or Harvard or something to go get his MBA. And he thought instead of doing that -or maybe this was advice given to him and he took it- instead of taking that couple hundred thousand dollars worth of whatever I needed to go get my MBA. I'm going to invest that in myself, very similar to what you're saying. And I'm going to use that to live on so that way I can go and I can intern for that company that I would never be able to if the money mattered that much. Because once you get out of school its like, “Oo I've got to go do something with this.” But if you've got the money set aside to go get the MBA anyway, it goes a long way to really feeling free to not have to pay that rent or pay that car payment that you could really dive in.Steve: And most people never use their college education for what they use. I had a meteorologist specialist. She had a degree in meteorology for TV and she was my marketing assistant. And you go, “I want to see what you spent four years doing versus what's your grade point average or what's you major.” I don't care about that stuff.Seth: So to fast forward to today, you are general manager of a very successful record label. When you got to hire somebody to your team, do you even say, “Hey, send in your resume. Where did you go to college?” Or does that not even cross your mind?Steve: I do want to see that. Four years in college gives me the impression that they follow through, they finish. You’ve said it before, finishing is such a hard art in today's world. To have somebody who finished is very valuable. Do I care about your grade point average? No. Do I even care about your major? No. Because if you have the right work ethic and the right heart, I can train you to do other things but I want to see how hard you're willing to work.Seth: So, a college degree still carries some weight but maybe it doesn't carry the weight that people think it does in terms of having the training because you kind of have to relearn it all when you get out into the real world.Steve: Exactly. Most college students that I see haven't learned anything that’s a really good use at a record label. My last five hires at Centricity have all come from internships. Now, I've had a lot of bad interns. I've wanted to fire a couple of interns, that's pretty bad when you want to fire somebody who works for free.Seth: What defines a good intern and what defines a bad intern?Steve: A bad intern sits on Facebook until you give them something to do and then they do exactly just to the letter of the law of what you asked them to do, hand it in to you and then get back on Facebook. A great intern does what you do and says, “Hey and I thought about this. And what about this more?” You give them to go to D and they go to G; then you give them to G and they go to S. I have a girl in my office, I asked her to do one thing and she says “Oh by the way while I was thinking about it I did these other three things that will help you out.” That type of proactivity and thinking ahead is so incredibly valuable. Like having somebody patching in your compressor before you ask for it. They know where you're going so fast that they're working ahead of you. And for all of those out there, that's old school once again patch bays.[Laughter]Seth: We have a small patch bay, we have two patch bays actually so we're probably on the old school end of things.Chris: It looks very cool though. It's looks kind of old science fiction movie.Steve: Spaghetti.[Laughter] Seth: It's like a telephone operator kind of thing. I heard a thing on…man, we keep talking about podcast, we're all just podcasts nerds, dude. I think that’s what we do for a living is listen to podcasts. And I heard one last night, they did a study of millennials; if you had a dream job, pick out of these choices what would be your dream job. Number one was the president; number two was a senator; number three was a successful athlete; number four foreign diplomat; five was a CEO of Apple; and then the last choice was the personal assistant to a famous actor or athlete. And 45% I think picked that one, hands down.Steve: They have no idea what that job looks like.Seth: They don't but it also speaks to they don't want to take the responsibility. Like, when you're that person, when you're the boss, they want to have a boss and maybe you can speak to a little bit to that but I feel like when you were talking about the internships, the ones who go above and beyond are the ones who are willing to take some responsibility and say, “Here's an idea” and just put it out there. How many interns would you have to get, to get that one good one?Steve: Probably 10 to 15.Seth: 10 to 15 to 1?Steve: Yeah, to 1. I think that’s what it is.Chris: Wow.Steve: Yeah, that's what it is. And I heard you, I think we had the conversation, there's such a different work ethic in today's young adults. And part of it is my fault, I'm a parent of a young adult they've been given everything in their whole life, they haven't had to work for anything. You want that iPhone! Here's that iPhone. You want that? Here's that. The art and the craft of working, the labor of getting something is a lost art, I think.Seth: So, would you go back and do those things differently?Steve: For my kids? My kids had to work.[Laughter]Seth: So, you weren't saying from my experience, you weren't–Steve: I’m saying that personally and much more of…[Laughter]What we made our kids do is like when they wanted that $100 American girl doll is you buy half, we’ll buy half. And all of a sudden they're digging out rocks in the backyard at $1 a bucket out of the garden. Because you want to give your kids what the value of work is and that's that doll at the end.In our world, I sat with an intern once and he was irritating everybody in the office. He's that guy who only asks questions because he wanted to tell you how much he knew. An intern needs to be quite and listen because there's a lot of information that flows around… And then they find the person that they can go to and go, what did that mean when he said this? So, what did that mean or… Come to me! I've told everyone in my internship, feel free to come to me and say, what does it mean when you said that? Versus this guy would come to you and tell you everything he knew. So, I was sitting him down one day and going,  “Man, you're irritating everybody. The whole office wants to prove you wrong.”Seth: You literally said that?Steve: I said that to him and later on, “I know I do that. I'm just trying to figure out where I fit and trying to find a job make $100, $120,000 a year and start in the music industry.” And I said, “You're in the wrong industry, man.”Seth: Go into finance!Steve: Go into finance, or go be an architect somewhere I guess or something. It was just about wanting to make as much money as his dad did, now! This generation wants to start where their parents have gotten to right now. I've seen it with artists, I've seen it with interns–Chris: They don't want a drop in their lifestyle that they've become accustomed to.Seth: A luxury once had, becomes a necessity.Steve and Chris: Ooohh.Steve: Very nice.Seth: And I'm very guilty of that. You fly first class once and you feel like a swine by sitting in coach.[Laughter] Steve: I've flown private jets twice in my whole life, in my whole career both times sort of accidentally. And man, once you do a private jet and you don't have to go through security and you’re just like, “Oh, I want that.” I say this all the time about artists. The worst thing you can do for an artist is start them touring in a bus because that's the expectation and then you know what happens? Is they got on the bus and they’re, “This isn't a very nice bus.” There are people in vans like when you were out in a van, to be on a bus, to be able to sleep horizontally would be the greatest thing ever and just because you started at this place and then you get into private jets. Everybody needs to start their first tour in a Silverado truck and then the next one to a bigger–Seth: Graduate to a suburban!Steve: A suburban would be great, then a 15 passenger old church van that you bought for $5,000 that the left side of the speakers don't work. And then, you work your way into a [inaudible 19:58] van and then into a bus. Then you're grateful for everything that's better along the way.Seth: It's more about the process than anything.Steve: Yeah.Seth: And getting there.Steve: A wise manager once said, his job is to make his artists life better every year, just a little bit better. I'm like, that's a good goal. That's a good goal to have.Seth: It is. So, your transition, we shipped about 20 years–Steve: We skipped through it very fast.[Laughter] Your transition from doing that 6pm to 3 in the morning thing in LA, you had your baby…Steve: Yep. My wife and I were praying at that point going, “God, please give us some sane clients or open another door.” And I just worked probably two months before with Peter York–Seth: And for those out there listening, was this at a record label you got your first…Steve: I was working with Peter in the studio and he called me up and said, “Hey, are you interested in A&R?” And I started in A&R in Sparrow…what's that 87, 88? Right around there and we were still in Chatsworth, California, spent time out there with him. So, I’ve been at Sparrow, moved from Sparrow to Star Songs and then back to Sparrow when they came up. Started in A&R worked my way into the marketing side, artist development side… So, yes back to Sparrow went to  Mer and worked my way up to Vice President at marketing at Mer, was general manager at [inaudible 21:34], general manager at SRI and now general manager at Centricity.Chris: Wow.Steve: It's been a long journey. If you’d ask me to 25 or 30 years ago, were you going to be general manager at Record Label? I would have laughed in your face.[Laughter]Chris: Because you didn't think it was attainable or because you didn't want have this job?Steve: That was not the path I was on. I thought, I was going to be producing records and engineering records.  Jack Pueg is still mixing great great records out there and I thought I was going to follow that path. God had something very different in mind which makes me laugh going I was talking to [inaudible 22:09] this morning and I can't believe I’ve been doing this, this long. When you're now an industry veteran it means that you've been around a long time.Seth: But I don't think looking back and I don’t want to put words in your mouth but you don't strike me as one of those people that's looking back and feeling like you’re working in the corporate side of the industry because you never made it on the creative side.Steve: No, no.Seth: You don't strike me as that at all.Steve: I made that decision for my family. What's funny is I've learned more about engineering and more about mixing and more about mastering being on the corporate side of what we're trying accomplish and why trying to do what we're doing. I learned so much about that. And for the first year or so, I was mad at God going, “Why did I just spend 9, 10 years in studios, in dark rooms working long hours if this is where you wanted me?” But realize, every day of my life in the last 27 years in the corporate side I've used information I learned in the studio. Sometimes we can't ask God why until you're 20 years down and you go, “oh I get it.”It's the path he puts us on, he brings people in and out of your life. I remember a girl over at Sparrow she was an accountant, that was her thing she loved accounting and God put me with her to learn that whole budgeting, it was only like for four months and then we were separated again but once again she changed my perspective and my life for the next 20 years. So, you don't know if these people that are coming in and out of your life are for a short period of how they're going to impact you.But yeah, I've sort of worked my way, I was one of the strange guys everybody wants to be in A&R. I started in A&R and left to got to marketing and then got back into it as I moved back up into the but everybody wants to be an A&R guy, hang out in the studios and have dinner with the artists which is not what an A&R guy does.Chris: Well it's the perception out there–Steve: Yeah, exactly, that's what they think.Chris: Just like you saying the artist is going to be in private jets.Seth: And for honestly if somebody's out there, can you break down what exactly what it is A&R. What is that? What is that job?Steve: A&R, we [inaudible 24:27] airports and restaurants which is [inaudible 24:28].[Laughter]It’s artist and repertoire. It’s basically looking for artist, finding people that have a seedling of something. Sometimes you don’t know what it is. We’ve all got our standards of what we feel like will lead to success. But finding that, nurturing it, grooming it, it’s sort of the mustard seed put into the ground, pat around and hopefully something really great grows out of it. Sometimes the plants don’t live, sometimes they give up. But it basically the music made by the A&R guy, we have one of the best in the industry in Centricity. When he’s done, when the music is done, he hands the baton over to me, and I go everywhere from there. But it’s his job to make sure we have hits, we have songs that work for live or work on the radio, an artist that’s got uniqueness to him that fits differently than everything else in the market place and sometimes it’s just plain old dumb luck. We’ve got all those where we’re like, “We though this person had everything they needed, was need for success and it didn’t work, and this one over here it’s that seedling and it’s just growing like crazy.Seth: Yeah, sometimes you don’t know or probably more often than not, I would think.Steve: How many songs have you worked on and said, “Man, that’s the hit.” I have a memory of I will eat my shoe if this is not [inaudible 26:04][Laughter] I believe you owe me a shoe eaten.Seth: I’m wearing Nikes right now. I have a feeling that this material is not organic.Chris: I was going to say, whatever you choose make sure its biodegradable.Steve: I was going to send you a shoe after one particular sock.[Laughter]We’ve all got them dude.Seth: Oh yeah, totally. I think more often than not and it’s honestly becoming a theme on this show is, we’re all just kind of winging it we’re all just guessing. So, my question to that is, I mean, it sounds like there’s a lot of responsibility placed on the shoulders of an A&R person. They’re the one that’s finding and nurturing talent and ultimately seeing what songs make it on records.I think a lot of people listening in our podcast audience, we have a lot of producers and writers and people outside of the music industry but then there are also probably some people who are just wanting to get in on the music business side and people who maybe want to be in music marketing or be in music management or maybe do what you’re doing someday, run a record label. You said what you look for interns, what qualifies a person to be an A&R person?Steve: Wow. Interesting. There are a few A&R guys you should interview. A great A&R person is able to inspire an artist beyond what they’ve every thought they could do. A great A&R person knows how to get a good song to a great song. We’re no longer in a society that good is not good enough, it has to be great. A great A&R guy can go, “You know what? There are seedlings, there are moments in here that are really great.” But you’re missing the mark I these two or three places. And then, coming in and sitting side by side with a producer like you and making sure that… I think that I’m a big movie buff and A&R guy is sort of like an executive producer on a movie where you put the team together and then sort of let the team go make the music. So, it’s the right producer for the right, for the right song and for the right artists and then let them shine where they go. It’s very much putting the pieces together. They’re not usually playing the music, they’re not [inaudible 28:34] musicians, they have to have a really good song sense and I think one of the skills an A&R guy has to know is, it’s not about them. They’ve got to know their audience, know what they’re making for because all of us have a tendency to gravitate towards music that’s on the fringe because we listen to so much stuff that all of the stuff in the middle starts mucking up. There’s a big muck in the middle. So, “you know what I like? I like this thing way over here or way over there.” Where a normal consumer listens to 10 records a year, the middle is the sweet spot for them. So, an A&R guy that understands who he’s trying to record for is very important.Seth: That’s very good. And, you said that they have to have a great song sense, that is even a sticky situation because why is one person’s song sense better than the other? Is that determined by track record? And, if you’ve never done A&R before, how do you prove that, hey I know a hit when I hear one?Steve: You know what? Our history of…John Mays is a 25 years somebody took a chance on him 27 years ago and said “You’re a great musician on the road, let me bring you in here.” Part is the relationship, you know, can they sit and hang with an artist? You know, you’ve been in these mediums. Where it’s like can you move an artist from A to Z while making the artist think it’s their move? As a producer it’s the same skill set of can you get an artist to bend without knowing that they’re bending? Or being able to move–Seth: All the artists out there, they just had a–Steve: I know they had a convulsion.[Laughter]And all the producer are like, yeah![Laughter]But that’s part of it, of like how do you get a song… because you don’t want to tell an artist, “You know what? This song sucks.” You just want to say, “Let’s work on the chorus. The chorus isn’t paying off hard enough, let’s make it lift better. Let’s make it shine.” Whatever it may be, moving them away from, “I love this, this is my baby. It’s beautiful.” To let’s keep working on this song.Seth: So, it sounds like it maybe starts with who they are as a person. Are they a good hang? Are they a servant? And then, the music kind of just follows and that taste follows.Steve: Our young A&R guy over there, he went through our radio department so he was listening to radio hits, radio hits, radio hits. And part of it is… There’s marketing guy named Roy Williams, I went to a seminar with him and he said he has a friend that works at General Market Record Label to pick all the singles and I’m like, “How did you learn this?” And the guy basically said, “Since I was five years old, every week I’d get my allowance and I would go buy the number one song in America.” And so for his whole life, he poured into himself hits. This is what a hit sounds like, this is what a hit sounds like, this is what a hit sounds like.Seth: That’s pretty good wisdom, right there.Steve: And so, at a certain point you go, you got to know our music, you got to listen to our music, you got to know what a hit sounds like. I’ve heard a lot of kids come though “I hate listening to Christian radio.” Then why do you listen to Christian music? How many people in country music go, “[inaudible 32:11] but I hate country music.” Get out! You’re not going to succeed.[Laughter]But they almost wear it as a banner that I hate Christian music in our market place. We have an open concept office and I’ll try to listen to two hours of Christian radio every day in my office. And if I’m listening to it, everybody in my office is listening to it too; more for this is what a hit sounds like, this is what radio sounds lie. If you’re trying to meet a need at radio and you don’t know what they’re playing, how can you meet the need? So…I digress, sorry.Seth: No, that’s gold. That’s all gold.Steve: I think you nailed it in your earlier podcast when you said, this is a servant industry. It really is. And in my life, it took me a lot of time to figure out what my calling was. I knew I wasn’t an artist but God, what does that mean? And I was walking through Exodus with my kids when they were very young and hit Exodus 17 where God say to Moses, they’re out of Egypt heading towards the Promised Land and they hit the Analcites, God calls Moses up to the hill top; arms up in the air he wins, arms down they lose. But what never caught to me until I was reading it, Moses took two people along with him Aaron and Hur and I love to say I am the Hur in the Moses’ life. It’s my job, what Hur was up there to do is to hold Moses’ arms up, that’s all he did. When Moses was weak, when Moses needed help, Hur held his hands up. That’s my calling be a servant, be there to hold your hands up. Some people know Aaron “Aaron, you know, Moses’ little brother.” No one knows who Hur is. If you’re okay standing, holding someone’s arms up and no one recognizes, you are created to be in the music industry. Because you’re not in to be the rock stars; we’re in the back of the room with our arms folded, looking at the person on stage going, “Yeah. I was there to hold their arms up.”Chris: That’s wise. One of my favorite movies is That Thing You Do, I don’t know if any of you have seen that.Steve: Yeah. I’m the guy that goes, “You look great in black.”[Laughter]Chris: Has anyone told you that?Steve: Yeah.Chris: But, one of my favorite characters in the movie, and they’re filled with them. Anybody out there that hasn’t seen it, it’s a great movie.Steve: Please, go see it.Chris: But there’s Horus who’s basically the A&R guy that sees them in–Steve: In the camper-[Laughter]Chris: Yeah, he lives in a camper and he’s essentially the A&R guy. But he sees them in a performance at an Italian restaurant or something and comes and buys their album and get’s them to sign a little deal. And then at the end, when they get signed to a major label and they’re going out to play these state fairs, Horus leaves and the main character drummer of the band says, “We don’t want you to leave.” And he goes, “My [inaudible 35:27] is done. I’ve done what I’m supposed to do.” And then move on to the next thing and so he wasn’t meant to ride that out the whole movie; he’s there for a specific piece to move it from A to C. He’s the B part of it, the Hur of that story so to speak.Steve: Nowadays, you’d call them just production deals. You start working with an unknown artist who has a little bit of talent, you start developing them and then you start shopping them to record labels. And then you go, my job here is done. They then take the baton and now try to make to a national artist. If you make 2 out of 20, 3 out of 20, you’re in great shape. You’re a hall of fame baseball player if you hit 3 out of 10. And you’re a hall of fame A&R guy if 3 out of your 10 are hit artists.It’s a cycle, you have the young artist going up; you have the artist at their peak; and then you have some that are on their way down. And you’ve got to keep that circle going because any artist that’s been at the top is going to be past its peak and slowly work its way down, and you got to have the new artist coming up behind to grow into. So it’s a continual cycle of in the music industry. The circle of life in music would be that.Chris: I had a mentor –Scott [inaudible 36:48] if you’re listening I’m about to talk about you- but he always talked about how life in the ministry or in a career is kind of like looking at life or the people that you interact is like a watching a parade go by. There are things that are right in front of you, there are things that you just saw, and there are things that are coming down. And to really appreciate what is happening in the parade you have to absorb it all. And so there’s a little bit of grabbing from each of those in order to get the full experience of it all.Steve: And the bigger what’s right in front of you, the bigger those artists are in front of you, sometimes you don’t have time to look behind and develop what’s behind and what happens is with a lot of these record labels and I’ve been at these where, man they’ve got the big, and they slowly slipping. The [inaudible 37:32] slowly start getting past their prime and they haven’t developed anything behind them and then you’re in trouble because you’ve got this machine you’ve got to feed and you haven’t created for the future, it’s only for the present.And so, every A&R guy wants to sing but some of the big labels, the big artists, the A’s are so big that’s all they’re paying attention to. We’ve all seen it, we’ve all seen artists where we say, “Man, they’re amazing” but they got lost in the shuffle and that’s the sadness. We forget that we’re playing with people’s lives, especially on the record label side their dreams.I signed this band at a label and they were 18 years old when I signed them and 21 years old when I had to drop them. So, their dreams had come true and shattered by the time they were 21. And it’s just hard when you start thinking about that stuff.Chris: That’s true. And if you think about it there are some people that are fortunate enough to have a full career in the music industry and there are some people that have a three year window kind of like a profession sports guy or those things. There’s a window and the once you pass it, yeah but the guy is only 24 and the band is only 21. What’s coming up for them?Steve: You know what, I think it’s a catalyst of those people leaving or burning out, is balance. You guys have said it; I can walk through a record label at 8 o’clock at night and I can tell you which employees will be gone in a year because they have nothing to put back into themselves. The music industry is a take industry, it just continues squeezing and it just wants more and more and more. If you have one they want five; if you have five we want ten; if we have ten we want twenty, and it’s never enough. My poor radio team goes, “Hey we got number one.” And I’m like, “Great. How do we keep it on number one for another week?” It’s never enough and so you continue squeezing out what this industry does, if you don’t have a ministry, if you don’t have a relationship, if you don’t have friends that give back to you that don’t care what you do  for a living and basically go, “Yeah, yeah. You do music, how are you?” You know, if there aren’t nursing students at the college that you got to that are your friends, you’re going to burn out.  Because there’s nothing giving back, there’s no one pouring into you. Sooner or later the candle ends, there’s no more fuel and it juts burns out.So, I try to keep my staff saying, I want you to go to concerts and date people and go home at 6 o’clock and have a life. Because if you don’t have a life you have nothing to come back when you come back tomo