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Today's guest is Dana Cornell.   Dana Cornell is a Certified Investment Management Analyst and Certified Financial Planner, whose passion is to take the uncertainty out of investing and provide consistent returns his clients can count on.   Show summary:  In this podcast episode, Dana Cornell shares his journey from working at Morgan Stanley to starting his own firm, Cornell Capital Holdings. He discusses his focus on income replacement and tax efficiency strategies, as well as his role as a capital raiser for real estate developers. Dana explains how his licenses and certifications as a fiduciary set him apart in the financial world and emphasizes the importance of thorough due diligence in making informed investment decisions. He also discusses his involvement in development projects, particularly in the self-storage sector.    -------------------------------------------------------------- Intro [00:00:00]   Dana Cornell's Background and Starting Cornell Capital Holdings - [00:01:11]   Walking Away and Starting a New Path - [00:02:16]   Focus on Income Replacement and Tax Efficiency Strategies - [00:05:09]   The process of bringing capital to deals - [00:08:59]   The role of a capital raiser for developers - [00:09:28]   The number and types of investment opportunities available - [00:11:59]   Building a Team - [00:19:14]   Demand for Income Replacement - [00:20:09]   Contact Information - [00:21:37] -------------------------------------------------------------- Connect with Dana:   Web: https://cornellcapitalholdings.com/ Email: dana@cornellcapitalholdings.com Book: https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Wealth-Blueprint-Create-Investing-ebook/dp/B097KMXSTY   Connect with Sam: I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/ Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com   SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f -------------------------------------------------------------- Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: Dana Cornell (00:00:00) - So by going and essentially becoming an outsourced team member for our developer, I said to them, Look, I'm going to go raise this money, but you're going to pay me the fee, not the client. So it's very efficient from the client standpoint and it's very efficient from the developer standpoint because they're paying me a few percent. The same thing I used to charge a client, basically, but they deal with me. I handle all that. I raise all the money for them. And on the flip side, the is not paying a fee. So it's very efficient for them unless we're doing some deep planning for them, that type of stuff. And I'll just charge a flat planning fee.   Sam Wilson (00:00:35) - Welcome to the How to scale commercial real estate show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big.   Sam Wilson (00:00:47) - Dana Cornell is a certified investment management analyst and certified financial planner. His passion is to take the uncertainty out of investing and provide consistent returns his clients can count on.   Sam Wilson (00:00:58) - Dana, welcome to the show.   Dana Cornell (00:00:59) - Sam Thanks for having me, my friend.   Sam Wilson (00:01:01) - Absolutely.   Sam Wilson (00:01:02) - The pleasure is mine. Dana There are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show in 90s or less. Can you tell us where did you start? Where are you now and how did you get there?   Dana Cornell (00:01:11) - I'll give it my best shot. So I'm from south of Buffalo, New York. A little town called Olean started pretty typical, you know, middle class family. My father is excavation contractor. My mom was a kindergarten teacher. Didn't really come from money. I didn't know many people that had money. Um, so I started knocking on doors to start talking to people and let them know what I did for a living and see what they needed and how I could help them. That turned into, 17 years later, fortunate to be recognized on the Forbes under 40 list for advisors in the country, best in the state, All that good stuff managed about 1.4 billion with my team and my group at Morgan Stanley and about two years ago decided, you know, I didn't feel like I was doing the best job for my clients, which I'm sure we'll talk about why and how and decided to literally walk away from that, which, as I told you briefly before we started, they asked they asked me if I needed mental health counseling because that's not typically the move in that industry when you reach that level of success.   Dana Cornell (00:02:16) - Um, but I felt strongly about it. I knew there was a better way to build wealth. I knew my ultra wealthy clients did it a different way. And so that's how Cornell Capital Holdings was born.   Sam Wilson (00:02:26) - Wow.   Sam Wilson (00:02:26) - Okay, let's let's let's let's do dive into that a little bit. Walking away because that 1.4 billion in assets under management those are hard earned clients. I mean getting people to put their accounts with you, to trust you with their finances. I mean, that's a that's a tough row to hoe.   Dana Cornell (00:02:44) - It is. It is. Yeah.   Sam Wilson (00:02:47) - And walking and walking away. And when you leave, you leave all your clients behind, essentially.   Dana Cornell (00:02:52) - You have to.   Sam Wilson (00:02:52) - Yeah, you have to.   Sam Wilson (00:02:54) - No wonder. No wonder they asked you. Do you need I mean, you spent 17 years just I mean, beating your head against the desk, getting this done, and now you're like, okay, I got to go. Like, I'm done. Yeah. Have you, have you Let me let me see if there's a nice way to ask this, since you had that move when you when you made that move, was it just like, yes, this is it.   Sam Wilson (00:03:15) - This feels amazing. I'm so glad I did that. And you've never looked back.   Dana Cornell (00:03:19) - Are you asking if they were right, if I needed that mental health counseling?   Sam Wilson (00:03:22) - Don't know. But. No, no, I wasn't asking that.   Dana Cornell (00:03:24) - But no, I have not looked back and I'll tell you why. So, you know, being a traditional financial planner. It's funny. Everybody would always ask me, What's your number? What's the number you need to retire? And it's all relative to what you need, right, and what you spend. Right. But if you reverse that and I talk a lot to my clients now about the reverse financial plan, if you start with income first and buy your time back by buying passive income and being very efficient with it in both not paying tax as best you can and fees to eat away at your your income and your capital. You know that's a it's a much different situation. So when I experienced that for myself investing in real estate syndications and then made the decision that, hey, this is how my ultra wealthy clients have built wealth, this is something I truly you know, I had two little boys show up around the same time.   Dana Cornell (00:04:19) - You know, they're five and and soon to be four now makes it just puts a different perspective on things maybe really reflect internally, hey, am I doing the right thing? So I feel great about what I'm doing and I didn't. You know, so the answer is no. I never looked back. And that's the main reason why, you know, I truly believe in how we're doing it now. And. You got to feel good about what you're doing at the end of the day.   Sam Wilson (00:04:43) - Oh, you do? Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly. Tell me. So what when you when you launch that on your own. How did you decide and what did you decide to focus on? Because you're basically doing the same thing. You've started your own, your own, you know, financial planning firm. But now you can you can call the shots because now you can tell your clients and you can advise your clients, hey, you could invest in this multifamily syndication or whatever it is. I mean, is that the gist?   Dana Cornell (00:05:08) - Exactly.   Dana Cornell (00:05:09) - So so, you know, quite simply, to sum it up, instead of being a more of a generalist, we're just more of a specialist. I focus on your your income replacement and tax efficiency strategies or not working with all of your capital typically. Um, some we do, but most we don't. And it just allowed me to be laser focused on what we're doing and what we're offering. So to answer your question, you know, I had started researching and interviewing different developers and there was a gentleman I knew that that had a similar firm he started 20 years ago, and quite simply they would partner with best in class developers in different asset classes of real estate. And I started with self storage. It's the most I did that because historically as an asset class, it's the most consistent, right? Um, that's where I started. Found a really good team to partner with there. Convince them that they could do more projects if I added fuel to the fire and handle the investor relations on their side.   Dana Cornell (00:06:09) - You know, and I helped coach a lot of developers now to structure their raise, how to find the right investors, how to do all that stuff on one side, and then on the other side, I'm profiling high net worth individuals looking for passive income and tax deductions and matching them to the right projects and teaching them about the risks and where that fits into their portfolio. So that's how it's come together.   Sam Wilson (00:06:31) - Got it. I want to hear your state of the market and interest rates and all of those things and kind of what you're seeing on the development side, maybe as part B here of this showed here today. But maybe before we get there, you said you're only handling portions now of people's income. I think probably previously you're handling the majority of what your clients had and now you're only taking portions of it. How do you how do you structure that? I mean, I think about that just, okay, how do you how do you structure it such that obviously you get paid because you got to still feed your family and I mean, without doing fun to funds and things like that.   Sam Wilson (00:07:06) - How does that process work with you as an advisor helping your clients?   Dana Cornell (00:07:09) - Yeah, so great question. So the beauty of it is, you know, I had worked previously on managing as much of your assets as I could, doing a financial plan charging an annual management fee, very typical wealth management structure. That's fine, but I thought there was a better way to structure the whole thing. So by going and essentially becoming an outsource team member for our developer, I said to them, Look, I'm going to go raise this money, but you're going to pay me the fee, not the client. So it's very efficient from the client standpoint and it's very efficient from the developer standpoint because they're paying me a few percent. The same thing I used to charge a client, basically, but they deal with me. I handle all that. I raise all the money for them. And on the flip side, the is not paying a fee. So it's very efficient for them unless we're doing some deep planning for them, that type of stuff.   Dana Cornell (00:08:01) - And I'll just charge a flat planning fee so it makes it much more economically viable. And the reason I say we deal with typically a portion of their money. Alternative investments are not appropriate for all of your cash. Right. We have liquid alternatives, but you can do that stuff anywhere. You know, I'm not going to charge you 1% to manage your cash and and fixed income exposure. It doesn't make any sense where rates were, especially right now. We can talk a lot about rates if you'd like, but, you know, I'll tell them, look, I can do that for you, but you can do it elsewhere just as efficient and cheaper. All right. Let me add value where I really, truly add value. And that's usually for about half, 40 to 50% of people's liquid net worth.   Sam Wilson (00:08:49) - That's that's really interesting because, I mean, a lot of times what we'll see in the I mean, you're a capital raiser in its own right just with a different kind of spin on things.   Sam Wilson (00:08:59) - And you're doing this through because you have your licenses. You you know, I don't know what they all are probably at this point forgotten a lot of those. There's a lot of probably reporting. I've had too many FINRa licenses over the years and I've kind of blacked out a lot of that. Yeah, it's like I forget a lot of that, but I mean, you have some compliance things to keep up with in reporting things. Maybe they're different than what somebody who doesn't isn't licensed. So how does how does that process work and why have you chosen to go the route you have in bringing capital to deals?   Dana Cornell (00:09:28) - Yeah, you know, I'm glad you brought that up. I appreciate it because I think it's something that sets sets me apart. So from the world I came from, right? I'm a fiduciary based on my licenses and my certifications to the client. Right. A lot of people. And I saw I experienced it myself, you know, going into syndications or a real a private investment of any kind.   Dana Cornell (00:09:50) - Doesn't matter if it's a private investment. It's private meaning the information is not as accessible as buying a publicly listed stock or bond. Sure. So how do you if you don't spend all of your working hours and have 20 years of experience like we bring to do the right due diligence to make sure it's the right fit and then figure out how does that fit into your world as an investor, what percentage, how much you should invest in each project, so on and so forth. So I blend both of those worlds. You're right on one side. I'm a I'm a capital raiser for the developers. I just make it easier for them because I'm one source of capital and I handle all things investor relations and, you know, it makes it streamlined for them. They can go further faster. But I'm really I focus. More on the investor side and being that guide and that bridge to making the right decision. So you're not getting burned, you're not over concentrated. You know what the risks are. I think there's a lot of value being that guy in the middle.   Sam Wilson (00:10:48) - You know how when you're looking because I'm thinking about this and if you're looking at someone's portfolio, what you how many deals do you guys have as available deals to your clients at a time? Because maybe one type of an investment may work for me. I may want you know, I may want something, you know, my stage in life. Like I really don't want necessarily the cash flow right now. I want it to double or triple in the next five years where somebody 75th May want to just flip the coupon. Yep. So how do you have the like what what is your set number of opportunities look like at any given time?   Dana Cornell (00:11:23) - Yeah. So, you know, it's a moving target. It kind of honestly comes by by opportunity and our underwriting process of what deals come through. You're right. So I'm always looking. I spent a lot of my time profiling deals, doing my underwriting, taking it through our process to have different offerings. And we have a menu of probably right now between registered fund offerings that we have access to that you would typically have to put a million or more indirectly to have access and you can get for a much lower minimum with us and the true direct private syndicated deals.   Dana Cornell (00:11:59) - You know, we probably have a menu of ten different options at any point in time, but really of the true privates, 2 or 3 going at one time that are more growth focused cash now, cash later, have your tax advantage trying to hit the main points there. Give them enough opportunity. You know.   Sam Wilson (00:12:17) - How do you stay in front of maybe you just have an amazing team behind you, but how do you stay in front of that many different opportunities and kind of I mean, because that's a lot of communication. That's a lot of I mean, just just reporting back to investors the status of those opportunities and where they're going and what the different moving pieces are like, how do you manage that whole communication flow?   Dana Cornell (00:12:39) - It's leverage. You know, I couldn't do it myself by any means. So it's the the old who to do the whole story. You know, I lean on a lot of other professionals to help me with due diligence to give me third kind of third party non biased opinions on deals.   Dana Cornell (00:12:56) - My team here is handling an awful lot of investor relations and summarizing and synthesizing all that information. So I can then take it, you know, and efficiently kind of put my spin on it and relate it to the investors so I can disseminate that to help them make good decision and keep them updated on what's going on.   Sam Wilson (00:13:15) - Right? No, I think that's great. Tell me a little bit let's let's let's go to part B here of this of this podcast and talk about the. Kind of the state of the economy, what you guys are seeing, especially because it sound like you're doing a lot of development stuff. It's not that you mentioned the word development a couple of times, so it sounds like that's kind of one of the niches that you've picked. Yeah. What's the what's going on in that world? Give us kind of the the the breakdown of where we are and maybe where you see things going.   Dana Cornell (00:13:44) - Yeah. So big question, man. You know, I'm always contrasting in comparing what I call traditional investments, publicly traded stocks and bonds to private alternative offerings.   Dana Cornell (00:13:59) - Um, we could talk about stock market and all that stuff all day long, but I think it's no secret that that market is going to fluctuate. It's going to go up and down. We're coming into an election year. It's going to have good periods. It's going to have bad periods at the end of the day. It's consistency of returns and the predictability of those. That that truly changes the game for people. And that's what you see the ultra wealthy focus on. So when I'm looking at projects, I'm looking at what is the predictability that one of course our principal is protected to if it's an income producing project. And that's why like a lot of our self storage development that where I started. We're building in areas where they have three times the amount of demand or partnering with publicly traded companies to run, operate and eventually acquire those properties. They've checked the box that it all makes sense ahead of time from their standards. So you're borrowing some credibility from a publicly traded company and their team and their resources, right? Instead of, hey, I'm going to I'm going to go out and build my own storage facility.   Dana Cornell (00:15:12) - And I like this spot because I'm biased towards it. And, you know, I think this makes sense and I hope it works. No, there's a lot more going into the research before I'm going to put my name on an offering and put my own money in it because we're doing that, too. You know, I'm not I'm not suggesting anything that we don't have our own capital in one way or another, you know. So.   Sam Wilson (00:15:36) - Think. Go ahead. I'm sorry.   Dana Cornell (00:15:37) - Well, I was just going to say so I think that then leads you to a path of, okay, if it's private investments over public investments where. Right. Real estate. There's a bunch of different flavors of private real estate rates going up so fast. You know, one of the things we did was underwrite all of our projects to historical interest rates. Mm. Commercial real estate historical rates are about 6.5%. Give, give or take. Right. That's what we underwrote that to. Plus a cushion. A lot of projects I saw over the last two years.   Dana Cornell (00:16:13) - We're underwriting the current rates plus a cushion in their pro forma. Well, I have 20 years of experience of seeing rates fall. I know they're not going to stay low. That's the new normal for people. But that's not our reality. That's not the historical average. We haven't been there in the last 30 years. We were for the last few. But if you're not building in that cushion, you're going to see a lot of trouble in a lot of asset classes within real estate and a lot of individual projects. So those are some of the things we're looking at. That's why you've heard me mention development, because I think you can kind of pick and choose your spots there. Um, not to say there's not issues there. It comes down to the project and the developer at the end of the day.   Sam Wilson (00:16:53) - Right. No, absolutely. You've mentioned a couple of things, and I want to hear your thoughts on this. You said the two things that you're really working with people on is income replacement and tax abatement.   Sam Wilson (00:17:04) - On the income replacement side of things, how? Because of where interest rates have been climbing, like how how have you combated that in its own right because preferred returns of whatever they were 7% 6% in 2019 were pretty attractive, but 7% in 2023 is like, okay, I can get five and a half at the credit union. So exactly it and I can get it out tomorrow is not tied up for five years. So what are you doing on that front to kind of structure things creatively?   Dana Cornell (00:17:35) - Yeah. So, you know, it's I talked to developers about this a lot, so it's knowing your marketplace and knowing where you're at in this market cycle. And you're right. So now the risk free rate of money, you've got to beat five 5% to make it even worth your time to get out of bed. Correct. So how do you change your offer and how do I find offerings that are more income focused in more of a really right now, a lot of what we've been doing is not as much growth focused, right? It's cash flowing properties or soon to be cash flowing properties at enough of a of a current yield to make it worth you know it is the eight, nine, 10% income.   Dana Cornell (00:18:15) - Right. Um, and it's looking at other asset classes, you know, real estate's great, but you got to keep your eyes open for everything. We do a lot of small business acquisition as well. Um, you move to where the risk isn't as much and in turn that creates more opportunity. And right now it's higher income tax deduction and less growth type strategy That seemed to work right now.   Sam Wilson (00:18:39) - Right. Oh, man, that's really, really cool. I love I love what you've done here. Dana. This is really cool. The just the I mean, leaving big business, leaving a $1.4 billion portfolio of assets under management to go do what you really feel in your heart is the right thing to do. I think is is admirable. And you know, it's it's cool to watch. Just see what you've done that on that side of things. Let's talk let's talk staff, building teams, those sorts of things. We touched on this slightly, but when you venture out on your own and and maybe you already knew, you're like, okay, I'm going to step out and it's going to be a home run.   Sam Wilson (00:19:14) - I have no I don't think this would be a problem at all. But or maybe there was some apprehension as you went out on your own and said, we're going to launch this thing. What's it been like building a team around you to help you guys run your day to day operations?   Dana Cornell (00:19:25) - Yeah, you know, it's it's been an interesting learning curve. When I left, I thought I could be. I thought I'd be more of a and I still am, but I thought it'd be more of a lifestyle type situation, kind of a one man band, limited staff, that type of thing. What surprised me, even though I knew and it proved concept, was the demand for people looking for the two main issues I solve for, you know, income replacement, passive income by cash flow don't pay tax on it. That's our core thesis, right? So the amount of investors reaching out, wanting help with that, whether it be on the planning side or just implementation of that, was overwhelming.   Dana Cornell (00:20:09) - So Morgan Stanley taught me about I mean, that's the beauty of a corporate structure. You see. You see how that works. You see how teams are built, an organizational structure, but it's also done for you, right? So I had to spend a lot of time increasing my learning curve and finding the right people. And that took a while. You know, we went through a few people that I thought were the right spots initially, and initially they probably were. But the business evolved so quickly, you know, we kind of had to increase capacity and increase the capacity of our people to fulfill that spot. So yeah, man, it's been a it's been a learning curve and it's a continuation of that learning curve as we continue to grow, Right?   Sam Wilson (00:20:54) - No, that's cool. That's cool. Thank you for taking the time to share that with us, Dana, And thank you all for taking the time to come on the show today and just tell us what motivates you, What makes you get out of bed and why you're excited about doing what you're doing right now.   Sam Wilson (00:21:07) - I think it's awesome. And I really appreciate it, too, because me and the number of financial advisors and financial professionals I talked to that are just their hands are tied. I mean, they're like, Man, I love what you're doing. I love, you know, I love that private real estate, private syndication, private business, any of those types of investments there. Like we can't touch with a ten foot pole. We just we're just forbidden from from doing so. So thanks for stepping out and doing what you're doing. This is. Great if our listeners want to get in touch with you and learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?   Dana Cornell (00:21:37) - Our website, Cornell Capital Holdings with an you can join our investor network. There's a button on there and you can email me directly. It's just Dana at Cornell Capital Holdings within. Com. Tim Thanks for having me on, man. This has been fun. Thanks for letting me tell my story.   Sam Wilson (00:21:52) - Absolutely. Thank you for telling it again.   Sam Wilson (00:21:54) - Cornell Capital Holdings. We'll make sure we include that there in the show notes. You get the spelling on that. Exactly correct. Cornell Capital Holdings. Dana, thank you again. The pleasure was all mine. Thanks, Sam. Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.

Even though a vacancy can be painful for an investor, leasing doesn't have to be the biggest hat a property manager has to wear. Join property management growth expert Jason Hull to talk about the topic of the property management Summer busy season with Tim and Larry from Tenant Turner.  You'll Learn [02:55] When is the right time to automate? [07:52] Why being cheap leads to bad clients [14:34] Staying competitive in the slow season [18:04] The multifamily market oversupply [22:13] Lockboxes and self-showings Tweetables “The most important currency related to growth is not cash, it's focus.” “It's really stupid, in contrast, to hold onto the moldy peanuts in the monkey trap because you don't want to let go and not get your hand out because you just want to be cheap.” “I find that cheap business owners attract cheap clients and they don't grow and scale their businesses.” “Even if you only have, you know, one door, eight doors, 10 doors, any vacancy is painful.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: I find that cheap business owners attract cheap clients and they don't grow and scale their businesses. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, "well, I'm being cheap and I'm being frugal, and that's smart." It's not smart when it comes to business, and it's not smart when it comes to growth.  [00:00:17] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate, think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, along with Sarah Hull, the COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show, and our guests today are Tim Wallace and Larry Hancock of Tenant Turner. Welcome you two.  [00:01:27] Tim: Thanks for having us.  [00:01:28] Larry: Yeah, thanks for having us.  [00:01:29] Jason: So does everybody there have red hair now? Is this the thing? [00:01:32] Tim: We're slowly taking over the world.  [00:01:34] Larry: Like it's just-- gingers unite-- job application requirement. [00:01:37] Jason: That sounds like a really good t-shirt.  [00:01:40] Sarah: I like it. Yeah. "Are you willing to dye your hair?" [00:01:43] Jason: That'd be the strangest thing. Yeah. "It's part of the, it's part of the uniform." All right. Awesome. Well, it's good to have you both and you know, we really appreciate you being a sponsor for our DoorGrow events and doing some cool stuff with us. And Tim, you actually sold Sarah Tenant Turner previously. Oh, Larry did. Larry sold Sarah Tenant Turner. Yeah. You can't have the credit, Tim. Sorry. It's Larry. Larry did this. He closed the deal in Sarah's property management business that she's since sold, but they're still using Tenant Turner.  [00:02:17] Sarah: They do use tenant turner. [00:02:19] Jason: There you go. So awesome. So our topic today is scaling up your leasing process during the busy season, which is right now, right? It's summer, things heat up. And what's interesting, if you do go onto Google Trends, trends.google.com and look at the keyword "property management" and you backdate it for like a decade and you'll see these, it just spikes. It doesn't go up like it's not growing in search volume, but property management spikes every summer and goes down in the winter. And that's probably how leasing works as well in property management. So what, where should we start with scaling up your leasing process during the busy season? [00:02:59] Larry: So what's interesting is it's almost like a catch 22 for our customers. So for folks that aren't using any kind of automation, they're like, "I really need your services, but I'm just too darn busy to even consider it." I'm like, "ah! Why didn't you talk to us just a few months earlier?" And then you got the opposite side where some customers are like, "I'm not busy enough to consider your services." so we're always trying to, you know, have these conversation with these people why automation's beneficial for them. Whether they're in a stage where they're just, you know, drinking from a fire hydrant and they're just trying to just figure things out while they're in the busy leasing season. Or maybe you are using automation and it's just a matter of creating efficiencies. So that way you can continually grow your business. So, typically that's how we'll start our conversation is kind of where are you at right now? Are you kind of just struggling to stay afloat and you need to add some automation into your life, or do you have the automation and it's just creating those efficiencies in your business? [00:03:53] Jason: So how do you help people that say they're not busy enough justify leveraging and getting tenure turner?  [00:04:02] Larry: Yeah. So from there it's really. Trying to get them more in the head space of like, "I understand that for now. But let's figure out how we can create value here." So maybe I'm getting them in a place of, you know, let's build the building blocks. "We're not going to create your account just yet, but in a perfect world, when you are busy and need our services, let's kind of back out what the steps are to get there." Sometimes maybe their portfolio isn't large enough. So then that would be a time when I would recommend to someone like you, Jason, where it's like, "Hey, you need to be a part of a program where you can, you know, grow your portfolio because he's going to help you grow your portfolio and then you're going to need us because you're only one person." so I'll try to get them in that kind of head space. But it's really almost building their tech stack. So while we're an important piece to that whole thing there's other moving parts to the entire system. So that's usually how I start. It's really more playing a consolidative role. [00:04:55] So I'm trying to consult them, figure out where they're at in the process. And if they're not a good fit for us that day, that's okay. Maybe they will be. And then I'm going to set a reminder to reach out before they're busy losing season basically.  [00:05:07] Jason: So where is that kind of cutoff point to where they've achieved, you know, Tenant Turner readiness status? [00:05:17] Larry: So sometimes people will view it from like a portfolio size. I think it's really more about the entrepreneurial mindset. I met some people where they have just one door and they're like, "Hey Larry, I'm going to be a hundred units by the end of the year." I'm like, "that's awesome man. You know, it's great you're kind of trying to build this plane before you're trying to take off," where sometimes I talk to customers, they're like, "Hey, We're flying this plane. The wings are about to fall off. And I just don't know what to do." I'm like, "okay--" [00:05:42] Jason: I'm going to build it in the air. I'm working on it.  [00:05:45] Larry: I know. It's like, "all right, well I appreciate you, you know, diving ahead first, but you're probably really stressed out right now." So, typically in our world, our pricing model, month to month, no contracts. So one to 50 units you're fine. We're going to talk to you. We're not going to be like, "oh you're too small for us, man. Like, I just can't talk to you." We have a great culture in that way. We try to be that partner with them. But typically our general rule of thumb is if you expect to have any vacancy, whether it's one throughout the entire year, you should at least consider us. Even if it's only one month out of the entire year we'll still talk to you.  [00:06:16] Jason: Yeah.  [00:06:17] Sarah: Yeah. And I think something that people don't always realize is even if you're like, I don't need it right now, I'm not ready, I don't have enough. It's going to make it so much easier if you have systems in place already, so that you can scale so that when you scale, you're not now in massive amounts of pain. And even if you only have, you know, one door, eight doors, 10 doors, any vacancy is painful. Yeah, any vacancy is painful and it's going to help you massively, not only just in your time and your effort, but it will make your clients happier. Like when I implemented Tenant Turner, my vacancy rate like took a nosedive. Now, not that I had a high vacancy rate. But like just trying to like market and figure out where to put these things and answering all the messages and doing a gazillion showings for people that might not even qualify. You know, it was taking sometimes like weeks to fill a vacancy. And when I implemented that, it went down dramatically. So clients are much, much happier and you and your staff are going to be much, much happier because now it's a lot less work for you.  [00:07:28] Larry: Yeah and kind of building on that, Sarah, we kind of find our solution is almost like a an aspirin approach. So people are kind of taking that aspirin when they have a headache in the form of vacancy. And there is a time and place to pop the aspirin, but usually what's a lot better is kind of plan ahead of, "oh, I know I could have headaches during this time of the year, so I'm going to be a little bit more you know, I'm going to prepare, I'm going to be more proactive." where I see people have the right mindset in regards to software is usually what they'll do is they'll annualize the cost and then figure out how to generate enough ROI. So if I'm able to save. Five hours per week, you know, and I annual analyze the software in such a way I don't need to worry about it because I've looked at the 12 month period and I know I'm going to get my value that way. It's a little bit harder when you're trying to convince people when they're kind of penny pitching and it's like you're wasting all this time on that part and that time worrying about it, you just wasted where you could be attracting new owners. So the mindset really is kind of analyzing the software, but trying to build the ROI into that. [00:08:31] Sarah: I have to say like I was hesitant for a while because I was like, "well, this is easy and like I have this streamlined process" and really, I said this to you. I was like, "I just don't spend that much time." I had 200 and like some odd units, like 260 I think at my highest. And when I was talking with you, I was like, "you know, I just don't spend that much time doing it. So is there a benefit to it? Yes, but how much time am I really going to save? Because I feel like it's already something that is simple for me." And even though I had this streamlined and I had processes to find and I maybe was spending a couple hours a week doing, you know, messaging and email and confirmations and stuff like that. [00:09:14] I was still spending time doing it. When I implemented Tenant Turner, then I was like, "oh, I don't have anything to do." Like every once in a while I have to just pop in and you have to like manually approve somebody. And then once, like I updated my showing schedule once a week. So once a week I had to go in and update the showing schedule for the upcoming week, which took all of maybe four minutes. And other than that, I was just popping in and kind of like manually approving people. And I was spending, I went from maybe a few hours a week, which I still didn't think was a lot to minutes per week. And I was like, "oh wow. Okay. I see it now. I see it." But sometimes they think you have to experience it to see it. Because I was like, "I just don't know!" And I was really glad that I did it because it really like, it took so much. And sometimes when you make a change like that, then you realize how much work you are actually doing. Because we rationalize, we're like, "it's not that hard. It doesn't take me that long. Like I just send a couple emails," and then when you realize, "oh, I don't have to do any of that anymore." it was like mind blowing to me. I was like, "oh, like this literally takes me like 10 minutes a week and that's it." So all my leasing was done in 10 minutes.  [00:10:33] Jason: I think that's one of my favorite ways to justify an expense is you have to look at the opportunity cost because if you're just looking, you're like, "okay, well it costs me this much money and if I do it myself, then it's free. But your time is the most valuable resource you have in a business-- not free-- and the most important currency related to growth is not cash. It's focus. And if your focus is diluted as a business owner away from what can generate more revenue, then the opportunity cost is huge in two to three hours you could be closing deals that are worth tens of thousands of dollars over that year. So it's really stupid in contrast to like hold onto the moldy peanuts in the monkey trap because you don't want to let go and not get your hand out because you just want to be cheap. [00:11:22] And so I find that cheap business owners attract cheap clients and they don't grow and scale their businesses. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, "well, I'm being cheap and I'm being frugal, and that's smart." It's not smart when it comes to business, and it's not smart when it comes to growth. You need to let go of those moldy peanuts. There's bananas in reach and the farmer's going to come along and chop off your head. And this is why most businesses fail. Most businesses fail in the-- or they get stuck-- first year or the first five years. A lot fail and property management is tough. And I see, I see a lot.  [00:11:55] Sarah: They get, they just get stuck and they're trapped. "I don't have more time. I can't do anything else. Like, I don't know what else I can do in making these little changes." Like I'm going to be honest with you, I like, I bought into the product and I still wasn't like, "ah, I think that's going to be amazing." I was like, "it'll help me." And it helped way more than I thought it was going to help me. I would say this is like 1. Was implementing a property management software and 2. Was implementing tenant Turner. Those are the two things that like made a massive shift in my business for me. [00:12:28] Jason: Nice.  [00:12:29] Sarah: And I almost wish I could have told myself like, "Hey, remember when you had 260 units and you were doing it all yourself? You should have been talking to Tenant Turner.  [00:12:37] Jason: There was some guy that had mentioned these things to you. [00:12:40] Sarah: I know! [00:12:40] Jason: He's pretty smart.  [00:12:41] Tim: I think even if you are in that cheap mindset, like at the end of the day, like vacancy is what's going to cost your owners the most money down the road too. Like one day on the market can cost them anywhere from what, 50 to $200 depending on what they're paying for their mortgage and everything. Like those costs add up and it's as property managers, it's your fiduciary duty to help them recoup that money. And if you're spending too much time on those types of things, even if you're focused on your business and spending time on that, you could still be losing that money by having those extra days on market without this type of system. [00:13:11] Sarah: Absolutely, and I think the conversation that I have with people over and over again is you need to figure out what this particular task is worth in dollars. So if this is like a $10 an hour task, a $20 an hour task, Is it something that you, as a business owner need to be doing? Is your time worth more than 10 or $20 an hour? And if the answer to that question is yes, then you need to not be the one who's doing this.  [00:13:35] Jason: Yeah. If a business owner, and a lot of business owners are the BDM, they are the business development manager. They are the person that's doing sales and generating revenue and growing the business. And if you do not as a business owner, have a full-time BDM. [00:13:49] You have somebody focused on this and it's on your shoulders, then you're a shitty part-time salesperson. You're maybe investing, I find one, maybe two hours a day. That's like 10 hours a week focusing on growing the business. And so everything else other than that should be offloaded that you can everything else. Give up the leasing stuff as much as you can, give up the maintenance stuff as much as you can, like you need to be focused on generating revenue until you can offload that piece and focus. Otherwise, you're not going to grow. And if any business owner is listening to this in property management, if you haven't grown significantly over the last year or two or three, it's because you are doing the wrong things as a business owner in the business. Plain and simple, there's no way around that. So we chatted about justifying it for those that are already, they have lots of doors and they're, you know, how do we deal with making things scalable during the busy season? And then things really for leasing tend to really cool down in the winter months. And so what are you typically seeing with clients that come to you that are maybe at a 200 plus doors or it's obvious that you can serve them. [00:15:02] Tim: I mean, even if you do have 200 doors sure, summertime's going to be the busiest, where generally speaking, you could have anywhere from what, five to 12% vacancy rates and whatnot with turnovers and whatnot. During the wintertime, there still might be one or two that hit every month. And what we're noticing with customers that size is that throughout the year we kind of keep things with that month to month rate really low for everyone. [00:15:24] It's based on portfolio size for us. And so most people are keeping that active because even one listing, like you're saying, if you're working on one listing, spending two or three hours on that one listing, even getting to go back and forth with the messages, the emails and everything like that could still be costing you more than what your monthly rate for subscription might be. So a lot of people do keep us going year round and have the lock boxes and things like that in service for vendors and stuff that might need to come and go for properties as well. So, there's lots of different little solutions that we provide there too that kind of help keep the business flowing smoothly, but generally speaking, we're there when they need us and any spot in the road where if it's crazy or if it's just a little bit, we try to keep the system smooth all year for them.  [00:16:10] Larry: I guess to add to that so typically when things are slow, usually people are saying, "I'm not getting enough leads." really what they mean is they're not getting enough leads from, you know, Zillow, Trulia, the big networks. And when they come to us and say, "Hey, what do I do? What can Tenant Turner provide?" That's usually when I tell them like, "you're really going to hunker down and how are you going to be different than your competition?" and that's also times when like, you know, "let's look at your website. You know, are you being an industry leader in your market?" So maybe they're not going to the Zillows, but when they search, or, you know, what is your web, your presence in your market? Automation's great and you definitely should automate, but then there's also times to be that personalized touch. So when things are slow, what aren't your competitors doing? If they're leaning really heavy where they can't talk to a person at all maybe you should go to what we call the 'take request model,' where we're automating things, we're pre-qualifying, and then we're setting, you know, a couple days and times. But before an appointment's approved, you get to talk to that lead. And really what you're doing, you're leveraging yourself. You introduce yourself, you say why you're great and you're market maybe some key differentiators. And then you schedule an appointment. And you do a couple things. What I like to say is you're doing what's called a vibes test just to make sure both of you are, you know, a good fit, rather to rent the property and that type of stuff. And also you're making sure they have a heartbeat. Making sure, you know, if you're using self-guided tours, it's another security layer to everything. Because at the end of the day, I'm a big fan of it's the, a book called Rework by the guys who created Basecamp. And the whole philosophy is that it's not that in a world where people saying, "I need more of this," whether it's "I need more leads" or "I need more tools," it's more utilizing the tools that you already have more efficiently. So when we look at things like lead flow, maybe it's not necessarily a top of the funnel problem, it's more of a bottom of the funnel conversion problem. And then when you use personalization to a lot of interesting ways, like I mentioned. [00:18:04] Jason: So one of the things that I think is happening a bit throughout the US and I've had some podcast guests touch on this, is that in some markets-- and I've heard some some property managers anecdotally share this with me as well-- they're having a difficulty getting tenants because the inventory as a result of the pandemic just went up, skyrocketed. A lot of people are like, "Hey, let's build, let's create a bunch of investments." Now there's a surplus of inventory and that creates a scarcity of tenants, and so they're having to get a little bit more aggressive. What strategies Have you guys seen, or you know, because you're connected to a lot of people that are doing leasing, how are they becoming more attractive to tenants than their competition? [00:18:48] Tim: You want to start or? So there's a lot of different things out there, like different solutions, whether it's providing something like a benefits package to your residents, things like that really making your listings stand out. If it's better photography, if it's better marketing in general for stuff. But generally speaking, we are kind of seeing that trend as well, where days on market are expanding a little bit. It's kind of a trend that's-- we were kind of in a goldlock zone for the last couple of years with rentals. Like it's been amazing and pre covid it wasn't ever really like that either. Like that we're kind of seeing the ebbs and flows of the market, and that's just natural in real estate. So, we're coming back to the time where people are like, kind of hunkering down and making sure that their properties are as good as they can be to really attract the best tenants for them. So while there might be a few extra days on market, there's a couple things you can do around there. Like Larry's saying, adding those personal touches in there. Setting up notifications so that as soon as someone gets to the property, you can still have that personal touch by making a phone call as soon as you can see they got into the property. Or if maybe some people are doing a few more in-person showings, if that's the case. Generally speaking, that's putting more time on the property as well, which, like we talked about, costs opportunity costs.  [00:20:00] If you got the team to do that, and that's kind of their role as a leasing agent or whatnot, great. They can have that personal touch and then go a little bit further with them. But if you're also focused on self showings having that additional personal touch, some additional marketing on the property or whatnot, I can kind of help draw that process out a little bit sooner. And really with our system, it. We really try to provide as much immediacy as possible. So when someone sees a listing on a site like Zillow, for instance they're clicking request information. We're sending them an email right away that they have the opportunity to come into Tenant Turner and click a link and schedule a tour right away. If they're calling into us, they're not going to a voicemail. They're going to be sitting there waiting three days for someone to respond to. I know that's a trend of the industry. A lot of people have massively filled inbox inboxes that they just can't handle. So tenant leads never hear back from anyone because they kind of pick and choose. We're responding to every single one of those leads as they come in and making sure that immediacy is really driving that engagement.  [00:20:59] So if we keep that engagement up for everyone the goal is that, generally speaking, that alone will really help drive. What's, I think there's a statistic out there? If you respond within five minutes, generally speaking, you're going to get 80% more acceptance in terms of a conversation. Yeah. There's that click or an actual phone call, things like that, like providing that immediacy is a massive, and it goes a long way for impressing tenant leads on the consumer side, but also in, in business. We all know B two B sales and even BDMs like calling their owners. As soon as you see a click on a website, you want to call them. So we want to keep that trend going on our side as well.  [00:21:33] Jason: Yeah, this is the TikTok generation man. They have attention spans of like two minutes, you know, it's like really short. So I love these ideas. So pushing owners to improve the property I think is a great strategy. Increasing your availability and your responsiveness and that immediacy, quick, beat, slow for sure in business. Increasing the ease Tenent Turner helps with. And then making sure that you are able to be super responsive within the first five minutes. So yeah. Love it. All right, cool. What else should we chat about related to scaling up your process during the busy season? Did we miss anything?  [00:22:12] Larry: We got it. I know typically the elephant in the room, so a lot of times, you know, self-guided tours is the golden child of, you know, why you should consider it and how it's helpful, whether it's busy or slow and this, that, and the other. But one of the things that we had is for people that aren't using it and it's like, "I would never consider that or I'm scared to use this or I can never get owner buy-in." And that's kind of always the elephant in the room. I know Tim, you have some very interesting data of, you know, while, you know, like anything in business there are inherent risks, but as business owners every day we are willing to kind of, you know, improve or, you know, try to tackle these risks. And there's usually a pot-- not all the time, but you know, a pot of gold can be waiting for you. So was there any data that you wanted to share, Tim?  [00:22:56] Jason: Before we get into that, let's kill that objection real quick. because I hear this all the time too. So I say, "Hey, maybe you should be using Tenant Turner or something like this," and they say, "well, I don't want to do lock boxes." And my response is, "you don't have to." like, there's a lot of benefits besides that piece. In fact, there's plenty of benefits besides that piece. And so maybe you can address that real quick and then we can talk about is that even really a valid concern or not? And are there markets that are better for lockbox versus others? Some are like, "I can never do that in my market. I'll have squatters all over the place." you know, they're concerned. So let's address that, that elephant in the room.  [00:23:34] Tim: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you guys know your properties best. You're going to know which areas might have a high potential for negativity happening. Whether it's someone coming in and stealing wires, the horror stories of people stealing appliances and stuff like that. At the end of the day, if someone wants to do something bad, A lockbox or a keyless lock isn't necessarily going to stop someone in that scenario, right? We all know areas where people aren't afraid to break a window and get in, steal a refrigerator. Like the fact that a property isn't known to be vacant is a big enough red flag alone that most people that want to do something nefarious will go ahead and do it. But at the same time on our side of things, if we can block as many of those instances as possible with our abilities to kind of keep track of known scammers and squatters and things like that. We've got some stuff built into our system, but really at the end of the day, if someone wants to do something bad, it's going to happen. But generally speaking, most people that are doing showings, that type of scenario, if you're, you know, your area, if you're doing your own kind of awareness inspections periodically and you're on top of the property yourself, we barely hear of any instances of negativity happening with those scenarios. Like self showings, we can come up with the horror stories, but at the end of the day, in our experience, they are really few and far between and we're not having major issues, at least more than what you would on average. See, with any property that's being marketed, it's vacant. Like that's, it's going to happen.  [00:24:56] Jason: And there's some serious advantages because, I would imagine the best defense, period, against all of those type of problems is just getting it leased out as quick as possible. Yep. It's decreasing vacancy, and so if a lockbox can help them get into it right away, get a showing right away, whatever, decreasing the vacancy time is probably your best, you know, defense.  [00:25:18] Sarah: Yeah. The other thing I'll add to this too, is if there are people who are kind of scoping out the property and they notice, hey, like every Tuesday at six o'clock people come and then that's it. They're not going to come at Tuesday at six o'clock. They're going to come at other times. Yeah. So if we do have a lockbox on it, and now we don't really know, like when people are going to come because they're coming whenever is like convenient for them. So it might be earlier in the morning or in the afternoon or late at night. We don't know for sure. There's not so much predictability in the schedule. So I think that's something that would help as well is if there's someone who's " Hey, that house over there is vacant. Let's like check that out." But they consistently see people in and out of it, that is a little bit of a deterrent as well, because you never know, like, "Hey, if I go over there because I want to steal that refrigerator, am I walking into someone who's already there? [00:26:14] Jason: Now you can not have a big old sign on the property out front that says, "Hey, this is vacant right now. Do you want to see this?" You know, but you can still market it online without like giving out the address until they're ready to do a showing probably.  [00:26:29] Larry: Yeah, so there's some kind of tips and tricks that we've found. So one thing is not advertising it as a self-guided tour. If you're going to use verbiage in the marketing description, use contactless showing. Because that could mean virtual tours, it could mean other things. But really for us, I like to describe ourselves as a closed loop system. because usually leads are only interacting with our platform if they find out through your website or through a syndication site. So it makes it much more harder to shop for homes because they really don't know, you know, but if they inquire, then that's when the automation will engage. Some interesting things, you know, kind of like Sarah said, one thing deterrent is they see activity, but you know, we find that a lead isn't going to put a government Id answer some questions and go through this process. Why would they do that when they could just go to the front door? You could go to YouTube and learn how to pick a lock and under five minutes, and then no one's going to know I'm on the radar. It's so much easier to do that. Especially in the age of TikTok. I'm sure there's a TikTok, within two minutes or less you'll learn how to pick a lock or pop open a lockbox or something like that too. [00:27:34] Sarah: Or break a window.  [00:27:35] Larry: Or break a window.  [00:27:37] Jason: Yeah, it's a little bit quicker probably. All right, cool. So, how can people get in touch with Tenant Turner and reach out to you guys?  [00:27:48] Larry: Yeah, so obviously if they want to learn a little bit about our services, tenantturner.com. My name's Larry, larry@tenantturner.com. Feel free to email me directly. I kind of deem myself as a software nerd so you know, any questions about whether you use this or not, that's fine. You know, I'm always happy to share tips and tricks of how to automate your process, so that's kind of how you learn some more.  [00:28:12] Tim: So Larry's on the sales side of things for tenant Turner. I'm on the marketing side too, so if you ever need any additional materials or data and statistics around the self showings, if you want to help market to your owners and whatnot, if you've already signed up with Tenant Turner, happy to kind of jump on that side of things. You can email me at tim@tenantturner.com. [00:28:26] Jason: Awesome. I'm sure that's a big part of it is really if they understand how to sell it to their clients, then that's probably the biggest hurdle. Is just being able to confidently say, here's why this is a good idea and how it's going to benefit you and to sell them on it. So, awesome. Well it's been great having you both here on the show. We appreciate Tenant Turner. We get great feedback on tenant Turner from our clients, so we've always felt very confident pushing our clients towards you as one part of their growth strategy and and I hope you guys have an awesome week.  [00:28:59] Larry: Thanks. You as well. We appreciate you guys and thanks for including us. [00:29:02] Jason: All right. So if you are a property management entrepreneur that is wanting to grow your business, reach out to Tenant Turner and make sure you reach out to DoorGrow. We are really good at helping our clients scale if you feel like you need more doors to be able to afford Tenant Turner or to be able to justify tenant Turner. We're really good at helping people do that. Anything else we should add? I don't think so. Let's tell them to join our Facebook group. Join our Facebook group.  [00:29:28] There you go. DoorGrow club.com. Join our Facebook group community. We have some free stuff in there. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.  [00:29:37] Jason Hull: You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:30:04] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

We're back for Episode 78! In this episode Cody and Eric catch up on the news + Battle Of The 8-Bit Brawlers. We are doing news for the first monthly episode and then "catching up" later in the month.   Episode Guide --------------- 6:34 Quick Questions  19:48 Giveaway! 27:10 Errata 34:35 Patreon 39:34 Eric's Take - Crown Jewels w/10MARC  1:10:06 Tea Time With Tim - PS Vita 1:24:18 News 2:28:48 Battle Of The Systems - River City Ransom (NES) vs Dynamite Dux (SMS)   NEWS -------- (Cody) Breaking News! - https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/03/hooray-universal-studios-hollywood-will-be-getting-its-own-super-nintendo-world  (Cody) https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/03/f-zero-x-is-now-available-on-switch-onlines-expansion-pack  (Cody) https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/03/konami-announces-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-the-cowabunga-collection-for-switch  (Cody) https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/03/advance-wars-1plus2-re-boot-camp-delayed-in-light-of-recent-world-events  (Cody) - Capcom Fighting Collection https://www.capcom-games.com/cfc/en-us/  (Tim) - New game by show Partreon and game coding wonder, Roy Feilding (@Roysterini) - Turdle for the C64 released under the Megastyle label, is a slightly stinky play on the popular Wordle word guessing game. Turdle initially started as a silly idea for the RESET 4Kb Craptastic Compo for C64, but I decided to embellish on it a little and release it now, while there's still steam rising off it. Now available for free on Roy's itch.io page. You can even play it in the browser from the itch.io page!  roysterini.itch.io/turdle64  (Eric) - JAGAIOA: Amp'd Edition (Jaguar Video device) - https://www.retrorgb.com/jagaioa-ampd-edition.html  (Tim) - Itch.Io Bundle for Ukraine - The people of Ukraine are under attack. As game developers we want to create new worlds, not to destroy the one we have. That's why we've banded together to present this charity bundle to help Ukrainians survive this ordeal and thrive after the war ends. This cause has resonated with creators around the globe, to the extent that our bundle contains almost 1,000 games, tabletop RPGs, books, etc. All this for a minimum donation of $10 but please give more to this cause.   https://itch.io/b/1316/bundle-for-ukraine  (Cody) https://retrododo.com/tank-mouse/  (Cody) Evercade released in USA plus more releases! https://evercade.co.uk/cartridges/  (Eric) Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition - Hot News as a glorious in development C64 edition gets a demo - http://www.indieretronews.com/2022/03/street-fighter-2-champion-edition-hot.html  (Tim) - Thanks to Doug @10marc for the heads up on this. Tutankham C64 - This game for Commodore 64 is the port of Tutankham, an arcade game developed by Konami in 1982. This port was developed by LC-Games and is available on itch.io now and you can name your price:  https://lowcarb.itch.io/tutankham-c64  (Cody) http://www.indieretronews.com/2022/01/final-assault-rather-impressive-fps-by.html  (Eric) - Tiny Combat Arena released in Early Beta for 13.99 on Steam! - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1347550/Tiny_Combat_Arena/  (Cody) Vampire Survivors - https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/19/22941145/vampire-survivors-early-access-steam-pc-mac-luca-galante  (Eric) Souverän Soccer - This in development footy game for the Amiga (and CD32) looks very decent indeed! - http://www.indieretronews.com/2022/02/souveran-soccer-this-in-development.html    Cody – Uncharted, Cuphead, Twisted metal  https://www.netflix.com/title/80242531  https://twitter.com/RottenTomatoes/status/1498375793184964613?s=20&t=DBcXVGvNOgMwf-qz_MihAw  (Eric) - Save your carts ROMs *AND* saves with this device! - https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/02/this-device-could-end-up-being-essential-for-all-retro-gamers  (Cody) Lyman Sheats https://www.destructoid.com/lyman-f-sheats-pinball-obituary-rip/  (Cody) Sega Exits Arcades - https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-01-28-sega-exits-the-arcade-business-after-56-years  (Tim) - The Hair Nett BBS is now live. This is for all you BBS geeks out there that want a peek back to a BBS that was run from the early 90's to 1999 when it was shut down, this BBS is from Rod Hull of The Future Was 8 Bit. Tim and Eric have been involved with testing the BBS before it went public. It contains 1000's of downloadable files and BBS messages that have not been seen since the 90's along with Multi line chat and Door games like Casino and !Command a missile command game in ANSI.  Connecting is easy using SyncTerm for Windows or for bonus points you can use a WiFi modem with your 16bit systems like an Amiga or Atari ST. C64 support will be available soon.  The.hairnettbbs.com port 6502  (Eric) Never a better time to be a MiSTer owner - https://www.retrorgb.com/mister-fpga-updates-psx-sega-saturn-atari-jaguar-core-news-and-more.html  (Eric) Hundreds of sealed retro games discovered in Nebraska storage facility - https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2022-02-18-hundreds-of-sealed-retro-games-discovered-in-nebraska-storage-facility    Please give us a review on Apple Podcasts! Thanks for listening! You can always reach us at podcast@pixelgaiden.com. Send us an email if we missed anything in the show notes you need. You can now support us on Patreon.  Thank you to Henrik Ladefoged, Roy Fielding, Garry Heather, Matthew Ackerman, Josh Malone, Daniel James, 10MARC, Eric Sandgren, David Motowylak, Team Gray All The Way, Maciej Sosnowski, Paradroyd, RAM OK ROM OK, Mitsoyama, David Vincent, Ant Stiller, CityXen, Hermski, VaderGB, Mr. Toast, Jason Holland, Mark Scott, AmiWest, John "Boat Of Car" Shawler and Dustin Newell for making this show possible through their generous donation to the show. Support our sponsor Retro Rewind for all of your Commodore needs! Use our page at https://retrorewind.ca/pixelgaiden and our discount code PG10 for 10% off any order!

Sara: Welcome to another episode of Copyright Chat. Today I have a special guest and member of the ALA Policy Core. I, too, am a member of policy core cohort three, and so is my guest today Timothy Vollmer welcome Timothy. Tim: Thanks for having me on. Sara: And so, I'll call you Tim for […]

Sara: Welcome to another episode of Copyright Chat. Today I have a special guest and member of the ALA Policy Core. I, too,  am a member of policy core cohort three, and so is my guest today Timothy Vollmer welcome Timothy. Tim: Thanks for having me on. Sara: And so, I'll call you Tim for short because that's what I usually call you and Tim and I had met each other previous to becoming members of the policy core through copyright circles. I know Tim works at University of California Berkeley, with Rachel Sandberg and Tim, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do there and and your previous work history. Tim: Yeah, sure thing. well I'm the scholarly communication and copyright librarian at UC Berkeley, and we have an office that helps scholars, understand, copyright law, the publishing process. We also deal a lot with various intellectual property and information policy issues that come up in, you know, teaching and research and an academic writing. So, we intersect a lot with copyright challenges copyright concerns that researchers have probably some of the same things that you experience working at a large academic institution. But before I was here at Berkeley. I also worked for Creative Commons for several years. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners are somewhat familiar with Creative Commons. This is a nonprofit organization that provides free copyright licenses for sharing all types of creative works, and the licenses really help provide increase sharing on more open terms, then you know the default. all rights reserved. Copyright regime. And I've also worked actually with the American Library Association, a long time ago, I was a Technology Policy Analyst at the ALA Washington office. And there we did a lot of research, and also policy advocacy on technology and other legal issues that are relevant to libraries. So thinking about things like intellectual property and copyright issues. Broadband policy, and also like organizing and educating alien members on copyright issues that come up in our library work. And then as you mentioned, I've been a part of the a la policy core, and we're part of this. The third year the third cohort. Sara: Well, it sounds like you've had a variety of interactions with the library community over the years and also the copyright community so it seems like a perfect fit for your current position, and obviously we were both drawn to the ALA policy core. And I personally was really interested in doing more advocacy with the United States Copyright Office, and just getting to know how to make an impact on policy nationwide because, of course, so much of what we do as librarians, is to try to get access to information for our patrons and copyright is one of those ways right that we try to get access is, people think of it, a lot of times as a barrier, but I think of it as kind of one of those ways of means of access right through a lot of different ways sex, you know copyright exception section one await of the Copyright Act and fair use and things of that nature. But I wonder what drew you into deciding to join the policy core. Tim: Yeah, some of the same reasons for you. I think there's oftentimes like a public conception that copyright is like a bad or like a negative thing, but in my work, you know, working with the LA Creative Commons and now working in a library. I think our role is really to educate and push on our users to exercise their copyrights and then flex their copyright muscles because because oftentimes, there are like you say limitations and exceptions such as fair use, and we need and are able to take advantage of these. And it's an important thing that we can work on together with regard to the alien policy core. I've really wanted to learn how to become a better advocates around a lot of different library issues especially some of the issues that we deal with on a day to day basis, you know, working in academic libraries. So, looking into ways that we can help push for improvements and updates to copyright law. I'm looking at digitization issues. Access to research issues, open access publishing those types of things. But I also wanted to get the more sort of plugged into policy issues, and other advocacy work for different types of libraries which I don't have that much experience with. I did start out working in a public library and also worked at the Wisconsin State Law Library and those are really interesting jobs as well but I kind of wanted to know how to advocate better for for other types of libraries as well and see how we can contribute to those space spaces. Um, so as a policy core has really provided a kind of a broad overview on how to do that and it also incorporate many different types of librarians and library workers so of course you and I are working in college and research libraries, but there's a a broad spectrum of other people so we have school librarians and people who are working in public libraries. And people are working in community libraries, those types of things. So I think the policy core has really given me and this is sort of what I wanted out of it, a better understanding of not only the issues, the policy issue that those libraries sort of encounter, but how we can work together to advocate for better outcomes. Better funding better public policy outcomes for all types of libraries. Sara: That's a really great point and I often when I teach about copyright at the high school at the University of Illinois. A lot of my students are surprised when they realize just how much copyright will impact their work right as, for instance, a school librarian or a public library and I mean copyright is kind of one of those all inclusive topics and so it has really given, both of us I think an opportunity to grow our network and to kind of understand what the different areas are that different people are struggling with through the pandemic there's been a lot of funding issues, there's been a lot of broadband issues. And it's been really interesting to kind of learn what people are handling right now and and and it seems like right now there's also a lot of fights ago about freedom of information and right you know different books that are on the shelves that maybe parents don't want to see on the shelves in a children's library or a school library so there been so many different issues that we've been hearing about which has been really interesting. Tim: Yeah, you're totally right like issues around intellectual freedom around broadband access for libraries, these are ones obviously that maybe you and I don't deal with on a day to day basis but it's important to be able to advocate for them, and with them for other library workers and other libraries as well. Sara: Yeah. And so we have the opportunity. Not too long ago to go to Washington DC and to have a face to face meeting with our cohort of course our cohort began in the middle of Kovats so normally we would have done that much earlier but I thought that was one of the most useful parts of our training because we learned some really fascinating. Media techniques right and we're kind of putting the hot seat with, you know, pretend that you're doing like a video interview right now and what what is this going to look like. I found that really challenging but also really interesting and helpful in terms of training and I've had some similar training here at University of Illinois but I felt like this was even more targeted because the folks doing the training or media specialist. What did you find to be a kind of the most rewarding part of your training as part of the policy core. Tim: Yeah, um, I will say that media training was a little bit outside of my comfort zone, I guess, but I really appreciate that we were able to do it, especially in the context of understanding how to best communicate a message with the decision maker or a member of Congress, or with the media because crafting a clear, concise, usually short message about a policy topic that you're advocating for is really crucial. You know, one thing I was actually involved with last year as a part of the policy Corps was doing a virtual Hill meeting with a staffer on on library funding issue so we were advocating for an increase in a library funding. And, you know, one thing that was really interesting and important to know about in this meeting was really short, it was like a 10 minutes, like zoom meeting with a staffer and something that we talked about going into the meeting as we were as we were kind of building up. What we wanted to talk about and how we wanted to deliver it it was like the understanding that a lot of these staffers. They cover, you know, 10 issues or more. And maybe library is just one of them, or maybe they only deal with library issues in their capacity as someone who's involved in education. So, sort of understanding that we need to craft a very sort of deliberate and concise message about the policy ass, or the policy issue that we're talking about, is really important so that was one of the most interesting pieces from like the media training that I sort of took took took away from it, but also lots of other great sort of tips around how to, how to host like events, how to get your message out in a variety of different forms so obviously it's not all just meeting with legislators, it's about creating campaigns and doing social media and thinking about sort of online messaging. And I know we do a lot of that sort of in our work as well. And then, you know, kind of talking a little bit more broadly with regards to the policy core and maybe some of our issues. There are a lot of different ways that we can we can advocate, you know, one of them is talking with policymakers and entering into conversations and relationships with staffers that deal with intellectual property and library issues. But another thing that you mentioned earlier is dealing with institutions like the corporate office, because a lot of, not necessarily policymaking, but a lot of public input and advocacy actually runs through groups like the copyright office. So looking at the various sort of ways and venues for advocacy around library and copyright issues, is something that's been good for me it's particularly with regard to the policy car, and I think it's been good for other people as well, just to kind of understand where are the leavers that we can pull and push to get better outcomes for my library policies. Sara: Yeah. and when you were mentioning the day on the hill I participated in that as well the virtual one and it was really tempting when meeting with a staffer to just jump right into like. Here are the 5 million things that our library has done for you, you know, and here are the things that we need for the community and to continue doing this. But Shawnda Hines from a la policy was in my meeting one of my meetings and instead of law, allowing us to kind of launch in she, she started with a question, and she said to the staffer. What is your experience in libraries, do you have a library card, and it was amazing because the response to the staffer was, oh I worked in a library all through college. So not only, you know, almost, almost everyone I won't say everyone but almost everyone has been to their library right so they have some experience, but this woman had more than the average amount of experience when she had been in the library, every single day working behind the scenes and really knew the struggles of the library and was a real, true library supporter and so after that, after that knowledge, it was so easy to have that conversation because she was she said right off the bat I worked in. I worked in the library all through college and I really love libraries and I really support them. And it's like okay so you're on our side like you know, you don't have to do this hard sell here, you know, and it's still important to like make your points but it was really key to make that emotional connection with her because I think that if you just forget about that, then you don't hear what their personal story is their personal connection, you might miss that golden opportunity right because if you're if you're looking for funding for a specific thing maybe they have experienced with that thing right I mean, right now, the issue is broadband for a lot of libraries right because students from school, potentially don't have internet. Well, guess what, what if the staffer you're talking to grew up in a rural area. What if they had no internet at their house like they would have a personal connection to what you're talking about and you would never know that. And so you really want to make that connection if you can. And I think, you know, one of the things that I learned also during that time Shonda spoke with us at the policy core training and said, You know, there's a fine line between, you know, people kind of treating libraries as, like, Oh, that's so cute. You're the library, you know, versus like you're a serious part of our society right so you don't you don't want to make it like, oh, didn't you go to story time when you were five, you know it's not a library story but like to understand that we that librarians and libraries really have an impact on our society, and that we need to fund them because if we don't students can't necessarily go to school or students aren't going to learn or, or, you know, if you don't have that access. You may not learn about science, or some other area that that you know you could have a future doctor who really doesn't have access to these types of books at their school and comes to the library and read about it, or who knows what the experience might be right. I know I read about a, an astronaut who grew up, and he was just tied to his local library right and always reading about like outer space and just had this big dream and became an astronaut one day I mean, these are the kinds of things that libraries can do. And, but trying to really make, make it real for somebody and I think so starting with that human element. To me, that was a really great lesson not to just launch into the logic, because we all just want to start with like here's why we need this money, you know, right, right. But if we can connect with them on a human level like on a personal level, it's going to make it a lot easier. Tim: Yeah. Right on. Another thing I was thinking about is, um, you're right and asking those probing questions and trying to connect with policymakers on a personal and emotional level is really key, but also doing our homework as well so how did have how have they voted in the past, around library issues. What have they supported what have they been maybe not so great on sort of understanding their history a bit with with libraries and and pulling those things up and having that those data points on hand is really helpful going into these meetings with decision makers. Another thing that we did, which I think is really important in any sort of advocacy meeting and ask is coming, prepared with local data and stories and impact. So, you know, in the meeting with the legislative staffer for representative Lee in my district, I talked a little bit about how the Oakland Public Library, which is, you know, the city where I live in how they were making content available and services available during the pandemic and pulling out two or three or four top things that they were working on, which could and should require more funding to continue. So coming up with those local stories and hearing from people on the ground is really important. In addition to, you know, really communicating the importance of funding or improving policies for libraries more generally. Sara: Yeah, that's very true having those data points but also those stories of like real life scenarios. During the pandemic despite my being a copyright librarian who never does circulation, I was actually working in circulation, because we were kind of all hands on deck. I mean, we had a lot of folks who couldn't come in at all due to, you know, underlying medical conditions or family members with underlying medical conditions like before we have the vaccine available. And we really had a call to the whole library saying you know who can come in and help so I had, I learned how to do some circulation, you know, which was really good and and and it really gave me some sort of knowledge of, you know, on the ground, of what my colleagues go through on a day to day basis but it also gave me that crucial contact with patrons because I was really missing that interaction. And so, you know, the pandemic really gave us an opportunity to like change our skill set a little bit, and to also like get to know our other colleagues like I don't normally work in circulation so I don't necessarily know all my colleagues in circulation and so I got the opportunity to kind of spend time with them and to learn our patrons a little bit more and see what they were you know what their needs were. So I think that there are a lot of stories like that and the public libraries really were doing tremendous thing, you know, this is an academic library but the public libraries to we're doing tremendous things during the pandemic right to keep to keep everybody reading and keep everybody engaged because really like we couldn't for for quite some time in Illinois we couldn't leave our house. So, you know, if the students couldn't get on the internet and if you couldn't, you know, read books at your house, then you really didn't have a lot to do, and especially education wise. So I think those stories are really important, I think you're right. And I really valued getting to know you know some different levels of service and different people in the library too. So, I guess one. I wanted to change the topic a little bit and talk about you know what we've done. Copyright wise, since we've been a member of the policy core. And one of the big issues that still isn't resolved, is the CASE opt out for libraries you want to tell us a little background about that and how we were engaged with that. Tim: Sure, so maybe to back up a little bit. So, the CASE Act passed at the end of 2020 and C stands for the Copyright Alternative to Small Claims Enforcement Act. And this was a law and the aims of the law was to provide an alternative venue for copyright holders to pursue smaller dollar copyright infringement cases, instead of filing a federal copyright law suit which costs a lot of money, typically, and can take a really long time. And so, the case act sets up this copyright claims board that sits within the corporate office. And the point of this copyright claims board is to adjudicate these smaller copyright infringement proceedings. And we should note that these proceedings are voluntary. So if you have a claim brought against you. So if someone accuses you of infringing their copyright and wants to take you before the copyright claims bar, you don't have to agree to go through that venue, you can opt out as an individual. And that's a really important feature of this law. And this is a from a library perspective, we see it it says concerning law for variety of reasons. So, one thing, thinking about copyright and how copyright interacts with libraries and with researchers. We know that researchers and teachers, they leverage these limitations and exceptions to cart braid all the time like fair use. So, you know, researchers use images or copyrighted content within their own original research, because we all know that scholarship builds on the works of others and there are important limitations to cooperate that allows faculty and researchers to be able to do this. But sometimes that might not be communicated to rights holders, you know. So, what we see coming out of this case that would be possibly, you know rights holders brain these infringement actions against, you know, a scholarly researcher, because they think the scholarly researcher improperly used a piece of copyrighted content when in fact, perhaps a scholarly researcher was including that content under one of their rights under copyright like fair use. So, there's a big concern that when this copyright claims bar actually gets up and running. Are we going to have a ton of claims being brought against researchers or even students for incorporating copyrighted content under fair use in their research and teaching, and what are the implications of that going to be, you know, of course the limits on what the monetary damages within the case act and within this copyright claims or are some are a lot less than what they would be with a normal federal copyright lawsuit, but they're, they're not nothing You know, there's a cap of $30,000 per infringement proceeding and another that's nothing to sneeze at. So, one way that this CASE Act is concerning is that you know it might be, it might be a chilling effect for researchers they might think twice about incorporating others copywriting content into their scholarship, if they're afraid that they're going to be brought before this copyright claims board for use that should be covered under fair use. But another piece of that is concerning is during the implementation. So, the Copyright Office has been engaging in NPR, and then NPR m sound stands for a notice of proposed rulemaking. And these are things where the corporate offices looking for feedback from the public on how a particular law should be implemented. So, the corporate office has issued several, several of these NPR around the case act, about how it should be implemented, once it actually is up and running. And one thing that was up concerned for library is it for libraries is that while libraries and archives institutions can preemptively opt out of this. What it doesn't extend to our library workers so workers like you and I, who are working within libraries and we deal with copyrighted content on a daily basis, you know, we provide information and guidance around digitization projects, we're involved with things like interlibrary loan, we deal with copyrighted works. So what the NPR and was asking for is. We know that libraries and archives as institutions are opted out, but they held in their, in their first sort of draft of this. Well, we're not going to provide that, that, that opt out for library workers, And we thought, and a lot of libraries are on country thought that this could be a very negative way to pursue for the copyright claims board because us working with copyrighted content on a daily basis. We provide education. What we don't want is library workers to be dragged before the copyright claims board for infringement claims for things that we know and we are operating in good faith, under our limitations and exceptions to copyright. So maybe you want to talk a little bit more about sort of the advocacy and how we organize around that aspect. Sara: Yeah, so we saw the proposed rule come out and it basically said that even though, as you said, the library can opt out preemptively and basically just opt out once and say, You know where this library is not going to participate in these. Small Claims Act cases. They, the US Copyright Office, read the CASE Act as only applying to libraries and not to their employees and kind of did so under an agency, sort of analysis saying, well, this is, you know, the employees can still be liable, potentially, it's just saying that there's no like vicarious liability here for their lawyer, and my reaction to that was that that doesn't make any sense right just because the reality is that libraries do not do the work, the work on a daily basis of the libraries is done through their employees, and therefore if you don't want to hold libraries liable. You shouldn't hold their employees liable. It makes no sense to me right. It's like basically don't go after the deep pockets here at the Library, which doesn't even have that big of pockets but go after the, you know, staff member who made the copy that doesn't make any sense. And I really don't think that that's what Congress intended. When they enacted the case act and so what we did was the LA policy core members Tim and myself and Carla and along with la kind of came up with this, this, this letter that folks could use if they wanted to submit it to the copyright act in response to their proposed rule, and it was just a form letter but allowed folks to put in their individual, you know position their name and what they do that, that gives them concern. So for instance, I said you know I'm a copyright librarian at the University of Illinois. And if you are going to enforce this against me in the scope of my employment, that's a problem because I deal with copyright every day. This is my job right I have to make you know various determinations for my own news I provide folks with information about copyright. And so, you know, I could get 10 of these notices every day, you're going to get sued every day. And so the reality is it would really stifle me from doing my job. And so a lot of folks responded in fact the Copyright Office still has not issued their final rule on this and said that they had thousands of these notices because one of the notices from library futures had an Excel spreadsheet with thousands of responses and there were at least 135, I think, responses so they got a lot of feedback from librarians, basically saying this is not going to. This is not a good thing. Right. I wanted, I still think the door is open. If Congress really feels that they the Copyright Office got it wrong to come through and say, No, you know, they I guess they could amend the case act and say, no, this really means also employees. I did reach out to Senator Durbin, from Illinois, saying hi Senator Durbin I know you supported the case act but you couldn't have possibly meant that this doesn't apply to library employees right and trying to put it on his radar because I know the final rule isn't out yet but if the final rule does still apply. If the Copyright Office says it does still apply to library employees within the scope of their employment. Then I really think my next step is going to be to talk to Congress and say, Is this really what you meant because I don't think so. Well, I still hold out a little bit of hope that we made some progress with our arguments. And our common sense to the copyright office but we haven't heard back yet. So what do you think Tim. Tim: Yeah, I think you touched on a lot of good points there, um, one thing. Well, first off, I mean I'm really glad that the corporate office has issued these NPR M's because it does provide a public venue for citizens and organizations to provide feedback and commentary on how our particular this particular law should be implemented. And that is important, and the Copyright Office, there are reading these you know so it's great that we have this venue. And you mentioned that there are a variety of different ways to respond. Like so. Some of some organizations such as the library. Copyright Alliance. Individual universities and libraries I know from the, from speaking from the University of California. We submitted a letter, which was signed on but I think almost all of the UC schools, talking about what the negative repercussions of including library workers as subject to these proceedings would be, and we provide very detailed and specific examples, and also talked about the legal aspects of it, like you mentioned, have some discussion around this idea of agency law, so that you know if the library itself is able to opt out, why isn't the library able to delegate that opt out to those who are working for it. So on the one hand, we have institutions and schools, writing detailed responses to the CRM. And also we have the public who are able to provide individual stories like you and others, and and also just anyone can can file a response to this NPR. So it's important to kind of like, hit it at multiple levels, because the corporate office is reading these. It's good that we've provided detailed responses. And it also good that we're hearing from the public, and from those workers that it's going to affect. Another reason that this is really important is that you know the CASE Act has been around for a few years, but only at the end of 2020 and did it gets pushed through into becoming a law. And the way it did that was attached to a gigantic piece of spending legislation. And this is very problematic because there's not really any opportunity then to have some back and forth and to have feedback from the communities that it was going to affect you kind of got pushed through at the last hour before the end of the year, along with a ton of other bills. And there was not that much opportunity for libraries and library workers to comment that that point. So it's good that we can use some of these NPR on processes to lay out the issues and lay out how we think they should be improved, especially for the Ah, so we're going to keep our eyes open for that final rule and see, see where that goes. I mean I would read a huge sigh of relief, if, if we were able to sway the copyright office, and if they do find that when a library ops out its employees are also opting out. But if not, like I said, then, you know, I will still feel that there's some, some advocacy work to be done with with Congress and to say, Hey, is this what you meant because you have the ultimate word of what you met on the other side of that though. You know there is still work going on behind the scenes to challenge the the court or the board claims board when it does start hearing cases as unconstitutional. So there are a lot of things going on here and it's, nothing's going to get resolved, super quickly. I would say that this is one of those things we need we all need to keep an eye on because as things progress, we'll know more and more and we will will need to kind of react to those changing environment. So it's a good thing to have to be aware of. It's a good thing to keep track of. And, you know, I believe that the, they will start hearing actual claims in around June, at the latest that seemed like that was what they were doing so well I'm thinking going to start hearing some of these final rulings coming out very soon. Another thing that we're doing, and I'm sure you are and other schools as well is doing a little bit of education around what this law means and what does it mean. So for our library users or our university, communities, if we were to receive one of these claims notices. Of course we know that everyone has the ability to opt out. But it's really going to be up to the individual. To determine that but we know that libraries can help provide education around some of these copyright policy issues on our campuses and we're starting to do that right now. And also being in communication with our legal departments within the universities because they're going to probably want to know about these things as well, you know to what extent, our faculty or students or researchers, getting these notices. What are they going to do about them and how can we provide education, you know with the knowledge that we can't really provide legal advice but how can you provide education to help our communities make good decisions about what this means and how they might want to proceed. Sara: And that's a really good point there so we, you know, as, as you mentioned, Tim. This is going to be an issue for for everyone really whether or not the libraries, and their employees can opt out because we've still got scholars and students and other folks who could potentially be sued. The other issue is that it does exempt. At least University of Illinois writ large because it's a it's a government or state institution, which seems to kind of go hand in hand with sovereign immunity, where, you know, the University of Illinois cannot be sued for copyright infringement in federal court, either due to sovereign immunity. But then it leaves the question of what about the employees of the university within the scope of their employment, how does that work out. And so there are still some questions that really don't have great answers. And it's very similar to the library opting out, and the employees, maybe being on the hook what's, what do we have what happens when the professor is in a similar situation so it'll be really interesting. I mean from from a standpoint of like a lawyer, right it's kind of interesting to see this play out and see these cases go forward but from a standpoint as a librarian it's a little frightening, to be honest with you because I would not want a patron say faculty member to come to me and say I just got this, you know, what do I do, and then oh I got this two months ago I forgot to opt out now I have to go. You know, and then see what happens it's like that would be scary and not a fun experience so yes we definitely need to educate folks so that they do know if they can opt out and figure out why they might want to opt out versus go through. I mean, in my opinion, and this is not legal advice but I would, I would opt out every time I mean, I'm not sure why would go to this board, and you know willingly. Because, you know, federal court is much harder for them. There is, it's harder for the plaintiff and there's a lot more they have to pay and go through. So, I'm not sure what what would motivate someone to go to the small claims court I'll be interesting to see what types of cases end up there, although that scares me to that some of the claims that end up there the folks who, you know, didn't really pay attention to the notice and it just laughs and then all of a sudden, they have they have to go. I don't like that idea, because, to me that's not really voluntary that's just like I didn't really pay attention. Right, but I'm thinking that's going to be some of the cases unfortunately because that's that happens in, you know, in regular court too is you get what's called a default judgment because the other person just never shows up. And, and that can be good for the plaintiff but it's that's never going to be good for the defendant and if they are professors or students. Tim: That's not good. I wouldn't like, I would not like to see that happening so yeah i think one possible mitigating factor is, it seems like the law and the corporate office has been doing some due diligence, about what gets put into these notices and making sure that they are official, they are served using the how other things are served on people so sending you a notice through the mail, sending a bottle up notice within that 60 day window if you didn't get the first one, it'll be interesting to see actually how it plays out. But hopefully there are some of those measures that are set up that will allow people to be able to have information to make those decisions. Before that 60 day window runs out because you're right. Otherwise, we're just going to have a lot of default judgments because people are going to be like well what is this and is this just spam or as am I being trolled here I don't know so that's all uh to be determined yet. Well, and even in, even in quote unquote regular court right default note default judgments happen, and even there where you have to show proof of service right that you know they were personally served and and the the notices are very clear and, you know, you have to do this and answer within 20 days and whatever folks still don't get their act, gather all the time. Now of course you can't opt out. In that instance like you know you have to show up it's like, no, don't even do anything it's like they just sit there then they get a default judgment so I'm a little concerned and I'm especially concerned I'll tell you about students, because I do think professors I think professors if they get this notice like, yeah, they're probably going to try to figure out what to do. I could see a student just being busy and just thinking like, I'll deal with it later and then forgetting about it. Sara: I could see that happening. And that would bother me a lot if that's if that happened because I know some students will be right on top of it right and and finding out all the information they need to but but yeah I just will see maybe I would hope that, that, that people aren't just go, you know, raring to go and try to sue up as many students as possible I mean that just seems like a terrible outcome of this limit of this legislation which I do think some of their goal was to deal with, you know, photographers, for instance right who posts maybe some of their work on their website but other people are stealing it and things like that and I do understand that, you know, there are issues with folks who are saying, well, I I'm losing money but I don't have enough money to go to the federal court system. I think that's where they wanted, that's like the sweet spot where they wanted to get this legislation to hit but you know I really hope that it doesn't play out in a different way. And I know the legislation also I think you pointed out recently, to me at least was that there's kind of an anti trolling mechanism, kind of trying to prevent folks from just spam, you know suing everybody. Tim: Yeah, there was a there was a provision of one of the most recent NPR, that suggested that there be a cap by Bob, I believe, 10 claims, per year, per rights holder. So I think that that could help because I think one of the fears, when we saw this originally is. Well yeah, they're just going to be copyright trolls that are sending these like hundreds of them out, you know, and see what sticks against the wall or see which they can get default judgments on but if this actually does go through where there's an actual limit, I think that would go a long way into tamping down on some of the abuse that a lot of people have been critical of this process. Yeah, so I i hope that is the case and that we don't see an you know an abuse of the system. Sara: Well, it's been a really great chat we've had here and I want to respect our listeners time so they feel like they can, you know, go and do some advocacy on their own and one thing we learned through a la is tag, tag your congressperson tag your legislator, if you're doing something on Twitter. And it's you know about your local library doing something amazing, or you need funding for something or what have you tag folks on twitter, so that they see it. Tim: Yeah. Right on, I mean there's so many issues that are that are coming up over the next few years, relevant to copyright in libraries. I mean, we have controlled digital lending, we have a lot of these state ebook laws that are being challenged now. There are other things that will come up within the next year or two. So it's important to stay involved, it's important to to engage with decision makers and there's a variety of ways of doing that. We can do it through social media. We can do it through getting involved in organizations like like the ALA, we can subscribe to like legislative alerts. We can help out in some of the organizing that sort of new groups are doing, like library futures. And just follow along. There's a lot of ways that we can all work together and be involved in a lot of these policy and copyright issues that affect libraries. Sara: Yeah, and that's a great point because one of the things that we also learned it, and policy corps that it's not just about us right. I mean, we are learning these tools and we are going to, we are empowered to pass them along and and so I hope this episode kind of inspired listeners to get more involved in to follow their local legislators on Twitter and kind of see ways that they can advocate for libraries as well. So, and also obviously pay attention when a la has a policy alert and wants you to call your local senator or your local legislator, you know, give them a call because that's one of the ways that we can make an impact right.

Max: Hello! Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today all the way from Plano, Texas, I'm delighted to welcome on the show. Tim Meehan who's VP and Global Head for Talent Acquisition Innovation Lab at Pontoon which is part of the Adecco Group. Tim, welcome to the podcast.Tim: Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to chat with you, Max. Max: Thank you. Thanks, Tim. We met years ago in the real world and we were just saying how a business is now keeping us at home, which is lovely. And it's mostly lovely. How else is Pontoon Solutions affected? You know, changed its business over the last couple of years? Can you maybe start off by telling us how Pontoon Innovation had to adapt to the new normal, which is not new at all anymore?Tim:  What do I have? Two hours, right?Well, first on the Pontoon levels. Thanks for asking. I would say our business has been very strong even through the pandemic. We're fortunate to have a portfolio of customers in the technology area so that business remains strong for us. But you know, as we were talking a little bit earlier, Max, I think there's a couple of trends that increasingly occupy my time, my mind, my thought focus in terms of how to bring, not just Pontoon for it, but our entire industry.Because I think we're at an inflection point, an important point in time where the way talent is acquired in our industry is changing radically. And we all understand digitization and the automation that's occurring in homeport experiences, but there are some trends that I increasingly look at and say, you know, I think there, if we're all aware of them then perhaps each of us in our own individual spaces can be thinking about how we work within theMax: And the Talent Acquisition Lab at Pontoon is, correct me if I'm misdescribing it, is like a consultancy practice focused on helping companies crack the case of how to bring in new tech in their talent acquisition tech stack, and how to work within their existing IT architecture. So yeah. Does that sum it up?Tim: Yeah, it does. And it's important to explain it. So for us, at Pontoon Talent Acquisition encompasses all the workforce categories.So certainly RPO, or we call it RXO, the full-time talent acquisitions is a big part of what we do. MSP or contingent labor talent acquisition is another part of our portfolio offering that my team supports, but increasingly statement of work or service procurement. So people coming in on fixed deliverable basis, those are all different ways for companies to access a growing and very powerful talent pool.Then my team, which is a team of technologists, product marketers and, solution designers are responsible for figuring out how to simplify it to our customers because this stuff is really hard. Steve Jobs once said simplicity is the answer, make it easy. And so that's what my team is trying to do. Make a little less confusing for our customers to understand and decide what to do. Max: Yeah, it's so complex for companies, especially when they have a broad variety of job types from blue-collar, white-collar, graduates and, and so on. And almost for every job category, you need a different partner on the sourcing side, on assessments, on the process and, and a strong case could be made for a company to buy 30 different technologies just for talent acquisition, right? I mean, you must have these kinds of, I wouldn't call them horror stories, but customers that are heavily loaded right? Or overloaded?Tim:  Yeah. I think one of the trends I see is some of the tech companies in our space are trying to simplify it by bringing the entire tech stack to the customer.So I look at like Phenom people or an eight folder, and I sense a little bit more ATS, but certainly the capabilities of Symphony Talent. So their pitch to our customers is I bring the stack to, you know, one buy and I can plug you into a whole architecture and ecosystem of capability. And we are seeing companies look at that.The key issue is a lot of times the applicant tracking system is owned by eight. IT, the career site may be run by the marketing department internally developed, and then you've got HR with the room budget as well. So you've got kind of a challenging cross-functional challenge to break those, take those pieces, and have them all into one buy.But I am seeing that trend. I call it the field of dreams, where these big tech companies are going out and they're building it and hoping companies come and we are seeing some interest in that. And certainly, as an outsourcer, we work with those vendors when that's the case.Max: And maybe five, ten years ago, IT had a little, relatively to today, a little bit more power, and it's shifting a little bit to the marketing function.Tim: Well, the other one is my other joke is Love Actually, where Hugh Grant says to uh... where Billy Bob Thornton says to Hugh grant, “I'll give you anything you want as long as that's not something I don't want to give you.” And in some ways, that's sort of the IT group. HR, go out there and look at everything you want. But only if it's within the framework of what I'm willing to let you do, which is to say data, privacy, data, security, data governance, the vendors have to pay a certain threshold. So IT is increasingly empowered, ITN, data privacy, certainly with the  data privacy regulations that are coming out, not without good reason. So you have to be able to operate increasingly. HR has to be able to operate both. Understanding the language and needs of an IT organization in their company, as well as the technology needs of the many vendors out there that can help them supercharge their recruiters.Max: Okay. I thought it was going in the other way, because I thought, well, it's so easy to buy software now that nobody needs to know IT or be an engineer to be able to buy it. And you know, the cloud story of everybody can be a buyer now. But you're seeing it, the counter-trend to that movement. Tim: Absolutely, I am. I think about my career and my early career recruitment. My expertise we're building source two plans with which job boards, how many recruiters in which job boards in a couple of ratios. And today I'm doing data mapping, integration design, architectural reviews, and granted, this is all I do. But any program we want to do, that's what we have to do. And so, you know, I think we're going to have a… no, I think the language of HR in the future, certainly talent acquisition is increasingly require a digital mindset, a digital skillset.But you know, if it's something like, you know, I don't want to do that, that's not my area then I would probably say, make a decision, either build the competency so your TA person listening to me right now, and you're not familiar with Talkpush and all the Talkpush's competitors in the HR tech landscape, and you don't want to be then I would suggest you're going to struggle. And what you should either do is say, I'm going to ramp up and build the competency early or myself, or call me. Honestly, or call one of my competitors. This is what we're doing. We're building out an entire ecosystem of capability to help you through that gap.Max: If you walked into HR on talent acquisition, because you wanted to get inside the psychology and the human and touchy part of recruitment and, and stay away from flow charts and Excel sheets. It's going to be tough, right? You know, you'll have to ask for help some way. Tim: And you know, so my team, we're involved in some of these very big bloggers complex deals. Our HR sponsors will bring us into dialogue with their IT org, and these get extremely technical. But that's what we can bring to the table. Now we've got other clients that they have that competency within their organization. So you know, and if you don't outsource it, you don't have the competency, then you're going to struggle a little bit.Max: And that's when, I guess, that's when companies or TA teams, they call their IT team and say, “Please come and help me out”. And when IT comes in, they come in with a whole new set of requirements, which will change the scope and perhaps tilt the conversation towards having a one standalone system that can do it all. They'd be more likely to consolidate all under one architecture, perhaps. Yeah. And so now let's give some advice to the TA listeners who are dealing with maybe one system to rule them all. And they wanna create some flexibility for their local team, maybe for their local sourcing team. How do you navigate these necessary IT architectures and convince some of your customers to open up?Tim:  Well, I would say, first, self-assess. Where you're at and what your competency is. And if you're in a company where maybe you have an IT organization that's very helpful and wants to be supportive, that's different than maybe you have a discussion with IT, and you don't understand what they're saying.So I would suggest rely on your vendors. So certainly there are in Asia, you know, mature organizations, a big company well-respected, well thought-out. You've got the resources that can command and have the discussion with your HR contacts, technology people to help them get them through these gaps. And we can have that discussion and certainly, Pontoon can have that discussion. So I'd say rely on your vendors. For certainly our HR tech trade shows, hopefully, it will be coming back on their virtual ones. I think just self-assess would be my biggest recommendation. How big is your, if you're having talent, acquisition pains, can you perceive or believe your technology may be a challenge. If you don't have the ability internally to do this, then I would start talking to either outsourcers or significant point solution providers that can help you.And then the only other thing I'll say specific to Asia is, you know, what do you have for the world? Two thirds of the world. It's Asia, right? How many languages? How many countries are there?So even in Asia, the trends for Asia are different. So you'll have the ability to do maybe some work. You can be a little more creative in parts of Asia than you can in some of the Western continents.Max: You were saying in Brazil, for example. A whole different... You typically end up with a completely different architecture than you would for global brands, right? They make exceptions market by market. Those exceptions are would you say they dictated by language barriers or behavior? Yeah. What's your take on those differences? Is it well...Tim: If the case in Brazil specifically. If you're trying to do it… If it's a Brazilian company that is looking for TA innovation, you cannot lay her in a San Francisco technology solution. The cost structure is hysterical. So, you know, you have to find a Brazilian technology companies that can support you in Brazil because their cost structure is lower. In fact, we're talking to them and bring them outside Brazil and come to the rest of the world because they've been developed in a low cost country and they're successful.But certainly the same with India. I mean, you just cannot lay her in an extremely expensive tech stack. If it's only in India or only in Brazil. Now the big multinationals, they're going to spread that cost across their entire organization. And so the cost impact to say Brazil or in India isn't significant.Max: But we are going to make some adjustments for internal accounting and they'll say, “Well, yeah”. They use more seats in India and Brazil, but we'll adjust the cost, the cost per seat.Tim: Yeah, you can. Or you know, the allocation model could be not even specific to that tech, right? So the corporate IT may allocate its cost over all of the businesses in a different way. So I just say certainly when you're talking about multinational and certainly Western countries, IT technology, IT barriers become a big issue.If you're talking to emerging economies, there, I think, there's still a lot of opportunity for point standalone solutions, country-specific technology solutions. Max: Yeah. We've noticed very different candidate behaviors from one place to the next, which communication channels they use. Obviously, the language is a barrier but also almost every country has a different leading job board.With, of course, Indeed being maybe at the top of the mountain and, you know, number two, a number three in a lot of other markets, but companies... Job boards that otherwise nobody would have heard of outside of the US. And they have different levels of openness. So when you have a global customer come to Pontoon and do you... First, put a map of the world? You try to figure out, yeah, where they could... Do you work mostly on global contracts and then you have to map out the whole world and figure out so, you know, how to help them at every pit stop? Tim: No, I would say... boy, I don't know the statistic off the top of my head, but certainly a chunk of them are multicountry. But I wouldn't call them multi-region. Multi-region which to me, it starts to talk global. Those are harder to do. That's a big change management, but to get an Americas deal or a MIA deal, part, you know, parts of Asia, maybe three or four countries in Asia, that's pretty typical whole all or one, not quite as common.Though I will say, we're, maybe part of my self promotion here, part of our answer to what we've talked about today is within my team, we have built out a product portfolio that's very scalable, and it starts with a top of funnel sourcing, highly automated sourcing capability. And then we can layer in various texts using our backbone technology and the cost model is extremely attractive. So it's, it's going to work for us in Brazil. It'll work for us in India. But you know, for me, for us, we need a lot of bullets in our holster. And so the client is you know, they're wanting to just start with a couple of steps. We've got an offering and then as they evolve, we can expand that offering.Max: Okay. So it sounds like you're saying it's more cost-effective even though it's more work and that's where you guys come in, but it's more cost-effective to find point solutions that are, you know, best in class for each stage of the recruitment funnel and then assemble them. And thenthat will outperform, cost-wise, having a, you know, a single platform that offers to do everything.Tim: Well, I wouldn't quite go that far, but I wouldn't disagree that, you know, it's a messy world. And so if you're a… If you're going to be a regional or a global talent acquisition company, and you want a single experience for your customers, then you're going to have to layer in a pretty complex technology solution, not point. But if you're a single country, standalone, then it gives you more flexibility to pick tools that are specific to that country or your use case.And then you got to layer in. Maybe I only want to outsource blue-collar. Or I've got a new ability I'm building. And I only want to... I only want these roles in this location, but this amount of time. So there's besides the technology, there's, you know, customer use case scenarios that you're going to be almost solved for too.Max: Yeah. It's for the RXL business that you cover. You come into our company saying, which part of the talent acquisition defines your brand and you want to own a hundred percent of it, versus something which is something you have to do, but it doesn't necessarily define you. And then it's a little bit easier to outsource, right? Tim: Yeah. Yeah. Max: Great. Well, one question that I love to ask my guests is to share with our practitioner listeners a mistake that you've made--a hiring mistake that you've made and to kind of try to dig it out forgotten raised a memory of yours. Somebody you hired and it just didn't go right. And, you know, we know in a long career such as the one you have, it must've been more than one instance. I mean, you can't hire without making a few mistakes. So is there one that comes to mind without giving names that you can draw an experience from on a lesson for our audience?Tim: Well, I will just say for me personally, hiring somebody is a sacred responsibility and I personally have been hired into a role that I wasn't successful at. I, at the time,  did not know I couldn't do the job. I thought I could. And I believe the person who put me in that role made a bad hiring decision and it had a pretty bad impact on me personally.So that was a learning for me. And yes, I have hired people that didn't work out. And I view that as my failure. I absolutely hold myself accountable. I'm with the team I manage, I view their success as a reflection of my leadership and management competency. So…Max: I applaud your humility  in answering the question. I've asked this question to 50 plus people, and nobody's said that they were the wrong hire. So you've given everybody something to think about there. And I think I might have been the wrong hire once or twice to myself. Tim: Oh, how do you know? I mean, the enthusiasm, you know, so I'm pretty good now about thinking through a couple of things to help me make sure that the person is making this good decision and cyclic. I am. Max: Yeah. And to go back to that time when you were the wrong hire, what was the mistake that the manager did or that your employer did then? Was it they were trying to paint too rosy a picture, or they had written the wrong description?Tim: Well, it was when I moved into the temporary staffing industry many, many, many years ago. I had a career before this industry. I was in recruitment. I did... Max: Good thing you got out thereTim: It's gone. It's, in fact, every company I've ever worked for is bankrupt. So it wasn't my fault, but the industry collapsed. And so when I moved into this industry, they put me in a very important role and the staffing company, and I had to learn the industry. I had to learn the people and I was remote and it was just a lot. And the environment itself was challenging. So I think anybody who would have struggled and I didn't kind of walk through it though.I was asking like really stupid questions. You know, I got an order from a hundred people and I didn't ask what the pay rate was like and you're the leader. So you know, it was a humbling experience, but fortunately, here I am. I'm not going to tell you, but it's decades.Max: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, today remote hiring is a lot easier than it was back then. It was a lot more people are better at it. So maybe if the same scenario played over today, you know, it would have worked better, but certainly industry experience and, you know, never underestimate, I think, the importance of training. Your talent acquisition team and your recruiters on the industry, on the lingo. So they don't sound stupid. I mean, that's pretty essential again.Tim:  I would say don't put your need to fill the job ahead of that person, that human you're trying to hire. Always think about that first.And that comes back to pays dividends. I have amazing people. I'm very proud of the many senior leaders in this industry that I hired and developed and I played a role in their career. And so I, again, it's hiring somebody as a sacred responsibility and if you hire people that don't work out, you gotta own it.It's like Colin Palisson. You break it, you bought it. So just take... Don't think about your mistake. Take it as a personal reflection of your leadership and hiring competency. Max: Strong words. I think we'll wrap it up on that. Thanks so much, Tim, for sharing. Where can people get ahold of you? I guess LinkedIn?Tim:  LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn. Max: Tim Meehan. M-E-E-H-A-N from Pontoon Solutions. And thanks. Thanks very much, Tim. It was a pleasure.Tim: Thank you very much for having me on your show.Max: That was Tim Meehan from Pontoon Solutions, reminding us that if you got into Talent Acquisition and recruitment, to stay away from doing too much technical work and, you know, building technology stack if it's not your cup of tea. There is help out there. There are providers such as Pontoon Solutions and others that can be your partner and help you put together a best of breed solution. Hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll be back for more and remember to subscribe and to share with friends.

This week, Anne's guest is Tim Heller, who's currently recording his vocal clone.  Ready to evolve with AI? Lots of doom & gloom out there lately about AI “stealing” voice acting jobs, which means now's the time to get educated and learn to evolve with new technology. In this episode, voice actor Tim Heller shares his AI experience - choosing an ethical company, the benefits of creating a clone, the role of human voice actors, the importance of emotion, and more…  Find out how AI can help rock your business #VOBOSS style! About Tim Tim Heller is an actor and voice actor based in Austin, TX. He's voiced VR trainings for the Air Force, commercials for Fox Sports, ads for Spotify, ADR and dubbing for international cartoons & animated features, corporate narration projects, and eLearning modules around the globe. Recently, Tim was interviewed in the BBC article “Voice Cloning of Growing Interest to Actors and CyberCriminals.” Top 10 Takeaways An AI voice clone could be a way for talent to increase passive income streams. Voice actors must properly record an AI voice for it to be successful. Look for a company that has a clear and fair user agreement and offers licensing opportunities. Don't know who to trust? Seek companies that provide an open communication flow and opportunities to ask questions. Get it in writing - all agreements between you and the company should be part of a contract before recording. An ethical company will give you control over how your voice clone is used. The actual process of creating a voice clone is very expensive, so expect the company you are working with to take a portion of your AI earnings. Avoid fear in the AI sphere. Stay curious and ask questions so you and the companies you work with can learn together. AI voices aren't meant to replace humans, but should allow for quicker turnarounds and greater content accessibility options. Being human is your job security - clones can't fabricate emotion, so use yours to its best advantage! References in this episode Learn more about VocalID >> Visit Tim's website at TimHellerVO.com >> Recorded on ipDTL >> Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast, the AI and Voice series. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today I'm excited to have special guest Tim Heller, who is an actor and voice actor based out of Austin, Texas. Tim has a long line of credits here and has voiced VR trainings for the Air Force, TV commercials for Fox Sports, podcast advertisements for Spotify, ADR and dubbing for international cartoons and animated features. And he's also voiced, of course, my favorite, corporate narrations, children's English e-learning modules in Korea and done local commercials and more. And so he also, before he got into VO was in musical theater and plays in New York City and around the world with some on-camera jobs mixed in there as well. Hoo, wow. Tim: Hoo. Anne: A multitalented [laughs] guest. Thank you so much for joining me, Tim. It's wonderful to have you here today. Tim: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on, Anne. I'm excited to be here. Anne: Well, you have been in the news lately. I've read quite a bit of press with you in the news. And at first, I guess, saw and met you. And I'm not quite sure how I don't know you already, what with that long list of credits, but I saw you in the article from the BBC news that was en- -- it was a great article, but it was entitled "Voice Cloning of Growing Interest to Actors and CyberCriminals." Always -- Tim: Yes. Not -- not scary -- Anne: -- a little bit of click bait there. Tim: -- at all, right? Yeah, exactly. [laughs] Anne: But the article I thought had a really positive spin on it, but yet they put that title on there to associate, I feel like, oh, are you associating voice actors and cyber criminals? Like in the same -- Tim: Yeah, I got, you know, I had a lot of people reaching out to me afterwards saying, you know, are you, so which one are you? Are you a cyber criminal or a voice actor? I said, well, guess you're just going to have to find out, huh? Anne: Oh gosh. So, you know, I've interviewed quite a few people already for this Voice and AI series, and I've noticed a kind of a trend with what a lot of people will say as a pro of having an AI voice. And they use the argument that it's all about adding work for the voice actor. So I guess I'd like to ask you, first of all, how do you feel about that? What do you feel is the benefit of having an AI voice in your repertoire of talents and skills? Tim: Yeah, so initially I, like, I thought that it would be a great tool to have just to future-proof my job. I sought out more information and tried speaking with lots of different people and ultimately ended up meeting Rupal Patel with VocalID, just because I was curious about like where things were going, and where people thought they were going, and hearing Jim Connelly talk about -- like, he's always thinking about what's next. And so through my experience with Rupal and VocalID, I feel like it is, it is potentially adding more work, work that I wouldn't necessarily have to book a session out in my studio, for which believe me never upset to book my studio up for a session. And I, and I love my job. And so I'm not trying to work less or get rid of any work that could potentially come in. But -- Anne: Well, I think that's a good clarification because I think if I talk to many voice actors, they would say, well, I don't think it's a matter of getting more work, I don't have a problem handling more work. But I don't think that it, it really grabs voice actors in the way that people are trying to sell it. You know, like, oh, you can do more work. And I don't know really many voice actors that say, well, I'm really, I can't handle the amount of work I'm getting. So -- Tim: Yeah, oh gosh, I'm just double-booked all the time. Poor me. Anne: Yeah, that's, that's a very interesting spin on it, but I will say that, I think that it's really good for us to hear these things because there are perceptions out there, right? And these perceptions come from people who we sell our voices to. Tim: Yeah. Anne: So I think it's good for us to really get an idea as to like what their perception is and what their ideas are about voicing, and you know, what it takes to voice and what our job really entails. Tim: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. And it's, you know, like, so many people have said before on your series, which also thank you so much for doing this whole series on voice and AI with so many different perspectives. Anne: Thank you. Tim: It's so diverse, and educational, and fascinating just to hear like how different companies are approaching all of this, you know? But so many people have said too, that you can't just take like our conversation that we're having right now, rip my voice, and then have a, like a beautiful clone of, of me or -- and you can also just do like five minutes of like the "Cat in the Hat," you know. It's, it is, it takes a voice actor to properly take direction to, you know, recite these prompts that they have in the VocalID interface. And it's still a skill to have. And so I think it's -- Anne: So anybody off the street, if we had hours, and if we had -- I'm just going to say, I know that there are some companies out there that might have a lot of media, a lot of media, of people, of celebrities, of, you know, people in the entertainment industry. And they theoretically don't need a whole lot of additional material in order to create a voice. However, I think the big thing, and I want to get into a discussion about ethics with you, the big thing is the licensing, right? Tim: Yeah, absolutely. Anne: And how can we protect, you know -- we might have audio out there. As a matter of fact, I have a ton of podcasts out there, and who's to say that somebody isn't going to go download those MP3s and create a voice. Tim: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. The ethical side of all of this is fascinating as well, because it is kind of still the wild west with, especially, I feel like between everything that happened with, like starting with Bev Standing and TikTok, and then from that point, it seems like every couple days, there's something new and fire and brimstone about AI coming out. Anne: But I think that could be good. Tim: Yeah. I think, I mean, it's, it's getting people talking, right? Anne: Right. Tim: It's, and it's -- Anne: And it's getting people in action, right? In, in action -- Tim: Exactly, yes. Anne: -- to get something done, to get laws enacted. Tim: Yes. And it's, and so, and it's unfortunate, and I wouldn't wish this on anybody, for anybody to have to go through any of that, but now we're talking about it. Now, we're like, when you work with people doing AI clones and stuff, you know, I've said this before is that you really need to make sure you're vetting who you're working with. Anne: Yeah. Tim: And I got very, very lucky that Rupal was already working with a couple of colleagues of mine in the VO world and with Jim and Sam at Lotas, like, and people who are incredibly trustworthy and, you know, really forward-thinking and trying to protect everybody involved. So. Anne: Mm-hmm. Tim: Yeah. Anne: I think that's a very, very important point. And I actually, one of my questions was going to be, what was your process in selecting VocalID and the people that you work with? What was your process in selecting them? Because I think that is now become a factor for people that might be considering having their voice cloned or having a voice dub, is working with a company because obviously we can't do it. We have to hire a company that can do that for us. And so I think that there's something to be said for vetting the company that you work with. What are the qualities of the company that you think voice talent should look for in regards to when they want to create an AI voice? Tim: In terms of my process with finding a VocalID, it started off as just kind of like a conversation with -- a check-in with a voice actor friend of mine when I was still in New York City. And I was hearing him talk about, you know, recording these prompts for this, like, AI clone voice that he was doing with Jim and Sam. And I was fascinated by it. And then a couple months went by, the pandemic started, and I kind of forgot about it. And then when we moved down to Texas, through like an entrepreneur group that I'm in, got connected to Rupal in a completely different way. And so through that conversation, finding out that we had all these mutual connections and stuff like that -- and it was a face-to-face conversation too, at least through Zoom. And that's something that's important to me. I love when I'm able to like, especially in a business setting, be able to have -- like look at somebody and really talk with them and not just communicate through email for something that's really felt as high stakes as this could potentially be. So with Rupal, she started off the meeting with just kind of the backstory of why VocalID was initially created. And I think she mentioned on, on her episode on your podcast, that it initially was created to help people who lost their power of speech. And so that was something that spoke to me as well, that like, okay, this isn't a company that's just like -- Anne: Yes. Tim: -- okay, where is that cash cow? How can we milk it and, and move on? Anne: Well, and she's been around too a little bit longer than -- it just seems like lately, there's just a ton of that have sprung up out of nowhere -- Tim: Yeah. Anne: -- creating AI voices. And so I think she's got some longevity to her having started, I think it was back in -- what was it? 2014. I'm not sure when she started. Tim: I'm not sure either. Anne: It's been a while though. Tim: But it's also coming from like an academic background too, like really having, like, I think -- something I always try to do is surround myself with people who are a lot smarter and better than I am. And so I think meeting Rupal really knocked that out of the park. And so really focusing on like the ethical side of things and she -- we have a contract that, you know, for the, for recording my dub, and I didn't even have to ask the questions of, okay, well, what if I don't want to do a project? Or how is this protected? She had everything laid out already. And, and the fact that she was working with Lotas, you know, like if you can really vet somebody by finding out who you know in common or asking people in the industry -- like for instance, I had another company reach out to me that was interested in cloning my voice again. And so like reaching out to the people that I know now through all of this and, and really trying to figure out who they are, and what they're doing, and making sure you're not stepping on anybody's toes. But does that kind of answer the question? Anne: And looking at every contract. Tim: Yes. Oh my gosh, contracts, contracts. Anne: You know, I actually have employed the services of my lawyer more than once in terms of looking at a contract. And I think that for today, it is so important that when we're talking about AI voices that maybe a lawyer get involved. I think it's a worthy investment to really check out those contracts. Tim: I agree. And you know, I've only been doing voiceover for three and a half years and full-time for the last year and a half. And so I haven't really needed a lawyer for any of this yet, but now that I've got my -- my dub has been fully created and I got my first job request today for it -- Anne: Ooh, congratulations. Tim: Thanks. I was, I was like, whoa, this is kind of cool. I don't know what to do next, but we're going to figure it out together. But it's definitely at the point where I do think that it is necessary to bring a lawyer into make sure that like everything going forward is protected for, for me and for VocalID, but -- Anne: Absolutely. Tim: -- yeah. Anne: And that you're fairly compensated. Tim: Exactly. Anne: Yes. Tim: And that's a whole other thing too, that I've gotten a lot of questions about since the BBC stuff came out, is that, like, can you charge the same amount? And it's right now, the answer is, is no, right? Yeah, because it's, I'm not the one that's going to be spending an hour or 20 minutes or whatever it is to book out my studio and do it. Anne: Your time is not necessarily required at this point. Tim: Right. Anne: To create that. Tim: And it costs a lot of money to create this dub. And so I'm not the one who has that machine learning and that computer who's running everything. Anne: Sure. Tim: I provided my voice, and I was able to build this for free because they're working on building it up and really polishing it to turn it into something that's more commercially friendly. Anne: Well, I, I should make note that companies are now charging to have your AI voice be created. Tim: Wow. Anne: And so it's absolutely, that's going to be -- Tim: Yeah. Anne: -- you know, that's going to be an industry there. So I don't necessarily want the BOSS listeners out there to think that they may necessarily have their voice just created. As a matter of fact, there have been some auditions that I've seen out there for TTS projects where I think they may or may not state that it's going to be used for creating a, a dub after that. But there has been some low pay per hour I've seen, and everybody's like run, don't, you know, don't audition for that. And it's interesting because I guess you have to figure out really, who is this company vet that company. And if you can, like you mentioned, meet face to face with the people from that company, are they transparent about the usage and what's going to be happening? And, and I of course would say to everybody at this point, I think it's great to get a lawyer involved. Even if the contract seems like it's got everything specked out, I would suggest that that would be a good thing to do. Tim: Yeah. It can't hurt. And, and with the vetting of the companies too, like I find that if you are just curious and really honestly, anything around AI is just -- with all the fire and brimstone posts that I've been seeing all over social media and in the news about all of this and like kind of damning those who are involved in it from other industry professionals, it's like, if we can just like, stay curious, ask questions and be kind, just like, just seek that understanding out. I think that's, like, the most important thing is that don't just take anybody else's word for it. Anne: Sure. Tim: Don't just believe like one article you read, but really like ask those questions. Anne: Sure. Tim: And so trying to make myself available to those who are curious or who are upset and afraid, and it's like, it's totally fine to be either/or. Anne: And, and understand that there will be clickbait [laughs] Tim: Oh yes. Anne: in terms of the publicity around this. There's going to be a lot of clickbait just because it is a very current, relevant topic of today. And it's not just people in the voiceover industry that are afraid of the robots or AI taking their jobs away. So there's going to be a lot of, I'm going to say, a lot of that going on. And so I think we just need to make educated decisions. So let's talk a little bit about how you've actually created the voice. Let's talk about that process. What did that involve? Tim: Yeah. So the way that VocalID works is that once you are brought on and sign the contract and everything is squared away, legally you get login information for their own interface online. So it's not me recording prompts into Logic on my own system. I'm actually recording directly into their interface, and it goes kind of line by line, and it's like different speeches or children's books just to capture all those individual phonemes that we create with speech, where I think with traditional text-to-speech modules like Siri or Google or any of those assistants, you record those prompts, and then it pieces those exact prompts together, where with this, it's really building it from scratch completely. And then you can manipulate it phonetically or modulate the pitch or change inflections on things. And it's, it's really, it's wild technology. It's really cool. Anne: So I've seen some of the technologies now that say that they can literally change emotion. I mean, have you seen that? I mean, what are your thoughts about that? I think that's a, I don't know. It's, there's so many nuances of human emotion, and to me -- Tim: Yeah. Anne: -- and I'm a tech girl, and I'm trying to envision and understand because that's what I always do. I mean, I was in technology for 20 years, so I'm trying to understand the process. And is it possible -- you know, we have, I want to say infinite amount of nuances as a human -- Tim: Yeah. Anne: -- and I don't know how possible that is to dial that emotion in like a straight, linear fashion, right? Like, oh, let's do -- Tim: It's hard because -- Anne: 20% happy. Let's do 40% happy. Tim: Yeah, exactly, 'cause like, what is that 20%? The 20% happy is going to be different for every person and different for every subject that you're talking about. So I think that alone, like having emotion and being human is our job security in the industry, right? Anne: Yeah. Tim: Like computers will not do stuff that we don't explicitly tell them to do. And so it's, you know, with the emotion side of things, I think it's, it has potential, but I think that it's hard to get it to really convey sadness. 'Cause then you have to like, you have to break down sadness then into code, into an equation. Okay. It's like -- Anne: Into an algorithm. Tim: Yes, exactly. So it's fascinating and wild to play around with, but I don't think like that true human emotion is there yet. And it might not be like what the point of having an AI voice is. Anne: Oh, I'm so glad you said that. It's exactly, it may not be the point. And I think a lot of people are just so afraid of, like, the ultimate, oh my God, it's bad. It's going to replace us. But I think that there's going to, in, in a few years, there's going to be like, it'll settle, it'll evolve into here's where it belongs or here's where it fits best. And it may not be -- I mean, I still believe that there's always going to be room for humans. Tim: Yeah. Anne: And I don't know if they'll try to develop the technology to make it sound completely human. I don't know if it's even possible. And again, humans are the ones that are creating the technology. Tim: Yeah. Yeah. And the company that just came out with the, they did the audio for the DLC, for The Witcher 3 expansion. Anne: Mm-hmm, yeah. Tim: I listened to some of their samples on their site. And in that sounds like pretty realistic, but that's also like that character is -- it's old right here and it's all very upset. Anne: Yeah. Tim: And it's like, it's very, it's not incredibly dynamic. That voice actor who voices him is dynamic and gives the dynamic performance. But like for, for that kind of stuff, like that can come in handy. That's where an AI voice is great because then they can just pick that up and it's quick. But right now I feel like it's more so along the lines of that e-learning, the traditional text-to-speech stuff, IVR, and it's not -- we're not looking to replace the human experience or the human emotion, right? It's just something to kind of augment -- Anne: Well, we aren't. [laughs] Tim: We aren't. I'm sure that there are companies that are working towards that. And I'm sure we'll see that at some point, right? Anne: Yeah, but you're right. There's going to be an attempt. I'm sure there's going to be attempts. Tim: Yeah. Anne: And it's, I think that's just the evolution. And again, it's not just affecting the voiceover industry. I think we're just here in a little bubble sometimes, and we need to really try to -- well, we really need to really try to, to see AI for what it is and try to evolve along with it. So let me ask you a question. How are you intending or how are you marketing your AI voice? Tim: That's something I'm still working on. It's a great question. So Rupal asked if I'd be interested in putting my AI profile on Voice123, and Rolf and their team has been working on putting these profiles on there just to try to get ahead of things and stay with the movement of AI. And so I agreed to do that, and I've got a profile on there, and then trying to figure out like what samples, like I have some samples I'm going to put on my website, and a little like VocalID badge, but it's going to be, it's still kind of in process of like, okay, how do I pitch this to clients too, or to potential new clients? And so I think it's going to be reaching out to those people like that you've brought onto your podcast, like Hugh -- Anne: Sure. Tim: -- that would have a better idea of like, okay, well, if you pitch it to this company for this reason, then that would be best case scenario, you know? But I think it's going to change a lot. Anne: This is great. I'm thinking so if you have it marketed through a pay-to-play, I think we need to make sure how are we being protected legally? How are our voices being protected? Are their usage -- is there something that's going to be put in place that will protect us if we sell it through that? Or if you sell it on your own, how are you negotiating that -- you creating a contract, I would think, I would hope, that you would create a contract that would -- and well, normally, I think in our emails, we specify usage and, and all of that. And I think that the same thing absolutely has to be for your AI voice. And again, I'm at this point, because of the newness of it all and the wild, wild west of it all, I'm always happy to have somebody consult with me that's in the legal field -- Tim: Totally. Anne: -- just to make sure that when I'm first starting to negotiate that voice, I wouldn't want that voice to be used for any purpose other than what it was intended. I would not want it to be sold. I would not want to say things that I didn't agree to with that voice. Tim: Yeah. Anne: And so I think that that's very important. So I commend you [laughs] for going ahead and, and delving into the new world of technology here, and kind of really you're, you're testing the waters. You're on the, I always call it the bleeding edge of technology. Tim: I love that. Anne: There has to be, you know, we have our trials, we have our, our successes and our failures, and that's how we all evolve and move forward and learn. And so I wish you all the luck with your AI voice and congrats on your job [laughs] on your first job. Tim: Thanks. We'll see how it goes. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. And we'll, we'll keep in touch with you. And so I thank you so much for spending time with us this morning and sharing your story with the BOSSes. And I am excited to hear about where your voice will go. Tim: Thank you so much, Anne. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on and give me the opportunity to speak on this. And if any of the VO BOSSes out there have any questions, I'm, I'm here. Anne: Yes. Tim: You know, I'm easy to find. Anne: Absolutely, how can they get in touch with you? Tim: You can either reach me through my website TimHellerVO.com or @TimHellerVO on all the social platforms. So. Anne: Perfect. Tim: Yeah. Anne: Awesome. Well, thanks again. I'm going to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect to like BOSSes and learn more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week, and we'll see you next week. Bye! Tim: Bye! >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to Coast connectivity via ipDTL. 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After a year of shutdown and no racing, it looks like racing is happening again with some variation. Today's guest is familiar with all the new protocols, especially, in triathlon racing. I’m Hilary Topper, and this is Hilary Topper on Air. Today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Tim Delss of CBMultiSport. Tim is also the head coach of WeREndurance. Tim, Welcome to the show. Let's talk about the return to triathlon racing. Tim - Thanks for having me, Hilary. Hilary - So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? Tim - Sure, I am the owner and coach at CBMultiSport, which is a company that I operate here in Maryland focusing on coaching age group triathletes of all ages. My specialty is people like you and me, that work normal jobs and have lives and families and things to schedule work around. In addition to that, I am the head coach for you guys over, WeREndurance. I'm also a business partner with AJ Baucco coaching. And then I also helped the first time Ironman athletes at iron man Maryland, and do the secrets to success clinic and help with race staff there as well. Hilary - So, can you talk to our listeners about what to expect from Iron man and other long courses, this racing season 2021? Tim - Yeah. First of all, it's great that we're seeing transitioned back to racing. The return to triathlon racing is very exciting. Last weekend I was actually down at a race in Virginia, the kinetic triathlon festival that had sprint Olympic at 70.3 distance. So, it was fun to be back at a race and see what was going on. There's a lot of variables and what's happening because, obviously, CDC guidelines are changing, each state they're managing their guidelines and their standards all individually. And then, below that, it funnels down to counties and local jurisdiction. So there's no real, set protocol. It depends on where your races are, but, the most important thing is racing is coming back. And from what I've seen, what I've heard, as races are taking off is that the race organizations, the race directors and the staffs are they're putting a lot of time and effort into making things as safe and reasonable as possible. I know, and this may change since the guidelines were just changed by the CDC. But, prior to this weekend, races were requiring you to wear masks, to pack and pick up their space and people out to maintain social distancing. I know for Eagle man, 70.3, which is our first Ironman branded race. Now this season here in Maryland, we are going to be having people call or schedule their packet pickups. So that'll be coming soon. For those athletes, and their return to triathlon racing, they will be getting an email to schedule when they actually want to pick their pack up to try to minimize crowding. And will be doing the same for bike racking. We'll see how that progresses into the year with other races like Maryland or things like that, but that's just one of the things that Angie and the staff is doing, for Eagle man to make it as efficient, as easy as possible, but, I'm sure you noticed that so many things are in flux right now, especially with the new revisions by the CDC. So, pretty much everything I thought we were going to talk about when we set this up last week, it is about to change. I find it's changing. So, being an awesome podcast, I'm going to give you a lot of “I think” as opposed to “I know”. Hilary - Yeah, yeah. I know. It's just, it's crazy. Every day something comes out that's completely different than two days before. And, in that vein, what do you think about triathletes? I mean, should we all get vaccinated? Let's take politics out of this and just what do you think in terms of these long races and that type of thing? Should we protect each other and ourselves in order to return to triathlon racing? Tim - Sure now there's a lot of things to consider there. Some people have cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, their own opinions. Right, and I'm never going to tell someone what they should or shouldn't think. And, unfortunately, in the climate we have here, almost everything is being politicized and the vaccine is… Those are waters that nobody really wants to wait into and rightfully so. But, from a pure triathlon standpoint, if you have access to the vaccine, if you can go get it, like I know here in Maryland, mass vaccination sites are walk up now and we bet we're actually getting to the point where in a lot of places we have more vaccines and we have appointments being filled. Because the initial rush kind of over, everybody can get one versus you have to be a certain age or have a certain predetermined health issue or things like that. If you have access to it, unless you have a very specific reason not to get it, then I don't really see why you shouldn't. I can't tell you not to, but from an endurance sports standpoint, triathlon, especially a long course, it's very hard on the body with the training and the racing, it wears you down, it makes you more susceptible to illness and injury and things like that, and so yes, we are that small percentage, generally of the most healthy people in the country, right? Because we're incredibly active and most people are pretty decent about their eating in some form. And we generally take care of ourselves, which, on the surface, makes us less predisposed to get an illness than someone who smokes two packs a day and doesn't take care of themselves or whatever. When you're going out there and training hard and racing hard and doing all that stuff, you compromise your immune system, that's why recovery is so important. You know, and that's why triathletes and during south fleets come up sick within, oftentimes, a couple of weeks of a race cause their immune system's down or they're immunocompromised at that point. So to return to triathlon racing, the vaccine can be a tool to help in that regard. I personally got my second shot, last Thursday. So, after my two weeks lapse, I was fully vaccinated and I was never worried about myself. I'm 36 years old. I'm a healthy guy. I don't have, I wasn't worried about me getting COVID, but what I was more worried about is me giving it to someone else or, you know, something like that. So, that for me was an easy personal step. So it's, unfortunately, it's something that everybody has to decide for themselves most Americans have at least one shot at this point, the majority of people that are eligible, right? Not, it's not accounting for children who aren't yet eligible or things like that. And I think that's why we're starting to see things open up and seeing more racing coming back. And, you know, we're getting towards that level of herd immunity that people have been talking about for so long. And, but we're doing it more by vaccine than we are by you catching it and me catching it and everybody else catching it. So that's why things are starting to open back up. I know that's why the CDC relaxed their guidelines because we hit some percentage that they wanted to see. So things are on the up and, hopefully, within a year or two, it's going to be kind of like the flu. In that, they understand more about it. And every year they have a shot that people can get if they want to get it, based on what the strands are doing and the evolution and all that stuff. And it'll just become a small, but normal part of our culture, like the flu. Hilary - Do you think, sorry to interrupt for a minute, but I just, I'm curious to know your thoughts about whether or not race directors should require either negative test or proof that you got the vaccine in order to return to triathlon racing, is that happening? Tim - Not that I know of, I know some people in the industry, not necessarily race directors, but bike fitters like chops, stuff like that that are requiring things like that for like bike fittings and stuff like that. As a small race team, if you're a local race director or anything like that, you run a private business and as private business, you're allowed to allow to require those things and request those things. There's been debates on whether or not someone asking you if you're vaccinated to violation of HIPAA laws or whatever, and I'm not a lawyer, I don't study medical law. But I was like, well, I mean, you have to provide proof of vaccination that your kids have had a their measles, mumps, and rubella if they're going to go to school, and that's not a violation or, you know, at the same time, I've read a couple of things that were like, well, there's a, if you're a business owner, race director, whatever, you have an obligation to keep your employees and volunteers safe, that's kind of a counter argument, so to speak. But I don't know of any race directors doing that to return to triathlon racing. The couple of running races that I've done during COVID time has been, you have to wear a mask until the race starts, they're spacing out, starting times. The race I was at this past weekend, they did the same thing. Everybody had to wear their masks in the corral. And then they did like time trial start. And as you were going up to the edge of the beach, they had a trashcan there for you to throw masks. And they also provided two masks to the athletes, and then once you finish, before you lead the finisher shoot, you had to have a mass back on, so I think that race directors are in a really sticky spot because it's, it's a business. Everyone has personal opinions there, but they're also trying to be as safe and welcoming as possible. They're really in kind of a situation that they can't win, so they're kind of trying to balance everything to allow us to get back to racing. And I certainly don't envy the position that they're in with having to make their decisions. But the few that are the ones I know that I've talked to in a couple of races, I've seen, they seem to be doing a pretty good job of doing the best they can. Hilary - Before we move on, I have to say that I am so appreciative of our sponsors and must take the time out to thank them. Please support our sponsors and tell them that you heard about them on Hilary Topper on air. Special thanks to the Russo law group, the Profit Express with Tim Healey, Pop international galleries, Gold Benes L L P and the Pegalis law group. Now back to you, Tim. So we're talking about racing and triathlons and the return to triathlon racing. Can you tell me if you think this year is a good year for a newbie to race? Why or why not? Tim - Every year is a good year to try something new. In my local tri club here in Maryland, I actually run a beginners program, where I provide a group focus training plan, they're not individual fully customized, like I do my normal day to day work, but, kind of a group focused plan that leads towards a race that our tri club. And it's a way to welcome the men, give them a little guidance. It allows me to be there to answer their questions and, and kind of help them on their journey. Like someone helped me when I got into this sport. It's never a bad time to try something new and to get in. I don't know how long you've been in the sport, but you know, if we go back 10 years ago, when the triathlon exploded, there were always new people coming in. There was always a rush of excitement. Like there was an atmosphere in the sport that was pretty amazing. And everything kind of settled in the sport retracted a little bit, like most things do after they boom, to what it has been the last few years, which is good, has been steady. Races are still selling out and things like that. So that’s great. It's not like it's just falling off a cliff, but there is something that new athletes bring to the sport that the anticipation, the anxiousness, the nervousness, the excitement that they bring that really kind of excites all athletes, even people that have been doing this a long time. And so I love seeing new people in, the other thing that's happening is with COVID, with the pandemic, the race directors have had to get very creative in trying to figure out ways to bring race and back last summer, fall, and now for 2021. And so, the new athletes can actually use that as an advantage. There are more races popping up. There are different formats popping up, they're now spreading races, instead of having one big race on one day, they're spreading it out over two days. So there are things that are happening that kind of take a little bit of that entry pressure off. Cause like when I got into this sport, you had to sign, you had to commit to something a year in advance, sign up right away, know everything sold out fast. You had to jump in the deep end just to guarantee that you could get to a starting line. Then you had to work your way back, no matter what distance you were racing. But now there's so much more variety and variability and option that an athlete can really kind of way into the water instead of jumping in or immersing ourselves at kind of their own speed. And after a year off of racing, the seasoned athletes and experienced athletes, they're all really just kind of happy to be getting back to racing. And so the dynamic it's reminding me more of when I first got into it, the atmosphere in the sports, a little different. So, it's more inclusive and it's less, the pressure is less intense. Like people are just happy to be back racing. And so I think that's a great atmosphere for beginners to come into. Hilary - Absolutely. Now let's just, I just have a question about the pandemic. How should triathletes be careful during racing? I mean, you know, is there anything that you think, advice that you would give a triathlete or an athlete when they are racing with hundreds of other people? Tim - Well, the biggest thing is, and this we're talking about the pandemic, but this is always going to apply in or out a pandemic is don't do something that you're uncomfortable doing. There's a certain level of discomfort in triathlon. Whether it's tackling a new distance or your legs are tired or lungs are burning, right? There is a saying in triathlon that you get comfortable being uncomfortable and that's very true. What I mean is don't do something that you fear, don't put yourself in a situation that you're worried would be harmful to you. So it's one of those people who has an underlying medical condition or has older family that you're really worried about while everything's still happening with COVID or whatever, then wait a few more months and see how things progress, right? Like there's no reason that you have to just rush into something that you're unprepared for. As far as the racing standpoint goes, the truth is like, I could tell you, make sure you're staying away from people, make sure you're legally not drafting, right. That's more than six feet, right. That don't run close to people when they're sweating and breathing and all that stuff. And I can say all those things, but I think for most of us, once we get into a race, you're not really thinking about a lot of those things. You're kind of you're in the race. So it's like, you're thinking about making sure you get your water and you get your nutrition and you're staying on your pacing and there's so many you just kind of do when you're racing, and for the most part, like being in the water is not really that concerning of an issue right. On the swim portion, on the bike portion, you're not actually supposed to be close enough to really have any issues. So, the biggest sticking point would be the run from a safety standpoint. And, in that case, it's like, well, don't grout around an aid station. You know, things like that. I haven't raced yet this year, so I can't say personally, but like when I've done running races during COVID we've been required to carry a mask in case we needed to stop at an aid station for the safety of volunteers. I don't know if that's some race directors are requiring that for triathlon aid stations or if they're going self-serve and you know, some of them are doing self-surveyed stations. You know, where someone pours the water and puts it on the table, and then they stay out of the way so you can just run through and grab it, but it's pretty, for the most part, it's pretty easy and triathlon to maintain a reasonable distance. There's been very few times that I've ever been shoulder to shoulder with someone on a run or something like that. Like most things, common sense serves you best, you just have to, you just have to think about it. And unfortunately, it doesn't really seem so common anymore, but, just practical, common sense will serve people well. Hilary - Absolutely good, good advice. Could you talk a little bit about how you personally help triathletes grow and develop? Tim - Sure. Triathlon is a sport that rewards two things: time and consistency, and by consistency, I mean, whatever your distance, whether you're a sprint athlete or an iron distance at one 40.6 athlete, or the more consistently you can train over a longer portion of time, the better you will be. It takes years to reach an aerobic peak and things like that. It’s a sport that rewards consistency. So, whether, if I'm coaching an athlete, then obviously I'm managing their day to day training schedules and things like that. So we're shooting, my job is to make sure that they're consistently training, hitting their progressions in their training plans, things like that. If I'm not, if we're just having a conversation and I'm talking to some new athlete at a race venue or something, then usually the advice I give is to find a training schedule that fits your life. You know, it has to fit within your life. I could build the best training plan on earth for you. For example, you know that they'd be like, oh man, we're going to blow some things out of the water and, in a year, you're going to be awesome. But if the schedule doesn't fit into your daily life, it's really helpful to you at all, cause you're not going to do it as it was intended, so you're not going to see the improvement. So there would need to be revisions made, so they need to pick a schedule that fits. The second thing is don't be afraid to take your time. There's been kind of a rush of athletes that come into triathlon and they jump in and they want to get right up to do an iron man because they saw on TV in December when NBC aired it. And you know, it becomes a bucket list item. So they jump in and they want to do it. That's fine and good. And that's a great goal and a great ambition. There's also an extremely high likelihood of injury. If you come from not doing this to try to jump in and do 140 mile race. So don't be afraid to take your time. It should take a few years for you to get to the point of doing an Ironman and then the last thing is don't take it too seriously. Like generally we're kind of type a people, right? We care about data. We care about the numbers. If you use training peaks, you want your work out to be green at the end of the day you don't want to miss stuff, we want to improve. We want to get better. And, and all those things are good traits and there, it can be good and positive. But you still have to remember that this is supposed to be fun for 99.9% of the people. This is a hobby and so while it is good to want to be better and to focus on getting better, don't beat yourself up if you have a bad race, they happen. Or if things don't go the way you want, or, there's always going to be another race on the horizon and it's still supposed to be fun. So enjoy the fact that you're able to do it and take in the experience because if you pay attention to the experience around you while it's happening, it, it really is. Triathlon is an amazing world to live in. Hilary - Totally. I totally agree. And coach Tim, can you tell our listeners how to get in touch with you to learn more about your services? Tim - Sure, guys can reach me just about anywhere, you can find me on Facebook, my coaching pages CBMultiSport, or you can look me up by my name. Tim Delss, you can find me at www.cbmultisport.com or www.ajbcoaching.com . For my partnership with A.J. Baucco Coaching, you can also find me roaming the grounds at most triathlons in the Mid-Atlantic area, you can join the WeREndurance team. You can find me there and you can find me on Instagram at CB multi-sport or you can if you don't remember any of that stuff, you can contact Hilary and she can get you to. Hilary - Absolutely. And I just want to thank you, Tim. This was a great show as always talking about the return to triathlon racing. You're always an amazing guest. I also want to thank our sponsors, the Russo law group, the Profit express, Pop International Galleries, Gold Benes, LLP, and the Pegalis law group. And last but not least, I want to thank you our listeners for tuning in. If you want more information on this show or any other show, you can find us at hilarytopperonair.com or you can find us also at Spotify, iTunes, apple podcasts, Google play, even Amazon Alexa, have a great week and we'll see you next time...

02:21 - Corey’s Superpower: Reading 3,400 WPM * Increasing Reading Speed 05:35 - Keeping Up w/ AWS * Last Week in AWS (https://www.lastweekinaws.com/) * AWS Morning Brief (https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/) * Screaming in the Cloud (https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/) 08:45 - Delivering Corey Quinn – Personal Evolution * Speaking Truth to Power (Kindly, but Snarkily) * Privilege * Sonia Gupta and Corey Quinn - Embarrassingly Large Numbers: Salary Negotiation for Humans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK6yrvsSaFs&list=PLK3MtoG6xjv_eLXKEVKG_uuYCZWqKfAaa&index=101) * Holding Yourself Accountable * Defensiveness * This Cloud Computing Billing Expert Is Very Funny. Seriously. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/technology/corey-quinn-amazon-aws.html) (NYT Article) * Intentionality 25:51 - Career Snarkiness * @SimpsonsOps (https://twitter.com/SimpsonsOps) * @killedbygoogle (https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle) 28:05 - Approaching and Handling D&I as a Business Owner * Discussing Salary Compensation 43:44 - Making and Delivering Jokes 45:08 - The Prospect of Being a Public Figure 50:03 - Recognizing Your Own Failure Mode * The Art of Delegation 54:32 - Approachability * Admitting Mistakes * What’s the point? Reflections: Rein: Systems derive their purpose from how they relate to larger systems. Tim: Iterating on oneself to become a better person. Becoming a human optimized. Arty: Holding yourself accountable. Taking responsibility for how other people see you in a public context. Mando: There’s a power in not hiding who you are. Apologizing for not letting people know what’s going on. Corey: Words are loud. Words are heavy. Words carry weight. Words carry impact. There is a balance. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 228 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I am here with my fabulous co-host, Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thank you, Artemis. I'm delighted to be here with my good friend, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Mando and I'm here with my friend and brand-new co-host, Tim Banks. TIM: Thanks, Rein. I am Tim Banks and I am delighted to have our guest for this show, Corey Quinn. COREY: Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure to be here to once again, indulge my ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice. TIM: Just so everyone knows, Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and somewhat less horrifying. He also hosts the Screaming in the Cloud and AWS Morning Brief podcasts; and curates Last Week in AWS, a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure. COREY: I would agree that that is a fair characterization of what I do. Excellent work. Thank you. MANDO: Corey, we like to start off every podcast with asking our guests kind of the same question and that question is what do you consider your superpower to be and how did you get it? COREY: I would consider my superpower to be the fact that as tested and certified by some random site on the internet, I read 3,400 words a minute and the way that I got there was growing up, most people have friends, I had books because of the wonderful thing that happens in my world namely, having a personality that is pretty obvious to anyone who's spoken for more than 30 seconds. In my early phases of my life, this didn't resonate super well so I turned to escapism in the form of reading. Later in life, this turned into something of a superpower when you're trying to do something like, I don't know, read every release that comes out of AWS in a given afternoon. MANDO: Yeah, that'll do it. [laughs] REIN: There are so many. MANDO: I went to a private elementary school for a year and one of the less weird things that they had us do was do speed reading training. They had this little cylinder and you would feed in a piece of paper and the cylinder had room for, I don't know, 8 to 10 lines of the paper and it would scroll automatically at a certain rate and you would read the story and then take a test afterwards and then as you pass the tests, they would both speed up the cylinder and then also shrink the amount you could see at one time to point where it got to just reading line by line and this thing's scrolling superfast. It was really weird and really struck my competitive juices like, I really wanted to show the teachers that I could read as fast as possible. So that's the one thing from that weird private school that I went to that I think has had any sort of payoff in my adult life. COREY: There are a bunch of tools and techniques that people can use to increase reading speed, and I've never done any of them. I don't know how I do it, I just do it. It's easy to sit here and think that, “Oh, I'm going to read super quickly. That's a superpower. That's something I can use and leverage, too,” and then what? The skill, or the talent is necessary, but not sufficient the way that I do things and you have to refine it and apply it in different ways. Sitting here and doing it as a spectacle or sport on a conference panel or something and look at how fast I can consume information, not much of a party trick. Using that and applying it to something that for, in my case, distilling vast quantities information down in an understandable and meaningful way, that was the outcome. It was never about just “being smart,” which is how I often hear other folks talking about various superpowers. “Oh, I have a natural innate intelligence.” Great, what do you do with it? How do you apply that? That's the thing that often gets overlooked; at least by folks in a somewhat early stage of the development that they're dealing with professionally. REIN: So let me ask, you do the Last Week in AWS podcast, why do you give a shit about that stuff? COREY: Functionally, what I do and what I started doing when I started The Duckbill Group, it was understanding the AWS bill so that I can reduce it. Sure, it's easy to do that from a pure numerical analysis perspective and figure out oh, what reservations, or commitments you can use. But a lot of it required insight into what the application was doing because the worst consultants in the world are the ones that walk in, look around, have no idea what they're looking at, and then start telling you that you screwed everything up. That's not helpful, it's not compelling, and it's the sign of a terrifically awful consultant, in most cases. I see something that looks like it's ridiculous, my first question is: great, can you help me understand this? I don't tend to, by default, assume the person I'm talking to is a moron and similarly, I had to understand the various economic impacts of different capabilities, features, and services. They're changing all the time. I had to keep up with this stuff so I shoved a bunch of things into my RSS feed and I was tracking this because there was nowhere else to do it. That got me 80% of the way there to being able to share this with the rest of the world. I figured, ah, I can make other people do my work for me. I figured I would launch a newsletter, run it for a few weeks, someone would chime in, “Well, why don't you just read, insert other thing here?” and then great. I can turn off the newsletter. I found the thing that does this for me and I can focus on other things. Instead, 550 people signed up for the first issue and it's been growing ever since and it turns out that thing that people should read to solve this problem is the thing that I built. It still surprises me and the reason I care about it all is because my customers need to know these are the things, but they don't want to read all of it. They don't want to know all of these things. They want to solve their problem. REIN: It seems relatively easy for a consultant to go in and say, cut here, trim there, and then you'll get 20, 50% off of your AWS bill. But isn't the thing that you want for the people who will be there long after you're gone to be able to make better decisions about their own spend? COREY: One of the nuanced areas of what I do is this idea that, “Oh, I'm going to come in and lower your bill,” That virtually always happens, but that's not the actual goal. The goal is to inform the business so that they can make decisions around managing spend, managing capability, and managing risk. In some cases, we suggest spending more on certain areas such as, “Huh, you claim that that thing is an incredibly critical to your business set of data and you're not backing it up anywhere. Perhaps, you should consider doing that.” It's the idea of doing the right thing, not the cheap thing. It's we don't ever charge for example, by percentage of savings, or percentage of bill, it's flat rate only because once that's done and we agree on what that rate is, there's no other conflict of interest. I'm not trying to rack up savings to claim a percentage of it. I have no partnerships with any vendor in the space, so I'm not getting a kickback if I say, “Oh, use this tool or that tool or that service.” Instead, it purely reduces me down to, “This is what I would do if I were in your position, take it or leave it.” TIM: So I think Corey, it's fair to say that people recognize your expertise, both in optimizing of costs and optimizing the practice. Writing good tools, adopting best practices, having sound resilient architectures, and saving money. But it's also fair to say that that's not why people follow you. You have a voice and a particular way of analyzing things that appeals to people. Snark has its place and it's very well-placed in your commentary, but what it mostly involves is true insight. So can you give me the story behind what really empowered you and made you comfortable in delivering your full Corey Quinn to people in an industry where maybe people aren't really supposed to be their whole selves? COREY: My entire career, I had a core competency that I was always the absolute best in the room at, across the board and no one could step to me as far as being good at that thing and that thing was getting myself fired because of the things that I said. My entire career, every boss, every mentor, every teacher, every family member, every vague acquaintance that I pass on the street has given me the same advice: “Your sense of humor/personality is going to hold you back in your career.” When I started this place, I was so tired and beaten down from hearing that, that I figured that either everyone I've ever spoken to is right and I'm wrong, or I'm right and they're all wrong. And with the confidence born of being a mediocre white man in tech, I figured let's try it and see. Because worst-case, if the whole thing blows up in my face, well, I can go back to using my maiden name professionally. I can effectively shove the Corey Quinn identity as it is down the memory hole and I can go back to being an unhappy employee somewhere else. It started to resonate and it took on a life of its own and for the first time in my entire career, I don't feel like I have to hide who and what I am and that is a powerful thing. TIM: So one of the things that I think people appreciate, especially in your very active and humorous Twitter feed, is saying the things that everyone is thinking about the Giants. You speak truth to power, but you do so in a manner that does not insult nor mischaracterize the people who make the technology, who make the decisions. Can you talk to us a little bit about how being kind while still being somewhat snarky guides – what's your thought processes and how does that guide your commentary? COREY: You say this like it's a done deal, but it's very much not. Earlier, the week that we're having this recording, I wound up doing a snarky, sarcastic rebuttal of the profile of me that appeared in the New York Times in the voice of AWS. I made some snarky offhanded comments that implied basically that AWS marketing was crap and I heard from several people inside that team that, that they thought that hurt them and to be very direct, I got that wrong. If people are hearing what I have to say and feeling bad about themselves, about their work, then I've gone in a wrong direction. It's a very fine line to walk, given who and what I am, but when people see what I have to say and hear it and they walk away hurt, I failed. I don't always get it right, clearly. All I can strive to do is be better and not make the same mistake twice. It's a constant process of evolution and learning. And to be very direct, I am incredibly grateful by people feeling that they have the psychological safety to reach out to me and say, “That hurt my feelings.” MANDO: One thing that I've seen you do, Corey, as an accessory to that is be on the lookout for people who maybe don't feel that same kind of psychological security, but also feel some, or have some negative impact, or connotation with what you said. I've seen this a couple of times. I saw it once this week, when you were talking about – you had a Twitter thread talking about how to find a job in tech, how to negotiate salaries and stuff like that. And then there was a Slack group that we're both involved in and someone made a comment saying that they felt put out a little bit by the tone of what you had said and I personally found it impressive and a little bit inspirin, the way that you responded to that individual. Would you mind building on that a little bit, why you think that's so important and then how you address and maybe manage those kinds of situations? COREY: Sure. Privilege is a funny thing because we all swim in it in various ways, no matter who you are or what you do, there are elements of privilege that are inherent to you based upon aspects of your life and to you. That's not something that you're generally aware of in a conscious sense. Instead, it's very much a part of the background of your own lived experience and it's difficult, at times, to put yourself in the shoes of people who have different stories. The natural response, in some cases, when being told about privilege is to push back, “Excuse me, nothing was handed to me. I had to work and build this thing and sure, maybe that's true on some level, but you did not have to deal with a headwinds against you that a lot of other people did.” And there is an element of, “Well, I was born on third base. I didn't hit a triple.” Yes, that's true. It absolutely is. But you still got to go from third base to home on some level. It's easier than someone who's starting off on home and having to round all of the bases and there's still work that has to be put in. But it's important to understand that this is an important thing and a lot of people struggle with it because our society is inherently unjust. There is no way around that. The differences is that I'm not sitting here when I have these conversations, talking about how I wish the world was, or how it should be. I'm one of those people that sees the world as it is, or as I assume, as I interpret it to be, and I speak from a position of this is how I function in the environment in which I find myself. Now, some aspects of what I do, do not apply to people who don't look like I do. I generally go out of my way to avoid airing those things. I don't want to build a conference talk on how to handle job interviews for white guys, because that's awful. It's about getting interesting perspectives on this one. I did that actual talk, or something close to it back in 2016, or so and when I realized what I'd built, I was horrified and didn't give it again for a couple of years and then I gave it as a keynote at devopsdays Charlotte. I did that with my co-speaker, Sonia Gupta, who she and I sat there and gave the talk called Embarrassingly Large Numbers: Salary Negotiation for Humans. Her background is as an attorney. She also doesn't look like I do. And it became a much more equitable talk, it became a much more universal talk, it was better in every respect, and it remains one of the talks I'm proudest of giving. It's a matter of when you realize that you have done something that inadvertently causes harm, or perpetuate some of the inequality that is rampant around us, it's incumbent on you, if you want to continue to be a good person, even if nowhere else other than you're in your own mind, to correct the misbehavior, say, “I'm sorry about that,” and then this is the key part, strive not to do it again. We're all works in progress. TIM: I think that notion of us all being a works in progress rings more true than I think most people like to admit. We constantly iterate on ourselves as we should be doing to find our mistakes, correct them, and then implement those corrections as we go forward. The thing that I think most people miss is the fact that they have to admit the fact that they did something wrong in the first place, especially in the form of public opinion. In a very public place like Twitter, Corey, you have done really well at that and I think there's a lot of wisdom that people can gain just by watching how you say, “Hey, this was not right,” or “I can do better,” and holding yourself accountable when especially other people hold themselves accountable. How do you think that we can promote this type of behavior in our culture and in our industry? COREY: Okay. Let me tell you a dark secret then because I don't want people to get an unrealistic expectation of who I am, or what I do. When I get it wrong, very often someone will either say something on Twitter or DM me with a, “This isn't a great take,” and every time like clockwork, my immediate response is to get defensive because no one likes being called out. What I learned I going by through the process is when I feel that flash of defensiveness: shut up. I do not respond. I step back for a minute. I go for a walk. I think. I wait for that reaction to subside and then really think about the feedback that I'm given from a place that is not in the moment, fraught with emotion. There are times that I can do that in seconds. There are times it takes me days. Usually, what happens is I realize that they have a point. Very occasionally, I disagree with what they're saying either because I didn't communicate clearly, or they misunderstood, or on some level, past a certain point, it is so far below even the level of rising to microaggression that it's one of those. Yeah, I have a bit of a hard time accepting that feedback where easy example of this is, I wound up having a gag recently called AWS Hambone, where they had some line art drawings in some of the AWS stuff that was put out, and I wound up having an event called AWS Hambone. Twitter Safety blocks someone who tweeted the phrase at one point, it was, “What is this?” Someone said, “Ah. Well, on Urban Dictionary, if you look up the word Hambone and scroll down a few things,” and of course, it's something horrific. There's always something horrific for three quarters of the words in the English language and at that point, you're so far into the weeds that I don't know that I necessarily would agree with that in that sense, but it's also not going to be a recurring gag that I use all the time. When I named my company, The Duckbill Group, and slapped a platypus up on as our mascot, I spent a week researching is there anything problematic on any aspect of the platypus and every bit of research I could do was no and here we are and no one has ever told me, the platypus is problematic. At this stage, that offer has expired. Please don't email me. But it's about doing your best to make these things right when you get it wrong, taking people's advice seriously and again, I don't do this in a vacuum. I have a number of people whose insight I trust and with whom I have a sense of psychological safety that I can reach out to and ask them, “Is this too far afield or not?” I want to be very clear, the majority of those people that I reach out to look an awful lot like me, because I'm not asking folks who are not overrepresented to do additional on paid free labor. REIN: I’d really liked to dig in a little bit more deeply to the part where you said you get defensive and then you take a moment because that seems like the key to me and it also seems like something that's really, really hard in the moment to do. Virginia Satir says that the problem isn't the problem, how we cope as the problem and that these emotions come unbidden to our consciousness, and then we get to decide, we have an opportunity to decide what we do with them. So what I'm hearing you say is you make a conscious effort to decide what to do. You feel defensive. You don't have control over that. What you have control over is what you do with it and so, my question is how do you create the space for yourself to cope? COREY: It helps tremendously in that the most common form that I use for my aggressive shitposting, hot takes, et cetera, et cetera, but also testing new things out is Twitter. There is no SLA around responses on Twitter. I don't need to respond within 30 seconds or so. Right now, we're having a conversation, if I stop for 2 minutes to really think something through, you're going to wonder if the call dropped. Twitter doesn't have that problem and from where I sit, it's a place of, I don't believe that I can control my own emotions to the point where I don't that defensive flare, but that's on me. That's something I need to think through. I don't wind up turning aside and kicking the dog, or punching a hole in the wall. I sit there because it never feels great, but it's where growth comes from. If you've doubled down on being wrong when people whose lived experience are actively telling you that what you're saying or doing causes harm, I don't believe that you are being the kind of person that in your heart of hearts, you wish you were. Now, some people want to be shitheads and that's fine. Good for you. I don't want to be around you. REIN: I want to make it possible to say your real yeses and your real nos. COREY: Yes, absolutely. Punch up. It's hilarious. I mean, I'm a hell of a cyber bully to a company that's worth $1.6 trillion, the last time I checked. If they can't take it on the chin, they need to deal with it. But there are individual people who work there and they don't deserve getting dragged. As I mentioned previously and repeatedly, the single exception to this is of course, Oracle co-founder, Larry Ellison. Because even if someone's garbage, they have friends and family who love and care for them and Larry Ellison is an asshole who does not. Nobody likes Larry Ellison and the best part of that is I got a lot of pushback and a lot of feedback on that article in the New York Times and the one thing that I thought was notable is not a single person defended Larry, or said that I was wrong because I'm right. He's an who has no friends QED, but everyone else, off the table. REIN: You're obviously very intentional about this. So what do you do intentionally to stay on the right side of that line? COREY: The honest and easy way is I talk to people. I fall into the trap personally of forgetting people behind things. To my worldview, a big company is one that has 200 people and when I don't know anyone on a service team at AWS who is involved in building a project, or launching a service, I just view it as this thing, this enormous behemoth thing and then I make fun of it. As soon as I talked to someone who was involved with that it's, “Oh crap, I need to understand who these people are.” Honestly, one of the reasons I've been so rough on Amazon Marketing is that no one in that group talks to me. It's basically a void so it becomes almost a punchline and then I have to be reminded from time to time that there are people there. That's an area I get it wrong in. Now on some level, the Amazon corporate posture is if we ignore Corey, he'll probably go away, which is absolutely the wrong direction to go in. It's akin to, “Well, if we kidnap the bear cubs, then may be that grizzly will let me pet her.” It doesn't work. [laughter] It's like smacking an alligator over the snout with a rock in the hopes it'll make him friendlier. Don't do that. I guess, I'm saying I crave attention. Well, roll with it. REIN: I think you compared yourself to an alligator. COREY: Oh, absolutely. TIM: Oh, that sounded deliberate. [overtalk] REIN: It’s fair. TIM: Alligators, to my recollection, do not have bills, correct? COREY: No, no. Those are reserved for generally ducks, geese, and platypuses. TIM: Is it platypus or platypi? COREY: Platypi is a myth. It's platypoes, if you want to go down that particular Latin root. TIM: I don't know if there's a witty monotremes joke in general so, I'll just let that go. COREY: Exactly. There are, but you have to look for them. That's why my mascot is an extreme monotreme. REIN: I like that you explicitly tried to avoid being [inaudible] platypus. COREY: There is always that aspect of things. REIN: All right, so I can tell you that platypus is actually extremely racist! [laughs] COREY: Exactly. No, no. The platypus for the mascot that we have is not racist. Well, insofar as other than the [inaudible], we are all racist to some extent, which is problematic but it is a thing to say in some quarters, but let's be a little more intentional of how we say it. The platypus isn't a bigot. The platypus isn't even usually angry most of the time. The platypus is just disappointed in all of us, because realistically, we could be doing better than we are. REIN: Do you have any advice for any of our listeners who might want to make a career out of being snarky? COREY: Quite honestly, don't do it. I'm serious. They're either a number of folks who try it periodically because they see what I'm doing, or they reach out to me and ask for advice and the advice is the same: don't do it. The reason is that with almost anything else that you're trying to do, the failure mode is just, okay, no one cares. It doesn't make a splash. It doesn't work. Okay, great. The problem with being snarky is the failure mode isn't obscurity, it's being an asshole and that failure mode is potentially very damaging. To that extent, when I see various parody accounts on Twitter, the novelty accounts that are doing snarky, or sarcastic things, I generally don't engage for a while. I want to get a read on them. Two of the parody accounts that absolutely nail it are, what is it? @SimpsonsOps is the parody account there. MANDO: Oh god, that’s fantastic. COREY: And @killedbygoogle. Both are phenomenal. They get it. I talk with the people behind those accounts regularly and I learn from them. There are times, I get it wrong and they correct me and very occasionally, I will give feedback to them when I think they've gone in a different direction and we all sort of make each other better for it as a result. But most folks do it. It doesn't end super well. There's an Andy Jassy parody account and has been for years and it's just mean. It's just mean, I'm sorry. One of the most distressing things I ever heard, that got to me through the grapevine. was that some exec at AWS was convinced for a little while that it was me and that hurt because to be very honest, I don't operate like that. I'm not here crapping on people individually, with a remarkably small subset of exceptions to that and those exceptions universally have something in common and that is that they punched down, they drive good people away, and they're small people in positions of inflated importance. Think the corporate equivalent of a number of senators that I'm sure already leaped to mind when I say that. TIM: So Corey, I'd like to ask—we talked about how you handle things on Twitter, we talked about your personal evolution—now as a business owner in the tech industry, a small business owner, B2B, not a large trillion-dollar company yet. But how are you approaching in handling diversity inclusion, especially around hiring and retention and salary equity in your own company? Q: Fair question and no one has ever asked me that, if you can believe that. The answer is that in order to build and hire diverse teams, it takes effort. The easiest thing in the world to do is to reach out to the people you know from your background. Well, that's not generally hugely diverse because regardless of what we look like, you're generally encountering them in the same types of environments, doing the same kinds of things, and you basically wind up accidentally hiring half your fraternity or whatnot for those who went to college and that's a bit of a challenge. So you have to be intentional about it, for one. You have to be prepared to expand your hiring pool. Do things that don't necessarily come naturally. There are folks who specialize in diversity, equity, and inclusion who have tremendous advice on how to do this, pay them for it. Advice is worth what you pay for it and have them assist and then from there, it's do your best. Have a way to measure what you're trying to achieve and whether you get there or not. As far as salary goes, that's relatively straightforward for us because we publish the ranges when we put the job position up and the ranges are relatively narrow and we stick to them. We are very transparent internally with what our structure is and how we approach these things and to be very direct, the delta between the highest and lowest paid employee is smaller than people would expect. MANDO: I've got a question about salary ranges. I have a hard time understanding what good reasons a company might have for not making their pay scales and salary ranges transparent, at least within the company. I've worked at several places where if you're lucky, your manager may know what the salary ranges are, but as an individual contributor, you're not supposed to find out and I have a hard time coming up. Are there any good reasons why, other than exploitation? COREY: There are a bunch of bad reasons, but not many good ones, but here's one that we can try on for size. If you and I have the same job and we work at the same company and I discover that you make $20,000 more than I do, there are a few different ways that I can react. I can get angry at the company, which is not generally constructive in that context. I can ask what I would need to do to get to a similar level of compensation. If I want to be nosy, I can start digging into well, why do you get more? And there are a bunch of answers to that. Maybe you've been doing this for a longer and a better experience. Maybe you have a skillset that was challenging. Maybe it's competitive bid situation. Maybe it's an accident of fate. Maybe you asked for it and I didn't. But there is a very common mode where now that I know that you're making $20,000 more than I am, I'm going to be a shit heel to you. I am going to hold it against you personally, because I'm envious and jealous and instead of asking how I can get up to your level, my immediate response is how to drag you down to mine. That can be a subtle and pernicious thing and if I look like I do and you don't, then that manifests in a whole bunch of other ways that are reinforced by systemic biases and as a result, it winds up impacting some of the folks that that transparency would be designed to help. That is one expression of a good reason. Is that outweighed otherwise? I don't know. I really don't. We speak in generalities and total budget. We don't disclose individual's compensation internally because that is not – MANDO: True. COREY: Again, it's a weird thing if I tell your coworker how much you make and then they're mad at you. Same type of problem. We strive very hard not to have that culture and I don't believe that we do, but I'm not willing to risk someone's psychological safety on that. MANDO: Yeah, no, I get that. I think in my experience, it's been a little more, I can't find out what the top and bottom band is for this role, unless I have people working for me in those roles and that's where, at least for me, it makes it difficult to understand why that's the case. It's hard to talk to people who you're managing about moving in different directions, moving possibly to other areas of the company, or even up and down the ladder without being able to say, “Here are the numbers that you could be looking at.” COREY: I'm also coming at this from a different/possibly privileged position where we do not offer equity in The Duckbill Group. The way we're structured, it doesn't support that. We're a services company that does not have anything approaching an exit strategy. I'm not looking sell the company to the very types of companies I energetically and enthusiastically insult. So we're not offering the brass ring of equity because there's no expectation of ever turn into anything. Instead, we offer cash comp and we have a bonus structure that is tied to what the company does. It becomes very easy for you to look at what we're doing and if you're toying with a role here, we have those conversations and figure out what your compensation is going to look like. Is it comparable to Netflix pay? Of course not. They pay top of market and tend to, but that's okay. We also don't have you on edge every day, wondering if you're about to get fired. So there are benefits to the way we approach things. There are drawbacks as well. Again, it's different people want different things and that's okay. At a company that has a significant equity component to compensation, that usually is removed entirely from transparency in compensation, unless you're a named executive. How many shares have you been granted? Are there options? What was the strike price? How is the vesting work? Did you come aboard as part of an acquihire? In which case, there was a very distinct compensation structure, that was almost certainly set up for you, that does not apply to other people. Do you have a particular rare skillset that was incredibly valuable? Let's be direct here, is your cousin the CEO of a target customer and having you there has that nice, quiet benefit that no one is ever going to dare whisper out loud? There are a whole bunch of reasons that compensation will vary, that companies don't necessarily want to explain to each other. When I worked at an agency consultancy, they would periodically have a consultant/engineer who would discover one day that the company was billing it out for roughly twice what they were being paid, which is a fairly standard and reasonable structure given the overhead cost, and they would be incensed by this because well, sales and marketing, how hard could that be? I should just go direct and wind up making all that extra margin myself. It is never that simple. If you can do it, good luck. It's a near certainty you can't because no one can, not at any step and that's scale. There is the lack of maturity that is understood, or not understood by folks you're dealing with and especially as you grow beyond a certain size, you can't expect everyone you're talking to in your company that you hire, or potentially hiring to come in with that level of maturity. So it's far easier just to avoid the topic altogether and then of course, there's a nefarious thing if we want to see how much we can rip people off. I have a hard time accepting that as being a genuine reaction, because for example, from a company perspective, the difference of a $10,000 or $20,000 to make someone happy versus angry, your payroll costs at a certain point of scale is never going to notice or feel that you don't want to waste money. But if that's all it takes to make someone happy, why wouldn't you spend it? MANDO: Has anyone here worked at a place where payroll numbers accidentally got sent out to the entire company, or is that just me? TIM: I have not worked at a place like that, but I wish that had happened. MANDO: It happened to me super early on in my career. I've been doing this professionally for maybe 2, or 3 years and it was a small little dev shop here in Austin and it was, you had your classic accidental reply all situation from whoever's in charge of keeping the books and the next day, like 8 people out of the 30 who worked there just walked out. It was kind of bad and ugly, yeah. COREY: One of the things that I find the most interesting about that type of story is that when those things come out and half the company is in flames over it, this was preventable. When we started The Duckbill Group, we did the exact same thing. We have always operated in such a way that if our internal documents and chats and everything else were to become public, there would be some missing context we'd have to fill in, but there's no one that would, or at least no one who has understanding of the relevant issues would look at this and say, “Well, that's just not fair, or just.” That even goes down to our pricing structure with our clients. Like we don't disclose what our margins are on certain things, but if they were to see that they would look at that, understand the value of that process of how we got to those price points and say, “Yes, that is fair.” That has always been our objective and it's one of those if you act as if it's going to be made public, it turns out that no one can really hold things over anymore, which is interesting because given the nature of what we do with AWS bills, confidentiality is super important. It's critical because some of our largest customers do not let us admit to anyone that they are in fact, our customers and I get that; there's a strong sensitivity around that. Other customers are, “Yeah, by all means, please talk about us all you want. Put us on the website.” I mean, the New York Times mentioned that Epic Games, Ticketmaster, and The Washington Post were customers of ours. Yes, we have logo rights. We are very clear in whether or not we're allowed to talk about folks publicly. It's great. We love our customers, but what are the tricks to getting there incidentally is if you don't respect a company's business, you probably shouldn't do business with them. We're not sitting here making massive value judgements about various companies that we look at. But when it's one of those, you make landmines, not so much. Whereas, I noticed, I was like, “Okay, you’re ad tech, do I love it? Not usually, but I also understand how the world works. It's fine. Don't worry about it.” Unless, you're into truly egregious territory, there's never one of those, “Do we work with them or don't we work with them?” The “Do we work with them or don't we work with them?” question honestly distills down to, “Can we actually help them get to where they need to go/think they need to go and is it the right thing for them?” If the answer that's no, then all we're going to do is have an unhappy customer story out there in the world. We don't want that. It's not that hard to act ethically, as it turns out. REIN: There is an interesting contrast between Corey, your story about salary disclosure and Mando's, which is you made the point of that it could be in your employee's best interest to not disclose. I don't think you're lying, but I bet if you had asked Mando's company's executives, they could have very well may have given the exact same story. The thing that, I think is difficult is when you have to trust in the benevolence of capitalists to figure this thing out. COREY: Absolutely and from my perspective, again, I have this position that I'm coming from, which is, I assume good faith. From my position, if our salary compensation numbers were to be exposed internally, the external is a whole separate thing. Because honestly, if there's a certain implicit expectation of privacy, if you work at my company and suddenly without warning you, I tell the world how much you're being paid. That's not necessarily a situation you would be thrilled to find yourself in. So let's remove that from the table entirely. When we speak internally about what you're making, I have always operated with the expectation that you will exercise, in the US, your federally protected to discuss your compensation with your coworkers, because not discussing your compensation with your coworkers only really helps those capitalists, as you put it, who run companies themselves. If I want to exploit people, yes. Step one, make sure that they're all scared to talk about how much they're making with each other. That doesn't align with anything I ever want to see myself doing. So from my perspective, why would I not disclose salary information? The only reason I can think of that would really matter is that, does it make it harder either first, most importantly, for my employees to operate as they want to operate and two, does it do any harm to my business in any meaningful way and that is a nuanced and challenging thing to figure out. I don't know the answer is the short response to it. I don't think there'd be anything necessarily good that would accelerate my business if we're suddenly talking about compensation numbers publicly. I don't know that necessarily anything bad would happen either, but it's not the story that I want people telling about the company. We're small. We don't have a marketing budget. We have a spite budget. So when people bring us up, I don't want it to be in the context of compensating employees. I want it to be in the context of fixing the AWS bills since that's the thing that lets us compensate those employees, [laughs] It's a fun and interesting nuanced issue and it's easy to take a singular position from all of the different stakeholders that are involved in something like that and make strong pro, or con arguments from that person's position. But one of the weird things about running a company that I discovered is you have to put yourself in multiple shoes simultaneously all the time, where you have to weigh the opinions and perspectives of various stakeholders. You ask someone in engineering what they think we should be focusing on strategically, the answer is probably going to align around engineering, but is engineering going to align with what the company needs to do? If you're getting no sales coming in, is engineering going to be the way you fix that? Maybe not. Maybe you invest in marketing or sales as a result and it's always about trade-offs and no one's perfectly happy with what you decide. The world is complicated and for better or worse, one of the bad tendencies of Twitter is to distill these principles down to pithy soundbites that fit 280 characters and the world doesn't lend itself to that. REIN: Okay. Let's try to distill this down into a pithy soundbite. COREY: By all means. REIN: No, I was just kidding. COREY: And I'm sure someone's going to be pithed. It'll be fine. MANDO: Hey! TIM: I was waiting. Took longer than I expected. [laughter] COREY: Latency. REIN: What's the most important thing in comedy? TIM: It's timing. COREY: Timing. REIN: Timing! [laughter] It’s easier to love that joke in-person. TIM: It is. COREY: Or if you’re going to put that in, just make sure you insert a bunch of time before audio engineer can wind up doing that. [laughter] TIM: Right. I was going to ask if an audio engineer can actually make that joke funny, or is that? [laughter] COREY: Yeah. Or it’ll just come off as corny. So many jokes work super well when you deliver them in-person or face-to-face with a small group, but then you deliver into, to an audience of 5,000 people and they fall completely flat because the energy is different. That observation right there is why so many corporate keynotes are full of jokes that bomb horribly, because with the 20 people who were in there and have context and nuance, it's great in the rehearsal, but then you have a bunch of people and it just feels lame. TIM: Yeah, I thought the corporate keynote jokes, they failed because the 20-person focus group was a bunch of sycophants ready to laugh at anything they said. Whereas, the audience, maybe not so much. COREY: Yes. Do you end up with the entire executive committee watching it? They're just a bunch of yes men and the one token yes woman, but diversity is important to them. Just look at their website. No, no, the point that makes the statement about diversity being important, not the pictures of their team. MANDO: That part. One of my favorite speakers in the technical circuit is Aaron Patterson and I think part of the reason why I love his delivery so much is that he himself personally laughs at all his jokes. Like it really [laughs] like he cracks himself up and so you just can't help, but get pulled along with him. COREY: I find that most of my jokes that I put in my talks and whatnot are for me, because without it, I get bored and I lose interest and have other people come along for the joke, great. And if not, well, that's okay, I'm still laughing. MANDO: [laughs] Yeah. TIM: So Corey that I have a question that I had wondered and then never got to ask out loud. But seeing as how, although we pretty much knew that Andy Jassy was going to be the new CEO of Amazon, would obviously need someone to replace him at AWS. What would you say to the AWS recruiter when they offered you the job and why? COREY: Directly, that would be one of the most thankless jobs I can possibly imagine for the way I see the world and how that job has to be done, in all seriousness. It is the ultimate expression of responsibility without the ability to directly impact an outcome. You will have to delegate absolutely everything and it's paradoxical, but the higher you rise in a role like that, the less you're able to say. Every time Jeff Bezos makes a comment in public, it hits the news. He doesn't get to go effectively shitposting on Twitter. How Elon Musk manages to do it, couldn't tell you, but his random jokes move markets and that's why he's constantly in trouble with the SEC. The reason that I enjoy the latitude and the freedom that I do is that I am functionally, a nobody and that's okay. As soon as I start becoming someone who is under global public scrutiny, then that entire thing becomes incredibly misaligned. Every time there's a controversy or a scandal, I would never be allowed to sit down and be directly and completely honest about what I think about those things because you can't in those roles. These things are always nuanced and public messaging is a problem. I do firmly believe. For example, the reason I don't weigh in very often on a lot of the labor relations issues, for example, that Amazon winds up finding itself confronted with is, I believe firmly that there is a choice that I get to make as part of my expression of privilege. Here, I can be part of the mob on Twitter, yelling at them over these things, or I can have conversations directly with people who you are in a much better position to influence these things internally. I do not believe you can do both, simultaneously. We pick and choose our battles sometimes and I can't wind up going off about every outrage, real, or perceived, that accompany does, or I simply look like an endless litany of complaints. You have to find the things that make an impact and there's always a price to that. An example of a fight that I do go to bat for is Amazon's position on non-competes for their employees and their decision to pursue them after they leave Amazon. I think it has beneath them, I think it makes the entire industry poorer for it, and it's one of the areas in which I do not respect Amazon's position, full stop. Their employees are better than that and deserve more. That's an issue that I feel profoundly about and I'm willing to go to the mat on that one, but when I do it, it comes with a price. It makes them look at me like a little bit of a, “Oh, is he going to be one of those?” whatever those happen to be and maybe. There's a reason I don't bring it up casually. There's a reason I don't drag them with that in casual joke threads, but it's there and that's what one of those issues I'm willing to be known for. Now, labor organizing and the rest. There's an entire universe of people paying better attention to a segment of their business that I don't talk about, or know about and who are well-suited to lead a public opinion, to have conversations internally. I don't know about a lot of those things and this is why I've never cut out to be a VC either, by the way, where when I don't know something, I don't feel that I should be sounding off about that thing on Twitter. Apparently, that is not normal in D.C. land, but here we are. The beautiful part about being me is that I'm fundamentally in possession of a platform I can use to broadcast every harebrained idea that crosses my mind out to an audience to test it. So I don't feel constrained in what I can say. In fact, that's the reason that I am what I am is that no one can fire me. I'm an AWS customer, but I have no client that is a significant percentage of our revenue base, which means I can't get fired. The only real risk is something either systemic that happens globally, in which case, all bets are off, or we're at a scenario where I have surprise, become a secret dumpster goblin and no one is going to want to do business with me anymore and everyone abandons me. But that doesn't seem likely because that is not my failure mode. REIN: Do you know what your failure mode is? COREY: Oh, absolutely. I sometimes, as I mentioned, go too far. I find that things that are funny, just wind up being mean at times. A joke wasn't that great there. I mean, my entire company is fundamentally built around aspects of my own failures. I am possessed of a profound case of ADHD that manifests in a bunch of interesting ways. A lot of the company is functionally scaffolding around me and picking up the things that I am not good at and will not be successful at if left to my own devices. I feel bad about it on some level, but on the other, it frees me up to do the things I am great at. It's an area of being able to take the things that make me, for better or worse, borderline unique and really focus on those because I don't have to continue to wrestle with things like making sure that JIRA tickets get done for us to use an example from my engineering days. We tend to have this bias when hiring people to optimize for hiring folks who have no weaknesses rather than hiring for strengths. Yeah, there are a lot of things I'm crap at, but I'd rather be very, very good at the subset of things that are intensely valuable and that means that okay, maybe someone else can handle making sure my expense report gets filed, if you want to use a banal example. REIN: One of the first things that you talked about was sometimes to improve the way a customer uses AWS; they have to spend more money in one area rather than less. There's an interesting property of systems, which is that you can't improve a system just by making each individual part better and actually, sometimes you have to make some parts worse to make the system better. So I'm hearing a little bit of that here as well, which is you want to build a system that works well and takes advantage of the parts that you have, the people you have, their relationships, their strengths, how they work together, and you're not interested in everyone having to be perfect. You're okay with parts that work in different ways and accounting for that and focus. So the other thing is that a system is not the sum of its parts. It's the product of its interactions and what I'm getting is that you care about those interactions. COREY: Very much so. It's hard to build things in isolation. It's hard to wind up treating everyone as interchangeable components that you can shuffle up and have them do different things. You don't want to know what would happen if you put me in charge of accounting, for example. There's this also this idea as well that is endemic, particularly to the world of developers and software engineers in the context of – I saw this most prominently with a number of professors in my first job, as a Unix systems administrator at a university, where I have a Ph.D., I am a world leading expert in this very narrow field of knowledge and I am brilliant in it, which means I'm very good at everything else, too, ha, Getting the computer to work. Oh, they don't even offer Ph.Ds. in that so how hard could it really be? This idea that, “Oh, I am terrific at this one very valuable, highly advanced skill; I should be good at everything else.” Well, not really. It doesn't work that way and is there even value in you learning that particular skill? Let's use an example that's germane to what we're doing right now. When I record podcasts, I'm good at having the conversations. I'm good at making the word noises come out of my mouth to varying degrees of good and then we're done with the recording and what tends to happen next? Well, it has to get edited, put together, and the rest, and I don't know how to do that. Now, do I go and spend a year learning how audio engineering works and then spend my time doing the audio engineering piece, or do I find someone who lives in that world, who loves it, who they are great at it, and they want to do it and they want to do it more and wind-up paying people for their expertise and let them come out with a far better product than I'm ever going to be able to deliver? If it doesn't need to be me doing a thing, I might want to tag someone else in to do it instead. That's the art of delegation and increasingly, I have to be more and more comfortable with letting more and more things go as our company continues to grow. It's a hard lesson to learn. I mean, the biggest challenge of running a business bar, none, I don't care what anyone else tells you, it's always the same and it is managing your own psychology. ARTY: So you mentioned earlier with you were talking about psychological safety and people being able to give you feedback about when their feelings were hurt, or things that are challenging to talk about. What factors do you think contribute to your approachability when you have the stance of being this kind of snarky identity? What makes you approachable still? COREY: I think it's that when I get it wrong, I'm very vocal at apologizing. Let me use an example of the time I got it spectacularly wrong. A while back, I did a parody video of Hitler Reacts, the Downfall parody thing that everyone's doing and it was Hitler receives his AWS bill was my entire shtick. I did a whole dialogue thing for it, as one does. There's generators for it—this was not an artistic endeavor whatsoever—and one line I have in there is one woman turns to the other and says, “Yeah, I get gigabytes and terabytes confused, too,” and it goes on. People started liking it on Twitter and I went to bed. The next day, I get a message from someone that a number of women were having a thread somewhere else that they thought it was offensive because that was the only speaking line women had and it was admitting that math is hard, more or less and when I heard that my response was, “Holy shit.” I took the video down and did a whole thread about here's how I fucked up and some people were saying, “Oh, it wasn't that big of a deal. It's fine.” You are wrong. I'm sorry. People felt shitty because of what I said and that's not okay and just deleting it, or not talking about it again is a response, but it's not an instructive one and what I did ideally, will help people avoid making similar mistakes in the future. Again, this stuff is not easy. We're all learning. I've made jokes when I was – if I go back in time 10 years, I made a whole bunch of jokes and had a sense of humor of now I look back and I am very honestly ashamed of them and I'm not talking about things that the kind of joke we have to look over your shoulders before you tell anyone to make sure that someone doesn't look like you isn't within earshot. No, I'm just talking about shitty jokes that punch down. I don't make those jokes anymore because guess what? They're just not that funny and that's important. We all evolve. So that's part of it is I vocally critical of myself when I get it wrong. I also have DMs open for this specific reason. Again, I am not in the demographic people going to harass me by a DM. Not everyone has that privilege so people can reach out to me when they think I get something wrong, or they just want to talk and I view confidentiality as sacrosanct. If someone says that wasn't funny, I always thank them first off and then I try and dig deeper into what it is that they're saying. If someone says it on Twitter, because they don't feel that a call-in is warranted—no one knows you would call-in—a callout is fine, too. I try to engage in the same behavior just because if nothing else, I can set an example. I don't know if people feel they have a sense of psychological safety in approaching me, to be perfectly honest. No one knows their own reputation. But the fact that people continue to and I have never once broken the faith and thrown someone out under a bus publicly, or even mentioned who they were without their permission first, that's powerful and I hope anyway. I mean, again, no one knows their own reputation. For all I know, there are whisper networks out there that are convinced that I'm a complete piece of crap and if that's true, I'm not going to inherently say that they're wrong. I would be honored if someone would tell me and would let me know what I'm doing that has caused that opinion to form, because if possible, I'd like to fix it. If not, I at least want to hear the perspective. But feedback is an opinion and not everyone's opinion carries equal weight and I don't agree with everyone's opinion, but I would like to know how I'm being perceived. The biggest problem I get is with all the podcasts, with all of the tweets, with all of the newsletters, that most common response by landslide is silence. There are days I wonder I remember to turn the microphone on. There are other days where oh, I get emails and I love those days because I at least get to learn how I'm coming across. ARTY: I can imagine just seeing someone having a history of admitting when they make a mistake and trying to correct it and fixing it, turning you into someone that if you have feedback that feeling like you'd be heard, that your feedback would be listened to and taken seriously, I can see that really making a difference. I also really appreciate you modeling that kind of behavior, too because I think it is important. We are human. We make mistakes and having models to follow of what it looks like to be confident enough in ourselves that we can screw up publicly, I think is really important. COREY: I have the privilege and audience and at least apparently public reputation to be allowed to fail, to be allowed to mess these things up and if I can't own those things that I get wrong and what's the point, really. The honest way that I feel about all of this is I just recently crossed 50,000 Twitter followers, which is a weird, trippy, and humbling experience. But if I can't use that vast audience to help people, then what the fuck was the point of it all? Why did I do it? It's not just for my own self-aggrandizement, or trying to sell consulting projects. If I can't leave a little bit of a dent in the universe in the sense of helping people become better than they are then what was the point? Spoiler, the answer to what was the point never starts with a dollar sign. REIN: What do you think is the point? COREY: I think it has to be different for other folks. For me, the point has always been about helping people and I have a sense of indebtedness that I have my entire career because early on in my career and consistently throughout, people have done me favors and there's no way for me to repay them for the kindness that they have shown and the help that they've given. All you can ever do is pay it forward. But I help people with an introduction. It doesn't take much from me. You two people have problems that would be a solved by having an introduction between the two of you? Wonderful. Go ahead and talk. Let me know how I can help and it costs me nothing and when people are like, “How can I thank you for this?” Help someone else. It's always the same answer. It's a someday, you're going to be in a position to help someone else, do it. Don't think about how it's going to come back and help you. Maybe I will, maybe it won't. Cosmically, I found it always does somehow, but again, you don't have to take that on faith. Just assume it doesn't help you in the least. The more you help people, the more you wind up doing favors for people, the more it comes back around and that is something that opens up a tremendous level of, I guess, leverage. I guess, it makes sense of being able to make a difference in the world. Now, please, don't misunderstand what I've just said as, “Oh, you should do a bunch of uncompensated work for anyone who demands a moment of your time.” That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not suggesting you let people take advantage of you, but when you find someone who's struggling at something that you know would approach it, it really doesn't cost you much to reach out and ask if they need a hand. ARTY: That seems like a good note to switch to reflections. REIN: I think that's great. I was thinking about Corey, how you look at mistakes as opportunities to get better, not just for yourself, but also for how you participate in communities that matter to you. One of the interesting things about systems is that systems derive their purpose from how they relate to larger systems. So an engine drives its purpose from how it relates to the other parts of the car. If you take the engine out of the car, the car doesn't move, but neither does the engine. So I think that the best communities, whether they're basketball teams, or software development teams, whatever they are, are communities that make each person better and that we derive our purpose and our meaning from our relationship with other people. TIM: I can offer my reflection on this. I've often been either disappointed with, or very impressed by people's ability to learn about themselves and about the impact that they have on the world. I have observed in Corey and have been inspired to do self-optimization, where I have a course of action or behavior, or a line of thinking or reasoning presented into the ether and then based upon the feedback in whatever other means of observability, I amend and iterate on myself to become better. Never perfect—perfect is the enemy of good—but just to be better, to be continually improving. If I were going to find a term to describe Corey and the term that I would ascribe to myself to become a human optimist. I think if we take some of those examples that Corey has discussed and apply them, we can all reach that point to where we'll always know that there's always ways to improve and if we listen to those around us and we study the impact that we have on those people that we can do that. ARTY: It's been interesting listening to you talk and have this description of you in my head of this kind plus snarky being and what does that look like. One of the things I've seen you model repeatedly as I've listened to you talk is holding yourself accountable. In one context, being able to take in one-on-one reflections from other people and really take it in and think about what people say. But two, also taking responsibility for how other people see you and your position in the world and how those things you do end up affecting other people. So, I really appreciate your

Tim Thompson from RevThink & ZipLineGear A creative entrepreneur, all around nice guy, Southern Oregon local, and if that wasn't enough, he loves drinking coffee! ☕ Join us as we sit down for a fun chat with Tim Thompson about life around Grants Pass and his business ventures with RevThink and ZipLineGear. Checkout RevThink and ZipLineGear at the links below . Also be sure to listen to the Revthink Podcast, RevThinking! ZipLineGear - https://www.ziplinegear.com/ RevThink - https://revthink.com/ RevThinking Podcast - https://revthink.com/resources/podcast/ Transcription Brian: Tim Thompson is kind of an enigma. He's the owner and CEO of ZipLineGear.com and Grants Pass Oregon, but that doesn't explain all of who he is. TV producer, Minister, investor, married for 23 years, father of five boys, I can go on and on. But at the core of Tim's career as an owner, consultant and coach is what Tim calls the four stages of a creative career. At the consultancy he founded RevThink, which can be found at RevThink.com. And their podcast called RevThinking, they are the leader in the field of the creative entrepreneur. His story in this interview will help you understand how this comes together. So Tim Thompson, welcome to Grants Pass VIP. Tim: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for the introduction. Whoever brought that did a very good job, I might want to get a copy of that, because it's often hard to explain all those aspects. But it's funny, as you read that off, you know, you're told as a kid to avoid three topics in conversation, money, religion, and politics. And I feel like as you read my bio, like you're basically saying, Here's Tim Thompson, he talks about those three things that no one's supposed to talk about. Brian: Very cool. Tim: I love what you're doing with this podcast, this idea of building community get to know one another, especially in this odd situation we find ourselves in. So thanks for putting this together and inviting me onto it. Brian: No sure thing, we're happy to have you here. We were talking a little bit before about how I came across your name. And to tell you the truth, I don't recall how we came across your name, we start building a list together, we start asking other people about names. My producer, Sean E. Douglas had worked on this. So it's one of these things where we're kind of, we're really getting to know each other from scratch, I know a little bit about you just from research, a little bit of your background that's found online. But other than that, we're just going straight into this and find out more about each other. So why don't you give everyone kind of a common life story up to this point? Tim: Sure. I don't think you're gonna want to hear my life story. You kind of read off the bio, it goes a lot of different directions. Usually I do this over coffee, though, Brian. So just at least I have a raincheck for coffee in the future, right? Brian: Of course, absolutely. Tim: Yeah, that's great. You know, it's hard to explain the path really because, as you mentioned, when I was in college kind of started my career, what I was really focused on was television, television production. I'd like to say I fell in love with the television of the 80s. But by the time I got involved in television that time had already passed. So there was a new discovery in that field. Obviously, the digital has changed all of our lives. I look like I'm older than you. So I'm just going to tell you Brian, that back in my day kind of a thing. But the digital transition in the entertainment industry was something that was happening, and I was on the front lines. So that gave me a chance as a young person to really create, invent, I don't know what it be, but like, just put standards into place. And that gave me like a foundation for a career that I'm still living today. It's the foundation of why I became a consultant.

After some audio issues with Apple Podcasts, we have new URLs for our feeds. We get an update on Zorin and ZFS from Bill, on FreeOffice from a listener, suggestions for testing another distribution, and we solve some listener problems. Episode 379 Time Stamps 00:00 Going Linux #379 · Listener Feedback 00:15 Introduction 01:84 Apple drops the Going Linux Podcast 06:56 Zorin update 20:25 Bill tries ZFS 25:61 David: Try Makulu Linux 29:36 John: No Internet problem 32:84 Michael: A problem with Bluetooth 37:37 George: A report on SoftMake FreeOffice 41:53 Tila: Skidmap SSH vulerability on Linux 44:68 Koree: How to reset a forgotten password 48:86 Stefan: Google Chrome and telemetry 53:59 Michael: Volume is dropping 55:24 Tim: Thanks for the switchers episode 56:43 Göran: Feedback on random numbers 59:21 Michael: Python and Pluma 65:21 goinglinux.com, goinglinux@gmail.com, +1-904-468-7889, @goinglinux, feedback, listen, subscribe 65:27 End

After some audio issues with Apple Podcasts, we have new URLs for our feeds. We get an update on Zorin and ZFS from Bill, on FreeOffice from a listener, suggestions for testing another distribution, and we solve some listener problems. Episode 379 Time Stamps 00:00 Going Linux #379 · Listener Feedback 00:15 Introduction 01:84 Apple drops the Going Linux Podcast 06:56 Zorin update 20:25 Bill tries ZFS 25:61 David: Try Makulu Linux 29:36 John: No Internet problem 32:84 Michael: A problem with Bluetooth 37:37 George: A report on SoftMake FreeOffice 41:53 Tila: Skidmap SSH vulerability on Linux 44:68 Koree: How to reset a forgotten password 48:86 Stefan: Google Chrome and telemetry 53:59 Michael: Volume is dropping 55:24 Tim: Thanks for the switchers episode 56:43 Göran: Feedback on random numbers 59:21 Michael: Python and Pluma 65:21 goinglinux.com, goinglinux@gmail.com, +1-904-468-7889, @goinglinux, feedback, listen, subscribe 65:27 End

Tips on how to delegate to improve your bottom line with Tim Francis I didn't know how to delegate and I didn't know how to lead and manage. What I discovered after my first failure with an assistant was that at least 50% of the problem was not with the assistant, but was with me. At the very top, which is what the surgeon focuses on and what I encourage entrepreneurs to focus on, is strategy, high-level skill, and high-level access. Everything below that we draw a delegation line and everything below that should be done by everyone else. Sooner or later there is going to be those rinse, wash, and repeat tasks that come up. They seem innocuous, but they really add up. The number one of the big six concerns when it comes to hiring an assistant was actually, I don't know how to trust and let go of control. I mean I am super passionate about a few things. One of which is actually our dinner parties. A horrible idea is going on Facebook and posting up, "Hey, who knows someone?" That's bad advice number one. Bad advice number two is hiring the first person that you meet, irrespective of how you find them. I actually think it's a great idea to go overseas if you are going to be delegating work that happens every week or every month and is a simple task that doesn't require a lot of decision making. But, to have someone with those three attributes, the culture, time zone, and language, you immediately solve at least 40% of the misunderstandings, maybe 50% of the misunderstandings that are happening. I think the other thing that people don't realize is how affordable it can be. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ HOW TO DELEGATE TO IMPROVE YOUR BOTTOM LINE [just click to tweet] HOW TO DELEGATE TO IMPROVE YOUR BOTTOM LINE I didn't know how to delegate. What I discovered was that at least 50% of the problem was not with the assistant, but was with me. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Hey welcome back another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in the studio I've got joining me, Tim Francis. Now Tim is a fellow Canadian, but he's also an NYU guest lecturer, certified Scrum Product Owner and lecturer at the University of Alberta. He's an award-winning entrepreneur and the founder of Profit Factory.com and the greatassistant.com. He's a graduate of the University of Alberta and in 2010, 2011 Tim was blindsided and he had a rare illness that left him unable to walk for three months. He nearly went bankrupt as a result of this, and he was re-forced to restart his business, and at that point, he promised himself that he'd never be a burnt out entrepreneur again. So I had a great conversation with Tim and we talked about why more entrepreneurs don't have assistants. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. You're going to want to make sure that you stick around to the very end as Tim rolls out and shares with you how he got his humble start and the challenges that he had to overcome to build his business to be successful and what it is today. Doug: So I'd like to welcome Tim Francis to the Real Marketing Real Podcast today. Hey Tim, super-excited to have you to join me as part of the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today, so welcome to the show. Tim: Thanks for having me, Doug. Doug: So we start talking a little bit before we started recording and I asked you what your superpower was and I'd just like you to recap that because I think it's so valuable. I mean, we have entrepreneurs and C-level business and executive guys on here and often they feel overwhelmed, there's lots of details and stuff to do. So do you want to take a minute and just give us a little bit of background on what you're doing and how you help your clients be more successful? Tim: So I own a company called Great Assistant, and we help entrepreneurs to get a great executive virtual assistant that's coming out of corporate America.

Japan has a long history of small shopping streets and tiny markets. In fact, despite the population density, American-style mall culture never took off here. The back streets of even the most crowded downtown office districts are filled with little specialty stores and vegetable stands. Akiko Nishiura, the CEO and founder of Nokisaki, wants to see that culture spread even further in Japan, and her company is helping small merchants find physical spaces for pop-up shops, vegetable stands and food trucks. Nokisaki is connecting these small merchants, who need just a little bit of space, with commercial landlords who have a little bit of free space and are looking for some additional foot-traffic. It’s an interesting business model, and Akiko and I discuss how it will work outside of Japan or even outside of Japan's big cities. She also explains how Nokisaki survived a crisis that would have bankrupted almost any other startup — at least any other startup outside Japan. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes Why parking is different (and difficult) in Japan How a new alliance is developing between big-brand stores and tiny retailers Why it's so difficult for Japanese moms to return to work after having kids How the Japanese market reacts to new challenges How a security risk shut down her company How Japanese retail culture differs from the West How Nokisaki will out-maneuver her much better-funded competitors Links from the Founder The Nokisaki Homepage Nokisaki Parking Nokisaki Business Nokisaki Parking on Facebook Nokisaki Business on Facebook Friend Akiko on Facebook   [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 94. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Napoleon supposedly once called England a nation of shop keepers. And while the comment was undoubtedly meant as an insult in the context it was offered, there’s something to be said in favor of being a nation of shop keepers particularly in this age of e-commerce, Rakuten, Amazon stores, and drop shipping. In fact, Japan, more so than the U.S. has a culture of tiny little neighborhood shops that have never been pushed out completely by big box stores, shopping malls, and chain stores even in the big cities. Well, today we’re going to sit down and talk with someone who’s accelerating that trend by making it easier for small shop keepers to pop up all over Tokyo. Akiko Nishiura, CEO of Nokisaki, connects commercial landlords with just a little extra space to small merchants who are looking for, well, just a little space. And in their spare time, the company is also trying to solve Japan’s horrible parking problems. The discussion of the company in the market alone would make this episode worth listening to. Akiko also shares a story of something that would have forced almost any Western startup into bankruptcy but due to the unique and frankly somewhat extreme notion of Japanese customer loyalty, it resulted in only a minor interruption of Nokisaki’s rapid growth. But you know, Akiko tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey"  ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Akiko Nishiura, the founder and CEO of Nokisaki. Akiko: Yes. Tim: Thanks for sitting down with us. Akiko: Thank you, Tim. Tim: Now, Nokisaki is a parking space sharing and space sharing startup but I think you can explain it much better than I can. So tell me a bit about what Nokisaki is. Akiko: Okay. Tim, have you ever heard the word “nokisaki” and do you know the exact meaning of nokisaki? Tim: I have to admit I didn’t know it until I looked it up. Akiko: Right.

This week welcome to the show Tim Noakes.  Prof Noakes was born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1949. As a youngster, he had a keen interest in sport and attended Diocesan College in Cape Town. Following this, he studied at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and obtained an MBChB degree in 1974, an MD in 1981 and a DSc (Med) in Exercise Science in 2002. In the early 90s, Noakes teamed up with Morné du Plessis to drive the founding of the Sports Science Institute of South Africa (SSISA). The Institute was built to provide a facility that would primarily fund research in sports performance. The application of this research would provide sports personnel of all disciplines with the means to improve. Noakes and du Plessis also wanted to use it as a platform to build public interest in the country’s top sports people and build state pride. Prof Noakes has published more than 750 scientific books and articles. He has been cited more than 16 000 times in scientific literature, has an H-index of 71 and has been rated an A1 scientist by the National Research Foundation of South Africa for a second 5-year term. He has won numerous awards over the years and made himself available on many editorial boards. He has a passion for running and is still active, running half marathons when he can. He is a devoted husband, father and grandfather and now, in his retirement, is enjoying spending more time with his family. Questions we ask in this episode: You’ve been a huge voice in making changes within the dietary guidelines over the last few years, how has the response been? Can you tell us about the ‘Ocean View Project” and the results you have seen so far. What results have you seen in reversing diabetes? You’ve written a book called ‘Waterlogged’. Can you explain the concept behind this book and overhydration On the topic of longevity should we favour a specific type of exercise? And much much more. Shop: http://shop.180nutrition.com.au/ Guy [00:01:00] Hey, this is Guy Lawrence of 180 Nutrition. Welcome to another stellar episode of the Health Sessions, of course, where we are connected with leading global health and wellness experts to share the best and the latest science and thinking, empowering us all to turn our health and lives around. This week we welcome back to the show the one and only, awesome, Mr. Professor Tim Noakes from South Africa. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Tim's work, he has published more than 750 scientific books and articles. He's been cited more than 16,000 times in scientific literature. He has a H-index of 71 and has been rated an A1 scientist by the National Research Foundation of South Africa for a second five year term. Amazing. He has won numerous awards over the years, and made himself available for many editorial boards, and of course, has a very famous book. The Law of Running is considered the bible of the running sport itself. It was just a privilege to get Tim back on the show today and pick his brains on what he's been up to over the last few years. [00:01:30] Now, if you're unfamiliar with Tim more recently ... Well, I say more recently, a few year ago, which we get into today, he kind of flipped his way of thinking around fueling for sport where he had been for 33 years promoting the low-fat, the carb loading, endurance sport diet for athletes. Then had a complete turn around and came out with that, which is a huge deal. We get into that today, and over the five years since, I think, this has happened what he's been up to and his fights against type II diabetes as well in South Africa. We get into sports recovery, sports hydration from his famous book, Water Logged, as well. [00:02:00] It's all in there and you are going to love it. If you do love the show guys, just share it with people that you think are going to benefit from this kind of information because we're getting more and more people listening to our podcast. We're getting more and more emails and from people that are just having these epiphanies around their health, and it's definitely helping everyone, including ourselves as well. Help spread the love, share the word, and get this information out there with people, because it does change people's lives. Anyway guys, let's go over to Tim. Hit me up on Instagram stories if you enjoy the episode. Oh, I've also started my own little Instagram channel as well, which is Guy H. Lawrence, which you can follow me on there as well, outside of 180 Nutrition. Awesome guys. Let's go over to Tim Noakes. Enjoy. Hi, this is Guy Lawrence. I'm joined with Stuart Cooke as always. Hello Stu. Stu Hello, mate. Guy Our fantastic guest today is Mr. Tim Noakes. Tim, welcome back to the podcast. Tim Thanks very much Guy, lovely to be back with you. Guy It's phenomenal, mate. I can't believe it's been over three years since you last come on, and I have no doubt a lot has happened since then that we can get into today. Tim Yeah. Guy Tim, there's a question that we ask everyone on the show at the moment and that is, if a complete stranger stopped you on the street and asked you what you did for a living, what would you say? Tim At present I'm retired, so I do what I want to do. Essentially, I'm finishing up a five-year trial against me on the basis that I gave information on Twitter, which was considered unconventional. What we did was, we put the low-fat diet on trial. We said, "Okay, if you're going to try me for this nonsense, let's see whether there's any evidence that the low-fat diet is healthy." So we put it on trial, and the trial ended on April the 21st and I won 10-0. Full Transcript & Video Version: http://180nutrition.com.au/180-tv/tim-noakes-interview/

Interview w/ Tim Ballard & Mark Mabry Tim: The guy’s name was Marble. Mark: Marble the child molester. Tim: His name was Marble, and he looked like a marble. El Centro childporn... Mark: Child Fugitive Caught in Calexico? 'Child Pornography Fugitive Caught in Calexico Port' Tim: No. Mark:  Imperial Valley Press. 'A man suspected of having child pornography was arrested in Calexico, El Centro, indicted in child sex crime'. Tim: Is his name Marble? Mark: Man, Imperial... "An Imperial man was arrested on suspicion of possession of child pornography on Tuesday, after authorities allegedly found child pornography on his computer. Homeland Security investigators, special agents began investigating local internet activity about child pornography."   Intro: You are listening to Slave Stealer. "It is a world that I know I understand better than most people, but you don’t even know how real and how huge it is. There are laws put in place to protect kids, and one of the laws, surprise, surprise, is you can’t sell them. If you guys are traffickers, you’d come in just like this. This is what happens. This is the core of the problem."   Tim: Welcome to Slave Stealer podcast. I am here shouting too loud for... Mark: You broke the mike! Tim: ...with co-host Mark Mabry, but we welcome you, and this is our kind of Throwback Thursday version We’re just going to talk about couple of interesting things that we think you should know about.    Mark: One in particular... People ask, "Do you do domestic work?" "Is everything overseas?" So, I want a domestic Throwback Thursday. Tim: Yeah, we... See, it’s interesting. We... I say about half our, half our case load right now is domestic, but the domestic cases are the ones we cannot readily talk about because they are generally more sensitive, because they require more... They require a different set of tools, they are law enforcement sensitive - a lot of software, a lot of techniques that require us to go online and do things that we can’t reveal to the public because there are countermeasures that the bad guys could utilize if they knew what we were doing. So...  Mark: Like what? Tim: Well, let me...let me just tell you and ruin every case we have pending! So yeah, we do a ton of domestic work, but because of the nature of it, we don’t get to talk too much about it. We let our law enforcement partners talk about it. They come out with a press release, and then we just point our donors to it. And they are usually kind enough to mention us in it, and we leave it at that.   Mark: Yeah. What do you find... Before we jump into that, give me like kind of a glossary of key elements for this story that...a few little background tidbits that will help us understand things that you are going to say in the story. Are there any like technical things we need to understand? Tim: No, I mean, you should just know that things like child pornography and acquiring children, in the United States in particular, are readily available on the internet - mostly in the dark web. These are the places that Google is not going to reach.    Mark: You mean Google does not reach everything? Tim: Google does not reach everything. There are many parts of the internet that are impossible for Google to reach, and these are the places where the pedophiles flock to. They network, they trade in child pornography, they negotiate child sex deals, and we are way behind in terms of our response to this. And so - when I say we,  I mean the nation, law enforcement in general - and so we are working to better the solution to that problem - building software, working with some of the most advanced technology companies on the planet, working with the top U.S. officials in this area. And we are building tools that will allow law enforcement to go into these dark places and root out these bad guys.    Mark: Are there...on the market right now - or not on the market, in the space right now - there are software solutions that are good. What are some of the good guys out there with great software that are busting... Is Thorn? Tim: Oh, absolutely yeah! So Thorn, which is Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore's foundation - they have internet computer gurus/engineers who are constantly in a think tank developing software. They have developed tools, for example - and they have been open about this - tools that allow law enforcement to identify when a child is actually soliciting himself or herself. And the reason... And it has to do with how they are writing the post. Now, the posts look like they are coming from some pimp, but the pimp takes the kid and forces them to write their own advertisement on Backpage or Craigslist, or different social media networks - Facebook. And so it looks like it is coming from an adult.   Mark: Or a kid. Looks like it is coming from an adult, but it’s a kid. Tim: They are trying to make it look like it is coming from an adult, or that a pimp is negotiating the deal, when in fact the child himself or herself is writing it. Mark: Under duress. Tim: Under duress. And so the software actually has...looks for key identifiers that would indicate that it’s a child.   Mark: Voiceprint things. Tim: And then they would...yes, and verbage and different things. And then that would allow law enforcement to go solicit that individual in their current capacity to pull them out and find them. So that’s some software that Thorn is involved in building.    Mark: That’s cool! Way to go Demi and Ashton Kutcher - on the good guy list. Tim: Good guy list. Mark: Ok, that’s... Let’s storm straight into the story that I’d like you to tell today. It happened in Imperial Valley. Talk to me. Tim: So it was, again it was... We identified somebody through means I can’t reveal, but it was somebody who was dealing in the dark net. Mark: Now, we were there doing some training. Can you reveal that? Tim: Yeah. I mean that’s how...that’s how it started. We were training... Mark: Yeah, walk me through the whole story. Tim: We went down to Imperial County and we trained law enforcement - several agencies - on how to go on the dark net and find people who are trading in child pornography. And during the training, we found this manual, this 'how to' manual. And it was multiple pages - I want to say somewhere between 40 and 50 pages long. Mark: How to what? Tim: Well, I am getting to that, ok. It’s 'how to'... Mark: Oh, you are saving that? Tim: I am saving that, yeah, the punchline. Mark: Awesome. Stay tuned. Tim: ...how to court and ultimately rape a child. That’s what the manual was. And it said things like - and this is something that had been traded amongst many pedophiles... Mark: So this manual has a title on it in pretty script that says, 'How to court and rape a child'? Tim: I don’t...I can’t tell you that that is the exact language, but that is what the manual was. And it talks about everything from how do you find a child - "well, find a niece or nephew that has friends and invite them over," like starting there. And then from there, these are the kind of gifts you can give them, here's the kind of things you can say to them so they trust you...and then it takes you down this whole dark horrific path to the point where you are controlling this child completely and abusing them sexually. Mark: So you had... You found this manual in the training on the dark web. Tim: On the dark web, being traded by someone who was in Imperial County. And then following up... And again, I can’t get into details of how we did this, but following up, we were able to - in an undercover capacity - able to ascertain the same person also possessed quite a bit of child pornography: child rape videos and images. Mark: And then what? Tim: And then, after that, we decided that this training should end with the search warrant for this individual’s home being at least mostly written. And that’s what we did. And so we were able to do the training, come back a week or so later after they got the paperwork in place, judge signed the warrant, and we were able to accompany the Imperial County sheriff’s office as they raided the home of this individual and seized his computer and talk to him. Mark: Are you allowed to say his name? Tim: Sure, yeah! He’s been convicted, it’s open, it’s public - his name is, his last name is Marble. Mark: That is such a creepy pedophile name. Tim: Why? Mark: Marble. I don’t know, that’s like a movie character name. Tim: Yeah. Mark: "Mr. Marble, we’d like to have a look around." So, were there any big or little surprises at the house? Tim: So, yeah, a couple funny things... As law enforcement breached the door, he instantly said - we didn’t tell him why we were there - the minute the door was breached, he said, "Other people have been using my computer too!" "Well, we didn’t say we were here for your computer," you know, "I’m not the only one, who uses it!" So it was obvious - he ended up confessing everything. And it was... Some of these cases get depressing, you know. You want to hate these guys completely because of what they are doing and the threat they pose. He actually told one of the sheriff deputies: "It’s a good thing you caught me," because, he said, he was in the process of being a foster parent to a 7-year-old girl. And he said, "If I got that little girl, I was going to rape her. That’s why I was doing it. So it is a good thing you caught me." And a lot of these guys, from my experience, do say that. They admit that they are monsters. And they don’t like that they are in this place. And some are almost relieved to get caught and be put away before they can really hurt somebody. I mean, it’s like they’ve lost control of their lives - they are so addicted to this horrific desire and passion and everything else. And so this guy in the interrogation, the thing that made it kind of sad... And we have video of him, we can probably put at least part of the video up on the website - he started talking about his life and how he was sexually abused as a child. You know, we talk a lot about how people can become addicted to child pornography because they start looking at pornography and that changes their brain - it basically creates brain damage, shrinkage in the brain, because of the overstimulation of the frontal lobes of the brain because that’s what people are going for, right, trying to get this chemical reaction and they overuse it and they overrun it and that ruins their life. It hurts their opportunity to have a normal, healthy, romantic relationship, you know, because their brain is now demented, and porn is the only thing that they recognize as fulfilling that need. It’s really sad. That’s a choice people make, like drugs. And it takes them to a dark place where they end up in jail. And all the guys - everyone who is a pedophile abusing children - are a threat to children and need to go to jail. But this case was a little bit different, and we see this often too. When you are abused as a child and that becomes your first sexual experience... And I’ve talked to so many psychologists to try to understand these guys - these guys that we're investigating, interrogating. And they said it is absolutely true: when your first sexual experience as a child or a teenager, whatever that experience is, that becomes what your brain, as it’s still forming... It’s still, really physically hasn’t formed completely and so it’s still taking ideas and concepts and ingraining them into your person. And so sex becomes, to these kids who are being molested, can become a relationship that is defined by an adult and a child. And that’s what their brain recognizes as sex. So when they get older, and they start developing their sexuality, what they know to be that sexuality is relationships, sexual relationships, between an adult and a child. So they then become the offender.    Mark: Now, to be clear, not every child that was molested grows up to become an offender... Tim: Absolutely. Mark: ...or has that predisposition. Tim: Absolutely. That’s not... Yeah, it’s not every...it’s certainly not every person who is abused, but it happens quite a bit. Mark: It’s a factor in a lot of people we catch. Tim: It’s a factor, and in the case of this man, that’s what he was telling us - that he had been abused. And I mean, you listen to the interrogation and it makes you sad. You know he needs to go to jail because he is a threat. He admits himself he needs to go to jail and he’s a threat. But when you hear his story, you realize how tragic this whole thing is. It’s so cyclical.   Mark: Is there a more... And I love to hear you say that and it breaks my heart too, because there’s...seems like it’s really easy, and we do it frequently. Some of the bad guys, like Fuego and these guys that we bust that are selling kids - they are horrible monsters. And then there are guys like Marble who...there’s a high degree of sympathy where you're like, "Man, I’m just sad for your ruined, shattered life that started out ruined and shattered and you were left to try to pick up the pieces." Like, how do you go about your job sympathetically or empathetically? You know what I am saying?   Tim: You just carry that sadness with you, but you don’t regret for one second putting the guy behind bars. Mark: Yeah. Tim: Because there’s nothing more important than children and their safety and the preservation of their innocence. So they have to go to jail. And you just look at them and you are sympathetic to their plight, and you hope that they can have redemption and they can somehow be healed from their brain damage.   Mark: You know, it’s interesting. Our intro music on the Slave Stealer podcast is - you know the intro sequence where you are talking about, "They look like you, and this guy and that guy" - that actually took place in an interrogation room in Haiti. And you can see it on "The Abolitionists", the documentary that is coming out on April 8th, that you are actually lecturing me. It was our very first op that I accompanied you on and we busted those two ladies who were selling kids, and I said to you, "Man, I’m a little torn up here." Do you remember that?    Tim: Yeah, absolutely! Mark: And you went off and you were like, "Listen, this is hard," and you essentially said the same thing. But I understand it now with a little more time under my belt.   Tim: Yeah. Look, you never... And it’s, it was a shocking thing for me when I started doing these cases - and this is outside even child cases, drug cases, any kind of case. There is an element of human sadness when you are taking someone from their family - even as bad as they are, there are people that love them and can’t believe they made these decisions. And you are the guy taking them away in handcuffs and putting them in jail for a long time. And you can’t help but feel an element of human sympathy, you know. And you don’t know what decisions led, you know, what things happened to this person that led them to make these decisions. But that doesn’t mean for a second that you don’t wish they were in jail. Mark: Yeah. Tim: You know they need to go to jail, but it’s rarely this total victorious, just, "Yeah, we did this!" You know, it’s... There can be some of that, but the whole thing is sad. The whole thing is tragic. It is tragic for everybody involved, especially for the victims, especially for the children, the parents. But also, in some ways, for the bad guys... Mark: Yeah. Tim: But it doesn’t mean you stop doing it. Mark: I think that’s a great little Throwback Thursday moment. Sign us off, man. Tim: Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next time on Slave Stealer podcast.

Tim, Mark & Marisol Interview 00:00 Tim: When you rape a child, you lose rights forever. That’s it! You lose rights forever. Somehow we don’t understand this. And again, you can serve your sentence and everything else, but you still have lost rights. One of those rights you lose is you don’t get to travel around the world with anonymity. We are going to talk about where you are. We are going to watch you. Is that so unreasonable? I mean, the argument is that, well if they travel to some place like Iran and we tell the Iranian Government, they might kill him. Well, you know what, that is his choice to travel to Iran after raping children. Don’t rape kids! How about that?! Let’s start with that. 00:36 Mark: If you do it twice, we are sending you to Iran with a big tag on your head, ‘I rape kids’. 00:40 Tim: That should be the punishment, right? That should be the sentence. 00:42 Marisol: We do that for terrorism and we give up their rights that way. It should be no different. Intro 00:50 You are listening to Slave Stealer. 00:54 Tim: It is a world I know and understand better than most people, because you don’t even know how real and how huge it is. There have been laws put in place to protect kids, and one of the laws - surprise, surprise - is that you can’t sell them. If you guys are traffickers, you have come in just like this. This is what happens, this is the core of the problem. Tim: Marisol, thank you for joining us on Slave Stealer podcast. Marisol: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Tim: Marisol Nichols is our friend, and actress, and social activist. She has been on ‘Criminal Minds’, ‘24’, ‘Blind Justice’, ‘NCIS’ - all these cop shows. Does that have anything to do...or is that just a coincidence with your passion to fight crime?   Marisol: I am sure it does. I am sure it does. I did so much resource playing different kinds of cop roles and agent roles and stuff that it just kind of, by default, dealt with me into this world.   Tim: Tell us about your foundation, and we’ll talk about how we met and what we are doing together with you. Marisol: Sure! So I have got involved in trafficking maybe three or four years ago, and the whole reason I started my foundation was... Well, there are a couple of reasons. One was, like, the more I learned, the more I found out about it, the more I was like, "I have to do something." I can not do something. It can’t be something that I can sit back and say, "Those poor people over there, how horrible for them." That’s… I can’t sleep at night unless I do something. And there were many, many, many nights that I wouldn’t sleep because the more I learned, the more, you know, horrific it is. So forming my own foundation - it was sort of a natural thing that came out of meeting with different organizations and legislators - you know, the people that live and work in this field - to see how I could help, what could I do. I have, you know, many, many friends in the business, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, and anyone and everyone I would talk to were like, “What can I do? How can I help?” And because of that is how I started doing these briefings and big events, educating a particular audience about what is happening not only in our world and on our planet, but also in our own backyard. Tim: So, question for you, because I don’t know the answer to this question but it bugs me. I mean, this is the greatest plague on the planet. There is nothing worse than this and yet, we, our presidential candidates, aren’t talking about it. It is kind of still a vague word, you know, people, trafficking… What is going on? Why can’t people see it? Marisol: Two reasons. And I don’t actually even blame people for not seeing - I blame the people that are in charge of our entertainment. I blame...I really do, I truly do, because I think that we have created a world where we can’t get purposely distracted by Kardashians and social media and whatever other things that they want coming down the line as a buzzword of the week. So we don’t pay attention to what is really really going on. And that our news channels are not very forthcoming - some of them are really wonderfully, will do pieces on it and pieces on it, but to me, like you said, is nowhere near fit to what is needed. And I am sure that you have had this strange [inaudbile] that when you do meet people that find out about it, their world is completely rocked and they are completely changed and they want to help. Tim: Yep. Marisol: And I honestly believe that there are, you know, certain forces out there that don’t want to see this end. Mark: Name names. Marisol: Well look, who is profiting? I mean, you can follow money: who makes the most money from this? Whether it is sex slavery or labor bondage or what. Who is making money from this? And you can trace it back and trace it back. And Tim hit it right on the head - why aren’t our presidential candidates talking about this? This is a huge issue; it is bigger than anything. Tim: Yeah. Marisol: He is right. Why isn’t there a giant spotlight on who is profiting from that? Who is benefitting and keeping people enslaved? Tim: It boggles my mind, but I do believe like you believed it - if we can get people to see it and they become converts, our politicians will have to start talking about it if there is a demand for that subject.   Marisol: Exactly. Tim: And we are not yelling loud enough yet. We are trying to yell loud and be a voice for these victims. Now you got to come with us - we took you down to visit some of the victims that we had rescued in Haiti, and then on our way back we stopped in an unnamed city. Marisol actually went undercover with us, and... Tell me, tell me about the whole experience, how you felt seeing those kids. And then, I mean, you kind of got this cool experience where you got to see these victims and, all of a sudden, you are thrown into this - one of the people who travels and abuses these kids, one of the partakers. What was that like?     Marisol: It is haunting because it is one thing to read about the issue, talk about the issue, hear the stories, look at videos; it is another thing to see it firsthand, and particularly meeting the abuser... I mean, this was... You know, you wouldn’t recognize him down the street. You’d think this is your college guy, this is your neighbor, this is your… You know, he looks like an everyday Joe. And the casualness in which he would talk about doing these things to girls was astonishing and also heart-breaking. You realize that these are human beings, right? You realize that you are talking about someone’s sister, someone’s daughter, someone’s mother, one day hopefully...   Tim: Yeah. Marisol: And it was....you know, it was haunting because you go, “Ok, that is the mindset that allows this to occur.” That is the mindset - partyyy, woohoo, or whatever it is. It was haunting; it stayed with me. Tim: And can you tell us...what was the role you were playing? You were awesome, by the way, and it was obviously natural. You know, it’s funny... People think like, you know, like undercover operators... Just because you are a cop, you think you are going to be good in undercover work. It is not true. And when I was in the law enforcement, it was difficult to find good undercover operators because, again, it is not inherent to a police officer. It is more an actor or actresses, and that is where you were being able to pull it up. So, tell us what role you played in that?   Marisol: Yeah. So, I was playing the person who sets up the sex parties basically, who sets up the situation for men to come and abuse these girls. You know, it was very, very like spur of the moment. I think we had, what, half an hour to plan it or something. Tim: Yeah. Marisol: You know, when I saw that the only way I am going to pull this off with this guy is if I pretend to be one of those people that just don’t care. Mark: What did you do? Give me some lines. Marisol: You know, I have... I did things like, “Hey, yeah, you know, it’s all good.” Tim: Yeah, she was sitting like really sexy, like just loosey-goosey. It was perfect. And the guy was like watching her more than anything else, and he understands that she will be able to get girls for us, better than we can get them on our own. Marisol: One of the facts that I was surprised to learn about is that some of the traffickers are girls - they are. And they lower young girls just as men do. Tim: Even better. Mark: Let’s say you get a big role as a trafficker on a film coming out in a couple of years. What do you do to prepare? Marisol: It is interesting because prior to coming into this world, you know that there are evil people out there, but you think, you know, you just don’t have that much reality. And then playing the trafficker or playing someone like this...now I’ve started to play some sort of, you know, one or two bad guys here and there, and I am like, “Oh no, no, no, it is 100% evil with no remorse and no feeling and no nothing.” That is how you would have to be to do this. You have to be one of those people, that ‘there is nothing left’. Tim: You are looking into their eyes when you see these people - I mean there is no soul. I mean, it is like past feeling. It is just unbelievable. Like the woman we have talked about, the trafficker, the beauty queen, who was going and luring these girls at 9, 10 years old, telling them that she will teach them to be famous. She is famous, she is also in music videos, and the families were sending their kids with her. And she is going and selling them to us who she believed were men coming down to violate. And Marisol, you talked about this guy we met and you played your undercover role... I mean, I am literally sitting here, we are late for the podcast, I have twenty dudes sitting here, and they look just like that guy. I mean, I have a couple - I am not kidding you - I have a couple right now who are coming together to abuse who they believe to be a 13, a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old. And they are all excited - they tell me what they are going to do and they both want to do it together. They will be arrested next week when they show up. Marisol: It sound like how can you not do everything you possibly can, and, like, why aren’t there writings on the streets, why aren't we talking about this? It should be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. And I believe that if we did, it really would end it fast.   Tim: Yes. And the problem is this concept that people think, "Well, I have heard of it, but law enforcement is taking care of it. The government can take care of it." And not to slam the government, but it is too big of a problem. There are 30 million plus slaves, depending on what numbers you look at, 2 million at least or more, probably, kids in the sex slave industry. If people knew… And it reminds me of the slavery in the 19th century where it was the same thing. They were not talking about it. It was just like people knew what was happening, but: "Oh, the government will take care of that." It wasn’t until people learned through, like, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote "Uncle Tom’s Cabin." It wasn’t until the people rose up and it got so loud that the government said, “Oh crap, we better do more, we better do something.” And then you start to stop it. We can do it, we can stop it! Marisol: And it comes down to people demanding that the government do something about it. These are just demands that it will end, and it will end it. But you need multitudes and multitudes of people demanding, showing more, and educating others to really put an end to this. But it can be done. I believe you, 100% it can be done. Mark: I have a question, Marisol. In your dealings with trafficking, who were the good guys? Why don’t we just start shouting out people that are amazing? You may have worked with them directly or not, you have known them or are friends of yours. Marisol: Yeah, ok! Well, first of all, Tim, Tim Ballard, whom I met at Osborne - for sure, 100% top of the list. Tim: Thank you, you are so nice. Marisol: What they do is incredible. And I have mentioned it before, but it is when you first learn about this, you are, “Let’s go get the kids. Can we just go and just get the kids?” And that is what they do. Mark: Yes. Marisol: And I mean that is vital. There is, obviously, a lot more they are doing. There are so many people doing this particular fight. There is Kim Biddle, from an organization called Saving Innocence in Los Angeles, that has dedicated her life. She is this beautiful, brilliant, brilliant girl, gorgeous, and she has dedicated her entire life to saving girls from trafficking and then rehabilitating them and seeing it through, like seeing it all the way through - not put them in a home and walk away, but seeing all the way through until the girl graduate from the home, goes to college and has her entire life back. She is dedicated. Mark: More influencers... Anyone in your world, acting world? Who are the good guys in trafficking? Marisol: There was this one movement that Sean Penn and other celebs got involved in and it was quick, but it really made a difference. It was "Real Men Don't Buy Girls." I don’t know if you remember that, but it was a whole Twitter and hashtag thing, and they got giant celebs to do this. And I thought it was really effective because people look up to actors, musicians, incredible artists as opinion leaders. For these guys to stand up there and say real men don’t buy girls... I thought it setted up a little bit which was really, really good to set a precedent of like, "Hey, who are we looking at that really does this?" and maybe, maybe make someone think twice about it. There needs to be more. I mean, just to be honest, we need more shows focusing on it. We need more episodes of crime shows focusing on it and really telling the stories. On "Law and Order: SVU," they have done a fairly good job on that because that is their ‘Sexual Victims Unit’ - that is the entire title of the show - but I believe we need more.  And recently - I don’t know if you saw "Room," but "Room" did a really good job of taking you through a girl’s experience, what it would be like to be trapped and under the control of someone else who is monitoring your every single move. I don’t know if you know the story, but she was trapped for seven years and had a baby by the trafficker and eventually escaped. And this particular story in this movie did such a good job. But it is based on so many cases of girls being trapped in the exact same way, having children from their traffickers, all of it… And it really... I thought they painted a really great picture of what it is like for the victim, and they do sort of wake up, like, “Wait, this exists. This happened.”       Mark: Are there certain writers or studios or groups that do a better job of talking about trafficking, and are they getting the ratings when they do it? Marisol: That is a really good question. There are definitely episodes that focus on it, but not anyone where I can, “Oh yeah, this particular writer," or, "Fox is dedicating an entire series to this,” or anything like that. It is still not there. And, like anything right now, it is just an episode or two that would be dedicated to it rather than an entire show. Is that make sense? But when they do air, they make just as equal ratings as they would any other crime, because it usually goes on crime shows. What I would like to see is that at the end of those things, "To find out more, go to www..." or statistics. Mark: Yes. Marisol: Or, like, “Hey, this is actually based on a real case,” to get the audience going, “I had no idea.” Because anything that is based on real life events will always get more interest. Mark: Do you feel like we speak about trafficking correctly? In general, how it is messaged? How should it be messaged in your opinion, if you were PR for the movement? Marisol: If I was PR for the movement, I would call it slavery. I would call it modern-day slavery and I would make sure that it was on the forefront of everything. And I would really, really, really validate the people who rescue the kids - not only OUR, but also police officers, FBI agents, sheriffs...because when I would tell people, they would go, “Why isn’t the police doing anything about it?” I am like, “Because the police is the same people who have to respond to a burglary, to a murder, to a cat caught up in the tree, to all of it.”     Mark: Yeah. Marisol: And I think if we started validating more and more the officers and sheriffs and agents that are focusing on this, and on getting results, freeing girls, and, most importantly, putting the traffickers away... I think the more validation you give that, or anything, the more of that we will get. Mark: Yeah. Marisol: You know, there is a fascination with murder. You know, there are a thousand TV shows about murder, about this, and I have been in all of them, so I do know. And I think we need to shift our focus, because, for one, I think you get whatever you validate. So, if you validate that, you are going to get more of it. We can use that to our advantage and validate those guys that are doing this, and not only getting the girls, but arresting those traffickers and making sure it sticks. Because it is not easy. And I know this from law enforcement, I know this from meeting with different legislators, and all of that. It is that trafficking is not an easy thing to prosecute.   Mark: It is not. Marisol: It is crazy to me, and I have certain ideas that I am working with to make it a lot easier and what I think could be done. But we will get to that whenever you are at that point of the program.   Mark: Well no, if you have certain ideas, let those out. Marisol: What is hard, at least in this country, is you have to get a victim to testify against her trafficker and the johns just walk free: "Well, she approached me," or, "I don’t know… answered an ad," blah blah blah… There is an existing law in the book called statutory rape that doesn’t matter if the girl was consensual or not. It doesn’t matter at all. So if you would start prosecuting johns and traffickers with statutory rape, you don’t have to get the girl to go through a whole testimony, and how he forced her, anything. Is she under the age of 17 or not? Tim: Yeah. Marisol: That... It is done. And when you start prosecuting johns and traffickers with rape, that is a different story now. Tim: Yeah. Marisol: And charging traffickers, by the way, with facilitation of late, where you are creating an environment, where a girl can be raped extremely easily, should be under the age of 17, it is done. Tim: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. In fact, a lot of our approaches to this is all about figuring out how to prosecute these cases without needing to put the victim on the stand. These victims are so... They have been so terrorized and so rewired. For their own well-being, you don’t want to put them on the stand to have them have to relive this. Also, they are not the best witnesses because they do not know who they are, they don’t know who to trust. And so, this solution of prosecuting different crimes to get around that is one approach. Something we are doing, especially in foreign countries, is we do these sting operations and film everything. And they don’t really do that, especially in developing nations. We film every part, from the day we meet the trafficker until we buy the kid. And so, at the end of the day, we just give a hard drive to the prosecutor, and it is like they are watching the movie, and they say, “We don’t need to put the kid on the stand because we have the true intent of this trafficker from seventeen different angles."    Marisol: Yeah. And you know, Tim, I have had these conversations with Lieutenant Mark Evans, who is head of all Los Angeles Vice and all of the trafficking in Los Angeles on the Valley side, and he is like, “We would do this if the DA/district attorney would prosecute.” So my next step is to meet with DA and go, “Would you prosecute them?” Because all depends on are they going to prosecute a case like that or not. The cops can actually charge them with anything that they want, so if we just start instilling the mindset... And also johns... Can we just take a moment about the customers? Because if, right now - and I don’t know if this is the case all over, but at least in California, you know - let’s say there is a 12-year-old-girl. Someone answered an ad on Backpage and went to a motel and had sex with the 12-year-old girl. And the guy is 55 years old - he gets a slap on the wrist and he goes to john school and he gets a misdemeanor and gets it wiped from his record, just like traffic school. I don’t understand - how that is ok? Tim: Yeah… It is not ok. Marisol: And if we started prosecuting the johns with statutory rape, and you advertise that, you are going to take away the demand a lot faster. Tim: Absolutely. Marisol: Because people don’t like to be charged with rape by any means. But right now, there is no consequence. Tim: Yeah. Marisol: There is no consequence. They walk free. It doesn’t matter. So there are mindsets and things that can be changed within our already existing laws, at least in this country, that I believe can go a long way towards making a difference. Continuing with the customers... And then, as the johns get arrested and as they do get prosecuted, or even just arrested, why are we protecting them? If you look on the back of a newspaper, or whatever, you can read like who got arrested for what, drunk driving, blah blah blah blah, but you can get arrested for this and it is not there.    Tim: Yeah. Marisol: So I think we should make the johns, particularly the rich white guys, pay for a billboard with their face and their mugshot in their neighborhood. Tim: The Queen of Sweden did this. She did this thing where if you got caught trying to have sex with a child, you got your face plastered on a billboard for everyone to see. And guess what happened? They stopped. They stopped soliciting kids in Sweden. They left. It is exactly what we need to do. Marisol: Exactly. Tim: Unfortunately, there are a lot of groups out here who would stop us from doing that. Trying, worrying about child rapist rights. Marisol: It is insane to me. And I think, I honestly believe, Tim, that if we could get the certain people in the government that are not scared of that, we could push something like that through. But what I have run into in meeting on the local state and federal level is you get guys that are just, "Oh no, we can’t do that. We will be fought,” and they don’t even try. But I believe if you would try hard enough, we could push something like that through just based on the statistics alone that you ended this.      Tim: These politicians answered to the people. If we would get the people loud enough, then they would say, "Of course, I will put their face on a billboard!" Because the people are demanding it, and that is where we need to start this, right. And that is what you are doing - that is what we are doing - is trying to create this grassroots movement - get so loud that these guys have to start doing stuff like this. History tells us that they will do it if we get loud enough. Mark: You mentioned politicians that are scared, and we don’t know what the exact story is on H.R.515 right now, which is before Congress, which is a big cause that we are going to take up.     Marisol: Which one is that? Mark: It is International Megan’s Law. Marisol: Oh great, yes! Ok. Mark: It will allow better communication between governments as bad guys travel abroad and come in. Right now, you cannot really get the information quickly enough to be actionable intelligence. Now, it went through the House, it went through the Senate, the Senate put some amendments on it, threw it back to the House - now it has a 15% passage rate. We have got a brilliant girl from the Podcast Congressional Web that just dissects bills. She is amazing.    Marisol: Who? Who does she work for, do you know? Mark: She is, totally... It is just her, totally independent. Marisol: Oh, ok. Mark: I don’t know what her politics are. I have listened to her shows - I have no idea, which is beautiful to me. She just dissects bills and sees what the [inaudible], sees what the hold-ups are in...what day, I think February 10th, we are going to be on with her and she is going to walk us through the bill and dissect who is holding it up and why. Marisol: Great! Mark: That is going to be awesome, right? Tim: This thing has been in Congress for over a year. It is ridiculous. Now, I actually testified with [inaudible] of Utah. We testified before the House on this bill because we were so frustrated, like, “Why can’t you pass this?!” It is a place that actually creates what is called the Angel Watch Center, a center where non-profit, private groups, government groups all get together and they talk about... They bring intel together, they start communicating better. And like Mark was saying, it is a notification program. If some French child rapist/former convict comes into our country, they are going to tell us, “Hey, this guys is flying into JFK. You might want to either deny him entry or watch him,” you know. We did the same for other countries. And again, what the issue is is their rights, the criminal’s right to travel without being notified. Mark: As we start to find more about H.R.515, maybe we engage you. Marisol: I am looking at it right now and I am kind of seeing where possibly the hold-up is because they are talking about any sex offender, and what I found in the past of certain other laws was that the definition of sex offender also includes, like, the person who was caught urinating in a park drunk, and he is labeled a sex offender for the rest of his life. And they are using those cases to cause an uproar to stop the whole thing, and say it is discriminatory against them. It is a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense, but that is where I am guessing - it is a guess - some of the hold-up is. One of the things that could go a long way is we will prosecute people for aiding and abetting. If they knew about a murder or they knew about a robbery that was taken place - so they were the driver but they didn’t do it... But we don’t do this with [inaudible].     Tim: It is a great point. It is true. Marisol: That would be another angle to getting the johns going, "Hey, you knew about this?” to get prostitution illegal in this country. So, did you really answer an ad for a massage? Do you know what I mean? And cast a wider net when you can actually prosecute people for aiding and abetting, for helping along, for being an accomplice...you know, looking in terms of existent laws that we already have in the books and prosecute differently to make a bigger dent. Tim: Agreed. We could make a list and shout it out to the world: "So, here are the things that need a change," and just be loud. Get the footage, get entertainment industry, get everyone to be so loud - Harriet Beecher Stowe thing, right - and then say, "What do we do?" "Here is the list, call your congressmen, get this stuff changed." Let’s do it, we are going to do it! Alright. Thanks so much, Marisol, we will have you back soon. Marisol: Alright, thanks guys! Thanks for having me! Tim: Alright, thank you! You know, the thing done is at least there are people out there because what this requires to save kids... You have to think outside the box. Just like to get rid of slavery in America, you had to think outside the box. And the model we are proposing is this private public partnership where we need our law enforcement. They have the badges, they have their prosecutors, they have the jail system, they have the judicial system, they can do this. But the problem is, this is such a unique problem and it is so enormous you have to be proactive and creative. Because these…the bad guys are being creative, and most law enforcement agencies don’t have the wherewithal to cover the homicides, the drug dealers and all the things they have been fighting for years and years and are trained to do. And now, you have trafficking problem on top of that. It is relatively new in terms of trying to react to it and most don’t have the tools they need. And that is why I left the government. Because I recognized all the gaps in the agencies that were fighting this problem. Again, not to slam them, but there are gaps everywhere. I got turned down by half the time when I put out request to do an operation. I got shut down because of X,Y, or Z. I always kind of understood the reasons, and I thought, “Alright, I don’t see the government fixing these gaps anytime soon, so I am going to leave - start my own organization that fills those gaps.” So I can go to any agency and say, “I know your problems because I had them, and I am going to solve them for you. We will do this, this, that and the other.” And the law enforcement agencies that want to save their kids are like, “Yes, come on in!” and we go and conquer together in the private-public model.  There are other law enforcement officers who... I will not name them right now, but have them in my head right now, and I am pissed off at them. So close-minded. Mark: What did they say? Give me a conversation. Tim: "You shouldn’t be doing this work. This is just for us. This is for a SWAT law enforcement." "I was a SWAT law enforcement for 12 years, I know how to do this." "Well, you cannot do it. I do not like you doing it." “The parents of the kids, who are being abused - they like that we are doing it. And where we are working, no one is doing it." So there is no answer, no answer to it. It just the partners we work with - they are not this way. If you are this way, we don’t work with you. But you would be surprised how many come back and say that they literally gave up the opportunity to rescue more kids because of pride, because of ego, because if you don’t have a badge, you shouldn’t be consulting or helping or anything like that. They can’t see outside the box. And it is sad because kids are getting hurt. I have had a conversation, actually - and I will not name the people, the agency - but I have literally had a conversation that went like this: "So you are telling me that you or your boss would rather let these kids continue to be raped than work with a private organization that you know together we can solve the problem?" And they said, "Yes." Mark: Wow. Tim: They said yes. It wasn’t them... The person I was talking to said, “I want to do it, but yes that is... My boss has made that deliberate decision.” They don’t want to admit that they need help or that they don’t have a handle on it. It is sick, it is sad. But you know, you have all sorts of people, and the good news is that there are a whole bunch of law enforcement agencies out there and prosecutors all over the place that put the kids above everything else, and that is who we work with. Yep, that is who we work with. And there are so many of them that we don’t run out of work. So, you know, I was talking to some folks at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children who are a wonderful asset - all law enforcement works with them on so many areas to find kids, to find child pornographers - such an amazing organization. And I was talking to them about some of my frustrations and they said, "You know what? We did the same thing." They went through the same thing in the 80’s when they created the organization. There was a major - and I won’t name the agency - a major agency in the United States government that actually put out a policy/memo to their agents, to their law enforcement, saying, "You will not work with this new National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. You will not work with them. We got this. We don’t need help."    Mark: Farm Bureau. Tim: Yeah. That was a farm bureau. You got it.    Mark: Gosh…you know, the pressure was their heyday. Tim: Between that and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, yeah... They just went...yeah, unbelievable. But now, guess what? That agency has agents in their office that work inside the National Center. And so they say, "Just don’t worry. Buck up, little Timmy. Just work with those that will work with you. And success will be built upon success." And so we just have to put the negative aside and put the haters aside and we will work with those who see the vision. And they are the best ones anyway. They are the ones who are getting it done. Mark: Today, more than any other day, in talking to you, I feel momentum. I feel really pumped. And I don’t know what you had for lunch, or what your pre-workout was, but you are on fire, man. You are going to kill it. Tim: You didn’t feel that before? Mark: I did. Tim: You jerk. Mark: I didn’t... I felt like... Tim: ...how to take a compliment and just throw it in the trash. Mark: No, listen. I have felt like you are pushing a boulder uphill before, but now I feel like the boulder is moving. You know what I am saying? Like, we were getting people and we're shedding light on the problem, but really I just feel a new energy and not sure what it is. Tim: Well, what you are feeling probably is... I am in the middle of a case. I am back in my... Mark: You are... Tim: ...I am back in my agent days right now as an employee of this law enforcement agency. It is… I have been given authorization to get back and get my hands dirty back in this. And when I do that, I get very energized. Well, friends, sign us off, Timmy. Buck up, little Timmy. Tim: Thanks for joining us, guys. Looking forward to see you again on Slave Stealer Podcast.

Thanks Be to God for His Inexpressible Gift (2 Corinthians 9:15) Thanksgiving Series #1

This week, we have a brief discussion about how third party ad networks affect performance on news sites before talking with Sophie Shepherd. Sophie is a Senior Designer at Ushahidi, a non-profit software company that develops free and open-source products for information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping. We discussed the challenges of designing for international users with minimal data speed, how Ushahidi brings data and information to regions with nearly no connection, designing with task completion in mind, and more. ##Show Links: Sophie Shepherd Follow Sophie on Twitter Ushahidi Lara Hogan - A List Apart - Showing Performance Global Mobile Book Eric Meyer Crisis Design Rust Belt Refresh ##Transcript Katie: Welcome. You're listening to Episode 8 of The Path to Performance, the podcast dedicated to everyone to make the web faster. I am your host, Katie Kovalcin. Tim: And I'm your other host, Tim Kadlec and yeah, you nailed it; this is Episode 8. Well done! Katie: I was like, oh yeah, I totally know which episode it is. Wait: no, I don't. This is Episode 8. Tim: I mean, it's understandable; the numbers are getting higher, it's getting harder and harder. Katie: Totally out of control it's on more than one hand now! Tim: Yeah, once you've thrown that second hand, things get really complicated. It gets worse when you have to start taking off the socks and using your toes as well! That's where I always get hung up! Katie: You can wear flip-flops and then you don't have to worry about it. Tim: True, true. Katie: How are you, Tim? Tim: I'm doing OK; I'm actually wearing flip-flops right now! Yeah, I am! Katie: It's warm in Wisconsin? Tim: It is warm, for once. Yeah, I'm doing good; enjoying my day. And you? Katie: I'm good as well. The sun is shining here, which is a very rare thing in Ohio this summer and I feel like I have been whining about it for so long but today, I'm not whining. Tim: That's good! That's good! I'm guessing, we could maybe one of these times maybe we'll have an episode where we just kind of whine all the way through, but otherwise I think people probably enjoy the non-whining better. Katie: We can just have a bummer episode! Tim: Yeah, just a downer of an episode where we just air all our grievances about everything… Katie: We just talk in emo voice, just like…mwww…yeah, the web does actually kinda suuuuck… Tim: Yeah, exactly! I think this goes over well, I think this is maybe like a special Christmas edition. Katie: That is a really good idea. Tim: Right in time for the holidays. Katie: Christmas Bummer Episode! Tim: This is brilliant. That has to happen; I'm writing this down. Anyway, but glad to hear you're doing good now on this totally not Christmas at all episode. That's good. Katie: Yeah, on this summer-sunshine flip-flop fun-time episode! Tim: Yay! Katie: So, on the note of cool things, there's this episode from the Washington Post where in kind of a similar fashion, I know we talked a couple of months ago about Vox sort of declaring performance bankruptcy, Washington Post kinda did the same thing and talked about in an article the other day and that was pretty cool. They mentioned it sort of being in response to the instant articles and talking about just ads on news sites generally kind of sucky for performance, but I really liked this quite that it ended on that we have very little control over ads that load late or slowly but we wanted to make the core use experience as solid as possible because that is what we have control over and that's kind of a cool way to think about performance, just focusing on making good the core part that you do have control over. Tim: Yeah, and I think that's just generally awesome advice for anybody, because the ad work stuff comes up a lot and you have very little control over those third party ad networks and unfortunately a lot of them are super-slow right now but also essential for business but I like that they made the clear distinction between their core experience and understanding that the ads is just something you're going to have to tack on afterwards but mitigate the issues as much as possible. I think that's just really solid advice for any publisher. Katie: Yeah, absolutely. It's a nice article, it's a quick read; I recommend giving that a little skim or browse. Tim: Definitely. And then of course, Lara Hogan, who has made a habit out of writing good things over and over and over again or providing good performance advice in general, she wrote a post for A List Apart about showing performance; basically getting into some of the things she talked about way back in Episode 1 with us and also in her book about the importance of making performance visual: going into the dashboards and things like that, that they have up at Etsy and making sure that people can actually see the difference in performance. Katie: Yeah, she tweeted a little quick video a while ago and it might actually be in that article, I haven't had a chance to read it yet; it's on my to-do list but she posted a video of their video systems and it's really cool, it's really awesome to see that. Did I tell you that Lara, she talks about donuts all the time and donuts being her reward for good performance, achievements, good things like that, and when I saw Lara in New York a couple weeks ago, she took me to The Donut Spot that's in her neighborhood and I was so excited! Tim: Yeah, you told me. She's never taken me to The Donut Spot. I'm a little disappointed. I'm excited for you though: that sounds really cool. That's kind of… Katie: You know what? It was a really good donut because she says she's not a fan of the hipster donuts with a bunch of stupid toppings like cereal and candy bars and crap. Tim: Like the voodoo donuts thing in Portland? Katie: Yeah. These are just some straight-up home-town donuts in Brooklyn; I guess not really home-town but they were good! Tim: That's good. This is just like plain glazed? I want to know how far down the rabbit hole you went. Katie: We got banana…no, not banana: they were like custard-filled ones with the chocolate icing. I'm not a donut expert but those good ones! Tim: Gotcha, OK. That's a safe choice. Katie: Not the white sugary whipped cream-filled, the kind of yellowy-custard cream-filled ones; those are good ones. I don't know the distinction: is one cream and one custard? Is one icing and one cream? I don't know. Tim: I think it's usually like an icing and cream thing. Depending on where you go, it's almost like pure frosting is what it tastes like you're eating… Katie: Yeah, like you bite in and you're just like, oh my… Tim: Yeah, it's like there's frosting on the outside of the donut and frosting shoved down the inside as well and you just feel the cavities forming as you're eating them. It's great. It's a really good experience. But that's good. No, I did not…you did tell me this and that's very awesome, very cool. It's kinda like… Katie: Sorry; I'm obviously still thinking about that. Tim: I don't blame you. Katie: It was an experience. But, back to today's episode! We are talking to Sophie Shepherd and the big reason we wanted to get Sophie on here is not only because she's an awesome designer but because she has experience with working on products that are primarily used in developing countries that typically have the less than ideal device scenarios that we kind of always talk about in theory but she has some really great insight on talking a bout it in practice and actually designing for those devices and scenarios so it's going to be really interesting. Tim: Yeah, it'll be a nice fresh take, a different perspective than we usually get. Very cool. Katie: Cool. Well, let's go hear from Sophie. Katie: And we're back with Sophie Shepherd from Ushahidi. Sophie; can you tell us a little bit about Ushahidi and what exactly that is? Sophie: Sure. So, the what exactly it is, it's a Swahili word that means "Testimony". A lot of people are like, "Usha-what?" so it's not English so don't feel bad if you can't say it. And the company was founded in 2008 in Kenya so in 2008 what was happening in Kenya. there was an election that was fairly corrupt and there was quite a bit of violence broke out and some bloggers who were in Kenya and living in Kenya realized that they needed to do something to help out as well as just writing about what was happening, so they made a product in which people could submit reports of different places where the election was happening, different polling stations and this way they could say, there's been violence here, someone was killed here or this is a safe place where you can go to vote, or there's fraud happening. And what Ushahidi does is it takes all of these different reports and collects them into one place and provides a list and a map for them. So that's how it was founded; it's now a number of products but the name of our main platform is still Ushahidi and the purpose of it is still too collect data, crowd-source data. It's oftentimes gets mapped but isn't necessarily, we're re-doing the platform right now so that it's not only map data; it can really be anything that users submit. Katie: Awesome. So, spoiler alert, I know Sophie really well so I know the details of what she does and what really struck me and why I wanted to get her on the podcast so bad is because you deal a lot with users that are in places that have really poor connectivity and the products that you're designing are really crucial information that they need to get to. Can you talk a little bit about all of that and the challenges that you face when designing for that? Sophie: Sure. So, I think something that's really interesting is that it's not only poor connectivity but the kind of contexts in which people are using our products are unique. Not exclusively, but oftentimes they're used in crisis situations, so people don't have a whole lot of time. A lot of the time, the power could be down or internet could be down, so it's not only we have to think about connectivity but also ways that people are submitting information. This has been the first project I've worked on where it's not just, when we talk about performance, it's not just people needing to load something fast but it's about access and accessibility so, built into our product is people can anonymously text stuff in and that'll become a part of our system so it's really thinking about this whole ecosystem of access and ways of submitting information rather than just a website. Katie: Can you talk a little bit about what that means exactly, more than just a website? How else are you working around those connectivity and accessibility issues? Sophie: Yes, well, Ushahidi as a whole, not only with our platform but we have a lot of other companies that have spun out from the product itself, so there's a company Brick which is really, really awesome. It was founded by someone who was also a founder in Ushahidi and they make wifi devices that are super-rugged; they work off 3G connections so you can take those anywhere. We were in Kenya and they have all these attachments so it can be solar-powered wifi, so we had a group meeting in Kenya and we were all accessing the internet in the middle of nowhere on a beach from this device we had. So, it's thinking more about getting people information. Similarly we do a lot with SMS so if someone only has a phone they can text in a report or receive a response saying, OK, this has been confirmed, through their phone. Tim: This is fascinating stuff. I always think it's very interesting to hear the perspective outside of what we're used to in the little bubble that we get to live in here in the United States tech industry. This is taking everything in terms of the importance of building something that is going to work on different devices and the importance of building something that's going to perform well and this is really scaling up the importance of doing that, the vitality of doing that from just business metrics to, like you're saying, people's lives at stake in some of these cases. I'm curious; you mentioned being in Kenya and using those devices to get access. You can't obviously develop all the time in Kenya, so how are you finding ways to get that experience here, when you're building stuff from the United States so that you're feeling what it's going to be like on those, a 2G or a 3G connection or whatever it happens to be? Sophie: It's definitely a challenge for me because not only am I working every day on a really good connection but I've never really not had that; maybe five years ago my connection was not as good as it was now but I think I've always been as far as connection speeds in the one per cent, but we have a really great user advocacy team at Ushahidi so this is not only thinking about performance and website metrics, but we have a whole team that is dedicated to making sure that our users are satisfied, listening to what their needs are and responding in that way and also helping them, because this is a product that then gets extended and they can download it and set up their own deployments to use the product so we have a team that works really closely with people who are actually using it, which is terrific because we get a lot of feedback through that. Tim: I was going to say, are some of the team members in Kenya? Sophie: Uh-huh. Yeah, we have one person in Kenya, one person in Canada and then we have as part of, we have a specific user testing wing that's in Kenya but what they do is, since they are so in touch with people who use this stuff all over the world, they're good at being able to not only test it in Kenya but test it elsewhere and talk to…we have a large group using this stuff in Nepal right now because of the earthquake so they're in touch with them, checking that everything's working OK, getting any feedback from them. Katie: Do you tend to look at what specific devices the majority of users in these areas are using and start building and testing there or how does that work out? What's the size of an iPhone, that tends to be our default? What devices are you really thinking about in those areas? Sophie: It's interesting because right now, we are in the midst of re-building this product and so a lot of the people out there who are using it right now are using Version 2 which is the older version and at this point I don't even know how many years old it is but it's fairly outdated. It still works really well but it's not responsive; it's hard, we've noticed that quite a lot of people are using it on a desktop but that's only because it doesn't work very well on a phone so it'll be really interesting, we're launching the new one which is fully responsive and a lot more modern in this way to see how people end up using it. But it's tough because we can't say, iPhone users use this because it's used really everywhere in the world so maybe if it's used in the US it is going to be on an iPhone more, whereas elsewhere, it's Android but we try to cast a really wide net so there's an Android app that will be used for collecting information, you can submit by SMS. The new version's going to be totally responsive so what we try to do is not really focus on one but make sure that everyone can use it. Katie: So, you've been working on a responsive re-design and everything we've talked about has been the poor connectivity and all of that. How has performance played into those decisions when building this site or the product again for this new version? Sophie: It's a continuous consideration and process of checks and balances. One thing is that, thinking about images: part of this new system is we're able to have people submit images as part of their reports so that's something that we still have not quite figured out how we should work with how to then deliver those back to people and also thinking about different JavaScript libraries that we're using. It's a constant balance, so I think we're still figuring it out. We've done quite a bit of user-testing but more UX user-testing but the application itself is not totally done, it hasn't been built yet, so I think that's to come in terms of optimizing how it's going to work exactly. But from the design and front-end, we've definitely been keeping things really light and really the only question that we have is how we're going to treat images. Tim: Is it primarily a matter of using them or not using them or is it a degree of compression in terms of getting them to a point where maybe they're a little pixilated and ugly but they're balanced: the trade-off is that they're going to perform well on those types of networks? What are you battling with, with the images? Sophie: Well, I think basically every single image that is ever going to be on the site is going to be submitted by a user, so we don't know exactly the sizes of images that are going to come in and then at what point we are then going to compress them or shrink them and how we're going to do that and then how they're going to then be delivered back out. Yeah. Tim: So it's getting a system in place for all the user-generated content? Sophie: Exactly, yes. Tim: Gotcha. OK. Katie: So, you talk a lot about style guides and patter libraries and Sophie I know that's how you like to design and work. What is that process looking like? Do you do testing as you go on designs and see how performing it is or how fast it's loading under those different circumstances? Can you just talk a little bit about your design thinking? Sophie: Yeah. What we have been doing is we did all the UX fairly separately, thinking about just user flows and how things were going to be laid out and how things should work and then we did some visual design and then we started combining these by building the pattern library, so we took out patterns from visual design and eventually we've just started building templates and designing in the browser because we have enough of these patterns to build upon and it's been really great; this is the first time that I've worked in this way and what I really love about it is that each of our patterns and components basically stand on their own so it's really easy to look at them and understand exactly where certain weights are coming from. By designing modularly, we can pull those out rather than seeing a page as a whole and not really understand what's causing what. Tim: In a prior episode, we were talking to Jeff Lembeck of Filament Group and he mentioned what he called the "Jank Tank" which is this big box of basically ugly, horrible, slow devices. Considering how wide the net you're spreading, do you have anything similar? Is there a Ushahidi Jank Tank that you guys go to? Sophie: There isn't, but I love that idea. Tim: Yeah, I think we were fans of that too. Sophie: Is it like…what does he mean exactly? Tim: The idea was having… Sophie; …lowest common denominator kind of devices? Time: Yeah, basically grabbing cheap devices or old devices and firing those up: things that are going to be maybe a few years old and are probably going to be a huge challenge to make things feel fluid and work well on those and you have those handy to test them out and see what honestly might be a more typical user would experience than the high end stuff. Sophie: Yeah, we don't have that here in the States; I feel bad calling it a Jank Tank because that's negative-sounding, but in the office in Kenya, they have…they all work in a building and there's quite a few tech companies that work in there and they have something like a Mobile Device Lab and I think it was sponsored by a mobile company there but I was there earlier in the year and it kind of blew my mind; I put a picture of it on Twitter that we can refer to in the Speaker Notes. But that was all of these phones that were phones that I hadn't even necessarily seen, that they don't sell in the States, and they're all used for testing so at some point probably now that I'm talking about it, I'm realizing we should do it sooner rather than later, they have a whole testing lab there that we can test this product on. Tim: Nice. A mobile device lab does admittedly sound a little bit more ??? serious. Katie: Everything that you're saying sounds like, just tying in that accessibility and performance are going hand in hand and it sounds like you've just learned a great deal of empathy in your time there. Is that true and has that influenced your design? Sophie: Yeah, definitely. I think something that has really changed in my mind is thinking about when doing the design, what actions are people going to want to take, so I think that goes with performance too: if we can only load this one button that says "submit a report" and skip all of the images then that's the most important thing, so, really thinking about where to guide people and what the most important and crucial actions are before loading and everything else, so as a designer that's been definitely something that, previously I was doing client work and it was like we had this long list of requirements that we had to fit in and now it's kind of re-assessing and re-prioritizing what requirements actually are and having different levels of this is the one thing they need to really use this app and then here's all of this other helpful stuff that could be called crucial but isn't actually life or death crucial. Katie: That's really interesting. Do you think that there's any way that, for those of us still working on client projects, to have those conversations with the client to try to be like, "no, really, but the marketing video isn't truly required"; exercises in priority and stuff: do you have any tips for paring down those requirements? Sophie: I think it's tough if your talking to a marketing person because they'd be like, "no, literally I'm going to die if I don't get this on there." Katie: And you're like, "no, literally, people are on our products like…" Sophie: Yeah. I think any time it's easier to say, "does this go above this in the priority list" people are willing to answer that question rather than either or. So, in general, communicating and deciding things I would recommend ordering rather than choosing people to sacrifice things. Tim: And it seems like that's clarified too in, I would guess one of the reasons why it works so well where you are is because that task, if you're looking at what the most important thing for the user to do is, it's so very clear and so very critical whereas on maybe on a more traditional thing where you're working with marketers or whatever, they may not have as clear a sense of, what is the ultimate purpose of this site? And then it becomes a lot harder to do the prioritization without that. Sophie: Yeah; it's funny because we're in the process right now of re-designing the company site as well as re-designing the product itself and it shouldn't be, because there's no life or death, but it's so much more complicated to prioritize stuff on the company site because there's so many different types of audiences and services that it needs to provide whereas on the app itself, it's pretty clear to say, what's the most important action for someone to take. Tim: Within the new site, do you still have to take into consideration a lot of the same sort of constraints in terms of the different devices and connectivity because that's who your audience is that you're marketing to, or are you marketing to a different group through the site? Sophie: Yeah, the site will be, well that's up for debate; that's I think what we're still trying to figure out. I think by default it's a good idea to not ever say, "oh well only people in the States with nice phones are going to look at this" just because that's a dangerous attitude to have, but it's possibly less of priority for the site itself. Tim: So, going back to prioritizing performance within the actual apps and stuff that you're doing: did you have set targets that you were looking at when you were working V3 of this? Were there hard-set goals; we are not going to go over this amount of weight or we are not going to take longer than this for the map of data to appear or anything like that? Sophie: Yeah, so we set a performance budget and we've set a few of them; we set one for the front-end so what we've done is build this pattern library and we have all of our, we're calling them "weight-outs" which are basically our different views within the app itself. So we had an initial goal for that, that we've met and then we set a separate one for the build itself and that's still in process, so hopefully we can get around that target. I like this too because instead of having one end-goal we can really check as we go. Tim: Yeah, it's nice to have it broken down like that. Can we ask what the targets are, just out of curiosity? Sophie: I can look them up but I don't know them right now. Tim: That's fine. Just curious. Was it in terms of the weight or is it a different sort of, more like an experience-focused metric or anything like that, that you're targeting? Sophie: Yeah, we did a weight and a load time. Tim: Gotcha. OK. Katie: It sounds like you've worked in some of the perceived performance thinking too when you're saying, what's the critical information to load first. Sophie: Yeah, for me as a designer, that's definitely something that I can relate to more and I think in some ways it's possibly more important. I think they work as a team but… Tim: I think it is. And I think that's…I think or I hope that that's what, within the performance community, the people who really that's what they do focus on, I think that that's where everything is starting to, we're starting to wake up to that and certainly to shift towards understanding that it really is about the experience and making sure that the critical things are coming in, whatever the top task, whatever the most important features are on the page or coming in and measuring those sorts of things, instead of this blind race to the finish that we've kind of had in the past. Sophie: Yeah. I'm curious to see how that thinking changes because I love the idea of a performance budget but I think sometimes it can be a little limiting and you wouldn't want to sacrifice certain things just to fit into the performance budget. Not limiting, but I think it's very concrete whereas it should be a fairly fluid depending on context of the site itself. Tim: Sure, yeah, it doesn't dictate what goes on; it's another consideration or it's part of another piece in the puzzle. Sophie: Right. At the same time, it's the easiest way to communicate goals. Tim: True. It's hard to without it having a hard set thing, it's very hard, yeah. Sophie: Yeah, until you have the design done, you can't say, OK, our goal is that this is going to load and then this is going to load this much later. It helps to have a number that everyone can refer back to. Katie: So, when you say for everyone to communicate, who is that? Is that between you and the developers? Is this something that your leadership is really that's close to their heart as well? Sophie: Yeah, I think when I said that it was more coming from my experience with client work, where you're using this number as a kind of tactic to force a client to decide on certain things. For us, since we're all working internally, I think definitely any…basically, everyone wants to see it be as fast as it possibly can, so we're all working towards the same thing. Katie: Is there ever a push-back to even like, "OK, now that we've hit that, let's try another goal that's even faster"? Sophie: Not yet, because we haven't launched it, but I wouldn't be surprised if we launch it and get certain feedback that it wasn't loading or it wasn't working quite right on something. I'm really curious to see once it's out there and people are using it, how people respond. Katie: Yeah, I'm really curious to see what metrics you find out from that. Tim: Did you make a distinction…there's the cutting the mustard approach that the BBC popularized which is the core experience goes to maybe older, less capable browsers/devices and the enhanced experience goes to everybody else. One of the things that that fails at, or that doesn't take into consideration which seems like it would be really important for Ushahidi is the situation where you have somebody is on a very nice device but the connectivity is really awful. Did you have to make any distinction between different experiences or do you just have one experience and that experience itself is extremely lightweight, no matter what the scenario is? Was that enough for you to accomplish or you needed to do? Sophie: Yeah, that's funny; we had our company retreat in Kenya so it was I think maybe about half, maybe a little less of our company is in the US so we all went there with our snazzy iPhones and still couldn't connect to anything and it really, I think in terms of empathy, made us realize: oh, wait a second. But in terms of yeah, I think we're just going to try to make it fast for everyone. We don't have a whole lot of enhancements for people on quicker systems yet. Katie: When you were in Kenya, were there any things that were especially awful to try to load, like you're used to just being part of your everyday life? I'm just curious. Sophie: I remember reading Twitter, on the Twitter app and everything loaded except for the pictures and it made you realize just how often people supplement their tweets with pictures; I remember getting really frustrated about it. Katie: That's interesting. Sophie: But I didn't even really try to do a lot of stuff because it really didn't look very well. Same thing on Instagram; it's like sometimes this progressive loading thing; I would rather it not load at all than, oh, I see all of these people posted great pictures that I can't look at. I'd rather not know than… Katie: Or like the tweets having fomo, oh, you had a joke and I can't see the punch-line! Sophie: Exactly! Katie: That's really interesting because when we're just designing here in a bubble it's like, "well I think that would be fine for you to just know that it's there but not see it" but then when you're actually using it, you're like: no, this sucks. Sophie: Yeah, it's like actively frustrating. Tim: How often do you get to Kenya? Sophie: I'm new to the company; I've only been here since the beginning of the year but I think they do a retreat every year but not necessarily always in Kenya; I think every other year it's in Kenya. And I think other people on the team, it depends, we'll do these what we call Hit Team Meetings because everyone is remote and then mini-teams will get together and all work together for a week so those have been all over the place since people live on opposite ends of the world, depending on who's meeting they usually choose a place that is fairly central for everyone to get to. Katie: We'll start to have a list of sites, Sophie, how much is this really crappy, wherever you end up going… Sophie: How long does this take? Katie: Look it up and tell me how much it sucks. Sophie: It is cool to have people on the team everywhere for that reason. Tim: Sure, I bet that gives you a really nice overall picture of a whole bunch of different landscapes from a technical perspective. Sophie: Yeah. Katie: I know, I didn't prepare a list of questions like I should have! Tim: It's all right, I'm actually having a lot of fun just going off the cuff on this, knowing almost nothing. I did a little bit of research and I had heard of Ushahidi from this big fat book about mobile on a global scale that was put out a couple of years ago. Sophie: That's cool. What was that book? Tim: It's called Global Mobile. It's six hundred pages and each chapter is written by a different author on a different topic and I think Ushahidi came up twice… Sophie: Oh, that's awesome. Tim: …in the book. Sophie: Do you know what they referenced or what it was…. Tim: One was just talking about how…I don't remember one of the references in much detail. The other one I know that they were talking about a variety of different mobile technological solutions that were out there; I think they were focused primarily on Africa in that chapter or similar areas and they were talking about the different services that are making use of technologies that we might consider a little bit more simple, but they're doing really powerful things with it and so I think that they were focused on the SMS aspect, if I remember right. Sophie: Yeah, it's been definitely challenging, but also interesting that designing a product that is not used for one specific thing; it's very much user-focused and people will download it and decide how they use it, so it's been a challenge to design for that and to keep it well designed but also really, really flexible. Tim: Which is why I guess it's so important I guess that you are getting a chance to experience at least a little bit every once in a while because everybody talks about front-end design perspective, from a development perspective, how important it is to put yourself in your user's shoes and when you're talking about what Ushahidi is dealing with, and it's not just the devices or the browser or the connections: it's the situations; it's just so hard. It's so hard to put yourself in those sorts of shoes and understand what it must feel like to use the application or the site in those sorts of scenarios; that's such a huge challenge. Sophie: Yeah, there's no way that, well it sounds selfish saying it, but hopefully there's no way I would ever actually be able to experience that but I think that is why we have such a strong and valuable user advocacy team so that they can really communicate with them when people are in those situations and as they're using it in those situations. Tim: Do you get feedback from the users that are pertaining directly to things like how quickly they're able to report something or how quickly they're able to get access to the data that's been reported, in terms of it takes too long sort of a thing, not just a usability thing but from a performance perspective? Sophie: We haven't. Or not that I know of. Tim: Well, maybe that means you're doing an awesome job! Sophie: We'll see. It's also tough because the new version is yet to be used on a wide…by a lot of people, so we'll see, but it is great because we have the product is also open source, so we have a lot of community submissions and ideas so this is again the first time I've worked on something like that where I'll just be in my normal task list that we use internally as a team and I will get one from…I'm in Katmandu and this thing is not working; can you add this? So it is really cool to see that people care about improving the product. Tim: That's awesome. Katie: Is there anything that you've learned from going through this process and being hit with all of these pretty heavy design constraints that are just, oh man, there's no way I can ignore that. Has that changed your view on design, even outside of this product in particular? Sophie: I think that this has, compared to how I used to design, I'm keeping things a lot more simple, not even necessarily visually; visually as well but also just in how they work and not trying to dictate how something should work. Oftentimes we'll, with other people in my design team or sometimes with our developers, we'll discuss how something, spend hours doing flows and then just realizing, why don't we just let people do what they want to do and take a step back and not define so much how this should be used, so I think just the fact that so many different people are using it for different ways, I've found that it's often best to leave things open and then to not over-complicate them. Katie: Is that kind of freeing? Sophie: Errr….it's been difficult because I'm so used to not being like that. But yeah, kind of. For me as a designer it's been kind of hard to let go of control. Katie: Yeah, that's usually I think our downfall as designers is wanting to control everything and that's kind of a big part about embracing performance too: it just sounds boring to design for performance, even though it's not and it's just like anything else. Sophie: Yeah, I think that I talked to ??? about this a long, long time ago and I remember it's stuck with me in terms of performance but also it's kind of user advocacy side of design, which is that it's not in conflict with the design; you shouldn't think of performance as taking away from visual design but it's just a piece of design so it's just another aspect of UX and if it loads faster, then that'll make the design better. Katie; It means you did your job well! Sophie. Yeah, exactly. Tim: At the end of the day it's about, especially in your case, but at the end of the day it's really about how quickly can the people using the site or the application get the task done that they came to the site to do and so that makes performance comes right up front and center along with any other bit of the process really, information architecture, clear content structure and good visual design; it all contributes. Sophie: That's what design is, right? Getting people to be able to do what they want as easily as possible. Katie: Is this something that you were thinking about before having these experiences in these other parts of the world, or was that the eye-opener of, oh-whoa, my designs should encapsulate this? Sophie: Yeah, I think it's always something theoretically that I could be like, your designs have to load really fast, of course, but selfishly I've always wanted them to look really cool or try out some latest thing that's trending on the web. So I think it's helped me step out and realize I'm not designing this for me. If I want to try something, I can just do it on my own site. Katie: So, I'm wondering if that's maybe the first step for designers that are not wanting to think about it… Sophie: Make them design something for someone in crisis. Katie: Yeah! Sophie: At an agency, every junior designer has to design for… Tim: Oh man! Sophie: …life or death situations. Katie: It's part of the interview process, you need to whiteboard a crisis design. Sophie: Yeah! Tim: Talk about no pressure right off the gate, that's what you're dealing with! Sophie: Have either of you seen Eric Meyer's presentation? Tim: I have not, but I've heard it's excellent. Sophie: I really want to. Katie: I want to see it as well. Sophie: It sounds really… Katie: Everything you are talking about is making we think of that. Sophie: I would really, really love to hear, I don't know if he would…he could be a good guest on the podcast just to talk about his experience. Tim: Yeah, I'd love to talk to Eric. I've heard the presentation is just fantastic but I haven't had a chance to catch it live. I don't know if it's recorded or not anywhere but if so, I haven't seen it. Katie; I think if any of you want come hang out in Ohio, I believe I would have to double-check, but I think he's giving that Rustbelt Refresh in Cleveland in September. Tim: I do like that conference. I did that last year, it's a lot of fun. Katie: So, you want to come hang out in Ohio and see it? Tim: Sunny Cleveland! Katie: Where the lake caught on fire! Sophie: Oh my God! Tim: I don't think I heard this. Katie; I think it was before I ever lived in Ohio, ten or so years ago. It may have been the river, it may have been the lake, I can't remember. One of them was so polluted that it caught on fire at some point. (45:11) Tim: That sounds a lovely! Sophie: That's terrifying! Tim: My only knowledge of Cleveland, which I think is probably upsetting and insulting to all people who live in Cleveland… Katie: Drew Carey Tim: Yep. So, I apologize for that! Sophie: I've been to Cleveland; I spent two weeks in Cleveland. Katie: What? Sophie: I was going through, you know, being young and wanting to work for Obama during the election but even then, I don't know what's in Cleveland, even after spending time there. Katie: I have been to Cleveland twice and I don't know. I live two hours from it; I couldn't tell you what's in Cleveland. Sophie: Really cheap houses if I remember; lots of empty, cheap houses! Katie: One time I tried out to be on The Price is Right this is when Drew Carey was the host and because I am really bad at being like, wooow, cookie-crazy person to be on The Price is Right, they interview every person that goes through the process and like, "why should we pick you?" and my only response was just like, "I'm from Ohio. Just like Drew. Cleveland Rocks, right?" Sophie: Certainly good for TV. Katie: Yeah, well, we'll talk about Ohio. Obviously I did not make it! Tim: That's sad! Sophie: There's still hope; you could try again. Tim: Don't give up on that. Katie: No, that was actually…. Sophie: Don't give up on your dreams. Tim: No, you've got to follow through. Katie: That was horrific; you're just like cattle being herded for six hours through this line as they interview every single person that goes in the thing, so if you're ever in LA and thinking, it would be fun to go on The Price is Right: it's not. Sophie: Think again! Katie: Sophie, you never did that when you lived there? Sophie: A lot of people I knew did. Katie: Did anyone ever get picked? Sophie: They did it…I grew up in LA and they filmed Jeopardy I think right next to my High School and they would do it as a fundraising thing where you would…they'd get a group things of tickets to Jeopardy and then the cheerleading squad or whoever would try to sell them individually. Katie: Whoa! Sophie: That's the closest I've gotten. Katie: Growing up in LA sounds wildly different from anywhere else! Was it? Sophie: We didn't have any lakes that lit on fire! Katie: Wasn't your High School the one from Grease? Sophie: Yep! Katie: Oh man. Sophie: And Party of Five. Is that what that show was called? Katie: Yeah. Tim: That's kinda cool. Katie: I'm more interested in Rydell High though. Sophie: I think they filmed it in partially different schools but the stadium was our stadium. Katie: The track where Danny's trying to be a jock and running around? Sophie: Yeah, yeah. Katie: Aw man, that's the worst part when Danny's trying to be a jock! Sophie: Wonder Years. Wonder Years, that's the block I grew up on. Katie: Really? Sophie: Yep. Katie: Dang, you have Wonder Years, Alison has Dawson's Creek. Sophie: Dawson's Creek. Way before my time. Katie: I want to grow up on a teen drama! Sophie: The Yellow Brick Road was also the street, from the Wizard of Oz. Tim: Where was the Yellow Brick Road? Sophie: Before the houses were built, they filmed it on the street that my house was on. Tim: What? Sophie: And then years later, they had a reunion for all of the oompa-loompas that I accidentally walked on and I was sort of….what? Katie: Were they dressed up? Sophie: No. Tim: Wait, wait, wait…you just said oompa-loompas, but isn't that…that's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, right? Sophie: Not oompa-loompas. Munchkins! The Munchkins! Tim: I was like, wait a minute… Katie: Glad you got that 'cos I didn't! Sophie: I didn't either, I was like, this sounds right. Tim: Yeah, OK, I just wanted to clarify which movie it was. Sophie: Can we cut this out? We're going to get complaints from Little People of America organization. Tim: Yeah, that's fine. Actually we could use a few complaints. We haven't got many or any yet. Katie: Thanks for bringing it up. Now we're going to….well, if you're looking for feedback, let me tell you...you can lay off the chit-chat. Tim: We've gotten plenty, plenty of negative feedback and complaints so please don't bother sending those emails or letters. There, that should… Katie: I'm going to write you a strongly worded letter about your podcast! Tim: It happens. Sophie: This really went off the rails! Tim: It did, but you know what? That's cool. That's all right. I feel like… (50:03) Katie: It was getting really heavy, so you know we to lighten it up. Tim: It was, we had to lighten it up and I feel like it's kind of weird that we had gone this far without talking about Drew Carey so, you know, however many episodes we're into this and Drew Carey had never come up; seems wrong. Katie: Really? Sophie: Give us some Drew Carey facts, Katie! Katie: Actually, well I don't know any Drew Carey facts but I'm sure Tim has lots because that seems like that's your era of TV. Tim: I'm not that old, all right? Katie: Yeah, but Everybody Loves Raymond, you'll never… Tim: Yeah, I actually had…. Sophie: Are you Everybody? Tim: No, no. Am I? Sophie: Do you love Raymond? Tim: I do love Raymond; I do. It was a good show, all right? It was a good show. Under-appreciated by the current generation! Sophie: It was the most popular show ever at the time. Tim: It was really popular; really popular. Sophie: Did you just watch it on multiple TVs over and over again to up the ratings? Tim: Errr…. Katie: He had it going on every TV in the house, the whole day and night! Sophie: The syndication too so they're getting those checks, all from Tim! Katie: Tim loves Raymond! Sophie: New TV show! Tim: All right, all right; neither one of you are ever invited back on this podcast; even you, Katie. That's it, that's the end of it. I'm going to go start my own podcast where we're going to talk about Everybody Loves Raymond and The Drew Carey Show and things like that. Katie: Indiana Jones Tim: Indiana Jones, yep. This really did get off the rails. My gosh! Sophie: Yeah, feel weird going back to talking about crisis. Tim: So, well, you know, maybe we don't, there was a lot of really good, like Katie said, it was getting really serious and really awesome discussion, I think, around performance and it was really cool to hear somebody who is coming at it from that global perspective which, it's just not something that we commonly think about a lot, for most of us aren't dealing with on a day to day basis, so it's really interesting to have somebody come in and burst the bubble a little bit and give us a broader perspective. Katie: Yeah, it's great because I think like you said, Sophie, earlier: in theory everybody's like, it's nice and stuff and obviously we talk a lot about performance and everything and it's one of those things that I think everybody is like, yeah, yeah, in theory yeah, we want it to be fast because we don't want to be shamed by Twitter, but… Sophie: Other web designers! Katie: Yeah, basically. So it's great for you to come in here and give us the perspective of what that actually means and hopefully shed some light on that empathy. Sophie: Yeah, thank you for having me. Katie: Yeah, thank you so much for joining us. Tim: Going forward, it anybody wants to follow along and hear more about what Ushahidi's doing or about what you're doing, how do they do that? Sophie: For Ushahidi, I would recommend following Ushahidi on Twitter, ushahidi.com for a lot of information about all their different products and blogposts and then for me, my website is sophieshepherd.com Tim: Very cool. Katie: What about any social media that you may have because, I might be biased, but I think Sophie you have a pretty good account that's pretty funny! Sophie: My Twitter unfortunately is sophshepherd, because there's a British teenager named Sophie Shepherd who took that from me. So, don't follow her unless you want to hear a lot of complaining about tests and boyfriends. Katie: Do you follow her? Sophie: Occasionally! Then I get too mad about it and then I think, what if they think it's me? Katie: Is she also blonde and kind of looks like you? Sophie: Yeah, I've sent her a message; she does kind of. I sent her a message on Facebook once and she went, what are you freak? And then that was it. Katie; Really? Sophie: Yep. Katie: She called you a freak? Sophie: Yeah. I'll put a screenshot in our speaker notes! Katie: OK, well follow the real Sophie Shepherd then. Sophie: Yep. Tim: Well, thank you and we'll definitely have to have you on again to discuss because I feel like there's a lot more we could get into in terms of Drew Carey and Ray Romano, so in a future episode. Katie: You can do that on your separate…Everyone Loves Ray. Tim: And Tim Loves Raymond. Yeah, that's good. It'll be the initial episode. Sophie:: Tim and Ray. All right. Thanks. Bye. Tim: Thanks; bye. Katie: Thanks. Bye. Tim: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Path to Performance podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes or on our site pathtoperf.com; you can also follow along on Twitter @pathtoperf. We'd love to hear what you thought so feel free to drop us a note on Twitter or leave a raving and overly kind review on iTunes. We like to read those. And if you'd like to talk about being a guest or sponsoring a future episode, feel free to email us at hello@pathtoperf.com

Slow Robot A Go-Go Show 103 – Blood Harvest Tonight Dr. Morbius (from parts unknown) and mOw go over the 13 movies that didn’t make over $400 in the box office. Yeah, i SAID $400. We were going to do a very touchy list but decided at the last minute to take the higher road […]