Podcasts about steve yeah

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I sit down with serial entrepreneur Steve Reynolds for his perspectives on innovation in corporate travel tech. As CSO of Embers Inc., Steve shares his journey developing TripBam, an early pioneer utilizing algorithms and robotics to optimize hotel rates. He explains TripBam's strategic transformation from consumer to enterprise software, strengthening the company and positioning it for seamless integration under Embers. Steve offers valuable lessons on championing passion within high-performing teams. The importance of actively engaging customers and development staff to creativity solve problems is emphasized. We discuss the challenges of maintaining innovation at scale versus smaller startups. Steve's experiences navigating acquisitions and a turbulent industry offer cautionary advice. A theme emerges—embracing flexibility positions leaders to overcome challenges and achieve lasting impact. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In this episode, I spoke with Steve Reynolds, Chief Strategy Officer at Emburse Inc., about his journey in corporate travel technology and entrepreneurship. Steve discussed the origins and evolution of TripBam, a platform he founded that uses algorithms and robotics for hotel rate monitoring, which eventually pivoted from a consumer-focused to a B2B model. Steve shared insights on navigating the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing the strategic decisions that helped TripBam emerge stronger, including cost optimizations and product enhancements. We explored the importance of fostering a passionate and innovative team, highlighting the value of listening to customers and involving development teams directly in problem-solving. Steve explained the critical difference between passionate programmers and those who are merely formally trained, and how assembling a team that shares the company's vision and offering equity can drive success. The episode delved into strategies for managing company growth and financial stability, such as quick decision-making in right-sizing staff and optimizing operational costs through cloud environments. We discussed the benefits of subscription-based pricing models over transaction-based ones, particularly during economic downturns, and how this approach helped maintain cash flow during the pandemic. Steve reflected on the evolution of workplace environments and leadership styles, noting the shift from rigid, traditional settings to more flexible, results-oriented cultures. We talked about the challenges of maintaining innovation in large companies, contrasting startup environments with big company mindsets, and the importance of hiring the right people for each setting. Finally, Steve shared his thoughts on the future of the travel industry and the innovative approaches that have set new standards in modern practices. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Emburse GUESTS Steve ReynoldsAbout Steve TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Steve Reynolds, chief Strategy Officer for Emburse Inc. Steve has built his career in corporate travel technology and in starting various companies over the four-decade career. Steve looks for opportunities to be disruptive. Steve, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure to meet you and appreciate you taking the time. Steve: You bet Chris Glad to be here. Chris: So you know there's a lot that I'd love to get into with you. I know that you know currently you're with a company called M-Burst Travel, but that you started a company before that called TripBam. Tell us a little bit about, I guess, those companies and what they do. What is the business they're known for? Steve: Okay, and just to back up a little bit further, I guess what you could call a serial entrepreneur. Tripbam was my third or fourth venture kind of lost count, but I've been in the corporate travel tech space for 40 some odd years. And TripBam when we started 10 years ago, we recognized that hotel rates change a lot more often than people actually realize. If you were to create some robotics that went out and grabbed the rate at a particular hotel for a certain date in the future, you'd see that rate changes just about every hour and what we found is if you just keep watching it, eventually it's going to drop, especially as you get closer to check-in. So we created some algorithms, robotics, whatever you want to call it that said okay, I've got a rate of $2.99 at the Grand Hyatt in New York. I'm arriving on the first and departing on the third. I want you to just let me know when it drops and if it does, I want you to rebook it for me If everything is the same room, same bed, same cancel policy, blah, blah, blah. So that's what we did. We originally invented it for the consumer market. We put out a website and we got mentions in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today and so on. But sort of my corporate travel buddies called up and said, hey, Steve, we really need you to apply this to corporate travel. And they started writing some pretty significant checks. We followed the money, we pivoted and went all B2B at that point. And so the company grew 40% year over year for the first six years, cashflow positive within just a couple of months. I mean it was great. It was great. And then COVID came along and kind of took our knees out from under us for a bit. Chris: COVID kind of wiped out the fundamental business model for at least a little bit. Steve: At least for a little bit. But fortunately a lot of our customers were paying us subscription fees rather than transaction fees, so we were to stay afloat. We got through COVID and we actually came out on the backside of COVID in a much stronger position, both financially and you name it, because we were able to do a lot of just cost improvements, right-sizing the organization. We kind of got a little bit ahead of our skis, I think, in some areas and created some new products, just all kinds of things, pushed everything out to the cloud and such that dramatically reduced our costs and just were firing all cylinders. Chris: And then we worked out a deal with Emburse in July last year to buy the company. Okay, how does I guess what TripBand does fit within the Emburse excuse me, overall, maybe suite of products or company strategy. Steve: Yeah. So Emburse provides travel and expense to the largest of companies, to the smallest of companies, and what I mean by that? Everybody. When you go, you have kind of a booking tool to start with. Most folks are familiar with Concur. We have our own. The reservation gets created. It then needs to be watched, monitored, audited, improved upon. That's kind of where we fit in. So before the money is spent we actually see if we can actually do better than what the traveler did on their own. Travelers are not going to check the hotel rate every day. They're not going to check their airfare every hour. They're not potentially going to book the preferred property within a particular city. We fix all that before the money's actually spent. We then push all that to mobile. So you've got a companion app in your pocket where the traveler gets a ton of destination content specific to that company. So I'm going to New York, I'm staying at headquarters, what hotel should I stay in? I need to go take a client to dinner, what restaurants do you recommend? All kinds of other stuff, including safety and security perspective and so on. Then the data is all captured and fed into an expense report so that your expense report if the traveler is compliant. It's kind of pre-created and pre-approved, so the traveler in a lot of cases doesn't have to do anything and if they're compliant all the way throughout, they could actually kind of be paid as soon as their plane hits the ground. Then it all feeds into reporting and analytics so that we can improve your travel program, identify additional savings opportunities, find some fraud issues, detect all kinds of other stuff that might be a problem. We also offer a card product if you don't have one, and that's kind of the travel plus expense ecosystem that we provide. Chris: That's fascinating. I obviously wasn't aware that something like that existed, but I can see how large companies with a lot of employees traveling could see the benefit and realize a lot of savings from those services. Steve: Yeah, when you combine travel with expense, some kind of magic happens in that we have enough data and insight to be able to start pre-filling out that expense report. Otherwise, all we're counting on is card transactions and receipts, and that's really not going to do the trick. But if we can get that card information augmented with the receipt scanning and everything else that we do now, we can really do a nice job of pre-filling out that expense report. So really all you have to do is add mileage, hit, click and you're submitted. Chris: So you mentioned that you've been in this industry for 40 plus years. I'm curious how did you first get started in the corporate travel tech space 40 years ago? Steve: It was just by happenstance, I guess you could say. I was originally started as a programmer for Texas Instruments, got accepted into their executive program, which meant I could go off and get an MBA and then come back to TI, but quickly realized that the consulting firms were paying a lot more. So I ended up with Ernst Winnie, at the time with Ernst Young and my first assignment was with a travel agency in Houston, Texas, called LifeGo Travel, which doesn't exist anymore. The owner of that company hired us to come in and build some technology. It really put him on the map and he got tired of paying the bills and seeing the hourly checks that we were charging. And so he approached and said, hey, you know, do you want to come work for us? And I'm like, well, that never thought about working for a travel agency. That doesn't sound all that exciting. But he said look what if we created a company, We'll spin it off and we'll give you some equity. And I'm like, okay, now you're talking. So we left, we started up a company called Competitive Technologies and all of it was bought by American Express Travel two years later. Chris: Oh, wow. So unquestionably you had a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit going way back then to see an opportunity. Put you in it. Steve: And a lot of it is just kind of, I guess, my personal. I don't do well at big companies. I really struggle because I get so frustrated at just the lack of progress or the lack of innovation or the speed at which things happen, so I tend to sort of find an excuse to hit the exit button, usually within a year or two. Chris: Right. So you said something in that response that I want to talk to you about, and that's innovation. I think that's there's such a common theme, I think, with entrepreneurs about. You know, and innovation can mean so many things. What do you think that you've done, as you've built several companies, as you mentioned, to create or foster and nurture a spirit and environment of innovation? Steve: You know a lot of it is just becoming a really good listener to the buyer, to whoever the customer is. And then when they say things, there are certain kernels that are aspects of what they say that you just go oh, wait a minute, okay, can we go back to that? That sounds important. You know this level of frustration. Why does that frustrate you? And if you have engineering and development in the room when those things are said, oftentimes some real magic starts to happen and we just the creativity, the innovation just comes out naturally as wow, we can solve that problem. That's not that hard, you know, let's go do that. So that's on the B2B side. That's kind of the formula, that conversation. Something falls out as far as a new feature, product, something like that, that we can start working on the B2C side. Chris: Go ahead. Well, it sounds like there's a function there of asking the right questions and really listening. Steve: Well, and just most big companies or companies they try to protect the dev engineering. They're like oh, we're not going to let you talk to customers. You guys sit over here in the back room and we'll come to you with sort of a priority or roadmap of what we think is needed. And I feel like that's just the wrong way to do it. You've got to get the dev and the engineers and the programmers in the room to hear the story, otherwise you get this telephone tag of what actually gets built isn't quite what the customer wants or was even asking for. And for most companies that's really hard. I don't know why, but they just. It's like we can't allow that to happen, but that's just not the way I operate. Chris: Well, I mean, it makes sense that people you're asking to solve the problem probably need to hear what the problem is firsthand, right? Steve: Exactly. And then it's oftentimes the dev guys are like they're coming up with much more creative solutions. If you just hand them a requirement sheet or spec sheet, they're like, oh okay, this is going to take a month. But when they're involved with the client and they actually hear what the true problem is, oftentimes they're like, oh, I can knock this out overnight, I'll have a solution to you by tomorrow. It's just a night and day sort of sense of urgency or sort of the emotion around creating the solution. They're bought in. At that point, when they hear it directly from the client, they can be the hero. Chris: Well, when you think about kind of that and getting the right developers and the right kind of team together, what have you found to be successful as far as what to look for in building the right team and then keeping the team together? Steve: Yeah. So fortunately for me I mean through all of these different companies that I've started I've been able to kind of get the band back together multiple times. A because I, you know, I'm a big believer in sharing the equity. You know, let's get everybody, if not equity, at least options, so that when there is an exit, everybody benefits, and they've all seen that so far today, knock on wood, I haven't had an unsuccessful exit where we've had to, you know, turn out the lights or whatever. My shareholders have all made money, you know, typically around 5x to 10x on their investment, which has been great. So it's easy to get the bad back together. But what I also have found out is there are certain programmers that are passionate about programming and others that are just taught programming, and there's a night and day difference on the result. If they're passionate about it, the results come out quick. I get creative solutions that nobody would think of. They're usually extremely low cost and it's just so much better than if I have someone that's college taught. I'm doing this because it's a paycheck and I took this degree because that's what somebody told me to and I was good enough to get a B in college on all my programming courses, but at the end of the day, if their heart's not in it and they're spending their time, you know, just on the side weekends and nights learning new stuff, they're not going to be very good. So give me one or two of those that are passionate and I'll put them against 10 to 20 of those that are school taught and will kick their ass every time. Chris: So yeah, well again, I think that transcends all industries and disciplines, the key being passion. Right, I think you, as the leader, are the one that has to start with the passion and then find people that share that passion to get to where you're talking about, where there's that flow within the organization. Steve: Yeah, I think development's a little bit different. I mean, you're not going to find anybody super excited about accounting or I don't know the other aspects of it, but with development there's guys that just get so into it. You know they're programming on the side. They get into hackathons, they want to prove that you know they're smarter than the guy next to them and just constantly looking for the next challenge and just coming up with those creative solutions. I don't know of any other discipline that really has that level of it, but there might be. I mean, I could be wrong. Chris: So, just going back and maybe not the first venture where you and the travel agency in Houston started, but maybe I'm just curious to know as you began some of these startups, maybe sharing some of the lessons learned through some of the challenges you found in starting that venture, whether it be raising capital as an example, or any other challenges that may come about, but I think that capital raise can be one in the startup that some entrepreneurs find daunting and maybe can't solve and never get anything off the ground. Steve: Yeah Well, I think, first off, just wait as long as possible to raise capital. You know most of them kind of build an MVP which just kind of barely works and then go out and try to raise money on it. And whenever you go down that path you just end up way undervaluing what you have. And I know people get in certain situations where they just need to have a check, you know, or it's you know, lights out. But if you can wait until you actually have a client actually generating revenue, actually having positive cash flow, whatever, and then you can show someone, look, we just need to add fuel to the fire here. This is not about keeping the lights on, this is about generating growth You're going to have a dramatically better outcome. The other thing I found out is when you take the big check too early, you start making really stupid decisions. You start hiring attorneys that are expensive, you hire a CFO before you need it, you have a head of HR, all kinds of stuff and overhead that's just not necessary and over time it makes you less and less nimble because you're so worried about payroll, you know, and less focused on just delivering a product that has a you know, a bunch of value. Keep your day job, keep working nights and weekends, wait as long as possible. I mean, I always said, look, cash is like oxygen. If you run out you're going to die. So hang on to it with both hands first. I mean beg, borrow and steal from friends and family and whatever to just get stuff. If you need a contract, go out on the web and search for a capolar plate contract. It'll be good enough to get you started. Or find someone that's a buddy, that's a lawyer, that's willing to do some pro bono work in return, maybe for a little bit of equity stuff like that. Just hang on to that cash as much as you can, for as long as you can. Chris: Well, I think there's a lot there that someone can learn from. Obviously, speaking as a chairman of a law firm, I can't endorse legal Zoom for the startup, but I understand your point. We talk to clients a lot about especially know, especially in the startup phase. Maybe you know helping them get going, but you know and being smart about how they spend their money. But make it an investment in getting at least a sound structure and they may not need right the full-blown set of legal documents, but I can promise you I've seen people start on legal Zoom and wish they hadn't, you know, a couple of years later when things were getting a little tight. But I understand your point there. But conserving cash is important to get off the ground. Steve: Yeah, I mean you don't need to come right out of the gate being in an Inc. You know and incorporated in Delaware and pay all the fees, whatever to make that happen. I mean, just start out as a low-cost LLC and then, when you're ready to sort of raise capital and become a real company, you know you use part of that capital to convert at that time. Chris: So you had mentioned earlier, you know just, I guess, going back to kind of trip BAM COVID having, at least initially, a pretty profound impact but then turning it into a positive, and I'm kind of want to take you back to that time and you maybe dig in a little bit deeper. I think it's a beautiful lesson of something where you know a lot of people just throwing up their hands because travel stopped, et cetera, which decimates your business specifically to you. But then you said we actually learned from that and became a better, stronger company because of it. And you've mentioned right-sizing, the organization stuff. But could you share a little more detail and some stories from that our listeners can learn from if and when their business faces something similar? Steve: Yeah, I think, first off, being fairly quick. You know you can always hire people back, you know. But if you keep them on the payroll and you start burning up cash just way too fast or you're starting to trend towards in the red, you just got to pull the trigger. Nobody wants to, nobody likes to do it, but it's really nobody's fault. It's just something as an executive or CEO you have to do, or a founder. So that's one. Second is, as companies grow, you kind of make stupid mistakes along the way. You get kind of inefficient. You don't anticipate the level of growth that might have been reality. So going back and saying, all right, take a step back, let's catch our breath. You know, what should we have done to kind of handle the scale better? And so, for example, just moving everything to a cloud environment, you know, putting it out to bid, switching from one cloud provider to another, whatever it is, you know you can just generate or reduce your costs dramatically. You know, rather quickly, if you just focus the time on it. Everybody gets so white hot, focused on growth and the next client and the revenue they forget to look at the rear view mirror about. You know there was a lot of costs we could have taken out, you know, which could generate even more cash going forward. Advert: Hello friends. This is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations, and business leaders. Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at BoyerMiller. com and thanks for listening to the show. So we pulled the trigger pretty quick. We right-sized the staff. We had a pretty good and, fortunately for us, this is the other. We kind of lucked into this. Our customers, for whatever reason, decided they wanted to pay a subscription fee rather than maybe a percentage of the savings or a transaction fee, to where what they were going to spend would fluctuate month over month. By paying a subscription fee, they could budget it and they were going to get a better return on investment. So we did most of our deals that way and thank God we did, because when COVID and everything went into toilet in April of 2020, we still had cash coming in the door. So we were actually stayed cashflow positive because we kind of right-sized the staff fairly quickly. And then, coming out of COVID, as the revenue started to ramp back up and our sales started to continue, we were just on a much better platform that would scale after it because it was just all right-sized and efficient and whatever, and at the same time we added new products. So we had a two-year kind of all right, just keep the lights on, market will come back around. We added an air reshopping solution. We added a bunch of analytics to audit contracts and to benchmark performance, so that we had a whole bunch more to sell coming out of COVID than going in, and so that caused another year of kind of explosive growth as a result. Chris: That's great. So, yeah, obviously part of that is give some deep thought to how you price what your product right. So that subscription-based versus transaction for you sounds like a very. Maybe it didn't seem as meaningful at the time you made it, but it turned out to be. Steve: You know that's a tough one If the ROI of your product is pretty clear, like reshopping. If you've got a rate of $2.99, I drop it to $ to $250. I've got $49 per night in savings If you pay me a couple of bucks. Okay, here's the ROI. And we could run some pilots and all kinds of stuff to prove that out. So that makes it really simple and we try to hit look, I need a ROI that when they take it to their boss the guy that's doing the budgets, you know, won't cause all kinds of frustration and concern. So four to one is usually the minimum. A lot of our customers, the larger ones, are getting eight to one, 10 to one, you know. So you could say like you've probably underpriced it. But that's okay, you know we'll claw back some of that. You know, over time when it's a product that's the ROI is a bit fuzzier. You just got to somehow convince the client that this is the potential savings. They're going to guesstimate and then from there work backwards to a price which kind of gets you back to that four to one ROI. So if I think I'm going to save you five bucks a transaction, I'm probably going to charge you a dollar to $1.50 is what I'm going to aim for. Again, to get to that four to one kind of savings estimate for Relagate. Again to get to that four to one kind of savings estimate. Chris: So part of that goes, I think, in building that customer base, really focusing on strong relationships. Talk a little bit about that and what you've done, because it sounds like over the course of the various businesses, you've done a good job of creating some very good partnerships and alliances. What are some of the things you think that have helped you foster that and keep those for so many years? Steve: I think one is you know you got to under promise and over deliver. So if they're going to sign up, you know, don't make them look bad or stupid to their boss. The other one is identifying the influencers in the market. So I'm sure every industry has some individuals that are kind of on the bleeding edge, willing to try new things. And if they do and it works, they've got the microphone or the megaphone to tell a whole bunch of others. So fortunately for me, I've been able to identify who those influencers are. I've got a reputation for just delivering as promised. So when they sign up they have confidence and then they tell their peers and a lot of our sales in the large enterprise market are peer-to-peer networking. It's not from email campaigns or other stuff that we do. Chris: The kind of part of that, the old adage of just do what you say you committed to do when you said you committed to do it right. Steve: It's just delivering as promised. Don't sell me a can of goods and all this great wonderful thing. And then when the reality is just not there, you know, don't make them look stupid. You know that's the key one. I mean, these are after 40 years they become. We have some pretty tight relationships with these folks and I want them to keep their job and we want them all promoted and moving on to the next big role, because when that happens they just take us with them and we just keep getting bigger and bigger. Chris: So you mentioned that about kind of keeping this, your words, the band back together. You've been able to do that, hiring some of the right people and incentivizing the right way. Any insights into. You know what people could think about when they're looking at their team one, trying to, I guess, evaluate whether they have the right people and then finding the right ways to incentivize them to kind of keep that core group together. Steve: To me it's if they feel like they're a part of a team and they understand the value they're providing to the customer and they see that customer's appreciation. You know they're in the conversation with the client, you know, and that's easy to do at a small company, because who else are they going to talk to? Right, you got to bring the dev and engineering. But when you start layering and bifurcating and have people you know in engineering back there in the back room, kind of stuff that don't talk to clients, that's when it gets a lot harder. But when you get them into the conversation and that sense of this is my company, this is my reputation. I'm a part of something here, you know, that's growing and doing well and whatever. It's not that hard, it's really not that difficult at all. It's just everybody wants to be appreciated and feel like they're, you know, part of a team. So that's the formula, right, I mean I could throw money at them. But I ask my employees I mean I am not the guy that's writing big checks to hire people right? I'm like look, we're going to pay a reasonable salary. You know this is not, you're not going to be broke, but you know we're in it for the long term game, and so we want to keep the cash in the company so that we don't have to go do another capital raise which is going to dilute all of us, and so your equity just keeps getting smaller, you know, over time, and the guys that actually make the money, or the investors this needs to be a collaborative team effort so they get that. Chris: I think that transparent communications is key right. So they again they understand their role on the team, they understand what the goal of the organization is and how they can help further that. Steve: You know it's always been kind of fire slow, fire quick as well. You know the people, everybody makes hiring mistakes. It happens all the time. And you know when you hire someone within like a couple of days you're like this is not feeling right. You know, don't let it just sit, don't let it be two years later when you actually kind of work them out. You have to kind of pull the trigger fairly quick because it messes up the whole culture of the company. Oftentimes, especially at a small company, it can create some real problems. Chris: Yeah, I mean that may be the most sage advice and, I think, maybe the most consistent that I hear from entrepreneurs and business owners. It's been my own experience too, that that kind of fire, you know, don't be slow to fire when you know you made a mistake and it's the hardest, maybe one of the hardest ones to do because you're dealing with people. I spoke to someone yesterday and they were like hired, someone had some uncertainty and literally what I learned was to trust my gut because on day one that they started in a conversation went oh my God, this is a huge mistake. Tried to play it out, tried to make it work and guess what? It didn't. Steve: Yeah, the thing is I don't believe resumes anymore and I don't believe LinkedIn pages at all, especially when it comes to higher dev and engineering. It's just anybody can put whatever language they want and say they've got a ton of experience. You've got to figure out a way to validate Most of our hires. There's kind of referrals and peer-to-peer sort of networking. If I find someone, I can usually find someone they know, especially in the Dallas market where we are, that's worked with them at a prior company. That sort of thing and do some back-channel checking is what really pays off for us. And we know the rock stars. We know the rock stars. We know the rock stars, but they're not that hard to kind of pick out. It's the ones that are kind of questionable. That you know. You just got to do your homework and don't count on the resume. Chris: That's a really good point. It's a hard thing to do, though, and it may be easier in programmers. But, to you know, I totally agree with resumes, and profiles can be, you know, massaged, but it's sifting through and kind of through the smoke to really get to what's behind the curtain. Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean. And Zoom calls, I mean people hire on Zoom calls or whatever. Like dude, you got to get them in the office face to face, go to lunch, have a couple of face to face interactions before you actually bring this person on board. You know, make them pass a coding test or something. You know something tangible. Don't just look, they're very nice people. You know they all have a. You know look great on a phone call or Zoom call, whatever, but that doesn't cut it. Chris: Yeah, I mean no substitute for personal interaction and seeing how people show up. Right. Steve: Yeah, the other thing is, since we're, you know, on a startup mode where everybody's looking at kind of the potential for equity, I'm like, look, if you're as great as you are, why don't you come on board for a month on a contract basis? Let's see how it works out, you know, and we'll go from there All right, and you really get a feel for someone and how well they're going to. We try it, we like to try it, before we buy. Let's put it that way. That's one way to do it. Chris: just talk about you know specific kind of leadership styles and and how you would describe your leadership style, and maybe how you would describe it today versus maybe 20 years ago as you you were emerging as a leader, and how you think it's changed oh, my god, it's night and day. Steve: so first company way back when. Maybe it comes as a surprise or not, but it was a coat and tie environment. Okay, guys, we've got to put on the ties and whatever. That was just so stupid. Checking office hours and all that crap and tracking vacation time just seems so silly. Now, if you can get the job done, I don't care what you wear, I don't care what you look like, I don't care what you wear, I don't care what you look like, I don't care where you do the work, I don't care if you have to take vacation on a pretty regular basis for whatever reason. I don't care if you're going off and disappearing to watch your kid play soccer, I do not care anymore. Just here's the job. Here's kind of an expectation. You know, as long as I understand, you're trying hard to get it done as quick as possible. We are good. You know, it's kind of a thing. So all that other stuff was just noise. That was just stupid, anyway it's. I mean back when I started in this, I mean programming and development and all that and the whole tech world was fairly new, so nobody knew what they were doing or how to manage these folks and it evolved over time, but fairly quickly. I mean, by company two, ties were gone. By company three, office was gone. I mean I've been virtual for 25 years. Unfortunately, we had offices but we just I think they were a waste of money but we did it for optics more than anything. Chris: Yeah, so it sounds like more kind of a traditional and somewhat of a command and control, starting out to now a little more, much more flexible and providing autonomy as long as people deliver on the expectations that they're communicated with. Steve: Which comes down to you just hire the right people, right, if you can get kind of get that sense for what the kind of folks that are going to do well. So, for example, if I see, if you can get kind of get that sense for what are the kind of folks that are going to do well. So, for example, if I see that you've got you spent 20 years at a really big company, you are not going to do well at a startup. I could guarantee you You're used to other people doing work for you. You know you're just kind of the sit back in your office and sort of you know, tell folks what to do. That ain't going to happen. You need to get your hands dirty. You might have to write code. You got to do PowerPoints, you got to do Word docs all that stuff yourself. Big company folks just tend to lose that ability, let's say, or it's beneath them and that's not going to work. Chris: Yeah, I mean it's almost. Yeah, that's not in my role. Mentality versus everything is in everyone's role. Mentality, right, it's almost. Yeah, that's not in my role. Mentality versus everything is in everyone's role. Mentality right, it's about getting a job done, no matter what it takes. Steve: And I think that drives me crazy at a big company because, you know, unfortunately for others, I tend to poke my nose into others' lanes and I get told a lot Steve, stay in your lane. Nothing bugs me more, you know, than to hear that. But that's the big company way. Chris: So you've gone through a few companies and you're now, I guess, inside of a larger company. Now Are you finding it easy to kind of have that mentality of flexible leadership and innovative environment? Steve: In the new company? Yes, I would have to say no, it's kind of as I expected. You know, with other acquisitions you start. You know, this kind of here's how it happens. However, embers, I believe, is trying hard to carve out a role where I can exist, let's put it that way. So my title right now is Chief Strategy Officer, and it's a bit nebulous, kind of by design. I can sort of make it what I want and as a result of being chief strategy officer, I can get outside of my lane and people can question it. I'm like everybody needs strategy. That's my title, I'm going to get in your lane, kind of stuff you know. So I tend to kind of bounce around to lots of different projects, objectives so on. I kind of help make sure that it's cohesive, you know, across this travel and expense story, you know. But at the same time I don't have a lot of direct reports, which is great. That usually doesn't go too well either. So so far, so good. Chris: Fingers crossed, that's great, yeah, we we kind of covered kind of the challenges of COVID If you think back prior to that, any other challenges along the way with the first two or three companies, everybody, yeah, yeah, I think people some of those are the best lessons we learned or some of the challenges we go through. I'm just curious to know any kind of lessons from a challenge that you could share with the listeners that might help them when they face something similar. Steve: Oh my God. I mean everybody's made mistakes and if they got lucky along the way and if they don't admit that they're lying, I mean some of the bigger ones. 9-11, we had a solution that was processing about 80% of all corporate travel reservations made in the US. 9-11 hit and we went to zero within about 24 hours, so that was kind of a gut check. Fortunately, travel bounced back fairly quickly, but it made us take a step back and realize how nimble we were If something like that were going to happen again. So that's one, and you know, and there's all the kind of day-to-day stuff. I mean there's fraud, there's employee HR issues that happen. You know there's. I'm not going to get into details on that, but you know you just kind of all right, let's deal with this. You know, don't just look the other way and take care of it. I think the latest I mean the big one right now is just, you know, the whole third party hacking and getting into your network and holding you hostage, stuff like that. You know that's made everybody just super anxious and nervous and to the point where companies are kind of shutting down their network so much that individuals can't do the job. You know, which is causing concern and it's what else are you going to do? I mean, if some employee can click on a link and bring down your network, do? Chris: you just turn off email. You're right, it's creating such a challenge. Everybody, all companies, are being attacked every day from all kinds of angles, and it just takes one and but you also? You can't operate out of fear and you can't let it stop you from doing your business. Steve: Well, they say there's two kinds of companies out there. There's those that have been hacked and those that don't know they've been hacked. So just kind of keep that in mind and I think it's fairly true. I think, you know, it's just almost too easy to get into someone's network and poke around and kind of see what's going on these days. Chris: It's so scary, but I thought you were going to say those who have been hacked and those that will be hacked, but I guess already have you, just don't know it. Well, see, I really loved hearing your story. It's a fascinating industry, and one that you don't really hear much about, but you definitely. It sounds like for 40 years you've been crushing it at it, so congratulations to that. Well, thanks for that. Steve: But also the one thing people don't know about corporate travel is that it sits on a backbone of legacy technology that's probably 40 years old. That has not changed. The GDSs are antiquated, the travel agency systems are antiquated. It's not that hard to come up with something innovative and new in this environment. So I just got lucky to where I got into it and I'm like this thing is so bad. I mean anything you do is going to be innovative. And so we just started coming up with new stuff solving clients' problems and it just kept evolving from there. Like this thing is so bad. I mean anything you do is going to be innovative. And so we just started coming up with new stuff solving clients' problems, and it just kept evolving from there. Chris: Yeah, that's really. You know so many entrepreneurs I've talked to. It's what you just said solving the customer or client's problem. Because what I said earlier, it goes back to asking the questions and listening and then trying to solve that problem. Steve: So many great ideas that come from that across so many industries. Yeah, and just to set up a little process to where you talk with your customers on a regular basis or a group of clients or people you trust and it just happens naturally, it's really not that difficult. Chris: Well, let's turn to a little bit on the lighter side before we wrap this up. I always like to ask people like yourself what was your first job? Steve: oh, my first job, let's see. Uh, I worked at a pet store at junior high. Well, actually first job was mowing yards, right? So everybody every kid did that just to get my allowance money. Then I worked at a pet store in junior high for a short period but fairly quickly realized waiting tables made a lot more money. So I told a guy I was 18, when actually I was 16, and they never really checked. They hired me as a waiter. I was actually kind of a part-time bartender, so I was serving liquor in Houston the strawberry patch I'll probably get them in trouble back when I was 16 years old and just made a ton of money as a, you know, a high schooler. So that was kind of the first. And then, you know, got into computers and writing code at a very early age. I was part of a program at Shell where they gave us mainframe time to go in and kind of play around and then went off to Baylor for computer science and then went to TI and then went to A&M for grad school. Very good, very good. Chris: So okay. So, being a native Texan, do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Steve: That is not a fair question, because both are pretty dang awesome, but, being in Texas, I think we've got some of the best barbecue on the planet. So Pecan Lodge here in Dallas is, I think, kind of the best, and there's a lot of Tex-Mex, though that's really good as well, yeah, I agree on all points. Chris: I haven't heard of Pecan Lodge before, so I'll have to check that one out. Steve: Yeah, it's in Deep Ellum, so next time you fly in, go in out of Love Field, and it's not too far, it's a 10-minute drive from there. Chris: Deal Noted. And then last thing is you know you've made early in the career, probably never did this and maybe have done since. But if you could take a 30 day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Steve: I actually got a 30 day sabbatical. So a guy hired me or not hired me, but when he brought me on board to run a company he said hey, you know, I threw in there. Just, I read it in a magazine that it was the hot thing for techies to ask for, so I threw it in there and they accepted it. I guess they thought I'd never make it to my five-year anniversary. Anyway, I did and I took the kids and family, went all the way throughout through Europe. So we went to Italy, paris, france, austria, switzerland, whatever you know, just really unplugged for that 30 days. Actually it was a 90 day sabbatical. That's what I took. Wow, so I got a little bit more time. Yeah, it was great, it was great. So if that were to happen today, I'd probably look to do something similar, but nowadays if I want to take 90 days, I probably could just got to ask for it. Chris: Very good, very good. Well, steve, thanks again for taking the time to come on and love hearing your story and all the innovation you brought to the travel industry. Steve: All right. Well, thanks for having me, chris, I really enjoyed it. Good conversation. Chris: Thanks, well, we'll talk soon. Steve: Okay, you bet. Special Guest: Steve Reynolds.

Podcast: Emerson Automation Experts (LS 23 · TOP 10% what is this?)Episode: Building Cybersecurity Robustness in Pipeline Operations PodcastPub date: 2024-07-25Manufacturers and producers across all industries know the challenges in keeping their operations cyber-secure. Industries such as pipeline transportation and electrical & gas distribution networks face additional challenges in the wide geographic spread of their operations and the need for reliance on public communications networks. In this podcast, I'm joined by Emerson cybersecurity expert Steve Hill to discuss these additional challenges and ways the companies in these industries, suppliers, and federal regulators are collaborating to develop and implement best practices for strong cyber resiliency. Give the podcast a listen and visit the SCADA Solutions & Software for Energy Logistics on Emerson.com and the AspenTech Digital Grid Management page for methods and solutions to improve your cybersecurity defenses and ongoing programs. Transcript Jim: Hi, everyone. This is Jim Cahill with another “Emerson Automation Experts” podcast. Pipelines cover a wide geographic area and require continuous monitoring for safe, efficient, and reliable operations. Today, I’m joined by Steve Hill to discuss the challenges pipeline operators face in keeping their pipeline networks cybersecure. Welcome to the podcast, Steve. Steve: Thanks, Jim. Pleasure to be here. Jim: Well, it’s great to have you. I guess, let’s get started by asking you to share your background and path to your current role here with us at Emerson. Steve: Thanks, yeah. I’ve been in the automation and SCADA industry for about 40 years, started on the hardware design and communications that then moved over to software. And it’s nearly 20 years I’ve been with Emerson. I joined as part of the Bristol Babcock acquisition. My main focus now is working in wide-area SCADA as the director of SCADA Solutions for Emerson, and most of that’s working in the oil and gas industry, working with Emerson sales and the engineering teams and our customers as they design systems and products for the industry. And also, alongside that, for the last few years, I’ve been collaborating with CISA. That’s the U.S. government Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as part of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative. Jim: Okay. That’s a nice, varied background. That’s really good for our discussion. So, what exactly do you mean by wide-area SCADA? Steve: That’s a great question. There’s a SCADA system where the software is monitoring equipment across a very wide area. It might be a very large geographic area, like a pipeline or gas, or water distribution network, or perhaps a well field. I mean, some of the systems, for example, I was speaking to a customer last week who is monitoring an entire pipeline across Peru, and yet, their control centers are actually in Mexico. So, to do that kind of thing, the equipment is usually connected via public networks. You know, private networks don’t extend that far, and even the control centers may be widely distributed. And as part of that, compared to in-plant control, there’s an assumption that your communications are clearly not gonna be 100% perfect. You’re gonna lose communications either momentarily, like with cellular networks, and when, for example, like we’ve got in Texas this week, with natural events like hurricanes can cut communications for hours. But because these systems are all critical infrastructure, such as pipelines or electrical distribution, the actual operations, the process, must never be interrupted. Today, we’re talking about cybersecurity, and that same sensitivity is why these systems are now the target to some of the most sophisticated cyberattacks. Jim: Okay, that gives a picture of the breadth of these types of SCADA systems, and you had mentioned you’d work with CISA, the cybersecurity infrastructure defense agency, and the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, which I’ll just call JCDC for short. Can you give some more examples on that work? Steve: Yeah. Really, I could give you a bit of background. Probably many of our listeners know that there’s been several successful cyberattacks against critical infrastructure over the last few years. Probably the most famous in the pipeline industry was an attack that’s referred to as the Colonial Pipeline attack. That was actually a criminal ransomware attack that resulted in gasoline and jet fuel shortage across the Eastern U.S. for several days, and that was criminals basically trying to get money. And it was almost a random attack, it wasn’t targeted. However, there have been actual state-sponsored attacks, and probably the one that was most successful was prior to the Russian military attack against Ukraine. They actually instituted several successful cyberattacks against the Ukrainian power grid. And very concerning is, in recent months, the U.S. infrastructure, including pipelines, have been successfully infiltrated by a group that are called Volt Typhoon, who are thought to be from the People’s Republic of China. So JCDC and CISA are working hard to really counter and protect against these threats. Jim: Wow. Well, that’s clearly a huge concern. What is the JCDC doing to address these challenges? Steve: Well, in 2023, so last year, JCDC facilitated the development of something called the Pipeline Reference Architecture. Basically, Emerson, alongside other industry vendors and also pipeline operators, participated in the development of this Pipeline Reference Architecture, which I’ll refer to as the PRA. It’s a fairly short document that outlines the design and operating principles for SCADA systems in the pipeline industry. And one thing the government is keen to point out, it’s not a regulatory document, but it does set out the best principles and is intended as guidance for the industry. Really, they want to work with the industry to come up with best practices. Jim: Well, it sounds like this PRA is another set of standards to address cybersecurity. Why is another document needed in the industry where a bunch of standards exist now? Steve: Yeah, that’s a question I and other members get asked quite a lot. The main reason is that wide-area SCADA represents a very different set of challenges to traditional SCADA, which we refer to as inside the wire. So for example, a refinery or a manufacturing plant, everything is in one location. But as I mentioned before, wide-area SCADA has got a very wide displacement, physically. It also actually has a lot of remote field workers. There may be folks working on that system hundreds of miles from base, and you’re also using communications networks that are not even owned or operated by the owners of the pipeline. Though this PRA is really intended for the pipeline industry, clearly, it’s applicable to almost any wide-area SCADA, that’s water or electrical industry as well. Jim: Okay, that makes sense. So those are definitely challenges that don’t exist for more automation systems, as you say, inside the wire. Tell us more about how the PRA addresses these. Steve: Well, the big thing is segmentation, basically, taking the network and splitting it into different levels that represent different areas of the operation. For example, the internet would be what’s referred to as level zero, and moving all the way down to the bottom of the network, that’s level nine. And the levels in between that represent different levels of trust. Now, those who are familiar with cybersecurity and SCADA are probably familiar with something that is called the Purdue model, which I think first came out in the late 1980s, and that also splits up SCADA and control networks and actually business networks into different levels. However, when that came out, the internet was in its infancy. No one would ever have used the internet or even really public IP networks for their connectivity. So it doesn’t really take into account many of the things we take for granted today in these systems. So the PRA is intended to expand and take into account the reality that, for example, some of this critical data will actually be transiting across a public network, right? And in order to achieve that with this segmentation, we’re using a concept called Defense in Depth, right? And as you go down the different levels of the network, the assumption is you can trust each item on that network better. So, for example, on the internet, you don’t trust anything, but when you get down, let’s say, to the communications between an RTU [remote terminal unit] and a gas chromatograph on a local serial link, you might completely trust that. Now, it’s interesting, although that’s part of the PRA model, that does actually conflict with a security concept called Zero Trust, which is something that Emerson has really based our products on. But both zero trust and defense in depth are valid. Jim: Now, you had mentioned a couple of concepts I’d like to explore a little bit more in there, and let’s start with zero trust. Can you explain that concept to us? Steve: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Zero trust is a concept where any piece of equipment or software should trust nothing. Don’t trust anything else on the network, don’t trust the network to be safe, and it should not rely on anything else for protection. And historically, SCADA was protected, for example, by firewalls. You would use insecure products that were known to not be secure because they were developed perhaps 20 or 30 years ago and hide them behind firewalls, and that’s really how we’ve handled security today. But there’s a realization you can’t do that. So we now need to design products so that they don’t trust anything. But the reality is many of our customers, Emerson’s customers and pipeline operators, have devices that were installed perhaps 30 years ago. That’s the typical lifespan of some RTUs and controllers in this industry. So as a result, when you get down to the lower levels of the network, zero trust doesn’t work. So you do have to have levels of additional protection. So for example, if you had a Modbus link, which is basically insecure almost by design, that should be protected by additional levels of firewalls and so on. But if you’re designing a modern product, it should be designed so it doesn’t rely on anything else. And that’s the concept of zero trust. Jim: Okay, got it. So don’t trust anything. Everything must be proven out. And the other concept you talked about was defense in depth. So, what does that mean? Steve: Well, the phrase is most commonly used where we’re talking about a network with multiple levels in. So when you come from, for example, the internet into your business network, you would have a set of firewalls and what’s called the demilitarized zone. And then when you go from your business network down to your controls network, you’d have another set of firewalls. So it’s multiple levels of protection. However, that same concept should be used actually within products as well. And, in fact, Emerson takes that very seriously with our secure development lifecycle certifications, IEC 62443, and how we design those products. Jim: Well, that’s good. As you get those two and as you put in more modern technology, that it complies and has that cybersecurity built into mind there. So, can you give us an example of how it’s built in? Steve: Yeah. That great one. If I take, for example, the Emerson FB3000 RTU, that’s a flow computer and a controller device that’s designed specifically for the oil and gas industry, especially for pipelines, an obvious concern is that that may be attacked externally to modify the firmware. Now, at the first level, the RTU itself has secure protocols. It uses something called DNP3, which would, in theory, provide access to the device. But then the firmware, when we issue new firmware, we put it on a website so we have protection of the website, we also publish a hash, which is basically a unique key that the customer downloading the firmware can check. It hasn’t been modified by anyone attacking the website. But then, when they actually put it into the RTU, so they’re updating firmware, the RTU will check that that firmware was developed by Emerson and was intended for that device. It does that by certifying certificates on the load. Now, once it’s in the device and it’s running in the field, you might say, “Well, the task is done,” but there’s an additional level of protection. It will continually and on boot, check that firmware, make sure the certificate still matches, it’s not being changed. And if it has been changed, it will actually revert to a known good factory firmware that’s basically embedded in the device. So you can see that there’s really five or six different things all checking and ensuring that firmware in that device was not compromised. So basically, multiple levels within the device, and in addition, there’s multiple levels on the network. So the bad guys have to get through a lot of different levels to damage or compromise the device. And we’re trying to do that with everything we design today. Jim: Yeah. And with modern cryptography and making any change completely will change that hash and everything and make it impossible to slip something in without it being noticed. So that’s really a nice thing. Steve: Yeah. And the fact that even if it detects it, it then goes back to factory firmware, which may be a slightly older version, but your operation will keep running. It will keep controlling, which is a very nice feature. Jim: Yeah, that’s a great example there. I guess, going back to the PRA, what else does it include other than the segmentation that you discussed? Steve: There’s about 10 high-level principles that cover aspects of the design and operation of the SCADA system. And for each of these, there’s various examples and guidance on how to actually follow the principle in a real-world system. So, for example, there was a whole section on how to manage third-party devices in the contractors, because on a pipeline system, you’re almost certainly gonna have, for example, engineers from Emerson coming in from third parties. So it gives examples on the real-world aspects of operating the system. Jim: Are there other examples from it you can share? Steve: Yeah. One important one is when you’re designing the system, you should identify and document all of the different data flows that occur. And that’s, when I say data flow, communications or conversation between different pieces of equipment. So, for example, this RTU may communicate with that SCADA platform on this particular machine and may communicate with a measurement system on another machine, document all of those data flows, and then deny all other data flows by default. Then, after the system is running, continually monitor it passively. And if you see an additional communication, say, between two pieces of equipment that normally never communicated or didn’t communicate on a particular IP socket, flag that immediately, because it may be something that’s going on that was unexpected. It certainly was outside the original design of the system. Jim: This has been very educational. Thank you so much, Steve. Where can our listeners go to learn more? Steve: Well, really a couple of places. If you go to the CISA blog, which is at www.cisa.gov/news-events, there’s details there. The actual PRA was published on March the 26th of this year. And also, if you want to discover more about Emerson’s involvement in wide-area SCADA and the cybersecurity associated with it, if you go to Emerson.com/SCADAforEnergy, you’ll find some information there. Jim: Okay, great. And I’ll add some links to that and to some of the other things we discussed in the transcript. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Steve. Steve: Not a problem. It’s a pleasure. -End of transcript-The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Emerson Team, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

A hilarious exchange sent Vineeta Sawkar and Steve Simpson ends with an explosion of laughter.Join the fun by checking out the podcast.

A hilarious exchange sent Vineeta Sawkar and Steve Simpson ends with an explosion of laughter.Join the fun by checking out the podcast.

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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

Steve Tuck, Co-Founder & CEO of Oxide Computer Company, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his work to make modern computers cloud-friendly. Steve describes what it was like going through early investment rounds, and the difficult but important decision he and his co-founder made to build their own switch. Corey and Steve discuss the demand for on-prem computers that are built for cloud capability, and Steve reveals how Oxide approaches their product builds to ensure the masses can adopt their technology wherever they are. About SteveSteve is the Co-founder & CEO of Oxide Computer Company.  He previously was President & COO of Joyent, a cloud computing company acquired by Samsung.  Before that, he spent 10 years at Dell in a number of different roles. Links Referenced: Oxide Computer Company: https://oxide.computer/ On The Metal Podcast: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/on-the-metal TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is brought to us in part by our friends at RedHat. As your organization grows, so does the complexity of your IT resources. You need a flexible solution that lets you deploy, manage, and scale workloads throughout your entire ecosystem. The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform simplifies the management of applications and services across your hybrid infrastructure with one platform. Look for it on the AWS Marketplace.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. You know, I often say it—but not usually on the show—that Screaming in the Cloud is a podcast about the business of cloud, which is intentionally overbroad so that I can talk about basically whatever the hell I want to with whoever the hell I'd like. Today's guest is, in some ways of thinking, about as far in the opposite direction from Cloud as it's possible to go and still be involved in the digital world. Steve Tuck is the CEO at Oxide Computer Company. You know, computers, the things we all pretend aren't underpinning those clouds out there that we all use and pay by the hour, gigabyte, second-month-pound or whatever it works out to. Steve, thank you for agreeing to come back on the show after a couple years, and once again suffer my slings and arrows.Steve: Much appreciated. Great to be here. It has been a while. I was looking back, I think three years. This was like, pre-pandemic, pre-interest rates, pre… Twitter going totally sideways.Corey: And I have to ask to start with that, it feels, on some level, like toward the start of the pandemic, when everything was flying high and we'd had low interest rates for a decade, that there was a lot of… well, lunacy lurking around in the industry, my own business saw it, too. It turns out that not giving a shit about the AWS bill is in fact a zero interest rate phenomenon. And with all that money or concentrated capital sloshing around, people decided to do ridiculous things with it. I would have thought, on some level, that, “We're going to start a computer company in the Bay Area making computers,” would have been one of those, but given that we are a year into the correction, and things seem to be heading up into the right for you folks, that take was wrong. How'd I get it wrong?Steve: Well, I mean, first of all, you got part of it right, which is there were just a litany of ridiculous companies and projects and money being thrown in all directions at that time.Corey: An NFT of a computer. We're going to have one of those. That's what you're selling, right? Then you had to actually hard pivot to making the real thing.Steve: That's it. So, we might as well cut right to it, you know. This is—we went through the crypto phase. But you know, our—when we started the company, it was yes, a computer company. It's on the tin. It's definitely kind of the foundation of what we're building. But you know, we think about what a modern computer looks like through the lens of cloud.I was at a cloud computing company for ten years prior to us founding Oxide, so was Bryan Cantrill, CTO, co-founder. And, you know, we are huge, huge fans of cloud computing, which was an interesting kind of dichotomy. Instead of conversations when we were raising for Oxide—because of course, Sand Hill is terrified of hardware. And when we think about what modern computers need to look like, they need to be in support of the characteristics of cloud, and cloud computing being not that you're renting someone else's computers, but that you have fully programmable infrastructure that allows you to slice and dice, you know, compute and storage and networking however software needs. And so, what we set out to go build was a way for the companies that are running on-premises infrastructure—which, by the way, is almost everyone and will continue to be so for a very long time—access to the benefits of cloud computing. And to do that, you need to build a different kind of computing infrastructure and architecture, and you need to plumb the whole thing with software.Corey: There are a number of different ways to view cloud computing. And I think that a lot of the, shall we say, incumbent vendors over in the computer manufacturing world tend to sound kind of like dinosaurs, on some level, where they're always talking in terms of, you're a giant company and you already have a whole bunch of data centers out there. But one of the magical pieces of cloud is you can have a ridiculous idea at nine o'clock tonight and by morning, you'll have a prototype, if you're of that bent. And if it turns out it doesn't work, you're out, you know, 27 cents. And if it does work, you can keep going and not have to stop and rebuild on something enterprise-grade.So, for the small-scale stuff and rapid iteration, cloud providers are terrific. Conversely, when you wind up in the giant fleets of millions of computers, in some cases, there begin to be economic factors that weigh in, and for some on workloads—yes, I know it's true—going to a data center is the economical choice. But my question is, is starting a new company in the direction of building these things, is it purely about economics or is there a capability story tied in there somewhere, too?Steve: Yeah, it's actually economics ends up being a distant third, fourth, in the list of needs and priorities from the companies that we're working with. When we talk about—and just to be clear we're—our demographic, that kind of the part of the market that we are focused on are large enterprises, like, folks that are spending, you know, half a billion, billion dollars a year in IT infrastructure, they, over the last five years, have moved a lot of the use cases that are great for public cloud out to the public cloud, and who still have this very, very large need, be it for latency reasons or cost reasons, security reasons, regulatory reasons, where they need on-premises infrastructure in their own data centers and colo facilities, et cetera. And it is for those workloads in that part of their infrastructure that they are forced to live with enterprise technologies that are 10, 20, 30 years old, you know, that haven't evolved much since I left Dell in 2009. And, you know, when you think about, like, what are the capabilities that are so compelling about cloud computing, one of them is yes, what you mentioned, which is you have an idea at nine o'clock at night and swipe a credit card, and you're off and running. And that is not the case for an idea that someone has who is going to use the on-premises infrastructure of their company. And this is where you get shadow IT and 16 digits to freedom and all the like.Corey: Yeah, everyone with a corporate credit card winds up being a shadow IT source in many cases. If your processes as a company don't make it easier to proceed rather than doing it the wrong way, people are going to be fighting against you every step of the way. Sometimes the only stick you've got is that of regulation, which in some industries, great, but in other cases, no, you get to play Whack-a-Mole. I've talked to too many companies that have specific scanners built into their mail system every month looking for things that look like AWS invoices.Steve: [laugh]. Right, exactly. And so, you know, but if you flip it around, and you say, well, what if the experience for all of my infrastructure that I am running, or that I want to provide to my software development teams, be it rented through AWS, GCP, Azure, or owned for economic reasons or latency reasons, I had a similar set of characteristics where my development team could hit an API endpoint and provision instances in a matter of seconds when they had an idea and only pay for what they use, back to kind of corporate IT. And what if they were able to use the same kind of developer tools they've become accustomed to using, be it Terraform scripts and the kinds of access that they are accustomed to using? How do you make those developers just as productive across the business, instead of just through public cloud infrastructure?At that point, then you are in a much stronger position where you can say, you know, for a portion of things that are, as you pointed out, you know, more unpredictable, and where I want to leverage a bunch of additional services that a particular cloud provider has, I can rent that. And where I've got more persistent workloads or where I want a different economic profile or I need to have something in a very low latency manner to another set of services, I can own it. And that's where I think the real chasm is because today, you just don't—we take for granted the basic plumbing of cloud computing, you know? Elastic Compute, Elastic Storage, you know, networking and security services. And us in the cloud industry end up wanting to talk a lot more about exotic services and, sort of, higher-up stack capabilities. None of that basic plumbing is accessible on-prem.Corey: I also am curious as to where exactly Oxide lives in the stack because I used to build computers for myself in 2000, and it seems like having gone down that path a bit recently, yeah, that process hasn't really improved all that much. The same off-the-shelf components still exist and that's great. We always used to disparagingly call spinning hard drives as spinning rust in racks. You named the company Oxide; you're talking an awful lot about the Rust programming language in public a fair bit of the time, and I'm starting to wonder if maybe words don't mean what I thought they meant anymore. Where do you folks start and stop, exactly?Steve: Yeah, that's a good question. And when we started, we sort of thought the scope of what we were going to do and then what we were going to leverage was smaller than it has turned out to be. And by that I mean, man, over the last three years, we have hit a bunch of forks in the road where we had questions about do we take something off the shelf or do we build it ourselves. And we did not try to build everything ourselves. So, to give you a sense of kind of where the dotted line is, around the Oxide product, what we're delivering to customers is a rack-level computer. So, the minimum size comes in rack form. And I think your listeners are probably pretty familiar with this. But, you know, a rack is—Corey: You would be surprised. It's basically, what are they about seven feet tall?Steve: Yeah, about eight feet tall.Corey: Yeah, yeah. Seven, eight feet, weighs a couple 1000 pounds, you know, make an insulting joke about—Steve: Two feet wide.Corey: —NBA players here. Yeah, all kinds of these things.Steve: Yeah. And big hunk of metal. And in the cases of on-premises infrastructure, it's kind of a big hunk of metal hole, and then a bunch of 1U and 2U boxes crammed into it. What the hyperscalers have done is something very different. They started looking at, you know, at the rack level, how can you get much more dense, power-efficient designs, doing things like using a DC bus bar down the back, instead of having 64 power supplies with cables hanging all over the place in a rack, which I'm sure is what you're more familiar with.Corey: Tremendous amount of weight as well because you have the metal chassis for all of those 1U things, which in some cases, you wind up with, what, 46U in a rack, assuming you can even handle the cooling needs of all that.Steve: That's right.Corey: You have so much duplication, and so much of the weight is just metal separating one thing from the next thing down below it. And there are opportunities for massive improvement, but you need to be at a certain point of scale to get there.Steve: You do. You do. And you also have to be taking on the entire problem. You can't pick at parts of these things. And that's really what we found. So, we started at this sort of—the rack level as sort of the design principle for the product itself and found that that gave us the ability to get to the right geometry, to get as much CPU horsepower and storage and throughput and networking into that kind of chassis for the least amount of wattage required, kind of the most power-efficient design possible.So, it ships at the rack level and it ships complete with both our server sled systems in Oxide, a pair of Oxide switches. This is—when I talk about, like, design decisions, you know, do we build our own switch, it was a big, big, big question early on. We were fortunate even though we were leaning towards thinking we needed to go do that, we had this prospective early investor who was early at AWS and he had asked a very tough question that none of our other investors had asked to this point, which is, “What are you going to do about the switch?”And we knew that the right answer to an investor is like, “No. We're already taking on too much.” We're redesigning a server from scratch in, kind of, the mold of what some of the hyperscalers have learned, doing our own Root of Trust, we're doing our own operating system, hypervisor control plane, et cetera. Taking on the switch could be seen as too much, but we told them, you know, we think that to be able to pull through all of the value of the security benefits and the performance and observability benefits, we can't have then this [laugh], like, obscure third-party switch rammed into this rack.Corey: It's one of those things that people don't think about, but it's the magic of cloud with AWS's network, for example, it's magic. You can get line rate—or damn near it—between any two points, sustained.Steve: That's right.Corey: Try that in the data center, you wind into massive congestion with top-of-rack switches, where, okay, we're going to parallelize this stuff out over, you know, two dozen racks and we're all going to have them seamlessly transfer information between each other at line rate. It's like, “[laugh] no, you're not because those top-of-rack switches will melt and become side-of-rack switches, and then bottom-puddle-of-rack switches. It doesn't work that way.”Steve: That's right.Corey: And you have to put a lot of thought and planning into it. That is something that I've not heard a traditional networking vendor addressing because everyone loves to hand-wave over it.Steve: Well so, and this particular prospective investor, we told him, “We think we have to go build our own switch.” And he said, “Great.” And we said, “You know, we think we're going to lose you as an investor as a result, but this is what we're doing.” And he said, “If you're building your own switch, I want to invest.” And his comment really stuck with us, which is AWS did not stand on their own two feet until they threw out their proprietary switch vendor and built their own.And that really unlocked, like you've just mentioned, like, their ability, both in hardware and software to tune and optimize to deliver that kind of line rate capability. And that is one of the big findings for us as we got into it. Yes, it was really, really hard, but based on a couple of design decisions, P4 being the programming language that we are using as the surround for our silicon, tons of opportunities opened up for us to be able to do similar kinds of optimization and observability. And that has been a big, big win.But to your question of, like, where does it stop? So, we are delivering this complete with a baked-in operating system, hypervisor, control plane. And so, the endpoint of the system, where the customer meets is either hitting an API or a CLI or a console that delivers and kind of gives you the ability to spin up projects. And, you know, if one is familiar with EC2 and EBS and VPC, that VM level of abstraction is where we stop.Corey: That, I think, is a fair way of thinking about it. And a lot of cloud folks are going to pooh-pooh it as far as saying, “Oh well, just virtual machines. That's old cloud. That just treats the cloud like a data center.” And in many cases, yes, it does because there are ways to build modern architectures that are event-driven on top of things like Lambda, and API Gateway, and the rest, but you take a look at what my customers are doing and what drives the spend, it is invariably virtual machines that are largely persistent.Sometimes they scale up, sometimes they scale down, but there's always a baseline level of load that people like to hand-wave away the fact that what they're fundamentally doing in a lot of these cases, is paying the cloud provider to handle the care and feeding of those systems, which can be expensive, yes, but also delivers significant innovation beyond what almost any company is going to be able to deliver in-house. There is no way around it. AWS is better than you are—whoever you happen to—be at replacing failed hard drives. That is a simple fact. They have teams of people who are the best in the world of replacing failed hard drives. You generally do not. They are going to be better at that than you. But that's not the only axis. There's not one calculus that leads to, is cloud a scam or is cloud a great value proposition for us? The answer is always a deeply nuanced, “It depends.”Steve: Yeah, I mean, I think cloud is a great value proposition for most and a growing amount of software that's being developed and deployed and operated. And I think, you know, one of the myths that is out there is, hey, turn over your IT to AWS because we have or you know, a cloud provider—because we have such higher caliber personnel that are really good at swapping hard drives and dealing with networks and operationally keeping this thing running in a highly available manner that delivers good performance. That is certainly true, but a lot of the operational value in an AWS is been delivered via software, the automation, the observability, and not actual people putting hands on things. And it's an important point because that's been a big part of what we're building into the product. You know, just because you're running infrastructure in your own data center, it does not mean that you should have to spend, you know, 1000 hours a month across a big team to maintain and operate it. And so, part of that, kind of, cloud, hyperscaler innovation that we're baking into this product is so that it is easier to operate with much, much, much lower overhead in a highly available, resilient manner.Corey: So, I've worked in a number of data center facilities, but the companies I was working with, were always at a scale where these were co-locations, where they would, in some cases, rent out a rack or two, in other cases, they'd rent out a cage and fill it with their own racks. They didn't own the facilities themselves. Those were always handled by other companies. So, my question for you is, if I want to get a pile of Oxide racks into my environment in a data center, what has to change? What are the expectations?I mean, yes, there's obviously going to be power and requirements at the data center colocation is very conversant with, but Open Compute, for example, had very specific requirements—to my understanding—around things like the airflow construction of the environment that they're placed within. How prescriptive is what you've built, in terms of doing a building retrofit to start using you folks?Steve: Yeah, definitely not. And this was one of the tensions that we had to balance as we were designing the product. For all of the benefits of hyperscaler computing, some of the design center for you know, the kinds of racks that run in Google and Amazon and elsewhere are hyperscaler-focused, which is unlimited power, in some cases, data centers designed around the equipment itself. And where we were headed, which was basically making hyperscaler infrastructure available to, kind of, the masses, the rest of the market, these folks don't have unlimited power and they aren't going to go be able to go redesign data centers. And so no, the experience should be—with exceptions for folks maybe that have very, very limited access to power—that you roll this rack into your existing data center. It's on standard floor tile, that you give it power, and give it networking and go.And we've spent a lot of time thinking about how we can operate in the wide-ranging environmental characteristics that are commonplace in data centers that focus on themselves, colo facilities, and the like. So, that's really on us so that the customer is not having to go to much work at all to kind of prepare and be ready for it.Corey: One of the challenges I have is how to think about what you've done because you are rack-sized. But what that means is that my own experimentation at home recently with on-prem stuff for smart home stuff involves a bunch of Raspberries Pi and a [unintelligible 00:19:42], but I tend to more or less categorize you the same way that I do AWS Outposts, as well as mythical creatures, like unicorns or giraffes, where I don't believe that all these things actually exist because I haven't seen them. And in fact, to get them in my house, all four of those things would theoretically require a loading dock if they existed, and that's a hard thing to fake on a demo signup form, as it turns out. How vaporware is what you've built? Is this all on paper and you're telling amazing stories or do they exist in the wild?Steve: So, last time we were on, it was all vaporware. It was a couple of napkin drawings and a seed round of funding.Corey: I do recall you not using that description at the time, for what it's worth. Good job.Steve: [laugh]. Yeah, well, at least we were transparent where we were going through the race. We had some napkin drawings and we had some good ideas—we thought—and—Corey: You formalize those and that's called Microsoft PowerPoint.Steve: That's it. A hundred percent.Corey: The next generative AI play is take the scrunched-up, stained napkin drawing, take a picture of it, and convert it to a slide.Steve: Google Docs, you know, one of those. But no, it's got a lot of scars from the build and it is real. In fact, next week, we are going to be shipping our first commercial systems. So, we have got a line of racks out in our manufacturing facility in lovely Rochester, Minnesota. Fun fact: Rochester, Minnesota, is where the IBM AS/400s were built.Corey: I used to work in that market, of all things.Steve: Really?Corey: Selling tape drives in the AS/400. I mean, I still maintain there's no real mainframe migration to the cloud play because there's no AWS/400. A joke that tends to sail over an awful lot of people's heads because, you know, most people aren't as miserable in their career choices as I am.Steve: Okay, that reminds me. So, when we were originally pitching Oxide and we were fundraising, we [laugh]—in a particular investor meeting, they asked, you know, “What would be a good comp? Like how should we think about what you are doing?” And fortunately, we had about 20 investor meetings to go through, so burning one on this was probably okay, but we may have used the AS/400 as a comp, talking about how [laugh] mainframe systems did such a good job of building hardware and software together. And as you can imagine, there were some blank stares in that room.But you know, there are some good analogs to historically in the computing industry, when you know, the industry, the major players in the industry, were thinking about how to deliver holistic systems to support end customers. And, you know, we see this in the what Apple has done with the iPhone, and you're seeing this as a lot of stuff in the automotive industry is being pulled in-house. I was listening to a good podcast. Jim Farley from Ford was talking about how the automotive industry historically outsourced all of the software that controls cars, right? So, like, Bosch would write the software for the controls for your seats.And they had all these suppliers that were writing the software, and what it meant was that innovation was not possible because you'd have to go out to suppliers to get software changes for any little change you wanted to make. And in the computing industry, in the 80s, you saw this blow apart where, like, firmware got outsourced. In the IBM and the clones, kind of, race, everyone started outsourcing firmware and outsourcing software. Microsoft started taking over operating systems. And then VMware emerged and was doing a virtualization layer.And this, kind of, fragmented ecosystem is the landscape today that every single on-premises infrastructure operator has to struggle with. It's a kit car. And so, pulling it back together, designing things in a vertically integrated manner is what the hyperscalers have done. And so, you mentioned Outposts. And, like, it's a good example of—I mean, the most public cloud of public cloud companies created a way for folks to get their system on-prem.I mean, if you need anything to underscore the draw and the demand for cloud computing-like, infrastructure on-prem, just the fact that that emerged at all tells you that there is this big need. Because you've got, you know, I don't know, a trillion dollars worth of IT infrastructure out there and you have maybe 10% of it in the public cloud. And that's up from 5% when Jassy was on stage in '21, talking about 95% of stuff living outside of AWS, but there's going to be a giant market of customers that need to own and operate infrastructure. And again, things have not improved much in the last 10 or 20 years for them.Corey: They have taken a tone onstage about how, “Oh, those workloads that aren't in the cloud, yet, yeah, those people are legacy idiots.” And I don't buy that for a second because believe it or not—I know that this cuts against what people commonly believe in public—but company execs are generally not morons, and they make decisions with context and constraints that we don't see. Things are the way they are for a reason. And I promise that 90% of corporate IT workloads that still live on-prem are not being managed or run by people who've never heard of the cloud. There was a decision made when some other things were migrating of, do we move this thing to the cloud or don't we? And the answer at the time was no, we're going to keep this thing on-prem where it is now for a variety of reasons of varying validity. But I don't view that as a bug. I also, frankly, don't want to live in a world where all the computers are basically run by three different companies.Steve: You're spot on, which is, like, it does a total disservice to these smart and forward-thinking teams in every one of the Fortune 1000-plus companies who are taking the constraints that they have—and some of those constraints are not monetary or entirely workload-based. If you want to flip it around, we were talking to a large cloud SaaS company and their reason for wanting to extend it beyond the public cloud is because they want to improve latency for their e-commerce platform. And navigating their way through the complex layers of the networking stack at GCP to get to where the customer assets are that are in colo facilities, adds lag time on the platform that can cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. And so, we need to think behind this notion of, like, “Oh, well, the dark ages are for software that can't run in the cloud, and that's on-prem. And it's just a matter of time until everything moves to the cloud.”In the forward-thinking models of public cloud, it should be both. I mean, you should have a consistent experience, from a certain level of the stack down, everywhere. And then it's like, do I want to rent or do I want to own for this particular use case? In my vast set of infrastructure needs, do I want this to run in a data center that Amazon runs or do I want this to run in a facility that is close to this other provider of mine? And I think that's best for all. And then it's not this kind of false dichotomy of quality infrastructure or ownership.Corey: I find that there are also workloads where people will come to me and say, “Well, we don't think this is going to be economical in the cloud”—because again, I focus on AWS bills. That is the lens I view things through, and—“The AWS sales rep says it will be. What do you think?” And I look at what they're doing and especially if involves high volumes of data transfer, I laugh a good hearty laugh and say, “Yeah, keep that thing in the data center where it is right now. You will thank me for it later.”It's, “Well, can we run this in an economical way in AWS?” As long as you're okay with economical meaning six times what you're paying a year right now for the same thing, yeah, you can. I wouldn't recommend it. And the numbers sort of speak for themselves. But it's not just an economic play.There's also the story of, does this increase their capability? Does it let them move faster toward their business goals? And in a lot of cases, the answer is no, it doesn't. It's one of those business process things that has to exist for a variety of reasons. You don't get to reimagine it for funsies and even if you did, it doesn't advance the company in what they're trying to do any, so focus on something that differentiates as opposed to this thing that you're stuck on.Steve: That's right. And what we see today is, it is easy to be in that mindset of running things on-premises is kind of backwards-facing because the experience of it is today still very, very difficult. I mean, talking to folks and they're sharing with us that it takes a hundred days from the time all the different boxes land in their warehouse to actually having usable infrastructure that developers can use. And our goal and what we intend to go hit with Oxide as you can roll in this complete rack-level system, plug it in, within an hour, you have developers that are accessing cloud-like services out of the infrastructure. And that—God, countless stories of firmware bugs that would send all the fans in the data center nonlinear and soak up 100 kW of power.Corey: Oh, God. And the problems that you had with the out-of-band management systems. For a long time, I thought Drax stood for, “Dell, RMA Another Computer.” It was awful having to deal with those things. There was so much room for innovation in that space, which no one really grabbed onto.Steve: There was a really, really interesting talk at DEFCON that we just stumbled upon yesterday. The NVIDIA folks are giving a talk on BMC exploits… and like, a very, very serious BMC exploit. And again, it's what most people don't know is, like, first of all, the BMC, the Baseboard Management Controller, is like the brainstem of the computer. It has access to—it's a backdoor into all of your infrastructure. It's a computer inside a computer and it's got software and hardware that your server OEM didn't build and doesn't understand very well.And firmware is even worse because you know, firmware written by you know, an American Megatrends or other is a big blob of software that gets loaded into these systems that is very hard to audit and very hard to ascertain what's happening. And it's no surprise when, you know, back when we were running all the data centers at a cloud computing company, that you'd run into these issues, and you'd go to the server OEM and they'd kind of throw their hands up. Well, first they'd gaslight you and say, “We've never seen this problem before,” but when you thought you've root-caused something down to firmware, it was anyone's guess. And this is kind of the current condition today. And back to, like, the journey to get here, we kind of realized that you had to blow away that old extant firmware layer, and we rewrote our own firmware in Rust. Yes [laugh], I've done a lot in Rust.Corey: No, it was in Rust, but, on some level, that's what Nitro is, as best I can tell, on the AWS side. But it turns out that you don't tend to have the same resources as a one-and-a-quarter—at the moment—trillion-dollar company. That keeps [valuing 00:30:53]. At one point, they lost a comma and that was sad and broke all my logic for that and I haven't fixed it since. Unfortunate stuff.Steve: Totally. I think that was another, kind of, question early on from certainly a lot of investors was like, “Hey, how are you going to pull this off with a smaller team and there's a lot of surface area here?” Certainly a reasonable question. Definitely was hard. The one advantage—among others—is, when you are designing something kind of in a vertical holistic manner, those design integration points are narrowed down to just your equipment.And when someone's writing firmware, when AMI is writing firmware, they're trying to do it to cover hundreds and hundreds of components across dozens and dozens of vendors. And we have the advantage of having this, like, purpose-built system, kind of, end-to-end from the lowest level from first boot instruction, all the way up through the control plane and from rack to switch to server. That definitely helped narrow the scope.Corey: This episode has been fake sponsored by our friends at AWS with the following message: Graviton Graviton, Graviton, Graviton, Graviton, Graviton, Graviton, Graviton, Graviton. Thank you for your l-, lack of support for this show. Now, AWS has been talking about Graviton an awful lot, which is their custom in-house ARM processor. Apple moved over to ARM and instead of talking about benchmarks they won't publish and marketing campaigns with words that don't mean anything, they've let the results speak for themselves. In time, I found that almost all of my workloads have moved over to ARM architecture for a variety of reason, and my laptop now gets 15 hours of battery life when all is said and done. You're building these things on top of x86. What is the deal there? I do not accept that if that you hadn't heard of ARM until just now because, as mentioned, Graviton, Graviton, Graviton.Steve: That's right. Well, so why x86, to start? And I say to start because we have just launched our first generation products. And our first-generation or second-generation products that we are now underway working on are going to be x86 as well. We've built this system on AMD Milan silicon; we are going to be launching a Genoa sled.But when you're thinking about what silicon to use, obviously, there's a bunch of parts that go into the decision. You're looking at the kind of applicability to workload, performance, power management, for sure, and if you carve up what you are trying to achieve, x86 is still a terrific fit for the broadest set of workloads that our customers are trying to solve for. And choosing which x86 architecture was certainly an easier choice, come 2019. At this point, AMD had made a bunch of improvements in performance and energy efficiency in the chip itself. We've looked at other architectures and I think as we are incorporating those in the future roadmap, it's just going to be a question of what are you trying to solve for.You mentioned power management, and that is kind of commonly been a, you know, low power systems is where folks have gone beyond x86. Is we're looking forward to hardware acceleration products and future products, we'll certainly look beyond x86, but x86 has a long, long road to go. It still is kind of the foundation for what, again, is a general-purpose cloud infrastructure for being able to slice and dice for a variety of workloads.Corey: True. I have to look around my environment and realize that Intel is not going anywhere. And that's not just an insult to their lack of progress on committed roadmaps that they consistently miss. But—Steve: [sigh].Corey: Enough on that particular topic because we want to keep this, you know, polite.Steve: Intel has definitely had some struggles for sure. They're very public ones, I think. We were really excited and continue to be very excited about their Tofino silicon line. And this came by way of the Barefoot networks acquisition. I don't know how much you had paid attention to Tofino, but what was really, really compelling about Tofino is the focus on both hardware and software and programmability.So, great chip. And P4 is the programming language that surrounds that. And we have gotten very, very deep on P4, and that is some of the best tech to come out of Intel lately. But from a core silicon perspective for the rack, we went with AMD. And again, that was a pretty straightforward decision at the time. And we're planning on having this anchored around AMD silicon for a while now.Corey: One last question I have before we wind up calling it an episode, it seems—at least as of this recording, it's still embargoed, but we're not releasing this until that winds up changing—you folks have just raised another round, which means that your napkin doodles have apparently drawn more folks in, and now that you're shipping, you're also not just bringing in customers, but also additional investor money. Tell me about that.Steve: Yes, we just completed our Series A. So, when we last spoke three years ago, we had just raised our seed and had raised $20 million at the time, and we had expected that it was going to take about that to be able to build the team and build the product and be able to get to market, and [unintelligible 00:36:14] tons of technical risk along the way. I mean, there was technical risk up and down the stack around this [De Novo 00:36:21] server design, this the switch design. And software is still the kind of disproportionate majority of what this product is, from hypervisor up through kind of control plane, the cloud services, et cetera. So—Corey: We just view it as software with a really, really confusing hardware dongle.Steve: [laugh]. Yeah. Yes.Corey: Super heavy. We're talking enterprise and government-grade here.Steve: That's right. There's a lot of software to write. And so, we had a bunch of milestones that as we got through them, one of the big ones was getting Milan silicon booting on our firmware. It was funny it was—this was the thing that clearly, like, the industry was most suspicious of, us doing our own firmware, and you could see it when we demonstrated booting this, like, a year-and-a-half ago, and AMD all of a sudden just lit up, from kind of arm's length to, like, “How can we help? This is amazing.” You know? And they could start to see the benefits of when you can tie low-level silicon intelligence up through a hypervisor there's just—Corey: No I love the existing firmware I have. Looks like it was written in 1984 and winds up having terrible user ergonomics that hasn't been updated at all, and every time something comes through, it's a 50/50 shot as whether it fries the box or not. Yeah. No, I want that.Steve: That's right. And you look at these hyperscale data centers, and it's like, no. I mean, you've got intelligence from that first boot instruction through a Root of Trust, up through the software of the hyperscaler, and up to the user level. And so, as we were going through and kind of knocking down each one of these layers of the stack, doing our own firmware, doing our own hardware Root of Trust, getting that all the way plumbed up into the hypervisor and the control plane, number one on the customer side, folks moved from, “This is really interesting. We need to figure out how we can bring cloud capabilities to our data centers. Talk to us when you have something,” to, “Okay. We actually”—back to the earlier question on vaporware, you know, it was great having customers out here to Emeryville where they can put their hands on the rack and they can, you know, put your hands on software, but being able to, like, look at real running software and that end cloud experience.And that led to getting our first couple of commercial contracts. So, we've got some great first customers, including a large department of the government, of the federal government, and a leading firm on Wall Street that we're going to be shipping systems to in a matter of weeks. And as you can imagine, along with that, that drew a bunch of renewed interest from the investor community. Certainly, a different climate today than it was back in 2019, but what was great to see is, you still have great investors that understand the importance of making bets in the hard tech space and in companies that are looking to reinvent certain industries. And so, we added—our existing investors all participated. We added a bunch of terrific new investors, both strategic and institutional.And you know, this capital is going to be super important now that we are headed into market and we are beginning to scale up the business and make sure that we have a long road to go. And of course, maybe as importantly, this was a real confidence boost for our customers. They're excited to see that Oxide is going to be around for a long time and that they can invest in this technology as an important part of their infrastructure strategy.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me about, well, how far you've come in a few years. If people want to learn more and have the requisite loading dock, where should they go to find you?Steve: So, we try to put everything up on the site. So, oxidecomputer.com or oxide.computer. We also, if you remember, we did [On the Metal 00:40:07]. So, we had a Tales from the Hardware-Software Interface podcast that we did when we started. We have shifted that to Oxide and Friends, which the shift there is we're spending a little bit more time talking about the guts of what we built and why. So, if folks are interested in, like, why the heck did you build a switch and what does it look like to build a switch, we actually go to depth on that. And you know, what does bring-up on a new server motherboard look like? And it's got some episodes out there that might be worth checking out.Corey: We will definitely include a link to that in the [show notes 00:40:36]. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.Steve: Yeah, Corey. Thanks for having me on.Corey: Steve Tuck, CEO at Oxide Computer Company. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry ranting comment because you are in fact a zoology major, and you're telling me that some animals do in fact exist. But I'm pretty sure of the two of them, it's the unicorn.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

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

Two weeks ago co-host Bruce Miller offerred up his a list of the top 6 summer blockbuster films to see in 2023. But there are many more highly anticipated films (including a few already in theaters) that are hoping to draw big audiences this summer. The list includes: "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" in theaters now "Fast X" in theaters now "The Little Mermaid" out this weekend "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" out June 2  "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" out June 9 "Asteroid City" out June 16 "Joy Ride" out July 7 "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" out July 12 "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" out Aug. 4 "Gran Turismo" out Aug. 11 "Blue Beetle" out Aug. 18 Listen here to our previous episode on summer blockbusters  About the show Streamed & Screened is a podcast about movies and TV hosted by Bruce Miller, a longtime entertainment reporter who is now the editor of the Sioux City Journal in Iowa and Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises based in Madison, Wisconsin. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Welcome everyone to another episode of Streams and Screens and Entertainment Podcast about movies and TV from Lee Enterprises. I'm Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer at Lee and co-host of the program with the star of our blockbuster sequel. Bruce Miller, editor of the Sioux City Journal and longtime entertainment reporter. Bruce, we we exploded a couple of weeks ago, exploded with six movies to watch. But there's a lot more than six movies coming out this summer, so we just had to do more. Can I tell you, you have a career as a publicist. You could really sell anything, right? Yes, I can. You make me sound good. Well, that's like good luck. You were here during the show. Here he is. And now, ladies and gentlemen, for your dining and dining pleasure, please wear one of those. But there are you know, Memorial Day is usually the start of the big movie summer movie season. And I think I mentioned this before on the on the podcast. It really didn't start until Jaws. Jaws was the one that kicked off the blockbuster. The concept of the blockbuster. And after that, in 1975, it became this thing that you needed to have big films during the summer that would draw crowds at a In the old days, it was because you got air conditioning. People wanted to come in. It's name, but this is a good way to park kids, too. If you don't want to mess with kids and you don't have to worry about them, shove them to the theaters. They can watch this. And as long as under PG 13, you're good. It's a way to get out of the house. During the hot months of the year. I mean, most of these movies are not going to win an Oscar. I mean, you might get one or two here. That's. Yeah, Yeah. Explosions, big bangs. Well, over the more Memorial Day weekend, you will see vast X or vast hand, whichever you prefer to call it, as kind of the one that's going to dump a lot of things because, you know, Fast and Furious, all they need to do is show up for a party. They could film the party and they would still get $1,000,000 billion. Right. Yeah. So we're we're going to skip over that list of six that we did a couple of weeks ago. A link to that episode is in the show notes. So if there's a movie that we pass over here, you're like, Why didn't they talk about Indiana Jones? Well, we talk about it already, so no Indiana Jones. We that was in our list of six that you must see. But we're going to kind of come back now. So guardians of the Galaxy Volume three, it's already out. So that was kind of the start of this summer's and is doing very well. It's not bad. It's not bad, but it is one of those ones that if you're starting with three, you won't know where you are. So you just have to kind of go with it, enjoy the moment, enjoy the story, and then go back and catch up. All right. Well, I haven't seen one or two, and to be honest with you, I lost you will be so lost. Is Deadpool in it? I mean, that's it's like the only. Well, there are no doubt there are new characters and Groot. Rooney is this kind of tree that. Yeah, Vin Diesel is the voice I rude, but that's all he said. I am Groot. So you see how. How are you doing that? I am Groot, and it's just different inflections that he uses. But in earlier editions, this is your spoiler alert. He had to be regenerated. So he's a little baby Groot, and now he's back to being full sized Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy three. So I am Groot. So Vin Diesel is Groot, and he just says that and he probably gets paid $20 million. Can you believe it? We are in the wrong business. All we had to do was say one line, and I didn't even need to memorize it. And. Yeah, and you get big bucks and he's a breakout character. It's one you want. But the movie belongs to Rocket the Raccoon, and that's played by Bradley Cooper or voiced by Bradley Cooper, Brad Little Rocket Raccoon suit and pretend like he's he's one but yeah and he's good and it's his story and then you see what happens to him in the course of this. Well the other guardians try to help him through his crisis. The other movie that and we touched on this a little bit that I'm kind of excited for is either fast facts are facts ten, whatever you want to call it, which is the penultimate installment to the series, which has been going on for eons now. I was at the Super Mario Brothers movie with one of my daughters a couple of weeks ago and during the trailers they had a trailer for Fast X and my daughter is looking at it and she seems kind of like mildly interested like that might be interesting to see, but probably not. And I said to her, I'm like, okay, see, this is a series of movies that Dad likes to watch, but it's completely ridiculous now. It's like completely jumped the shark because originally it was just like an FBI agent race. It's Oh, right. He's going after a bunch of bad guys who are like racing cars and stealing things, and now they're sending cars into outer space. It's completely ridiculous. But, you know, every episode they add somebody else in another action star. This time it's Jason Momoa. We're adding some legitimacy with some Oscar winners with Rita moreno and Brie Larson. So we're this is this is an Oscar movie, right? Is that what we're we're going to see here high toned right there, But that, you know, count the lines that some of these actors get. They barely speak. It's all action. And I swear they work a week. They probably go in a week, record, whatever they need, and then everything is created around them because all those car chases, those aren't they aren't actually racing those cars. They're done in special effects. And so, you know, unless you have a director who comes out and says, No, we really did do this, it's special effects and if you stay at the end of the movie where it must be 2 hours of just in the list credits, you know that somebody else is drawing those cars. Yeah. The real stars of the show are sitting in a in a climate controlled computer room, probably with carpal tunnel and all the. Yeah, all the all the hand movements they're going through to to try to do that stuff. Another movie that's coming out May 26, The Little Mermaid. Now this is the live action version of it. You have Ali Bailey as Ariel, Melissa McCarthy as Ursula. Have you seen it or what are your thoughts? I'm out of fence about it because I know that people have raved and said, Oh, it's just wonderful. That's great. I don't like taking an animated film and turning it into a live action. I really don't. I they've done it with Lion King, Jungle Book. You name a Disney, if they've made an animated one, get ready, because they're coming out with a live action one pretty soon because it's another way to make money. They've added some songs. Lin-Manuel Miranda is writing some stuff for this. He grew up with the original Little Mermaid. Love The Little Mermaid. But I. I don't know. When you look at Flounder and Sebastian. Scary, scary, if you ask me now, The Little Mermaid, she could be great. But I just I don't know that it needed to be done and time will tell. We'll see what happens with this. I saw the live action of The Lion King. We went to a drive in theater, actually, and saw that a few years ago when it came out, it was okay. I, I didn't see the point of doing it other than Disney was just looking at a new avenue to make money. Mulan, which was the I think that went pretty much straight to Disney Plus where they did it was during, I think during the pandemic. Yeah, they tried to get you to buy it first and then that didn't quite work. So then they just released on Disney. Plus it's become a running joke in my house because we watched it on New Year's Eve that year, and my wife says to me, It's like I fell asleep in it, like right after that scene with the chicken. And then I said to her there was a chicken because I, I fell asleep before the chair. And the chicken was like 2 minutes into the movie, I guess. So it's like, it's like the credits, roll the movie, hit the screen and then I was out cold. I have no recollection of that film whatsoever. But you notice how sometimes that movie is a good nap. Yeah. Boy, I can go to the theater and as like. And I'm out. And maybe it's just the atmosphere. You're in a soft chair, the lights are out, you know, you have somebody talking in the background, but you don't really pay attention. That's what that's about. It could be. But I think the jury is out on The Little Mermaid. I don't think that we have a verdict yet another one that's coming out shortly after that. And I'm kind of kicking myself. I feel like I need to go and see it because, you know, it's one that I probably meant to watch initially. And I just for whatever missed it was the Spider-Man across the Spider-Verse Yeah, into this break was the first one and it won the Bear Best picture. It was wonderful because it it doesn't have a Spider-Man like you think. And there are so many other elements to it. I watched it on a plane and I thought, Well, this is one I haven't seen. Let's catch up. And I was disappointed that I hadn't seen it in the theater because it is good. It is really well-done. The storytelling is wonderful. And I have every confidence that because the same people are involved, this one's going to be good, too. Yeah, I have to go back and watch it because I and we've talked about this before, I'm not a huge comic book person, with a few exceptions, a little bit of Batman, a little bit of Superman. And I do like, you know, some of the Spider-Man movies, But just for whatever reason that kind of came out, I meant to see it and I just didn't. So I'm going to try to get back and watch the original and then maybe even get to the theater this summer and check out that one when they get to some of those super those Marvel superheroes like Doctor Strange. Oh, Pass. I do not need some of those ones in my life. And I think they need to be a little more discriminatory in what they're bringing out because honestly, they just don't throw everything at us. It's the same story. Basically, they're just wearing goofy costumes, but this is a good way of taking I tried thing and really flipping it because there are many spider verses, and I think the last Spider-Man film learned a lot from the first animated version of this. So now the next film on my list, I have I have not say, you want to see this, I am disowning you. This is Transformers Cancer. And those films I hate the Ones Rise of the Beast, you name. I have a confession to make. Not that this is you probably respect me more. I have never seen any of those Transformers movies I flipped one on one time. It was on maybe HBO or Showtime. It was, you know, Long Pass at the theaters. And I flipped it on briefly. And I think it was on for about 30 seconds. And I went, Nope, clicked it off. It was just so, so bad. I mean, I see the concept. It was based on a toy. And the toy was you could turn a toy into like a a big robot is one of them. And it was like car you, you it's like a Rubik's cube. You kind of move a little bit and then it becomes something else. But what's the story? Well, there is no there is none. No. Right. It's just the the thing turning into whatever. Optimus Prime was the king of all of that. And I frankly, I do not care what happens to Optimus or any of his brands. And I thought that once we hit the scrapheap, we were done with up. But apparently not because they're bad. Well, they obviously make money if they keep making them. We know nothing. We know nothing. It's huge. You probably need to go back and do all this and read or see all those and you'll say, Oh, I really think I need to see more of that. No, I know. I'm going to completely skip that one and but it'll probably make a ton of money. Is that going to be one where it will make it'll make like $100 million the first week, but then lose 75% of its box office will be number one the week it opens. They always are. And then it dwindles from there. And that is one of those kind of like, well, let's send the kids to this. It can't be too much. You know, it's not going to hurt them. Let's send the it's a that's that's what rules all these kind of things because you got who would make this you had that kind of money to spend on a film and this is what you're coming up with. There's no I did read I think one of them came out when the writers were on strike in dozen years ago, and it doesn't. Yeah, that was basically the thing. It's like we're just blowing things up. It really didn't matter. They just they just kind of went ahead and and did it anyway. They throw in a narration at that a long time ago, it a century which we were an end. This is happening and the world was coming to an end. But we had Optimus Prime and that badly frozen crap like they had on it and that's they get, they get people watching Stupid Night. So the next movie on my list here comes out a week later. My guess is it will not make a ton of money limited really as you age, but it's one that I want to see. Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Margot Robbie, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton. Cast like that can only mean one thing. It's Wes. Wes Anderson. Yeah, yeah. And it's set in 1955, so that gives you another little boost. And it's about a science fiction convention. So it's like, God, there's a lot here to pick of a lot of things that you could. It reminds me just on first glance of Hello tomorrow, if you've seen that show on, on streaming, yeah, this is on Apple. But it's about one of those kind of things where they're wanting to send trips to the moon and there's, you know, and how people were all kind of all in on space travel. But something happens at this convention and it changes things. And then I don't want to spill anymore. The only I think real notable thing out of that, no. Bill Murray, It's like the first Wes Anderson movie in 20 years or more that that does not have. Bill Murray I read that he had COVID and had to be replaced by Steve Carell. He works though. NASIR can make it. Let's get Steve Yeah, right. So. Well, I think it now will be one that people who are kind of movie snobs will say, Oh, wonderful film, loved it. It was great. It was great. And yes, fabulous film. In the third hour. It was very, very, you know, that kind of stuff. But it's about the funny thing is I watch a lot of my movie trailers on YouTube. So then when you watch something on YouTube, you start getting recommended videos to watch. After that, I started getting hit by these YouTube recommendations for these fake trailers to Wes Anderson movies where it's like Wes Anderson reimagines Star Wars and it has like this ridiculous concept of a movie. And then, you know, like each person that's playing like Owen Wilson is Darth Vader and Bill Murray plays AI. Whoever Obi-Wan Kenobi, those are great and they are hilarious. A.I. is going to help them the most. So if we can make that, you know, really blow up, it's because air has made it easier to do. Exactly. So side note, go to YouTube, check out the trailers for the Wes Anderson Star Wars movie. There was one for I think it was Lord of the Rings, and there might have even been like a Harry Potter one, too. And they look hilarious. I would pay good money to see Wes Anderson reimagined any of those films. We talked about this next film a little bit last week on our episode, Joy Ride out July 7th, kind of like a hangover type or film concept, but it's it's starring a bunch of female actors Ashley Park, Stephanie Shue, Terry Cole, Sabrina Woo. It is directed by Adele Lim, who co-wrote Crazy Rich Asians. So that looks interesting. It looks like a fun movie. Yeah, it'll be a fun trip, a romp. And I think this is your, you know, each like I say, you can put these in categories. These are the girls are going out movies. Mom wants to get out with her girlfriends. They're going to have a couple of drinks before we go to the movie. We might have dinner, we might go shopping. This is your movie? Exactly. I guess this next one is a completely opposite direction and it's probably going to be a huge one this summer. And it was one that I thought might have made your list know when you did you your sex and you know, didn't. The reason I'm not on that list is because it's part one. Same with Dune. Dune was a part one and it drives me insane that they would split these things up. I would rather sit for 4 hours and see the whole thing than to have to wait a whole year to get the next part. What happens if you're hit by a truck in that next year and you never saw the end of it? Doesn't make sense. So that's a good point. So Mission Impossible, Dead Reckoning, Part one out July 12th. So this is supposed to be the final two installments of Tom Cruise's journey through Mission Impossible. First off, do you believe that? Are these really going to be the last? And this was the one where he got mad at the crew and he yelled at them and said, come on, we've got to make this, you know, anything? Well, maybe not. Maybe we don't need to. But we'll see what happens. I'm sure that it'll end at a very crucial point, and then we'll be ready for the next one next year. But as far as I'm concerned, it's okay. It can go without me. It is what it is. And a Tom Cruise proving that he can do stand still. I, I don't need to know that. I don't need to know that he can jump across a building to another building. I don't need to see him hanging out of a an airplane or climbing the top of a building. I don't need any of that because I know you can do it. But why? What's the point? And besides, Mission Impossible, we used to watch us as kids. It was a TV show and at the end of the instructions, the cassette started burning in the cassette player and it was like, Your mission, should you decide, is to accept it, you know? And then we will disavow any knowledge of your existence. If this goes badly. And then they send people out. One person puts a mask on and suddenly you've got this big hoo ha. Well, they had how many years of Mission Impossible. So if he really wanted to keep doing it, there's enough copy there that they could just pilfer. My suspicion on this one is that they're they're going to continue the story. It's almost going to turn into a James Bond situation where it's going to live in perpetuity because you can just kind of recast the role. I mean, we've we've been through like six James Bonds now and they're still fine. I love the James Bond series, and I've always enjoyed the Mission Impossible series. So I feel like it's just going to kind of move on and Ethan Hunt will go away. Yeah, exactly. Now, so and nobody else. Yeah. Yeah. It'll make a ton of money, you know, 500 million and. And we'll get excited or I'll get excited. You won't. But, you know, now that's we're on the set of They had Mission impossible one of the earlier ones in four D Have you ever that. No. Well it's a 3D film but they also have like the seats move. Oh, so they kind of shake you during those rate times Every It would've been perfect to an earthquake. Now, I know you're too young to ever have been when earthquake was here, but he had what was called sense around and all they did was basically turn up the speakers in the theater. But you thought the theater is falling apart. Oh, my God. It sounds like it's all but it's is one of those he's so this bawdy is a way to kind of like it's a ride, it's erratic and it's fun. Yeah, I've been to a couple of things similar to that. We're looking at where the aquarium in Chicago. I think that's one of them, where you go, you sit in your chair and you watch a movie about whales, and then the whale goes flying out of the water and then hits the ocean and then you get separated by phase. Yeah, Yeah. So that would be kind of fun. And the sound, too sound is the evening at the theaters were rigged for the best sound. You'd have them start in one end, and then you hear them kind of walking all around you and you go, Oh, what is this? This is kind of different. But I don't know if the average screening of Mission Impossible is going to have all that kind of detail. Just know he's going to be hanging off something, skipping ahead a little bit now to August. August 4th, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mutant Mayhem, is it? I don't know what to think about that. Yeah, it's animated. I'm not sure what to think about this. This might be just like a summer animated film to get kids out. Do kids still like the Turtles? I don't know. See, I think the Turtles in had their day and I think the turtles would resonate more with dad than they might with the kids, because, you know, it is what it is. Yeah. Yeah. When I was when I was sitting in Mario Brothers, this was another one of those trailers that aired. And I kind of got mildly excited at first, Lego Ninja Turtles, and but then I'm thinking myself, Do I really want to see this? And I don't know. I like this one. It's they're going to be a complete box office disaster or it's going to make 200 million and people are going to be like, Oh, look at that. It just knocked off Mario Brothers is as this big movie. Well, and when they try to make them look too realistic, I think they ruin it. I think this one's going back to the real kind of and drawn look. Yes. Yeah. Well, I think that might be in its favor. You know, it's really weird. A number of years ago, I went on a Make-A-Wish trip to Disney World with a little boy. From here. He was maybe four or five, yet he had cancer. And his wish was he wanted to meet the Mutant Ninja Turtles. And they were at the Disney MGM Studios at the time, or whatever it's called now. I think it's called Disney's Hollywood Studios. Okay. And they were they're doing like a stunt show, whatever. And he wanted to see the Turtles. Well, we all we went to this thing and the turtles were like greeting people, high fiving up. It was really cool. And the little boy who had been very ill, he was not feeling well that day. He started to come to light. He was like, Oh my God, it's the turtles. The turtles are here. And his mother said, Just wait. They're going to come over and see you. And he was so thrilled. And they came over and they hugged him and they lifted him up. And they they really they had a moment and his mom said already, ask your question. And the little boy said, Oh, he said, I don't know. And he said, no. She said, go ahead, ask that question. And the question was, Will you watch over me at night because I'm afraid of cancer. And he has a poster in his room of the Turtles. And they said, yes. And he was so thrilled. And I swear that he helped that kid through all of this kind of situation. So as much as I might bad mouth the turtles, I had a moment where the turtles gave a little boy hope. And I loved that. And I live with that story all the time because you never know what kind of thing someone might say that could make your day just a little bit better. Yeah. Wow, that's great. So there's my turtle story. There's your turtle story. Wow. You'll see Bruce, if you come with that turtle story one more time. Right. We've got a couple more on this list. This next one, I'm not I'm kind of very surprised because I'm taking credit for some of these because I know I made my some of those bad movies that you get terrified. Oh, that's right, Granturismo out August 11th. Now, this is kind of an interesting one. I used to play the video game when I was in college. Yeah, Yeah. So it's like it's another one of these, you know, because we saw Last of US on HBO, which was based on a video game, and that's what Granturismo was. It was a it's a racing game, but it's also based on a true story for the movie of a of a racecar driver. And it stars or costars David Harbor from Stranger Things. So I, I don't know what to make of this one. It's like it might do well, it could be terrible. Well, what do you do? What's the goal? You just drive. You just drive. You drive and you win. Well, how is that a story? Well, is it Ford versus Ferrari? I mean, if a dad and I actually had a real race is in it. So what's the deal? Yes. I mean, Granturismo it's listed as an upcoming American biographical coming of age sports drama. So it's based on reality. So, yeah, okay, let's go for it. This is not too far afield from past eggs. You know, that's what that was when it first started out. Remember where they were not did you recall old things but Fast and Furious? The Fast and the Furious based in various Tokyo Drift Ohio draft. Yes. All those. Wait, that must be the most work they put in on those movies is trying to figure out what we're going to call this thing. You know, we've already dropped the articles, so we can't use that. We're going to add some more. The best of the various, you know, really, really fast and super duper furious. So, see, Granturismo could take over for that good. And it could grander, too. Rees-Mogg The next I feel like it's going to be an interesting one to just keep an eye on because it is on one hand, it's like based on a video game, On another hand, it's based on reality. I don't know, you know, if uppers down or what. Okay. As a person who does video games, when you see a film based on a video game, does it get you excited because they're kind of doing a better job of visualizing what's on a video game, or do you feel like you want to control it? Yeah, I don't know because I haven't played a lot of video games since becoming a parent. And, you know, it's something I did when I was a kid and through college and kind of even my early marriage years. But I just to me, video games is just an escape and you kind of sit there. My I have a brother that really like the last of us because he played the video game and he said it was pretty much, you know, they made some changes here or there that because the video game aspect of it wouldn't work on TV or vice versa. But he enjoyed it. And, you know, I like I just I played the original game. It was a Sony PlayStation game and eon ago and I always enjoyed playing it with my college roommates and we did it. But yeah, I don't I don't it's I'm so far removed from it now. I don't know what to make of it. I'm back from the days of Pong, so, you know, Pong. When will there be a movie? Could that be a movie somewhere, I think, Or a little pad opening across the screen? Yeah, Well, boom, boom, boom. That's a blue beetle is another one that's coming out, and that's a superhero one. Yeah, That was the last one on my list here. So, you know, we are coming to the end of this episode that's out August 18th. It's a DC Universe movie. This is on my list to not see because I'm just I have just no interest in it. I've never. What are your thoughts, Needle? You know, and I think it just takes all it takes is a good film and if it's done well, people will come and see it. If it's a bomb. We've seen the last of the blue beetle. They won't try to reboot it. There's too many other things that are hanging out there that they could do, but it's DC, so who knows? You know, is looking for something that's going to bring them in. I still am going with the Flash, though. The Flash is going to be their big summer thing. Yeah, yeah. The Flash is really the only superhero movie I'm interested in seeing this summer and Beetle and it. Yeah, yeah, that's a that's a different. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Superhero, I guess. Comic book movie. Yeah. If I'm going to go comics, that's really the only The Flash is the only one I've any interest in seeing. You know, I loved Jaws and Jurassic Park. I really enjoyed those this summer. All the bad iterations of Jurassic Park, I, I enjoyed it because it is like you are going somewhere else and you know that when it's over, you'll get out. Yeah. During the moment that you're in the middle of the whole whatever. It's fun to be in that, that environment. And I think that's what we like. I mean, it's like going to a theme park. You could have a great day or you could have a really bad day depending on what rides you get on. And, you know, with these, these rides are going to be pretty well engineered. Yep. So I think that's yeah, that's what we're missing from this summer's list is we need something like that. I don't think the Transformers is going to be that Jurassic Park jaws kind of experi and said thrill. And you need to have that kind of scariness where you know you're going down a and a hallway and you think something might be behind you. Then you turn around. There's nothing there, and then you look the other direction and there it is. I think that's that was what's so fun about those films, is they really are serials for the 21st century. I think my take away on this summer is last year Top Gun got me back into the theater, but there wasn't a whole lot else that got me back into the theater. And I actually looked at my my purchase history in the app and I went to see Top Gun. Then I went to see Avatar and now I just went to see Mario Brothers. Those are the last three movies I've seen since that final Star Wars movie came out in £29 since since the pandemic. And it's just been a combination of some just, you know, things going on in life and, you know, family things that they got to get done. So I just haven't been able to get to the theater. But I also think it speaks a little bit to the lack of really good films that have wanted that I've wanted to go and see, especially since I think the one thing the pandemic did is, is I learned that I could just sit on my couch and watch movies over a over 65 inch TV. I'm sitting really close to it, so it's not a whole lot different. And I have the comforts of home and I'm not paying ten bucks a ticket and, you know, $10 for a bucket of popcorn. And I could just watch these things. I'm already paying for them anyway, through my streaming service. Yet streaming has changed their world and I think you need to have event programing. It's got to be really big to get you to get out of the house and go to the theater and they can't throw it on streaming right away. They really have to hold it. That's what Topgun did a marvelous job of holding it from that that crowd for a while, so that then you had to go to the theater to see things. And I think more could be that way. I thought air could have been in theaters for a long time before I went to Amazon Prime. So, you know, who knows what it is. But I think it is a game changer and they've got to watch that. And you have to look for the the big hits. The big hits are what people will go to the movies for. All right. Sounds good. So we're going to wrap up the show. Thank you once again for listening to streamed and screened. And we will be back again next week.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

          Welcome to the Aphasia Access Aphasia Conversations Podcast. I'm Katie Strong and I'm a member of the Aphasia Access Podcast Working Group. Aphasia Access strives to provide members with information, inspiration, and ideas that support their aphasia care through a variety of educational materials and resources. I'm today's host for an episode that will feature Dr. Debra Meyerson and Steve Zuckerman. We'll be talking about their bike ride across the country, Stroke Across America, as well as the importance of identity and storytelling in a person's journey with aphasia. Before we get into the conversation, let me tell you a bit about our guests. Debra Meyerson was, until her stroke in 2010, a tenured professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University's School of Education.  Debra's most significant contribution from that period was Tempered Radicals:  How Everyday Leaders Inspire Change at Work (HBS Press, 2001). More recently, she authored  Identity Theft: Rediscovering Ourselves After Stroke (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2019) and is co-founder and co-chair, with her husband Steve Zuckerman, of Stroke Onward, a nonprofit working to ensure stroke survivors and their supporters have the resources needed to rebuild identities and rewarding lives.    Steve Zuckerman is, along with Debra, co-founder and co-chair of Stroke Onward; he has been Debra's care partner since her stroke in 2010.  He has held leadership roles at Self-Help, a nationally recognized economic justice nonprofit, since 2006 and still serves part time as a Senior Advisor.  Before that, he was a managing director at a private equity firm.      In the summer of 2022, Debra and Steve led Stroke Across America – a 100-day cross country bike ride, from Oregon to Boston, to raise awareness for stroke, aphasia, and the importance of the emotional journey in recovery.   In this episode you will: be inspired learning about the bike ride, Stroke Across America, and its effort to raise awareness about the emotional journal of living with stroke and aphasia. learn about the power of story in reconstructing identity in people living with aphasia. become aware of Stroke Onward's mission to support the emotional journey of rebuilding identities and rewarding lives.   Katie: Welcome Debra and Steve. I'm so happy that you are here with me today. Debra: Thank you so much, Katie. Steve: It's great to be here. Katie: Well, I'm just so excited for our listeners to be able to hear about what you've got going on, and I'd love to start with what you were up to last summer. You did an amazing bike ride across the U.S. called Stroke Across America. Congratulations! I mean it was a big deal! Can you tell us about it? Debra: Sure. Stroke Across America was a bike ride across the US and Canada to raise awareness about stroke, brain injury and aphasia. We wanted to spotlight the emotional journey after stroke. How do we rebuild our identities and live meaningful lives? We rode 4,500 miles over 100 days, traveling from Oregon to Boston. There was a core team of six riders and others who joined us for portions of the ride. We became a family. I didn't expect that. Katie: That's fantastic. Tell me about who rode with you and became family. Steve: As Deb said, we had six core riders most of the way across the country. In addition to the two of us, a woman named Whitney Hardy, who's actually a close family friend. She's a young woman in her thirties who unfortunately suffered a traumatic brain injury about four years after she graduated from college and suffers no ongoing physical disabilities but has some cognitive issues and memory issues. She rode with us from the beginning to the end. Another stroke survivor was Michael Obel-Omia, who I know is an active participant in Aphasia Access. Michael is a stroke survivor who also lives with aphasia. He joined us about 15 days late because his son was graduating from college, so he joined us in Missoula, Montana. We had two wonderful summer interns, Emily and Alex. We met Emily through her grandfather, who was a stroke survivor and hoped to ride with us but didn't end up riding with us. Emily and Alex are both students at Washington University, St. Louis. They traded off, one rode and one worked, every other day. We can't say enough about the wonderful, not just competent and great work they did, but the energy they brought. They really helped make it special. I guess our seventh team member was our then roughly one-and-a-half-year-old golden doodle named Rusty who was along for the ride. Sometimes she rode in a trailer behind our bike and sometimes in one of the support vehicles. We had a group called Bike Eternity, a gentleman named Arlen Hall, who really arranged all the on-road logistics and the route. He and his team were just fabulous in terms of just making everything work. That was our family. Katie: It's quite a crew. Fantastic. I was wondering if you could tell us about a favorite experience from the ride. Debra: We hosted sixteen community events across the country. They brought together survivors, families, friends, stroke care professionals, and more. It was really inspiring to be with all these people. Building community and collaborating with others is the only path to real change. And you were at the Ann Arbor event? Katie: Absolutely. Yeah. My friend Becca and I came down to the Ann Arbor event. I think it was Dexter or something. Debra: Yeah Katie: Boy, did we show you how we can have rain in Michigan! Debra: I know. Oh, yeah. Katie: Oh, my goodness. Yeah, it was great. Even though we had rain, there was so much great energy around the event. I can feel what you're talking about. Steve: I think the events were kind of really the most powerful experience. But Deb, you were going to talk about one particular ride you loved. Debra: I loved riding past Cameron Pass in Colorado for 30 miles up and 40 miles down. Katie: Wow! Steve: Yeah, so just to add a little bit to that, because I think that one day of riding really, I mean, every day was fantastic. We just loved the riding. But this one stood out for all of us. It was from a town called Walden in Colorado, a bit east of Fort Collins to a campground called Stove Prairie Landing. The pass we rode over was about 10,276 feet, so we were up there. And as Deb said, we rode up for 30 Miles about 2000 feet, but then got to come down 4000 feet. The whole ride was in a canyon with dramatic mountains and a river that we happened to catch at the right time of the year because the snow was melting. So, it was just a rushing river where we got the sound, the sights, and sometimes the spray of rapids as we're cruising downhill. And then there was just a perfect riverside campground at the end. It was just sort of a magical day. Katie: Yeah. As you were describing it, I wanted to use the word magical! So, I agree. Yeah. Fantastic. I'm sure it wasn't all easy street. I was wondering if you could tell us one of the hardest things about planning such a big activity. I mean, this was a big event. You had several events along the way, but you know, tell us a little bit about the planning. Debra: Organizing this event was so hard, but it was so important and so impactful. We had sixteen events: three events before we started riding in Palo Alto, Bend, and Portland, eleven along the way, and two in Boston after we finished. We had so much to do after the rides and after dinner, such as PR, social media, Stroke Onward, events, and a documentary film. There was so much to do! We are really tired. Steve: Yeah, I think the biking certainly was a lot, but we weren't trying to ride fast. You know, one thing I say about biking is, if you want to ride long distances, you just have to ride long distances. You get used to it. So, that didn't really feel like a strain for us. And the organizing of the route, particularly with the help of Arlen, kind of got done ahead of time. It was a lot of work, but he's a pro and we put it together. But it was really, I guess we're “Type As” who can't get out of our own way. We built so much into the trip that it really was those evenings and our theoretical “rest days,” which were nonriding days. We renamed them “stress days.” We felt like we had to get everything done. So, you know, that was the hardest part of the trip. It was just how much we packed in. We jokingly say, but it may not be a joke, “that someday we want to ride across the country where we have absolutely nothing to do but ride across the country.” That way, we can enjoy the evenings and the rest days, do a little more touristing, and spend time meeting people along the way. Katie: Yeah, it was very focused. You were very intentional about gaining awareness and supporting community. And I'm sure that it sounds like there was lots to do beyond just pedaling. You mentioned earlier about a campground, but I'm curious, where did you stay along the way? Steve: Our main support vehicle was an RV, pulling a trailer with a lot of gear. We organized mostly around staying in campgrounds. Partly to keep the cost down and partly because we didn't want to have to stay rooted to where the hotels and motels were. And so, Deb and I got the privilege of sleeping in the RV. It was a small RV, but very comfortable. And the rest of the group was camping, so we had tents and cots, and all you would need for relatively comfortable camping. About one or two nights a week, we would end up staying in a motel, partly just to give the folks who are camping a little bit of a break. We actually came to enjoy the RV so much; we almost preferred it to the hotels. Then, one of the real highlights of the trip was we were able to see a lot of friends going across the country. Particularly in the cities where we held events. We almost, with maybe one exception, always had a rest day connected to the event. Probably at about half of those we ended up staying with friends. That was really special to be able to involve more people in our lives in the journey. Katie: Yeah, I was thinking when you were in Ann Arbor. Deb, you had a number of colleagues and friends that came to the Dexter event. Debra: Yes, in Detroit, two days later, we met with my middle school buddies, Debbie and Debbie and Debbie. Katie: I love that, fantastic! That's great! Well, riding across the country is a huge endeavor. What made you decide to do it? Debra: Steve. Steve: Deb would say, “Steve made me decide to do it.” Well, actually, it is true. I had a close friend from college who rode across the country right after we graduated from college. From that day, I always said, “that's something I want to do”. As I got older and older and hadn't done it, it was kind of rising to the top of the proverbial bucket list. But cycling really has been a huge part of our recovery from Deb's stroke. It has been the best way that we can continue to do a lot of the things we love - exercise, adventuring, seeing new places, and spending time with friends. We had never ridden a tandem before Deb's stroke, we rode individual bikes. It was a bit of a challenge for Deb to give up control, understandably. But when we saw the opportunity to do it with a purpose, that's what kind of got us really excited. We were just starting to build Stroke Onward, we wanted to build awareness for the importance of the emotional journey, and events create good opportunities to attract attention. So, what better thing than to do something you've always wanted to do and do it with a purpose? That's kind of how we got going. Katie: Well, it is inspirational, and I know a big focus of the trip was to raise awareness about stroke and aphasia. Debra, for people who might not know, could you share a little bit about your life story. Debra: Of course. My life story started earlier. In 2010, I was a professor at Stanford. I studied, taught, and wrote about feminism, diversity, and identity. Then, I had a severe stroke. For three years, I did therapy almost full time. I had to get my old life back, but I couldn't. My disabilities, especially aphasia, forced me to leave my job at Stanford. Giving up tenure was like a second punch in the gut. It was a huge trauma on top of my stroke trauma that started my identity crisis. Who am I now? Katie: So, Debra, I think that's what sparked you writing a book called Identity Theft. Can you tell us a little more about that? Debra: I had written two books before my stroke. I decided to write another book after my stroke, Identity Theft. Writing Identity Theft became my learning journey. It has helped me rebuild my identity. It took me five years, and I learned to accept lots of help. No one told me rebuilding identity is so central to recovery. I learned firsthand that it's so important. While researching Identity Theft, I learned that other survivors think so too. They had no advice and support for this.  Steve: Maybe I'll add. Deb mentioned doing research for Identity Theft. From the very beginning when Deb decided to write a book, she didn't just want to write about her story. She was an academic, she wanted to bring in other people's points of view. And so, Deb interviewed twenty-five other survivors and probably another thirty-five people who were care partners, friends, families, and professional caregivers. Kind of the idea being that she wanted to be able to write about a diversity of people and stroke experiences because that would make the book more relatable and more accessible to more people. And that really kind of gets at one of the things that really struck me about Deb writing Identity Theft. In many ways, the writing of the book really reflected her personal journey. That at the beginning, she was kind of writing it to prove she could, she didn't want to let go of that identity as an academic. But very quickly, she realized that the process of writing it, as Deb said, was kind of her journey. She was able to turn her knowledge of identity and the lens on herself to really help rebuild her identity and her life. But along the way, she realized, “Man, there are so many other people out there who aren't being told about this and need resources.” I say this all the time, choosing to write a book when you have aphasia has got to be one of the bravest decisions because it puts you face to face with your frustrating disability every day. And there were a few times when Deb came downstairs and said, “I'm done,” “I'm not finishing the book,” “This is too frustrating,” and “I can't stand it”. But it was that knowledge that it could help other people that got her to push through that frustration. And that gets to kind of one of the big themes of our work, which is about finding purpose and having purpose and how that's often our biggest motivator in life, what we can give. So, that's kind of a little bit of the history of the book. Katie: I appreciate you sharing that. And as you were both talking, you were talking about this journey. And you know, thinking about the story and the writing and the rewriting of your identity. It really isn't about the product, not necessarily the book, which maybe initially that's what you were interested in Deb. But really, the journey is where all the work and the reintegration of who you are and who you're going to be is. very powerful. Very powerful. It's such a great read. I've enjoyed the book very much. So, you have even moved forward beyond a book, and you've started a nonprofit. It's been established for a little bit now. Can you tell us about your nonprofit, Stroke Onward? Debra: Yes. I created it three, no, four years ago? Our mission is to ensure stroke survivors and their supporters have those tools necessary to rebuild identities and rewarding lives. The vision is a stroke system of care that fully supports every survivor's emotional journey and recovery. Steve: Maybe I'll add. I think, clearly, the issues of critical care and helping people survive a stroke, and then all the work on rehabilitation is critical. What we saw is that a lot of people don't get all their capabilities back. It's almost like, well, if recovery means rehabilitation, then does that mean everybody who doesn't fully recover their capabilities, has a failed recovery? And we were just unwilling to accept that. Recovery had to mean more than just capabilities. That's why we decided to really focus on that next step in recovery, which is the emotional journey. So, we really think about our work around three areas. One is raising awareness, just that this whole issue of the emotional journey is really important and doesn't get enough attention. Even if people realize it's important and say, “Well, gosh, where can I get help with this?” There aren't enough resources out there. You know, at the end of the day, as Deb said, “it's about system change.” That we would hope that 10 years from now, a person who suffers a stroke and their family enters a system that not only provides good critical care and points them in the direction of good rehab, but also creates a framework and resources for this part of recovery, for the emotional journey. I won't go through all the actual things we do. Hopefully, you'll be able to post the website and people can go and see more about stroke onward, www.strokeonward.org, easy to remember. Katie: Absolutely.  Debra: And there's the book discussion guides. Steve: Yeah, well, one of the places in that the speech therapy community has been so supportive and such a wonderful partner is with the creation of our book discussion guides. Our colleague, Jodi Kravitz, led the creation so that the book can be more accessible. There's a guide, you know, with the idea being a group of people with aphasia can read the book together and have a facilitated discussion with a guide. But also, we created separate guides for families, speech therapists, and other health care workers. Just again, the whole idea of trying to make the material accessible, digestible, and useful for people who are going through what we went through, which was the identity crisis and having to rebuild our lives. Katie: Absolutely, we use the resources for our local book club here at Central Michigan University and our Lansing Area Aphasia Support Group. The materials were great, but the book just brought forth so much rich discussion. Debra: Yeah. Katie: You know, not all of it was easy to read. There is some tough stuff; you don't skirt the issues. I think it really was a very meaningful experience for our members and the students that were a part of the group to be able to hear the journey, to hear what maybe hadn't been addressed, to hear how people had moved forward with things, and the areas where we really do need to be thinking more about as healthcare providers. It is important that we can support the whole person and not just fix the physical or the language. It's a whole emotional journey that you're moving forward with, which in Stroke Onward is really important. Well, as you know, a lot of my work is about the importance of storytelling. Deb, I was wondering if you could talk about how storytelling impacts your work. Maybe even share a few stories from your work. Debra: Sure. Storytelling is so important. We are always changing, and our stories evolve over time. Storytelling helps us navigate the emotional journey after a stroke. And in my book, Identity Theft, I share my story and the stories of others so that survivors don't feel alone. I would like to share one story that helped me recognize that life could be good after my stroke. Seven months after my stroke, my friend Ann invited me to her 50th birthday weekend in Palm Springs with tennis, hiking, talking, and biking. I said, “No...no, no, no.” I would need so much help, and most of all, I could barely talk at all. Conversations would be loud and lively. I would feel frustrated, jealous, and sad. Kim, my friend, said she would help with everything. She said she would help me have fun. She was there for me. I was nervous, but I decided to give it a try. At first, I was determined to be the “old Deb” at the party, but the frustrations were constant. Conversations were too fast, and the friends trying to help did not give me time to find the words. I was frustrated constantly, but I decided to enjoy myself anyway. The night of the birthday party, I danced a lot! Great music, so fun. I was not the “old Deb” anymore, I was a newer version of myself. I could spend my time with my friends dancing, laughing, and enjoying what is essential in my life: friends, community, and fun. It is so hard, but it is so important. Pushing myself to be social and telling stories about it has been so important to my recovery. Katie: Thanks for sharing, it's a great story. And well, I mean, you sound like you have fabulous friends, but it sounds like Kim really was one that stuck around and was willing to help you through some of that change. Steve: And if I can add one other story, which kind of gets to how Deb reclaimed some of her old identity. In this case, her identity as a mom, and Deb tells the story in the book. When our daughter Sarah, who at the time of Deb's stroke was 15 and was not a big dater in high school. But about a year and a half after Deb's stroke, she got invited to the prom her senior year and she started going out with this guy. And I kind of said to Deb, you know, you never had that mother daughter talk with Sarah. And Deb hadn't been too active in parenting for that year, year and a half because she was you know, fighting for her recovery. I said, “You know, maybe you should be the one, as her mom, to have the talk.” And so, we kind of told Sarah that we wanted to talk to her. We were all standing around the island in the kitchen. Sarah kind of knew something was coming but didn't quite know what. And you know Deb's speech was nothing like as good as it is now back then. You could just see the concentration on her face trying to figure out what she was going to say. And she kind of slowly said, “Boyfriend? Yes. Pregnant, no!” And that has been dubbed by all of our friends for the world's most efficient and effective mother daughter talk. It was funny; we all just burst out laughing. It was really a great kind of wake up for us that Deb could reclaim a lot of aspects of her identity, but she would just have to live them out differently. And that just because they had to be different didn't mean she couldn't live them out. That was one of our favorites. Katie: That is a good story. What I love about your sharing of the stories and where your work brings storytelling to life. One of the things that's happening in the literature that's coming into practice, particularly in the UK, and over in Australia, and hopefully maybe over here in the U.S. sometime, is this idea of step psychological care for aphasia. We'll put something in the show notes if listeners want to check this out a little bit more. This idea consists of different tiers to support mental health and particularly depression in people with stroke and aphasia. At that bottom tier, which is supposed to be accessible to every stroke survivor, one of the level one interventions is storytelling. So, it's that powerful, you know. It's not just fun to tell stories; it's very important to who we are as people and integrating our mental and emotional health into who we are. Steve: Deb, did you want to mention somebody you interviewed for the book that particularly talked about storytelling? Debra: Yes. Randy enjoys storytelling, and he is a stroke survivor from St. Louis who I interviewed for the book. Randy and his wife, Rose, started their own aphasia meetup group. Social connections were really important to him. Steve: And he talked a lot about how he gradually got more and more comfortable telling his story and how much that helped him. He spoke at our community event in St. Louis, and I thought he kind of stole the show when he said, “My stroke changed my life, but it will not hold me back.” I just kind of well up because that's what it's all about. And he said it so eloquently. Katie: Powerful, powerful. Well, Debra, can you tell us a little more about this idea of identity? Debra: Sure. Barbara Shadden and you, Katie Strong, I am so thankful. Identity is our narrative about ourselves over time. We have not one static identity, we have multiple identities. We are always changing. Relationships like friends, family, colleagues, and others are a big part of making who we are. Identity is a choice. Instead of asking, “Who am I now?” ask “Who do I want to be now?”. Katie: Powerful. I like it. Debra, could you talk about aphasia specifically, and how that plays into your views on identity and your recovery? Debra: Yeah. Communication is so central to everything we do and to my identity. Having communication challenges just makes everything harder. Steve: And I'll just add that sometimes in recovery, the physical stuff, you know, trying to walk better or get use of a right arm back, would tend to be the focus. But in reality, the aphasia is really the thing that has challenged her identity the most because it was the communication that forced her from a career she worked so hard to achieve. Also, friends and interaction are so central to who Deb is, and that has just gotten so much more challenging. So, not to diminish the impact of physical disabilities, but aphasia is big and really central to the recovery process. Katie: And I think you know, you mentioned Barbara Shadden earlier, but you know her idea of identity theft. We are the stories that we tell and when we have trouble with the that one thing that we use for story, that tool of language that is impaired, or changed or broken, or, you know, smaller, or however we want to view it with having aphasia, it really makes a significant impact on how you view yourself and how you can connect with other people that are important to you. Debra: Yeah. I agree completely, and I am so lucky to have friends and family to support me. Steve: And I think what you said, Katie, is so powerful, and it's why we talk a lot about how few people really know and understand what aphasia is. I think that's because there's this, whatever the opposite of a virtual cycle is, it's the doom loop cycle of aphasia. Aphasia impacts people's identity so that they don't want to speak if they have aphasia because it's not consistent with who they think they are. But because people don't want to speak with aphasia, nobody knows what it is. And so that, you know, makes it that much harder to speak with aphasia. And I think, you know, that gets to this notion of purpose sometimes driving people through what's hard and what's uncomfortable. That was true for Deb and played a role in making a decision that “Yeah, I really wish I could speak the same way I used to.” We've had so many arguments about Deb saying, “I was terrible," because she was evaluating her speaking performance against the way she would have done it before her stroke. Yet, Deb's been willing to push through that, to be out there. You know, that's part of our work of trying to network with other people and encourage people to get out there and tell their stories because that's the only way the world is going to learn. Katie: And that you're doing, which is so appreciated and inspirational. Steve, I know your work is as much about supporting care partners and other family members as it is about supporting survivors. Can you share a bit about your journey through all of this? Steve: Oof, it feels like that could be a podcast in and of itself. But you know, I think maybe the nugget that I'll share is it's pretty obvious that people who are close to somebody who has a stroke or aphasia, our lives are going to change. Things we used to do; we can't do. Help we didn't used to have to provide, we do have to provide. I think the real “aha” for me personally, was that I needed to focus on my identity change as well. It wasn't just Deb's identity. And for me personally, and I've talked to a lot of care partners about this, really embracing “care partner” as part of my identity. Not just something I had to do to support Deb, but part of who I now am. This was really important to me because that mind shift actually helped me resent some of the changes in my life less. It was just, like Deb said, our identities change, our lives change, this is just another change. If I can embrace that as a change in who I am, then those just become part of life. Not that they're not frustrating sometimes, but it's a lot better. So I think, you know, Sarah, our daughter, is when you talk about the impact on family. And again, this story is in the book as well. But again, not just the impact on her life, but the impact on her and who she was. About two years after Deb's stroke, she gave a talk to her whole school community. Sarah talked about the experience of watching her mom have a stroke, and how she wanted to be like her mother and be strong and tough it out. People were offering to help, and she said “No.” She was going to soccer practice, she was doing all of her assignments, and she was visiting Deb in the hospital; she was going to tough it out because she wanted to be strong. Then, she started to see Deb accept more help and she started wondering, well, maybe I can accept some help. She started to let her friends in and let herself be vulnerable. She kind of realized that real strength isn't about toughing it out, real strength is about being vulnerable and using your relationships. Sarah's an athlete, and she ended the talk with, “Even the world's strongest person needs a spotter.” I well up just telling the story. When she told it, we went through boxes of tissues. But that changed her as a person in ways that actually, you know, maybe she would have gotten there eventually, but not when she was 17. I think that's what we talked to a lot of the families and care partners about. Allow yourself to think about how this experience can change you as a person and try to embrace some of that change where you can. Katie: Powerful. Debra: And the families, Danny, Adam, and Sarah. The families are affected. Katie: Yeah. Aphasia just doesn't happen to the person who has it. Well, Deb, you mentioned that there is one part in your book that sums up a lot of what you were trying to share with other survivors and their families. Maybe we can end with you reading from that paragraph. Deb: Faced with a trauma like stroke, the opportunities for both challenge and growth are great. We can clarify what we value most in life, set goals that will help us meet them, and achieve repeated small wins in pursuit of them. In this way, we can achieve not just recovery, but satisfying growth and fundamental meanings in our lives. Katie: I love it. Yeah. Challenge and adversity, thinking forward into the future, and having goals, purpose, and meaning. It's what life is about. Well, this has just been a fabulous conversation. Thank you both for taking time to share with us a little bit about what you've been up to over the summer and inspire us with some of your stories. Debra: Thank you. Steve: Thank you. Well, that wraps up this episode. Thank you for listening. For references and resources mentioned in today's show, please see our show notes. They're available on our website, www.aphasiaaccess.org. There you can also become a member of our organization, browse our growing library of materials, and find out about the Aphasia Access Academy. If you have an idea for a future podcast episode, email us at info@aphasiaaccess.org. For Aphasia Access Conversations, I'm Katie Strong. Thanks again for your ongoing support of Aphasia Access.   Information about Stroke Onward   https://strokeonward.org/  Stroke Onward website Instagram Facebook Twitter YouTube Identity Theft Book Club Materials developed by Jodi Kravitz, Ellen Bernstein-Ellis, Liz Hoover and Stroke Onward https://strokeonward.org/bookguides/   Resources Related to Identity and Aphasia   Meyerson, D., E., (2003). Tempered Radicals: How Everyday Leaders Inspire Change at Work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Meyerson, D. & Zuckerman, D. (2019). Identity theft: Rediscovering Ourselves After Stroke. Andrews McMeel Publishing. www.identitytheftbook.org Shadden, B. (2005). Aphasia as identity theft: Theory and practice. Aphasiology, 19(3-5), 211-223. https://doi.org/10.1080/02687930444000697 Strong, K., & Shadden, B. (2020). The power of story in identity renegotiation: Clinical approaches to supporting persons living with aphasia. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_PERSP-19-00145 Listen to Episode #5 of Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast featuring a conversation between Katie Strong and Barbara Shadden about the important role story has in supporting identity in people who are impacted by living with aphasia. https://aphasiaaccess.libsyn.com/insights-and-aha-moments-about-aphasia-care-with-professor-emeriti-barbara-shadden   Resources Related to Stepped Psychological Care Listen to Episode #34 of Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast featuring a conversation between Jerry Hoepner and Ian Kneebone about stepped psychological care and other research related to supporting the emotional journey of living with stroke and aphasia. https://aphasiaaccess.libsyn.com/34-in-conversation-with-ian-keebone Kneebone, I. I. (2016). A framework to support Cognitive Behavior Therapy for emotional disorder after stroke. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 23(1), 99-109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpra.2015.02.001 Ryan, B., Worrall, L., Sekhon, J., Baker, C., Carragher, M., Bohan, J., Power, E., Rose, M., Simmons-Mackie, N., Togher, L., & Kneebone, I. (2020). Time to step up: A call for the speech pathology profession to utilise stepped psychological care for people with aphasia post stroke. In K. H. Meredith & G. N. Yeates (Eds.), Psychotherapy and aphasia: Interventions for emotional wellbeing and relationships (pp. 1-16). Routledge.    Acknowledgements – A special thank you to Amanda Zalucki and Emma Keilen from the Strong Story Lab at Central Michigan University for their assistance in the transcription of this episode. Cite as: Bertram, M., Isaksen, J., Toft, L. E., Olsen, A. M., & Breckling, M. (2021). Evaluering af projekt Forløb for borgere med afasi samt afrapportering af implementeringsopfølgningen KomTil – fra udvikling til drift. Unpublished report from University of Southern Denmark.

How to Make a Million Dollars a Year is the Career Path Number 5 Number One Request (LA 1875) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the natural springs area of Arkansas. Yes, Eureka Springs right now and we are loving it. Steve: Can't say enough positive stuff about this area, with the state and the country. Jill: You know what's funny, we had a day this last week where it was like, started off, it got sunny but it started off kind of dark and weird and it rained a little bit and it was, you know the show the Ozarks, how we all know it has that funky tint. They make the, there's like a filter on the cameras or something and make it kind of a dark, interesting blue? Would you call it blue background kind of thing? I swear it felt like that. Steve: It was that color. Jill: I was running around taking pictures, I'm like, "That's real." Now I get the Ozarks show and I always thought, why do they make it look so dark? But by the way, right now we're sitting in a beautiful, sunny day. Blue sky, it's gorgeous so it's not always like that, but I get it. It was really cool. Steve: Today Jill and I are going to talk about how making a million dollars a year is the number one discussion point and request for this new career path class. Jill: There's kind of two things that came up because I want to share, to tell you, there's one other thing that everybody asks for. So it's important to know. I want leave a little teaser here. So when we went around the room the other day, everybody brought up two things and one is the money and I'll tell you the other one in a minute. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the land investors.com online community. It's free. And last year a ton of people came to us, came to Jill and I requesting for help getting their first mailer out or just getting consistency in doing mailers or mailer type stuff. Well enough people came to us. Jill and I decided to turn over our own mailer department to our employees to allow them to do that. So we call it concierge data and now it's called concierge data plus, you can completely and entirely outsource doing a mailer to this department and it's a subdepartment of offers2owners.com. Or if you're having trouble getting the first one out, check it out. It's very, very efficient. And now we process a ton of orders, more and more every single month. Jill: All right, Chief wrote, "As a seller, how do you ask a buyer, how do you ask a buyer close, as a seller how do you ask a buyer to close through your selected title company? Or is it just customary for the seller to choose? It's a little late for me to be inquiring about this, but I've been letting, or should I say making the buyer's agent find one. Now that I say it out loud pretty sure I'm doing it completely wrong. I need to be sending them somewhere specific, right? My thought was it doesn't really matter to me and it's all about the same price so let them have it in case they have people they like to close through. It was one less thing I had to set up. Now I see why all the buyer's agents attitude seemed to change a little bit after their clients have signed. I'm making them do my job accidentally but sure enough, they'd sign and I'd been letting them take it from there. I'd been asking them where they want to close and wait for an email. How messy. This must be what Jack means by being able to, by doing it all wrong and still being able to pull it off. Embarrassing but enlightening." All right, so let me back up here. Steve: Embarrassing but enlightening. Jill: So here's what I do, Chief, and this, I'm going to make it easy. This will be make it easy for you actually, because I bet you putting it on them could slow you down too. I want you to stay in control for the whole transaction. Steve: Yeah,

How to Make a Million Dollars a Year is the Career Path Number 5 Number One Request (LA 1875) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the natural springs area of Arkansas. Yes, Eureka Springs right now and we are loving it. Steve: Can't say enough positive stuff about this area, with the state and the country. Jill: You know what's funny, we had a day this last week where it was like, started off, it got sunny but it started off kind of dark and weird and it rained a little bit and it was, you know the show the Ozarks, how we all know it has that funky tint. They make the, there's like a filter on the cameras or something and make it kind of a dark, interesting blue? Would you call it blue background kind of thing? I swear it felt like that. Steve: It was that color. Jill: I was running around taking pictures, I'm like, "That's real." Now I get the Ozarks show and I always thought, why do they make it look so dark? But by the way, right now we're sitting in a beautiful, sunny day. Blue sky, it's gorgeous so it's not always like that, but I get it. It was really cool. Steve: Today Jill and I are going to talk about how making a million dollars a year is the number one discussion point and request for this new career path class. Jill: There's kind of two things that came up because I want to share, to tell you, there's one other thing that everybody asks for. So it's important to know. I want leave a little teaser here. So when we went around the room the other day, everybody brought up two things and one is the money and I'll tell you the other one in a minute. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the land investors.com online community. It's free. And last year a ton of people came to us, came to Jill and I requesting for help getting their first mailer out or just getting consistency in doing mailers or mailer type stuff. Well enough people came to us. Jill and I decided to turn over our own mailer department to our employees to allow them to do that. So we call it concierge data and now it's called concierge data plus, you can completely and entirely outsource doing a mailer to this department and it's a subdepartment of offers2owners.com. Or if you're having trouble getting the first one out, check it out. It's very, very efficient. And now we process a ton of orders, more and more every single month. Jill: All right, Chief wrote, "As a seller, how do you ask a buyer, how do you ask a buyer close, as a seller how do you ask a buyer to close through your selected title company? Or is it just customary for the seller to choose? It's a little late for me to be inquiring about this, but I've been letting, or should I say making the buyer's agent find one. Now that I say it out loud pretty sure I'm doing it completely wrong. I need to be sending them somewhere specific, right? My thought was it doesn't really matter to me and it's all about the same price so let them have it in case they have people they like to close through. It was one less thing I had to set up. Now I see why all the buyer's agents attitude seemed to change a little bit after their clients have signed. I'm making them do my job accidentally but sure enough, they'd sign and I'd been letting them take it from there. I'd been asking them where they want to close and wait for an email. How messy. This must be what Jack means by being able to, by doing it all wrong and still being able to pull it off. Embarrassing but enlightening." All right, so let me back up here. Steve: Embarrassing but enlightening. Jill: So here's what I do, Chief, and this, I'm going to make it easy. This will be make it easy for you actually, because I bet you putting it on them could slow you down too. I want you to stay in control for the whole transaction. Steve: Yeah,

How to Make a Million Dollars a Year is the Career Path Number 5 Number One Request (LA 1875) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the natural springs area of Arkansas. Yes, Eureka Springs right now and we are loving it. Steve: Can't say enough positive stuff about this area, with the state and the country. Jill: You know what's funny, we had a day this last week where it was like, started off, it got sunny but it started off kind of dark and weird and it rained a little bit and it was, you know the show the Ozarks, how we all know it has that funky tint. They make the, there's like a filter on the cameras or something and make it kind of a dark, interesting blue? Would you call it blue background kind of thing? I swear it felt like that. Steve: It was that color. Jill: I was running around taking pictures, I'm like, "That's real." Now I get the Ozarks show and I always thought, why do they make it look so dark? But by the way, right now we're sitting in a beautiful, sunny day. Blue sky, it's gorgeous so it's not always like that, but I get it. It was really cool. Steve: Today Jill and I are going to talk about how making a million dollars a year is the number one discussion point and request for this new career path class. Jill: There's kind of two things that came up because I want to share, to tell you, there's one other thing that everybody asks for. So it's important to know. I want leave a little teaser here. So when we went around the room the other day, everybody brought up two things and one is the money and I'll tell you the other one in a minute. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the land investors.com online community. It's free. And last year a ton of people came to us, came to Jill and I requesting for help getting their first mailer out or just getting consistency in doing mailers or mailer type stuff. Well enough people came to us. Jill and I decided to turn over our own mailer department to our employees to allow them to do that. So we call it concierge data and now it's called concierge data plus, you can completely and entirely outsource doing a mailer to this department and it's a subdepartment of offers2owners.com. Or if you're having trouble getting the first one out, check it out. It's very, very efficient. And now we process a ton of orders, more and more every single month. Jill: All right, Chief wrote, "As a seller, how do you ask a buyer, how do you ask a buyer close, as a seller how do you ask a buyer to close through your selected title company? Or is it just customary for the seller to choose? It's a little late for me to be inquiring about this, but I've been letting, or should I say making the buyer's agent find one. Now that I say it out loud pretty sure I'm doing it completely wrong. I need to be sending them somewhere specific, right? My thought was it doesn't really matter to me and it's all about the same price so let them have it in case they have people they like to close through. It was one less thing I had to set up. Now I see why all the buyer's agents attitude seemed to change a little bit after their clients have signed. I'm making them do my job accidentally but sure enough, they'd sign and I'd been letting them take it from there. I'd been asking them where they want to close and wait for an email. How messy. This must be what Jack means by being able to, by doing it all wrong and still being able to pull it off. Embarrassing but enlightening." All right, so let me back up here. Steve: Embarrassing but enlightening. Jill: So here's what I do, Chief, and this, I'm going to make it easy. This will be make it easy for you actually, because I bet you putting it on them could slow you down too. I want you to stay in control for the whole transaction. Steve: Yeah,

Jill Friday - Taking Due Diligence with a Grain of Salt (LA 1872) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewit coming to you from the home of the 1925. Can you believe it's almost a hundred years. Grand Old Opry. Steve: Nashville. Jill DeWit: Yep. Nashville, Tennessee. Steve: Neither one of us feel like we're going to leave here anytime soon. Jill DeWit: Nope. Steve: Spent about one day in Ohio. That was good enough. Jill DeWit: That was good enough. We saw it. Steve: Tennessee's a blast. I wish we would've stopped in Kentucky. Jill DeWit: Yes. We'll go back. We have lots of things we're going to go back and see. 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 I hope you know by now hope- Jill DeWit: Hope. Steve: ... Hope. Like yesterday. That we have solved phase one due diligence with a product called parcelfact.com. You quite simply put in the state, the county, and the assessor parcel number. The property in question pops up anywhere in the country and all the stuff that we think is important to complete phase one due diligence, the six As that we talk about in the program, is at your fingertips within seconds. Check it out. Parcel fact, F-A-C-T .com. Jill DeWit: Evan wrote, how does one... Oh, I'm testing this. How does one feel about mailing the counties that was hit by the hurricane in Florida? Steve: I put this in your show for a reason. Jill DeWit: I don't feel good about that. If I already sent the mail out already... I would explain. I didn't mean to do that. Who knew? I mean, this one out a week ago or a month ago, whatever it was. It was planned out before the hurricane. But now specifically targeting that community, I'm not a fan. Sure, there's people that would be loving the cash. I can see positive things to it, but the negative that could be taken from it, it is too great. Steve: Yeah. I think it's an outrage. I think you're directly kicking people when they're down and taking advantage of them. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: Like Jill said, every time there's a forest fire in the Southwest, we get this question. We got a ton of these questions during Katrina. So no, I don't think this is okay at all. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: At all. The only way it's okay is if you sent the mailer out. Actually we were in this situation where we sent the mailer out- Jill DeWit: And then a fire came. Steve: ... Something happened, a fire came and then people are calling us back saying, What kind of person are you that, you know? Jill DeWit: Check the date, Look at the date on the letter. Steve: Over and over again. Jill DeWit: Who knew. Steve: We're so sorry. We buy property in the area. You can only explain that so many times. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steve: Please don't do this. Not joking around. It's not okay. Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about taking due diligence with a grain salt. This is the meat of the show. Jill DeWit: So as I sit here in this bug infested bubble. Steve: There's nothing bubble about it. Jill DeWit: There's like a spider here. I don't know what that was over there. This here. I've got two mosquito things on, but we're having a ball. Steve: Yeah. Jill DeWit: We really love it here. Oh, my goodness. I want to talk about this today for just a few minutes because I wanted to make sure everyone's really clear on what's really needed. How much time you should be spending on due diligence. Because I think sometimes people do due diligence overkill. And I get it, but there's some things that are reliable, some things are not. And that's where the grain of salt comes in. So let me back up here. What are we talking about? A deal comes back, I send out the mail. Purchase agreement comes back. Now I'm looking at the deal online. I'm like, Oh,

Jill Friday - Taking Due Diligence with a Grain of Salt (LA 1872) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewit coming to you from the home of the 1925. Can you believe it's almost a hundred years. Grand Old Opry. Steve: Nashville. Jill DeWit: Yep. Nashville, Tennessee. Steve: Neither one of us feel like we're going to leave here anytime soon. Jill DeWit: Nope. Steve: Spent about one day in Ohio. That was good enough. Jill DeWit: That was good enough. We saw it. Steve: Tennessee's a blast. I wish we would've stopped in Kentucky. Jill DeWit: Yes. We'll go back. We have lots of things we're going to go back and see. 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 I hope you know by now hope- Jill DeWit: Hope. Steve: ... Hope. Like yesterday. That we have solved phase one due diligence with a product called parcelfact.com. You quite simply put in the state, the county, and the assessor parcel number. The property in question pops up anywhere in the country and all the stuff that we think is important to complete phase one due diligence, the six As that we talk about in the program, is at your fingertips within seconds. Check it out. Parcel fact, F-A-C-T .com. Jill DeWit: Evan wrote, how does one... Oh, I'm testing this. How does one feel about mailing the counties that was hit by the hurricane in Florida? Steve: I put this in your show for a reason. Jill DeWit: I don't feel good about that. If I already sent the mail out already... I would explain. I didn't mean to do that. Who knew? I mean, this one out a week ago or a month ago, whatever it was. It was planned out before the hurricane. But now specifically targeting that community, I'm not a fan. Sure, there's people that would be loving the cash. I can see positive things to it, but the negative that could be taken from it, it is too great. Steve: Yeah. I think it's an outrage. I think you're directly kicking people when they're down and taking advantage of them. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: Like Jill said, every time there's a forest fire in the Southwest, we get this question. We got a ton of these questions during Katrina. So no, I don't think this is okay at all. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: At all. The only way it's okay is if you sent the mailer out. Actually we were in this situation where we sent the mailer out- Jill DeWit: And then a fire came. Steve: ... Something happened, a fire came and then people are calling us back saying, What kind of person are you that, you know? Jill DeWit: Check the date, Look at the date on the letter. Steve: Over and over again. Jill DeWit: Who knew. Steve: We're so sorry. We buy property in the area. You can only explain that so many times. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steve: Please don't do this. Not joking around. It's not okay. Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about taking due diligence with a grain salt. This is the meat of the show. Jill DeWit: So as I sit here in this bug infested bubble. Steve: There's nothing bubble about it. Jill DeWit: There's like a spider here. I don't know what that was over there. This here. I've got two mosquito things on, but we're having a ball. Steve: Yeah. Jill DeWit: We really love it here. Oh, my goodness. I want to talk about this today for just a few minutes because I wanted to make sure everyone's really clear on what's really needed. How much time you should be spending on due diligence. Because I think sometimes people do due diligence overkill. And I get it, but there's some things that are reliable, some things are not. And that's where the grain of salt comes in. So let me back up here. What are we talking about? A deal comes back, I send out the mail. Purchase agreement comes back. Now I'm looking at the deal online. I'm like, Oh,

Jill Friday - Taking Due Diligence with a Grain of Salt (LA 1872) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewit coming to you from the home of the 1925. Can you believe it's almost a hundred years. Grand Old Opry. Steve: Nashville. Jill DeWit: Yep. Nashville, Tennessee. Steve: Neither one of us feel like we're going to leave here anytime soon. Jill DeWit: Nope. Steve: Spent about one day in Ohio. That was good enough. Jill DeWit: That was good enough. We saw it. Steve: Tennessee's a blast. I wish we would've stopped in Kentucky. Jill DeWit: Yes. We'll go back. We have lots of things we're going to go back and see. 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 I hope you know by now hope- Jill DeWit: Hope. Steve: ... Hope. Like yesterday. That we have solved phase one due diligence with a product called parcelfact.com. You quite simply put in the state, the county, and the assessor parcel number. The property in question pops up anywhere in the country and all the stuff that we think is important to complete phase one due diligence, the six As that we talk about in the program, is at your fingertips within seconds. Check it out. Parcel fact, F-A-C-T .com. Jill DeWit: Evan wrote, how does one... Oh, I'm testing this. How does one feel about mailing the counties that was hit by the hurricane in Florida? Steve: I put this in your show for a reason. Jill DeWit: I don't feel good about that. If I already sent the mail out already... I would explain. I didn't mean to do that. Who knew? I mean, this one out a week ago or a month ago, whatever it was. It was planned out before the hurricane. But now specifically targeting that community, I'm not a fan. Sure, there's people that would be loving the cash. I can see positive things to it, but the negative that could be taken from it, it is too great. Steve: Yeah. I think it's an outrage. I think you're directly kicking people when they're down and taking advantage of them. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: Like Jill said, every time there's a forest fire in the Southwest, we get this question. We got a ton of these questions during Katrina. So no, I don't think this is okay at all. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: At all. The only way it's okay is if you sent the mailer out. Actually we were in this situation where we sent the mailer out- Jill DeWit: And then a fire came. Steve: ... Something happened, a fire came and then people are calling us back saying, What kind of person are you that, you know? Jill DeWit: Check the date, Look at the date on the letter. Steve: Over and over again. Jill DeWit: Who knew. Steve: We're so sorry. We buy property in the area. You can only explain that so many times. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steve: Please don't do this. Not joking around. It's not okay. Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about taking due diligence with a grain salt. This is the meat of the show. Jill DeWit: So as I sit here in this bug infested bubble. Steve: There's nothing bubble about it. Jill DeWit: There's like a spider here. I don't know what that was over there. This here. I've got two mosquito things on, but we're having a ball. Steve: Yeah. Jill DeWit: We really love it here. Oh, my goodness. I want to talk about this today for just a few minutes because I wanted to make sure everyone's really clear on what's really needed. How much time you should be spending on due diligence. Because I think sometimes people do due diligence overkill. And I get it, but there's some things that are reliable, some things are not. And that's where the grain of salt comes in. So let me back up here. What are we talking about? A deal comes back, I send out the mail. Purchase agreement comes back. Now I'm looking at the deal online. I'm like, Oh,

About Steve:Steve Rice is Principal Product Manager for AWS AppConfig. He is surprisingly passionate about feature flags and continuous configuration. He lives in the Washington DC area with his wife, 3 kids, and 2 incontinent dogs.Links Referenced:AWS AppConfig: https://go.aws/awsappconfig TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig. That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: Forget everything you know about SSH and try Tailscale. Imagine if you didn't need to manage PKI or rotate SSH keys every time someone leaves. That'd be pretty sweet, wouldn't it? With tail scale, ssh, you can do exactly that. Tail scale gives each server and user device a node key to connect to its VPN, and it uses the same node key to authorize and authenticate.S. Basically you're SSHing the same way you manage access to your app. What's the benefit here? Built in key rotation permissions is code connectivity between any two devices, reduce latency and there's a lot more, but there's a time limit here. You can also ask users to reauthenticate for that extra bit of security. Sounds expensive?Nope, I wish it were. tail scales. Completely free for personal use on up to 20 devices. To learn more, visit snark.cloud/tailscale. Again, that's snark.cloud/tailscaleCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This is a promoted guest episode. What does that mean? Well, it means that some people don't just want me to sit here and throw slings and arrows their way, they would prefer to send me a guest specifically, and they do pay for that privilege, which I appreciate. Paying me is absolutely a behavior I wish to endorse.Today's victim who has decided to contribute to slash sponsor my ongoing ridiculous nonsense is, of all companies, AWS. And today I'm talking to Steve Rice, who's the principal product manager on AWS AppConfig. Steve, thank you for joining me.Steve: Hey, Corey, great to see you. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to a conversation.Corey: As am I. Now, AppConfig does something super interesting, which I'm not aware of any other service or sub-service doing. You are under the umbrella of AWS Systems Manager, but you're not going to market with Systems Manager AppConfig. You're just AWS AppConfig. Why?Steve: So, AppConfig is part of AWS Systems Manager. Systems Manager has, I think, 17 different features associated with it. Some of them have an individual name that is associated with Systems Manager, some of them don't. We just happen to be one that doesn't. AppConfig is a service that's been around for a while internally before it was launched externally a couple years ago, so I'd say that's probably the origin of the name and the service. I can tell you more about the origin of the service if you're curious.Corey: Oh, I absolutely am. But I just want to take a bit of a detour here and point out that I make fun of the sub-service names in Systems Manager an awful lot, like Systems Manager Session Manager and Systems Manager Change Manager. And part of the reason I do that is not just because it's funny, but because almost everything I found so far within the Systems Manager umbrella is pretty awesome. It aligns with how I tend to think about the world in a bunch of different ways. I have yet to see anything lurking within the Systems Manager umbrella that has led to a tee-hee-hee bill surprise level that rivals, you know, the GDP of Guam. So, I'm a big fan of the entire suite of services. But yes, how did AppConfig get its name?Steve: [laugh]. So, AppConfig started about six years ago, now, internally. So, we actually were part of the region services department inside of Amazon, which is in charge of launching new services around the world. We found that a centralized tool for configuration associated with each service launching was really helpful. So, a service might be launching in a new region and have to enable and disable things as it moved along.And so, the tool was sort of built for that, turning on and off things as the region developed and was ready to launch publicly; then the regions launch publicly. It turned out that our internal customers, which are a lot of AWS services and then some Amazon services as well, started to use us beyond launching new regions, and started to use us for feature flagging. Again, turning on and off capabilities, launching things safely. And so, it became massively popular; we were actually a top 30 service internally in terms of usage. And two years ago, we thought we really should launch this externally and let our customers benefit from some of the goodness that we put in there, and some of—those all come from the mistakes we've made internally. And so, it became AppConfig. In terms of the name itself, we specialize in application configuration, so that's kind of a mouthful, so we just changed it to AppConfig.Corey: Earlier this year, there was a vulnerability reported around I believe it was AWS Glue, but please don't quote me on that. And as part of its excellent response that AWS put out, they said that from the time that it was disclosed to them, they had patched the service and rolled it out to every AWS region in which Glue existed in a little under 29 hours, which at scale is absolutely magic fast. That is superhero speed and then some because you generally don't just throw something over the wall, regardless of how small it is when we're talking about something at the scale of AWS. I mean, look at who your customers are; mistakes will show. This also got me thinking that when you have Adam, or previously Andy, on stage giving a keynote announcement and then they mention something on stage, like, “Congratulations. It's now a very complicated service with 14 adjectives in his name because someone's paid by the syllable. Great.”Suddenly, the marketing pages are up, the APIs are working, it's showing up in the console, and it occurs to me only somewhat recently to think about all of the moving parts that go on behind this. That is far faster than even the improved speed of CloudFront distribution updates. There's very clearly something going on there. So, I've got to ask, is that you?Steve: Yes, a lot of that is us. I can't take credit for a hundred percent of what you're talking about, but that's how we are used. We're essentially used as a feature-flagging service. And I can talk generically about feature flagging. Feature flagging allows you to push code out to production, but it's hidden behind a configuration switch: a feature toggle or a feature flag. And that code can be sitting out there, nobody can access it until somebody flips that toggle. Now, the smart way to do it is to flip that toggle on for a small set of users. Maybe it's just internal users, maybe it's 1% of your users. And so, the features available, you can—Corey: It's your best slash worst customers [laugh] in that 1%, in some cases.Steve: Yeah, you want to stress test the system with them and you want to be able to look and see what's going to break before it breaks for everybody. So, you release us to a small cohort, you measure your operations, you measure your application health, you measure your reputational concerns, and then if everything goes well, then you maybe bump it up to 2%, and then 10%, and then 20%. So, feature flags allow you to slowly release features, and you know what you're releasing by the time it's at a hundred percent. It's tempting for teams to want to, like, have everybody access it at the same time; you've been working hard on this feature for a long time. But again, that's kind of an anti-pattern. You want to make sure that on production, it behaves the way you expect it to behave.Corey: I have to ask what is the fundamental difference between feature flags and/or dynamic configuration. Because to my mind, one of them is a means of achieving the other, but I could also see very easily using the terms interchangeably. Given that in some of our conversations, you have corrected me which, first, how dare you? Secondly, okay, there's probably a reason here. What is that point of distinction?Steve: Yeah. Typically for those that are not eat, sleep, and breathing dynamic configuration—which I do—and most people are not obsessed with this kind of thing, feature flags is kind of a shorthand for dynamic configuration. It allows you to turn on and off things without pushing out any new code. So, your application code's running, it's pulling its configuration data, say every five seconds, every ten seconds, something like that, and when that configuration data changes, then that app changes its behavior, again, without a code push or without restarting the app.So, dynamic configuration is maybe a superset of feature flags. Typically, when people think feature flags, they're thinking of, “Oh, I'm going to release a new feature, so it's almost like an on-off switch.” But we see customers using feature flags—and we use this internally—for things like throttling limits. Let's say you want to be able to throttle TPS transactions per second. Or let's say you want to throttle the number of simultaneous background tasks, and say, you know, I just really don't want this creeping above 50; bad things can start to happen.But in a period of stress, you might want to actually bring that number down. Well, you can push out these changes with dynamic configuration—which is, again, any type of configuration, not just an on-off switch—you can push this out and adjust the behavior and see what happens. Again, I'd recommend pushing it out to 1% of your users, and then 10%. But it allows you to have these dials and switches to do that. And, again, generically, that's dynamic configuration. It's not as fun to term as feature flags; feature flags is sort of a good mental picture, so I do use them interchangeably, but if you're really into the whole world of this dynamic configuration, then you probably will care about the difference.Corey: Which makes a fair bit of sense. It's the question of what are you talking about high level versus what are you talking about implementation detail-wise.Steve: Yep. Yep.Corey: And on some level, I used to get… well, we'll call it angsty—because I can't think of a better adjective right now—about how AWS was reluctant to disclose implementation details behind what it did. And in the fullness of time, it's made a lot more sense to me, specifically through a lens of, you want to be able to have the freedom to change how something works under the hood. And if you've made no particular guarantee about the implementation detail, you can do that without potentially worrying about breaking a whole bunch of customer expectations that you've inadvertently set. And that makes an awful lot of sense.The idea of rolling out changes to your infrastructure has evolved over the last decade. Once upon a time you'd have EC2 instances, and great, you want to go ahead and make a change there—or this actually predates EC2 instances. Virtual machines in a data center or heaven forbid, bare metal servers, you're not going to deploy a whole new server because there's a new version of the code out, so you separate out your infrastructure from the code that it runs. And that worked out well. And increasingly, we started to see ways of okay, if we want to change the behavior of the application, we'll just push out new environment variables to that thing and restart the service so it winds up consuming those.And that's great. You've rolled it out throughout your fleet. With containers, which is sort of the next logical step, well, okay, this stuff gets baked in, we'll just restart containers with a new version of code because that takes less than a second each and you're fine. And then Lambda functions, it's okay, we'll just change the deployment option and the next invocation will wind up taking the brand new environment variables passed out to it. How do feature flags feature into those, I guess, three evolving methods of running applications in anger, by which I mean, of course, production?Steve: [laugh]. Good question. And I think you really articulated that well.Corey: Well, thank you. I should hope so. I'm a storyteller. At least I fancy myself one.Steve: [laugh]. Yes, you are. Really what you talked about is the evolution of you know, at the beginning, people were—well, first of all, people probably were embedding their variables deep in their code and then they realized, “Oh, I want to change this,” and now you have to find where in my code that is. And so, it became a pattern. Why don't we separate everything that's a configuration data into its own file? But it'll get compiled at build time and sent out all at once.There was kind of this breakthrough that was, why don't we actually separate out the deployment of this? We can separate the deployment from code from the deployment of configuration data, and have the code be reading that configuration data on a regular interval, as I already said. So now, as the environments have changed—like you said, containers and Lambda—that ability to make tweaks at microsecond intervals is more important and more powerful. So, there certainly is still value in having things like environment variables that get read at startup. We call that static configuration as opposed to dynamic configuration.And that's a very important element in the world of containers that you talked about. Containers are a bit ephemeral, and so they kind of come and go, and you can restart things, or you might spin up new containers that are slightly different config and have them operate in a certain way. And again, Lambda takes that to the next level. I'm really excited where people are going to take feature flags to the next level because already today we have people just fine-tuning to very targeted small subsets, different configuration data, different feature flag data, and allows them to do this like at we've never seen before scale of turning this on, seeing how it reacts, seeing how the application behaves, and then being able to roll that out to all of your audience.Now, you got to be careful, you really don't want to have completely different configurations out there and have 10 different, or you know, 100 different configurations out there. That makes it really tough to debug. So, you want to think of this as I want to roll this out gradually over time, but eventually, you want to have this sort of state where everything is somewhat consistent.Corey: That, on some level, speaks to a level of operational maturity that my current deployment adventures generally don't have. A common reference I make is to my lasttweetinaws.com Twitter threading app. And anyone can visit it, use it however they want.And it uses a Route 53 latency record to figure out, ah, which is the closest region to you because I've deployed it to 20 different regions. Now, if this were a paid service, or I had people using this in large volume and I had to worry about that sort of thing, I would probably approach something that is very close to what you describe. In practice, I pick a devoted region that I deploy something to, and cool, that's sort of my canary where I get things working the way I would expect. And when that works the way I want it to I then just push it to everything else automatically. Given that I've put significant effort into getting deployments down to approximately two minutes to deploy to everything, it feels like that's a reasonable amount of time to push something out.Whereas if I were, I don't know, running a bank, for example, I would probably have an incredibly heavy process around things that make changes to things like payment or whatnot. Because despite the lies, we all like to tell both to ourselves and in public, anything that touches payments does go through waterfall, not agile iterative development because that mistake tends to show up on your customer's credit card bills, and then they're also angry. I think that there's a certain point of maturity you need to be at as either an organization or possibly as a software technology stack before something like feature flags even becomes available to you. Would you agree with that, or is this something everyone should use?Steve: I would agree with that. Definitely, a small team that has communication flowing between the two probably won't get as much value out of a gradual release process because everybody kind of knows what's going on inside of the team. Once your team scales, or maybe your audience scales, that's when it matters more. You really don't want to have something blow up with your users. You really don't want to have people getting paged in the middle of the night because of a change that was made. And so, feature flags do help with that.So typically, the journey we see is people start off in a maybe very small startup. They're releasing features at a very fast pace. They grow and they start to build their own feature flagging solution—again, at companies I've been at previously have done that—and you start using feature flags and you see the power of it. Oh, my gosh, this is great. I can release something when I want without doing a big code push. I can just do a small little change, and if something goes wrong, I can roll it back instantly. That's really handy.And so, the basics of feature flagging might be a homegrown solution that you all have built. If you really lean into that and start to use it more, then you probably want to look at a third-party solution because there's so many features out there that you might want. A lot of them are around safeguards that makes sure that releasing a new feature is safe. You know, again, pushing out a new feature to everybody could be similar to pushing out untested code to production. You don't want to do that, so you need to have, you know, some checks and balances in your release process of your feature flags, and that's what a lot of third parties do.It really depends—to get back to your question about who needs feature flags—it depends on your audience size. You know, if you have enough audience out there to want to do a small rollout to a small set first and then have everybody hit it, that's great. Also, if you just have, you know, one or two developers, then feature flags are probably something that you're just kind of, you're doing yourself, you're pushing out this thing anyway on your own, but you don't need it coordinated across your team.Corey: I think that there's also a bit of—how to frame this—misunderstanding on someone's part about where AppConfig starts and where it stops. When it was first announced, feature flags were one of the things that it did. And that was talked about on stage, I believe in re:Invent, but please don't quote me on that, when it wound up getting announced. And then in the fullness of time, there was another announcement of AppConfig now supports feature flags, which I'm sitting there and I had to go back to my old notes. Like, did I hallucinate this? Which again, would not be the first time I'd imagine such a thing. But no, it was originally how the service was described, but now it's extra feature flags, almost like someone would, I don't know, flip on a feature-flag toggle for the service and now it does a different thing. What changed? What was it that was misunderstood about the service initially versus what it became?Steve: Yeah, I wouldn't say it was a misunderstanding. I think what happened was we launched it, guessing what our customers were going to use it as. We had done plenty of research on that, and as I mentioned before we had—Corey: Please tell me someone used it as a database. Or am I the only nutter that does stuff like that?Steve: We have seen that before. We have seen something like that before.Corey: Excellent. Excellent, excellent. I approve.Steve: And so, we had done our due diligence ahead of time about how we thought people were going to use it. We were right about a lot of it. I mentioned before that we have a lot of usage internally, so you know, that was kind of maybe cheating even for us to be able to sort of see how this is going to evolve. What we did announce, I guess it was last November, was an opinionated version of feature flags. So, we had people using us for feature flags, but they were building their own structure, their own JSON, and there was not a dedicated console experience for feature flags.What we announced last November was an opinionated version that structured the JSON in a way that we think is the right way, and that afforded us the ability to have a smooth console experience. So, if we know what the structure of the JSON is, we can have things like toggles and validations in there that really specifically look at some of the data points. So, that's really what happened. We're just making it easier for our customers to use us for feature flags. We still have some customers that are kind of building their own solution, but we're seeing a lot of them move over to our opinionated version.Corey: This episode is brought to us in part by our friends at Datadog. Datadog's SaaS monitoring and security platform that enables full stack observability for developers, IT operations, security, and business teams in the cloud age. Datadog's platform, along with 500 plus vendor integrations, allows you to correlate metrics, traces, logs, and security signals across your applications, infrastructure, and third party services in a single pane of glass.Combine these with drag and drop dashboards and machine learning based alerts to help teams troubleshoot and collaborate more effectively, prevent downtime, and enhance performance and reliability. Try Datadog in your environment today with a free 14 day trial and get a complimentary T-shirt when you install the agent.To learn more, visit datadoghq/screaminginthecloud to get. That's www.datadoghq/screaminginthecloudCorey: Part of the problem I have when I look at what it is you folks do, and your use cases, and how you structure it is, it's similar in some respects to how folks perceive things like FIS, the fault injection service, or chaos engineering, as is commonly known, which is, “We can't even get the service to stay up on its own for any [unintelligible 00:18:35] period of time. What do you mean, now let's intentionally degrade it and make it work?” There needs to be a certain level of operational stability or operational maturity. When you're still building a service before it's up and running, feature flags seem awfully premature because there's no one depending on it. You can change configuration however your little heart desires. In most cases. I'm sure at certain points of scale of development teams, you have a communications problem internally, but it's not aimed at me trying to get something working at 2 a.m. in the middle of the night.Whereas by the time folks are ready for what you're doing, they clearly have that level of operational maturity established. So, I have to guess on some level, that your typical adopter of AppConfig feature flags isn't in fact, someone who is, “Well, we're ready for feature flags; let's go,” but rather someone who's come up with something else as a stopgap as they've been iterating forward. Usually something homebuilt. And it might very well be you have the exact same biggest competitor that I do in my consulting work, which is of course, Microsoft Excel as people try to build their own thing that works in their own way.Steve: Yeah, so definitely a very common customer of ours is somebody that is using a homegrown solution for turning on and off things. And they really feel like I'm using the heck out of these feature flags. I'm using them on a daily or weekly basis. I would like to have some enhancements to how my feature flags work, but I have limited resources and I'm not sure that my resources should be building enhancements to a feature-flagging service, but instead, I'd rather have them focusing on something, you know, directly for our customers, some of the core features of whatever your company does. And so, that's when people sort of look around externally and say, “Oh, let me see if there's some other third-party service or something built into AWS like AWS AppConfig that can meet those needs.”And so absolutely, the workflows get more sophisticated, the ability to move forward faster becomes more important, and do so in a safe way. I used to work at a cybersecurity company and we would kind of joke that the security budget of the company is relatively low until something bad happens, and then it's, you know, whatever you need to spend on it. It's not quite the same with feature flags, but you do see when somebody has a problem on production, and they want to be able to turn something off right away or make an adjustment right away, then the ability to do that in a measured way becomes incredibly important. And so, that's when, again, you'll see customers starting to feel like they're outgrowing their homegrown solution and moving to something that's a third-party solution.Corey: Honestly, I feel like so many tools exist in this space, where, “Oh, yeah, you should definitely use this tool.” And most people will use that tool. The second time. Because the first time, it's one of those, “How hard could that be out? I can build something like that in a weekend.” Which is sort of the rallying cry of doomed engineers who are bad at scoping.And by the time that they figure out why, they have to backtrack significantly. There's a whole bunch of stuff that I have built that people look at and say, “Wow, that's a really great design. What inspired you to do that?” And the absolute honest answer to all of it is simply, “Yeah, I worked in roles for the first time I did it the way you would think I would do it and it didn't go well.” Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted, and this is one of those areas where it tends to manifest in reasonable ways.Steve: Absolutely, absolutely.Corey: So, give me an example here, if you don't mind, about how feature flags can improve the day-to-day experience of an engineering team or an engineer themselves. Because we've been down this path enough, in some cases, to know the failure modes, but for folks who haven't been there that's trying to shave a little bit off of their journey of, “I'm going to learn from my own mistakes.” Eh, learn from someone else's. What are the benefits that accrue and are felt immediately?Steve: Yeah. So, we kind of have a policy that the very first commit of any new feature ought to be the feature flag. That's that sort of on-off switch that you want to put there so that you can start to deploy your code and not have a long-lived branch in your source code. But you can have your code there, it reads whether that configuration is on or off. You start with it off.And so, it really helps just while developing these things about keeping your branches short. And you can push the mainline, as long as the feature flag is off and the feature is hidden to production, which is great. So, that helps with the mess of doing big code merges. The other part is around the launch of a feature.So, you talked about Andy Jassy being on stage to launch a new feature. Sort of the old way of doing this, Corey, was that you would need to look at your pipelines and see how long it might take for you to push out your code with any sort of code change in it. And let's say that was an hour-and-a-half process and let's say your CEO is on stage at eight o'clock on a Friday. And as much as you like to say it, “Oh, I'm never pushing out code on a Friday,” sometimes you have to. The old way—Corey: Yeah, that week, yes you are, whether you want to or not.Steve: [laugh]. Exactly, exactly. The old way was this idea that I'm going to time my release, and it takes an hour-and-a-half; I'm going to push it out, and I'll do my best, but hopefully, when the CEO raises her arm or his arm up and points to a screen that everything's lit up. Well, let's say you're doing that and something goes wrong and you have to start over again. Well, oh, my goodness, we're 15 minutes behind, can you accelerate things? And then you start to pull away some of these blockers to accelerate your pipeline or you start editing it right in the console of your application, which is generally not a good idea right before a really big launch.So, the new way is, I'm going to have that code already out there on a Wednesday [laugh] before this big thing on a Friday, but it's hidden behind this feature flag, I've already turned it on and off for internals, and it's just waiting there. And so, then when the CEO points to the big screen, you can just flip that one small little configuration change—and that can be almost instantaneous—and people can access it. So, that just reduces the amount of stress, reduces the amount of risk in pushing out your code.Another thing is—we've heard this from customers—customers are increasing the number of deploys that they can do per week by a very large percentage because they're deploying with confidence. They know that I can push out this code and it's off by default, then I can turn it on whenever I feel like it, and then I can turn it off if something goes wrong. So, if you're into CI/CD, you can actually just move a lot faster with a number of pushes to production each week, which again, I think really helps engineers on their day-to-day lives. The final thing I'm going to talk about is that let's say you did push out something, and for whatever reason, that following weekend, something's going wrong. The old way was oop, you're going to get a page, I'm going to have to get on my computer and go and debug things and fix things, and then push out a new code change.And this could be late on a Saturday evening when you're out with friends. If there's a feature flag there that can turn it off and if this feature is not critical to the operation of your product, you can actually just go in and flip that feature flag off until the next morning or maybe even Monday morning. So, in theory, you kind of get your free time back when you are implementing feature flags. So, I think those are the big benefits for engineers in using feature flags.Corey: And the best way to figure out whether someone is speaking from a position of experience or is simply a raving zealot when they're in a position where they are incentivized to advocate for a particular way of doing things or a particular product, as—let's be clear—you are in that position, is to ask a form of the following question. Let's turn it around for a second. In what scenarios would you absolutely not want to use feature flags? What problems arise? When do you take a look at a situation and say, “Oh, yeah, feature flags will make things worse, instead of better. Don't do it.”Steve: I'm not sure I wouldn't necessarily don't do it—maybe I am that zealot—but you got to do it carefully.Corey: [laugh].Steve: You really got to do things carefully because as I said before, flipping on a feature flag for everybody is similar to pushing out untested code to production. So, you want to do that in a measured way. So, you need to make sure that you do a couple of things. One, there should be some way to measure what the system behavior is for a small set of users with that feature flag flipped to on first. And it could be some canaries that you're using for that.You can also—there's other mechanisms you can do that to: set up cohorts and beta testers and those kinds of things. But I would say the gradual rollout and the targeted rollout of a feature flag is critical. You know, again, it sounds easy, “I'll just turn it on later,” but you ideally don't want to do that. The second thing you want to do is, if you can, is there some sort of validation that the feature flag is what you expect? So, I was talking about on-off feature flags; there are things, as when I was talking about dynamic configuration, that are things like throttling limits, that you actually want to make sure that you put in some other safeguards that say, “I never want my TPS to go above 1200 and never want to set it below 800,” for whatever reason, for example. Well, you want to have some sort of validation of that data before the feature flag gets pushed out. Inside Amazon, we actually have the policy that every single flag needs to have some sort of validation around it so that we don't accidentally fat-finger something out before it goes out there. And we have fat-fingered things.Corey: Typing the wrong thing into a command structure into a tool? “Who would ever do something like that?” He says, remembering times he's taken production down himself, exactly that way.Steve: Exactly, exactly, yeah. And we've done it at Amazon and AWS, for sure. And so yeah, if you have some sort of structure or process to validate that—because oftentimes, what you're doing is you're trying to remediate something in production. Stress levels are high, it is especially easy to fat-finger there. So, that check-and-balance of a validation is important.And then ideally, you have something to automatically roll back whatever change that you made, very quickly. So AppConfig, for example, hooks up to CloudWatch alarms. If an alarm goes off, we're actually going to roll back instantly whatever that feature flag was to its previous state so that you don't even need to really worry about validating against your CloudWatch. It'll just automatically do that against whatever alarms you have.Corey: One of the interesting parts about working at Amazon and seeing things in Amazonian scale is that one in a million events happen thousands of times every second for you folks. What lessons have you learned by deploying feature flags at that kind of scale? Because one of my problems and challenges with deploying feature flags myself is that in some cases, we're talking about three to five users a day for some of these things. That's not really enough usage to get insights into various cohort analyses or A/B tests.Steve: Yeah. As I mentioned before, we build these things as features into our product. So, I just talked about the CloudWatch alarms. That wasn't there originally. Originally, you know, if something went wrong, you would observe a CloudWatch alarm and then you decide what to do, and one of those things might be that I'm going to roll back my configuration.So, a lot of the mistakes that we made that caused alarms to go off necessitated us building some automatic mechanisms. And you know, a human being can only react so fast, but an automated system there is going to be able to roll things back very, very quickly. So, that came from some specific mistakes that we had made inside of AWS. The validation that I was talking about as well. We have a couple of ways of validating things.You might want to do a syntactic validation, which really you're validating—as I was saying—the range between 100 and 1000, but you also might want to have sort of a functional validation, or we call it a semantic validation so that you can make sure that, for example, if you're switching to a new database, that you're going to flip over to your new database, you can have a validation there that says, “This database is ready, I can write to this table, it's truly ready for me to switch.” Instead of just updating some config data, you're actually going to be validating that the new target is ready for you. So, those are a couple of things that we've learned from some of the mistakes we made. And again, not saying we aren't making mistakes still, but we always look at these things inside of AWS and figure out how we can benefit from them and how our customers, more importantly, can benefit from these mistakes.Corey: I would say that I agree. I think that you have threaded the needle of not talking smack about your own product, while also presenting it as not the global panacea that everyone should roll out, willy-nilly. That's a good balance to strike. And frankly, I'd also say it's probably a good point to park the episode. If people want to learn more about AppConfig, how you view these challenges, or even potentially want to get started using it themselves, what should they do?Steve: We have an informational page at go.aws/awsappconfig. That will tell you the high-level overview. You can search for our documentation and we have a lot of blog posts to help you get started there.Corey: And links to that will, of course, go into the [show notes 00:31:21]. Thank you so much for suffering my slings, arrows, and other assorted nonsense on this. I really appreciate your taking the time.Steve: Corey thank you for the time. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Really appreciate your insights.Corey: You're too kind. Steve Rice, principal product manager for AWS AppConfig. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment. But before you do, just try clearing your cookies and downloading the episode again. You might be in the 3% cohort for an A/B test, and you [want to 00:32:01] listen to the good one instead.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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,

Overview Steve attributes the success of his series to his great character, Joshua Oates. He had the idea for the series because he had the character so well developed. We discuss how focusing on the character helped him to create the series as a whole. Book https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Numbers-Joshua-Oates-Adventure-ebook/dp/B0B5HPRFZZ?crid=2ZTZ9J3F3XRM2&keywords=murder+by+the+numbers&qid=1663785280&sprefix=murder+by+the+number%2Caps%2C126&sr=8-5&linkCode=li2&tag=discoveredwordsmiths-20&linkId=d31b8b9e04fa43f3409a708dc5351a01&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_il YouTube https://youtu.be/DjzDgCtfNf0 Transcript All right. So let's talk some author stuff. Before we talk about writing your series based on your character let's a few other things you've been writing for a while. What are some things you've learned that you're doing different now than you did from at the beginning? [00:26:41] Steve: Yeah. One thing get a comfortable chair. Because you're gonna be on that keyboard or writing on a notebook or whatever, but you're gonna be sitting down and you're gonna be writing. And that's a task that if you have a comfortable chair, that helps a lot. What else can I tell you? The things that I did yes, be compact. Be economical. What I mean by that is. You can be writing and you have rambling sentences that people, don't we really wanna read. You really wanna get to the action. What's taking place, the dialogue is something you learn as you go, I think and you want crisp short dialogue that goes with the story that, makes it go. You can have reflective dialogue, but I find that when two people are talking to each other two characters are talking to each other. You wanna get to the point, [00:27:38] Stephen: right? Yep. Okay. Now, I picture with that hat and talking about the 1920s, I picture you sitting there at an old Remington steel typewriter taking away at it, but I assume you don't do that. What, so what what do you do when you write, is there any software or services that you particularly like? Yeah, [00:27:58] Steve: I tried different ones. First I tried a Microsoft word, which is good. And then I went to Google docs, which I use now. There are many others out there that I'll probably experiment and try different ones. But right now the Google docs seem to work. One of the things it has is that if I misspell a word it tells me, Hey, this word does not spell like that. Okay. all right, then. I'll correct it. And. And I can I can use that and you can actually convert Google docs to either a PDF file or a Microsoft word file. So yeah. So you can have the best of both worlds, [00:28:41] Stephen: okay. All right. And you had also mentioned earlier about marketing and that, so what are you doing to market? Do you have any interesting marketing you're doing. [00:28:50] Steve: I'm doing I'm doing podcast, which I'm thankful on. Thank you. Thank you for having me by the way. And I'm also doing some book signings. I also do some what would I call it? The library has different author days, my local library. So I do those. And I also get on as many websites as I can to try to promote my book. I do have the Amazon author page. I do have the Facebook page. I not on Instagram and I don't do Twitter. It's probably, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing for an author. But that's what I'm trying to do that. And also there's book fairs too, that I enter to try to do it that way. [00:29:37] Stephen: So how are you finding like the book fairs and things to go to? Are you just Google searching or do you hear about 'em from other places? [00:29:45] Steve: Yeah. A little both. And then I have author friends that tell me about. and I read about it in the newspaper and yes, I still read a paper newspaper that comes in. [00:29:58] Stephen: With that hat, you have to, , [00:29:59] Steve: You gotta do, you gotta go for it. Yeah and I get and word of mouth,

An international commercial airline pilot who, after the tragedies of 9/11, was forced to realize that his “Safe and Secure career” was nowhere near as safe and secure as he had thought. Steve Rozenberg chose real estate investing to be able to control his own destiny and create his own generational wealth. He created the fastest-growing property management company in the state of Texas. Managing over 1,000 properties across 3 major metropolitan cities. Steve built the business up and created maximum cash flow positioning his company for a very profitable exit.   He has been a guest and collaborated on countless panels, webinars, masterminds, conferences, and podcasts as well as being a published author. In today's episode, he shares his story, how he began real estate investing, and how important your mindset is to be successful in this business.   Episode Link: https://steverozenberg.com/ --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by Steve Rozenberg, who's an airline pilot and entrepreneur, and he's gonna be talking to us about the mental mind shifts we as investors need to make in order to scale and have successful businesses. So let's get into it.   Steve, what is going on, man? Thanks so much for taking the time to come hang out with me today. I appreciate it.   Steve: What's happening, fellas, good to see you.   Michael: Oh, super good to see you, Steve. I am super excited to share with our listeners a little bit about you and your background, because I know a little bit about it. But for anyone who doesn't know who Steve Rozenberg is, bring us up to speed quick and dirty. Who you are, where you come from, what is it you're doing in real estate today?   Steve: Sure. So I live in Houston, Texas, born and raised in Los Angeles, actually, my career brought me out here and that careers, what got me kind of involved in being a real estate and being an entrepreneur. I'm an airline pilot by trade and I got hired at 25 years old. I was the second youngest person ever hired by this particular major airline and hired at 25, I had the best job in the world is flying all over the globe. I was 25 years old and it was the most safe, most secure job that anyone could imagine having. Until a certain day in history. That day was 9/11 and that day changed my life, it changed a lot of people's lives. It changed my life because on 9/13, two days after 9/11 in the towers fell, I got delivered a furlough notice and I was basically told, hey, Steve, you know what that safe, secure job that you thought you had, it was never safe and it was really never secure and you're about to be on the street with 50,000 other pilots.   So to say that I got punched in the face very, very hard within about 48 hours would be an understatement and it was it was rough. You know I always I ever want to do as a kid is be an airline pilot. I didn't want to do anything else. I was fulfilling my dream and this something happened, which I realized it had nothing to do with me but it affected me. You know, I didn't I wasn't a part of 9/11 but I was a repercussion, a ripple effect, if you will and so I started to talk about what I could do, what could I do? What to survive to make a paycheck, right? All I knew was to be a pilot, but there was many, many other pilots out there probably better pilots than me to be honest with you that you know, we're also on the street and I looked and I saw that everyone that was tied to wealth somehow was tied to real estate. I didn't know anything about real estate, but I was like, okay, I mean, I knew some pilots who had rental properties, but I didn't know much about it. So this is 2001. So there was no YouTube or Facebook. So I had to go to the library. I had to get a library card.   Michael: A lot of our listeners are probably asking, like, what is that?   Steve: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a big house with a lot of books and so I had to start learning about real estate, I read a book a week and I just I read everything I could, because I thought that I was behind the curve of figuring out what I was going to do with this airline thing. If there was another terrorist attack or something happened, I was gonna be out of work and so I learned all the different things you know, now it's very cliche, you know, burrs and all this other stuff. But I just I learned how to buy I learned how to flip I learned how to wholesale properties. I got lied to, I got ripped off, I got cheated on. I mean, you name it, I just kept getting pushed down face down in the mud every time. But I kept getting back up because I had to I didn't I didn't have a choice. I had to figure out this combination and I, I saw people that were successful. So I was like, okay, there's a recipe. I just don't know it. But I can think like, I'm not the dumbest guy in the world. But I could figure this out and then I started getting better and I started winning a little bit more than I was losing and I started figuring out and what I realized was communicators are actually the ones that are the most successful, not the contractors.   It's four walls in a roof. It's relationship driven. It's not anything else and that relationship is driven by business models, and it's driven by systems and so I started realizing that the four walls and a roof and the dirt really had nothing to do with being a real estate investor. The successful people were good communicators, and they understood the value of leverage and team and then I started looking back at my real estate in my airline career and I started looking at how airlines run and I was like okay, systems, procedures structure and I kind of started melding the two and that led me into start learning to become successful as with my, my old business partner, Pete Newberg, who has been on your show, he and I built a very, very successful property management company, by understanding how to leverage those models and how to leverage systemization and then I've gone on to do a lot of other things, coaching people working with people, helping people understand the systemization of a business is very fundamental to be successful, is what I've learned and that's what I help people with.   Michael: I love that and we're gonna get into a little bit more of the systemization here in a minute. But for anyone listening, it's like, well, Steve, Michael, I'm not an extrovert. I'm more of an introvert, I'm more of an insert inside kind of person, like, Am I just doomed to never be a real estate investor like, what should I be doing if that's me?   Steve: So that's a good question because a lot of people you know, are a lot of people that go into real estate, what I've learned is they're running away from a life or job that they don't want you when you talk to real estate investors, and I coach a lot of real estate investors all over the world and when I talk to them, I'll ask them, why are you doing this, and a lot of them will tell me, I don't want this, I don't want that. They're running away from something and what they're running away from is a life that they don't want to have. Unfortunately, when you're running away from something you don't want, that's what you're focused on, and you run right back into it. I mean, that's the cycle, right because that's your filter. But what I've learned is, you don't have to be the best communicator, but you have to have good communicators on your team. There's things that I am really, really good at and there are things that I am horrible at. It's a matter of understanding, what are my strengths? What are my weaknesses, I don't think that I should become like, that's just my opinion. I don't think it makes sense to work on my weaknesses. I don't know anything about accounting, I would make a company go bankrupt if I started doing the accounting books for my business. So why should I go and take two year courses at a junior college to learn how to do books, or I just hire someone and that's what they do. So I've taken my weakness, and I've actually turned it into a strength because now I don't have to think about it, I don't have to focus on it. I have someone in place that is run by KPIs and metrics and accountability and I just, I just parceled, that whole piece of my life off.   So to answer your question, I don't think you have to be good at that. A business needs it like my business partner, Pete. He was the integrator and I was the visionary. I was the forward guy, I was the guy out in front. But I sucked at the operational side, he was like the mushroom in the in the back room and, you know, my job was to break his business all the time. It's like I wanted to have so much sales and marketing coming in, that he would go Steve, I can't take it anymore and that was like my victory lap of showing. That's the that's the sales and marketing tug of war that goes on, right and so I don't think that you have to be good at everything because the reality is, is you're not, you're probably good at one thing and you suck at everything else that you do. It's a matter of identifying what am I good at? What am I not good at leveraging out those other things and focusing on that one thing to be the very best that you can be and if you can do that, you will help the business, the organization and you'll be much happier too.   Michael: I think yeah, I think it makes a ton a ton a ton a ton of sense. So talk to Steve about like, you got three to five properties, you're looking at scaling up, you're realizing maybe a little bit more and more, you're self-managing, hey, this might be more of a job than I was anticipating I'm trying to get out of a job that people what are some systems people should be putting in place and how should they be thinking about systemization if that's a new term for them, that's never something they've done before?   Steve: Yeah, that's a great question and let, I'm going to back it up a little bit if it's okay, because a lot of people, if they have three to five properties, and I get a lot of people that will call me and ask me that question like, hey, Steve, you know, if I'm in front of them, they'll put a deal like three inches from my face and they're like, hey, is this a good deal like being closer makes it more sense? I don't know. But they'll put this right to my face and they're like, is this a good deal? Well, I don't know what a good deal is for you. So first question is, what's the goal, right? What is the date of that goal? So if they don't know the goal, and they don't have a date, and a timeline and a way to achieve that goal, I can't tell them what to do. I can't give them directions. It's kind of like if you said, hey, Steve, we're all gonna go to Disneyland and we got to be at the front gates at 8am on Friday morning and we're going to leave our house at 6am and we're going to take the 405 to the 91. Get off on Disney drive, and we're gonna go into the gates to be there ready to go. Well, if along that way, you get lost, you're gonna pull over and you're gonna go, hey, Steve, can I get directions? What's the first thing I'm going to ask you? Where are you? Where are you going? If you say, I don't know, I'm just driving around today, I'm gonna go with it. I can't help you, because I don't know where you're trying to get to. So if you take that same analogy, many people buy properties. They don't have a goal. So they say, should I buy more properties? My question is, is I don't know what's the goal? Because, you know, many people, you know, they think that owning rentals is the goal. That's just the strategy to achieve the goal. That's like saying, I'm going to get on the 405 freeway and you're going, where are you going? I don't know, I'm just gonna get on the freeway and drive and the reason I know that is when Pete and I first started buying properties, that's what we did. We were just buying properties and we're going the wrong way, in the wrong direction at a very, very fast pace and nobody stopped us to say, where are you guys going because we're just driving. We're like, we're making great time. Unfortunately, we're going in the wrong way. So to answer your question, to going back to what you're saying about systemization, every business normally has about eight to 11 systems in their business, it's a matter of looking at what you do and systemizing everything. So if you took a system and put it in a vertical, let's just say when you're going to rent a property, what is the system that it takes to rent that property, you've got to basically first thing you've got to do is maybe the first trigger of that system is when the Make ready is done. Now the property is in rent ready condition, it now triggers this system to happen. What's the first thing you got to do? Well, maybe you've got to go and take pictures and video of the property. Step one, what's the next thing you got to do? Well, then you've got to do some comps and check out the area and see what the property is renting for. That's step two. So you're going through and you're just basically talking to me, like I'm a three year old or third grader and you're explaining to me in very painstaking detail, what you're doing. These are all steps in the process of a systemization. Once you create the system all the way through to getting the property rented, once the property is rented, that system is complete. Maybe that system is 19 steps, right? Then you look at that system and go okay, is this the most efficient way to run this system, does or is there any redundancy? Is there any things that we don't even do or should not do? Are we missing some things? Now, let's say for example, this person, he, let's just say he grows and he gets an employee to do these tasks, right and or he subs it out to a company. This company needs to know very, very clearly what they're doing because the definition like look, I think we can all agree that when you own one business, or you own 50 businesses, which are rental properties, those are businesses, that you've got to treat it like a business, right? The challenge is, most people don't they don't have any systems that don't have any structure and it's chaos, which is why so many landlords get sued, because there's no systemization or standardization, meaning how you lease a property. When you're in the airlines, right, we'll go back to being an airline pilot, if I'm an airline pilot, and I came out and said, hey, everyone, this is gonna be a great day today. We're off to Hawaii. This is my first time ever doing this. So wish me luck. I'm just gonna wing it and hopefully we make it there. How would you feel?   Michael: Yeah, a little bit shaky.   Steve: Right but yeah, you'd probably be like, I'm not getting on this plane. Yeah, but that's what many people do with their rental properties and they're doing that with their financial lives, right? This is your real life, you're trusting me with your life but you don't do that with your financial life. So there's a disconnect as to the training and, and the way that you can scale because if you have to do everything in your business, you don't own a business, you own a job and a job is not scalable, because you have only so many hours in the day, and you have so much knowledge of what you're good at and what you're bad at. So I don't know if that answered the question but there's, that's a very hard thing to unpack.   Michael: No, it totally does. It totally does. Two things. First thing is I think you must be having been out of LA for a long time, because your analogy you're talking about getting on the 405 Dizzy land, you leave by six get there by eight. There's no world in which that happens today. Yeah, first and foremost. But secondly, so like, how does someone make that mindset shift because I think so many of us and specifically, it seems to be pretty pervasive in the real estate world, this DIY mentality, you know, I do it myself, do it myself, do it myself. How does, how do you make that mental leap of, okay, I'm going from doing it myself, small business owner to hiring someone or contracting it out or putting it to somebody else so I can get out of my own way?   Steve: Sure. Well, there's a couple things. Number one, you've got to you have to be willing to let go of your ego and pride, right? Because ego and pride are success inhibitors, they will kill your success quicker than anything. I should do it because I'm in charge, right and so let's go back to the goal, right? If I said, hey, what's your goal and you didn't, you didn't and this is what I use this example when I coach people, I'll tell them, okay, let's just use this as an example. I call it a 2020 2020 properties in 20 years, giving you $20,000 a month in passive income. It's a bait. It's a goal, right? Yeah, it's, it's got a time limit on it. It's something that we can attach an actual goal to and we know how we're going to achieve that goal because we have a scoreboard to see if we've made that. So that means that each property needs to be giving off $1,000 a month in passive income to get 20 properties give me $20,000 a month. Okay, that means, okay, so let we're gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna answer your question in a roundabout way, we've got to say, Okay, if we want to have 20 properties, that means by year 10, we have to have acquired all those properties so that from year 10, to your 20, we're going to pay those properties off, because we want them free and clear by your 20. That means between year one and year 10, we have to purchase 20 properties, which means we have to close on two properties a year, which is every six months, which means every three months, we have to be looking for deals.   My first question is, is do you have the finances to even make this happen? Do you have the do you have the financial means to achieve this goal? If they say I don't have a job, I'm gonna go well, then we're done talking because first thing you need is the financial means to make that happen. That's number one. Then we say okay, when you achieve the goal of 20 20 20, right, and we get to where we want to go, what I have learned and what many people I'm sure some people will learn, it's not a bad thing to learn. But a lot of people identify success by their accolades, meaning how much money they have in the bank, or how many properties they have, how many doors whatever they want to whatever they want to use as their gauge. That's how they quantify their success, or lack thereof. Now, I had Pete and I had a very successful property management company that we sold to a venture capital much larger firm and I can tell you that when you get that money in the bank, it is very, very, very anticlimactic. Like I mean, literally, like after we sold our company, and we sold it for well into seven figures, all of a sudden, I thought I'm done, like, oh, this is awesome. Now, mind you, I still am an airline pilot this whole time. So I'm okay financially but I thought, man, if I just if we sell this company, we're good. You don't happen Monday morning, after we sold the company?   Michael: You put on your uniform and go fly a plane.   Steve: My wife said, hey, don't forget, take the trash out the trash bin or come and I'm like, when I sold the company, like I sold my goods just like, don't give a shit. Take the trash out. So, but the point is, is like all of a sudden you think you're in some magic club like you think you break through this glass ceiling and the reality is, is nobody cares and the reason I'm saying the reason I'm going somewhere with this is that we think that once we achieve a mark or a goal that's going to make our lives complete and sadly, it doesn't, it actually makes it more hollow because you realize, like, wow, I've been doing this all these years, and nobody even cares. Like they're, you know, everyone's moving on. So what I always tell people when I talked to when I told you earlier that a lot of entrepreneurs, they buy real estate, and people want to get involved in real estate and I asked them why they say I want more freedom, right? I'm sure you've probably heard this, I want anytime freedom, do what I want, blah, blah, blah, they use this word freedom, like it means something special to them. I tell them okay, well, let me ask you this, why don't you just sell all your shit today, go live in your car at the park, and you'll have all the freedom you need. No one will bother you, you'll have your freedom. They think about that I'm like, but you know, what you won't have is you won't have the memories that you want associated with that freedom.   So we're really not buying freedom. What we're buying is memories. So when I sell a business, or I have rental properties, giving me cash flow, what am I doing with that cash flow, it's giving me the ability to have freedom to go buy the memories. It's the memories we want. So going back to your question, how does somebody step out of what they want? I would first ask them, what memories do you want to buy because at the end of the day, we're not leaving, we're not leaving this earth with anything except our memories, right? When we go when our when our expiration date happens. We're not going anywhere, except with memories in our brains. What memories do you want, right in the real estate, and the cash flow or whatever you're doing with that will give you the means to buy those memories. So buy the memories don't buy the time is you go to prison and have all the free time you want. You may not like the result, but you'll have free time by the memories, right? Go to you know, have dinner on the Mediterranean in Greece, right? Go to this African Safari, the Rolling Stones in Wembley Stadium. Those are the memories that you want and that's what real estate gives you. So going back to your question when someone says, hey, like, you know, how do I get out of it? I'm like, what memories do you want? Do you want to be an employee? That's trading time for money because that's what you're doing? I'll give you an example. So my son, he bought a rental property at 14 years old. Okay and everyone's like, oh, that's awesome. Yeah and he bought it with his money, you know and so everyone's like, man, that's awesome. That's great. Like, did you have him do the rehab and clean the house and I'm like, No. Why would I do that? They're like, so he can learn. I'm like, I don't do that. Why should I make him do that? That's being a hypocrite. I want him to be a business owner, not an employee. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with being an employee but that's that that is not the goal of one rental property like, hey, congratulations, you want a rental property? Now go learn how to cut wood lay tile, put it insulation but dad, you don't do that. I wouldn't even know how to do that. Like, again, working on strengths versus weaknesses, right? People seem like when they get a rental property that like, all of a sudden, I've got to learn how to put a toilet in and I gotta get up on the roof and inspect it. I'm like, have you ever done that before? No and I'm like, Well, then why in the heck would you get up on a roof? If you didn't know what you're doing like this is how you become a statistic. But we think we should because of ego and pride. So that's kind of a long answer but that's my answer.   Michael: I love it, I love it a great answer. Steve, great answer. Talk to us a little bit about, like, the qualities and what you see really successful people do who are able to implement systematization like what like, what skills should people be go out there and refining in order to be able to execute here really, really well?   Steve: Well, yeah, that's a great question and I've studied a lot of very successful people. I've been coached and mentored by some very successful people and I'm a constant student, I still a mentor to this day. Anyone who says that they don't need to be coached, and they don't need to be mentored, is missing out on a lot of opportunity. I look at Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, these guys are at the top of their game, and they still have coaches and mentors. All professional athletes have coaches, you don't become a professional athlete, and then lose the coaches. They make you better.   Michael: So I'm done.   Steve: Yeah, it's like I'm done. Um, you know, even Kobe Bryant, I mean, everyone, they all have coaches. I mean, that's how it works, right? Right, it's brings the best thing out of you. So number one, I think you always have to have somebody holding you accountable and if you look at all successful people, they have accountability. They have somebody holding them accountable in somebody, you know, a three feet distance is a world of perspective, right? In the simulators. When we find the simulators and we're practicing engine failures and all these things. The simulator instructor is about three feet behind us the control panel, and we joke and he they know, they're like, yeah, I'm the smartest guy in here because I'm three feet behind you, I can see all the mistakes you guys are making. You don't see it, because you're in the heat of battle. He's like, I can see it coming a mile away. I'm the smartest guy in the room. So having somebody three feet away, is a world of perspective, having an organization help give you guidance to when you're looking to acquire a property that's giving you that three feet difference. That's a world of difference, right? So, there is a recipe for success and I'm a firm believer. If you look at all successful people, they follow a very simple recipe. It's not magic, people who are failures, they follow a recipe also and I think that every day that you wake up every day that we all wake up, we have a decision to make. It's very simple. Am I going to be better than yesterday or am I going to be worse than that, initially, is our decision that we make every day because you're not good, you're they're getting better. You're getting worse, we never stay the same ever and so when you wake up in the morning, what is the decision you're gonna make? Are you going to do any reading? Are you going to do any I'm statements? What are you going to do to focus on solution based questions slash trying to be better or are you going to be in blame excuse or denial? So going back to your question, I think that people that if you want to learn how to become better at systemization, then talk to someone who knows what they're doing and that can help you become a systems expert because, look, as an airline pilot, right? I've been I've been flying for almost 30 years, I've been trained by Boeing, I fly one of the most complicated aircraft out there a Boeing 787. I didn't, I wasn't born that way, I had to be trained and guess what, we still go back to training every six months, and we go back through all the initial stuff. So just because you reach the pinnacle, you don't stay up there and if you look at people that are successful, they're always trying to be better, just because you have three houses or five houses or 500 houses. Look, the crash to the bottom is much faster than the rise to the top, as we all know, and seen, you know, with banks crashing and other things. It's the people that are cognizant and follow that recipe and again, I don't think it's a very complicated recipe and if you look at people, you know, they do a lot of things in the one thing that I've learned, I'll give you a quick story. I was with one of my mentors one time, guys. 11 businesses, right. He's on the board of 11 businesses and he was my mentor, and we lunch and I was like, man, I don't know how you do it. Like you have 11 businesses. I'm like, how many days a week do you work? He's like, Tuesday, Thursday, and sometimes half a Friday. It was like this guy was talking Martian to me. I was like, like, how is that even possible and he goes, You know what, Steve, you know what the difference is? He says, I say No, way more than I say yes and I said, you know what, that's easy for you to say because you're this multimillionaire that has 11 businesses and he said, I would have never become this way. If I didn't start saying no and he said there's an opportunity cost that every time you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else, right.   So he goes every time you say yes to doing something that is not the most high income producing activity, you are saying no to something. He's like, it's again, he goes, it's your choice. So when I coach people, one of the things I do, and this will be a freebie for people watching is, I always have them do a two week time study, okay? So it's a very simple time study that they have to go and they have to write down for two weeks, every single thing that they do, right, you want to go on a diet, you start tracking your food, you want to see where your money's going, you go on a budget, you want to see where your time is going and start tracking it at the end of the day, they have to give me an executive summary. Tell me how your day went? I don't care. I don't care what you did. I just want to hear it from your words. Within one week, within one week, they will be like, I now know where my time is going and most people think they're so productive, like, oh, I work all day long. I'm like, bullshit, you don't work all day long. Yeah, study and we'll see. After they do the time set, he's like, man, I'm only working like three hours a day. I'm like, because everything else is reactionary. A five minute interruption, a five minute phone call is equal to 23 minutes of lost time. How many times as a as a real estate investor entrepreneur, do we get the sideways calls that interrupt our data, and they sidetrack us, if you get 10 calls a day, that's 230 minutes that you were never expecting to lose, you just lost that chunk of time. So now you're living what's called a reactive life and when you're living a reactive life, you're in chaos and when you're in chaos, you're not in control and when you're not in control, you're not making money. So the challenges is what people don't put a factor into this chaotic life, is the mental stress that it weighs on you. So once they do the first week, the second week, they have to go back in every day, they have to do this and I and just the type of coach I am, every day, they have to send me a picture of their time study and I tell them, the day you don't send this, to me is the last day you will hear from me, because I can't want it more than you like it's very simple. Like, even if you pay me all the money, you're done like that's just how it is I can't I don't have time to waste if you don't want to be better. So when they do this, the next day is they have to put an H or an L next to that high income activity, low income activity. And guess how many low income activities they do on a day?   Michael: Probably the majority…   Steve: Probably the majority. So then what we do at the end of that next week, we go, okay, these are the things that make you money. These are the things that don't we need to outsource systemize or automate the things that you don't make money on of these high income activities. Which ones do you like doing? Which ones are you good at? I like this, and this, okay, this is the focus, we need to find someone else to do these other high income activities. We don't ignore them and so my point is, is one of my mentors said that he goes TV goes understand saying no is not saying that. No, the way you think it. He goes when I say no, it just means I'm not doing it. He goes, I just make sure that other people are getting it done, but it's not through me. He goes things to have to get done in a business but he goes, it doesn't have to be you. That's your ego and pride, thinking that you have to be the one doing it all. So that was a very valuable lesson for me that I share with you, you in the listeners.   Michael: Yeah, thank you. I mean, as you're saying this, I'm just like, oh, my God, I have so many hours in my day, this is insane.   Steve: Yeah, we do. We all look, we all do. And it's a matter of stepping on the scale whenever I'm coaching someone, or someone gives me a call, like, man, I just feel like I'm losing it. I'm like, just do a time study. I mean, it sounds it sounds so simple, or whatever but I'm like just do the time study you will see very clearly, and then just fix it. Look at the pendulum swings. It's okay but you got to do something to take corrective action. Otherwise, it's going to keep swinging, it's never gonna go back on its own. You don't all of a sudden become more organized and more productive. It doesn't work that way, right? You're always gonna go back and you've got to start focusing on making that decision every day. What am I doing? You know, and it could be something simple. It could be reading for five minutes, could be writing your day could be whatever it is, but start creating habits and those habits become patterns and those patterns will change your life.   Michael: Mike drop exit stage left, Steve, that was amazing. Man, I want to be super respectful of your time. If people want to talk with you more, learn more about you reach out, have you as their coach, what's the best way for them to do so?   Steve: Yeah, they can find me on all social media handles. It's Rozenberg, Steve on Instagram, Steve Rozenberg on all the other stuff. They can also go to my website. My website is https://steverozenberg.com/ , it's ROZENBERG.com and you know, I do a lot of coaching. I do three day masterminds with very high level, people like Bradley, the iron cowboy, other people, I bring them in. It's all about mindset and it's all about, you know, the one thing I'll say real quick before we go and I want to be respectful of your time is don't be selfish, and to the people watching and what I mean by that is as entrepreneurs, we watch these shows, right? We buy real estate, we do all these things, and we do it for the people that we love but here's the thing, we never actually share the knowledge that we've learned with the people we're doing it for. To me, that's the definition of being selfish be selfless. Like I said, my son bought his first rental property and 14, create generational wealth, right? Bring them into the loop. Don't be selfish, because when you're selfish, you're isolating yourself, have an open mind and the ability to give abundance and share the knowledge that you learned from this podcast, show reading, bring the family that you're doing it for into the mix, and you will have a much, much more fulfilled life and you'll be much more successful not just financially, but personally relationship and all that stuff. So don't be selfish.   Michael: Yeah. I love that, Steve and one more final question before I let you go. You mentioned you're running a mastermind and I think a lot of our listeners maybe have been to how to coach or been to seminars or been in real estate trainings, and just whoever reason can't implement it. They take the classroom knowledge, but they can't execute a role. So what have you seen people do who are really successful at that and actually applying what they've learned and taking that excitement and went out and actually ran with it…   Steve: That's a good question. So and the reason I created my mastermind is that very reason, right? Everybody goes there, rah, rah, they leave in there, like two weeks later, they're like, it's in their car underneath their seats, all the dogs chewing on it and so what I do when I do my masterminds is once they're done, they get unlimited coaching from me, they get my phone, they get my text, they get my email, if they need me, they call me. So I'm there as accountability for them every single day. It's not that hey, I know you have a problem Monday morning with a tenant exploding your house but we're supposed talk Thursday at three so call me then that doesn't work in the real world. I don't think that that's a very successful model. I give unlimited so that they have me and they have me as accountability. I think the biggest challenge when you leave these events and coaching is the accountability part. If the coach if you have a coach and he's not accountable, find them accountability person, one of the things I do when I coach partners is I have a board of directors meeting, I create a board of directors for them going over the P&I statements going over balance sheets, going over the goals. This is what you need to do in any organization, all businesses do it. Most people don't. So if you can't make your coach be accountable, or you can't afford a coach or whatever the case may be find a friend, a family member or go to the bum on the corner. I don't care but make someone hold you accountable that you actually have to answer for what you're doing and I think if you're accountable, based on what you learned, that's why I do unlimited coaching, you're going to be much more successful with achieving the goals that you set out to achieve.   Michael: Makes total sense, Steve, this was a total, total blast, man, thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with me. I really, really appreciate it.   Steve: Thank you, man. It's good having you appreciate you having me on.   Michael: Hey, we'll definitely talk soon.   All right, when that was episode, a big thank you to Steve for coming on super, super, super great stuff. As he was talking. I was like, oh my God, I need to start doing a lot more of what Steve is talking about. As always, if you enjoyed the episode, feel free to leave us a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and we look forward to seeing you on the next one. Happy investing…

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

It's Joël's first episode as host of The Bike Shed!

I have had my head down working on some big things since RapidStart CRM growth exploded, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Charles Lamanna who recently took over for James Phillips as head of Business Applications for Microsoft. This was my fourth chat with Charles, and it was interesting to back listen to them in order. It really gives you a sense of where Microsoft has come. I managed to catch him in his office having just wrapped up their year-end. Enjoy! If you want to listen to my chats with Charles in order, The first one was October of 2018, the second one was September of 2019, the third one was March of 2020. Transcript Below: Steve: Welcome to the Steve Has a Chat Podcast. Where I call someone out of the blue with a record button on, and hope to have an unscripted conversation about Microsoft business applications. Let's see how it goes. Enjoy. Charles: Hey, this is Charles Lamanna. Steve: Charles. Steve Mordue. How are you doing? Charles: Good. Great to hear from you, Steve. It's been a long time. Steve: It has been a while. Have you got some time for a chat? Charles: For you, anytime. Steve: I appreciate it. Well, I guess the big news for you obviously is putting on the big boy hat, huh? Charles: Yes. I moved up an extra floor in the Advanta building in the Microsoft Campus. Steve: Oh did you? Charles: No, I'm just kidding. But metaphorically speaking at least. Because for folks that don't know, James Phillips leaving in March of this year, I kinda stepped in across all aspects of business applications of Microsoft. And, over the last four years, I've gotten to know the place, know the people, know the business and I'm super excited about the opportunity. And I think the future has never been brighter for business at Microsoft. Steve: Well, I never got the feeling that James held you back, or any of the folks on your team back, but he certainly, we have to give him a lot of credit for really taking this thing to a whole nother level. You weren't here before, I don't think, at least with the business apps, but it was really run by morons before he took over. And he completely turned that thing around and turned it in a whole nother business. And now with you taking over, I'm expecting that to continue. I don't know if there's been some things that have been in your bag that you've wanted to do that James was keeping you from, that you're going to pull out, or if you're just going to continue the path, or what's your thinking now that you've got that gavel? Charles: So definitely not held back. I would say I was super fortunate I worked for James for, I think seven, eight years in total. So I was able to learn a bunch and he was without a doubt, the most supportive manager I've ever had in my career, in terms of both enabling and clearing paths for what we wanted to do from a vision and dreaming perspective. And if it weren't for his support, things like Power Apps would have never gotten off the ground. So, definitely. And I think as we go to the future, we have this amazing foundation. I mean, BizApps is a major and key component and pillar of the Microsoft Cloud. Charles: 10 years ago, you probably would've thought that impossible. Right. To have Dynamics and Power Platform alongside Azure and Office. Now that we're here, let's go take it to the next level. And that's the push, and it's continuing a lot of the great innovation we've already done from a data-first, AI-first approach. Kind of sprinkling in some more collaboration with teams, and really revisiting the end-user experience, the platform, to go increasingly modernize and scale it and make sure that all our components from CRM, to ERP, to Power Platform work great together. Steve: I don't think it could have achieved that status with Dynamics 365 alone. It really took the Power Platform coming into being, I think, to give it the breadth that it needed to be able to get there. With Dynamics 365, we didn't have apps for users to do small things, there was no way it was going to permeate an organization the way the Power Apps do. Charles: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I say two things are interesting. The first is, Power Platform has allowed us to help more users and more customers with business process transformation, which is what BizApps are all about. Right? Steve: Yeah. Charles: How do you make your sales processes better, your financial processes better, and Power Platform really turbocharged that. And that earned us credibility in a lot of those departments and with a lot of those users, and we have some great data about every user who adopts Power Platform is significantly more likely to adopt Dynamics within the next year or two. So we see that symbiosis working in a way which is incredibly customer-friendly, and it helps our business. Second thing is Power Platform has even helped us reimagine parts of the Dynamics apps themselves. And I think probably two of the best examples are the connectors, which are key to the Power Platform. Charles: You see the connectors starting to show up inside all these Dynamics apps, like Customer Insights uses Power Query for data ingestion, or Viva Sales even connects to Salesforce. So there's this amazing interoperability that we have, and also enabling the end-user. Our team built Viva Sales, even though it's not in the Dynamics or Power Platform brand. But it's this idea of having an integrated experience in Office for sellers, built on connectors and built on the Office integration. So it's changed the way you think about some products, and it's also helped us go expand our user base. Steve: Yeah. I saw I was on a PGI call with that yesterday. Very, very cool stuff. At the last PAC meeting, I was supposed to be on the Viva Sales round table, but I'm like, "Yeah, that sounds boring. I think I'm going to go to this one." And I really, I went to the wrong one, I missed a good one. But you know where I am, right? I'm on the platform. Charles: Yep. Steve: And we're exploding. Our app is continuing to grow on the platform as a low-cost simpler alternative to Dynamics 365 for companies that aren't ready for that. And I'm always bugging you about, "Hey, that cool new feature you guys got in the first-party. When are we going to get that at the platform level? So ISVs, and people that are just building their own stuff from scratch, could take advantage of some of the syncs." We got the Outlook app a while ago, we've been getting some things. And when I saw Viva Sales, that was probably my only disappointment was that, at least as I understand it, it's hardwired to Dynamics or hardwired to Salesforce. And I get that trying to play those two against each other, but it's leaving guys like me out in the cold. Charles: Well, I'd say for Viva Sales, the intent is to support any CRM, and I really do mean that generally. And even customers, because there are customers out there that we talked to today who have homegrown CRMs, they coded 15 years ago. They have a whole dev team still working on it. The idea is to support interoperability with your account records, your lead records, your opportunity records, standard pipeline data. And to do that in a way which works through the connector. So today it'll earn V1, it'll only be Dynamics in Salesforce, but the intent is to make that be a general purpose adapter. And you could have a RapidStart CRM connector, which shows up and supports the contacts the way we want, and it would be connectable. That's not going to happen in the next three months, but that's the ambition. Steve: I can call you in four. Charles: I go down and said... What was that, in four Months? Steve: I can call you in four months. Charles: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I might not pick up the phone then in four months, no I'm just kidding. Because even talking about, if people are even on Seibal. We should be able to support them with their sales. Because the idea is, you shouldn't have to transform the seller experience at the same pace that you transform your core CRM, your core system of record, and that's just the way the world's moving. Steve: Well, I love the idea that one of the challenges that CRM has always had, of course, is user adoption. It's one more place they need to go to do something. Outlook app helped with that, getting data into CRM without them having to actually go to it. It seems like yet another way for people to engage with their CRM without actually realizing they're engaging with their CRM. Charles: Exactly. Yeah. It's almost like ambient... Yeah for sure. Sorry. Yeah. I say it's almost like ambient CRM basically. How do you make it so that, instead of the user goes to your CRM, the CRM goes to the user where they are. And the outlook app was the beginnings of that. Some of the Team's integrations we've done are the beginnings of that. And that Viva Sales and that whole Viva idea is how do you elevate it? So anywhere you go, your CRM data is accessible without you having to go to a different user interface. Steve: Very cool. Very cool. So I ask you every time we get on a call about exciting features that are coming up. And in particular, maybe even some features that have launched, that didn't take off the way you thought they would and people are just missing something. We have this problem with our app sometimes, people don't understand and so they don't move forward, and it would be perfect for them. And I'm sure there's lots of features and capabilities that you guys broke a sweat building, and know in your heart, this would be awesome, but people don't seem to be getting that. What's a good example of one of those? Charles: I'd say a product which we've had a capability, where we've had a lot of customer usage from a small number of customers, but very deeply and with huge impact, and we wish were with more customers, is probably Conversation Intelligence. I'm not sure if you've seen that around the Sales app, and where that actually will sit in inside of say a phone call or a meeting and help you generate action items, and summaries, and coaching, and help you understand sentiment, and listening and talk ratio. We've used that internally at Microsoft with great success. So our digital sales reps and the folks who work our phones, they are diehard fans. We have this amazing video we released a couple months ago where we actually went out and interviewed these digital sales reps and their managers, and they just were going on and on about how great it is. Charles: And that's rare where you hear that about a piece of technology for a seller. And we have a few other external customers that have gone through that same journey, where they have a thousand digital reps, 2000 digital reps using this and just in love with it. But it's not as pervasive as we thought it would be at this point. And it's one of those things where, it's a product discovery, and easing people into the capability, because then you got to go out of your way to enable it and configure it. So we're doing work now to simplify it, and make it more accessible to more users. And we're doing that partly through Viva Sales, like conversation intelligence, the major capability of Viva Sales. Charles: And the second thing is also, there's even some culture aspects to it. Because if you use it, it's generating transcripts and recordings of a call, and not everyone's necessarily super comfortable with that. So we're even working about how do you enable more features without having to record the call, and how do you enable capabilities without having to get a transcript? Or how do you make it more natural to say, "Hey, I have a sales co-pilot thing. Are you okay if I enable it?" So there's a lot of interesting things, it's never just a technology problem. It's also a discovery and a, I'd say, change culture management problem. Steve: Yeah. I think that's been the challenge with anything AI really. A lot of people, it seem to think it might be a little too futuristic. They look at the benefit and think that's really cool, but they have no idea how to get it. And AI just in general, doesn't feel that approachable to people, even though in certain cases, it's extremely approachable. You don't have to do anything, it's approaching you. So it's a learning curve, you got to wait until my generation dies off and then you guys will see. Charles: I don't have as myopic of you, as you Steve. But I would say that, the big thing that we have to do is, there's been this evolution of AI where the AI is going to be something that automates away what humans do. And what we've realized is, AI is not even remotely close to being able to do that. But what AI can do, is it can turbocharge the people that use it. And so what we're trying to do is, how do we go expose these AI capabilities in a way where you or anyone else who uses them feels so much more productive. And just like when you first got the ability to use PC or a spreadsheet, you're like, "How did I exist before?" We're hoping we'll get to the point where, once you start using some of these AI assistive capabilities, like we've done in Conversation Intelligence, you'll be like, "How did I ever do a customer call before? And I had to take notes on paper while listening as opposed to having the AI take notes for me?" Yeah, exactly. Steve: I'm terrible about that. I'll be chicken scratching over here while I'm talking to people, and then we get off the phone I look at and I can't understand a word I wrote. Charles: Yeah. I like post-it notes next to my desk where I'm always writing stuff down. Steve: Yeah. So what else cool's coming on the horizon that we should be... That sounds like the Conversational Intelligence has been around. Sounds like Viva Sales is going to really bring that to the masses, so that one's on a path. What are some other new things that we should pay attention to that you're able to talk about? Charles: Yeah. Another one of my favorite things, which we've started to reveal some capabilities going back to last Ignite, so November of 2021. And we have some big announcements planned for the second half of 2022, is the new Contact Center related capabilities inside of Dynamics Customer Service. We have Omnichannel, we announced integrated voice, the Nuance acquisition closed, and the Nuance contact center AI team joined my group to align with customer service and contact center. So there's a lot of really exciting innovation happening there. And I'm really excited about the potential to make it super easy to get a comprehensive customer engagement story, without having to wire up eight different pieces of technology and do a ton of different complex integrations. So that's a place where there's a lot of innovation, there's new capabilities, Omnichannel, Power Virtual Agent, even the same type of conversation intelligence applied to support cases, Nuance for their Gatekeeper, which is identity and authentication verification based on voice and biometrics. Charles: There's a lot of cool stuff in that space. And that's one of the places where so many of the customers we work with are trying to improve the customer experience, and to go reduce costs. So I say that's a place where we've had a lot of exciting announcements over the last six to nine months, and we have a whole bunch more planned for the next six to nine months. So I say, stay tuned. And I won't say more than that to avoid getting in trouble by leaking information. But I just say, that's a place to really pay close attention. Steve: Who knew call centers could be cool? Charles: Yeah, exactly. Who would have thought that I'd be talking about contact centers, and how it's the next generation or next frontier of AI applications in 2022. Steve: Oh, well. Well I do have to thank you guys for the low-code advances you've continued to make in that platform. It actually allowed us to launch a, I think we're the first ones to try this, a new Service as a Subscription. Which includes awesome includes deployment, customization, training, everything except development code, which as you know today in so many of these projects, there's so little, if any of that. Charles: Yeah. Steve: Just a few years ago, if you tried to offer something like this, it really would be little more than a support agreement. But now, we're deploying, we're building, we're customizing, we're building entire things for customers all on a monthly subscription. It's an interesting concept, and hopefully I don't go broke, but... Charles: But you know what, it's fascinating. I literally was talking about this with the Power Platform team this morning. About a future where we'll have more partners who are able to sell a comprehensive service agreement, which includes the cloud hosting licenses, but also some incremental custom development and also ongoing maintenance and support. And it'll be almost this whole new industry, which will push a lot of innovation to the edges of the ecosystem, right? Steve: Yep. Charles: Not built by Microsoft, built by partners who really understand particular regions, particular industries, or particular segments. Like y'all are targeting a space where we're not trying to go take Dynamics, CRM, and go bring it down there. You can go build a world-class experience on top of our platform and provide a very much all-in-one, which exactly serves the needs of that audience and that market. And we can stay focused on building the super horizontal platform, which has great performance, great usability, incredible power, those types of things. Steve: Yeah, it sounds great. I'm glad that we had the same idea you guys did. I'll let you know, in a few months, if it was a smart one. Time will tell. Charles: Yes. Yeah. Steve: So, how are the rest of the team doing? It seems like some folks have moved around a little bit in the org, who's moved where? Charles: Yeah. So one of the big things we've been really focused on the engineering side, for the engineering organization, is bringing together strength from a product perspective that target the same type of user. And for example, we have a new customer experience platform team underneath Lori Lamkin, who leads all of our Dynamic Sales apps. So the Core Sales and Viva Sales, as well as commerce, as well as marketing, as well as customer insights. And it's very much focused on revenue generation, customer journeys, customer experiences. And what's great is by bringing those assets together, we have a great answer for B2B customers, as well as B2C. Like if you want to have self service, no touch eCommerce experience with lightweight telesales, you can do that all with those sets of applications. If you want to do a high relationship, high touch B2B sales process, you can do all of that. You're not going to use commerce, but you're probably going to use customer insights and sales, and maybe a little bit of account-based marketing. So we brought together these things, which are solving similar problems under a single leader. And that way the engineering teams can go back and forth between these different places to finish out full end-to-end customer journeys. And so that's a big area that we've spent a lot of time on, and that's a place where it's really the biggest and fastest growing category for us in the Dynamics 365 application portfolio. So that's one interesting example. Jeff Comstock, folks may know him. He's been around Dynamics 365 for a while. He continues customer service, he leads omnichannel, he's done some of this great expansion around the contact center for us. Ray Smith leads our supply chain team. So that includes things like more supply chain. Steve: So Ray moved? Charles: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He by way of acquisition to SAP then moved. He worked in Dynamic Sales for a bit, where people may have known him. And now the supply chain, and really helping us be this new data driven, AI powered, supply chain story for core supply chain execution. Then we also had some exciting announcements around process advisor and the minor acquisition to help turbocharge that. Or Georg Glantschnig who leads our finance room of the house. And basically we call the room of the house, is the collection of products which focus on serving the CFO and the finance department. And that includes the Suplari acquisition, which we had done a couple years ago, as well as the Core Dynamics, 365 finance, HR, and project operations products. Charles: So you can see how we started to build these critical paths around particular departments and particular lines of businesses with our products. And in addition to that, we also of course have Power Platform to support all of it. So it's amazing to see these things come together and converge. And we've been on this incredible run of innovation around Dynamics. I was counting it earlier this year, 29 different products in Dynamics, and really coalesced around these specific areas where we have a lot of energy, and also very well understood. I'd say synergies between the products that we have. So I'd say exciting times. Very exciting times. Steve: Customers are starting to understand it better also. Business Applications was the same thing for a long time. Then it spent the last five years reinventing itself every month, and new things exploding out of Advanta. And I think a lot of customers were having trouble just keeping up with... It's like little whackamole for them. And it takes a little time for customers to absorb what's happening, and what it's for, or what it does, and then to adopt it. And we're seeing that now. We used to have to go out and promote Power Apps to people who didn't understand what this was, or why it was. And now it's the opposite. They always come to us, looking for Power Apps, looking at those sorts of things. So that understanding seems to have finally permeated down to the customer level. But boy, it took a while. Charles: Yeah. It warms my heart. And I would say one of my favorite books is by Jim Collins, 'Good to great.' I always recommend it to folks on my team to read it. And he talks about this idea of the flywheel. It takes time to get a flywheel spinning, for the first period of time it looks like it's barely moving, but then eventually it's going super fast and it's just a blur. And you need to be consistent, and convicted, and believe in the strategy and the approach. And what's amazing about BizApps is for the last four years, we've been on the same mission, the same vision, the same ambition. And we just spend all the folks in advance at turning that flywheel, turning that flywheel. And it's started to reach that blur phase where it's spinning so fast, you can't even see it. Charles: And this, this all started years and years ago with a ton of work, but we're really at that magical moment where customers know what Power Platform is. Customers know that Microsoft gets customer experience and customer engagement. They know that Microsoft can help them optimize their supply chain. And what the good news is once that thing is going, it really builds upon itself, and I think it'll only continue that momentum further. And my favorite story is, I used to always do these executive briefings at Microsoft where we have executives come in from our customers to Redmond and we have a briefing center. It's very nice. And I would always say, let me talk about Power Apps and low-code. Charles: And everybody gives me a blank stare like, "What the heck is Power Apps? What the heck is low-code?" I go in those meetings now, and people know what Power Apps is, and they know the low-code strategy. And the only question is, "how?". Not, "should I?" Or "if?" "How do I do it with you, Microsoft?" And so different from three years ago. So anyway, so you're exactly right. A long winded answer, but I'd say it's exciting to see all of these things come together, and the benefits of just consistently repeating a message that resonates with customers. Steve: I would say at least three quarters of my customer calls today, they're bringing up right out of the gate, "We don't want any development. We want to do everything low-code, no code." So this is coming from the customer side where we used to have to explain to them what low-code, no code meant. Now they're coming demanding, "I only want low-code, no code." I think that they've come to this realization that, while low-code, no code might not be easy enough for your mom to do, it doesn't require a developer, and code does require developer. And once you've got this little blob of code in your environment, it's a black box for you. And so they don't want any of these black boxes. They want everything to be accessible. Steve: Use your knowledge to build us something complex out of low-code, but then I can still go back in there later and manipulate it, adjust it myself, or our team. So they have absolutely bought into that. And I know we originally, a lot of us partners were concerned early on that this was going to reduce the workload for partners, while our workload is more than it has ever been. Although the developers on the bench don't stay as busy as they used to. We've completely pivoted the team from developer heavy to now, we haven't even got a good title for them. A citizen developer doesn't sound right. We tell customers that, but citizen developers is what we've got so... Charles: This guy we found on the street, or gal found on the street, we just asked them to start building out. But no, it makes sense. There is almost this new role which is, it's not just pure coding expertise, it's technical development concept expertise. But even more importantly is business process and solution expertise. And that fusion of those two skill sets, that's the magic. That's what makes it special, because you understand it. Steve: Yeah. The challenge that we have with this brand new model that we just launched, because, first of all, being the first one out there is not always good because people have no idea what you're talking about. They're trying to compare it to other things. But we've got this little caveat that it's all you can eat, everything, except development code. And trying to define what that is hasn't been easy, and you get these customers coming in, "Oh, we're going to need a lot of customization. So this isn't going to work for us." And so you may need a lot of customizations, but you don't need any "development code". Charles: Yeah. Steve: And getting them to grasp that development code and customization are not synonymous, not even close. Charles: Exactly. Steve: Development code is a very small component today of customization. And once I think that they understand that, then we'll probably see more partners coming into a model like this. Because it makes a lot of sense for customers, makes a lot of sense for partners. Charles: Yeah. And if you go look at building solutions that last a decade, this is to your point, code is this little black box opaque thing, which is hard to maintain over time. If it's no code, low-code, it's easy to open it up and reconfigure as business requirements change. And it's how you build solutions that last. And I think we're getting to the phase with business software where customers are expecting to make long term technology bets. You're not going to replace your CRM every five years from now on. It's like building manufacturing plants and warehouses. These are big investments that you need to be able to amortize over a long time, to justify. And so I think to your point, no code doesn't mean no flexibility, no customization, also doesn't mean no agility. It just means you're doing it in a different way. Couldn't say it better myself. Steve: All right. Cool. Hey, listen, I'm going to let you go. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day here when I caught you, to chat with me about this stuff, always fun talking to you Charles. I'm going to call you in four months and ask you about Viva Sales for the platform. Charles: Sounds good. Sounds good. Steve: I've got you on record there. Charles: So really appreciate you taking the time, giving me a ring, Steve. Hope you have a great rest of the summer. Steve: All right, man. Have a good one. Charles: Yep. You too.  

Episode 117g Having a Think About Celtic ChristianityDescription: In today's episode Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow will dive in the intellectual tradition of early Irish Christianity. We will talk about who some of the important Irish Christian intellectuals were, how they operated and how they spread their version of Christian scholarship not only in the Ireland and Britain, but throughout Continental Europe as well.About Today's Guest:Dr. Carolyn McNamaraOn Twitter: @MedievalCarlyEducation Evolved: @EducationEvolvd www.educationevolvedltd.com/You can learn more about the History of Papacy and subscribe at all these great places:http://atozhistorypage.com/https://www.historyofthepapacypodcast.comemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyparthenonpodcast.comhttps://www.gettr.com/user/atozhistoryBeyond the Big Screen:Beyondthebigscreen.comThe History of the Papacy on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6DO2leym3kizBHW0ZWl-nAGet Your History of the Papacy Podcast Products Here: https://www.atozhistorypage.com/productsHelp out the show by ordering these books from Amazon!https://amzn.com/w/1MUPNYEU65NTFMusic Provided by:"Danse Macabre" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Virtutes Instrumenti" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Crusades" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Funeral March for Brass" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"String Impromptu Number 1" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Intended Force" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Agnus Dei X - Bitter Suite Kevin MacLeaod (incomptech.com)"Folk Round" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Celtic Impulse" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Image Credits:By Ariely - Own work, CC BY 3.0, ttps://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4533576By Pam Brophy, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9124089By ACBahn - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33810833By Trebbia at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22444330Begin Transcript:Thank you for listening to the History of the Papacy. I am your host Steve and we are a member of the Parthenon Podcast network, including Scott Rank's History Unplugged, James Early's Key Battles of American History, Richard Lim's This American President. Go to parthenon podcast dot com to learn more.•Patreon Plug patreon.com/history of the papacy•4 Tiers – Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Rome•Inclusion on the History of the Papacy Diptychs, bonus audio and video content, Pope coin coming soon, monthly book drawings, early content, and add free, early content. Sign up early so that you have your name at the top of the lists!•Now, let us commemorate the Patreon Patrons on the History of the Papacy Diptychs. We have oRoberto, Goran, William, Brian, Jeffrey, Christina, John, and Sarah at the Alexandria level oDapo, Paul, Justin and Lana all of who are the Magnificent at the Constantinople Level. oReaching the ultimate power and prestige, that of the See of Rome: we have Peter the Great!•In today's episode Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow will dive in the intellectual tradition of early Irish Christianity. We will talk about who some of the important Irish Christian intellectuals were, how they operated and how they spread their version of Christian scholarship not only in the Ireland and Britain, but throughout Continental Europe as well.•With that, here is the next piece of the mosaic of the history of the Popes of Rome and Christian Church.Steve: [00:00:00] If we move on to what were some of the big cities that were starting to, as we get into the later middle ages and we're, you know, we're getting some new things. We have the Vikings coming in. How does that continue to develop?Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah. So I think that's a great point. So if we're looking at kind of pre Viking age Ireland, there aren't really any cities that we would think of today. They tend to be your smaller settlements. And again, that's going to be a little bit different to what we expect to see. You know, from places that were part of the Roman empire, where Rome, you know, founded these, you know, London kind of places, but then when the Vikings come in, they start to found what becomes cities and some of the big ones that I can think of just off the top of my head are, you know, Dublin is a big one.We've got Waterford Wexford, cork, lemme. You know, these are all places that are [00:01:00] going to have a, a close Viking age, Scandinavian connection, because that's where they decided to settle. When they decided that reading, wasn't just going to cut it anymore. They want to just start spending the winter over in Ireland and then settling permanently. Steve: How did those cities develop a Christian and an ecclesiastical, uh, support and a system?Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah. So we see the Vikings kind of getting pulled into Irish politics fairly quickly. You know, being able to talk a bit more in depth about that would be, I think really interesting, but just to give a little blurb about it, if you like, you know, they're finding themselves in a context in which, you know, we're looking more and more at society itself being.Christian. And [00:02:00] so if they want to trade with people, it's likely they're trading with Christians. If they want to take wives from the local population, they're likely to be Christians. If they're wanting to know. Agreements with local Kings to serve as mercenaries in their wars against other Irish Kings.It's likely that those Kings are going to be Christian. So they're going to get a lot of exposure and as they start to get that, you know, we're gonna get. The the Ecclesiastics coming in, or maybe there's a monastery nearby anyway, you know, near cork, there's a Lismore and a number of other monasteries.So they're just, they're going to be around. And I think that's probably, I almost want to say by attrition kind of how they start to. Pulled into Christianity. You're talking about the Christianization of Scandinavians, I think is really fascinating stuff. Steve: [00:03:00] Yeah, because they, they come in and in different ways, different places where the Scandinavians, when some times they had their families with them. But if they're going into a place that's heavily acculturated in one area and you want to become a part of that culture, it's really a lot easier to just become a part of that culture then to really impose your culture.On top of that, it's just. Not how that would generally work. If you're a handful of Vikings going into England or, uh, Ireland, you're not going to NESA and you want to get married and you want to settle down, you're still probably going to care. You're still going to carry on some of your aspects of your culture just naturally, but it's sure a lot easier to learn their language, get into their religion so that you can get married, settle down, do that whole thing.Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah. And we start to see, you know, once we've got the. kingdom of Dublin getting fairly large. We start [00:04:00] to see Vikings who themselves have Gaelic names. And so it's very obvious. So there's been intermarriages going on between Scandinavian and native Irish or Gaelic speaking peoples. And we might have a think about the degree to which a certain amount of inter religious.You know, experiences within a marriage word, going to be fairly normal, even though we are moving increasingly towards a very Christian society. Steve: Yeah, I think of like I'm in a. It seems so real to me that it plays out like you maybe have a Viking comes in, who's into, uh, Odin or whatever. He's marrying a Christian and, you know, maybe he adopts Christian Christianity in every way, but he's still going to, you know, just naturally carry on what some of the things that he had always celebrated.And it's going to get [00:05:00] folded in a little bit, at least into his Christianity. Or a lot of bed, probably depending on case by case.Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah. One of my favorite stories that talks to the conversion of Scandinavians is, you know, more in the Santiam and they would do these big baptism events. And this one guy comes in and he gets his baptism and they give him a new piece of clothing and they're giving new clothing to all of the people getting baptized.And he, he we're told that he turns to the people who are doing the baptizing. He says, well, this shirt isn't as nice as the one I got last time. And so that's kind of evidence for us. You know, how sincere are some of these Vikings actually being when they go through some of these mass baptisms, you're there going, you know, I'm going to get maybe a nice [00:06:00] meal.Uh, I got to wash myself anyway. Maybe it's logger job. Maybe it's washing day. They're going to give me some stuff afterwards, you know, in their own religion. They're not beholden to just a single deity or they can, you know, Revere any deity they want basically. And so they're like, right. I'll share, I'll worship your guy too.And you're going to give me some nice stuff so we can throw that into the mix. And I think that goes back to when we talked last time about. The conversion of Ireland and what the thought process of some of these Kings or even just your, your everyday person might my bring to the process of conversion in, or the sincerity of their conversion.Steve: And it's so interesting. We're really looking at, in any cultural change. What's. Really zoomed out view, but all of these changes were really made granularly. [00:07:00] They're changed at, you know, the individual pixels come together to make the pig the big picture. Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah.

Episode 117f Monasteries, Bishops, Abbotts and The Loch Ness MonsterDescription: Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow joins us again to lead us through another great topic in the conversion of the Irish to Christianity. Today we will talk about monasteries, abbots and bishops and the roles they played in Irish Christianity. We will also talk about new evidence and new interpretations on the organization of early Irish Christianity.About Today's Guest:Dr. Carolyn McNamaraOn Twitter: @MedievalCarlyEducation Evolved: @EducationEvolvd www.educationevolvedltd.com/You can learn more about the History of Papacy and subscribe at all these great places:http://atozhistorypage.com/https://www.historyofthepapacypodcast.comemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyparthenonpodcast.comhttps://www.gettr.com/user/atozhistoryBeyond the Big Screen:Beyondthebigscreen.comThe History of the Papacy on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6DO2leym3kizBHW0ZWl-nAGet Your History of the Papacy Podcast Products Here: https://www.atozhistorypage.com/productsHelp out the show by ordering these books from Amazon!https://amzn.com/w/1MUPNYEU65NTFMusic Provided by:"Danse Macabre" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Virtutes Instrumenti" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Crusades" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Funeral March for Brass" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"String Impromptu Number 1" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Intended Force" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Agnus Dei X - Bitter Suite Kevin MacLeaod (incomptech.com)"Folk Round" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Celtic Impulse" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Image Credits:By Ariely - Own work, CC BY 3.0, ttps://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4533576By Pam Brophy, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9124089By ACBahn - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33810833By JohnArmagh - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26491115Begin Transcript:Thank you for listening to the History of the Papacy. I am your host Steve and we are a member of the Parthenon Podcast network, including Scott Rank's History Unplugged, James Early's Key Battles of American History, Richard Lim's This American President. Go to parthenon podcast dot com to learn more.•Patreon Plug patreon.com/history of the papacy•4 Tiers – Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Rome•Inclusion on the History of the Papacy Diptychs, bonus audio and video content, Pope coin coming soon, monthly book drawings, early content, and add free, early content. Sign up early so that you have your name at the top of the lists!•Now, let us commemorate the Patreon Patrons on the History of the Papacy Diptychs. We have oRoberto, Goran, William, Brian, Jeffrey, Christina, John, and Sarah at the Alexandria level oDapo, Paul, Justin and Lana all of who are the Magnificent at the Constantinople Level. oReaching the ultimate power and prestige, that of the See of Rome: we have Peter the Great!•Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow joins us again to lead us through another great topic in the conversion of the Irish to Christianity. Today we will talk about monasteries, abbots and bishops and the roles they played in Irish Christianity. We will also talk about new evidence and new interpretations on the organization of early Irish Christianity.•With that, here is the next piece of the mosaic of the history of the Popes of Rome and Christian Church.Steve: [00:00:00] Now th there has been a fairly recent change in scholarship on how the, what the role of the Bishop was an Ireland. What was the traditional scholarship on the role of the Bishop and how has that sort of modified throughout the sense maybe the, the eighties.Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah, that's a great point. So the previous understanding was that, you know, there's the. It was a huge blossoming of monastic. Life in Ireland, I think to a degree that you don't frequently see elsewhere, just the sheer number of monasteries in Ireland is impressive. So there was this belief that it was the Abbots themselves that were the most important ecclesiastical figures.In Ireland and north Britain in this early medieval period, and that they held a higher status even than [00:01:00] bishops. And some of this belief was based on, I think. The point that we were in understanding the materials that we had at the time. So as I've said, we've, we've constantly been evolving in how we understand materials and how we work with them.And maybe even what's been translated, you know, I have this huge pile of, of materials, but if we haven't had time to properly have a look at it and compare them with each other and really make sure we're understanding what's going on, then we're not going to have as good an understanding as we do, you know, once that work has been done.And I think that's part of what went into this previous perspective versus how we, we view it now. So. There's not as many discussions of bishops because you are unlikely to have as many bishops as Abbott's, you know, every monastery needs an Abbott, but not every monastery needs a Bishop. [00:02:00] And even at my favorite monastery at banger, like they only had a few bishops ever, so we can cut.Take that into mind, as we're thinking about, you know, what this understanding was, but yeah, starting around the 1980s, they really started to readdress some of these earlier perspectives and realize that, you know, When we talk about these monks and these monasteries, the monks themselves were not likely to be in clerical orders themselves.Like it, wasn't a requirement of being a monk. And even if you're not in monastic orders and you haven't taken an oath of being a monk, you know, there's an even larger pool of lay brothers that existed around monastery who were associated. Perhaps just because they lived on land owned by the monastery.So [00:03:00] there's this large lay population that's associated with the monastery and none of those people needed to be in clerical orders. And we've come to understand more and more that, you know, all of this pastoral care that's required. In the church was under the purview of the Bishop. You know, the Abbott didn't have the right to ordain clerics.He may not have been ordained himself. So the Bishop needed to do that. And the Bishop was the one who had the right to, you know, bring a church into use as a sacred place. And so they're the ones who have that power. And they were the ones who were charged with the good working of a church and making sure that, you know, the people receive the sacraments that they needed, whether it's, you know, birth or, um, baptism or, you know, final rights and burial.So that was all under the purview [00:04:00] of the Bishop. So this thought that had existed about, you know, the Abbott speak, the ones in charge because they were maybe so many of them. And I think there was also some confusion in that there wasn't a big city for a Bishop to kind of have as his seat of his power.There was no York, there was no Canterbury for these bishops to be located at. As part of what led to that, uh, previous understanding, but that we're, we're starting, we're getting better and better at it. Seeing how it more likely was today with this, you know, monasteries and Abbott's being more concerned about their monastic lives than about the pastoral care of the, the wider communities.And we see that even in the life of St. Colombia. And if people are interested in early medieval religious lives, I highly recommend reading the life of Saint [00:05:00] Colombia. It's really easy to read. You know, there's a really good translation by Richard Sharp. It's got the earliest mention of the Lochness monster in it.So it's lots of fun. Uh, But we also see in it that Colomba himself as described by Adivan a hundred years later, his focus wasn't on conversion. You know, this is very different from what we see with Patrick, he's interested in his own community. And the times that you'll see him involved with conversions are when people have specifically come to him and said, you know, Colombia, please, you know, do this for me.You know, I'm about to die. I want to die a Christian or what have you that they've specifically come to him to ask him personally for intervention. Steve: Yeah, it's kind of interesting because, because Ireland wasn't in the Roman empire, that or organization would be a little bit different, but maybe not quite [00:06:00] as different as what earlier scholars thought.

In this episode, we cover:00:00:00 - Reflections on the Episode/Introduction 00:03:06 - Steve's Bio00:07:30 - The 5 W's of Servers and their Future00:14:00 - Hardware and Software00:21:00 - Oxide Computer 00:30:00 - Investing in Oxide and the Public Cloud00:36:20 - Oxide's Offerings to Customers 00:43:30 - Continious Improvement00:49:00 - Oxide's Future and OutroLinks: Oxide Computer: https://oxide.computer Perfectlyboring.com: https://perfectlyboring.com TranscriptJason: Welcome to the Perfectly Boring podcast, a show where we talk to the people transforming the world's most boring industries. I'm Jason Black, general partner at RRE ventures.Will: And I'm Will Coffield, general partner at Riot Ventures.Jason: Today's boring topic of the day: servers.Will: Today, we've got Steve Tuck, the co-founder and CEO of Oxide Computer, on the podcast. Oxide is on a mission to fundamentally transform the private cloud and on-premise data center so that companies that are not Google, or Microsoft, or Amazon can have hyper scalable, ultra performant infrastructure at their beck and call. I've been an investor in the company for the last two or three years at this point, but Jason, this is your first time hearing the story from Steve and really going deep on Oxide's mission and place in the market. Curious what your initial thoughts are.Jason: At first glance, Oxide feels like a faster horse approach to an industry buying cars left and right. But the shift in the cloud will add $140 billion in new spend every year over the next five years. But one of the big things that was really interesting in the conversation was that it's actually the overarching pie that's expanding, not just demand for cloud but at the same rate, a demand for on-premise infrastructure that's largely been stagnant over the years. One of the interesting pivot points was when hardware and software were integrated back in the mainframe era, and then virtual machines kind of divorced hardware and software at the server level. Opening up the opportunity for a public cloud that reunified those two things where your software and hardware ran together, but the on-premises never really recaptured that software layer and have historically struggled to innovate on that domain.Will: Yeah, it's an interesting inflection point for the enterprise, and for basically any company that is operating digitally at this point, is that you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. You can scale infinitely on the public cloud but you make certain sacrifices from a performance security and certainly from an expense standpoint, or you can go to what is available commercially right now and you can cobble together a Frankenstein-esque solution from a bunch of legacy providers like HP, and Dell, and SolarWinds, and VMware into a MacGyvered together on-premise data center that is difficult to operate for companies where infrastructure isn't, and they don't want it to be, their core competency. Oxide is looking to step into that void and provide a infinitely scalable, ultra-high-performance, plug-and-play rack-scale server for everybody to be able to own and operate without needing to rent it from Google, or AWS, or Microsoft.Jason: Well, it doesn't sound very fun, and it definitely sounds [laugh] very boring. So, before we go too deep, let's jump into the interview with Steve.Will: Steve Tuck, founder and CEO of Oxide Computer. Thank you for joining us today.Steve: Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.Will: And I think maybe a great way to kick things off here for listeners would be to give folks a baseline of your background, sort of your bio, leading up to founding Oxide.Steve: Sure. Born and raised in the Bay Area. Grew up in a family business that was and has been focused on heating and air conditioning over the last 100-plus years, Atlas. And went to school and then straight out of school, went into the computer space. Joined Dell computer company in 1999, which was a pretty fun and exciting time at Dell.I think that Dell had just crossed over to being the number one PC manufacturer in the US. I think number two worldwide at Compaq. Really just got to take in and appreciate the direct approach that Dell had taken in a market to stand apart, working directly with customers not pushing everything to the channel, which was customary for a lot of the PC vendors at the time. And while I was there, you had the emergence of—in the enterprise—hardware virtualization company called VMware that at the time, had a product that allowed one to drive a lot more density on their servers by way of virtualizing the hardware that people were running. And watching that become much more pervasive, and working with companies as they began to shift from single system, single app to virtualized environments.And then at the tail end, just watching large tech companies emerge and demand a lot different style computers than those that we had been customarily making at Dell. And kind of fascinated with just what these companies like Facebook, and Google, and Amazon, and others were doing to reimagine what systems needed to look like in their hyperscale environments. One of the companies that was in the tech space, Joyent, a cloud computing company, is where I went next. Was really drawn in just to velocity and the innovation that was taking place with these companies that were providing abstractions on top of hardware to make it much easier for customers to get access to the compute, and the storage, and the networking that they needed to build and deploy software. So, spent—after ten years at Dell, I was at Joyent for ten years. That is where I met my future co-founders, Bryan Cantrill who was at Joyent, and then also Jess Frazelle who we knew working closely while she was at Docker and other stops.But spent ten years as a public cloud infrastructure operator, and we built that service out to support workloads that ran the gamut from small game developers up to very large enterprises, and it was really interesting to learn about and appreciate what this infrastructure utility business looked like in public cloud. And that was also kind of where I got my first realization of just how hard it was to run large fleets of the systems that I had been responsible for providing back at Dell for ten years. We were obviously a large customer of Dell, and Supermicro, and a number of switch manufacturers. It was eye-opening just how much was lacking in the remaining software to bind together hundreds or thousands of these machines.A lot of the operational tooling that I wished had been there and how much we were living at spreadsheets to manage and organize and deploy this infrastructure. While there, also got to kind of see firsthand what happened as customers got really, really big in the public cloud. And one of those was Samsung, who was a very large AWS customer, got so large that they needed to figure out what their path on-premise would look like. And after going through the landscape of all the legacy enterprise solutions, deemed that they had to go buy a cloud company to complete that journey. And they bought Joyent. Spent three years operating the Samsung cloud, and then that brings us to two years ago, when Jess, Bryan, and I started Oxide Computer.Will: I think maybe for the benefit of our listeners, it would be interesting to have you define—and what we're talking about today is the server industry—and to maybe take a step back and in your own words, define what a server is. And then it would be really interesting to jump into a high-level history of the server up until today, and maybe within that, where the emergence of the public cloud came from.Steve: You know, you'll probably get different definitions of what a server is depending on who you ask, but at the highest level, a server differs from a typical PC that you would have in your home in a couple of ways, and more about what it is being asked to do that drives the requirements of what one would deem a server. But if you think about a basic PC that you're running in your home, a laptop, a desktop, a server has a lot of the same components: they have CPUs, and DRAM memory that is for non-volatile storage, and disks that are storing things in a persistent way when you shut off your computer that actually store and retain the data, and a network card so that you can connect to either other machines or to the internet. But where servers start to take on a little bit different shape and a little bit different set of responsibilities is the workloads that they're supporting. Servers, the expectations are that they are going to be running 24/7 in a highly reliable and highly available manner. And so there are technologies that have gone into servers, that ECC memory to ensure that you do not have memory faults that lose data, more robust components internally, ways to manage these things remotely, and ways to connect these to other servers, other computers.Servers, when running well, are things you don't really need to think about, are doing that, are running in a resilient, highly available manner. In terms of the arc of the server industry, if you go back—I mean, there's been servers for many, many, many, many decades. Some of the earlier commercially available servers were called mainframes, and these were big monolithic systems that had a lot of hardware resources at the time, and then were combined with a lot of operational and utilization software to be able to run a variety of tasks. These were giant, giant machines; these were extraordinarily expensive; you would typically find them only running in universities or government projects, maybe some very, very large enterprises in the'60s and'70s. As more and more software was being built and developed and run, the market demand and need for smaller, more accessible servers that were going to be running this common software, were driving machines that were coming out—still hardware plus software—from the likes of IBM and DEC and others.Then you broke into this period in the '80s where, with the advent of x86 and the rise of these PC manufacturers—the Dells and Compaqs and others—this transition to more commodity server systems. A focus, really a focus on hardware only, and building these commodity x86 servers that were less expensive, that were more accessible from an economics perspective, and then ultimately that would be able to run arbitrary software, so one could run any operating system or any body of software that they wanted on these commodity servers. When I got to Dell in 1999, this is several years into Dell's foray into the server market, and you would buy a server from Dell, or from HP, or from Compaq, or IBM, then you would go find your software that you were going to run on top of that to stitch these machines together. That was, kind of, that server virtualization era, in the '90s, 2000s. As I mentioned, technology companies were looking at building more scalable systems that were aggregating resources together and making it much easier for their customers to access the storage, the networking that they needed, that period of time in which the commodity servers and the software industry diverged, and you had a bunch of different companies that were responsible for either hardware or the software that would bring these computers together, these large hyperscalers said, “Well, we're building purpose-built infrastructure services for our constituents at, like, a Facebook. That means we really need to bind this hardware and software together in a single product so that our software teams can go very quickly and they can programmatically access the resources that they need to deploy software.”So, they began to develop systems that looked more monolithic, kind of, rack-level systems that were driving much better efficiency from a power and density perspective, and hydrating it with software to provide infrastructure services to their businesses. And so you saw, what started out in the computer industry is these monolithic hardware plus software products that were not very accessible because they were so expensive and so large, but real products that were much easier to do real work on, to this period where you had a disaggregation of hardware and software where the end-user bore the responsibility of tying these things together and binding these into those infrastructure products, to today, where the largest hyperscalers in the market have come to the realization that building hardware and software together and designing and developing what modern computers should look like, is commonplace, and we all know that well or can access that as public cloud computing.Jason: And what was the driving force behind that decoupling? Was it the actual hardware vendors that didn't want to have to deal with the software? Or is that more from a customer-facing perspective where the customers themselves felt that they could eke out the best advantage by developing their own software stack on top of a relatively commodity unopinionated hardware stack that they could buy from a Dell or an HP?Steve: Yeah, I think probably both, but one thing that was a driver is that these were PC companies. So, coming out of the'80s companies that were considered, quote-unquote, “The IBM clones,” Dell, and Compaq, and HP, and others that were building personal computers and saw an opportunity to build more robust personal computers that could be sold to customers who were running, again, just arbitrary software. There wasn't the desire nor the DNA to go build that full software stack and provide that out as an opinionated appliance or product. And I think then, part of it was also like, hey, if we just focus on the hardware, then got this high utility artifact that we can go sell into all sorts of arbitrary software use cases. You know, whether this is going to be a single server or three servers that's going to go run in a closet of cafe, or it's going to be a thousand servers that are running in one of these large enterprise data centers, we get to build the same box, and that box can run underneath any different type of software. By way of that, what you ultimately get in that scenario is you do have to boil things down to the lowest common denominators to make sure that you've got that compatibility across all the different software types.Will: Who were the primary software vendors that were helping those companies take commodity servers and specialize into particular areas? And what's their role now and how has that transformed in light of the public cloud and the offerings that are once again generalized, but also reintegrated from a hardware and software perspective, just not maybe in your own server room, but in AWS, or Azure, or GCP?Steve: Yeah, so you have a couple layers of software that are required in the operation of hardware, and then all the way up through what we would think about as running in a rack, a full rack system today. You've first got firmware, and this is the software that runs on the hardware to be able to connect the different hardware components, to boot the system, to make sure that the CPU can talk to its memory, and storage, and the network. That software may be a surprise to some, but that firmware that is essential to the hardware itself is not made by the server manufacturer themselves. That was part of this outsourcing exercise in the '80s where not only the upstack software that runs on server systems but actually some of the lower-level downstack software was outsourced to these third-party firmware shops that would write that software. And at the time, probably made a lot of sense and made things a lot easier for the entire ecosystem.You know, the fact that's the same model today, and given how proprietary that is and, you know, where that can actually lead to some vulnerabilities and security issues is more problematic. You've got firmware, then you've got the operating system that runs on top of the server. You have a hypervisor, which is the emulation layer that translates that lower-level hardware into a number of virtual machines that applications can run in. You have control plane software that connects multiple systems together so that you can have five or ten or a hundred, or a thousand servers working in a pool, in a fleet. And then you've got higher-level software that allows a user to carve up the resources that they need to identify the amount of compute, and memory, and storage that they want to spin up.And that is exposed to the end-user by way of APIs and/or a user interface. And so you've got many layers of software that are running on top of hardware, and the two in conjunction are all there to provide infrastructure services to the end-user. And so when you're going to the public cloud today, you don't have to worry about any of that, right? Both of you have probably spun up infrastructure on the public cloud, but they call it 16 digits to freedom because you just swipe a credit card and hit an API, and within seconds, certainly within a minute, you've got readily available virtual servers and services that allow you to deploy software quickly and manage a project with team members. And the kinds of things that used to take days, weeks, or even months inside an enterprise can be done now in a matter of minutes, and that's extraordinarily powerful.But what you don't see is all the integration of these different components running, very well stitched together under the hood. Now, for someone who's deploying their own infrastructure in their own data center today, that sausage-making is very evident. Today, if you're not a cloud hyperscaler, you are having to go pick a hardware vendor and then figure out your operating system and your control plane and your hypervisor, and you have to bind all those things together to create a rack-level system. And it might have three or four different vendors and three or four different products inside of it, and ultimately, you have to bear the responsibility of knitting all that together.Will: Because those products were developed in silos from each other?Steve: Yeah.Will: They were not co-developed. You've got hardware that was designed in a silo separate from oftentimes it sounds like the firmware and all of the software for operating those resources.Steve: Yeah. The hardware has a certain set of market user requirements, and then if you're a Red Hat or you're a VMware, you're talking to your customers about what they need and you're thinking at the software layer. And then you yourself are trying to make it such that it can run across ten or twenty different types of hardware, which means that you cannot do things that bind or provide hooks into that underlying hardware which, unfortunately, is where a ton of value comes from. You can see an analog to this in thinking about the Android ecosystem compared to the Apple ecosystem and what that experience is like when all that hardware and software is integrated together, co-designed together, and you have that iPhone experience. Plenty of other analogs in the automotive industry, with Tesla, and health equipment, and Peloton and others, but when hardware and software—we believe certainly—when hardware and software is co-designed together, you get a better artifact and you get a much, much better user experience. Unfortunately, that is just not the case today in on-prem computing.Jason: So, this is probably a great time to transition to Oxide. Maybe to keep the analogy going, the public cloud is that iPhone experience, but it's just running in somebody else's data center, whether that's AWS, Azure, or one of the other public clouds. You're developing iOS for on-prem, for the people who want to run their own servers, which seems like kind of a countertrend. Maybe you can talk us through the dynamics in that market as it stands today, and how that's growing and evolving, and what role Oxide Computer plays in that, going forward.Steve: You've got this what my co-founder Jess affectionately refers to as ‘infrastructure privilege' in the hyperscalers, where they have been able to apply the money, and the time, and the resources to develop this, kind of, iPhone stack, instead of thinking about a server as a single 1U unit, or single machine, had looked at, well, what does a rack—which is the case that servers are slotted into in these large data centers—what does rack-level computing look like and where can we drive better power efficiency? Where can we drive better density? How can we drive much better security at scale than the commodity server market today? And doing things like implementing hardware Roots of Trust and Chain of Trust, so that you can ensure the software that is running on your machines is what is intended to be running there. The blessing is that we all—the market—gets access to that modern infrastructure, but you can only rent it.The only way you can access it is to rent, and that means that you need to run in one of the three mega cloud providers' data centers in those locations, that you are having to operate in a rental fee model, which at scale can become very, very prohibitively expensive. Our fundamental belief is that the way that these hyperscale data centers have been designed and these products have been designed certainly looks a lot more like what modern computers should look like, but the rest of the market should have access to the same thing. You should be able to buy and own and deploy that same product that runs inside a Facebook data center, or Apple data center, or Amazon, or a Google data center, you should be able to take that product with you wherever your business needs to run. A bit intimidating at the top because what we signed up for was building hardware, and taking a clean sheet paper approach to what a modern server could look like. There's a lot of good hardware innovation that the hyperscalers have helped drive; if you go back to 2010, Facebook pioneered being a lot more open about these modern open hardware systems that they were developing, and the Open Compute Project, OCP, has been a great collection point for these hyperscalers investing in these modern rack-level systems and doing it in the open, thinking about what the software is that is required to operate modern machines, importantly, in a way that does not sink the operations teams of the enterprises that are running them.Again, I think one of the things that was just so stunning to me, when I was at Joyent—we were running these machines, these commodity machines, and stitching together the software at scale—was how much of the organization's time was tied up in the deployment, and the integration, and the operation of this. And not just the organization's time, but actually our most precious resource, our engineering team, was having to spend so much time figuring out where a performance problem was coming from. For example in [clear throat], man, those are the times in which you really are pounding your fist on the table because you will try and go downstack to figure out, is this in the control plane? Is this in the firmware? Is this in the hardware?And commodity systems of today make it extremely, extremely difficult to figure that out. But what we set out to do was build same rack-level system that you might find in a hyperscaler data center, complete with all the software that you need to operate it with the automation required for high availability and low operational overhead, and then with a CloudFront end, with a set of services on the front end of that rack-level system that delight developers, that look like the cloud experience that developers have come to love and depend on in the public cloud. And that means everything is programmable, API-driven services, all the hardware resources that you need—compute, memory, and storage—are actually a pool of resources that you can carve up and get access to and use in a very developer-friendly way. And the developer tools that your software teams have come to depend on just work and all the tooling that these developers have invested so much time in over the last several years, to be able to automate things, to be able to deploy software faster are resident in that product. And so it is definitely kind of hardware and software co-designed, much like some of the original servers long, long, long ago, but modernized with the hardware innovation and open software approach that the cloud has ushered in.Jason: And give us a sense of scale; I think we're so used to seeing the headline numbers of the public cloud, you know, $300-and-some billion dollars today, adding $740-some billion over the next five years in public cloud spend. It's obviously a massive transformation, huge amount of green space up for grabs. What's happening in the on-prem market where your Oxide Computer is playing and how do you think about the growth in that market relative to a public cloud?Steve: It's funny because as Will can attest, as we were going through and fundraising, the prevalent sentiment was, like, everything's going to the public cloud. As we're talking to the folks in the VC community, it was Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are going to own the entirety of compute. We fundamentally disagreed because, A, we've lived it, and b, we went out as we were starting out and talked to dozens and dozens of our peers in the enterprise, who said, “Our cloud ambitions are to be able to get 20, 30, 40% of our workloads out there, and then we still have 60, 70% of our infrastructure that is going to continue to run in our own data centers for reasons including regulatory compliance, latency, security, and in a lot of cases, cost.” It's not possible for these enterprises that are spending half a billion, a billion dollars a year to run all of their infrastructure in the public cloud. What you've seen on-premises, and it depends on who you're turning to, what sort of poll and research you're turning to, but the on-prem market, one is growing, which I think surprises a lot of folks; the public cloud market, of course, it's growing like gangbusters, and that does not surprise a lot of folks, but what we see is that the combined market of on-prem and cloud, you can call it—if on-premise on the order of $100 billion and cloud is on the order of $150 billion, you are going to see enormous growth in both places over the next 10, 15 years.These markets are going to look very, very small compared to where they will be because one of the biggest drivers of whether it's public cloud or on-prem infrastructure, is everything shifting to digital formats. The digitalization that is just all too commonplace, described everywhere. But we're still very, very early in that journey. I think that if you look at the global GDP, less than 10% of the global GDP is on the internet, is online. Over the coming 10, 20 years, as that shifts to 20%, 30%, you're seeing exponential growth. And again, we believe and we have heard from the market that is representative of that $100 billion that investments in the public cloud and on-prem is going to continue to grow much, much more as we look forward.Will: Steve, I really appreciate you letting listeners know how special a VC I am.Steve: [laugh].Will: [laugh]. It was really important point that I wanted to make sure we hit on.Steve: Yeah, should we come back to that?Will: Yeah, yeah yeah—Steve: Yeah, let's spend another five or ten minutes on that.Will: —we'll revisit that. We'll revisit that later. But when we're talking about the market here, one of the things that got us so excited about investing in Oxide is looking at the existing ecosystem of on-prem commercial providers. I think if you look at the public cloud, there are fierce competitors there, with unbelievably sophisticated operations and product development. When you look at the on-prem ecosystem and who you would go to if you were going to build your own data center today, it's a lot of legacy companies that have started to optimize more for, I would say, profitability over the last couple of years than they have for really continuing to drive forward from an R&D and product standpoint.Would love maybe for you to touch on briefly, what does competition for you look like in the on-prem ecosystem? I think it's very clear who you're competing with, from a public cloud perspective, right? It's Microsoft, Google, Amazon, but who are you going up against in the on-prem ecosystem?Steve: Yeah. And just one note on that. We don't view ourselves as competing with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. In fact, we are ardent supporters of cloud in the format, namely this kind of programmable API-fronted infrastructure as being the path of the future of compute and storage and networking. That is the way that, in the future, most software should be deployed to, and operated on, and run.We just view the opportunity for, and what customers are really, really excited about is having those same benefits of public cloud, but in a format in which they can own it and being able to have access to that everywhere their business needs to run, so that it's not, you know, do I get all this velocity, and this innovation, and this simplicity when I rent public cloud, or do I own my infrastructure and have to give up a lot of that? But to the first part of your question, I think the first issue is that it isn't one vendor that you are talking about what is the collection of vendors that I go to to get servers, software to make my servers talk to each other, switches to network together these servers, and additional software to operate, and manage, and monitor, and update. And there's a lot of complexity there. And then when you take apart each one of those different sets of vendors in the ecosystem, they're not designing together, so you've got these kind of data boundaries and these product boundaries that start to become really, really real when you're operating at scale, and when you're running critical applications to your business on these machines. And you find yourself spending an enormous amount of the company's time just knitting this stuff together and operating it, which is all time lost that could be spent adding additional features to your own product and better competing with your competitors.And so I think that you have a couple of things in play that make it hard for customers running infrastructure on-premises, you've got that dynamic that it's a fractured ecosystem, that these things are not designed together, that you have this kit car that you have to assemble yourself and it doesn't even come with a blueprint of the particular car design that you're building. I think that you do have some profit-taking in that it is very monopolized, especially on the software side where you've only got a couple of large players that know that there are few alternatives for companies. And so you are seeing these ELAs balloon, and you are seeing practices that look a lot like Oracle Enterprise software sales that are really making this on-prem experience not very economically attractive. And so our approach is, hardware should come with all the software required to operate it, it should be tightly integrated, the software should be all open-source. Something we haven't talked about.I think open-source is playing an enormous role in accelerating the cloud landscape and the technology landscapes. We are going to be developing our software in an open manner, and truly believe whether it's from a security view through to the open ecosystem, that it is imperative that software be open. And then we are integrating the switch into that rack-level product so that you've got networking baked in. By doing that, it opens up a whole new vector of value to the customer where, for example, you can see for the first time what is the path of traffic from my virtual machine to a switchboard? Or when things are not performing well, being able to look into that path, and the health, and see where things are not performing as well as they should, and being able to mitigate those sorts of issues.It does turn out if you are able to get rid of a lot of the old, crufty artifacts that have built up inside even these commodity system servers, and you are able to start designing at a rack level where you can drive much better power efficiency and density, and you bake in the software to effectively make this modern rack-level server look like a cloud in a box, and ensure these things can snap together in a grid, where in that larger fleet, operational management is easy because you've got the same automation capabilities that the big cloud hyperscalers have today. It can really simplify life. It ends up being an economic win and maybe most importantly, presents the infrastructure in a way that the developers love. And so there's not this view of the public cloud being the fast, innovative path for developers and on-prem being this, submit a trouble ticket and try and get access to a VM in six days, which sadly is the experience that we hear a lot of companies are still struggling with in on-prem computing.Jason: Practically, when you're going out and talking to customers, you're going to be a heterogeneous environment where presumably they already have their own on-prem infrastructure and they'll start to plug in—Steve: Yeah.Jason: —Oxide Computer alongside of it. And presumably, they're also to some degree in the public cloud. It's a fairly complex environment that you're trying to insert yourself into. How are your customers thinking about building on top of Oxide Computer in that heterogeneous environment? And how do you see Oxide Computer expanding within these enterprises, given that there's a huge amount of existing capital that's gone into building out their data centers that are already operating today, and the public cloud deployments that they have?Steve: As customers are starting to adopt Oxide rack-level computing, they are certainly going to be going into environments where they've got multiple generations of multiple different types of infrastructure. First, the discussions that we're having are around what are the points of data exfiltration, of data access that one needs to operate their broader environment. You can think about handoff points like the network where you want to make sure you've got a consistent protocol to, like, BGP or other, to be able to speak from your layer 2 networks to your layer 3 networks; you've got operational software that is doing monitoring and alerting and rolling up for service for your SRE teams, your operations teams, and we are making sure that Oxide's endpoint—the front end of the Oxide product—will integrate well, will provide the data required for those systems to run well. Another thorny issue for a lot of companies is identity and access management, controlling the authentication and the access for users of their infrastructure systems, and that's another area where we are making sure that the interface from Oxide to the systems they use today, and also resident in the Oxide product such as one wants to use it directly, has a clean cloud-like identity and access management construct for one to use. But at the highest level it is, make sure that you can get out of the Oxide infrastructure, the kind of data and tooling required to incorporate into management of your overall fleet.Over time, I think customers are going to experience a much simpler and much more automated world inside of the Oxide ecosystem; I think they're going to find that there are exponentially fewer hours required to manage that environment and that is going to inevitably just lead to wanting to replace a hundred racks of the extant commodity stack with, you know, sixty racks of Oxide that provide much better density, smaller footprint in the data center, and again, software-driven in the way that these folks are looking for.Jason: And in that answer, you alluded to a lot of the specialization and features that you guys can offer. I've always loved Alan Kay's quote, “People who are really serious about software make their own hardware.”Steve: Yeah.Jason: Obviously, you've got some things in here that only Oxide Computer can do. What are some of those features that traditional vendors can't even touch or deliver that you'll be able to, given your hardware-software integration?Steve: Maybe not the most exciting example, but I think one that is extremely important to a lot of the large enterprise company that we're working with, and that is at a station, being able to attest to the software that is running on your hardware. And why is that important? Well, as we've talked about, you've got a lot of different vendors that are participating in that system that you're deploying in your data center. And today, a lot of that software is proprietary and opaque and it is very difficult to know what versions of things you are running, or what was qualified inside that package that was delivered in the firmware. We were talking to a large financial institution, and they said their teams are spending two weeks a month just doing, kind of a proof of trust in their infrastructure that their customer's data is running on, and how cumbersome and hard it is because of how murky and opaque those lower-level system software world is.What do the hyperscalers do? They have incorporated hardware Root of Trust, which ensures from that first boot instruction, from that first instruction on the microprocessor, that you have a trusted and verifiable path, from the system booting all the way up through the control plane software to, say, a provisioned VM. And so what this does is it allows the rest of the market access to a bunch of security innovation that has gone on where these hyperscalers would never run without this. Again, having the hardware Root of Trust anchored at a station process, the way to attest all that software running is going to be really, really impactful for more than just security-conscious customers, but certainly, those that are investing more in that are really, really excited. If you move upstack a little bit, when you co-design the hardware with the control plane, both the server and the switch hardware with the control plane, it opens up a whole bunch of opportunity to improve performance, improve availability because you now have systems that are designed to work together very, very well.You can now see from the networking of a system through to the resources that are being allocated on a particular machine, and when things are slow, when things are broken, you are able to identify and drive those fixes, in some cases that you could not do before, in much, much, much faster time, which allows you to start driving infrastructure that looks a lot more like the five nines environment that we expect out of the public cloud.Jason: A lot of what you just mentioned, actually, once again, ties back to that analogy to the iPhone, and having that kind of secure enclave that powers Touch ID and Face ID—Steve: Yep.Jason: —kind of a server equivalent, and once again, optimization around particular workflows, the iPhone knows exactly how many photos every [laugh] iOS user takes, and therefore they have a custom chip dedicated specifically to processing images. I think that tight coupling, just relating it back to that iOS and iPhone integration, is really exciting.Steve: Well, and the feedback loop is so important because, you know, like iPhone, we're going to be able to understand where there are rough edges and where things are—where improvements can even can continue to be made. And because this is software-driven hardware, you get an opportunity to continuously improve that artifact over time. It now stops looking like the old, your car loses 30% of the value when you drive it off the lot. Because there's so much intelligent software baked into the hardware, and there's an opportunity to update and add features, and take the learnings from that hardware-software interaction and feed that back into an improving product over time, you can start to see the actual hardware itself have a much longer useful life. And that's one of the things we're really excited about is that we don't think servers should be commodities that the vendors are trying to push you to replace every 36 months.One of the things that is important to keep in mind is as Moore's laws is starting to slow or starting to hit some of the limitations, you won't have CPU density and some of these things, driving the need to replace hardware as quickly. So, with software that helps you drive better utilization and create a better-combined product in that rack-level system, we think we're going to see customers that can start getting five, six, seven years of useful life out of the product, not the typical two, or three, or maybe four that customers are seeing today in the commodity systems.Will: Steve, that's one of the challenges for Oxide is that you're taking on excellence in a bunch of interdisciplinary sciences here, between the hardware, the software, the firmware, the security; this is a monster engineering undertaking. One of the things that I've seen as an investor is how dedicated you have got to be to hiring, to build basically the Avengers team here to go after such a big mission. Maybe you could touch on just how you've thought about architecting a team here. And it's certainly very different than what the legacy providers from an on-prem ecosystem perspective have taken on.Steve: I think one of the things that has been so important is before we even set out on what we were going to build, the three of us spent time and focused on what kind of company we wanted to build, what kind of company that we wanted to work at for the next long chunk of our careers. And it's certainly drawing on experiences that we had in the past. Plenty of positives, but also making sure to keep in mind the negatives and some of the patterns we did not want to repeat in where we were working next. And so we spent a lot of time just first getting the principles and the values of the company down, which was pretty easy because the three of us shared these values. And thinking about all the headwinds, just all the foot faults that hurt startups and even big companies, all the time, whether it be the subjectivity and obscurity of compensation or how folks in some of these large tech companies doing performance management and things, and just thinking about how we could start from a point of building a company that people really want to work for and work with.And I think then layering on top of that, setting out on a mission to go build the next great computer company and build computers for the cloud era, for the cloud generation, that is, as you say, it's a big swing. And it's ambitious, and exhilarating and terrifying, and I think with that foundation of focusing first on the fundamentals of the business regardless of what the business is, and then layering on top of it the mission that we are taking on, that has been appealing, that's been exciting for folks. And it has given us the great opportunity of having terrific technologists from all over the world that have come inbound and have wanted to be a part of this. And we, kind of, will joke internally that we've got eight or nine startups instead of a startup because we're building hardware, and we're taking on developing open-source firmware, and a control plane, and a switch, and hardware Root of Trust, and in all of these elements. And just finding folks that are excited about the mission, that share our values, and that are great technologists, but also have the versatility to work up and down the stack has been really, really key.So far, so great. We've been very fortunate to build a terrific, terrific team. Shameless plug: we are definitely still hiring all over the company. So, from hardware engineering, software engineering, operations, support, sales, we're continuing to add to the team, and that is definitely what is going to make this company great.Will: Maybe just kind of a wrap-up question here. One of the things Jason and I always like to ask folks is, if you succeed over the next five years, how have you changed the market that you're operating in, and what does the company look like in five years? And I want you to know as an investor, I'm holding you to this. Um, so—Steve: Yeah, get your pen ready. Yeah.Will: Yeah, yeah. [laugh].Steve: Definitely. Expect to hear about that in the next board meeting. When we get this product in the market and five years from now, as that has expanded and we've done our jobs, then I think one of the most important things is we will see an incredible amount of time given back to these companies, time that is wasted today having to stitch together a fractured ecosystem of products that were not designed to work together, were not designed with each other in mind. And in some cases, this can be 20, 30, 40% of an organization's time. That is something you can't get back.You know, you can get more money, you can—there's a lot that folks can control, but that loss of time, that inefficiency in DIY your own cloud infrastructure on-premises, will be a big boon. Because that means now you've got the ability for these companies to capitalize on digitalizing their businesses, and just the velocity of their ability to go improve their own products, that just will have a flywheel effect. So, that great simplification where you don't even consider having to go through and do these low-level updates, and having to debug and deal with performance issues that are impossible to sort out, this—aggregation just goes away. This system comes complete and you wouldn't think anything else, just like an iPhone. I think the other thing that I would hope to see is that we have made a huge dent in the efficiency of computing systems on-premises, that the amount of power required to power your applications today has fallen by a significant amount because of the ability to instrument the system, from a hardware and software perspective, to understand where power is being used, where it is being wasted.And I think that can have some big implications, both to just economics, to the climate, to a number of things, by building and people using smarter systems that are more efficient. I think generally just making it commonplace that you have a programmable infrastructure that is great for developers everywhere, that is no longer restricted to a rental-only model. Is that enough for five years?Will: Yeah, I think I think democratizing access to hyperscale infrastructure for everybody else sounds about right.Steve: All right. I'm glad you wrote that down.Jason: Well, once again, Steve, thanks for coming on. Really exciting, I think, in this conversation, talking about the server market as being a fairly dynamic market still, that has a great growth path, and we're really excited to see Oxide Computer succeed, so thanks for coming on and sharing your story with us.Steve: Yeah, thank you both. It was a lot of fun.Will: Thank you for listening to Perfectly Boring. You can keep up the latest on the podcast at perfectlyboring.com, and follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll see you next time.

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

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.

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

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.

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,

Real Definition of Homestead (LA 1299) 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: And I'm Jill DeWitt broadcasting from sunny, Southern California. Steve: Today Jill and I talk about, well, really, I talk about, the real definition of the word homestead. Jill: Why is it only you? This came up because of a call that I had it. And this guy was nutty. Well, I'll explain it. But this nutty seller was explaining to me how he got this property. He's the first one to get the property. It was never properly, what was the word he said, what did he call it? Divided. It wasn't subdivided. He said staked out or something like that. And I'm going along like a homestead and he's telling me no. So we talked about it. Now we're going to try to clear this up. Steve: That's interesting. Because I chose this topic because I was reading a stream, an extremely lengthy stream in our Facebook. Jill: So they're talking about it too. Steve: Yeah. It's all over the internet man. And it's so wrong. I have to be real straight here. There's some really bad information about the word homestead. And I know why, because homestead means four or five things to different people. So I'm going to try to clear it up. Jill: It's funny. Steve: And not in a boring way. Jill: [inaudible 00:01:22]. By the way. Steve: That's okay. Jill: Okay, good. I got to say usually we're recording this a few days before. Now pretty much today we're recording on the day. This tells you a little bit about our weekend. Steve: We were late because of our social life interfered with our professional life recently. Jill: You should not let that happen. And we did, "Well, we can record tomorrow." I'll just record tomorrow, or we can record tomorrow. And then here, we're like, Oh, you can't. We have no more tomorrows. Steve: Remember back when we first started out, not with the Atlanta Academy, but just working together. And we were there every day and working hard and all into it. And now it's just a lapse [crosstalk 00:00:02:03]. Jill: [crosstalk 00:02:06] I guess so. Don't do that. Steve: I hear radio radio switches clicking off all over the place right now. 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. So Austin wrote, "Hello. After a somewhat successful first round mailer, I have a handful of recorded deeds from the County," as you should. This is great. "I haven't sold anything so far. I focus in Northern Arizona and have five acre plus desert properties that I'm hoping to sell in the 2,500 to $3,000 range. For this price point, is it appropriate to hire a photo company such as WeGoLook. There's others like that too, to shoot photos and or video, or should I use stock photos from the region and those will be adequate?" Thanks, Austin. And we put those in there for [inaudible 00:02:59] people. That's one of the things- Steve: There's 10,000 pictures in the original program of Northern Arizona. Jill: That we shared. Steve: [crosstalk 00:03:08] 10,000, maybe 8,000. Jill: When I say we, I mean, somebody else that worked for us or you. Steve: What do you think about this topic? Jill: I would, you know what? I think that back in the day, it was hard to get people and hard to tell them where to go. And for them to find properties, it was difficult for us alone telling photographer. But nowadays you could get a guy for 50 to 75 bucks off these companies or Craigslist, and you can give them GPS coordinates that they can pop in their phone and they can drive right there. So I think not hiring it I think there's no reason nowadays to not hire a photographer, to go out there, hopefully see a couple... And you've got how many properties? Steve: A handful. Jill: Is there a way... Do all of them at the same time. Have your photographer pick the first sunny day w...

How Much We Really Need to Be On the Phone (1088) 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:                          I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve:                   Today Jill and I talk about how much do we really actually all need to be on the phone in this business. Jill:                          A lot. Steve:                   What are you looking at back here? Jill:                          I don't know. I thought I was ... I'm expecting people to walk by that we might recognize and so I was just kind of keeping an eye out. Steve:                   Why isn't that, Jill? Jill:                          I don't know. Anyway ... Steve:                   Before we get into the topic, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill:                          Kyler asks, "Does anyone have experience with quiet titling a property in Texas? There are no other persons claiming ownership. There's just a cloud in the title because the property was owned in a DBA. Debt Doing Business As of a husband that is deceased. The title company instructed us to quite title the property into the wife's name. Never done this before and would love specific input and steps on how to take the process." Thank you. I love that. [crosstalk 00:01:11]. Steve:                   Kevin answers this perfectly. Kevin, our moderator on land investors and then I'll have a couple of comments right after. Jill:                          Thank you for sharing. Steve:                   What does that mean? Jill:                          I don't know. I just think silly. Steve:                   What does that mean? Jill:                          I don't know. Steve:                   Thank you for sharing. This is what the show is. I share some stuff. You share some stuff. Jill:                          Just the way you interjected there. I thought it was funny. Kevin, our moderator is going to answer this perfectly and we're going to get right back to you in a moment. Steve:                   You know why I said it that way? I had to get it in there quickly because I think you're ready to just jump in. Jill:                          I was. That's usually what I do. Steve:                   Sometimes Kevin answers. Sometimes not. Sometimes Kevin answers perfect. Perfectly, and I just throw it in here. You were about to go off the teleprompter again. Jill:                          No, I wasn't. I was continuing to read. I can [inaudible 00:02:01]. Steve:                   Jill's famous for going off script. Jill:                          Really? Steve:                   Yeah. Jill:                          I don't think it's me. Steve:                   Famously. Jill:                          All right. Anyway, Kyler, I would not pay for quiet title and put the property in the wife's name. You could lose control of it. This is good advice. She might sell it to your friend after you've paid for the quiet title. Quiet title can take about three months and will cost some money, maybe two to $3,000. if you go this route, you can get an attorney to help you make the agreement with the wife to accept the purchase amount and make no claim on the quiet title. Bottom line is talk to an attorney on this one if it's worth it. That's such good advice. Steve:                   It's great advice and what he's talking about. What this whole topic is is called equitable title. It's everywhere in the whole country. Equitable title means you don't own the property but you have an interest in it. This is what actually foreclosing on a tax lien is. You have a an interest in the property because you own that tax lien. Let's say you bought the tax lien from the country.

Planning for Your Family Legacy Like Saras Farm (LA 1035) 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. Steve:                   and I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny southern California. Jill:                          Today. Jill and I talk about planning for your family legacy, like Sarah's farm. Steve:                   Who The heck is Sarah? Jill:                          Sarah is our niece and this is because of a story that I heard, and I was talking to your sister yesterday and she was sharing with me Sarah's farm, one of their properties that they purchased, and I thought this was really, really cool and I want to talk about it more. Steve:                   If you're a regular listener, you know this, but my middle sister is... It lives in Trevor City, Michigan, and she's extremely successful residential real estate agent. She's actually the single only residential real estate agent that I enjoy spending time with. Jill:                          That is true, well hey wait, there's two. Steve:                   Oh yeah. Jill:                          Well we have two, we have one more local. Steve:                   Yeah, and so she's been accumulating property. She pours a lot of her money, the commission money that she earns ,into buying properties, and I think she's up to what, 20 or 30 or something? Jill:                          20 doors. Steve:                   And so one of them is Sarah's farm, which I think... Tell the story. Oh no, okay wait... Jill:                          We'll save it for the show. 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:                          Mike L. asks, "Hi Steve and Jill, I recently sent out a mailer and have been getting calls back. It's exciting, but everyone wants more than we are offering. I'm okay with that, but I'm having trouble properly assessing the true market value against the land flippers on LandWatch who are properly following your advice and to price less than the cheapest listed seller to move land fast. We have no seller lists yet and we have priced well enough it seems, but we can't move much higher if I'm basing the sales price off the lowest seller. I can find... The lowest one I can find on LandWatch. Have you or others had any experience with this? Is it worth acquiring with the expectation that the sales price will fall more towards the average low? Steve:                   Yes. Jill:                          Usually other flippers or the one or two that are viciously low. Please help. I've got an example below if my question didn't make sense. Steve:                   It makes complete sense. Jill:                          I'm sorry. I'm going to say what he put in here too? This is so cute. Oh, this is a good... hey, good way to do this. This is how you get on this show. He put hashtag podcast question, hashtag love the show hashtag. I'll put whatever I have to put here to get on this show, hashtag you just told us to do something like this to get your question on the show. Mike. Hashtag Mike, you did great. Steve:                   That was hilarious, Actually. Jill:                          Perfect. Steve:                   I didn't even realize that when I put this question in here. Jill:                          That was so good. Alright. Do you want me to read the example? Steve:                   He says, "For example, we listed a property for $750 and they made an offer for $750 and the guy wants four grants. So the cheapest on LandWatch is 2,500 everybody else falls into the four to $5,000 range for the same property that's in a planned urban development. That's east coast, east coast speak for mash plan community.

Finance Friday with Steven Butala, Jill DeWit & Justin Sliva (LA 903) Transcript: Steve:                   Steve and Jill here with Justin. Jill:                          Hello. Steve:                   Welcome to the Land Academy Show on this Friday, it's a special Friday. I think this is the first time all three of us are doing it. Jill:                          I think so. Justin:                   It is, it is. Steve:                   Here at tending Land Investment Talk, I'm Steven Jack [Butella 00:00:15], with guests, Justin [Slieva 00:00:17], and Jill [DeWitt 00:00:17], broadcasting from sunny Southern California and Dallas-Forth Worth. Today, Justin and I talk about Finance Friday with special guest, Jill, which is a little bit strange. Jill:                          Thank you. Steve:                   I can't even read it, it's so strange. Jill:                          You a little confused right now? I kind of like this. I just get to sit back and coast, Justin:                   And relax. Jill:                          And comment now and then. Yeah, this is awesome. Steve:                   I'm gonna say some revealing stuff about Jill. Jill:                          Oh, great. Justin:                   Okay. Steve:                   Jill loves to be the only girl. Like, wherever we're just with a bunch of guys, she's like, "Yeah, I like being the only girl." Jill:                          Actually, it is nice. I understand the dialog. I understand, yeah I get it. It's good. Steve:                   Before we get into the show today and I find out the deals that Justin's doing and the stuff that Jill's doing, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the Landinvestors.com online community, it's free. Jill:                          Do you want me to add? Steve:                   Sure. Jill:                          Travis asked, "Has anyone successfully used the CoreLogic API to fetch their data from RealQuest Pro instead of the GUI?" Steve:                   User interface. Jill:                          Oh, the new user interface. Got it. "What would be a quick and helpful way to get the number lots in a given area if that's possible? Faster than searching county by county on their website, any ideas? Steve:                   Yeah, so the RealQuest API is literally the backend. CoreLogic API of parcel facts. Actually, yeah. I have a lot of experience using that. This will be solved, what you're trying to accomplish when we release DataTree, access to DataTree. The searching function and the parcel checking function based on geography, even map searching it, is instantaneous. It's leaps and bounds above what we use for RealQuest. However, the real value in RealQuest is it has, I think, a superior search function for land. Actually, Justin, go ahead and comment. I know you have experience with both too. Justin:                   Yeah. DataTree is ton of better on houses. It just leaps and bounds better on houses; but, when you get into RealQuest, they're actually getting their lots down. It's way, way easier to use than RealQuest. For someone who may have less than half the price on what the data is, it's worth it for me to pay more on data in RealQuest, because it's so much easier to manipulate with land. It works out for us a lot better. Steve:                   Same exact experience here. Exactly. So, with House Academy, which is just a couple of months away from release? Jill:                          A couple months. Steve:                   The subscription to DataTree will be included much like RealQuest prop. Jill:                          Because, I personally would like to have a life. So, that's why House Academy's going to be not next week. A month or two. Justin:                   Are you missing date night? Jill:                          What's that? I don't know what that is. Justin:                   We literally have a meeting after we're done r...

Not all groups in Steve Shields book should be considered denominations.  In our next conversation, we'll talk about some of these subgroups with official endorsement of the LDS Church, such as Affirmation and the Genesis Group.  https://youtu.be/CmDpx5LlEac Steve:  Affirmation is a para-church organization. It provides a church-oriented fellowship for LGBTQ people who are not often welcomed in the standard ward and most of them are LDS folks in Affirmation. But, they're providing a ministry that is, dare I say it? Tangential to the LDS Church. So, I consider that an expression. GT:  Would it be like the Genesis Group? Steve: Genesis Group would have been a very similar kind of a group. Genesis had the full support of the church where Affirmation does not. So, there's a little difference there. Maybe that's a big difference, actually. Certainly, with the LDS Church's policy of a couple of years ago about LGBTQ people, and their children being able to be baptized [that] would take them even one step further the other direction, away from seeing Affirmation [as a good thing] GT:  Whereas the Genesis [Group] was [fully supported by the church], right? Steve: Yeah, they were. Right. GT:  Just for people who may not know what Genesis Group is, I know we do. But can you describe Genesis Group? Steve:  I probably don't know very much about it. It was before blacks were allowed to be ordained and it was a ministry group for black LDS Church members, their families and friends. They could be members of the church and it was a support. It was supported by the church, mostly here in the Salt Lake area, I think. Darius Gray, who is well-known in Mormon thought circles, was one of the key people, as I remember. GT:  Yeah, he was one of the original counselors and he went on to become President later. He's a great guy. Steve:  So that was an important ministry in the era of civil rights upset in the United States. Ultimately then in 1978, when full ordination was finally permitted for all. Find out more about these and other groups!  Check out our conversation… Steve Shields describes para-church Mormon groups. What is that? Check out our other conversations with Steve! 239: Cutlerite Endowment, Female Priesthood, & House of Aaron (Shields) 238: Fundamentalists and Cutlerites (Shields) 227: Conspiracy Theories:  William Smith, Samuel Smith, James Strang(Shields) 226: Sidney's Unsung Role in Restoration (Shields) 225: Steve's Shields Own Divergent Path 224: Who Owns the Temple Lot? (Shields)

The LDS Church recently made changes to their temple endowment ceremony.  Rumor has it that the Cutlerite endowment has changed very little since the death of Joseph Smith.  We'll continue our discussion about Cutlerite temple practices with Steve Shields. It appears they believe women hold priesthood in their temple ordinances! https://youtu.be/8nA9mj_bp3s Steve: So, that building is, in all intents and purposes, it's a temple and it would resemble the Kirtland Temple model except Kirtland had no font. But, the upstairs room for the priesthood on the second floor, they weren't necessarily doing rituals there, but they did some washings and anointings upstairs on the third floor in the attic level. And so, on the second floor of the Cutlerite buildings in Minnesota and Independence, that's dedicated as a holy place. They call it the upper room work. They don't use the term endowment. They do know what that means because we've talked about it with them. But, I do know. They've told me this, that women are ordained as high priestesses in the celestial church, not in the outer church, not in the public church. They have no priesthood in the public church. GT: Oh, so women have a temple priesthood, but not an Ecclesiastical priesthood. Steve: Exactly. Yeah, that's right. That's the extent of my knowledge about that. A few years ago when… GT:  That's interesting, Michael Quinn, in my current interview, just kind of said the LDS have the same thing. Jonathan Stapley said, "Well, we don't want to call it priesthood." But Quinn wasn't nearly as careful on that. Steve: Yeah. Well, I'm in the Quinn camp on that issue. We'll also discuss a break off from the RLDS Church called the House of Aaron. Steve:  The House of Aaron is based at Eskdale, Utah. And they used to be called the Aaronic Order or the Order of Aaron. Morris Glendening was the founder, promoter of that. In the recent 10 or 12 years, they've been having lots of conversation with Fred Larsen and the Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. John Conrad, who is the leader of the House of Aaron, his father was Bob Conrad, who was the chief high priest successor to Morris Glendening as chief high priest. John has gone out to Independence many times with folks their church. They've shifted a lot since Glendening's times in the '40's. They always said they were not Mormons and yet all of their members had been Mormons. Have you heard of the House of Aaron before?  Check out our conversation…. Steve Shields says Cutlerites have female priesthood, and we talk about House of Aaron in Eskdale, Utah Don't forget out other conversations with Steve! 238: Fundamentalists and Cutlerites (Shields) 227: Conspiracy Theories:  William Smith, Samuel Smith, James Strang(Shields) 226: Sidney's Unsung Role in Restoration (Shields) 225: Steve's Shields Own Divergent Path 224: Who Owns the Temple Lot? (Shields)

Steve Shields was raised in the LDS Church and attended BYU.  So why is he now a member of the Community of Christ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJq4ul9ymB4 Steve:  I was really interested in church history and I started reading these books and pamphlets that were not approved by the general authorities and my mother warned me that if I kept reading that kind of stuff, I would lose my testimony and leave the church. She wasn't happy that she was right. I don't see it as losing my testimony. Did I leave one organization for another? Yes, but I think my faith in Christ is stronger than it has ever been. I'm not saying that I didn't have faith before. By going this different route, I began to focus more on what I think matters most. Steve:  And history then, didn't become the main focus of my faith, but became a main interest. That sort of--Oh, do I dare use the word tangent? Tangential to my faith. GT:  We like that word. Steve:  Yeah. It was a big deal to make that move. By the time I had been on my mission and, and done that, I had some pretty out of the box ideas about God. Steve discusses his reasons for changing his religion, and we discuss the RLDS/Community of Christ hierarchy.  What are the similarities and differences with the LDS Church? GT:  I know John Hamer was recently called to be a Seventy. Steve: He's a Seventy, right. ... GT: He would be more like an Area Authority? Steve:  He's like an area authority. Yeah, that would be. Yeah. Our Seventies are more like Area Authorities. Now, there may be some official expenses that they're provided for travel and things like that. And I don't know. Every jurisdiction, every mission center of the church and mission centers for us are like areas for the LDS organization. GT:  I've heard that they've been compared to a stake. Steve:  Well, but stakes are different from LDS, have always been different from LDS stakes. It's not been uncommon for us to have 30 or 40 congregations in a stake. Steve:  And the stake presidents were full-time world church appointees. So, stake looks and feels like it might be the same in both, but it really wasn't because of the size. So, I really think the mission centers replaced stakes, as we tried to reduce the number of levels, so we used to have the general officers and then the fields. Each apostle had a certain geographical area. Then we had stakes and regions and districts. And so, we tried to compress all of those stakes and regions and districts are now all mission centers and we reconfigured that. Check out our conversation… You may also want to check out our previous conversations with John Hamer and Community of Christ apostle Lach MacKay! 120:  Start of RLDS Church & Mormon Schisms Tour (MacKay & Hamer) 119:  Surprising Word of Wisdom Insights from an Apostle (MacKay & Hamer) 118:  Mormon Followers of the Prophet James Strang (MacKay & Hamer) 117: Alice Cooper's Roots in Lively Mormon Schisms (MacKay & Hamer) 116: Different Succession Claims:  Other Mormon Groups (MacKay & Hamer) 115:  Strange Kirtland Temple Ownership Problems (MacKay & Hamer) 114:  Comparing LDS & RLDS Temple Worship (MacKay & Hamer) 113: A Seventy & Apostle discuss myths & Kirtland Temple (MacKay & Hamer)

Mark Hofmann tried to create evidence of the Spalding Conspiracy.  There has long been a theory that Book of Mormon was plagiarized from a manuscript originally written by Solomon Spaulding (or Spalding.)  The problem with the theory is that there was never a connection between Joseph Smith and Solomon Spaulding—until Mark Hofmann came up with a document.  Steve Mayfield talks about buying this Hofmann forgery. https://youtu.be/HUT1qoEiikU Steve: So, in January of 2000, the former owner of Cosmic Aeroplane sold it to Ken Sanders who used to work there. He now had his own bookstore there in Salt Lake, Ken Sanders Books. Well he had it on display and I'm just sitting there just [thinking], "Oh, oh, I love it." But it was like $4,000 they wanted for it. Well, I had enough in a credit card, so I bought it from him. GT: Oh my goodness. Steve: In August of 2000. So, for four years I owned a Hofmann. GT: You knew it was a forgery. Steve: Yeah, Yeah. I mean he sold it as that. The minute he sold it after I bought it, I take it back to the office and show George [Throckmorton.] He showed some things on the document that only he and I know. I guess this proves there is a market for Hofmann forgeries!  What do you think of Steve's purchase? Check out our conversation, as well as Steve's other conversations.... Mark Hofmann forged a document that attempted to tie Sidney Rigdon & Solomon Spalding together. Steve discusses why it is a forgery. 194: What is the Dead Lee Scroll? (Mayfield) 193: John D. Lee's Role in Mountain Meadows Massacre (Mayfield) 192: Mormons & the FBI (Mayfield) 191: Steve Mayfield: Crime Photographer (Mayfield) 190: Mormon Connection in Patty Hearst Kidnapping (Mayfield)

September 11, 1857 was the largest mass-murder in American history.  Over 100 immigrants from Arkansas were killed in southern Utah.  John D. Lee was the only person executed for this atrocity.  In our conversation with Steve Mayfield, we'll talk more about Lee's involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. https://youtu.be/VCtObMKj7PQ GT: So as I understand it from what I understand what the Mountain Meadows Massacre, there's a lot of tensions going on. John D. Lee kind of spurs the Indians to attack, says it's going to be an easy target, but it's not an easy target. And so, they surround themselves. So, John D. Lee and William Dame and Klingonsmith and Higbee, they're kind of the leaders of this whole thing. So, they come out and they say, "Well, if you'll turn over your weapons we will save you from the Indians." Steve: Yeah. GT: So as I understand it, every Mormon man had a gun. [Each Mormon] was walking each man from the Fancher Party out. And then the women and children were kind of in the back and somebody gave a signal. Was it Lee that gave the signal? Steve: I can't remember. GT:  There was something to the effect of "Do your duty," and then every Mormon man turned to the Fancher [Party] and shot and killed them. And then they left the women and children to be attacked by the Indians. Steve:  Yeah. Again, you've got so many different stories and the fact is I think they realized, whoops. Because when they reported back to Brigham in Salt Lake, what happened is not what they actually did. You know, they, they kind of lied to Brigham. GT: Because Lee was one of the people that went to Brigham and told him what happened. But he lied about it. Steve: Yeah. One of the interesting things is that supposedly the church or the church leaders trying to hide this. But I saw an article in New York Times two months later, before the end of the year, were talking about this massacre of white people done in southern Utah. I mean, it's not like we have instant news today. But it was very quick when this started going around and when the government comes and then they to look into it. And again, the Johnston's army there and all the government investigation. Here comes Mountain Meadows in the middle of it. Now of course, you know Brigham kind of telling John D. Lee to take off and hide because they were trying to find him. And of course, it was 20 years later when they [try him.] GT: Ok, let's make sure we've got those details there. So, Lee participates in the massacre. Of course, he wasn't the only person that was in the massacre. Check out our conversation, as well as our other segments on Mormons & Crime! John D. Lee was the only person executed for involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Sept 11, 1857. 192: Mormons & the FBI 191: Steve Mayfield: Crime Photographer 190: Mormon Connection in Patty Hearst Kidnapping

Nothing Phases Me Anymore. My Speech. Whats Yours. Jack Butala: Nothing Phases Me Anymore. My Speech. Whats Yours. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: It's Jack Butala for Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow From Land Show. We show you how to buy property for half and resell it the next day. Great information and instruction from Jack, that's me ... Jill: ... And inspiration from Jill, that's me. Steve: Here's some funny stuff that happened to us recently. Jill: I realized Steven's beach footwear consists of ... What ... Are they Converse? And Gucci loafers. We're here for a month, you have 2 things. Steve: I own 2 pairs of shoes. Jill: That's it. Gucci loafers ... There's no flip flops, there's nothing in between, it's that. No sandals. You have your converse shoes or your Gucci loafers. I was looking at that and you know what's funny? I can tell what kind of mood your in depending on your the shoes you put on. Steve: Really? Jill: Oh, totally. You are all business today. You're wearing your loafers. Steve: Oh. Jill: You wear your Gucci loafers- Steve: Is that good or bad? Jill: It's all good. I just ... I can mentally prepare to what's going on in your world based on the shoes you put on. Nothing else but your shoes. Steve: There's maybe 2 or 3 things in life that I'm extravagant about. Not extravagant, but I will pay full retail price for shoes. Jill: Yeah. Good shoes. Steve: Gucci discontinued these shoes. Here's a funny story. Jill: This is a good story. Steve: Gucci discontinued these shoes and we found a store 2 years ago. Jill found a store that still carried them and still had them leftover in stock from 2 years ago, so she goes and buys- Jill: It was in a Nordstrom. Steve: ... She goes and buys multiple pairs of these shoes, that are not cheap, and put them in her closet. I only know this because I saw the thing on the credit card bill ... Jill: Uh-huh (affirmative). Steve: ... Puts them in her closet and I asked her about it. She's like, "Oh yeah, I plan on, 2 years from now when the pair that your wearing is worn out, you can't take them to the shoe maker anymore, I'm going to give you one of these for Christmas. Jill: I'll whip out another one. I've got multiple pairs hidden, stacked away, so I know we're okay. Steve: That's love. That is Peppermint Patty love right there. Jill: Thank you, thank you. That's exactly what I did. Steve: In this episode, Jill and I talk about nothing phases me anymore. Here's my speech, what's yours? Jill, great show today. Before we start let's take a question posted by one of our members on SuccessPlant.com, our website and our free online community. Jill: Okay, Chaz wrote in and asked, "I started thinking about all the letters I just sent out and everybody can see what I'm flipping them for. May it better to have a separate sell website?" Oh. Steve: Yeah, what I think Chaz is saying is, "I have a website, it's XYZ.com," or whatever, "and I'm sending out on letterhead, sending all these letters to purchase property from people and then they can log onto my website and see them, clearly see that I'm selling them for way more." Chaz, you're darn right. I did respond to you directly in SuccessPlant because this is a great question and I can tell, the first sentence I said was I can tell that you're on your way. If you're having these kinds of thoughts and these concerns, you are in this, you've committed, and you're invested in it. The answer's this: You're dead right. We have a separate buy site and sell site, we always have. Well, not always,

Nothing Phases Me Anymore. My Speech. Whats Yours. Jack Butala: Nothing Phases Me Anymore. My Speech. Whats Yours. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: It's Jack Butala for Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow From Land Show. We show you how to buy property for half and resell it the next day. Great information and instruction from Jack, that's me ... Jill: ... And inspiration from Jill, that's me. Steve: Here's some funny stuff that happened to us recently. Jill: I realized Steven's beach footwear consists of ... What ... Are they Converse? And Gucci loafers. We're here for a month, you have 2 things. Steve: I own 2 pairs of shoes. Jill: That's it. Gucci loafers ... There's no flip flops, there's nothing in between, it's that. No sandals. You have your converse shoes or your Gucci loafers. I was looking at that and you know what's funny? I can tell what kind of mood your in depending on your the shoes you put on. Steve: Really? Jill: Oh, totally. You are all business today. You're wearing your loafers. Steve: Oh. Jill: You wear your Gucci loafers- Steve: Is that good or bad? Jill: It's all good. I just ... I can mentally prepare to what's going on in your world based on the shoes you put on. Nothing else but your shoes. Steve: There's maybe 2 or 3 things in life that I'm extravagant about. Not extravagant, but I will pay full retail price for shoes. Jill: Yeah. Good shoes. Steve: Gucci discontinued these shoes. Here's a funny story. Jill: This is a good story. Steve: Gucci discontinued these shoes and we found a store 2 years ago. Jill found a store that still carried them and still had them leftover in stock from 2 years ago, so she goes and buys- Jill: It was in a Nordstrom. Steve: ... She goes and buys multiple pairs of these shoes, that are not cheap, and put them in her closet. I only know this because I saw the thing on the credit card bill ... Jill: Uh-huh (affirmative). Steve: ... Puts them in her closet and I asked her about it. She's like, "Oh yeah, I plan on, 2 years from now when the pair that your wearing is worn out, you can't take them to the shoe maker anymore, I'm going to give you one of these for Christmas. Jill: I'll whip out another one. I've got multiple pairs hidden, stacked away, so I know we're okay. Steve: That's love. That is Peppermint Patty love right there. Jill: Thank you, thank you. That's exactly what I did. Steve: In this episode, Jill and I talk about nothing phases me anymore. Here's my speech, what's yours? Jill, great show today. Before we start let's take a question posted by one of our members on SuccessPlant.com, our website and our free online community. Jill: Okay, Chaz wrote in and asked, "I started thinking about all the letters I just sent out and everybody can see what I'm flipping them for. May it better to have a separate sell website?" Oh. Steve: Yeah, what I think Chaz is saying is, "I have a website, it's XYZ.com," or whatever, "and I'm sending out on letterhead, sending all these letters to purchase property from people and then they can log onto my website and see them, clearly see that I'm selling them for way more." Chaz, you're darn right. I did respond to you directly in SuccessPlant because this is a great question and I can tell, the first sentence I said was I can tell that you're on your way. If you're having these kinds of thoughts and these concerns, you are in this, you've committed, and you're invested in it. The answer's this: You're dead right. We have a separate buy site and sell site, we always have. Well, not always,

Buy Apartment Buildings for Nothing From the City with Tyler Sheff Jack Butala: Buy Apartment Buildings for Nothing From the City with Tyler Sheff. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: Tyler Schiff founder of cashflowguys.com, is a licensed real estate problem solver, educator, investor and syndicator. Tyler has been involved in real estate for over 16 years and now maintains 100% focus on investing for cash flow and helping others do the same. Tyler's team help others to acquire, stabilize, and then provide clean, safe, affordable housing to those in need when it matters most. Boy, I have some questions about that, what a great job description. As the host of Cash Flow Guys podcast, teaches the public how to avoid the common pitfalls found in real estate investing, and inspires others to take massive action toward their goals. Tyler, it is such a pleasure for Jill and I to have you on the show. Tyler: Thanks guys I appreciate it. Jill: Glad you are here. Steve: That was an awesome big picture description, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what you do. Tyler: Well Steve, this all started when I was working for the Federal government. I was out on a ship in the middle of the ocean as a merchant mariner and of course, your tax dollars were paying me way too much money. That was all great on the surface, it looked really cool on the top part of the pay check, but when the IRS got ahold of they said, "Oh, Tyler, thank you for your donation, sir." I was paying more in income tax than most people made for a living, it was kind of scary. Steve: Yeah, a W-2 can do that to you, huh? Tyler: Yes, it sure can, so I obviously need to find a better way. I come from a real estate background, I grew up in real estate with my mother. I have had my real estate license about 16 years now. I was on a little sabbatical, I was out there bobbing around the ocean and I had to figure out a way to legally, address the word legally, mitigate my tax obligation and then I discovered the power of passive income, that was the game changer right there. Steve: That's great. How long were you out there? Let's talk about the boat experience first. We are actively looking to buy a fairly large boat right now. Tyler: I spent 5 years working for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, that's NOAA, that's who predicts your weather and all that. They have a fleet of ships that are based around the world, pretty much. I went to them with virtually no experience. I was a turner boat captain here in town, I did that part time when the real estate market was not performing to expectation in 09' and early 2010, I was out doing charter fishing for people and doing real estate while the market was at it's absolute worst. I got hired by NOAA because I am a US veteran and they give preference to US veterans for employment. It was pretty much a shoe in job. My first duty assignment, guys, was Honolulu, Hawaii. You can't really argue with that. Jill: Love it. Tyler: At the time it was ... NOAA, ironically, also runs the national marine fisheries. Being in the charter business, for taking people fishing, they had so heavily regulated the fishing industry, it made it harder and harder and harder to get people out on the ocean to take people fishing. Ironically, the government organization that put the charter business on hold, was where I wound up going to work, if you can't beat them, join them, type of a thing. I can tell you ... We could go on for hours about my experiences at NOAA, that was an absolute blast. I had so much fun working for that organization, a good group of people. Steve:

Buy Apartment Buildings for Nothing From the City with Tyler Sheff Jack Butala: Buy Apartment Buildings for Nothing From the City with Tyler Sheff. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: Tyler Schiff founder of cashflowguys.com, is a licensed real estate problem solver, educator, investor and syndicator. Tyler has been involved in real estate for over 16 years and now maintains 100% focus on investing for cash flow and helping others do the same. Tyler's team help others to acquire, stabilize, and then provide clean, safe, affordable housing to those in need when it matters most. Boy, I have some questions about that, what a great job description. As the host of Cash Flow Guys podcast, teaches the public how to avoid the common pitfalls found in real estate investing, and inspires others to take massive action toward their goals. Tyler, it is such a pleasure for Jill and I to have you on the show. Tyler: Thanks guys I appreciate it. Jill: Glad you are here. Steve: That was an awesome big picture description, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what you do. Tyler: Well Steve, this all started when I was working for the Federal government. I was out on a ship in the middle of the ocean as a merchant mariner and of course, your tax dollars were paying me way too much money. That was all great on the surface, it looked really cool on the top part of the pay check, but when the IRS got ahold of they said, "Oh, Tyler, thank you for your donation, sir." I was paying more in income tax than most people made for a living, it was kind of scary. Steve: Yeah, a W-2 can do that to you, huh? Tyler: Yes, it sure can, so I obviously need to find a better way. I come from a real estate background, I grew up in real estate with my mother. I have had my real estate license about 16 years now. I was on a little sabbatical, I was out there bobbing around the ocean and I had to figure out a way to legally, address the word legally, mitigate my tax obligation and then I discovered the power of passive income, that was the game changer right there. Steve: That's great. How long were you out there? Let's talk about the boat experience first. We are actively looking to buy a fairly large boat right now. Tyler: I spent 5 years working for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, that's NOAA, that's who predicts your weather and all that. They have a fleet of ships that are based around the world, pretty much. I went to them with virtually no experience. I was a turner boat captain here in town, I did that part time when the real estate market was not performing to expectation in 09' and early 2010, I was out doing charter fishing for people and doing real estate while the market was at it's absolute worst. I got hired by NOAA because I am a US veteran and they give preference to US veterans for employment. It was pretty much a shoe in job. My first duty assignment, guys, was Honolulu, Hawaii. You can't really argue with that. Jill: Love it. Tyler: At the time it was ... NOAA, ironically, also runs the national marine fisheries. Being in the charter business, for taking people fishing, they had so heavily regulated the fishing industry, it made it harder and harder and harder to get people out on the ocean to take people fishing. Ironically, the government organization that put the charter business on hold, was where I wound up going to work, if you can't beat them, join them, type of a thing. I can tell you ... We could go on for hours about my experiences at NOAA, that was an absolute blast. I had so much fun working for that organization, a good group of people. Steve:

How to Buy Anything for Half Price Jack Butala: How to Buy Anything for Half Price. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: Jack Butala here from Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow From Land show. Today Jill and I talk about how to buy anything for half price. Well what the heck does that have to do with real estate? I'll tell you. Jill, great show today. Before we start, let's take a question posted from SuccessPlant.com, our free online community. Jill: Cool. All right. Brent from Dallas asks: "I'm a brand new real estate investor. I'm in the very beginning stages of starting my real estate investing business, and I was curious if anyone had advice on where I should start from step one. Should I start marketing the motivated sellers without a business entity, or get a business structure first? Feel free to add any tips for now. I'm just starting out. Thanks." Steve: Hey, I'll answer that in a second. If you have a question, or you want to be on our show, please call 800-725-8816. Great question. I think a lot of people have it. I'm sure a ton of listeners have the exact same question. Where do you start? So this is what you do. Marketing certainly is not where you start. You always start with education on anything that you want to accomplish, in my opinion. You want to start with free education. You don't want to plow a bunch of money into something that you're really not going to follow through on. If you're interested in real estate do two things: Get our fee eBook at LandAcademy.com, that will get you in a system, give you some exercises, some hands-on stuff; and get yourself a username at BiggerPockets.com. Jill and I have no affiliation, but it's a huge community of very experienced and completely brand, spanking new real estate investors of all different types: apartments, land, houses, the whole thing. Start utilizing those two free resources, that's step one. We'll talk about marketing and all that stuff, eventually, and business structure. A lot of people say, "Hey, I need to start an LLC before I do anything." Leave that down the road. Get educated. You might not like real estate at all. Maybe you would rather open a website eventually, and sell stuff that you by from China. I don't know, but find out for free. Jill: I love the things you just pull out of mid air. Like, whatever. Maybe you want to sell sunglasses in a kiosk at the mall. What the heck? Remember when we talked about that a long time ago? Steve: Selling sunglasses? Jill: We did. Oh gosh. Steve: That was for the kids. Jill: Oh, all right. But we- Steve: Yeah. One of the kids had an idea to do that. Jill: Yeah. Because you and I, sometimes before we started ... I hope it's okay I'm jumping in ahead here. Steve: Yeah. Jill: Right. Before we started Land Academy because our land business was rolling and it was going so smooth, you and I were like, "Well what should we do now?" Steve: We were bored. Yeah, "What are we're going to do?" Jill: That's exactly it. We started looking around at all kinds of crazy things like, "Gee, I wonder how much that makes." It's like driving for dollars, but driving for businesses, like, "Gee, what's a good business to ..." You know? Walking through the mall going, "Oh, I could do that. Look at the return they get." Steve: You know what I do sometimes late at night on the Internet? I look for dry cleaners for sale. I'm just fascinated with that business. I don't mean a dry cleaner plant. Next time you walk into the dry cleaner. If it's one of those that have an actual ... They don't clean the clothes. They just have one of those big,

How to Buy Anything for Half Price Jack Butala: How to Buy Anything for Half Price. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: Jack Butala here from Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow From Land show. Today Jill and I talk about how to buy anything for half price. Well what the heck does that have to do with real estate? I'll tell you. Jill, great show today. Before we start, let's take a question posted from SuccessPlant.com, our free online community. Jill: Cool. All right. Brent from Dallas asks: "I'm a brand new real estate investor. I'm in the very beginning stages of starting my real estate investing business, and I was curious if anyone had advice on where I should start from step one. Should I start marketing the motivated sellers without a business entity, or get a business structure first? Feel free to add any tips for now. I'm just starting out. Thanks." Steve: Hey, I'll answer that in a second. If you have a question, or you want to be on our show, please call 800-725-8816. Great question. I think a lot of people have it. I'm sure a ton of listeners have the exact same question. Where do you start? So this is what you do. Marketing certainly is not where you start. You always start with education on anything that you want to accomplish, in my opinion. You want to start with free education. You don't want to plow a bunch of money into something that you're really not going to follow through on. If you're interested in real estate do two things: Get our fee eBook at LandAcademy.com, that will get you in a system, give you some exercises, some hands-on stuff; and get yourself a username at BiggerPockets.com. Jill and I have no affiliation, but it's a huge community of very experienced and completely brand, spanking new real estate investors of all different types: apartments, land, houses, the whole thing. Start utilizing those two free resources, that's step one. We'll talk about marketing and all that stuff, eventually, and business structure. A lot of people say, "Hey, I need to start an LLC before I do anything." Leave that down the road. Get educated. You might not like real estate at all. Maybe you would rather open a website eventually, and sell stuff that you by from China. I don't know, but find out for free. Jill: I love the things you just pull out of mid air. Like, whatever. Maybe you want to sell sunglasses in a kiosk at the mall. What the heck? Remember when we talked about that a long time ago? Steve: Selling sunglasses? Jill: We did. Oh gosh. Steve: That was for the kids. Jill: Oh, all right. But we- Steve: Yeah. One of the kids had an idea to do that. Jill: Yeah. Because you and I, sometimes before we started ... I hope it's okay I'm jumping in ahead here. Steve: Yeah. Jill: Right. Before we started Land Academy because our land business was rolling and it was going so smooth, you and I were like, "Well what should we do now?" Steve: We were bored. Yeah, "What are we're going to do?" Jill: That's exactly it. We started looking around at all kinds of crazy things like, "Gee, I wonder how much that makes." It's like driving for dollars, but driving for businesses, like, "Gee, what's a good business to ..." You know? Walking through the mall going, "Oh, I could do that. Look at the return they get." Steve: You know what I do sometimes late at night on the Internet? I look for dry cleaners for sale. I'm just fascinated with that business. I don't mean a dry cleaner plant. Next time you walk into the dry cleaner. If it's one of those that have an actual ... They don't clean the clothes. They just have one of those big,

Planning the Rest of Your Life Today Jack Butala: Planning the Rest of Your Life Today. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: Jack Butala here from Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow from Land Show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about planning the rest of your life today. Jill, is there anything more important than this to do today? Jill: No. Steve: I still do it sometimes. Jill: I love it. Steve: Before we really get into, let's take a question. Jill: Okay. Brian from Seattle called in and asked, "You guys are great. I am all in. How can I convince my wife?" Steve: He's all in. Have you talked to him? Jill: I have talked to him and this is true. Steve: Of course it is, I know. I'm wondering if he's like, is he a member? Jill: [crosstalk 00:00:41] Steve: Is he a member is what I'm asking. Jill: Yeah he is. This is why I actually threw this in here because this is real and I think this comes up more than you realize Steven. Steve: Oh, you're qualified to answer this more than me. Jill: I am qualified to answer this because this is what I told Brian on a couple things. One, have her call me. No, seriously. There's something to be said for that. We women look at things differently. Steve: Really? Jill: You're so silly. Nice. Oh my goodness. All right. We all know it's true. Our gut, we have these things. We see things differently and it's a good thing. You know, if you, how do I say this? When you're looking at something, you want your wife's input. A, she might pick up on something that you missed, so that's a really good thing. Have her evaluate the situation, or the investment, or whatever it is with you. Then, for that reason. B, she better be on board or it's not going to work, so you want her to be all in. That's a good thing. Here's what I tell Brian, a couple things. A, I'm happy to talk to her. B, get her involved, listen to her. C, if she's not sure that this is something, that would be to doing our just buying and selling land and making a profit, agree on a dollar amount. Say hey sweetheart, I want to spend five hundred dollars, buy a property, make some money. I'm going to show it to you as a working example, what do you think? Because that's what he did and she was like, "Oh, I'm in." Steve: That's good. Jill: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Steve: You know, I'm going to have two points to make here. One, you should never get into any partnership or stay in one, whether it's in marriage or a business partnership or any two people doing anything if you're not better together. Jill: True. Steve: Sometimes you find out about that later and you make some changes, but two people have to be better together, so if his wife's concerned it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing, right? Then, my second point is, I have a peeve, you want to hear what it is? Jill: Uh oh, yes. Steve: Don't just say, no you're not going to get into the land business. Say, you know what? I love your spirit. I don't want to work at this job the rest of my life either, but land's not my thing at all, but I would love to own an ice cream shop, or I would love to buy skyscrapers. Land is too small. Let's go bigger. Let's provide a solution too, not just like a bitch. Jill: What your peeve is, just people that just shut down ideas for no reason? Steve: Yeah, or just say no. Like remember your parents used to do that. No. Jill: Steven are you speaking from experience? Where did this peeve come from? Steve: I have spent a lot of time in Detroit. There's a lot of people in Detroit who are, they're just, you know. My dad calls it quietly desperate, which I think is a poem or some crazy quote from some car guy somewhere. Jill: Quietly desperate.

Planning the Rest of Your Life Today Jack Butala: Planning the Rest of Your Life Today. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: Jack Butala here from Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow from Land Show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about planning the rest of your life today. Jill, is there anything more important than this to do today? Jill: No. Steve: I still do it sometimes. Jill: I love it. Steve: Before we really get into, let's take a question. Jill: Okay. Brian from Seattle called in and asked, "You guys are great. I am all in. How can I convince my wife?" Steve: He's all in. Have you talked to him? Jill: I have talked to him and this is true. Steve: Of course it is, I know. I'm wondering if he's like, is he a member? Jill: [crosstalk 00:00:41] Steve: Is he a member is what I'm asking. Jill: Yeah he is. This is why I actually threw this in here because this is real and I think this comes up more than you realize Steven. Steve: Oh, you're qualified to answer this more than me. Jill: I am qualified to answer this because this is what I told Brian on a couple things. One, have her call me. No, seriously. There's something to be said for that. We women look at things differently. Steve: Really? Jill: You're so silly. Nice. Oh my goodness. All right. We all know it's true. Our gut, we have these things. We see things differently and it's a good thing. You know, if you, how do I say this? When you're looking at something, you want your wife's input. A, she might pick up on something that you missed, so that's a really good thing. Have her evaluate the situation, or the investment, or whatever it is with you. Then, for that reason. B, she better be on board or it's not going to work, so you want her to be all in. That's a good thing. Here's what I tell Brian, a couple things. A, I'm happy to talk to her. B, get her involved, listen to her. C, if she's not sure that this is something, that would be to doing our just buying and selling land and making a profit, agree on a dollar amount. Say hey sweetheart, I want to spend five hundred dollars, buy a property, make some money. I'm going to show it to you as a working example, what do you think? Because that's what he did and she was like, "Oh, I'm in." Steve: That's good. Jill: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Steve: You know, I'm going to have two points to make here. One, you should never get into any partnership or stay in one, whether it's in marriage or a business partnership or any two people doing anything if you're not better together. Jill: True. Steve: Sometimes you find out about that later and you make some changes, but two people have to be better together, so if his wife's concerned it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing, right? Then, my second point is, I have a peeve, you want to hear what it is? Jill: Uh oh, yes. Steve: Don't just say, no you're not going to get into the land business. Say, you know what? I love your spirit. I don't want to work at this job the rest of my life either, but land's not my thing at all, but I would love to own an ice cream shop, or I would love to buy skyscrapers. Land is too small. Let's go bigger. Let's provide a solution too, not just like a bitch. Jill: What your peeve is, just people that just shut down ideas for no reason? Steve: Yeah, or just say no. Like remember your parents used to do that. No. Jill: Steven are you speaking from experience? Where did this peeve come from? Steve: I have spent a lot of time in Detroit. There's a lot of people in Detroit who are, they're just, you know. My dad calls it quietly desperate, which I think is a poem or some crazy quote from some car guy somewhere. Jill: Quietly desperate.