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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
In today's episode, we're tackling an intriguing question: Can you trade in your older annuity for a newer, more advantageous one? With interest rates on the rise, now is a particularly opportune time to consider upgrading your annuity. Steve discusses the nuances of this decision, emphasizing that while it can be a favorable move in some cases, it may come with certain costs. As the discussion unfolds, Steve shares remarkable rates and opportunities available with certain annuity products. He highlights the attractiveness of index annuities, which participate in market gains while ensuring zero losses. Steve underscores the importance of staying up-to-date with industry trends and seizing high-yield products before they're no longer available. Steve also shares a real-life success story of a client who, like many others, found themselves in an annuity that didn't align with their goals. By offering the right solution and facilitating a strategic transition, Steve helped this client turn a potentially unfavorable situation into a bright financial future for their family. If you're curious about optimizing your annuity or exploring opportunities for growth, call Steve TODAY for your complimentary Annuity Stress Test! Subscribe and Follow the “Ready Set Retire" podcast on Apple or Spotify!
Jill Friday - I Love Everything about Your Land But the Price (LA 1867) Transcript: Steve: Video - three, two. Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the still amazingly nice weather, sweet Detroit, Michigan. Why did I just call it Sweet Detroit, Michigan? If you have not been downtown lately, Detroit, let me tell you, it's changed and it's awesome. Steve: Really is. Jill: Fancy restaurants and walking down the street, having a good time and shopping and yeah. Steve: Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about - I'm quoting her now. "I love everything about the land deal, except the price." Happens all the time. If you buy and sell a lot of property, you know this happens. Jill: Yep. Steve: If you're still in the beginning stages of your career here, get ready for it. Jill: Yep. Steve: Deal's awesome, too expensive. Jill: Yep. And as a side note for yesterday, the Happiness Lab is still existing, so that was kind of funny. Clearly Jack does not listen to that. Steve: No. Nor have I been invited to be on the show. Jill: No, no, that's okay. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our land investors, one of our members of the landinvestors.com online community. It's free and I hope you know that we have a site now and we've had it for several years called parcelfact.com. It allows you to look up an assessor's parcel number and find the property and all the things that we think as land investors, you need to know about to make a real quick first, phase one due diligence decision. Jill: Uhuh. Steve: Check it out. Parcelfact.com. Jill: Exactly. Okay. "Can someone with Land Academy experience, give me some advice on PATLive? I'm new to Land Academy and have the ability to answer my own calls from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM central standard time. I've been in sales for 40 plus years, so answering the phone is the easy part for me. However, if I'm on the phone, it will go to a vendor voicemail, which I want to avoid. I'm starting with a five to 6,000 unit mailer month and I'm going to wrap up to 10,000 plus units a month as the business income grows. My budget's tight, so I'm trying to get a price range on what your average spend is for a 10,000 unit mailer. Thanks in advance for your help." Steve: I think you're setting yourself up for serious success here. If you're going to answer the phone between seven and seven, it's 12 hours a day. I think that's a great start. I really would highly recommend, Jill, this is more your area than mine, to have yourself with an account with PATLive or whatever, so that if you do miss calls, which nobody wants; but it happens, especially in the beginning part of a mailer, then- Jill: They could roll over to PATLive. Or for whatever reason, you're not available every single day from seven to seven, you could just flip a switch and have them go to PATLive. Steve: No, I think you thought this out perfectly well. I love your five to 6,000 mailers a month and ramping up to 10,000. You're going to be successful. Jill: And taking the initial calls, you're just going to learn so much about this and sellers and develop your own script and tweak what you want PATLive to do for you and your business. I think it's awesome. Steve: Yeah. Jill: Don't change a thing. I know it might be a bit in the beginning, but just do it. And there's always waves when the mail hits; you know it. There's a couple crazy days, that's fine. And then it starts to trickle off. You're like, "ah, you know what? I can handle this." You'll be - you could do it because you're a professional - Sid, you could handle it. Steve: Yeah. Yes. Answer the phone. Seven hours a day is huge. Jill: Ten - Steve: What do you think - Jill: 12. Yeah. Steve: What do you think [inaudible 00:03:41], he's asking at the end here, for 10,000 units. Jill: Oh,
Jill Friday - I Love Everything about Your Land But the Price (LA 1867) Transcript: Steve: Video - three, two. Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the still amazingly nice weather, sweet Detroit, Michigan. Why did I just call it Sweet Detroit, Michigan? If you have not been downtown lately, Detroit, let me tell you, it's changed and it's awesome. Steve: Really is. Jill: Fancy restaurants and walking down the street, having a good time and shopping and yeah. Steve: Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about - I'm quoting her now. "I love everything about the land deal, except the price." Happens all the time. If you buy and sell a lot of property, you know this happens. Jill: Yep. Steve: If you're still in the beginning stages of your career here, get ready for it. Jill: Yep. Steve: Deal's awesome, too expensive. Jill: Yep. And as a side note for yesterday, the Happiness Lab is still existing, so that was kind of funny. Clearly Jack does not listen to that. Steve: No. Nor have I been invited to be on the show. Jill: No, no, that's okay. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our land investors, one of our members of the landinvestors.com online community. It's free and I hope you know that we have a site now and we've had it for several years called parcelfact.com. It allows you to look up an assessor's parcel number and find the property and all the things that we think as land investors, you need to know about to make a real quick first, phase one due diligence decision. Jill: Uhuh. Steve: Check it out. Parcelfact.com. Jill: Exactly. Okay. "Can someone with Land Academy experience, give me some advice on PATLive? I'm new to Land Academy and have the ability to answer my own calls from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM central standard time. I've been in sales for 40 plus years, so answering the phone is the easy part for me. However, if I'm on the phone, it will go to a vendor voicemail, which I want to avoid. I'm starting with a five to 6,000 unit mailer month and I'm going to wrap up to 10,000 plus units a month as the business income grows. My budget's tight, so I'm trying to get a price range on what your average spend is for a 10,000 unit mailer. Thanks in advance for your help." Steve: I think you're setting yourself up for serious success here. If you're going to answer the phone between seven and seven, it's 12 hours a day. I think that's a great start. I really would highly recommend, Jill, this is more your area than mine, to have yourself with an account with PATLive or whatever, so that if you do miss calls, which nobody wants; but it happens, especially in the beginning part of a mailer, then- Jill: They could roll over to PATLive. Or for whatever reason, you're not available every single day from seven to seven, you could just flip a switch and have them go to PATLive. Steve: No, I think you thought this out perfectly well. I love your five to 6,000 mailers a month and ramping up to 10,000. You're going to be successful. Jill: And taking the initial calls, you're just going to learn so much about this and sellers and develop your own script and tweak what you want PATLive to do for you and your business. I think it's awesome. Steve: Yeah. Jill: Don't change a thing. I know it might be a bit in the beginning, but just do it. And there's always waves when the mail hits; you know it. There's a couple crazy days, that's fine. And then it starts to trickle off. You're like, "ah, you know what? I can handle this." You'll be - you could do it because you're a professional - Sid, you could handle it. Steve: Yeah. Yes. Answer the phone. Seven hours a day is huge. Jill: Ten - Steve: What do you think - Jill: 12. Yeah. Steve: What do you think [inaudible 00:03:41], he's asking at the end here, for 10,000 units. Jill: Oh,
Jill Friday - I Love Everything about Your Land But the Price (LA 1867) Transcript: Steve: Video - three, two. Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the still amazingly nice weather, sweet Detroit, Michigan. Why did I just call it Sweet Detroit, Michigan? If you have not been downtown lately, Detroit, let me tell you, it's changed and it's awesome. Steve: Really is. Jill: Fancy restaurants and walking down the street, having a good time and shopping and yeah. Steve: Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about - I'm quoting her now. "I love everything about the land deal, except the price." Happens all the time. If you buy and sell a lot of property, you know this happens. Jill: Yep. Steve: If you're still in the beginning stages of your career here, get ready for it. Jill: Yep. Steve: Deal's awesome, too expensive. Jill: Yep. And as a side note for yesterday, the Happiness Lab is still existing, so that was kind of funny. Clearly Jack does not listen to that. Steve: No. Nor have I been invited to be on the show. Jill: No, no, that's okay. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our land investors, one of our members of the landinvestors.com online community. It's free and I hope you know that we have a site now and we've had it for several years called parcelfact.com. It allows you to look up an assessor's parcel number and find the property and all the things that we think as land investors, you need to know about to make a real quick first, phase one due diligence decision. Jill: Uhuh. Steve: Check it out. Parcelfact.com. Jill: Exactly. Okay. "Can someone with Land Academy experience, give me some advice on PATLive? I'm new to Land Academy and have the ability to answer my own calls from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM central standard time. I've been in sales for 40 plus years, so answering the phone is the easy part for me. However, if I'm on the phone, it will go to a vendor voicemail, which I want to avoid. I'm starting with a five to 6,000 unit mailer month and I'm going to wrap up to 10,000 plus units a month as the business income grows. My budget's tight, so I'm trying to get a price range on what your average spend is for a 10,000 unit mailer. Thanks in advance for your help." Steve: I think you're setting yourself up for serious success here. If you're going to answer the phone between seven and seven, it's 12 hours a day. I think that's a great start. I really would highly recommend, Jill, this is more your area than mine, to have yourself with an account with PATLive or whatever, so that if you do miss calls, which nobody wants; but it happens, especially in the beginning part of a mailer, then- Jill: They could roll over to PATLive. Or for whatever reason, you're not available every single day from seven to seven, you could just flip a switch and have them go to PATLive. Steve: No, I think you thought this out perfectly well. I love your five to 6,000 mailers a month and ramping up to 10,000. You're going to be successful. Jill: And taking the initial calls, you're just going to learn so much about this and sellers and develop your own script and tweak what you want PATLive to do for you and your business. I think it's awesome. Steve: Yeah. Jill: Don't change a thing. I know it might be a bit in the beginning, but just do it. And there's always waves when the mail hits; you know it. There's a couple crazy days, that's fine. And then it starts to trickle off. You're like, "ah, you know what? I can handle this." You'll be - you could do it because you're a professional - Sid, you could handle it. Steve: Yeah. Yes. Answer the phone. Seven hours a day is huge. Jill: Ten - Steve: What do you think - Jill: 12. Yeah. Steve: What do you think [inaudible 00:03:41], he's asking at the end here, for 10,000 units. Jill: Oh,
Thinking OTB | Thinking Outside the Box with Steve Valentine and Bernie Espinosa
We're doing things a little differently for this week's podcast, with an episode focusing on Bernie asking Steve some questions about how he's doing as an agent in today's market. The truth is that things aren't always sunshine and rainbows, even for someone who's had success in the market like Steve, but even when times are hard, there is still opportunity to be made if you have the right perspective on things. The reality is that so much of the real estate market revolves around the perspective you have on things: are you playing by the rules as they're set by other people, or are you on the lookout for those outside the box solutions that are going to make you a winner? The hard truth is that things aren't always going to work out the way that you want them to. Even Steve has been pinched by the changes to the market. As an agent, we need to get out of the mindset that we can predict the future because as we've seen in the last few years, things can change on a dime, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes in harsh ways. Keeping an eye on how things are changing can help to keep a clear head when they do change and maintaining that long term perspective on surviving in the market can help you find those outside the box moves that can keep you floating while everyone around you is convinced that they're sinking. “Nobody's perfect, and if somebody tells you they've done all these things and they've never lost money, that's all bullshit.” – Steve “There are some agents out there that are setting real expectations for the sellers by leveraging data and information, and then there are the agents that are still over-promising like it's a fire sale and are desperate calling people to try and make a deal.” – Bernie “2008 compared to today is completely different. Back then it was greed and all the stuff being buried, and all the bets against the market.” – Steve “Today's market is much more positive knowing that yes, there are some shifts and things are happening, but the goal is that we need to have more conversations and more guidance and giving people the things that they need. As real estate agents, we have the ability to be either the grim reaper or a hope dealer.” – Steve Hey you! You're a long-time listener, time to be a first-time caller! Have a question or topic you'd like us to cover? Drop a line to our DM's at: Steve's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevedvalentine/ Bernie's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bernzpix/ You can find us on all the major Podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to be notified when new episodes are live and leave us a review and 5-star rating to help the show grow!
“It's ok to say I want back what was me before. It's ok to say I want the quality of life back.” ~ Steve Today, we talk with Steve. Steve is an experienced physiotherapist who lived with a temporary ileostomy for 7 months post resection, after surgery due to Bowel Cancer. He decided to choose quality of life over quantity when he opted to stop his 2nd chemotherapy midway, focusing on improved choices of lifestyle - fitness, food, good relationships, etc. However, this experience was also an eye opener for Steve. From bouts of erectile dysfunction, Peyronies, and to the challenges of having a stoma on his abdomen. All this led to his discovery and invention - an invention geared towards lessening the challenges of patients with a stoma. Listen here to this inspiring story from Steve. And remember, from Steve's message, U-can! For the link to U-Can's website, please don't forget to check the show notes. --- ----- If you feel The Penis Project is valuable to you then, please review and subscribe as this will ensure more people get to hear what we have to say. ---------- Websites: https://thepenisproject.org/ https://rshealth.com.au/ http://www.menshealthphysiotherapy.com.au/ http://prost.com.au/ https://www.theyogavine.com.au Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Restorativeshealthclinic Music David Mercy https://open.spotify.com/artist/1HbvnltKu4XbWTmk0kpVB9?si=D1xP5dDVQK-zzNU3rViRWg Producer Thomas Evans: The SOTA Process https://www.instagram.com/thesotaprocess/ https://open.spotify.com/show/4Jf2IYXRlgfsiqNARsY8fi
Jack Thursday - Chasing Zero (LA 1771) Transcript: Steve and Jill here. Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the valley of the sun. Steve: Today is Jack Thursday and I'm going to talk about this concept I created quite some time ago that just doesn't seem to die. It's sung to some people called Chasing Zero. Jill: I'm excited. I love it. This comes up often. I'm trying to think of, probably because of career path, it comes up in career path. You talk about it and we've done a few shows on this. This whole topic and this description intrigues people, myself included. So, I'm glad we're doing another show on this today. Steve: Good, Jill. Before we get into it though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free and don't forget to subscribe to the Land Academy YouTube channel. Comment on the shows you like. Jill: Josh wrote, "Hi all, new guy here with a quick question. Got my first mailer and I'm getting some responses. Tried to bring my wife into the operation/discussion, but she's having a hard time wrapping her head around the vacant land, then I mentioned houses. Her interest peaked quite a bit and she's been looking at the House Academy public website. Curious of your thoughts on House Academy training business model, and if any other newbies are doing both, or houses exclusively. Likewise, any thoughts as to why the House Academy podcast and overall focus from Jack and Jill has waned a bit? Market? Just making that model less appealing? Feel free to PM me if that's easier." Oh, I love it. This is good. Steve: This is a very popular topic on discord. Jill: Yep. Steve: There is a lot of responses to this. Jill: I bet. Steve: I love buying and selling houses. Jill: Me too. Steve: Right now it is the most competitive I've ever seen it in my entire career. Jill: And I don't want to play. Steve: If you talk to any homeowner, especially in those target areas, with mid range, two, three, four hundred thousand dollars, buy it for 300, sell it for 400 without any real renovation, they'll tell you that they get two or three offers a week. Jill: Right. Steve: And very frustrated. They'll tell you in a very slam it down on the desk frustrated way. We don't care to run with that, so much competition. We could make it work. We've done it. When the market ... and everybody said this on discord. Jill: Isn't that funny? Steve: I'm reiterating it. When a market chills out a little we'll get back into it. Jill: It seems counterintuitive, but you're like, "Wait a minute. Why would you want now to buy houses and jump in the pool when it's so hot because everything sells so fast?" But, Steven's right, because of the whole way that we operate everything is buying it right. If I'm in a bidding war with somebody else, I'm not buying it right. It's just too nutty. I like it to be slowed down a little bit, not as much competition, I can get some smoking deals, mark it up very effectively, and then sell it and move on. Steve: Here's the truth. Jill: But I like houses, too. Steve: Here's the truth time. If somebody put a gun to my head and said, "You're going to buy and sell houses now." I would sit down. I would run data like I run it now with some changes, and then I would look at the pretty rural markets that are pretty solidly served by useful internet service providers so you can get a good connection, because everybody seems to be ... more and more people are working from home and moving out into outlying areas. So I could choose the right rural markets and buy and sell houses all day long. Jill: Correct. Steve: The fact is, and if I had a nickel for every Land Academy member that came to Jill and I and said, "Wow, thank you. I'm so much out of the house business now. It's so much easier and more profitable to buy and sell land.
Jack Thursday - Chasing Zero (LA 1771) Transcript: Steve and Jill here. Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the valley of the sun. Steve: Today is Jack Thursday and I'm going to talk about this concept I created quite some time ago that just doesn't seem to die. It's sung to some people called Chasing Zero. Jill: I'm excited. I love it. This comes up often. I'm trying to think of, probably because of career path, it comes up in career path. You talk about it and we've done a few shows on this. This whole topic and this description intrigues people, myself included. So, I'm glad we're doing another show on this today. Steve: Good, Jill. Before we get into it though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free and don't forget to subscribe to the Land Academy YouTube channel. Comment on the shows you like. Jill: Josh wrote, "Hi all, new guy here with a quick question. Got my first mailer and I'm getting some responses. Tried to bring my wife into the operation/discussion, but she's having a hard time wrapping her head around the vacant land, then I mentioned houses. Her interest peaked quite a bit and she's been looking at the House Academy public website. Curious of your thoughts on House Academy training business model, and if any other newbies are doing both, or houses exclusively. Likewise, any thoughts as to why the House Academy podcast and overall focus from Jack and Jill has waned a bit? Market? Just making that model less appealing? Feel free to PM me if that's easier." Oh, I love it. This is good. Steve: This is a very popular topic on discord. Jill: Yep. Steve: There is a lot of responses to this. Jill: I bet. Steve: I love buying and selling houses. Jill: Me too. Steve: Right now it is the most competitive I've ever seen it in my entire career. Jill: And I don't want to play. Steve: If you talk to any homeowner, especially in those target areas, with mid range, two, three, four hundred thousand dollars, buy it for 300, sell it for 400 without any real renovation, they'll tell you that they get two or three offers a week. Jill: Right. Steve: And very frustrated. They'll tell you in a very slam it down on the desk frustrated way. We don't care to run with that, so much competition. We could make it work. We've done it. When the market ... and everybody said this on discord. Jill: Isn't that funny? Steve: I'm reiterating it. When a market chills out a little we'll get back into it. Jill: It seems counterintuitive, but you're like, "Wait a minute. Why would you want now to buy houses and jump in the pool when it's so hot because everything sells so fast?" But, Steven's right, because of the whole way that we operate everything is buying it right. If I'm in a bidding war with somebody else, I'm not buying it right. It's just too nutty. I like it to be slowed down a little bit, not as much competition, I can get some smoking deals, mark it up very effectively, and then sell it and move on. Steve: Here's the truth. Jill: But I like houses, too. Steve: Here's the truth time. If somebody put a gun to my head and said, "You're going to buy and sell houses now." I would sit down. I would run data like I run it now with some changes, and then I would look at the pretty rural markets that are pretty solidly served by useful internet service providers so you can get a good connection, because everybody seems to be ... more and more people are working from home and moving out into outlying areas. So I could choose the right rural markets and buy and sell houses all day long. Jill: Correct. Steve: The fact is, and if I had a nickel for every Land Academy member that came to Jill and I and said, "Wow, thank you. I'm so much out of the house business now. It's so much easier and more profitable to buy and sell land.
Jack Thursday - Chasing Zero (LA 1771) Transcript: Steve and Jill here. Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the valley of the sun. Steve: Today is Jack Thursday and I'm going to talk about this concept I created quite some time ago that just doesn't seem to die. It's sung to some people called Chasing Zero. Jill: I'm excited. I love it. This comes up often. I'm trying to think of, probably because of career path, it comes up in career path. You talk about it and we've done a few shows on this. This whole topic and this description intrigues people, myself included. So, I'm glad we're doing another show on this today. Steve: Good, Jill. Before we get into it though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free and don't forget to subscribe to the Land Academy YouTube channel. Comment on the shows you like. Jill: Josh wrote, "Hi all, new guy here with a quick question. Got my first mailer and I'm getting some responses. Tried to bring my wife into the operation/discussion, but she's having a hard time wrapping her head around the vacant land, then I mentioned houses. Her interest peaked quite a bit and she's been looking at the House Academy public website. Curious of your thoughts on House Academy training business model, and if any other newbies are doing both, or houses exclusively. Likewise, any thoughts as to why the House Academy podcast and overall focus from Jack and Jill has waned a bit? Market? Just making that model less appealing? Feel free to PM me if that's easier." Oh, I love it. This is good. Steve: This is a very popular topic on discord. Jill: Yep. Steve: There is a lot of responses to this. Jill: I bet. Steve: I love buying and selling houses. Jill: Me too. Steve: Right now it is the most competitive I've ever seen it in my entire career. Jill: And I don't want to play. Steve: If you talk to any homeowner, especially in those target areas, with mid range, two, three, four hundred thousand dollars, buy it for 300, sell it for 400 without any real renovation, they'll tell you that they get two or three offers a week. Jill: Right. Steve: And very frustrated. They'll tell you in a very slam it down on the desk frustrated way. We don't care to run with that, so much competition. We could make it work. We've done it. When the market ... and everybody said this on discord. Jill: Isn't that funny? Steve: I'm reiterating it. When a market chills out a little we'll get back into it. Jill: It seems counterintuitive, but you're like, "Wait a minute. Why would you want now to buy houses and jump in the pool when it's so hot because everything sells so fast?" But, Steven's right, because of the whole way that we operate everything is buying it right. If I'm in a bidding war with somebody else, I'm not buying it right. It's just too nutty. I like it to be slowed down a little bit, not as much competition, I can get some smoking deals, mark it up very effectively, and then sell it and move on. Steve: Here's the truth. Jill: But I like houses, too. Steve: Here's the truth time. If somebody put a gun to my head and said, "You're going to buy and sell houses now." I would sit down. I would run data like I run it now with some changes, and then I would look at the pretty rural markets that are pretty solidly served by useful internet service providers so you can get a good connection, because everybody seems to be ... more and more people are working from home and moving out into outlying areas. So I could choose the right rural markets and buy and sell houses all day long. Jill: Correct. Steve: The fact is, and if I had a nickel for every Land Academy member that came to Jill and I and said, "Wow, thank you. I'm so much out of the house business now. It's so much easier and more profitable to buy and sell land.
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What is HOA and Why it Matters in Land Investing (LA 1430) 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 Dewitt broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about what is an HOA, and why does it matter in land investing? I hate them. Who doesn't? Jill: I know. Who wants more people involved telling you what you can and cannot do with the property that you own. By the way, they don't own it, you do. So I have a lot to say about this. Steve: I do, too. I have to tell you, I've always had this weird fascination with somehow requesting that clinical psychiatrists or psychologists do a dissertation on certain topics. And this has always been one of them. What psychologically makes someone choose, forget about the money, [crosstalk 00:01:02] make someone choose to start an HOA? Which I get, because you make some money. But more importantly, why do you seek out to live in an HOA or seek out some type of a land where there's more rules, not less? Is it better that we have more laws in life or less laws? Jill: I was just thinking that. Working at an HOA has got to be like the IRS. There's really no reason anyone's going to call you happy. They're calling you to find out what's the stupid rule, or why did I get fined? Steve: What's that movie, when the kids were little? It was a cartoon about the bunch of animals are living in the back of the woods, and they in they're all hibernating. And they woke up out of hibernation and there this massive subdivision where they used to live? Jill: Yep. Steve: What's it called? Hedge ... Jill: I forgot, and they went through the fence. Steve: Over the Hedge. Jill: That's right. Steve: Over the Hedge. Yeah. Jill: Okay. Steve: And there was this character in there, this woman who was the classic real estate agent/president of the HOA. And they took it to extremities where she would measure the length of everybody's lawn and then send them notes. Do you remember that? Jill: No. I mean, I do remember that movie, but I don't remember it in that level of detail that you have. I do not recall. That is so flipping funny. I love it. Steve: 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. Jill: Kristen wrote topic idea. Why do responding sellers have property with no physical access, or in a flood plain, and what to do about it? Oh, why do responding sellers have property with no physical hazards or a flood plan? What to do about it? I know new sellers shouldn't be buying these, but it's pretty much all I'm getting. Yeah. I like that. That's a good idea. Can we do that one day and really dive deep into it? Steve: Yeah, we can dive deep. I can give you the 32nd overview here, too, if you want. Jill: Go for it. Steve: Sellers almost always don't know about their property. They've inherited it. They've never seen it. I mean, back me up here or correct, Jill, probably 80% of the time, they have no idea about the property. Sometimes they live adjacent to it and that's a different story, so they don't know. No physical access can be remedied. It's not that complicated. You just need to get the right people involved and make sure that there's a ton of profit margin on it, because it takes a while. And if there's a process, then it's possible. The floodplain scenario, they're not going to know. It's only relatively new to land ownership that we can click on these FEMA maps at places like Neighbors Scoop, and just within seconds, see if the property is in a flood plain. Jill: Right. Steve: So even two years ago ... I mean, even now, if you go on to fema.gov and try to find out if a property ... it's a big, huge, massive process. So, that's not their fault at all. And what do you do about it? You just work through these things where you adjust the price.
Land Academy 1000 Free Record a Month Giveaway (LA 1424) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from awesome, cool Arizona. Steve: Rainy Arizona today. Jill DeWit: It is, a little bit. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about Land Academy's 1000 Free Record-a-Month Giveaway. I was just informed, it's not a giveaway at all. Jill DeWit: It's not a giveaway. It's a new thing. It's not like it's a special thing right now. It's the way we roll, and I'll explain it. Steve: 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 a Land Academy member already, please check us out or join us on Discord. Jill DeWit: David wrote, "My latest mailer had sites zip code- Steve: Situs. Jill DeWit: Situs, excuse me. It was not spelled the right- Steve: I know. It's not you. Jill DeWit: Okay, got it. Steve: It's David. Jill DeWit: S-I-T-U-S zip code for about half of the 1000 records I downloaded. I got those all priced by zip code. Then there's the other 4000, and I don't know where they are in the county, unless I put them into ParcelFact. Pricing by zip code or subdivisions, always how I do it, but on this other half of the [inaudible 00:01:15], that that doesn't seem to have those. How would you price them? I have them priced by school district right now, which looks to be a reliable data set for the properties. But I haven't sent them out. My gut is that this won't be perfect, but the county's good enough that I think I'm willing to risk my mailer costs on pricing that may not be exact. Take it away, Jack. Steve: It's never perfect. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: Jill and I went to a dinner with a bunch of our years and years friends last night. And one guy's a government contractor. And he owns a manufacturing company. They do all kinds of stuff, from jet engine parts to whatever. And we're going down the path, starting a company with him, which we will market some very specialty items that he will manufacture. And there was a guy there that has been in that business for a lot of years, but he's never been an entrepreneur. He's been a friend of mine for 25 years. And so, I started down the path with the entrepreneur buddy. And the guy who's a former CEO of a company, a government contracting company, couldn't keep up and didn't understand us. And I love these guys. I love them equally. But there's entrepreneurs who just won't take no for an answer. And then, there's former CEOs or former W2 employees that have never been truly through a startup, so they don't get it. So on my left, is this guy saying, "We're going to do this and we're going to probably fail at it 50 times before we get it right," which I'm saying, "Exactly. Is there another way?" And my former CEO buddy's just horrified. And he doesn't understand why. So look, so my point is here, yeah, it's not going to be perfect. The mailers I do are not perfect. I'm going to talk about failing all this week. Because we have a lot of new people, and there's a material percentage of these people... I'm not sure if David is one or not. I don't think so. He's not actually, now that I'm thinking about it, that haven't wrapped their head around the fact that they're going to fail a few times. Jill DeWit: What do you think about his thought process here? I think that was scrappy. Steve: I do too. Jill DeWit: I'm really impressed. You're like, "Okay, what else can I use?" Steve: That's geographic specific. Jill DeWit: School district is great. Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Jill DeWit: That's a great way to do this. I love it. Steve: Here's what I'd do- Jill DeWit: I'd love to... you can't... what David said in the beginning, I'm just going to explain real quick. There's no way, nor should anyone ever sit and one-by-one look up things.
Land Academy 1000 Free Record a Month Giveaway (LA 1424) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from awesome, cool Arizona. Steve: Rainy Arizona today. Jill DeWit: It is, a little bit. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about Land Academy's 1000 Free Record-a-Month Giveaway. I was just informed, it's not a giveaway at all. Jill DeWit: It's not a giveaway. It's a new thing. It's not like it's a special thing right now. It's the way we roll, and I'll explain it. Steve: 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 a Land Academy member already, please check us out or join us on Discord. Jill DeWit: David wrote, "My latest mailer had sites zip code- Steve: Situs. Jill DeWit: Situs, excuse me. It was not spelled the right- Steve: I know. It's not you. Jill DeWit: Okay, got it. Steve: It's David. Jill DeWit: S-I-T-U-S zip code for about half of the 1000 records I downloaded. I got those all priced by zip code. Then there's the other 4000, and I don't know where they are in the county, unless I put them into ParcelFact. Pricing by zip code or subdivisions, always how I do it, but on this other half of the [inaudible 00:01:15], that that doesn't seem to have those. How would you price them? I have them priced by school district right now, which looks to be a reliable data set for the properties. But I haven't sent them out. My gut is that this won't be perfect, but the county's good enough that I think I'm willing to risk my mailer costs on pricing that may not be exact. Take it away, Jack. Steve: It's never perfect. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: Jill and I went to a dinner with a bunch of our years and years friends last night. And one guy's a government contractor. And he owns a manufacturing company. They do all kinds of stuff, from jet engine parts to whatever. And we're going down the path, starting a company with him, which we will market some very specialty items that he will manufacture. And there was a guy there that has been in that business for a lot of years, but he's never been an entrepreneur. He's been a friend of mine for 25 years. And so, I started down the path with the entrepreneur buddy. And the guy who's a former CEO of a company, a government contracting company, couldn't keep up and didn't understand us. And I love these guys. I love them equally. But there's entrepreneurs who just won't take no for an answer. And then, there's former CEOs or former W2 employees that have never been truly through a startup, so they don't get it. So on my left, is this guy saying, "We're going to do this and we're going to probably fail at it 50 times before we get it right," which I'm saying, "Exactly. Is there another way?" And my former CEO buddy's just horrified. And he doesn't understand why. So look, so my point is here, yeah, it's not going to be perfect. The mailers I do are not perfect. I'm going to talk about failing all this week. Because we have a lot of new people, and there's a material percentage of these people... I'm not sure if David is one or not. I don't think so. He's not actually, now that I'm thinking about it, that haven't wrapped their head around the fact that they're going to fail a few times. Jill DeWit: What do you think about his thought process here? I think that was scrappy. Steve: I do too. Jill DeWit: I'm really impressed. You're like, "Okay, what else can I use?" Steve: That's geographic specific. Jill DeWit: School district is great. Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Jill DeWit: That's a great way to do this. I love it. Steve: Here's what I'd do- Jill DeWit: I'd love to... you can't... what David said in the beginning, I'm just going to explain real quick. There's no way, nor should anyone ever sit and one-by-one look up things.
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Working with Your Spouse without Tragedy (LA 1301) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello. Steve: Welcome to The Land Academy Show entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: I'm Jill DeWit, playing with my hair, and I'm broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about working with your spouse without tragedy. I'm sure Jill has a lot to say about this. Sure of it. Jill: Let's define tragedy. Just kidding. Steve: We can show you what a tragedy looks like on this episode, actually. Jill: I guess we could. Steve: We can give a great example of tragedy. Jill: So, divorce papers? Or just getting into it? Steve: Yesterday, and I bit the inside of my lip, we were talking about when to leave your job and I'm thinking like, "We should be talking about when to leave your relationship." Jill: Oh, that's sad. Don't say that. Steve: Sometimes you've got to leave. Jill: No, I mean, come on. Don't leave let's... careful. Steve: All right. Jill: All right. Let's be cool here. Steve: 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. Jill: Okay. Rebecca wrote, "Hi, Land Academy. Quick question on filtering and pricing lots. The last list I sent out for four to six acre lots/parcels, I filtered out the higher priced lots over 75,000, but kept the lowered valued lots. I filtered them out." So, she didn't keep them. Okay. "I received about eight signed contracts from people who I sent offers to for eight to $10,000 when their lots were worth less than $10,000. Should I price by zip code or filter out the lots assessed under 10K or both? Thoughts please." Steve: You should price by zip code, for sure. No doubt about it based on the information that we have, the level of information we now have specifically because of Zillow. So yes, you should price by zip code, for sure. Should you remove any of the top end or the bottom end data? I call it like a bell curve. I keep it all in. We send out offer prices at a million plus now, and we get some of them signed back because you just never know. Over and over and over again what I hear from our advanced group at our live events, is send out more mail. Send out more mail and see what happens. You put yourself in such a position of control when you send out just hoards of mail. So yeah, maybe some of it's overpriced, maybe some of it's under priced, to this day I over and underprice property sometimes, but I'll tell you, when you're staring at a pile of purchase agreements that are signed, let's say 10 of them, you're going to pick the best three. If you have five purchase agreements signed and you're going to pick the best three, it's not as good of a situation to be in as 10, pick three. But yeah, you've got to price by zip code now. Jill: Well, I like what you said too, careful, don't limit yourself too much because you never, like you said, you never know what's going to come back. And if you're really, really deathly afraid of anything over $100,000, I can understand that, that's over your threshold. I would download the data. You're famous for saying the data is cheap, the mail's expensive and that's true. So, I would download the data just to have it and play with it and think about it too, but go for some bigger numbers anyway because you can afford to do this. Why? Because we'll fund your deals and people in our community will fund your deals. You might find something spectacular, Rebecca, that you're buying it for $83,000 and holy cow, it's worth 400, that just comes across your desk. And I want you to be able to look at those and see those and act on them. Adding a zero or a couple zeros is not nuts. Steve: This group is packed full of people that would love to write you an $83,000 check. Jill: Right. My other thing is too, I think what may have happened is sometimes how counties assess properties.
Working with Your Spouse without Tragedy (LA 1301) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello. Steve: Welcome to The Land Academy Show entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: I'm Jill DeWit, playing with my hair, and I'm broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about working with your spouse without tragedy. I'm sure Jill has a lot to say about this. Sure of it. Jill: Let's define tragedy. Just kidding. Steve: We can show you what a tragedy looks like on this episode, actually. Jill: I guess we could. Steve: We can give a great example of tragedy. Jill: So, divorce papers? Or just getting into it? Steve: Yesterday, and I bit the inside of my lip, we were talking about when to leave your job and I'm thinking like, "We should be talking about when to leave your relationship." Jill: Oh, that's sad. Don't say that. Steve: Sometimes you've got to leave. Jill: No, I mean, come on. Don't leave let's... careful. Steve: All right. Jill: All right. Let's be cool here. Steve: 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. Jill: Okay. Rebecca wrote, "Hi, Land Academy. Quick question on filtering and pricing lots. The last list I sent out for four to six acre lots/parcels, I filtered out the higher priced lots over 75,000, but kept the lowered valued lots. I filtered them out." So, she didn't keep them. Okay. "I received about eight signed contracts from people who I sent offers to for eight to $10,000 when their lots were worth less than $10,000. Should I price by zip code or filter out the lots assessed under 10K or both? Thoughts please." Steve: You should price by zip code, for sure. No doubt about it based on the information that we have, the level of information we now have specifically because of Zillow. So yes, you should price by zip code, for sure. Should you remove any of the top end or the bottom end data? I call it like a bell curve. I keep it all in. We send out offer prices at a million plus now, and we get some of them signed back because you just never know. Over and over and over again what I hear from our advanced group at our live events, is send out more mail. Send out more mail and see what happens. You put yourself in such a position of control when you send out just hoards of mail. So yeah, maybe some of it's overpriced, maybe some of it's under priced, to this day I over and underprice property sometimes, but I'll tell you, when you're staring at a pile of purchase agreements that are signed, let's say 10 of them, you're going to pick the best three. If you have five purchase agreements signed and you're going to pick the best three, it's not as good of a situation to be in as 10, pick three. But yeah, you've got to price by zip code now. Jill: Well, I like what you said too, careful, don't limit yourself too much because you never, like you said, you never know what's going to come back. And if you're really, really deathly afraid of anything over $100,000, I can understand that, that's over your threshold. I would download the data. You're famous for saying the data is cheap, the mail's expensive and that's true. So, I would download the data just to have it and play with it and think about it too, but go for some bigger numbers anyway because you can afford to do this. Why? Because we'll fund your deals and people in our community will fund your deals. You might find something spectacular, Rebecca, that you're buying it for $83,000 and holy cow, it's worth 400, that just comes across your desk. And I want you to be able to look at those and see those and act on them. Adding a zero or a couple zeros is not nuts. Steve: This group is packed full of people that would love to write you an $83,000 check. Jill: Right. My other thing is too, I think what may have happened is sometimes how counties assess properties.
Quick Land Sale vs. Retail Price (LA 1300) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Jill: Oops. Steve: Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about a quick land sale versus retail price. Jill: Right. Steve: You want to explain that title? Because it's kind of your title. Jill: Oh, is it? Okay. It's kind of like, think about the kind of person you want to be. A quick land sale is for me, just how we operate. I used to say I'm a wholesaler, but that even gets confused. I don't want people to ... People have negative thoughts sometimes- Steve: Yeah, it became a negative term. Jill: It did, and it's so silly because I think people see a wholesaler as someone who doesn't acquire property, all they do is assign a- Steve: Get in the way. Jill: ... property. Exactly. Assign it versus yeah, virtually get in the way. I am with you. And the way we do it, which is still wholesaling. People don't, I don't know why it got all garbled. We buy the property. I will seek out the property. I will buy the property. I will pay the full price for the property. We own it. We close escrow, it's in our name. Now I'm going to turn around, mark it up and sell it. So I can choose to quickly double my money and get out or I can, Hm, I can mark it up and some people do this, they get a little greedy and they think about retail. Why would I sell a property, Jill, that I paid $20,000 for? Why would I sell it for $45,000 tomorrow when I can sit and wait and get seventy for it. Because that's really what it's worth. And my question is, why wouldn't you? I mean, do you really want to sit and babysit the property and talk to all the people who want to go drive on it and roll around on it and camp on it and love on it? Have a virtual thing of what their tiny home's going to look like on it and see their family running through the field on it. Dream it up. And waste all that time. I'm kind of getting into the show, but that's describing it and we'll talk more. Steve: The undertone or between the lines here is, the ethics of what we do. That's what I want to get into. Jill: Oh, really? Steve: Yeah, because I haven't heard it recently, but I've heard people in the past, give me a hard time about what we do for a living. We haven't brought this up. Jill: I haven't heard this in a while. Okay, good we'll talk about that. Steve: We haven't brought this up in a long time, but I think it's worth talking about. Jill: I love it. Steve: 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. Jill: Okay. Gina wrote, "Hello. My name is Gina. I've been doing land investing for a few years now and I guess I'm here to try and see if I can improve my workflow. I send out about 2000 letters a month, but I'd like to make that close to 5000." Thank you, Kevin. One of our moderators. Yep. Steve: Thank you, Kevin, by the way from me. Jill: Yeah. "Any tips, tools tricks you use to scale? I currently work a full time job and simply don't have the time to sort through all the sites and piece together that many records. 2000 sites would be my max without going crazy. Any help from experienced members, such as yourself, would be much appreciated." Cool. So I'm wondering what sites she's going through to piece together records. I'm thinking if she's a member, you're not piecing anything together, you're just- Steve: She's a member. Jill: Okay. So you should be using Real Quest Pro, having an idea before you go into there to download the data, you've spent a lot of time picking the areas, picking the County and getting it all from there. You're holding back. Go. Steve: In the interest of education, I'm going to be very plain speaking here. I don't see the difference between processing 2000 or 5000 at all. In fact,
Quick Land Sale vs. Retail Price (LA 1300) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Jill: Oops. Steve: Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about a quick land sale versus retail price. Jill: Right. Steve: You want to explain that title? Because it's kind of your title. Jill: Oh, is it? Okay. It's kind of like, think about the kind of person you want to be. A quick land sale is for me, just how we operate. I used to say I'm a wholesaler, but that even gets confused. I don't want people to ... People have negative thoughts sometimes- Steve: Yeah, it became a negative term. Jill: It did, and it's so silly because I think people see a wholesaler as someone who doesn't acquire property, all they do is assign a- Steve: Get in the way. Jill: ... property. Exactly. Assign it versus yeah, virtually get in the way. I am with you. And the way we do it, which is still wholesaling. People don't, I don't know why it got all garbled. We buy the property. I will seek out the property. I will buy the property. I will pay the full price for the property. We own it. We close escrow, it's in our name. Now I'm going to turn around, mark it up and sell it. So I can choose to quickly double my money and get out or I can, Hm, I can mark it up and some people do this, they get a little greedy and they think about retail. Why would I sell a property, Jill, that I paid $20,000 for? Why would I sell it for $45,000 tomorrow when I can sit and wait and get seventy for it. Because that's really what it's worth. And my question is, why wouldn't you? I mean, do you really want to sit and babysit the property and talk to all the people who want to go drive on it and roll around on it and camp on it and love on it? Have a virtual thing of what their tiny home's going to look like on it and see their family running through the field on it. Dream it up. And waste all that time. I'm kind of getting into the show, but that's describing it and we'll talk more. Steve: The undertone or between the lines here is, the ethics of what we do. That's what I want to get into. Jill: Oh, really? Steve: Yeah, because I haven't heard it recently, but I've heard people in the past, give me a hard time about what we do for a living. We haven't brought this up. Jill: I haven't heard this in a while. Okay, good we'll talk about that. Steve: We haven't brought this up in a long time, but I think it's worth talking about. Jill: I love it. Steve: 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. Jill: Okay. Gina wrote, "Hello. My name is Gina. I've been doing land investing for a few years now and I guess I'm here to try and see if I can improve my workflow. I send out about 2000 letters a month, but I'd like to make that close to 5000." Thank you, Kevin. One of our moderators. Yep. Steve: Thank you, Kevin, by the way from me. Jill: Yeah. "Any tips, tools tricks you use to scale? I currently work a full time job and simply don't have the time to sort through all the sites and piece together that many records. 2000 sites would be my max without going crazy. Any help from experienced members, such as yourself, would be much appreciated." Cool. So I'm wondering what sites she's going through to piece together records. I'm thinking if she's a member, you're not piecing anything together, you're just- Steve: She's a member. Jill: Okay. So you should be using Real Quest Pro, having an idea before you go into there to download the data, you've spent a lot of time picking the areas, picking the County and getting it all from there. You're holding back. Go. Steve: In the interest of education, I'm going to be very plain speaking here. I don't see the difference between processing 2000 or 5000 at all. In fact,
Thin Line Between Insulting a Seller and Pricing to Buy (LA 1295) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Howdy. Steve: Welcome to Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny northern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about the line between insulting a seller and actually buying a piece of property. This is a topic that's very fresh in how we're buying and selling land, and it's something that we all deal with. It's one of the top five- Jill: It happens. Steve: -or eight questions that we get from new people or really even experienced real estate people, like, "What do you mean you send offers out for 20% of what the property's actually worth?" Jill: Exactly. Steve: How do you deal with that? There truly is a line between... There's a thin line between offering $25 for a piece of property, which I personally think is ridiculous. Some people do it with success. Jill: Right. Steve: We'll talk about all that. Jill: Thank you. Steve: Before we get into it, though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandAcademy.com online community, it's free. Jill: I would like to add on the LandInvestors.com online community, it's free. Steve: Oh, yes. You'll get there. Jill: It's okay. Steve: You'll get there both ways. Jill: That's true. Lucas wrote, "Hi, everyone. Lucas here from Greenville, South Carolina. For some reason, I'm extremely nervous and excited at the same time. After reading the book-" Steve: Are you crying? Crying on the inside. Jill: That's daily. That's kind of how I wake up, nervous and excited. You're not alone, Lucas. Steve: Crying on the inside and laughing on the outside. That's how I wake up. Jill: "That's right. After reading your ebook, listening to the podcasts and watching YouTube interviews, I have become convinced that I want to do this and I could be good at this. I love data. Steve: Excellent. Jill: "I'm part of a manufacturing engineering group, and my colleagues call me the data guy because I so enjoy statistics and deep diving into the metrics." This is all really good. Steve: Excellent. Jill: "And I love land. This is good. I have a dream of starting a homestead with my wife and children someday, so for the last several years, I've been scouring GIS maps and Google Earth, trying to find a hidden gem for our homestead. I have long believed that there are incredible deals out there, just waiting to be found, and I couldn't process the data in a way that was efficient. After spending hours examining attributes of parcels in numerous states, I just couldn't figure out how to get the truly amazing deal. When I saw this community, it was like a lightning bolt turning on. It hadn't even occurred to me that this could be a potential business. I have been focused on upstate South Carolina, western North Carolina, upstate New York and all of Vermont, my home state. Steve: Excellent. Vermont's a great choice. Jill: "Someday, I want to leave properties for my children, and I want them to have business savvy. I feel like I have a knack for this stuff. I just need some direction. My biggest challenge will be managing this endeavor with the time constraints of my full-time job and my life as a parent. I'm so determined, though. If I can make some success with my initial mailer and my first purchase, I know there'll be enough momentum to really change my career. I'm looking forward to meeting some of you and collaborating and sharing ideas. Thank you, Steve and Jill." Awww, that's so cool. Steve: I'm going to turn this over to you right now, just the initial part of it, anyway, because I know that you talked to people constantly in the exact same boat. Jill: There's no question. I'm looking to see. He's just kind of sharing his experiences, right? Steve: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jill: Am I missing something? Steve: I think he joined. Jill:
Thin Line Between Insulting a Seller and Pricing to Buy (LA 1295) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Howdy. Steve: Welcome to Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny northern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about the line between insulting a seller and actually buying a piece of property. This is a topic that's very fresh in how we're buying and selling land, and it's something that we all deal with. It's one of the top five- Jill: It happens. Steve: -or eight questions that we get from new people or really even experienced real estate people, like, "What do you mean you send offers out for 20% of what the property's actually worth?" Jill: Exactly. Steve: How do you deal with that? There truly is a line between... There's a thin line between offering $25 for a piece of property, which I personally think is ridiculous. Some people do it with success. Jill: Right. Steve: We'll talk about all that. Jill: Thank you. Steve: Before we get into it, though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandAcademy.com online community, it's free. Jill: I would like to add on the LandInvestors.com online community, it's free. Steve: Oh, yes. You'll get there. Jill: It's okay. Steve: You'll get there both ways. Jill: That's true. Lucas wrote, "Hi, everyone. Lucas here from Greenville, South Carolina. For some reason, I'm extremely nervous and excited at the same time. After reading the book-" Steve: Are you crying? Crying on the inside. Jill: That's daily. That's kind of how I wake up, nervous and excited. You're not alone, Lucas. Steve: Crying on the inside and laughing on the outside. That's how I wake up. Jill: "That's right. After reading your ebook, listening to the podcasts and watching YouTube interviews, I have become convinced that I want to do this and I could be good at this. I love data. Steve: Excellent. Jill: "I'm part of a manufacturing engineering group, and my colleagues call me the data guy because I so enjoy statistics and deep diving into the metrics." This is all really good. Steve: Excellent. Jill: "And I love land. This is good. I have a dream of starting a homestead with my wife and children someday, so for the last several years, I've been scouring GIS maps and Google Earth, trying to find a hidden gem for our homestead. I have long believed that there are incredible deals out there, just waiting to be found, and I couldn't process the data in a way that was efficient. After spending hours examining attributes of parcels in numerous states, I just couldn't figure out how to get the truly amazing deal. When I saw this community, it was like a lightning bolt turning on. It hadn't even occurred to me that this could be a potential business. I have been focused on upstate South Carolina, western North Carolina, upstate New York and all of Vermont, my home state. Steve: Excellent. Vermont's a great choice. Jill: "Someday, I want to leave properties for my children, and I want them to have business savvy. I feel like I have a knack for this stuff. I just need some direction. My biggest challenge will be managing this endeavor with the time constraints of my full-time job and my life as a parent. I'm so determined, though. If I can make some success with my initial mailer and my first purchase, I know there'll be enough momentum to really change my career. I'm looking forward to meeting some of you and collaborating and sharing ideas. Thank you, Steve and Jill." Awww, that's so cool. Steve: I'm going to turn this over to you right now, just the initial part of it, anyway, because I know that you talked to people constantly in the exact same boat. Jill: There's no question. I'm looking to see. He's just kind of sharing his experiences, right? Steve: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jill: Am I missing something? Steve: I think he joined. Jill:
Franciscan Spirituality Center920 Market StreetLa Crosse, WI 54601Steve Spilde: Welcome. My guest today is Sister Jolynn Brehm. She is a Sister with the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. I’ve been blessed to know Jolynn for many years. She was a longtime supervisor in our Spiritual Direction Preparation Program. Welcome, Jolynn.Jolynn Brehm: Thank you. Thank you.Steve: Today we are joining by Zoom, and this is kind of a new experience for both of us. But it’s a testament that even old dogs can learn new tricks.Jolynn: Exactly. We’ll either prove it or disprove it.Steve: Sounds good. Sounds good. So tell me, Jolynn, how long have you been a Sister?Jolynn: Well, I entered the community in 1954. So actually, that’s about 66 years ago. This year I would be celebrating my 61st year of profession. It’s been an interesting and wonderful long life.Steve: Amazing. Tell me where you grew up, and tell me where the desire to become a sister, how that evolved.Jolynn: I was born and raised on a dairy farm in Colby, Wisconsin, in 1939, and I was the first liveborn member of my family. The sister who was to be a year older than me, my mom and dad’s first child, was stillborn. So when I came along, I think they kind of favored me. Obviously they were happy I was alive, so that was my experience as the firstborn of my family. My family heritage, which is very interesting that I’ve kind of thought about with these questions and this opportunity … But I realize that on both sides of my family – paternal and maternal – we are four generations of farmers. So that is very significant, and it has allowed me now to really delve into why it seems my genetics are deeply, deeply grounded in the land. Everything about nature, everything about creation, everything about how I relate to life, to people, to living is all pretty much in the framework of anything that has to do with nature and creation. It would be understandable because having great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents who worked the land, they understood how to live with the land.Steve: Were all of your relatives kind of around the farm there in Colby?Jolynn: Yes, they were. I would say probably within maybe a one-hour radius we had at least five or six different homesteaded farms in both my father’s side and my mother’s side of the family was near Auburndale, Wisconsin. That’s the central Wisconsin area – all the same kind of area. I was led to think about religious life when I entered Saint Mary’s Catholic School in Colby, Wisconsin. The principal at that time was Sister Alice McMullen. For some reason or other, we already made a connection when I was already in the first grade. She would let me go over to be with my friends or whatever. Then she left Saint Mary’s in Colby when I graduated from the eighth grade. But the year of eighth grade, she, after afternoon recess, would stand behind my desk since I was tall and in the last seat, she would stand behind there and pray a prayer to the Sacred Heart. Then we also had a family in Colby who had three sisters as FSPAs. The dad invited some of us to go and visit La Crosse, Wisconsin Saint Rose Convent, which I did. From there on, I just sensed from Alice McMullen that I admired who she was, who the sisters were, and so she kind of facilitated my entering. I also had an aunt, a sister of my mother’s, who was also a member of the community. So I had a connection with FSPA, and that’s where I entered.Steve: The Sister would stand behind you and pray to the Sacred Heart.Jolynn: Yes.Steve: For those who are not Catholic, please explain what that means.Jolynn: That way of taking time out in our school day to have some quiet and to be attentive to the idea that we weren’t just who we were, that God was an entity in our lives. And as eighth graders, I don’t think we had any clue about what that really meant. But in our Catholic tradition, we have a whole, whole long history of people who created ways of connecting with the divine or God or that entity. So we have a long, long history of many, many prayers. The Sacred Heart Prayer has to do with connecting with Jesus. Jesus revealed in his earthly experience how to be a human being, how to be present to people. He really showed that he had a heart for all of humanity. His heart was really the focus for a lot of people to feel connected to our God. So for her to call upon that aspect of Jesus to bless us as kids and to help our lives be better. Somehow or another, that touched my heart.Steve: She was just praying that you would be guided? Or that you would be guided specifically to become a Sister in La Crosse?Jolynn: It was just a general prayer for all of us in our class. And it just so happened that because I was right in front of her – she was right behind me – somehow or another it felt we were more connected simply because we were that close in space to each other. That’s how I sensed that it felt almost like it was a personal prayer for me.Steve: Nice. So then you went to La Crosse, and that’s where you went to high school?Jolynn: I was a sophomore in high school when I entered the community. And at that time, yes, we had Saint Rose High School, which was located in the north portion of the Viterbo University building. That was our way of finishing our high school, plus we also went to summer school to make the process happen faster, and to give us something to keep us out of trouble. We went up to Modena, Wisconsin, where we had a school for the Native Americans, the Ojibwa Tribe up there. We helped out in the summer. We helped out with the farming that was there. We helped with creating the things to get ready for the school year, and we just basically had a feeling for one another, and kind of a sense of community.Steve: I know you. I know that nature and connection to the earth, to the universe, is an important part of your spirituality. And it sounds like it was being formed in you already in some of these summer experiences.Jolynn: Definitely, definitely. And because we were that plot of land that was farmland as well, we would talk about our farming background. I think at that time there were seven or eight of us in that process of needing the summer school, and as far as I know all of us were from farms. Some were from Iowa, so of course we would often talk about our farms and our families and things like that. I think it always entered into how we appreciated even the opportunity to work up there on the farm.Steve: Talk about your experience with native spirituality as a result of that experience. Were you able to pick up any of that?Jolynn: Not at that time specifically. But I’ve the privilege of ministering in the Woodruff Minocqua area, which is eight miles from Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, which is also the Ojibwa Native Reservation. Through the years that I was up there – about 30 years I lived up in the Minocqua Woodruff area and worked up there – I became acquainted with several of the people from Lac du Flambeau. We would have book discussions, we would have conversations. And one of the things I did was when one of the women especially from Lac du Flambeau would offer programs through the technical institute where I went in Minocqua, I would always attend. There was one very specific time when, Rochelle was her name, she offered the way in which the rituals of the native people were so significant, and we participated in some of those rituals. That really grounded me in the fact that you know, my religious tradition and my spirituality, we have a lot of rituals, so there was a link. It felt like a link between how rituals in their tradition, in their life, and in mine, rituals almost always had something to do with something from nature. Either stones or grasses or incense or sage or oils or animals – something like that.Steve: Is it fair to say those experiences learning the native perspective on spirituality helped you to have a better understanding of your own Catholic tradition?Jolynn: I would say yes, because what it allowed me to do was to say, ‘OK, what is the underlying way that all peoples are invited to be aware of the greater dynamic in their lives? How are all peoples invited to sense that spirit world?’ So when I sensed how the native people were so in touch with the creator and everything that was created and how all of earth was gift, I began to realize that in our Catholic tradition, yes, we too – all from way, way back when – use earth items as ways of entering into a ritual that seemed to connect us with the divine. So it felt like that two of them together. Also then, during that same time, I began to be much more attentive to, what are some of the other traditions? What are some of the other kinds of ways people connect with the divine, or that essence, if you will. I heard some things about the Buddhist tradition. I heard some things about other cultures, the Spanish-speaking people. I think connecting with the native people opened my eyes to, how broad is and how fundamental is ritual? And for me, how fundamental is ritual using things of nature as the visuals or the ways to connect?Steve: Can you give me some examples of that within the Catholic tradition?Jolynn: In the Catholic tradition, in many of the Old Testament stories, the ways that some of the people understood that God was present to them was usually in some walking that they did. And very often there were stones, or if there is a prophet who realized he is sensing God’s presence, he would lay down and put his head on the stone. It seemed to me that was a way of that. We have the whole reality of way back in the Book of Kings, the leader of that day was encouraged to feed thousands of people with minimal, minimal. It was the use of wheat in the bread and the wine of the grapes. In our Catholic tradition, that particular piece of bread and wine from the earth is very central to our wahttps://www.fscenter.org/
How to Make a Good Land Posting (LA 1082) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Good day. Steve: Welcome to The Land Academy Show, Entertaining Land Investment Talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about how a good- how to make a good land posting. Sorry. I got a little confused there for a second. Jill: Okay. What is a good land posting? Steve: What is a land posting? Jill: What? Steve: What's a land posting? Jill: Wait a minute. Steve: Wait, don't I just call my real estate agent and say, "Hey, I've got a piece of property. How about you sell it?" Jill: Can I just put a for sale sign on it, and just walk away? Put my phone number? Steve: This has got off to a good start. Jill: Oh, good. Steve: Because that's what I think the whole world thinks. Jill: I want to think. Okay, let's think of all the things you would just [inaudible 00:00:43] like. Steve: My sister in-law is a real estate agent [inaudible] last Christmas she was talking about a piece of land that this she looked at. Let's call her. Jill: Yeah. Steve: Shell get solved, it'll be fine. Jill: Well, how about the girl that we bought our house from? Let's just call her. Steve: So it turns out it 21st century, almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we are think about that and the internet and how we do stuff with computers is so dramatically changed. This industry since it was kind of the whole concept of it, the modern day real estate industry was started in the forties and fifties 1940s and fifties for some reason there's lingering real estate agents still. Jill: Yep. Steve: If you want the answer to that question, go see who the number two lobbyist group is in Washington for the last 35 years. Jill: That's interesting. Steve: It's the national association of realtors anyway. Jill: Who are they? Who are they behind? I hate to guess, does it start with an N? Jill: [inaudible 00:01:41]. Jill: Is it? is it, is is number one the, is it the NRA is number one? Steve: NRA, up there, it's top five. Jill: Okay, I would guess. Steve: That's a good question. Jill: We should look this up. Steve: I only ever looked. I look up, I obsess on this stuff. Jill: I know. Steve: And all five of them or if you just, they're propping themselves up, falsely. Like it removes ironically removes the raw supply and demand of capitalism. But wow that went sideways fast. Steve: Turns out... Jill: You're getting a lecture from dad right now or professor Steve pick one. Steve: Jill and I are in the pre development of a show called the Jack and Jill show about relationships and working together and you know, kind of like couples therapy and, and a non real estate show for is what Jill wants to do and I and I completely agree with her. Jill: It's going to happen. Steve: So what we're practicing that was a... [Inaudible 00:02:42]. Jill: There we go. Perfect. Thank you. Professor Butala. Steve: It'll launch out in October and I'm sure it'll fail.
Taz Ahsan - Balancing a Successful Amazon Business and a Day Job Successful entrepreneurs view challenges as opportunities. This is what sets them apart from the rest. On today’s episode, Steve talks to Taz Ahsan of tazahsan.com. Taz is currently a program manager for a big tech company and a self-made Amazon success story. He also runs a podcast series, the Amazon Entrepreneur podcast, that aims to help entrepreneurs turn those dark times to milestones. Here are more interesting highlights of today’s episode: How Taz does a massive balancing act working his job, managing his Amazon business and running a podcast series. Why we should help our self first to make a bigger impact. The advantages of getting a mentor. His daily morning routine and how it helps him with his busy schedule. All ears here as we learn today how to be like Taz, a true Awesomer who turns challenges into defining moments. Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey. SPONSOR ADVERTISEMENT If you're launching a new product manufactured in China, you will need professional high-resolution Amazon ready photographs. Because Symo Global has a team of professionals in China, you will oftentimes receive your listing photographs before your product even leaves the country. This streamlined process will save you the time money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is in stock and ready for sale. Visit SymoGlobal.com to learn more. Because a picture should be worth one thousand keywords. You're listening to the Awesomers podcast. Steve: You are listening to episode number 51 of the Awesomers.com podcast. And as our tradition has become, all you have to do is go to Awesomers.com/51 to find the relevant show notes and details, including any links and things that we talked about like our special guest on the podcast. 01:36 (Steve introduces today’s guest, Taz Ahsan, a top Amazon seller.) Steve: Today, my special guest is Taz Ahsan and he's just getting really as a successful Amazon seller and he's been doing it in a year or two now. And he tells us about his story and his journey. What I love is the fact that he's sharing live his journey where he's still working a full-time job but he's already putting together a business. He's putting himself out there, I should say, trying to learn and trying to get better, finding mentors, networking and all those things that really show a commitment to being a success. Now, Taz started out as a young person out with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. Despite his success in selling on Amazon, it didn't start there, his motivation wasn't money. He just wants to achieve and he enjoys the thrill of success. When he was a kid, even as young as eight or nine years old, he was already negotiating with his parents. In high school, he burned CDs that he would sell. He didn't grow up in a wealthy family so he had to take action to get the things that he wanted or needed and that drove him into being a successful entrepreneur. Taz is always about learning what you need to know and when you need to know about it and that I really respect. That is kind of one of my axioms: Do what needs to be done when it needs doing. Which, by the way, I lifted from a great mentor of mine, the great Terry.
Great entrepreneurs know that a healthy body equates to a stronger and empowered mind. On today’s episode, Steve talks to Jay Kali AKA The Strength Architect of Kali Coaching. Jay is a coach and fitness specialist who helps build strong, motivated and empowered women. Here are more awesome takeaways on today’s episode: What Kali Coaching is all about and how it can help women entrepreneurs. Finding your personal why. Training smarter versus training harder. The evolution of fitness, according to Jay. So put on your headphones and learn how you too can have a healthy, well-balanced life as an Awesomer. Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey. SPONSOR ADVERTISEMENT If you're launching a new product manufactured in China, you will need professional high-resolution Amazon ready photographs. Because Symo Global has a team of professionals in China, you will oftentimes receive your listing photographs before your product even leaves the country. This streamlined process will save you the time money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is in stock and ready for sale. Visit SymoGlobal.com to learn more. Because a picture should be worth one thousand keywords. You're listening to the Awesomers podcast. Steve: You're listening to the Awesomers.com podcast episode number 47 and those numbers are just racking up faster than I can keep track of. I have to tell you. The secret for you is, all you have to do is go to Awesomers.com/47 and you can find relevant show notes and details and things like that. You can also join the mailing list and I think that's probably a pretty good idea for you because we send you lots of free stuff - videos and even processes to help you find your personal why or to help you with your company origin story or to give you some financial overviews 101, an ERP 101 and other things. It's just drip fed out to you, there's no sales pressure. We're pretty easy-going guys and I think that it is Awesomer and you should be on that list for sure. 02:03 (Steve introduces today’s guest, Jay Kali.) Steve: Today, my special guest is Jay Kali. I probably pronouncing his name wrong as is my custom but Jay is such an amazing guy and I really enjoyed my time with him. Jay is known as the strength architect with three fitness facilities success stories to his name. He is an Iraq war veteran. Jay is a man characterized as a true fitness nutrition and mindset empowering powerhouse. Jay is a contributor for Women's Health and Fitness magazine as well as Consumer Health Digest and also Smart Healthy Women. He was also featured on ABC 24's Good Morning Memphis. Jay has been a guest on many top performing webinars, webcasts and other online training seminars. Jay is an American-born expat who had moved to Cancun and he's taken the health fitness and nutrition industry by storm since he moved down to Cancun back in 2012. His well-known 3-step health and weight loss ideology which has successfully transformed countless women stuck in the ruts. They're stuck trying to lose pounds and trying to break through plateaus. He's helped them do that. Jay's mission is to help women specifically create long-lasting healthy lifestyles within just eight weeks that they can go on and maintain for life.
Entrepreneurs are constantly making a positive difference in the world and anyone can take part in it too. On today’s Awesomers insights episode, Steve talks about entrepreneurship, cooperatives, E-commerce and Amazon. Here are more key points on today’s episode: The three general propositions for a cooperative to work. How Empowery leverages the strength of its community. The Dear John letter project and why it is important. So join us on today’s episode and learn how you too can embark on your entrepreneurship journey. Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey. SPONSOR ADVERTISEMENT If you're launching a new product manufactured in China, you will need professional high-resolution Amazon ready photographs. Because Symo Global has a team of professionals in China, you will oftentimes receive your listing photographs before your product even leaves the country. This streamlined process will save you the time money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is in stock and ready for sale. Visit SymoGlobal.com to learn more. Because a picture should be worth one thousand keywords. You're listening to the Awesomers podcast. 1:16 (Steve introduces today’s episode.) Steve: Today is going to be an Awesomers insights episode where we talk about something that's very important to me and you're going to get a very special opportunity to do something I think that is not a common thing. And I'm going to talk to you more about that here in a minute. Now this is Awesomers episode number 39. And it's surprising to me that we've already cranked out nearly 40 episodes. And this episode 39 is going to talk about something very special. But before we dive into that I wanted to share a couple things with you. First of all if you haven't been to Awesomers.com and you want to know about any show notes and details about this episode, you just go to Awesomers.com/39. Now if you just go into the regular Awesomers.com website by the way you can join our mailing list and you'll get drip fed some free stuff. We don't oppressively email your spammy trying to get you to buy a bunch of stuff is a matter of fact we don't directly sell anything. Often will refer resources to whether they're bookkeepers or a software program or things that we use and like but we're just not hard sales guys running out and beat you down to buy stuff. We share what worked for us and that's part of the the magic of working with the Awesomer community. And so this particular episode we're taking a little bit of a diversion from our normal interviews with either book reviews or the backtalk live episodes and even the interviews with entrepreneurs. Because we've got a very special opportunity. 2:51 (Steve talks about the Empowery Ecommerce Cooperative.) Steve: Now the Empowery Nonprofit Cooperative, so it's called the Empowery Ecommerce Cooperative if you haven't heard of it. I want to just give you a kind of a brief overview and then tell you something very unique that's happening right now. So the Empowery Ecommerce Cooperative is all about members joining together and the members actually own the coop. Each member has one vote, they have one share and they own the coop. So every member side to side owns one share and they all have one equal vote.
Find Your Zen Investor Inside (LA 805) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk, I'm Steve Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about 'Find Your Zen Investor Inside' and I'm going to quote Jill right before the show.
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