Podcasts about tim yeah

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 7, 2022 28:17

Today's episode is about trust; trust in technology and trust in each other. Very few startups experience what LPixel went through and far fewer survive it. Today we welcome Yuki Shimahara, founder of LPixel, back to the show. The last few years have been a roller-coster for LPixel, and despite the chaos LPixel managed to created Japan's first certified medical AI device and roll it out into hospitals around the country. And despite his success in Japan, Yuki also explains why smart medical AI startups are all looking to Southeast Asia. It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it. Show Notes How LPixel was certified as Japan's first AI medical device The transition from diagnostic support to full medical diagnosis Why it's not technology holding back medical AI The nature of trust in Japanese business Japanese health insurance is now paying for AI diagnosis What happens when an employee steals all your funds? The advantages (and disadvantages) of full transparency How investors reacted and their new demands Why more doctors are founding startups Why research is easier at startups than at universities Why developing countries will see more advances in medical AI than the developed world Going global does not mean going to the US (yet) How the Japanese government should (and should not) foster Japanese innovation Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about LPixel LPixel's medical diagnostic support system Eirl Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Japan is often described as a high trust society, but it's hard to explain exactly what that means and why it matters. Well, today we sit down to talk about trust and about medical AI with Yuki Shimahara, CEO of LPixel. Now, a lot has changed since Yuki was on the show four years ago. And by all metrics, LPixel is a stronger and more successful startup today. But one unfortunate event really put that level of trust to the test. Well, Yuki will give you the details, but the level of trust that existed between investors and clients and employees resulted in saving a startup that no one could reasonably expect to be saved. And we also talk about why medical AI is going to be adopted so much faster in Southeast Asia, why more and more doctors are starting startups in Japan and why Yuki thinks it's more productive to do deep research at a startup than at a university. But you know, Yuki tells that story much better than I can. So, let's get right to the interview. Interview Tim: I'm sitting here with Yuki Shimahara, the CEO of LPixel. So, welcome back to the show. Yuki: Yeah, thank you for having me. Tim: LPixel a cloud-based AI image analysis for life sciences and medical research. And well, you can probably explain it much better than I can. Yuki: I'm very honored to be back here. LPixel is a startup company from Research Lab of Tokyo University, which is a pioneer bio image informatics. We combine life science and imagine analysis including AI, but also we do are the two main business. So, we developed the AI for medical misdiagnosis and then developing AI for accelerating the pharma research. Tim: And wow. Last time we talked, I think you were still a PhD candidate at that point. Yuki: Probably. Tim: Yeah. Because I do remember we were running around into different rooms at the University of Tokyo campus at Hongo trying to find a room that didn't like echo. So, much has changed since then. You're a lot bigger and more successful than before. So, how many people do you have working at LPixel now? Yuki: Now, 60 or 70. Tim: Tell me about your customers. So, last time most of your customers were research institutions, people working on medical research and it seems like you've expanded a lot since then. Yuki: I think the last time is just developing the AI but ...

ceo university ai japan phd japanese tokyo medical southeast asia yuki taking off se asia research lab hongo tokyo university tim yeah disrupting japan tim romero

The National Association of Voice Actors

VO BOSS Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2022 22:56

In this Bonus Episode, Anne is joined by The National Association of Voice Actors co-founders, Tim Friedlander & Carin Gilfry. NAVA is a new association that aims to advocate and promote the advancement of the voice acting industry through action, education, inclusion, and benefits. The three discuss why & how NAVA came to be, what their specific goals are, and how voice actors can join. If all goes to plan, NAVA will be the first organization to offer health benefits to voice actors. Bosses, you definitely don't want to miss this! 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. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza. And today I am very excited to bring the founders of the National Association of Voice Actors or NAVA to the show, Mr. Tim Friedlander and Carin Gilfry. Welcome, guys, to the show. Thanks so much for joining me. Tim: Hello. Hello. Thanks for having us. Carin: Thanks for having us. We're excited. Anne: Well, I'm very excited to talk to you about this brand new initiative, which I think is only, what, a month or two old? Carin: Couple months. Yeah, a few months. Anne: So tell me, what is the National Association of Voice Actors? Tim: National Association of Voice Actors is a national association of voice actors. We made the title nice and simple to keep . It grew out of some groups that car and I have put together over the last, I started mine in 2014. I believe Carin, you were around the same time, 2016 or so? Carin: I think 2015. Yeah, something like that. Tim: Yeah. And these groups we have, uh, you have the voice actors of NYC. I have Gardner Street Voiceover Collective, various other groups I'm involved in. And over the years, we talk about business. We talk about how to get into the, into SAG AFTRA. We talk about what it means to go Fi-Core. We talk about various other different parts of the voiceover industry. Currently that conversation is around synthetic voices. So we're having that conversation in our groups as well. And we decided we wanna take that to a broader audience. And so we kind of took this off of Facebook and put this into a national group that we could offer education and support and financial support to on a much larger, much larger scale. Anne: I love that. Carin: In addition to that too, over the past few years, Tim and I have also, through our groups, been kind of creating emergency funds and donation funds for people in the voiceover industry, particularly during the pandemic. My group and Tim's various groups, we had emergency funds set up for people who lost their jobs during the pandemic, or who just needed extra money to pay bills or get a new microphone, 'cause theirs broke and they didn't have any money to do it. And so we were giving out payments to people, no questions asked without having a nonprofit. And so we thought that by forming a 501(c)(3), we would be able to do that in a much better way than just having a PayPal account and paying it out to people when they asked. Anne: Absolutely. Now it's membership driven. Is there a fee to join or can we join free? How is that working right now? Tim: Currently it's brand new and we have a membership committee that is going to be setting those standards for us on what that will be. Currently it's free to anybody who wants to join. And so there will always be a free membership tier that people can access the information. Definitely we wanna be a resource for people who are getting into the industry to find a trusted area for information. So we'll have a free tier that our membership committee will set for us. And then beyond that, there will be dues at some point, but we don't have that currently in place. Anne: Talk to me a little bit more about the resource-driven initiatives that you have. You mentioned before resources for the union or for Fi-Core for non-union people. What's that look like? Tim: Sure. We're currently calling it Pathways, different VO pathways that you have. And a lot of people think it's very black and white. It's either union or non-union. And in voiceover, for many of us who work in this industry know that it's very gray. There are non-jurisdictional jobs, which means it's not covered by a union contract. So what does non-jurisdictional even mean? What jobs are non-jurisdictional ,what can we work on? How do we join the union? If a voice actor wants to be in the union, what they need to do to get in that union? I was eligible for two years before I even know I could join the union. 'Cause I didn't know I worked under a contract that was a union contract. I didn't even know I worked under a contract. So that's just -- you know, I worked under an AFTRA contract for an audiobook that made me eligible. And two years later I was trying to get my eligibility and I was already set. I didn't know these things. And then also this concept that you can convert jobs. You can take a job that is currently non-union and convert that into a union job. So a lot of voice actors look at this concept of joining the union as having to give up all this work that I do in the non-union realm. And for a lot of people, that's not a tenable situation to be in, where you're gonna be giving up a massive amount of money, your entire living that you support your family with, to move into someplace where you may not even have access to auditions and jobs. So we are gonna show, we wanna provide that information on how can you navigate this industry. If I wanna go union, this is what I do. If I wanna go Fi-Core, this is what that means. If I wanna stay non-union, this is what it means. And the union is great when you can reach them. And their information is very solid when you can reach somebody over there, but they don't deal with voiceover specifically, and voiceover for everybody who knows is such a very unique niche aspect of what SAG AFTRA and the arts industry and community in general is, that we want something that's very specific to just voice actors. Anne: Very important. Carin: We also, we have an incredible advisory board of just people from literally every genre of work that there is in voiceover. We made a point of asking people from audiobooks and video games and commercials and TV narration, and all just across the spectrum of voiceover so that we have people advising NAVA on all of those different aspects. And we have people as part of our advisory board who are very important people in SAG AFTRA who are very pro-union and want everyone to join the union if possible. We also have people on our board who are Fi-Core and we have people on our board who are non-union. Our goal is to be voice actor first and to be as unbiased as we can be as a group and just provide accurate information out there for people to have, because I think SAG AFTRA is absolutely wonderful. But when I called and was trying to figure out whether I should join or go Fi-Core, I called them and I didn't feel like the information that I got about joining the union and converting work specifically -- they basically didn't tell me that I could convert work. And so I really thought that I was gonna have to give up every non-union job that I would book in the future. And it's mostly just because I think people are unaware that it's possible to do that. This group we hope is a resource for people with unbiased, accurate information. That's very voice actor forward. Anne: I think that's so important because I know there are so many questions when people get into the industry, like, what is the union and how do I become eligible for the union? Should I join the union? And it's always those questions that, you're right, the information has not been really readily available anywhere to find out that information, and it's complex. And so the different avenues are, I think each one of them has a special set of circumstances, and there are advantages and disadvantages to whichever way you decide. And I think having a resource to provide that information to voice talent is so very important for that. So that's a wonderful initiative, and especially things like -- I know that you've started something for healthcare or you're attempting to try to lobby for voice talent that, if they don't have healthcare, they can get it. Talk a little bit about that. Carin: Yes. Tim: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's something, you know, for anybody who is, those who are SAG AFTRA and have health insurance in SAG AFTRA, they know the benefits of having that access to phenomenal healthcare. And one of the things that we learned after forming this group that we did was that there is a possibility of providing healthcare for members of our association. And that is about the extent of the information though. It's about as far as we are in this, in this process. I started working on it before we actually had a group in this capacity. And I started in November of last year. I had been in discussions about possibly offering this for a year before that. And it was actually kind of put into motion of November of last year and is just for anybody who's dealt in healthcare, i's just a convoluted process of misinformation and different information and, and what information is accurate and what information is inaccurate and -- Carin: And changing what changing laws. Tim: Changing laws, yeah, exactly. Anne :Yeah. And it's such an important component for us as entrepreneurs, right, to have health insurance. I know we don't like to think about it, like we could ever need it, but I'll tell you, when you least expect it, you could really use that healthcare. And I know that first hand. And I was thankful that I was able to have healthcare, but it was through my spouse. So, and for those people that, that may not be an option, this is a wonderful initiative, and the best of luck with that. I think that's phenomenal. That's something that's very important. Tim: We look at it as, you know, I've, I've always thought of it as one of the things that can help advance people in their career. and it can help get you into that level where you are able to get union healthcare. It can get to that point. You know, the more work people can focus on -- I've always been somebody who in all my spare time, I personally don't wanna wait tables to support my career of being an artist. I wanna be an artist. Anne: Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. Tim: And I'm a musician all the time, and I want more people to have access to doing the art that they want to do, and love to do and make a living at it, and not have to stay in a job they don't wanna -- this is one of Carin's talking points that she brings up quite frequently is, you know, this, this concept of staying in a job you don't want to be in be just purely because you need the healthcare. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. And being able to have the income, right, coming in so that you can be confident in pursuing more work. And so I've always been, you know, a big proponent of have that little bundle of cash. And if you're spending that cash on something, when it goes wrong on healthcare, the whole thing kind of crumbles. And so I think it's important to have something like that put in place so that you can pursue your creative career and grow in it. Tim: We're just in the process of building that. So we just don't have, we don't have answers yet that are fully formed for us to give rates and to give who's gonna be covered and how it's gonna be covered, which is why we're here today talking about this. You need help from people to, you know, because -- Carin: We do have a plan of action. Anne: Yes. Let's hear the plan of action. I love it. Carin: Great. You can see, we have an infographic up on our website, which is navavoices.org. And you can see it's called, I think, the road to health insurance you'll see a little map on there. But basically the idea is we, as an association, have to come up with a pool of applicants who would apply for this health insurance. The health insurance companies wanna see who are these people, you know, what is their average age, where do they live, those kinds of questions. So we have a health insurance census, and we are hoping to get 800 to 1000 people to add their information to the census. Once we have that pool of applicants, that's when we can go to all the different health insurance companies and say, here we are, this is what we are. This is what we do. Our job is very low risk. We're not like construction workers, or even on camera actors have a more dangerous job than we do. We're literally sitting in a booth talking into a microphone. It's not very dangerous work. So this is who we are. They look at the full group and they say, okay, these are the rates. These are the plans that we can offer you. Then we choose which plans we think would best suit the needs of our members. And then during the open enrollment period this year, November and December, hopefully fingers crossed, if all goes, according to plan, we will have options for people to be able to purchase that health insurance, which will then start January of 2023. So the main thing right now is that we need as many voice actors who are interested in having this health insurance option to fill out the census. And also I should add that if you are on the census, you have the ability to purchase health insurance in November and December. If you're not on the census, you will not be able to purchase health insurance until the following year. Anne: So the next enrollment. Carin: Yeah, until the next enrollment. So, so if you have even like a little bit of interest in, maybe this is something that I might wanna consider, depending on what the rates are, fill out the census so that when we do get those plans and those rates, you will have the option to buy it if you want. Tim: Yep. And you can look at the compare rates when offers come around, and if it's not right for you, then there's no obligation to sign up on our plan. Carin: No obligation. Tim: But again to reiterate, if you aren't on the original census, and the rates come out and it looks like something viable you would want to get into, you wouldn't be able to join until the next open enrollment. So we definitely encourage everybody who is even just slightly and should want to compare rates. We have a question on there about "how interested are you, I'm just comparing rates," you can just check that section so we know that you're somebody who is just kicking the tires and just trying to compare rates. Anne: Fantastic. Carin: Just to clarify, you must be a voice actor in some capacity in order to be a member of NAVA and or qualify for this health insurance. So. Anne: Fulltime or part-time or in some capacity, paid jobs? Carin: Full-time, part-time doesn't matter, just in some capacity. Yeah. Paid jobs. We're working on what the vetting process is gonna be because we don't want it to be like an earning threshold. It's not gonna be like SAG AFTRA where you have to make 25,600 or whatever it is, almost $26,000 in union earnings to qualify for health insurance. It won't be like that. It will be like a vetting process where we'll see, oh, this person has a website. Oh, this person has a demo. Oh, this person has done a little bit of VO work. They qualify. Or, oh, this person has a profile on Voice123, they're probably doing some work as a voice actor. They qualify. And again, we don't know what that is yet, but it will be something like that, not an earning threshold. Tim: Yeah. And that kind goes in parallel with what the requirements are gonna be for the health plan. Like what level of connection does this group have to have between its members in order to show that they're part of a single group of association. So it all fluctuates, but we do, we have a membership committee who is handling that for us, and that we'll have something in the next, hopefully the next month or so that will, um, have some information on what different membership tiers will look like and what those dues will be and, and what the, what will be offered for those people who have different tiers. Anne: Fantastic. Now, as I look at the front page of your website, you have some lofty goals, which I really love, not only the health insurance that you just spoke about, but also you mentioned earlier financial assistance through scholarships and emergency funds. And I think that that's a really wonderful thing because prior to having this group put together, they were kind of all over the place. And I know at one point long ago, I offered scholarships through VO Peeps. And so since then there have been other groups that have offered scholarships. And of course there's the Brad Venable fund, which is amazing. Talk to us a little bit about what your plans are for that. I love having it in the central place. Tim: Yeah. You know, as I said, kind of some part of this started with us based on this financial aid that we were offering to some of our members in there and the kind of the foundation, what got the NAVA started in the early part of the year was we received a donation from Bev Standing and Rob Siglimpaglia after Bev's TikTok lawsuit was settled last year. They donated their GoFundMe money they had raised to the Brad Venable scholarship into that fund. And that became the foundation of what started NAVA. That allowed us to pay for the lawyers, pay for all of the incorporation, pay for the things that we needed. And also allowed us to put a decent amount of money aside into a basis for a fund which provided three full scholarships to VO Atlanta for three voice actors, which covered tickets, covered airfare, covered lodging, covered food for the entire duration of the time they were there. So we were able to cover all the expenses out of that fund. We also have been able to use that fund going forward to help some people, a little bit of money here and there. It's currently not public because we are still setting it up, and we have to wait until all of our final paperwork gets through for us to officially be fully sanctioned to do the things we wanna do. So currently it's on hold, but we will be able to take donations which will be tax deductible donations. So voice actors can donate to the group. We have a lot of people who over the years have just donated here and there. Somebody books a good job, and they turn around and donate a little bit of money to the fund just to help have our group. I think we've probably done $40 or $50,000 in the last 18 months to two years out of our group. Carin has done, you know, something similar along those lines. Carin: Yeah. Same, same number from my groups. Tim: Yeah. And a lot of voice actors, we all know, you know, $200 here and there sometimes is the difference between us getting through the weekend and not getting through the weekend or a client is late on paying or something doesn't come through. Or we do a lot of ACH. You know, we do direct bank transfer and your deposit gets made, but it's not gonna hit until Friday because it's a holiday. So sometimes just that $200 gets somebody through the weekend, gets somebody through the next 24 hours or the 48 hours until something come through, which we all know is small business owners. And as cash flow is tough sometimes, it's, those are the little things that help. And we help a lot of people in that little way that we wanna continue doing. Anne: Fantastic. Now you also have education and inclusion. So speak about education, resources. That's gonna be on your website? You're gonna also thinking of hosting classes maybe, or workshops or NAVA meetings that, uh, you would provide that? Carin: Yeah, I think we'll probably do a Zoom every month or so for our members about various topics, but also we are kind of partnering with different resources around the voiceover community that provide educational materials. So like GVAA for example, um, is -- Tim: VO peeps Carin: And VO peeps. Yes. Anne: VO Peeps, VO BOSS. Yeah. Okay. Carin: Yes, yes. And VO BOSS. Great. Anne: Thank you. Carin: No, but the GVAA rate guide is definitely something that we are fans of. And so that is part of our website, and SAG AFTRA has a lot of educational resources that I think people don't -- when they go to the website, it's not like totally 100% clear exactly where it is. So we can have links to those on our website. So people can just find a central place where you can go, where if you have a question, you can look up that information on our site, information on converting work, other things like that. Tim: Yeah. And there are lots, there's so many great coaches out there that we can, we want to help support and advocate for those who we know are trustworthy, who we know are great to work with, different people. And also I think Carin I've worked with most everybody in, in the Los Angeles area. I know who are some great people to work with, who personalities -- one of the great things, you know, a great coach, a great coach. If they're the great coach for you, some people work better with other people. And we know these things would help, help guide somebody into a great mentorship with a great coach or a great group of people who are offering classes and things along those lines. So that's kind of where we're looking at and promote. Anne: And the VORG is coming back. Tim: The VORG, the voiceover resource guide. Anne: The VORG. Carin: It's the VORG. Anne: I'm on the VO. Yeah. Tim: Voiceover resource guide goes to print. It's 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, hopefully tomorrow. And we go to print tomorrow. We have to. Anne: Wow. Tim: We're going out. Anne: That's incredible. The VORG was all there was back and see, now I'm gonna date myself. But the VORG was all, there was back, I wanna say in the eight, was it the 80s? It's the -- Tim: Voiceover industry's oldest publication since 1988. And actually up until about four years ago was the only printed publication in the industry. Anne: Yeah. Absolutely. And when I saw that was coming back, I was so excited to see that. Also now an online version as well, so absolutely. Recommending the best of the best in LA and New York and fantastic stuff. So, get your copy of the VORG. You can pre-order, right? Pre-order the printed copy, which, hey, who doesn't love, who doesn't love a good book? Tim: My stack of voiceover resource guides right here. So. Anne: Yeah, I was gonna say, do you have, I don't have one. I don't have one with me, but I do have one. So fantastic. Awesome. Talk a little bit about -- I know you mentioned this in your, in your meeting the other day, inclusion and diversity and how you support that. Carin: Yeah. So we are also partnering with kind of the people in the industry who have formed groups that are really interested in, in representative casting and authentic casting. And so Queer Vox and the PGM list are two groups that we are partnered with. Maria Pendolino is also starting a new group for disabled voice actors, which we will hopefully be able to be a part of. It's just about supporting all of our colleagues and supporting the voiceover industry and moving toward this authenticity and representation that I think we all are -- it's about time and Anne: Absolutely, absolutely. Carin: -- excited about. Yeah. So that's something that NAVA is supportive of. Anne: Oh, fantastic. Tim: And hopefully to be able to take that next step and be able to then educate and work with casting directors and productions on what this means to cast authentically earlier in the process, so it's not a, not an afterthought or something that's happening. Either when it's too late or when it becomes too difficult to find what's needed authentically. Anne: Well, congratulations guys. I mean, what a beautiful, wonderful initiative and resource for the community. Thank you so much on behalf of the BOSSes out there and everybody in the community for putting in the work. I know, again, I date myself, and I know how much work you're putting in, especially I had my own 501(c)(3) back in the day. So yeah. Good luck with that. And really thank you so much for everything that you're doing for the community. Tim: Oh, well, thank you. Carin: Thank you. Thank you so much for having us today. It's great to get the word out. And the VO BOSS is fantastic, and thank you for all the work you're doing -- Anne: Well, thank you. Carin: -- with all of your podcasts and information and all of that. It's just fantastic. So thanks for having us. Anne: Well, thank you. So that website, BOSSes, is navavoices.org. Any other links I need to be shooting out to people? Tim: That's our main link. Yep. Carin: The census is on the front page of the website. So if you wanna take the census, go there, click, and you're in. Tim: That's it. Carin: To the census. Anne: Awesome. Yes. All right. BOSSes. Sign the healthcare census and become a member now. All right, well, thanks again, guys. I'd like to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, 100 Voices Who Care. You guys can have an opportunity to have your voice make a difference. You can find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. And of course, to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect like a BOSS and find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week. Thanks so much for joining us this week, and we'll see you next week. Bye. Tim: Bye-bye. Carin: 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.

Empathy Driven Management and Engagement with Tim Banks

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 4, 2022 36:25

About TimTim's tech career spans over 20 years through various sectors. Tim's initial journey into tech started as a US Marine. Later, he left government contracting for the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores.Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with clients in his current role. Tim is also a father of five children, as well as a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. Currently, he is the reigning American National and 3-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.Links Referenced:Twitter: https://twitter.com/elchefe TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A bit of a sad episode Today. I am joined by Duckbill Group principal cloud economist, Tim Banks, but by the time this publishes, he will have left the Duckbill nest, as it were. Tim, thank you for joining me, and can I just start by saying, this is sad?Tim: It is. I have really enjoyed being with Duckbill and I will never forget that message you sent me. It's like, “Hey, would you like to do this?” And I was like, “Boy would I.” It's been a fantastic ride and I have enjoyed working with a friend. And I'm glad that we remain friends to this day and always will be, so far as I can tell.Corey: Yes, yes. What you can't see while recording this, I'm actually sitting in the same room as Tim with a weapon pointed at him to make sure that he stays exactly on message. Yeah, I kid. There's been a lot that's happened over the last year. We only got to spend time together in person once at re:Invent. I think because re:Invent is such a blur for me, I don't remember who the hell I talk to.Someone can walk up and say, “Oh yeah, we met at re:Invent,” and I'll nod and say, “Oh yeah,” and I will have no recollection of that whatsoever. But you don't argue with people. But I do distinctly remember hanging out with you there. But since then, it's been a purely distributed company, purely distributed work.Tim: Yeah, that's the only time I've seen you since I've worked here. It's the only time I met Mike. But it's weird because it's like, someone you work with you see every day virtually and talk to, and then you actually get to, like, IRL them and like, “Oh, wow. I had all these, kind of, conceptions of, you know, what you are or who you are as a person, and then you get to, like, check yourself. Was I right? Was I wrong?” I was like, “Oh, you're taller than I thought; you're shorter than I thought,” you know, whatever it was.But I think the fun part about it was we all end up being so close by the nature of how we work that it was just like going back and seeing family after a while; you already know who they are and how they are and about them. So, it felt good, but it felt familiar. That's a great feeling to have. To me, that's a sign of a very successful distributed culture.Corey: Yeah, it's weird the kinds of friendships we've built during the pandemic. When I was in New York for the summit, I got to meet Linda Haviv at AWS for the first time, despite spending the past year or so talking to her repeatedly. As I referred to her the entire time I was in New York, this is Linda, my new old friend because that is exactly how it felt. It's the idea of meeting someone in person that you've had a long-term ongoing friendship with. It's just a really—it's a strange way Everything's new but it's not, all at the same time.It reminds me of the early days of the internet culture where I had more friends online than off, which in my case was not hard. And finally meeting them, some people were exactly like they were described and others were nothing at all like they presented. Now that we have Zoom and this constant level of Slack chatter and whatnot, it's become a lot easier to get a read on what someone is like, I think.Tim: I think so too, you know, we've gotten away—and I think largely because of the pandemic—of just talking about work at work, right? The idea of embracing, you know, almost a cliche of the whole person. But it's become a very necessary thing as people have dealt with pandemic, social upheaval, political climates, and whatever, while they're working from home. You can't compartmentalize that safely in perpetuity, right? So, you do end up getting to know people very well, especially in what their concerns are, what their anxieties are, what makes them happy, what makes them sad, things that go on in their lives.You bring all that to your distributed culture because it's not like you leave it at the door, when you walk out. You're not walking out anymore; you're walking to another room, and it's hard to walk away from those things in this day and age. And we shouldn't have to, right? I feel like for a successful and nurturing culture—whatever it is, whether it's tech culture, whether it's whatever kind of work culture—you can't say, “I only want your productivity and nothing else about you,” and expect people to sustain that. So, you see these companies are, like, you know, “We don't have political discussions. We don't have personal discussions. We're just about the work.” I'm like, “All right, well, that's not going to last.” A person cannot just be an automaton in perpetuity and expect them to grow and thrive.Corey: And this is why you're leaving. And I want to give that a little context because without, sounds absolutely freaking horrifying. You've been a strong advocate for an awful lot of bringing the human to work, on your philosophy around leadership, around management. And you've often been acting in that capacity throughout, I would say, the majority of your career. But here at The Duckbill Group, we don't have a scale of team where you being the director of the team or leader of the team is going to happen in anything approaching the near or mid-term.And so, much of your philosophy is great and all because it's easy to sit here at a small company and start talking about, “Oh, this is how you should be doing it.” You have the opportunity to wind up making a much deeper impact on a lot more people from a management perspective, but you do in fact, need a team to manage as opposed to sitting around there, “Oh, yeah. Who do you manage?” “This one person and I'm doing all of these things to make their life and job awesome.” It's like, “Yeah, how many hours a week are you spending in one-on-ones?” “20 to 25.”Okay, maybe you need a slightly larger team so you can diffuse that out a little bit. And we are definitely sad to be losing you; super excited to see where you wind up going next. This has been a long time coming where there are things that you have absolutely knocked out of the park here at The Duckbill Group, but you also have that growing—from what I picked up on anyway—need to set a good management example. And lord knows this industry needs more of those. So first, sad to lose you. Secondly, very excited for where you wind up next and what they're in for, even though it has a strong likelihood that they don't know the half of it yet.Tim: One of the things that I like about The Duckbill Group and how my time here has been is the first thing that I was asked in the interview was very sincere, like, “Well, what's your next job?” And I was very clear. It's like, “After this, I want to be a director or VP of engineering because I would like to be a force multiplier, right?” I would like to make engineering orgs better. I would like to make engineering practices better. I want to make the engineers better, right?And not by driving KPIs and not by management, right, not administrative functions. I want to do it via leadership. I want to do it by setting examples, making safe places for people, making people feel like they're important and invested in, nurturing them, right? I've said this before I—this analogy was getting me somewhere else and I love, it's like, if I plant a tree and I want it to grow apples, right, I'm not going to sit there and put a number down of apples it's expected to produce, and then put it on a performance plan if it doesn't get that number of apples, right? I need to nurture the tree, I need to fertilize it, I need to protect it, I need to keep it safe, I need to keep it safe from the elements, I need to make sure that it doesn't have parasites, I need to take care of that tree.And if that tree grows and it's healthy and it's thriving, it will produce, right? But I'm not—I can't just expect apples if I'm not taking care of the tree. Now, people are not trees, but you still have to take care of the people if you want them to do things. And if you can't take care of the people, if you can't manage the environment that they're in to make it safe, if you can't give them the things they need to be successful, then you're just going to be holding numbers over someone and expecting to hit them.And that doesn't work. That's not something that's sustainable. And it doesn't really—it's not even about how much you pay them. You must pay them well, right, but it has to be more than just that if you want people to succeed. And that doesn't necessarily mean—like, one thing is at the Duckbill Group I love, succeeding doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to stay at—or your engineer is going to stay at one place in perpetuity. If you mentor and train and coach and give an engineer opportunity to grow and thrive and what they do is they go to another job for a title increase and a pay increase or something like that, you did your job.Corey: A lot of companies love to tell that lie and they almost convince themselves of it where I look at your resume, and great you have not generally crossed the two-year mark at companies for the last decade. I never did until I started at this place. But we magically always liked to pretend in job interviews that, “Oh yeah, this is my forever job—” like you're a rescue dog getting adopted or something, “—and I'm going to work here for 25 years and get a gold watch and a pension at the end of it.” It's lunacy. I have never seen the value in lying to ourselves like that, which is why we start our interviews with, “What's the job after this and how do we help you get there?”It's important that we ask those questions and acknowledge that reality. And the downside to it—if you can call it a downside—is you've got to live by it. It's not just words, you can slop onto an interview questionnaire; you actually have to mean it. People can see through insincerity.Tim: And it's one of the things, like, if you run an org and you grow your people and you don't have a place for them to grow into, you should expect and encourage them to find those opportunities elsewhere. It is not reasonable, I feel like, as a leader for you expect people to stay in a place where they have grown past or grown out of. You need to either need to give them a new pot to grow into or you need to let them move elsewhere and thrive and grow. And moving elsewhere—like, if you have a retention problem where you can't retain anybody, that's a problem, but if you have your junior engineers who become senior engineers at other places, right, and everyone leaves on good terms, and they got the role and you gave them a great recommendation and they give glowing recommendations to you, there's nothing wrong with that. That's not a failure; that's success.Corey: One bit of I would say pushback that I suspect you might get when talking to people about what's next is that, “Well, you are just a consultant, on some level, for a year.” You always know that someone is really arguing in good faith when they describe what you did with the word ‘just,' but we'll skip past that part. And it's, “You're just a consultant. What would you possibly know about team management and team dynamics?” And there is a little bit of truth to that insofar as the worst place in the world to get management advice is very clearly on Twitter.It turns out that most interpersonal scenarios are, one, far too personal to wind up tweeting about, and two, do not lend themselves to easy solutions that succinctly fit within 280 characters. Imagine that. The counter-argument though, is that you have—correctly from where I sit—identified a number of recurring dynamics on teams that you have encountered and worked with deeply as a large number of engagements. And these are recurring things, I want to be clear. So, I'm not talking about one particular client. If you're one of our clients and listen to this thinking that we're somehow subtweeting you with our voices—I don't know what that is; subwoofing, maybe?Tim: [crosstalk 00:12:05]—Corey: Is that what a subwoofer is? I'm not an audio person.Tim: Throwing shade, we'll just say—call it throwing shade.Corey: Yeah, we're not throwing shade at any one person, team, or group in particular; these are recurring things. Tim, what have you seen?Tim: And so, I think the biggest thing I see is folks that are on the precipice of a big technological change, right, and there is an extraordinary amount of anxiety, right? I've seen a number of customers through our engagements that, “We are moving away from this legacy platform,” or from this thing that we have been doing for X amount of time. And everyone has staked the other domains, staked out their areas of expertise and control and we're going to change that. And the solution to that is not a technical solution. You don't fix that by Helm charts, or Terraform, or CloudFormation. You fix that by conversations, and you fix that by listening. You fix that by finding ways to reassure folks and giving them confidence in their ability to adjust and thrive in a new environment.If you take somebody who's been, you know, an Oracle admin for 20 years, and you going to say, “Great. Now, you're going to learn, you're going to do this an RDS,” that's a whole new animal, and folks feel like, well, you know, I can't learn something new like that? Well, yeah you can. If you can learn Oracle, you can learn anything. I firmly believe that.But that's one of the conversations we have, it's never, almost never a technical problem folks have. We need to reassure people, right? And so, folks who reach out to us, it's typically folks who are trying to get their organizations in that direction. Another thing we see sometimes is that we find that there's a disconnect between leadership and the engineers. They have either different priorities or different understandings of what's going on. And we come in to solve a problem, which may be cost but that's not the problem we actually solve. The problem we actually solve is fixing this communication bridges between management and leadership.And that's almost an every time occurred. At some point or another, there's some disconnect there. And that's the best part of the job. Like, the reason I do this consulting gig is not because I want to bang away at code. If I've had to do that, that's an anomaly for sure because I want to have these conversations.And people want to have these conversations; they want to get these problems solved and sometimes they don't know how to. And that is the common thing, I think, through all of our customers. Like, we need some amount of expertise to help us find solutions to these things that aren't necessarily technical problems. And I think that's where we run into problems as an industry, right, where we think a lot of things are technical problems or have technical solutions, and they don't. There are people problems. They're—Corey: Here at The Duckbill Group, we're basically marriage counseling for engineering and finance in many cases.Tim: We really are.Corey: This is why were people not software.Tim: Yeah. And I will say this very firmly and you can quote me on this: like, you cannot replace us. You cannot replace the kind of engagements we do with software. You can't. Can't be done, right? Software is not empathetic.Corey: There are a whole series of questions we ask our clients at the start of an engagement and the answers to those questions change what we ask them going forward. In fact, even the level-setting in the conversation that we have at the start of that changes the nature of those. We're not reading from a list; we're trying to build an understanding. There is a process around what we do, but it's not process that can ever be scoped down to the point where it's just a list of questions or a questionnaire that isn't maddening for people to fill out because it's so deeply and clearly misses the mark around context of what they're actually doing.Tim: Mm-hm. Our engaged with their conversations. That's all they are. They're really in-depth conversations where we're going to start asking questions and we're going to ask questions about those answers. We're start pulling out strings and kicking over rocks and seeing what we find.And that's the kind of thing that, you know, you would expect anyone to do who's coming in and saying, “Okay, we have a problem. Now, let's figure it out.” Right? Well, you can't just look at something on the surface, and say, “Oh, I know what this is.” Right? You know, for someone to say, “Oh, I know how to fix this,” when they walk in is the surest way to know that someone doesn't know what they're talking about, right?Corey: Oh, easiest thing in the world is to walk in and say, “This is broken and wrong.” That can translate directly to, “Hi, I am very junior. Please feed my own ass to me.” Because no one shows up at work thinking they're going to do a crap job today on purpose. There's a reason things are the way that they are.Tim: Mm-hm. And that's the biggest piece of context we get from our customers is we can understand what the best practices are. You can go Google them right now and say, “This is the ten things you're supposed to do all the time,” right? And we would be really, really crappy consultants if we just read off that list, right? We need to have context: does this thing make sense? Is this the best practice? Maybe, but we want to know why you did it this way.And after you tell us that way, I'm like, “You know what? I would do it the exact same way for this use case.” And that's great. We can say like, “This is the best way to do that. Good job.” It's atypical; it's unusual, but it solves the problems that you need solving.And that's where I think a lot of people miss. Like, you know, you can go—and not to throw shade at AWS's Trusted Advisor, but we're going to throw shade at AWS's Trusted Advisor—and the fact that it will give you—Corey: It is Plausible Advisor at absolute best.Tim: [laugh]. It will give you suggestions that have no context. And a lot of the automated AI things that will recommend that you do this and this and this and this are pretty much all the same. And they have no context because they don't understand what you're trying to do. And that's what makes the difference between people. There's these people problems.And so, one of the things that I think is really interesting is that we have moved into doing a shorter engagement style that is very short. It's very quick, it's very kind of almost tactical, but we go in, we look at your bill, we ask you some questions, and we're going to give you a list of suggestions that are going to save you a significant amount of money right away, right? So, a lot of times, folks when they need quick wins, or they don't really need us to deep-dive into all their DynamoDB access patterns, right? They just want like, “Hey, what are the five things we can do to save us some money?” And we're like, “Well, here they are. And here's what we think they're going to save you.” And folks who really enjoyed that type of engagement. And it's one of my favorite ones to do.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: I can also predict that people are going to have questions for you—probably inane—of, well, you were a consultant, how are your actual technical chops? And I love answering these questions with data. So, I have here pulled up the last six months of The Duckbill Group's AWS bills. And for those who are unaware, every cloud economist has their own dedicated test account for testing out strange things that we come across. And again, can the correct answer in many consulting engagements is, “I don't know, but I'll find out.”Well, this is how we find out. We run tests and learn these things ourselves. I suppose we could extend this benefit, if you want to call it that, to people who aren't cloud economists but I'm not entirely sure what, I don't know, an audio engineer is going to do with an AWS account that isn't, you know, kind of horrifying. To the audio engineer that is editing this podcast, my condolences if you take that as a slight, and if there is something you would use an AWS account for, please let me know. We'll come talk about it here.But back to topic, looking at the last six months of your bill for your account—that's right, a ritualistic shaming of the AWS bill—in January you spent $16.06. In February, you spent 44 cents. And you realized that was too high, so back in March, you then spent 19 cents. And then $3.01 back in April. May wound up $10.02, and now you're $9.84 as of June. July has not yet finalized as of this recording.And what I want to highlight—and what that tells me when I look at these types of bills—and I assure you as the world's leading self-described expert in AWS billing, I'm right; listening to me is a best practice on these things—that shows the exact opposite of a steady-state workload. There's a lot of dynamism to those giant swings because we don't have cloud economists who are going to just run these things steady-state for the rest of our lives. Those are experiments of building and testing out new and exciting things in a whole bunch of very weird, very strange ways. Whenever I wind up talking to someone in one of the overarching AWS services at AWS and I pull up my account, a common refrain is, “Wow, you use an awful lot of services.” Right. I'm not just sitting here run and EC2 instances forever. Imagine that. And your account is a perfect microcosm of that entire philosophy.Tim: Well, I don't know all the answers, right? And I will never profess all the answers. And before I say, “You should do this—” or maybe I will say, “You might be able to do this. Let me go save as possible.” [laugh]. Right? And so, just let me just see, can you do this? Does this work? No, I guess it doesn't. Or AWS docu—especially, “The AWS documentation says this. Let me see if that's actually the case.”Corey: I don't believe that they intend to lie, but—Tim: No.Corey: —they also certainly don't get it correct all the time.Tim: And to be fair, they have, what, 728 services by this point, and that's a lot of documentation you're not going to get—Corey: Three more have launched since the start of this recording.Tim: I—yeah, actually—well, by the time this hits, they're probably going to have 22. But we'll [laugh] see. But yeah, no. And that's fine. And they're not going to have every use case, and every edge, kind of like, concern handled, and so that's why we need to kick the tires a little bit.And what I think more than anything else is, you know, sometimes we just do things out of convenience. Like, “Well, I don't want to run this on this; let me just fire it up because it's not my money.” [laugh]. But we also want to be fairly concerned about you know, how we do things. You don't want to run a fleet of z1ds, obviously.But there is a certain amount of tire-kicking and infrastructure spinning up that you have to do in order to maintain freshness, right? And it's not a thing where I'm going to say, “Oh, I know YAML off the top of my head, and I need to do—you know, I'm up to speed on every single possible API call that you can make.” No. My technical prowess has always been in architecture and operations. So, I think when we have these conversations, folks mostly tend to be impressed by not only business acumen and strategy, but also being able to get down to the weeds and talking with the developers and the engineers about the minutia. And you will have seen you know, the feedback that I've gotten about my technical prowess has always been good. You know, I can hang with anybody, I feel like.Corey: I would agree wholeheartedly. It's been really interesting watching you in conversations, internally and with our clients, where you will just idly bust out something fricking brilliant out of left field. And most of the time, I don't think you even realize it. It's just one of those things that makes intuitive and instinctive sense to you. And you basically just leave people stunned and their scribbling notes and trying to wrap their heads around what you just said.And it's adorable because sometimes you wind up almost, like, looking embarrassed, like, “Did I say something rude and not realize it? Like, I wasn't trying to be insulting.” It's like, “Nope, nope. You're just doing your thing, Tim. Just keep on doing it. That's fine.”Tim: Yeah, it's funny because, like you, one of the things that I've really enjoyed about it is, like, we'll just start bouncing ideas off of each other and come up with something brilliant. “Yeah, let's do that.” And then, “Okay, this is now a thing.” And it's like, you know, there's something to be said about being around smart people. So, it's not just me coming up with something brilliant; these are almost always fruits of a conversation and discussion being had, and then you formulate something great in your head.But again, this is why I love the aspect of talking and having conversations with people, so that way you can come up with something kind of brilliant. None of this is done in a silo. Like we're not really, really good at what we do because we don't rely or talk to or have conversations with other people.Corey: One thing that you did that I think is one of the most transformative things that has happened in company history in some respects has been when you started, and for the first half of your tenure here, we had two engagement types that we would wind up giving our consulting clients. There's contract negotiation, where we help companies negotiate their long-term commitment contracts with AWS—and we're effective at it and that's fun; that's basically what you would more or less expected to be—and the other is our cost optimization project engagements. And those tend to look six to eight weeks where we wind up going in deep-dives into the intricacies of an organization's AWS accounts, bills, strategy, growth plan, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to an exhaustive level of detail. And in an interest of being probably overly transparent here, I didn't like working on those engagements myself. I like coming in, finding the big things that will be transformative to reduce the bills—it's like solving a puzzle—and then the relatively in-depth analysis for things that are a relatively paltry portion of the AWS bill does not really lead me to enjoying the work very much.And I beat my head against that one for years. And you busted out one day with an idea that became our third type of engagement, which is the first pass, where we charge significantly less for the engagement and it essentially distills down into you get us to talk to your engineering teams for a day. Bring us any questions, give us access in advance to these things, and we will basically go on a whirlwind guided tour and lay waste to your AWS bill and highlight different opportunities that we see to optimize these things. And it has been an absolute smash success. People love the engagements.Very often, it leads to that second full-bore engagement that I was describing earlier, but it also aligns very well with the way that I like to think about these things. I'm a great consultant, specifically because once I've delivered the value, I like to leave. Whereas as an employee, I just sort of linger around, and then I go cause problems and other people's departments—ideally, not on purpose, but you know, I am me—and this really emphasizes that and keeps me moving quickly. I really, really like that engagement style and I have you to thank for coming up with the idea and finding a way to do it that didn't either not resonate with the market—in which case, we're not selling a damn thing—or wound up completely eviscerating the value of the longer-term deep-dive engagements, and you threaded that needle perfectly.Tim: I thank you; I appreciate that. There was this kind of vacuum that I saw where, both from a cost and from a resource point where six to eight weeks is a long time for an engineering org to dedicate to any one thing, especially if that one thing isn't directly making money. But engineering orgs are also very interested in saving money. But it's especially in smaller orgs where that velocity is very important, they don't have six to eight weeks for that. They can't dedicate the resources to those deep-dives all the time, and all the conversations we—and when we do a COP, it is exhaustive. We are exploring every avenue to almost an absurd level, right?And that's not the right engagement for a lot of orgs, right? So, coming in and saying, “Hey, you know, this is a quick one; these are the things that you can do. This is 90% of the savings you're going to realize. These things: bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.” Right?And then we give it to the folks and we let them work on it, and then they're like, “Hey, we need this because we want to negotiate EDP,” or, “We need this because, you know, we're just trying to make sure that our costs are in line so we can be more agile, so we can do this project, or whatever.” Right? And then there are a lot of other orgs that do need that exhaustive kind of thing, larger orgs especially, right? Larger, more complex orgs, orgs that are trying to maybe—like, if you're trying to make a play to get acquired, you want to get this very, very in-depth study so you know all your liabilities and all your assets, so that way you can fix those problems and make it very attractive for someone to buy you, right? Or orgs that just have, like, we are not having an impending EDP; we have a lot of time to be able to focus on these things, and we can build this into the roadmap, right?Then we can do a very exhaustive study of those things. But for a lot of times, people are just like, “Look, I just need to save X amount of money on my AWS bill and can you do that?” Well, sure. We can go in there and have those conversations and give you a lot of savings. And I'm very much in the camp of, you know, ‘perfect is the enemy of good.' I don't have to save down to the nth penny on your DynamoDB bill. But if I can, shave—cut it in half, that's great. Most people are very happy about those kinds of things. And that's a very routine finding for us.Corey: One other aspect that I really liked about it, too, is that it let us move down market a bit, away from companies that are spending millions of dollars a month. Because yeah, the ROI for those customers is a slam dunk on virtually any engagement that we could put together, but what about the smaller companies, the ones that are not spending that much money, yet? They've never felt great talk to them and say, “Oh, just go screw up your AWS bill some more. Then, then you will absolutely be able to generate some value. Maybe turn off MFA and post your credentials to GitHub or something. That'll speed up the process nicely.”That's terrible advice and we can't do it. But this enables us to move down to smaller companies that are earlier in their cloud estate build-out or are growing organically rather than trying to do a giant migration as sort of greenfield growth approach. I really, really like our ability to help companies that are a bit earlier in their cloud journey, as well as in smaller environments, just because I guess, on some level, for me, at least, when you see enormous multimillion-dollar levels of spend, the misconfigurations are generally less fun to find; they're less exciting. Because, yeah at a small scale, you can screw up and your Managed NAT Gateway bill is a third of your spend. When you're spending $80 million a year, you're not wasting that kind of money on Managed NAT Gateways because that misconfiguration becomes visible from frickin' orbit.So, someone has already found that stuff. And it's always then it's almost certainly EC2, RDS, and storage. Great. Then there's some weird data transfer stuff and it starts to look a lot more identical. Smaller accounts, at least from my perspective, tend to have a lot more of interesting things to learn hiding in the shadows.Tim: Oh, absolutely. And I think the impact that you make for the future for small companies much higher, right? You go in there and you have an engagement, you can say, “Okay, I understand the business reason why you did this here, but if you make these changes—bam, bam, bam—12 to 18 months and on, right, this is going to make a huge difference in your business. You're going to save a tremendous amount of money and you're going to be much more agile.”You did this thing because it worked for the POC, it worked for the MVP, right? That's great, but before it gets too big and becomes load-bearing technical debt, let's make some changes to put you in a better position, both for cost optimization and an architectural future that you don't have to then break a bone that's already set to try and fix it. So, getting in there before there's a tremendous load on their architecture—or rather on their infrastructure, it's super, super fun because you know that when you've done this, you have given that company more runway, or you've given them the things they need to actually be more successful, and so they can focus their time and efforts on growth and not on trying to stop the bleeding with their AWS bill.Corey: Tim, it's been an absolute pleasure to work with you. I'm going to miss working with you, but we are definitely going to remain in touch. Where can people find you to follow along with your continuing adventures?Tim: The best way to find me is on Twitter, I am @elchefe—E-L-C-H-E-F-E. And yeah, I will definitely keep in touch with you, Corey. Again, you have been a tremendous friend and I really appreciate you, your insights, and your honesty. Our partners are friends with each other and I do not think that they will let us ever drift too far apart. So.Corey: No, I think it is pretty clear that we are basically going to be both of their plus-ones forever.Tim: [laugh]. I think so.Corey: I'm just waiting for them when they pulled the prank of dressing us the exact same way because our styles are somewhat different, and I'm pretty sure that there's not a whole lot of convergence where we both wind up looking great. So, it's going to be hilarious regardless of what direction it goes in.Tim: Well, you do have velour tracksuits too, right?Corey: Not yet, but please don't tell that to Bethany.Tim: [laugh].Corey: Tim, it has been an absolute pleasure.Tim: The pleasure has been all mine, Corey. I really appreciate it.Corey: Tim Banks, for one last time, principal cloud economist at The Duckbill Group. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice and an insulting comment that says that we are completely wrong in our approach to management and the real answer is as follows, making sure to keep that answer less than 280 characters.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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The secret edge of Japan’s best SaaS startups

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2022 32:21

There is a very good reason B2B SaaS is huge in Japan right now. Today we sit down with Chiemi Kamakura, co-founder and CEO of Agatha, and she explains why. Agatha is a Japanese SaaS company that has been global from Day 1, but is leveraging some unique strengths developed in Japan. We talk about how Japanese SIs have responded to SaaS, why Japan is likely to see a lot more female founders soon, and the fact that Japanese managers and regulators actually hate paper just as much as the rest of us, but there is one thing that keeps them from going digital. It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it. Show Notes The real reason Japanese hospitals can't get away from paper Why it's hard to innovate from inside a company Can Japanese SIs survive in the SaaS era Agatha's commitment to being global from Day 1 How global and Japan SaaS markets are different (and how they're not) How SaaS can thrive in highly regulated industries. The importance of a personal network in high-trust products How to develop more female founders in Japan Some good advice on going global with a SaaS product Links from the Founder Everything you evert wanted to know about Agatha Connect with Chiemi on LinkedIn Friend her on Facebook A good Forbes article about Agatha Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Today, I'd like to introduce you to Chiemi and to Agatha. Actually, Agatha is the startup created by Chiemi Kamakura and her co-founders to solve a global problem in the record-keeping required for clinical trials that are run by pharmaceutical companies. Chiemi tells a great story, and one that illustrates why SaaS is slowly taking over the business world. We talk about the challenges of launching a SaaS startup in a highly regulated industry, the advantages of thinking global from day one, and selling to Japanese customers who always seem to want customization. And Chiemi also explains that contrary to the stereotype, most Japanese workers and regulators don't really like having to rely on mountains of paper. For the most part, they hate it just as much as the rest of us. And today, we'll explain the two things that are actually keeping them from going digital. But you know, Chiemi tells this story much better than I can. So let's get right to the interview. Interview Tim: So we're sitting here with Chiemi Kamakura of Agatha, who makes clinical and regulatory document management for small early stage clinics and life sciences companies. And Chiemi, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. Chiemi: Of course, thank you for inviting me to this opportunity, that's a great honor for me. Tim: The honor is all ours. So I gave just like a really brief explanation of what Agatha does, but can you flesh that out a little bit? Can you explain in more detail, what is it Agatha does? Chiemi: We are offering Document Management Cloud Service for clinical trial for hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. Tim: So is it just for the research stage, just for the trials themselves, or is it more for operational support as well? Tim: Yeah. So main target is clinical trial business, but not only that, it's from research and also marketing and manufacturing. So we are covering all stages. What we do, especially in clinical trial, for clinical trial is operated between pharmaceutical company and hospitals. There are many, many communications on trial, those communication still paper is used. Tim: Okay. Well, let's get into some specifics. So maybe tell me about your customers. If you're improving the communication between the hospitals and the laboratories doing the trials, walk me through an example. How does that work? Chiemi: Yeah. In hospitals, that people who are managing clinical trials, so that's our user, and in pharmaceutical company side,

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The Multi-Cloud Counterculture with Tim Bray

180 Nutrition -The Health Sessions.

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2022 41:50

About TimTimothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystemsand Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.Links Referenced: Textuality Services: https://www.textuality.com/ laugh]. So, the impetus for having this conversation is, you had a [blog post: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/01/30/Cloud-Lock-In @timbray: https://twitter.com/timbray tbray.org: https://tbray.org duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats V-U-L-T-R.com slash screaming.Corey: Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service is flexible, full-featured and fully managed with built in access via key-value, SQL, and full-text search. Flexible JSON documents aligned to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling while reducing cost. Capella has the best price performance of any fully managed document database. Visit couchbase.com/screaminginthecloud to try Capella today for free and be up and running in three minutes with no credit card required. Couchbase Capella: make your data sing.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today has been on a year or two ago, but today, we're going in a bit of a different direction. Tim Bray is a principal at Textuality Services.Once upon a time, he was a Distinguished Engineer slash VP at AWS, but let's be clear, he isn't solely focused on one company; he also used to work at Google. Also, there is scuttlebutt that he might have had something to do, at one point, with the creation of God's true language, XML. Tim, thank you for coming back on the show and suffering my slings and arrows.Tim: Oh, you're just fine. Glad to be here.Corey: [laugh]. So, the impetus for having this conversation is, you had a blog post somewhat recently—by which I mean, January of 2022—where you talked about lock-in and multi-cloud, two subjects near and dear to my heart, mostly because I have what I thought was a fairly countercultural opinion. You seem to have a very closely aligned perspective on this. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Where did this blog posts come from?Tim: Well, I advised a couple of companies and one of them happens to be using GCP and the other happens to be using AWS and I get involved in a lot of industry conversations, and I noticed that multi-cloud is a buzzword. If you go and type multi-cloud into Google, you get, like, a page of people saying, “We will solve your multi-cloud problems. Come to us and you will be multi-cloud.” And I was not sure what to think, so I started writing to find out what I would think. And I think it's not complicated anymore. I think the multi-cloud is a reality in most companies. I think that many mainstream, non-startup companies are really worried about cloud lock-in, and that's not entirely unreasonable. So, it's a reasonable thing to think about and it's a reasonable thing to try and find the right balance between avoiding lock-in and not slowing yourself down. And the issues were interesting. What was surprising is that I published that blog piece saying what I thought were some kind of controversial things, and I got no pushback. Which was, you know, why I started talking to you and saying, “Corey, you know, does nobody disagree with this? Do you disagree with this? Maybe we should have a talk and see if this is just the new conventional wisdom.”Corey: There's nothing worse than almost trying to pick a fight, but no one actually winds up taking you up on the opportunity. That always feels a little off. Let's break it down into two issues because I would argue that they are intertwined, but not necessarily the same thing. Let's start with multi-cloud because it turns out that there's just enough nuance to—at least where I sit on this position—that whenever I tweet about it, I wind up getting wildly misinterpreted. Do you find that as well?Tim: Not so much. It's not a subject I have really had too much to say about, but it does mean lots of different things. And so it's not totally surprising that that happens. I mean, some people think when you say multi-cloud, you mean, “Well, I'm going to take my strategic application, and I'm going to run it in parallel on AWS and GCP because that way, I'll be more resilient and other good things will happen.” And then there's another thing, which is that, “Well, you know, as my company grows, I'm naturally going to be using lots of different technologies and that might include more than one cloud.” So, there's a whole spectrum of things that multi-cloud could mean. So, I guess when we talk about it, we probably owe it to our audiences to be clear what we're talking about.Corey: Let's be clear, from my perspective, the common definition of multi-cloud is whatever the person talking is trying to sell you at that point in time is, of course, what multi-cloud is. If it's a third-party dashboard, for example, “Oh, yeah, you want to be able to look at all of your cloud usage on a single pane of glass.” If it's a certain—well, I guess, certain not a given cloud provider, well, they understand if you go all-in on a cloud provider, it's probably not going to be them so they're, of course, going to talk about multi-cloud. And if it's AWS, where they are the 8000-pound gorilla in the space, “Oh, yeah, multi-clouds, terrible. Put everything on AWS. The end.” It seems that most people who talk about this have a very self-serving motivation that they can't entirely escape. That bias does reflect itself.Tim: That's true. When I joined AWS, which was around 2014, the PR line was a very hard line. “Well, multi-cloud that's not something you should invest in.” And I've noticed that the conversation online has become much softer. And I think one reason for that is that going all-in on a single cloud is at least possible when you're a startup, but if you're a big company, you know, a insurance company, a tire manufacturer, that kind of thing, you're going to be multi-cloud, for the same reason that they already have COBOL on the mainframe and Java on the old Sun boxes, and Mongo running somewhere else, and five different programming languages.And that's just the way big companies are, it's a consequence of M&A, it's a consequence of research projects that succeeded, one kind or another. I mean, lots of big companies have been trying to get rid of COBOL for decades, literally, [laugh] and not succeeding and doing that. So—Corey: It's ‘legacy' which is, of course, the condescending engineering term for, “It makes money.”Tim: And works. And so I don't think it's realistic to, as a matter of principle, not be multi-cloud.Corey: Let's define our terms a little more closely because very often, people like to pull strange gotchas out of the air. Because when I talk about this, I'm talking about—like, when I speak about it off the cuff, I'm thinking in terms of where do I run my containers? Where do I run my virtual machines? Where does my database live? But you can also move in a bunch of different directions. Where do my Git repositories live? What Office suite am I using? What am I using for my CRM? Et cetera, et cetera? Where do you draw the boundary lines because it's very easy to talk past each other if we're not careful here?Tim: Right. And, you know, let's grant that if you're a mainstream enterprise, you're running your Office automation on Microsoft, and they're twisting your arm to use the cloud version, so you probably are. And if you have any sense at all, you're not running your own Exchange Server, so let's assume that you're using Microsoft Azure for that. And you're running Salesforce, and that means you're on Salesforce's cloud. And a lot of other Software-as-a-Service offerings might be on AWS or Azure or GCP; they don't even tell you.So, I think probably the crucial issue that we should focus our conversation on is my own apps, my own software that is my core competence that I actually use to run the core of my business. And typically, that's the only place where a company would and should invest serious engineering resources to build software. And that's where the question comes, where should that software that I'm going to build run? And should it run on just one cloud, or—Corey: I found that when I gave a conference talk on this, in the before times, I had to have a ever lengthier section about, “I'm speaking in the general sense; there are specific cases where it does make sense for you to go in a multi-cloud direction.” And when I'm talking about multi-cloud, I'm not necessarily talking about Workload A lives on Azure and Workload B lives on AWS, through mergers, or weird corporate approaches, or shadow IT that—surprise—that's not revenue-bearing. Well, I guess we have to live with it. There are a lot of different divisions doing different things and you're going to see that a fair bit. And I'm not convinced that's a terrible idea as such. I'm talking about the single workload that we're going to spread across two or more clouds, intentionally.Tim: That's probably not a good idea. I just can't see that being a good idea, simply because you get into a problem of just terminology and semantics. You know, the different providers mean different things by the word ‘region' and the word ‘instance,' and things like that. And then there's the people problem. I mean, I don't think I personally know anybody who would claim to be able to build and deploy an application on AWS and also on GCP. I'm sure some people exist, but I don't know any of them.Corey: Well, Forrest Brazeal was deep in the AWS weeds and now he's the head of content at Google Cloud. I will credit him that he probably has learned to smack an API around over there.Tim: But you know, you're going to have a hard time hiring a person like that.Corey: Yeah. You can count these people almost as individuals.Tim: And that's a big problem. And you know, in a lot of cases, it's clearly the case that our profession is talent-starved—I mean, the whole world is talent-starved at the moment, but our profession in particular—and a lot of the decisions about what you can build and what you can do are highly contingent on who you can hire. And you can't hire a multi-cloud expert, well, you should not deploy, [laugh] you know, a multi-cloud application.Now, having said that, I just want to dot this i here and say that it can be made to kind of work. I've got this one company I advise—I wrote about it in the blog piece—that used to be on AWS and switched over to GCP. I don't even know why; this happened before I joined them. And they have a lot of applications and then they have some integrations with third-party partners which they implemented with AWS Lambda functions. So, when they moved over to GCP, they didn't stop doing that.So, this mission-critical latency-sensitive application of theirs runs on GCP that calls out to AWS to make calls into their partners' APIs and so on. And works fine. Solid as a rock, reliable, low latency. And so I talked to a person I know who knows over on the AWS side, and they said, “Oh, yeah sure, you know, we talked to those guys. Lots of people do that. We make sure, you know, the connections are low latency and solid.” So, technically speaking, it can be done. But for a variety of business reasons—maybe the most important one being expertise and who you can hire—it's probably just not a good idea.Corey: One of the areas where I think is an exception case is if you are a SaaS provider. Let's pick a big easy example: Snowflake, where they are a data warehouse. They've got to run their data warehousing application in all of the major clouds because that is where their customers are. And it turns out that if you're going to send a few petabytes into a data warehouse, you really don't want to be paying cloud egress rates to do it because it turns out, you can just bootstrap a second company for that much money.Tim: Well, Zoom would be another example, obviously.Corey: Oh, yeah. Anything that's heavy on data transfer is going to be a strange one. And there's being close to customers; gaming companies are another good example on this where a lot of the game servers themselves will be spread across a bunch of different providers, just purely based on latency metrics around what is close to certain customer clusters.Tim: I can't disagree with that. You know, I wonder how large a segment that is, of people who are, I think you're talking about core technology companies. Now, of the potential customers of the cloud providers, how many of them are core technology companies, like the kind we're talking about, who have such a need, and how many people who just are people who just want to run their manufacturing and product design and stuff. And for those, buying into a particular cloud is probably a perfectly sensible choice.Corey: I've also seen regulatory stories about this. I haven't been able to track them down specifically, but there is a pervasive belief that one interpretation of UK banking regulations stipulates that you have to be able to get back up and running within 30 days on a different cloud provider entirely. And also, they have the regulatory requirement that I believe the data remain in-country. So, that's a little odd. And honestly, when it comes to best practices and how you should architect things, I'm going to take a distinct backseat to legal requirements imposed upon you by your regulator. But let's be clear here, I'm not advising people to go and tell their auditors that they're wrong on these things.Tim: I had not heard that story, but you know, it sounds plausible. So, I wonder if that is actually in effect, which is to say, could a huge British banking company, in fact do that? Could they in fact, decamp from Azure and move over to GCP or AWS in 30 days? Boy.Corey: That is what one bank I spoke to over there was insistent on. A second bank I spoke to in that same jurisdiction had never heard of such a thing, so I feel like a lot of this is subject to auditor interpretation. Again, I am not an expert in this space. I do not pretend to be—I know I'm that rarest of all breeds: A white guy with a microphone in tech who admits he doesn't know something. But here we are.Tim: Yeah, I mean, I imagine it could be plausible if you didn't use any higher-level services, and you just, you know, rented instances and were careful about which version of Linux you ran and we're just running a bunch of Java code, which actually, you know, describes the workload of a lot of financial institutions. So, it should be a matter of getting… all the right instances configured and the JVM configured and launched. I mean, there are no… architecturally terrifying barriers to doing that. Of course, to do that, it would mean you would have to avoid using any of the higher-level services that are particular to any cloud provider and basically just treat them as people you rent boxes from, which is probably not a good choice for other business reasons.Corey: Which can also include things as seemingly low-level is load balancers, just based upon different provisioning modes, failure modes, and the rest. You're probably going to have a more consistent experience running HAProxy or nginx yourself to do it. But Tim, I have it on good authority that this is the old way of thinking, and that Kubernetes solves all of it. And through the power of containers and powers combining and whatnot, that frees us from being beholden to any given provider and our workloads are now all free as birds.Tim: Well, I will go as far as saying that if you are in the position of trying to be portable, probably using containers is a smart thing to do because that's a more tractable level of abstraction that does give you some insulation from, you know, which version of Linux you're running and things like that. The proposition that configuring and running Kubernetes is easier than configuring and running [laugh] JVM on Linux [laugh] is unsupported by any evidence I've seen. So, I'm dubious of the proposition that operating at the Kubernetes-level at the [unintelligible 00:14:42] level, you know, there's good reasons why some people want to do that, but I'm dubious of the proposition that really makes you more portable in an essential way.Corey: Well, you're also not the target market for Kubernetes. You have worked at multiple cloud providers and I feel like the real advantage of Kubernetes is people who happen to want to protect that they do so they can act as a sort of a cosplay of being their own cloud provider by running all the intricacies of Kubernetes. I'm halfway kidding, but there is an uncomfortable element of truth to that to some of the conversations I've had with some of its more, shall we say, fanatical adherents.Tim: Well, I think you and I are neither of us huge fans of Kubernetes, but my reasons are maybe a little different. Kubernetes does some really useful things. It really, really does. It allows you to take n VMs, and pack m different applications onto them in a way that takes reasonably good advantage of the processing power they have. And it allows you to have different things running in one place with different IP addresses.It sounds straightforward, but that turns out to be really helpful in a lot of ways. So, I'm actually kind of sympathetic with what Kubernetes is trying to be. My big gripe with it is that I think that good technology should make easy things easy and difficult things possible, and I think Kubernetes fails the first test there. I think the complexity that it involves is out of balance with the benefits you get. There's a lot of really, really smart people who disagree with me, so this is not a hill I'm going to die on.Corey: This is very much one of those areas where reasonable people can disagree. I find the complexity to be overwhelming; it has to collapse. At this point, it's finding someone who can competently run Kubernetes in production is a bit hard to do and they tend to be extremely expensive. You aren't going to find a team of those people at every company that wants to do things like this, and they're certainly not going to be able to find it in their budget in many cases. So, it's a challenging thing to do.Tim: Well, that's true. And another thing is that once you step onto the Kubernetes slope, you start looking about Istio and Envoy and [fabric 00:16:48] technology. And we're talking about extreme complexity squared at that point. But you know, here's the thing is, back in 2018 I think it was, in his keynote, Werner said that the big goal is that all the code you ever write should be application logic that delivers business value, which you know rep—Corey: Didn't CGI say the same thing? Didn't—like, isn't there, like, a long history dating back longer than I believe either of us have been alive have, “With this, all you're going to write is business logic.” That was the Java promise. That was the Google App Engine promise. Again, and again, we've had that carrot dangled in front of us, and it feels like the reality with Lambda is, the only code you will write is not necessarily business logic, it's getting the thing to speak to the other service you're trying to get it to talk to because a lot of these integrations are super finicky. At least back when I started learning how this stuff worked, they were.Tim: People understand where the pain points are and are indeed working on them. But I think we can agree that if you believe in that as a goal—which I still do; I mean, we may not have got there, but it's still a worthwhile goal to work on. We can agree that wrangling Istio configurations is not such a thing; it's not [laugh] directly value-adding business logic. To the extent that you can do that, I think serverless provides a plausible way forward. Now, you can be all cynical about, “Well, I still have trouble making my Lambda to talk to my other thing.” But you know, I've done that, and I've also deployed JVM on bare metal kind of thing.You know what? I'd rather do things at the Lambda level. I really rather would. Because capacity forecasting is a horribly difficult thing, we're all terrible at it, and the penalties for being wrong are really bad. If you under-specify your capacity, your customers have a lousy experience, and if you over-specify it, and you have an architecture that makes you configure for peak load, you're going to spend bucket-loads of money that you don't need to.Corey: “But you're then putting your availability in the cloud providers' hands.” “Yeah, you already were. Now, we're just being explicit about acknowledging that.”Tim: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that's highly relevant to the current discussion because if you use the higher-level serverless function if you decide, okay, I'm going to go with Lambda and Dynamo and EventBridge and that kind of thing, well, that's not portable at all. I mean, APIs are totally idiosyncratic for AWS and GCP's equivalent, and Azure's—what do they call it? Permanent functions or something-a-rather functions. So yeah, that's part of the trade-off you have to think about. If you're going to do that, you're definitely not going to be multi-cloud in that application.Corey: And in many cases, one of the stated goals for going multi-cloud is that you can avoid the downtime of a single provider. People love to point at the big AWS outages or, “See? They were down for half a day.” And there is a societal question of what happens when everyone is down for half a day at the same time, but in most cases, what I'm seeing, your instead of getting rid of a single point of failure, introducing a second one. If either one of them is down your applications down, so you've doubled your outage surface area.On the rare occasions where you're able to map your dependencies appropriately, great. Are your third-party critical providers all doing the same? If you're an e-commerce site and Stripe processes your payments, well, they're public about being all-in on AWS. So, if you can't process payments, does it really matter that your website stays up? It becomes an interesting question. And those are the ones that you know about, let alone the third, fourth-order dependencies that are almost impossible to map unless everyone is as diligent as you are. It's a heavy, heavy lift.Tim: I'm going to push back a little bit. Now, for example, this company I'm advising that running GCP and calling out to Lambda is in that position; either GCP or Lambda goes off the air. On the other hand, if you've got somebody like Zoom, they're probably running parallel full stacks on the different cloud providers. And if you're doing that, then you can at least plausibly claim that you're in a good place because if Dynamo has an outage—and everything relies on Dynamo—then you shift your load over to GCP or Oracle [laugh] and you're still on the air.Corey: Yeah, but what is up as well because Zoom loves to sign me out on my desktop whenever I log into it on my laptop, and vice versa, and I wonder if that authentication and login system is also replicated full-stack to everywhere it goes, and what the fencing on that looks like, and how the communication between all those things works? I wouldn't doubt that it's possible that they've solved for this, but I also wonder how thoroughly they've really tested all of the, too. Not because I question them any; just because this stuff is super intricate as you start tracing it down into the nitty-gritty levels of the madness that consumes all these abstractions.Tim: Well, right, that's a conventional wisdom that is really wise and true, which is that if you have software that is alleged to do something like allow you to get going on another cloud, unless you've tested it within the last three weeks, it's not going to work when you need it.Corey: Oh, it's like a DR exercise: The next commit you make breaks it. Once you have the thing working again, it sits around as a binder, and it's a best guess. And let's be serious, a lot of these DR exercises presume that you're able to, for example, change DNS records on the fly, or be able to get a virtual machine provisioned in less than 45 minutes—because when there's an actual outage, surprise, everyone's trying to do the same things—there's a lot of stuff in there that gets really wonky at weird levels.Tim: A related similar exercise, which is people who want to be on AWS but want to be multi-region. It's actually, you know, a fairly similar kind of problem. If I need to be able to fail out of us-east-1—well, God help you, because if you need to everybody else needs to as well—but you know, would that work?Corey: Before you go multi-cloud go multi-region first. Tell me how easy it is because then you have full-feature parity—presumably—between everything; it should just be a walk in the park. Send me a postcard once you get that set up and I'll eat a bunch of words. And it turns out, basically, no one does.Tim: Mm-hm.Corey: Another area of lock-in around a lot of this stuff, and I think that makes it very hard to go multi-cloud is the security model of how does that interface with various aspects. In many cases, I'm seeing people doing full-on network overlays. They don't have to worry about the different security group models and VPCs and all the rest. They can just treat everything as a node sitting on the internet, and the only thing it talks to is an overlay network. Which is terrible, but that seems to be one of the only ways people are able to build things that span multiple providers with any degree of success.Tim: Well, that is painful because, much as we all like to scoff and so on, in the degree of complexity you get into there, it is the case that your typical public cloud provider can do security better than you can. They just can. It's a fact of life. And if you're using a public cloud provider and not taking advantage of their security offerings, infrastructure, that's probably dumb. But if you really want to be multi-cloud, you kind of have to, as you said.In particular, this gets back to the problem of expertise because it's hard enough to hire somebody who really understands IAM deeply and how to get that working properly, try and find somebody who can understand that level of thing on two different cloud providers at once. Oh, gosh.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: Another point you made in your blog post was the idea of lock-in, of people being worried that going all-in on a provider was setting them up to be, I think Oracle is the term that was tossed around where once you're dependent on a provider, what's to stop them from cranking the pricing knobs until you squeal?Tim: Nothing. And I think that is a perfectly sane thing to worry about. Now, in the short term, based on my personal experience working with, you know, AWS leadership, I think that it's probably not a big short-term risk. AWS is clearly aware that most of the growth is still in front of them. You know, the amount of all of it that's on the cloud is still pretty small and so the thing to worry about right now is growth.And they are really, really genuinely, sincerely focused on customer success and will bend over backwards to deal with the customers problems as they are. And I've seen places where people have negotiated a huge multi-year enterprise agreement based on Reserved Instances or something like that, and then realize, oh, wait, we need to switch our whole technology stack, but you've got us by the RIs and AWS will say, “No, no, it's okay. We'll tear that up and rewrite it and get you where you need to go.” So, in the short term, between now and 2025, would I worry about my cloud provider doing that? Probably not so much.But let's go a little further out. Let's say it's, you know, 2030 or something like that, and at that point, you know, Andy Jassy decided to be a full-time sports mogul, and Satya Narayana has gone off to be a recreational sailboat owner or something like that, and private equity operators come in and take very significant stakes in the public cloud providers, and get a lot of their guys on the board, and you have a very different dynamic. And you have something that starts to feel like Oracle where their priority isn't, you know, optimizing for growth and customer success; their priority is optimizing for a quarterly bottom line, and—Corey: Revenue extraction becomes the goal.Tim: That's absolutely right. And this is not a hypothetical scenario; it's happened. Most large companies do not control the amount of money they spend per year to have desktop software that works. They pay whatever Microsoft's going to say they pay because they don't have a choice. And a lot of companies are in the same situation with their database.They don't get to budget, their database budget. Oracle comes in and says, “Here's what you're going to pay,” and that's what you pay. You really don't want to be in a situation with your cloud, and that's why I think it's perfectly reasonable for somebody who is doing cloud transition at a major financial or manufacturing or service provider company to have an eye to this. You know, let's not completely ignore the lock-in issue.Corey: There is a significant scale with enterprise deals and contracts. There is almost always a contractual provision that says if you're going to raise a price with any cloud provider, there's a fixed period of time of notice you must give before it happens. I feel like the first mover there winds up getting soaked because everyone is going to panic and migrate in other directions. I mean, Google tried it with Google Maps for their API, and not quite Google Cloud, but also scared the bejesus out of a whole bunch of people who were, “Wait. Is this a harbinger of things to come?”Tim: Well, not in the short term, I don't think. And I think you know, Google Maps [is absurdly 00:26:36] underpriced. That's hellishly expensive service. And it's supposed to pay for itself by, you know, advertising on maps. I don't know about that.I would see that as the exception rather than the rule. I think that it's reasonable to expect cloud prices, nominally at least, to go on decreasing for at least the short term, maybe even the medium term. But that's—can't go on forever.Corey: It also feels to me, like having looked at an awful lot of AWS environments that if there were to be some sort of regulatory action or some really weird outage for a year that meant that AWS could not onboard a single new customer, their revenue year-over-year would continue to increase purely by organic growth because there is no forcing function that turns the thing off when you're done using it. In fact, they can migrate things around to hardware that works, they can continue building you for the things sitting there idle. And there is no governance path on that. So, on some level, winding up doing a price increase is going to cause a massive company focus on fixing a lot of that. It feels on some level like it is drawing attention to a thing that they don't really want to draw attention to from a purely revenue extraction story.When CentOS back-walked their ten-year support line two years, suddenly—and with an idea that it would drive [unintelligible 00:27:56] adoption. Well, suddenly, a lot of people looked at their environment, saw they had old [unintelligible 00:28:00] they weren't using. And massively short-sighted, massively irritated a whole bunch of people who needed that in the short term, but by the renewal, we're going to be on to Ubuntu or something else. It feels like it's going to backfire massively, and I'd like to imagine the strategist of whoever takes the reins of these companies is going to be smarter than that. But here we are.Tim: Here we are. And you know it's interesting you should mention regulatory action. At the moment, there are only three credible public cloud providers. It's not obvious the Google's really in it for the long haul, as last time I checked, they were claiming to maybe be breaking even on it. That's not a good number, you know? You'd like there to be more than that.And if it goes on like that, eventually, some politician is going to say, “Oh, maybe they should be regulated like public utilities,” because they kind of are right? And I would think that anybody who did get into Oracle-izing would be—you know, accelerate that happening. Having said that, we do live in the atmosphere of 21st-century capitalism, and growth is the God that must be worshiped at all costs. Who knows. It's a cloudy future. Hard to see.Corey: It really is. I also want to be clear, on some level, that with Google's current position, if they weren't taking a small loss at least, on these things, I would worry. Like, wait, you're trying to catch AWS and you don't have anything better to invest that money into than just well time to start taking profits from it. So, I can see both sides of that one.Tim: Right. And as I keep saying, I've already said once during this slot, you know, the total cloud spend in the world is probably on the order of one or two-hundred billion per annum, and global IT is in multiple trillions. So, [laugh] there's a lot more space for growth. Years and years worth of it.Corey: Yeah. The challenge, too, is that people are worried about this long-term strategic point of view. So, one thing you talked about in your blog post is the idea of using hosted open-source solutions. Like, instead of using Kinesis, you'd wind up using Kafka or instead of using DynamoDB you use their managed Cassandra service—or as I think of it Amazon Basics Cassandra—and effectively going down the path of letting them manage this thing, but you then have a theoretical Exodus path. Where do you land on that?Tim: I think that speaks to a lot of people's concerns, and I've had conversations with really smart people about that who like that idea. Now, to be realistic, it doesn't make migration easy because you've still got all the CI and CD and monitoring and management and scaling and alarms and alerts and paging and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, wrapped around it. So, it's not as though you could just pick up your managed Kafka off AWS and drop a huge installation onto GCP easily. But at least, you know, your data plan APIs are the same, so a lot of your code would probably still run okay. So, it's a plausible path forward. And when people say, “I want to do that,” well, it does mean that you can't go all serverless. But it's not a totally insane path forward.Corey: So, one last point in your blog post that I think a lot of people think about only after they get bitten by it is the idea of data gravity. I alluded earlier in our conversation to data egress charges, but my experience has been that where your data lives is effectively where the rest of your cloud usage tends to aggregate. How do you see it?Tim: Well, it's a real issue, but I think it might perhaps be a little overblown. People throw the term petabytes around, and people don't realize how big a petabyte is. A petabyte is just an insanely huge amount of data, and the notion of transmitting one over the internet is terrifying. And there are lots of enterprises that have multiple petabytes around, and so they think, “Well, you know, it would take me 26 years to transmit that, so I can't.”And they might be wrong. The internet's getting faster all time. Did you notice? I've been able to move some—for purely personal projects—insane amounts of data, and it gets there a lot faster than you did. Secondly, in the case of AWS Snowmobile, we have an existence proof that you can do exabyte-ish scale data transfers in the time it takes to drive a truck across the country.Corey: Inbound only. Snowmobiles are not—at least according to public examples—are valid for Exodus.Tim: But you know, this is kind of place where regulatory action might come into play if what the people were doing was seen to be abusive. I mean, there's an existence proof you can do this thing. But here's another point. So, I suppose you have, like, 15 petabytes—that's an insane amount of data—displayed in your corporate application. So, are you actually using that to run the application, or is a huge proportion of that stuff just logs and data gathered of various kinds that's being used in analytics applications and AI models and so on?Do you actually need all that data to actually run your app? And could you in fact, just pick up the stuff you need for your app, move it to a different cloud provider from there and leave your analytics on the first one? Not a totally insane idea.Corey: It's not a terrible idea at all. It comes down to the idea as well of when you're trying to run a query against a bunch of that data, do you need all the data to transit or just the results of that query, as well? It's a question of, can you move the compute closer to the data as opposed to the data to where the compute lives?Tim: Well, you know and a lot of those people who have those huge data pools have it sitting on S3, and a lot of it migrated off into Glacier, so it's not as if you could get at it in milliseconds anyhow. I just ask myself, “How much data can anybody actually use in a day? In the course of satisfying some transaction requests from a customer?” And I think it's not petabyte. It just isn't.Now, there are—okay, there are exceptions. There's the intelligence community, there's the oil drilling community, there are some communities who genuinely will use insanely huge seas of data on a routine basis, but you know, I think that's kind of a corner case, so before you shake your head and say, “Ah, they'll never move because the data gravity,” you know… you need to prove that to me and I might be a little bit skeptical.Corey: And I think that is probably a very fair request. Just tell me what it is you're going to be doing here to validate the idea that is in your head because the most interesting lies I've found customers tell isn't intentionally to me or anyone else; it's to themselves. The narrative of what they think they're doing from the early days takes root, and never mind the fact that, yeah, it turns out that now that you've scaled out, maybe development isn't 80% of your cloud bill anymore. You learn things and your understanding of what you're doing has to evolve with the evolution of the applications.Tim: Yep. It's a fun time to be around. I mean, it's so great; right at the moment lock-in just isn't that big an issue. And let's be clear—I'm sure you'll agree with me on this, Corey—is if you're a startup and you're trying to grow and scale and prove you've got a viable business, and show that you have exponential growth and so on, don't think about lock-in; just don't go near it. Pick a cloud provider, pick whichever cloud provider your CTO already knows how to use, and just go all-in on them, and use all their most advanced features and be serverless if you can. It's the only sane way forward. You're short of time, you're short of money, you need growth.Corey: “Well, what if you need to move strategically in five years?” You should be so lucky. Great. Deal with it then. Or, “Well, what if we want to sell to retail as our primary market and they hate AWS?”Well, go all-in on a provider; probably not that one. Pick a different provider and go all in. I do not care which cloud any given company picks. Go with what's right for you, but then go all in because until you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, you're going to spend more time solving global problems locally.Tim: That's right. And we've never actually said this probably because it's something that both you and I know at the core of our being, but it probably needs to be said that being multi-cloud is expensive, right? Because the nouns and verbs that describe what clouds do are different in Google-land and AWS-land; they're just different. And it's hard to think about those things. And you lose the capability of using the advanced serverless stuff. There are a whole bunch of costs to being multi-cloud.Now, maybe if you're existentially afraid of lock-in, you don't care. But for I think most normal people, ugh, it's expensive.Corey: Pay now or pay later, you will pay. Wouldn't you ideally like to see that dollar go as far as possible? I'm right there with you because it's not just the actual infrastructure costs that's expensive, it costs something far more dear and expensive, and that is the cognitive expense of having to think about both of these things, not just how each cloud provider works, but how each one breaks. You've done this stuff longer than I have; I don't think that either of us trust a system that we don't understand the failure cases for and how it's going to degrade. It's, “Oh, right. You built something new and awesome. Awesome. How does it fall over? What direction is it going to hit, so what side should I not stand on?” It's based on an understanding of what you're about to blow holes in.Tim: That's right. And you know, I think particularly if you're using AWS heavily, you know that there are some things that you might as well bet your business on because, you know, if they're down, so is the rest of the world, and who cares? And, other things, eh, maybe a little chance here. So, understanding failure modes, understanding your stuff, you know, the cost of sharp edges, understanding manageability issues. It's not obvious.Corey: It's really not. Tim, I want to thank you for taking the time to go through this, frankly, excellent post with me. If people want to learn more about how you see things, and I guess how you view the world, where's the best place to find you?Tim: I'm on Twitter, just @timbray T-I-M-B-R-A-Y. And my blog is at tbray.org, and that's where that piece you were just talking about is, and that's kind of my online presence.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to it in the [show notes 00:37:42]. Thanks so much for being so generous with your time. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.Tim: Well, it's always fun to talk to somebody who has shared passions, and we clearly do.Corey: Indeed. Tim Bray principal at Textuality Services. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that you then need to take to all of the other podcast platforms out there purely for redundancy, so you don't get locked into one of them.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Conversations On Creativity with Kinja Dixon

Create Art Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 19, 2022 52:19

Being a Creative Powerhouse Hello friends, this is a rebroadcast from my old show KDOI Podcasting. In the last season of that show I took on various topics and had conversations with fellow artists about those topics. In this episode I talked with Kinja Dixon who was and sill is a powerhouse of creativity. his story will inspire you to go out there and be a creative. I do want to share a special shout out to my good friend Chris jones of the Art & Business of Writing Podcast for putting me in touch with Kinja and being a supporter of this show. Links for Kinja Kinja's Website Dixon On Demand Chris Jones's Interview with Kinja Reaching Out To reach out to me, email timothy@createartpodcast.com I would love to hear about your journey and what you are working on. If you would like to be on the show or have me discuss a topic that is giving you trouble write in and let's start that conversation. Email: timothy@createartpodcast.com YouTube Channel: Create Art Podcast YT Channel IG: @createartpodcast Twitter: @createartpod [podcast_subscribe id="207"] Transcripts Create Art Podcast KDOI ReBroadcast Conversations on Creativity with Kinja Dixon Tim: Create art podcast, Katie or I rebroadcast conversations on creativity with Kendzia Erickson. Hello friends. This is Timothy Kimo. Brian, your head instigator for great art. Where I bring my 20 years plus experience in the world, education and art. My previous podcast was K DOI podcasts, which stood for chemos den of equity. And of course we did a name change a while back, but I wanted to bring, especially this episode out to you, instead of letting it, you know, kind of sit in my external hard drive. This episode, we're going to be talking about creativity and time management. And we're talking with Kendzia Dixon. When I did this interview, all my gosh, Kenya has so much energy that literally, luckily I have a couch right next to my studio here, and I had to take a nap because of all the energy that he was pushing. So I hope you enjoy this rebroadcast of Katie Oli podcast. I hope it helps you tame your inner critic and create more than you can sell. Enjoy. Hey everybody, this is your friend, Timothy Kimo, Brian, the host of Katie or iPod. This episode is going to be a little different. We're going to tackle two subjects instead of one. So we're going to do creativity and some time management. And this one now this week we have on Kendzia Dixon, he's recognized unanimously unanimously as the number one sales executive in the world in 2013. And he's the first to win the gold Stevie and a R D a award in the same. Kendra is the author of three books. And in demand, public speaker is interactive course Dixon on demand and theatrical experience. The recreation encounter has helped thousands of people reshape their lives. His latest book, little solar book of superpowers takes young people on an interstellar journey of self-discovery as they learned the meaning of living with character and convince. Now you can learn more about kendzia@kendziadixondotcomandlittlesolaratbookofsuperpowers.com and Kendzia is spelled K I N J a all right, folks. So I want to thank you. Again, tuning into chemos den of iniquity. K DOI, podcasting, head instigator here, Timothy chemo, Brian. You know, folks we try to bring on guests here that really can speak to the conversations that we've started up here in season three. And tonight is is no different. We're bringing. Kanja Dixon. And he's going to be talking to us tonight about creativity and time management. Now, earlier you heard me talking about his very impressive resume for everything that he's been doing here lately, a big thing is he's got. S little solar book of superpowers coming out. It is actually out already, and I'm definitely going to be getting a copy for my girls. And you all should get a copy for your girls or guys if you've got boys as well. But I definitely wanted to bring on Kenji here at tonight to talk to us about creativity and time management, Kenya. How are you doing this? Kinja: On believable, just in a space of just pure joy. So many beautiful things have been happening within the last few weeks that are stemming from just following this process that I'm hopefully be able to share tonight, but I'm just honored to be up here and happier today than I was yesterday with the intention to be happy tomorrow. Tim: You know, that's a fantastic outlook in life. I just love your energy coming through here, coming through their airwaves. And I know, I know my audience is going to be feeling this when they're listening to it in their daily life, Kenya, you, like I said, you have an impressive resume. You have a lot of projects going on here. And tonight's topic is creativity and time management. Let's tackle creativity, right? All of these projects that you have going on here. And I brought up the you know, your latest book which is, you know, taking young people on an interstellar journey of self-discovery as it learned the meaning of living with character and conviction where do you get this idea from? How, how are you connecting this kind of stuff together together? Kinja: And to, to fully, fully explain. I have to go back to when my recreation's started. See, I just hit 40 years old in December of 2018. So. Now approaching my 10th year in a whole new state of mind in 2009, at a point in my life where I thought I was doing very, very well because of my real estate credentials. I was considered a legend with the company, Wyndham selling homes and vacation properties and went to a. And Puerto Rico with the young lady, friend of mine at the time for our yearly president's club. And when I got back in Virginia, which was my, my, my place of residence at the time we were in our home and we were looking at the pictures and. I saw my picture. If you go on my TEDx talk, you see the picture during that talk, but I got up to 300 pounds. I was looking at the picture and all, I just thought. With how within 10 years I went from 185 pounds to 300 pounds. And I was a functional alcoholic. I was in a position where I was competing with so many different parts of my company and having all these issues that I didn't realize were issues because on the outside things were so good. So literally I started within that month to reach out to a nutrition. In a, in a physical trainer. And I remember us walking into the Walmart after I agreed to pay him $100 a month for him to design a full life health plan for me. And I remember my true weak creation started with. The name of the second book, we creationism the oddest shape reality, but real quick, I realized that from that day, until today, there have been four things that I have been focusing on is the priority of my life. But to, to jump back a little bit, the drama of walking in to the Walmart with my trainer, and he said, Kim, If you're going to start this lifestyle and not waste your money, you do not need to eat out for the next two years. And I said, what do you mean? I said, what, what are you, what do you mean? And he said, in order for you to get this lifestyle going at the level I have intended, I really need to put you into a mindset where your willpower muscle increases. So if you don't want to do that, don't even pay me. And I really had a moment in Walmart where I really had to make it. And for him to step out and say, don't even pay me if you really don't want to do it, it let me know how much passion he had about the process. So I jumped on and I'm telling all this background, because literally that is one of the things that help the priority of health become a high priority in my life. So with the mixture of. Following his program of eating the same thing for the next two years fall increasing my emotional intelligence by diving deep into all the things that had me wanting to do so many things that didn't have to do with health, getting better at my sales profession and including so many new things into my daily agenda. My new life started at that point. And the rest is history, man. So to, to, to, to give you a true perspective, that was the day that started my next phase of life in February of Tim: 2009. Excellent. And you had to get to that point in, get your life changed around, get into a healthy mindset in order to be able to do everything that you're doing now and do it successfully. With, with the amount of passion that you have Kinja: exactly. Exactly. And that, that's one of the reasons why, you know, in, in the philosophy that I don't try to take any credit for, I just have studied a lot of people and found out that these four things of what I believe are the priorities in every person that could, if every person was a plant, I believe that health, emotional intelligence, hunger to gain new knowledge and getting better at whatever you do. I would consider that. Oil and the water and the mixture of how those things are focused will determine how high your plant grows. So the reason why I'm in a space now where I'm able to create so many things that I could even fathom is because I have prioritized my life. And if it doesn't help those four things grow, I cannot have it in my world. So people relationships that I'm building podcast. You know projects, if it does not fit into helping myself grow those things and people that I'm helping, those four aspects in their life grow, it's not a part of my daily regimen and I keep it out of my. Tim: That's that's fantastic because we have so much bombarding us in this world. I mean, you know, we're going to do the old back in my day, but back when I was in the air force, you know, and I was in the air force 91 through 94 we didn't have the. That we have today, we didn't have the cell phones that we have today. Everything that's bombarding us. And I'm looking at my girls, you know, they're five years old. I got twin girls that are five years old and I'm seeing all the all the apps, all the, the ways that marketers and people can get to them and get in front of their eyes and have them sit and be a couch potato and do absolutely nothing. You just, you know, passively absorb all this stuff and. I'm grateful that I grew up when I grew up, because when I was a kid, you had to, you know, you went out of the house. Until the streetlights came on and even then you stayed out for a little while longer finding things to do. And and this society that we're in right now, things are finding to do with you. And you have to have a really good, a really good edit, but we're not edit button, but you have to have really good filter to filter in the good and keep out the bad. Kinja: You, you hit it on the head, man. And I'm so honored for you to be a parent that recognizes how important creating that filter is for your girls. Because we have so many people, so many creations, and if we don't have a second. Foundation of what we're going to focus on. Our, our world will dictate what we become and what our focus is put on. So that's one of the reasons why when I look at the last 10 years and what I've been focusing on and been enabled to help others on. I believe those are the most important things. And the beauty of it is you get all of the accolades and the financial mastery and the choices that everyone wants, but you will be in control of it versus it controlling you. And that's what I learned firsthand, because I'll tell you that kind of talk about why I got to 300 pounds is in 2007 because of me allowing the world to control me. I got to a certain amount of money. So, you know you know, my went to bank of America, made a deposit in my account was over seven figures. And because of me thinking that I made it the next two years of my life was a blur. I was drinking more. I was throwing parties. I was doing all that. Things, because based off of humanity's agenda, I made it. And so in 2009, when I looked at that picture, it was like everything just crumbled. And I was able to start from scratch. And now I can really testify to, if you don't have, if a person doesn't have. Set amount of foundational principles. They live by the things that are popular in our humanity are usually not going to be in your best interest. That's just the reality Tim: and, and the things that are popular with with humanity and with the world right now, don't seem to last for that long. I mean, you know different musical styles. I was listening to NPR and they were talking about the whole Taylor swift thing. She's, you know, six records in, but I tell you in, you know, 20, 30, 40 years. Is there anyone good people say Taylor, who, you know, the things that last are things that aren't flashing the pants things that last have been proven time and time again, to withstand the test of time. One of our quotes from Rumi who's. Definitely lasted for centuries, the 13th century Persian poet. He says about creativity, you know, don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others, unfold, your own myth. And, and to me, it sounded like you had two. You know, create the what am I trying to get at here? You ha you had to create the mantra, the, the picture of what you wanted to be with the help of your trainer and with all this study, in order to get to where you were at here today in 2019. Kinja: Exactly and, and, and another piece that's so important is I did not allow my monetary success after oh nine to dictate how I lived. And I think that is one of the most important piece. That you can gain from the timeless masters, like Rumi, that when you look back into history, the people that have been able to sustain and really make a debt in this world on a, on a, on a spiritual level. And when I say spiritual, I'm not talking religion, I'm talking about the soul or the people that have not allowed their value to be. On a monetary level, but from an inside level. And it's so unique because this point of view usually comes from someone that does not enjoy making money, but that's not the case. I I'm, I'm doing better than I've ever done. It's not a part of me chasing it. It's being created like a seed because of working on the things that make the seed grow. And that's when you can, you don't have to worry about getting to a certain place in life and then losing it like we see on the news regularly because you can, you get to a space where you can now add more and more subtle to the world because you don't get comfortable in your skin. So. Great, great point. And again, I congratulate you. For being a parent, you know, I work with so many schools and I work with so many parents and that's one of the issues is that parents sometimes get lost in the storm and, and forget that there are little people watching you and everything you do is teaching them how to live. And so I'm so honored that you have. Notice that sometimes just giving the kid an iPad and just thinking, okay, that's all right. That, that might not be the best thing to do. No. Tim: Yeah. That is, you know, that's probably another podcast that I should start up is, you know, how to raise twins. I think there's a few podcasts out there like that. Yeah, you can't and for yourself too. I mean, one of the reasons why I started up this podcast is I was seeing a lot of people just sitting there looking at their phones and these devices are, are fantastic. I mean, the cell phone that you have in your hand right now has the same computing power as the computer back in 1969 that sent a man to the moon. It's the same computer. So you could. Send a man to the moon with your cell phone. And you know, how many millions of cell phones are out there? It's a great tool, but. You want to make sure that you're using the tool and the tool is not using you and there's great art programs on there. You know, there's a million different apps that you can use to create something that's out there that's uniquely yours where you're not imitating somebody else. You're, you're creating something completely out of the blue. And when you're talking with these with these kids in these schools, and I know at the same thing with my daughters, they'll come. With their own stories, I encourage my girls to you know, kind of create their own stories out of fairytales that, you know, we tell them at night before they go to bed and the stories that they come up with. Our very inventive in a unique, because they don't have the same trappings that we as adults have. And it's kind of getting back into that mind, that childlike mindset of, you know, what let's, let's get rid of everything else and let's let that mind wander and see where it goes. And you know, let's not restrict ourselves. Let's go and make beautiful mistakes. Kinja: Exactly and, and to, to tie all of this into creativity, because many times when the net word may come up, it w the person that's talking about it is at a space where they are creative now. And sometimes they're not. Vocal about some of the downsides that they had to get to their creativity. And I'm such an open book. I want everyone to know that your highest creativity comes when fear is no longer the dominant emotion in your life. And in order for fear to be eliminated. There has to be habits that are going to be love producing. And even though food, even though television, even though what we're looking at, even though associations sometimes are not dissected, some of our most fear is instilled by the things that we do and are most comfortable with. And so I'm at a space now because of things that I started years and years ago, where I can, I can, my mind can wander into. So the unknown, because I don't have anything producing. Anything other than love in my life. And I'm talking about love for you. Love for family love for everyone, people that I know, people that I don't know. And that is because I will honestly say my identity is no longer tied into human based agendas. My identity is now risen above human based things. And now into. That I don't want to put a name on it. It's just a universal love for life for ourselves, for our heart beating for the plants, the animals. It's just, once you get to this space, it sounds kind of hokey and unrealistic, but it's just one of the best. 10 years that I can imagine anyone in human history has been able to live. Man, I I'm, I I'm just, and I'm just so honored to be able to share because it's, it's only getting. Tim: Absolutely. Well, and when you, when you clean out the clutter, what do you have left? You have your human spirit. And, and, you know, like you said, you're not getting re you know, you're not talking church or, and neither am I, you have that spirit that's within all of us that You know, I, I hate to make this sound like a value judgment, but it kind of separates us a little bit from the animals and from, from the plants, you know, w w w we look at the cave paintings, you know, from, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago, you know, we all have this need to relate to others in, in some sort of fashion, whether that be painting. Public speaking writing a book tattooing you know, making dinner, that's an artistic and creative endeavor. If there ever was one and you know, if you can create a dinner for very finicky five-year-old twins, that is definitely creative. That's you know, that's one of the epitome of creative. Yes, Kinja: it is man. And, oh, I'm so I know y'all are going to have so much fun coming up with this July 4th. So good, good. Kudos to you. Kudos to you. Tim: Absolutely. Now, Kendra, you've been talking about a little bit about, you know, the the dark side you know, th the stuff that impedes our creativity. Can you talk a little bit more about. You know how you filtered that stuff out. You know, you, you, you, you, you paid for a personal trainer, a hundred bucks a month. But can you talk a little bit about how that investment in yourself and getting rid of it and getting rid of it because that's, that's not an easy task to do what you're telling us, you know, what your path and what you're telling us. It's not an easy task to do. What's. Kinja: Well, beautiful. So once a person decides to. Their whole holistic life grade. And if anyone that wants to find out what their holistic life grade is, or if it gets simply log on to our e-creationism.com, R E dare C R E a T I O N I S m.com. There's a 40 question survey that allows you to answer some questions to see what your whole elistic life grade is because what has happened. And I can testify. I did not look at myself as a whole being for several parts of my life. So I was able to do well in one area and doing well in that area, justified mediocrity in another area. So I wouldn't focus on all the little details of my life. When I started this process with the Jew, the February, 2009, I already was a very good sales executive. So, and I only became a good sales executive because of reading and mastering my process. So once I was able to focus on eating the same two, three meals, every day, I started in following his workout plan. My. It started instantly getting better. I used to not, I used to hate the treadmill. I remember my first time running on it and then a week or two later, I'm able to do, you know, a mile straight. And so I started seeing things that I never thought were possible and that had we become better in sales. So then I started adding new different style types of styles into my workout regimen. So that allowed me to get new knowledge and with the accumulation. Getting more physically fit, getting more emotionally independent by not allowing things that used to get me upset, like walking upstairs. Now I'm excited to go up the stairs with the mixture of getting better in my craft. My entire essence as a human spirit started elevating. And before you knew it within seven. I could no longer drink alcohol because as I lost 75 pounds within the first year, so what happened? When I would celebrate after selling so much in a month, I was not able to hold my alcohol the same way. So I was now attempting to celebrate drinking the same drinks that I used to drink, and I was getting sick. So what happened because I didn't because I wasn't. So, so stuck into just living a certain way. October 31st, 2009 was my last alcoholic beverage. So now imagine in 2009, losing the. Getting better in myself, crap and then no longer drinking all of this time. That used to be muddled with doing things that are going to be quite honest. My mind wasn't clear. I am now focused on inward. Helping me become a better person. So 2009 was really a recreation year for me, because I was now able to reprioritize things that I used to think were important. I realize we're not that important. And so for anybody listening, what I ask you to do when you go on and check your HLG, and this is not a grade where a, B, C, or D you're literally going to grade yourself based off the answers. You're going to give yourself. What has happened in our world is destination based. Grades degrees, places in life has allowed us to start getting complacent. So my goal is for you to have a year from taking some things from this conversation where you start reprioritizing. Which leads your next year to reprioritizing some more things. And so every single year, and I'm not talking calendar year, you are just exploring new dimensions that you never even thought were possible, but sticking to a foundation that you never were, you never straight up, you'd never strayed from the printer. If that makes sense. That makes Tim: perfect sense. Because in this year, you know, after a year of doing that, you're going to be in a different spot. And if you take that same that same questionnaire again, you're probably going to end up with a different grade and see, okay, maybe I need to tweak this area and focus more on this. Okay. Maybe I need to focus more on my physical than my mental. Okay. So let's go ahead and do that. What do I gotta do to do, do that follow one year you switch. And, and, and, and that, that's the beauty of when we drop a lot of the pretenses away that we are, we allow ourselves to grow and to, and to be the the spirits, the individual, the person that we were meant to. Kinja: You hit it on the head, man. And I'm going to tell you that is one of the biggest things that every person has to battle with. Is are you willing to step into the unknown and some of the people in relationships and situations that. Maybe pulling you back, you, you don't have to cut them off drastically. You might just have to turn it into a limited association. I got that from Jim Roan, you know, you might have expanded associations and limited associations, and I believe if you willing to do that, each one of us has something special in us that is going to help our humanity become a better Tim: place. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. So The another quote that we had here cause I'm big one about kids. Cause I got a couple is the Albert Einstein quote, where he says creativity is intelligence, having fun. Now just talking to you, you know, over the airwaves like this I can tell that we put you in a party anywhere. You're going to be the most interesting person at that party. Absolutely. Kinja: Wow. I I'm honored for that, for that thought man. And really what I think will make that true is how much of an interest I would have in finding. What sparks the people at the party, because, you know, I've went through a lot of different phases and with my sales hat being put back on, one thing I have learned is how to become a better listener. When you go through four, four or 5,000. In depth conversations with husband, wives about their, you know, their real estate portfolio. You, you, you learn how to listen. And so one of the things that makes me, I believe one of the most interesting people is because I, I I'm, I have more fun learning about others in their, their lives, because as I listened to so many people. The similarities and all of us versus the differences. So this is a beautiful way to live and communicate. Tim: That is true. That is absolutely true on that. All right. Let's dive a little bit into a time management because it's, for me, it goes hand in hand with creativity, there are certain demands that we have on our time with all, all the balls that you have up in the air. You know, w w with speaking, with writing, we're doing the courses you know, I know you can probably tell us about like 10 different apps to help people out, but. As an individual, how do you keep all that? How do you keep the energy and the interest in all the activities that you're doing and still have a. A social life. I still have a family life. It's still, you know, find time to energize yourself and to get to where you're at right Kinja: now. Great question. And I'll say since 2009, every single morning without fail, no matter where I am in the world, a gym workout is the first thing that I do. So what, as far as my time management, I have. Schedule where my four pillars are being prioritized in the, every single day of my life. This was in my sales career and it transferred into when I retired. So every single day without fail to start my day off, I have body. I go to the gym. It's my body breakfasts, you know, just Nikki started. And then afterwards in, during the gym, I'm listening to audio books that have to do with broadening my horizon. So I'm now double whammy and it's one of the best things that anybody can do. I used to listen to music. A decade ago, but ever since I started reading, I mean, like listening to audio books, like you said, I mean of all different types of people, biographies, Napoleon hill, Jim Roan the yoga through trees upon Todd, Julie, the Bible, like just reading and understanding life while your body is being exhausted. So the first two hours of my day, Probably learned or had more reinforced principles than what the average person has their whole day. You know what I mean? So by the time I come home and have my nutrition, I am now so eager to now work on my fourth pillar, which is purpose. So it's either. What interview I'm going to prepare for which of the 36 titles am I going to add to today? I'm part of a college agency. I just went to a huddle in Florida. So which program am I going to revamp? Which conferences am I going to submit for? But everything that I do is within the four pillars of my life. So I don't necessarily have to have a set to do list every day, because no matter what I do. Because I have my four foundations set. It's all helping the life cycle of Kenya increase. And that's why it's so important for us as individuals to take inventory of what we're giving our time to, you know, some no offense, you know, for anybody that loves to watch television. But what I want everyone to ask themselves because the day that I cut off television, It stem from a conversation I had with one of my sales when I sold real estate, but he all, he was a hit a high position at a television station. And I w during our conversation of three hours, I found out that he graduated cum laude and was supposed to be a little. And for some reason, I asked them in closing, I said, why are you working with a television station versus practicing law? And he said something that I've shared at a few conferences that I'm going to share with you and your audience today. That changed my life, man. It takes about two minutes. If we have time, he said, oh, well, okay. He said, Kenya, I am not like. You are someone that goes hard, man. I could tell you are an asset to your company. But I honestly, man, the time that it took for me to become a good lawyer, I didn't want to give, and I want, I'm going to ask you about. Questions about television. When I was given this opportunity, this has been some of the easiest money I've ever been able to make. And then he took me down a journey. He said, Kendra, when you were you know, crawling and what do you think your mother puts you in front of? Soon as you got a little too much for her hands. And I was like, wow, probably the TV. He said, so let's jump, let's jump a few years. He said, when you were around nine, 10 years old for you to go to bed when your mother told you, you had to cut the TV off, were you happy? Or you said, I was like, wow. I was sad. He said, let's jump a few more years. He said, Kendra, when you get off work today, what is the first thing you're going to do? When you get off of work and you relax? I said, wow, TV. He said, and when you get into an old folks home, if you make it. What are they going to put you in front of, for most of your life? I said, wow. V said, not Kenya. Don't don't get me wrong. I don't want to paint a picture. That TV is wrong, but what I want you to ask yourself personally, right now he said whatever your favorite show is right now, honestly, is it something that helps you become a better version of yourself? And when I thought about what my favorite show was, man, and what I was so excited to come home to watch, I realized that none of the things that I was looking at. Was enhancing me to become a better sales professional. It was not helping me become a better person in humanity. And because of me at this time, when this happened already being pretty much clear on my goals with my health and with my purpose, I realized. Having the television in my home was more of a hindrance than a help. And so I disconnected television from that point on, I don't, I don't, I'm not telling everybody to do that. But what I am saying is that if you want to manage your time, you got to realize that three to four hours of television a day equates to at least a few years off of your life. And what everyone wants to ask themselves is, is it. Is the television worth my time. Am I somebody complaining about bills? Am I somebody complaining about opportunity? Am I somebody complaining about things that I'm not able to master, but I allocate two to three hours of time every day. So looking at somebody else who's mastered. This person that you're looking at is Matt. They're living in their mastery while we are sometimes sitting at home complaining about our life, but not realizing that if we were to take those three hours and refocus them, we could actually increase our awareness, our results and help our family become a better place. Tim: And, and, you know, for everyone that's watching TV out there. Okay. So you're watching. Take an hour off because on your tombstone, do you want it to be said, Hey, he binge watched all of game of Thrones and walking dead, you know, in, you know, 48 hours or this person did X, Y, Z created a whole new art form, created a whole new philosophy you know, re. People, you know, millions of people find their potential. I'd kind of want the the the second thing on my tombstone versus he watched game of Thrones for 48 hours straight, you know, it's, it does very little for you. If anything at all. And unfortunately I'm not at that point yet. I used to be, I used to have no TV in my house whatsoever. When I was a bachelor Creep its way back into my life. And listening to you here tonight. I'm like looking around my, my man cave and I've got three laptops that I use. Specifically for my arts, you know, once for podcasting, once for doing music production and then the other one is for my, my writing. But then I looked just a little over my shoulder here and I'm looking at a big 42 inch screen TV going. Yeah. Do I need that? How many times am I sitting, you know trying to knock out a song and I've got the TV on behind me when all I need to do is turn off the TV, throwing the record player that I have 10 John Coltrane records on put that on and let my mind. Kinja: Hmm, I give you so much credit man for being that self-aware. And I also want everyone to know that there are psychologists and scientists that create these shows so that they literally keep us. And I'm going to tell you why, you know, in, in planet fitness, when I do an hour of cardio daily, they have the televisions. And there's been a couple of times when I've been in a family member or a friend's home and they're, they're looking at a show and I'm like, wow, I fully understand how someone who is not mentally prepared and understanding the effort put into these shows, how you could literally have your life taken away from you and not even realize it because they designed them to literally take you away. So, all I ask is for, I love yourself awareness because all it takes is for a person to kind of step outside themselves for a moment so that they can look at themselves. If a person does that, then I think they, they, they will just automatically make the right moves. I don't want to come across as I'm militant on myself. So I don't want anyone to take my militant way of approaching my growth. And I don't, I don't want you to take that and put it on yourself. This started over a decade ago and probably literally over 15, 16 years ago because of my, my mother being a very harsh person. So I think I catered to the har style, but I realized everyone has not went through that. So I don't want the message to be taken in a wrong way. All I ask the person to do is just take themselves outside of themselves, work on their own speed, but just do the best to become a better version of themselves every single day. It's not about rushing. It's not about a time. Time a time rush where you have to do it by a certain time. But I do ask you to at least spend time focusing on becoming a better version of yourself every day for the rest of your life. And then before you know it, five, 10 years of path, and you'll be surprised how much you've created and how much you've helped our world become a better. Tim: Perfect. Perfect. A and I'm going to, I know it's a cliche, but I want to remind folks and I think you probably would agree with me on this. You know, it's, it's a marathon, it's not a a hundred yard dash, you know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna get. That quick and you need to find your own path. You, you need to what works for me, doesn't work for everybody else. What works for you, Kendra. Isn't going to work for everyone else, but if we can take bits and pieces of it and go, Hmm, I like that idea. I'm going to, I'm going to try that out. It's not going to hurt you. Everything that you're, you've been talking about here tonight. It's not going to, you know, stopping drinking myself. I stopped smoking after 25 years of smoking. It was tough. I did that two, two and a half years ago. Have I fallen off the wagon once or twice? Yes I have. But you know what I got right back on and I said, you know what, boom, we're going to, you know, Hey, I'm, I'm a ex smoker, I'm a non-smoker now. And I'm gonna continue to, you know, get healthier. And you know, when that happened, I went and did 22 labs. Because that's what I needed to do to remind myself, this is where I want to be. I don't want to be outside having a cigarette. I want to be in this pool knocking out 22 laps, teaching my girls how to swim and doing that versus having to stand outside and hide a cigarette, try to cover the smell. So that way my girls don't don't smell it. And aren't influenced by that. Kinja: Good job, man. That's one of the hardest habits to break. So I congratulate you and, and I love your honesty. And I believe in anybody that wants to grow as long as they're honest with themselves and don't start living the lie, you know, their potential is, is. Tim: And, and, you know, you've got to remember that we are enough, you know, I, I, I, I, I'm honest because I'm not trying to impress anybody. I've just, I make my mistakes just as well as everybody else does. And, you know, we have to be for ourselves. We have to be enough for ourselves. And if we're working towards that goal, working towards that state of mind that's a good state of mind to go. Kinja: Yes, sir. And I love what you said, just taking little pieces of everybody's world and adding it to our world in our own speed. And it's a beautiful thing, man. I just wanted to the most important principles, I believe the key is just remembering what that nugget is and sticking to adding it to our daily regimen. So that it's just not a moment of, of, of, of, of, of emotional events. But then we go right back into the comfort zone. So that's another thing I recommend is if anybody heard anything that is going to be a tool work, figure out how to add it into your daily regimen affective tomorrow so that you can instantly shake up your, your vibration and increase your. Tim: So we're going to be wrapping up here in just a few moments, but Kenya, the first thing I'd like to do is where can everybody find all of your great stuff here? I know you have a website but where can everybody find your stuff? And then the second thing is what's the next project. What's the next big thing that you're working towards? Kinja: Well, it's pretty, pretty simple. Kanja dixon.com is the first website that I created when I realized I was retiring from sales. So it gives you access to everything that I would say led up to where I am now. Recreation, ism.com is the NSR E first K I N J a D I X or Windex. We creationism.com is accessible through Kenji dickson.com. But I like to give them separately because they're all their own separate entities. So R e-creationism.com. That's the philosophy that goes deep into the pillars. The four pillars, H health, emotional intelligence, K knowledge P purpose. And. Little soul laws, Booker superpowers. You can find that@bookofsuperpowers.com, it's an interactive website that allows every single week. To meet the seven stars of that book. Little solar is the solar system, and it's a journey where the solar system goes to each of the continents to find one child that has at least six of its seven superpowers. And to give you an example, One of the superpowers is the power of connection. So this conversation with their child helps them learn how to connect with everyone and what I'm working on now, man, believe it or not. My, I have two. There are going to be released within this next year. The next one is the book of superpowers workbook and my, my Fingal single or broken. Can you tell the difference is a singles manual there. Anybody can write. Because I'm going on my fourth year of celibacy, man. That's another wow moment that I believe I'm able to help people learn that there is a way to be successfully single and to go old school on a man, fall in love with yourself before putting yourself out there, man, like it's so, so instead of me doing it from the normal self-help style, 12 stories with 12 different people in their lives. I've created. 12 different stories. Cause single are broken. I broke it into an acronym. So, but man, it's just so much that's going on. Just to, to stay on, to stay on track. Literally my Facebook, Kendra Dixon and my Instagram, Kenji Dixon, my YouTube Kim's to Dixon and just follow the path. I don't know where I'm headed, but one thing I can tell you for sure is I'm going to help our humanity become a better. By helping teach the thing that I am personally using myself. Perfect. Tim: And you know what? I can't wait to go on that journey with you and to see where you're going to be going with it because I have a lot of people that pop up to me and they'll go, Hey, Tim, you know, you do this, you do that. And you do this, you do that. And just sitting here, listening to you, reading through your bio. Reading going through your websites. I'm like, man, I need to, I need to do a little bit more because I've got that spirit. I've got that spirit 10% energy that I need to expound and and put out into the universe and, and do a little bit more. So thank you for that. And thank you for coming on Katie, why podcast? And we really appreciate you here tonight. Is there one idea that you'd like to share with the audience before we go out for Kinja: tonight? Identity identity identity, no matter who we are, we will never surpass our self image. So with our world that we just finished talking about that bombards us with so much technology, so many titles, so many names, so many labels. I definitely ask every single person to do an inventory because if you have an identity attached to your being, that is. Unlimited, you will only perform to the level of what that identity is. And I'm talking about Titan w if you, if you buy into that color of a skin, I think you might need the question. If you are literally a color of a skin, if you buy into an income class, are you literally just an income class? If you buy into a, the way your body right now has manifested, or do you really think you are that name? No, these are all just. And titles and labels that your human experience has accumulated on you. And all you need to start doing is just every single night that setting and taking away some of these titles and going to sleep free. And before you know it, you become a universal identity instead of a segmented identity. Wow. Oh, I I'm, Tim: you know what, we're going to have to have you back just to talk that, that. Just for an hour adjust on that. I could go so many different places with you on that. Oh my gosh. Well, can you do it has been a privilege and an honor, and I want to thank you so much for for showing up here tonight with us talking to us about creativity and time management and folks. Definitely go onto a Kenya's websites there. You're going to find some wonderful, wonderful, wonderful information there for yourself to unlock yourself and to be the person that you're meant to be always Katie, why podcasting.com is where we're at here. We're looking to create more than we consume and have conversations with you. And again, thank you Kendra, for showing up here tonight with us and everybody out there. Have a great evening. Okay. Now I'm going to give you permission Kinja: to go take a nap because after hearing that episode, I need to take a nap again. It Tim: was a real pleasure Kinja: having Kendzia on with me and, and I do have to do a special shout out to Chris Jones who Tim: introduced me to NGO. Chris Jones is over at the art business of Kinja: writing. Tim: So. How about you? Are you feeling a little bit more creative Kinja: right now? I know I am. I know. I definitely am. Go ahead out there. Read more than you consume aim that inner critic create more than you can do them. Okay. Tim: So you can always reach out to me, Timothy at create art podcast com you go to our website, create art podcast.com. Kinja: Catch all of our old episodes and even the one. Than I did as gay DOI podcast until Tim: next time. Thank you so much for joining us here Kinja: today. .

All About ALA Policy Corps with Tim Vollmer

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Play Episode Listen Later Jan 25, 2022

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.

university california media washington dc illinois congress policy npr library individual berkeley excel crm copyright uc berkeley corps uc ala broadband american library association california berkeley durbin shonda vollmer copyright office us copyright office tim yeah tim thanks united states copyright office sara well copyright alliance

Conversation On Going Professional with Ronika Merl

Create Art Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 22, 2022 38:16

Making The Decision To Go Professional In this episode, I talk with Ronika Merl, a screenwriter out of Ireland who at the time of the interview late last year had quit her day job and decided to take her craft to the next level and went professional. Ronika reached out to me via email and wanted to share her experience with going professional. If you are thinking about taking your practice to the next level, take a listen to someone who has just recently did that very thing and learn from her experience. Ronkia Merl's Bio Ronika is an award-winning screenwriter, writer, and producer. Having placed highly in both the Academy Nicholl Fellowship as well as the Austin Film Festival in 2019, she has since expanded her slate to contain more than 22 feature-length scripts, 4 of which are currently in preproduction or development with various production companies. She is also producing her "Wicklow Stories" Anthology "The Pier" in coordination with No Wifi. Her autobiography "The Unfinished Heart" is slated for publication in the coming years, and her textbook for Irish Screenwriters "The Hustle" is now available on Amazon or can be purchased directly from her. She has consulted on projects in the US, UK, South Africa and Australia. Discussion topics on Going Professional The hardest point of going professional that Ronika was unprepared for What drives her to overcome obstacles Advice she gives artists who are considering going professional Dealing with collages who are not as professional as she is Who inspired her to make films Her definition of success Links to Ronika's work Ronika Merl's Website Ronika Merl's IMDB Ronkia Merl's Instagram Ronika Merl's YouTube Ronika Merl's FaceBook Reaching Out To reach out to me, email timothy@createartpodcast.com I would love to hear about your journey and what you are working on. If you would like to be on the show or have me discuss a topic that is giving you trouble write in and let's start that conversation. Email: timothy@createartpodcast.com YouTube Channel: Create Art Podcast YT Channel IG: @createartpodcast Twitter: @createartpod Transcripts for Going Professional Introduction Tim: Create art podcast conversations going pro with Ronica, Merl. Hello friends. This is Timothy Kimo. Brian, your head instigator for create art podcast where I use my 20 plus years in arts and education. To help you tame your inner critic and create more than you consume. Now, have you ever wondered what it would be like to quit your day job and go full professional? That's a scary thought. Isn't it? Some of you may have thought there's no way I'd be able to leave the security or a steady the security of a job or a steady paycheck. Well, if this pandemic has taught us anything, it's that the time to dive into your passion may be now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying at the end of this episode, you should give your boss a two weeks notice and start doing underwater basket weaving full time. And that if you do it, it'll pay the bills. What I am saying is that it may be time for you to take a look at your, at the next step in your practice and start thinking about making this your vocation with anything there is risk. And even if you don't feel like going full price, You may want to listen in on this conversation that I had with Ronica Merrill, who at the time of the interview had just quit her day job and decided to go full pro doing screenwriting in Ireland. Now she just didn't decide one day to drop everything. She did have a plan and had been working on it for a few years before she made that leap. Now you're probably asking, well, who is Ronica Merle? Well, she's an award-winning screenwriter. Writer and producer, and has placed very highly in both the academy Nicole fellowship, as well as the Austin film festival in 2019. She has since expanded her slate to contain more than 22 feature scripts, four of which are being currently pre production or development with various production company. And she also is producing her Wicklow stories, anthology, and the peer in coordination with no wifi. Now her autobiography, the unfinished heart is slated for publication in the coming years. And. The her textbook for Irish screenwriters, the hustle is now available on Amazon, or it can be purchased directly from her. She has consulted with projects in the U S the UK, South Africa and Australia. And you can look at her work on her website and ID B IMDV page. Now links are going to be in the show notes, and then we'll also have the transcript of the conversation we had in the show. For you to look at now, when it came, when I came up with this topic Going pro is one I really wanted to tackle and it's not because I'm technically a professional artist. However, I've consoled others to make that break and start earning income from their practice. Now, luckily Ronica reached out to me at the perfect time, and I'm very pleased to bring you the conversation that we. Feel free to share this episode with your friends and with somebody that, you know, that may be thinking about going pro also drop by Ronica his website and let her know that I went ahead and sent you. And now here's the conversation that I had with Monica mural on going pro Interview Ronika: So I recently quit my day job. Which was probably the most exciting moment of my artistic career so far, it was an absolute thrill. Right. And literally today it's 2:00 AM here. So today is my last day in employment. Ever, hopefully fingers crossed ever. And it's been quite the journey like it has been, it has been quite the journey to get me here. I started freelance copywriting in 2017 am. Now it's 2021. So it took me, it took me four years to get to a point where I thought, okay, I'm going to be able to make that leap. I'm going to be able to make that jump and really live off my writing. Immediately after I, I wrote my resume resignation email. I immediately regretted panic. Completely lost my mind because I thought, oh my God, am I good? Am I God? What am I doing? What am I doing? I am not prepared for that. Capable of this. But I think as you'd expect it to but I think that's kind of when, when the, when your confidence in your craft has to, has to come in and you have to. Bring yourself back down and say, listen, you got this, you know exactly what you're doing. You are a professional, you know, no matter what happens there, your craft is what is going to get you to the next level that you need to be reaching. And I think that's why it's usually important that before anybody stops thinking or starts thinking about stopping their day job is that they first are a professional artists in whatever field they're in. They need to be confident that, you know if push comes to shove, they can create at a, at a full-time level kind of pace because chances are as soon as you stop as soon as you stop your day job, it's not that you stop working it's that you work that much harder at what you, what you want to be doing. Which is also, I think why it's usually important to actually have a day job for a good while. I think it's important to understand what it feels like to work for 40 hours a week or six years a week or 80 hours a week, because that's what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life. So, and if you don't have that discipline in you if you, if you think, oh, I'm just going to be, I don't know, I'm just going to be an artist on. Because the old saying goes, you know, if you give him on a job that he loves, he'll never work a day in his life. No, no, no, no. You'll work. You will work a lot. You will work very, very, very hard. It's just that hopefully you have a lot of satisfaction doing the work. But it's still going to be work. Like you're going to be up as I am now. You're going to be up at two o'clock in the morning and you're going to be super, super happy to be up at two o'clock in the morning, talking about what you love doing and talking about your art and talking about your craft. But the fact still remains you're up at two o'clock in the morning and you're working. And I think a lot of people are, are misunderstanding. That aspect. And I think as soon as people who aren't maybe involved in, in, in a creative or an artistic pursuit, I think, oh my God, it's some sort of magical innate. Beautiful mysterious landscape that an artist just sneezes and a portrait exists, or, you know, a writer just sits down and types a sentence like Carrie Bradshaw at her window looking out that's immediately. It, no. It's not it's, that's not what, that's not what it is. It's it's work. It's really, really hard work. And so quitting the day job to be able to, to pursue a different day job. Doesn't mean that you're, that you're, that you stop working. So I think that that was kind of my major takeaway was that, yeah, I wasn't going to have any more free time now. I wasn't going to, I could structure my day a little bit better around, you know, my small children or, or other, or the things that I need to take care of, but it was never going to be that I worked less. Tim: True true. And will. And especially in your field with, you know, with the screenwriting and with making films, I've got a tiny bit of experience. I, you know, I looked at your bio and I've listened to a couple of your interviews. And I know the work as just an actor in a film, in a small film, not in a much less, you know, major motion picture. A lot of work and it's a lot of standing around and not doing anything. And then to have that, you know, two minutes of, okay, you know, getting the character, make sure that you have all your lines, all the, you know affects and, you know, make sure that the sound guy, especially the sound guy is is on point physical point. Ronika: I was. Sorry. Yeah. I was going to say the film industry, like as it's very, it's very topical at the moment. I know when this goes out, it'd probably be boiled over, but the whole film industry in the state just went on strike. So yeah, for good reason, because they're 16 hour days, you know, they're 16 hour days in the sunshine, in the freezing cold. And so I absolutely stand in solidarity with my, with my colleagues over there. So yeah, but as you were, sorry, you were saying. Oh, well, I, I was gonna ask I, I was going to pop back a little bit and ask you, you know, you know, you're, you're doing the resignation letter, you know, today's your last day. I feel privileged to be here with you to do that. I, you know, I want to grab, you know, a cake for you or something, but, you know, what's, what's the hardest thing about going pro that, that you weren't ready for it. And, and how are you overcoming that? I think the hardest thing about making the jump is the big dip that comes just after making the jump, because everything is beautiful and everything is rosy. If you know where your next paycheck is coming from, but there will come a time. There will come a moment in time. It's just, it's just going happen. Where you don't know where your next paycheck is coming from, and that will happen for most artists, unless you like, you know, I don't know. Hozier or someone who had like this big hit with their first song and at 22 who never had to worry about a paycheck ever. But you know, if you're, if you're a normal, if you're a normal kind of artist trying to, trying to go pro for a few years and then making the jump, there will come a time. It might come a week after you make the jump. It might come a month. It might come a year after, but there will come a moment. And in that moment, Is where you have to question. And in that moment then is where you have to rely on your gumption and have to remind yourself of how hard you worked to get here. Because chances are before you took the jump you had long nights, you sat at your kitchen table while your kids were asleep, or your partner was watching TV. You sat at the kitchen table looking at. Script researching something, writing a song, practicing you're practicing your craft, you know? And that's what you have to jump back on. That's what you have to remind yourself on. Is that okay? Yeah. No, at the moment, it's a little bit difficult, but look what it took to get you. And yeah, you have to, you have to keep that perspective alive. And I think that that's for me, at least for now, for the first few weeks when I'm kind of looking at, okay, my finances and Christmas is coming up and I have to kind of struggle around, okay. I'm going to have to make things, structure things differently until the big gigs come in. Yeah, you have to remind yourself of, okay. It took a while, but it's going to be fine because you, you got. It's going to be fine. Yeah. Tim: And I was gonna, cause you had mentioned about having confidence in your work, having confidence in your craft and from what I'm hearing, that's one way that you can It helps you to overcome these, these hard times is having that confidence in there. Is there anything else? And you'd mentioned the word gumption. And is there anything else that's helping you get through these through the tough times of going pro? Ronika: I think CRA, I think crafting con or confidence in craft is the most important thing. Because I know. There isn't anything somebody could put in front of me that I couldn't write. You know, there isn't, there isn't a concept that I couldn't possibly write about because that is what I do. This, this is my profession, you know friends. Who are supportive family who are supportive, that's extremely important. I, I don't have to worry about family cause I don't have family, but friends who are important or friends who are supportive, that is hugely important. Friends who cheer you on friends who are always no matter what going to be in your corner and want you to succeed. I think that. And I think what gets overlooked a lot of the time is just rest. You know, it is so important to also cause you're hustling, you're hustling, hustling, you're running, you're running, running, you're, you're trying to make this work and you, and you think, because again, you think, because this isn't your job, your, you know, old-timey job where you have to, you know, do things that your boss wanted you to do. You keep on running and you keep on, on trying to make something because you think, okay, this is what I always wanted to do. I've been working towards this for God knows how many years. Yeah. Yeah, no, you still need a day off. You still need to recharge your battery is specially in the creative industries. You cannot be expected to create a masterpiece every single day. You have to rest, you have to recharge your batteries and you have to know how to that's really important because I think a lot of artists they go into it and they love creating their art and they have natural kind of breaks. Before you become a professional, you have natural forest breaks because you are as an actor waitressing, or you are as a visual artist, you know, it's just, you just cannot paint 24 7. It is not possible. Or as a writer. Yeah. You're going to sit in the office and write up reports about numbers in columns and Excel sheets, which is what I did. And so. So you have natural breaks that, that recharge your creative juices. And as soon as you become a professional, all of a sudden you don't tend to take those natural breaks, but you have to, and you have to know how to recharge those batteries. For me, for example, it's painting. I, I know I'm not. I know, as soon as I, as soon as I find myself holding a paintbrush, I know my writing isn't, isn't, isn't going great. But you know, and I would never, I would never want to be known as a painter. It's not it's I I'm not, but I know it's, it's important. And I know that this is how I recharge my, my, my batteries. So yeah, taking breaks and resting in between. Is important also. And I think the last thing I would, I would say is it to, to, to kind of alleviate the struggle is before you take the jump, understand how to market yourself, please, please. Before you become a professional. Please understand that you're going to have to be up at two o'clock in the morning doing podcasts. That's how it works. You have to market yourself. Nobody's going to come rush towards you unless you market yourself. And unless you, you know, people love working with you. And so, yeah, those are, those are the kinds of the kind of Biggest tips I can give to somebody turning pro is be confident in your craft, know that you can do this, you know, have friends and family around you to support you work really, really, really hard and be disillusioned about that. Absolutely kill your illusions about having to work less. You're going to have to work more and Yeah. Put yourself out there. Don't be shy about that. Tim: Yeah, no, I completely agree with you because unless you are a huge name you know, like Peter Jackson, for instance, or our Tom Cruise or something like that, people aren't going to necessarily come and looking for you. So you need to go to where those people are and go, Hey, you know I, I do screenwriting, I do poetry. I do podcasting. You got to put yourself out there because. Yeah, that's how we got hooked up. You put yourself out there, you, you know, you messaged me and you're like, Hey, and of course I'm going, you know, head over heels. Ronika: I'm talking with a screenwriter in Ireland. Yes, that's fantastic. Exactly. Yeah, and I think also the biggest hurdle for me in that regard was Overcoming the imposter syndrome and overcoming the kind of odd, why would anybody ever want to know about me? Yeah. People do want to know about me. I have things to say, I'm a writer for God's sake. Of course I have things to say, you know, if I didn't have things to say, I'd be not a very good writer. And so you have to, you know, it's not being arrogant, thinking that you have things to say and thinking that your art is important. That's not arrogant. That's just, again, confidence in your craft. You have to get to a point where you really, truly deeply understand that what you do is important. And if you don't think it's important, why are you doing it? You know, you have to, you have to have that confidence and that confidence doesn't just come. There's there's two types of confidences. I think when it comes, when it comes to your own art, it's either the overconfident kind of, oh my God. I'm the best artist that's ever existed. I don't know if you know, there's, there's a few out there like that, maybe. Okay, fine. But then there's this really deep seated that kind of really, really intrinsic, deep sea. Around it, confidence that just comes with years of experience. And that just comes with you with, with the knowledge that you absolutely it's like a carpenter looking at a at a pile of, you know, slats and woods and stuff. I just know inside their gods that they can build a table. It's just, they know they have the materials there and they can do it if they need to, they can build that table. And that's what I think you want to get to as an artist is that deep seated confidence, which again, helps you in promoting yourself, helps you in, in running into problems. Because you just know you can work your way out of it because you have the craft and you have the knowledge and you have the professionalism to do it. So that's important. Tim: That is very important. I when I was in the military and the air force my unit, our motto was quiet, professional and. It, that was back when I was 18 when I was a pup. And you know, now that I'm almost 50 on my God, I'm understanding that because when I do well, when I did because of COVID, I'm working from home, which is great for podcasting. I, but when I walk into a room, people know this is the guy. That you need to talk to. I don't have to say a word. People just, you know, and it, and it didn't happen when I was 19. Didn't happen when I was 30. It happened when I was about 40, 45. People knew my body of work through the jobs that I've had. And and, and when you get to that level, You may realize that you may not, but that's something that, you know, to, to this day, I still work towards it because yes, I'm successful in what I'm doing, but I keep putting in the work, keep doing the craft. Ronika: Yes. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And and to get to that point, that kind of, that kind of. What I always say is I don't want to be rich. I don't want to be famous. I don't need any of it. I just want there to be a few people in the world. If they run into a problem, I want them to think, oh, I know who can fix this. I know who can write us this script. I know who we can call. Ronnie. And so that is that all you want to aspire to be there should be, there should be a good few people in the industry that you were working in whose go to person you are in, in your discipline. If you have that. Then my, you have, you have it, you have that. And I so quite recently, actually, and this, I probably shouldn't be talking about it, but I will because it's in the states anyway, and this is Ireland. So quite recently I'm not a member. I'm not actually a member of the screen writers Guild of Ireland. I don't know why I just haven't gotten around to actually becoming a fully fledged member, but. They had their annual general meeting a few weeks ago. And in the annual general meeting, I came up. So, you know, there was a meeting of all the screenwriters in Ireland and who did they choose to talk about me? And so one of the guys called me right after they're at their meeting finished and said, oops, you know what? Ronica, I would love to work. You know, and I mean, that's what you want. That's what you want. You're not even there at the meeting, but there, you still come up. 'cause, you know, they, they, they, they thought, oh my gosh, we, we really are. We're trying to get this initiative off the ground. We're trying to, we're trying to do a few certain things who would be best to talk to. Well, there's only one person Ronica. And so, I mean, that's exactly what you want. You're not even at the party, but you still, you still the topic at the party. So yes, that, that exactly, as you said, that quiet professionalism, that, that being on somebody's mind, and that only happens when you, it's funny, you bring up age. I always said, I always said I wanted to quit my day job when I'm 30. And I turned 30, 30 days ago. I reached my, I reached my independent by 30 goal. But exactly one month. And so, so, but yes, exactly. But it does take, it does take time until you become that person where you, you are regarded as someone who's professional, as someone who can deliver by your peers. And that's a hugely. Tim: Absolutely. Now with that experience and with that recognition, there's always tasks that you have to do that you absolutely hate doing, or that are very monotonous. Would you, you know, releasing the old job. You know, full force into this new job this new career, this new endeavor what is some of the things that you hate doing that, you know, Hey, I got to do it. And how do you overcome those tasks? Ronika: For me, the hardest part was always networking and I thought thought, which is ironic because that's what I'm doing right now. And I always said, oh God, that's what I struggle with them. Or, oh God, you know, talking to people and pitching my stuff and, oh God, I don't know. I don't know. I'm not a people person. I'm a writer. All I want to say is I want to do is sit in my chair, not but the more I kind of did it. The easier it became and then exactly to bring that example up again, I didn't even need to be networking. It was a huge, big networking event, you know, huge networking opportunity. And I wasn't there because I thought I know I can't, but I played my cards so well, and I didn't need to be networking. I ain't got it. They got in there anyway. So, yeah, networking was a struggle for me, for the, I think that was the biggest struggle for the longest time because I struggled with it, but I, I kind of made sure to dive head first into that. And I've overcome that a little bit. And right now I think the biggest, the most tedious I struggled with that question because I I'm really, really glad to be doing anything at all. Which is exactly how it should be. I think the social media aspect of it, they kind of the hustle. I think that I think just the daily hustle of answering DMS and weeding out the weeding out the genuine kind of can we work together requests from the just kind of plain old. Messages you get on social media because because it's all online now, you can't just, you can't just go to a film festival anymore or do something. Yeah, I think social media and the weirdness that comes with it, I think that's the most tedious. And that's the only part of my, of my job right now that I have to do that. Absolutely have to do. But that I maybe don't enjoy as much as I potentially. Good. So yeah, I think that's, that's the most tedious aspect that. Tim: Gotcha. Yeah, it's, it's weird. I think for everybody because and I'm of an age that, you know, we didn't have all this kind of all this stuff going on. I know when I was 30. Oh, it seems like it was yesterday. I wish it was, but we, we didn't have, you know, we didn't have my space, we didn't have geo cities. We didn't have all this kind of stuff. And then you have a new. It seems like to me, I'm going to sound like an old man here. But like every, every week there's a new social media thing that is popping out like clubhouse, tick, tick talks been around for awhile, but all that stuff. And I know in the podcast world, when it's like, oh, you've got to get on club house, you got to get on this. You got to get on discord. Where do I create my art, then what, you know, what am I supposed to do? And yeah. And I do the painting thing too, as a relaxation thing, myself with my girls and, and I paint like a four year old on crack. So as long as you're getting better, You're doing fantastic. Ronika: Yeah, no, it's, yeah, you need that relaxation, but I agree with you with regards to kind of not knowing where there's so much and you know, for writers. Oh my God. You know, there's a billion avenues you could be pursuing and in the moment. That kind of harks back to, to what we were talking about earlier in the moments where you panic, where you don't know where your next paycheck is going to come from. And you're like, oh my God, am I going, am I going? I could go back to copywriting for websites. I could, I could, I could do all of that again. And then you stop and you think, and you're like, yeah, you did all that. When you had to build your portfolio, relax, take it easy. You got this, you know, you are on the path that you should be on. You are on the whatever platform that you should be on. If you're not, if you really, really need to take stock and really meaning need to redesign your career path, then do do that, but do it in a considerate, calm, non panicky head space, you know, because chances are you got this. Fine. And yes, there's ticked. Jeez. I recently actually joined tick-tock I don't know what goes on. We told a friend of mine and he turned 30. He turned 30 just a month before I did I'm on take tik tok now. And he's like, that is disgraceful. You are 30 years old. Now you should not be. Tim: Somebody that's 48 that just got on Tik TOK. So, Ronika: yes, exactly. So but yeah, no chances are you doing okay. Chances are you're on the right path and life will tell you, you will feel it in your gut when you're not on the right path. Something will tell you something will pop up to tell you. Maybe you need to, maybe you need to change whatever, whatever path you're taking. But chances are, you're doing just fine. Tim: Perfect I got one more question for you. And that is. And I think we've been kind of hitting at this the whole time, but for you, how do you define, how do you define success for yourself and what needs to happen for you to reach that goal? So, you know, maybe you have a five-year or 10-year plan. That's a set up there, but for you, when are you going to know that your successful? Ronika: Okay. So for the longest time of my life, It was the Oscar. It was kind of the big Oscar on the shelf. It's not that anymore. I don't think I would be nice to have that kind of commercial, huge, big blockbuster success. You know, if, if, if a movie I wrote made a billion dollars, that be nice, but would I measure my success by it? No. No. No, not anymore. I've outgrown that I've outgrown the kind of fantasy world of wanting to be, you know, the next Christina Aguilera or the next spiel over her girl or whatever. I don't know. No. My measurement of success is very, very tiny, very, very tiny. Just from a purely kind of financial aspect. I would like to one day make 30,000 Euro a year without really struggling to get there. Sure. That's not a lot. That's not a lot. That's like a part-time job. That's really, really not a lot. I'm very humble. I can live very, in very small ways. That's financially speaking, emotionally speaking. I think I'm already kind of starting to be there to be quite honest with you because emotionally speaking, like exactly, like I said, I would like to be the person people think about, I would like to be that person that comes into people's heads when they struggle with something. When they have a question about something that is what I would like to be that. For as many people as I can possibly come across in my lifetime. And then they reach out to me and then I help them in whatever, when whatever problem they have. Yeah, that's my measurement of success. Being able to help other people and especially in the filmmaking world it's such a collaborative effort. It is such a team. It is such a teamwork kind of approach that. Being able to be the person who helps others. Yeah. I think that's the most, that's the most success I could ever possibly want. Maybe, you know, in 20 years time, the Oscar will, will result from that. But I think that the point of my life, where I chase just the big golden glory at the, at the end of the rainbow, no, I don't think I, I, I think I've outgrown that a little bit. That's how I would define success. Being able to live comfortably with, with a revenue stream that comes in from my art and then being able to work with people and help them Tim: sounds great. It sounds like you get a really good focus on that. You know, versus, you know, just focusing on the Oscar because you know, if you think about it, think about the year that you were born. I was born in 72 who won the Oscar that year. I have no. Yeah, I'd have to go into, you know oscar.com and figure that out. But I know in my network, who can I call when I have an issue when I'm, you know, struggling with you know a painting. So I don't paint like a four year old on crack all the way I call now. I know now I have that person that's exactly. Ronika: And Maya Angelou said, people will forget what, what What you did in your lifetime, people will forget what you achieved, but they will never forget how you made them feel. And that's, I think that's what I would like to live by. Tim: Perfect. Well, thank you so very much for coming on. I'm going to let you get back to bed, get some breakfast, whatever you need to do. I know I've got to get my girls up in a few hours anyways for school. So. Ronika: It's such a pleasure and it's really nice. And thank you so much for having me on and I'm looking forward to hearing it. Tim: You got it. You got it. Absolutely. Thank you. Now that was a very informative conversation. That I had with Veronica and I am so glad that she reached out to me at the perfect time. Now, if you have more questions about how she managed her transition to going pro, please reach out to her via her website links again, or in the show notes. You know, going pro is scary, but with proper planning you can make it happen. And even if you don't plan on going pro, much of the information shared is good for you to be aware of and incorporate into your practice. You never know in today's economy. If you might need to take that side hustle and turn it into your main hustle, when you take a professional attitude to your work. Others will take a professional attitude approach to you and take your work seriously. If you'd like to appear on the show or have more questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me, timothy@createartpodcast.com and I'd be happy to have that conversation with you. Now. Go out there and create more than you consume tame that inner critic and make art for somebody you love yourself. This has been a gaggle pod east studio production at Goggle pod. We've been helping creatives tell their story through podcasting since 2017 to connect with our network shows, go to gaggle pod.com. And if you need help, reach out to us. We'd love to share your story with the world. Our newest show, find a podcast about which can be found at find a podcast about doubt XYZ helps you find your next binge-worthy podcast and outsmart the algorithm. Take a listen today and find that next hit podcast.

Conversations On Community with Mike Porter

Create Art Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 15, 2022 55:13

Community Support and Building In this episode, I speak with Mike Porter, my comic book store guy about how community impacts artists and the need to build a community around yourself. Although Mike didn't think of himself as an artist, I thought it was important to have him speak about the impact of community on his business and practice as a shop owner and burgeoning writer. Hello friend, this is Timothy Kimo Brien your head instigator at Create Art Podcast where I bring my 20 years in art and education to help you tame your inner critic and create more than you consume. In 2022 I am rebroadcasting my former podcast KDOI Podcast here so you can catch up on what we have been doing for the past 4 years. KDOI Podcast was my first serious attempt at podcasting after spending many years just creating content without regard to the final product. KDOI started in 2016 and had 3 seasons until I closed it down in 2019. I wanted to make sure that these gems didn't get relegated to my external hard drives, so here you go, there will be interviews, commentary, and projects that you can do for yourself. Enjoy these rebroadcasts and Create More Than You Consume. This episode is about the novel, so enjoy. Topics Discussed Definition of Community : a unified body of individuals, the people with common interests living in a particular area. A group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society, a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered throughout a larger society, a body of persons or nations having a common history or a common social economic and political interests. A group linked by a common policy, joint ownership, or participation social activity, Quote from Gothe on Community : The world is so empty. If one thinks only of mountains, rivers, and cities, but to know someone who thinks feels with us and who through distance and who though distance is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us and in the inhabited. Quote From Fred Rogers on community : Reaching Out To reach out to me, email timothy@createartpodcast.com I would love to hear about your journey and what you are working on. If you would like to be on the show or have me discuss a topic that is giving you trouble write in and let's start that conversation. Email: timothy@createartpodcast.com YouTube Channel: Create Art Podcast YT Channel IG: @createartpodcast Twitter: @createartpod Transcripts of the show KDOI Rebroadcast Conversations On Community with Mike Porter Tim: Create art podcast. KDOI rebroadcast conversations on community with like Porter. Hello friends. This is Timothy Kimo. Brian, your head instigator for create art podcast where I use my twenty years. Plus. From my experiences in the arts and education world to help you tame your inner critic and create more than you consume. Now, a few years ago, I used to run a podcast called K D O I podcasts, which stood for Kimo's den of iniquity. I closed down that podcast and started up create art podcast because I felt. That is a better way to communicate to you what this podcast is about. So in 2022, I'll be rebroadcasting season three of Katie or podcasting. Now for this episode, I'll be talking with Mike Porter and we're going to be discussing community. And in each of these episodes, I start off with the definition of community and then two quotes. And then I talked to my guest to see what their opinion is on that topic. So I hope you enjoy. Welcome back friends. Welcome to KDOI podcasting Kimo's den of iniquity, where we create more than we consume. I am your head instigator, Timothy Kimo, Brian, many times creating art is done in an imposed isolation or away from our audience. When we do that, we can often feel like we're the only person doing the art we are doing. And we may never find our intended audience. It's important to find our community, to learn, to challenge and to inspire our creativity. I never went to conferences while in college, but since I left academia, I've gone to three conferences in two years about podcasting. Now, each time. The other weirdos that do what I do. I have a sense of family that I'm not the only crazy one out there doing this. It makes me want to push through blockages and create more. Now let's listen to what Merriam Webster says, a unified body of individuals, the people with common interests living in a particular area. A group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society, a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered throughout a larger society, a body of persons or nations having a common history or a common social economic and political interests. A group linked by a common policy, joint ownership, or participation social activity, our quotes come from Goethe or girthy. However, you'd like to pronounce his name. The world is so empty. If one thinks only of mountains, rivers, and cities, but to know someone who thinks feels with us and who through distance and who though distance is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us and in the inhabited. We also have Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers, to the most of us, we live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It is easy to say it's not my child at my community, not my world, not my problem. Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people. My heroes Guthy was a German writer in state. Is works, include four novels, epic and lyric poetry, prose, verse dramas, memoirs, autobiography, literary, and aesthetic criticism, and true to seize on botany and anatomy and color. Fred Rogers, otherwise known as Mr. Rogers was an American television personality, musician, puppeteer writer, producer, and I didn't know this Presbyterian minister. Dictionary definition was very long-winded. But what really spoke to me was body of persons of common and a specifically professional interests scattered throughout through a larger society. You know, we have shared interest in our exploration in inter interpretation of art. Yes, we are all over the world and we can always find a kindred soul that. For me, you can't go wrong with Fred Rogers. We do have a shared responsibility and isn't it great to know that we can help each other out. In fact, many artists I know are only too happy to help other artists out with supplies or a space to express themselves. Just like I'm doing here today. So let's get this conversation started. Mike Porter: making off of your art. Do you consider yourself a professional artist? Tim: All right, so it's $400. $400 a year. Is it 400 American or 400 Canadian or 400 Australian? It's $400 American Mike Porter: wise, unless you're a dual citizen and you're living in Australia, in which case it's whatever their tax codes is. Tim: Well, why does it have to be 400 Mike Porter: American? Because that is the amount Tim: that, but who determines that it has to be American, who is the determining factor who was saying that it has to be 400. Who says that the government they get, what, which government, the American government, why is Mike Porter: there an American government? There is definitely an off and on occasionally, Tim: every four years might be an American government. We get an extra day. If we want to be open. I like being open. I'm all about giving and being open Mike Porter: and honest. Tim: Oh no, I don't know. I didn't say that. No, Mike Porter: no, no, no. So open and dishonest, ask me anything. I'll tell you anything. Not necessarily the truth openly Tim: dishonest is a beautiful thing. Openly dishonest. That's that's the way I like to be. That's that's what I'm going to run my platform on that you are going to be the head Mike Porter: off, right? Except that can't be because I'm a Canadian citizen. Tim: That's. That's okay. We're going to run you for president. I'll be your vice president. And when you are elected, then you can just kind of go. I Mike Porter: don't, I don't even think I Tim: can run. Sure. You care. Anybody can run. No, Mike Porter: I think you have to be with the 35 years old and an American citizen Tim: technicalities, or you can run, you just can't win. Mike Porter: I don't think that's true. I think this is one of those openly dishonest. It sounds good. Tim: And folks, you have tuned into another episode of K D O I podcast, where we create more than we consume. And as you know, I'm Timothy Kimo. Brian and I have with me here are wonderful merchants of mercy, our purveyor of books of glean and happiness. Mr. Mike Porter with now is little fish, still an official thing, or is it not Mike Porter: a little fish? Comics died? Sasha's dead. I do have a secret nerd Panda, which is up and running. It is doing okay. But you can find me in person at Sage manages game evening, Tim: which we just came from this very afternoon before we recorded this podcast. And it was a very mirthful place. It, it, there's a lot of happiness in that place Mike Porter: For the people coming in. Yes. For the employees, not so much. Tim: See folks. That's why, when you go into these places, you need to provide either mirth or leave the employees. Don't feed the employees, help Mike Porter: feed Tim: what kind of food. Provide you with a sustainable amount of happiness for about two hours. Mike Porter: We do have a one customer who is a professional chef and he brings me pastries, apple pastries all the time. And I appreciate him very much. Tim: You know, so folks pastries, if you go into Sage manners, pastries is the way to go. Mike Porter: Now I am Canadian. So a. Donuts. They're an official food group in Canada. Oh, I did Tim: not know that I'm shocked being parked Canadian myself. I was not aware of that. Now. It doesn't have to be a certain type of donut. Mike Porter: Now us personally, I personally prefer jelly donuts, but jellies are great. Tim: What type of deal they needs to be in that donut? It Mike Porter: doesn't matter. It can be, it can be a custard, it can be a jelly. It can be they're all Tim: jellies. So a filling of some sort that is not cream, or it can even be a cream, like a Boston cream, Mike Porter: like a Boston cream is a jelly Tim: donuts. All right, fantastic. So folks, you know, Some donuts stacked. He needs them. He is not happy. He's happy where he's at and he's happy to serve the public and customers, but in order to get them even more happy, which I believe you could be more happy who couldn't be more happy. One of there's a few people that couldn't be more happy. Name one. One of my daughters, I'm sure couldn't be more happy. She could not be more happy. Cause she's my daughter. Oh, how could you be more happy than being. You would not know that you're not know Mike Porter: the answer to that. Tim: I do not have the answer to that, but you don't even a few years you could interview one of my daughters. It doesn't matter either one, they're both interchangeable and you can see, you know, what it takes to be more happy than what they are. Teenagers. Yeah, that's not loud then we'll get it out now. We're not missing. No, no, no, no, no. Don't curse me like that. That's just that's mean that's growing for Canadian kind of shocked and in awe that, I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you. That's what we're looking for here today, folks. So how Mike Porter: many apologies will you get out of me? Tim: In this episode? Okay. And we already got one 11 to go 11 to go. Let's see if we can do it. All right. So today's topic that we're going to be discussing today. Here is a community, right? So in the pre-show I've already read the definition of community and given the the two quotes that we're using today, one from Fred Rogers and one from Guthy or Gerta. So SuperNet people pronounce it, correct though. Healthy. My first question, he likes, how do you pronounce his narrative? Mike Porter: It's definitely Gurtis anyone who pronounces it go theme. You get to punch. Tim: Really? It's true. You get the punch that in my philosophy class. Okay. So the reason why he pronounced it, go for it. He is because some people do pronounce it that way before you go ahead and strike me down. Right. But I just, you know, for some of the folks out there, they, they want to pronounce it that way you prefer Gerta and that's. And that's okay. I Mike Porter: appreciate you allowing me to be right. Well, I Tim: like it when you're right, because then that means that I'm right. And you know, couldn't you be more happier if you were more right? I don't think you could be Mike Porter: many things would make me happier pronunciation of people's names. Probably not high on that list. Not high on the Tim: list. Okay. What do you think about the quotes that we had from from Gerta and from Fred Rogers? Okay. So Fred Rogers quote is and I have it right here. If you'd like to take a look at it again. Oh no, no. It is tattooed on your chest. I did see a tattooed on your chest. I don't know why you showing me his chest areas, but he is doing that right now. As we're sitting in this coffee shop for the Mike Porter: folks at home, the, just for the Tim: quote. Mike Porter: Him and talking about how the people that actually are involved in the community or the people that he sees as being heroes, that there are people that walk by or somebody is in trouble. They don't feel invested in that person, right. As, as part of a community and the people that stop and help that person or the people that fed Rogers consider as a hero, Tim: remembering the program. You want to remember this correctly. So you enjoy that E that really spoke to you. Right? My, Mike Porter: my rebuilt, I think that there's a lot of. Sidelines people and more now, I mean, it's weird to give an example when we moved into the neighborhood that we're currently in I went with home-baked goods to the neighbors and introduced myself and he was like, Hey, we're neighbors. We're just moving in. And they looked at me like I was insane. Because he was a stranger coming over and knocking on the door and, and introducing themselves, you only go to people's houses if there's an emergency, not a Tim: fear. Now let me ask you a question on this, because I've known you now for about five years. What color was your hair when you did that? Like the color of my hair was probably brown. It was brown. Okay. So it was a natural color, right. Okay. That's fine. Nevermind. Nevermind. Go ahead. The reason why that's, because I've had purple Mohawks and I can understand if somebody was a little. For clubs, shall we say a little bit alarmed. If I came up with baked goods to their house and said, hi, I'm your neighbor. Right. Mike Porter: But the point I, well, I don't know if this is a 409, but what, I'm, what I'm trying to move, maneuver myself towards. Is that the idea of what is a community it's changed in that? The face-to-face. Sort of interactions with people that, that community I think has drifted apart, but it's sort of been replaced with a digital community now, like the online people, you have the GoFund me's and the. Hey, help me out two pages and people will give money to the people in need and that's fantastic. But if they saw them on the street, wouldn't, wouldn't stop in and help. Wouldn't, you know, they look at the person who's homeless is an inconvenience when they're walking, but that same person will give money to somebody they don't know to have their window fixed or to help them get into college or to. So the idea of community, the what, what is the community has changed in that re in some ways it's a lot broader because we live in this digital world, but at the same time, the interpersonal in-person community is, has suffered, Tim: I think. And I can't Verify the information that I'm going to share with you. So I'm gonna share it with you anyways, right? Because just making this up because that's what we do know. I actually heard it someplace. I, I heard it on NPR and like they're very reliable, more reliable than my shell. I don't know. Okay. But certainly more viewers. Well, just three more viewers, three, just three more, you know, and that's, that's on statistics that I have created, right. And I don't have any viewers. I have listeners, but that's okay. I've got, you know, they've got three more than I do. So, but they were saying with the go fund me accounts that well, over half are dedicated to people's medical bills. So they're like one of the largest insurers in the country. Right. That doesn't surprise me at all. You know? So, you know, w we, we have a tendency to develop the community around us to better ourselves, well, to, you know, for an emerging. If we need it, but in order to enrich and enliven ourselves, we need to have the community around us. Right. Mike Porter: When, when I had little fish comics, at one point, there was. Vandalism incident with involving a what do you call them? Slingshots. And somebody broke the window in Tim: the front. It wasn't me. I know. I'm not saying it was just because I'm from Chicago. The way we don't use slingshots in Chicago, by the way, Mike Porter: that would be an amazing town. If it was a city, if it was Tim: just all slingshots, there would be, Hey, you know what? It'd be a lot nicer place to leave. Zack a lot nicer, fewer rocks, fewer rocks would be new. That's true. But somebody, one of our customers set up a GoFundMe for a little fish comics. Didn't didn't talk to me about it. Just set it up that, that day. And the community of people that were coming to the store donated enough to have the window repaired within 24 hours. Mike Porter: So that was crazy. And that's like, that's a cool way that the digital world can interact with. The actual sort of meat Tim: world, the meat world, as in like cow ham, Limburger cheese. Yep. Physical world, the physical world. Okay. I got you. As opposed to digital well understood digital meat I hear is making a breakthrough. Mike Porter: It's not as filling Tim: it really. Isn't looking at Mike Porter: pictures of cows. Tim: It's just not the same. And it's, you know, it's, it's satisfying yet. Not fulfilling. And I'll give you that, but in a satisfying to look at pictures of cows, I often look at videos of cows myself, but that's what I do, Mike Porter: nothing to say to that, Tim: nor am I looking for you to say anything to that? You know, what more can you say after that? So now Gerta is a thing is the world is empty. If one things only of mountains, rivers, and cities, but to know someone who thinks and feels with us and who through though distant is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth. And inhabited garden. How does that make you feel? Do you have a community now? You know, there's an arts program. We would talk a lot about arts here, obviously. And, and we had our I don't really want to call it a disagreement. We had our miscommunication we define words different. In our last conversation. Okay. Mike Porter: I have to refresh me in, what Tim: were your artists, the term artist, right. You were referring to a professional artist. I was referring to ameture artistry as, as being an artist. So for this, your community, do they provide you an inhabited. Artistically Mike Porter: artistic. Well, here's the thing that I think is kind of interesting about artistic community. I think that up to a certain point, they're incredibly helpful that they, they can inspire you to continue. They can push you to, to create when a community is made up of the same sort of. I'm going to use, let's say podcasting as an example, my impression of having listened to several people, talking about making podcasts and how to make podcasts. Up to the inception point of creating the podcast incredibly helpful and wonderful to each other. Once you actually have that podcast up and running, and it becomes a competitive competition, the community sort of doesn't help as much right now. That they're up and running. Now that you've gotten them creatively going now, you don't want them to have viewers because, or listeners, because you want those listeners for yourself. If they're talking about the same sorts of things, there's a a measure of where the pendulum is going to go and you want it to go towards you rather than towards them. Kind Tim: of like a territorial kind of thing, what you're saying. Right. Mike Porter: I've I've experienced it with writing in the sense of once as when you're a struggling writer. Professional writers will give you a lot of advice. Well, I'll give you a lot of helpful advice. As soon as you are a published author and you're interacting with another published author, it becomes weird because they, they're not talking to you like Like a mentor mentee. Not even at a, as peers, like getting equals you're, you're more guarded because if I have a story idea and I'm trying to flush it out or flesh it out I might not talk to somebody that I know has published a book because I'm worried that they will take that idea and publish it, because I know that they have the ability to do that because they've published before. Whereas somebody who is struggling as a writer, I might be, feel more free to talk about an idea in front of it and workshop an idea because I'm not as concerned that it's going to be stolen. So there's, there's a. Among communities of the same sort of art, art history. There's a guardedness. I think that happens at after a certain point at a certain level that doesn't help. Yeah. And I don't know if there's any way to get past that beyond. Proprietary thinking of that idea as being yours and getting to where I think is a more evolved state of, Hey, here's an idea. And even if they do something with that idea, it doesn't diminish what you're doing with the idea at all. So I think that's the sort of the next level of community is where, where you can get to that point. Openly discussing things without the fear, but generally speaking in, in sort of a consumer capitalist kind of, kind of base where you're chasing that the monetary value of things there's always going to be a guardedness that we're getting in the way of producing a creative idea in a community, in a group because who owns that idea? Tim: Exactly exactly who does own that idea. If a bunch of people developing it, if you workshop an idea, if you bring a short story to. And they toss him, their critiques windows become theirs when he does come. When does it become the communities and see speaking to yours. Right. You know and that, that can be a, a downfall of communities as well. Folks that are in the same disciplines, you know, a group of writers or group of podcasters. Absolutely. I've witnessed that too. You know, you get. You, you, you know what you're saying? That, that certain level of force no longer your amateur doing it for fun, doing it for a hobby it's Ooh. I just, you know with podcasting it's I scored my first advertiser. And then that was that next phase. How do I get my next advertiser on here? How do I get, you know, a beeline beeline B-level celebrities on my show, right. And there's really no way of going about doing it. Three conferences and it's all be pushed on monetization, monetization, monetization, and then they're going to show you how to do that, but you gotta pay a little, you gotta pay, you know, 40 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month for that. Right. And so it's no longer mentor mentee. The business, providing Mike Porter: a service at that point. It's not a, it's not that mentoring you they're, they're offering their expertise as a service to be mine and the fear and the, the, at least for me, like my still discomfort, when we go back to that idea of workshopping an idea. If I put, put forward a short story in a group and they add things in and I, I make use of that. There comes a point where you're. You have to give credit, right. And it's never clear at what that level is at what point you, you say, thank you for lying to the group for helping me workshop this, versus giving somebody an author credit versus, you know, the different levels of, of contribution. And then at the expectation of Reimbursement. If, if you say, well, this person did a lot of editing on, on my, my story. I'm going to give them a, a writing credit on it and being nice about it. Nice being, just being honest in saying, Hey X person helped the lawn experts and given, then go look at my, my name is on this too. I should be getting 50% of whatever. Exactly. So it becomes how much credit can you give and still make money with what you're doing. Tim: You kind of lose the the, the, the giving aspect of a community. Versus the what's in it for me. Right. Mike Porter: And that's, that goes to the Fred Rogers quote, actually, if you're, I think that that's sort of the fear of giving a credit or helping out. You're not going to get any, anything out of it. That's the person that Mr. Rogers is saying, isn't that isn't their hero. The person that's, that's volunteering, their, their expertise and help to solve. Is the person that he's looking at as Tim: being easier. Fantastic, fantastic thoughts there. Do you think and I'm going to play a little devil's advocate here and that's not just because that, you know, the drink that I have has a is an ex gold cup in the most of my tattoos have skulls on them. You get to keep that. No, I do not. As far as well, I don't know. I might, I could fit my bag nicely and I would assume, no, I wouldn't want to do that. I like these people here at this coffee shop that were fantastic, Mike Porter: but I'm Tim: going to play the devil's advocate here with that. And could it be that that what you, you know, published that first book once you get that first sponsor once you get that first a thousand dollars on Patrion. Sure. The other people that have. Guided you, mentored you at that point, then they kind of go, okay, well you've made it over that hurdle. You've made it over that goal. Fly be free. Now, now it's up to you to do that. Now it's up to you to repeat Mike Porter: that. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a, there comes a point when mentors become peers. And that that fits into community somewhere. I mean, you can have a community of peers, you can never I'm not sure. I'm not sure what your, your, your point is to it. Other than, other than just say that. Yes. I think that at some point you know, the student has become the master grasshopper that you've learned as much. Ken from somebody in a practical sense, but at least artistically since it's a creative endeavor, there's no limit on creativity. So you can keep learning from the same person and seeing how they create things and learn something new from them. As long as they're willing to let you observe or interact In terms of a community it, it becomes more difficult for peers in a competitive industry to help each other out Tim: their world is a very competitive thing. And there's Mike Porter: only so much wall space for your, for who gets to hang their P their paintings. Right. So that's true. If, if you get that, that showing, that means somebody else is, and I don't, I get, I think that goes to that, that idea that The more involved, artistic ideal would be congratulations. You've gotten this space and I will get my space. And it's, it's not a competition. But as long as we're looking at trying to make a living at it, we're going to be the professional versus the amateur. I mean, that's it, that's when it, when you can. You can't be as altruistic as you might want to be because you're going for a limited Tim: resource. So it basically, once you hit that point of you no longer to have that, your, your professional, then you don't necessarily. Cutthroat about it, but you have to you you've taken on a new master per se, instead of the the inspiration ferry that, you know, flies around that, you know, it's everybody, you have to think of it as a business. You have to go on that left side of the brain. Right? Mike Porter: I think, I think that the community is a lot more willing to help you out on the creative end of things, and a lot less willing to help you out on the business. End of things, because creative. We helping you develop an idea that you've come up with and right. That you, or tell your, your own or whatever that doesn't cost me anything. Right. Getting you to the, so once you have that idea and develop, once you have that painting done, once you have that story. And you're trying to get it published. That's where we start getting into competition. And that's where the community, I think, breaks down in the sense that we can work very well together on workshopping an idea. But as soon as you're trying to get it published, and if you're wearing the same art form, I'm writing a science fiction stories and you're writing science fiction stories. There's only so many places that are accepting science fiction stories. And I might not want to tell you that about an idea where you could actually sell that idea if I'm intending to submit something to that place, to And that doesn't make you a bad person, as I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking that it's also misguided in the sense that while you and I are both submitting something to the same people, we're not in competition with each other, we're in competition for their attention. My, you, you putting in. A great story. Isn't stopping me from putting in a great story and both of us feel accepted, but it's hard to get past that idea that it is a competition that even. I guess a more involved. I think you, you don't look at it as being in competition with each other. When you're living paycheck to paycheck to paycheck, it, I'm going to stop hitting the table because of you get Tim: the typical questions you want me to focus? He's about ready to flip over the table because he knows that if we were to go ahead in the science fiction, writing contest, he would beat the crap out of me. He's a better writer than. Mike Porter: It is very kind of you to Tim: say, well, I try to be kind like that because you know, I, I do fear you. I just, I thought I should let everyone know. I do. I do fear Mr. Porter here light mighty brain hit his mommy brain and is something that I have been eating all of ever since I lived in Chicago and he actually reviewed some of my work a long time ago in a galaxy. And provided some good criticism for me. And this was a long time ago. You may or may not remember it. Mike Porter: I think that you gave it to me at one of these spoken word. Open mics. Tim: I'm remembering correctly. I saw, and I give it to you when I lived in Chicago and we in tele my wife passed about two and that he can help me. I don't. Am I a minute spoken when I could be, you know, there's been many, you know, it serves so much time has passed. We've known each other for so long. Excellent. So with this community idea here do you think you would be better to have a community of different disciplines? W would you be more willing to do it? I think we need different disciplines. So let's say you wanted to do some writing and then you were in a group of painters, podcasters dancers. No, that congestion Mike Porter: first, first we have to overcome the idea that one discipline is better than another. No, I'm not. I'm not just, just trying to think of, of how that community would work because you would tend to. Collaboration. Because as a writer, I can sit in this coffee shop that we're in right now, and I can look at the paintings on the wall. Tim: It'd be inspired to write something because of that painting. I've my, one of my books of poetry wisdom from the it was 60 pounds, 30 poems in 30 days. I did it twice, you know, so I had 60 poems in 60 days. And I give it to my good friend, Heather, and I said, I need some illustrations paintings. What have you, anything grabbed me? And she did all the illustrations for it. And she did the editing on that poetry book. So I think. Our forms can influence and inspire each other. She's also a writer. She's also a poet and musician and all that kind of jazz. You know, she's got a lot like me, which is scary. She's the female version of me. Mike Porter: Well, do you think that makes it easier when you're a Jack of all trades like that? You can put a master of none you can look at at how other disciplines can interact in, you know, when you, when you're painting. And that inspires you to write a poem about that piece. Well, and good. You're you you've worked those two disciplines together. But if you're only. Tim: Oh, you're just a writer, just a lowly writer. Cause you know, we all know that the writers are the lowest ones on the totem pole. There are, what do they got a piece of paper and something to put it on. You don't even need a pen. You, you know, you can take a mark who decides example and be in the insane asylum and write a whole book with poop. I don't, I don't think that's true. That is true. I saw it on a movie once. Mike Porter: I don't think he wrote a book in feces. I think that's a great story. Tim: That's true. We will put it in the show notes. We will find out we'll do some investigative journalism here with all the money that you guys are putting in my patriotic. Oh, what, Mike Porter: what I think with a community of a diverse community of different art artists, artists, and artistic types. First you'd have to overcome the, the tendency for groups to come together. And that's where people who are like yourself that are able to bring together a diverse set of skills and different forms of artistry to bridge that gap because. Wow most, well, not most, but a lot. A lot of artists tend to be insular creatures. They live inside their own heads. And so when you get a group of artists together, it's usually a very quiet sort of, or it's incredibly Rawkus and has nothing to do with art. So in order to facilitate a productive community, you would have to have people that are able to bring up, bring people into the conversation. Okay. If you leave things to their own devices, I think that the painters would clump with Peters, right? As you'd pump with writers, and then they would maybe wave at each other across the room and say, your thing really inspired me. Thank you. And you're welcome sort of thing. But in order to actually get collaborations, you would need somebody to say, Hey, Hey, come in, Kevin, come into this conversation. What do you think. About X and, and make that that person share. And once you get those, those boundaries down, I think you would have an amazing group that that would fire off of each other. But until you have those, those facilitators in inside of a community of artists, I think it's, it's just going to be a lot of so quiet introspection and every so often, very hesitantly showing something to somebody else. Tim: So what's stopping you from creating this. Me, you might stopping you from this. Yes. It's Mike Porter: all your fault. Usually it's my fault for myself. Tim: Why would you want to partaking up the cup? You're picking up the cup now. He is, you know, deep in thought and he's being very contemplated here, folks. But my question to him is going to be, you know, would, do you feel yourself or would thrive if that community was presented to you? No. No. You don't think you would thrive that. Mike Porter: I, I think I can see how other people would thrive in that and how beneficial it would be. But I am, you're very handsome. I'm crazy shy. And I don't like groups of people and I would much rather, you know, My wife has said in the past, we'll go have fun and going into, into groups and we have very different, different definitions for fun in those things. I, I sort of at any gathering and up against a wall. Sort of watching and then every so often I'll make the effort to dive back in like one of those Valiant sea turtles, just sort of pushing, it's trying to get given the tide of the party will push me back up against the wall and get my breath back. Kind of get that energy back up being by myself and then I'll dive back into the party, but I'm Tim: telling you, it's not for you. Yeah. I'm not, Mike Porter: I'm not a big sharing kind of kind of person. Tim: Do you think that that would it's not for you, but do you, would you get benefit from it? Do you feel you would get benefit from it? Mike Porter: The. Brutal honesty of, of self-reflection reflection. I would probably benefit very much from it. I'm not sure anybody would benefit from me being there because I would not be sharing as much as I wouldn't be sort of quietly in the corner, listening and taking notes and bettering myself because I just, I don't deal with groups very well. Just not extroverted enough. Tim: Okay. We're not, we're not, we don't have the couch here today, so we're not going to psychoanalyze. I hope you're okay with that. Sure. Okay. Good. I mean, I, if you want to, we can go to my house in the man cave in the studio. I have a couch there with a vibrating chair. It doesn't have heat, but I do have a little, a little, a little firebox there that we can turn on and have some heat pour on us. And we can say, I call the sideline long as you, if you like. Mike Porter: Well, I'm just saying that right now. There's two of us. Tim: Yeah. Well, there's, there's three. There's you and me and the listener. Right. Mike Porter: But they're not Tim: interacting. Sure. They are. They're judging us as we're talking over Mike Porter: there quietly, what is he talking to him? He does not know what we're up. He speaks, but I don't know what they're thinking. So their judgment of me has no impact on me talking to you. I feel no. Wait. I have people around me judging what I'm saying. I feel a little bit because I'm in a coffee shop and I'm sure that other people can hear me and then feeling a little nervous, more nervous now that I'm thinking about that, Tim: but you're here with me. Right. And I'm a very, yeah, you can take, you can take them a very extroverts. I've been known to be that way on occasion. Okay. So I'll take them on for you. If anyone, everyone harasses you, Chicago Tims. But, but the point being that Mike Porter: There was a point something oh, that I, that I don't mind the, the, the idea of the listener, because I, it's not going to effect what I'm saying right now. On the other hand, if I was in a, in a room. With the expressed purpose of us as a group, doing something together, I would feel a great deal of weight in expressing my, my opinion to a bunch of people that would be judging that opinion in real time. In front of me, which again goes back to that idea of digital community. I'm a lot more comfortable sharing stuff on a, on a forum than I am in in person. Tim: So maybe what we need to do is to set up a community where you can be cloistered in a room where you can view what's going on, and then you provide your feedback without having. Actually be in the physical presence of the people that would be in the room and then they could get a read out of it, you know, that you could write your paragraph or whatever it is and say what you liked and what you didn't like about it. And then, and just leave it at that. And then that way you don't have to interact with these. Yeah, that's weird. Okay. We won't do that for you kind of prompt. So this idea of community things that the artists communities are not necessarily your cup of tea and it's understandable. It's understandable. You've explained yourself. Mike Porter: I love the idea of You know, that the artists, community of painters that are off and they all have the same thing that they're painting and PG moves around and looks at their stuff and it gives them pointers in that you're there to develop your skill at painting. And I'm sure the same thing can work for, for almost any artistic endeavor. But when it's more. Interactive when it's more on the level of peers, that's where I get really nervous. So that's comfortable. And I don't think I would be the hero that Mr. Rogers would want me to be. Tim: And you need to be the hero, Mr. Rogers, much. Mike Porter: Everybody should be the hero that Mr. Rogers minds, Tim: folks, you heard it here for student Mr. Rogers. She's going to move you coming out here Mike Porter: on Netflix and Tim: it's fantastic. It is on Netflix. Did I miss it in the theater? Yeah. I Mike Porter: don't know if it was released in theaters. I'm not sure Tim: Tom Hanks, right. It was a play Mr. Mike Porter: Rogers. Oh. And we're thinking of something else. There's a movie coming out with Tom Hanks. I wasn't aware of, but there is a biography of Mr. Rogers there on Netflix currently. And it was really good. Tim: I know. I was actually talking there is. From what I understand now, again, you know, NPR has better information than I do because they have three more listeners than I do through our viewers than not listeners, but viewers. But yeah, there's a movie that's supposed to come out with Tom Hanks being, playing a part of. Mike Porter: But you're listening to a higher caliber. Tim: They're they're they're they're very good looking folks. More discerning. They are more discerning they're way more intelligent. That's what I heard. That's Mike Porter: that's what I know. I heard that recently, Tim: I, I know that they are way more intelligent, way more. They're nicer people. There are people that you want to, you know, bring over to your house. And have a wonderful conversation with, well, bring over to your house. I'll bring over to my house. Absolutely. I'd love to bring all the people that listen to this podcast over to my house. Right. And you know, I, I would cook some poutine for some of them, man, that would be enjoyable. And for the other people, I would you know, bust out my grill in a grilled from steaks. Some asparagus grilled asparagus is very tasty and the the the little dish that I made last night for my wife, with the Alfredo sauce, the pasta shells asparagus, and we had not scaling. Scallops scallops. Thank you. You're welcome. Oh my gosh. The scalps animated that my wife and I had three bowls off in less than 24 hours and she thoroughly enjoyed. She's probably going to have some more tonight. Mike Porter: We'll see. Before this is a community. You can define the community by what foods you do. Okay. Tim: And you really can't, you really can't, you know, there's, there's people that like the. The farm farm to table stuff. There's people that are you know, raw they like nothing cooked, vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, pescatarians, peanut, the buck Tarion's, you know, all that kind of good stuff and the omnivores. And of course the carnivores, which they'd all the carnivores have tiny little arms just saying, all right. Well, Mike, thank you so much for this conversation with us here on community. You provided a lot of great insights, I think. And you know, folks community is out there for you. I think you can create community if you really want to, they might bring up some fantastic points about once it comes from a mentor mentees situation to a appear situation. I think he made some great points with that. Is there anything else that you'd like to leave us with with community? I think that the only other thing that I would say about community is that almost by definition, it's an investment. You have to be willing to invest time and effort in order to build community communities. Mike Porter: Don't just happen if they did, when I brought Cookie's over to the neighbors. They would have just been, Hey neighbor, thank you. Sort of thing. You, you have to continually reinforce the idea that the people that you want to be in a community with are important to you, that they have value and that you have. Insight or value for them. And that's what keeps the community together. I think the idea that you're in something together, or you have something to share with each other in common. Excellent. Tim: Excellent. And yeah, just like we're building this community with you, our listeners. He must end up iniquity where we create more than we consume. Can't wait for y'all to listen to this episode and the rest of our episodes. Go back through our catalog. You can always reach out to us at kdoipodcastingatgmail.com. Let us know if you would like to get involved in this. We have 11 topics for you to choose from Mike here. He chose this topic. I well, you chose two topics. And I we picked this one. We may get him to talk on the other topic at a later time. But that's how easy it is. Mike did was this pretty easy? This was Mike Porter: fantastic. I love doing this. This is a painless way of expressing opinion. It's like, if you don't like, I, everybody likes talking about themselves. And an extension of that. I think it's you asking? I think about X. Well, let me tell you about and why I think that my opinion, why my opinion matters. Tim: So next episode with Mike here, we are going to ask him when he thinks about the letter X. That's right. We'll probably use the capital X versus the lowercase X because you know, Mike has a lot of thoughts about the I believe it's true. He had more thoughts about the upper case versus the lower case. So again, thank you for gratuity. We will see your next episode. Remember you consume All right. Well, thank you for joining me. As I go down memory lane in discussing community with Mike Porter, he was my cartoon, not my comic book guy, not my cartoon guy, but he was my comic book. Way back in the day. Unfortunately he had closed his shop, but it was a fantastic conversation that we had at a local coffee shop here in town. So you got to hear a little bit of the ambiance as it were. I really enjoyed doing these conversations on specific topics with a lot of my artistic friends. And I hope you got something on. Now I would ask you if you did get something out of it, go ahead and subscribe or follow on your podcast app of choice. Or you can go right ahead to the website, create art podcast.com and subscribe right there in 2022, we're going to be doing these KDOI rebroadcasts there'll be 10 episodes. This is the first one and we'll have our regular episodes. And I also want it. Remind you that I run another podcast called find a podcast about, and that's where we help you find your next spring, where the podcast and outsmart the algorithm. And you can find that at find a podcast about dot X, Y, Z. For creating art podcast, you can email me timothy@createartpodcast.com. Twitter and a Instagram account and a YouTube page for you as well. All the links will be in the show notes. So it's been my pleasure to help you team your inner critic and create more than you consume. Now. Go out there and create some art for somebody you love yourself. We'll see you next. This has been a gaggle pod, east studio production gagglepod pod, where we've been helping creatives tell their story through podcasting. Since 2017, you can find all of our network shows at gagglepod.com. You can contact with. We want to help you tell your story to the world through .

Tim James - Optimizing Health With a Chemical Free Body

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 16, 2021 58:52

This week, I'm excited to welcome Tim James to the podcast. Tim is the founder of chemicalfreebody.com and the host of the Health Hero Show. He has a mission to help people put themselves in the health first and supports their transformations with articles, videos, coaching, and arrange of natural products. In this episode, we discussed the commonly used chemicals that we should try and avoid, the biggest weight loss misconceptions, and where to start when wanting to quickly improve our health. Questions asked in the episode - Are there any commonly used chemicals in particular that we should mindfully avoid? - Which lifestyle changes made the most immediate difference to your health? - What are the biggest misconceptions regarding the weight loss industry? https://180nutrition.com.au/ Stu Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and welcome to another episode of The Health Sessions. It's here that we connect with the world's best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long lasting health. Now, I'm sure that's something that we all strive to have. I certainly do. Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That's right. We are into whole food nutrition and have a range [00:00:30] of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website. That is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay. Back to the show. This week, I'm excited to welcome Tim James to the podcast. Tim is the founder of chemicalfreebody.com and the host of the Health Hero Show. He has a mission to help people put themselves in the health first and supports their transformations with articles, videos, [00:01:00] coaching, and arrange of natural products. In this episode, we discussed the commonly used chemicals that we should try and avoid, the biggest weight loss misconceptions, and where to start when wanting to quickly improve our health. Over to Tim. Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and I am delighted to welcome Tim James to the podcast. Tim, how are you, mate? Tim Hey, I'm doing good, brother. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to share today. Stu Yeah, [00:01:30] me too. We've got lots of questions to get stuck into. But first up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work, I'd love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, please. Tim Yeah, absolutely man. So I grew up over in Eastern Oregon. So I'm over here in the states on a small cattle and hay farm. So that was a really good way to grow up. I feel like my parents and the people around there are good decent people and I learned a lot of common [00:02:00] sense. I was out in nature a lot. We had Hereford cattle. We did grass and alfalfa hay. And I had a great childhood, man, growing up outside as a kid. You don't need a whole lot of toys. Nature is the playground. It's pretty awesome. For full transcript and interview:https://180nutrition.com.au/180-tv/tim-james-interview/

health nature wellness nutrition natural weight loss stuart optimizing cooke hereford tim james eastern oregon chemical free body tim yeah health hero show health sessions

When Consolidated Agencies are Not a Holding Company

The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2021 30:13

Tim Ringle is Global CEO of Meet the People, an “international family of unified but independent agencies. In the three months since its inception, Meet the People has acquired 3 agency brands. Tim has bigger plans. He intends to bring in a total of up to 15 agencies, reaching from Canada and the US to Europe and Asia. “We have 400 people in North America right now. We want to be 2,000 people in at most 18 to 24 months globally.” Even though he is acquiring agencies at a fast pace, Tim says what he is not building a holding company. He explains that holding companies have been consolidating the industry, the trend a “survival response” to complications from the digitization of processes and channels and, more recently, because covid has changed how work is done. He says small agencies may need to hire one or more people “just to handle the benefits, taxes, payroll, inflation, and salary increases” of those employees who now want to work from “anywhere,” where “anywhere” has different laws, tax rates, and costs of living and working than at an agency's home office. Tim sees holding companies as a powerful trend. Even though there are 14,000 independent agencies in the United States, six major holding company networks “own sixty percent of the entire media industry within the agency space.” However, Tim says, they often don't act in the best interests of their clients because they are driven from the top by financial rather than client interests. He claims that both small, independent agencies and holding companies often fail in communicating when passing clients from one agency or holding-company-entity to the next. “They're only going to talk to each other if there's some money to be made in between . . . there's a lot of lost information . . . .” In Meet the People's “family,” the agency owns its affiliate agencies, but the people within those affiliate agencies also “own a part of Meet the People.” The network structure provides “a fully integrated approach for brands . . . to cross-pollinate across multiple services,” the opportunity for the agency to build multi-brand micro-offices, and scalable support for dealing with “anywhere” variances. Tim says, “Keep the brand, be the best you can, but let us create connective tissue between the different companies to see if we can increase share volume with a client.” Tim has a lot of experience building global agencies. He says he has learned that it is extremely important, “especially in the beginning of the engagement,” to build trust with the client. To do this, his team of disparate agencies will need to work as one. Tim is bringing his people together physically to take time to create “a deep understanding and culture between all the different offices, people, trades, and brands,” building what Tim describes as an “integrated DNA.” They also will be discussing the implementation of individualized OKRs (Objectives, Key Results), a tech tool for tracking accountability. Tim says his agency is very focused on operational excellence, on brand positioning, on bringing really good entrepreneurs . . . and on hyper-goals. He says it is important to make the right decisions now because, “if you build something with small cracks, they become massive gaps when you are at scale.” As his agency network continues to grow, Tim is excited about finding “really talented entrepreneurs who want to change the industry who can't or are tapping out” with their skills/abilities/finances and being able, through Meet the People, to provide the experience, capital, and structure and small-enough scale “where they can actually still move things.” Tim can be reached on his agency's website at: https://www.meet-the-people.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast I'm your host Rob Kischuk and I'm joined today by Tim Ringle, Global CEO at Meet the People based in New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Tim. TIM: Hi, Rob. Thank you for having me. ROB: It's great to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Meet the People, what is the business, and what are you all best at. TIM: I think, to understand what we are building with Meet the People, you have to understand a bit of my background. I've been an entrepreneur in the agency space – primarily digital agency space for 24 years. That sounds long but I'm also 45 years old so I can carry that. I started my first agency literally in the basement of my friend's house. We started as a SEO agency digital marketing agency, very much focused on performance marketing. I was blessed to be able to do that in '98, '99 – when this industry was about to develop and therefore was able build that business to 150 people and then sell the business. After that, I did a reverse takeover of the company that bought my business –and that got me to around 400 people in Europe. So, I started my first business in Germany – my native Germany – and we scaled the 400 people agency that was all across Europe into 1,000 people. It was stock market listed in beautiful Paris. I left that to move to the dark side of the ad industry as I call it. Having built multiple agencies as an independent agency entrepreneur, you were always battling the holding companies, right? And I swore to myself many times because they beat me and sometimes I beat them. That's how it works, right? I swore to them I would never work for them. So, I ended up moving to New York City and working for 1 of the holding companies who always wanted to acquire my business. So, I did that for 3 years within IPG. I have to say the experience was amazing. I really learned a ton of stuff that I couldn't learn from being someone who was leading 1,000 people. Now I was part of 65,000 people. I inherited an agency there – once again, a performance marketing agency – around 1,000 people – and then left it after 3 years scaling it to 3,000 people. So, I've done this a couple of times and what we're building with Meet the People is what I would say is version number four of my vision of what an independent agency network should look like. We're building it with my 24 years of experience of what I liked and disliked in the agencies that I've built in the past. What I liked the most was that people in the advertising industry are mainly driven by culture. If you're good in your trade in advertising, you can get a job anywhere on the client side in tech companies. You can build your own company because marketing, just like legal, is a service that you always need everywhere. So, selling a product, branding a product, coming up with a marketing strategy is something you can use pretty much in every business in the world. It's 1 of the integrated parts. Why do people choose to work for an agency? Because they love the culture in agencies, right? What we're doing at Meet the People – when we looked at the industry and I had – I still have the same vision. I'm building a global agency network as an alternative to the large holding companies. I figured that nobody's talking about the people anymore. Everybody's talking about technology, data, automation, and how computers will replace us, how AI will come up with creatives – all this kind of stuff. It's true that the technology has enabled us to be extremely more efficient. But, in the end, the new Coke logo or the new “just do it” from Nike does not come out of AI or a computer, it comes out of the brain of a human being a creative strategist. So, we believe (or I believe) that we have to remember in the ad industry that it's all about the people. We are a service industry. Without the people who are sitting behind the machines and using the machines, tech enabled, we're not going to produce disruptive, new ideas that actually put a brand on the map. That's why we're building Meet the People. I can obviously talk much more about it. But that's kind of it in a nutshell. ROB: When you say an agency network . . . what does that look like when it's an agency network? It's not a holding company. I'm curious about the differentiation of some of the different agencies within the network and how you think about that – because your website is very people-centric. It's more about the people, the partners, than it is about this brand and this specialization and this other thing we just acquired and all that you see in the holding company world. TIM: Correct. So, why am I not calling it a holding company? A holding company has one purpose – and it is a financial orientation. right? So, a holding company is most a holding company because it is actually managed by finance people. I don't necessarily I don't want to diss anyone. But I would say that a finance-led company most probably will be struggling with creating the best strategy, best creative, and best outcome for their clients. They might create the best outcome for themselves, right? That's why we're not calling ourselves a holding company. We are running this network of agencies who, don't misunderstand me, we do own the agencies – and the people within the agencies own a part of Meet the People. That's the concept. We are building this, first of all, to fulfill a fully integrated approach for brands so, instead of just servicing one client within one specialty with one agency, we are allowing the conversation to be elevated and to cross-pollinate across multiple services. For example, when our creative agency, VSA Partners, out of Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Beautiful, creative design work and strategy. When they come up with a brand refresh or rebranding or brand strategy – I would love to see that through until you actually can see it on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn – wherever that brand comes to life besides on brochures, in magazines, or the logo or the CI. Many independent agencies, because of their size and their financial scrutiny because they're small, can't invest a lot of capital into innovation or additional services. They can't see that journey through. That means you have a lot of inefficient handshakes in between. That happens in holding companies because they're structured that way, but it happens in independent agencies as well. One independent agency is a hundred people might be excellent in creative. The next one might be excellent in social media. But they're only going to talk to each other if there's some money to be made in between. There's a lot of lost information when a chief creative officer comes up with a brand strategy and somebody implements that on social media in community management. We want to make that a much more seamless flow with less barriers for the client but also more excitement for the people involved because you actually see the product living there and a colleague of you in another agency – but it's part of our structure – has basically put that on the social channel or billboard. ROB: When you come to thinking about – there's, obviously, within a holding company lots of capabilities, you're talking about these more seamless handoffs. How do you think about building that team? Did you go out hunting for best of breed agencies to bring them into the group or did you build some capabilities from scratch? How did you think about this? TIM: We were going to do both. We started Meet the People three months ago and since then we had 3 agency brands join us – so we acquired 3 brands. Three agencies and we're going to bring more than 10 – probably 15 plus – companies into Meet the People as a group. We're going to do that in North America – so we already have US, Canada, some capabilities. We're going to do it in Europe and then we're going to do it in Asia. How we decide what to go for depends on what services we need next in that journey. Right now, we have a very strong creative agency with VSA Partners and we have a very strong experiential agency with Public Labels. We have certain services that sit in a similar bucket where the client sees the service, so that adjacent service is part of the scope. If we don't service that ourselves. then we should basically fill that gap either with another agency joining us or with building these capabilities organically with the acquire or actually hire before revenue. Ultimately, we want to have a seamless handshake between the different trades. ROB: We have 2 former guests who have been acquired into a similar opportunity recently – which is interesting. We had Chantel from Imagine Media and Techwood Digital were both acquired. Jared Belski, who was the CEO of 360i, has rolled up 3 or 4 agencies. That's all I know. Is this a trend or is this just 2 people that happen to have done a similar thing and why now? TIM: No, it is a trend. As much as I don't like the traditional holding company model, we have to respect that the holding companies have created an industry. Because there's 14,000 independent agencies in the United States alone. Fourteen thousand and there are six networks and the six networks own sixty percent of the entire media industry within the agency space, right? So they've created an industry. We all live in that ecosystem and that industry. The trend right now and primarily driven by the extreme success of what whatever intention Martin Sorrell, Sir Martin Sorrell, had to bid as for capital. If it was ego, if it was revenge, I don't know. He only knows. But he has been extremely successful from a financial perspective doing that because there is a gap, a vacuum in the Market. So, there's models like that that are older than the S4 Capital MediaMonks model. MediaMonks is only 3 years old but Stagwell MDC by Mark Penn is 5-6 years old and You & Mr. Jones is also 7 years old, I think. So, there's a couple of these what we call an agency rollup network model. They existed for years. What has changed in the industry is covid has accelerated the fact that independent agencies got scrutinized because of their size. Before, when you were 100 people, you could live a very good life as an independent agency. There's two real trends. One is the digitalization of processes and channels. At the same time covid is putting extraordinary pressure on talent, new work. This is all very complicated for smaller companies to handle because now your people tell you, “I want to work from anywhere.” How are you going to do that from a benefits perspective . . . tax perspective? It creates complications. Clients are the same. “Oh, I don't need you to come into my office anymore, but I want to take T&E out of your expenses.” Economy of scale becomes more and more important. A couple of people have understood that, so these networks are created over the last couple of years. But they're also created all over the planet. So there are networks in Asia, networks in Europe, networks in the US. There's only very few who can bridge multiple continents. This is one thing we're going to do with Meet the People. We're going to bridge multiple continents because we believe (or I believe) that our clients want the same quality of service across multiple jurisdictions that are not only North America. So, I've not invented this model, right? They exist. They're very successful. The main reason why they're successful is that, when you have, as I said, 100 people on your P&L, it's very difficult for you to invest a million dollars into innovation technology. You might only have a million dollars of profit and you want to keep some of that. Usually, it's very difficult for them to hire before revenue, to anticipate bigger jumps. In economy of scale, it's easier for us to say, “Ten, twenty percent of our EBITA goes to a business strategy consultancy layer that most agencies can't afford or a technology IP that you actually own as a company. We can make these investments. And that makes it extremely attractive. ROB: How do the capital markets feel about this sort of arrangement? I know there's a lot of money out there looking for yield. I could also see the case that you just have to self-finance this sort of thing if you want to. Where is the money side of the world? Are they looking to fund this sort of thing because they need something to believe in and something that's going to give them better than inflation? Although inflation is getting pretty good now. TIM: Let's make a relatable example. Let's imagine you have a million dollars excess capital right now. You have it lying around. Where are you going to put it? You can put it into crypto. Very risky. You can put it into NFTs. Even riskier. You can put it into traditional venture capital. So, there's a lot of money in the market. But there's also a lot of options in the market. You know pre-IPO, post-IPO, or FinTech, software as a service, space – there's so many categories. The service business as a sector in general or the advertising industry service side of it – not MarTech AdTech – it's not the most attractive industry to invest money. Why? Because you have no tangible assets. The desks, the computers – they're all at home right now. As people, as a company, you maybe own intellectual property. But mostly you have a lot of walking assets and that's your people. For the longest time, the ad industry was not super attractive for larger investors. That has dramatically changed because of the pressure coming from tech. Tech has gotten so heavy on advertising and so relying on advertising. Same time that there's more capital in the market and that a couple of people, including Sir Martin and others, have proven that you can make real money there. Most of the investment in this space is private equity and I would say large family offices. ROB: It's fascinating just to see this emerge. I think I hear what you're saying that you know there's all these different factors in play, right? You have some firms that are a little bit “walking wounded” due to . . . it does get complicated when people want to be in different states and now you're having to pay taxes on your payroll in different states. There's an economy to having 1,000 people, 10,000 people where you know what there's a department that handles that baked into the margins of the overall business. I totally get it. TIM: Yeah, and you don't go through this alone, right? If you have a 50-people business and 20 people decide they don't want to work from New York anymore or LA, they're going to work from anywhere, you need to hire at least 1 more person just to handle the benefits, taxes, payroll plus inflation increases plus salary increases. So, it's complicated. What's important about Meet the People is we give that layer at scale, but the agency brands stay independent in their DNA. We're not changing their brands. VSA Partners that joined us at the beginning of the year is VSA Partners. They've done that. This work for 40 years . . . successful. They're an incredible, talented shop and great people. Why would we change any of that? Doesn't make any sense. Keep the brand, be the best you can, but let us create connective tissue between the different companies to see if we can increase share volume with a client. You're already sitting on an amazing client. You define the strategy. Why don't we talk about who actually builds the website, who actually manages social media? Why don't we talk about it because we already have that relationship? That is very attractive to companies who don't have that client access. There's a lot of independent agencies who are very specialized, who would die to get into a client like Google or IBM or Ford who just can't because they don't have the gravitas. ROB: When it comes to new and existing business, it sounds like you have some thoughts about the role of location. But the role of location is different from what it used to be. On the one hand you mentioned having offices and having people in these different geographies. But you also had this dynamic where some of the agencies that are joining the network may have played very much off a home field advantage that may not be the case anymore. So, how are you looking at the strategic role of geography? TIM: I think geography stays extremely important. I'm someone who grew up with in-person meetings and built businesses within in-person meetings. I do believe in-person meetings to create chemistry. Especially in the beginning of the engagement with the client, it's extremely important because you're not only buying a service, you're buying the trust into the person across from you. Because there's so many agencies out there. So many service providers out there. Who are you going to go for if the service is extremely comparable and they sadly so are? In the creative space, not as much, but in the digital execution, who does better search than that person – there is a chemistry factor to that. I think in person will stay extremely relevant. Our strategy here is to say, instead of having large headquarters, we're going to have more micro-offices. When we have 10 agencies, let's say in North America, it's extremely likely that we end up having 20 offices all over the place. Instead of having one person in a WeWork, we're going to have 20 people from maybe 5 different agencies in Austin, Texas. Or we're going to have the same in Dallas, or we're going to have the same in San Francisco. We already have 5 offices in North America and anyone from these companies can really work from anywhere within these proximities. We also hire outside of these proximities because we want to have at some point an office in Miami, maybe in New Orleans, and whatnot. So, I foresee that we have certain client-centric larger footprints in New York, LA, San Francisco. We have Boulder, Colorado, we have Chicago, we have Toronto . . . but we're going to have a lot of micro-offices because we need to have flexibility. That's new work. This is part of that. Maybe one of the things we got from covid . . . besides covid. ROB: Really fascinating. Tim, we quite often ask people what lessons they've learned and what they would do differently, but it strikes me that you are actually in the process of getting to do things differently. You know we say, what would you do if you were starting over? You, you have had a chance to do that in some cases. An interesting thing about this model is you're kind of starting on third base but you have agencies who have made it here on their own journeys and you're having to coalesce something together. What are you doing differently in the structuring of Meet the People that you learned in your past and said, “It's got to be different”? TIM: One thing that we're doing the same is creating a deep understanding and culture between all the different offices, people, trades, and brands. I've done this before. The last business I managed for IPG, I ended up having 72 offices around the globe. The business before had 25 offices around the globe and we made sure that these people met physically. It sounds counterintuitive during covid but, the fact that you spend time together workshopping. For example, let's say we have five companies and all their creatives can come together in one location for three days and talk about the differences of their work approach. That would be such a forming experience for them because they all are going to learn from that. You have some people who have done this for 40 years. You have some people who are doing this for 4 years. It's that culture of respect, of understanding, of bringing the different traits together. I think that is extremely powerful. I learned through this journey that you can have you can have the best product in the world. If your people don't believe in it, you're not going to go anywhere. Creating that belief and creating that culture and creating that integrated DNA is a little bit of magic that's extremely important to build a successful business. That's what I learned. What I go to do different, and I kind of promised my wife I would, is travel less. I don't think that's not happening. What I try to do is travel a little bit less because covid allows for that new model. The second thing that I learned is to run an agency a little bit more like an agile tech company. Not because I want to strip away the creativity or anything – none of none of that. The problem in many agencies is that there's a lack of accountability because of a mutual understanding that the creative process is complicated. You know what I mean. Building a tech product is as complicated and needs as much creativity. But somehow there are better levers or control mechanisms in there that allow you to achieve a target in your planning session a little bit quicker and more agile. We want to apply a little bit of startup thinking to a very traditional industry. ROB: I think anybody in the startup industry would claim the same degree of creativity and the same degree of craftsmanship. I'm very much from a software development background and if you want to talk about something that resists measurement. People always say, “Building software is not the same as building a house. You can stamp out houses, but software is a different thing.” Yet within technology there are certain constraints that you talk about. You don't get to just walk away and say, “Well I'm sorry. It'll take some amount of time and we'll show up and it'll be great. There's process to it. TIM: In the advertising industry, that is not always the case. People walk away and they say, “I'm going to come back in a week or two because I don't know when I'm going to come to a product.” I get that because it's creative and it needs time but in many of these trades you can have OKR's, for example. So you can have certain accountability factors or set certain targets. That's how you can manage a large company. A bit more agile and efficient. ROB: Yeah, so to talk about OKR's for a moment because they're popularly said, but I think sometimes poorly understood. Where did you come to a good understanding of them and how do you think about deploying them? TIM: I've got to be honest with you. This is why I got my management team together in New York this week. They're all here in the office in New York – came in from Germany, London, Connecticut. Sounds like a long trip but we're all coming together. ROB: Can be. TIM: We are coming together right now, here in New York, to decide “how do we implement OKR's within an agency environment” and we're not done with that journey. We're not done with the discussion, but we do know we want to approach it a little bit different than the last 3 times we did it together. I think in six months' time I can answer that question much better. I do believe that OKR's need to be very individualized. Your overall underlying principles are the same, but you have to individually craft it towards your organization because you don't want to over-engineer it as well, right? You need to give people the freedom. So, I will be able to answer that question in three to six months ROB: Sounds good, sounds good. Tim, as you're thinking about what's next for Meet the People and for this evolved holding company model, what's coming up next? What are you excited about? TIM: For us, it's hyper-goals. We have 400 people in North America right now. We want to be 2,000 people in at most 18 to 24 months globally. So, we are very much focused on making the right decisions now because, once you build something with small cracks, they become massive gaps when you are at scale. So, we're very much focused on operational excellence, on our brand positioning, on bringing really good entrepreneurs. When I look at companies, we have to do the financial background checks and stuff like that needs to be in order. But I'm looking much more for entrepreneurs who see that the industry needs to change. That is where the minds are aligned with the companies we are looking at and acquiring and partnering with. That's what I'm most excited about, finding really talented entrepreneurs who want to change the industry who can't or are tapping out with their skills or their abilities or financially and asking, how do I get from 50 to 100 people? How do I get from 100 to 200 people? We bring the experience. We bring the capital. We bring structure where they can actually still move things – because we're not 10,000 people or 5,000 people like our competitors are. So, that's what gets me most excited. Then, obviously, there's always something new in our industry, there's always something new, right? It never stops. I remember when I built my first agency, I thought, when I master search, I'm going to be done with this. Affiliate marketing comes along. Oh well. Then I master affiliate marketing. Then social came and I mastered social. Programmatic came. It never ends – and that's also, to some extent, very exciting because you keep having to learn and adapt. At some point, I will age out, where people will tell me, “Tim you know what? Just drink your coffee. You know we have got it because you don't, and you don't get it anymore.” ROB: (Laughs) Ah, so it's always a struggle to try and figure out what things you might be aging out of and what things are just a little weird. It's always a little bit of both. TIM: That's right. And what's the little bit of bullshit right now in the industry that you can just face over. You don't need to go deep. ROB: I think there were moments early in social where it felt very experimental. It felt very strange. It felt very frothy. We've been through that on an influencer. You were around. I was around. You look at the crypto world and it seems almost like – I could be dead wrong – I think the thing that's most misunderstood but also well observed now about the dot Com era is everything happened eventually. But it didn't happen then. That's maybe where we're at with crypto. I'm not sure. TIM: Well, like crypto is one thing, but then think about NFTs, right? ROB: Yeah, I'm lumping that in. Yeah TIM: Okay, if you lump it all into one OKR, fair enough. I can talk for hours about my diverse opinions on NFTs and the NFT world. Nevertheless, we have clients who are extremely excited about and who really want to deploy capital, being part of that industry because there's the strong underlying belief of making something really good at the same time. There is this unnecessary social hype on certain topics where I'm thinking, “Guys, you're destroying something that was meant to be really good. I think blockchain and crypto is falling or has fallen into a similar trap where the underlying idea . . . because technically I'm an engineer, right? I got my first pc when I was eleven. Taught myself coding and all this kind of stuff. So, I love the idea of blockchain and decentralized holding of assets and accountability and ledgers. That's amazing. It could solve so many problems in world. The problem is that when dodgecoin comes along in Shibona or whatever, the next thing is, it drags it in the dirt. The underlying technology is incredible. The sad story is people want to get rich fast and lots of them don't. ROB: That's right. It happened before. People built the worst websites in the world for a couple million bucks back once-upon-a-time early internet. TIM: But you remember when you could buy 1 pixel on a website or something like that for a thousand dollars and there were these crazy businesses out there and it's coming back, just differently now. My hope is that just like the dot com bubble . . . yes, there was a hype. Yes, there was a crash but, after that an actual industry developed. So, I'm hoping that we're going to go through the same thing with NFTs and some of these offsprings of crypto. ROB: That makes complete sense. Well, Tim, Thanks for hopping on. Thanks for illuminating us on what's going on in this holding company opportunity, what you're doing with that. I think it's interesting you started and you kind of knew what it looked like to run a large organization. I can imagine starting with 2 people in a closet might not always be the best use of those skills. It's neat to see the industry lining up in a way that that lets us see so much happen so quickly. So, thanks for coming on. Good to have you, Tim. TIM: Thanks Rob for having me. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. ROB: Alright, be well, thanks, bye.

The “Banksgiving” Special with Tim Banks

The Recruitment Hackers Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2021 34:54

About TimTim's tech career spans over 20 years through various sectors. Tim's initial journey into tech started as a US Marine. Later, he left government contracting for the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores. Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with clients in his current role. Tim is also a father of five children, as well as a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. Currently, he is the reigning American National and 3-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.TranscriptCorey: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn joined by Principal Cloud Economist here at The Duckbill Group Tim Banks. Tim, how are you?Tim: I'm doing great, Corey. How about yourself?Corey: I am tickled pink that we are able to record this not for the usual reasons you would expect, but because of the glorious pun in calling this our Banksgiving episode. I have a hard and fast rule of, I don't play pun games or make jokes about people's names because that can be an incredibly offensive thing. “And oh, you're making jokes about my name? I've never heard that one before.” It's not that I can't do it—I play games with language all the time—but it makes people feel crappy. So, when you suggested this out of the blue, it was yes, we're doing it. But I want to be clear, I did not inflict this on you. This is your own choice; arguably a poor one. We're going to find out.Tim: 1000% my idea.Corey: So, this is your show. It's a holiday week. So, what do you want to do with our Banksgiving episode?Tim: I want to give thanks for the folks who don't normally get acknowledged through the year. Like you know, we do a lot of thanking the rock stars, we do a lot of thanking the big names, right, we also do a lot of, you know, some snarky jabs at some folks. Deservingly—not folks, but groups and stuff like that; some folks deserve it, and we won't be giving them thanks—but some orgs and some groups and stuff like that. And I do think with that all said, we should acknowledge and thank the folks that we normally don't get to, folks who've done some great contributions this year, folks who have helped us, helped the industry, and help services that go unsung, I think a great one that you brought up, it's not the engineers, right? It's the people that make sure we get paid. Because I don't work for charity. And I don't know about you, Corey. I haven't seen the books yet, but I'm pretty sure none of us here do and so how do we get paid? Like I don't know.Corey: Oh, sure you have. We had a show on a somewhat simplified P&L during the all hands meeting because, you know, transparency matters. But you're right, those are numbers there and none of that is what we could have charged but didn't because we decided to do more volunteer work for AWS. If we were going to go down that path, we would just be Community Heroes and be done with it.Tim: That's true. But you know, it's like, I do my thing and then, you know, I get a paycheck every now and then. And so, as far as I know, I think most of that happens because of Dan.Corey: Dan is a perfect example. He's been a guest on this show, I don't know it has as aired at the time that this goes out because I don't have to think about that, which is kind of the point. Dan's our CFO and makes sure that a lot of the financial trains keep running on time. But let's also be clear, the fact that I can make predictions about what the business is going to be doing by a metric other than how much cash is in the bank account at this very moment really freed up some opportunity for us. It turned into adult supervision for folks who, when I started this place and then Mike joined, and it was very much not an area that either one of us was super familiar with. Which is odd given what we do here, but we learned quickly.The understanding not just how these things work—which we had an academic understanding of—but why it mattered and how that applies to real life. Finance is one of those great organizations that doesn't get a lot of attention or respect outside of finance itself. Because it's, “Oh, well they just control the money. How hard could it be?” Really, really hard.Tim: It really is. And when we dig into some of these things and some of the math that goes and some of what the concerns are that, you know, a lot of engineers don't really have a good grasp on, and it's eye opening to understand some of the concerns. At least some of the concerns at least from an engineering aspect. And I really don't give much consideration day to day about the things that go on behind the scenes to make sure that I get paid.But you look at this throughout the industry, like, how many of the folks that we work with, how many folks out there doing this great work for the industry, do they know who their payroll person is? Do they know who their accountant team is? Do they know who their CFO or the other people out there that are doing the work and making sure the lights stay on, that people get paid and all the other things that happen, right? You know, people take that for granted. And it's a huge work and those people really don't get the appreciation that I think they deserve. And I think it's about time we did that.Corey: It's often surprising to me how many people that I encounter, once they learn that there are 12 employees here, automatically assume that it's you, me, and maybe occasionally Mike doing all the work, and the other nine people just sort of sit here and clap when I tell a funny joke, and… well, yes, that is, of course, a job duty, but that's not the entire purpose of why people are here.Natalie in marketing is a great example. “Well, Corey, I thought you did the marketing. You go and post on Twitter and that's where business comes from.” Well, kind of. But let's be clear, when I do that, and people go to the website to figure out what the hell I'm talking about.Well, that website has words on it. I didn't put those words on that site. It directs people to contact us forms, and there are automations behind that that make sure they go to the proper place because back before I started this place and I was independent, people would email me asking for help with their bill and I would just never respond to them. It's the baseline adult supervision level of competence that I keep aspiring to. We have a sales team that does fantastic work.And that often is one of those things that'll get engineering hackles up, but they're not out there cold-calling people to bug them about AWS bills. It's when someone reaches out saying we have a problem with our AWS spend, can you help us? The answer is invariably, “Let's talk about that.” It's a consultative discussion about why do you care about the bill, what does success look like, how do you know this will be a success, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that make sure that we're aimed at the right part of the problem. That's incredibly challenging work and I am grateful beyond words, I don't have to be involved with the day-in, day-out of any of those things.Tim: I think even beyond just that handling, like, the contracts and the NDAs, and the various assets that have to be exchanged just to get us virtually on site, I've [unintelligible 00:06:46] a couple of these things, I'm glad it's not my job. It is, for me, overwhelmingly difficult for me to really get a grasp and all that kind of stuff. And I am grateful that we do have a staff that does that. You've heard me, you see me, you know, kind of like, sales need to do better, and a lot of times I do but I do want to make sure we are appreciating them for the work that they do to make sure that we have work to do. Their contribution cannot be underestimated.Corey: And I think that's something that we could all be a little more thankful for in the industry. And I see this on Twitter sometimes, and it's probably my least favorite genre of tweet, where someone will wind up screenshotting some naive recruiter outreach to them, and just start basically putting the poor person on blast. I assure you, I occasionally get notices like that. The most recent example of that was, I got an email to my work email address from an associate account exec at AWS asking what projects I have going on, how my work in the cloud is going, and I can talk to them about if I want to help with cost optimization of my AWS spend and the rest. And at first, it's one of those, I could ruin this person's entire month, but I don't want to be that person.And I did a little LinkedIn stalking and it turns out, this looks like this person's first job that they've been in for three months. And I've worked in jobs like that very early in my career; it is a numbers game. When you're trying to reach out to 1000 people a month or whatnot, you aren't sitting there googling what every one of them is, does, et cetera. It's something that I've learned, that is annoying, sure. But I'm in an incredibly privileged position here and dunking on someone who's doing what they are told by an existing sales apparatus and crapping on them is not fair.That is not the same thing as these passive-aggressive [shit-tier 00:08:38] drip campaigns of, “I feel like I'm starting to stalk you.” Then don't send the message, jackhole. It's about empathy and not crapping on people who are trying to find their own path in this ridiculous industry.Tim: I think you brought up recruiters, and, you know, we here at The Duckbill Group are currently recruiting for a senior cloud economist and we don't actually have a recruiter on staff. So, we're going through various ways to find this work and it has really made me appreciate the work that recruiters in the past that I've worked with have done. Some of the ones out there are doing really fantastic work, especially sourcing good candidates, vetting good candidates, making sure that the job descriptions are inclusive, making sure that the whole recruitment process is as smooth as it can be. And it can't always be. Having to deal with all the spinning plates of getting interviews with folks who have production workloads, it is pretty impressive to me to see how a lot of these folks get—pull it off and it just seems so smooth. Again, like having to actually wade through some of this stuff, it's given me a true appreciation for the work that good recruiters do.Corey: We don't have automated systems that disqualify folks based on keyword matches—I've never been a fan of that—but we do get applicants that are completely unsuitable. We've had a few come in that are actual economists who clearly did not read the job description; they're spraying their resume everywhere. And the answer is you smile, you decline it and you move on. That is the price you pay of attempting to hire people. You don't put them on blast, you don't go and yell at an entire ecosystem of people because looking for jobs sucks. It's hard work.Back when I was in my employee days, I worked harder finding new jobs than I often did in the jobs themselves. This may be related to why I get fired as much, but I had to be good at finding new work. I am, for better or worse, in a situation where I don't have to do that anymore because once again, we have people here who do the various moving parts. Plus, let's be clear here, if I'm out there interviewing at other companies for jobs, I feel like that sends a message to you and the rest of the team that isn't terrific.Tim: We might bring that up. [laugh].Corey: “Why are you interviewing for a job over there?” It's like, “Because they have free doughnuts in the office. Later, jackholes.” It—I don't think that is necessarily the culture we're building here.Tim: No, no, it's not. Specially—you know, we're more of a cinnamon roll culture anyways.Corey: No. In my case, it's one of those, “Corey, why are you interviewing for a job at AWS?” And the answer is, “Oh, it's going to be an amazing shitpost. Just wait and watch.”Tim: [laugh]. Now, speaking of AWS, I have to absolutely shout out to Emily Freeman over there who has done some fantastic work this year. It's great when you see a person get matched up with the right environment with the right team in the right role, and Emily has just been hitting out of the park ever since he got there, so I'm super, super happy to see her there.Corey: Every time I get to collaborate with her on something, I come away from the experience even more impressed. It's one of those phenomenal collaborations. I just—I love working with her. She's human, she's empathetic, she gets it. She remains, as of this recording, the only person who has ever given a talk that I have heard on ML Ops, and come away with a better impression of that space and thinking maybe it's not complete nonsense.And that is not just because it's Emily, so I—because—I'm predisposed to believe her, though I am, it's because of how she frames it, how she views these things, and let's be clear, the content that she says. And that in turn makes me question my preconceptions on this, and that is why she has that I will listen and pay attention when she speaks. So yeah, if Emily's going to try and make a point, there's always going to be something behind it. Her authenticity is unimpeachable.Tim: Absolutely. I do take my hat's off to everyone who's been doing DevRel and evangelism and those type of roles during pandemics. And we just, you know, as the past few months, I've started back to in-person events. But the folks who've been out there finding new way to do those jobs, finding a way to [crosstalk 00:12:50]—Corey: Oh, staff at re:Invent next week. Oh, my God.Tim: Yeah. Those folks, I don't know how they're being rewarded for their work, but I can assure you, they probably need to be [unintelligible 00:12:57] better than they are. So, if you are staff at re:Invent, and you see Corey and I, next week when we're there—if you're listening to this in time—we would love to shake your hand, elbow bump you, whatever it is you're comfortable with, and laud you for the work you're doing. Because it is not easy work under the best of circumstances, and we are certainly not under the best of circumstances.Corey: I also want to call out specific thanks to a group that might take some people aback. But that group is AWS marketing, which given how much grief I give them seems like an odd thing for me to say, but let's be clear, I don't have any giant companies whose ability to continue as a going concern is dependent upon my keeping systems up and running. AWS does. They have to market and tell stories to everyone because that is generally who their customers are: they round to everyone. And an awful lot of those companies have unofficial mottos of, “That's not funny.” I'm amazed that they can say anything at all, given how incredibly varied their customer base is, I could get away with saying whatever I want solely because I just don't care. They have to care.Tim: They do. And it's not only that they have to care, they're in a difficult situation. It's like, you know, they—every company that sizes is, you know, they are image conscious, and they have things that say what like, “Look, this is the deal. This is the scenario. This is how it went down, but you can still maintain your faith and confidence in us.” And people do when AWS services, they have problems, if anything comes out like that, it does make the news and the reason it doesn't make the news is because it is so rare. And when they can remind us of that in a very effective way, like, I appreciate that. You know, people say if anything happens to S3, everybody knows because everyone depends on it and that's for good reason.Corey: And let's not forget that I run The Duckbill Group. You know, the company we work for. I have the Last Week in AWS newsletter and blog. I have my aggressive shitposting Twitter feed. I host the AWS Morning Brief podcast, and I host this Screaming in the Cloud. And it's challenging for me to figure out how to message all of those things because when people ask what you do, they don't want to hear a litany that goes on for 25 seconds, they want a sentence.I feel like I've spread in too many directions and I want to narrow that down. And where do I drive people to and that was a bit of a marketing challenge that Natalie in our marketing department really cut through super well. Now, pretend I work in AWS. The way that I check this based upon a public list of parameters they stub into Systems Manager Parameter Store, there are right now 291 services that they offer. That is well beyond any one person's ability to keep in their head. I can talk incredibly convincingly now about AWS services that don't exist and people who work in AWS on messaging, marketing, engineering, et cetera, will not call me out on it because who can provably say that ‘AWS Strangle Pony' isn't a real service.Tim: I do want to call out the DevOps—shout out I should say, the DevOps term community for AWS Infinidash because that was just so well done, and AWS took that with just the right amount of tongue in cheek, and a wink and a nod and let us have our fun. And that was a good time. It was a great exercise in improv.Corey: That was Joe Nash out of Twilio who just absolutely nailed it with his tweet, “I am convinced that a small and dedicated group of Twitter devs could tweet hot takes about a completely made up AWS product—I don't know AWS Infinidash or something—and it would appear as a requirement on job specs within a week.” And he was right.Tim: [laugh]. Speaking of Twitter, I want to shout out Twitter as a company or whoever does a product management over there for Twitter Spaces. I remember when Twitter Spaces first came out, everyone was dubious of its effect, of it's impact. They were calling it, you know, a Periscope clone or whatever it was, and there was a lot of sneering and snarking at it. But Twitter Spaces has become very, very effective in having good conversations in the group and the community of folks that have just open questions, and then to speak to folks that they probably wouldn't only get to speak to about this questions and get answers, and have really helpful, uplifting and difficult conversations that you wouldn't otherwise really have a medium for. And I'm super, super happy that whoever that product manager was, hats off to you, my friend.Corey: One group you're never going to hear me say a negative word about is AWS support. Also, their training and certification group. I know that are technically different orgs, but it often doesn't feel that way. Their job is basically impossible. They have to teach people—even on the support side, you're still teaching people—how to use all of these different varied services in different ways, and you have to do it in the face of what can only really be described as abuse from a number of folks on Twitter.When someone is having trouble with an AWS service, they can turn into shitheads, I've got to be honest with you. And berating the poor schmuck who has to handle the AWS support Twitter feed, or answer your insulting ticket or whatnot, they are not empowered to actually fix the underlying problem with a service. They are effectively a traffic router to get the message to someone who can, in a format that is understood internally. And I want to be very clear that if you insult people who are in customer service roles and blame them for it, you're just being a jerk.Tim: No, it really is because I'm pretty sure a significant amount of your listeners and people initially started off working in tech support, or customer service, or help desk or something like that, and you really do become the dumping ground for the customers' frustrations because you are the only person they get to talk to. And you have to not only take that, but you have to try and do the emotional labor behind soothing them as well as fixing the actual problem. And it's really, really difficult. I feel like the people who have that in their background are some of the best consultants, some of the best DevRel folks, and the best at talking to people because they're used to being able to get some technical details out of folks who may not be very technical, who may be under emotional distress, and certainly in high stress situations. So yeah, AWS support, really anybody who has support, especially paid support—phone or chat otherwise—hats off again. That is a service that is thankless, it is a service that is almost always underpaid, and is almost always under appreciated.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: I'll take another team that's similar to that respect: Commerce Platform. That is the team that runs all of AWS billing. And you would be surprised that I'm thanking them, but no, it's not the cynical approach of, “Thanks for making it so complicated so I could have a business.” No, I would love it if it were so simple that I had to go find something else to do because the problem was that easy for customers to solve. That is the ideal and I hope, sincerely, that we can get there.But everything that happens in AWS has to be metered and understood as far as who has done what, and charge people appropriately for it. It is also generally invisible; people don't understand anything approaching the scale of that, and what makes it worst of all, is that if suddenly what they were doing broke and customers weren't built for their usage, not a single one of them would complain about it because, “All right, I'll take it.” It's a thankless job that is incredibly key and central to making the cloud work at all, but it's a hard job.Tim: It really is. And is a lot of black magic and voodoo to really try and understand how this thing works. There's no simple way to explain it. I imagine if they were going to give you the index overview of how it works with a 10,000 feet, that alone would be, like, a 300 page document. It is a gigantic moving beast.And it is one of those things where scale will show all the flaws. And no one has scale I think like AWS does. So, the folks that have to work and maintain that are just really, again, they're under appreciated for all that they do. I also think that—you know, you talk about the same thing in other orgs, as we talked about the folks that handle the billing and stuff like that, but you mentioned AWS, and I was thinking the other day how it's really awesome that I've got my AWS driver. I have the same, like, group of three or four folks that do all my deliveries for AWS.And they have been inundated over this past year-and-a-half with more and more and more stuff. And yet, I've still managed—my stuff is always put down nicely on my doorstep. It's never thrown, it's not damaged. I'm not saying it's never been damaged, but it's not damaged, like, maybe FedEx I've [laugh] had or some other delivery services where it's just, kind of, carelessly done. They still maintain efficiency, they maintain professionalism [unintelligible 00:21:45] talking to folks.What they've had to do at their scale and at that the amount of stuff they've had to do for deliveries over this past year-and-a-half has just been incredible. So, I want to extend it also to, like, the folks who are working in the distribution centers. Like, a lot of us here talk about AWS as if that's Amazon, but in essence, it is those folks that are working those more thankless and invisible jobs in the warehouses and fulfillment centers, under really bad conditions sometimes, who's still plug away at it. I'm glad that Amazon is at least saying they're making efforts to improve the conditions there and improve the pay there, things like that, but those folks have enabled a lot of us to work during this pandemic with a lot of conveniences that they themselves would never be able to enjoy.Corey: Yeah. It's bad for society, but I'm glad it exists, obviously. The thing is, I would love it if things showed up a little more slowly if it meant that people could be treated humanely along the process. That said, I don't have any conception of what it takes to run a company with 1.2 million people.I have learned that as you start managing groups and managing managers of groups, it's counterintuitive, but so much of what you do is no longer you doing the actual work. It is solely through influence and delegation. You own all of the responsibility but no direct put-finger-on-problem capability of contributing to the fix. It takes time at that scale, which is why I think one of the dumbest series of questions from, again, another group that deserves a fair bit of credit which is journalists because this stuff is hard, but a naive question I hear a lot is, “Well, okay. It's been 100 days. What has Adam Selipsky slash Andy Jassy changed completely about the company?”It's, yeah, it's a $1.6 trillion company. They are not going to suddenly grab the steering wheel and yank. It's going to take years for shifts that they do to start manifesting in serious ways that are externally visible. That is how big companies work. You don't want to see a complete change in direction from large blue chip companies that run things. Like, again, everyone's production infrastructure. You want it to be predictable, you want it to be boring, and you want shifts to be gradual course corrections, not vast swings.Tim: I mean, Amazon is a company with a population of a medium to medium-large sized city and a market cap of the GDP of several countries. So, it is not a plucky startup; it is not this small little tech company. It is a vast enterprise that's distributed all over the world with a lot of folks doing a lot of different jobs. You cannot, as you said, steer that ship quickly.Corey: I grew up in Maine and Amazon has roughly the same number employees as live in Maine. It is hard to contextualize how all of that works. There are people who work there that even now don't always know who Andy Jassy is. Okay, fine, but I'm not talking about don't know him on site or whatever. I'm saying they do not recognize the name. That's a very big company.Tim: “Andy who?”Corey: Exactly. “Oh, is that the guy that Corey makes fun of all the time?” Like, there we go. That's what I tend to live for.Tim: I thought that was Werner.Corey: It's sort of every one, though I want to be clear, I make it a very key point. I do not make fun of people personally because it—even if they're crap, which I do not believe to be the case in any of the names we've mentioned so far, they have friends and family who love and care about them. You don't want someone to go on the internet and Google their parent's name or something, and then just see people crapping all over. That's got to hurt. Let people be people. And, on some level, when you become the CEO of a company of that scale, you're stepping out of reality and into the pages of legend slash history, at some point. 200 years from now, people will read about you in history books, that's a wild concept.Tim: It is I think you mentioned something important that we would be remiss—especially Duckbill Group—to mention is that we're very thankful for our families, partners, et cetera, for putting up with us, pets, everybody. As part of our jobs, we invite strangers from the internet into our homes virtually to see behind us what is going on, and for those of us that have kids, that involves a lot of patience on their part, a lot of patients on our partners' parts, and other folks that are doing those kind of nurturing roles. You know, our pets who want to play with us are sitting there and not able to. It has not been easy for all of us, even though we're a remote company, but to work under these conditions that we have been over the past year-and-a-half. And I think that goes for a lot of the folks in industry where now all of a sudden, you've been occupying a room in the house or space in the house for some 18-plus months, where before you're always at work or something like that. And that's been a hell of an adjustment. And so we talk about that for us folks that are here pontificating on podcasts, or banging out code, but the adjustments and the things our families have had to go through and do to tolerate us being there cannot be overstated how important that is.Corey: Anyone else that's on your list of people to thank? And this is the problem because you're always going to forget people. I mean, the podcast production crew: the folks that turn our ramblings into a podcast, the editing, the transcription, all of it; the folks that HumblePod are just amazing. The fact that I don't have to worry about any of this stuff as if by magic, means that you're sort of insulated from it. But it's amazing to watch that happen.Tim: You know, honestly, I super want to thank just all the folks that take the time to interact with us. We do this job and Corey shitposts, and I shitpost and we talk, but we really do this and rely on the folks that do take the time to DM us, or tweet us, or mention us in the thread, or reach out in any way to ask us questions, or have a discussion with us on something we said, those folks encourage us, they keep us accountable, and they give us opportunities to learn to be better. And so I'm grateful for that. It would be—this role, this job, the thing we do where we're viewable and seen by the public would be a lot less pleasant if it wasn't for y'all. So, it's too many to name, but I do appreciate you.Corey: Well, thank you, I do my best. I find this stuff to be so boring if you couldn't have fun with it. And so many people can't have fun with it, so it feels like I found a cheat code for making enterprise software solutions interesting. Which even saying that out loud sounds like I'm shitposting. But here we are.Tim: Here we are. And of course, my thanks to you, Corey, for reaching out to me one day and saying, “Hey, what are you doing? Would you want to come interview with us at The Duckbill Group?”Corey: And it was great because, like, “Well, I did leave AWS within the last 18 months, so there might be a non-compete issue.” Like, “Oh, please, I hope so. Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please. I would love to pick that fight publicly.” But sadly, no one is quite foolish enough to take me up on it.Don't worry. That's enough of a sappy episode, I think. I am convinced that our next encounter on this podcast will be our usual aggressive self. But every once in a while it's nice to break the act and express honest and heartfelt appreciation. I'm really looking forward to next week with all of the various announcements that are coming out.I know people have worked extremely hard on them, and I want them to know that despite the fact that I will be making fun of everything that they have done, there's a tremendous amount of respect that goes into it. The fact that I can make fun of the stuff that you've done without any fear that I'm punching down somehow because, you know it is at least above a baseline level of good speaks volumes. There are providers I absolutely do not have that confidence towards them.Tim: [laugh]. Yeah, AWS, as the enterprise level service provider is an easy target for a lot of stuff. The people that work there are not. They do great work. They've got amazing people in all kinds of roles there. And they're often unseen for the stuff they do. So yeah, for all the folks who have contributed to what we're going to partake in at re:Invent—and it's a lot and I understand from having worked there, the pressure that's put on you for this—I'm super stoked about it and I'm grateful.Corey: Same here. If I didn't like this company, I would not have devoted years to making fun of it. Because that requires a diagnosis, not a newsletter, podcast, or shitposting Twitter feed. Tim, thank you so much for, I guess, giving me the impetus and, of course, the amazing name of the show to wind up just saying thank you, which I think is something that we could all stand to do just a little bit more of.Tim: My pleasure, Corey. I'm glad we could run with this. I'm, as always, happy to be on Screaming in the Cloud with you. I think now I get a vest and a sleeve. Is that how that works now?Corey: Exactly. Once you get on five episodes, then you end up getting the dinner jacket, just, like, hosting SNL. Same story. More on that to come in the new year. Thanks, Tim. I appreciate it.Tim: Thank you, Corey.Corey: Tim Banks, principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. I am, of course, Corey Quinn, and thank you for listening.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

god ceo amazon google starting speaking dm chief finance cloud maine saturday night live banks cfo gdp compete last week screaming werner aws iso devops periscope brazilian jiu jitsu invent us marines s3 ndas twilio 5x unix mysql deployments andy jassy devrel oracle cloud site reliability engineering corey quinn emily freeman american national olap community heroes tim banks ml ops oltp tim it amazon redshift tim yeah tim you duckbill group amazon aurora tim no tim thank tim here last week in aws humblepod

Field of Dreams: Closing the Tech Gap in HR with Tim Meehan from Pontoon

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 12, 2021 20:58

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.

Working on the Whiteboard from the Start with Tim Banks

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 13, 2021 44:10

About TimTim's tech career spans over 20 years through various sectors. Tim's initial journey into tech started as a US Marine. Later, he left government contracting for the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for largeUnix-based datastores.Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with clients in his current role. Tim is also a father of five children, as well as a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. Currently, he is the reigning American National and 3-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/elchefe The Duckbill Group: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Periodically, I have a whole bunch of guests come on up, second time. Now, it's easy to take the naive approach of assuming that it's because it's easier for me to find a guest if I know them and don't have to reach out to brand new people all the time. This is absolutely correct; I'm exceedingly lazy. But I don't have too many folks on a third time, but that changes today.My guest is Tim Banks. I've had him on the show twice before, both times it led to really interesting conversations around a wide variety of things. Since those episodes, Tim has taken the job as a principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. Yes, that is probably the strangest interview process you can imagine, but here we are. Tim, thank you so much for joining me both on the show and in the business.Tim: My pleasure, Corey. It was definitely an interesting interview process, you know, but I was glad to be here. So, I'm happy to be here a third time. I don't know if you get a jacket like you do in Saturday Night Live, if you host, like, a fifth time, but we'll see. Maybe it's a vest. A cool vest would be nice.Corey: We can come up with something.[ effectively, it can be like reverse hangman where you wind up getting a vest and every time you come on after that you get a sleeve, then you get a second sleeve, and then you get a collar, and we can do all kinds of neat stuff.Tim: I actually like that idea a lot.Corey: So, I'm super excited to be able to have this conversation with you because I don't normally talk a lot on this show about what cloud economics is because my guest usually is not as deep into the space as I am, and that's fine; people should never be as deep into this space as I am, in the general sense, unless they work here. Awesome. But I do guest on other shows, and people ask me all kinds of questions about AWS billing and cloud economics, and that's fine, it's great, but they don't ask the questions about the space in the same way that I would and the way that I think about it. So, it's hard for me to interview myself. Now, I'm not saying I won't try it someday, but it's challenging. But today, I get to take the easy path out and talk to you about it. So Tim, what the hell is a principal cloud economist?Tim: So, a principal cloud economist, is a cloud computing expert, both in architecture and practice, who looks at cloud cost in the same way that a lot of folks look at cloud security, or cloud resilience, or cloud performance. So, the same engineering concerns you have about making sure that your API stays up all the time, or to make sure that you don't have people that are able to escape containers or to make sure that you can have super, super low response times, is the same engineering fundamentals that I look at when I'm trying to find a way to reduce your AWS bill.Corey: Okay. When we say cloud cost and cloud economics, the natural picture that leads to mind is, “Oh, I get it. You're an Excel jockey.” And sometimes, yeah, we all kind of play those roles, but what you're talking about is something else entirely. You're talking about engineering expertise.And sure enough, if you look at the job postings we have for roles on the team from time to time, we have not yet hired anyone who does not have an engineering and architecture background. That seems odd to folks who do not spend a lot of time thinking about the AWS bill. I'm told those people are what is known as ‘happy.' But here we are. Why do we care about the engineering aspect of any of this?Tim: Well, I think first and foremost because what we're doing in essence, is still engineering. People aren't putting construction paper up on [laugh] AWS; sometimes they do put recipes up on there, but it still involves working on a computer, and writing code, and deploying it somewhere. So, to have that basic understanding of what it is that folks are doing on the platform, you have to have some engineering experience, first and foremost. Secondly, the fact of the matter is that most cost optimization, in my opinion, can be done on the whiteboard, before anything else, and really I think should be done on the whiteboard before anything else. And so the Excel aspect of it is always reactive. “We have now spent this much. How much was it? Where did it go?” And now we have to figure out where it went.I like to figure out and get a ballpark on how much something is going to cost before I write the first line of code. I want to know, hey, we have a tier here, we're using this kind of storage, it's going to take this kind of instance types. Okay, well, I've got an idea of how much it's going to cost. And I was like, “You know, that's going to be expensive. Before we do anything, is there a way that we can reduce costs there?”And so I'm reverse engineering that on already deployed workloads. Or when customers want to say, “Hey, we were thinking about doing this, and this is our proposed architecture,” I'm going to look at it and say, “Well, if you do this and this and this and this, you can save money.”Corey: So, it sounds like you and I have a bit of a philosophical disagreement in some ways. One of my recurring talking points has always been that, “Oh, by and large, application developers don't need to think overly much about cloud cost. What they need to know generally fits on an index card.” It's, okay, big things cost more than small things; if you turn something on, it will never get turned off and will bill you in perpetuity; data transfer has some weird stuff; and if you store data, you pay for data, like, that level of baseline understanding. When I'm trying to build something out my immediate thought is, great, is this thing possible?Because A, I don't always know that it is, and B, I'm super bad at computers so for me, it may absolutely not be, whereas you're talking about baking cost assessments into the architecture as a day one type of approach, even when sketching ideas out on the whiteboard. I'm curious as to how we diverge there. Can you talk more about your philosophy?Tim: Sure. And the reason I do that is because, as most folks that have an engineering background in cloud infrastructure will tell you, you want to build resilience in, on the whiteboard. You certainly want to build performance in, on the whiteboard, right? And security folks will tell you you want to do security on the whiteboard. Because those things are hard to fix after they're deployed.As soon as they're deployed, without that, you now have technical debt. If you don't consider cost optimization and cost efficiency on the whiteboard, and then you try and do it after it's deployed, you not only have technical debt, you may have actual real debt.Corey: One of the comments I tend to give a lot is that architecture and cost are the same thing in the world of cloud. And I think that we might be in violent agreement, as Liz Fong-Jones is fond of framing it, where I am acutely aware of aspects of cost and that does factor into how I build things on the whiteboard—let's also be very clear, most of the things that I build are very small scale; the largest cost by a landslide is the time I spend building it—in practice, that's an awful lot of environments; people are always more expensive than the AWS environment they're working on. But instead, it's about baking in the assumptions and making sure you're not coming up with something that is going to just be wasteful and horrible out of the gate, and I guess part of that also is the fact that I am at a level of billing understanding that I sort of absorbed these concepts intrinsically. Because to me, there is no difference between cost and architecture in an environment like this. You're right, there's always an inherent trade-off between cost and durability. On the one hand, I don't like that. On the other, it feels like it's been true forever and I don't see a way out of it.Tim: It is inescapable. And it's interesting because you talk about the level of an application developer or something like that, like what is your level of concern, but retroactively, we'll go in for cost optimization houses—and I've done this as far back as when I was working at AWS has a TAM—and I'll ask the question to an application developer or database administrator, and I'm like, “Why do you do this? What do you have a string value for something that could be a Boolean?” And you'll ask, “Well, what difference does that make?” Well, it makes a big difference when you're talking about cycles for CPU.You can reduce your CPU consumption on a database instance by changing a string to a Boolean, you need fewer instances, or you need a less powerful instance, or you need less memory. And now you can run a less expensive instance for your database architecture. Well, maybe for one node it's not that biggest difference, but if you're talking about something that's multi-AZ and multi-node, I mean, that can be a significant amount of savings just by making one simple change.Corey: And that might be the difference right there. I didn't realize that, offhand. It makes sense if you think about it, but just realizing that I've made that mistake on one of my DynamoDB tables. It costs something like seven cents a month right now, so it's not something I'm rushing to optimize, but you're right, expand that out by a factor of a million or so, and we're talking serious money, and then that sort of optimization makes an awful lot of sense. I think that my position on it is that when you're building out something small scale as a demo or a proof of concept, spending time on optimizations like this is not the best use of anyone's time or brain sweat, for lack of a better term. How do you wind up deciding when it's time to focus on stuff like that?Tim: Well, first, I will say that—I daresay that somewhere in the 80% of production workloads are just—were the POC, [laugh] right? Because, like, “It worked for this to get funding, let's run it,” right?Corey: Let they who does not have a DynamoDB table in production with the word ‘test' or ‘dev' in it cast the first stone.Tim: It's certainly not me. So, I understand how some of those decisions get made. And that's why I think it's better to think about it early. Because as I mentioned before, when you start something and say, “Hey, this works for now,” and you don't give consideration to that in the future, or consideration for what it's going to be like in the future, and when you start doing it, you'll paint yourself into corners. That's how you get something like static values put in somewhere, or that's how you get something like, well, “We have to run this instance type because we didn't build in the ability to be more microservice-based or stateless or anything like that.”You've seen people that say, “Hey, we could save you a lot of money if you can move this thing off to a different tier.” And it's like, “Well, that would be an extensive rewrite of code; that'd be very expensive.” I daresay that's the main reason why most AS/400s are still being used right now is because it's too expensive to rewrite the code.Corey: Yeah, and there's no AWS/400 that they can migrate to. Yet. Re:Invent is nigh.Tim: So, I think that's why, even at the very beginning, even if you were saying, “Well, this is something we will do later.” Don't make it impossible for you to do later in your code. Don't make it impossible for you to do later in your architecture. Make things as modular as possible, so that way you can say, “Hey”—later on down the road—“Oh, we can switch this instance type.” Or, “Here's a new managed service that we can maybe save money on doing this.”And you allow yourself to switch things out, or turn different knobs, or change the way you do things, and give yourself more options in the future, whether those options are for resilience, or those options or for security, or those options are for performance, or they're for cost optimizations. If you make binding decisions earlier on, you're going to have debt that's going to build up at some point in the future, and then you're going to have to pay the piper. Sometimes that piper is going to be AWS.Corey: One thing that I think gets lost in a lot of conversations about cloud economics—because I know that it happened to me when I first started this place—where I am planning to basically go out and be the world's leading expert in AWS cost analysis and understanding and optimization. Great. Then I went out into the world and started doing some of my first engagements, and they looked a lot less like far-future cost attribution projections and a lot more like, “What's a reserved instance?” And, “We haven't bought any of those in 18 months.” And, “Oh, yeah, we shut down an entire project six months ago. We should probably delete all the resources, huh?”The stuff that I was preparing for at the high end of the maturity curve are great and useful and terrific to have conversations about in some very nuanced depth, but very often there's a walk before you can run style of conversation where, okay, let's do the easy stuff first before we start writing a whole bunch of bespoke internal stuff that maps your business needs to the AWS bill. How do you, I guess, reconcile those things where you're on the one hand, you see the easy stuff and on the other, you see some of the just the absolutely challenging, very hard, five-years-of-engineering-effort-style problems on the other?Tim: Well, it's interesting because I've seen one customer very recently who has brilliant analyses as to their cost; just well-charted, well-tagged, well-documented, well—you know, everything is diagrammed quite nicely and everything like that, and they're very, very aware of their costs, but they leave test instances running all weekend, you know, and their associated volumes and things like that. And that's a very easy thing to fix. That is a very, very low-hanging fruit. And so sometimes, you just have to look at where they're spending their efforts where sometimes they do spend so much time chasing those hard to do things because they are hard to do and they're exciting in an engineering aspect, and then something as simple as, “Hey, how about we delete these old volumes?” It just isn't there.Or, “How about we switch to your S3 bucket storage type?” Those are easy, low-hanging fruits, and you would be surprised how sometimes they just don't get that. But at the same time, sometimes customers have, like, “Hey, we could knock this thing out, we knock this thing out,” because it's Trusted Advisor. Every AI cost optimization recommendation you can get will tell you these five things to do, no matter who you are or where you are, but they don't do the conceptual things like understanding some of the principles behind cost optimization and cost optimization architecture, and proactive cost optimization versus react with cost optimizations. So, you're doing very conceptual education and conversations with folks rather than the, “Do these five things.” And I've not often found a customer that you have to do both on; it's usually one or the other.Corey: It's funny that you made that specific reference to that example. One of my very first projects—not naming names. Generally, when it comes to things like this, you can tell stories or you can name names; I bias for stories—I was talking to a company who was convinced that their developer environments were incredibly overwrought, expensive, et cetera, and burning money. Okay, great. So, I talked about the idea of turning those things off at night or between test runs, deleting volumes to snapshot, and restore them on a schedule when people come in in the morning because all your developers sit in the same building in the same time zones. Great. They were super on board with the idea, and it was going to be a little bit of work, but all right, this was in the days before the EC2 Instance Scheduler, for example.But first, let's go ahead and do some analysis. This is one of those early engagements that really reinforced my idea of, yeah, before we start going too far down the rabbit hole, let's double-check what's going on in the account. Because periodically you encounter things that surprise people. Like, “What's up with those Australia instances?” “Oh, we don't have anything in that region.” “I believe you're being sincere when you say this, however, the API generally doesn't tell lies.”So, that becomes a, oh, security incident time. But looking at this, they were right; they had some fairly sizable developer instances that were running all the time, but doing some analysis, their developer environment was 3% of their bill at the time and they hadn't bought RIs in a year-and-a-half. And looking at what they were doing, there was so much easier stuff that they could do to generate significant savings without running the potential of turning a developer environment off at night in the middle of an incident or something like that. The risk factor and effort were easier just do the easy stuff, then do another pass and look at the deep stuff. And to be clear, they weren't lying to me; they weren't wrong.Back when they started building this stuff out, their developer environments were significantly large and were a significant portion of their spend. And then they hit product-market fit, and suddenly their production environment had to scale significantly in a short period of time. Which, yay, cloud. It's good at that. Then it just became such a small portion that developer environments weren't really a thing. But the narrative internally doesn't get updated very often because once people learn something, they don't go back to relearn whether or not it's still true. It's a constant mistake; I make it myself frequently.Tim: I think it's interesting, there are things that we really need to put into buckets as far as what's an engineering effort and what's an administrative effort. And when I say ‘administrative effort,' I mean if I can save money with a stroke of a pen, well, that's going to be pretty easy, and that's usually going to be RIs; that's going to be EDPs, or PPAs or something like that, that don't require engineering effort. It just requires administrative effort, I think RIs being the simplest ones. Like, “Oh, all I have to do is go in here and click these things four times and I'm going to save money?” “Well, let's do that.”And it's surprising how often people don't do that. But you still have to understand that, and whether it's RIs or whether it's a savings plan, it's still a commitment of some kind, but if you are willing to make that commitment, you can save money with no engineering effort whatsoever. That's almost free money.Corey: So, much of what we do here comes down to psychology, in many ways, more than it does math. And a lot of times you're right, everything you say is right, but in a large-scale environment, go ahead and click that button to buy the savings plan or the reserved instance, and that's a $20 million purchase. And companies will stall for months trying to run a different series of analyses on this and what if this happens, what if that happens, and I get it because, “Yeah, I'm going to click this button that's going to cost more money than I'll make in my lifetime,” that's a scary thing to do; I get it. But you're going to spend the money, one way or the other, with the provider, and if you believe that number is too high, I get it; I am right there with you. Buy half of them right now and then you can talk about the rest until you get to a point of being comfortable with it.Do it incrementally; it's not all or nothing, you have one shot to make the buy. Take pieces out of it that makes sense. You know you're probably not going to turn off your database cluster that handles all of production in the next year, so go ahead and go for it; it saves some money. Do the thing that makes sense. And that doesn't require deep-dive analytics that requires, on some level, someone who's seen a lot of these before who gets what customers are going through. And honestly, it's empathy in many respects, becomes one of those powerful things that we can apply to our customer accounts.Tim: Absolutely. I mean, people don't understand that decision paralysis, about making those commitments costs you money. You can spend months doing analysis, but those months doing analysis, you're going to spend 30, 40, 50, 60, 70% more on your EC2 instances or other compute than you would otherwise, and that can be quite significant. But it's one of those cases where we talk about psychology around perfect being the enemy of good. You don't have to make the perfect purchase of RIs or savings plans and have that so tuned perfectly that you're going to get one hundred percent utilization and zero—like, you don't have to do that.Just do something. Do a little bit. Like you said, buy half; buy anything; just something, and you're going to save money. And then you can run analysis later on, while you're saving money [laugh] and get a little better and tune it up a little more and get more analysis on and maybe fine-tune it, but you don't actually ever need to have it down to the penny. Like, it never has to be that good.Corey: At some point, one of the value propositions we have for our customers has always been that we tell you when to stop focusing on saving money because there's a theoretical cap of a hundred percent of the cloud bill that you can save, but you can make so much more than that by launching the right feature to the right market a little sooner; focus on that. Be responsible stewards of the money that's invested with you, but by and large, as a general piece of guidance, at some point, stop cutting and go back to doing the thing that makes your company work. It's not all about saving money at all costs for almost all of us. It is for us, but we're sort of a special case.Tim: Well, it's a conversation I often have. It's like, all right, are you trying to save money on AWS or are you trying to save money overall? So, if you're going to spend $400,000 worth of engineering effort to save $10,000 on your AWS bill, that doesn't make no sense. So—[laugh]—Corey: Right. There has to be a strategic reason to do things like that—Tim: Exactly.Corey: —and make sure you understand the value of what you're getting for this. One reason that we wind up charging the way that we do—and we've gotten questions on this for a while—has been that we charge a fixed fee for what we do on engagements. And similarly—people have asked this, but haven't tied the two things together—you talk about cost optimization, but never cost-cutting. Why is that? Is that just a negative term?And the answer has been no, they're aligned. What we do focuses on what is best for the customer. Once that fixed fee is decided upon, every single thing that we say is what we would do if we were in the customer's position. There are times we'll look at what they have going on and say, “Ah, you really should spend more money here for resiliency, or durability,” or, “Okay, that is critical data that's not being backed up. You should consider doing that.”It's why we don't take percentages of things because, at that point, we're not just going with the useful stuff, it's, well we're going to basically throw the entire kitchen sink at you. We had an early customer and I was talking to their AWS account manager about what we were going to be doing and their comment was, “Oh, saving money on AWS bills is great, make sure you check the EBS snapshots.” Yeah, I did that. They were spending 150 bucks a month on EBS snapshots, which is basically nothing. It's one of those stories where if, in the course of an hour-long meeting, I can pay for that entire service, by putting a quarter on the table, I'm probably not going to talk about it barring [laugh] some extenuating circumstances.Focus on the big things, not the things that worked in a different environment with a different account and different constraints. It's hard to context switch like that, but it gets a lot easier when it is basically the entirety of what we do all day.Tim: The difference I draw between cost optimization and cost-cutting is that cost optimization is ensuring that you're not spending money unnecessarily, or that you're maximizing your dollar. And so sometimes we get called in there, and we're just validation for the measures they've already done. Like, “Your team is doing this exactly right. You're doing the things you should be doing. We can nitpick if you want to; we're going to save you $7 a year, but who cares about that? But y'all are doing what you should be doing. This is great. Going forward, you want to look for these things and look for these things and look for these things. We're going to give you some more concepts so that you are cost-optimized in the future.” But it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to cut your bill. Because if you're already spending efficiently, you don't need your bill cut; you're already cost-optimized.Corey: Oh, we're not going to nitpick on that, you're mostly optimized there. It's like, “Yeah, that workload's $140 million a year and rising; please, pick nits.” At which point? “Okay, great.” That's the strategic reason to focus on something. But by and large, it comes down to understanding what the goals of clients are. I think that is widely misunderstood about what we do and how we do it.The first question I always ask when someone does outreach of, “Hey, we'd like to talk about coming in here and doing a consulting engagement with us.” “Great.” I always like to ask the quote-unquote, “Foolish question” of, “Why do you care about the AWS bill?” And occasionally I'll get people who look at me like I have two heads of, “Why wouldn't I care about the AWS bill?” Because there are more important things to care about for the business, almost certainly.Tim: One of the things I try and do, especially when we're talking about cost optimization, especially trying to do something for the right now so they can do things going forward, it's like, you know, all right, so if we cut this much from your bill—if you just do nothing else, but do reserved instances or buy a savings plan, right, you're going to save enough money to hire four engineers. Think about what four engineers would do for your overall business? And that's how I want you to frame it; I want you to look at what cost optimization is going to allow you to do in the future without costing you any more money. Or maybe you save a little more money and you can shift it; instead of paying for your AWS bill, maybe you can train your developers, maybe you can get more developers, maybe you can get some ProServ, maybe you can do whatever, buy newer computers for your people so they can do—whatever it is, right? We're not saying that you no longer have to spend this money, but saying, “You can use this money to do something other than give it to Jeff Bezos.”Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: There was an article recently, as of the time of this recording, where Pinterest discussed what they had disclosed in one of their regulatory filings which was, over the next eight years, they have committed to pay AWS $3.2 billion. And in this article, they have the head of engineering talking to the reporter about how they're thinking about these things, how they're looking at things that are relevant to their business, and they're talking about having a dedicated team that winds up doing a whole bunch of data analysis and running some analytics on all of these things, from piece to piece to piece. And that's great. And I worry, on some level, that other companies are saying, “Oh, Pinterest is doing that. We should, too.” Yeah, for the course of this commitment, a 1% improvement is $32 million, so yeah, at that scale I'm going to hire a team of data scientists, too, look at these things. Your bill is $50,000 a month. Perhaps that's not worth the effort you're going to put into it, barring other things that contribute to it.Tim: It's interesting because we will get folks that will approach us that have small accounts—very small, small spend—and like, “Hey, can you come in and talk to us about this whatever.” And we can say very honestly, “Look, we could, but the amount of money we're going to charge you is going to—it's not going to be worth your while right now. You could probably get by on the automated recommendations, on the things that already out there on the internet that everybody can do to optimize their bill, and then when you grow to a point where now saving 10% is somebody's salary, that's when it, kind of, becomes more critical.” And it's hard to say what point that is in anyone's business, but I can say sometimes, “Hey, you know what? That's not really what you need to focus on.” If you need to save $100 a month on your AWS bill, and that's critical, you've got other concerns that are not your AWS bill.Corey: So, back when you were interviewing to work here, one of the areas of focus that you kept bringing up was the concept of observability, and my response to this was, “Ah, hell. Another one.” Because let's be clear, Mike Julian—my business partner and our CEO—has written a book called Practical Monitoring, and apparently what we learned from this is as soon as you finish writing a book on the topic, you never want to talk about that topic ever again, which yeah, in hindsight makes sense. Why do you care about observability when you're here to look at cloud costs?Tim: Because cloud costs is another metric, just like you would use for performance, or resilience, or security. You do real-time monitoring to see if somebody has compromised the system, you do real-time monitoring to see if you have bad performance, if response times are too slow. You do real-time monitoring to know if something has gone down and then you need to make adjustments, or that the automated responses you have in response to that downtime are working. But cloud costs, you send somebody a report at the end of the month. Can you imagine, if you will—just for a second—if you got a downtime report at the end of month, and then you can react to something that has gone down?Or if you get a security report at the end of the month, and then you can react to the fact that somebody has your root keys? Or if you get [laugh] a report at the end of month, this said, “Hey, the CPU on this one was pegged. You should probably scale up.” That's outrageous to anybody in this industry right now. But why do we accept that for cloud cost?Corey: It's worse than that. There are a number of startups that talk about, “Oh, real-time cloud cost monitoring. Okay, the only way you're going to achieve such a thing is if you build an API shim that interprets everything that you're telling your cloud control plane to do, taking cost metrics out of it, and then passing it on to the actual cloud control plane.” Otherwise, you're talking about it showing up in the billing record in—ideally, eight hours; in practice, several days, or you're talking about the CloudTrail events, which is not holistic but gives you some rough idea, but it's also in some cases, 5 to 20 minutes delayed. There's no real-time way to do this without significant disruption to what's going on in your environment.So, when I hear about, “Oh, we do real-time bill analysis.” Yeah, it feels—to be very direct—you don't know enough about the problem space you're working within to speak intelligently about it because anyone who's played in this space for a while knows exactly how hard it is to get there. Now, I've talked to companies that have built real-time-ish systems that take that shim approach and acts sort of as a metadata sidecar ersatz billing system that tracks all of this so they can wind up intercepting potentially very expensive configuration mistakes. And that's great. That's also a bit beyond for a lot of folks today, but it's where the industry is going. But there is no way to get there today, short of effectively intercepting all of those calls, in a way that is cohesive and makes sense. How do you square that circle given the complete lack of effective tooling?Tim: Honestly, I'm going to point that right back at the cloud provider because they know how much you're spending, real-time. They know exactly how much you spend in real-time. They've figured it out. They have the buckets, they have APIs for it internally. I'm sure they do; it would make no sense for them not to. Without giving anything anyway, I know that when I was at AWS, I knew how much they were spending, almost real-time.Corey: That's impressive. I wish that existed. My never having worked at AWS perspective on it is that they, of course, have the raw data effective immediately, or damn close to it, but the challenge for the billing system is distilling and summarizing and attributing all of that in a reasonable timeframe; it is an exabyte-scale problem. I've talked to folks there who have indicated it is comfortably north of a petabyte in raw data per day. And that was a couple of years ago, so one can only imagine as the footprint has increased, so has all of this.I mean, the billing system is fundamentally magic from the outside. I'm not saying it's good magic, but it is magic, and it's something that is unappreciated, that every customer uses, and is one of those areas that doesn't get the attention it deserves. Because, let's be clear, here, we talk about observability; the bill is still the only thing that AWS offers that gives you a holistic overview of everything running in your account, in one place.Tim: What I think is interesting is that you talk about this, the scale of the problem and that it makes it difficult to solve. At the same time, I can have a conversation with my partner about kitty litter, and then all of a sudden, I'm going to start getting ads about kitty litter within minutes. So, I feel like it's possible to emit cost as a metric like you would CPU or disk. And if I'm going to look at who's going to do that, I'm going to look right back at AWS. The fun part about that, though, is I know from AWS's business model, that if that's something they were to emit, it would also cost you, like, 25 cents per call, and then you would actually, like, triple your cloud costs just trying to figure out how much it costs you.Corey: Only with 16 other billing dimensions because of course it would. And again, I'm talking about stuff, because of how I operate and how I think about this stuff, that is inherently corner case, or [vertex 00:31:39] case in many cases. But for the vast majority of folks, it's not the, “Oh, you have this really weird data transfer paradigm between these two resources,” which yeah, that's a problem that needs to be addressed in an awful lot of cases because data transfer pricing is bonkers, but instead it's the, “Huh. You just spun up a big cluster that's going to cost $20,000 a month.” You probably don't need to wait a full day to flag that.And you also can't put this on the customer in the sense of, “Oh, just set some budget alarms, that's great. That's the first thing you should do in a new AWS account.” “Well, jackhole, I've done an awful lot of first things I'm supposed to do in an AWS account, in my dedicated test account for these sorts of things. It's been four months, I'm not done yet with all of those first things I'm supposed to do.” It's incredibly secure, increasingly expensive, and so far all it runs is a single EC2 instance that is mostly there just so that everything else doesn't error out trying to divide by zero.Tim: There are some things that are built-in. If I stand up an EC2 instance and it goes down, I'm going to get an alert that this instance terminated for some reason. It's just going to show up informationally.Corey: In the console. You're not going to get called about it or paged about it, unless—Tim: Right.Corey: —you have something else in the business that will, like a boss that screams at you two o'clock in the morning. This is why we have very little that's production-facing here.Tim: But if I know that alert exists somewhere in the console, that's easy for me to write a trap for. That's easy for me to write, say hey, I'm going to respond to that because this call is going to come out somewhere; it's going to get emitted somewhere. I can now, as an engineer, write a very easy trap that says, “Hey, pop this in the Slack. Send an alert. Send a page.”So, if I could emit a cost metric, and I could say, “Wow. Somebody has spun up this thing that's going to cost X amount of money. Someone should get paged about this.” Because if they don't page about this and we wait eight hours, that's my month's salary. And you would do that if your database server went down; you would do that if someone rooted that database server; you would do that if the database server was [bogging 00:33:48] you to scale up another one. So, why can't you do that if that database server was all of sudden costing you way more than you had calculated?Corey: And there's a lot of nuance here because what you're talking about makes perfect sense for smaller-scale accounts, but even some of the very large accounts where we're talking hundreds of millions a year in spend, you can set compromised keys up on GitHub, put them in Payspin, whatever, and then people start spinning up Bitcoin miners everywhere. Great. It takes a long time to materially move the needle on that level of spend; it gets lost in the background noise. I lose my mind when I wind up leaving a managed NAT gateway running and it cost me 70 bucks a month in my $5 a month test account. Yeah, but you realize you could basically buy an island and it gets lost in the AWS bill at some of the high watermarks for some of these larger accounts.“Oh, someone spun up a cluster that's going to cost $400,000 a year?” Yeah, do I need to re-explain to you what a data science team does? They light money on fire in return for questionable returns, as a general rule. You knew that when you hired them; leave them alone. Whereas someone in their developer account does this, yeah, you kind of want to flag that immediately.It always comes down to rules and context. But I'd love to have some templates ready to go of, “I'm a starving student, please alert me anytime it looks like I might possibly exceed the free tier,” or better yet, “Don't let me, and if I do, it's on you and you eat the cost.” Conversely, it's, “Yeah, this is a Netflix sub-account or whatnot. Maybe don't bother me for anything whatsoever because freedom and responsibility is how we roll.” I imagine that's what they do internally on a lot of their cloud costing stuff because freedom and responsibility is ingrained in their culture. It's great. It's the freedom from having to think about cloud bills and the responsibility for paying it, of the cloud bill.Tim: Yeah, we will get internally alerted if things are [laugh] up too long, and then we will actually get paged, and then our manager would get paged, [laugh] and it would go up the line. If you leave something that's running too expensive, too long. So, there is a system there for it.Corey: Oh, yeah. The internal AWS systems for employees are probably my least favorite AWS service, full stop. And I've seen things posted about it; I believe it's called Isengard, for spinning up internal accounts and the rest—there's a separate one, I think, called Conduit, but I digress—that you spin something up, and apparently if it doesn't wind up—I don't need you to comment on this because you worked there and confidentiality is super important, but to my understanding it's, great, it has a whole bunch of formalized stuff like that and it solves for a whole lot of nifty features that bias for the way that AWS focuses on accounts and how they've view security and the rest. And, “Oh, well, we couldn't possibly ship this to customers because it's not how they operate.” And that's great.My problem with this internal provisioning system is it isolates and insulates AWS employees from the real pain of working with multiple accounts as a customer. You don't have to deal with the provisioning process of Control Tower or whatnot; you have your own internal thing. Eat your own dog food, gargle your own champagne, whatever it takes to wind up getting exposure to the pain that hits customers and suddenly you'll see those things improve. I find that the best way to improve a product is to make the people building it live with the painful parts.Tim: I think it's interesting that the stance is, “Well, it's not how the customers operate, and we wouldn't want the customers to have to deal with this.” But at the same time, you have to open up, like, 100 accounts if you need more than a certain number of S3 buckets. So, they are very comfortable with burdening the customer with a lot of constraints, and they say, “Well, constraints drive innovation.” Certainly, this is a constraint that you could at least offer and let the customers innovate around that.Corey: And at least define who the customer is. Because yeah, “I'm a Netflix sub-account is one story,” “I'm a regulated bank,” is another story, and, “I'm a student in my dorm room, trying to learn how this whole cloud thing works,” is another story. From risk tolerance, from a data protection story, from a billing surprise story, from a, “I'm trying to learn what the hell this is, and all these other service offerings you keep talking to me about confuse the hell out of me; please streamline the experience.” There's a whole universe of options and opportunity that isn't being addressed here.Tim: Well, I will say it very simply like this: we're talking about a multi-trillion dollar company versus someone who, if their AWS bill is too high, they don't pay rent; maybe they don't eat; maybe they have other issues, they don't—medical bill doesn't get paid; child care doesn't get paid. And if you're going to tell me that this multi-trillion dollar company can't solve for that so that doesn't happen to that person and tells them, “Well, if you come in afterwards, after your bill gets there, maybe we can do something about it, but in the meantime, suffer through this.” That's not ethical. Full stop.Corey: There are a lot of things that AWS gets right, and I want to be clear that I'm not sitting here trying to cast blame and say that everything they're doing is terrible. I feel like every time I talk about billing in any depth, I have to throw this disclaimer in. Ninety to ninety-five percent of what they do is awesome. It's just the missing piece that is incredibly painful for customers, and that's what I spend most of my time focusing on. It should not be interpreted to think that I hate the company.I just want them to do better than they are, and what they're doing now is pretty decent in most respects. I just want to fix the painful parts. Tim, thank you for joining me for a third time here. I'm certain I'll have you back in the somewhat near future to talk about more aspects of this, but until then, where can people find you slash retain your services?Tim: Well, you can find me on Twitter at @elchefe. If you want to retain my services for which you would be very, very happy to have, you can go to duckbillgroup.com and fill out a little questionnaire, and I will magically appear after an exchange of goods and services.Corey: Make sure to reference Tim by name just so that we can make our sales team facepalm because they know what's coming next. Tim, thank you so much for your time; it's appreciated.Tim: Thank you so much, Corey. I loved it.Corey: Principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group, Tim Banks. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, wait at least eight hours—possibly as many as 48 to 72—and then leave a comment explaining what you didn't like.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Voice and AI: The Voice Creation Experience with Tim Heller

VO BOSS Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 21, 2021 22:15

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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245: Hacking Reality with Rony Abovitz

Greater Than Code

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2021 80:18

03:03 - Rony's Superpower: Being a Space Cadet: Free-Willing Imagination, Insight, and Intuition 06:54 - Becoming Interested in Technology * Science + Art * Star Wars (https://www.starwars.com/) * Solar Power 10:30 - Unstructured Play and Maintaining a Sense of Wonder and Free-Spiritedness * Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcenden (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnxpqecbpOU) 15:15 - Power Structures and Hierarchies * Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow) * Order vs. Disorder * Greater Than Code Episode 125: Everything is Communication with Sam Aaron (https://www.greaterthancode.com/everything-is-communication) 35:04 - Using Technology to Decentralize Social Structures: Is it possible? * Hacking Reality * Enlightenment and Transcendence * Somatics (https://www.healthline.com/health/somatics) * Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis by Stanislav Grof (https://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Emergency-Personal-Transformation-Consciousness/dp/0874775388) 01:05:19 - The Game of Capitalism * What It Means To Win; Mimicking Desires * Reorienting Around Joy, Creation, Learning, and Experiences * Self-Actualization & Community 01:09:39 - Are We Technology? * Survival of the Fittest Reflections: Tim: We as a global community, need to bring our drums to the drum circle. Chanté: How do we build decentralized guilds? Arty: 1) Breaking out of nets and creating opportunities to innovate, invent, rethink, and enable new things to happen. 2) How do we create more entrepreneurship and enable more entrepreneurial innovation to happen? Rony: Empathy, Compassion, Imagination, Freedom, Courage. BONUS: The lost classic "Fire" (from one of Rony's early bands) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/5575o58xzm2kh28/fire.wav?dl=0) 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: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join. CHANTÉ: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 245. My name is Chanté Martinez Thurmond, and I am here with my friend, Tim Banks. TIM: Hey, everybody! I'm Tim Banks, and I am here with my friend, Damian Burke. DAMIEN: Hi, I'm Damian Burke and I'm here with my friend, Arty Starr. ARTY: Thank you, Damien, and I'm here with our guest today, Rony Abovitz. This is actually the second time Rony has been with us on the show. The first time we unfortunately had some problems with our audio recording. We had a really great conversation so, disappointing, but I'm sure we will have an even better conversation the second time around. Rony is a technology founder, pioneer inventor, visionary leader, and strategic advisor with a diverse background in computer-assisted surgery, surgical robots, AI, computer graphics, and visualization sensing advanced systems, media animations, spatial audio, and spatial computing XR. Rony has a strong history of creating new technology fields in businesses from the startup garage onward, including Magic Leap, the world's leading spatial computing company founded back in 2011. His new still start at Sun & Thunder he plans to launch in 2021 and prior to Magic Leap, he also founded MAKO Surgical, a medical software and robotics company specialized in manufacturing surgical robotic arm assistance technology. He is deeply into film, art, animation, music recording, AI, robotics, ethics, and philosophy. He is also a senior advisor at the Boston Consulting Group advising a small group of deeptech startups and a few Fortune 50 companies, a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, and a two-time World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Welcome to the show, Rony. RONY: Thank you for having me again. ARTY: It's a pleasure. So our first question we always ask on this show is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? RONY: I think my superpower is not being able to do a podcast the first time correctly. Actually, I think I had a really good response last time, but I think the main one is I'm just like a space cadet and you could translate that into just, I have a very freewheeling imagination so I think that's always been my superpower. I could always imagine, or have a creative idea around a problem and really imagine things that don't exist, that aren't there yet. I think that's been always really helpful in anything I've done. So that's probably my main superpower. I don't know what that would look like as a superhero outfit. I think I gained a second achievement level, which is some level of insight, or intuition into knowing things, which I think it's really hard to explain, but I feel like I didn't have that. And then in college, it was a really interesting experience, which I probably won't get into a lot of detail here, but I think I gained that achievement level. I feel like I have both of those now. I feel like I leveled up and gained this insight intuition kind of thing that I didn't have before and I think those two together have been helpful. So there's probably many more achievements to unlock, but I think I got those two so far in the game. DAMIEN: You leveled up on intuition as a result of an experience in college. RONY: Yes. It was an interesting experience. I had a transcendent experience. DAMIEN: [chuckles] Well, that sounds exciting. ARTY: I think before my question was, how did you develop that? Tell us a little bit about your background. What kind of family did you come from? Was this something that you think was cultivated in childhood, or was this something that happened as you got to adolescence and then to into college? RONY: My mom's a painter. So she's an artist and she was pregnant with me walking around the campus at Kent State during the Kent State shootings and had to run away to not be shot. That was kind of there, but not there. She was an art student at Kent State at the time. I think she said to me at some point, there was difficulty in the pregnancy such they had to give her some morphine, or something. It probably got into my brain [chuckles] so probably scrambled it a little bit. I'm not sure if I had all that, but who knows what they did back then. So there's a little bit of that, but my mom's a freewheeling artist so I grew up that way. Dad passed away a couple of years ago, but always entrepreneurial, also artistic. So had this freewheeling imaginative household where no one told you, you couldn't do anything. I think that actually helped a lot. Nobody was born with a silver spoon. Both my parents were born but I was dirt poor as you could imagine. My Dad grew up in a house that had no windows so when we'd visit, my grandmother's chickens would literally fly through the window [laughs] and knock your head. When you're a kid, you think it's the greatest thing in the world. I think I swam in a bathtub that also served as the place to cheat fish. I think my Dad's mom would bring fish to the market and sell them, like a carp, or something and I thought they were my friends and didn't realize they were turning into dinner. I think that's why I became a vegetarian. So we grew up really poor on both sides. Everyone was self-made, freewheeling, and imaginative so that probably did help. CHANTÉ: Yeah. I think for myself, too. Just growing up poor helped with my imagination; I just dreamed of all these amazing things I would one day have as an adult. So I happen to think it's a superpower, too. It's pretty cool. Thanks for sharing all that. TIM: So I guess, what I'd like to know is when you're coming from that kind of background, what first was your jumpstart into using technology, or being interested in technology? RONY: I think I was always simultaneously interested in science and art at the exact same time, which is odd, which makes for a good misfit because either you're the art damaged kid in school and you hang out with the art crowd, or you're the science nerd and you hang out with – but I liked both so there's not really a good place where if you're both to hang out. Probably just being really curious about how everything works and what's going on behind the scenes. Like, why are things the way they are, trying to imagine them, but I'm not totally sure. I just sort of always was into both. That is a very good question. It's kind of asking if you're a fish, how did you get fins? I'm like, “I guess, they grew?” But I don't know, I just seem to be equally into that. Probably Star Wars, if you really get down to it. I saw Star Wars as a kid and suddenly, that's what you want to do. You want to build an X-wing, fly an X-wing, blow up the Death Star. That probably had a lot to do with it. Actually got to meet George Lucas, which was super awesome and I'm like, “You're responsible for my entire path in my life. Science and engineering, wanting to do all these crazy things. It's all your fault.” He was like, “Oh my God, don't blame me for this.” [chuckles] CHANTÉ: Wow. RONY: But no, it was in a funny way. CHANTÉ: That's funny because the last time the conversation we had, Rony, we talked about all these cool people that you've met that have influenced you and I asked you like, “Is this a SIM? How are you meeting all these amazing people?” [laughs] RONY: I'm pretty damn sure it's a SIM at this point. [laughter] Definitely a SIM. I'm very close to that. [overtalk] CHANTÉ: Become convinced now, for sure. RONY: We can get into that later, if you want. I think it's a SIM. I'm not sure who's running it right now, but it's a SIM. [overtalk] CHANTÉ: [inaudible] wanting to do that. ARTY: So with all this creativity, what were some of the first things you started dreaming about building? RONY: I think as a kid, I wanted to make a solar-powered airplane, which sounds like an odd thing, but I was weirdly into solar power. Like, I wanted solar-powered cars, I started to get solar cells from Radio Shack and soldered them up in stuff and spin motors. I'm like, “That's so cool, it's free, there's no battery needed,” and then of course, you need batteries to store it if there's clouds. But I was thinking that was really neat. It was just like this magic of sun on this thing, on this chip and suddenly, you get electricity out of it. It was like, whoa. I think my uncle gave me some Radio Shack science kit when I was really small. I started messing with it. I had a solar cell and I figured that was magical and I got really into it. I don't know why I didn't pursue that because it seems like that'd be a good thing to do today. But I was like really into in the very beginning, solar-powered, building solar-powered everything, especially solar-powered airplanes. I wanted to build some perpetually flying. Actually, I designed something that won a state science fair award that pretty much looks like later on and after that, it was a plane that I think flew across the United States, a solar-powered plane, and it was very similar design. So I was actually kind of happy I was a little bit in front of all of that, maybe 5 years or 10 years ahead of that one. ARTY: Just thinking about there's so many things like that that are magical. Just you've got this conversion of sun energy to electricity and there's so many things now we take for granted that are just kind of there like, “Oh, I have the internet in my pocket.” I feel like we've lost some bit of that wonder with taking some of these things for granted. I was talking with Chanté a little bit earlier about how dreaming gets stifled, how creativity gets stifled, and we ended up in this mode where we're doing things the way the world expects us to. We've got jobs in this path of life that we're supposed to follow and these rules, or the ways that things are supposed to be versus that passion of creativity, of discovery, of wonder, of wow, isn't this amazing that sun energy can be converted to electricity? I wonder what I could do with that. I wonder what I could build. I wonder what I could create that doesn't already exist. Where do you think that spirit comes from and is there a way that we can create more of that in our culture? RONY: It's a great question because I think there are still kids who have this experience, but I think less kids. I think it was just totally unstructured imagination, unstructured play. All my friends when we were kids – I didn't let my daughter do this, but we were like 8, 9, 10 years old, we'd grab a garbage can lid, make a sword out of a branch, and then we'd run around in the woods fighting dragons. There's no adults around, dozens of kids having some kind of like full on whatever we wanted. Like, we're just running about till almost nighttime deep in the woods like the kids from Stand By Me, the movie, or something. We got our bikes; we're riding miles away. We'd do whatever adventures we wanted. I remember a couple of friends of mine and I, we'd walk along the highway, which was incredibly stupid, collecting beer cans because we thought, “Wow, look at that, we can collect beer cans.” I don't know why. We're like 9 years old, we thought that would be a cool thing to do and we would figure it and then we'd cut them and make airplanes out of them and just craft stuff. That's probably dangerous. I won't recommend kids do that right now. But the idea of unstructured play; there's not a game, there's not something someone designed, you're not watching television. You're just running around in the world, doing stuff and your brain and your imagination have to fill in the gaps, I think that's what people really should be doing. Whereas, I think a lot of kids do this now, here's a tablet. It forces you to think in patterns; you're thinking in a certain way and that's actually scary because everyone's copy pasting the same device and running on the same popular app, or whatever and that's patterning your brain to be caught in a certain way of thinking versus this unstructured thinking, which is more rare right now, I think. DAMIEN: So that sounds like something that would be lovely to get back as an adult. Do you have any techniques? Is this something you do? Do you have ways of structuring that? [chuckles] Of getting to that unstructured play as an adult? RONY: I'm an anomaly because I don't think I ever got structured, which is, I think unfortunate. Not unfortunate, I think it's fortunate that I never got structured. So trying to think if you got caught and how would you break free. But I think I really never got caught in that net. I think I've always been like a wild fish in the ocean, but – [overtalk] DAMIEN: How do you stay out of the net? That's also something I'd like to hear. RONY: That's an interesting, I never had a job, like an actual job job. College, I started my first company and never really worked for anybody. I figured I'm unmanageable so I can't work for anybody, I might as well start my own companies. That was a saving grace because I think it would have been difficult to work for somebody. To conform and work in somebody else's system rather than to build something and try to make that a place people want to be at. But then it's weird, it's like you become the man and you're like, “Oh my God, what am I doing?” That's a whole another topic I won't get into this second. DAMIEN: But do you provide that sort of structure and patterns for people who work for you? RONY: In the beginning of all the companies I started—and I'm doing this again with a new one—it's always been freewheeling, awesome – I think the people that are beginning, that was the greatest time ever. But then as you get bigger, once you get to pass 20, 30 people, even 30 people unstructured, big, crazy, some folks start to come in and crave that structure. This is chaos, like what's going on and then you're like, “Okay, we've got to order this and we've got to processes and operating plans and all these other things,” and then next thing you know, there's 2,000 people working for you. I'm still trying to figure out how do you maintain that wonderful, free-spirited, freewheeling environment at bigger scale because at bigger scale, it feels like you've got to create all this framework and all these boxes for people to be in and processes. People are demanding it like, sometimes employees get upset that it's not there because they're so used to being in that cage for somebody else that they're not used to being free and they want to run around and go back to that cage and I'm like, “Be free,” and they're like, “No.” People who worked for me in the past will tell you that. They'll basically say it was this odd thing that I was pushing them to be more free than they wanted and then the ones who really liked it, got shunned as the things got bigger because what's that person not conforming? They're supposed to follow the procedures and why are you spending all your time with them because they're the ones that don't follow the rules. I'm like, “I don't like following the rules.” So I guess, what is a good technique? I have a recording studio, so I think playing really loud guitar helps. It lets you feel like you can like do anything. Really loud guitar through a big amp, a lot of fuzz pedals, or things like that, or you go on a long hike. We would do ocean kayaking, go a whole day ocean kayaking where there's sharks and weird stuff and some of you are far away from a computer. There's the universe and wild animals and you're back to primal nature again; you feel like you're just a wild, free spirit. I try to do that as much as possible. I think those things help, but it's hard, though and then you've got to go back on a Monday morning and there are some office space type manager asking you for TPS reports. That's really difficult. I feel bad because as the companies I've built got bigger, I probably had someone who had someone who made someone do a TPS report and it always bothered me. But it's like, you can't run at a certain size without the TPS report even though nobody knows what a TPS report is. If you don't know what it is, watch the movie but it's like why at some point you'd have someone two, or three levels below you make someone else do a TPS report? ARTY: Yeah. That's a great question. It's like who created this damn report? And why are we so coming to the demand of a report, or empirical data to move forward and work it in our life? As you were sitting there talking and everything, it brought me back to that comment I had again of Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute who talked about his concept of scaling, how that happens in all things that exist in the universe. There's a ratio of scale that we can't really escape and it's an interesting phenomenon that I'm still trying to understand, but I think, Rony where I feel really kindred spirited to you is I hate to be tamed and then once I feel like we have to scale, or tame, I'm like, “Oh, this I want out of this.” Get me out of this game, get me to the new game where I get to germinate something and start it, and there's no form and I love that. I wonder, though. Somebody like you who's created all this amazing technology, aren't you the guy who could maybe make this a reality where we can create those experiences [chuckles] using technology to help us get in and out of these dreams, dates in and out of these waking and normal states that the society has locked into? RONY: Well, here's a couple things to think about from what you're saying. One of them, I have a notion of can you build a gigantic decentralized—I won't even call it a company, but a guild—of free people who are connected through blockchains? And it does not look the pyramid of structure of a company, but it's some kind of guild of artisans and we blockchain to each other and emerge and do things together? Like orcas will form packs because it's the right thing to do but there's no – well, there actually is an alpha orca so you do have a small pyramid. So it's the alpha orca have fights and then you become the ronin orca. There's a little bit of that. But is there a decentralized guild blockchain thing that could have hundreds of thousands of people that could build totally new tech platforms that are not the central power tech companies? I've always been pondering that and wondering how is that possible and every time I've thought about it, it seems like people collapse back into the same structure of the pyramid. Like they want a king, you try to create something that doesn't have a king, or a queen, and they want the king again. Why do we keep doing that? But somehow, I believe that there is a way to do that to have that democratic free-spirited thing. I think that's what the United States was founded on. Let's not have a king. Let's just have someone who's kicked out every 4 years. They're nothing special. Don't make a big deal about them. But now, 200 years later, we made that person more into a king. We give them special powers; they can do things and they don't get – they're above normal citizens. How did that fall apart? But I just keep wondering, is that possible? Because I think big tech companies reflect more of a monarchy. There is a central figure that have massive power, there's the inner court that have massive power, and then there's the serfs who all work for the central authority. It's basically, we fought against that to free ourselves of monarchies, but our companies and tech companies look more like monarchies. They could be benevolent, or not benevolent, but we still have not been able to get past that king over people thing. It perplexes me and why we keep repeating that. TIM: Well, I think there's a few things with that. You mentioned scale, like as you get bigger and as you add more people, you add more ideas and you add more notions on what the right thing to do is, or what the right way to go is. Obviously, as you do that, more folks are going to agree, or disagree on it. You're going to have various ways of opinions; you end up getting factions, or tribes, or whatever it is. Certainly, this is where people think that way, this group of people think that way, and then you introduce politics because you have to find some way to get all these folks with different ideals to agree on a common purpose, or a common goal. When you do that, once you introduce politics, then you start to introduce the notion of leadership like that. But I think it's interesting when we look at it in the guise of big tech companies and how we have these regions, a lot of this ends up coming is because of the people that ended up profiting the most off of the tech company are the ones that get to make all the decisions. It would be an interesting thing if there was a truly democratic company where everybody from top to bottom made the same amount of money, had the same amount of equity, have the same amount of say in the company. And then if you are a leadership role, it's more like maybe a strategic vision, but your CEO is going to make the same amount of money as your junior developer. Because unless you do that, you don't have a democratic, you don't function; you have a hierarchy by definition. DAMIEN: What we're talking about is power structures and every time there's a power differential, there's going to be a power structure that supports that. The reason why you said earlier when you were about talking how you were having to be like, “No, be free. There are no rules here. It's not a cage.” People resist that because they've been lied to. They say, “You don't have to stick to my rules.” All that really means is I'm not going to tell you what the rules are, which is horribly traumatizing. So until you have that equally distributed power, you're going to have that hierarchy and that structure and somebody is going to want a TPS report before they can go forward on something. RONY: Are there any examples where that's existed for some period of time, even in a small form? Like the equally distributed power, anything? DAMIEN: I've seen it in co-ops. It requires a lot of trust and the more people you involve, the more differentials you're going to find. [overtalk] CHANTÉ: And I think there are some [inaudible] in this communities. ARTY: I think scale. [overtalk] RONY: Like a small co-op. CHANTÉ: We can definitely do this. RONY: A small co-op. ARTY: Yeah. There's definitely people that are trying to do the sorts of things that you're talking about from an organizational structure standpoint, but as you've also pointed out, there's dynamics of resistance to it of it not necessarily being what people want. I mentioned this book before, Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book and the thought that comes to mind as we're talking about this dynamic of being pulled toward wanting order and structure is a big part of his thesis in the book is that we have a desire for order in our consciousness and we have a gravity toward wanting order in that chaos and disorder is uncomfortable. So when we're in that uncomfortable situation, we can learn skills to create our own order out of the disorder, to be creative, to think about ways to construct new ideas and stuff in our head and make new games. But our brain wants some kind of game to play, wants some kind of order to build around, and I feel like, we were talking about these nets that we get caught in and the way that our education system is structured, the way that we learn in school is a net in itself. We learn how to play the game of school and teach people how to follow the rules and be really good at following the rules and in playing the game that's given to you. I feel like if we want to teach people how to create order out of disorder from their own consciousness, through creative play, that we need a learning environment that is oriented toward those things so that we can get practiced at it. Being in a situation of being uncomfortable, being around people that are good at those kinds of things that we can learn how to mimic perhaps and shift those shifts, those things around that way. An acquaintance of mine, we had on the show a while back, Sam Aaron, he does Sonic Pi and he teaches little kids how to code, learn how to be a music DJ and it's the coolest thing. I was reading this post about a little 6-year-old, who was super excited about DJing it at her next birthday party coming up and she was going to get really good at DJing and mixing her own beats. She's 6 years old and I'm just looking at this how beautiful it is and that seeing that fire, that inspiration to create light up in someone, once that fire's lit, it keeps fueling itself. It keeps fueling that desire. I feel like there's something very powerful about music, because you've got some basic rules of how things work, but this huge space to create in, and almost everything we can relate in various ways to music. What if we changed the way that we educated to focus on some of those musical principles and this could be something that's adult learning, too is how can we learn to riff together in a musical context and learn how to do jazz? RONY: That's very cool. DAMIEN: What I heard is that we should all start jazz bands. TIM: Yeah, same. RONY: That's all good with me. TIM: Let's see if they get too big, then you have to have a conductor. [laughter] DAMIEN: Like a quartet, big band at most. No orchestra. [overtalk] TIM: You see, big band has to have a conductor, right? That's one of the things. DAMIEN: I have played in a big band without a conductor. TIM: I was in a couple of myself. We'll talk about that one later. RONY: Well, actually that's a good thing because if you have a trio, or a quartet, everyone can go and it somehow works. You all have to pay attention, but if you try to do that with 10 people, 20, 50, a 100, it turns into noise. DAMIEN: I also think it depends on what kind of music you're making. A symphonic orchestra generally needs a conductor, at the very least a concert master who can wave the bow and get people on time. But I've been in drum circles of 300 people that made beautiful music with absolutely no leadership, or any sort of control like that. TIM: Well, I think the difference is that in the drum circle, I don't think there's a preconceived plan that's being executed. It's all improv, right? It's all made on the fly and then you pick a direction. I think it's different when you have a set task, or a thing you're going to accomplish. In the case of a symphony, or any other thing where we have we're not making up music on the point on the spot, we have a set score. We know what notes they're going to be and we're going to be done. I think there's space for both of those. There's space to say that we're just going to see what comes out of this and then there's another bullet that says, “Okay, well we have to do this.” One is very much creative and I love that. The other part is executive. You don't want, for example, surgeons to just go in there willy nilly and just saying, “We're just going to see what we find and just do whatever.” There has to be a plan. There has to be something that gets executed. Any kind of engineering feat, it has to be done with a plan and structure and different things that have to be done at certain times. So I think there's a place for both in any healthy culture and society where people that create and people who design certainly should not be encumbered by definitions of structure. But if you're going to create, or design something that's going to withstand a hurricane, there obviously needs to be some concerns about a structure and how things are put together. RONY: But let me give you guys a comment on power structure and I'm a bit of anomaly because I've always been super uncomfortable being in that alpha power spot, but I've always had to be there to build a company. Some of them got quite big and the bigger they got, the more uncomfortable I was because I didn't think a human being should have that power. By the way, the question about smart people and billionaires, I've met a bunch of those billionaires that you've mentioned, I've also met some incredibly smart people; they're not always directly correlated. There may be a smart billionaire, but it's not one-to-one—a billionaire who's someone who's highly optimized at a certain function. Some of those brilliant people I know are super poor and they have built-in things in their mind that they don't want to do the things that they might see oppress others to get to a certain place. They just don't. So they're more happy in their lot making $25,000 a year, or whatever they're doing. But I think what's interesting about trying to not have a power structure is how people just default go into this algorithm in people's brains. I'll give an example. When one of my companies was small, I had a largely empty office and a couple cool collectible vinyl toy things. I love weird, those kind of animate vinyl toys and then just Star Wars thing. I just have a couple of my shelves. When people would visit, like new employees, or partners, they would bring something and put it on the shelf like an homage offering. I'm like, “That's weird,” and then the more that people thought now it was required to bring one of those and make an offering and leave it on my shelf. So a few years later, my shelves are covered the hundreds of these offerings and I'm like, “What in the heck is going on here?” I didn't ask anyone to do it, but people felt like if you're going to go see the alpha wolf, you have to bring them a dead rabbit and leave it as an offering and it was just amazing. It's like all this stuff and I would give most of it away, but it was really weird how everyone has this algorithm that they feel like if you're going to go visit the alpha leader, you've got to bring a gift, an offering, a moose, whatever you happen to have caught. Even when we dealt with people from outside the US, it was even more extreme like you'd have this whole formal exchange; you had to bring them a gift and they would bring you this gift. I was like, “What is going on here?” This is thousands of years of evolutionary biology wired into people's brains making them do things. I'm like, “I don't want to be that!” Like, that's not what we're doing. We're totally building a different social order, no one's paying attention to me at all, and everyone is just like, “Nope, we have this code built into our brain and we're just going to do that.” I found that to be really strange to the point where I build two decent sized companies and each time, I felt like I had to throw the ring into the volcano like in The Hobbit, or Lord of the Rings, because if you don't, it just kind of gets to you. I felt like if it started to get to me, I just need to throw it into the volcano and start over again. Hand the ring to someone else and go back to base camp and try it again, which I'm doing now. But I found that both times I built successful tech, but not the nonhierarchical culture I had in mind at the beginning, which I'm trying to do now again. I'm not sure how do you fight human biology? I'm like, “Don't do that. Stop bringing the moose and the rabbits by! What on earth are you people doing?” and they just keep doing it. I don't know what it ism or why, but it's like, we are hard wired as humans to follow an alpha wolf. In fact, the alpha two and threes feel like they actually have to challenge you in a tribal fight and if you don't put them down and show the rest of the wolf pack that you're the alpha, then they'll try to eat you. It's like what is going on? But that is what happens at every company, in every country, in every government, and it's so weird that we have not evolved past the way we were thousands and thousands of years ago. CHANTÉ: Is it possible, Rony the endeavor that you're working on now to use technology, to dream of new futures and realities that does decentralize social structures in the sense – because my feeling is the collective consciousness is why we're doing this. Like, we can't escape ourselves. So if we give ourselves new experiences and we know what it feels like to have decentralized collectivism, then we may choose to build new cities, families, and companies in a decentralized structure. Because that power and oppression, it feels like a human instinct that we can't escape it. but I'm just not convinced that that's real. I think it's been something, a story, a narrative that we've been stuck in. So I think we have to build a new story, or create a new story and a new reality and I think technology can allow us to do that and people like you and everyone on this call, we can do that together. ARTY: Yeah. I was thinking about that, too of software gives us this ability of reality construction and if we've learned certain ways of doing things, if we operate in a certain net in a certain rails playing certain games and we don't have a template for anything else so that outside of that is just disorder and unstructured and unknown, then we're going to cling to the familiar structure. We're going to cling to what feels safe and known and predictable, and that we know how to operate. I feel like the way to escape that is to create an alternative that offers structure of a system that gives you a set of rails that reorients things and creates opportunities for creativity, for entrepreneurship, for ideation, but creates new structures where those things can thrive. I don't think we're going to get away from technology, but we can reinvent our interface with technology. We can reinvent the shape of our social software infrastructure and how we relate to one another through technology. I feel like to overcome that gap, what needs to happen is a vision, really, is the putting together a vision of what that might look like such that we can build it. RONY: I spent the last decade going really deep into that, about as deep as you could possibly imagine, and it started out actually a few years earlier, 2008, 2009, working on this call it a Miyazaki film world project with my friends at Weta and we spent a few years on that. And then one of the things I felt was if you're going to – I won't get into the details of the project is actually something Sun & Thunder will hopefully be releasing. But if I was going to go into this idea of hacking into reality, what is that? I actually needed to go do that in order to be credible about making a story about it, or making a film about it, or film world. So I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to go on a tangent.” So I started a tech company with the idea that we're going to be reality hackers. Like, we're going to figure that out and we're just going to go all the way. We're going to hack into the visual cortex, we're going to go full on, and it was amazing because all these people, like people who created The Matrix and Neal Stephenson from Snow Crash, all these people started showing up. And then some of the very early stuff we did, we started to go really there, like really deep. That's stuff that you can productize, but we're starting to unlock things about how the human brain works in our connection to this weird connection between the physics and how our brain constructs reality. What does that mean and how do you actually get in there and actually hack it? We did some stuff that freaked me out so much. Everyone in the early days was like, ‘Whoa, maybe we need to take a step back.” I think that's actually what happened. We had those whoa moments. “Let's take a step back and let's not unlock full atomic fusion right now. Let's do something that you can actually maybe ship,” but we're going to places that were not ready for as a species. We really had those moments where we would see over the horizon. That was intense. One of the things that made me walk back and I think a couple of early folks that we just felt like human software, our human biology is totally unprepared for this. Like, we're not prepared to hack reality. We are not equipped. We're not ready as a species. We would screw things up beyond all belief. Look how badly we're doing on social media, which is so thin and almost nothing. When I think of digital realities, whether it's AR, spatial computing, VR, those are simulation training grounds for the real thing. It scares me when people are talking about neural implants in the brain like, no, no, no, we are not ready for that. In our SIM testing on social media and digital reality, we're not doing a good job. We're creating fairly awful places with occasional cool places. I thought, “Okay, we're going to unleash this like Renaissance of art and imagination.” It's like, no, that's not what's going on. It's going on in little pockets. But for every art and Renaissance thing, you've got like nine, or ten horrible things. Some things I can't even mention. I used to tell our investors, “Someone's going to make trillions of dollars doing the things we refuse to do” because the level of control and weird stuff you can pump into someone's brain. There are companies I'm not naming; you could imagine why they're spending $6 to $8 to $10 billion a year trying to conquer digital reality. Why they have reality labs. You should be really frightened about why they're doing it. L ARTY: Right. RONY: I started out with a notion of can there be this real creative imagination Renaissance and I actually believe there can. But at the same time, it's like every time you have a superhero, there's something else like the super villain appears. It's a law of the universe and I feel like the more we were trying to do good in hacking reality, you would have bad equally emerging and equal strength, maybe sometimes even larger. I don't know what's going on, but it did get me to take a step back and wonder. The human software is totally unprepared and so backwards. Like we're running Dos 1972 right now, or even worse than that. Our software is like Middle Ages and it's so easily manipulatable and triggerable and all kinds of horrible – the human, we have not transcended. We are not where we need to be collectively. That doesn't mean there's not individuals, or groups who are transcending and becoming more enlightened and evolving in a good way. But the net human condition seems to be quite in the bad place right now. It actually scares the crap out of me. So I did take a step back from the notion of I don't know we're ready and maybe we just need to take a breath and figure out our social system, our human biology, like what's going on because we are evolving at so much slower pace than the rapid accelerating pace of our tech capabilities. We're building insane tech. AI will pass us all in this decade, like, what the heck are we doing to ourselves? We're unleashing things in the world we have no idea and society is not capable of predicting. The nonlinear event impact is really scary and we just keep doing it. I don't mean to be all pessimistic, but I think the hope of this creative Renaissance is something that's a beacon—it should be a beacon for some—where you're free, you're decentralized, you're not controlled by this monarchal power. But too much of the other side is actually winning right now, too much of the other side is dominating everything because they're playing the game that I think our brain is wired to. We're wired to a pyramid structure. The people who realize that manipulate it, they take advantage. They do all the things; they've figured out the social psychology, they've hacked the code of the human brain, and they're making tons of money doing it because they know how we are. I don't know if that's just how it will be forever, or is there going to be an actual enlightenment for people. That made me take a step back from hoping that everyone will just have this inner artist wake up and now, I'm not so sure. CHANTÉ: I love that question now. I think it makes me go back to something I continue to say, it's just like, do we get off of our technologies, or get off of the things that we believe connect us? Because we are ourselves technologies so, do we need to be constantly manipulating something else? There's a lot of power in just being together in real time, in real life together and I think if we can go back to some of that, we can remind ourselves because—and this is coming from somebody who spent a lot of time and money in meditation and self-transcendence. Now I'm at this place where I'm like, “Do I need to transcend, or should I just be right where I am because the past, the present, and the future are actually all one and should I pay attention to who I am and what I am and where I am a little bit more versus constantly thinking in the future? This is so hard for me because I'm a futurist. I love to think and imagine new possibilities. But I just wonder. That's kind of one of the mantras I've been sitting with in the last six months, or so. RONY: Thinking of what you're saying, we had a pretty high-level of Tibetan Buddhist who built one of the great temples in Tibet where monks meditate and they built it from memory. There's no architectural plans and he was one of the leaders that he came by and I showed him some stuff we were doing. It was maybe 5, 6 years ago. He's like, “That's amazing and you're cheating.” He goes, “We take years to learn how to do that, but we could do more than what you're doing. You're just level jumping.” I get what you're doing, I understand it but you're taking the elevator, the sky tram up the mountain, and there's something about – but you're not equipping people to know,” or. I didn't really understand what he was talking about at the time. I think I have a better grasp now, but we're not spiritually ready for what we can do and they spent a lot of time doing this. They have their own virtual reality. In fact, it was interesting was I said, “We're not really building technology. We're simply trying to unlock what's in the human brain, which is an amazing computer, best GP in the world is the visual cortex. Best display is our brain. That's all there, we're just trying to tap into it.” He's like, “We do the same thing using different tech, but you're kind of cheating.” I thought that was interesting. It's like you don't really have the satisfaction of climbing up to mid base camp on Everest; you just took the elevator and suddenly, you're there. But your lungs aren't ready. You didn't climb the mountain. You're not fit. I feel like technology is doing that for us. Spiritually, we're just not ready. CHANTÉ: Yeah. I spend a lot of time in somatics. I'm in a couple of somatic communities and we talk a lot about those somatic reps. There's a lot of wisdom in experiencing something firsthand and witnessing somebody else do it alongside you in that community because we learn that way, too. If you're picking up on other people's energetic vibes and feel, you collectively whoever's in that space, in that room, It is something that cellularly somatically, you will become a little bit wiser from. I can't describe it. It's only when I'm in a collective with my yogis who we're doing deep breathing together, or we're doing POS in a practice together and there's just this thing that I experience that I've never had on any drug, or any kind of tech, using technology, what do I put on a headset, or something? I can't describe it. It feels out of this world and it's almost like only those of us in that room would ever be able to describe it and maybe indescribable, but it's powerful. So I keep going back to that. RONY: One of the things he told me was, “Okay, you'll help people realize that reality is just an illusion, but are they equipped to understand that?” That will just freak them out, they're going to break down, and now what? When you actually really get that, when you really understand like how reality is constructed, if you go deep and get into that, which we had to do to build some of the things we were doing, it does weigh heavily on you because you're like, “What the heck is actually going on?” A lot of things you were taught growing up that your parents, or grandparents might believe and then you're – where you might read in a book and you're suddenly facing that the reality you know is not stable; it's liquid, it's hackable, it's editable. You're like, “What is going on?” That kind of opening up of your mind is an interesting place, but no one's equipped to really go there. You almost got to step back and say, “I'm going to forget I saw that. Let me just go back and watch a football game,” and it's way easier to go back and play X-Box right now. [laughs] DAMIEN: Those sorts of discoveries have been happening for all of recorded history and I think farther. People get there via gyms, they get there via sitting on a mountain in the modus pose and sometimes, they come back and go, “Okay, I'm just going to pretend that it's real. [laughter] And sometimes, they don't and die under a Bodhi tree, whatever. But these are things that these are not new realizations, or discoveries. RONY: No, they're not. But what weird is that the vast majority of people have not had that. CHANTÉ: Right. RONY: Vast majority like, think about how many people in this country are not even on the first step of any form of enlightenment. The actions they take, the things they believe, the people they vote for, you're like, “They're so orthogonal and distant from that.” So you do have pockets of people who've had enlightenment and transcendence over the last thousands years, but it's a fractional minority and that's what's like why are the rest stuck? Where is everybody's stuck on and why? DAMIEN: Because they want to be. CHANTÉ: Well, I don't know. [overtalk] DAMIEN: Ego death is death. Nobody wants death. CHANTÉ: We're programmed to be. I think we're conditioned and makes me think, too also Stanislav Grof, I'm not sure if you all know him, a famous transcendent, or transpersonal kind of. RONY: What's his last name? CHANTÉ: Stanislav Grof talks about the spiritual emergency. I'll drop the link here. Really interesting, too and did a lot of holotropic breathwork to get people through transcendence and used a lot of other, I think drugs and synthetics to have those transcendental experiences. But talks a lot about the spiritual emergency and I think you're right, Rony talking about when we have this realization that oh my God, what is reality? [chuckles] Because reality is something that we all can define differently and even this is something that I think quite a bit about what the future of work and technology and all of us coming together, this convergence of who am I without that role, without that title? Who am I without my computer and without my phone with the internet in my pocket? I don't know that we've spent enough time examining who we are going in. We're always looking out and I think we have to come back into ourselves to be home and I'd like to see and I am trying to do more of that, trying to cultivate those experiences with the communities that I run circles with, or the things that I have influence on is just, let's go back into ourselves because there's so much power there. DAMIEN: I talk about this as the high school basketball version of reality. If you've ever been to a high school basketball game, championship, league championship, whatever, and you got the crowds yelling and screaming and everybody's enthused and excited about what's going on. If you were to go down to center court and wave your hands and go, “Hey, hey, hey! Hey everybody, everybody, whoa, whoa, none of this matters.” That's really rude. You're right it doesn't matter. It's high school basketball, but we have chosen to make it matter because that's what makes the game. If you don't care about the rules, you don't have a game. If you don't care about the characters, you don't have a movie. If you don't care about the desk and the computer, you don't have a job. So we make these decisions. We can see through it, if we choose to and see that it's an illusion, it doesn't really matter. But if that's what you're here for, go for it. Have fun. If that's not – RONY: Here's a question, just because it's an illusion, does it mean it doesn't matter? DAMIEN: Exactly. RONY: Actually, just a hint at that. We made this digital person, her name was Micah, and people's reactions to her were unbelievable. They began to have relationships and we had to change behavior code around Micah and if you actually broke her personal space, she would leave. She'd walk away and actually open up a door in a wall and disappear. If you behave badly around her, you would lose access. We had to create this social code of conduct because people were – it was odd. I won't get into all of it. But then we fixed that and it was just interesting that people would want to be with her because she would gaze into your eye and pay attention to you. Looked amazingly real, but almost hyper real, like the most real person who was totally focused on you and that attention level from this illusion made people feel good. Even though she is an illusion, that feeling was real and reality is illusion anyway so is she just as real as anything else, or was something going on? It was kind of odd, like is what you feel, or what you carry with you actually that thing anyway, even if it's all an illusion? DAMIEN: And you get to decide that for yourself with and among your culture and your peers, your group. ARTY: Well, I think joy matters for its own sake. Connecting with one another, having fun, experiencing joy, it's a reason to live, it's a reason to be. And if we're playing a basketball game together, it's fun. The people that are in the crowd, enjoying the game and getting involved with it emotionally, too, it's fun and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with having fun and enjoying those experiences and then being meaningful for their own sake. If we have an experience with a digital person and figure out ways to have some feeling of connection, of being paid attention to, of being listened to, there's definitely some risks with regards to dynamics of attachment and just messing with us as humans that I think are definitely of concern. There's just risks with creating emotional love attachments to digitalness that I think is unexplored, unpredictable riskiness because heartbreak is a real phenomenon experience that can be devastating. That aside, I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with experiencing good feelings from those things happening in our lives. TIM: I just wonder, though what does it say about the human condition when with 7 and a half billion people on the earth that we need to be with, we would think that we need to create a digital person with which to interact? There are so many of us out there with which we could be interacting and probably should be interacting. We've gotten this far as a species without needing to have an artificial person. [overtalk] DAMIEN: Well, we have our emotional people. We have our pet canines, we have the robot people, people make friends with Roombas. Before that, people made friends with stars in the sky. They'll look back to Orion and that's Ra, Ra loves me and so on. TIM: Sure. DAMIEN: It's the same relationship we have with other human beings. TIM: To some extent, but we were still, the person who was having that relationship was the one who actually defined what that person is, who that was, was essentially the imagination. With an artificial person, or artificial intelligence, you don't have that; someone else is deciding that. So would you want to have that type of interaction? I feel like we could probably, as a society, do way better of devoting our resources to improving the human condition among each other by interacting with each other and understanding each other's hopes and dreams and heartbreaks and struggles than if we were going to spend the resources and the time to develop an artificial person with which to interact. If I think of what we want to do to help people, we want to help everyone to help the human condition, to help and just improve lives and create joy around people? I feel like spending toil creating an artificial person is a fool's errand to that end. DAMIEN: Well, what you're describing would be more effective, but it's outside of our skillset. [chuckles] We need George Lucas for that. RONY: Let me agree, but disagree on one thing, I'll give you a couple examples. Imagine your family has, let's call it an artificial person who's with your family for hundreds of years and is the keeper of the cumulative wisdom of your great, great, great grandparents and is that wise uncle, or aunt, or grandparent that just has the whole history of your family all the way through and can be pulled up and is that kind of totem with the family all the way. It's just an example, something a human being can't do, but could be interesting. It's like we keep photo albums. Now we have video albums of family. What if you had almost like a shaman of the family who you could talk to and it could give you the accumulated wisdom of all your ancestors? Wouldn't that be kind of interesting? TIM: We've had that accumulated wisdom passed down without having the demonstrable technological privilege of being able to afford to purchase not only an artificial person, but the means with which to property to keep that artificial person going. They've had books and scrolls, they had cultural passed downs, they've had just word of mouth passing down these stories that have been great and rich stories for those of us who are descendants of slaves. I know who my family members were not because they were written down anywhere, not because of any technology preserved, but when they were preserved through word of mouth. Linnaeus was written in Bibles somewhere. So we have that and we have the stories behind that, that to me, it speaks to why carrying those things forward is important, but it also speaks to that even if such technology existed back then, it would still be only to the very, very privileged. I think that we need to acknowledge that with a lot of the things we're talking about, talking about why people haven't become enlightened, it is definitely, almost certainly an essential clue that you have the time and the ability to be able to spend time enlightening yourself versus trying to survive. I think if we spend the time to improve everyone's conditioned to where survival is not a struggle, then we will see much more enlightenment. We would actually see, I think, a dramatic leap forward in what we're capable of as a culture and as humanity. But we spend time shooting billionaires in the space instead. RONY: When you say moving people from survival not being a struggle, what is that level that you think everyone is beyond the day-to-day struggle and is in that place? What does that mean you think across our collective country, or countries? TIM: I know for me, I have been in a place where I didn't know where my next meal was coming from and I haven't had that worry in decades. I don't think any of us here probably have worried about really, are we going to eat today? Are we going to have a place to live today? Maybe we've had those struggles before, but right now, we're five of us sitting around here talking on the internet. Those are probably not our struggles. But there are people in this world that we can all imagine, we have folks that don't have that they are wondering, like, am I going to have the lights one day in the country we are on that only has the power on for 4 hours a day as our food going to spoil? There are various conditions under which people struggle, I think if we could get a baseline and just have a baseline opportunities where people have power, they have access to clean water, they have access to healthcare, they have access to what we define the basic needs of food, health, power, access to the rest of the world via the internet as a baseline so that when they're not concerned with what we take for granted as the basic things. Like, I know if I get sick, there's a hospital I can go to. I don't know how much could it cost, but I can go right now and I can ask the hospital. To have those kinds of things handled allows people the privilege to be able to really then look beyond the essence of struggle, taking care of the animal brain, and we can now look beyond those things. We can now say, “Hey, what does it mean now?” They can examine the condition a lot better when they're not hungry. I feel like for us, these things are all great to talk about, but I think if there's a place where I'm going to turn my attention, if I can, beyond the basics of feeding my family, I would love to do that and then see what the world becomes in 50 years, or a 100 years when so many more people are freed from having the struggle of survival and we have now the point where we talked about before, where now we're all equal people in this society of the globe and now we all have our equal ideas that we can contribute to moving us forward instead of so many of us just trying to stay alive. RONY: I'll tell you what's interesting. I agree with you. The thing that I wonder about first of all, I think it would be great if there is a way – by the way, I think technologically, there is a way to get everyone on the planet out of their survival mode. I really think we have the smarts, the capabilities, the resources to actually do that. Why we can't organize to do that, I'm not sure, but I totally believe we can. There's zero reason. In fact, I was at this thing in 2005, it was the World Economic Forum where it's just the biggest billionaires and people that run the countries, the world, they get together. I was there as a technology pioneer. So every year, they'll pick a number of startup people and they want you to co-mingle with the people that run the biggest things on the planet. It was a very weird experience. But one of the things they were talking about was this issue, how do we solve that and I'm just sitting there going, “All of you in this effing room could actually solve this today. Right now. You really could.” There's meetings, there's dinners, people are talking about it. I'm like, “That's good that you're doing, but you literally can. All of you have the means to do it.” Like, where is the – but they didn't. They didn't do it, but they were talking about doing it. I'm like, “Do you like talking about doing it more than doing it?” So that was one thing. I don't know why we haven't able to organize, but the other piece is my grandparents, my great-grandparents, everyone was as dirt poor as you can imagine. But they were more spiritual and transcendent and enlightened and that as we got up, I look at my cousins, everyone's struggled and then my parents did a little better and we did a little better. People seem to be less concerned about becoming enlightened and improving and more concerned about what's the next car they're going to buy and we do need to bring everyone to that baseline, I totally agree. But I haven't seen it make people get spiritually better, get themselves together more. It's more of they go down a different path of just wanting more cars, more things, and less enlightened. It's kind of weird. I don't know why. In fact, the more money, maybe the inverse proportion that the whole enlightenment, it's a weird phenomenon. Not that you want people to be impoverished like, we want to pull people out of that. I think that's important. But as you go to the other side, you almost zap that part of your brain away. You have too much money, it makes you not sensitive anymore to what's happening in the world. ARTY: There's this game of capitalism that is this game of business of how much money can we make and you see different folks at different tiers of playing these various games, whether you're in the workforce and you're thinking about how do I get the highest paying job and be able to buy a nice house and there's a set of rules and thinking of how to excel in that. Then you've got this world of investment and just playing at another level of abstraction. But in both of those dynamics, there's this game and these rules and this idea of what it means to win that seems to anchor people's thinking and drive. And then as we learn from others, what it means to win and we see other people being successful in that and they go and buy a new fancy car and then we're like, “Whoa, they want a fancy car. Well, I want a fancy car, too.” So we mimic these desires from other folks in our culture at whatever game we're fascinated by and I feel like some of those things are some of the fundamental things that need to shift is these game mechanics that we're incurring around. One of the things from the Flow book is Csikszentmihalyi talks about how symbols are deceptive and they have a way of distracting us from the realities they're supposed to represent. So there's these symbols of things that we chase—a better job, a bigger house, more money, et cetera—and these symbols are things that are supposed to make us happy and then we end up chasing the symbol. Often, people that have all kinds of money playing these games, doing all this stuff, they still haven't found a way, even with all these things, to find happiness, to find joy in their lives. I feel like if we can learn and reorient around the experience of joy, the experience of creation, of creating with other people, of learning how to have and how to experience these really cool highs in life and turn those kinds of experiences into the goals that we have, that maybe we can break free of the chains of things that we play of what it means to win, what it means to win at life. This is effectively what we're talking about here. CHANTÉ: I was going to say, as you were describing that, it's like okay, then how do we rebuild – maybe not rebuild as a word – it's how do we cultivate a culture amongst those of us who are interested

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AWS Isn't a Threat to OSS

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 23, 2021 18:46

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: And I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild. Today, we're going to be talking about AWS, an open-source software. Now, that's kind of a broad topic, but there have been some specific, recent events I'll say, over the last year maybe or maybe even less, related to AWS and open-source software that really got us talking, and I wanted to have a deeper conversation with both of you on this topic.Tim: Well, you should probably start by going over some of the things that you're mentioning, when you say ‘some of these things,' what are those things, Jesse?Jesse: Yeah. So, I think the best place to start is what constitutes open-source software. And specifically, I think, not just what constitutes open-source software, but how does that differ from an open-source company?Tim: So, open-source software can be anything: Linux kernel, bash, anything like that, any Python functioning module. If you make a piece of software, whatever it is, and you license it with one of the various open-source licenses, or your own open-source license or whatever, it's something that the community kind of owns. So, when they get big, they have maintainers, everything like that, but at its essence, it's a piece of software that you can freely download and use, and then you're free to modify it as you need, and then it's up to the specifics of the license to whether you're required to send those modifications back, to include them, or to whatever. But the essence is that it's a piece of software that's free for me to use and free for me to modify under it's license.Jesse: And one of the other things I want to add to that is, correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't a lot of open-source software is very community-owned, so there's a lot of focus on folks from the community that is using this software giving back not because they need to under the licensing, necessarily, but because they want to continue using this and making it better over time.Amy: I think one of the issues is that becomes a very opinionated kind of statement where there are a lot of people in the open-source community who feel that if you're going to use something and make changes to better suit what your needs are, that you should be able to submit those changes back to the community, or back to whoever owns the base of the software. But that said, it's like the community edition of MySQL before Microsoft bought it, where the assumption was that there's essentially a candidate of it that anyone can use without the expectation of submitting it back.Jesse: So, that's a broad definition of open-source software, but how does open-source software, broadly speaking, differ from an open-source company? I'm thinking specifically there is the open-source software of Elasticsearch, for example, or I should say, previously the open-source software of Elasticsearch that was owned by the open-source company, Elastic. So, what does that relationship look like? How does an open-source company like that differ from the open-source software itself?Tim: So, there are typically a couple of ways. Usually, a company that is the owner of an open-source product still has some kind of retention of the IP in their various licenses that they can do that with, but essentially—and this is in the words of one of the founders of Elastic—that they're benevolent dictators over the software. And so they allow folks to contribute, but they don't have to. And most of those open-source software companies will have a commercial version of that software that has other features that are not available, packages with support or some of the things like that, some kind of value-added thing that you're going to wind up paying for. The best way to describe—like you said—there's the company Elastic and then the product Elasticsearch.I relate back to before: there was Red Hat Linux, which was open-source, and then the company Red Hat. And I remember when they went public and everyone was shocked that a company can make profit off of something they gave away for free. But while the core of the software itself was free, the support was not free, nor was the add-on features that enterprises wanted. And so that tends to be kind of what the business model is, is that you create the software, it's open-source for a while to get a big user base, and then when it gets adopted by enterprises or people that really would pay for support or for other features, that's when the license tends to change, or there's a fork between the open-source version and then the commercial version.Jesse: And it definitely sounds like there can be benefits to an open-source company essentially charging for not just the open-source software, but these extra benefits like supports and additional features because I know I've traced multiple code bugs back to a piece of open-source software that there's a PR or an issue that has been sitting open for months, if not longer because the community just doesn't have the time to look into the issue, doesn't have the time to work on the issue, they are managing it on their own, separate as a side job, separate from their day-to-day work. Whereas if that is a bug that I'm tracing back to a feature in an open-source piece of software, or I should say software that I am paying for through an open-source company, I have a much clearer support path to a resolution to resolving that issue.Tim: And I think what the end up doing is then you see it more like a traditional core software model, like, you know, a la Oracle, or something like that where you pay for the software essentially, but it comes packaged with these things that you get because of it, and then there's a support contract on top of it, and then there's hosting or cloud, whatever it is, on top of that, now, but you would still end up paying for the software and then support as part of the same deal. But as you know, these are for-profit companies. People get paid for them; they are publicly traded; they sell this software; they sell this product, whether it's the services or the hosting, for profit. That is not open-source software. So, if company X that makes software X, goes under, they are acting like the software would then go under as if the software doesn't belong to the community.So, a business that goes after a business is always going to be fair play; I believe they call it capitalism. But when you talk about going after open-source software, you're looking at what Microsoft was doing in the '90s and early 2000s, with Linux and other open-source challenges to the Windows and the other paid commercial enterprise software market. When folks started using Linux and servers because it was free, customizable, and they could do pretty much everything they wanted to or version of it that they were using commercial Unices for, or even replacing Windows for, you didn't really see the commercial Unices going after it because that very specialized use cases; the user had specialized hardware. What folks were doing, they're buying Wintel machines and putting Linux on them, they were getting them without Windows licenses, or trial licenses, throwing Linux on it. And Microsoft really went after open-source; they really went after open-source.They were calling it insecure, they were calling it flash in the pan, saying it would never happen. They ran a good marketing campaign for a long time against open-source software so that people would not use it and would instead use their closed-source software. That is going after open-source, not going after quote-unquote, “Open-source companies.”Jesse: Yeah, I think that's ultimately what I want to dive into next, which is, there's been a lot of buzz about AWS going after open-source, being a risk to open-source software, specifically, with the release of AWS Managed Services for software like Elasticsearch, for example, Kubernetes, Prometheus vs. Other open-source packages that you can now run as a managed service in AWS. There's a lot of concern that AWS is basically a risk to all of these pieces of open-source software, but that doesn't necessarily seem to be the case, based on what we're talking about. One of the things that I want to dive into really specifically here is this licensing idea. Is it important to end-users? How would they know about what license they're using, or if the license changes?Tim: I'll let Amy dig in on it because she's probably the expert of three of them, but I will say one case in point, I remember where licensing did become very important was Java. JDK licenses, when Oracle started cornering the market on enclosing all the licenses, you had to use different types of Javas. So, you had to get, like, open JDK; you couldn't use Sun, Oracle Java, or whatever it was. And so that became a heavy lift of replacing packages and making sure all that stuff was in compliance, and while tracking packages, replacing them, doing all the necessary things because if you're running Java, you're probably running it in production. Why you would, I don't know, but there are those things that you would have to do in order to be able to just replace a package. The impact of the license, even if it doesn't cost a dime for usage, it still matters, and in real dollars and real engineering time.Amy: Even free licensing will cost you money if you do it wrong. The reason why I love talking about licensing is because I used to work for the government—Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —and if you think a large company like Amazon or Microsoft loves doing anything to rattle the cage of smaller businesses, it's not nearly as much as they love doing it to the government. So, any company that has a government-specific license, and the government is not using it, they will get sued and fined for a bunch of money, which sounds like a conflict between a super-large company and the government and who the hell cares about that, but this also translates the way they handle licensing for end-users and for smaller companies. So, for the most part for the end-user, you're going to look at what is generally sent to you to use any piece of licensing, the EULA, the End-User License Agreement, and you're just going to say, “Yeah, fine, this thing is 20 pages long; I'm not going to read this, it's fine.” And for most end-users, that is actually, you're good to go because they're not going to be coming after small, single-person users. What these licenses do is restrict the way larger organizations—be it the government or mid to larger companies—actually use their software, so that—this is a little dating—someone does not buy a single disk that does not report home, and then install that one disk on 20 computers, which is a thing that everyone has seen done if they've been in the industry long enough.Jesse: Yeah.Amy: Yeah. And it means things like licensing inventory is important, to the single you're using this license at home and you install Adobe on three computers, you would think it's not… would not hurt their value very much, but they also make it so that you can't even do that anymore. So, in purchased software, it makes a big deal for end-users; if it's just something free like being able to use some community SQL workbench just to mess around with stuff at home or on personal projects, you're usually going to be okay.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at ChaosSearch. You could run Elasticsearch or Elastic Cloud—or OpenSearch as they're calling it now—or a self-hosted ELK stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for app performance monitoring, cybersecurity. If you're using Elasticsearch, consider not running Elasticsearch. They're also available now in the AWS marketplace if you'd prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count towards your EDB commitment. Discover what companies like HubSpot, Klarna, Equifax, Armor Security, and Blackboard already have. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm, yet again.Jesse: Yeah, this is a really big issue. There's so much complexity in this space because Tim, like you said, there's some amount of capitalism here of AWS competing with open-source companies; there's business opportunities to change licensing, which can be a good thing for a company or it could be a terrible thing for a company's user base. There's lots of complexity to this issue. And I mean, in the amount of time that we've been talking, we've only really scratched the surface. I think there's so much more to this space to talk about.Tim: There really is, and there's a lot of history that we really need to cover to really paint an accurate picture. I think back when web hosting first became a thing, and everyone was running LAMP stacks and nobody was saying, “Oh, no, using cPanel is going to kill Apache.” That wasn't a thing because, yeah, it was a for-profit company that was using open-source software to make money and yet Apache still lived, and [unintelligible 00:15:00] still lived; MySQL still made it; PHP was still around. So, to say that utilizing open-source software to provide a service, to provide a paid service, is going to kill the open-source softwares, at best it's misrepresentation and omits a lot of things. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff we can dig into, a lot of things we can cover.And the topic is broad, and so this is why it's important for us to talk about it, I think, in the context of AWS and the AWS, kind of, ecosystem is that when you see companies with big crocodile tears, saying, “Oh, yeah, AWS is trying to kill open-source,” it's like, “No, they're not trying to kill open-source.” They may be trying to go after your company, but they aren't the same.Jesse: And it feels to me like that is part of the way that the business world works. And I'm not saying that it's a great part of the way the business world works, but how can you differentiate your company in such a way that you still retain your user base if AWS releases a competing product? I'm not thrilled with the fact that AWS is releasing all these products that are competing with open-source companies, but I'm also not going to say that it's not beneficial, in some ways, for AWS customers. So, I see both sides of the coin here and I don't have a clear idea of what the best path forward is.Amy: As much as I hate the market demands it type of argument, a lot of the libraries, and open-source software, and all of these other things that AWS has successfully gone after, they've gone after ones that weren't entirely easy to use in the first place. Things like Kubernetes, and Prometheus, and MongoDB, and Elastic. These are not simple solutions to begin with, so if they didn't do it, there are a lot of other management companies that will help you deal with these very specific products. The only difference is, one of them is AWS.Jesse: [laugh]. One of them is a multibillion-dollar company.Amy: Oh, they've all got money, man.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: I mean, let's be real. At our pay grade, the difference between a multimillion-dollar and a billion-dollar company, I don't think affects you at your level at all.Jesse: No.Amy: I'm not seeing any of that difference. I am not. [laugh].Tim: Yeah, I definitely think if you all want us to dig into more of this—and we could do a lot more—let us know. If there are things you think we're wrong on, or things that you think we need to dig deeper on, yeah, we'd love to do that. Because this is a complex and nuanced topic that does have a lot of information that should be discussed so that folks can have a clear view of what the picture looks like.Jesse: Well, that'll do it for us this week, folks. If you've got questions you'd like us to answer please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the form and we'll answer those questions on a future episode of the show.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us your thoughts on this conversation, on AWS versus open-source software versus open-source companies.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

amazon pr discover microsoft open field sun threats cloud windows ip oracle adobe api python aws linux java lamp hubspot prometheus qa devops apache elk php s3 equifax sql red hat kubernetes klarna elastic mongodb mysql blackboard elasticsearch launchdarkly edb jdk cpanel tim yeah red hat linux wintel oracle java tim there tim well tim so amy oh elastic cloud jesse yeah end user license agreement jesse well last week in aws humblepod

AWS Account Teams and You

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 9, 2021 17:56

LinksPete and Jesse Talk Account ManagersTranscriptCorey: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it's time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you're building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don't really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That's why Lacework is built from the ground up for the Cloud: low effort, high visibility and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: And I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we're going to be talking about, really, a couple things; building your relationship with AWS, really. This stems from one of the questions that we got from a listener from a previous event. The question is, “How do the different companies that we've worked with work with AWS? Is the primary point of contact for AWS at a company usually the CTO, the VP of engineering, an architect, an ops person, a program manager, or somebody from finance, a [unintelligible 00:01:00] trainer? Who ultimately owns that relationship with AWS?”And so we're going to talk about that today. I think there's a lot of really great content in this space. Pete and I, back in the day, recorded an episode talking about building your relationship with your account manager, and with your TAM, and with AWS in general. I'll link that in the show notes. That's a great precursor to this conversation. But I think there's a lot of great opportunities to build your relationship and build rapport with AWS, as you work with AWS and as you put more things on the platform.Amy: I think one of the things we always say right off the bat is that you should introduce yourself and make a good relationship with your account manager and your technical account manager, just because they're the ones who, if you need help, they're going to be the ones to help you.Jesse: Yeah, I think one of the things that we should also take a step back and add is that if you are listening to this and you're saying to yourself, “I don't have an account manager,” that's actually wrong; you do have an account manager. Anybody who's running workloads on AWS has an account manager. Your account manager might not have reached out to you yet because usually speaking, account managers don't reach out unless they see that you're spending a certain amount of money. They usually don't start a conversation with you unless you specifically are spending a certain amount of money, have reached a certain threshold, and then they want to start talking to you about opportunities to continue using AWS, opportunities to save money, invest in AWS. But you definitely have an account manager and you should definitely start building that rapport with them as soon as possible.Amy: First question. How do you actually engage your account manager?Tim: So, there's a couple ways to do it. If you have reached a certain spend threshold where your account manager will reach out to you, it's real simple: you just reply back to them. And it kind of depends. The question most people are going to have is, “Well, why do I need to reach out to my account manager? If I just have, like, a demo account, if I'm just using free tier stuff.”You probably don't ever need to reach out to your account manager, so what are the things, typical things that people need to reach out to their account manager for? Well, typically because they want to grow and want to see what kind of discounts are offered for growth, and I want to see what I can do. Now, you can open a support ticket, you can open a billing ticket, but what will end up happening is once you reach a spend threshold, your account manager will reach out to you because they want to talk to you about what programs they have, they want to see how they can help you grow your account, they want to see what things they can do for you because for them, that means you're going to spend more money. Most account managers within a little bit of time of you opening your account and reaching a lower spend threshold, they're going to send you an email and say, “Hey, this is my name, this is how you reach me,” et cetera, et cetera. And they'll send you some emails with links to webinars or other events and things like that, and you can typically reply back to those and you'll be able to get your account manager sometimes as well. But like I said, the easiest way to get a hold of your account manager or find out who it is, is to start increasing your spend on AWS.Jesse: So, then if you're a small company, maybe a startup or maybe just a student's using AWS for the first time, likely that point of contact within a company is going to be you. From a startup perspective, maybe you are the lead engineer, maybe you are the VP of engineering, maybe you are the sole engineer in the company. We have seen most organizations that we talk to have a relationship with AWS, or build that relationship or own that relationship with AWS at a engineering management or senior leadership level. Engineering management seems to be the sweet spot because usually, senior leadership has a larger view of things on their plate than just AWS so they're focused on larger business moves for the company, but the engineering manager normally has enough context and knowledge of all of the day-to-day specifics of how engineering teams are using AWS to really be involved in that conversation with your account manager, with your technical account manager, or with your solutions architect, or whatever set of folks you have from AWS's side for an account team. And I think that's another thing that we should point out as well, which is, you will always have an account manager; you won't always have a technical account manager.The technical account manager generally comes in once you have signed an enterprise discount program agreement. So, generally speaking, that is one of the perks that comes with an EDP, but obviously, there are other components to the EDP to be mindful of as well.Tim: So, let me clarify that. You get a technical account manager when you sign up for enterprise support. You don't have to have an EDPs to have enterprise support, but when you sign up for enterprise support, you automatically get a technical account manager.Jesse: And, Tim, if you could share with everybody, what kind of things can you expect from a technical account manager?Tim: So, a technical account manager, I mean, they will do—like, all TAMs everywhere pretty much can liaise with support to escalate tickets or investigate them and see what's going on with them, try and, kind of, white-glove them into where they need to be. AWS TAM's, they also have the same—or a lot of the same access to the backend. Not your data because no one at AWS actually has access to your data or inside your systems, but they have access to the backend so they can see API calls, they can see logs, and they can see other things like that to get insight into what's going on in your system and so they can do analytics. They have insight to your billing, they can see your Cost Explorer, they can see what your contract spends are, they can see all the line items in your bills, they have access to the roadmaps, they have access to the services and the service teams so that if you need to talk to someone at a particular service team, they can arrange that meeting for you. If you need to talk to specialists SAs, they can arrange those meetings for you.With a TAM, you—and if you have enterprise support, and they're looking you for an EDP, you can have what's called an EBC or an Executive Briefing Council, where they, in non-pandemic times, they will bring you to Seattle, put you up for a couple of days and you'll have a couple of days of meetings with service teams to go over, kind of like, what the roadmap looks like, what your strategy for working with those teams are or working with those services are. And you can get good steps on how to utilize these services, whether it's going to be some more deep dives on-site, or whether it's going to be some key roadmap items that the service team is going to prioritize and other things like that. And the EBC is actually pretty neat, but you know, you have to be larger spender to get access to those. Another thing that a TAM can do is they can actually enter items on the roadmap for you. They have access to and can provide you access to betas, or pilot programs, or private releases for various services.You'll have access to a weekly email that include what launches are pending, or what releases are pending over the next week or two weeks. You'll have access to quarterly or monthly business reviews where you get access to see what your spend looks like, what your spending trends are, support ticket trends, you know, usage and analytics, and things like that. So, a TAM can be quite useful. They can do quite a lot for you, especially in the realm of cloud economics. That said, every TAM has their specialty.I mean, depending on how many customers they have, the level of engagement you may get. And, you know, some TAMs are super, super, really good at the financial aspects, some are better at the technical aspects. So, to be fair because the TAM org is so large at AWS, you don't always have the same experience with all your TAMs, and the level of depth to which they can dive is going to vary somewhat.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. You could run Elastic Search or Elastic Cloud or Open Search, as they're calling it now, or a self hosted out stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for App performance monitoring, cyber security. If you're using ElasticSearch consider not running ElasticSearch. They're also available now on the AWS market place, if you prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count toward your EDP commitment. Discover what companies like, Klarna, Equifax, Armor Security and Blackboard already have. To learn more visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm yet again. Amy: So, let's say we got the best TAM—even though he technically works for us now—when trying to envision what our relationship with the world's best TAM is going to be—and I just imagine that as a nice little block text on a white mug—what is that relationship going to look like? How are we going to engage with them? And even, how often should we talk to them?Jesse: I used to work for an organization that had, I believe, quarterly meetings with our account manager and our TAM, and every time we met with them, it felt like this high stakes poker game where we didn't want to show our cards and they didn't want to show their cards, but then nobody really was able to do anything productive together. And I have to say that is the exact opposite of how to engage your account manager and your TAM.Tim: Yeah, that doesn't sound great.Jesse: No, it was not great. I do not recommend that. You want to have an open, honest conversation about your roadmap, about what you want to do with AWS.Amy: They're not getting that mug.Tim: No, no.Jesse: [laugh].Tim: So, if you have a super-engaged TAM—and I will use my own experience as a TAM at AWS—that we had office hours, routinely, bi-weekly. One customer I had, I would have onsite office hours at their offices in LA, and I would have virtual office hours in offices in London. And those office hours, sometimes I'd have—we—that—we would use those to bring in, whether it was specialist SAs, whether we go over roadmap items, or tickets, or something like that, or we do architectural reviews, or cost reviews, we would schedule quarterly business reviews aside from that, typically sometimes the same day or on the same group of days, but there was typically be different than office hours. I was in their Slack channel so they needed to ping me on something that's not a ticket but a question, we could have conversations in there. A couple of their higher points of contact there had my phone number, so they would call me if something was going on. They would page me—because AWS TAMS have pagers—if they had a major issue, or, like, an outage or something [unintelligible 00:11:05] that would affect them.Jesse: I'm sorry, I just have to ask really quick. Are we talking, like, old school level pager?Tim: No, no, no. Like on your phone, like PagerDuty.Jesse: Okay, okay. I was really excited for a minute there because I kind of miss those old-school pagers.Tim: Let me say, it was like PagerDuty; it wasn't actual PagerDuty because AWS did not actually use PagerDuty. They had something internal, but PagerDuty was the closest analog.Amy: Internal PagerDuty as a Service.Tim: Something like that.Jesse: Oh, no.Amy: So, you know, if you have a very engaged TAM, you would have regular, several times a week, contact if not daily, right? Additionally, the account team will also meet internally to go over strategy, go over issues, and action items, and things like that once or twice a week. Some accounts have multiple TAM, in which case then, you know, the touchpoints are even more often.Jesse: I feel like there's so much opportunity for engagement with your AWS account team, your account manager, your TAM. It's not entirely up to you to build that relationship, but it is a relationship; it definitely requires investment and energy from both sides.Tim: And I would say in the context of who's working with a TAM, ideally, the larger contact paths you have at an org with your TAM, the better off it's going to be. So, you don't want your TAM or account team to only talk to the VP of engineering, or the DevOps manager, or the lead architect; you want them to be able to talk to your devs, and your junior devs, and your finance people, and your CTO, and other folks like that, and pretty much anyone who's a stakeholder because they can have various conversations, and they can bring concerns around. If they're talking about junior devs, your TAM can actually help them how to use CloudFormation, and how to use a AWS CLI, or do a workshop on the basics of using Kubernetes, or something like that. Whereas if you're going to have a conversation with the VP of engineering, they're going to talk about strategies, they're going to talk about roadmap items, they're going to talk about how things can affect the company, they're going to talk about EDPs and things like that. So ideally, in a successful relationship with your TAM, your TAM is going to have several people in your org are going to have that TAM's contact information and will talk with them regularly.Jesse: One of the clients that we worked with actually brought us in for a number of conversations, and brought their TAM in as part of those conversations, too. And I have to say, having the TAM involved in those conversations was fantastic because as much as I love the deep, insightful work that we do, there were certain things about AWS's roadmap that we just don't have visibility into sometimes. And the TAM had that visibility and was able to be part of those conversations on multiple different levels. The TAM was able to communicate to multiple audiences about both roadmap items from a product perspective, from a finance perspective, from an engineering architecture perspective; it was really great to have them involved in the conversation and share insights that were beneficial for multiple parties in that meeting.Tim: And oftentimes, too, involving your TAM when you do have this one thing in your bill you can't figure out, saying, “We've looked and this spend is here, but we don't know exactly why it is.” Your TAM can go back and look at the logs, or go back and look at some of the things that were spun up at the specific time and say, “Oh, here was the problem. It was when you deploy this new AMI, it caused your CPU hours to go way, way up so you had to spin up more instances.” Or a great one was a few years back when Datadog changed its API calls and a lot of people's CloudWatch costs went through the roof. And then several TAMs had to through and figure out, it was this specific call and this is how you fix that and give that guidance back to their customers to reduce their spend. So, being able to have that backend access is very, very useful, even when you are working with an optimization group like ourselves or other folks, to say, “Hey, we've noticed these things. These are the line items we want to get some insight into.” I mean, your TAM can definitely be a good partner in that.Jesse: All right, folks, well, that'll do it for us this week. If you've got questions that you'd like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. Fill out the form; we'd be happy to answer those on a future show. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review. Give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us, did Tim pronounce the shortening of ‘Amazon Machine Image' correctly as ‘ah-mi' or should he have said ‘A-M-I?'Amy: I heard it and I wasn't going to say it. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Amy: I was just going to wait for someone to send him the t-shirt.Tim: Just to note, if you put beans in your chili, you can keep your comments to yourself.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: You're just going to keep fighting about everything today, is all I'm—[laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. Oh, no.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

amazon discover service phd seattle field engineering cloud app fill wtf account cto slack api aws tam sas qa devops cpu s3 equifax kubernetes klarna datadog blackboard edp elasticsearch ebc pagerduty tams lacework cloudformation cloudwatch tim yeah amy you tim no tim so amy so aws cli elastic cloud jesse yeah last week in aws amy they humblepod jesse all

Tagging Isn't Just About Cost

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2021 16:49

Links: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/aws-cost-allocation-guide-tagging-best-practices/ https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/aws-cost-allocation-guide-identifying-your-costs/ TranscriptCorey: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it's time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you're building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don't really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That's why Lacework is built from the ground up for the Cloud: low effort, high visibility and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com. Jesse: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: And I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we're actually going to talk about a very specific listener question that we didn't get to last week, but really, we had so many thoughts on this topic that we wanted to break it out into its own episode. So, today we're going to be talking about tagging, and the importance of tagging, and how tagging can be used. And when I say tagging, specifically we're talking about user-defined cost allocation tags. The original question that I'll read off was from [Aaron 00:00:58].Aaron asks, “Is tagging over-recommended as a cost reporting mechanism? I recently took on managing my company's AWS bill and when talking to AWS and reading third-party blog posts about cost management, a solid tagging strategy is often extolled this step zero for understanding AWS costs. Based on what I know about AWS so far, this approach seems like it may work for some aspects of cost management, but does not seem to be a sound strategy for more formal cost reporting, like budgeting or calculating total spend for a given product or cost center. To me, these activities require complete or near-complete accuracy the tags just don't seem to be able to provide since there are some costs like data transfer that aren't tagged, and the fact that the tags are not retroactive—” that's a big one that I can say is super frustrating for me. “Is there something I'm missing here? Is there in fact, a way to use these tags to ensure that 100% of an AWS account's costs are in fact attributed back to a specific cost center accurately? It seems drastically simpler to embrace a multi-account strategy where each account is simply billed to whatever cost center makes sense to the organization.” So, Amy and Tim, again, the main question here is, is tagging over-recommended as a cost reporting mechanism?Tim: The simple answer is no, it is not over-recommended. And the question makes a lot of good points around some of the heartaches and some the problems that come with tagging, specifically about tags not being retroactive, but, if you're going to make changes to reflect changes in the past, I mean, you know, I don't really have a good answer for that, if we're being honest. But if we're talking about going forward, tracking costs from this point forward, tagging is going to be a much more concise solution than using multi-account strategy. That said, there are a lot of reasons you should use multi-account strategy and tagging together. Multi-account strategy and tagging strategies should definitely be an ‘and' situation, not an ‘or' situation. That's like pizza or steak. No. It's both pizza and steak.And I feel like because there are a number of non-cost reasons to use multiple accounts, especially in AWS, the biggest concern of which are service limits, right? Service limits, as you know, are done by account by region, so, if I have a service limit of S3 buckets that I can create—and I think that the hard limit is, like, one thousand—once I need that one thousandth and one S3 bucket, I have to create another account. That account can still be production, it can still be for all the same things that I've used for anything else, but I had to add another account so I can spin up S3 buckets. So, how do I track those, what those buckets are for, what those costs are going to be? I'm going to track those with tags.And I'm going to track those tags from the payer account, or from up in the organization. So, as you set up multiple accounts, you can have—even if they're all production, they still need to be tagged. Even if they're all dev, they still need to be tagged. If you're using the account vending machine style stuff from Control Tower where you spin up a sandbox account, you run some stuff, and then you throw it away, tagging is going to be the best way to track those costs, not just the fact that this account is named a certain thing. Names are arbitrary; they don't really reflect necessarily what they're going to be for, accounts can come and go.So, I don't necessarily like the use of name. Plus, sometimes it's hard to do that if you're doing, like, [unintelligible 00:04:21] various countries and things like that, various languages. Different things can impart different meanings. Tags also still probably use language problems, but they are arbitrary values. You know you're going to try and lump these all together; that's all that matters.So, I definitely think that, if we're using tagging, tagging is going to let you be more concise with your costs, it's going to let you apply costs across different accounts more readily, it's going to let you apply costs across different cloud providers, especially if you use one of the CMP tools like CloudHealth, or Cloudcheckr, or something like that and you run production workloads from a single cost center across multiple clouds, you're going to want to tag those in those tools, so, that way, you can keep a consistent track and more concise tracking of costs, versus just using account names. Account names after a while is going to just become unmanageable when it comes to tracking costs.Amy: I totally agree. And one of the big things that I harp on, especially on this podcast, is that if you're worried that it's not going to be as explicit as other billing methods, you will still at least have that data. You will still know per resource—if it's properly tagged—who it's supposed to be charged to and who owns it. You would make that decision on an architectural level, you should also make it for your bill, just to make sure that if you ever need that information in the future, you can go get it. You're not going to get it—since they don't happen retroactively, then you may as well do it as early as possible.Jesse: Yeah. It's super frustrating that a lot of this information is not available retroactively. And while I understand the technical limitations to that, I can't harp enough why starting to tag resources early is super, super critical to understanding that spend, and using that tagging setup, that tagging policy, to better understand your spend in a number of different ways. But again, I also want to call out that, like, I've been saying everything about tagging related to spend, there are other ways that tags can be beneficial to your organization. I've seen organizations where security needs to know, are all of the containers that were running patched to a certain level?Are all of the AMIs that we're running patched to a certain level? Tags can do that; tags can help you understand what resources are using a certain AMI version, or a certain container version, or other security pieces that are important for security to know and be able to understand that all of these resources are patched to the latest available version of whatever we're looking at. One of the things that we talk about a lot in this podcast is having conversations with other teams because I feel like cloud cost management is not just an engineering responsibility. It's a responsibility of finance, and product, and security, and IT because there's all sorts of different groups that may ultimately be using the cloud. And that's kind of important for everybody to be on the same page in terms of how you're using the cloud. And so it's not just about tagging so, you can know the cost of something, but tagging so that you can know all these other important things like security, like product details, like maybe IT details, all these other different use cases for different departments that are also involved in cloud usage.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. You could run Elastic Search or Elastic Cloud or Open Search, as they're calling it now, or a self hosted out stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for App performance monitoring, cyber security. If you're using ElasticSearch consider not running ElasticSearch. They're also available now on the AWS market place, if you prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count toward your EDP commitment. Discover what companies like Hubspot, Clarna, Equifax, Armor Security and Blackboard already have. To learn more visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm yet again.Tim: Yeah. I think there's this idea that comes, I think, from very legacy data center operations where you're going to use an account name to, kind of, specify what it does and where it comes from in the same way that you would use, like, a host naming scheme to define what a computer is and what it does and things like that. And I think that can be practical, but sometimes it's often short-sighted, especially as an organization grows, and you create more accounts, and you bubble up other accounts [unintelligible 00:08:21] accounts. It comes time to sign the EDP and you need to have a master payer account, you acquire some other accounts and things like that, and then all of a sudden, whatever naming schemes they used is now integrated into what your naming scheme is. And that becomes, maybe, unmanageable.So, I've always preferred to have account names. I mean, if you need to have it specified, understand it's going to just be for humans to, really quick, find it, but I'm just as content to have an account name be a UUID and then have some other kind of method for looking at what it does or assigning billing to it. Because in the end, like I said, I prefer to use tagged resources to define what they are and where they go. They are obviously going to be exceptions made for things that are, like, dev, test, UAT, or something like that, where [unintelligible 00:09:06] are different, but we're still talking about changes on an account, and then you make the changes on the account as you need. And then if it's for production, then obviously those accounts can be tagged as production. They don't have to necessarily be named production.Amy: Right, and I think, security boundaries and resource permissions aside, if you're just looking at trying to track costs to a resource, an account ID is really just one piece of information as opposed to tags, where you can just overload it with as much information as you need.Jesse: Absolutely. Now, one other thing that I do want to talk about is we're talking about a lot of good use cases for tags. We should also talk about some of the not-so-good use cases for tags, or some of the not-so-great best practices for tags that we have seen. Amy, I know specifically you had some examples that you want to talk about.Amy: Yes. [laugh]. So, this comes from having to do data normalization, back in the day. First thing you never want to do when developing your tag strategy is you want it to just determine things like casing, or whether or not you're allowed to use spaces because I've seen in different places, not just on resource tagging, but also the way information is meta-keyed, where they have their key name identical to a completely different key name, like you have ‘product owner' except ‘product owner' is capitalized in one instance and not capitalized in another instance, and these are considered to be different things within the system. Whether or not that's your intention, they will show up as different things on some visualizations. On other visualizations, they will get normalized and turned into the same thing. So, it really depends on what it is that you want your reports to look like and what you want these resources to be able to tell you.Jesse: Yeah, that's a really great point that one of the things that we haven't potentially touched on for this episode, and is covered in a number of other podcast episodes and blog posts in general is a good tagging strategy is equally as important as tagging coverage. Knowing that the tags should all be uppercase or all lowercase, or use these types of characters and not those types of characters is equally as important as making sure that those tags are applied accurately across all of your resources. So, as you are talking about tagging, as you are thinking about tagging, even in the multi-account situation, it is important to think about, what are the best practices? What are the standards that you want for your tagging? And again, this may not be a conversation that you have in a silo by yourself; this may be a conversation that you have with a number of other teams because there may be a number of other teams that need certain information from tags and need to use certain letters or special characters. And you need to incorporate all of that; you need to include all of that in the tagging policy that you create.Tim: I think it's also important, though too, that with most analytics tools, even if it's just, you know, Cost Explorer within AWS Console, you can still aggregate those tags together, especially if you're doing costs, you can absolutely aggregate multiple cases and things like that. CloudHealth, I know you can select multiples or anything that matches a pattern regardless of case and do it that way. So, it is possible to work around those mistakes. It's not a, “Oh, we didn't have our tagging schema set up correctly, so, throw your hands up and give up.” It's just something else you have to consider, and hopefully, you can normalize going forward.Jesse: Yeah, absolutely.Amy: And really, the other thing is to make sure that the tags that you choose makes sense for what you're doing. So, if you are tagging the environment and that is the only tag that you put on a resource, then just know that when you start pulling things up in Cost Explorer or Cost and Usage Report, that's the only thing you're going to see. So, you're only going to see things split up between your production account and your dev account; you're not going to be able to see what service is actually costing you more money, or what storage, as associated to a team, has suddenly decided to grow beyond the usual predictive usage patterns.Jesse: Yeah, we have some recommendations we can make if you are just getting started on your tagging journey, and I will make sure that information is shared in the [show notes 00:13:53]. But ultimately, again, it becomes a strategy conversation. It becomes a question of what are you trying to accomplish? What are the goals that you're trying to accomplish? What is the information that you want out of tagging? Because that's ultimately going to drive what you tag and why you tag.All right, that'll do it for us this week, folks. If you've got questions you'd like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the form and we'd be happy to answer your question on a future episode. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review. Give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us what are the most important things that you focus on in your tagging strategies? What are the things that you tag for your company?Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

amazon discover service phd cost field cloud app id names wtf account api aws hubspot qa devops amis s3 equifax tagging cmp blackboard edp elasticsearch lacework uat tim yeah cloudhealth elastic cloud jesse yeah last week in aws humblepod

Tim O'Brien from The Healthy Place

The Joe Costello Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2021 56:01

Tim O'Brien along with his wife Becki, have created a unique vitamin, supplement and nutrition store that is more about helping people than it is about margins and commissions. As Tim says" Souls before sales!" It was a pleasure sitting down with Tim to learn more about The Healthy Place and what products and services they have to offer. After Tim educated me, I'm definitely going to lean on him and his team in the future, to help me make better and more educated decisions when it comes to my health. I hope you enjoy this episode and you walk away with at least one snippet that either helps you in your entrepreneurial journey or with you health in general. For 30% off, please use our affiliate link as it helps us to generate a little income to produce this podcast...thx so much! https://findyourhealthyplace.com/?rfsn=5901087.08b0f6 Thanks for listening! Joe Tim O'Brien Founder - The Healthy Place Website: https://findyourhealthyplace.com/ Website: https://livelyvitaminco.com/ Website: https://wildtheory.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/applewellness/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thehealthyplaceTHP YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYQVVKB58mGd_YgxAL0LMGA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/apple-wellness-the-healthy-place/about/ Email: tim@findyourhealthyplace.com Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Tim: My guest today is Tim O'Brien, the founder of The Healthy Place, an e-commerce store for healthy products. They also have for brick and mortar locations, one in Madison, Wisconsin, one in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, one in Middleton, Wisconsin, and one in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Tim's passion is health and wellness, and he has spent the last decade sharing his passion with the world on a personal side. He is married to Becky and together they have three children. In this conversation with Tim, I expressed how much health and wellness is important to myself and how convoluted the marketplace is and very difficult to trust who you buy from and which products you buy. I was excited to have Tim on the show so that I could learn more about the difference in what the healthy place offers over buying products at other places like GNC, Walgreens, the vitamin shop and obviously Amazon.com. So sit back and listen to the education that we get from Tim on how to buy better and healthier products in the health and wellness space. Joe: Hey, Tim, welcome to the show. Tim: Hey, hey, how you doing, buddy? Joe: I'm doing great, man, happy, what is it? Wednesday, I lost track, I just got Tim: Yeah, Joe: Back into Tim: It's Joe: Town. Tim: Hump hump day of the week, man, and Joe: Beautiful. Tim: I'm doing this to say thank you for giving me a chance to be on your show. Man, this is cool. Joe: Yeah, no, that's my pleasure, as as I mentioned before, we actually started this that I have, you know, I know that literally health is everything. Like you can have everything in the world that you ever, ever wanted. And without your health, it's just, you know, it's it's unfortunate because I know people go through things that had nothing to do with them not being healthy. They just got delivered a bad hand, Tim: Yahav. Joe: You know, so that's a different story. But those of us Tim: Jerome. Joe: That can make sure we stay healthy, there are things that we can do. But before we get into all of that, and as a lot of my listeners for the podcast and the viewers of a YouTube channel, now, I'd like to get the back story because a lot of the people who listen to the show are my hope is that these entrepreneurial spirits that are trying to figure out what they want to do are there in the midst of doing it. And they they need ideas from people that are being successful doing it. So I would like to go back as far as you're willing to go back to allow myself and the viewers to understand how you got into what you're doing today. What Tim: I love Joe: For? Tim: To share that. Yeah. Joe: Yeah, like what triggered the fact that you're now in this world of, you know, Tim: Supplements, Joe: The health world Tim: Natural Joe: And. Tim: Alternatives, Joe: Yeah, Tim: Yeah. Joe: Yeah, yeah. So I'd love to hear that and then we'll get in, Tim: I'd love to. It's Joe: Ok. Tim: A cool story, I kind of like telling it because it's just cool to see how things can work together to sort of bring you to the place that you're at. And it's sort of confirmation in some different ways. So I love to share it, man. I'd be happy to do so when my when I was like five or six years old, my mom fought through thyroid cancer. And I remember her like going through the chemo radiation and losing the hair, like seeing her at the hospital. I have four siblings, so just a lot of fear in the home, worried about mom. And then I remember this time where she came home and she was sort of like excited and sort of like filled with a little bit of hope because she had gone into this health food store in a little town called Muskego, Wisconsin, just this tiny little town that had a health food store. And she talked to this guy named John for like an hour and a half. And John shared with her all these natural alternatives that had some good science and some good reason to believe that it could help her in her process recovery, treatment of the thyroid cancer. And so she would like go in there like once a week, whether it was a refill for some supplements or whether it was some more education, because there was a lot of literature that this guy handed out as well, like books that he gave her. Tim: And I would go with her. And through this whole process, she she was benefited quite a bit from these natural alternatives that helped her and her recovery process. So I remember hearing about that as a little guy. And through that process, she got a job as a manager at this health food store. And she was there all the time, 40, 50 hours a week kind of thing. And us kids were home schooled. So we would go with mom often sitting in this back room of this health food store, doing our math problems, doing our schoolwork. And I watched over the years these testimonies produced of people coming in with chronic pain, depression, sleep issues, other folks that battled cancer, that my mom held their hand through the process, educating them. And so that was like my whole upbringing. And it really got into my DNA that there is natural alternatives out there that work and the general population just doesn't know about them, because the way our medical system set up pharmaceutical medications, you know, we have some of the best doctors in the world. And, you know, you go to them, you get a prescription, you don't Joe: Mm Tim: Necessarily Joe: Hmm. Tim: Get a natural alternative recommendation. So I got a bit passionate about that in my late teen years. So I got a job at a GNC franchise and worked for the owner who invited me to move out to Madison, Wisconsin, to manage some of his GNC stores after a little while. So I was like, man, OK, my boss thinks I'm good at this. I really enjoy helping people, encouraging people. I just happen to like like people in general. So it was it was sort of a fit. Like I got this passion for this natural alternative thing. I feel like I'm helping people. I'm impacting the world. I want to make a difference. And I was managing these GNC franchises in Madison, Wisconsin. Well, there was a corporate takeover, dude, in twenty seven where everybody lost their jobs, like corporate took over these six franchises that my boss owned. And it was like, OMG, like, what am I going to do now? And so I determined, you know, hey, I want to do something. And that's natural alternative space. I have always been sort of passionate about business in general. I had like three paper routes when I was 11 and I hired my sisters for a quarter a day. I was making bank Joe: Right. Tim: And I was so I tried a network marketing business for a little while that was suppliments and that was brutal. Multi-level marketing can be really hard. And I was like, OK, I don't want to go that route. Maybe I should open my own health food store. And at that time I had just met dating, married Becky, my wife. So we're prayerfully like thinking through this. Should we do this, put the house on the line, open up our own health food store and risk everything. And we decided to take the plunge. So our first brick and mortar store, 2010, was in a town called Fitchburg, Wisconsin, which is right outside of Madison, Wisconsin. And then twenty fifteen, it was store number two in the Madison area and then twenty nineteen with stores three and four. So that was going well. We then moved towards ecommerce where like, hey, if we're making an impact and a difference here locally, which is really exciting, we really enjoy it together. We work as a team like let's let's hit the nation. That sounds fun. And so we started to see a little bit of success there, especially ones covid hit of last year because our in-store traffic took a hit. So our pivot as a company, like a lot of smart companies, was, let's focus on e-commerce. And so that really helped us talk about a blessing in disguise, really helped Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Us figure out the e-commerce space a little bit. So really exciting. In December, January of this last year, we got our little warehouse. So now we have a warehouse in Madison and we're shipping packages out all over the United States. And that's the story. And the mission is about impacting, empowering and educating as many people as we can to just like, learn, grow and create a lifelong foundation of health and wellness. It's like a fanning a flame. You know, somebody already just has a little spark. You know, they're putting the cigarette out outside my store, throwing the McDonald's bag in the trash and like, I need something for my chronic pain all the way up to the health enthusiasts. And no matter what, to me, it's so encouraging to just fan the flame of someone's health and wellness. Because you said it earlier, life is a gift and people need to remember that. Joe: Yeah, and so have you always, based on the background of sitting in that store with your mother and seeing what the proper nutrition and supplements and things like that did for her? Did you always pretty much lead a healthy lifestyle? Tim: Funny is Joe: Don't Tim: No. Joe: Tell me you're a fast food junkie. Tim: No, I wasn't. Yeah, I was, and I always felt very bad if I was going through that fast food line, but my diet really didn't really take a huge impact until I married Becky. So for whatever reason, I would I knew a lot about supplements, really passionate about natural alternatives. But I was I was not the guy who is eating ultra clean, raw, organic, clean. I was like, OK, I'm going to eat a basic diet cleaner than most know what kind of excuses that. And then I'd lean on supplements for nutrition. And so when I met Vecchi, this is two thousand eight, she's like, wow, this doesn't even make sense. Like you can't go eat at pizza, frozen pizza, you know, and then go take your supplements. And so she really convicted me. And it's been a pretty cool team because that's always been her passion is very clean eating. And she didn't understand or know about the supplement natural alternative thing. And my passion has always been for my mom's story of natural alternatives and supplements can change a life. And so then getting married and working together as a team to educate Madison and our social media platforms and on YouTube, it's like there has to be a marriage between nutritional deficiencies, making sure we don't have them eating well, eating clean exercise. So we should work together. And I've improved since meeting, Becky. Joe: Wow, so are you actually telling me that she was already before you guys even met, she was interested in this sort of thing or she was she was Tim: Yeah. Joe: A healthy, clean eating person. Tim: Yes, she was Joe: Wow. Tim: A health enthusiast, yeah, I mean, just health, and that's part of what drew me to her is like, man, this girl's got discipline, like extreme self-control. For me, that's been an area of struggle, just like in general, like discipline waking up early. I'm the guy that would, before I met Becky, like stay up till one and then sleep till nine till I had to quit, get to work. And, you know, he's like, man, we got some work to do. But, yeah, she sure inspired me and a few of those areas. Joe: Ok, so without prying too deeply then, because now you're really piqued, my interest is the fact that you guys are lying so well. How did you meet? Tim: Yeah, so we there was like a young adults meeting through it, through church called Metro Believers Church in Madison, Wisconsin, you know, I'm a Christian, she's a Christian, and in my early twenties, it was like, hey, I really enjoyed finding people like minded. And I think in the back of my mind, I'm like, I'm searching for a life, you know? So I would go to a couple of these different churches, young adult ministry meetings, whatever, 20 something groups. And we just started hanging out. So it was like a group of like six or seven of us. And I was about six months in. I pulled her aside one day after church and said, I still laugh at what I said. I said, Hey, Becky, I've taken a shining to you and I'd like to continue on to marriage. And she's like, oh my gosh. Like, OK, I'm kind of like you, too. It was weird way to ask, but OK. Joe: It's also that's Tim: Yeah, Joe: Old school, Tim: I don't do it right. Oh, yeah. Joe: But also Tim: Oh. Joe: All right, cool, well, that's that's great. So how did you change or why did you change the name from Apple Wellness to the healthy place? Tim: Yeah, really good question, you know, Apple Wellness was a good name, you know, in the sense of like Apple a day keeps the doctor away and we just had too many people thinking we are the Mac Apple store. So I literally get calls, at least weekly, Joe: Wow, Tim: And Joe: That's so subtle. Tim: At least I know, and then I'd see my employee across the way and he'd be talking to somebody and he'd be like, well, try turning the phone off and then turn it back on, you know? Joe: Oh, my Tim: So Joe: God. Tim: Especially after he got the e commerce thing going, I started, Becky, as the graphic designer and kind of branding expert within our company for a long time. She's like the Apple word's taken. That's just gone. And I should have consulted with her a little bit more before we chose the name. Joe: Uh huh. Tim: And so she's always kind of wanted it changed. But then I found out that Apple, the company, has an Apple wellness program Joe: Oh, Tim: For employees Joe: Of. Tim: Like it's trademarked. I mean, so I figured it was just a matter of time before I end up getting some sort of litigation letter from Joe: Yeah, Tim: Apple. Joe: Yeah, well, OK, that's interesting. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So you stole one of my questions, but it was perfect because it was actually in line with what you were talking about. But I want to go back to it because Tim: Sure. Joe: It's important, again, for like the entrepreneurs that are listening to this and what we just went through with covid, you talked about shifting. They're not shifting, but literally adding to what you've already established. Right. So you were Tim: You. Joe: You were a retail store, people walking in foot traffic. That's what you counted on to make a living. Right. So when covid hit, obviously, everyone stayed home. So there goes all the foot traffic. So did you already have the e commerce portion of this set up before this happened when you said it was a blessing in disguise? Were you already ready to go the moment like that? Tim: Really Joe: The Tim: Good. Joe: You know, Tim: Yes, Joe: The doors. Tim: Yes and no, I Joe: Ok. Tim: Mean, it's like we had the website, we had the ability to set up ship products out. We had maybe three hundred out of the four thousand products that we have in our stores on the site. So we were ready in certain ways and then not ready for a lot of things. And we had no idea on the digital side of marketing, Google ads, Facebook ads, SEO optimization, email marketing. We hadn't done text messaging. We hadn't done very much of that, very basic and each one of those areas. So it was all of a sudden like pedal to the metal once March hit, where it was like, OK, we have some of these basic fundamentals. And I always tell a business owner like you, if you don't already, you have to have a website like I mean, covid showed us all that pretty quick, like Joe: Yeah. Tim: Have to have a website and you can get free ones are very inexpensive. Wick's dotcom. I'll tell business owners, like even if you're not a photographer, don't don't try to be don't don't get some real basic a white posterboard. Put the product right over it. Just take a picture by a window. Don't don't try to get real clever with it because Vecchi tells me that it can end up looking really bad if Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: You're trying to do so. Basic things like get a website, get a social media, you know, ask your grandkid if you don't know how to set one up sort of thing. So we had all the basics, but then for us it was like, OK. Let's get live chat on our website, because we are one of our difference makers, is consultations Joe: Huh? Tim: With we change lives because we ask questions and we figure out the best products and forms and brands for their specific issues, problems. So let's get a live chat on our website so we can have those conversations. Let's get free shipping. Let's make it really easy. Even if we lose money on maybe one out of five orders, let's just like make it easy, reduce friction in any way that we can. Let's get on Google ads and Facebook ads. So we hired a digital agency for that and it's pretty cool. A year later, we had 30 percent overnight of our foot traffic was just gone once we were able to stay open, thankfully. But that 30 percent in one year's time, we were able to build that on our e-commerce platforms. We were able to replace what was lost. So I'm still head spinning, so thankful for my team able to bring that together because it's quite the operation and it takes a lot of work. Joe: Yeah, did you did you keep the stores open themselves or did you? Tim: We did Joe: You did OK. Tim: Not. Joe: Ok, Tim: We Joe: And Tim: Were Joe: Was it. Tim: Scrambling in the beginning of if we could be classified as essential or not, and my belief is that the immune system is something that can really be strengthened. I'm more passionate about terrain versus the germs so we can strengthen our terrain, strengthen our immune systems, both defense and offense. I mean, there's incredible science behind simple nutrients like sand, mucus from elderberry. The University of Sydney showing the prevention which with elderberry prevention of viruses entering the cell. I mean, it's some pretty cool science. So at the beginning of the covid thing, it was like, OK, I'm not going to tell anybody I can cure or prevent Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Whatever, but I'm sure as heck going to yell it from the rooftop that you can strengthen your immune system and a strong immune system. Strong health is the best defense against any disease, virus, sickness anywhere. So I got pretty passionate about that a year ago. Joe: Cool. Yeah, that's great. So I'm normally pretty good at not bouncing around, but in this case, I want to go back to when you decided to do this. You know, obviously when when someone gets released from a corporate environment and they're like, oh, my gosh, I don't have control over my own destiny because these people Tim: The. Joe: Just literally rip the rug out from underneath me, which is another thing that a lot of entrepreneurs know because this is how they got to where they are there that happen to them. Like I'm not letting someone else dictate how my life is going to turn out. Right. So Tim: Yeah. Joe: But what's really crazy is I don't know if it if in Wisconsin or the places where you have these stores, obviously we know that you already brought it up at GNC is a big brand around the country. There's also where we are. There's the vitamin store. Right. Are the stuff that one of those Tim: Yeah, Joe: Is a vitamin Tim: Yeah, Joe: Shopper. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So there's a lot of these places. So it's almost like you saying you and Becky going, oh, yeah, we're going to create the next pizza delivery like pizza Tim: Now, Joe: Delivery Tim: There's already Joe: Franchise. Tim: 10 right around Joe: Yeah, Tim: The corner, Joe: Right. Tim: So let's see number 11, yeah. Joe: Right. It's we're going to be the next Pizza Hut or Papa John's or whatever. It's just like that that industry Tim: Yes, Joe: That's it takes a lot Tim: It's Joe: Of guts. Tim: So competitive. Joe: Yeah. So when you thought about it, as all entrepreneurs, do, we always come up with these ideas and then we sometimes will kill our own ideas without our spouse or partner or someone will say they'll be the sensible one and say Tim: Right, Joe: That's Tim: Right, Joe: Never Tim: Yeah. Joe: Right. But then you have all these outside influences of of friends and things. And, you know, at any moment, if you would have said, hey, we're thinking of opening up a vitamin supplement, healthy sort of Tim: John. Joe: That people would look at you. But what about all of these major brands? So tell me about how you got over the hump to make to pull the trigger. Tim: Yeah, do that's such a good question and, you know, to identify and I had some friends who opened a coffee shop, you know, and a year later, you know, the coffee shops not doing so well is unfortunate with covid timing and everything. And it's like the supplement thing where you, like, hear this and you're like, oh, I don't know, you know, I wish him well, but I don't know if that's going to work because it's just like there's a hundred of them, you know. Joe: Right. Tim: So I think for me what happened was I worked for GNC for, I don't know, five years. And you start to see good stuff. You start to see bad stuff, you start to see their model. They were purchased by China a while back. So, OK, it's all sourced from China. Forms of nutrients are in their synthetic forms or not so absorbable forms. And you start to learn like, OK, a better product would help this person more than this form of curcumin that's not absorbing into their system from China or wherever, you know, so you start to see where you could make a difference and you sort of start to see your difference makers. So in the supplement world, there's two veins of supplement stores. There's the type of stores that are all about muscle gain and weight loss, you know, weight loss, thermogenic high caffeine, ephedra, and then trim and tracks Hydroxycut. And a lot of that isn't super healthy for Joe: Hmm. Tim: People to be taking steroids or pro hormones, you know, not super healthy. So that's like one vein of supplement stores. And then there's another vein of supplement stores that just they sourced from China. They use synthetic nutrients. It's a little bit more about margin and profit than it is about quality and making a difference. And so that is something I realized pretty early on. And there's not too many supplement health food stores that have a lot of knowledge where you walk in. And there's not just like a high schooler selling the huge jug of protein because it gets a two dollar commission on it, you know. Joe: Yes, I do know. Tim: Yeah, yeah. And there's just not a lot of those out there. So then all of a sudden starting to dream about, you know, originating from my mom's story where somebody really helped her out, where I can really make a difference, because if I open my own stores or store at the time, I can bring in some of the best brands in the world. And pretty quick, in any industry, you find out, good, better, best. And I want to be in that best category. And all of a sudden you're working with some of the best brands in the world and you have the knowledge to be a to guide somebody with Crohn's disease. Let's just Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Talk over asthma on natural alternatives that really work. And if you impact them, if you help them, if you change their life a little bit for the better, now they're going to keep coming back forever. And they tell everybody they know because there's such a vacuum, such a desperate need in this day and age for knowledgeable resources in the natural alternative space. We have a ton of medical, we have a ton of pharmaceutical drugs. We just don't have information coming to the general public on natural alternatives that work. And I get to be that resource in Madison, Wisconsin. So I think that's why we have done well in our brick and mortar stores. And I think that's probably why our attention is higher for our e-commerce is because of that customer service, that knowledgeable resource, that going the extra mile to impact their lives. And I'll give you an example. A lady might hit our live chat from California and say, hey, I'm looking for a V12. Can you give me a recommendation? And then we might ask the question like, absolutely. Here's a couple of options. Do you mind if I ask while you're while you're taking V12? Oh, my doctor said because I have really low energy, I have nerve pain and my mental clarity and focus, I get like foggy brain all the time. So then all of a sudden we say, awesome, OK, I'm actually going to encourage the method in form of V12 because it absorbs much better than this sign form that I first sent you, because I really want you to feel the difference. And since you're feeling fatigued, a little brain fog, I'd love for you to consider this adrenal boost product that has adapted genic herbs in there, like Atul Gawande wrote Rodeo Mocca because ninety two percent of fatigue is related to your adrenal glands. So then you recommend that product. They get it. And this lady two months later goes, Oh my gosh, my energy is a little better, my focus is better, my stress is reduced, which I didn't even bring up. But that adrenal product helps with stress, too, I guess. Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Then all of a sudden they're leaving a review like, wow, that wellness consultant, Ryan, he's one of our our wellness consultants. He really helped me out. And so it's a very different sort of dynamic than a typical GNC store, health food store, vitamin shop type experience. They're Joe: Huh? Tim: All great stores. I mean, I love Natural. Anywhere you can get them. So that was like our difference maker and that's why I thought I could make a go out of it. Joe: Ok, cool. I have so much to ask you now, because you keep opening up like Kansas. So. So before again, I, I want this stuff to be helpful for the entrepreneur. And then then we're going to help the consumers that listen to this. So how when you decided on doing this and said, OK, and let's pull the trigger, how did you figure out the place where you're going to open up store number one, that you do all that extensive, Tim: Oh, Joe: You know, Tim: Good question, yes. Joe: Traffic, you know, what's going to pop up around us? What Tim: You know, Joe: Is, you Tim: Find Joe: Know? Tim: Find a good broker, a real estate broker that can find you spaces. So I had a guy named Kent in Madison, Wisconsin, and he you don't have to pay these guys. You know, it's the landlord that pays them. Joe: Right. Tim: And so as a young entrepreneur about to, like, risk everything you had, that was really important for me to know. Like, I I still am shocked by that. Like, you can just call one of these guys, try to find a reputable one, find somebody that trusts that can make a good referral. And they do all this scouting for you. They send you all the reports and you don't pay a penny. You know, I am a bottom line at the end or something, but you don't pay a penny for this. They get paid from the landlord. So he was bringing me idea after idea after idea. And he had been in the industry for a long time. So he knew the city really, really well. And he was able to guide me through, hey, this has a really strong anchor. The anchor in Fitchburg was Joe: Yeah, Tim: Target. Joe: Yeah. Tim: It was a super, super target. So I was like, oh, learning about anchors are important, Joe: Yeah. Tim: Really important. So I tell you, if you're listening, like, look for some strong anchors, because that's really going to help you for traffic. Joe: And just for the listeners and the people that don't like it, like when they talk about like a small strip mall or a plaza or something like that or even in a in a mall small, an anchor is an anchor store. That is when they go in, there's a really good chance they're not going away like they are a big thing like Target or Wal-Mart Tim: Exactly. Joe: Or Nordstrom or whatever. So I just wanted to clear that up because I didn't know at one point. But I know when you're looking at retail space like that, you want to be surrounded by an anchor store that has been around forever and is not going away. Tim: Yes, and just to further drive that point home, we have for brick and mortar stores and the one that's doing like the worst is the one that doesn't have a strong anchor by it. So just get one with a strong anchor and then look at price points and definitely negotiate. So we had that broker that was able to help us out. He was able to negotiate tenant improvement. Our big deal when you're opening a store, because you you could use money towards the build out and you can ask landlords for that. So if, again, if you have a good broker and you tell them your story, what you're trying to build out, a lot of times you can get a number of things paid for by the landlord because they're about to ask you to sign a five year lease. Joe: Mm hmm. OK. So at this point, the four locations that you have, you are in a lease situation Tim: Yes, all for you Joe: At Tim: And I've Joe: Any Tim: Looked into purchasing. Joe: Ok, so there is yeah, that's my question. It's like when do you pull the trigger on saying, OK, I want to actually start to own some of these buildings are these spaces. And that's a huge job. That's that's really put your Tim: Yeah, Joe: Neck out. Right. Tim: So in all four, I looked at them and each one has a different story, the first one I looked into though, at the Fitchburg location, the buildings were not for sale. So I was like, all this is so cool. So I looked into it and it was seven million dollars for these two buildings because it's in a strong anchor, high traffic area. So it is difficult to buy the spot by the strong anchor Joe: Maha. Tim: Because it really it would have been risking I couldn't I couldn't do it. But then the idea next idea is like, well, maybe I should move locations now that my name is established, if I can buy a strip mall down the way or something like that. So that Joe: Te. Tim: Idea is in the back of my head. But then you move away from the strong anchors. That's Joe: Right. Tim: Been called me back. Joe: Right, cool. See, that was perfect because that was like all of the things that you have to consider and Tim: Right. Joe: It's yeah, that's a tough decision, man. That's a lot of money. Tim: It is, Joe: Yeah. Tim: Dude, I Joe: Yeah. Tim: Know and I have a buddy who owns a dentistry office and he Joe: We. Tim: Was able to purchase his location and it's awesome. He's about to pay it off after ten years. And I'm super excited. So Joe: Yeah. Tim: It is depends on the situation. Joe: Yeah, OK, so now let's get into what I consider in the world that you're in and I'm a huge fan of natural like I is, it's a there's a difference between naturopathic or is. Right. Is that pronounced correctly? Is that they say it Tim: Yeah, Joe: Now Tim: Naturopathic Joe: Or Tim: Medicine Joe: Or homoeopathic. Tim: Homoeopathy yupp homoeopathy Joe: Right. OK. Tim: And integrative medicine is kind of like medical and naturopathy together. Joe: Yep, yep, so Joel and my life partner went through a battle of breast cancer where she had some lymph nodes and luckily, you know, Tim: Giese. Joe: Through through chemo and radiation, she came out on the other side and everything's great. But Tim: Good. Joe: The big thing that she also had was she had a naturopathic doctor Tim: Hmm. Joe: That went that came from the cancer world. So the advantages is that he understood the treatment that was happening with the normal medicine and he knew what to give her to not take away from what she was doing with the chemo and radiation, but at the same time helped to keep her system built up and not offset any of that. So there was a perfect marriage between the two. And Tim: That's. Joe: I swear to this day, I feel like that was the reason that she was Tim: Wow. Joe: Fairly, fairly normal through the process, like we were doing 90 X and she was in the middle Tim: That's Joe: Of chemo Tim: All Joe: And radiation. Tim: Right. Joe: Yeah, it was ridiculous. So Tim: Dude, that's Joe: So Tim: Awesome. Joe: I'm a big fan of the naturopathic side of things and natural remedies and all of that. So Tim: Not the. Joe: So that's why this was a cool episode for me, because it's hard to talk with somebody that is in this niche that you're in without it being the big stores. And so my first question, because I got so many of them Tim: I Joe: First question and the first Tim: Love Joe: Question Tim: It. Joe: Is how do you become with all of the misinformation that's out Tim: The. Joe: In the world? Right. And this is what confuses all of us as consumers. You go to Amazon and you say, I need a B vitamin of Tim: Right Joe: Some B supplement. Tim: Now. Joe: And the habit is you you click on the five star rating, things that you want. You think that's going to be the best because people are taking their time to read it, which Tim: Yeah. Joe: I think there's enough Tim: What Joe: Conversation Tim: Did he. Joe: In the world that says that's not necessarily true. Tim: Right. Joe: And then you literally are just like throwing darts at a dartboard with Tim: I Joe: A blindfold Tim: Know that, Joe: On. So. Tim: I know. Joe: So how do you get through all the misinformation that you feel so confident enough that when you when you suggest something to a client that you haven't been taken advantage of by the misinformation, like Tim: Yeah, Joe: How do you get through Tim: Because. Joe: All of that stuff? Tim: A great question and even the reviews, if a company markets really well and they're incredible at marketing, they can get a billion, five star reviews and they can be like synthetic sourced from China, not NSF certification. So over the years, you start to be able to read between the lines and you start to be able to say, hey, this is B.S. over here. This is marketing. Only not met with quality. And like any industry, you start to learn the good, better and best. So there's a few things. So first and foremost, I think everybody needs somebody on their team. Like your wife has that naturopathic doctor now as a resource that she can probably shoot an email to or make an appointment with and ask these questions. I think everybody needs somebody on their team because most people have a medical doctor and beyond that and they might have a pharmacist. Right. And they're good to have on your team, but we need somebody with. Expertise, knowledge, history in the supplement space, because even a naturopathic doctor, they know way more than I do about the human body, about maybe. Yeah, just just how to treat maybe disease. Tim: Right. When you're in the supplement space, there is you get to deal with hundreds and hundreds of brands. And over the decades, which I think 18 years now, you start to find out what brands are good and trustworthy and which ones aren't because the FDA doesn't regulate all the supplements. So you can say whatever you want on the label about me, your romantic drink here, but you can say whatever you want and. FDA isn't going to necessarily nail you if you're lying, if your label is making false label claims and this happens, there was a clinic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where not real clinical, but where they took products from a number of stores, GNC, Walgreens, Wal-Mart and Target. They took supplements from those four stores and then they had them tested at Chavannes and it was Chavannes Labs. And all four of them had discrepancies with what the label said and what was actually in the capsule. And one product was an Asia product, which is good for the immune system. And it had zero percent echinacea in there and a little bit of garlic like Joe: Oh, Tim: What Joe: My Tim: The H Joe: Gosh. Tim: Now? Yeah. So that exactly what you said. It's shooting in the dark. Is it marketing that's producing these reviews? Is it quality? Is it going to help me? Is it a waste of my money? Am I being sold. Right. So there's all those questions and the privilege that I'm so thankful for is just being submersed in the supplement world long enough. You learn a couple of things. So sourcing is vital. Where is it coming from? There is vitamin C that you can get our China, that there's some concerns there with chemicals, heavy metals, arsenic, or you can get vitamin C from Scallan, which happens to have a really rich ascorbic acid form of vitamin C clean, great place to source it from. So where a product is sourced from is really important. Number two is does the brand have NSF certification? So NZDF C, GMP grade facilities that they work with, which they're paying money to NSF to a third party test and ensure that they're having all of these practices that are healthy for supplements, they're sourcing their cleanliness. Has it been tested? Is it clean? Those questions? And NSF doesn't care about the company. They care about the reputation. So there sure as heck going to just that's a good certification is trusted in the supplement world to ensure that what's on the label is actually in the product. Tim: So sourcing No. One, NSF, GMP certification, number two and number three, which all of these take some sort of expertise or having somebody on your your team. You know, that's why I say to have somebody on your team first. But number three is the forms of nutrients. So E 12, which I gave the example earlier, Psion Kabalan and B 12 is synthetic. So your body has to convert it and you lose a lot of the content in that conversion versus a methyl form B 12, which is the natural form that your body absorbs really, really well. So four items, number one and two, saucing and NSF, you can have a very clean form of sign Kabalan and B 12 source, very clean. You could have NSF facility ensuring that you have that 50 micrograms of cyanide Kabalan B 12 in the B complex. But then it would take some expertise to know, like, OK, that's fine, that's good. But we would prefer a methyl form would be 12 because it absorbs so much better Joe: Mr.. Tim: And every single nutrient. This blows my mind because every single nutrient has good, better, best. You know, whether you're talking about vitamin C, ascorbic acid, sodium ascorbic calcium ascorbic B 12, which I'm talking about the six paroxetine hydrochloride versus toxified phosphate turmeric. You can get the the turmeric that colors your Indian curry orange and you can take that capsule and it's good for you. It just doesn't do very much for inflammation unless you extract the curcumin out and then even that doesn't have a good absorption rate. So blending it with the turmeric, essential oils and the sunflower lecithin launch the absorption where it's literally absorbing two hundred to five hundred times better than the turmeric Indian spice that you started with. And that's the form of ninety five. That's the form that Baylor University of Texas is using to literally treat cancer and chronic pain with incredible results. I mean, the cancer story is very cool. Inflammation is the root of the root system of cancer. Joe: Mm, huh. Tim: So that's an example where it's like oh man form so saucing, NZDF, GMP, great facility forms of nutrients. Those are the big three that you want to look at to know quality. Right. So that's what I always tell somebody, find somebody that you can trust. So for you guys, it might be your your doctor that your wife worked with for in Madison, Wisconsin. A lot of people trust the healthy place to help guide them, know we don't do commission so that we can just recommend what's best so Joe: Right. Tim: People can use that live chat feature on our website to just ask those questions. But find a health food store maybe that is trustworthy in your home town, that you do meet a job like my mom met John Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Or find a store like mine that you can connect with and you can go to when health strikes, health problems strike because everybody has some conditions, some problem, something, even if it's something as simple as fatigue, you know. Ninety two percent of fatigue is related to your adrenal glands. You can strengthen your adrenal glands and you can have more vibrant energy every day. And people just don't know that. So they keep reaching for the coffee or the soda or the caffeine pills, what have you. So get somebody on your team that you can trust. Joe: So go. So you said at one point in this conversation that do you have over 4000 Tim: Products, yeah. Joe: Excuse now, right? OK, so let's just take that as an example. It's a full time job for someone like you to be the Tim: Yes. Joe: Gatekeeper Tim: Yeah. Joe: Of your of the healthy place. You have to be the gatekeeper to say, yes, this comes into our door and gets put on ourselves or in our e-commerce store or Tim: The. Joe: No, this doesn't meet the criteria. So to me, it feels like it's continuing education and literally a full time job for whoever that person. Let's just say it's you at the moment that Tim: Yeah. Joe: Is the person that says yay or nay on these products. So it's just mind boggling what is out there and what you have to do to sort of educate yourself to to say, yes, this makes the cut, not only doesn't make the cut, but it's in a product. It's not a product and not a C product, you Tim: Yeah, Joe: Know what I mean? Tim: You're Joe: So. Tim: Absolutely right. And it's like reading a book, though, you don't want to minimize what I do, it's like it's not hard for you to read English, you know, after you've learned it. But if you're learning a new language, it looks like totally confusing. Overwhelming can take me forever to learn this language. And it might take some years to learn it. Once you have that language mastered, it's just like reading a book, you know, Joe: Yeah. Tim: You just check the boxes, right. OK, where is the source from NSF? GMP, what's the forms of these nutrients? Because you start to learn and then you have experts that you follow. A lot of people smarter than me that I follow. Dr. X, Dr. While, Dr. Whitaker, Dr. Northrup. And you start Terry Lambrew and you start to follow these gurus in the southern industry that have been there for 40 years, that know so much more than you. And you're reading their literature, listening to their podcasts. They're the symposiums around the planet that are going on for this breakthrough, that breakthrough. You get the subscriptions right to the. So I just tell everyone, get plugged in at least where you're getting encouraged on a regular basis to own your health, build your terrane strength in your health and all the ways that you can inspire yourself on a regular basis and then get somebody on your team that you can trust to help guide you in the space, because it is a new language, right? Joe: It's nuts, it's just it's so frustrating. Did a three month vegan plan Tim: Nice. Joe: Because Tim: Yeah. Joe: I'm not vegan, but I loved it like it was good for me. But I Tim: Yeah. Joe: Actually I actually, in the process, lost a lot of muscle mass because I was also going always going to the gym. But all of a sudden I started to shrink both, Tim: Right, Joe: You Tim: Like, Joe: Know. Tim: No. Joe: So, yes, I'm like, I'm doing all this hard work. And it's just I needed to get on a B 12 vitamin of something. And it's funny because I don't even know what I'm taking, but it's something that I got from Amazon and Tim: Your Joe: I Tim: I can do it. I've been assigned to general Joe: I'm sure. Tim: Check that Joe: So Tim: After Joe: I'm going Tim: The program. Joe: To look when yeah. When we're done, I'm going to look and then I'm going to and then I'm going to say I need a direct line to Tim in Tim: There Joe: The Tim: We Joe: Chat Tim: Go. Joe: Room. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So have you ever thought of franchises? Tim: I have, I Joe: And Tim: Have. Joe: And I'm Tim: You Joe: Just interested you don't have to you don't have to Tim: Know, Joe: Say to. Tim: I'm so I am very interested and I have been kicking that ball around in my head for a long time because we are we specialize in education, right. So you got to find ways to duplicate yourself in a franchise. And so we created a three month curriculum that our wellness consultants have to go through. They have to pass quizzes and tests and they have to get certifications from this company, this company and MKB certification, all the enzyme certifications to understand the industry, know what questions to ask customers and how to make recommendations. So that's one of the hardest things that we've done that would make it more easy to duplicate the knowledge side of our company and our brand. And as I've talked to people who have created franchises, the the legal side to it is one hurdle and then enforcing them to actually maintain your model as representing the healthy place. What we have created is the two big unknowns for me as far as difficulty. So then the choice came, should we just keep adding brick and mortars in our own territory? Right, right. In the Madison area and then put all of our energy and focus into our brands that we've created and our website because there's infinite you can do in the business world and you kind Joe: Mm Tim: Of Joe: Hmm. Tim: Have to choose. Joe: Yeah. Tim: So we decided to park the franchise idea for now and really go after lively vitamin CO. This is one of the brands that have been borne out of our brick and mortar stores. So now we're selling that to other health food stores around the country. And the number two is build find your healthy place dotcom, because just like Amazon is a freakin mammoth, there's so much opportunity to impact and power and educate everything that I'm passionate about on that website. So currently with four kids, we are chilling on the franchise idea. But I think it's brilliant because there's not there's not the option out there, which is why it keeps coming back to me Joe: Yeah, Tim: Like Joe: Yeah. Tim: There's not that many health food stores out there that really care. Soulsby for sales. You know, as one of my Joe: Mm Tim: Saying Joe: Hmm. Tim: That, Joe: I Tim: I really Joe: Love that, by the way, I love that. Tim: Thank you. Thank you. There is a time I was praying and it was like not I it going to make my friggin mortgage. When I first opened the store, I was praying to God for sales and I was like, God to declare bankruptcy here is brutal. And it was like an arrow is like, do you care about their soul as much as you care about the sales? Joe: Yeah. Tim: And it was kind of striking. So, yeah, there's not that many stores out there that really care about the human that have knowledge to help guide them and a model that works to help people, you know. So it's still an idea that keeps coming back to me. So Joe: Right. Tim: We'll see. Joe: Yeah, well, good luck if it happens, I'm sure it'll be great. Tim: Thank you. You see one popping up next door, you'll know where to get your V12. Joe: There you go. So you hit upon this a moment ago with the whole franchising thing of how to actually create this template and create a strict thing where where the people that are talking to your customers are very educated and they're giving the right information and asking the right questions. So how have you done that with the people that are at your current stores and how have you done that with the people that are on the other end of the chat? When somebody files in to ask these questions, Tim: Yeah, so. Joe: How do you get something like when is somebody OK? You're ready to take a call, you're ready to be on the chat, you're ready to to advise a customer in the store, like, what's that process? Tim: Yeah, Joe: And you don't Tim: So. Joe: Have to go too deep. I just Tim: No, Joe: I Tim: No, Joe: But Tim: That. Joe: I'm sure somebody is going to say, like, hey, Tim, super educated on this. So every time I talk, like I just said, you know what I call him on the chat, I want him, you Tim: Right. Joe: Know. So Tim: Right. Joe: How to how do you duplicate Tim so that everyone that's coming in on the chat or walking in the store says this is just a clone of Tim like he may. He's already run them through the ringer, you know? Tim: Yeah, that's so the three month curriculum that we created is our pride and joy. I'm so thankful for that. It was brutal to create. So I created one hundred videos, having a five minute conversation where I'm explaining different parts of the world and explaining brands and what to look for and how to explain it. And then we'll go through they'll have to pass quizzes and tests based on each module. So there's nine different modules to this curriculum. They have to go through trainings with specific companies. They have to do a number of roleplaying activities with our managers where they pretend to be the customer Joe: Mm Tim: And Joe: Hmm. Tim: Coming in, hey, I'm looking for some CBDs. What do you got? And so they get tested there and they have to get these certifications from each of these brands, so they have to pass it. So there's one guy who got to the end and he is like, OK, dude, we got to rewind because you're not retaining this stuff. So either you did the last minute cramming for this quiz the night before. And like I didn't I did that in high school. Joe: Ok. Tim: And then you don't retain it, right. Joe: Yeah. Tim: So do you really care about this or not? So he had to start over. He had to go through it again. So it's a team. We have a leadership team of five. And so we have these nine modules, the quizzes, the tests. They have to pass them. They have to do the role playing. And then the leadership team of five will say, OK, this person's ready or they're really not ready. And there's still a couple of parts of our team where we're like, OK, where they can be a wellness consultant in the store, but we don't think they're ready to be on live chat. So then we'll wait maybe six months until they have a little bit more experience, because where our team learns the most is from the customers coming in asking the questions and they don't know the answers of how to treat colitis Joe: Mm Tim: With Joe: Hmm. Tim: Whatever. So then they have to go find out to get back to that customer and then they learn something. So right now, I'm proud to say our live chat feature on our website, if you go to find your other place, dotcom lower, right. You get that little live chat bubble, the seven different consultants that you might run into over there are, I wouldn't say clones of Tim because I think they're smarter than me, but they are really well equipped and able to match, kind of hit the mark of where they need to be. And they all know and are passionate enough about helping people to not. One of the first things that I'll tell them is, dude, never bullshit. Joe: Yeah, yeah. Tim: That's a real thing. And I came from a I won't say anything negative where it's just more about getting the sale, about getting that commission. And and that's part of why we don't do commissions. So it's a fun process for intense. Joe: Well, that's great, man. Yeah, so I want to respect your time. We're down to the wire. I want to make sure I didn't miss anything that you want to talk about. So you have four stores in Wisconsin. Tim: Madison, Joe: Correct. Tim: Wisconsin, the. Joe: Ok, and you have the website Tim: Find your healthy place, Dotcom. Joe: Buying your healthy place, Dotcom. Anything else that I missed that is important that we talk about? Tim: You know, dude, I mean, as I was thinking about this program and your followers, like what your mission is, you're trying to encourage entrepreneurs, trying to encourage people to be thankful for life. You don't Joe: Mm Tim: Take Joe: Hmm. Tim: To treat life like the gift it is, you Joe: Yep. Tim: Know? So I did want to offer your followers a coupon code. If they don't have you know, if you have a health food store in your own home town, that's great sport. Those guys, if you have somebody on your team, that's awesome. That's my main passion. And if you need a resource that you can trust, if you go to find your healthy place dotcom and you get something type in coupon code, Castelo, and that'll give 30 percent off the full price on anything on our whole website, we have thousands of products. So anything from V12 to something more intense. And regardless if you buy something or not, use that live chat feature to ask questions. You know, I've had people call my cell phone bill. Hey, Jim, you know, I'm in Wholefoods right now and I'm looking at three different multivitamins. Like which one do you think I should get? You know, and I get to tell them and it's fun and you can share the love. And so use that live chat feature as a resource, because more than ever, dude, we need natural alternatives. We need some education we at least need to know about, like Joel and your Joe: Yeah, Tim: Life partner. Dude, Joe: Yeah. Tim: What if she didn't have that naturopathic doctor that gave her some natural supplements through one of the most intensive crisis's that she ever faced in her life? Like, you know, in your gut that that helped her in a dramatic way because you watched her do P ninety three, the cancer experience. Joe: Yeah. Tim: I mean, that's a miracle, dude. And it took somebody reaching out and it took a resource being willing to respond to create that miracle, you know. And so that's what I want for people. Joe: Yeah, it's I can't stress it enough that Tim: Right. Joe: What I saw before my very eyes every single Tim: Right. Joe: Day and it would and then I see people that are going through cancer of some type and they're only being treated, Tim: As Joe: You know, Tim: A medical doctor, yeah. Joe: And they're their body is just being crushed. Tim: Yes. Joe: And there's and there's nothing, no nothing helping to offset the chemicals and all of the harshness Tim: Know. Joe: Of that treatment. And so. Tim: Right, and let me say, you know, you saw it with somebody you loved very much, I saw it with my mom when I was five or six. And since then, I'm getting goosebumps. I have seen it for thousands of people through the last 11 years that the healthy place has been a company, thousands of people, not always cancer, but but we're talking depression, chronic pain, Crohn's disease, asthma, like people suffering like megacorp. There's so much suffering going on Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: In the world and there is natural alternatives that people literally don't know about. They have nobody in their world telling them. So they just listen to whatever mainstream media or their medical doctor Joe: Yeah. Tim: Or their pharmacist. And there's a lot of good people with good intent in those areas. It's just there's not the voice of natural alternatives. So we need to know about this stuff. We've got to get the word out. Joe: Yeah, it's great, man, I love what you're doing, and this Tim: Think. Joe: Was exciting for me and and I think I actually have your personal email, so I'm just going Tim: That's Joe: To I'm Tim: Awesome. Joe: Going to go I'm going to go ten. I need Tim: You Joe: More Tim: Should. Joe: Energy, Tim. I think I think I have inflammation. And I'm going Tim: Yeah, Joe: To be like. Tim: I know you should, and if anyone's listening to and they because sometimes, you know, they just have a trust factor or whatever, Tim at Find Your Healthy Place Dotcom. I am happy to take emails. This what I get to do all day, dude, and it's just fun. It's so rewarding. You just get to point people in the right direction and help them out. So I love it. Joe: I wish you all the luck in the world, this is a Tim: Thank you. Joe: This is a great thing that you're doing. It's nice to have somebody who is, like you said, it's it's Soulsby before sales. It's a great it's a great way to do it. And I think Tim: Thank Joe: You'll be Tim: You. Joe: Rewarded continually be rewarded for doing Tim: Thank Joe: It that Tim: You. Joe: Way. I'll put everything in the show notes. Thank you for the coupon for the listeners Tim: Now. Joe: And I'll make sure I have all the correct links. So find your healthy place. Dotcom is the website. The company's name is the Healthy Place for locations in Madison, Wisconsin. You eventually might franchise someday, Tim: Yes, Joe: But Tim: And people on Facebook, you know, Joe: Yeah. Tim: The healthy people on Facebook, my wife's a genius as far as really caring for our community there. So you'll find a lot of good content and Instagram as well. So thank you, dear. This Joe: Yeah, Tim: Is. Joe: Tim, thanks so much, man, I really appreciate your time today and thanks for all the insight and I really do wish you the best of luck. Tim: Any time, brother, and wish the same to you. Joe: Thank you, Matt. Tim: I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I want to thank you for listening to my podcast. I know you have many options to listen to various podcasts, and I'm honored that you chose to listen to mine. I would love it if you were to rate my podcast Five Stars and write a nice review. It really helps to bring up the rankings of the podcast. Other listeners, once again, thank you so much for listening to the Joe Costello show. I appreciate you very much.

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Listener Questions 6

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2021 21:13

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: And I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today is a very special episode for two reasons. First, we're going to be talking about all the things that you want to talk about. That's right, it's time for another Q&A session. Get hyped.Amy: And second as is Duckbill's customary hazing ritual, we're putting a new Duckbill Group Cloud Economist Tim Banks through the wringer to answer some of your pressing questions about cloud costs and AWS. And he has pretty much the best hobbies.Tim: [laugh].Jesse: Absolutely.Tim: You know, I choke people for fun.Jesse: [laugh]. I don't even know where to begin with that. I—you know—Amy: It's the best LinkedIn bio, that's [laugh] where you begin with that.Tim: Yeah, I will change it right after this, I promise. But no, I think it's funny, we were talking about Jiu-Jitsu as a hobby, but my other hobby is I like to cook a lot, and I'm an avid, avid chili purist. And we were in a meeting earlier and Amy mentioned something about a bowl of sweet chili. And, dear listeners, let me tell you, I was aghast.Amy: It's more of a sweet stewed meat than it is, like, some kind of, like, meat candy. It is not a meat candy. Filipinos make very sweet stews because we cannot handle chili, and honestly, we shouldn't be able to handle anything that's caramelized or has sugar in it, but we try to anyway. [laugh].Tim: But this sounds interesting, but I don't know that I would categorize it as chili, especially if it has beans in it.Jesse: It has beans. We put beans in everything.Tim: Oh, then it can't be chili.Jesse: Are you a purist that your chili cannot have beans in it?Tim: Well, no. Chili doesn't have beans in it.Amy: Filipino food has beans in it. Our desserts have beans in it. [laugh].Jesse: We are going to pivot, we're going to hard pivot this episode to just talk about the basis of what a chili recipe consists of. Sorry, listeners, no cost discussions today.Tim: Well, I mean, it's a short list: a chili contains meat and it contains heat.Jesse: [laugh].Tim: That's it. No tomatoes, no beans, no corn, or spaghetti, or whatever people put in it.Amy: Okay, obviously the solution is that we do some kind of cook-off where Tim and Pete cook for everybody, and we pull in Pete as a special quote-unquote, outside consultant, and I just eat a lot of food, and I'm cool with that. [laugh].Jesse: I agree to this.Tim: Pete is afraid of me, so I'm pretty sure he's going to pick my chili.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: I could see him doing that. But also, I just like eating food.Tim: No, no, it's great. We should definitely do a chili cook-off. But yeah, I am willing to entertain any questions about, you know, chili, and I'm willing to defend my stance with facts and the truth. So…Amy: If you have some meat—or [sheet 00:03:19]—related questions, please get into our DMs on Twitter.Jesse: [laugh]. All right. Well, thank you to everyone who submitted their listener questions. We've picked a few that we would like to talk about here today. I will kick us off with the first question.This first question says, “Long-time listener first-time caller. As a solo developer, I'm really interested in using some of AWS's services. Recently, I came across AWS's Copilot, and it looks like a potentially great solution for deployment of a basic architecture for a SaaS-type product that I'm developing. I'm concerned that messing around with Copilot might lead to an accidental large bill that I can't afford as a solo dev. So, I was wondering, do you have a particular [bizing 00:04:04] availability approach when dealing with a new AWS service, ideally, specific steps or places to start with tracking billing? And then specifically for Copilot, how could I set it up so it can trip off billing alarms if my setup goes over a certain threshold? Is there a way to keep track of cost from the beginning?”Tim: AWS has some basic billing alerts in there. They are always going to be kind of reactive.Jesse: Yes.Amy: They can detect some trends, but as a solo developer, what you're going to get is notification that the previous day's spending was pretty high. And then you'll be able to trend it out over that way. As far as asking if there's a proactive way to predict what the cost of your particular architecture is going to be, the easy answer is going to be no. Not one that's not going to be cost-prohibitive to purchase a sole developer.Jesse: Yeah, I definitely recommend setting up those reactive billing alerts. They're not going to solve all of your use cases here, but they're definitely better than nothing. And the one that I definitely am thinking of that I would recommend turning on is the Cost Explorer Cost Anomaly Detector because that actually looks at your spend based on a specific service, a specific AWS cost category, a specific user-defined cost allocation tag. And it'll tell you if there is a spike in spend. Now, if your spend is just continuing to grow steadily, Cost Anomaly Detector isn't going to give you all the information you want.It's only going to look for those anomalous spikes where all of a sudden, you turned something on that you meant to turn off, and left it on. But it's still something that's going to start giving you some feedback and information over time that may help you keep an eye on your billing usage and your spend.Amy: Another thing we highly recommend is to have a thorough tagging strategy, especially if you're using a service to deploy resources. Because you want to make sure that all of your resources, you know what they do and you know who they get charged to. And Copilot does allow you to do resource tagging within it, and then from there should be able to convert them to cost allocation tags so you can see them in your console.Jesse: Awesome. Well, our next question is from Rob. Rob asks, “How do I stay HIPAA compliant, but keep my savings down? Do I really need VPC Flow Logs on? Could we talk in general about the security options in AWS and their cost impact? My security team wants everything on but it would cost us ten times our actual AWS bill.”Rob, we have actually seen this from a number of clients. It is a tough conversation to have because the person in charge of the bill wants to make sure that spend is down, but security may need certain security measures in place, product may need certain measures in place for service level agreements or service level objectives, and there's absolutely a need to find that balance between cost optimization and all of these compliance needs.Tim: Yeah, I think it's also really important to thoroughly understand what the compliance requirements are. Fairly certain for HIPAA that you may not have to have VPC Flow Logs specifically enabled. The language is something like, ‘logging of visitors to the site' or something like that. So, you need to be very clear and concise about what you actually need, and remember, for compliance, typically it's just a box check. It's not going to be a how much or what percent; it's going to be, “Do you have this or do you not?”And so if the HIPAA compliance changes where you absolutely have to have VPC Flow Logging turned on, then there's not going to be a way around that in order to maintain your compliance. But if the language is not specifically requiring that, then you don't have to, and that's going to become something you have to square with your security team. There are ways to do those kinds of logging on other things depending on what your application stack looks like, but that's definitely a conversation you're going to want to have, either with your security team, with your product architects, or maybe even outside or third-party consultant.Jesse: Another thing to think about here is, how much is each of these features in AWS costing you? How much are these security regulations, the SLA architecture choices, how much are each of those things costing you in AWS? Because that is ultimately part of the conversation, too. You can go back to security, or product, or whoever and say, “I understand that this is a business requirement. This is how much it's costing the business.”And that doesn't mean that they have to change it, but that is now additional information that everybody has to collaboratively decide, “Okay, is it worthwhile for us to have this restriction, have this compliance component at this cost?” And again, as Tim was mentioning, if it is something that needs to be set up for compliance purposes, for audit purposes, then there's not really a lot you can do. It's kind of a, I don't want to say sunk cost, but it is a cost that you need to understand that is required for that feature. But if it's not something that is required for audit purposes, if it's not something that just needs to be, like, a checkbox, maybe there's an opportunity here if the cost is so high that you can change the feature in a way that brings the cost down a little bit but still gives security, or product, or whoever else the reassurances that they need.Tim: I think the other very important thing to remember is that you are not required to run your application in AWS.Jesse: Yeah.Tim: You can run it on-premise, you can run at a different cloud provider. If it's going to be cost-prohibitive to run at AWS and you can't get the cost down to a manageable level, through, kind of, normal cost reduction methods of EDPs, or your pricing agreement, remember you can always put that on bare metal somewhere and then you will be able to have the logging for free. Now, mind you, you're going to have to spend money elsewhere to get that done, but you're going to have to look and see what the overall cost is going to be. It may, in fact, be much less expensive to host that on metal, or at a different provider than it would be at AWS.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn't translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that's not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Jesse: Our next question is from Trevor Shaffer. He says, “Loving these Friday from the field episodes and the costing”—thank you—“I'm in that world right now, so all of this hits home for me. One topic not covered with the cost categorization, which I'm tasked with, is how to separate base costs versus usage costs. Case in point, we're driving towards cost metrics based on users and prices go up as users go up. All of that makes sense, but there's always that base load required to serve quote-unquote, ‘no users.'“The ALP instance hours, versus the LCU hour, minimum number of EC2 instances for high availability, things like that. Currently, you can't tag those differently, so I think I'm just doomed here and my hopes will be dashed. For us, our base costs are about 25% of our bill. Looking for tricks on how to do this one well. You can get close with a lot of scripting and time, teasing out each item manually.” Trevor, you can, and I also think that is definitely going to be a pain point if you start scripting some of these things. That sounds like a lot of effort that may give you some useful information, but I don't know if it's going to give you all of the information that you want.Tim: Well, it's also a lot of effort, and it's also room for error. It won't take but a simple error in anything that you write where these costs can then be calculated incorrectly. So, that's something to consider as well: is it worth the overall costs of engineering time, and maintenance, and everything like that, to write these scripts? These are decisions that engineers groups have to make all the time. That said, I do think that this is, for me I think, one of the larger problems that you see with AWS billing is that it is difficult to differentiate something that should be reasonably difficult to differentiate.If I get my cell phone bill, I know exactly how much it's going to cost us to have the line, and then I can see exactly how much it's going to cost me for the minutes. The usage cost is very easily separated from—I'm sorry, the base cost is very easily separated from the usage cost. It's not always that way with AWS, I do think that's something that they could fix.Jesse: Yeah, one thing that I've been thinking of is, I don't want to just recommend turning things on and measuring, but I'm thinking about this from the same perspective that you would think about getting a baseline for any kind of monitoring service: as you turn on a metric or as you start introducing a new metric before you start building alerts for that metric, you need to let that metric run for a certain amount of time to see what the baseline number, usage amount, whatever, looks like before you can start setting alerts. I'm thinking about that same thing here. I know that's a tougher thing to do when this is actually cost involved when it's actually costing you money to leave something on and just watch what usage looks like over time, but that is something that will give you the closest idea of what base costs look like. And one of the things to think about, again, is if the base costs are unwieldy for you or not worthwhile for you in terms of the way the architecture is built, is there either a different way that you can build the architecture that is maybe more ephemeral that will make it cost less when there are no users active? Is there a different cloud provider that you can deploy these resources to that is going to ultimately cost you less when you have no users active?Tim: I think too, though, that when you have these discussions with engineering teams and they're looking at what their priorities are going to be and what the engineering cost is going to be, oftentimes, they're going to want metrics on how much is this costing us—how much would it cost otherwise? What is our base cost, what's our usage cost?—so that you can make a case and justify it with numbers. So, you may think that it is better to run this somewhere else or to re-architect your infrastructure around this, but you're going to have to have some data to back it up. And if this is what you need to gather that data, then yeah, it is definitely a pain point.Amy: I agree. I think this is one of those cases where—and I am also loath to just leave things on for the sake of it, but especially as you onboard new architectures and new applications, this should be done at that stage when you start standing things up and finalizing that architecture. Once you know the kind of architecture you want and you're pushing things to production, find out what that baseline is, have it be part of that process, and have it be a cost of that process. And finally, “As someone new to AWS and wanting to become a software DevOps insert-buzzword-here engineer”—I'm a buzzword engineer—“We've been creating projects in Amplify, Elastic Beanstalk, and other services. I keep the good ones alive and have done a pretty good job of killing things off when I don't need it. What are your thoughts on free managed services in general when it comes to cost transparencies with less than five months left on my free year? Is it a bad idea to use them as someone who is just job hunting? I'm willing to spend a little per month, but don't want to be here with a giant bill.”So, chances are if you're learning a new technology or a new service, unless you run into that pitfall where you're going to get a big bill as a surprise and you've been pretty diligent about turning your services off, your bill is not going to rise that much higher. That said, there have been a lot of instances, on Twitter especially, popping up where they are getting very large bills. If you're not using them and you're not actively learning on them, I would just turn them off so you don't forget later. We've also talked about this in our build versus buy, where that is the good thing about having as a managed service is if you don't need it anymore and you're not learning or using them, you can just turn them off. And if you have less than half a year on your first free year, there are plenty of services that have a relatively free tier or a really cheap tier at the start, so if you want to go back and learn on them later, you still could.Tim: I think too, Amy, it's also important to reflect, at least for this person, that if they're in an environment where they're trying to learn something if maintaining infrastructure is not the main core of what they're trying to learn, then I wouldn't do it. The reason that they have these managed services is to allow engineering teams to be more focused on the things that they want to do as far as development versus the things they have to do around infrastructure management. If you don't have an operations team or an infrastructure team, then maintaining the infrastructure on your own sometimes can become unwieldy to the point that you're not really even learning the thing you wanted to learn; now you're learning how to manage Elasticsearch.Amy: Yeah.Jesse: Absolutely. I think that's one of the most critical things to think about here. These managed services give you the opportunity to use all these services without managing the infrastructure overhead. And to me, there may be a little bit extra costs involved for that, but to me that cost is worth the freedom to not worry about managing the infrastructure, to be able to just spin up a cluster of something and play with it. And then when you're done, obviously, make sure you turn it off, but you don't have to worry about the infrastructure unless you're specifically going to be looking for work where you do need to manage that infrastructure, and that's a separate question entirely.Amy: Yeah. I'm not an infrastructure engineer, so anytime I'm not using infrastructure, and I'm not using a service, I just—I make sure everything's turned off. Deleting stacks is very cathartic for me, just letting everything—just watching it all float away into the sunset does a lot for me, just knowing that it's not one more thing I'm going to have to watch over because it's not a thing I like doing or want to do. So yeah, if that's not what you want to do, then don't leave them on and just clean up after yourself, I suppose. [laugh].Tim: I'll even say that even if you're an infrastructure engineer, which is my background, that you can test your automation of building and all this, you know, building a cluster, deploying things like that, and then tear it down and get rid of it. You don't have to leave it up forever. If you're load testing an application, that's a whole different thing, but that's probably not what you're doing if you're concerned about the free tier costs. So yeah, if you're learning Terraform, you can absolutely deploy a cluster or something and just tear it back out as soon as you're done. If you're learning how to manage whatever it is, build it, test it, make sure it runs, and then tear it back down.Jesse: All righty, folks, that's going to do it for us this week. If you've got questions you would like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the form and we'd be happy to answer those on a future episode of the show. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us whether you prefer sweet chili or spicy chili.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Return to Triathlon Racing with Tim Delss

Hilary Topper On Air

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2021 28:07

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...

covid-19 tv spotify google olympic games americans maryland pop nbc profit iron man air cdc racing eagle races russo triathlon cb hipaa triathletes amazon alexa llp mid atlantic tim healey tim yeah tim well tim thanks pop international galleries

184|Becoming a Leader With Tim Stokes

Business Built Freedom

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2021 27:05

Becoming a Leader With Tim Stokes G'day everyone, I'm sure we've all been in a spot that we've thought about how do we become a leader, are we already a leader, what is a leader anyway? And ultimately in being a leader, is that going to be something that's going to leverage your ability to achieve business freedom? Today, we've got Tim Stokes here, and he's going to be talking about exactly that. How do you achieve business freedom and how do you make sure that you are a leader, and you are a developing leader, and you are continuing your skills, etc. He's from a company named Profit Transformations. Tell me, Tim, in your opinion, what is a leader? The Qualities of a Leader Tim: I've got a great answer to that one. You're a leader when someone is following you because if there's no one following you, then you're just a dictator going for a walk on your own. That's the simple definition for it. It's the effect that you have on other people. If you're inspiring people to follow your words willingly, that's what I would call a leader. If people are regretfully, resentfully, slowly or not very effectively following your words, then that's the sign that the leadership skills could be improved. I think it's as simple as that. It's the difference you're making to other people. I believe leadership is one word: servitude. You're there to serve...serve your followers. It's about redundancy. You're aiming to make yourself redundant through the people that are following you, not rule them, if you like, not dictate to them, but empower them to be like you, to give power to them, to increase their confidence, and to be able to do what it is that you are doing yourself. Ultimately, anyone can be a leader, but it's also very field specific. You could be a leader at home, but not necessarily be a leader at work. Do you think that leadership can be taught or is it something that you are or you're not? We’re All Leaders Tim: I think we're all leaders. We just probably don't recognise that we are because we all influence other people. As a parent, you're a leader because your children are watching you, scrutinising everything that you do, copying you, mirroring you, following you, saying what you say, doing what you do and copying your body language. I remember watching my daughter look at me when she was about three and she looked at me, saw it on, and then she adjusted her posture and I said, don't do that. She just copied my posture from just watching me without saying a word, and I watched her do it and then I watched her adjust and I was like, 'Oh, don't do that. Have your own, not mine.' We're always being watched. Employees are always watching their bosses. If the bosses aren't punctual, the employees think, 'Oh, punctuality doesn't really matter here. That's great. I don't need to be that punctual.' So we're leading whether we like it or not. I think everything is co-leadership. Sometimes other people lead, sometimes you lead. We probably have a prioritised role of leadership in business, but definitely, leaders are always leaders. I believe selling is leadership because you're leading people from doubt and potentially resistance or a bit of fear into making a confident decision. So when people are in doubt, they need leadership. So selling is leadership to take people from 'I'm not sure what I need to buy,' 'I'm not sure of the price, so I don't have my decision-making criteria,' 'I'm a bit ignorant of what I'm buying. Someone guide me to making a confident decision and buying.' That is a leadership opportunity. Every sales phone call, every sales opportunity is leadership. That's exactly what it is, so I think it's everywhere. Everywhere in business is leadership. At home, you're in leadership mode. Sometimes I say the wife wears the pants, but that's not true all the time. It'd be alternating leadership because that tends to be how relationships work. We call it co-leadership. I completely agree with everything you've just said. I think it's important to make sure that you are walking your best step forward for everyone else to follow suit. With punctuality, as you said, it is important making sure that you are punctual at work. With situations like remote workforces and even workforces that haven't ever met in person, I guess this is coming more and more common, you're very disciplined, very passionate, and you've got all those traits and the business is going absolutely gangbusters. Maybe you're a solo entrepreneur and you're doing that and you decide I'm going to outsource some of these roles and grow a bit bigger. How do you make sure that some of the good traits that you have when you're not necessarily in the office and they're not seeing everything that you're doing and it's not being completely obvious to them because you might only be seen for a couple of hours in a Zoom meeting a week or something like that. Support Your Employees Tim: I believe that the emotions that you share with your employees is what they pass on to their customers. It's about being there for them. It's about supporting them. It's about constantly being in touch to show that you care about them and care about the work they're doing. It's recognising the work they're doing, appreciating the work they're doing. They actually work for you. So even though they might not be in eyesight, they still work for you. I have clients, and their business has grown and grown and they're in other states and have employees in other states and even other countries. I've got a client who took his business into four countries, and it's just a regular contact. Those clients are always talking to their people wherever they are, touching base with them, seeing how they're going, making sure they're happy, making sure their needs are met, etc. It's not assuming that they are okay on their own. It's actually finding out all the time. 'How's it going? How did you go with the job? Do you need any help? Yeah. Great. Could you do this? Fantastic. Great. Sounds like it went great.' So it's just those regular conversations that I think are crucial. In having those regular conversations, how do you make sure that you come across as someone who's appreciative and not necessarily someone that's micromanaging? Tim: That's really getting the context of what they went through, not just the content. When you start saying, 'Did you do this? Did you do this? Did you make sure you did this?' That's micromanaging. I love introducing numbers into businesses, the eight ingredients that achieve business freedom for business owners. One of them is KPIs and having numbers for the person to see themselves that they're doing a great job because the numbers don't lie. The numbers help people to see that they're doing a great job. The regular communication is great, but when you back it up with the numbers and say, 'Hey, you did an excellent job. You're on that job for two hours. I estimated it to be two and a half. Well done. That's excellent.' And the number backslap. And I'll find that over time that the numbers can fulfil a person with a couple of other ingredients. Then that way, when an employee's fulfilled, they need far less supervision. But it's getting them to that stage is what takes a lot of work. Quit Micromanaging and Being a Business Dictator You said earlier that everyone's a leader in some way, shape or form. But I'm sure that there is people that we've all worked for or worked with and we've seen that they're not people that would like to follow. You've come across someone that isn't necessarily willing to step away from the dictatorship role. Is that still going to be a successful business or is it just not as successful? I'm sure there's been some famous dictators in that time that have done well. Tim: Well, Steve Jobs is a bit of a dictator, for example. He's controlling everything in a way because no one in any department knew what they were working on until the launch of the product. And then he went, 'Oh, is that what I was making?' I mean, when it all comes together, they finally figure out what they're making, but it's like everyone's sort of locked in a little area. Don't talk to anyone in any other department. It's all secret stuff. That's how that business was run, but it became the most successful company in the world, whereas Google is the opposite. It's like I have half a day off with pay. Just mingle here. Here is a community area. Everyone go and play pool and play video games and everyone talks to everyone from every department all the time. Yeah, you can be very successful if you're a dictator. I've had clients that it's like, why did my staff keep leaving? I can't stand staff leaving. I've got to build in some penalties and get better contracts. I'm like, 'Well, maybe you need to improve your leadership skills.' So I'm subtly trying to say, 'Well, they're leaving because of you and how you treat them.' But he's looking for tighter contracts because he's too much of a dictator, not enough of a leader. Still had a successful business, very successful business. However, if he wasn't there, they used to complain. If he's not cracking the whip, then they're not going to do it. So, yes, businesses can definitely be successful without great leadership. However, I'm about the word optimising and efficiency and taking businesses to an extremely high level. That's a very important ingredient. We're not born leaders. Some people are, but the rest of us are going to figure it out by trial and error of what leadership is by the results that we have and the effect that we have on people. We go 'Oh, okay, let's not say that next time.' You slowly improve your leadership skills from the experience. But we can take a proactive approach to learning this thing called leadership. It's like most people in sales don't know they're in a leadership role. Give them the good news and say, 'You understand you're in the leadership role.' 'What's leadership got to do with sales?' They're in doubt and they need to go from doubt to confidence. There's a leadership opportunity, the leadership journey, to facilitate and take them from their doubt to the confidence of saying to you, 'Oh, this is exactly what I want.' Getting people to that state of mind where they're so confident that they're asking to buy from you is good sales, and it's actually good leadership. Stopping Your Bad Business Owner Habits As a generalisation, if there's a problem in your business and it seems to be consistently happening, chances are it's the business owner that's causing that problem. If you find that people are leaving or that people aren't answering the phone or aren't doing things in a suitable amount of time, even if it comes down to people having more sick leave than usual, it can be something that they might not even consciously be doing. But that does boil down to something that needs to be corrected. The ship needs to be steered in the best direction or a better direction to what it's currently going. If that is something that you're wanting to do, this is all about leveraging and achieving business freedom. If you're trying to teach your staff how to be minions of yourself, mini-mes, so to speak, what is the best way to step away from a bad habit and towards something that's going to be closer to leadership can be a gift or a developed skill. What's the best way to make sure that you identify and then correct? Tim: I think a really good thing to do as a touchstone before is understand that it's about context. It's not about content. As a leader, you want to create the context. And it's like saying there's a soccer field, there's boundaries, here are some rules. Don't play the game. It's defining the rules and the parameters with which to play the game or how an employee can occupy the role in the business by knowing the parameters and knowing what the expectations are, which is sort of KPI can kick in. 'Here's a performance guide. Hit this number and you're doing a great job.' Run Your Business By The Numbers It's about getting from Point A to Point B. The road that you follow is not critical, but it's getting to a Point B. Your Point A gets you to Point B, and leadership is about defining Point B so that the person can figure out their way of getting there by using the parameters which you set and that's where policy is. The policy is like a rule or guideline that an employee follows. A simple one is answer the phone two and a half rings. That's a policy. So it's a parameter with which to perform well in your role. So when a business owner gives the clear parameters, which are systems, when you digitise the roll with the parameters and the policies, the procedures are not as important. It's clarifying what the outcome looks like because in the end, that's all that really matters. I was fortunate in about 1999 to look at the business reports that Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire, wanted from his newspaper every week, sent to him by fax by his general manager. And the guy, the general manager, was showing me this. We got on really well. He said, 'Hey, come and check out the office.' He's got like 50 staff in there. And he said, 'This is all the salespeople over here, the production people over here, all the journalists that are doing all the writing, and then we have the finance people, admin people, etc. These are the reports I have to fax Rupert Murdoch every single week or I don't have a job.' I started to realise that billionaires run their businesses remotely by numbers, straight numbers. He said there are 23 offices faxing the same reports, so 23 separate businesses every Monday seeing the same reports. And he said we don't talk too much because the numbers tell the story. And that insight was great for me to understand that when you set the parameters up, which is a lot of work, and then you introduce the KPIs that show the outcome that they're aiming to hit from that role, and you have the systems in place for them to follow as guidelines, you don't need to micromanage. That's when you achieve business freedom, where you don't have to work in your business, because if you set it up correctly or at a very high level, then that's the outcome that you can achieve. Well, I can say that I wish I knew you were around when I started business because back in 2007, when Dorks Delivered was in its infancy and I started off as the cowboy who just went around doing everything that he read online once or had the trial and error and worked out that was the best way to do it. And then I went down a path and hand over fist loads of coin, but went to a spot where I thought, 'Okay, this is fantastic. I got to bring someone else on board. Brought David on at the time. He was going really, really well. He was working 80 hours, I was working 80 hours. We're both going gangbusters, loving it. The family wasn't as keen on it, but everyone else says you got to balance these things until they had a stroke and end up in hospital. And then I can't do 160 hours in a week. So I went, 'Okay, what can I do here to make sure this doesn't happen again.' And removing onboarding times and things like that and started systematising and putting in processes, practices, operating procedures, KPIs, I got to get our business running to a spot where I could step away. His heart attack happened in 2012. It took me until 2016 to be pretty confident in my systems. It was 2018 I was able to step away for 3 months and not do anything in the business and I thought, 'Okay, sweet.' but it took time. Tim: Oh yeah. It takes a lot of work. I can shortcut that for a lot of businesses but you know what it's like. I was talking to a client yesterday about that exact thing and we were just guesstimating that it's probably at least 500 hours' work on your business that you got to do to get to that level. It's a lot of extra work, and if you can shortcut it, excellent. The way I did it I looked at the different things that I do in the business, and I just started writing a list of absolutely everything. I got about 500 different things on a list, and then I was categorising them so you could see was it an accounting role, was it an administration role, was it a technical role, was it on the tools? Where was my time going? That was eye-opening. I saw where my time was going and then speeding up all the different processes, and I love it. You've got to be passionate about it to be able to move it away from a job into an investment. Remove Repetition Tim: Absolutely. I found that one of the reasons business owners go into business is they just want a change from doing the same stuff all the time as an employee. I think it's a mixture of ingredients. One of the most rewarding roles that you can have in a business is being in a non-repetitious space. You set your business up so that you're not dealing with the same customers, which is the production, you're not doing with sales, which is the same stuff. Same problem, same sort of stuff. And you move into that non-repetitious stage and that's where you can occupy different roles. If you're the business development manager for your own business, that could mean a few things. You could be the product innovator, researching to find new products to introduce into your business that can sell them as line extensions, or you could be going in a state meeting people in your same industry that you're not competing with having lunches and dinners with them and sharing ideas and swapping ideas. You can travel around tax deductible and have this great lifestyle and choose when you turn up for work and when you're travelling and having fun and staying home, researching kind of thing. And that's I think a great role to strive for as a business owner, to be in a creative, non-repetitious space, then life's just fun. It's just enjoyable. Well, the terrible thing is while most people are being rewarded by being paid per hour, most people aren't looking at faster, more effective ways to do things. That is something that I'm really happy that we step away and help other businesses step away from that and make sure that they and their staff are doing things that are speeding up their processes. We don't charge our customers per hour for the work that we do unless we absolutely have to. We normally try and scope it all out and then have a set rate that we're charging them to achieve certain key objectives, and if we don't, then we don't get that money. It's very important that we set up ourselves like that, and I think other businesses should be doing the same thing. That ultimately has everyone strive towards the same common good. You don't want to have people in monotonous, repetitious work for lots more reasons than just it's boring. If they're doing something that's repetitious, it's something that we'll be able to automate. If it's not us doing it, it'll be someone else doing it. If no one's doing it for them, then it'll be their competitors that are doing it and then they'll be out of business. Any job that is repetitious can be automated. Tim: Yeah, that time's coming. We'll definitely move in that direction. Always be learning, and that's the great thing with the BDM role. You're always learning new things about the industry, new ways to talk to people, new ways to become a better version of you and ultimately I guess become a better leader in doing that sort of research. If you had to pick just three effective leadership qualities, what would you say is the three main things that people should make sure they're doing? Consider Weekly Meetings Tim: I think it's really good to set up a weekly team meeting in businesses. When you set up a weekly team meeting, then you get the collective but you also get the individual at the same time. That's an example of something to be doing, is listening to a collective and instructing a collective instead of just instructing people one on one or communicating with people one on one. I think that is a huge ingredient that moves people towards that business freedom stage. And people like getting together and hearing from other people's point of view. That's a method of redundancy. I found that clients that I've set up the weekly team meetings with and then introduce numbers to employees use the word 'love' like say, 'I love working here since these meetings have happened and we're talking about numbers and all that.' We might think it's a bit scary to do all that sort of stuff initially, and sometimes there is a little bit of resistance from the business owners to do it as well as when trying to get the employees to do it. It takes a few months, but about Month 3, 4 or 5, often employees use the word 'love.' I think that's about as good as it gets kind of thing. 'I love working here. I want to work here until I retire. It's the best job we've ever had.' It's not changing the type of work they do, but just the environment that you create, the culture that you create from that weekly team meeting, getting together. And then I work for the team that doesn't work for you, and that makes a huge difference. They don't care if you're there or not because if a person is happy and fulfilled, they don't care what you're doing. If your employees are not happy and you go, 'I'm taking two months off.' They go, 'Why am I still working here?' They have a grudge about it. If you make your employees happy and fulfilled in their roles, they don't care what you do. You can do whatever you like. You can turn up for work or not, and they really don't care because they're not working for you. They're working because they're a significant part of the team. I think a leader can set that up and then create that redundancy, which I think is an essential ingredient of leadership: to figure out how to make yourself redundant in the role. You've got to make sure you're redundant. We do our best to have a weekly team meeting. I have spoken to other people that have daily huddles to talk, and the staff said that they would love a weekly meeting, but it just becomes too much having daily meetings. Can you overdo it? Tim: Absolutely. Weekly is a magical timeframe. I've had hundreds of businesses that I've introduced team meetings to. Those that strive fortnightly don't make much progress. Those that meet monthly don't make any progress, but the ones that do it more often than weekly doesn't achieve a lot. A week is a magical timeframe. That's what I've found. It's a different day name for every week. And it's just a really good time trying to get your head around so you can say, 'Okay, last Tuesday, remember when this happened.' So they have a good memory for the events of those five days in that week kind of thing. So a week is just a great timeframe. You don't need to be more often because you're trying to review how you went for the week. Reviewing how you went for the day is not going to motivate you, but reviewing how you went for a week, it's a significant amount of effort to review how you went from that week's effort. It averages out some of the bumps as well. You have a great day one day, not so good next day, average day the next day. When you look at the average of the week, 'That's good. I averaged well.' The Meaning of Business Freedom What does business freedom mean to you or what should that mean to everyone else? Tim: I think business freedom is a state of mind. It can be a physical thing. I like saying to business owners: would you like to have a business where you can go holidaying wherever you like? I got a client who goes surfing in Indonesia in a remote place for two months, sometimes three. That's business for you. That's great. As you said, it's different things for different people. But I think most people, as you said, 19 out of 20 would relate to that: wanting to be able to spend time on the things that they care about, be it surfing, painting, hanging out with snotty kids or whatever else that you're doing. Tim: It's the choices to do what you want, when you want, with whoever you want, wherever you want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Final Word That sounds awesome. I'd love to go surfing for that length of time. I think I'd finally learn how to stand on the board properly. One last question before we head off. What is your favourite book on business and leadership and why? Tim: The E-Myth Revisited I love it. Michael Gerber. He's great. Tim: Yeah, I discovered that when I've been in business for seven years, and then I read the book. I was actually really absolutely shocked and stunned that there's this subject called business and it has got nothing to do with an industry. And that's what the realisation was. Because I was like the typical person. I've got to be really good at my job. I was in a trade service business. I was a fantastic climber, great at destroying trees and turning them into mulch. However, I didn't know how to run a business, so that's seven years of struggle and then I realised there's this thing called business. You can learn about this topic. Then I did the Michael Gerber two-day workshop and that was just life-changing. It changed my whole philosophy, everything about business, because he'd say, why do you work? That's what your business is meant to do. Business works hard so you don't have to. I think that's the best book. It should be compulsory for business owners to read that book when they start a business. I read it in 2007 and loved it. I've since read it again, and just on 'McDonaldising' your business is a big part of that. I think we'll leave it there unless there's anything else you'd like to add for our listeners? I know that there is one thing that I wanted to go through with you, particularly understand that if you are struggling in business, you have some options for people to have a bit of a review and you've got a book that you have on offer at the moment, is that right? Tim: Yeah, I have a book called Eight Ways to Improve Your Business in Five Days. It's got eight strategies to implement to improve your business in eight different areas like employees, profitability, cash flow, marketing, etc. It gives you eight strategies to implement. They don't cost anything to implement them, but all of them will make a difference to your business. That's my challenge for business owners. If you're willing to put eight new strategies in your business, I challenge you to make a difference in your business within a week. It sounds like something no one can lose with. That sounds awesome. If anyone else out there has any questions for Tim, we'll have him part of our Facebook group so you can jump on there, ask any questions that you have for him. Actually, what is the best website to go to? That's going to be easy to say. Tim: Just go to https://www.profittrans4mations.com.au/ Thank you for your time, and everyone out there, stay good.

第1210期:Great State

Play Episode Listen Later May 10, 2021 1:05

Todd: OK. Hey, hello!Tim: Hey, how's it going?Todd: Doing pretty good. Could you introduce yourself, please?Tim: Yeah, I'm Tim Peterson. I'm from Oregon in the United States.Todd: Oh, nice. You're from Oregon.Tim: Yeah.Todd: OK, and were you born there?Tim: Yes, I was born there.Todd: Oh, really? Did you ever live in any other states or..?Tim: I lived in Wyoming for a really short time.Todd: Oh, really?Tim: And, I've lived in California for a short time too.Todd: OK. Of those three states, which one is the best?Tim: Oregon.Todd: Really? Why?Tim: It's got lots of nature. It's really beautiful, I think in the United States probably Oregon and Washington's state are the most beautiful.Todd: Oh, OK.Tim: Lots, lots of green stuff and lots of nature. Good mountains, good streams, good water.Todd: Wow! Well, what about Wyoming?Tim: Wyoming is nice but it is really dry. And it's really sort of dark.Todd: Oh. OK. Wow, so when you grow old and retire someday, you're a very young guy but when you grow old, would you like to live in Oregon?Tim: Ah, Oregon or Washington probably. Maybe Alaska.Todd: Yeah. Not California?Tim: No!Todd: Man, the Golden State.Tim: Yeah, too many people.Todd: All right, Yeah. OK. Thanks a lot.

united states california washington oregon wyoming golden state great state tim peterson tim it tim yeah tim no todd yeah

Todd: OK. Tim, we're going to talk about running.Tim: OK.Todd: Now, we've been running the last couple of nights.Tim: Yeah, that's true.Todd: And, you're much faster than me. You're a fast runner. How often do you run?Tim: Well, now I only run about four days a week but when I was younger every day.Todd: Oh, really? Wow! Did you run in high school or college?Tim: I ran.. I started when I was six years old.Todd: No kidding?Tim: And I started running and I ran all the way through the university.Todd: Really?Tim: Yeah.Todd: OK. So what events did you do?Tim: Middle distance. The middle distance is 1,500 meters to 5,000 meters.Todd: Wow! Are you a better short-distance runner or long-distance runner?Tim: Middle distance runner.Todd: Middle distance. OK, how far is a middle distance?Tim: Oh.. 1,500 meters, about.Todd: 1,500.Tim: Yeah.Todd: OK! What's your fastest time in the 1,500 meters?Tim: Ah, 3.... about 3:47.Todd: Three minutes and forty-seven seconds.Tim: Yeah.Todd: That's pretty fast.Tim: Yeah. I did that in high school actually. I wasn't so fast in the university.Todd: Oh wow, man you can fly!Tim: Yeah.Todd: Now I don't feel so bad when you run so much faster than me.Tim: I've been slowing down. I've been drinking beer so I don't run so fast anymore.Todd: Yeah, we're getting older. Actually, I'm 33. How old are you?Tim: I'm 27.Todd: 27. Oh, OK. So, do you think you'll be running your whole life?Tim: I think so, yeah. I grew up running in the woods, every day in the woods and so I really want to get back to running in the woods every day. I think it is really healthy thing to do.Todd: Yeah. That's nice. OK. Thanks a lot, Tim.

runner tim oh tim yeah tim well todd yeah

第1205期:The Runner

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2021 1:26

runner tim oh tim yeah tim well todd yeah

第1205期:The Runner

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2021 1:26

runner tim oh tim yeah tim well todd yeah

第1200期:Road Trip

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 29, 2021 2:05

Todd: So Tim, you want to talk about road trips?Tim: Yeah, I wanna talk about road trips.Me and my friends when we were in high school we took a lot of road trips to lots of different places.Todd: OK.Tim: We would go down to California sometimes Mexico. One time when I was living in Wyoming, in one weekend we drove from Wyoming through Colorado, New Mexico, and Mexico and back in the same weekend.Todd: Wow! Well, actually for people who are not familiar with the United States how far is that?Tim: It's a long way. I don't know. It took.. I don't know, it took probably about 15 hours one way.Todd: Wow!Tim: So, thirty hours altogether. But it was fun. We drove down to Mexico had a good night a good meal, a little bit of drinksand drove back the next day.Todd: So you went to Tijuana?Tim: No, we went to Ciudad Juarez.Todd: OK. Nice.Tim: That was really fun and a lot of other trips we took when I lived in Oregon when we'd go down to California and we'd surf.Todd: Oh, really?Tim: Yeah!Todd: Oh, you're a surfer?Tim: A little bit, a little bit of surfer.Todd: OK. What kind of car do you drive? What do you use for this road trip?Tim: Well, typical American a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Big vehicle, lots of gas but a lot of fun.Todd: Oh man, you're from Oregon you're supposed to be a tree-hugger!Tim: I know. I know. But they're good. One rule we had on our road trips was any lake or big body of water we had to stop and swim in. It was a good thing to do.Todd: Well, you live in Japan now. Do you ever do road trips in Japan?Tim: I took a road trip from Niigata up around Hokkaido and back, so it was a long road trip actually.Todd: OK. Wow! What's the difference between a road trip in Japan and a road trip in America?Tim: Well, a road trip in Japan..it's a little bit more difficult to get around, it's a little bit more expensive. In America, road tripping is sort of.. something a lot of people do.Todd: Yeah.Tim: And in Japan, when we do that it is a little bit strange, a little bit different, not very normal.Todd: Yeah, that's true. OK. Great, thanks a lot Tim.Tim: All right.

united states america american california japan mexico colorado oregon new mexico road trips wyoming tijuana hokkaido ciudad juarez niigata tim it tim yeah tim no tim well tim all tim so todd yeah todd so todd well

第1200期:Road Trip

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 29, 2021 2:05

第1200期:Road Trip

Paleo Ayurveda and Spartan Yoga

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 29, 2021 2:05

228: Career Snarkiness – Words Hold Weight with Corey Quinn

Greater Than Code

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2021 68:50

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

ceo amazon netflix texas english spoilers advice new york times career writing elon musk dm holy adhd llc humans giants weight washington post cloud adolf hitler sitting honestly jeff bezos b2b sec oracle privilege dms excuse vc slack punch prospect simplify last week downfall screaming keeping up artemis aws linux epic games mando ds rein ticketmaster s3 apologizing urban dictionary mandy moore sla unix jira snark larry ellison andy jassy qed hambone linode amazon marketing corey quinn virginia satir cosmically tim oh tim it aaron patterson tim yeah tim is tim so tim thanks tim right greater than code devreps

225: Uncovering and Breaking Patterns with Tim Banks

Greater Than Code

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 10, 2021 63:03

03:31 - Uncovering Patterns * Making the Covert Overt * Reasons for Covertness 13:22 - Taking Care of People as Whole People * People Are Dynamic – Not Stagnant * Roles Are Constantly Changing * Iterating on Practices * William A. Kahn: Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work (https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/256287) * Financial Compensation * Metrics and Observability 28:43 - The Tech Industry: Now vs Then (aka we still have A LOT of work to do) * Gatekeeping * Accountability * Inclusivity * New Zealand Maori leader ejected from parliament for refusing to wear 'colonial noose' (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newzealand-politics-necktie/new-zealand-maori-leader-ejected-from-parliament-for-refusing-to-wear-colonial-noose-idUSKBN2A9329) * Whitewashing 45:59 - The Messaging Around Diversity and Inclusion * Doing the Right Thing 51:26 - Changing Mindsets * Using Privilege to Speak to Power Reflections: Rein: Capitalism and White Supremacy are the same thing. The Invention of the White Race (https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Invention_of_the_White_Race_Racial_o/G4elgqb-MjwC?hl=en&gbpv=0). We have an obligation to not just make it possible for people to exist in the industry, but to also make it healthy. John: It’s always great to have these conversations as reminders. Tim: Figure out why something makes you uncomfortable. Look and uncover the pattern underneath that in yourself. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable. If you run away, you’re never going to grow and things are never going to get better. 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. JOHN: Hello, everybody. This is Greater Than Code, Episode 225. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Rein Henrichs. REIN: And I’m here with our guest, my friend, and Dungeons & Dragons party member, Tim Banks. Tim Banks has a career spanning over 20 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started as a US Marine in avionics. Upon leaving the Marine Corps, he went on to work as a government contractor. He then went into the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores. Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with engineering groups in his current role as a Principal Solutions Architect at Equinix Metal. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, having won American National and Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu championships in his division. Hi, Tim! TIM: Hi! Good to see everybody in here. REIN: Yeah, I did that on the first take and I'm very proud of myself. TIM: I am so, so proud of you. That was amazing. REIN: Tim, it's time for the question. TIM: Right. REIN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? TIM: So my superpower is using empathy to uncover patterns that people haven't seen in the past and I think that's a superpower because a lot of people can look at something, there's a lot of folks out there that can see a pattern just on the surface like this does that, this does that, this does that. But when you really talk to groups and you talk to people, you can see some common things that aren't necessarily things that are going to have an output or a metric, but you can see how people feel about a thing. And then when you get enough people who feel a certain way about a thing, that's not going to be a coincidence, it's going to be a pattern. So finding those patterns is my superpower. As far as how I acquired it, it's hard for me to say. The easy way to say is over time, but over time and myself being a person who necessarily wasn't listened to, or seen, or heard trying to explain how things are, why things are the way they are without having metrics. So having been on one side of that equation, I've been able to see people on the other side of it. REIN: So Tim, you said “to uncover patterns.” Can you say a bit more about the word uncover? Because I feel like that might've been a specific choice that you made to use. TIM: Yeah. There are typically, as we see with anything else, especially being tech or people that like to take things apart, I'm sure as we all did as kids, there are things that you see on the surface. There are things that you see, this pattern or this thing happening here, but you take the face plate off of something, or you delve down below the API, or you delve down below the operating system and there are so many other things that are happening beneath that. If you kick over amount of dirt and you see an ant hill, the ants have their own system, how they do things down there that you don't necessarily create, but you're just going to see it and you have to uncover a few things. You have to move things around. You have to look below the surface to see some of these patterns that happen just below the surface that bring the things at the surface to fruition. REIN: This reminds me a lot of I guess, it's a mantra that I learned from Virginia Satir, which drink if you're playing that game, make hidden things visible, make the covert overt and make the general specific and related to you, me, here, now, and the current situation. TIM: Yeah. I think that's actually a good – I had not heard of that one before, but I do like that a lot. REIN: So when you say uncover, that makes me think, make the covert over. TIM: Yeah, I think so. I like that. It's interesting because people sometimes think that things are covered up to make them hidden and it's not necessarily, they're hidden like someone has hidden them so you can't find them. A lot of times they're hidden in plain view. You don't find them because you're not looking for them and when you actually start to look for some of these things, some of the underlying causes, you'll be surprised what you find. It's like a lot of us here have done RCAs on things and oftentimes, if you do a good RCA, you're going to go through a few levels and different layers to find what the actual root cause. Like, most of the times the root of something is not at the surface, it's way down. So you actually have to go down and dig to uncover these things, to really find out what's at the base of something. REIN: So since this is the show where we talk about the social side of things, I want to ask you about these things that are covered that are maybe covered for a reason and maybe that the reason that they're covert is that people are trying to protect themselves and they don't feel safe to make them overt. So do you think about these situations and how do you go about making that safe to talk about? TIM: So I do think about these situations and there's a couple of reasons why. First, obviously, is in the professional world you can't always call people out immediately for things. Even if you know that there's something that's a lie or something that's not right, there are the political reasons why you have to be tactful or you have to be very deliberate and cautious about how you uncover these things because even if people aren't necessarily intentionally hiding things, or it is their mind that I must hide this as he'll feel safe, people's egos are the number one obstacle, I think to innovation. Someone has staked out a claim. Someone has a territory. Someone has some domain that they have, that they are a gatekeeper thereof and it is their ego that makes sure that you have to pay homage to them or to that ego in order to get anything done. So figuring out what they're protecting, whether they're protecting their job, whether they're protecting their ego, whether they're protecting levels of influence so that they can rise in their career. You have to figure out what that is, that what that thing is that is important to them so that way you can make sure that it's either protected, or you can make sure that there are more than one person that have access to that thing so you can make your way. At personal levels, there are things that people cover up because they don't feel safe and doing the work of trying to make them feel safe so you can talk about these things, I think that's the hardest thing that we do in the industry. Solving technical problems is easy compared to solving people problems, or cultural problems, or societal problems because those are the problems that we've had for millennia that we, collection of people in a common industry, are trying to figure out. Saying to somebody, “Hey, I see these patterns here of work, or absenteeism, or productivity, or whatever it is and I need to know what it is that's going on so that we can fix that,” and make them understand that you are there to help them and there to fix that problem, whatever it may be, that takes some work on the part of the person who's trying to uncover that pattern. It takes vulnerability and it takes confidentiality. It takes empathy. Especially if it's something that you've never dealt with before. Someone's going to tell you, “Hey, I have this problem,” and you're going to say, “All right, well, I know leadership or I know management or unknown this senior technical professional here, but I don't know the answer to this problem, but I can say that I will help you find it and then we can work together on it.” And a lot of people don't like to say, “I don't know the answer.” We see a lot of people that are very technically savvy and because they're very technically savvy, they are now considered to be experts in all kinds of domains. Nobody in particular—Elon Musk—but there are people that are looked to be some kind of great genius just because they happen to know how to code something, or architect something. I think when you display the vulnerability of saying, “I don't know.” Or you are upfront about your problems or upfront about your struggles, it makes people feel safer about being upfront about theirs and then you can go through the work of trying to solve those problems. Well, first of all, identifying if it's a pattern, and then solving the problem that's causing those patterns. JOHN: I like that you use the metaphor of anthill earlier on in this, because rather than when you describe something as pattern, it's very abstract and feels like an object. But when you talk about an anthill, it's individual entities working together in a system. It's something that exists on its own, made up of other individuals. It's not just some object that we can examine and I think that brings it into thinking about it in a different way and much like the way you've been describing how you talk about these things and how you work with people. Very humanizing and I like that. TIM: Yeah. I do think there's a lot of us when we're looking at an organization, whether we're looking at a society, or government, or whatever it is, a neighborhood even all of us have the role that we play whether we're aware of it or not. It's a role not necessarily either we're assigned, that we signed up for, or that we just have by nature of and by coincidence of our birth. But we all do something that contributes in some way to the organizations that we're in. When we look at that as that – okay, that role covers a lot of things. No one is just one thing; no one is just a software developer, or no one is just a cashier at a grocery store, or no one is just an artist. No person is monolithic. No one is defined by their job save except maybe the police and that's not a slam—they're always at work apparently. But there are all these things that we have that yes, as you look at an ant farm, this one ant does all these various things, but they have this contribution to the colony as a whole. And I do think that when we look at it as a pattern, if we look at one individual person and all the things that they do, it is important to see that they are more than just a worker. We are not ants. We're not that specialized. We have all kinds of things that we contribute to. So like the colony metaphor breaks down there just to understand that all of us have different things that we do outside of just what our role is to make money or to contribute. We all have dreams. We all have hopes. A lot of times, the fact that these dreams or hopes have been unrealized or worse yet, they have been forcefully deferred by the society as a whole affects that role that we have. It affects how we view ourselves. It affects how others view us. That's what we bring when we sit down at our desk every morning, that collection of all those things rides along with whatever your skills are, that is it's not compartmentalized. As much as people may want to say they can't compartmentalize these things, you can't. You can’t contain it forever. So when these things start to manifest themselves in different ways, we as people—whether we are neighbors, whether we are leaders in government, whether we are coworkers, whether we're management—need to do whatever we can to make sure that these people can become a whole and they can thrive. When people thrive on a personal level, they thrive on a professional level. Maybe not at the job that they're in, maybe not at the company that they're in, but wherever they end up, when they thrive as people, they are going to thrive as professionals. REIN: I also want to throw in another element of the ant colony metaphor, which is that ant colonies are dynamic. They're constantly changing. Tunnels are caving in, new ones are being constructed; the colony itself changes over time. You were talking about the complexity of a person in a given moment, but their roles within the company are also constantly shifting based on how they interact with other people. TIM: That's true; how they interact with other people and how the companies need change. I mean, no company is typically monolithic in and of themselves. They always have to be growing, they have to be thriving, and they have to be moving into different segments and as that happens, your roles change within that company. What's been being kicked around Twitter these past few weeks is people talking about like, “I don't understand why people leave jobs,” and I was like, “Well, yeah, they leave jobs because they want to go do other stuff.” People don't like to stagnate, typically and people who do like to stagnate, most companies don't want to keep them around. So stagnation is not really in human nature. As resistant as we are to change, we are all extremely adaptable. It's built into our damn DNA so we tend to do that well. I do like the fact that people are dynamic, or if you look at what maybe people had expectations of what 2021 was going to be in 2019, it's clear that a lot of things have changed due to the various circumstances around the world—pandemic, social uprising, Nazis, whatever it is. We've all had to make some big changes and even though it sucked and it has sucked, we're still here. We are in the new normal because we are adaptable and so are the dynamics of our existence lend ourselves to the fact that our roles are constantly changing. What does it look like when you were a working parent 2 years ago versus what does it look like you're a working parent now? What does it look like if you were a single person with a job 2 years ago versus if you're seeing a person with a job now? So many things have changed and it speaks to the fact that we are adaptable. That all said, if you're looking at how we can improve and make better for people, we can't look at the ideal state or the state we were in 2019 or whatever it was. We have to look at how things are now and then we had to look at what we have learned in the past year, year and a half will prepare us for what's yet to come because we know that shit is always going to roll downhill. So we have to figure out what have we learned here and what can we do next? I think a lot of the things that we still need to embrace is how to take care of our people as a whole people, and not just employees and not just take care of how they can contribute to us. How many commits can they do? How many tests can they write? Or anything like that. We need to take care of their needs as people and when we take care of their needs as people, they are more likely to be able to take care of us, our needs from them as companies and orgs. REIN: What Russell Ackoff always says when people talk to him about total quality management and all of these things about how to improve the quality of your business, what he always says is, “The quality that matters is quality of work life.” The quality of the lives of the people who are doing the work. TIM: That is absolutely true. It's absolutely true. Some of the worst cases of burnout that people ever have, some of the worst working environments, it's because they do not treat their people like people. They treat them like any other resource, like print, toner, cartridge, and the people personally as people cannot thrive and people burn out that way. People have a hard time setting and maintaining boundaries around their work life. Yay, capitalism. That's one of the things that we start from. It's like, if you want to get ahead, you’ve got to work real, real, real, real hard. Well, yes, to some extent, but the higher up you go, let's be honest that “hard work” looks way different. You're working hard on a yacht apparently, or you're working hard on a vacation to Paris apparently, but the people that are actually doing the labor to enrich the people higher up the chain, those basic human needs for rest, relaxation, recovery, they're oftentimes not being met and I think that's a fucking shame. REIN: Yeah, and if something is particularly incumbent upon leadership to show that by example and to encourage that behavior because I think lower down in the ranks, if they've probably been punished for any sort of thing like that, or they've seen people punished for that kind of thing, they're going to be highly resistant to doing that unless you can prove that it's safe for them to do so. TIM: Oh, absolutely. I think it's interesting when you talk about what it is for a person lower down in the rung and the common gatekeeping tactic you see is “Well, they've got to pay their dues.” They've got to suffer through this role so that way, they can make it for other people or they can be a better employee going forward. That is so horribly bassackwards. I mean, you really want to nurture junior folks. You want to nurture people coming into the industry. You want to nurture people who are just starting. You want to mentor them. You want to give them knowledge and guidance. You don't want to push their nose into the grindstone. I don't know what you're trying to accomplish there. That's fine if you're in the Marine Corps. That's fine if you're going into the military service. That's obviously, a consequence of the choice you made to join. But if you're not doing that, you don't need to punish people at the bottom ranks, really You should be, as a leader, like you said, modeling those behaviors, but you should also be making sure that they can thrive, whatever that looks like. Thriving for a junior person doesn't look like giving them a half hour lunch break and watching them clock in and clock out. It doesn't look like monitoring their bathroom breaks, or some of the stuff that I've seen the junior folks have to do. These people are whole people, they are not servers. They're not computers. They're not billed by the hour like that to perform X number of tasks. They really have to be nurtured and they have to be guided and mentored. The other thing we have to take into the fact is that not everybody learns the same. People are neurodivergent. So what productivity looks like for some persons, it’s going to look completely different for another person. For me, the worst thing I had as a senior person was to be expected to sit down and work 4 hours, take a half hour break, and then work another 4 hours straight. I have ADHD and anxiety and that is torturous for me. Now I did it and some people will turn around and say, “Well, I did it. So you can do it. too” like the motherfuckers that talk about student loans. But I would say, “I had to do it and it sucks. So I don't want anyone else to have to go through that.” That's what we should be doing. We should be iterating on our practices as an org, iterating our practices as a society to say that, “Oh, well, just because I had to suffer, that doesn't mean that you should have to as well. We should actually fix that so that you don't have to go through that.” Typically, in capitalism, that's how they say you're supposed to do. A 2021 Ferrari has more features than the Model T because you add features, and you add features, and you add features. So I don't see why we can't do that for the people that actually build these vehicles, or build anything else for that matter. REIN: There's a study that whenever this topic comes up, that I refer people to, because I think it's really, really good. It is from Kahn in 1990 and this is interesting because this is the study of the “Engagement of the Human Spirit at Work.” So even the idea that in a capitalist country, you could get a grant to study the engagement of the human spirit at work is amazing to me. But the idea is that there are three psychological conditions that relate to this. What I wanted to do was list them and then get your thoughts. TIM: Sure. REIN: Add them, change them, do they resonate with you? The conditions are meaningfulness. Do I find meaning in the work and my job title, my tasks, and so on? The second is psychological safety. And the third is the availability of emotional and psychological resources and this includes things like, am I emotionally drained at the end of the day? Do I wake up looking forward to going to work? Am I being supported by my manager or my supervisor? TIM: I like all of those. I think those are all really good, but I do think it overlooks the financial aspect and the reason why I say it overlooks the financial aspect is because those things are important for how you feel about your work. But if you are struggling financially, your ability to deal with the normal rigors of work are significantly decreased when you have to then go home and figure out how you're going to make the ends meet. Are you living paycheck to paycheck? Are you going to pay off debt? You're trying to figure out how to take care of your children. You're going to have to figure out how to do all these other things. Your overall capacity is reduced because you have these other concerns as well. So I think it cannot be overstated, the impact of making sure that people's needs outside of work are met to make sure they can also, you can also take care of the needs inside of work. But going back, I do think those are very, very important aspects of people feeling spiritual engagement at work. I think the meaningfulness and the psychological safety to me are the two most important. You can do meaningful work, but if you're getting harassed all the fucking time, it's not a great place. Or you can have a great loving and nurturing environment, but you're just toiling away in dumb anguish and it's like, “Oh, well, I don't know why I'm doing this job. Everyone's super happy and I'll stay here for a while because I really like everybody, but I don't really get any meaning out of what I do.” So I think I like that list. I would just add a fourth one talking about making sure people are financially compensated to make sure their needs are met plus, plus. REIN: And actually, the study doesn't consider that and I think you're right that that's a huge oversight. There's a second study that attempts to quantify these relationships to say how much each of these influence engagement and the result is that meaningfulness was the highest correlation, but the way they did this is interesting. They did a quantitative survey and the survey would include different sections with questions on for example, rewarding coworker relations with questions like, “I feel worthwhile when I am around my coworkers.” I think we should be asking questions like that more often. I think that the engagement surveys you get in the modern world are superficial. TIM: Oh, they absolutely are. They absolutely are. Well, I mean, it goes back to a lot of topics we have in observability. What are your metrics if whatever you measure is what you're going to do? I learned this lesson working in tech support call centers right out of the Marine Corps where if they're going to reward you for the number of calls or they're going to – the primary metric is the number of calls you took in a day. So people were going to do whatever they can do to take the most number of calls, then to like, “Oh, then we're going to do NPS scores after that.” But they set the NPS score pretty low and saying, “Well, we just need you to answer the calls. They don't have to be that good.” That's what you're going to get. If you were measuring things like, “Oh, did your manager make you feel good this month?” If you ask that and they answer honestly, maybe they made you feel good once a month or something like that since the last one, but primarily, they made you feel like crap. That's kind of what you need to ask. I do think the interpersonal relationship aspects, they're hard to quantify because it looks different for everybody and even the nature of the questions are different for everybody. What that question looks like to a cis, white, straight male is going to look way different to say, a queer Black woman. REIN: What if the question is: “I feel a real kinship with my coworkers and I'm like a little, eh about that one?” TIM: Yeah, that goes back to that we're a family thing and I don't necessarily like that at all because we aren't a family. You can't fire your family or lay your family off. REIN: But then there were questions like: “I believe that my coworkers appreciate who I am,” and I like that one a lot. TIM: That's a good one. The appreciates who I am, that speaks to being a whole person and the more that we can be whole people at our jobs, the better off we are going to be. If you have to bite your tongue, if you have to cover your tattoos, if you have to make sure your hair is undyed, or you have to wear clothes that you don't necessarily like because they’re considered “professional” whatever that means. That the more that a person has to distance themselves from who they are as a whole person, probably the less happy they're going to be in that environment. Less safe they're going to feel in that environment. JOHN: Yeah, I find that there is a gap between the rhetoric about bringing your whole self to work and the practice of building a space where it's safe to do that. Like I myself know some things that can lead us in that direction, but I don't feel like there's a great playbook on building that all out. TIM: There really isn't and part of the reason is that the tech industry started out, by and large, as an artifact of the US government, US military, which is never not really known for being very welcoming and safe for people outside of a certain demographic. You talk about what the industry looked like when I got in back in the late 90s, IBM had just stopped requiring people to wear suits to work and they were allowed to wear polo shirts and khakis. That look was what you had. It was the “business casual.” Couldn't have long hair, couldn't have accessed piercings, no visible tattoos; not unlike dress codes or appearance regs that you would see in the military. So you make everybody look like the stereotypical white guy, essentially, because this is what you have to wear because some old white guy said, “This is what people should look like.” Those things are hard to break because who still has power in those things and it's a self-perpetuating society. People that do not fit that mold do not last in that industry, or the people that do last in industry had to divorce themselves of who they are so much that it becomes hard to break that mold once you get into places of power, because you can very quickly be run out for rocking the boat too much and it was very, very self-standing. This is the one thing that I think came out of the .com bubble burst after Y2K and the early aughts was that it broke up a lot of these big companies, big old legacy companies and you saw a lot of smaller startups come out. A lot of these smaller startups that came out of it maybe had a different way of thinking because they weren't run by 70-year-old white guys who were defense contractors. But I do think, when we get into that, if you look at what a person in the tech industry looks like in 2021 versus what they look like in 2001 is dramatically different. I can have my hair long. I can expose my tattoos. I can have a beard. I can say, “I'm a queer, ADHD, Black-Mexican man,” whereas such a thing would be dangerous career-wise and maybe even personally, 20 years ago. I remember in the industry when the first person that I knew personally came out as being transgender and the harassment that she had to go through was horrifying, but it was considered perfectly normal in 2001. We have come a long way, but that just speaks to what a shitshow it was before. Not that we're doing great now, because we have so much farther to go and we are still here in 2021 seeing all white panels, all white male leadership, diversity being heralded when you bring a white woman onto a board or when you bring a gay white man onto a board. And that ain't it chief. That is not it. We have so much more to do and the hard part about that is convincing people that you can't rest on your laurels. Convincing people that you haven't done enough in the first place. Convincing people that there are still problems. That goes back to what you're saying about some of these questions, about some of these metrics that we have about people in the workplace. The questions that you have to ask on these to really get an idea of where you are, have to be uncomfortable. They have to be uncomfortable. They have to challenge people's safe spaces and not just a safe spaces of other people who are marginalized, but certainly, the safe space of the people who are overrepresented. It goes back to talking about, “Hey, do you realize that you have gotten where you are largely by privilege?” or that you've been able to fail up, or that doors have been opened to you that haven't been opened to others, or bars have been lowered for you that weren't as lower for others, or even at the bar wasn't lower, the bar was not raised for you like it was for others? People don't like to hear that. People get very upset when you challenge the notion that maybe they haven't had to work as hard as other people have to get where they have. If you tell somebody, “Well, you got here because you had a fair amount of pillars to help you along the way.” People don't like to hear that. Now I will very much, I've said in the past I may be Black and I may be queer but I'm still a man so I have some privilege that goes along with that that women and non-binary folks have not been able to enjoy. I typically don't have to go to a conference and worry about whether I'm going to be sexually assaulted. God help the person that tries at least with me. But that is a worry and a concern that people have to have going to a conference that's supposed to help their career and that's a big detractor. That is a big obstacle that people don't realize that they have and then worse. I mean, heaven forbid, we even talked about motherfuckers that actually do the harassing there that are still allowed to enjoy their place in the industry, that are still allowed to hold positions of power, positions of influence where they can continue to do this. Not even just keep their jobs, but they keep being by to back these places and they can continue to perpetuate that kind of harassment and making the industry hostile to brilliant people. But it's funny that I will say that here I am on a podcast and every podcast I've ever been on with the exception of one – well, no, all the podcasts I've ever been on hosted by all white people. Every last one. Some have had white women in them, but it's all white people. So when we talk about these subjects, it still comes from a certain perspective that white folks aren't going to have, or that men aren't going to have. It's good that we're talking about it, but we need to do something about it. We need to have more of these voices routinely, not just in our panels at tech conferences, but in our normal, everyday consumption and I think that's important. We talk about what do these things look like? What are the patterns we're seeing? If you look at a tech company, especially in Silicon Valley, tech companies look like the neighborhoods. It's not very diverse. People refer their friends, people refer their coworkers, or they have these things about what was that Google employee letter? “We only want people with Bachelor's from Stanford or Ph.Ds. from these places and no one else gets accepted.” Those places are already quite exclusionary in and of itself. They list no HBCUs on that piece of paper, because they don't value HBCUs. They don't value schools that allow people of lower economic or lower in the socioeconomic strata to attend. It's literally self-perpetuating, that kind of gatekeeping. These people who pass through these gates erect those exact same ones and only the people that fit that mold are going to go through it and you never fix the problem. We do not do enough to break those gates down. We don't do enough to model that kind of behavior that we should be expecting. It's good that we're talking about it, but we need to be more about doing it. REIN: Yeah, and our whole panel for this show is majority not white dude, but it might not surprise you that the people who most often have the spoons and the privilege to take time out of their workday to do this podcast are the white dudes. JOHN: Yeah. TIM: Yeah. But I think when we talk about going forward, it's one thing to see a pattern and I think people who, if they're looking, they can see what it is, but what do you do? Do you just throw up your hands, go, “We tried, it's hard to do, so we're not going to do”? “Ah, all right, we gave it a shot. We asked some folks, but they can’t do it.” Or what do you do? I've seen a couple of folks, to call out the good behavior when I see it, I know Ashley McNamara when she had said that she was going to step aside from doing conferences, she was like, “Don't talk to me about conferences. Go talk to underrepresented minorities about these roles. Don't talk to me. I'm not going to take it.” I've seen folks that will say, “I'm not going to speak at this thing if it's an all white panel or if it's all male panel.” “If you're not paying your speakers, especially of color, to come, I'm not going to do these things.” That's how we see it in action. Holding the people that build the platform accountable to make sure that everyone has access to it. I think the thing that the pandemic has taught me that I've seen, for the most part, is a lot of these conferences have become free or very, very low in price because there were virtual, a lot more people showed up. People that couldn't necessarily go before and sometimes, it was harder even for them like you mentioned before Rein, just to get off of work and now they can kind of manage to do it in between because they don't actually have to leave. So when we get to a point where we can have in-person conferences again, I think it behooves the organizer of these conferences that if they're really serious about doing something about being more inclusive about breaking these patterns, not to have them in Silicon Valley, in the most expensive real estate on earth. Have them someplace less expensive to lower the cost for people, if they charge it at all. If anything, you cannot tell me that AWS cannot put the cost of an entire – AWS, Microsoft, all these panels’ sponsors cannot put the cost such that you don't have to charge people for a standard price of admission. You can't tell me that they can't sponsor it to the level where you can pay your speakers, especially women, underrepresented minorities, people of color, like that to come in and appear and talk about these things. Especially if it's a topic on which they have to do the emotional labor for. That's what I want to see us do to break some of the patterns that we're seeing, to make things better for everyone else, and then once some start doing that, that is going to be it. Once you start modeling that behavior, you're going to see other conferences do the same, where these big trillion-dollar companies that are sponsoring these orgs or sponsoring these conferences can actually put some money into it so that more people can come. I don't really have a good understanding yet as of why that hasn't happened and I'm sure folks who organize conferences will probably have plethora of reasons. But I feel like the time has come to do these kinds of things and if it means we have fewer conferences, okay. Move them more virtual, it's fine. REIN: Yeah. I have liked that some conferences are starting to do two tier tickets where if the company's paying, you pay the higher price and if you're just an individual or whatever, then you're paying a much lower price, and then usually, there's also some sort of scholarship program again, to try and bring people in. But I think you're right. Especially if it's the much more company focused things like AWS re:Invent or whatever, why is there a cost to attend that? Even for the tickets, but on top of that, there's all the travel, there's taking time off work, there's childcare; there's so many other attendance costs to going to a conference at a place that even if the tickets were free, there's still a huge barrier there. TIM: You could even go as far as say some of these venue choices. You go to a place like D.C., or New York City, or someplace that have HBCUs, those HBCUs have [inaudible] and conference centers. You don't have to go to some Richie rich hotel. Why don’t you give Howard some money to use their facilities? Why don't you do it in the [inaudible] area? Why don't you give Home by the Sea Hampton University some money? Or Atlanta? Any of these places where you have – or some of these are just lower income schools that serve underprivileged communities, give them the money to host these conferences. Not some hotel. Have it catered by minority-owned businesses, have something, do some things to get more people in. Like, have scholarships for HBCUs CS students where if you're a student—junior, senior—looking for internships where they're like, “Hey man, you know what, come to this conference, we’re not going to charge you and we're actually going to give you a stipend for travel.” That's doing something and it is almost the peak of intellectual dishonesty for people to try and act like the money isn't there because it's there. We've seen time and time again, all these earnings calls coming out, all these market caps going up and up and up and up. The money is there; just people don't want to open up them purse strings, I guess. REIN: Before the moment passes, I do want to point out that you call this podcast out for not doing enough to schedule things so that all of the panel can attend. I gratefully appreciate the rebuke and we're going to go work on that. TIM: I appreciate that and I appreciate you for giving me a space that I feel safe to say that. That matters. Like, if you want to do something, give people space to talk about it and don't get butthurt when they say something. REIN: So when you were talking about white person dress codes and the need to assimilate into that, I was reminded of this thing that actually just was published by CNN about a Maori representative in New Zealand’s parliament who was objected for refusing to wear a tie. TIM: I think he called it a colonizer's noose? REIN: He did and when they changed the rule and he was allowed back in, I am still thinking about what he said, which is, “The noose has been taken off our necks and we are now able to sing our songs.” TIM: It's true and it's a big deal because I know for me as, especially as a young Black male, it is imperative for our survival to not be threatening and I'm not overstating that. It is imperative for our survival to not be deemed as threatening. If you go into a workplace and you don't have a comfortable appearance whether your hair's cut close, you can't have dreadlocks, you don't want to have anything that's let's say, too Black. You have to look a certain way. Your car has to look a certain way. You can't listen to certain music. Can't talk a certain way. Those are the guardrails which I had to perform under and I say perform early on when I was early in the industry, because that's what was expected. You would see when the few Black people in an org would get together and the white folks weren't around, we would relax and it looks a whole lot different. If you're a fly on that wall, you would look and sound a lot different because we could be who we were and the problem happened was that you would see, you'd have to go out there and you'd be like oh, man. “Hey, Tim you have a blah, blah. You don't really sound Black.” Hm, okay. REIN: You’re so articulate. TIM: Oh yeah, that's a good one. “You're so articulate,” “You know a lot of words,” and that kind of stuff. The problem with that is that in order to do that, in order to assimilate into that culture to make a living, you have to do that and then we have to go back to our communities and hear about it. Hear about selling out, hear about – and it's one thing to get a job. People like to see people succeed, but what they don't like people have to do is change who they are in order to succeed. But that's what was expected of us to fit into this predominantly white culture. White people didn't have to change. Not really. I can't recall how many dudes I saw walking around with mullets. Even to this day, you see guys walking around with khakis, the polo shirt tucked into the belt, the mullet, the wraparound sunglasses. That has been unchanged since like 1985. But Black people now are starting to be able to be our whole selves, but how many didn't last in the industry because they couldn't? There's a lot and that was just for being Black. Heaven forbid, people who are gay, people who are trans, people who were immigrants first generation, or immigrants that really had a hard time. It's not great. We have not done, this “progressive tech industry” has not done a lot. Did not do a lot early to be welcoming or to do anything, really towards inclusion. It had to be done kicking and screaming by people who have kicked down the doors and I think, honestly, we really need to be. I am grateful that you are kicking down the doors for me and I've done my best to kick down doors for people behind me, who've come after me. But we need to keep doing that and I don't think we acknowledge really, how bad it was because it's uncomfortable. Especially the folks who are still in the industry that were part of that. You catch a lot of these high-tech level CEOs, C-levels SVPs who say they've been in the industry 20 plus years. They were complicit. No one was talking about that. They want to talk about what they're doing now, but no one wants to come up front and be like, “Yeah, I actually participated in this. This is the things that I was doing back then.” Or “I didn't speak up for whoever, whoever.” I guarantee you, if people had an honest disclosure of all that, you're going to see that. It talks about what US history looks like if we don't whitewash it. If we're really honest about it. We can prevent making the same mistakes, hopefully because we don't have this narrative that we were great all the time. Companies are the same way, managers are the same way, people who are long in the tooth of this industry are the same way and I think it's important that we talk about that especially when we talk about even now. You take salespeople, that is a good foray into tech for people that don't have a technical background, especially people of color and women and they still have to look like they're fucking bankers to sell a SaaS to people who are wearing hoodies and boardshorts to work. That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense. REIN: Can I share a hot take with you, Tim? TIM: The hottest of takes, please give me lava. REIN: I'm getting really frustrated with the messaging around diversity and inclusion that works and the fact that we have to use it, which is look how good this is for the business and I have a huge amount of respect for the people who do that work, sell that message. A lot of the people I've talked to who are doing this are Black women and they know how to get it done better than I do, but it must be grading to not be able to just say, “Look, we do this because it's right. We do it because it's just.” TIM: It's because the people that they have to placate in order to get this signed off on. Who are they? They are, by and large, white men and to try and give a message to them of doing it just because. People who are a hundred millionaires, billionaires sometimes, if you don't tell them it's going to be good for their bottom line, they're not going to do it. For the most part. Then there are some folks that I'm sure that wouldn't, but in the most part, you're talking about raging capitalists that will be glad to cut off. That would be the same people that didn't offer health insurance to their employees because they didn't have to. The same ones that give them shitty healthcare, but the executives get really, really nice healthcare. The stratification of the value that you hold to the companies is very apparent in the benefits package, pays, and other kinds of things they offer them. To expect them to do it for altruistic reasons is the peak of naivety. So yes, the people that can get those people to sign off on a diversity and inclusion program are fucking miracle workers. REIN: Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not mad at them for choosing that messaging. I have a huge amount of respect for their ability to be pragmatic and use the messaging that gets the job done. I mad that that's what they have to do because of how the system is. Because of how racism is. TIM: I wished we could live in a society where we can say, “This is the right thing to do so we're going to do it.” I've talked about this before, where you look at that AWS Leadership Principle of leaders are right. There's no impetus on doing the right thing. You can say, “Oh, I was right about this.” Well good, congrats on your fucking jeopardy win. But do you do the right thing? Doing the right thing is an ethical question. Do you do the right thing? Not for the business, right thing for the business. There's no parenthetical after that, there's no qualifying clause. If you are ethical, you will do the right thing and if that right thing isn't necessarily good for the business, okay. That's fine. All right. There's more money to be made and if your business cannot withstand you doing the right thing, then you're probably a shitty business in the first place. REIN: It’s not a means, it’s an end. TIM: Exactly. REIN: Okay. Well, there's my hot take for the episode. TIM: That was like medium hot. That was like jalapeno hot. JOHN: It's something we've all noticed, that language always comes up the moment you start talking about DE&I. TIM: What I think for me, the hurtful part is when I watch these things especially as you see these things like what you're seeing at Google because of fucking course, Google is that when people really start to move the needle, when people start to make a real impact, the powers that be get uncomfortable and then they start to let people go and they replace them with someone that they are more comfortable with. They don't realize that the discomfort that they feel is what's supposed to happen and you can make it very, very simple for them. If you were to talk about this as a digital transformation, as we say, it's like, “Oh, well, we're going to go from this monolithic gigantic system that we’re running on to microservices, cloud-based API, stuff like that,” and people say, “Well, these old school database administrators are very uncomfortable with it and they tell them.” It’s like, “Hey, well this is how it is now. You're going to have to deal with it, or you're going to probably have to find a different way to get the industry, because this is the way it's going and it's better for everyone involved.” They explain all these benefits and they tell people that discomfort is part of this journey. You're going to have to learn to swim in new waters and things are going to be different, but they're going to be better overall once you get on the other side of that, but they can't apply that to them fucking selves when it comes to about diversity and inclusion and I don't get it. JOHN: I mean, that's the privilege that they haven't had to be practiced at being uncomfortable in those situations, or even if it's a little bit of technical discomfort versus the much more impactful discomfort that comes when you start actually talking about race. TIM: Yeah, there's a level of introspection that they haven't had to do and they are seemingly unwilling to do. That's the part that's most frustrating; the people that have the least to lose in this are the most unwilling to change. REIN: Oh, do you think it's worthwhile if what we're talking about here is a change in mindset? It's a change in what these people strive for, what they want and I think that that change is incompatible with let’s call it, white supremacy and capitalism. So do you think that it's worthwhile to try to pursue that, or do you think we have to continue doing these pragmatic things? TIM: Well, first of all, I would say that white supremacy and capitalism are redundant, but I would say that we cannot change the minds of the people in power with anything other than pragmatic reasoning because if we could, they would have already. There has been more than enough reason, appeals to emotion, consequence, societal collapse, all these other things that we've seen, especially these past 18 months or so. A reasonable person would say like, “You know what,” or all the people who are reasonable about this and who are ethical about this have already changed their minds. At this point, anybody who doesn't see the need for it, the self-evident need for it without for the justification for business reasons, but the self-evident need for it will not be convinced. So you have to appeal to pragmatic reasons until they leave the industry. REIN: This is a Kuhnian paradigm shift: the people with the old views have to die or otherwise go away and be replaced. TIM: Essentially, that's it and so that's why it's so important for us to nurture the junior folks coming into the industry and the people who are mid-career to make sure that people who understand this, to make sure that the people who are underrepresented, and to make sure your LGBTQ, your people of color, any manner of folks that are not properly represented or that have been heretofore unsafe in this industry, stay in the industry by any means necessary. To make sure that the industry can change in the long run. It is incrementalism and as unpopular as it is in some circles to say, “Oh, we can't just change everything right now because we're inspired to do so.” I'm sorry, you don't steer a ship that quickly. This is a large thing we have to change. The industry is a lot of people and it's a lot of money. So you're going to have to change it a bit at a time and the only way to bring that change about is to bring and keep people in the industry that can affect that change. REIN: And for those of us who are more securely in the industry, whether it's because we're white dudes or we have experience, whatever it is, we have an obligation to do what it takes to keep them around you. TIM: You absolutely do and you also have an obligation to continue to push on the folks that don't see the value in keeping them around. Very openly. You have to use your privilege. You have to use your privilege to speak to power. You don't have to take anyone else's voices. You don't have to pick up someone else to sign a waiver on his own, certainly, but you have to keep them from being silenced and that is the important thing that we need to do. If you are a straight white male in this industry and you have seen the necessity of the industry being more inclusive, diverse, and to have a good sense of belonging, then what you have to do is you have to check your peers when people speak. REIN: And not just keep them around, but make it possible for them to thrive. TIM: Absolutely, absolutely. They have to have strong roots in the industry. They have to feel like they're safe here, that they can grow here, and that they belong here and then when they do that, that's when they can affect change. JOHN: Yeah. That is how you keep them around, either that, or you don't want to them to have to rely on just complete bloody mindedness to have the perseverance to go through all of the pain to stay in the industry. You want it to be them thriving in the industry. Like you said, they can be the tomorrow's leaders that can start that real change. TIM: The last thing I want to do is also say, I want to make sure that when we talk about doing that thriving, that again, we're talking about not just taking care of them in the workplace, but taking care of them as whole people. I will beat this drum every time I can get on, we cannot let, we cannot let women leave this industry. We cannot do it. We're losing too many women because they have to make the choice right now in 2021, in this pandemic, as to whether or not they have to be mothers or whether they have to be career professionals and it’s bullshit. It is bullshit and it goes two ways with that: we're not supporting mothers and we're not supporting our fathers. We can support our fathers, then they can play a more active role in raising their children and Mom doesn't have to take care of everything. Now obviously, work can't influence whether a father is a piece of shit father or not and there are a lot of them out there, I'm going to be honest about it, that won't change a diaper, that won't clean the house, shit like that. We can't do that, but we'll at least avail them the opportunity and not have them use work as an excuse. So we have to change the way we do business to make sure that working mothers can be whole people so they don't have to choose between raising their children and doing work. If we don't protect these women, and the reason I say that is because it is the women of color that are the most susceptible to having to make this choice, because they have fewer resources outside of that, typically. So we need to protect people. We need to protect these people so that they can stay in the industry and we need to do that now. Because we are bleeding off too many women as it is like way, way too much. And that goes beyond whether or not we're actually treating them as they should be treated like equals, like the brilliant engineers they are in the conference rooms. So that's a whole other problem. We need to tackle that too, but we need to at least keep them from saying, “Hey, I’ve got to leave the industry because I got to take care of my kids.” We should be fixing that and we should be fixing that yesterday. JOHN: Yeah, that’s part of bringing your whole self to work is the other selves that you're taking care of. Like, if you can't have that baby on your lap for the meeting, then you're not going be on the meeting and then it's snowballed from there. TIM: Absolutely. Absolutely. When we start coming back, whatever that looks like post-pandemic, think about what they did in World War II and beyond to keep women in working. They had daycares, like the companies had daycares. But why fuck can't we do that now? We have so much money. You mean to tell me Amazon can’t have a daycare at the facilities You mean to tell me that Microsoft can have a daycare facilities? You mean to tell me that fucking WeWork can't have WeWork fucking daycare that companies pay for? Like, there's no reason for it. People just don't want it and it comes down to greed and it’s bullshit. REIN: So maybe now is a good time for us to do reflections. I usually have two things, I guess, that's my pattern now. One is I wanted to point out that Tim said that capitalism and white supremacy are the same thing and I didn't want that one to go under the radar either. If you're a white person who doesn't know what Tim is talking about, I can recommend a book called The Invention of the White Race. Maybe Tim has some of his own recommendations. My reflection is that we have an obligation not just to make it possible for people to exist in the industry, but if we're dragging them through the barbed wire that is this toxic garbage industry, we're hurting them, too and so, our obligation is to make it healthy. JOHN: Yeah, I think that's really just been reinforcing a lot of my own thoughts on things like, I don't know if this is a reflection other than just it's always great to have these kinds of conversations as reminders. These are thoughts that happen, but sometimes they happen in the background or you're not quite sure to connect them to action and continuing to have these conversations to continually remind me what the priorities are and what the other perspectives are is incredibly useful to me. So Tim, if nothing else, I appreciate you spending the time talking with us, talking to me in specific about your perspective on this. So thank you. TIM: I want to take a moment again, to acknowledge and thank you all for giving me a space and a platform. I know it's difficult sometimes to hear criticism especially if you're doing what you think is right for someone to say, “Hey, well, you can do better.” It's hard, but I think it's important for us also acknowledge that growth is uncomfortable. Improvement is uncomfortable. One of the things that I learned in jujitsu, if it has taught me anything and it's something that I've reinforced in my life, is that adversity makes you thrive in some ways. Not adversity for adversity’s sake, but when you exercise harder, you get stronger. If you run faster, run harder to get faster. If you spend more time being crushed under a 300-pound man, you get better at jujitsu. In this context, the more time you spend listening to some of these things, the voice of the people that have been marginalized and it makes you uncomfortable, figure out why it makes you uncomfortable and don't figure out how to disqualify the person talking. Think about why you're uncomfortable, look and uncover the pattern underneath that in yourself and in your world and how you interact with it, and then once you find that pattern, fix the problem. Once you do that, you can then help others do it. But you have to at first be comfortable with being uncomfortable and to do, if there's maybe sound a little cliche, but it's true. If you just run away from that feeling, you're never going to grow, you're never going to improve, and things are never going to get better. JOHN: Thank you so much for coming on the show, Tim. TIM: I appreciate it, John. Thank you all for inviting me. I’m honored and humbled. Special Guest: Tim Banks.

god amazon black new york city google work home elon musk dna microsoft lgbtq speak new zealand mom bachelor world war ii cnn adhd nazis llc engagement holding silicon valley thriving ceos companies dragons stanford banks ibm ferrari saas dungeons uncovering slack invention marine corps api simplify taking care richie white supremacy aws linux wework ds rein y2k devops brazilian jiu jitsu kahn hm invent tunnels convincing hbcus maori us marines nps s3 rca human spirit unix disengagement model t breaking patterns linode site reliability engineering virginia satir american national john it principal solutions architect white race svps john yeah tim oh tim it tim you tim yeah rcas john thank tim well tim there tim so tim right greater than code devreps

Tim Thompson – RevThink & ZipLineGear

Grants Pass VIP Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2020 55:41

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.

tv ceo minister southern oregon grants pass tim thompson tim yeah brian no revthink tim thanks

164| Are You a Leader With Tim Spiker

Business Built Freedom

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 22, 2020 40:40

How to Work Out If You Are a Leader With Tim Spiker Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. Are you a leader, a lagger or a micro manager? I've got someone here to talk to you all about the best ways to work out what it is the voodoo that you do in your business. With Tim Spiker here from The Aperio, and he's going to go through what it is and how to work that out. So Tim, tell me, how do you work out if you're a leader, lagger or micromanager? How do you make sure you're doing the right things? And you're not being under spoken, over spoken, I think or any of the other ways that you could be? Learn more about leadership with Tim Spiker at dorksdelivered.com.au Tim: I want to share a little research to start this off. But I know when you start to talk about numbers and research for some people, you know, their eyes glaze over and they say, just get me to the punch line. But for other people, it provides some background so that we know that I didn't show up on the podcast today and made up some ideas that I thought were true, it's going to be ground. So if you don't like numbers, hang in here for about, you know, 90 seconds and we'll get to the punch line. So here's the story about how that research happened. I was working for a small boutique consulting firm, and we had people for a week at a time on the west side of Pikes Peak in Colorado in the US to do leadership development with them out of doors. And we gave them a number of assessments. And we had enough assessments and our clients were asking the question, is there any connection between personality style, natural abilities and leadership performance? And because we had all that data, we could run the numbers and look for those statistical connections. And so we did, and I was excited to get the answer. And my colleague, Vanessa Kiley, she crunched all the numbers and I went into her office one night, what did we find? And she said nothing. She found no correlations between personality style, natural ability and leadership effectiveness. But I turn to go out of her office that night, I remember it vividly. And she said, but we did find something. This is a great part of statistical software, it will look where you're not looking. So we weren't looking for what we found, but it's going to look for any correlation it can. And what it found is within our leadership assessment, we had eight different areas that were being measured. And what she found is that just two of those eight areas were driving almost 70% of the variability, and two out of eight, if everything is equal, that should be 25%, and it was almost 70%. And then years later, we had 10 times the data points with 20,000 data points at that point. She ran the data, and that number went up to 77%. So the issue was, is that there were just two areas that were driving over three quarters of a leader’s effectiveness. And many years after I left the firm. I was looking at those two areas, and I said what is unique about those two, and this is the punch line. So if you don't like numbers come on back with this now, here we go. Here's the punchline. Is that those two areas were about who the leader was as a human being, who they were as a person. The other six that we were measuring were about what a leader does. And that's when it clicked with me, that three quarters, or 77%, if you want to be really technical, but three quarters of our effectiveness as leaders comes from who we are, not what we do. So, if we want to be the very best leaders that we are capable of being, doesn't matter what you're talking about a leader at work or at home or in the community, we have to work on becoming well developed human beings. And we could talk about those two categories that were the big ones, but that's the main punch line. Three quarters of your effectiveness as a leader comes from who you are, not what you do. So we have to work on who we are. Josh: Okay. So what does it mean to then be that leader? How do you find the who? Tim: So I'll give you some really specific examples here. So we can make this actionable for everybody. But the two big buckets that were the drivers were a category that we want to call inwardly sound. And another category that we want to call others focused. So if you think about, I'll just ask you, you know, Josh, if you think about a boat, if I were to say, hey, we've got a really sound vessel here, what are the things that come to mind for you, when you think about a boat, that's really sound? What kind of characteristics does it have? Josh: Sound vessel means that it's has a high level of integrity. Tim: Yeah, keep going. Yeah, keep going. Let's brainstorm a few of these. So that's a great high level of integrity in the vessel. What else? Josh: Yep. So high level of integrity. A sound vessel, if you're talking and that that is already has the prefix that we know we're talking about a boat, is that right? Tim: That's right. Yeah. Go with the boat. Josh: So if you know it’s a boat and you've got a sound vessel, I always say that it's a high level of integrity. Yeah, that's probably the most of it. Like, besides thinking about them, you know that it's going to be able to achieve the objectives that you put forward through. So if you own a boat that was not a sound vessel, it might be leaking, it could be having issues across water or whatnot. You're smiling at me like I've given you the answer you want. What’s going on? Tim: Yes, you may have given me the answer I wanted, but in fact, and gave the answer that everybody gives, which is, I can trust this thing. Like this thing is sound, it's going to get hit by waves, it's going to get hit by surf, who knows it might even get hit by a fish. But ultimately, this is a well constructed vessel that can take a beating, and still be stable. And this is what when we talk about being inwardly sound, it's exactly that. I was doing an interview a few weeks back. And we were talking about this concept of being inwardly sound. And the person who was interviewing me said, so what you're telling me the person is not a dumpster fire as a person? Like, you know what, that's probably a fair description. But the idea of being inwardly sound is that I'm secure in who I am, comfortable in my own skin. I'm not looking to my followers to validate me every single second of every single day because I'm so insecure. You get somebody who's self aware, they understand strengths, weaknesses, here's where I excel. Here's where I need some work. You got somebody who's principled you use the word integrity that falls into that category. Is this a principled person who I can trust? You got somebody who's relatively, you know, they're an emotionally healthy person. They're not swinging up and down with every move. I mean, we are living and leading in some very turbulent times right now. So you know, unprecedented is the most common word I think I hear these days. Do you want a leader who is wildly swinging back and forth with all the ups and downs that are going on in the marketplace right now? Or do you want somebody who's got a steady hand? Of course, we want somebody who's not emotionally being blown all over the place. And you want somebody who has a sense of purpose. So these are the things we kind of talked about. What does it mean to be an inwardly sound person? And these are the things then that we have to work on. This is the part of our message, the part of the research, frankly, that is a little bit out of the norm. And, you know, I went to graduate school for business, and we did not talk about this in graduate school. We talked about finance, we talked about marketing, we talked about some organisational behavior, but we didn't talk about how sound we needed to be as human beings in order to lead well, in order to provide that stable foundation that others can trust. So, that's half of the equation on the inwardly sound side, so you want to jump over and talk about the others focus side or do you have a question on inwardly sound? Josh: That makes sense. I was interested to hear what the Yin to the Yang, maybe or hopefully another cool boat analogy. Tim: Probably won't be with the boat this time. But others focused means that when I roll out of bed in the morning, to go and read in the places where I read, that it is not about me. Endeavor is not about my ego, the endeavor is not about my bank account, my next promotion, that I am here to steward something. You know, I love that word, because it means that I don't own it forever and ever, I'm here to be a caretaker of it. I'm here to move it along. I'm here to move the people along, you know, that are under my charge, that I'm here. I'm not here as the leader on high to be served, but actually I'm here to reverse that role. I'm here to bring up and train up and be about the people that I'm leading, not just about myself. So the things that we talked about there where we encourage leaders to do significant personal work, it's about being curious. So this isn't like, I don't have all the answers and I'm willing to admit that. We talked about being empathic. You know, my emotional state’s not the only one that matters in the organisation. We talked about being attentive, which I'll say on that one in particular, and more and more, as the world gets more and more distractible more and more easily, you know, easily moved. And you know, when you, on your podcast with Oscar Trimboli, he talked about the art of listening. He talked about, you know, not being distracted. With technology, it's actually becoming easier and easier to stand out as a leader if you'll simply give somebody your attention. I mean, it's kind of a sad state of affairs, but it becomes a strategic advantage. And then the last two bits in there are a Greek word Agape, which means to selflessly care for others, and it's got an unconditional nature. So it's not about how you're behaving, it's I'm going to treat you with dignity and respect regardless of how you treat me. And then finally, an idea that lots of people are familiar with, but it's kind of elusive in the human condition, which is humility. And so when you combine those things, now, you've got a leader who's not only inwardly sound, but they're showing up not for their own gratification, not for their own enrichment, but they're showing up so that others in the organization and the mission can move forward. And when you bring those two things in combination, that’s 77% of leadership. Josh: That's amazing. So I know myself I started off thinking 13 years ago when I start a business, am I doing the right thing and I was the only cog and the only person in the business so it's easy to lead yourself, you'd think. You have to have a little bit of discipline to not jump onto Netflix or the like that are some of these other distractions, but as the business has grown, you brought up Oscar earlier and definitely being able to listen and hear is very, very important as opposed to just being present, I guess, with being present in the now and hearing exactly what someone's saying and understanding where they're coming from to be able to shift what you're doing. And I guess, from what you've been saying with being a leader, you did touch on it a little bit earlier, being leaders doesn't just stop at work, it's about being a leader at home as well. And I'd imagine being a leader isn't just about a hierarchal change between yourself and other staff members, as much as it can also be a shift in focus between the family of the business and the way that you speak and deal with clients. Would that be fair to say? Tim: Oh, yes, it's 100% true, because when you break leadership down to its most core components, it's a relationship. It's a relationship between the leader and those that he or she is leading. And so when you start to think about what creates great relationships, anything that's going to create healthy relationships is also going to be a huge addition to effective leadership. So going back to those two things, if I am a stable, sane, safe person that you can count on, and then I add into that, that it's not all about me, that's great for any relationship. And so whether you're talking about work or whether you're talking about at home, I'll say one of the most gratifying things that we get through experience in the work that we do with leaders is we pause quarterly, we go through a variety of those things that we were talking about, the makeup, you know, what does it mean to be inwardly sound and others focused? We pause quarterly and say, hey, let's take a step back from the mosaic of the last 90 days. And let's take a look at what we've seen, good and bad. And I get to hear amazing stories. And I will tell you probably in the neighborhood of 25% to, you know, probably 35% of the stories that I hear from our clients don't come from work, they come from home. One of the reasons that's gratifying it's not just because we're, you know, helping to make a contribution there. But, you know, families, it's weird to talk about families in a bottom line, because it's obviously very different than a business. But there are some bottom line things that we're after in our family just happens to not be finances. And when you see greater effectiveness and greater health coming into the family, you see better results, just like in a business. And what our clients begin to understand for their own betterment and for the betterment of the people they're leading, we come at it through the context of work, because we're able to show a measurable bottom line impact in work. But the truth is, if we're going to work on who we are, we got to work on who we are. Like, this is not my work self that I'm working on, it is the whole of me that I'm working on. So whether that most obvious first bit of progress happens at work or at home, we don't care, that indicates progress for the person as a whole human being. And that's going, if it shows up at home, it's going to begin to show up at work and vice versa. So we love all of that progress, because it's helping people lead more effectively, regardless of how they measure their bottom line. Josh: How do I know? Or how do we, do you have some tool or ability to measure to understand or is it how well I am leading or other people are leading that are listening at the moment. And the reason I asked this is, I find that people are always talking about being happy on Facebook or probably the ones that need to tell everyone that they're happy because they obviously don't feel happy. Does that make sense? So how do you have a sincere self reflection on if you are doing a good job with leadership or not? How can you find your who and make sure that that who is able to be understood, so that you once you understand that that's something you want to have changed, you have to understand it to be able to change it and then migrate from that spot in your mind and your mindset and your belief systems through to the new spot that you want to be and the goal that you have? How do you work out that transition? Or how do you find out where you start out really? Tim: Yeah, in the Google age where the search, the search box wants to finish what you're typing before you even put it in there, I have a very wildly unpopular answer, which is it takes three things. And we're going to talk about depth community and time for us to really grow and who we are. And I'm going to start with the last one, it takes time. Think about the analogy that we use with our clients with our leadership model is that of a tree. And I want you to think about the biggest healthiest tree you can imagine. I mean, I'm now thinking of some of the trees that I've had a chance to see in the Botanical Gardens in Sydney, they're right next to the opera house. Those are some of the most magnificent, amazing trees that I've ever seen in my life. Josh: Ah, we can be friends! Tim: Good, good. I'm glad. Josh How long did it take those trees to become that big and that strong? It took a while. [Yeah, absolutely] There was no little matrix blue pill that the tree was given. And magically, you know, it came up. So the disappointing news for many people is that there's no tip or trick for becoming a well developed who. It takes work and time. And if I could make that different for people, I promise you, I would. Like I would wave the magic wand. But that's not how humans develop. That's not how life works. So the first part of it is understanding to really work on who we are, it's going to take time. It also takes, and we'll go back to the first part now, it takes depth. We have to be willing, and this is the scary part. And I'll just put it out there because there's a lot of people be like, you know, if I can't do it quickly and easily then I don't want to do it. But what have we ever done in life? That was a great value that was done quickly and easily, like almost nothing. On the depth part, we have to be willing to pull up the rocks and look underneath. So we're not just looking at our outward behaviors, but we're looking at our motives and we're looking at our perspectives. And we have to be able to, you know, it's not just a question of how do we come off to other people, but you know, if I'm working to be more others focused, and part of that is becoming more humble and part of being humble is an eagerness to give acknowledgement and recognition to other people. Then one of the things we want to do is, is take a look at that over the course of, we usually use about 90 days per subject and to say, I'm going to look at myself through the prism of humility, and see, do I get excited about giving acknowledgement to others when I could kind of hug it for myself? If I don't get it excited about that, look, that doesn't make you a horrible person. That just means you have space for growth, and we all have space for growth. So welcome to the human condition. We all have ways in which we can grow. But that pointed focus over a period of time, in this case, I'm suggesting 90 days for each one of these subjects, that's what we do with our clients, is to really look deeply and I mentioned that you pull up those rocks and say, what really is my motive? What really is my intent? Am I just trying to look good? Or am I actually trying to be, in this case, for this example, am I trying to be a more humble person, a person who is willing to you know, here's another thing, look at any 90 day period, and ask yourself, how many times have I said, I'm sorry, or I was wrong? You and I both know people that cannot put those words together. You know, they they get there. They're like, you know, can't say I was wrong. I can't say I'm sorry. Those are indicators that we have space to work on. So you know, you know one activities I could just keep track of that for 90 days. How many times did I say I'm sorry, how many times again, what were analysing is the condition of our hearts. We're analysing the condition because what happens is people want to bring the whole of themselves on board for people that are that are on board for them. And so this gets back to the others focused idea. So let me hit on the last thing here community. Let's say I want to get healthier. And I'm going to start a workout practice. And I say, hey, Josh, will you be my workout partner, my workout buddy? And you say yes. And the alarm goes off at five in the morning, and we're supposed to meet at the gym at 5:30. If I know you're going to be there, my chances of showing up go way up. Way up. Some would suggest as much as five times up. And this idea because this is hard work, and because it takes time. We need people around us on the journey with us that are willing to tell us the truth about ourselves in a way that won't break the relationship, and who are also willing to be a little bit vulnerable and share about their journey as well. So imagine that you had a group of three or four people and say, hey, we're going to work on being more humble over the next 90 days, we really want to become that, we're going to trade some stories and how we're working on that. And we're going to travel in this way together to encourage people because it's hard. It's not easy. It takes time. We're going to see some stuff we're not proud of, let's do this together. You find that people have a much greater follow through on the inner development of who they are, when they have community around them. So I would say those are the key three things that we involve with our clients and all the work we do. But people don't have to work with us in order to apply those three things, you know, you can go do those things on your own. Depth, community and time are essential if we're going to work on the core of who we are as people. Josh: What you said, their own community pretty much comes down to accountability, doesn't it or not? Tim: Yeah, that’s part of it. There's also learning element. Yeah, you get to learn from others as well. Josh: I know. Just only what you're saying with the gym membership. I was a member of a gym for six years. And weirdly when the card set in my wallet, I didn't lose any weight. The moment I changed gym. Tim: That is strange. Josh: I know. I was paying the same price, I changed gyms. And when there was a class to go to and they're expecting you to be the class, you've been speaking to people in the class and you have in the nicest way possible have some fun competition, you don't necessarily go hey, I'm going to do more reps, I'm going to say sorry more times in your or whatever the case may be. But you have to okay that person that there is this you're looking at their body types about the same as mine. They're about the same fitness as me. Next week, I want to make sure I'm a better person, you definitely have that community and that feeling that definitely grows. I could totally see five times as a very achievable number because you have that and that's really cool. Definitely, with being able to build that into your business, and do you have much pushback from different people within the business structure that might be old fogies, dead wood or otherwise, that they're not really interested in applying and becoming that new person that is interested in being in the back of the warehouse or the number push or whatever they're doing the Voodoo that they've been doing for 30 years, or what do you do with that? Tim: You know, not nearly as much as I would have thought, honestly. Occasionally, you get somebody that can't get over the hump of how they've thought previously and how they've oriented. What I've seen many more times, is people who are open to the research. And I think it's really important to remember that that's where this comes from. And it's not only research that I got to be a part of with this group. A few years ago, Harvard Business Review published a really telling article from a consulting firm called KRW. And what they were measuring was positive character qualities of executives and executive team. They wanted to look at the financial performance. And what they found in that study was nearly again, the five times in a company, I believe was 4.8 times return on assets from the highest rated executives and executive teams on characteristics. And I'll find that in just a second from the lowest. And so what they were measuring. This is really interesting in terms of the parallel, they were measuring integrity and responsibility, remember those two together, and they were measuring compassion and forgiveness. When somebody said somebody is measuring compassion and forgiveness from the executive suite, really, somebody is actually doing that research. I was blown away that it existed. But think about this for just a second. They're measuring executive and executive teams on those four things, integrity and responsibility, that's about being inwardly sound. Compassion and forgiveness, that's about being others focus. So the words in the research was a little bit different, but it points in the exact same direction. And so, there's other works. David Byrum, who is a consultant who works out of Sydney with Human Synergistics. They have done longitudinal studies. They have over 2 million data points. They've been around for decades, and they're cut across all cultures, any demographic split you can imagine, they have found this exact same trend in their work. They call it constructive styles. But it's the same content. And so you look at these various pieces of data. And when you start to look for it, you're going to begin to see it everywhere. And that is to say, back to your question, do people really push back against that? Once they understand that there's research behind this, and not somebody saying I had a dream and therefore I woke up one day and decided this is what leadership is really about. We weren't even looking for it. We were not looking for this. The statistical software found it. There's other places who have found similar stories. And I'll just put this as the sealer for it. If you want to go around and ask people who is the best leader you've ever followed personally, and they do that thought process and then you ask this question. Why is that person on that list? Why does that person come to mind? If you listen to the answer, the vast, vast majority of what people will say it when they answer why, you're going to hear them talk about who that person is, as a human being. I have never had somebody answer that question by saying, you can't believe how great he was at Microsoft Excel. Never. Not in the history of that question. And what's even more amazing is rarely in the business space do people even talk about profit, they immediately start to talk about the quality of the human being that was the best leader they've ever followed. So when people look at the data, and then they start to look at their own history, and they see alignment, I think many of them become open to the idea, then they start to do it, then they really see how it has worked and has been working and it's working whether they're aware of it or not. It's working all the time around them. It's a question, are you going to go ahead and embrace the fact that gravity exists or you're going to ignore it? And, of course, we want people to embrace it so they can move the leadership forward. Josh: Cool. So don't we ask the question around this time of the podcast around what's your favorite book? But I think you've got a bit of an interesting answer to that one that I think I already know what the answer is. Tell me about your book, unless it's not your favorite. Tim: Well, hopefully, I've got some other favourite books. But, I'll take you up on the question anyway. So the book is called the only leaders worth following. And what it does is it outlines the research. So that's the first part, let's understand what we're talking about. So it goes into greater depth of the themes that we've been talking about. And then it spends the rest of the book diving deeply into these various realities of being inwardly sound and others focus and how they play themselves out to create a more effective leader. And so ultimately, we want to give people not only the data, but also the anecdotes. I think we need both. I think stories help us understand data, data helps us understand stories. I think we need both. But that is the idea of the book, to help people understand the research and then see it in real life stories and begin to think about what are the things that I need to work on? What are the things that I need to do to become a more effective leader? Now there's a different readership for the book in addition to that, which kind of the title handset which is, you know, the only leader worth following. And if you're somebody that says, Look, I don't even know that I'm interested in leadership as something that I want to do. But I bet you're interested in choosing the right leader to follow. I bet because leaders have a profound impact on our day to day experience they can make life really, really rewarding and fulfilling, even when the work is hard. They can also suck the life out of us. And that's not just the work life, they can suck the whole of life out of us. And so to really help people orient towards how they evaluate the leaders they want to follow, that's another quality, that's another way that this book can be put to use. So the only leaders worth following is about unpacking what we've been talking about what we call the who, not what principle, it details the research on that and then digs deeply into it so people can really understand the truth of that 77% about leadership. Josh: What we're going to do is we're going to make sure to have a link there so that people can check that out on your website. I definitely think that sounds like a very good quality first step towards going down the path of leadership and finding out your who. Who is the leader that you look up to, Tim? Tim: Oh, my goodness. Well, there are a lot of leaders that I have looked up to over the years, and I've been very blessed to, I've been very blessed to be around some really exceptional leaders. One of those leaders is my father. My father, started a business. And I kind of watched him about, you know, one of the great lessons I learned from my father, fell into that category of humility. I would watch him interact with the top people around him, and then I would watch him interact with the cleaning staff, and it was identical. He didn't treat them any differently. And I learned, you know, learned about humility from him. I think probably for the rest of my life I'll be striving to get like halfway on that scale to where my father is. He's definitely significantly more well developed in that arena than I am. I played basketball collegiately and I played for a Hall of Fame coach here in the States named Gene Keady. He was another person who was really sound person, a quality person. And I know perhaps not a lot of folks in Australia will have heard of Gene Keady, but he's a great person to follow. Now, I've got somebody in Australia that well, not technically in Australia, but I'm going to say a name that the business community in Australia is going to be familiar with, who was very, very well known in Australia, and then recently has in the process of leaving his current position that is a bit controversial right now. But I'm going to name out this person because he has been an incredible leader in my life and he is a great example of these two things of being inwardly sound and othes focused. And that is Mike Kane, who is in the process of finishing up his post at Boral. Now, you know, I've read all the things that are in the Australian papers about Mike, and I know Mike personally, and he's been a huge influence in my life. And I'll just say that there is so much more substance than what is reported in the paper. So I'll just, I mean, perhaps the listeners aren't shocked to learn that there's more to what's being written in in a paper whose goal is to sell ads. So I'll say that. But Mike Kane had an incredible run up at the start of his time. I understand that some people watch the stock price have Boral in the last couple of years and they have some questions. And I get that around the strategy side, but as far as somebody who I would personally run through a wall for because he is those two things of been inwardly sound and others focused, Mike Kane is near the top of my list. Even though you’re going to ask me that question. And I realised that there are a variety of opinions about Mike right now flying around in the business community, especially in Sydney. But I will tell you, he is a first-rate leader. Josh: Different leaders for different reasons. Your father is a big figure, you've got Mike Kane there as a business figure as well as then health fitness and recreational stuff. I like that, I didn't know what you're going to say. So I was very impressed with that. Because when you said it earlier, it sounds like ooh, who would be my leader, I don't know Tim: Well, think about that. That's worth thinking about. Josh: I thought dad definitely, Nikola Tesla, not Elon Musk, the car guy. I'm like, no, he helped the world in so many ways with the technologies that he created. And his name wasn't even really mentioned or heard of for another 80, 90 years. And the money that he had, he died in poverty. He wasn't lavish with the money that he got, and he didn't want war. And so you'd go to several countries and give them the same presentation. So he was funded by lots of countries that no one had a different, more unique approach to be able to jump into war. So I thought Nikola Tesla would definitely be up there for me and that's as high level humility. And dad has always been there to teach me very much what you're saying. It doesn't matter who they are in business, everyone's at the same at the end of the day, just blood and bones. And we need to be able to have that knowledge that everyone's here for the same amount of time. We all live the same way, and they be there and everyone has a story and it doesn't matter who you're talking to, you should not talk down. You should make sure you're always there and present to hear what they're all about. Tim: I'll encourage you with this and maybe some folks who are listening, maybe they've done this, they started to do this exercise with us as well, who are the best leaders that you've ever followed? And you begin to think about for many people and family members and coaches and teachers at young ages are folks that especially influences earlier in our careers, as you think about who those people are, and you begin to maybe even make a little list of the whys. Why did that person make it on your list? I'll encourage you to do something that will bless you, the listener, as well as the other person is call them up and tell them, write them a note. Tell them that I was asked this question, and you came to mind and here's why. That kind of stuff in life is priceless. Don't miss that opportunity. You will never be sorry for letting somebody know that they came to mind, that that person came to mind when they were asked who's the best leader you've ever followed? Josh: I love that. That's fantastic. And when I started the podcast many, not nearly two years ago, I thought, who would I like to have on the podcast? And I thought of the people that really changed my mind and changed the way of my thinking. Are you familiar with Bob Berg from the go giver? Tim: I'm not. I'm not. Josh: Bob Berg from The Go Giver. Fantastic book that I read that goes through and describes how to make sure that you're giving more than you're receiving and you're doing the things the way that business should be done. And it's not all just about numbers. And the other one was by a guy named Dr. Larry Little, Tim: You did have him on the show? Josh: I did. I had them both on the show. I reached out to them, and I said you've impacted the way that my life has worked, and the way that I've done business, and I've bought your books many times as gifts for clients because the readings have truly influenced me in the direction that I've gone and I thought I'm going to ask them like they're not gonna say yes, they got better things to do with their time. And they both said, sure, I'd love to be on the show. That was my American accent. And it was fantastic. Tim: I'm not even going to try an Aussie accent because it would be awful. It would be awful. So, you had them on and they both came on and you got to do those interviews. Josh: Both came on both go to do the interviews and very, very blessed to be able to have them on the show and be able to hear one on one what they were all about. And I thought, no way would this Nikola Tesla is going to be harder to say I really like his leadership skills, I have to do some ulterior method. Tim: That would be a creative interviewing process. If you think about what Dr. Little talked about. He talked about servant leadership. And he talked about the question of why are you leading and that leads us right back to that others focused piece that we were talking about earlier. He He's on to onto that part of it that's so very important. So yeah, I'm not as familiar with Bob Berg, but Dr. Little's interview with you, yeah. Josh: If there's anyone out there in podcast land that's keen to hear a bit more information, Tim has been nice enough to give us a link, theonlyleaders.com. If you jump across there, he's got a fantastic opportunity for you guys to have himself and his team deep dive in with 20% off for your digital journey through them. Is there anything else you'd like to go through on that offer that I haven't quite covered off on there? Or do you want to jump into a bit more detail on what they're looking forward to seeing in that? Tim: Yeah, well, you know, in the internet space, you have to be very clear on what the website is, right? So in terms of, you know, you punch it in to the search, you're like, oh, I hope it's available. I hope it's available. So what's really important about what you said is the only leaders, you got to get THE, and so theonlyleaders.com. And you mentioned the 20% off we take leaders on what we call journeys. You can imagine given what we've talked about, I keep talking about how hard and difficult and challenging it is. So we thought, well, let's just call it what it is. It's a journey. And it's challenging. As we take leaders on that, we do have the 20% off there for your listeners. So what they do is they would put in a promo code there. And if you put in the BBF, for the name of your podcast, then that will lock in when we get those digital journeys ready to go. And then also, if you're not interested in buying anything, we certainly want to be of help regardless of whether somebody's buying something. So you go to that same website, you can sign up to get a free copy of our study guide that goes along with the book. I suppose now that I say that then I guess it's only valuable if you buy a copy of the book, but you would also receive other free material that we're putting out as well. So there's opportunity to just sign up to be a part of the email list and get some free information, free content from us that we're producing as well. Josh: Tim, I've loved having you on the show. And is there any other questions you had for me or our listeners, I can only answer for me though. Tim: You can only answer for you. Well, you know, I might just go with a rhetorical question that parrots back with Dr. Little says, and that is if you're a leader, why are you leading? I mean, and that is, and I mean, to me, that's a question to think about. What is the purpose of my leadership? Is it just to enrich myself? Is it just to make money? Is it you know, what is it? Is it just some of those things? And look, there are people who are successful at making money, successful in their businesses without having kind of a profoundly positive answer to that question. However, what I would offer as we close out and think about that question, for all of us to think about, why am I leading, is that if we're not able to get to a spot in our life, where the answer to that question has something to do with others, we will never truly know what our full potential was. And I don't mean that in like an esoteric out in the universe kind of way, I actually mean that at the bottom line. Even at the bottom line, you'll never know what your potential was, so long as you're only in it for yourself, because we don't get that discretionary effort out of people. if we’re there for ourselves, they're well aware of it. No matter what words we use, no matter how we try to cover it up. And so why are you leading? Yes, perhaps there's a fulfillment question that lives within that question. But there's also hey, what's possible? What could you and your family or your organisation, what could you see if the answer to that question was, well, part of the reason why I'm leading is for the sake of others, for the sake of what they get out of being under my leadership. So it's tough to answer those questions honestly, because we want the answers to be really, really nice. And really, really positive. But we have to be honest with ourselves if we're really going to grow and develop. So I put that question, the final question is perhaps not one to answer today, but to sit with maybe for the next couple of weeks. What if you were to take a piece of paper and just put it somewhere where you saw it repeatedly that said, why am I leading? And you put a little energy into thinking about that, and challenge yourself to think about being more inwardly sound and others focused. Josh: That's brilliant. I'll be having a bit of think about it myself. I've got a quote wall that that I have there and that'll be getting added to it so that I can make sure to continue thinking about the who and the why. That's really good. Anyone out there that's been listening, if you have enjoyed this episode, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us some love, give us some feedback, and stay healthy, stay good. And thank you very much for being on the show. Tim. Tim: Thank you. Really, really great to be here with you.

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The Meat of Ayurveda - Part 3

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 14, 2020 25:16

Special Edition Series for the month of September! Ayurveda Outlaw Chef Tim is US Wellness Meats Featured Chef for the month of September. Check out his offal recipes at https://grasslandbeef.com/?affId=213910 (https://grasslandbeef.com/?affId=213910) Resources Did you subscribe to the podcast? Did you share this episode with all your friends? Did you check out our Private Online Yoga Alliance registered teacher trainings? Private Online 200-hr Yoga and Ayurveda Teacher Training (https://spartanmindstrength.com/2020/05/15/online-200-hr-yoga-and-ayurveda-teacher-training-yoga-alliance/) Private Online 300-hr Ayurveda and Yoga Teacher Training (https://spartanmindstrength.com/online-300-hr-ayurveda-and-yoga-teacher-training-yoga-alliance/) Both trainings include three months of private mentorship after you complete the training in order to help you successfully implement everything you have learned in your professional and / or personal yogic / ayurvedic life Email us your feedback at: training@asktimandvie.com (mailto:training@asktimandvie.com) Instagram account: yogaenergyschool (https://www.instagram.com/yogaenergyschool/) Instagram account: ayurvedaoutlaws (https://www.instagram.com/ayurvedaoutlaws/) Our YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/c/asktimandvie (https://youtube.com/c/asktimandvie) Yoga Energy's Training Library can be found at: https://squareup.com/store/training-courses (https://squareup.com/store/training-courses) Our favorite company for meat is US Wellness Meats (https://grasslandbeef.com/?affId=213910) The Charaka Samhita translation that we recommend is this: https://amzn.to/32lPXNc (https://amzn.to/32lPXNc) You can help support our Podcast by giving as little as $1 per episode, our PayPal account is here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=7FDYKCGSKL3NL&source=url (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=7FDYKCGSKL3NL&source=url) May we all be well, adapt and thrive! - Tim and Vie Episode Transcript Tim: Hello this is Tim Vie: And this is Vie and we welcome you to another episode of the spartan mind strength podcast. Tim: This is number three on the meat of ayurveda. Vie: Stay tuned. We’ll be right back. Tim: And we’re back. But first, did you subscribe, did you share, did you tell all your friends, did you like, did you leave a review and did you go to US wellness and sign up for their free giveaway for a $150 worth of the meat. Vie: Exactly. Yeah. Well, yes, but actually by the time they get this one, it will have been over. Tim: Oh, so hopefully you already did it. So if you haven’t shame. So we’re going to talk again about ayurveda and meat. But first I’d like to say that I had a ribeye steak today, well we both had ribeye steaks and cooked in butter, along with some pasta from Vie: Cappello's Tim: Cappello's, and that was Vie: cooked in more butter Tim: and that sauce was a butter, Romano, Parmesan, pepper, sauce, Vie: black pepper Tim: yep, black pepper sauce. So it really went very well together. so I am steak happy right now. So, Vie: So you’ve had your steak-tember meal? Tim: Yeah, that’s Shawn Baker right now is doing steak tember. Yes, we’ve had our steak-tember for the day. Vie: For the month. Tim: Steak is actually something that is eaten in ayurveda as it was taught before 500 AD. Vie: Exactly. Tim: And we keep saying before 500 AD because 500 AD is when a lot of things shifted in the political world of ayurveda. Vie: Yes. Tim: And that’s why they no longer talk about eating meat. So we do not teach ayurveda that came after that, because that actually has led to a lot of sickness. Vie: Yes. Tim: And it leads to a lot of, actually there was an article that we were reading today from a lady in India, a doctor, who, who was talking about how bad their diabetes is. Vie: Yes, she’s an endocrinologist and actually started her own practice, independent of the hospitals there.... Support this podcast

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2.20: Woven: Staying Interconnected

Find The Outside

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2020 31:31

In season two’s final episode, Tim and Tuesday wrap up by offering a piece of advice: stay woven! Stay woven with the people you care about, stay woven with the people you work with and pay attention to how woven and connected you are in your communities. And if you notice someone falling away, weave them back in! Keep weaving the world events into our everyday living. These times demand all of us together meeting these times.Together, Tim Merry and Tuesday Ryan-Hart are THE OUTSIDE—systems change and equity facilitators who bring the fresh air necessary to organize movements, organizations, and collaborators forward for progress, surfacing new mindsets for greater participation and shared impact.2.20 — SHOW NOTESTues: This week on the podcast we are talking about being woven… being woven together as Outsiders, and as a team, being woven together with our clients a little bit in this changing context and then making sure our work is woven and meeting what is happening in the external world.Tues: I am feeling that Tim and I are quite well woven together. I am feeling good about where we are in partnership with this business and my experience of that is simply a re-weaving or re-knitting together, in the past couple weeks, that make us quite strong and smooth. Tim: This is our final podcast of this season… and I like the idea of woven as well as it brings together many of the topics we’ve been talking about over the last two seasons and that feels right - what’s happening between us, what’s happening in the world, what’s happening in our team and in relationship to the people we work with. It feels like a good way to end talking about things being woven, and how they are woven and how well they are woven and how we weave each other together and how important that is when you are working remotely. The quality of attention and alertness we need to have to our relationships so that we can deliver on the work that is at hand is heightened. We’ve always said that relationships equal results. I think that is even more true in terms of being able to deliver results when you are not able to take a walk that morning together or whatever else it might be that you need to do to sustain your relationships. It’s that intention and aspiration to pay attention to each other. Tues: I did this work to be in partnership with you and the work is better when we’re in it together. This idea of distance - we can’t in the same way know what is up for each other. I wonder if there is some inevitable moving apart in this remote way of working that then says what are your practices for coming back together?Tim: When we are working remotely, and in technical web-based spaces, we also need to pay attention to the conditions we put in place for people to connect and contribute. There is a personal reaching out and paying attention to relationship but a lot of what we are doing is tech upgrade. How do you create the ease between people of reaching out to each other to keep everyone connected in? Tues: We were able to get by on good equipment until that was “the way” of being together. We are making it possible for our physical bodies to connect more. Tim: Yeah, can you have a set-up that allows you to relax and be online? Find your techie mate and have them help you to set up an environment to be conducive to being relaxed into online spaces. It’s a big deal when running online meetings and to organize effectively. The other thing I am realizing is one-on-one conversations still need to happen to build the relationship. This also requires effort and planning and it is part of the work. Tim: It’s wild out there, mate and that’s another reason to stay woven. It feels stressful. Meg [Wheatley] also says when the shit hits the fan, “people turn to each other.” That is why this species has managed to evolve. When things get hard, we turn to each other. Tim: If there is one piece of advice in our final podcast episode, as all of us head through the summer and into the Fall and Autumn, it’s stay woven. Stay woven with the people you’re caring about, stay woven with the people you’re working with to deliver the things that matter to you in the world, pay attention not just to the inevitable pivot and thrust of energy we all need to create to get through re-entering our work spaces in new ways but also pay attention to how woven we are and how connected we are as teams and caring members of communities. Tues: This particular moment is calling for a re-weaving or different kinds of weaving that we haven’t had to access before. Most of us haven’t had to do this kind of online life before. There is also the larger movement of breaking down of systems and seeing the brokenness of systems that I think also will require a re-weaving. As you think about staying woven, find new ways to weave and then also look for opportunities to re-weave. Tues: My uncle Chucky was very active in SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), so I can go to historical news reels and find mention of him and what he did and read his story. This makes me think of what my grandkids will ask of this time and what we did and how we were and will I be proud of how we/I responded? Tim: There is something about looking back and understanding the complexity of our heritage and our lineage that contributes to our ability to be here now. Tues: I feel like we all have to do that. We all have to know where we’re coming from to point where we’re going. Tim: For those of you who dane to tune in to us, we are grateful. Thank you for joining us. We will continue thorough the summer through a vlog series. You will find us on Facebook and Instagram for that. You will get to meet the members of The Outside team. The podcast will start up again this Autumn - let us know if there are things you want to hear in Season 3 or things you want us to go deeper into. Song: “Abebrese” by Ebo Taylor.Poem: “Turning to One Another” by Margaret Wheatley, “Turning to One Another,” 2002There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about. Ask “What’s possible?” not “What’s wrong?” Keep asking.Notice what you care about.Assume that many others share your dreams.Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters. Talk to people you know.Talk to people you don’t know.Talk to people you never talk to.Be intrigued by the differences you hear.Expect to be surprised.Treasure curiosity more than certainty.Invite in everybody who cares to work on what’s possible. Acknowledge that everyone is an expert about something. Know that creative solutions come from new connections.Remember, you don’t fear people whose story you know. Real listening always brings people closer together.Trust that meaningful conversations can change your world. Rely on human goodness. Stay together.Subscribe to the podcast now—in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or anywhere else you find podcasts. New episodes will be available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to get in touch with us about something you heard on the show, reach us at podcast@findtheoutside.com. Find the song we played in today’s show—and every song we’ve played in previous shows—on the playlist. Just search ‘Find the Outside’ on Spotify.Duration: 31:31Produced by: Mark Coffin @ Sound Good StudiosTheme music: Gary BlakemoreEpisode cover image: source See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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148|How to Restructure Your Business With Tim Wilshire

Business Built Freedom

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 15, 2020 54:04

How to Restructure Your Business With Tim Wilshire Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. We've got an awesome guest for you, we've got Tim Wilshire here, who is a networking number cruncher who podcasts people's perspectives. We've got him on to talk about how to restructure your business and when the right time is to do that. So Tim, first question, how do you know when to do that? I know you've come across businesses that are started as sole traders and other businesses are looking for asset separation and all sorts of stuff. How do you know when the right time is? Tim: Okay. Thanks very much, Joshua and hello listeners. But as far as restructuring is concerned, obviously, one thing that I've done plenty of over the last 20 years at my business is restructuring our clients from one structure to another. I guess, like a lot of the answers to questions these days, the answer is, it depends. Okay? You're probably hearing that quite a lot, this is the new 2020 thing, it depends. So it depends on what the different situation is. So if they're in the wrong structure to begin with, and it's not expensive to change them into the correct structure, that's usually a good time to restructure. So let's say they're a sole trader, let's say they've been going in business for a very short space of time and income is starting to come in the door, something that may potentially sell one day, then you can no longer be a sole trader anymore. It doesn't make sense to stay being a sole trader because number one, you're not protecting your assets. If you've got assets in your own personal name, all of a sudden those assets are at risk and the more at risk, the more risky behaviour that you're doing, the more at risk those assets are when you're a sole trader, so that's definitely a time to look at structures. If you're not out of the sole trader structure, get out of that particular structure. And there are two alternatives that we sort of look at, whatever the structuring is, do you want to try it as a company or do you want to trade as a trading trust? Or a combination of both types of structure as well. So that's one, I guess, time where it's quite common when it comes to restructuring. Another time might be, okay, I'm in the trading trust at the moment, but I'm basically making too much money and it's no longer viable, unless I've got a company structure. A company structure meaning, I can type my money and I can grow the business. So, a trading trust structure may no longer be applicable to those circumstances because, selling the business because you have less options. If you're in a company structure, you've got more options, easier ways to add and subtract business partners, shareholders, et cetera. If it's a trading trust, usually good for a smaller operation, up to a couple hundred thousand dollars of profit. Once you get beyond that, a company is certainly worth considering. So that's another time to consider, okay, what's it going to cost to restructure from that structure to that? What are all the processes that I need to do? It doesn't make sense to do that. So that's probably the two main ones you're sort of looking at changing structure because of the circumstances, the current structure don't fit what you're currently doing, and your medium to long term objective. Josh: And when you say trading trust, a discretionary trust and trading trust are the same thing? Tim: Yep, yes, exactly. Josh: Cool. So, you then have cascading setups where you have trusts that own companies, which I think you touched on a little bit there. And then you have companies that are sitting by themself and then you have some people that have multiple companies and asset companies, asset protection. Why would you have that? Tim: The larger you get us as an operation, the more it makes sense to. I'm not saying complicate things, but the more it makes sense to just do things that are going to protect yourself in the best way, shape or form. What you do see from time to time, not for every client, obviously, but once the clients get big enough, they might have one entity that's the training entity and then they might have another entity that basically looks after all the assets. Those items also, you might be paying staff. How do you pay staff in the most tax effective manner? And why would you do it, not in the trading company? Separation, if you're big enough, certainly justifiable. You just got everything in one trading company basket and you're growing and growing and growing, to me, you need to review that structure and you need to say, okay, well, what can we do to better utilise what's going on there? So certainly if you've got clients that are big enough that are turning over more than a couple of million dollars a year, really need to review their structures and say, okay, well, are we in the right sort of structure? Is there something going on that we can do a bit more separation? Can we protect our assets better than what they are? The moment it's all in one basket, and that company goes down, then what? What's the plan of attack if that were to happen? If you've got another company over here doing something, important stuff, whatever, you might be able to drop one or the other. So it just gives you a few more options. Yes, it's more of a cost. Yes, it's more of an administration to be able to manage more than one, but at least you're doing things. Separating and separating the risks. Josh: Okay. And you've talked about going forward, bigger, better, or potentially more complication and more administrative overhead. Is there any times that you would be pulling that back in? Going from a company structure and then going back to a sole trader or something like that. Tim: You never go back to a sole trader, unless you're not really running a business anymore. But you may sort of downsize your operations in it, if you've got too many different structures. And I'm thinking of a client right now who had way too many different things going on, different trusts. Once you stop using that particular trust, you can close it down, sort of get rid of it. So obviously if it's not getting used, get rid of it. You should be able to probably get rid of the different things that aren't getting used properly. Obviously if your sales are coming down, you're sort of downsizing the business, getting rid of staff for whatever reason, because you're downsizing the business. And then do you need that if there's no staff? I mean, all of a sudden you don't necessarily need that. Josh: Who opens the conversation to the structure? Is this something that people should be already aware of themself, where they're talking to their accountant about it, or does the accountant say, "Hey, look, you've turned over a million dollars as a sole trader, something's not adding up here. Let's look to restructure this." Or is this something that they sort of need to jump on their own steam? Or maybe they're listening to the podcast to work out the answer. But who should be opening up that conversation? Tim: I think us, as accountants and advisors, should be opening up that conversation with our clients. We've got to be proactive, we've got to see where the opportunities exist for those clients to get things right. And we've got to take advantage of those opportunities. So get the clients to think that they need to take advantage to get those opportunities. Josh: For us, I started off as the transitioning periods, as you've said, is pretty much what we did. So when everyone was 14 and nine months old and they were off getting their McDonald's job, I was getting my tax file number and registering my first ABN number. So as a sole trader, I started off just on 15 and continued through as a sole trader for a few years until I had the trust and then the company trusts and then the company trusts and then another company, to have asset protection. And then another company again, which was around some of the different grants and advantages that you can have that are pushed out to companies that are not trading as a trust. You can optimise your tax with multiple businesses and structures, but what would be the reason you'd want to have more than one company? If not for asset protection or a government grant or something like that. Tim: Why would you have more than one? Obviously, if you've got more than one business operation actually going, you want to separate them in different trading locations. There might be one location here, there might be one location there, it doesn't always make sense to put them in the same envy. That way, if things can be sold separately, you want to be able to treat them separately. Every different division of the business, you probably should have it in its own entity. And you should try to steer away from grouping them together as well. The reason you don't want to group them together is, it's definitely more messy when it comes to returning your tax. Also, if you've tried to group GST, that's messy. And also if you're grouping them, then you're losing out on some benefits sometimes as well. A good example is the government's recent cash flow boost. If you've got just one company, then you're only going to get one lot of cashflow boosts. Whereas if you've got two companies, you're going to get more benefits rather than just one. Josh: Fair enough. And you did touch on something there about if it's being sold. So when it comes down to exit strategies, if people are looking to sell their business, when's the right time to restructure. When is the right time? You don't want it to look like you've cooked the books or changed the books around or done something funky. You want to make sure there's some historical evidence there that the business is profitable, that everything is going as you would expect it to be. When is the right time to restructure if you are looking towards an exit? Tim: You don't necessarily want to restructure until it's no longer useful. So it doesn't make sense to restructure too soon. So make sure you get to what you're trying to do before you make that choice cutting these off. Josh: So, the main reasons you'd restructure is risk mitigation, tax optimization, and to allow for things to be sold off more easily or divided out. Is that right? Tim: Yeah, I guess all the reasons that I've sort of gone through. Growing, make sure you're structuring correctly, protecting your assets. You need to minimise tax, exactly what you said. And when it comes to the next step, you get to another step, keep reviewing. What's the benefit of bringing in another entity? And everything else that we've sort of discussed there as well. Are we running more than one business operation and can we separate them out? I see clients that shove three different car washes into one entity. They're all at different locations, it doesn't make sense. Josh: I'm going to say something that I think a lot of people, maybe even yourself, are going to disagree with. Companies are generally pretty straightforward to set it up. There's not too many things you can stuff up. If there's one company and then there's another company, the company as the Pty LTD, decides the division of shares and the amount of directors, et cetera, et cetera. The actual company itself, is a reasonably straightforward container. Tim: Well, I guess it's very easy to set companies up, yes. Making sure that it's set up right still requires a bit of skill. Who are the shareholders? The shareholders are a very important part of the company and how those shares are owned are very, very important. Putting mum and dad as a shareholder is not always the best way to do it. So is setting up a trust to own the shares, a better option? That's usually what we'd recommend. We'd say, look, you should want more flexibility. It's not owned by you as an individual, it's in the trust. Then we're talking asset protection 101, as far as making sure that things are done right. Josh: When it comes down to a trust though, it seems like there's a bit more of a grey area than a company. It seems that whenever I've gone to a bank or any lending Institute, they hear that you're running under a trust, they seem to think there's more complication. How come trusts inherently appear to be more complicated than a company? Tim: I mean, with trusts, once you sort of whirl into it, it's probably not as common. To some, it may not be as complicated as what you may think. So obviously it's a great structure. We're talking about protecting assets, we're talking about planning the long term beneficiaries, kids, children, that all make sense to find out about what all the particular roles are. You just need to know what those roles actually are in a trust, and a lot of people don't know about that unless they read it. So once there's a bit of understanding, then you say, well, this is not as bad as what we thought. But again, it's complicated because it's obviously different to that of an individual sole trader, different to a partnership, different to a company. So I guess that's the stigma behind it, that it is more complicated. Just requires a bit of understanding in order to make it not feel as complicated as what its outward appearances would suggest. Josh: Were they more open to abuse in the past? Or has that been sort of tightened down a bit? Tim: Self-assessment is obviously huge. So, there's a lot of trust given to people to do the right thing. And when it comes to trust, there's no exception. So just because you set up a trust, doesn't mean you're going to get an audit or anything like that. Obviously, the audits flags are going to arise if things just don't match up or add up when the ATO are looking at the back system. The government from time to time, have said they don't want trusts, but they've never done anything about that. The labour government, before the last election, tried to make some fairly drastic changes. I guess that's where we are with that at the moment. It's not like it hasn't flown under the radar, but they haven't done anything about it. Josh: What would be the advantages to not having the structure, where you have a company and then a trust and instead, you're just running solely as a company? Tim: You're talking about the shareholder situation and also the difference between having a trust as a shareholder and having an individual as a shareholder. So, the biggest issue with having an individual as a shareholder is, company makes money, makes a lot of money, it pays all its tax, there's only one person that can actually end up with that dividend. If they want to declare a dividend or get forced to declare a dividend in some cases, then that goes to one person's particular taxable income. And that could really jump their income quite high, depending on when and how they have to deal with that situation and the profit and all that sort of stuff. Whereas a trust, at least you got more flexibility. You've got the flexibility to look at the rest of the family group. Can we allocate that dividend to somebody who's on a lower tax income? It makes sense. Three or $400 you spend extra to set up a trust. It's worth it because, yes, you might have to do some dividends and you might have to split that and do another tax return but at the end of the day, it will more than pay for itself. Josh: So if I was to be a single bachelor or bachelorette and have no one that I can distribute anything to, have no business partners, I own 100% of the shares, still having it through a discretionary trust, would still put an extra level of protection there. Tim: It does protect the amount of assets that are attributed to yourself because it's a trust that owns the company. That means that, that's not a personal asset that belongs to you. Whereas if you were the only shareholder, whatever the equity in that company, is effectively your asset. If the trust has that there, then if it's not your personal asset, so it usually can be helpful in things like bankruptcy. Josh: Okay, cool. Well, I think anyone out there that's still scratching their head and has a bit of confusion, definitely make sure to contact Tim Wilshire. He'll be able to bring some clarity and hopefully leave you with the aha moments on how things should be set up. If you want more information or want to hear more about what Tim's doing there, jump onto his podcast from the Valley. We're going to chuck some links in there so that you can check out the website, check out his podcasts and find out what you're doing wrong and how to restructure your business. Tim: Appreciate you doing this, Josh. There's something I just wanted to finish off with. In 2020, and as it was in 2014 or 2015, if you're going into business with somebody else, set it up as a company. Yes, the shares held 50/50 by different trusts or what have you, but if you go into business with somebody else, make sure it's a company. It just allows a lot more flexibility, allows a lot more growth. It sort of ticks off all the common goals that two partners going into business should be looking at when they go into business together. Josh: If you were having a Pty or LTD and you had a couple of business owners, is there a restriction or any complication if you had one of those business owners that were not from Australia? Tim: We have clients where company's are wholly owned by overseas companies, it's always possible. What's required is, the operation to be here at the central management. So the central management being in Australia, one of the directors must be an Australian resident. That's the requirement. The shares can be owned 100% by overseas entities, or 50/50 here. Josh: That's good to know. Hopefully anyone out there that is thinking about their structure, has had that aha moment and is thinking a little bit more about it, how to set it up properly and yeah, jump down to you guys to get it all sorted. Tim: Thank you very much. Josh: Cool. Well, anyone out there in podcast land, if you've enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love and stay healthy. Stay good in this COVID climate.

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What makes people pay for new online events

#DoorGrowShow - Property Management Growth

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 8, 2020 39:21

You would expect that event-focused startups would be some of the hardest hit by the global pandemic and lockdown, and for the most part, you would be right. But Peatix is one event startup that adapted fast and is now actually thriving during the lockdown. We've talked with Taku Harada before, and if you have not done so already, you should check it out. It's a great conversation and there is no overlap with today. Today we talk about how startups can pivot and survive during the pandemic, why having too much money can be a curse for startups, and we dive into what's gone wrong with Japanese B2B SaaS startups. It's a great discussion, and I think you will really enjoy it. Show Notes How an evets company pivots during Covid-19 What makes a good online event Will people play for online events What will be the long-term behavioral changes from the lockdown The surprising secret to scaling a social network Tips for Japanese who want to run an international startup The trap of startups having too much funding What's wrong with Japan’s SaaS companies Why Japanese enterprise has too much influence on startups The importance of an ecosystem is not what you think Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about Peatix Friend Taku on Facebook Follow him on twitter at @takumeister Petix on YouTube Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Today we get a chance to sit down with (at a very safe social distance) with Taku Harada the founder of Peatix, and we’ll talk about how this particular event planning and booking company is not only surviving but thriving during this covid crisis. And hey, this is the very first DJ episode I’ve released, where I’ve interviewed someone over video conference. Oh, I’ve recorded a few interviews that way them before, but I’ve always found something lacking. Something impersonal and not fully connected when you talking to an image on a screen rather than a person in the same room. But this time was different. Maybe because Taku and I are old friends, or maybe just because we all, myself included, are getting more used to living our lives online. So we’ll be doing more interviews this way, at least until things return to the way they were in the before times. This is actually the second time we’ve had Taku on the show, but this is all new information, and I strongly encourage you to go listen to the other interview. It’s a great discussion about the things no one ever tells you when you first start your startup. I’ll have a link to that episode up on the site But today we are going to talk about how to build, and expand, your customer base during lockdown, some things you should know about fundraising right now, and what the hell is wrong with Japanese B2B SaaS companies. But you know Taku tells that story much better than I can, so let's get right to the interview. Interview Tim: So, I’m sitting here with Taku Harada of Peatix, the event ticketing and promotion service. Thanks for sitting down with me. Taku: It’s great to be back, I guess. We talked several years ago. It’s nice to see you again. Tim: Likewise, and we’re being very appropriately socially distanced here, you being in New York. Taku: Very much. Tim: Yeah. Yeah, actually, you were one of my very first guests on the show and that was, man, almost six years ago now. Taku: Was it six years ago? Tim: Yeah, 5 ½, six years. Times change. Taku: When was it, 2013 or so? I’m curious to find out what I had said back then, if it matches up with the way I’m thinking right now. Tim: Yeah. We finished off a bottle of wine at the old engine yard office in Tokyo. Taku: Yeah, an Ebisu, right? Tim: Yeah. Now, it was a really great interview and we’re not going to cover the same ground again today although I mean,

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DGS 128: Navigating the Cash Crunch with Tim Francis

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2020 55:20

Are you a business owner who wants to get good at financial decision making and CEO-level accounting? How can you build a runway to opportunities? By navigating mindset, expenses, and cash. Today’s guest is Tim Francis from Great Assistant and Profit Factory. Tim’s training, Know Your Numbers, shows how businesses can deal with cash crunch and cash flow. You’ll Learn... [02:48] Free Upcoming Event: Navigate the Cash Crunch. [03:20] Entrepreneurs: Like Indiana Jones, running as fast as possible from expenses. [06:00] Pre-built Spreadsheet: Adding and subtracting, red boxes and green boxes. [06:40] Beyond Profit First: In motion and cutting expenses when DoorGrow sales stop. [10:23] 3-Step Method: Navigating mindset, navigating expenses, and navigating cash. [11:29] Mistakes of sloth, and mistakes of ambition. [12:19] Step 1 - Navigating Mindset: Be good to your body, protect personal and professional relationships, and early action is crucial. [22:51] Step 2 - Navigating Expenses: Business's profit margin and bloat factor involves how many dollars to be sold at top line for $1 at bottom line to spend/buy something. [30:08] Survive and Thrive: When sales go down, create a situation where you don't have to sell as much. You can meet it at a lower sales level and still get by. [31:52] Step 3 - Navigating Cash: The Cash Flow Forecast figures out how much cash can you touch now? There's a big difference between cash and free cash. [45:38] Opportunities for Growth: If your business doesn't cash flow, it will fail. Cash flow first, then focus on growth. Cash comes from different places. Tweetables Entrepreneurs confuse revenue, sales, top line, or top of the P&L statement with cash. There's actually a way to navigate the cash crunch, even if revenue is going down. Property management industry has a massive opportunity due to big shift in the market. Panic isn't productive. It's important to be urgent, not anxious. There's a big difference between cash and free cash. Resources Navigate the Cash Crunch with Jason Hull and Timothy Francis Tim Francis on LinkedIn Great Assistant Profit Factory Know Your Numbers Keith Cunningham Verne Harnish DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your 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 businesses and their owners. 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. Now, let's get into the show. I am hanging out here with Tim Francis. Tim, welcome to the show again. Tim: Good to see you Jason, again. Jason: Tim and I just started trying to do this on Crowdcast the normal platform. It didn't work out. The internet gods were not kind to us for some reason so we're starting it over. I wanted to introduce Tim to this audience again. Tim has been on the show before because he was talking about his company, Great Assistant, a fantastic company. I've hired assistants through it for US based assistants. His parent corporation, or company, or whatever you want to call it is Profit Factory. I recently went through training with him called Know Your Numbers. One of my goals for this year was to get really good at this learning financial decision making, maybe more business owner, CEO level accounting. Tim is the go to guy for this. He has a program on this that I went through. He had a really cool thing that he showed us how to deal with cash crunch and cash flow. He reached out to me and is putting this out to audiences trying to help businesses out right now. I'm excited to expose my audience to this idea of how they can navigate the cash crunch. Tim, welcome. Tim: Thank you so much for having me. Jason: We're going to do an event here in about a week. I'll just plug that now up front, just get that out of the way. It's for free and we're going to go into greater detail about these things. You're going to be sharing your screen, showing spreadsheets, helping them figure this out. But let's start with talking about the problem. What's going on with the market right now, the cash crunch, and why is this relevant? Tim: Yeah, you bet. If you think of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, there's this amazing boulder scene. Jason, I have to give you credit for giving me this visual of this boulder rolling behind us as entrepreneurs. We're running as fast as we possibly can, and that boulder, that's expenses. Jason, full credit to you, every time I use this analogy now I'm giving you credit. A bit of the secret here is that there's actually a simple three step method that we can actually turn this into a different Indiana Jones scene. In the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones, there's this like leap of faith scene where he's standing on the very edge and he's looking at this massive chasm between him and where he needs to go. It looks impossible, it looks impossible that he’ll possibly be able to cross this chasm, but then he gets this idea. He takes some sand, and he throws it out and it covers, and there's this hidden balance beam, it's invisible, this invisible balance beam to walk across. That's exactly the three step method that I teach as a passion to entrepreneurs. I think a lot of entrepreneurs confuse revenue, sales, top line, or just that top of the P&L statement with cash. The thing is that they’re two extremely different ideas. Yes, one can lead to the other, however they're not necessary. There's actually a way to navigate the cash crunch, even if revenue is going down. I've helped many, many companies, I think I’ve had 139 board meetings now. I've helped over 70 companies, and at least 7 of them I've helped to escape bankruptcy, including that with them following the exact process that I'm going to teach today. Whether someone despises accounting and numbers, feels pretty good about them but maybe not a pro, or even if someone's an absolute pro at numbers, I think the perspectives that we share today are going to be really, really powerful. Also just in case anyone's afraid of like oh, my god, here we go, numbers and accounting. I hate that topic. I avoid my accountant like the plague. I'll tell you what, I was rejected from Business School three times. I couldn't finish calculus. I don't know my brain wasn't wired that way, and the good news is you don't need any of that to be able to navigate the cash crunch. If you know how to add and subtract, in fact Jason, you don't even need to be able to add, subtract. If you know how to use a calculator to add, subtract, we can make this happen. The tool that I'll go more in depth with you on our webinar coming in about a week from now, everyone will actually get access to a prebuilt spreadsheet. All you got to do, it takes maybe 20 to 30 minutes to put your own info in. Literally where you see a red box is a crisis line, and where you see a green box, you're good to go. That's it. It's adding and subtracting, and red boxes and green boxes, that help you to navigate. To build your very own—personalized to your business—path to navigate the cash crunch. Jason: Before we get into this, I want to touch on and create a little transparency in this. A lot of entrepreneurs are fearful. There's a lot of shame around admitting that something doesn't look perfectly successful. There's a lot of shame around finances and money. Like oh, no, I've got debt or I've got this. I'm going to share what we're experiencing at DoorGrow. Leading up to this, one of my goals for this year was to get control of finances, really understand and get into financials, which is why I did a training with you, Tim, and I'm working with you on different things, because that's a step beyond the Profit First. I've got my Profit First coach and accountant that I work with as well. I've been doing lots of calls with her getting all these different loans that are coming out, getting everything going. I'm glad that I was already working on this stuff prior. We started cutting expenses dramatically, we started doing shifts. As I was getting control of things, I was like why are we paying for that? If we weren't in momentum already—you used the analogy of the airplane flying over the trees—we probably would have hit some trees. We probably would have crashed. We were already in motion. Sales, March just stopped. Property managers stopped buying products and services from DoorGrow because they were holding their wallets tight, they were scared, and that's about half of our revenue. We had to tighten our belt really quickly. We weren't really ready for that, we haven’t budgeted the beginning of our month to do that, so we had to get really creative. Using some of these strategies helped us to keep that plane above the tree level, navigating the cash crunch, or in my Indiana Jones analogy, outpaced the boulder so that we were able to make it through the end of the month. I'm really excited to share this property management. I'll point out that I believe the property management industry has a massive opportunity right now. There are property management companies, especially in California, Florida, and Hawaii, that they are growing. March was one of their biggest growth months in adding new doors, in acquisitions, period, simply because there is a whole big shift in the market. A lot of people are going to be needing property managers. We won't get really into that now but there's a lot of opportunity right now. Property management is a really safe place to be hedging against the market right now. Most property managers will probably have pretty good cash flow. It's only the third and we're already seeing most people are paying rent on single family residential. They're not noticing much of a difference. They've had a few people reach out for payment arrangements, but all things, I'm saying is that it's basically normal. They're a little concerned about May, so this May become even more hyper relevant in the next month or beyond. I want everyone to pay attention to this. Property managers, you guys are blessed right now, while a lot of businesses are just done. They're failing, their revenue is cut to zero, especially luxury markets, vacation markets, restaurants in a lot of situations. Businesses are closing, failing. This also is the perfect excuse for entrepreneurs that are not really committed to their business to get out, perfect excuse. A lot of people are going to take it. If you are not one of those people, and you're committed to making this work and you want to grow, reach out to DoorGrow, I want to make sure we help you capitalize on all this. Tim, let's get into these three things that we need to pay attention to. Tim: There are three things to navigate, navigating mindset, navigating expenses, and navigating cash. I don't normally share this piece, but because of what you just so wisely shared just around the shame that sometimes entrepreneurs feel around money or like oh, I'm a failure or whatnot. I'll tell you what. I think that being a leader is a lot of responsibility. Even if you're a leader of 1 or 100, it doesn't matter. It's that classic man in the arena story. It's not the critic who counts. I think that there's actually something incredibly skilled when an entrepreneur sees that things have changed, and they're ready to change with it. I think that that's actually a sign of prescience is the word, when we can see things that are coming and to act accordingly. I also think that Verne Harnish has a great expression, he says, "Growth sucks cash." If you've been spending a lot of money to grow your company, and that's why you don't have a lot of cash to show for it, there's no shame in being ambitious either. There are mistakes of sloths, and there are mistakes of ambition. Mistakes of sloths are when we make mistakes because we're sitting on the couch not going for it and life passes us by. Mistake of ambition is when we were really going for it and things didn't work out. Mistakes of ambition, it's even arguable to say that it's even a mistake at all. I just think if you're in a position where you’re a little tight on cash, or maybe a lot tight on cash, I get that the shame narrative is available and I don't know that I'd go there. First of all, it's not accurate, and secondly, it's not productive. This leads us into our whole first of our three steps mindset, navigating mindset. Before anyone decides to tune out and say mindset is going to be the secret or some law of attraction, maybe more airy type topic. I assure you, it is not. I assure you that it is not. In 2008 I had a real estate portfolio of my own, not a big portfolio, just four houses, but I ended up losing around $100,000 mostly of other people's money. Around that time, I also had a mentor who ended up being one of the two leaders of a $12 million Ponzi scheme. Didn't start as a Ponzi scheme but it became a Ponzi scheme, that's typically the way they go. His business partner is convicted in court, barred folding securities for 25 years, and ended up actually leaving the country. This is in Canada, where I'm from. It was extremely exhausting and stressful to go through all that and to see everything that was happening around me. It led to me developing an illness called Erythema nodosum. Erythema nodosum is something there's no real cure for. You just have to wait it out. It's just bed rest. Your body really swells up and becomes so painful to walk that you can't, then it becomes so painful that you stand that you can't, and you end up just lying in bed every single day. 50% of cases are stress related. There's no way to know for sure, but I'm pretty sure mine was stress related. If you think an economic collapse like 2008 is bad, or an economic collapse like 2020 is bad... I'll tell you what's even worse is having economic collapse and also having a health collapse, where you actually can't do anything about your situation because you're in bed. Thankfully, at the time, I had very, very, very few dependents, I had no teammates and so the impact, the blast radius was small, it was just on me. Had my mom not paid my mortgage for me for three months, I would have gone double bankrupt, my personal finance, my business finance. Talk about an eye opener, and I was only 28. I was only 28 at the time. When I talk about the importance of managing mindset, this is absolutely crucial that we manage stress. I'll tell you, I've been not just through economic collapse, economic plus physical collapse, and it is not a pretty situation. You do not want to go through that. Along the lines of how do we go about managing mindset, I think that there are a few important perspectives in addition to some of the obvious practices. I'll just start the obvious because it's pretty straightforward. Make sure you're getting some exercise even if it's just a walk on a treadmill, or a peloton bike, or something like that in your living room, whatever the case may be. Get some sunshine if you can, even though we're all locked indoors, that sunshine is super important. Diet, take care of that. Make sure you’re getting lots of water, maybe ease off on the booze a little bit too if you're someone who enjoys to imbibe a little bit. Be good to your body. Probably the biggest of all, for most people, is actually sleep. Sleep is something that we can lose very quickly in times of turmoil and stress. You might need to turn to things like small meditation, reading, journaling, or something before bed to help take your mind off of some of the challenges of the day. I'm telling you that it's absolutely crucial. When I look back at my sleep habits and actually have been keeping track of my sleep for years and years and years. Jason, I'd sleep for four hours and lay on the floor next to my computer, sleep. I'd work till 5:00 in the morning, I'd sleep four hours on the floor next to the computer and I would stand up, go pee, and go back to the computer and start working again. Desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures, but there is such a thing as too high a price to pay. Remember that this too shall pass. September 11th came, the world changed, and we got back to business in a new normal way. The housing crisis came, the world changed, and we got back to business in a new normal way. Jason: Tim, I'm going to touch on what you just said real quick, interject. These are really basic things but they're showing some significant correlations between COVID-19 and melatonin, and nitric oxide in your blood, vitamin D. These are the basic principles of health. I have training for our clients called health secrets and it's these basics. We talk about getting sleep, that's when melatonin starts to get produced in your brain. It's much higher in children, it gets less. You may want to supplement with that but getting good sleep, getting some sunlight, finding a way to get sunshine and sunlight on your body is going to be a big deal that releases nitric oxide from your skin into your blood, if vitamin D gets produced, these are basic. Sleep, nutrition, some physical activity, exercise, some sunshine, water and hydrate. This and all of that lowers your stress levels and it lowers our pressure and noise significantly. I love that you're sharing that. Keep your stress levels as low as possible and start physiologically. Tim: I think along with stress is this idea of engagement. I don't know if I need to share this part, but I'll say it just to be responsible. If someone is not engaged enough right now, you're not paying attention to what's going on in the world. If you're only at about a 6 or 7 out of 10 engagements, goodness gracious, it might be time to pick it up a bit. If you're also to 9 or 10 engagements it's probably too high, you're over stimulated, you're over engaged. We need that 8 out of 10 where we're focused, pupils dilated just a little bit. Eye on the prize. I always say that panic isn't productive. It's important to be urgent, not anxious, to be urgent, not anxious. Jason: I'm too Agilent right now. I'm excited and that's where I'm at. I love chaos, let's be honest. Maybe there are other entrepreneurs like that but when chaos happens, that's opportunity. That's where we get to be a light and we get to stand out, so I'm enjoying this even though it's uncomfortable. Tim: Very nice, very nice. I think that two other mindset pieces, one is that it's important to actually protect relationships. Yes, I mean the personal relationships that we have in our life because they can be such a source of security, joy, and comfort. I also mean business relationships. We're going to get to the other side of this, and unlike other past catastrophes that were measured in years, I think, yes, our economic catastrophe is going to be measured in years on this one for sure. I think that in terms of months, I think this pandemic is going to be measured in months, not years and years and years. One of my questions at each point is what is the state of the relationships of suppliers, vendors in the case of property managers, tenants, if you're managing on behalf of other people like your clients, your investors, and owners. What's the state of those relationships going to look like in three months from now, or six months from now when we're on the other side of this. You might make it through, but do you still have people that respect you? I heard a story the other day of an entrepreneur that just cancelled all their credit cards and said well, everything's just going to fail in terms of expenses and I'm going to add back one by one the few things that make sense. It's a shortcut to just cutting expenses. That's a way to go about it, but are you going to just supremely piss off everyone in the process? I think that protecting relationships is important to keep in mind. That doesn't mean that you're always bringing good news to everyone along the way, especially in the cutting expenses part of our presentation today. I think to be respected for being accountable, navigating agreements that you have with people rather than just abandoning them. My other mindset piece is that early action is crucial. If you discover that you need to get alone, act now before more businesses are closing, and possibly soaking up some lending capacity, or even just work capacity that bankers have to fill out applications and whatnot. If you discover you need to reduce a teammate's hours, tell them as early as possible so they can start making plans of their own personal and family finances. So that if a dip comes for them income-wise, they're prepared for it. If you can help them find a new opportunity elsewhere, do what you can to manage those relationships. I got an interesting perspective from someone who used to have a business helping individuals, not businesses, but individuals navigate bankruptcy. He said one of the most common patterns he saw with people going through bankruptcy is they didn't cut expenses deep enough or soon enough, deep enough or soon enough. I think that that's a very interesting perspective and maybe a usable guideline would be to say anything that's not going to help increase the profitability, and specifically cash coming into your business in the coming six months, I'd probably delay it. If you're thinking of a new website, if that's not going to immediately give you a bump in cash in the next six months, then let's put that on pause. We'll see if we can renegotiate it, put it on hold, delay it, or even cancel it. I think that's a really powerful way and maybe for you, the number isn't six months, maybe it's three months or eight months, whatever. But if we can keep an eye on what's going to bring cash in, in that timeframe, that really makes decision making a lot easier around what expenses you can continue with and which do not. This leads us to our second of the three steps of what we need to navigate and that is expenses. I think that something I'd say in my path of learning accounting and I even went and took night classes at the University of Alberta. I finally did go and take University accounting classes. It was not for credit though, they wouldn't let me into the for credit version, but they'd let me still sit in the classes and study. You know what, Jason, I got 100% of my midterm. I wanted to throw up my middle fingers as I walked into the room. I can't complete calculus, I can't get into business school, but here I'm getting 100% of my midterm. How about that? How do you like them apples? One of the big ahas that I had is that in my brain, because we all grow up thinking about personal finance. I think in personal finance, we think if I make $1, I can spend $1, and $1 in is $1 out. If I want to go buy a car, a pair of jeans, or a pair of shoes, I just need to get that amount of income to be able to pay for the shoes, the jeans, or the car. When it comes to business finance though it's a little bit different. To be able to buy $1 of expenses, we can't just make $1. It's because there's other expenses in the business. That's why we always talk about profit margin. If I have $100,000 in revenue, and I've got $50,000 in expenses, then I have $50,000 in profit. My profit margin is 50%. What that means is at the end of that year, or quarter, that month, for me to have an extra dollar to go buy something the next month, quarter or year, I don't need to make $1, I actually need to make $2 because my profit margin is only 50%. I have to make the $2 at the top, 50% gets stripped away by expenses. I'm left with $1 to now go and spend in the next month, quarter, or year. There's this idea, I invented it, it's called bloat factor. How many dollars do I have to sell at the top line to have $1 at the bottom line to be able to use and go and spend and buy something else in the coming month, quarter, or year? It's very simple math. If you're at 50% profit margin, which very few businesses are—very, very, very, very, very few businesses are—then you'd have to earn $2 to have $1 at the bottom to be able to go and spend in the coming period. If I've got a 25% profit margin, I have to make $4 at the top to have $1 to go and spend. If I'm at a 10% profit margin, which a lot of businesses around that 10% margin mark, I have to go make $10 to be able to have one at the bottom. Jason: This is super important for people to realize. A lot of us entrepreneurs, we look at our bank accounts and we think well, I've got $1 that we made. Now I can go buy this thing for $1. They think it's a one to one relationship. That's a huge mistake. Tim: Whatever your business's profit margin is, you got to figure out the bloat factor. Let's just say for example, you're at a 10% profit margin, that means you have to make $10 to keep $1, your bloat factor is 10X. If you cut $1 of expense, you now don't have to sell 10X that in revenue to be in the exact same place. For example, this is actually an extraordinary story Jason, this going to blow your mind. I talked to one of my private consulting clients here. He and I had like uh-oh, the crisis is coming call like three weeks ago. He cut $9,000 a month in recurring revenue. Does that mean that he doesn't need to sell $9,000 in the coming year? Well, of course not, because it's recurring expenses. Jason: I was going to say he lost them? Tim: No, no, no. He cut $9,000 per month of expenses. At his profit margin, his bloat factor is 8.7. $9,000 times 12 months in a year times 8.7, he does not have to sell $944,882 in the coming year. He cut the need to sell a million dollars just by cutting $9,000 a month in expenses. That is mind expanding. Jason: We have pretty healthy profit margins at DoorGrow, we’re pretty tight. We're a virtual team but we cut a ton of expenses. Maybe if we have time, I could list some of the crazy actions that we took to help make sure that we cash flowed. It makes a ton of sense to me. Tim: Big time. I'll just take a super simple example. I actually set up a calculator which we'll play with in the free webinar you and I will do. We'll play with the bloat calculator a little bit. If I have a profit margin of 10%—not uncommon for businesses—my bloat factor would be 10. If all I removed was $250 a month, that's it, $250 a month of recurring expenses, canceling subscriptions, canceling unused services, access to different websites and whatnot, I would not have to sell $30,000 in the coming year. $250 a month does not sound like that much to cut, and yet a 10X bloat factor, that's $30,000 you do not have to sell anymore. You tell me what's easier, finding $250 a month and cutting it, or going out and generating $30,000 in new revenue in the coming year? Jason: Especially right now for us. My accountant was really impressed with me. We cut $10,000 in monthly expenses, depending on what our profit margin is. That can be pretty significant for us as well in terms of how much sales we don't have to do to make it each month. That's made it breathable for us significantly. Tim: When you talk about being able to survive and thrive even when sales go down, you just created a situation for yourself where you don't have to sell as much. Even if sales go down, you can still meet it at a lower sales level and still get by which is really incredible. Jason: I met with my accountant last night and we mapped out the month with all the recurring revenue that we have coming in. If we do no sales this month, we will make it. Tim: I love that. Jason: We’ve pivoted quickly and reduced the expenses, but right now it’s a great opportunity for property managers to grow and we're offering some crazy deals. Hopefully, we'll also be doing some sales this month and making a big difference. Tim: I love that. I think you were sharing offline about how all these Airbnbs are now switching to long term rental. They got smoked out of the market and now they just want to go back to traditional long term rentals. So there's all this flood towards property managers. For a property manager that knows how to convert an Airbnb into a standard long term rental, ready to rock, and knows how to find those deals, goodness gracious, this could be a really revolutionary time. Jason: There are several channels right now for growth and each one is going to get bigger. Property managers right now, they can capitalize on it. We're pushing our clients aggressively to start taking action on these things right now. Tim: That's so exciting. There's another way that we can navigate the cash crunch even if sales go down. It's not just by managing expenses but it's also by navigating cash. Let's get into the third and final step in navigating the cash crunch. The free webinar that we're gonna do in approximately a week from now, we're actually going to do live exercises. We're actually going to share screens and you're actually going to see this spreadsheet in action. It's super simple. Anyone can do it. It can be a game changer. Of the multi-million dollar companies that I've helped save, some of them I didn't even do private consulting with. They just came, they know your numbers, or they heard me talk about just this one tool, The Cash Flow Forecast. They use it religiously when they're in a tough spot and it helps them get through. It's very exciting. There's actually two parts to this. The very first is actually understanding how much cash can I actually touch right now? There's a big difference between cash and free cash. Cash is the amount of money that's in the bank if you add up your checking and savings accounts. That's cash. Free cash on the other hand, we have to deduct some money out of that total cash to get the free cash to know what we can actually work with. From our total cash amount, we need to set aside committed costs. Committed cost is any amount of money you've promised that you're going to pay. Let's say for example a website, I've signed a legal agreement to get a new website done. If I don't manage that agreement to delay the project, I'm on the hook for it. If that's a $10,000 cash outflow that's coming up in two weeks from now, that is a committed cost. I haven't received the service yet but I've committed to receiving the service or the product for that matter. Jason: It's money that's earmarked. It's money that is going to disappear. If you can't pay it, it could cause some serious problems. Tim: Big time, getting all the way back to that whole topic about managing relationships even through the tough times. The second category that we need to earmark some cash is payables. Let's say that you already had the website built. It was finished last week. You've enjoyed the service. You've received the service or the product for that matter. You're on net 30 terms or net 60 terms and now you got to pay that person. That's a payable. Now, one of the biggest payables that is unavoidable is death is taxes. Thankfully, the payment deadline in the United States has been extended, which allows for some cash flow breathing room for entrepreneurs, which is very important right now. I would do my best to get clear and make sure that I've got a separate account for tax. I actually have a separate bank account. It's a little profit first esque or Richest Man in Babylon esque that there's a separate account for income tax and that's where I would hold my income tax. Jason: I have that too. The idea is to have it at a bank that is difficult to get into. That's completely a normal thing. Tim: You don't know the pin. You give it to someone else. Two keys to authenticate and turn to open the vault. Jason: The worst online bank ever or something like that. Tim: Or the brick and mortar bank that has no online, something like that. After committed costs and payables including income tax, we also need to remove or set aside any deposits that we've got. This is huge in property management because we have deposits from tenants. You can't really spend that money, it's not money that you've earned. It's just money that you're holding as a deposit so we got to park that on the sidelines. Then from there, whatever amount that you've got to pay in credit card debt or any other very short term, high interest debt. Most credit cards are 10% more. If you've got all kinds of rewards on your card, you probably are facing 19.99% or 21.95% interest. We really want to make sure that we're getting that paid off at the end of each month or else we're facing colossal interest rates. I would earmark that money to hold to the side as well. Then from there, there's two more. The next one is ultra-short term debt that you need to pay. Short term debt in accounting refers to any debt that's due this year. A Tim Francisism ultra-short term is in the next 30 days. If there's any portion of debt that you need to pay down in the next 30 days, I would earmark that cash as well because if you don't pay it, a lot of small business loans have liens or guarantees against your house. You might lose your house if you don't pay it, or you don't renegotiate that payment because there are some circumstances now where banks and different lenders are allowing you to skip the payment right now because of what's going on. Our last category where we need to earmark and subtract cash, I actually have a whole separate account in my bank for this particular category, is what's called Unearned Revenue. I don't think that's as big in property management candidly. For example, for someone who's offering other services, unearned revenue can be the difference between life and death to know what is earned and what's not. For example, if someone hires me for a year of consulting and they pay in a block amount of money at the start of the year, they pay the whole year in advance, I can only touch 1/12th of that with each month that goes by because it's unearned revenue until I've delivered that guidance for the year. Understanding our starting point of actual free cash is the first part of managing cash, and then the second part is to build out what we call a cash flow forecast. It's very simple. It's 13 weeks which is 90 days, just three months. We simply plot into the cash flow forecast where we've got cash coming in and cash going out. Jason, would it be appropriate for me to just show a screenshot of a cash flow forecast or should we wait until the webinar? Jason: The podcast listeners won't see it so let's get that, we’ll show it on the webinar. They'll just be listeners but it's pretty cool. I'll give you a testimonial related to this. I met with my accountant. We're mapping out all the recurring revenue that we have at DoorGrow and figuring out what expenses. We basically went through this. She started doing this manually in a spreadsheet real time, basically doing exactly what your spreadsheet does. She was figuring out which things are going to hit, what are the due dates for these. We're figuring it all out. I was like that's so funny because Tim has a thing that does this. She took me through it manually to make sure that our cash flow situation is going to be good because it's not just hey, this month we're going to make X number of dollars. We're going to have X number of expenses and we're okay. It's maybe at the beginning of the month, you have a whole bunch of things that are running and you're making that revenue later in the month or however it might work. You need to make sure it's all going to be timed perfectly. That's the brilliance of your cash flow thing because if it ever dips below zero, you're dead. It goes into the red, that's death. You have to make sure that you always know when things are going to hit and this is what your spreadsheet does, which is pretty brilliant. Tim: I agree. I totally agree. I'll tell you, when people are calling you every single day to collect money, 29 days is an extremely long time. It is an eternity. Being clear about when money is arriving, not just by the month to your point, but to the week. To be very clear about when cash is leaving to the week, and making sure that not you or anyone in your team is sending cash out the door too soon especially without other people like a bookkeeper helping or an executive assistant helping to pay different bills, if you don't direct your team on when to pay bills, people in your office or on your team, they might just pay the bills when they come in. They just might pay it exactly the same day that they open the envelope or they get the statement online. They're like oh, well, I was just doing my job. I was just paying this because it came in. You got to give your teammates leadership, guidance, vision, and direction on items like this especially in a cash crunch. People oftentimes ask me Tim, this tool is brilliant. How often should I be looking at it? I say that you look at the tool as often as you need to, relative to two factors. Number one, how low is your plane flying relative to the treetops? This is just the analogy we talked about earlier. If your wheels are clipping the tree tops and those trees might take your plane down, then you're looking at that cash flow forecast possibly every single week to make absolutely damn sure that you're getting the money in that you're expecting on that week, and you're not sending money out any earlier than you're supposed to on that week. Jason: Even daily. Tim: A hundred percent. The clients that I have that weren't had multimillion dollar businesses which can have a lot of complexity, moving parts, people, teammates, products, clients, and all the rest, they would literally have it open every single day just to make sure things were coming and going, that all the trains are running on time because there was no margin for error. The other reason why you'd want to have your cash flow forecast updated in front of mine regularly is if there's a lot of turbulence in the air. Whether you're flying close to the trees or not close to trees. If you got a lot of altitude, that's great. But if there's a lot of turbulence, that can do a lot of damage to your plane as well. Maybe you're not looking at it every single day, maybe not even every single week, but at least once a month. I hate making absolute statements because there's always an exception to the rule, but more or less 100% of entrepreneurs are in turbulence right now because of the climate that we're operating in. This is not a situation, it's limited to a city, a state, or even a country. This is worldwide. The cash flow forecast is how you make sure that you've got oxygen in your tank and that you can keep moving. Without that oxygen in the tank, doesn't matter how big and fast your flippers are to generate revenue. You got to have the cash in the oxygen tank. If you do hit any spots where you've got red on your cash flow forecast and you need to manage that crisis line, there are a lot of different strategies. Some of the more obvious strategies would be applying for some of the SBA loans. The only downside to that is we don't know when they're going to arrive. Secondly, bank lines of credit or if you've got access to them already and they're just sitting unused, that becomes an option. There's raising money from family and friends or an investor. If you wanted to, this is maybe less attractive for most entrepreneurs, we can actually sell shares in your company to raise money. There's also just the simple renegotiating if you need to pay something. Let's say it's $5,000, it's in three weeks from now, and that's when your first red square hits on the cash flow forecast, that's your crisis line. If you're going to be short just $1,000 or something, maybe you could call that person that you owe the money and say can I make it in two payments? I'll pay you in three weeks half, and then one week after that the other half. Lo and behold, just by splitting to 2 payments over 14 days instead of once, all of a sudden you've made up the difference and now all your squares are green. Now you've got not three weeks of safety, but five weeks of safety. Jason: The plane can fly through all of those and knock at the trees. Tim: Hundred percent. The thing is there's a lot of conversation out there about how we have to pivot our businesses and how we have to change our sales and our marketing. I think that is all extremely important conversation to have, absolutely crucial conversation to have. Inevitably, if we're going to pivot our offerings in any way, shape, or form, it's going to take time to roll them out. If it's going to take, say, four weeks to come up with a new offering of some special for an Airbnb owners that want to convert into long term rental, if you need to create a marketing campaign to identify those people, if you need to train up your staff to call certain Airbnb to see if they're distressed. Whether it's people, projects, processes, offers that you're rolling out, it's going to take some time. Even if you do it really quickly, it will probably still take at least a month, if not a few months, to be able to make that pivot and to make that implementation. It doesn't matter if you've got the best idea. It takes four weeks to roll out, but you only have two weeks of cash. That's like building a brand new airplane that's the world's fastest, sexiest, coolest, most comfortable, smoothest plane in the world, but if you only give it 100 yards of runway, it's not going to take off. It's just not. Jason: To boil this down real simple for those listening, all these opportunities for growth, it does not matter if your business doesn't cash flow. It's going to fail. Cash flow first and then let's get you focused on growth. Tim: Cash can come from different places. It can come from loans and other places, not just from revenue. To your point, Jason, I just think there are so many opportunities on the other side of this. We just have to make sure we have enough runway. Surprisingly, amidst this entire thing, I'd say the thesis of all of this is that the most important factors in navigating a cash crunch is actually not cash itself. It's actually time. Time is what we're playing for and cash gets us time. By getting time, we can now get out of panic. We can get back to being calm, clear because we've got a cash flow forecast. You can see what's coming down the pipe. We're confident because you know the exact steps you need to take and because we're clear, confident, and calm, now we can be creative to take advantage of the opportunities that are coming down the pipe. That is the name of the game. Those three steps, navigating mindset, navigating expenses, and navigating cash are how we build the runway that we then can launch off whatever the new opportunities are to take us into the new economy. Jason: I had Michael McCalla on the show. I've worked with Al Sharpton as a coach. One of the things Al would say is if you lower the pressure noise for an entrepreneur, that's where their brilliance and genius comes out. One of the things Michael Mccalla talked about is that when we have constraints or limitations which this market is creating, it's going to create innovation. If you give somebody the Pareto principle, if you give somebody an endless amount of time to do whatever, they don't have to innovate. We're innovating crazy inside DoorGrow. My team members are getting new ideas. We release some contractors. Our salaried staff are figuring out new ways of doing things, ways to save money, ways that are more efficient, ways that are faster. These are big opportunities right now for you and your team to give them some constraints, have them work with you on lowering expenses, solving the cash crunch crisis that you may be experiencing, and allowing innovation creativity to happen. If you can keep your presence calm, your team will be there as well. This is a step towards that. Tim: Did you want to share with folks maybe a little bit about our presentation we're doing next week? We're actually walking people through building a cash flow forecast. Jason: Yeah. Let's just touch on the details. It's going to be on Thursday, what day is that? Tim: April the 9th. Jason: It's going to be on April 9th. It's going to be 11:00. Our time, we're both in Austin, Central, which is 9:00 AM Pacific noon Eastern. What are we going to be sharing during this? What are you going to be sharing with everyone? Tim: You bet. First of all, folks, go to navigatethecashcrunch.com/doorgrow. I know podcast listeners won't be able to see this, but Jason, I'll just share my screen so you can see it. We've got Navigate the Cash Crunch with Tim Francis and Jason Hull. It's happening Thursday, April 9th, 2020 at 11:00 AM Central, which is Chicago time just like Jason just shared. In it, we'll be sharing the three step process we've talked about today. We're not going to go into as much detail into mindset because we talked about it here today already. We'll cover a few tools around expense management. The real star of the show is building your very own cash flow forecast. You can register for that webinar at navigatethecashcrunch.com/doorgrow. What you'll get is access to the training. You also get the cash flow forecast template as well, which you can just drop into your very own computer and get to work with seeing where your crisis line is. Hopefully, it's not too close and from there, seeing the exact path to navigating safely. If you happen to be listening to this podcast episode of the DoorGrow Show after the webinars already happened, so after April the 9th, 2020, no problem. You can still go back to the exact same URL. You can see the resources and the replays there so that you are not left in the dark. Jason: navigatethecashcrunch.com/doorgrow. Tim: Yes, indeed. Absolutely. Maybe you guys can throw that in the show notes or something like that for anyone listening to the podcast. Jason: Absolutely. Tim: That's that. I think that somewhat as a final thought on my end over here. It's just that deep down inside, we as entrepreneurs, we take on a lot to be great leaders. I do view property managers as entrepreneurs. I hope they do too, because they are there. They're doing the courageous things of entrepreneurs every single day. Sometimes leadership isn't easy. Sometimes it has uncomfortable conversations. Sometimes it has uncomfortable moments. I think that there's something really beautiful about getting clear on where we are. Oftentimes we talk about our goals and what's the most important to us, but we also have to be very clear about where we are. Getting to Austin, Texas is very different if you're starting in Chicago versus Waikiki. Knowing where we are right now with free cash, and then from there being able to map the path with our cash flow forecast, it really creates calm, it really creates clarity. Therefore, it really creates confidence which then creates creativity that we can now take on this new economy. Something I am very sure about is not anyone including myself could have specific data around this. I just know my gut, Jason, that the economy that we had two months ago, it's over. It's gone. I don't just mean bull versus bear. What I mean is the way we did business once upon a time is forever changed. I'm very nervous for what kind of discomfort is coming for anyone who thinks that how we used to do things is coming back to what it used to be. As we chart into these new territories, I think being able to be calm, clear, confident, and creative is the path. It takes courage and just a couple simple tools to be able to have that. I think that if we're operating from clear facts and confidence, we become lighthouses that can attract what we need to attract into our worlds, and also fend away what we need to fend away. We're not left making super emotional decisions. One of my mentors, his name is Keith Cunningham, he talks about emotion and intelligence often working inverse of one another. The more emotional we are, which is really saying the more that we're in our amygdala, the less that we're in the frontal lobe of our brain, the less our executive functioning is there and the less that we're able to make intelligent, clear, confident decisions. On the flip side, the more that we can make calm, clear, confident decisions, the less that we become really emotional about what's going on. That's not to say we're not passionate. We are so passionate about our businesses. Yes, emotion has its right place. We just don't want to get stuck making decisions or taking action that we may regret down the road. Jason: Absolutely. Tim, thanks for coming on the show. Everybody else, make sure you tune in when we do our presentation. For those listening, watch the replay. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. 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20-She's Selling What? Getting Your Spouse On Board With Your Business

You're Not The Boss Of Me!

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 13, 2020 33:15

Learn more about the content discussed...No Boss Talk:https://nobosstalk.comTim Farrant’s Website: https://networkmarketinghusband.comTim Farrant’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Shes-Selling-WhatMonday Morning Routine: https://www.bethholdengraves.com/routineThe Camp Elevate Facebook Group:hereBeth’s Instagram:@bethholdengravesBeth’s website:https://www.bethholdengraves.comProfit HER Way Course:https://www.bethholdengraves.com/profitKeynotes discussed:I was really my wife's obstacle for the first few months that she was doing this business. I did not make it easy for her and I've apologized to her for that. And yet she persevere through and she crushed it and she's doing great. (05:01)Getting the husband to understand that compensation plan by someone who's been successful and can answer their questions. (10:01)When we don't include the spouse in that, we're kind of setting ourselves up for more obstacles than we need to or even for failure. (12:57)And so you are going to put in a lot of work early on to build the business and then ultimately as you stick with it and you don't quit, you know, you keep going. Then ultimately the income far exceeds the hours that you're putting in. (17:06)I tell a lot of women when I have opportunities like this, to have these conversations that if your husband or partner believes or thinks that you're going to quit, they're not going to get on board. (20:39)When Did It Air...January 06, 2020Episode Transcript...Beth:Welcome to ‘You’re Not the Boss of Me’. If you are determined to break glass ceilings and build it your way, this show is for you. I’m your host Beth Graves and I am obsessed with helping you to not just dream it, but make the plan, connect the dots and create what you crave. Are you ready? Let’s get started.Hey bosses and welcome back. It is episode number 20 is that so exciting? It is for me. I hope you're as excited as I am. And this week in honor of episode 20 we are doing a giveaway, and this is all you need to do to get boss swag in the mail from us. It's Mandy, my boss that mails it out. So, what you're going to do is leave a rating and review. If you've already left a rating and review, share this on your Facebook or in your Instagram stories and just send me a DM over on Instagram or over on Facebook messenger or sent to our email that's listed in the show notes and just say, I shared it. Let us know how and when. And we will send you our brand-new boss swag that you are going to love. So, I want to read to you from Bridget a review for this week and she says, thank you for this podcast.Beth:I love the energy Beth brings. Every time I listen to her, it seems to be spot on. Always the message I'm needing to hear. And that leaves me anxiously waiting for the next one. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Bridget, for this review and I am hoping that this episode is exactly what you need to hear today. So, without further ado, let me tell you what we're doing on episode number 20 it's a privilege for me to have Tim Farrant with us today. He is the author of, She’s Selling What? a skeptical husband's guide to supporting his network marketing wife. So, he will talk to us about how to have those conversations with your spouse, his story about helping and watching and supporting his wife's Epic rise in network marketing and his own journey from shock and skepticism to understanding and support. And you are going to love the actual ideas and spot on things that he's going to help you to do.Beth:That not only will help your spouse and your family to understand your network marketing journey, but to have a better marriage overall. So here we go with Tim. I can't wait for you to hear his story. Hey everyone. I am so excited today because, well, the last time Tim and I were together, we had like a cosmic disruption in our interview. And as you heard in the intro, Tim is the author of, She's Selling What, and I'm so excited for you to not only hear about how this book and this movement came about, but also most of my listeners, I have a few, a few guys out there. And women, and I hear so often, I'm not sure how to talk to my husband. I didn't really tell him I was doing this thing. And Tim is here to give you guys all of the behind the scenes, how to make sure that it's a partnership to get your spouse on board and also to create something together, not just as you know, you up in your office, your husband downstairs feeling annoyed, irritated and agitated because I've been there. So, Tim, welcome.Tim:Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.Beth:All right, so we know that your wife has had a meteoric rise in the industry. So, can you take us back at the end? Not the end, but it's like the beginning of the next phase. You have this amazing resource, this book you're speaking at Top Summit. I get to see you there. Yay! And you're all over the place as the network marketing husband, so take us back. You haven't always been the network marketing husband. Give us a little background of how all of this came to be and a little bit about you.Tim:No, that's great. In fact, I would have probably been the anti-network marketing husband when my wife started, which is, you know, where so much of this passion comes from now. So, I remember sitting at the table, like I remember the restaurant we were at, and the table when my wife looked across and I love my wife, I love her to death. We have a great marriage. She looked across the table and she was like, okay, I think I want to do this business. And I literally, it's one of the reasons why I named the book. She's selling what? Cause I literally looked at her and I was like, you want to do what? Like come on. At the time she had another business that she was successful in. And I was just like, seriously, you're going to do this? And to be honest, Beth, it was because I carried with me a bunch of the skepticism, like a U haul truck full of skepticism and all of that with me that a lot of other husbands have and spouses and partners have about the network marketing industry.Tim:And so I was really my wife's obstacle for the first few months that she was doing this business. I did not make it easy for her and I've apologized to her for that. And yet she persevered through and she crushed it and she's doing great. But what we have found is that there's so many spouses that the truth is they end up giving up because their husbands are significant obstacles instead of really being fuel on their fire in their business. And so, my passion is not only for people that have been in business for a while, but especially for newer people to get the spouse on board as soon as possible. And if you can, it will fuel not only your business, but align yourself in marriage in a way that could be really incredible. So anyway, that's my heart and passion.Beth:Okay. So, I'm visualizing the you haul truck and all of the skepticism. And I hear so often, and I, you know, I deal with it all the time myself now, I have such unshakable belief in the mission and what I do and the people that I'm helping, people will say, well, it's easy for you. Well, so some people will say, well, it's easy for Becky. It's easy for Beth and Tim because they've built these ginormous teams and networks. But it's every single day staying, staying like you're a pastor. So, I always say it's staying in the word, staying in the stories, staying with what we see, amazing things happening. I just had somebody send me a silly article, I think, I don't even know. It was in a popular little online magazine about why the network marketing industry is ruining women. And, and again, the skepticism. So, tell me about this is you had a U haul truck full of skepticism.So did my husband, my husband Don, he was supportive, but he was like, Oh yeah, okay. He thought it was me, this little thing, right? And all he said was, Oh, like do you have to pay a monthly fee and how much do you have to order and how long are you going to stick with this? And I was fueled because I, the name of this podcast is, You're Not the Boss of Me. And so as being the youngest of three, I was always trying to prove that I should be the first pick for kickball I could win at tetherball. So, I, I was going to win. They're going to win, but not everyone has that tenacity. I think it was kind of, I think my two older sisters for that, because you know that was my birthright is, I'm going to show you. So, tell me the skepticism is there.Let's walk. Let's, let's just get right down to it. You're listening today, your spouses and on board. You can also use these strategies if it's a parent, if it's a best friend. If you, and I know that you and Becky work with her new distributors when they signed on, so let's call our person Sarah. Sarah's just signed up. She has an incredible experience with the product. She wants to see if she can make a go of it and she doesn't even want to tell her husband that she bought some product to get started. So, walk us through what you would, how you would counsel a new person to bring their spouse, their husband, their boyfriend onboard, and what does that look like?Tim:Yeah, that's really a, it's a good question. One of the things that we do, and even if you don't have no a husband who's supportive with you right now, but you have a team of people, we always engage the husband or partner of the person before they start the business. So if they've already bought some product and they're already ready to go for it, like one of the worst things that you can do is hide it from your husband because if you try and hide it out of the gate, then how does that ultimately end? Right? Like ultimately they're going to figure it out and then when they figure it out, if they already have skepticism, then you saying that, I know I was hiding this from you, but like that's not going to build more trust with them. That's only going to erode it more.So right out of the gate we sit with spouses and we ask them for what their questions are like, let's get it all out there, let's have the conversation. And so, trying to address those concerns right out of the gate is really, really important. Or I would say to the people listening to this, like if you don't feel confident doing that yet with your team as you bring people on it with someone in your upline, right? Someone who's been successful and say, Hey, would you engage my husband as well? And having a conversation. And what we do first that is incredible is we always help the spouse, the husband, the partner, understand the compensation plan. It's so important because until they understand that they have no idea how to talk about the business because we have been trained since we were like 16 years old to trade hours for dollars, which you know, Beth isn't the way this business works?And so getting the husband to understand that compensation plan by someone who's been successful and can answer their questions ultimately, then that even gets more of them on board and they can answer questions and then they begin. I've seen, many times or the husband starts looking at the wife and going, is this what you want to do? Like, why don't we try and go for this rank? Or when, what's your goal to try and get to that? And you start to see them be engaged when they start to get how the business works also.Beth:Absolutely. And one of the pieces that when one of my upline, is also Blair Critch, and they also have a passion for marriage, and she had brought to my attention in the beginning, she said every Sunday night have a family meeting. So, I would sit down and write in understanding the comp plan and the goals. That is so huge. And when we talked the first time before we were interrupted by the thunderstorm and wifi, you had said to me that piece of the comp plan and since we started that when someone new comes aboard, I always say to them, listen, let's schedule a zoom with your husband in the next four days so that we can talk about this first bonus. We'll look at the comp plan, he can ask me questions and I also have had my husband have some personal phone calls without the spouse there because he'll say, let me, you know, let me give them a quick call.And it's really, I've heard back from the people that have engaged with us to say the whole process has reunited them in a way in their marriage, like the beginning, because you're working toward a common goal, you're communicating your sharing. I will say to Don, I will say, here's my goal this month. Here's what I need to do. And I give him permission to push me a bit because you know I do that when I'm, when I'm on a fitness journey right now I'm, I want a Peloton and I could go out and buy one. But I said, okay, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to run to the red line every day, give it, and we have the goal because we want to redo the garage. So, it's like the network marketing piece. So, the communication of the goal and having that. Now do you bring your kids into, to part of the celebrating of when you reached certain ranks or milestones, do they come into play as well?Tim:Yeah, absolutely they do. And I want to say this to everyone just to summarize what you're saying to Beth because it's so good. We don't like this truth sometimes, but the truth is no other person will impact your success more than your spouse, positively or negatively outside of you. Right? There's no other person that's going to impact your success more than your spouse, whether positive or negative. And so, and that's true for both sides of it. And so, when we don't include the spouse in that, we're kind of setting ourselves up for more obstacles than we need to or even for failure at sometimes. And so, I love the fact that you're getting husbands involved in and having those conversations. It really, really is a huge part. But with the kids, absolutely. So, we do little milestone things with our kids. We have a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old.And so, you know, we do everything with them from vision boards to they know, you know, mom's going for a particular rank this month or a particular goal. So, we're all going to sacrifice. And then, you know, when we get to the end of it, we've done like mini shopping sprees with them or when it's been really big. We've taken a trip together and it's fun because when your kids know that, especially if they're younger, if your kids know that, they're like pushing my wife, you know their mom also, where they're like, mom, how's it going with the goal? And you want some accountability and your goals, get your spouse and kids involved. They will hold you accountable, you know, if there's kind of a carrot or prize on the other side for sure.Beth:Oh absolutely. For sure. They love that piece. I have an almost empty nest and so when I started in network marketing, I had one in junior high and one in high school. Donnie was in junior high and McKenzie was in high school and we did that. We looked at, okay, and this is what I'm working toward. And I was really clear too, we talk a lot on this podcast, him about not dropping the glass balls, your spiritual life, your family life, your health goals, because all of those pieces have to be a part of your success with your business. And so having the communication with your spouse of like, Hey, this week, and I told I have a retreat this coming weekend and it's been planned and we talked about is this a good time, is this, how does this work with our son's schedule? How does this work with your schedule and feeling as though it's a team effort and the goals and they are all a part of the whole family piece.So I want to back up because something just came to me. I was looking at my notes before I got on of frustrations that I've heard from women that are starting in the business of helping that spouse to unpack that U Hall of skepticism. So, I always like to let people know like here are the reasons why the network marketing industry is good for women, especially women who want flexibility and freedom to perhaps be at home with their kids to not have that glass ceiling. What I saw when I first got started is I didn't have to figure out a distribution channel or build out a technology platform or hire a marketing team or HR, the zillion things that our family business had us doing because building a traditional business requires all of those things and all I had to do was talk to people, share the love of the product, share the company, build community and culture. Those were the pieces. It was like, I could start making money from day one. What are some of the ways that you help spouses to understand when they have that skepticism? Oh, nobody makes money in these businesses. Oh yeah, blah blah blah. What are, what are your go to points?Tim:Yeah, yeah absolutely. Because it's a huge issue. I mean some guys come into it and they think their wives should make like thousands of dollars the first month or if not it's a scam of some kind. You know? And I think one part is definitely understanding the compensation plan so that they have that as a framework for their, just their knowledge and understanding of how it all works. So that's a big one. But also, like you got to explain to your spouse and help them understand that building a business like they can't expect year 10 results on a month one business. Like it's not going to happen. And so, you are going to put in a lot of work early on to build the business and then ultimately as you stick with it and you don't quit, you know, you keep going. Then ultimately the income far exceeds the hours that you're putting in.But it's real work, like it's hard. And so, having that conversation early on for them to understand this is going to be difficult. So, I always encourage women that are coming into the business and starting their business to look at their husband and just literally look in the eyes and say, would you support me for six months? Would you please support me in this for six months? I'm not asking you for like the rest of your life, but for six months because it's going to take time and it's going to take hard work and I'm not going to make a bunch of money early on. But that's the way a business works. And obviously the lower investment, right? Like you said, not the complication and the lower investment to get a business is what makes network marketing such an incredible opportunity for so many people. So, is that, does that answer the question, Beth?Beth:Yep. And I love, I love that piece of it. If I went to my husband and said, listen, I want to go back to school and become a physician's assistant. That's what my sister did when she was 35 years old. So, did she make money right out of the box? No, she invested. I mean, you're going to make money right away in network marketing. You can start earning while you learn. But I like to say that. So, we always hear, Oh, she became a six-figure earner. She became this, she became that. And so, people think it's immediate success like you said. And so, I always say, what would happen if you invested five years? You said one, and I would say if I told you that showing up consistently, and maybe we did people, I always say, how much time do you have to invest?Well, okay, so a teacher that's making $1,000 a week or $1,500 become much time. Is she investing and preparing her lesson plans? How much time do you invest in preparing your sermons and working with your youth groups and helping everything in the church? So, I always say that the time commitment will reflect the income. And also, there's a piece of it too that we have to look at. People don't get lucky that some people walk in and have a larger network. Like Becky walked in and she had a blog following, right? She had people that were, that were curious and interested in what she was doing. She still had to have conversations, but someone that might have just started on social media or just started marketing will have a different path.So I'm always saying keep your blinders on, believe it can be you ask for spiritual guidance, always right? As for, I always say in my prayers in the morning, I take action with faith and clarity. Who will I serve today? And then having the spouse on board, the family on board, and being exceptionally coachable. These are like all pieces. So when you see someone that comes in into your space and wants to have you, we're going to talk about one last thing and wants to have you talk to their spouse and they're excited, they've got belief, they're ready to go, they've got the desire, and then it doesn't go as planned. The success isn't immediate. How do you then revisit, do you revisit that conversation? Because the last piece is commitment to go until no matter what. So, can you talk a little bit about commitment as a family, what you've seen with some of the couples that you've worked with?Tim:Yeah. In fact, I also, I tell a lot of women when I have opportunities like this, to have these conversations that if your husband or partner believes or thinks that you're going to quit, they're not going to get on board. And if you're just objective about it, can you blame them? Right. Like if you, if the tables were returned and they wanted to start something, but they were always, you know, complaining or they weren't putting in the work or they weren't setting the goals or they just were super negative or whatever it is, you would look and say, are you about to quit this? You know, and so your mindset on even the person building the business to say, I'm not going to quit. I'm going to keep building this. I'm going to keep going. Builds faith in your husband, builds faith in your kids.And when that's there, of course they're more likely to get around it and to keep going. And when you are struggling, reach out to, again, someone in the upline or someone on your team to have the conversation with you and your spouse. So, to sit together with both of you again and say, okay, so you set some goals and they weren't there. Well let's revisit it. Like you said that, is it the time you're putting in, you know, did you have too high of expectations of how much time you could put in or do you need to readjust some things? You can put some more time in, you know, what are those income producing activities? Are you doing them or are you not doing them? And having that honest conversation with the both of them together helps again, just realign, re-establish a baseline, and then setting new goals together and then helping them run towards that for a season. So, the struggle happens when those conversations happen in a silo and the spouses aren't talking with each other because that's not going to build more alignment and trust with them.Beth:And this is a big piece too, is not bringing the negativity and that using the second, then we open ourselves up for the complaining, the negativity, the doubt, and using your spouses as kind of the punching bag for that. Then they're like, well, this isn't making you happy. So, making sure that positive mindset, let's jump to you dealt with this personally. You started to see it in Becky's business. You started to see that there was really a need to educate, to inform, to support the spouses. So, you jumped into a book project, talk about the book, how can people get their hands on it and share a little more about that journey. I love it. I've read it, I've shared it. It's in my, when I send out a new person, joins my team personally, they get a package from me and that is always inside of there. It's kind of like the fab fit and fun box. That's one of my pieces inside of their welcome box. So, share a little bit more about your book and where people can get their hands on that. And you know that was a huge project for you.Tim:Yeah, it was a huge project and now we're having this conversation. We're seeing how marriages were being hurt, women were giving up. And so, I couldn't understand why nobody else was addressing or talking about this or getting resources. And so, after several months of like me personally wrestling and like fighting with God, because I felt a calling to write this book, you know, and I didn't want to, and I got enough going on in my life. Like all of that, I ended up, you know, writing this book. And I mean literally thousands of people and thousands of husbands that have gotten their hands on it, you know, weekly. Now I'm getting messages from people whose marriages are being helped and businesses are growing because of it. And it's just been a humbling, humbling journey and we'll see where this all goes. But my heart and passion for it is to see women build more successful businesses and see their marriages and families thrive in the process. So, you can get the book anywhere you can get on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or anywhere you want as well as I record it on audible. And so that was a big part cause a lot of husbands don't read. And so, guys are engaging it and it's just been received really, really well. And I'm humbled to be a part of it.Beth:Well, I thank you so much for that resource for thousands and thousands of spouses that just needed to hear and have it in their audible when they're walking the dogs when they're at the gym and also for that push to create conversations and to create a way to bring the whole family on board. So, it's huge in my business as a shift to help spouses. It's also brought to light that when someone comes aboard, we don't have that in our onboarding process. That question, and I've added it. Tell me about your family. Tell me about the support. What, what does support look like for you? So, I like to leave everyone with a good question. And that question I always would say to say each week is how does support look? And being able to ask to ask your spouse to say, listen, this is what support looks like for me and what you need from me.Like have that open level of conversation instead of being reactive, be proactive. I know that when life feels aligned for my family, it's when I'm in a proactive state, when I've really, really blocked my calendar. When I'm not running from here and they're trying to be on the phone, having a conversation with my spouse, checking messages. I always say this, Tim, be wherever your feet are, if you're with your spouse, be with your spouse, not with your team on your phone. If you're with your kids, be with your kids and block that time and there will not be resentment if you are so mindful of that time being spent and go to the date night, keep your phone in your purse, your team will survive, right? So, I want to end with three ways. I'm just throwing this out at you. Three ways that you can tell people to keep their marriage alive and vibrant while building a successful network marketing business.Tim:Oh, you're asking me three ways. Three ways. I thought you were…I was waiting for you to give the magical three ways Beth. Three ways. Okay. Three ways to keep your marriage alive while you're, okay, so you said this, but one is definitely a regular date night, right? Regular date night, family night. You got to do it. You got to carve out the time. Like you just said, your team will survive, and your spouse won't resent you. So that's number one. Number two, you have to include your spouse. We've talked a lot about that in this, but the spouse, can I talk about this a ton in the book? Like the spouse can't just sit on the sidelines and just observe from afar your business, they got to have a couple of small contributions. You got to share the wins with them. Ultimately, you want for your wins to become his wins as well as you go through this.So there's got to be some, some contribution on their part. And then, let's see, what's a third one? Oh, this is so good. Okay. You've got to treat your spouse. You got to be the spouse that you want your spouse to be. So just kind of an overall, as you're building this business, flip the script and say, you know, how would I want my spouse to react when this is going on? Or if, or if I was building a business and things weren't going like maybe you had even hoped, like how would I hope my spouse would respond and then respond that way or what would I hope they would do if the tables were turned and then act that way with them as you're going through this process, because it's a journey and building a business is hard. Anybody that's going to tell you that building any type of business is easy is lying to you.Beth:Amen to that. It's hard and I love it. You want to be, that's huge for sure. Marriage, longevity. I'm going on 25 years of being married. I love those pieces and yes, it is hard and be the spouse you want to be. And here's one that I'm going to add to it, because I didn't do this in the beginning and this just came to mind is, you know, you get teams on the West coast, she get teams in London and I would go up to my office at night and I would, you know, work and he would go to bed without me. And so I'm going to add that there may be one night a week that you're working on a different time zone, but 99% of the time, shut down, create a boundary around your time together and, and go to bed at the same time.Like have that ritual of whatever that because that's where you start to feel that disconnection. And so that's been a big piece in terms of being the spouse that I wanted to have was how would I have felt if he was working all night, didn't come downstairs and check on me. And they hear you in your office, you're on zooms, you're laughing. You know? So that shifted a year ago and I felt this complete reconnection. And so, I appreciate that so much. Be the spouse that you want to be. So, Tim, any closing thoughts you have for our podcast listeners today?Tim:No, I think this has been great. I just want to encourage everybody, and I know you do this Beth, and it's been part of your journey as well, but if you make it to the end and you've been super successful in your business, but you turn around and your marriage and family is in a destructive place, you haven't won and you haven't been successful. A definition of success, somebody shared with me years ago, success is when the people closest to you respect you the most. And so yes, you need to build a business. Yes, you need to work on it, but you really can do it in a way that you see your marriage and your families thrive in the process. And so, I guess maybe that's the closing thought.Beth:That is a perfect closing thought. Thank you so much Tim, for being with us today and grab his book, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. There's still time for you guys to get tickets to the Top Summit. It's in February, it's in Naples. Go to the topsummit.com you'll be able to hear Tim and Becky speak onstage on this very topic. I'll also be speaking on another topic, but it's a whole lot of fun. I don't even want to give a sneak peek, but it has to do with finding your spouse, but we're relating it to how you find the perfect recruit network marketing, so it's going to be a whole lot of fun. And Tim, thank you and I will see you in February and real life.Tim:Absolutely.Beth:All right, cool. Hey, you guys, check out the podcast next week because it is going to be something you don't want to miss. I have another exceptional guest who is also an author and we will catch you guys all next Monday.Thanks so much for hanging with me today on the podcast and remember, you can create what you crave. If you're looking for a supportive sisterhood, I would love to see you over in our free Facebook group. As most of you know, I love camp. It's part of, 'You're Not the Boss of Me' because when we're building this thing, we're doing this thing. We need a supportive sisterhood and I also crave more fun and more connection. Join us at camp over in the Facebook world, thecampelevategroup.com or just click on the link above and we will see you around our campfire and help you to create what you crave.

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Tim Campbell: 'Only two of us knew what The Apprentice was!'

Small Business Snippets

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 20, 2019 19:57

In this episode I meet Tim Campbell, an entrepreneur and the first winner of The Apprentice back in 2005. We discuss his views on apprenticeships and the idea behind one of his more unusual business ventures. Be sure to visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more articles on apprenticeships and grants. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Want to read the Tim Campbell's podcast interview instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Tim Campbell, an entrepreneur and the very first winner of The Apprentice back in 2005. Since working for Lord Sugar, Tim has launched Bright Ideas Trust, a charity for disadvantaged young entrepreneurs and Alexander Mann Solutions, a talent acquisition firm. We’ll be talking about what it was like to be in the first crop of candidates on The Apprentice and how to give interviewees useful, constructive feedback. Anna: Hello Tim. Tim: Hi, how are you, Anna? Good? Anna: Yeah, very well, thanks. A bit of a grim day but doing alright. How are you? Tim: Oh, if we didn’t have the weather to complain about, what would we have? Anna: Exactly! It’s the essence of being British. Tim: It is unfortunately, but let’s hope for better tidings to come. Anna: Awesome. Right, for a bit of context, we are recording in the Alexander Mann Solutions offices today – in a sound booth, which is very nice. Tim: It is indeed. But one of the interesting things that amazes me about London and is very exciting, is the juxtaposition between the old buildings we can see and the new cranes you can see everywhere. Anna: Exactly, yeah. It’s wonderful seeing the architecture of the new vs the old. You wouldn’t think they work together, but they do. Tim: That’s the thing about London – we make it work. That sings to the essence and the entrepreneurial nature of individuals from the UK. My mum was an entrepreneur, but she didn’t call herself an entrepreneur. She was just making ends meet, as it were. A Jamaican immigrant to the country who had three children and brought them all up to be relatively successful. But she always underpinned that with working hard, going out and earning a living. And London has always facilitated that and I suppose the inspiration for me in a lot of the things I do is my mum in that she came over with all the skills and attributes but didn’t have the knowledge, contacts or mentors to be able to do that. Do you think your mum didn’t call herself an entrepreneur because she didn’t go through the formal avenues of having a grant or a mentor? Tim: Definitely. She just didn’t have time to worry about the nomenclature, she was just focused on the outputs and I think that one of the things we talk about with the people that we either mentor or support is to strip it down to its bare necessities. Lots of people are very interested in the successful outputs of getting in business. They want the money, they want the accolades, they want the title and we have to start at the very beginning: ‘What problem is it that you’re solving? What is your business? Then we get some blank looks and they say, ‘We just want the money at the end. Can’t you just give me that?’ And I say, ‘Well, no actually – there’s a process to it.’ I think with my mum and me and the people we try and support, we try and encourage them not to focus on what the title is because titles are for corporate environments, whereas when you’re a business owner it doesn’t matter, particularly when you run a micro or small business, you do everything. But essentially, you’re focused on the output and delighting the customer. As long as you keep that at the forefront of your mind, then you can enjoy the pats on the back and the celebrations of what you’ve done. But never lose sight of why you’re in this and that’s to delight a customer and make them happy, and then get them to give you money as a result. The thing I’d like to talk about is your time on The Apprentice. You were on the very first series before anyone even knew what it was. Tim: A long time ago, neither did we! We didn’t know what it was. For the 14 contestants on the first show, there were probably only two people who did the investigation to find out exactly what The Apprentice was, which is a bit stupid to admit, but I’m going to be very honest. Anna: Was one of them you? Tim: Yeah. Anna: Oh really?! Tim: No, I didn’t. I was very naïve, I actually applied for a job with the main focus being to get the six-figure salary. That’s what I wanted. Because [the programme] wasn’t as popular as it is now and didn’t attract the millions of people watching every single episode, so it was a different beast. But when I applied, it was about securing a salary that would look after my family. And naïvely, I just applied thinking that 1) I was going to work with a great British entrepreneur in the then Sir Alan (as he is now Lord Sugar) and 2) it was a sizeable multiple on the money I was earning at the moment. I thought, ‘What could I lose?’ Little did I realise what you could actually lose, but that’s why I carried on with the application and thankfully it was a positive outcome. Yeah, that’s it – because people who apply now see it as a platform for a business idea that they might have and obviously you get the investment at the end. Tim: Correct. I suppose the thing for me is that the bigger opportunity for a show like that, apart from shouting and screaming at the contestants who don’t want to do the dreadful things they sometimes have to – or coming out with the ridiculous one-liners they seem to continually do every year without fail – is learning from Lord Sugar himself. He’s a brilliant entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word, in that he can spot problems, come up with solutions and deliver true value, not just to investors, but stakeholders, customers, in what he would be able to deliver. From what I’ve seen, there weren’t as many zingers in the first series as there were later on. What else is different between then and now? Tim: Probably because I was just boring. On the first series, I remember all of the contestants. All of us were really competitive – we just wanted to win. What we agreed on very early, was that the way we could secure victory was by not losing task and not falling out with each other. If we worked as a team, we’d actually do more. That must have been so annoying for the television producers because that’s not what they want to hear, but that’s what we had. When we went on task, we were going to be polite and civil. And when we were on task, we were going to be competitive, but not devious to the point where we would hurt other individuals. That wasn’t on our agenda. And that sung to our values – particularly me and Saira – who were project managers a number of times. Our values were that you could win without being negative to people. And I think that’s sometimes lost, particularly when people talk about business in general, where the image that people get is ruthless, belligerent character that kills everybody and steps on the heads of minor people to get to where they are. And there are some people who are like that in business, but the vast majority of people I’ve worked with – either on the show or in business in the real world – just want to survive. Anna: Those relationships are so important. Tim: It’s critical. What we took from our series was that the power of strong relationships helped you go further. As you said, the prize in the first series was a job with Sir Alan, back then. You set up his health and beauty division at Amstrad. Tim: It was a very interesting journey. You were asked on day one to come up with a health and beauty product. And I thought, ‘What is this?’ And what I saw it as was a test. What we were trying to do – and we did successfully, was replicate other multi-level marketing processes. We got other women to sell the products to other women. It was a very interesting two years I spent. The whole gambit of business was involved in that particular project. I look at it like it was a real-life MBA. It was phenomenal in terms of learning and experience. I still rub cream on the back of my hand now and say, ‘Ooo, isn’t that lovely?’ because I understand how it was all made. How was the reception of MLMs back then? Now we’re seeing a backlash, particularly with companies that don’t have a great reputation, make false promises, are quite exploitative. Tim: Yup, and I think people are right to see a backlash against those ones who don’t deliver against what they say they’re going to. The key thing that I learned from Lord Sugar was to deliver on your promises. The products that we put on were about empowering people to make a revenue from the products that we had already generated. But we had very clear outputs, a very clear rewards structure and had very clear marketing, which had no false pretence behind it. And the good thing about going on a television programme which had multi-million people viewing it is that you get held to account very quickly if you don’t do what you say you’re going to do. So thankfully, all of the work that we did was regulated, it was checked and verified by independent people and delivered against the promises. What we were really focused on was them learning about business while possibly generating some income for themselves as well as using a good, highly potent and effective product. If you were to go back on The Apprentice now and win the investment (£250,000) rather than the job, what would you do with it? Tim: Very interesting. I think if I were to do something today it’d be around artificial intelligence and some form of tech. You look at some of the industry sectors on a medium scale which are accelerating in excess of 20pc every single year and you’re immediately gravitating towards use of tech, particularly in the financial sectors. The fintech market has been amazing. I think there are some really interesting plays in the insuretech space and the edutech space. Education and people insuring against risk are never going to go away. If you look at some of the fast-growing businesses at the moment, they’re providing ancillary services behind businesses, so courier servicing, making sure that you can deliver consultancy advice and guidance into business. Or anywhere around tech in terms of promoting business propositions. Those are the areas I would’ve come up with a proposition for him to give me some money for. I know you’re supportive of apprentices. From a small business owner’s perspective, we’ve seen that some are put off hiring apprentices because they don’t have time to train them or they can’t afford them. What would you like to see that would make things easier? Tim: I think for small businesses you’ve got to make the decisions which are really important to your company. You can’t just follow on. It’s got to be right for you as a business. The difficulty with a small company is if you make a mistake the impact is much bigger than in a bigger company where you make a mistake, it might not be right, but you can move around and you’ve got the resources to absorb that. Small businesses have to make really critical decisions around can they take on an additional wage because when you take on an apprentice, it’s not a free resource. In my opinion, you have to pay them the living wage – and the London wage if you’re in the capital. Then you’ve got to work into the equation how long the value add is to you as a business owner. They’re going to have to learn the ropes and get off the ground before they become of value to you as a small business. And the training that comes with an apprenticeship – how valuable could that be to an organisation in making an assessment? It’s not for every small company, with the amount of supervisory element to an apprenticeship programme, the resources may not be there for a small business to be able to go along that journey yet. But it’s something that should definitely be on the agenda and maybe for the smaller to medium-sized businesses that are growing, as opposed to the micro businesses who are at the beginning. I’m going to take what is typically seen as a more morbid turn here. I understand that you are the director of a company called death.io. Tim: Yes, I am indeed. And rather than scaring lots of people, it should fill them with joy. What we have done, and when I say we it’s me, my co-founder Paul Wiseall and our chairman, Tom Ilube, have come together to start a company which is using artificial intelligence to help people better prepare for the inevitable. And the rather shocking title of ‘Death’, similar to the likes of Virgin or Google, makes you wonder what this is about, where is it coming from and it’s a bit of a shock factor. We want it to stick in people’s minds that this is one of the last taboo areas that you should be talking about. Because the whole industry is a conversation which happens behind closed doors, in hushed tones, and no one really wants to speak about it. There are so many different ways to talk about death. What we at death.io have done is utilise technology to help you live forever. We are able to take the essential elements of you as an individual and tell your story, tell us the significant moments of your lives and utilise technology to create a virtual person out of those recollections, which others can interact with. Is that verbally or in writing? Tim: Both! At the moment, we have a platform which allows you to talk using typed words back and forward to your avatar. But the developments are quickly incorporating voice into that. So very much like you might like you might tell a speaker to turn the lights or the music on in your house, you will have the ability to talk to yourself via one of those devices as well. Anna: Oh, that’s kind of eerie. Tim: In one way, I can understand why people think, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t want that, where would that come from?’ But at the same time, bringing it to back business, I had the privilege of speaking to the head of the Chinese Takeaway Association. It was very interesting – I didn’t know one existed – but one does! What he said is that you’ve got a lot of people who have come over as immigrants to this country and worked really hard to build up fantastic businesses within every single major city in the world. They’ve done that to facilitate a better life for them and their children. What happens though is that these children go to fantastic schools, go off to university, and may decide that they don’t want to run Mum and Dad’s Chinese takeaway. What happens to all of that information? What happens to all of that insight around how you pick stock, how you purchase stuff, how you set up a marketing campaign to get people to do stuff? That information has to go somewhere otherwise it just passes with the individual. It’s also an opportunity for us to make sure people have their lives in order: have you got the right insurance in place? Have you got the right protection for your family going forward? We have the facility to let people do that in a nice, friendly, social way. Yeah, from what I saw I like the holistic approach of it, especially with the blog. It’s touched by so many of today’s topics like rapidly advancing technology, sustainability, gender identity. It’s fascinating. I like the tone as well – normally with traditional funeral care providers and planners there’s a formal and sombre tone where again, on the blog, it helps breaks the tension around, as you say, a taboo subject. Tim: We had a great conversation with a phenomenal agency called Ready Ten, started up by a very good friend of mine, David Fraser. He was the only agency that picked up the potential of this in terms of how you could turn this into a positive conversation. Their ideas around how you could really grasp a difficult subject like death – you have to talk about these things because they’re not going to go away. We want to take the stance of not making light of the conversation, but in lightening the conversation around subject matters that have to happen. Like, if you got sick, what would happen? What’s your blood type? I don’t know – most people don’t know! If you don’t know what your blood type is or you don’t know if you’ve got any hereditary diseases, we have a way to capture that and share the true essence of who you are rather than the curated bit that you might do through other social platforms. I think there are some interesting ethical questions around grieving, the way that people’s memories are held. Because we touch so many people, you might want me to come back alive, but I might’ve been really horrible to someone else who doesn’t want me to continue on living. What are the ethical implications of all of those? But for us as a platform, we want to give that ownership and option over to the individual. Where you can sign up to have this delivered in any way, shape or form based on what you feel those around you need. It’s not for us to act as judge and jury around that, but it’s going to be a very interesting development to see how far people want to take it. Well, I’d love to talk about this a bit more, but I must move onto our last topic. You’re an advocate of the Fight for Feedback campaign, encouraging employers to give interviewees good quality feedback. In your opinion, what makes quality, decent feedback from an employer? Tim: I think it’s incredibly important that employers to understand that they have a responsibility to leave candidates with a good candidate experience from their resource process. Why is that important? I was always told that it’s important to say goodbye in a nice way rather than just say hello in a positive way. Those people will tell another ten people exactly how you treated them. It’s very important from an employer brand perspective to make sure that employees – whether they’re successful or not in going through a process – leave with a good feeling. And the best way to leave with a good feeling is to be told ‘No, but this is how you could improve’. As employers, I think we all have a responsibility to raise the level of our candidates, and I think the only way you can do is alert them to what they can do better in the future. Let me make it clear, because there are lots of very big employers who are saying, ‘Hang on a second, Tim – we see hundreds of thousands of people every year for our placements.’ Yes, that’s true, there are a lot of people coming through. It would not be impossible to put a structure in place which says to individuals, ‘You might not get direct verbal feedback from every person you spoke to but we can at least highlight the areas that we didn’t select you on.’ There are so many candidates who talk about filling out an application, taking the time to nurture a CV and make it bespoke to that employer, write the covering letter, do everything necessary, and don’t hear anything – not even a ‘no’. That’s a very negative seed that’s been planted around that brand and the value that they place around the people who interact with them. And for me, just to be able to say, ‘No, but these are the areas you fell down’ is as powerful as a half-hour phone call with an individual to walk them through exactly what they could do to improve. Now, the scale of when you can do that may alter depending on how far they’ve gone through a process and how senior the actual role is. I don’t mind that. And the other thing to think about from an employer’s perspective is that it’s a two-way process. You could get some free marketing research from individuals who have interacted with you and they can tell you what they found and that can help you develop and get better as well. You can create a brilliant campaign, attract a fantastic funnel of talent, but you don’t know unless you’re asking them how they are receiving it. I think feedback is such a small thing to do which can have such a big impact on how people perceive that brand and how they will go and work in the future. So, if somebody has a big problem presenting information in a way, tell them, help them to be better and you never know, they might come and work for you in the future because of that feedback. Plant good seeds; give good feedback. Anna: Well, that seems like the perfect place to end it on, so I’ll wrap up there. Thanks ever so much for coming on the show, Tim. Tim: Thanks so much for having me, Anna. Let’s hope that the sun is shining now in London and elsewhere and that all of our businesses improve. Thank you very much for having me. Anna: It’s been a pleasure. You can find out more about Tim at timcampbellhq.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more information on apprenticeships and grants. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.

Ep#30 Ultra Positive Mindset, Life’s Perspective and Multifamily Deep Value Add with Tim Bratz

Achieve Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2019 51:55

James: Okay. So let's get started. Hey audience, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth Podcast. Today, we have Tim Bratz from Legacy Wealth Holdings. Tim is a multi-family syndicator/sponsor who owns almost 3200 units almost valued at 250 million dollars in value. Hey Tim, welcome to the show. Tim: James, I appreciate you having me, buddy, thank you. James: Absolutely. Happy to have you here. I've been trying to get you on the show for some time and we have been playing tag on the appointments. That's good. So, can you tell me which market are you focusing on right now? Tim: I'm actually in six different markets, six different states. I'm pretty heavy in the Southeast. Majority of my property, about 70% of my properties are in South Carolina and Georgia, but I'm also in Ohio which is where I live. And then I'm also in Texas, Oklahoma and I got a couple of vacation rentals down in Florida as well. James: Okay. Without going too much into detail just quickly, how did you start? And then how did you scale to 3,200 units within how many years? Tim: Yeah. Well, I mean, I was going through college when the last market cycle was going gangbusters. So 03 to 07, I'm going through college, everybody said if you wanna make money get involved in real estate. I ended up moving out to New York City because my brother was living out there. And I became a commercial real estate agent for businesses. You know, so I broker leases and I brokered a lease that was 400 square feet in Manhattan. It was $10,000 a month and so I was like the wrong side of the coin. I need to be owning real estate not brokering it. So I got into a lot of the residential stuff. I think a lot of investors get into real estate because of the lure of passive income and residual income, but then many of us get stuck doing this transactional stuff of flipping houses and wholesaling. And I went through that same phase, you know, I thought I had to stockpile my own cash. I didn't understand that you could syndicate, that you could raise private money and bring in equity partners and how your sponsors to then cosign on loans. I didn't know that that was possible. So I went through the whole residential side of things and bought my first apartment building the end of 2012. So just like seven years ago. It was a little eighth unit building and I fixed it all up, put tenants in place and I was like man, I'm making better returns on this than I am flipping houses and it's way less headaches. And so I bought another eight-unit and kind of built up a portfolio about 150 units with some partners. That partnership ended up going bad a few years later. In 2015, I ended up liquidating everything and then just going back out on my own. And so I started on my own and just kind of partnered up with a couple of people that they just started raising money for different projects and I partnered up with good operators and bring money to those projects and help sponsor those loans or I started buying my own properties here locally in Cleveland. And over the past four years, pretty much in August of 2015, I started buying my own stuff. So it's been right at four years now. I built up a little over 3200 units, 3207 units as of today, about 251 million dollars worth of property value and my model is based on the residential realm, actually. I buy properties and I got to be all in for 65% of the stabilized value because that's what the model was. I never read a book. I never went to a seminar before. I just kind of developed it myself and I started buying properties, apartment buildings, the exact same way. So I have to be able to buy it, renovate it, be all in for 65% of that stabilized value. And so a lot of the buildings that I buy, you know, I'm into a building that's worth 10 million dollars for about six-six and a half million dollars. So on the 250 million dollars worth of property, I only owe to lenders and my equity investors, it's like right at 150 million dollars. So we have a lot of equity in our properties too. James: Got it. Got it. So it's very interesting you bring up that 65% because that's the exact number that I had when I was doing my single-family for zero money down. So I counted if I get at 65% ARV, which is after repair value, you should be able to do a second load, which is I call it as a double closing of a loan. I have two loans; one loan is like you do like a short term loan and at 65%, you buy it, you take a rehab loan and then you flip it to the long term loan. Tim: Yes. That's my entire model. So I don't traditionally syndicate, I buy distressed assets. I'm bigger than some of the smaller investors but not quite a hedge fund or a Reit and I'm willing to get my hands dirty, I'm willing to actually do the work. So I take on a little bit more distressed type properties. I only buy in A and B Class areas, but the properties are typically C-Class type properties that need physical improvements, better management. Like really not just value-add but like a total repositioning a lot of times. We're remarketing, rebranding, all that. And so, we come in and we fix it all up and because we force appreciation because we can make it happen and really create the appreciation versus speculating on appreciation and hoping values go up over the next five years, we're able to create a lot of equity in that first 12 months and then we're able to turn around and refinance and cash out our investors. So instead of selling, I just refinance at like a 70% loan to value that gives me enough money to then, pay off my bridge loan. Or that short-term construction loan is and it helps me pay off my investors and to me, it's more predictable. It's more predictable to know where interest rates and where the economy is going to be 12 months from now or 18 months from now than it is like maybe 5 or 7 years from now. Five or seven years from now, we could have a very different economy, very different political circumstances; could have three different presidents in the next five years, right? So we just don't know. And for me, I like the predictability of buying at a wholesale price, creating an appreciation and then cashing out my investors. Now it's you know for lack of a better term house money in play, right? So now we can let the property ride and we can hit sit on it. It doesn't matter what happens to the economy for the next 10 years, I have a long-term, long amortization schedule fixed interest rate loan, non-recourse loan in place; where the market can go up it can go down, I still have tenants in place paying the debt service, paying the operating expenses, and putting cash in my pocket and I could ride this thing out because I don't owe any of my investors any more cash. James: Got it. Got it. So yeah, that's exactly the deep value add, that's how I position it where you buy it at really good value; very, very low level. You really put all your effort to push up the first appreciation and then you go and refi in 12 to 18 months, I guess right? Tim: And we built some new construction stuff too, down in the Southeast. We built some townhouses. Like we'll do new construction, it'll be like an A or B plus kind of an area but it's not luxury. We do only workforce type housing so we can build townhouses for about $85,000 per unit, 80 to 90,000 per unit and they'll rent for about 1,300 bucks a month for us. And so that allows us to get the values where we need it to then refinance and do the exact same thing just for new construction. So we do a little bit of that and more repositioning of existing assets though. James: Yeah, very interesting. I really like the model. I was doing it like two-three years ago. I mean, for me, I got worried about the market and I start, not looking for deep value add and also deep value add is harder to find. Even though you find it, what happened the sellers are basically taking the value by pushing up the price on the deep value add and because of that, it's not a deep value add anymore. Tim: Right. I don't pay a seller for the value that I'm going to bring to the property, right? So there are some sellers that you know, they're like, oh, well, this could be worth this much. Yeah, but I have to create that value. You're not creating that value. So we find we're a lot of times direct to seller, off-market type property. You know, we're big enough now, especially in Georgia and South Carolina, we have the broker relationships where we're one of the top five buyers in town and you get those deals before they actually hit the market. But in a lot of other markets, I'm not, you know, the biggest buyer in town so I have to go off-market, direct to seller, kind of stuff. And we get a lot of our properties from Mom and Pops who have owned it for 20 30 years or inherited the property. They just didn't put any more money back into it. You know, the total debt on the property is very low if at all and they just don't want to put any more money into it. They don't want to do the work so we buy it from them. Or I buy a lot from smart entrepreneurs, really sharp people who make a lot of money in their traditional business and they just put their money in real estate and then they didn't have a joint venture partner. They never got educated. They don't know how to manage a management company or interview a management company and they just get abused in the business. So they're like I'm making too much money in my traditional business, this thing is going to sink me. Let me just fire sale this apartment building. So that's where we buy most of our properties from. And then again: we reposition it, we do the stuff that that hedge funds aren't willing to do, and we're qualified enough to take down a 200 unit building that needs a pretty heavy value-add. I do it that way. But like you said though, James, I'm starting to buy a little bit more stabilized assets, more like 85-90 percent occupied of just a little bit of tweaks in the common areas and amenities and then bumping up some rents. We're doing a little bit more of that right now just because of where we are in the market cycle. James: Yeah, correct. But you gave a lot of details that I want to go a bit more detail into that. So you said you look for deals that are in class A and B, but more distress. And I mean you're basically shrinking your funnel as well because you're going for that... Tim: Niche gets rich, right? James: Exactly. [11:02crosstalk] Tim: People say hey real estate's mine age. Now real estate's an industry, right? Apartments aren't even initial. You need to figure out what you are really, really good at. And one of the things that I'm really good at is 80 units to 100 units that are distress. It's bigger, it's too distressed for the small guys to get a loan on it because they don't have the background or the resume to go and take down that kind of stuff and the qualifications do that because they haven't done it before. It's a big project, big value add and at the same time, it's too distressed for the hedge funds because they just want to park money and let it sit, let it ride, and let it cash flow from day one. So this is my niche. It's A and B Class areas; good areas, desirable areas, just distressed kind of properties and we're able to get in there and we have all the financing, the relationships are all in place. We could raise the money pretty easily because we can cycle our money every 12 to 18 months. I don't have to wait five years to get my investors their money out; I can cycle at every 12 to 18 months. So as soon as I pay him back guess what they say, let's go do another one. And then they're involved in you know, three deals in five years versus one deal in five years and it makes my life easier because I don't have to go and raise money from new people all the time. James: Got it. Got it. That's a really good model. So that's the investors after you cash out when you pay them back, do they stay in the deal as well? Tim: Yep. So mine's a little bit different than traditional syndication. Usually me and my joint venture boots-on-the-ground partners, we keep 70 to 80% of the equity in the deal and then we pay a pref, a fixed pref to our investors regardless of the properties performance. So even if it's not cash flowing it's predictable because I know that if I'm borrowing 2 million bucks, I'm paying, let's say, 10% pref, I'm going to pay $200,000. That's just a cost of the deal. I got roofs, I got flooring, I got paint, I got cost of capital; it's an extra $200,000. So I build that into my model and then I can make those payments to them. They feel more confident, more comfortable because now they have a predictable return on their investment. Then I refinance, they get all their money back off the table and then they still maintain 20-30% ownership without any money invested and we're able to do that again and again and again. And so, you know with traditional syndicators if I try raising money from somebody who's used to traditional syndication, they're like, why would I ever do that? Well, you get a predictable return and secondly, you get 30% ownership. But if all your money is in three different deals, it's actually 90% ownership because 30% 30% 30%. And so overall, they're actually ahead of what they would do in traditional syndication where they might get 70 or 80% of the equity in one deal. So, it actually works out better for the investors, works out better for me but it's a lot of work on my part. We spend a lot of money. Sometimes we spend a lot of money on advertising in new markets until we have those relationships built up and then, in order to find those off-market direct to seller deals and it's a lot of work. Like my business partner down in Georgia that I own a bunch of property with, he goes and sleeps at the properties for three nights a week. He spends four full days there, sleeps in a B-class apartment, you know, on a blow-up mattress, the guy is worth 25 million bucks. And then his brother who's our other partner is worth another 25 million and they're sleeping at the properties, doing the work, kicking the tables, making sure construction ends up on time, on budget and that's what you need to do man. I see a lot of people who are trying to be this puppet master and they're not willing to actually do the work of taking ownership over this thing. They just want to go and syndicate and then go back off to whatever they're doing. And to me, like there's something to be said about just having old school diligence and work mentality and what you can get done if you're willing to do that kind of stuff. James: Yeah, real estate is very, very powerful; especially commercial real estate where you can force appreciate. And especially if you are going to get the majority of the equity in the deal, why not I sleep, right? In 12 months, 70 to 80% of this deal is going to be mine. Why not work hard, I'm with you. Tim: It's a season of your life. If you're putting your head down for a year or 18 months, but then you can generate millions of dollars of equity, why not do that? And so yeah, that's kind of the mentality that we take. James: Correct. Yeah, it's very powerful to create wealth and I think the investors appreciate that as well because now you're able to give them back their money and all that. But your model is assuming that you are able to refi into a long term loan in the 12 to 18 months, right? So what happened if that model breaks? Tim: Yep, absolutely. So that's the inherent risk with our model is what happens if rates change, what happens? If banking tightens up, what does that all look like? So a couple of things. One, I don't think rates are going to change as much in 12 or 18 months as they would maybe in five or seven years. So to me, we underwrite the deal - like right now, I just closed on 500 units. I got 2 buildings, around 250 units each last month and I got a 3.83 and a 3.88 interest rate. Even right now, rates went up back; they're hovering around for four and a quarter right now for stabilized assets. We're underwriting the deals with 4.75 to five percent interest rate on the back end for a stabilized property. So we're taking on some of that, some of that, we're underwriting it for that. We also underwrite our rents very, very conservatively and we're at such a low basis in the property, usually around 60% of what that stabilized value is, we have options. So Fannie and Freddie are tightening up big time right now. That's okay because we're at such a low basis that we can still go over to CMBS - commercial mortgage-backed security - or a life insurance company and even though they offer a lower loan to value, I'm okay with that because I'm at a low enough basis. I can still cash out my investors. So worst-case scenario, my investors still get their money back and we have a lower LTV loan. So maybe there's not some refi proceeds or anything like that that we can take off the table but at the end of the day, they're going to have more equity, you know, their equities gonna be worth more in the property and the cash flow is going to be more on a recurring basis for that. And the other thing is even when banks stopped lending to people in 2009-2010, guess what? They were still lending to somebody and it was the people with big balance sheets, with stabilized portfolios. And I have a big enough balance sheet and stable enough portfolio. I'll be able to get refinanced regardless of what happens in the next 12 to 18 months so I'm not that concerned about it. And again, because our basis is so low, we have such high cash flow on these properties. I have different options and have a good team of mortgage brokers. Who even if I had a slap another, you know three-year loan on there, even if it was at 6% interest rate or six and a half percent interest rate, I can still cash flow; it's enough. It covers my operating expenses, it covers my debt service, still puts cash flow in the bank. You know, it's a crappy conversation that I have to have with my equity investors, but they keep on making ten percent on their money so they're happy. You know, the worst-case scenario is they get their money back in 48 months; then, you know it is what it is. So I've taken a look at all the downside. I've talked to people with billion dollar portfolios and said, hey poke holes in my model. And that's the inherent risk is what if you can't refinance? So that's one of the things. The deals that I just closed last month, they were already in that 85-90 percent occupancy range. Like right at 90-91, I think is what they were. And so we got a Fannie Mae loan actually on it. That's a construction loan that we'll be able to put a supplemental debt on it. So, it's already a long term loan, 30-year amortization, couple years of interest only. And then, whenever we create the appreciation, 12 months 18 months from now, we'll be able to put supplemental debt, which is kind of like a second mortgage almost but through the same lender, so they're cool with it. And so the only real risk I'm taking is the interest rate on that portion of the debt. I owe 17 million dollar mortgage on it right now. And then the other will be about another 7 million dollars. So the only real rate risk is I'll get home at three point eight percent on 17 million dollars, even if the other 7 million goes a 5%, my blended cost of capital still four and a quarter or maybe a little less. So, you know, that's another way that we're reducing that ongoing risk. James: It's very interesting. Now you're convincing me to do deep value add again. So because it's just so hard to mess up. Tim: I mean, the construction is where it all comes down to. I mean, if you stay on time and on budget, you're in good shape. But if you don't have a good construction partner like you can really get burn bad in the deep value add stuff. So you've got to understand what your team looks like, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are. And for me, we're okay with it. We're pretty good at it and we have a really good construction team. My partner in Georgia, man, I put him toe-to-toe against anybody in the country from a construction standpoint. He can build new construction, he can renovate existing units. And because he has the mentality of 'let me go and sleep at the property' three nights a week, away from his family, away from his five kids, you know, he's willing to take that on because it's again a season of his life. Like that's kind of partners that I like to partner up with. James: Yeah. Hustlers, they will go really far in life and that's what we need. It's very interesting. So I mean, is there any deal that you find that you didn't do? That you think you should have done and after you passed on it, you realized, ah, should have done that deal? Is there a deal that you look at... Tim: That's a good question. Let me think on this. We try to kill deals. I try to kill every deal that comes across my plate, especially right now. I try to look for every reason to walk away from every deal that comes across my desk. If I cannot kill the deal then I know it's a good deal. And so, you know, as soon as you're like, 'hey, well, I think I can scale back construction and make it work', wrong idea, wrong strategy. Because the last thing you want to scale back is the construction of the value-add process. Because then your rents aren't going to hit where you expect them to hit because you're not able to attract better tenants or higher quality tenants and they don't see the value that you're adding to the property. At the end of the day, like people like, 'oh, I think we can make this one work.' No. The only way you can make it work is if you go back to the seller and negotiate a lower purchase price because that's the only variable in this equation. You know, what rents are going to be is what rents are going to be; what the construction budget is, is what the construction budget is. The only variable here is the purchase price. And you know, you make your money on the buy side. So are there deals that I passed up on that I should have moved on? Maybe but for me, man, I don't have much of a risk tolerance. I only buy stuff that I know that is very predictable to me. That's why I don't play the stock market. I can't control if you know Volkswagen - I can't control if Elon Musk smokes a joint on public television and the stock drops by 15%; you know, I can't control that. I like being able to control real estate and having very predictable returns for me and my investors. And sometimes it's a gut check, you know. Even if everything looks good on paper, but my gut doesn't feel good about it, I'll say no to a deal. It's just that I've seen enough deals go south. And as quickly as we can build our net worth, being in commercial real estate, one bad deal can take out your legs and wipe you out totally. So I'm just not willing to take on that risk, especially when it takes so much work in order to get to where we are. James: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I want to touch on your gut check thing because I know numbers don't lie and we are numbers guys and when underwriting, we want to make sure things work on paper and all that. But I've walked out of a deal because everything works very well and the numbers look good, but there is something wrong in that deal that I didn't discover and I've walked out from that kind of deal as well. And that's very important. I mean, real estate is not only science where everybody says a numbers game and people that are good in numbers will do it but there's a lot of odd to it as well where it's just something wrong somewhere and it comes from experience. Tim: That's the only way you get that, from experience and it's usually personnel kind of things that make me walk from a deal. I'm just not comfortable with that joint venture partner, with that management company or with whatever the seller is saying. You can kind of see through the lines once in a while, whatever that is. Yeah, I mean my model is I'm really good at raising money. I'm really good at sourcing deals. We're pretty good at creating - like we can handle a lot of the back office type stuff. I'm back in Cleveland, Ohio now, is where I live, we can handle a lot of the management side of things; collecting of rents, work orders, telecommunication; all that kind of stuff, all the administrative side. From here in Cleveland, we just need a local boots-on-the-ground partner and some local property managers, maintenance personnel, and I always have a joint venture partner locally. And so if that joint venture partner isn't strong enough, then usually I'll walk away from the deal. Because man, I think it's important to have somebody with vested interest, with equitable interest in the deal; who's local to the property, who can go put their eyes on it a couple of times a month; to keep everybody honest, to keep the management company honest, to keep the local property manager, maintenance personnel, leasing agents and just come in and kick the tables once a month and just let people know that we're paying attention. Because if you don't pay attention, then they take advantage of you. James: Yeah, it's hard work. I mean, I know exactly how you feel in terms of how much hustle and how much detail and how much you have to be on top of the property managers because it's not their baby, it's your baby. And there's so much of details that if you don't ask them, they're just going to slack off right? Tim: Yes. James: They are paid differently from what we have paid for and we are the owners and it's just completely different ownership level, right? So that's very interesting. Is there any deal that you think after you bought it didn't match from what you thought in the beginning. You thought this is how I'm going to execute it but once you buy, it's like, oh, it's completely different from what I thought and how did you overcome it? Tim: Yeah, I mean every deal is a learning experience and you to get punched in the gut enough times and eventually you learn. Fortunately, you know when I was growing my portfolio, I bought my first building in 2012 and I bought an eight-unit building for $30,000. So I'm in Cleveland, Ohio buying units for $4,000 a unit. I put another, I don't know, 50 grand into it. So I'm all in for $10,000 a unit. And it's hard to lose. And so in 2012 2013 2014 as I'm growing my portfolio, while I'm going through these learning curves, the market is getting better and that was able to absorb a lot of my screw-ups early on. So I still made money on every single deal that I did even though I was learning on a lot of these things. There's only one building, a 44 unit building, that I bought about 2-3 years ago maybe that I've lost money on. It was one of those things, hey, I saw the leases, I saw the rent roll. It was 80% occupied and I bought it from a guy that I know, somebody that I actually know. And so, I bought 44 units and he's like, "Yeah, man, 80% occupancy." "Great, man. I'm going to come in, I'm going to renovate the last whatever 9 units and turn those over. I got a local team." He was out of state. "So like my team can come in clean it all up clean up the common areas. I think I can make $300,000 on this thing in the next 12 months pretty easily and it'll cash flow a little bit in the meantime." So I buy it and I find out it's only 25% economically occupied. So there are 35 tenants or something in place and only 11 of them are actually paying rent. And so I learned my lesson there, you know. It's not about occupancy, it's about collections. And this is a buddy of mine. This is somebody I've known for many years and grabbed dinner with him, his wife, my wife and not a lot of times but a few times and close enough where I call him a buddy. And all of a sudden, he sells me a building, tells me it's 80% occupied, doesn't tell me it's only collecting 25%. And all of a sudden, I had to kick out 24 tenants and turn over 24 additional units. So imagine what that cost does now to the $300,000 I thought I was going to make? And this was one of the only times I brought an investor in and he wanted 50/50 of the deal: "Let me bring the money, you do the deal." "Okay, cool." And I'm stroking a check for about 35 40 thousand dollars when it was all said and done. And I could have gone to that investor and said, "Hey, man, I need 20 grand from you. I'm putting up 20 grand of my money. We're selling this thing. It's a pain in the butt. We're gonna lose money on it. But, you know, we gotta get rid of it. And that's part of the deal." Instead, I stroked the entire check, gave him 100% of his money back and because he didn't make a return, I gave him equity in another deal of mine, without him having to put up any money just to kind of soften that blow. And so I think when you do the right thing by your investors word spreads, you know, he says great things about me, he wants to invest in more deals with me and stuff now. It is, do the right thing knowing that there's always another deal. There's always another opportunity. That one, we could have held on to the property long-term and let it cash flow. That's a cool thing about buying apartment buildings. You can really screw up and if you had to, you can hold on to it, manage it, let it cash flow for the next 10 years and eventually, you'll actually make money on these things even with that big of a screw-up. But for me and where my long-term vision is and my team and everything else, it was just more of a C-Class type property. It took up too much management and too many headaches. It wasn't big enough. We couldn't really scale it. So we made just a business decision to sell it and to eat that loss. But it's the only building I ever really ever lost money on. Now we've gone through pretty much everything and we've gotten kicked in the crotch enough times where we know what to look for across every building. Like it's very hard to pull the wool over our eyes unless it's like grossly fraudulent on the sellers part. Another big thing that I didn't know early on that I wish I should have done that's always a consistent issue with every building we've ever bought is like the plumbing and the drain tiles leaving the building. It's always one of those unknowns. So now, we spend three to five thousand dollars to scope every single drain line, in every building that we put under contract to ensure that there's not going to be this massive plumbing bill, unexpected plumbing bill, once we buy the property. So that's one of the things that's been a big deal. And then just verifying collections. Like those two things from a financial due diligence and a physical due diligence perspective like those two things that we've dialed in now and we always did everything else. We always inspected the rooms in every unit, the electrical panels. One of the other things that I didn't do early on that I do now, we've done for the many years now, is I used to only walk the vacant units and the common areas and the mechanical rooms. And then all of a sudden, you realize that they're not showing you all the vacant units. There are other vacant units that they're telling you that they're occupied, they just didn't want you to see them. And like I bought buildings where tenants were turning on and off their faucet with a wrench because there's no actual faucet. So you don't realize a lot of that stuff early on when you're a dumb kid. But I've been through all man. I've been everything. We walk every single unit on a 500 unit apartment building. We will walk every single unit and we'll put a report together on every single unit. It's a one-page, just kind of condition report. We'll take 30 pictures of every single unit. We put it all into like a Google Drive or Dropbox folder. In that way, we have all the information we could ever need on this property. We're not relying on our memory to look up all that stuff. It's all there. Our contractors can see it during the entire due diligence period, all that stuff. And so I think everything's a learning curve. I think you learn from everything. The thing in this business though is like if you can get past all those learning curves, if you can get past some of those losses and some of those getting punched in the stomach, eventually, you're process is so dialed in. Like they can't pull the wool over your eyes that you cannot lose on deals. And that's why we walk away from a lot of deals that we do because they're waiting for somebody who's an idiot who doesn't know what they're doing to come in and buy their property and overpay for it or not do the due diligence that they're supposed to be doing and all these other things. But eventually, you know what you're doing enough, where your risk is so minimized because you've done all the due diligence on these things, it's a very predictable business at the end of the day. Like you said, it's all about numbers, right? James: Yeah, I mean, it's crazy nowadays, right? I mean with the market being as hot as it is right now, with so many people looking for deals and so many bidding war. So nowadays, the smarter thing that a lot of brokers and sellers are doing, they say day one hard money. Now, they lock you in. So you go into a bidding war, you pay this huge amount of hard money and sometimes they don't even give you early access., So now you're locked in. You can find a thousand and one things and yet we are locked in. Tim: No, I don't do that stuff. I don't play that game. You don't need to if your off-market direct to seller. If you're going through brokers, they're going to do that to you, you know. And there are some people who have crazy money and they're willing to risk that; I'm not willing to risk any of that stuff. A lot of people, they spend a lot of time on ROI - return on investment. I spend a lot of time on return on ROI - return of investment, you know, and making sure I get all my money back. I never ever want to risk principal. I mean that deal, that's just too risky of a deal. If they want hard earnest money from day one and I haven't already walked the entire property, I'm not interested in doing it. I think once you get to a point where if you're partnered up with a great sponsor or you are a great sponsor yourself and you have the business acumen that like you have James or that I have like I'm able to posture up with these sellers now and kind of say, "Hey. Yeah, no problem. You can go steal somebody's earnest money. That's okay. You can go ahead and do that. But they're not gonna be able to close on this deal because you're lying about the condition of the property or the financials whatever. Or if you're willing to actually sell it to me, give me my opportunity to do my due diligence and shoot straight with me on everything, I promise you, I'm more capable of closing than any of the other people that you're getting bids from right now or you're getting offers from right now." And so I've been able to kind of build up my credibility in that way where sellers are willing to take less money and offer me better terms than they would maybe with somebody else because they know that I can close on the property. They don't want to get dragged through the mud. James: Correct. Yeah, this is very interesting, nowadays, the way the market is being played. They're putting all these handcuffs of hard money, day one. And there's another handcuffed where they said you must do lending with our own in-house lending. So that's another handcuff. There are two or three handcuffs that brokers are putting on sellers. And the third subtle handcuff that they do; nowadays, when they close, they send out an email saying that, oh, this buyer paid day one, you know huge amount of money $500,000. They're telling everybody else. Tim: They're trying to set that expectation. James: If you want to come and buy deals nowadays, you better be ready. So many handcuffs are being put on buyers. But I think a lot of sellers, you know, if they want to work with a good buyer, people who want to really do business, they don't know want to just make the money on earnest money and waste a lot of time getting people to walk through all their units and getting their stuff all being nervous. So just find a guy who's willing to do it and who is the true buyer. Who knows what he's doing and can close. Tim: The good brokers with long-term visions and long-term goals, know how to find quality buyers and that's better than just anybody who raises their hand with earnest money, you know. In every hot market, there are people who are short-sighted, who got into real estate real quick just because they wanted to get rich quick, kind of a thing. And they'd rather just do it that way and then anybody who raises their hand, they're willing to go with and those aren't the brokers you want to work with. You want to work with the people who have been around the block a few times, who understand what a good buyer looks like, can build those ongoing relationships. Because as soon as the market shifts, if things cool off, it's going to clean out all the unqualified buyers and unqualified brokers as well. James: Correct. So, let's go to a bit more personal side of things. So what I like about you is you're very, very positive. So you like to look at life very positively and you know, it's hard to do because sometimes you always have something negative that comes in. So do you want to explain about in this business, yeah, you always want to say something negative that you always want to talk about but how do you maintain that positivity? Tim: Yeah, I mean, you know, I told you the story when we met up a couple of weeks ago or a month ago. I mean, just less than 90 days ago, I was out golfing and I got rocketed to the face with a golf ball, 100 miles an hour from about 30 yards away. It shattered my upper maxilla bone. It knocked out four of my front teeth and shredded my gums. And my lip opened and I was bleeding like crazy. I look down. I'm like, oh, I feel my teeth dangling from my gums and I look down at the ground and I kind of took a knee to make sure I didn't pass out. I looked down at the grass, I'm like, "Man, this grass is really well-manicured; like beautiful grass here, on this golf course." And I'm like, How the hell am I able to keep up such a positive attitude in this?" You know, I'm thinking about my thoughts. I'm very reflective in that regard. And I was like, "Well, here's why I can see it positive because I got hit my mouth and not in my eyeball or my temple. I could be blind or dead if this thing was an inch higher than where it was." And so, man, I don't know if it's the law of attraction. You can call it God, you can call it, you know the universe and call it whatever but I think when you put the positivity out, it comes full circle. It's kind of like you reap what you sow kind of a thing and I sow seeds of positivity. And so, I jump in the golf cart and I get taken back to the clubhouse. You know, who's dining in the clubhouse? There are two dentists and an ER nurse having dinner in the clubhouse. They put me in there. They look at my teeth. They drop what they're doing. They take me to their dental office, 15 minutes down the road. They stitched me all up. They put my teeth back in and I'm able to save my teeth and 90 days later, you couldn't even tell that this whole thing happened. Like I'm still going through some cosmetic stuff, but overall like it was a terrible situation, but I think because I was positive it all just kind of came to fruition. So, you know, one of the things I've always practiced is not saying I have to do something but saying I get to do something. When I go out to dinner with a bunch of my friends and I pick up the tab, they're like, "Dude, you don't have to do that." " No, I don't have to do it but I get to." The reason that I do what I do is so that I can help people out and I can pay it forward. "Oh, hey, you don't have to cover that bill. You don't have to do this" 'No, but I get to." I had to eat soup for about a month afterward, but I'm thinking you know, I'm eating a tomato bisque basil soup. I don't have to eat mud pies like people do on the other side of the earth. I don't have to walk two miles each way to go and get fresh water like people have to do on the other side of the earth and some people on this side of the earth. I get to eat soup, I get to eat something that's a bisque that has basil in it. Like are you kidding me? Like there are people who would kill to be able to eat that kind of stuff. I didn't have 14 teeth knocked out, I only had four teeth knocked out. I think when you just compare it and you put it in that type of perspective of, man, it could have been way worse, you know, like the situation could have gone - and there are still people even with me with my teeth dangling from my mouth, being in that circumstance, I'm still in a better circumstance than a lot of other people who don't have any food, who don't have any shelter, who don't have any clothes, who don't have any support. They're being trafficked by like human trafficking like all that kind of crazy stuff. Even when I have to go out and raise - I had to raise 7 million bucks for deals last month, and now I don't have to raise 7 million bucks. I get to raise 7 million bucks; that's a pretty awesome problem to have. And I think just putting it in that perspective of shifting your 'I-have-to' to 'I get to', will really make you more gratuitous or have more gratitude for life. James: Was it because of your parents or do you think because you just had some event in your life that you think now I have to change my time or it's just how you have been? Tim: That's a good question. My mom as always been very positive. My mom as always been, hey, you have something else to compare it to. Compare it to this, compare it to that. And I think that's probably what planted the seed of always looking at it from, "Yeah. You're right. I guess it could be way worse, right?" It could have been totally different circumstance. She always used to say, "Hey, if that's your biggest problem today, you've got a pretty good life, Tim." When I was growing up: "Ma, I don't know what I'm gonna do like my basketball just popped." "If that's your biggest problem today, it's a pretty good problem to have." You know, you're safe. You're secure, you're healthy, you have a family, you've got people who love you, you've got food with food on the table and clothes on your back and a roof over your head. Like all those kinds of things like you put in perspective. There's people dealing with a lot worse things. And yeah, I think my mom kind of rooted that into me maybe early on and it definitely stuck and man, I just show gratitude. Especially once you have kids, you know, and you realize man like all I want is their safety and their security and their healthiness and their happiness and as long as they're happy and I'm happy. That kind of a thing that's really amplified it over the past four years. I have a four-year-old and a two-year-old now. And so just putting things into in the perspective that way has been a big deal. James: Awesome. Awesome. Is there one proud moment in your life that you think you will be remembering it for your entire life? Tim: That's a good question, James. You've got some good questions there, buddy. James: I want you to think and answer. Tim: Yeah, you know, I mean, is there one... James: One proud moment that at the end of your life, you're going to say that I'm really, really proud that I did that and it's going to be you know. Tim: Yeah, I don't know if it's one specific moment, but maybe just like kind of how I live my life. I try to do it on a daily basis and maybe it's not something profound. Maybe it's not something that's like one specific thing that was a catalyst. You know, I'm driving to the office today to come and talk to you and some dude cuts me off. Maybe he's got some priorities or something going on. I don't know what other people are going through, you know and for me to judge or get pissed off because somebody cut me off, why would I do that? I'll tell you if there's a really proud moment, once my kids grow up to be decent human beings, you know, and making sure that I want to live my life as an example of what an exceptional life can look like. So I want people to be like, hey, if Tim Brax, some kid from a blue-collar family in a blue-collar town, outside of Cleveland, Ohio can build up a big portfolio and still maintain good health and still maintain positivity and still maintain great relationships with his wife and with his children, with his friends and still engage and and maybe not be balanced but have harmony in his life, like if this guy can do it, I know I could do it. If I can inspire people, whether that be one moment in time by a Facebook post or an event that I host or being on a podcast, if I can inspire people to just be their best which is what I have on my wall here and that's not 'do' that's 'be' you know, that's like consumed that all together. It doesn't have to be the best. It would be your best. There's always gonna be somebody more capable, more resources, more whatever. You know, I don't think it's healthy to compare yourself to other people but to compare yourself to yourself and making sure that you're advancing on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis is a big deal. And so, I think I just try to make my kids proud, make my mom proud, make my wife proud, make my friends proud. Inspire other people and I try to do it more in the daily activity versus just do it one time and look at that one moment. I try to give back and try to - like I had suites to the Cavs games when LeBron was here in Cleveland. All right, and so when was that, two years year to go? Two years ago, I think. No, it was last year, I think. And so last year, I had a suite to the Cavs. I got the entire series for the first series. I figured who they're playing, but essentially when you buy a suite, you get it for the entire series, however many games they play at home and they played four games at home. And so, you know the first game I went to, I brought some business partners and was able to pay for the suite that way. And then, the second game I brought some family and the third game, I'm like, hey, I was excited to go but like I'm not as excited as I was maybe the first or second time and I'm like somebody else deserves this more than I do because I've already had this experience right? Like, how can I pay this forward? And so I posted on social media, "I got a suite to the Cavs game. I have 18 tickets that I can give away, a couple of parking passes. It's stocked with food and drinks and whatever you guys want. Like does anybody know of a family or a few families that I can give these tickets to that maybe wouldn't have this experience on their own but really deserve because of how good of a people that they are?" And man, like it got so much momentum and got so many shares and then the news picked it up and came and did a story on it. And I had about 5-600 applications that came through for people nominating other people to get tickets to this Cav suite. And so, it was actually really hard to break it down and essentially I found four or five families. I think five families that four tickets a piece that I gave the tickets to. And it was pretty easy to narrow it down to like 25 because I wanted somebody who had maybe faced adversity, overcame the diversity and then found a way to pay it forward; not just overcoming it but actually paying it forward and creating a difference. So, you know, there was one girl whose sister died of an accidental overdose of drugs and now, this girl who's still alive, her younger sister goes around and speaks at different schools about opioid problems and drug problems and how to overcome that and different resources to plug into for that, you know. And so I'm like, wow, this girl, at the age of 16 years old is making an impact on the world; like she deserves some tickets. There was another gentleman who lost his daughter to a congenital heart defect. She was 3 years old, you know and loses his daughter to this congenital heart defect. And instead of like, I mean, I can only imagine how dark of a place he must have been in and he ends up opening up a nonprofit organization to help families with other kids with congenital heart defects to give them the support and help and the conversations and everything and making a massive impact up here in Cleveland, Ohio. This guy is such a good guy. I give him the tickets and he gives them to one of the people that are in his nonprofit, you know. And it's like, man, these people are just amazing individuals. And so I found five awesome families like that, that we were able to give the tickets to and like doing stuff like that really makes me feel good. And what's even better is that there were 500 people who I was able to create a catalyst by doing this who now, 500 people are thinking in a positive way about people who make a positive impact on their life. And just that positive ripple effect that's created, I think is really, really powerful and it was really, really cool to see. James: Yeah. When I talk to you, I get very inspired because it's not about the portfolio of real estate or [49:17unintelligible] rights, it's how you look at life and how you look at things. How you think positive and that's the most important when I look at a person. Tim: Yeah. And you do an awesome job with it, man. I mean, you realize that it's not the portfolio, it's not the money that's noble. It's what you can do with the money that's noble and utilizing it for good. I could afford a really expensive fancy exotic car and I drive a $20,000 Jeep just because I don't really care. I know that there's a bigger impact I can make by being a better steward of my Capital, putting it in more deals or paying it forward in ways like that. So I get more fulfillment from that than from maybe driving something fancy. James: Yeah, even for me, I can't really imagine driving exotic car because, do I really need it? Tim: At the end of the day, it'd be cool. I'd rather just go and rent one. I know I'd have buyer's remorse. I just know myself personally and I know that as soon as I bought it I'd be like, I don't really need this. And here's the thing. I like watches. I like clocks. I like taking nice vacations. I like traveling first class. I like that kind of stuff. I like making memories and traveling the world; I love all that. So that's where I get my drive from on making a lot of money. For other people, they like fancy cars, they like fancy houses; that's okay. I got a good buddy, man, he drives a Rolls-Royce and has multiple hundred-thousand-dollar watches, you know. But I know he doesn't do it for flashed and to impress other people. He does it because when he looks down at his watch and when he gets in his car, he always sits back and he's like, "Man, I had to overcome some adversity, I had to go through some shit in order to get this watch. In order to be able to afford this car. And I've had to grow as an individual, as a person and make an impact on enough other people's lives, positively, that then the universe came back and gave me enough money to be able to afford this car and afford this watch." And so, I think it depends on perspective and that's how you look at it. Like I have nothing against people who have fancy nice things, material type things. Because I know he's one of the most giving people that I've ever met as well and so it's perspective. James: Yeah, it's perspective. Yeah, awesome, Tim. So why don't you tell our audience how to get hold of you? Tim: Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty active on social media; you can find me on Facebook Tim Bratz. I run my own Facebook account, you know, it's not somebody else running it. I do some education stuff on how to get involved in apartments and things but hit me up with a message there if you're looking for formal education. I give a lot of away a lot of free content, a lot of free insight and I try to provide a lot of value on social media and stuff so just connect with me on Facebook. That's gonna be the best way and, yeah, man, James, I appreciate all the value that you give and all the value that you create and all the content that you put out there and, man, you're creating the ripple effect yourself on making a positive impact on people's lives. So appreciate you too, brother. James: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for coming on the show. It was really a very inspiring show. I'm sure for me and for my listeners and everybody's going to be enjoying it. Tim: Appreciate it, brother. Thank you so much. James: All right. Bye.

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The Most Successful Campaign Launch in Sports History

Marketing Upheaval

Play Episode Play 20 sec Highlight Listen Later Sep 18, 2019 33:53

Tim Smith of Chemistry on AOR vs project work, the Atlanta United campaign launchThe President of Chemistry, Atlanta talks about being named Ad Age’s small agency of the year - twice, the challenges with client agreements and the most successful campaign launch in professional sports history. Full shownotes and transcripts at www.creativeouthouse.com/podcastTranscript:Rudy Fernandez: Hey, this is Rudy Fernandez from Creative Outhouse. In this episode of Marketing Upheaval, I spoke with Tim Smith, President of Chemistry in Atlanta. Chemistry was named Ad Age's best small agency two out of the last four years, and we talked about that.Rudy: We also talked about what's not working with a lot of client agency relationships and new business, and we talked about the most successful launch in professional sports history and what we all can learn from that.Rudy: Check it out. Welcome to Marketing Upheaval.Earcon: You're listening to Marketing Upheaval from Creative Outhouse.Rudy: Hey, thanks for listening to Marketing Upheaval. My guest is Tim Smith, President of Chemistry in Atlanta. Chemistry won Ad Age's Small Agency of the Year in 2016 and 2018. They do great work and have some powerful case studies, including the most successful sports franchise launch in history, according to ESPN and Sports Illustrated. We're going to talk about that. Thanks for joining me, Tim.Tim Smith: Thanks for having me.Rudy: So I know you worked at a lot of big shops and big brands and stuff, and then you worked on Super Bowl spots and everything, and now small shops.Rudy: Well, first of all, why did you do that? Why did you go from the big agency, big budget to small shops?Tim: Yeah. So I started really right out of school, jumped right into the deep end and went to BBDO New York. Now, that was all big stuff, big budgets. I thought, "Wow, this advertising gig's amazing. We have huge budgets, and flying around, fancy hotels." It was fantastic.Rudy: I only get to hear about that kind of stuff.Tim: Right. Sadly, I got to experience it just long enough to miss it. So it was great. Well, I always wanted to live in the South, so I kind of would go to a big ad market, come back South. Got to a big ad market, come back South.Tim: Then an opportunity came up to be a creative director in a small shop, so I had the ego to believe that, wow, this small shop, they've got a few clients and I've done all this big stuff, I can certainly make them big, that's not going to be a problem. Found how difficult the struggle was. So we did some good stuff. We won a lot of business and stuff, but it was on a totally different level from all the ones I was used to. But I really liked it.More at: https://creativeouthouse.com/2019/09/18/tim-smith-of-chemistry-on-aor-vs-project-work-the-atlanta-united-campaign-launch/Support the show (http://www.creativeouthouse.com/our-work)

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These robots are changing cooking forever. But one thing will never change

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 2, 2019 32:00

The robotics ecosystem in Japan is amazing. And confusing. It's a collection of crazy ideas, odd creations, and true breakthroughs. And despite the combination of fawning prise and snide skepticism that Japanese robotics evoke in the international press, only time can really separate the true breakthroughs from the dead ends. Today, we sit down with Tez Sawanobori, the founder of Connected Robotics, and we talk about how robots are being adopted in the restaurant industry here in Japan. Connected Robotics already has two lines of consumer-visible robots being used in restaurants in Japan, and the reaction from the owners, the employees, and the customers has been overwhelmingly positive and quite a bit different than similar experiments run in America. We talk about the strong economic and social pressures affecting the adoption of robots in restaurants and discuss the changes he had to make before chefs and robots can really work side by side. It's a great conversation, and I think you will really enjoy it. Show Notes The real reason we need robots chefs The unlikely founding of Connected Robotics Why the restaurant business is so hard to disrupt Looking at the real economics of food prep robots What’s holding back robotics in restaurants Can robotics really solve the labor shortage in Japan? How Japanese employment practices make it harder to use robots but increase the need for them How Japan can catch up to the US and China in robotics research The best way for American and Japanese robotics engineers to work together The future of foreign workers in Japan Links from the Founder Everything you wanted to know about Connected Robotics Watch a video of the OctoChef in action Follow Tez on Twitter @tezsawa Friend him on Facebook Connect on LinkedIn Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Today, we’re going to be talking about the OctoChef. “What the hell is the OctoChef?” you might ask, and that would be a good and quite reasonable question. The OctoChef was created by Connected Robotics and it’s a robot that makes Takoyaki, and we’re going to sit down with founder Tez Sawanobori and talk about why it’s important. It’s important to understand that the OctoChef is not just some crazy side project of Tez and the team, although I guess it was the very first time I met them, but no, now, the OctoChef is being used in both small scale, single restaurant installations and industrial scale factory installations. Tez and I talk in detail about how Japanese react to robotics and work with robots very differently than westerners do. We also sit down and eat some pretty good robot-cooked Takoyaki and take a hard look at the question of whether the OctoChef is just a novelty or a fad, or if on the other hand, it’s solving a real problem. The answer turns out to be yes but the reason why is pretty surprising. But you know, Tez tells that story much better than I can, so let’s get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] Interview Tim: So, I’m sitting here with Tez Sawanobori from Connected Robotics, the maker of the OctoChef, so thanks for sitting down with me. Tez: Yeah, thank you for having me in this great show. Tim: Thank you. What is the OctoChef? Tez: OctoChef cooks Takoyaki. Takoyaki is octopus ball popular in Japanese festivals, you see a lot of Takoyaki stalls. Tim: Yeah, the round little – and they’re awesome, it’s great food. Tez: Yeah, yeah, it’s a popular Japanese fast food, and a robot cooks Takoyaki and it’s from pouring oil to serving to the dish, all the process the robots do. Tim: Okay, so in the process, the humans still have to create the batter? Tez: Yes. Tim: And, I guess deliver the cooked Takoyaki to the cus...

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第549期:Saving Energy

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 17, 2019 1:56

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Jeff: So, you are pretty in tune with global warming. You are pretty in tune with the environment - conscious, environmentally conscious. What do you do to do your part for help protecting the environment?Tim: Yeah, well, I think I do quite a bit. I grew up in an area that's really environmentally conscious. Oregon is pretty environmentally conscious, so I recycle. It's pretty easy to recycle in Oregon. They just pick it right up at your house. You don't have to separate it. They separate it for you, so I recycle as much as I possibly can.Jeff: But maybe those are traditional things. Do you do anything sort of more advanced or more modern than just recycling? Is there anything in your life that's more modern?Tim: Well, one thing: I recently bought a hybrid car.Jeff: A hybrid car.Tim: Yeah.Jeff: What's a hybrid car?Tim: So it is a car that basically gets better gas mileage cause what my car does is I have to put gas in it. I have to put gas in it but when I break it takes the energy created by the heat from the breaking and it charges the battery, and then the battery can help power the car, so it's half gasoline, half - just electric energy from the battery.Jeff: Really. Electric and gas.Tim: Yeah.Jeff: Really interesting. So do you have to charge the car at night? Do you have to plug it in or anything like that?Tim: No, my car just by breaking it charges the battery completely. Occasionally, I've heard of some people that if they leave their car for like a year or something they have to go back and they'll have to plug in the battery and it will charge up, but for the most part, I don't have to do very much at all.Jeff: So that is a fancy watch you're wearing as well. Is that environmentally friendly at all?Tim: Oh, yeah. This watch actually doesn't take batteries. It's solar powered and so it just gets energy from the sun.Jeff: Wow. So you pretty environmentally conscious dude.Tim: I try.

oregon electric saving energy tim oh tim yeah tim no tim well jeff so tim so

第547期:Snow Shoes

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2019 2:15

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Jeff: So, you do winter sports?Tim: Ah, yeah, really, I just do snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.Jeff: Snowshoeing!Tim: Yeah.Jeff: That sounds interesting. What snowshoe? Is that like a boot?Tim: Well, it's kind of hard to explain but it's kind of like a big - I don't know how you would say it - kind of like a big paddle that you strap on to your boot. You have a regular boot, your good boots and then you put a big flat kind of round thing on the bottom of your shoe.Jeff: What's it made of?Tim: Well, it is made out of kind of webbing. It's made out of webbing and basically, it spreads out your weight so that you can walk on snow, cause if you don't have them and you just have your regular boots you're gonna fall into the snow, so it distributes your weight out onto the snow.Jeff: So are they heavy?Tim: They can be, but like a long time ago they used to have huge ones that were made out of like skins and stuff like that from seals but now they're pretty light. They're made out of metals and good materials so they are pretty light now.Jeff: Are they expensive?Tim: They can be, but not too bad and you can rent them probably almost anywhere.Jeff: And how deep is the snow when you're walking with snowshoes? How deep is the snow?Tim: Well, it depends on how much it snowed really. You know it can be really really deep: something that is going to cover up a car, or it can be barely deep at all. Like I've taken snowshoes out on my pack - I was hiking Yosemite and we hiked up and there wasn't any snow at first as we got, there was more and more and then it got to the point where we were sinking in the snow and it was time to put on the snowshoes.Jeff: So, they're not heavy. Do your legs get very tired when you are walking in snowshoes?Tim: Not too bad really unless sometimes the snow isn't really dry. It's really wet snow and sometimes it will kind of clump on the snowshoes and then the snow will make it really, really heavy, so you got to knock them off and that can get really heavy and your legs can get tired.Jeff: And how do you put them on? How do you attach them to your boots or?Tim: Well, you just lay them down and they're some straps on them and you just put the straps on pull them tight. It's a lot like snowboarding really except you don't have click on boots. They're some straps you just pull on.Jeff: Cool. It sounds pretty cool.Tim: Yeah, it is not bad.

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第542期:Bad Jobs

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2019 2:54

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Tim: So, Jeff, you asked me about what kind of job I'd like. Well, what about a job you definitely you wouldn't want to do. There are lots of jobs out there and some of them aren't so good, so what would you not want to do?Jeff: That's a difficult question. I don't like working period, really.Tim: Yeah, but who does?Jeff: Yes, that's right, but I think a type of job I wouldn't like to do would be an office job, a straight desk job, where it is just task work, where you get paper - maybe sort of like an accountant - where you are doing nothing but sitting at your desk sort of by yourself all day, crunching numbers or putting things into the computer. I think it's very anti-social, a little bit boring, not so healthy, and even if the pay was good, I still wouldn't want to do it because you're compromising your life, which is short, to something that's not so fun so maybe a desk job, something at a desk, I wouldn't like to do. How about you? What job would you not like to do?Tim: Well, to be honest with you I don't think I would make a very good police officer. I really wouldn't want to be a police officer. I know it's exciting and it's always different but I kind of feel like I would be judging people and I'm not anti-police. I think they're needed but sometimes I don't agree with everything that a government believes in and I think it would be difficult for me to be busting people for something that I don't agree with. And I think that you know, it's a hard job. It's a hard job and you've got to deal with people that you know need help in different ways, and a police officer is just coming and putting them in jail.Jeff: Another thing, sort of related to police officer is I wouldn't want to be a nurse or a doctor.Tim: Oh, I'm surprised.Jeff: A great job and it would be rewarding to save people's lives or to make them better if they're sick, to make them healthy again, but I hate blood.Tim: Oh, really.Jeff: I can't stand blood so if there is... I can't even stand somebody with a bloody nose so I think in a situation where there is any blood around I wouldn't be your man.Tim: Well, I think another job I wouldn't want to be is a garbage man, to be honest with you.Jeff: Oh, a garbage man would be great.Tim: I understand. Like, I like the idea of driving from house to house. I think I would be a great post office worker, and I don't mind the manual labor of just lifting stuff up and stuff.Jeff: A bit smelly though.Tim: Yeah. That's the biggest thing. I think the smell would really get to me, like kind of like you were with blood. I think that eventually, that smell would sometimes make me sick, and you'd be surprised what people throw away. I mean, needles, all kinds of things, dirty diapers. Things like that. I don't think I could deal with that very well.Jeff: OK, so you'll never be a garbage man and I'll never be a nurse.Tim: Ah, fair enough I suppose.

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第541期:Cool Jobs

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 9, 2019 3:18

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Jeff: Tim, I'm a teacher, but you can have many, many jobs in the world. If you could pick any job, what do you think would be a cool job?Tim: Well, to be honest, I think it would be pretty cool to be a fisherman.Jeff: Fisherman!Tim: Yeah. Believe it or not I really like the ocean. I like spending time in the ocean and I think if you go out on those boats and get away from the land, you really get in touch with the sea and I just think that you get to work with your hands.Jeff: Is it dangerous though?Tim: Oh, it is dangerous. For sure. You can hook yourself. You can get caught in storms. It can be not so good.Jeff: Do you get paid a lot of money?Tim: Not so much, but that is not necessarily so important. You know. You can work with nature. You can catch your own food. Provide for yourself and I think that's really rewarding. How about you? What do you think would be a cool job?Jeff: I think I would like to be a writer.Tim: Why is that?Jeff: Because a movie star would be good, or a rock star but there is too much fame. Too many people always want to talk to you or want your autograph, but I think a writer, you are doing something you love without all that pressure or media coming after you and you can sort of make your own time and do it where you like. You can write in the country in a cabin or you can write in the city anywhere you like so I think it is a very flexible rewarding job.Tim: Yeah, you got to have the skill for it though. Do you think you have that skill?Jeff: No, I'm a terrible writer, but if I could have my pick of jobs, I'd like to be a writer. How about you? You would like to be a fisherman. Any other jobs you would like to be?Tim: Another job that I think might be cool is a fireman to tell you the truth. Again, you kind of working with nature. I'd really like to be a sort of a slash and burn fireman. Someone that goes out where there's wildfires, things like that, cause you're working with nature.Jeff: Those guys, the slash-and-burn fireman, they get to jump out of helicopters sometimes.Tim: Some of them do yeah, but that's kind of the glamorous one. Yeah, I wouldn't mind just being the guy that's on the ground, and the nice thing about it is you work really, really hard and you get paid pretty well for the time you work but then you get a long time off.Jeff: But, I'm a little bit scared of fires. You don't mind fire?Tim: I don't mind fire so much. You know. It's hot and it can be really, really dangerous but I don't know, it's kind of exciting and I like the idea of being out there in nature and just working hard to survive and working in a team. I think it would be good.Jeff: I want to be an astronaut. I think an astronaut would be good.Tim: Why is that? It's a dangerous job. A fireman's dangerous but it sounds like and astronaut would be pretty dangerous as well.Jeff: A little dangerous but I'd like to go to the moon to see what's on the moon. I think it would be kind of neat to be on the moon and looking back at the earth. They call the earth the blue planet. I think it would be neat to sit up there and look back on the earth and it would be kind of neat I think.Tim: Sounds like you like the ocean. You should think about being a fisherman.Jeff: No way! No thanks.

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第540期:Snow Camping

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 8, 2019 2:41

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Jeff: So, Tim, you live in a nice natural spot.Tim: Yeah, that's true.Jeff: Lots of nature around where you live?Tim: Yeah, I'm from Oregon. There's lots of nature. There's not a lot of towns really.Jeff: And do you take advantage of it by doing any outdoor sports or activities or anything?Tim: Yeah, I try to, like me and my friends, we go hiking. We camp. We backpack. Snow camp. Snowshoe. All kinds of stuff.Jeff: Really. You snow camp?Tim: Yeah, we snow camped before, yeah.Jeff: So do you stay out or do you stay in a cabin or?Tim: No, usually we go out. A lot of times it's snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. We go out and we build a little hut basically by digging down and go underneath and stay there for the night and come out. It's really cold.Jeff: So, do you pull a sled behind you or do you carry your stuff?Tim: Usually, we just put a pack on your back. Yeah.Jeff: I want to try that.Tim: Yeah, it's a lot of fun, but it's cold and usually, you don't enjoy a lot of it until you done, and when you're done you think, "Ah, that was a great experience."Jeff: Yeah, yeah. I think it would be good but, so is it very different from summer camping?Tim: I think that the biggest thing is that when you go out there it's really, really silent. You don't see a lot of things out and about because it's cold. So it's just really quiet and it's really, really peaceful.Jeff: Is it safe? Can you die?Tim: Yeah, it is relatively safe. People do die doing it. For the most part, it's really safe. One time we were caught in a pretty bad storm and we were coming back. The biggest thing is we came out and our car was covered in snow and we couldn't get out so that was a pretty big deal. Luckily the cellphone worked through and we were able to eventually get out but we had to dig the car out and call some people to come out and help us.Jeff: So do you follow a trail?Tim: Sometimes. It just depends. Sometimes we just use navigation systems and just go out and go and pick points and go for it and sometimes we follow like ski trails that have like little diamonds on trees and you can point towards them and look for them and find them.Jeff: So do you recommend winter camping to people?Tim: Not unless you've had some outdoor experience. Not somebody who's just gonna go out there because you really got to look at the weather. You gotta have the right gear. If you don't have the right gear you'll freeze to death.Jeff: So city people, don't winter camp.Tim: Mostly yeah. I'd say city people better not winter camp unless you've got somebody who's really experienced with you. I've taken my girlfriend out there and so you can do it as long as you're with somebody that knows what they are doing and you have the right gear cause if you don't have something that's waterproof and things that are going to keep water out you can't do it.Jeff: Great.

oregon snow camping snowshoes tim yeah jeff yeah tim no jeff so jeff is jeff great

第538期:Oregon Beauty

reThink Real Estate Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2019 2:31

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Jeff: So where are you from?Tim: I'm from Oregon.Jeff: Oregon.Tim: Yeah. It's on the West Coast of America, above California and below Washington. It has the coast. It has the mountains and a lot of different regions really.Jeff: Really, so which is your favorite of those for regions, which do you like the best?Tim: Well, that's difficult. I like the coast a lot. The coast of Oregon is really, really rocky. It's really natural. In Washington, it's really, really developed and in California as well, but in Oregon, it's really, really natural - really rocky. There's beaches and you go out there and it's just nature.Jeff: Swimming? Fishing?Tim: It's cold so there's not a lot of swimming. There's surfing. There's really good fishing. People fish. They take boats out. It's really nice, but...Jeff: Sounds good. So you have the ocean and then you can move inland to the woods.Tim: Yeah, from the ocean you move inland and you've got a real green area. In fact, it gets some of the most rain in all of America really.Jeff: So it is a rain forest.Tim: Well, there are areas that are considered a rain forest. One of the biggest rain forests in America is there, but it's real wet, real green and really mossy. There's moss hanging off the trees. It's beautiful. The greenest place you've ever seen.Jeff: And then, so you had the beach, the ocean. You had the woodland. Is there any other types of regions or landscapes?Tim: Well, you got the real green area I talked about and then from there you go to the mountains, and the mountain kind of traps all the rain. On the other side, it's really dry. It's called kind of a desert region. Lots of cattle ranchers. Real dry. It gets snow. It's good for outdoor sports, but hardly any rain really.Jeff: And that is mostly, you say farmland?Tim: Yes. It's farmland. Ranching land.Jeff: Are there any cowboys?Tim: There's lots of cowboys, actually. Lots of cowboys. Lots of people think of Oregon as a real liberal area but on the other side of the mountains, it's real conservative. So really two types of people.Jeff: So, you have those three regions. Do you have any big cities?Tim: We have Portland Oregon. It's a pretty big city. It's got a basketball team. It is a real nice city. It's got good public transportation.Jeff: So would you like to live in Portland?Tim: I'd like to live in Portland. It's be OK, but there's two college towns that I think would be really good: Corvallis, Oregon, and Eugene, Oregon. Real liberal college towns. They've got really good places to eat and friendly people. A little more liberal and laid-back, so it's my type of place.Jeff: So that sounds like a pretty good place to live. It has a little bit of everything.Tim: Yeah, I think so.Jeff: Maybe I'll move there.

america california washington real beauty oregon portland west coast fishing portland oregon corvallis ranching tim it tim yeah tim there tim well jeff so

70 : Workforce of the Future (w/ Tim Salau)

Living Corporate

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2019 19:09

Ade sits down with community builder and career/life coach (and Mentors & Mentees founder) Tim Salau to talk about what it means to take ownership of your career. They also discuss the future of the workforce and what shape it will take in the next 5-10 years.Connect with Tim on IG, Twitter, or LinkedIn!https://www.instagram.com/timsalau/?hl=enhttps://twitter.com/timsalau?lang=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/timsalauTRANSCRIPTAde: Hi. Welcome back to the show. If you're listening, this is Living Corporate. My name is Ade. I'm one of your hosts for the show, and with me today we have one of our favs here on this show, Tim Salau. Tim, you want to say hello?Tim: Yeah. Hey, y'all. It's Tim Salau.Ade: How are you doing? How are you doing, man?Tim: I'm doing well, Ade. I'm doing good.Ade: Welcome back. How have you been all of these days? Like, you just dipped off, left Living Corporate Land, haven't, like, shown your face back around these parts.Tim: I've been doing well. Some big, great things have been happening since then. I've recently started working with WeWork, leading product marketing management and focusing on really unleashing the future of work.Ade: Wow.Tim: Yeah, and I continue to grow the Mentors & Mentees community and have onboarded a few brand partners since then, including Living Corporate as one of them. So a lot of great things have been happening.Ade: That's amazing. That was a perfect segue into the conversation that we're having today. When you say the future of work, could you talk a little bit more about that?Tim: Absolutely. So the future of work is this really general, broad view of how, in the next 5-10 years, we're no longer gonna be working in a workforce where things are static, where you only see salaried employees. More so you'll see a mix of freelancers, salaried employees, and even contract workers in the workforce. So it's this very broad view with most of--you know, that looks at how the organizations of the future are gonna look, that thinks about how the gig economy is gonna affect, you know, what the workforce is gonna look like in the future, and most importantly, how will workers have to adapt in this future. And when I think about the future of work, I often define it as, from a worker perspective and a professional prospective, you being able to take control of your career as a worker, as a professional, and I think there are other elements of it where you can look at it from a gig economy perspective, you can look at it from an organizational design perspective and a more business perspective. How do organizations adopt and adopt a leveraging AI and all of these different tools that will allow them to stay digital in an ever-changing digital landscape? But my definition of it is more so taking control of your career as a worker and pursuing the opportunities that are tailor-fit for you.Ade: That's awesome. So question for you, then, to follow up on that. What does taking control of your career look like as an individual? I want to come back to what it means for organizations to make this kind of [C-?] change into the workforce of the future, but as an individual, as someone who's gonna be working for a few years, I want to know what it's like--what taking ownership of my career looks like and what that means for an individual.Tim: Well, you know, there's a lot of elements to that, Ade. I believe that taking control of your career, first and foremost, is starting to invest in what you can control. I think I often talk to professionals, and they don't realize that the future of work you have to be pushing yourself towards being an asset, not a commodity. So really starting to outline what are the strengths, the skills, the unique aspects of you that are fit for a role that you're interested in, right? For example, if you are someone looking to get into product management, right, and potentially work for a media podcast company, you would have to take control of the opportunities or the platforms that allow you to put yourself out there, whether it be a LinkedIn, you're having a website or networking the right circles that give you visibility to that network of media podcast professionals and product managers who are working within that industry, right? So I think that, for a long time, there's been traditional expectations, traditional behavior, that workers have adopted in which we no longer see our careers as in our control, as being proactive and really working towards where we want to be by doing the right things. Instead it's always been you wait to climb the corporate ladder, you wait until your manager says you can get promoted. You wait until, you know, you see the opportunity that comes to you instead of really taking that self-agency and pursuing the right opportunity. So I think that's one element of, you know, you taking control of your career. And I think another element of it is being very clear at investing in your personal brand. I do believe, from a worker's perspective, that personal brands are gonna matter in the future, 'cause your personal brand is what differentiates you. It's what allows people to start seeing you as an asset. Ade: Right. Okay, well, now I have to put some thought into my personal brand beyond, like, jokes and talking about food. Okay, thank you. I'm gonna put that on my to-do list. So you mentioned earlier the Mentors & Mentees community. Let's talk a little bit more about that. What are the top three tips that you give within Mentors & Mentees about the intentionality that you put into your career?Tim: Yeah. I think, first and foremost, it starts with introspection. I don't believe that, you know, you have to force your personal brand. I don't believe that you have to start investing in things, whether it be courses or coaches, who tell you that this is your personal brand, yet it's not. It's not something that you feel is true to you. I believe that one of the best ways, and what I often tell my community, is that you start realizing your strengths, what your gifts are, by really going deep, going deep and evaluating "What are prior roles that I've had that have led me to this point in my career?" "What do people that I spend my time with intimately--family, friends, coworkers--what do they think are some of the unique strengths of me? Let me ask them those questions," and then from there you get to a point where you start--and then you soul-search and say, "Okay, what am I great at? What do I want to be great at? What do I want to be known for?" And then when you take all of those different factors--what your coworkers say about you, your prior experiences, and then you dig deep, you start to see--you start to see some patterns, and you, more importantly, start defining what is it that makes you unique. Is it your cultural background? Is it certain industry experiences that no one else in your domain has? Are there certain skills that no one else wants to do or has acquired that you bring to the table when it comes to being, you know, an employee for a company? You really get that holistic perspective. So I always tell my members of my community and my friends that look, dig deep, right? And then from there, start being a giver. Start finding opportunities where you can give your strengths away, where you can really stand out because you're playing in your zone of greatness. So that's really when your personal brand starts unlocking for you. I'll give you an example. For me, I realized my purpose and kind of what I wanted to kind of be uniquely known for and that I wanted to kind of live day in and day out two years ago when I was at UT Austin pursuing my grad degree. And, you know, I had deep moments of reflection, and I realized, "You know what? If there's anything I want to be great at, it's to strengthen the bonds that people share through compassion and empathic action," and, you know, I eventually found a title for it in kind of an area that I really, really love, which is community building. From that point on, I created a community. I've invested myself in that community day in and day out, and to a degree now people know me as that. That's my brand because people know how great I am at it, right? So I've uniquely differentiated myself, and I also operate within this overlap where I do product management work and I'm in tech, so now I have this really unique characteristic of me where I stand out. I'm not only a community builder, but I'm somebody that can talk to you about product management. I'm someone that can talk to you about how to get into tech, so I get hit up about that a lot. So that's really how you go about saying, "Okay, how do I stand out in such a competitive job market so I can thrive in the future of work?"Ade: Right, and I love the phrase that you used earlier, "zone of greatness." I'm probably gonna--I'm gonna co-op that for my own use a little bit later on. Thank you. Snatched. [both laugh] All right, so before we go--those were some really great points that we're gonna take forward, and I'm probably gonna start sending, like, surveys around to my friends and my family members, like, "Hey, take this three to five question quiz about what I'm good at, 'cause I'm trying to develop my personal brand."Tim: Yeah, and you should. You should.Ade: So if you are my friend and you're listening, please note that you will be receiving a survey within the next three to five business days.Tim: And you know what? The ones that do, Ade, the ones that answer that survey, they care about you. They want you to be great. The ones that don't, you gotta question that relationship. [laughs]Ade: My woes. Listen, if you receive a survey from me and you do not respond to my survey, our friendship is dead. DEAD. [both laugh] All right. So before we go, let's talk about WeWork really quickly. You mentioned at the beginning of this interview that you now have a position or relationship with WeWork. I personally attend a ton of events at WeWork, especially at Flatiron School. Tim: [woos excitedly]Ade: Yeah, I'm a huge fan. So talk to me. What attracted you to WeWork? What are you doing there? How can I get a membership for the low-low? [Tim laughs] Tell me all about it.Tim: So I'll see what I can do about the membership, but to give you a little bit of clarity as to, you know, why I'm really excited to be working with WeWork is that what WeWork does in the community space in terms of their core business, which is, you know, obviously selling space to entrepreneurs and creators who want to, you know, do the best work of their lives and build their business and connect with others. The fact that WeWork is really just a framework for creating community, that's what attracted me to the company, and as a community builder, someone that is obsessed with community and someone that does it day in and day out as my life purpose--it is what I'm building my legacy around, 'cause that's what drives me, I saw that there was a unique opportunity for me to contribute my value, contribute my perspective as a black man in tech, and as someone who's an avid community builder and understands there's strength in numbers, there was great potential in me, I believe, working with a company like WeWork that's really building that next generation of what community will look like, right? Whether it be at work, in cities, and at a global level too, because we work as a multi-national company, and I felt as if, you know, I'm at a point in my career where I want to be able to do the best work of my life, and I know what my strengths are, I know what my gifts are, so the opportunity now for me to really lead the future of work, something I talk about often online with my community, with my friends, and what people know me of, it was a perfect fit. And, you know, that's why I encourage people to think about too--when you think about the future of work and you think about how you want to build what you're known for, you have to think about what are companies, what are the opportunities that are a unique fit for you? Because I could say working with WeWork is a unique fit for me. This role that I'm in, I'm gonna be doing a lot of community building. I'm gonna be doing a lot of evangelizing about the future of work. I'm going to be doing all of the things that really unleash all of the best aspects of me. So when you find that fit, you know, you become on another level.Ade: Right, right. That's awesome. I think an additional thing that I love about WeWork is that as a space it's almost inclined to support interaction, right? Like, you come in, and there are a lot of open spaces. Like, yes, you can find your privacy, and there's some really interesting areas and nooks and crannies that you can hide yourself if you are, like me, not interested in extended human interaction, but there are also times where you walk into WeWork and there are a bunch of people there who are complete strangers, or were complete strangers 20 minutes ago, and they're now talking about their interests and their companies and "Oh, I formed Such-and-such LLC, and I can help you form an LLC," and all of these really amazing conversations, particularly with young professionals in tech, many of whom are transitioning, many of whom aren't even sure what the vastness of the possibilities exist within tech. So yeah, I'm gonna wax poetic about WeWork a little bit more later on, but yeah, thank you so much for sharing that experience and sharing your purpose in that manner. And I especially think, for those of us who are underrepresented in tech in general, no one who wants longevity out of their career goes at it alone. It's one of the things that I discovered when I started self-teaching, is that isolation will hurt you more than it will help. There's some times where you need to shut the entire world off and really, like, buckle down and focus, but more often than not somebody has done what you're doing. They--Tim: Someone has done it.Ade: Right, you're not the first person in the world to be stuck on binary search trees or hash tables. [both laugh] And it's probably a better use of your time to seek out the wisdom of those who have done it before than to kind of bang your head at it for six months at a time, not because there's no utility in teaching yourself those things, but because you're joining a community, you're joining a community of learners and teachers, and there's no better place to be than people who are eager to share their experiences within their understanding with you, which does not minimize your experience as a learner. Again, waxing poetic. All of that to say that WeWork is such an important space, and building a community for yourself is such an important aspect of your career.Tim: I couldn't agree more. You need to come work with us at WeWork. [both laugh]Ade: Is that how I get a space? Tim: That's it.Ade: Because, I mean, I'm down.Tim: You got the job. You got the job! [Tim laughs]Ade: Just like that. See? 2019, getting jobs I didn't even interview for. Look at me. Shout-out to God. Okay. Before we go, Tim, is there anything else that you'd like to add, anything that you'd like to touch on that we haven't spoken about?Tim: Absolutely. For all of y'all listening right now, join the Mentors & Mentees community if you want to take control of your career and achieve career fulfillment. That is the focus of our community. We are in growth mode, and, you know, we are booming. As a community builder, I will welcome you, I will show you love, and our members will do the same. And I also want to share that if you've got a friend that needs a career coach, let them know I am a career coach as well. Aside from all of the things I do--I do a lot of things 'cause I'm living in the future of work literally as I speak about it--so if you need a coach that will take care of your career and help you, position you to thrive in the future of work, that is moi. So, you know, hit me up on LinkedIn. For y'all who are following me on LinkedIn, thank y'all. For y'all who are not, please get to it. I'm also on Instagram and Facebook as well if those are your preferred channels. But connect with me. I would love to continue to carry this conversation with you all.Ade: I just want to add that your hustle is unreal, because, like, I think I've counted--I think I've counted, like, the three positions just now. [Tim laughs] I think the only--like, the only people who work harder than Tim are, like, Jamaicans and Beyonce. Tim: I've gotten that before. "Are you Jamaican?" I said "No, I'm Nigerian. I'm Nigerian-American."Ade: [laughs] That's hilarious, and know you're doing Nigerians proud. Very happy to have you in your corner. Tim: I am happy to be a part of the Living Corporate family.Ade: Thank you so very much for joining us, yeah. So happy to have you. Please don't be a stranger.Tim: Oh, of course not.Ade: That's it from us, guys. We're signing off. Remember, per usual, you can catch us on pretty much, you know, everywhere. If you're on Facebook, if you're on LinkedIn, if you're on Twitter, if you're on Instagram. We are Living Corporate everywhere. You can also catch us at www.living-corporate.com. Tell Australia to free livingcorporate.com for our use. That's it for us today. I was so happy to speak to you today. Thank you so much for joining us, Tim, and until next time, Living Corporate family, go out and be great.Tim: Be great!Ade: Peace.

RTRE 49 - Tim Hur, Managing Real Estate Broker of Point Honors

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2019 36:43

Tim Hur is the Managing Broker of Point Honors & Associates, a residential real estate firm in Duluth, GA. Tim has built a great firm and has also served on NAR's Fair Housing committee during 2018. Tim joins us to give life to the fair housing conversation and why it's important in our business. He also answers great questions around involvement in the industry and commitment to clients needs. Don't miss this episode. Tune in and listen to your favorite real estate podcast, reThink Real Estate. You can find Tim Hur at https://www.pointhonors.com The re:think real estate podcast is hosted by Chris Lazarus, Nathan White, and Christian Harris. Thank you for tuning in. Please subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Real Estate Podcast Transcription Audio length 36:42 RTRE 49 – Tim Hur, Managing Real Estate Broker of Point Honors [music] [Chris] Welcome to re:Think Real Estate, your educational and hopefully entertaining source for all things real estate, business, news and tech. [Christian]: I am Christian Harris in Seattle, Washington. [Nathan]: Hi, I am Nathan White in Columbus, Ohio. [Chris]: And I am Chris Lazarus in Atlanta, Georgia. Thanks for tuning in. [music] [Chris]: Everybody and welcome back to re:Think Real Estate. I am Chris Lazarus here with Christian Harris and Nathan White. Guys what's going on? [Christian]: Not much. Talking to my favorite people. [Nathan]: Speak for yourself. But I am glad to be here on recording so that's good. Excited we get to talk about some new stuff. For someone might be boring but I still find it interesting so I am excited about that. And this is about it. [Chris]: How is your CMA going? [Nathan]: My CRM…I am just slightly…I'm doing alright. [Chris]: CRM. I say CMA because Christian was just talking about could services and CRM. You know. [Nathan]: That is something I am still failing at. We won't talk about it. We have a guest and we don't want to bore people. [Chris]: We'll move on. We do. We do have a guest. We have great guest. His name is Tim Hur. For those of you who haven't seen him at NAR events, Tim is the managing broker of Point Honors. His bio is a freaking novel. So we're gonna let Tim. Tim thanks for joining us today. [Tim]: No thank you so much for the invitation. I really appreciate it. It's a lot of fun. [Chris]: It's great to have you on. So for…for our audience you have achieved quite a lot of honors. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? And what you're doing. [Tim]: Sure. Thank you so much for that [laughter]. I appreciate that. Well my name is Tim Hur. Unfortunate not related to the fictional character Ben Hur otherwise I would be not selling real estate. Of course. But no I am…I was your 2018 chair, national chair for diversity for NRA based here in Atlanta. And I have been rocking and rolling ever since, been a realtor for what 12,13 years now. Kind of have been doing this right after college. [Chris]: Nice. So tell us your story. Did…Where did you grow up? How did you get into real estate? Where did you go to school? All the fun stuff. [Tim]: Sure. I was born in Huston. Moved to Atlanta than got too far away. You know, I went to high school here. I went to Georgia Tech right after that. And… [Chris]: [inaudible] [Tim]: I know. [laughter] Either you hate me or you love me. One or the other. But I had a really good opportunity going to real estate. So I got my license and got into real estate right before the crash. So it was really good. We all…I think a lot of us who have endured the pains of early real estate and have been in the industry at least for a while and everyone is complaining about interest rates right now but you know we started real estate when we were selling into it. It was 7,8,9,10,11,12%. So you know. The market tanked so I moved over to commercial for a little bit. And sustained myself with Doreos [phonetics] and commercial and came right back swinging and we've been…You know we have a small team here. We have about 18 agents in our company and we operate pretty well. So… [Chris]: That's awesome so you were the 2018 national chair for Federal Fair Housing and implementing that. [Tim]: Well slightly. So yeah I was 2018 chair diversity. [Chris]: Can you tell us on how that went on. [Tim]: Yeah so the 2018 yeah chair for diversity. [Chris]: OK. [Tim]: So the diversity committee from the national association of realtors we were…one of our tasks was to make sure that we helped launch the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the fair housing act. So we were…we were very hands on on that last year. [Chris]: So what was the…like how did that go? What did you do for the 50th anniversary? I know I saw you at several events. But what was the whole…What did NAR put together for that? [Tim]: Sure. So you know a lot of us you know we think of fair housing and fair housing violations more as…I mean this...It is obviously a very dry subject and a very boring subject at times but it is very instrumental and very important. But a lot of us put their housing as a risk. More than something that you can violate… [Christian]: You can't [laughter] [laughter]. [Tim]: …Trouble and then we learn about it. But really we were trying to take it different aspect of it and try show that fair housing really should be implemented in the beginning where you really should know about fair housing. And the 50th anniversary was very, very instrumental and very…is very important because as realtors we are on the wrong side of the law. Back in 1924 our code of ethics actually said that we would not be instrumental in introducing members of the community that would actually bring down poppy values. It was a direct attack on you know Asians, Blacks, Hispanics. So there was actually red lining and we were instrumental in doing that. Obviously we…that's why it was very important. [Chris]: We as realtors, not… [Tim]: Right. Realtors [laughter]. Yeah that was in the code of ethics. And you know can you…Nobody really believes that 50 years ago that we were actually fighting against fair housing. And you know obviously people don't know this as well but you know Atlanta has a very strong history with Dr. Martin Luther King and he actually was a very big pioneer in fair housing. And the day after the assassination of Dr. King, about a week later was when the fair housing act was signed. So it kind of…you know it kind of…there was a lot of things that went out to it. And realtors got smart and the legal issues got smart and we started putting restrictions and covenants. And you know building you know, fair housing violations into them. But now it's obviously, it's all been taken away. You know as realtors or you know, people that are in the real estate industry we are now looking beyond race and all the…classes at the fair housing act and trying to include LGBT queue housing rights and stuff like that. So we are looking at the future as well to make sure that stuff like this does not happen again. [Nathan]: So question for you than Tim, and I don't want this to sound ignorant. [Tim]: No no. It's OK. [Nathan]: Right [laughter] you know, like fair housing you said it sounds boring but it's not but then again how big of an issue is it? Like it's not…Like I just don't…my mind doesn't think that way to say “Oh we can't take you here because of this, that or you know redlining as we talk” or steering. My mind does not work like that. Like it just… [Tim]: And that's like…that's the point. Right. So a lot of us…And that's why it was very important. Not a lot of us don't think to vio…Intentionally violate the fair housing act. Nobody goes out and says “I am gonna discriminate tomorrow” or “I am not gonna do this and that”. We do it unintentionally and it brings up…that's why it was brought up to light. You know when we…for example you know there is issues such as you know I know that you know we as realtors and tidal companies you know there is a lot of D distinctions where it says “This property cannot be sold to somebody of black descend or Asian descent”. It is actually built into the legal description. [Chris]: I saw somebody post one of those online the other day. Yeah. [Tim]: Right isn't that crazy? [Chris]: Yeah and it's the first time I have been in real estate since 2010, that's the first time I have ever seen it. [Tim]: Yeah and you…it's still there. What people don't realize is that Tidal companies they assure over it because it is illegal. They don't really remove that portion where it says, this portion you know “This must sold…”. So you know a lot of it is awareness but a lot of us don't go out and say “I am going to go and discriminate against you know, somebody in some, you know one of the protected classes.” We just don't think that way. That's why it's very important. That's why NAR really…and a lot of people took this as a moral of risk issue. Our committee was very…we were very adamant about you know rewriting the fair housing camp book. And making sure that everyone is tarter at the beginning. Yeah not to intentionally violate but a lot of us just don't know. And we just don't know. Sometimes you need a refresher. [Christian]: So I have a question so if some would say, I have heard you know going back… [Chris]:[inaudible] [Christian]: Yes. And I am in Seattle. So you know it should be much more progressive and more focused on… [Tim]: Sure. [Christian]: …Discrimination. That sort of thing. You know I have heard you know very well articulated points that you know the history of real estate is reared with if not has a lot of racism and discrimination in history. And sounds like back in the day NAR and probably the whole real estate industry as a whole is on the wrong side of this issue. When did that change? Was that kind of the process of the civil right movement as society started shifting? Or.. [Tim]: Yeah I think…So I think you know I can't speak on behalf…I am not a history bud, but you know a portion of it you know when FHA started issuing loans. You know a lot of after World War 2 a lot of our veterans wanted to have the white big fences and to live in suburbs. And they were denied that because of FHA insurability and saying there whole fair housing violations here. You know, as people came back and they were promised they could live in suburbs and they don't have to live in you know in the city limits sometimes and you know a lot of this stuff that were not allowed they weren't given the same rights so to speak. Some were African Americans but you know we also have to look at you know women. Women were not allowed to own real estate without the permission of their fathers or their husbands until certain parts of the country until the 70s or 80s. So you know, this is a very recent event. These are not stuff that again you know you talk about Seattle being very progressive and you know and California LA but you know fair housing violations come all the time. [Chris]: Really? No way. [Tim]: I know that there are several instances where I have been, when I go around the country for renters. Renters they see an interracial couple. And the landlord is like “No not renting to you”. But in the beginning it was fine because they look at the last name and they were like “Sure sure sure”. And than they come and meet the tenant and they're like “I don't want to rent to you anymore”. Why? “So what's really the case. Why are you not renting to me?” So you know there is a lot of those…there is instances and maybe there are one offs sometime but I think that if you talk to some of our women or if you talk to some of our multicultural clients or agents they may have a lot of different stories. And it was really interesting to hear a lot of stories. You know there was one case in Chicago. There was one of the champions that I know. And he was talking about how he opened a real estate company and people just kept his phone lines busy so that he cannot sell real estate. So you know back in the day we didn't have email so you know all we did was we had a group of people keeping his phone lines constantly busy so that nobody could call his real estate office. [Christian]: Wow. [Chris]: Because he was black. [Christian]: That's messed up. [Tim]: That's crazy. Yeah it's crazy. You would never think that. That's just something they thought about. [Chris]: You know what year it was? What year was that? Do you know? [Tim]: This is right…I think this is…I don't know. He does speak often. He is at the VLNAIR [phonetics] conference. Well…But yeah it's crazy just to hear this. [Chris]: It's nuts. [Christian]: That's in our generation. [laughter]. [Tim]: Yeah. [Christian]: That's… [Tim]: It's only a few years. So what can we do? [Christian]: Yeah for like your situation you're talking about with the…the rental discrimination with like mixed race couple or whatever. I mean what sort of resort they have because I mean let's say “Why don't you rent to us?”. I would imagine most landlords aren't gonna be dumb enough to be like “Well because you're black”. [Tim]: You actually would be surprised. [Christian]: OK. [Tim]: Actually you would be surprised. So you would actually be very surprised. And a lot of realtors you have to be very careful as well. [Christian]: Sure. [Tim]: Because you know and you know the way that you…You have to be puritan. If you report it you have a special dedicated line. You know you have to really be careful and they'll make the calls. [Christian]: Sure. [Tim]: You know if it's not any to you and they deny you. They may not sustain. They may not claim race or they may not claim sexual orientation or whatever the case is or classes. But they can…if you are denied they will call the landlord back and see if it is available for rent. And if it is they will try to go through the whole process you know with a very different case scenario. And see why they wouldn't rent. So you know if you don't report it, it doesn't get reported. So we encourage everyone. If you see violations, you have to report it. [Christian]: Sure. Now I would imagine that the violations, well I mean you know prior to the fair housing act you know it was just kind of part for the course. But I would imagine with those initially enacted those violations were much more obvious you know as they were struggling to civil rights and racial discrimination stuff. I would imagine it is much subtler these days. I mean what are you seeing as the most common violations you know and I would imagine a lot of those are even unknowing violations. What are you seeing now? [Tim]: Yeah I don't know if there is any common violations. Right. And again nobody goes out there and says “I am going to discriminate against a certain race or you know religion.” It's you know…it may be more nuanced or a little more subtle than before. It may not be so plain. But you know it does exist and it does happen. You know it depends…depending on what part of the country you may be in and if you're not aware or how to work with a certain culture you may…you may…you may be found in violation. Especially from the code of ethics not if you are a realtor. But you may be found guilty of violating their housing. And again it's a matter of reporting it. Rather than you know…And figuring out was it really a fair housing violation they really…”Are they doing something against me?”. [Christian]: Sure, do they take into account kind of intention versus ignorance or kind of just kind of if you were violated you violated it. [Tim]: That's…it depends on how that I guess would…how they want to…you know, how they want to approach it. You know I think a lot of the familiar status gets…gets you know found upon. You know being single versus with family right you know with 2,3 children,4 children, 5 children. You know what…I see that part often as well. You know, disability. You know, you have to make sure you don't discriminate on disability. So it's…I think some of the…You know…A lot of the stuff…some of this comes up especially during the rental process. No, I don't think you know someone says no to somebody when they buy or sell as much as you may see that in more of a lender, tenant sometimes. [Christian]: Sure. The ones I have seen…You own a brokerage, is that correct? [Tim]: I do. [Christian]: OK. As do I and Chris. And the thing I have seen most common that I had a couple of agents on would be like listing descriptions. Would be like “This is a perfect friendly house”. I am like “Yeah you can't say that”. You know, great for kids, you know. And the other think I heard recently you know was an agent who was working with an Indian buyer and they were like “I want to live in a neighborhood hat is primarily Indian”. He is like “I can't tell you that. You do your research, you tell me where you are looking and I will support that”. But you know… [Tim]: Yeah if you say like “Oh yeah this is…you know…I think I know where you would like to live because there is a very big Chinese community”. You know that…that's…you're steering somebody so you have to be very careful how you do that. You know the next kind of the big one you know is schooling. You know schools and how much is good schools. Is that also kind of rooted into fair housing right. Because sometimes some of the better schools will have certain races that would make them more predominant. And so people have been using sometimes, may be using schools for fair housing violations. So you have to be as an agent and as broker, be very careful of schools. Because they are looking at that now. [Christian]: So you're saying they're kind of using that as the avenue to be in a predominantly white neighborhood or something like that? [Tim]: Potentially yeah, potentially right. So you may need to be careful on how we present schools. You know if you're saying that this is a really good school it's very different form saying “Hey this school is predominantly white”. You know in a predominantly higher class subdivision, or a neighborhood so you have to be very careful of how you use school in it too because they can use that… You know it is interesting that you bring schools up too. Or I brought it up but you know the listing descriptions anyway. Because the other day I was browsing around and there is a couple of apps on…on target marketing. And some of the target marketing for properties I have seen clearly violates fair housing. And I brought it to their attention and they're like “Wow wow we don't do that”. But I am like “But you can click male or female and you can click how many children that they have and you can click you know…”Because the data is out there. So you have to be very careful on how you do your advertising as well and this is why Facebook got sued. Because you know make sure that you're advertising when you do decide to purchase ad space, that it is open to all. Because you know in certain people…and this is another unintentional case. So people have said “Hey this million-dollar house I envision this to be a certain client. You know it's gonna be someone with a certain amount of wealth. And you know a certain race and sex”. And so they target, hyper target it you know a certain demographics so to speak. And you know instead of targeting based upon salary they were doing it…you can literally click on the different options and I was telling them “This is very bad”. And then of course they redid their algorithm and they took out some of the choices but that it happens. So again another unintentional violation. You're not going out there as an agent to intentionally say “Hey I am going to market this property only to white people or only to Asians in this market or only to certain you know, Chinese”. You know whatever the case may be. So unintentional. [Chris]: That's interesting that you…you know with the whole schools and how Christian you mentioned being a predominantly white neighborhood for a school with…you know Harvard was just recently sued by Asian students for… [Tim]: Right. [Chris]: For not being able to get in because they were too good. So I mean it…cultures are changing. The demographics are changing and you know us as agents…what are some things Tim that really brokers or agents should know? Brokers can train the agents or things that agents should know to be aware of outside of the normal like federal fair housing. Because you mentioned online with algorithms. [Tim]: Yeah. [Chris]: There really has not bene anything that comes down formally that says “This is how you can use demographics online to advertise”. [Tim]: Right. [Chris]: In the past we've had…Say you're in the Buford Highway area and you're advertising in a Korean newspaper. In Korean. In…In my training it has been that if you were advertising that elsewhere in the general population that is sufficient but if you go online and you target that it's a completely different story. [Tim]: Yeah I think the intent is always a key factor, right. So you know as brokers our jobs are getting much harder. You know as an agent it's very important to train them but you know we…they're independent agents. You know we don't…They're not employees of our companies. You know we do have to watch what they do and what they say and I have seen a lot of employment agreement or…You know not employment agreement. I have seen a lot of independent contractors in the game that are actually saying that they are able to monitor social media. Right? Because that's one of the places where a lot of people do market their properties now. And it does get a little harder as our jobs you know, as you grow you firm and your brokerage firm gets bigger and bigger and bigger. You know, how do you control your 3000 agents in you know do not violate right and who is the one that gets the trouble the broker or the agent? Right? Who is the one that has to go through the whole process and who is the one that is gonna get fined? So it is you know…It's hard to always…Our job is you know to not employ…not only to encourage our agents to make money but to help them you know elevate their business. But it is a harder job for us. You know you mentioned advertising in different languages. And yeah you know I always say make sure that you just don't advertise it just to 1 community or 1 avenue. Make sure it is available to everyone. And I think just in general it's good practice anyway. You know, why would you put everything in all Chinese or in all you know or in Spanish. You're limiting your market sphere anyway so why would you do that? [Chris]: Yeah. [Tim]: You know it's good practice. [Chris]: So what got you involved with NAR? So you came into this before, divide, you got into commercial. What created your firm and why did you get involved on the level that you did? Let's steer a little bit off of fair housing. [Tim]: Yeah. It was fun stuff. NAR you know being a realtor, starting off in a realtor world, you know that is something that we kind of naturally gravitate towards. I was fortunate. I kind of took a different path. I went to NAR and started on committees at NAR first. I am kind of a little bit of a goof ball and I was taking a…auditing a class. ABR class. And I just happened to be with a lot of the past presidents and future presidents of NAR in the class. And it was really cold and being from Georgia I am always cold. I don't like snow and I took…I was in a hotel room and me and the instructor were just fighting you know over the thermostat and I just eventually took the hotel robe and I just brought it to class. And the minute he started playing with the thermometer I was like “Done, can't do it anymore”. Just put on my robe. Out at the NAR building. All the along had no idea. I didn't even know who I was even talking to. I was just like “Oh I came to take a class”. And then everyone was like “Is that the robe from the hotel? Did you just steal a robe? We're paying for your class”. And I am like “Oh no no I will take it back, I will take it back”. Come to find out that was Ron Vapes and Steve Brown and those were all the future presidents and the past presidents of NAR. So I think I made a little bit of an interesting impact rather [laughter]… [Chris]: Yeah that's a little bit of an impact. [Tim]: Yeah but and you know I started getting involved with the realtor world just because it's very important for us to really ensure that our business is sustainable. You know there's so many things that we do and one of the few plan to my president circle…planted our members in Georgia. And I just…you know. Right? [Chris]: Our Pack baby. [Tim]: Our Pack. Yes. I do believe in giving back. And so I do give quite a bit back just because I have seen the policy world. I am a policy wonk. I have you know as…I want to make sure that our housing rights are protected. And you know yours and my jobs are…you know we're not impacted every day and I see that. So I want to make sure that we give back. [Chris]: Well you know what Tim is a former Our Pact chair. I appreciate that. Thank you so much for your contribution. [Tim]: Of course. [Chris]: You did everything that Our Pact does. So what made you go out and start your own brokerage? How did you get back into residential? [Tim]: So I work with a lot of international clients. You know, the good thing about having a dip or diversifying in the real estate world, you know, when I jumped back into commercial I also started working with a lot of international clients and global clients. And so you know our firm is a little unique. Most or our agents actually are bilingual. They do speak more than 1 language in our firm which is nice just because we do cater to a whole different demographics of clients at times. And we can help them. So when I started working with a lot of international clients they weren't really affected a lot by the recession. So they were able to work with a lot more investment properties and stuff like that. So when I started coming back into the residential world they were looking for commercial and then they were looking for something to buy on the residential side. So I kind of put my foot back in and it was fun. I started my own firm because I wanted to have a little bit more flexibility you know. Back in the day I would have said that it was because of commissions but looking at it now as a broker you don't really make that much money. You…There is a lot more headache. But I wanted to… [Chris]: A headache [inaudible] changes [laughter]. Yeah. [Tim]: But I did want the autonomy. So I started the firm and ever since I did it has been going ever since out. You know there is a lot of changes going on in the industry and I hate the word “disruptor”, but there is a lot of change going on. But I think at the end of the day if you service your clients and you take care of your clients that's why they have always been with me and you know I think they will always come back. [Nathan]: A [censored] men to that. [laughter] [Tim]: Yeah so I just… [Christian]: Nathan said the first F bomb in the day. Ladies and gentlemen Nathan [censored]… [Nathan]: Well you know how I feel about that so you know you don't need a big name, you don't need a gigantic flag, you don't need to have all the tech in the world. Just need to take care of people. [Tim]: Yeah absolutely. And you know in that thing that is you know going to independence or working in a mega firm there is always pros and cons. But people always go…they go back to you. They back to Nathan White because they know Nathan White is in real estate. They go back to Christopher because they know that Christopher is in real estate. So I think that if you know…and that is what I try to teach my agents like “You guys can leave me any day, I mean I have to sign your release forms if you decide to leave tomorrow or today or within the hour. You know, I hope that you know, during the time that you were with me that you were able to build your own brand so they come back to you for ever and ever and ever for real estate purposes. And if you can't than tie yourselves with…if you're not gonna be in real estate than tie yourself with a referral company and make some money that way”. There are so many different avenues in making money in real estate. And I have a top agent, a top agent in my office. I call her top just because she doesn't sell real estate. She refers. And it's funny because she works for a company that does a lot of relocations and if they don't offer real packages she's like “Where are you moving? I know where you're moving to. Let me find you an agent”. And she just collects a referral check all day long. And so in my world that's a top agent who doesn't sell real estate but is able to collect and really utilize her license. But it's funny how…I know when the checks come in. And I am like “These are yours”. I know exactly whose check it is. It's fun. [Nathan]: So Tim I always like to ask some fun questions and I typically pluck them out of a great book by Tim Ferriss. [Tim]: So you're the one? [Nathan]: Yeah I am the one right. Tim Ferriss wrote a great book called “Tribe of mentors”. He asked everybody the same questions and I always like to ask guests a few of these questions that he asked people. So I will fire away with the first one. If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it? What would it say? [Tim]: A billboard with anything that I want on it? [Nathan]: Yeah what would that message be? [Tim]: [laughter] I think people very close to me would say…It would probably say “Leave me alone”. [Nathan]: Really [laughter]. That's great. [Chris]: Tim Hur wants to be left alone. [Tim]: You know when I am at home and I want to be by myself, I want to be by myself but you know you don't get that luxury as a broker and working with international clients. We're always…We're always doing something but you know just having the time alone to be like “Give me my 15 minutes”. You know I try to turn off my phone when I am working out just because I am like “That's my 1 hour that I have, don't have to worry about clients. You can wait”. But yeah I think that's…you know that was the first thing that popped into my head. [Nathan]: That is fantastic. Might be the best answer that we've gotten for that one yet. I don't know. Leave me alone. [Tim]: I think that's the most truthful one you could get on the show. Right? [Nathan]: Yes and I appreciate that. So... [Chris]: That's good. [Nathan]: So number 2, what are some bad recommendations you hear in our profession? What are bad recommendations you hear all the time? [Tim]: Bad recommendations. You know I don't think anything is ever a bad recommendation. I think you just...you're just…you're just very misguided, right. You just…people don't realize all the ins and outs of how difficult it is to buy and sell a home. Recommendations…Gosh I hear that every day. I hear bad recommendations every day. I will say that rather than giving examples you can probably tell by my face. My partner says that I have facial trots. And I can't hide it anymore. So when I hear something really weird or wonky my face just turns. So you know I don't say anything. You just kind of tell from my face. [Chris]: You just see the reaction. [Tim]: You see the reaction. So I have been told that I need to really control my facial [laughter]… [Christian]: Start doing Botox. Just numb your face. [Chris]: Yeah it will tone it all down. Just nothing to worry. [Tim]: Yeah just gotta tone it down. That's probably you know sort of recommendations I hear all the time. I will tell you that. Just kind of be careful of that. [Nathan]: Got you. So 3rd one. What is a book that greatly influenced your life? [Tim]: A book that greatly influenced…Who reads books? OK. [Nathan]: Audible counts. [Tim]: Yes I am a bad millennial. I like to have something in my hands. No this is… [Nathan]: I am a book nerd so… [Tim]: Oh you're a book nerd. You know I am a big fan of the Chronicles of Narnia and I do like reading a lot of of very you know I don't want to say Christiany but you know it's very interesting reads. You know things that are kind of up in the air and Scrutiny…One of my favorite books is the Scrutiny of Letters. It was…I re-read that book not long ago and it's a very good book. I would recommend it. [Christian]: Allegory. Allegory story. [Tim]: Yeah. I just like the title too. I mean Scrutiny of Letters. It's kind of like…you know. [Nathan]: I will tell you I like books. I do have to do a quick plug. For those that do listen and like to know what book…Right now I am reading a book called Men's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. If you haven't read great lately go grab this book. It's really interesting. He was an Auschwitz survivor. If you are having or struggling with your why in your life, go read this book. It will speak to you. Great book right now. This one right here. You can't see it because you're listening but those that are recording right now can, but an awesome book. So anyway, onto that. Well best answer ever. Leave me alone. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. [Tim]: [laughter]. [Christian]: I have a quick question as we're wrapping up here. So you own your own brokerage. So you're a managing agent. So are you selling real estate yourself? [Tim]: I am. I am a compete broker. [Christian]: OK. So you're doing that [inaudible]. Whatever. We know what you mean. You're still involved in NAR? [Tim]: I am. [Christian]: Right you're still committee. So what's…What's…I mean I don't know how you find time for all of that. But what's kind of your next move? [Tim]: Mainly. [Christian]: Because of your involvement in the association. [Tim]: You know in this…as long as you can constantly serve and you know I don't mean that there is always ways to always get involved. You know I am a big Our Pack guy. I am a big global guy. Big diversity guy. You put your hands in a lot of business. But the thing as…the important thing rather than what I want to do or what I see myself in 5 years with what the realtor world is really more of “Let's get everyone else involved too”. I think that's just really important on a local level. State level. International level. You know we hear all these different stories about “The realtor committee doesn't represent me” or certain things, “Certain communities don't represent me well”. We can find you a mission. We can find you a way to get involved. And I think that's the really more important story than trying to find where I really need to be plugged in the next life. We can all…We're all…We're realtors. We're selling real estate. We can bounce around. We can serve wherever we're asked. [Christian]: Yeah. Do you…Do you believe that non realtor, non-members have an ability to serve and make an impact without being a member of the NAR. Is there…is there diversity in that or… [Tim]: Yeah, so actually there's 4 multicultural associations that NAR recognizes rather. There is the agency of real estate association of America. There is a national association in… [Christian]: ARIA. [Tim]: Yes ARIA. There is the national association of Gay and Lesbian in Real Estate professionals. NAGLREP. And National association of real estate brokers for the black community and the national association of real estate…of Hispanic real estate professional. NAHREP. So you know just because you're a realtor…You know if you're not a realtor and you want to get involved with some of our multicultural associations that's where to go. And so they make an impact on their own communities itself. So yeah you don't have to be a realtor. We would always encourage you to be one but if you want to be one. But even if you're a part time or…you can still make an impact because there is so much to do in our world. And yes we don't have…There's only 24 hours in a day and we don't have a lot of time but you know there is always…You can shrug along and you can find something to do. [Chris]: I couldn't agree more Tim. Thank you so much for joining us today. We got a lot of really great nuggets both on the fair housing side, both on your background and getting involved. For anybody who wants to reach out how can they find you? [Tim]: You can find me again…My name is really easy just think of the fictional American character of Charles Helson and think of Tim Hur. Other than that you can find me on Facebook. I am easily available on social media all summer. It's always nice when you get hacked and someone makes a fake profile of you which I found very recently but yeah you can't miss me. But you can find me…the easiest way is just google me and find me. If you don't google yourself and do a vanity search of yourself I highly recommend it. [Chris]: Definitely. Awesome. Everybody thank you so much for tuning in for this episode of re:Think Real Estate. Catch us back next week as we celebrate our 50th anniversary…not anniversary. Our 50th episode. [Tim]: Congrats you guys. [Chris]: Could be a long year. But thank you Tim for joining us. Everybody if you haven't go to rtrepodcast.com. Put in your email and name in the little subscription form and be alerted every time an episode drops. So you can hear great nuggets from guys like Tim Hur. Thank you and we'll see you next Monday. [music] [Chris]: Thanks for tuning in this week's episode of the re:Think Real Estate Podcast. We would love to hear your feedback so please leave us a review on iTunes. Our music is curtesy of Dan Koch K-O-C-H, whose music can be explored and licensed for use at dankoch.net. Thank you Dan. Please like, share and follow. You can find us on Facebook at Facebook.com/rethinkpodcast. Thank you so much for tuning in everyone and have a great week. [music]

america women american chicago washington men state chinese international ohio seattle spanish search managing meaning african americans harvard indian asian ladies real estate chronicles ga martin luther king jr lgbt letters columbus korean guys excited tribe moved realtors crm hispanic world war lesbian botox blacks auschwitz intentionally tim ferriss honors georgia tech asians nra narnia tidal unfortunate brokers cma scrutiny hispanics duluth renters nar allegory fha abr real estate brokers ben hur huston steve brown victor frankl fair housing christian right managing broker nathan white christian harris nahrep christ here chris yeah chris you chris how chris so chris well tim oh tim it tim you tim yeah california la christian you chris thanks tim no tim well christiany tim so ourpact chris can chris welcome christian so tim right rethink real estate christian not chris lazarus

26 : Tim Salau

Living Corporate

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2018 13:38

We sit down with social influencer, entrepreneur, community builder, public speaker, blerd, and AI subject matter expert Tim Salau to discuss his journey into tech.Learn about Tim Salau here:http://www.timsalau.org/TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and yes, you're listening to a B-Side. Now, yes, of course we've introduced the purpose of a B-Side before, but every episode is someone's first episode. So for our new folks, B-Sides are essentially random shows we have in-between our larger shows. These are much less structured and somehow even more lit--that's right, even more lit--than our regularly scheduled shows. Sometimes they're discussions that the hosts have, sometimes they're extended monologues, or sometimes they're, like, a one-on-one chat with a special guest. Today we have a very special guest, Tim Salau. Now, this is from Kathryn LeBlanc, who did a profile on Tim. "Tim Salau is an ex-Googler, UX wiz, and LinkedIn video creator extraordinaire. Tim somehow manages to spare enough time to run a Facebook group called Mentors and Mentees. The group provides high-quality advice for young professionals looking to launch or level up their careers. Tim is also a LinkedIn campus editor and recently just began his journey with Microsoft as an artificial intelligence product manager, AND on top of all of that, Tim is Living Corporate's first brand ambassador. Tim, welcome to the show, man. How are you doing?Tim: [laughs] I'm doing well, man. You boosted me a lot there. I appreciate it.Zach: Okay, look. So today we're talking about non-conventional entries into tech. Talk to us about your journey into tech.Tim: Man, my journey into tech was very, very interesting. So my background is in psychology. I went to Texas Tech University to get my psychology degree, and then from there I started learning a little bit about digital media as well as, you know, how psychology can apply a lot to technology. Around my junior year I realized I really wanted to get into UX as a vertical, and since UX is really big in the tech arena I decided that I wanted to go make a career out of that because I really enjoyed an internship I had that junior year, the summer before my senior year. So from there I decided I wanted to go to grad school at the University of Texas in Austin and study something called a Master's of Information of Studies, which would allow me to develop kind of a deeper understanding of UX and kind of the psychological principles of how information and people work together. And, I mean, from there I've just been pretty much practicing and learning as much as I can in the field, whether it be on my own accord or at school or, you know, going to any kind of event that will allow me to just soak up as much knowledge as possible. And now I find myself really focused on artificial intelligence, and I think I was able to break in by just talking to the right people, man, and kind of being in the right spaces at the right time.Zach: So, you know, you talked about--just now you talked about how you're leaning into and learning as much as you can. So you and I have joked about this, but you have, like, I don't know 70 bajillion LinkedIn training certifications, right?Tim: [laughs] Yeah, man. I'm working. I'm working. I think learning is--learning is the easy part. Applying it all is the hard part, right? But I think some people find it hard to start learning and find the sources, but I think we're in an information age where it's incredibly accessible.Zach: Right. And let's continue down the path of being self-taught, right? So I think it's easy to assume that being self-taught is easy because you're creating your own rules to follow. Like, there isn't a pace, and the content is there for you to stay engaged how you like. For some though that's more immobilizing than anything else. What advice would you have for folks who are struggling with the idea or just the anxiety of that type of learning?Tim: I think find out what learning methods work for you. Being self-taught, for me I found that it's a--it's not just one learning method I use. I go from watching YouTube, LinkedIn learning videos, to, you know, finding hands-on ways to apply what I've learned, to talking to people who are the experts and just kind of getting their perspective on the field and, you know, seeing what they've gone through. I think for people--usually they think that they have to go straight to being experts. They have to go straight to really, like, being able to--like, for example, let's say create some sort of machine learning model, right? Like, it would scare you because you're like, "What the hell? A machine learning model?" Like, "How do I get started doing it? That seems like such a hard thing to do." So, like, the initial thought is that "Oh, man." Like, "I can't do this," but if you literally go on YouTube and search "how to," right, there's a five-minute video, I guarantee you, that will kind of walk you through it step by step, right? And you may not even master it after you watch that video, so what you do then is--okay, you go ahead and you go apply that knowledge, right? And you may not even master it after that, but what you do after that is you go to talk to someone that's actually done it, right? And let them know, "This has been my experience," and I think it's really a matter of making experience of learning, right? Put yourself in a position to either, you know, go offline and visit one of the events or wherever this knowledge is being shared, and really put yourself in this mindset that learning isn't one-dimensional. It's not monolithic. It's just not me, you know, just watching someone do it, it's me making an experience of it.Zach: So let's talk about Mentors and Mentees, right? So what and how--what is it, and how does it fit into your other work in tech?Tim: So Mentors and Mentees, about a year ago I was--I mean, a lot of people were reaching out to me about career advice and, you know, kind of my career path and everything, and I've always been into mentorship. I've actively mentored many people, probably too many people, because I always have--I have an executive board of mentors myself, so I understand how valuable it is. So I created Mentors and Mentees, a community group for people who are interested in kind of finding different perspectives, to help them kind of nurture their career paths and whatever problems that they may have. So right now the group is on Facebook, and I have plans to kind of create more around it in the future, and it's essentially a resource for anyone that is kind of confused on whether it be their job search, right? You know, whether it be salary negotiations or how to--how to transition from a different position into a new one within the same organization in a totally new industry. So the whole notion of Mentors and Mentees was just to create that space, that community, and it was actually something that was missing not only on Facebook but at large, right? Kind of, like, this very democratized space where you get an international audience and a wide variety of different perspectives to kind of, like, come to the table and share their experiences. So it was just a passion project, but now it's growing into a brand for me, man, and, you know, I have a lot of work that I have to do to continue to grow it. Zach: So continuing on that path talking about just working. So I know, you know, recently you announced, and you've been celebrating--again, congratulations again--around the placement with Microsoft.Tim: Thank you, brother.Zach: Yeah, no, you're welcome. In your IG story, you talked about being--like, just being an African kid and, like coming from the mud so to speak, right? And building this path for yourself. So what advice do you have for minorities who come from all sorts of backgrounds and see tech as, like, this far off, distant, mythical--like, it's too obscure to even grasp. Like, what advice would you have for them?Tim: I think first thing is a change of perspective. Tech permeates everything. I think a lot of people see tech as only a centralized thing, but more so see it as a--technology as a distributed kind of vehicle to a lot of different change, whether it be in the health sector, in the transportation sector, in the education sector, right? So change your perspective. It's not just like--everyone says "I'm trying to get into tech." Really in whatever capacity you're working in or whatever field that interests you, you will be affected by tech in some, you know, way or form, right? So it's a matter of understanding, "Well, if I really want to build my technical aptitude," or "If I really want to get into this field, how do I apply tech to a problem I want to solve? How do I apply tech to where I'm going next? How do I bring in the knowledge that's being shared, whether it be in the space of artificial intelligence, in the space of bot design, in the space of UX, how do I bring that to the work that I do as someone who wants to be a health practitioner or someone that wants to go into journalism, right? So I think changing that perspective is the #1 thing I encourage someone who wants to get into tech, quote-unquote, to do, right? See how they can apply it to a problem they want to solve and they where they want to go next. And once you make kind of that change of mindset, once you set that stance to change your mindset, you'll start to see that, "Okay, wow." Like, [inaudible] tech. It's a component of tools that I could use to really actually do better, not necessarily in my job function and role but also within my community. What really got me into tech is the fact that I was obsessed. I was really obsessed with the fact that one, UX and psychology was a way where we could create digital experiences that people would understand, and it would follow them throughout their day, throughout their life, and it could be shared, and as I grew and developed my passion, I developed a deeper obsession with this whole notion of community, right? How does technology really integrate into our communities? How do we build that digital aptitude, that digital literacy, and how does it extend beyond just, you know, one person being able to do it to multiple people and then an organization and so on forth? And I think me being really obsessed with community but being obsessed with the topics, I found ways where, "Okay, there's a lot of different ways I can use tech to scale what I'm trying to do, the problem that I'm trying to solve." The fact that, you know, I don't think a lot of people have that, you know, digital aptitude to really maybe start their own business or find themselves successful in that first role after their job, right? How do I one break down that education block, right? And how do I use tech to scale my solution. So changing your perspective and then seeing how you can use the tools that you have across the tech landscape, whatever it is that you're interested in to kind of scale your solution, is the best way to go about it. Zach: Man, this has been awesome, man. Before we let you go, do you have any shout outs, any other parting words?Tim: Man, I think that you gotta stay hungry. [laughs] You have to stay hungry and really find your obsession, find what you really are interested in and the problems that you want to solve. Zach: Now, where can people who want to learn more about Tim Salau--where can they engage you?Tim: Well, [laughs] I'm not a great [omni-channel?] presence, so you can find me on my Facebook page and profile at TimSalau, on Instagram at TimSalau as well, and especially on LinkedIn, one of my favorite platforms, at TimSalau as well. Feel free to connect with me, send me an [in?] mail, let me know if I can be of help to you in anything, as well as join the Mentors and Mentees community if you're a professional and you have a perspective to share and you have a story to share. The community is for you, and it's a great membership base for you to learn from others as well. So definitely join our Mentors and Mentees community.Zach: So a couple of things. First of all, yes, definitely. We're gonna put some air horns right here for Mentors and Mentees. [Sound Man complies]Zach: But also, Tim has been super gracious as I've been jacking up his last name this entire conversation. He hasn't corrected me one time, so shout out to you for being gracious. So air horns to Tim on that as well.[Sound Man complies again]Zach: So for the audience one more time, can you pronounce your name? The first and last name so we all have it right.Tim: Tim Salau. So it's T-I-M, my first name, and my last name is S-A-L-A-U. Tim Salau.Zach: I've been saying straight up Salu this whole time. You did not correct me one time. The humility is so real. All right.Tim: [laughs] It's okay.Zach: All right, so to be clear, that does it for us on the Living Corporate podcast. Make sure you follow us on Instagram at LivingCorporate, Twitter at LivingCorp_Pod, and subscribe to our newsletter through living-corporate.com. If you have a question you'd like for us to answer and read on the show, make sure you email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. This has been Zach, and you've been talking with Tim Salau. Peace.Tim: Yeah. [laughs]Kiara: Living Corporate is a podcast by Living Corporate, LLC. Our logo was designed by David Dawkins. Our theme music was produced by Ken Brown. Additional music production by Antoine Franklin from Musical Elevation. Post-production is handled by Jeremy Jackson. Got a topic suggestion? Email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. You can find us online on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and living-corporate.com. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned.

america university texas ai business master peace talk tech diversity microsoft african llc corporate inclusion studies mentorship mentors ux corporate america solidarity poc texas tech university melanin b side mentees b sides woc googlers vsco salu podsincolor ken brown soundman jeremy jackson zac hall tim yeah tim salau timman living corporate tim well tim thank zach yeah zach so zach right zach now pocintech blackandbrown vscocam

Episode 1: Tim Albright On Recognizing Opportunity, AV as a Service And Being Competitive

Software Defined Survival

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 23, 2018 71:32

Tim Albright is arguably the most successful podcaster in AV. He started his career in radio, and somehow wound up becoming and AV consultant. He’s also worked as a control systems programmer and university technology manager before founding AVNation. AVNation is a network of AV professionals whose goal is to further the AV industry through education and knowledge. They do that through blog posts and covering industry events and they are most well known for podcasting. Their flagship podcast, AVWeek, was first recorded in 2011 and provides a weekly overview of the AV industry. Over the years they have launched several other podcasts like ResiWeek, EdTech and my personal favourite, A State Of Control. Transcript This transcription was created with IBM Watson's Speech To Text service. Computers aren't perfect. Please keep that in mind when reading the transcript. [spoiler title="Read More..."] Pat: Greetings everyone in AV lands my name is Patrick Murray and welcome to software defined survival, where we interview the people and companies in AV that you software to re invent themselves and the way they do business. We listen to their stories and asks for as for tactics and device on how to survive and even thrive in this software defines world. I'm excited about our first guest on the show he is arguably the most successful podcaster in AV and before you run away saying what the heck does podcasting have to do with software, I kind of see podcasting and blogging as software defined media. Right? That the podcasts and the blogs and things like that, they don't care where you are and they don't care how you consume it. They don't care what time it is like a radio show and things like that so this is definitely a software defined solution and that's why I'm excited to have this guest. He started his career in radio and somehow wound up becoming an AV consultant I'll have to ask how that happens and he also worked as a control system programmer and university technology manager before founding easy nation alienation is a network of AV professionals whose goal is to provide to further the AV industry through education and knowledge something that is near and dear to my heart and their flagship podcast TV week was first recorded in two thousand and eleven and it provides a weekly overview of the AV industry if you're in a movie you should definitely check out a few weeks it's a great way to get a a download of what's going on in the industry. Now over the years they launched several other podcasts like crazy week ed tech and my personal favorite state of control if your navy programmer definitely check out a state of control well ladies and gentlemen Tim Albright. Tim: Yeah, way too flowery. Pat: Welcome to the show Tim. Is there anything about that introduction that you'd like to add or expand upon? Tim: No you don't need me on the show now! Yeah yeah I'm good. Pat: Nice. Tim: How are you doing? Pat: Yeah I'm good I'm good. Tim: I'm excited for this dude. Pat: Thank you I appreciate that. I got a couple questions lined up here. We could also let this meander and go wherever it takes us. Tim: It probably will. Pat: It probably will. So I know you have kids I have a couple kids myself and one thing you'll never hear a child say is when I grow up I want to be in AV. At least, I haven't heard that one yet. So there's usually a story behind how people wind up in this industry so tell us how did you get started in AV? Tim: Why are you mention my broadcast and my broadcast background and I was working for radio stations and Lois and must show my my my wife and I Michelle had had had our first child and it was not conducive to having a child was not conducive to being on morning radio which is what I was because you know you get up at stupid o'clock in the morning and you go to bed at you know really early at night and just wasn't conducive for that and so I was starting to look around and the armada the college that I had had gone to school to school at was needing what they described as a in an engineer and somebody to take care of some projector installs once a month once a year and I was annoyed that day I'm, I'm somewhat technical and somewhat you know I can do that and I was already teaching already a production for them and so I was like sure I can do this and so they they they hired me on and what turned in what what started out as being do a couple of projector installs a year turned into holy cow we have no money and we have to upgrade all of these rooms and we have to adjust the programming in these rooms and we have to learn how to properly designed these these rooms so I quickly found myself taking Infocom classes and taking classes from various manufacturers and getting certified to program Sir your fax first and so I buy it we ended up having our own little small band of of designers and installers for our little college I mean we had a hundred ninety rooms which is not it's not small but it's not it's not the size of let's say young university of Illinois which is also listed above out for me but it was it was significant for us and so that got me only involved in AV almost from the get go. I mea, I went to my very first Infocomm shortly after starting there because of the lack of knowledge that I had and I need to get ramped up on so that's how I got involved was you need to do a career change and of finding myself you know in the ceiling trying to put together a five wire BNC and and getting a multi meter out to figure out why the heck my yellow look weird. Pat: Exactly switching that the black and white wires. Tim: Well, I started making cables with all kinds of short so that's why I that's what I used to multi meter is yeah every yeah eventually got better at it . Pat : So you mentioned your first visit to Infocomm do you remember what your first impressions were kind of walking into that hall? Tim: Holy crap, are you kidding me? I fell in love I honestly it well it wasn't the work and it was in the I love the work it was it was good work and I I still I still control is still my favorite part of of a B. and and probably always will be , but when I walked in the show floor this is this is back in the mid to late two thousands arm so wasn't the size it is now I was absolutely flabbergasted me, I had never been to anything like that like it before my life I'd never to the C. S. as as a as a journalist I'd been to a number of junk it's a movie junkets where they fight about interview people in this up now and go see movies and those are smaller by by a large margin but I never been to any be a detriment to CS and so this is my first trade show experience and I walked in the show for and I'm just awestruck and I'm like I don't want to do anything else I simply don't want to do anything else and I remember walking around and talking to folks and you know that was when I got to meet a lot of folks that I still you know consider friends today I mean I it was when when I will I met body mind his name is Kevin who happens to work for Crestron but you know met him there and I met them for the folks that just to kind of took me under their wing and said okay here's this here's as dumb kid that does not anything let's, let's show him a thing or two. Pat: Yeah there's nothing like having a mentor in those first years to know an explain things that are that are now probably totally obvious to you. Tim: And obsolete. Just for the record. Pat: Well, Yeah, RGBHV byebye. Pat: So everybody in AV usually has a at least one nightmare project under their belt. Let's not talk about that. Maybe you could tell me about your most rewarding AV projects and what made it special for you? Tim: Oh wow, see that one is harder. I can tell you can tell you my nightmare story off the top of my head. So this is not one that I specifically did but I was in charge of I mention the fact that I work for college and the largest the largest construction project that we were a part of the college I where I went to over the cards that I've I worked at was a small community college and it was it was bigger than what it should have been. It's it's it has delusions of grandeur at time and it's a good thing right I'm not I'm not saying that as a negative I'm saying that they have delusions of grandeur and all the times they meet those right so this is a community college who reaches beyond what the normal community college to play does they wanted to do a research center right this organization called script switches scripts ocean Oceana ocean out ripple oceanography is that right oceanic scripts motioning research center are they study the ocean well I live in Illinois, I live in southwest Illinois just outside of Saint Louis. We live on the Mississippi, the biggest outside of the Amazon the biggest of fresh water longest waterway in the in the North America there's nothing like that. Right there's nothing and so they wanted to develop a research center I community college, building a research center for the for the rivers. And where Alton is which is the whole time I live and it actually happens to be right at the confluence between the Illinois Mississippi and the Missouri rivers so not only are you on the biggest river in North America you're also at this very unique place between where all these three rivers come togther, right. So that's kind of the backstory here, they have this this grand idea are they partner with a bunch of people I know like we're gonna build this, right? It is a platinum level or gold level LEED certified building, right. I think when they started out they were going platinum and I think eventually they got gold. And we were tasked with doing all the AV in this research facility. Now there have been a couple other projects where they they built this this four story twenty million dollar research facility a year or two earlier and we spec'd out right. That was you're talking about thirty or forty rooms I think , six lecture halls that was subbed out we helped with the design and we we assisted with some of the direction but we did not do that. We did this research facility and at the end of the day when we had the grand opening and and this that and the other, you walk through and everything's working and everything's exactly you know what kind of the way you envisioned it as a designer so it was the first project as as a AV person as an A. V. professional, as a programmer, as a designer, as an installer you could sit back and go: „yeah we did that and it freaking rocks“. Pat: Nice! It does happen once in awhile. Has it ever happened again? Tim: No, well like that, I mean we've had a couple others while we were there like I said we were there and had the AV because we had to. Pat: Is that why you had that kind of success with it, because yeah because the control you have over the projects? Tim: Yes,absolutely! No it was one of these things where we were actually brought in early enough and every AV person in the world will tell you, the earlier we can get brought in the more successful going to half and we were able to do things like you know have conversations about you know the network and have conversations and this is early on with video over IP and integrating we used a,video conferencing system it was like the second or third video conferencing system college never had. We had two of them in this building because they were visiting scientists from all over the world who had their own water ways that they were concerned with they would come to this resurfaced research facility, because it was one of a kind of I believe it still as it was, one of a kind and so you had folks from China on you had folks from our member Argentina and Venezuela coming here. And so they needed to talk to their compatriots in a secure manner so we had we were tasked with creating a secure BTC system and something that was easy for them to use and understand and you know this was back way before anybody considered you know one button usability we had a one button system where they all they had to do was you know come in and and we were working with the the scheduling software and they can hit a button and they were connected to their people. If it was the right time and the right schedule. Pat: Very nice. There's a few things I want to impact there. Like somebody told me recently when a professor in a university for example. When they have a hard time with this technology, it kind of takes away from their credentials a bit. Right, if if they're like supposed to be this really smart person and they're fumbling around with the touch panel, it it kind of takes away from the authority that they have. So something like a one touch button, you know, where anybody could really use it, then they can get on with their own job. Tim: So, so I have a story about that. I have over the years worked with a couple integrators in Saint Louis. I still do work for one group. Just because I've known him for twenty years and they're good friends. One of the first times I was on a significant ,college and university in Saint Louis .I'm not gonna say which one. We were replacing a touchpanel and we get there and this touchpanel is concaved,right and this is an old, if you're familiar with the old Crestron quick media systems, it was a seventeen inch quick media touch panel, so this was not a cheap device to replace. It was somewhere between fifteen and twenty grants and the the entire center of it is concave and I'm like „what in the world happened to this?“ Pat: I think, I know what happened. Tim: There's this professor, who has like fifteen doctorates, probably like four or five, but still has a number of doctorates and is the first time using the system and just like any other good programmer you put in a cool down screen, when you're using a projector, especially back then right. Pat: Sure. Tim: And he said, how dare this thing tell me to wait two minutes so I can restart the system. And put his fist through it. Pat: Wow, he actually punched the touch panel. Tim: No, no he wailed on the touchpanel, to the point where it was busted. Pat: Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this, or I hope there are. Thant wanted to do that themselves once or twice. Tim: Oh, I'm certain. Pat: I know a guy, who threw his laptop across the room once, programmer. Tim: Laptop? I've done that too. Pat: Yeah? I always wanted to, never had the guts to do it. I wanted to believe it, but never had the guts to actually do it. So the other thing I wanted to talk about on that story was. I always like it, because a lot of times we do these projects and we go away and we never see how the rooms are used and usually it's some generic thing that you know we never really can appreciate at all. So I like the fact that you actually knew about people using the room and how they're using it. Like scientists coming together from all over the world and actually using your technology to collaborate and really produce results. That’s something I think we don't get to see often enough. Tim: Well especially folks like you, right. And you know folks, who are either independent programmers right. You guys are the mercenaries of the industry you get called in or subbed out and you don't. Alright, you go in and you know, I've talked about this before, you're kind of unique, because you're in Germany, you get to go around to different parts, different countries in you Amsterdam and done jobs. I've done jobs, not a whole lot of outside of Saint Louis but a couple of size and Louis. And you're right, if you are in this position, you're never going to go back to that job, hopefully. As long as everything worked correctly and see how they use it. Now being a tech manager, if you are a tech manager, yes, you get that you get that that ability you get that opportunity to do it on two different levels. First of all, if you're decent, if you are a tech manager worth their salt, you should at least be there or be available for folks especially new an incoming faculty to use your systems. Now you and I both know, that if you have to have instructions on how to use a touch panel the new done a poor job of designing the touch panel. But there are people with five doctor too that can't turn on a light switch successfully. Sometimes. Pat: They've got their minds on other things. Tim: Absolutely they do. So we actually developed a number of modules because we still had we're still going from one control system to another control system even when I left, because that we have had with at one standard we're moving to another so we had about three different, types of of control systems are at our college, so we had different models we had recorded them in and let met what made them available to new incoming faculty so I can get used to it right. If you're in this building with this is the type of system we have in this building this is how you access your but this building it's just a bunch of you know it's a it's a wall plate with a couple buttons this is how you do you you access it. And so, you would still be able to go and and and and walk through and and kind of be available the first couple weeks of of classes, to make sure that everything kind of works and and kind of comes off without a hitch. Pat: Very nice. Lets a shift gears for a minute and talk about AV Nation. Where did the... Tim: Why? I'm not very serious Patrick, you should know by now. Pat: Yeah I'm good I'm getting that, so I'll try to tone it down a little bit. Tim: No, you’re fine Pat: It’s my first podcast , give me a break, I'll loosen up. Tim: I have three hundred forty one AV weeks and I am not gonna count the other ones, so. Pat: Nice, so where the original idea come from? Tim: Oh Lord, so you mentioned very very nicely my broadcast background. I was weaned and kind of developed as a broadcast journalist at the the preeminent news talk stations at Lewis called KMOX. I had a job before I ever left college there and so I was able to rub shoulders with and learn from some of the best in the business it was it was owned by CBS at the time and so we were trained in the CBS way of of how to gather news. And said that that is my pedigree when it comes to the broadcast journalists part. And when I got involved in the AV industry and fell in love with it, that kind of put that down for a while I still taught on radio production in audio production, but actually since 2006, I was teaching students how to podcast I wasn't doing it myself, but I I saw it as an opportunity for up and coming broadcasters to cut their teeth and and and kind of stretch their legs and stretch their wings and see what's possible on in the realm of audio. And in 2005/2006 I was turned on to this week in tech by Leo Laporte. It's the twit network, yeah he has several podcasts, he's probably the most successful podcaster period. And possibly Adam Corolla has passed him at this point from a network standpoint I would say that Leo was probably up there. And so listening to that on a weekly basis, he does tech in general, right, so he does you know cell phones, computers and switches and all kind of stuff. Pat: Everything. Tim: Everything. And he also does for two hours a week which is way more than than I can I can do. So I was looking for something, right and, so there were a couple of people who have who have were already doing something not what I was looking for but they were doing something Essien at the time and that's when I see an atomic medications was doing a monthly video podcast are where they would bring people into a studio and they would talk about a specific project, right. So it was kind of white paper, a video version of a white paper. Pat: Okay. Tim: Wasn't what I was looking for. What I was looking for the twit version of the the AV version of twit, right. I want the news that I wanted it in a succinct way and I want it on a weekly basis. Nobody had it. Pat: Right. Tim: Right and I don't know that anybody's still does . Pat: Maybe in prints, but certainly not weekly, right. Tim: But not weekly, right. And so on it's one of these things where necessity breeds invention I didn't have what I wanted and so I made it. Pat: Scratch your own itch. Tim: Yeah, I mean I could see again I'm an old radio guy in and I've been in television as well and and I think that that medium has a lot to offer people. You get to learn people's voices and I don't mean that any any in the literal sense I mean, folks understand that I am as much, a lover of this industry, as I am not overly serious about it. And I was I don't take ourselves too seriously I've made the comment both on the air off the year it's our team and other people. If the projector doesn't work no one is going to die, right. You know it's not life and death and you have to understand kind of where your your places in the world. We make experiences. And I'm I'm gonna totally steal this line here, we make great experiences and our job as as a nation is kind of what we've developed into and what we were allies and and me still learning how to be a businessman, because I'm a producer that's my pedigree is, we speak directly to the integrators on a weekly basis, right. Way back when it when I was a radio we had, you will be called an avatar with this is the person that we're talking to. My avatar for AV nation specifically for a AV week are the folks the integrators who are are driving into their office on Monday morning: Why is it that they need to know for that week to be successful? Right? And that question has driven, darn near everything that we've done. It's driven the deep dive into the other, what I'll call niche podcast that we do on a monthly basis and that includes the state of control which is controlled automation that includes AV. social which is shell social media and marketing. Which is kind of developed into more marketing and social media because boxing in under understand how to talk to their clients, right. It drove a show actually from one of our underwriters, to look at the on the IT in A. V. and how they each influence each other. It drove a show that I developed probably a year ago with a consulting firm, called on the eighty profession. And that looks at you know ways to make your business better. Has nothing to do with the with the actual technology of AV, but it is about how to be better at your business. You know we've done everything from interview consultants who will help you with your business to interview business authors, on how to get consumer consumers. I'd just interviewed a guy who I was turned on to by a buddy of mine that I've developed a relationship with the Name Ian Altman. Ian is a fanstastic sales person to bend tastic sales consulting. He's spoken of a Bacchae spoke in other places you spoke with PSNI and super summit. Well, Ian turned me on this other guy by the name of Markus Sheridan. He is probably one of the best experts that I've ever read, when it comes to content marketing, he turned a like this closed bankrupt, swimming pool company in the middle of the recession, he turned around with about a year and a half through content marketing. And reading his story and reading his take on it, is fascinating and it's incredibly important to people in the A. V. industry. Title of his book is: „They asky you answer.“ It’s very simple. Pat: Okay. Tim: Your clients are going to ask you questions. Probably to the sales people, when they ask you questions, you answer it, in a not only obviously you know, Patrick is my client even assuming email say „Hey what about this and what what what's what's the steel with with HDMI to that on? How ist his gonna affect us?“ Okay, well first of all: Into the question to the client directly right now this is going to how it's going to do it this is this is what it's doing but then you send it to your marketing people and say „Hey we have a question, because, an old rule of thumb in broadcasting is that, between five and ten percent of your audience will ever ever contact you ever, I don't care if you're given a million million dollars will between five and ten percent of your of your audience will ever call and we'll ever email you ever contact you same is true in the business world. Between five and ten percent of your clients will ever ask you a question that is meaningful. You know, how they're going to be affected you take those nuggets, because I will guarantee you, that at least, twenty of the twenty other clients have the exact same question, they're just not gonna ask you. Pat: Sure Tim: Or potential clients may have that same question- they are not gonna ask you. Pat: Trash. Tim: But if you have this piece of content over here, right and they're searching how will HDMI two do affect me? Boom you have an article. Boom you have a video whatever, so it's stuff like this that has driven our content to say you know how it how can we best help integrators and in all honesty also tech managers do their job better and be more successful. Pat: Great stuff. I mean really does a lot of stuff to tackle their. How do you know what to write? That's something I always come up against, because of course this idea of putting content out there, that's all people find you. It's basically SEO, which sounds a little fishy, if you ask me, but if you are just writing stuff that people want to know about and they do find you, nothing is better than that. And I know what you mean like I ask, I have my online courses and I ask students all the time. „Please tell me what's wrong?“ and they never answer me. It's like pulling teeth getting any kind of feedback- out of anybody. And blog posting it takes a lot of time. It's really time consuming. It's a lot of fun, because it really makes you dig deep into a subject and become more knowledgeable about it and really start to look at it from different angles that you might not have considered, but again that time investment how do you decide what to write about. Tim: So we've done a couple different things. First of all we started taking our shows and regardless of the show there's going to be at least two or three different topics on each episode and and we've started pulling and culling information from there. But me personally, my personal blog it's what I'm interested in, right. It's what's hit me are within the last week or two weeks and right now this week I am formulating and doing some research for a blog about how the terrorists are going to impact the industry in North America large adversely beyond North America in the US our current president has put tariffs on steel, well let's not be silly a lot of our products are made with with feel , you know what the rack rack is a big giant piece of steel arm based metal and so I'm trying to do some research right now, because that to me is interesting and that's a question that nobody's asked yet. Is how are the how are the policies of not just this president every president, impacting our industry you know you look at what is it Brazil is one of the biggest exporters to us of steel. Guess what, they are also one of the biggest importer of what they are one of the biggest importers of US Cole. To make this deal. Pat: Okay. Tim: So you know, you're looking at stuff like this going, okay you know and at the end of the day whether it's you know Atlas or it's Middle Atlantic or its Chief and I'm just naming three you've got so many other people sure like a bank, that use steel every single day. And our listeners are users are clients or customers, how are they going to be impacted not today not tomorrow because they've already got a warehouse full of steel, but in six months or a year and then how do they decide whether or not to pass that shards alone? You know the first question is is there going to be an increase right. That's the number one question as you know this Atlas I eat is atlas and their racks had to they have to increase the price of middle when it comes to increase their price and if the question is yes it's almost like programming right, if yes then what's right and then you then the manufacturer has to make a decision without a past that that charge along most the time they have to, their business, they have to truck bass along the their their cost increases. And then okay so your you know H. B. can occasions are here city Iowa St Louis your rack price just went up ten percent okay you've designed a system you have a spec out will suddenly you're losing ten points right so how did you recoup that cost and hopefully you haven't done so are too far out right to where it's going to hurt you that much. But then how do you how do you adjust your prices again their business so they have to salute laces Hannah and so it just trickles on down to you know the final customer whether it's education reporter five hundred operation they've got to you know explain the situations I look you know. Our metal prices increased down the line, you know. Pat: It could, putting my programmer hat on, use less hardware. It could cause people to, right? Tim: That's actually a good point. Pat: Just their system design, put less stuff in the rac, right? That big matrix switch can be compressed down to a network switch and maybe the numbers would work out that way. Could be an interesting angle for to solve that kind of issue. Tim: Where people to more video over IP and not do it over a switcher. You'll also from a program from a control standpoint to you know move more toward software as opposed to you know a three to direct high, processor moved to software to where I somewhere in the cloud someone the network. Pat: Now how about that all due to the price of steel you the way things are all kind of connected to each other. You were talking about how the business podcast and I think that's another great subject because there really is no how to. And in A.V. for a long time everybody's always been busy. But with things changing, I kind of wonder, if in a few years from now, the flow of projects will change, just a little bit, if things do become more software based. Right the whole integrators maybe to change their business model. I mean it there was talk of this years ago, as margin started to go down with with Amazon you could buy display on Amazon. But the model still doesn't seem to be service based for the most part at all. It's still his margin based model of selling hardware. Tim: They trying. Pat: Yeah, well that's exactly the point. That I'm trying to make is like, there's no how to, to make that jump. And have you bumped into any resources on on a podcast to try to just help us you know take this thing apart and and figure out a new way to put it back together. Tim: Not on that possible broadcasters specifically. What I run into is some folks were doing it well. And I've run into those folks at different industry events. Two or three of my favorite events have nothing to do with the technology. They all had to do about the business of AV. Pat: Okay. Tim: And there's absolutely reasons to go to ISE, there's absolute reasons to go to Infocomm and all the other technology trade shows. Certainly you get to see cold things you get to do things you know it and and experience things, but what I would say is that there is more of a reason to go to these business centric our shows as well these business centric meetings. Pat: Do you have any examples? Tim: Well there's the three that I have is my super summit which that's only for PS my folks, in the CIA's BLC would stand for business leadership conference and then of ex is a back which is the A. B. executive conference. Is not taken out mean there's not there's not a technology showcase their. These are folks that are going to you're going to have a chance to talk with your peers, what other business owners. Pat: Right Tim: And find out what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong and how they can help you and honestly how you can help them. And in doing so, you know you're gonna be able to see what's worked in what's doesn't. You know we're obviously that there are regional differences in their cultural differences, not only across you know international borders but also on the scene in the US there's regional, cultural differences as big as we are. But the basics are the same, right and understanding that and it was it was actually at the BLC three years ago now, I ran into a young man who was in charge of emigration from up in Maine, which is singled out of the way. But but they were doing service and support, as a AV as a service and support through their clients right, they had they had taken the the sass model the software as a service model and convertible into AV rather successfully and they did it through number different ways number one was was the monitoring and maintaining of their systems. But that conversation and coupled with a couple different conversation with some other and integrators who had moved to AV as a service through not only monitoring but also leasing, the equipment. Pat: The equipment, okay. Tim: So it's not yellow you Patrick as the client you don't own anything, right. My contract with you says you're gonna have the latest greatest stuff within five years, every year, so it's my job to make sure that the system is up and running and maintained and that you have the latest greatest you don't have to worry about you know end of life for a projector or display or a control processor. Your stuff is just gonna work and it's my job to figure that out. Now you're going to pay me for that, right you gonna pay me for that, because suddenly you you don't have a need for a support team you know have a need for you know having somebody physically on site because I'm gonna come within and you know depending on base on the contract but within an hour five hours twenty four hours depending on what the contract says. I'm going to support you, to this to this degree. Pat: Do those numbers work out? Tim: It does for some people, it does for some organizations right for some for some clients they get, right. Pat: Is it really just an understanding thing or because you could put this in black and white: over the next ten years, system it will cost you X. and doing that as a service option will cost also X. Tim: X, plus some. Understand that, it's not, it's not the cheapest option, right. Pat: But you are not laying out the money up front. Tim: You’re not laying out the money up front: You're eliminating in you do you hate to talk about you know people line jobs for your limiting a jobber too are so your cost of off that. Number three you don't have to deal with the the half life of certain products of equipment and then you don't have to mess with what do you do with that product that that equipment once it's been taken out and that is actually one of the dirty little secrets of A V. Especially from a technology manager standpoint. Pat: Sure. Tim: What the heck do you do with this crap, once you've taken out of the rack. Pat: It's useless. Tim: Seriously I had the office I had it at Lewis and Clark, which is the college I worked at, it was, our head in for our master control for our our internal TV station, okay. So I had it you know five racks worth of equipment the set the other about time. I left there I had replaced everything in that rack, when I got there. It was all old CRTs and an old old analog equipment. Pat: Big stuff too . Tim: I all of my gosh I had, replaced everything in that rack to where it was down to two racks. I had a back room full of gear. Pat: Yeah, try ebaying it. Tim: Ebaying it is worth less right, because you you get five or ten Bucks. But then so we only end up doing electronic recycling our college had a green initiative in this and other once a year , we electronically cycle and that's where a lot of those old five wire switchers went right to a company that we knew that that are college had had bedded they knew what they did with the equipment once they got it and and they were responsible about the way that they dispose of it. But you know that's one of those things that folks don't really think about because you know I don't care what the VCR with the doc came from her years ago. This stuff has first of all has hazardous material and right now people think about that but you've got lead in there you've got ill do it like this electronics have got crap in it that probably shouldn't go into the ground how do you responsibly dispose of that and some companies absolutely do really good job of that they'll have a program to where the either get a credit to their their clients are the height say „Hey I'll take this off your hands and as we know how to properly dispose of it“. Absolutely there is that there's also I would say a large majority of folks we simply don't know what to do with you know a sixteen by sixteen BJ switcher, once they take it out and replaced it with the with a digital equipment. Pat: Right, so that's like another bonus of that as a service modelle right, they would take care of that that final tasks. So it sounds like this is all as a service model is more about convenience it'll cost a little more but you get a ton of convenience it's like kind of like what Rich does as a white glove service. So what's the hold up? Tim: Getting the AV sales people to wrap their head around it. Pat: Are we, so we are our own worst enemy, kind of. Tim: Absolutly, it’s just like every industry by way. Pat: Yeah, okay, sure, but this is like a real opportunity to grow, because you know within a service model, you know how much is coming in every month for the next five years. These are contracts as opposed to the way we do things now, a project comes in, you get it done and then you basically start from zero again. Tim: I think some of is also cultural, going back to that, but yet it's cultural as well, because you have a business that has a business plan. And it is in their business plan to sell ex amount in their hiring the salespeople to sell a system. Pat: Okay. Tim: I'm not so the contractor and some of that's it you know some that's also a cultural shift internally to say okay we're going to make the shift. I would say that the folks that I know they had gone to the service model alright there are sure to migrate to art are incredibly successful. Pat: Yeah. Tim: I am certain that there are failures out there. I have not heard of them, but I'm certain there are values out there, people who for whatever reason whether it's their market or their client base or whatever. Just couldn't get off the ground. Then gone back to to doing you know sales and and a service as a separate item. Pat: Okay, so to shift to an end as a service model, is obviously a big investment, right. It would it completely changes everything. Is there a pass to do it incrementally? Tim: That actually is how you almost have to do it, right? You can't exactly do on mass, you would have to take it , object right so you get an RFP, or you are selling to a client and you know you're listening to them and you're hearing their their big pain points. But that's the other part is this is not for everybody , there are some folks who eaten will never let you monitor their network okay ever let you monitor their system. So unless you can overcome that hurdle, it's not gonna be a very successful AV as in service installation. So that you use a limited arsenal system. Pat: That could be handled with staffing no? Tim: Yes and no. I mean yes, you can put somebody physically on on site, right. And then that's another cost. Pat: Right. Tim: Some cost, but yeah absolutely. Pat: Okay, interesting stuff. Let's shift gears back again to....you know that kind of reminds me of, is like you were saying, to start incrementally like I tell programmers just do something small you know find your smallest projects, if you want to learn a new programming language and tried on that something that you know you could go back to your old language and do in just a few minutes. But just just try it on a really small project first. And that's how you that's a gain confidence with these things- that's how you start to that so you go from crawling to walking. Tim: That's why the most famous phrase and all the programming is „hello world“. Pat: Yeah, there you go. Tim: Seriously, because that right there is you know if you can do „hello world“ in a language then you can go from there. Pat: Yeah, definitely. So speaking of control, „state of control“, but I'm a big fan of it, obviously. Tim: I am too. Pat: It's actually, you know, hearing everybody, she knows that I respect, talk about the different ways to approach AV control it's it's kind of inspired me a bit to follow up on some of my own ideas and develop them and even try out a new product or so on the market. They don't know it, didn't always work but. Tim: Oh they will. Pat: Do you know of any similar stories on estate control or any other podcasts where somebody's been inspired to really take action and do something with the information that that you guys are providing? Tim: There are a lot actually over the years. Pat: Pick your favorite. Tim: I'm trying to think, but I will probably will I'll stick with state control and the good lord this has been, two or three years ago now. I can't remember. Crestron came out with their diamond level programming. If you're not familiar with with Crestron sort of by programmers there are, number of years there was sweat three different metals and was bronze silver and gold and then they came out with platinum and then they came out with diamond. And we did a special episode with the first ever diamond programmers. Now two of them were Crestron employees but still there was there was four of them that were that were first ever and out of that Labadie Dave hats started talking about doing diamond and he became a diamond level year later the first ever diamond that I ever knew personally right. I knew the couple of the posters of the question that but I didn't know them really well the day was the incredible fantastic very talented diamond level programmerer. Pat: But we should also point out that it's about three weeks of work to do that certification. Tim: Well, more than that, because then you have to do it, you have to keep it you, have to teach every year. Pat: So it's a real investment. Tim: It's incredible investment and even with the one thing that I find fascinating, is you have to teach outside of your discipline and what I mean by that is, Dave is a network programmer, he could take you know network control and and and run with all day long he's a commercial programmer, he has done commercial programming for years, so the first class he did was buy a home. Pat: Was resi. Tim: Was residential automation. Fish out of water. As our water and that's with a duty right. That's what they do to you. To stretch your arms and to get you kind of on the path of making sure that you are not as a real well rounded, right. I'm obviously Hatz probably has you know, fifteen pro3's in this house and use fully automated the only service dog food every morning you know outlaw doc brown. But you know it it's, there is something where it's you're getting outside of your comfort zone and outside of what you do on a daily basis. Pat: So, I've had to make his decision myself and I decided for the time being not to make that huge investment in the next level of Crestron programming just because, yeah, does it really make a difference? And you know, from what you're telling me, this guy was inspired to make this huge investment, from one of your shows. I don't know, what do you think, does it really? Maybe it's a country thing, here in Germany maybe they just don't look at certifications the same way. They all kind of look the same and blur, but is there, yeah. Tim: This is why it depends: You're an independent programmer. I have been outside of the spec part of the AV industry for probably too long, so I understand that when I say what I'm gonna say. I have not yet run into a situation, where somebody has put on us back, that they want a diamond level programmer. It doesn't mean, that they're not out there. I'm just saying that I have not personally run into or heard about a spec I ate in our P. where somebody has put down but they want a diamond level I am certain that there is at least one or two out there that that they've asked for. And the other side of that is there very few situations where it be where it would be warranted. Pat: Well, that's the other thing, yeah. Tim: By and large most course for most programmers I know Crestron AMX external, most of them that are worth their salt and they get they get their certification, can handle a vast majority, of thrown at them. Yes, there are building automation's where you know what you're doing. right. And for that I would say a higher level of certification would be needed. And what you should be called out of respect, but if that's what your business is and that's what you talk about what you do on a daily basis a personal question then. Pat: You know, sure sure, got to be decided on a case by case basis Tim: Yep. Pat: Alright shifting back TV nation. I remember running into you a few years ago and you quietly whispered to me in my ear that you were I'm gonna go a hundred percent all in with AV Nation. Do you remember that time? Tim: I do. Pat: So what was the biggest reason was the biggest thing that that gave me the confidence to make that jump? Tim: Two things. First one the the support of my wife. Of any ship flight that you have to have the support of your partner, regardless of who that is. Pat: Absolutely. Tim: Certainly it was it was a weird combination. So we had just started monetizing aviation and and by what I said just I mean we had this was the first start, we had just started taking on money from other people up at that point it was completely financed by me. I was financing and by doing some outside jobs. We had just completed our first trip ISE, which was a can credibly successful Kickstarter for us. It was very humbling, because up to that point well Infocomm was a trip that almost went to anyway. So we were kinda able to kind of couple together and I could cover whatever nobody else could. But ISE was different, ISE was a big chunk of money. It was ten grand was our budget show and our listeners came through in our supporters came through in a huge winds quickly on more, but also prove something that we could do it and we could do it differently, than other people and that's kind of what our thing is. We cover the industry in a unique way because we're all in the industry. And so I wanted to finance it in a different way to kinda keep with with who we are. And so after I see that year was actually I was I is the twenty fifteen twenty fifteen to that I was looking around like, okay what's what makes sense to me and I'm a big fan of NPR and PBS and BBC in the UK and an image are an arcane and just the way they think their model is which is pretty much be a publicly financed but no undue influence, I guess the best way to put this. Pat: Okay. Tim: And so the way that we have our contracts with our underwriting structured is, there's no real influence. And you know that's just kind of the the way we we wanted to go. And so we were starting to take on some money, not a whole lot but enough to offset into where I didn't have to the side projects anymore. And the company that I worked for, was eighty eight, independent programming house. I was the they operate the ops manager for. We got sold to a local integration firm in Saint Louis of folks that I have a lot of respect for. Good friends with. They were one of our biggest clients at at the time. And some sitting in this meeting and not really knowing what to expect from them. They were very gracious, they had all these ideas for me. They wanted to do this and this and this and I'm sitting here in this meeting going „this is a unique place in my life, this is a unique time and I have an opportunity, I can absolutely take this job. I could take this job and I could work this job for a year two years five years whatever. But AN Nation at the time was in a unique spot that I was I it was it was when those moments where you either take it full bore and and and and take it out and spend it and take it out for a test drive and see what it's capable of. Or you just keep in the garage and it's something that you can tinker with on the weekend. And in that moment I just kind of decided well this is this is my time to figure out whether or not this is something real or not. Without this is something that people can really honestly sustain or not. And I told them that and I remember the owner, who's become a very good friend of mine and one of my business mentors, says „well it sounds like you're quitting, before you ever start“ and I said, „well I kind of am“ and so I left that meeting oddly on cloud nine. Not having a job. I was unemployed, thoroughly. And it has been the scariest and craziest two and a half years of my life and I would not do it differently. Pat: Excellent. I like how you mentioned you had to recognize the opportunity, that was happening. It was the it was a special opportunity that came you had the Kickstarter you had maybe a few underwriters so you kind of proven that there was a need for it that it could become something and then the company getting sold was kind of a catalyst to to kind of snap your into reality and say „wait a minute, I can either do this or that“ and then you chose this road. So what was what was really your biggest concern at the time what what were you worried about? Tim: Paying my bills. Pat: Yeah obviously. Tim: I mean so it's interesting, that when I tell people my story, they're the ones that one of the more common questions is „you have your wife“ and yet „you have kids right like „yeah yeah that I've a mortgage I have to to pay for in Ohio. Pat: Are you mentally stable? Tim: No, no I'm not. You know, but now that's that's the biggest concern every month you know and and you know there are months that are better than others. And well I have a really good friend, I have known Michael for over twenty years he has recently in the last year and a half he has gone out on his own is does he does IT consulting. And he will be on me the powerful, for advice and I'm you know is is one thing we were I'll tell him is like looking out there there are going to be days and they're gonna be months that are horrible, right where you are going to question your own sanity in question your own your own brains. But we've gotten to the point where we are are stable and we are solid. And I'm I'm happy with on or the underwriters that we have them happy with the group that we've got and so out of that stability you okay so what were stable now it's taken us two and a half years to get stable but were stable so okay so what does any good entrepreneur wants wants a stable, you try to grow right. And so we're in the process of doing some things that were were assessing some things and going okay you know what can we do to be a silly bigger for her sake but what can we do better? Right? What what can we do better how can we do things are even more differently and how can we reach more people and how can we do it more efficiently and how can we make our underwriters lives easier and how can we connect with more integrators and and what are we not just covering and were we not doing and you know we we started doing adjustments expo last year twenty seventeen. For the first time and we are doing it again this year, because our integrators are telling us that deals digital signage as a particle is important to them, so okay so you spend two days in Vegas right honestly Patrick it's the cheapest show that I do , from a from a cost standpoint, so it is the least expensive show that we cover and it's you know I'm in Saint Louis so I tell people, I'm spoiled as far as he is whites it takes me I get any place in the country in three hours you know at the most and Vegas is among those and you know southwest being southwest you can get in a fight pretty cheaply and you know hotels in Vegas Sir you depends on where you stay obviously but you know those little relatively inexpensiveunless you go during CIS, which I've heard really horror stories about that, but that's a whole nother issue: But you know it's it to you you grow from a stability standpoint and a you stretch and you see what's possible and you know we're not perfect by any stretch the imagination we have our own issues and and we're still learning how to be a website as opposed to in in addition to being a podcast company and that comes with that with its own challenges, because it's something that we never had to worry about you know was a website traffic because our our podcasting traffic is is what it does. And so that comes with is its own set of challenges and trying to shore that up and and learn because as a business owner I have to make I have to make intelligent decisions so the way that I make decisions, I want to learn everything about right I'll be an expert but I had to have I have to know enough to make an informed decision, so you know learning about you know things like you mentioned SEO and learning about things like making sure things are in proper categories and making sure that your , you're promoting so proper and all this other „hoo hah“ that I never had to worry about you know five years ago. So that's a learning. It's a way that we can we're able to become better and and serve our clients in in our our listeners better is okay, we're good you know we're or stable now now let's start stretching. Pat: Excellent, sounds great. Any plans for the future you'd care to share with us? Tim: Take over the world. Pat: Really? With a podcast? Tim: Absolutly. Here’s the thing- we I see online media, as not just the future of media in general, but I see it as as kind of where we're going as a society and I do mean it is a global society. I still believe in print, I think print is a is a fantastic medium, I think the journalists that worked at The New York Times SEM are fantastic people. Right? I think they do an incredible job of what they do, but I also look at what time magazine is doing on time magazine, if you've never heard of them is little magazine right, but they start out being being a print magazine. If you go to Times website you're going to see as much video as you are written conduct and you take the flip side of that company that started out as being just as video on that CNN, CNN start out being just video right. It was the cables news network, well with the the onset of of the of the internet are there is much written as they are video on their website now so you've got you've got to be as a media company you have to be everything are you have to provide folks written content as well as video and I would argue also as well as audio all you have to give your audience what they want in the format that they wanted an you regardless of whether you're covering audio visual or you're covering politics you have to give folks what you what they want in the way that they want it. And it took us a long time to realize that it really really dead because I thought blocks right I thought blogs I thought press releases I fought you know written content I'll let them right on the folks that help me run AV Nation will tell you that but I finally realize that you know what yet not everybody likes listening to me talk right not everybody likes looking and looking and then when watching some people just simply like to read , okay so you gonna go down that road as well. But no I mean I am I am fully ensconced in my business owners share. !I wanna take over the world, I want to be the number one you know audio visual media platform, I want to be the number one audio visual media company out there I would be number one and I I say that very humbly and but very honestly you know I am also a competitor, as well as a broadcaster and so how you do that you listen to your people you listen to you you listen to people who give you feedback , you make adjustments and you say okay to that just don't work and if it didn't well then you go back to the drawing board okay what what what's next. Pat: Excellent, excellent. Well, you're doing a great job you're definitely on the path. You know I'm a big fan. I remember the first time you called me for a programming job, that's the first time we met. Tim: Yep. Pat: And I was like holy crap, it's Tim, I heard your voice on the other side of a phone and not coming through my car speakers, so yeah there's a there's a lot about the power of you know audio and voice and things like that but but the other know die that you were mentioning it sounds a lot like the way people learn too. Like some people learn better with text, others with video and I guess the news is a form of of learning too. The next big change could be right, you're saying that there's this move to video. What happens when everybody has a pair of googles? Tim: No, not everybody will have a pair of googles. Pat: No, no, because then you're there, like it doesn't get more real. Tim: Well, the reason I say that is because I am, objects are right I am that you know that that lost generation between the damn boomers in the damn memorials and yeah so we're we're you know we're that we are the forgotten generation at and you know there there is you know our our kids are kids may very well have goggles the more likely than not our grandkids or great grand grand kids may very well have the goggles but in the meantime it is the augmented reality of the cell phone right and you know it it's the reason I say that we we probably don't have goggles is is does he goes back you go back to 3D. one of the main reasons the three D. never really took off to the people who were in the glasses if they don't have to wear glasses. Pat: Sure. Tim: I'm thirty three years old and I don't have to wear glasses knock on wood right so do you think Zak like you know my dad was forty when he started wearing his readers and I'm forty three and I still don't have to so I and I will fight it tooth and nail but I I'm legitimately I'm not I'm not fighting and there's a there's a box over there with the small print I can still read it now you know once I get to that point with wearing glasses you know I I don't know that I'll feel differently but I would say that if you don't have to wear glasses you're probably not really apt to even if it's going to give you some weird experiences however okay if you are already looking at yourself or let's be very Frank about it we all are right arm then you you kind of lean towards that and there's there's where some of the the I a are going to come from in our years honestly there's some games out there and there's some programs out there with that I'll let you you know see stuff on your desk if you know if you look at it through the through your lands and I'll give you an augmented reality experience. Pat: It's gonna be interesting however plays out. So given your background in the AV press do you have any ideas on for somebody if they're coming out with a new software based solution or even if it's hardware based something new and different approach to solving something in AV? Do you have any ideas or advice on how to raise awareness for something like? Tim: Two things. First of all get yourself a couple integrators to buy into it, because here's the thing so regardless of what the press release says this is the this is the latest greatest thing in the history the world and it will change how everybody does business in a brief period in the sentence right, I just wrote somebody's press release with, it doesn't matter if you don't have somebody to sell it to and to give the people in the press, a use case because with very few exceptions, the vast majority of audiovisual press have never been in the back of Iraq pulling cable. Pat: Okay. Tim: And as much respect as I have for them and I have a lot of respect for for everybody that that I work alongside in the process of the AB industry that is one thing that that they don't have as they do they've never worked anywhere right so that you're gonna tell them its latest greatest thing I don't care what the display with its control program over to switcher. They're gonna look at the specs and their comparison up to an old the on the previous model and they're gonna say you know this does X. amount more or this does this and the other and number one the kind of had to take your word for it unless you're there physically going to get a hold a bit and I have the testing equipment to test your hypothesis in in your your marketing speak or they're gonna talk to any writers that they trust that they've developed relationships with. They all do you know they're out there they all do their job right they did they have any brothers that they trust that they can bring to other they can bring a product to and say what do you think about this and why. And then no cultivate you know I'll use their their opinions is as part of their of their coverage because these are the folks are using on a daily and weekly basis, so I would advise you to obviously connect with the press but also connect yourself with some integrators and that you can point the press two and say look here is Susie's AV emporium who's been using this product for six months and this is what they think. Pat: All right. Great stuff, thanks for that. Tim, I think we can go on for a long time here, we're gonna have to do a part two some time Tim: Ok, whatever. You're in Germany so you can stay up as late as you will. Pat: Exactly, I think the kids will be knocking on the door here and running the podcast any minute so... Tim: It wouldn't be the first time. Pat: Exactly thank you so much for being on the show. Tim: Absolutely. Even with that shift in my head and and shipped in my philosophy, I sat there for probably, five minutes, yeah I'm wearing and blundering and just putting off quitting pressing record, before it will before we did our first show, once I pressed record and I started, it was down hill, but it was the active physically pressing record and saying what I had been trained to say which is three to one before ever start recording, it was that act that I was I was putting off right, I was it was that for whatever reason that pressing that record button was so difficult and in the moment. You know I had talked around I'd never met him before I had Linda from this who was a long time AV industry journalist, out her husband works for, okay booking audio and then I had my buddy Michael physically next to me right we're sitting in my college radio station that I top production and at the time and you know I've got things kind of Jerry rigged between two different computers and and a recording system and it's on the other, but it was until I hit record that it actually started doing anything in my head Pat: Yeah, have you heard about the war of art? Tim: No. Pat: He talks about exactly that it calls it the resistance he gives it a name he calls it resistance and he goes into this whole book is explaining how the resistance is out to get you and prevent me from doing everything you're meant to do it's it's a great book, are the war of art tour of art and, it's a good one to read for ten minutes in the morning to then she did to fix your head right. Tim: Okay. 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Leading with Love - Interview with Tim Sanders

Becoming Your Best | The Principles of Highly Successful Leaders

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2017 35:14

Welcome to all of our Becoming Your Best podcast listeners wherever you might be in the world today. This is your host Steve Shallenberger. And we have a tremendously interesting guest today. Our guest is a successful business leader and has influenced many many people for good. Welcome to our show today, Tim Sanders. Tim: Hey great to be with you Steve. Steve: I've been looking forward to this. Tim: Me too. Steve: Well, good. All right. Now, before we get started, I'd like to tell you a little about Tim's background. He spent his early career on the cutting edge of innovation and change. He was an early stage member of Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com, which had the largest opening day IPO in history. After Yahoo acquired the company, Tim was tapped to lead their Value Lab, and by 2001 he rose to a Chief Solutions Officer. And today he's one of the top-rated speakers on the lecture circuit. Tim is also the author of four books including The New York Times best seller "Love is the Killer App," which is an awesome book, "How to Win Business and Influence Friends," I really enjoyed reading that. Tim's book has been featured in Fast Company, USA Today, The New York Times, Boston Globe, and so on. He is a master storyteller who offers his listeners actionable takeaways that produce results right away. So I have been looking forward to having Tim here in our interview today. And to get going, Tim, can you tell our listeners maybe a little about your background, your story? What was it like growing up? And maybe some experiences that helped you see that you could be successful? Tim: Thank you. I grew up in Clovis, New Mexico. It's a farming community just east of the West Texas border. I'm sorry, just west of the...West Texas border. And I was raised by my grandmother. I was a special education student from second to fifth grade, which really, you know, taught me a lot of things. It taught me how to bounce back. That's for sure. Taught me how to fit in when people didn't understand who I was. But most importantly, my childhood taught me that anything is possible if I'm willing to put the preparation work in and seize the opportunity. In my adult life I had a period of time, say 15 years or so, where I was gainfully employed and successful to some degree but just not laser-focused on what mattered. You might say I was in a mediocrity trap. In 1997, I went to work for Mark Cuban about a year after I had gotten out of that trap and had a real paradigm shift about what it was gonna take for me to be successful for my family. When I worked for Mark Cuban you can imagine 1997, the dawn of the internet explosion. It was such a breathtaking opportunity Steve. But I remember those times mostly as being a student of the game. Something I learned from him. And I was a voracious book reader. I was a mentor to anybody I did business with. And by 2001 after he'd sold the company to Yahoo, I became Yahoo's Chief Solutions Officer right after the dot-com crash of 2000. So my team and I went out to rebuild hundreds of millions of dollars of lost business because all of those companies, like eToys, our big advertisers, had gone caput. And through those experiences, I built up a perspective that if we commit ourselves to lifelong learning, and we lead with love in our hearts for other people and expect nothing in return other than that they improve and pay it forward, you can accomplish anything in this world we live in. Steve: Wow, what a rich background and then to be able to take that background and, like, Clovis, New Mexico? You mean you can be successful if you were born in Clovis, New Mexico? Tim: I'll tell you something. Let me tell you something about Clovis, New Mexico. Little town, 30,000 people. I was on the debate team in high school, Steve. And we wanted to be nationally ranked. Now, it was a real kind of a pork chop circuit, right. There was the Las Cruces tournament, the El Paso tournament, the Odessa tournament. We had to get in our cars and drive over two hours to Lubbock, Texas, to go to a decent library to research for our debate. And we had to compete with, you know, Houston's Bellaire and Dallas' St. Marks and all these great folks in New Mexico, and all the big schools from Albuquerque and Santa Fe. But I'll tell you something, my senior year, we won state championship, and we went to the national tournament, and we didn't have nearly the resources of anybody we competed with. But man, I gotta tell you, and I thank my coach for this, we had heart. Steve: Wow! Well, I'll tell you I can attest that people from the salt of the earth communities like this can have a big difference in the world. Tim: Yeah. And I think too Steve, is that there's something in our values raised in that environment that makes us really good connectors. And I also think it makes us hungrier to find some way to get back that edge. And to look for those invisible resources that are out there, like knowledge that can really give us a leg up. And it makes us wanna give back too when we become successful, you know, there's a natural, very deep set generosity. And I gotta tell you, I come from it very honestly. I mean, the patriarch of our family is my great-grandfather the late great Tommy King. And he was one of the founders of Clovis when it organized into a city back around it, you know, after the Great Depression. And he was a successful farmer. And one of the things he did before the Dust Bowl era, right before it, was he engaged with some agricultural technologist and became the first farmer in that part of the country to use a circular farming techniques, which when the Dust Bowl hit, helped his farms survive if not thrive while others withered away. And in our family, one of the most poignant stories about Tommy was how much he gave back to other farmers who were in crisis. The ones that bullheaded, they wouldn't try circular farming knowing that the science said there was something coming in a drought. He was happy to give them microloans. He never collected on them. He would just tell people, "When this happens in the future, you pay it forward." And I believe that his philosophy really represented, you know, small town America. Steve: Oh, that's a great story. And then to actually go from being a special ed student to being successful, that's got to give hope to special ed students anywhere because, you know, they're behind a gun. And so, is there hope? I mean, like, can we make it? Tim: It's tough. I mean, you know, more background here. So my grandmother raised me because my mother abandoned me when I was in four. And it manifest into tremendous depression when I was a little kid. And it exhibited itself in discipline issues. And during those days, Steve, they really didn't have much to do with a kid, you know, when you're seven. So, all they really can do is put you in special education. And that experience was really challenging because it's not just that you're taken out of school, that you're ostracized. And when you go to church you're treated differently because, you know, you go to the other school. And I picked up the nickname Shortbus, and I really didn't shake that nickname till junior high. But I think the thing that I got out of the whole situation is when they put me back into the general population in the sixth grade. I had to deal with bullies for the first time. You know, when you're different you're gonna deal with bullies. For parents, this is a great challenge when a child is singled out into a program like special ed or frankly like gifted for that matter. And I'll tell you, I think my point of view about how I dealt with that traumatic sixth and seventh-grade year had to do with how I felt about love. I'll give you a classic story. So, in the seventh grade, the day that you wear your nice clothes and your nice white shirt for the picture, you know, for the yearbook? Steve: Yup. Tim: I went in and this bully who went to church with us demanded my lunch money and I hesitated. So he punched me right in the nose and I bled all over my shirt. Not gory but I bled on my shirt. It ruined me for the picture that day. When Billy, my grandmother, came to pick me up, I thought she was gonna just, you know, have it out with that boy's mom, or at least give him a good talking to. So when Billy and I are sitting in the vice principal's office and we're alone for a second, she turns to me and she looks at me and she says, "You know the problem here is that you don't love those boys enough." I remember looking at her and I point at my shirt and I said, "What do you mean? He's mean. He's a mean boy." And she said, "In our family, you don't love people because of who they are. You love people because of who we are." And she goes, "That's gonna go a long way with you fitting in at the school." And so she said I should invite him over after church. Because she believed that people were inherently good and when they were mean, or when they were bad, there was something about the story that you don't know. And so he came over after church and stole some of my stuff and still kind of picked on me but he didn't punch me in the nose. And then I guess he felt the duty to invite me over to his house a few weeks later on the other side of the tracks where he lived. And when I visited his home that Sunday afternoon, I realized why he was a bully. His father, a drunk, swore at him coming in through the front door. His older brother whipped him with what, like a horse bridle, in front of me. Later, and I realized that this guy had been going through a lot more than I was. And that he was manifesting it. He was a big guy. He was manifesting it by picking on the only thing that he could get away with picking on, that's a little guy called Shortbus. And once I had that breakthrough, Steve, it really changed the way I thought about people. I truly began to understand that if we give someone our love and we care about them, whether it's on a personal level like this or on a professional level like say someone that I manage, you'd be surprised how many of their problems go away. And how you can convert a bully into a blocker. And I gotta say, that guy and I became good friends. And a little bit more than four years later, he put up posters for me when I successfully ran for senior class president and won. And I realized that for the rest of my life, I'm gonna go out into the market and love people because of who I am, and it's very easy to find things about them that are incredibly easy to love. And that I'm assuming when people don't give back, when they don't do the right thing, when they're mean spirited. I'm assuming that there's something about their story or struggle that I have no knowledge of. And it's made me a much deeper listener and a much more curious person in a good way. Steve: Well, that's a fantastic experience and thank you for sharing it. How grateful are we for the people in our backgrounds that help us grow and develop and overcome maybe some of the deficiencies that we might have that we may or even may not be aware of, that help us start becoming what we're capable of becoming. So that's really an inspirational story. And then love is so powerful and we may talk about it more after our interview but after...well, I was going through my college career I sold books back East. And one of the great books that I read was "The Greatest Salesman in the World", "About the Scrolls," and "I Will Greet This Day With Love In My Heart," and "How Will I Greet Those That Treat Me Poorly Love." And, oh, my goodness, you just fill this tremendous power that comes from it. So I'm so glad you shared that. Tim: Well, thank you. And I will tell you, there's real science or at least there is real psychological research behind this. And if you think about it, this is a manifestation of Maslow's hierarchy, right? Abraham Maslow studied something he called B-love, that is being love. That is a detached form of caring about another person, like I care about another person whether or not you care about me. I care about that person solely because I wanna help that person grow. I don't care about that person because I need a new friend. D-love, Maslow brought about this, a deficiency based love, says, "I need to be loved." So everything I do from being friendly to making, you know, advances, whatever you do to try to go out and help people, you're doing it to solve one of your problems. So, next we'll talk about the idea that when we feel fulfilled in terms of how much we think we're cared about, and that the way we think about love and other people, again, whether it's personal or professional, when we do that, we are making the leap to becoming like self-actualized, if you will. And that it's the most powerful way to think about loving other people because there's no anxiety in those relationships because you're not expecting anything in return. And that's what makes them so beautiful. And I found in my business life, that as a leader, as a manager, as a colleague, this works even more. Because, you know, we need people to encourage us at work. We need people to care about us as customers. And I believe too many people are just traders, transactionalists, and don't bring that Maslovian, you know, B-love to work every day. Steve: Okay. All right. Well, that's a powerful point of view and force in our work lives. Now talking about how to be successful in what we do in business, in our work, and in life generally, it does take work and effort and doing certain things that make a difference. So you shared earlier, that as we visited, that you had made a discovery in your mid-30s that led to ten promotions and helped you achieve a strong financial position and financial security. Can you talk a little about that? What was that? Tim: So this is like 1996, 1997. I had been coming back into my studentship, and I had gone from just need to know in terms of learning to being a voracious reader of books. And not just on stuff that mattered to my current job but anything that was adjacent to it. Anything that I thought was interesting to know in the future. I was at a point Steve, where I would read a book a week. I would burn through these books. I'm not talking novels either I'm talking about complex books in some situations. And what happened was I began to talk about different things with clients. So when I go to work for Cuban, I had this mentality kind of fed by Leo Buscaglia as love on one hand and Steven Covey on the other. I had this mentality that I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna promote other people's success during a time of great change. Because you know the internet was disrupting everything. So I worked a lot with the retailers. So I would go out and work with Neiman Marcus or Victoria's Secret or whomever. And I took it upon myself to learn everything I could about their business future and their business challenges, and then share that with them. And that's where I had the big aha. That if my business practice was to aggregate my intangibles, my knowledge, my network of relationships, my ability to care about people. If I build those up so I can give them away, and systematically help other people make the leap without expecting anything in return, that faith would repay me with endless referrals, a powerful brand, and a magnetic value proposition inside my company. Because I make decisions with Mark, I start to adopt the style. I was a sales person of service out in the community. We accomplished a lot of great things. He sells the company two years later to Yahoo if you remember back in those days. When I transfer out to the West Coast at Yahoo, I've really refined the system of building relationships by sharing my knowledge, and my network, and my compassion in every interaction. And it was like the doors swung wide open. Because now it's 2000, now it's right after the dot-com crash. This idea about helping people finds success during times of great change and expecting nothing in return. Boy, it worked crazy good in Silicon Valley and that's when I begin to train the young Yahoos on this philosophy and this set of values. And that's where I begin to write down the steps I was taking to really document you know how I read books and how I chose books, and why I read books instead of articles, and what I talked about when I was networking. And that's where "Love is The Killer App" came from a few years later. And since then, you know 15 years, I've been traveling around the world meeting people, comparing notes and really building upon that philosophy. Steve: Oh, that's great. And as we've talked about with our listeners the twelve principles of highly successful leaders, these are the things that are present across the board for high achievers. Also they were able to sustain, really, success over a long period of time, both personally and professionally. And one of those was applying the power of knowledge. In other words, gaining knowledge in the first place, and one of the primary ways is being a reader. And so this is a great reminder to every one of us listening here today of the power of reading good books on a regular basis because they're just totally stimulating, aren't they? They just fire... Tim: They are. Steve: ...your mind. Tim: And what I like about books is that books require you to take a deep dive into usually a narrow subject. And you don't just learn a couple of data points and one story, you learn a construct. It's got a thesis, and it's got supporting anecdotes, and it usually has research and it's really meaty. And you can deeply understand the topic so you can give it away, right? So the twist here Steve, is read good books but have a mix. And what I say about this is every third book you read, read for someone else's benefit. I call it prescriptive reading. Think about what... Steve: What's an example of that? Tim: Yeah. Think about information challenges that the people have and go study on their behalf because talk about expanding your resume. Steve: Right. It gives you a whole different perspective to maybe a different discipline. Tim: Absolutely. That's made a big difference for me. And that was another part of my turnaround in the late 1990s that really shifted me away from the idea that, you know, I read books to help myself. No, I read books to help the world, and sometimes it helped me too. And that philosophy will keep you from being too laser-focused on what's in front of you and not focused enough on what's coming in the future. Steve: Okay, great. That's a powerful influence on our success. And you told this wonderful experience that you had personally, this story about the bully and your grandmother saying, "Listen, we need to love him." Tim: That's right. Steve: See things from a different perspective. So you must have learned, Tim, somewhere along the line that love can be applied across the board, in business and as an entrepreneur. What have you found? Have you been able to make the jump of using that in your personal life to a professional life, and what's the experience? Tim: Yeah. I've made it my professional strategy, you know, for the last 20 years or so. I mean, when I say love in a professional sense, Steve, I mean, that I have a set of emotions about you. I care and I am now committed to promote your success by sharing my intangibles with you, my knowledge, my network, my compassion. I want you to think about, for those of you listening, I want you to think about the mentor in your life who's made the most difference to you. There's maybe one. There's maybe two. Maybe some of you might have three, but there's maybe one, right? And I want you to really think about how that person felt about you. And I want you to think about how open that person was to loving someone like you, not as a family but just as a person maybe at work or just a person maybe they did business with. I'm talking about unleashing the capacity to do this every day. I developed strong emotional aspect for almost every single person I do business with, and I don't make them earn it, Steve. It happens quick. Maybe I start out by liking him and I look for things that other people don't look for. I wanna hear their story so I can admire their values and understand their point of view. I find things that are familiar about them. I experience their passion so I can really understand what makes them a unique person. I think our capacity to care about people that work quickly and then maintain that over time. I think that is oxygen for leadership. Steve: Absolutely. That's so powerful. I mentioned the research that we've done for 40 years and these principles that are present, you're doing them? Tim: Well, you know, we're thinking alike buddy. Steve: We are thinking alike. I mean, one of those was living the golden rule, really exceptional leaders. I mean, you can have leaders that are good in different contexts but when you put these together, and exceptional leaders also one that really cares about people. And this is manifest in how they treat others, how they learn about others so that they can bring the best out within others. And this is what starts creating excellence, so great going on this. Tim: Thank you. Thank you so much, man. Steve: And by the way, Tim's book "Love is The Killer App." He talks about these three things, knowledge, networking, and compassion. Would you mind touching on the compassion part a little bit? And I'd like to go back to the networking because you said one thing that is important, and that is how a mentor maybe ought to perceive others with this love, learning what their story is? How do you bring out the best? And you'll find mentors that have done this the same way for you. So, how can you be a good mentor? That's one question. And then we'll hit this other one before we're done. Tim: Absolutely. So, the best way to be a mentor is to remember that the mentor is usually a benefactor, a teacher of sorts. And their job is to give the hero a gift that will enable the hero to make it to the next stage of her journey. When you think about Homer's Odyssey, with the character mentor, when you think about the archetype of mentorship stories in very modern culture, like, say, Star Wars, with, you know, Yoda, or with Karate Kid in Miyagi, that's what it's all about. It's about finding that person that has heroic qualities. That's going somewhere a little too fast. You've got a gift for them, maybe it's your personal experience. You've been where they've been. You have knowledge that they need and you give it to them. You expect nothing in return but that they apply that knowledge and learn and improve. All the mentors, they gain enthusiasm from the student learning. And when they need to, they go beyond just sharing information and perhaps make vital connections to create alliances, to help that hero deal with upcoming adversity. As a mentor I just want you to think a little bit like Yoda. And I want you to not really think so much like a person who's like a fire hose of information, a person who's gonna "Take somebody under their wing." I think you need to think about your role very transitionally. But most importantly, you need to expect nothing in return other than that they hero seizes the opportunity, right? I think that is what changes the game. And by the way, you know, I know you talk a lot about how to be successful over a long period of time. My philosophy that we give without expectation, this is not lip service, Steve. I literally expect them to pay it forward but I don't expect them to pay it back. And I'm telling you that is liberating, because when I meet leaders who were generous for years and years and years and then they "Burned out." This is why they got burned out. Because just enough people didn't pay them back or give them credit or whatever their reciprocity was supposed to be and they were disappointed. And I call it ego economics. And it sets in on a lot of people in their career. Super generous in their 30s, a little bit jaded in their 40s, super protected in their 50s. I'm 55 years old, I've never been more generous because I'm not disappointed in people. And I think that's what comes with being detached about what you get back. Steve: Oh, great. You know that's great. I think even the savior of mankind, Jesus Christ, if you...regardless of what you believe, as it was described when he healed the lepers, and he had one return and thanked him. Nine did not. And if your expectation is that people are gonna thank you, you're probably gonna be somewhat disappointed. Tim: Absolutely. You will. Steve: If that's your expectation. Tim: And it's interesting. So, you know, I love that story and I appreciate that example. I think that, for us, the secret to a long-term career is a very flexible perspective. And I think that if we're willing to go against the grain that there's a quid pro quo. I think we really open up our opportunities in life. You just continue to be great until the day we die. Steve: Wonderful. What a refreshing wonderful perspective. I had a friend, Tim, that I had lunch with last week. He is a facilitator for a very successful training company. He has been, really most of his career 30 years, he's gone all over the world. And one of the things he talked about was precisely this, is that his observation is one of the keys for companies to get ahead today to be able to be a best in class, be the best in their industry, is to have active healthy coaching program within the company where people are able to coach each other. And I think it's really these type of qualities you're talking that would help that be successful. Tim: Absolutely. And for leaders, whether it's a small business or an enterprise, you can create a culture of coaching. So even if there's not a funded program per se, it can be the habit inside that organization. So Tom Ward was brought into Barton protective in Atlanta to turn that company around several years ago and he created that culture. He had something called Vision Quest. These values cards everybody carried with them. It was a huge part of the cadence that he had in that company. And the third value was love. "Do you care about me as a person?" He hired based on it. He rewarded based on it. He promoted or did not promote based on it. It made a big deal to how people behaved, because culture at work, culture at work is a conversation that's led by leaders about how we do things here. And that's like software that runs a company, right? So, when you as a leader go to work and say, "We coach other people because of who we are as a company," then the habit sets in. And it's very attractive, Steve, to today's millennial, to have a reputation for a company where we bring each other up as opposed to where we internally compete. So I just want everybody listening to know this is within your power. And you don't need a big checkbook, but you do need to have consistent cadence because you need to manage that conversation about how we do things here successfully. Steve: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I am, like, speechless that we are out of time. I can't believe it. Tim: It goes that quick, man. It goes that quick. Steve: It has been fast today. Now, any...what's one last bit of advice, or any tips you would like to give our listeners before we wrap it up today. It's been fun Tim. Tim: Hey, it's been fun buddy. So I'll tell you a place where you can get some stuff about me, but before that, I'll just give you one of my...it's kind of my new little piece of advice I like to give people. And I can't say that I came up with it but I can tell you I'm championing this idea. If you want to be a happier person in, life in traffic and in work, the next time somebody irritates you, does something that is seemingly rude to you, I want you to assume that that person is operating under the best intentions. I want you to assume that you don't know the whole story. Because more often than not, Steve, people are operating under the best intentions. It's just that their needs clash with our needs. And we spend a lot of our time judging those people instead of inquiring about the rest of the story. So like I said, next time somebody cuts you off in traffic, you might wanna consider that she's trying to get somebody to the hospital before you honk your horn and shake your fist. And this goes double for you as business owners and leaders. Steve: Oh, that's great advice. I hope I can get this right. This comes from an article I read yesterday and it really left a deep impression on me. It was given by the leader of a worldwide organization, a humanitarian service organization. And the fellow talked about 50 years ago, he had a mentor. And the mentor said, "Every time you meet somebody, if you'll say to yourself this person is dealing with a serious challenge," he said, "You're gonna be right 50% of the time." Tim: And guess what? Before, when you just reacted and judged that person, you were wrong 50% of the time. Steve: Exactly. Well, he said, "Man I thought my teacher, my professor was a pessimist," he said, "But I have come to learn what wise advice that was." Because indeed as we look around what's going on in the world, it is often true. And I love your comment that half the time we're wrong. So let's give everybody a lot of slack here, right? Tim: On that, you know, again, yeah, let's put our self in another person's shoes. And let's find out more. You can learn and grow so much more. You can expand your thrive so much more. And, again, you can just avoid those regrettable mistakes we all make. Steve: Yup. Well, these are some great things that we can do to make a difference, to lift others, to build others. Tim has done a great job in sharing these. What a tremendous background. And, Tim, if you'll share how our listeners can learn more about what you're doing, and which is tremendous? We'd love to hear about it. Tim: Absolutely. We've set up a special page for your listeners, Steve. It is timsanders.com/byb. That's timsanders.com/byb. I'll have a huge download excerpt of Love is The Killer App for you to read. I'll also have a way you can connect with me on LinkedIn, and find other resources like videos and other such content on my site. Steve: Well, that's terrific. Thank you Tim Sanders for being part of this show today. This has been enlightening. It's been wonderful. Tim: Oh, absolutely. It's been a pleasure Steve. I really enjoyed it. Steve: Well, you bet. We wish you all the best as you're making a difference in the world as well Tim. Tim: Thank you. Steve: And to all of our listeners, never forget, you are creating a ripple that can never be counted for good as we do the right things, good things. And they do make a difference. They lift our own lives and they lift others. And they help us be more successful, happier and have fuller lives. I'm Steve Shellenberger with Becoming Your Best Global Leadership wishing you a great day. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

america love jesus christ texas world star wars new york times east silicon valley boy new mexico west coast taught usa today yahoo ipo cuban fast company el paso great depression burned yoda albuquerque mark cuban santa fe boston globe karate kid barton maslow west texas lubbock miyagi timon vision quests neiman marcus scrolls dust bowl abraham maslow las cruces victoria's secret leading with love steven covey killer app shortbus tim sanders chief solutions officer win business becoming your best homer's odyssey leo buscaglia tim oh steve it tim it tim yeah steve oh influence friends steve yeah steve well becoming your best global leadership steve shallenberger tim well tim so tim thank steve right steve wow steve okay steve absolutely

Tim Noakes: Fat Myths, Reversing Diabetes & The Real Meal Revolution

180 Nutrition -The Health Sessions.

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 29, 2017 56:29

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/

university law running institute south africa nutrition exercise myths md shop weight loss zimbabwe cape town exercise science a1 carbohydrates morn harare plessis noakes reversing diabetes tim noakes mbchb waterlogged cape town uct national research foundation tim yeah guy lawrence real meal revolution prof noakes sports science institute tim thanks dsc med health sessions tim at stuart cooke

"Staying" | with Tim Vogt

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 27, 2017 9:47

Katie: So, why is the concept of staying important to Starfire's work?Tim: There is a great quote by Wendell Berry, and he talks about the marriage vows and they are not for better and for richer and for health, they are for better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness and health. He says that in staying we learn something closer to the truth which is that not everything in life is happy, and not everything in life is great. I think people with disabilities and their families that I know, relate that there is a great joy in life, especially when they get included and supported and loved in a way that we at Starfire hope that they could be. That continues to be a struggle for them and their families. So, if we can think about staying in solidarity, and in fraternity, and in relationship with people, we can be with them in that struggle, and it can lead to some good things, but it could be tough, many tough days.I also think that when we think about “staying” we think about that same quote reminding us that there's going to ups and downs and it might be tempting to leave. Leaving is an assumption that somewhere else is going to be better, but staying seems to be an invitation and a commitment to making this place better or this life better or this relationship better. So staying implies, in the depth of that concept, that I'm not just going to get out of here; I'm not going to leave you or this place. I am going to be here. There are going to ups and downs and good days and bad days, but I am still going to be here. So I think staying through those good days and bad days, and through the struggles and through the joys, and paying attention to the closer you get to the truth of what life is all about, what inclusion is all about.Inclusion is not all happy and fun; it means I accept you as you are.I believe you can do better, but I accept you as you are. And you belong already; there is no need for you to have to earn it or prove that you are valuable, more valuable than you already are, so the idea of stay relates to peace. It relates to rest; it relates to some sort of satisfaction, and it relates to time in a really great way that I chose to commit myself to people, or a place, or to an idea, in a way that just gives the long story a chance to unfold. People with disabilities have a really small degree of imagination of story and imagination around their lives. There is a very short story about disability. It fits in this box and goes here and these people go here and that is what defines their life. So it is not a very big story and if we can stay with people and help nurture and participate in their journey and struggle for a better life, then we can see that there is a better story. You have to stay to see that better story.Katie: Is it important to talk about staying because that isn't a common reality for people with disabilities for in their lives that people often do not “stay”?Tim: Yeah, I mean, when we look at the people that we support and the people that we love and know with disabilities, we see a lot of leaving in their lives. You've got professionals that are in and out depending on their next job, or if they got fired or promoted or left. So, there's this constant turnover. And if we're being really honest, we hear that there's a lot of absence of community and rejection sometimes for people with disabilities and their families. And, an absence and rejection is a leaving of sorts. Right? Like, you're left alone. We're outta here. We're not gonna be with you anymore. So, when you've got a disability, you've got this turnover almost in your life. Your social stories are very short. People are in it for a few minutes or a few hours or a few weeks or months as professionals, they're not really in it for a long period of time. So, the counter, the antidote would be staying, the people that are there for a long time.There's also just an interesting, I would call it a creative limitation, that people with disabilities and their families are inviting us into.A lot of people I know who have disabilities can't drive. And so, their mobility is limited. They might not be able up and move to a new city for college because college isn't even an option. Or, they would lose their funding if they moved out of state. Or, the public transportation system doesn't actually travel between cities, you know. So, the mobility of people with disabilities is really physically limited, and the options of moving about are limited. So, then if we're asking the question, “How might someone with a disability have a good life?” one of the factors is we that we think the reality is they're going to be limited in how they move about.So, we would want to develop local networks and really have people who have stayed around them be part of the story, that would have known them for a long time. The last aspect of stay that I can think of that really matters is that staying relates to taking care of a place and the people in that place. So, there's another great essay that Wendell Berry wrote about his family's farm and the generations of his family that have taken care of that place. And there's a, by taking care of that place, they're taking care of the people around them and of that place too. So, people who take care of a neighborhood or take care of a block, or take care of a city; because they've lived there their whole lives, those are the kind of people who create a culture where somebody's looking after the place and the people in it.And, if we could have more people stay and own the caretaking of places, and root themselves deeply, they would grow big networks, and they would, over time, probably build a culture that was very conducive to the lives of people with disabilities and that culture.Katie: So, last question. Who do you think is called to stay? And, how do they do that?Tim: I think we're all called to stay. However, I don't think that any of us are required to stay. There are good reasons for moving on from relationships and places. You can't afford it, or the person you're committed to turns out not to be the person that you thought they were, and that's dangerous. But, I think that the problem is that if we don't leave the potential for staying open, then we don't ever invest deeply. We don't get to know the people around us because we're already out the door. We're buying this next house in order to flip it in five years, and move to a new place. So, why would we invest in each other? Why would we care about each other's well-being? Why would we look out for our neighbors? Why would we bring flowers to the woman whose husband passed away across the street? Why would we, you know, get to know the kids on our block if we're gonna be gone in a few years' time? So, the temporary-ness that we start with is key. Or the permanency.If we start with an idea that this might be a place that I stay, and we find out that it's not, that's great because the assumption was there to begin with, and we invested as if we were going to stay. I once met a woman who really challenged me on that. And she said, “I was a military kid. I had to move.” She said, “And, I'm still a military wife now.” And she said, “I still have to move.” And she said, “But every place I go, I invest like I'm gonna be there for the rest of my life.” That was awesome and beautiful.She didn't forego relationships, she didn't create an absence in the neighborhood or in the families around her by assuming that she would be gone. She actively, intentionally said I'm going to invest, because I know I'm gonna be gone but I still need to take care of this place by investing in it as though I'm gonna live here myself.So, if I'm a person with a disability and I don't get to move, but everybody around me is flipping their houses every five years, and everybody is of the mindset that they're outta here in a few years, then quickly my condition deteriorates, and I could be stuck. And, instead of staying, I'm stuck. Everybody around me – no one knows me. No one's built a great garden that I can be a part of. Nobody knows when my birthday is. And, I'm not a part of their world either.

leaving staying inclusion vogt wendell berry starfire tim yeah tim there katie so katie is

Create an Ecosystem; Don't Become a Commodity

The Partner Channel Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 13, 2017 23:31

Jen: Hi, everybody. Welcome to "The Allbound Podcast." I'm Jen Spencer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound. And today, I am joined by Tim Harmon, Managing Director at Nuvello. Welcome, Tim. Tim: Well, thank you, Jen. How are you? Jen: I'm doing great. I'm loving living in Arizona in February. It is gorgeous. So my apologies to any listener who is knee-deep in snow right now. Come on out to Phoenix. It's beautiful. You know, Tim, so glad to have you here on this podcast. You know, most people in the channel space know you as being a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. But then, earlier this year, you announced this new endeavor, that you've launched a new analyst consulting firm called Nuvello. So this is really exciting for us in the channel technology space. Tell us more. What's this all about? Tim: Well, it is. I did leave Forrester in January and I am building Nuvello, which is essentially a new type of analyst consulting community and a new type of analyst consulting network really focused very much on channels. When I say network, the reason I use that term is because I don't profess to do everything that's knowingly in the Nuvello vision or plan all by my lonesome. And there are a plethora of very, very good and sharp independent channel consultants, I think, across the globe, and the intention is to bring them into the Nuvello network and to, in essence, create a more, you know, concerted analyst and consulting capability for, you know, both the chan-tech vendors that are attempting to support the primary target in our channel professionals. Now, I use, also, the term, community. So the reason I did that is because the tech vendors themselves are going to have, hopefully, a lot of involvement in Nuvello. I'll just give you one example. I have believed for a long time myself that some tech vendors, a lot of tech vendors create a wealth of very good content, educational, you know, content. And I saw what you guys published in the last couple of weeks in terms of your own study and benchmark. I think that's a great example. So we want to source tech vendors' content to nuvello.com. You know, you could consider, for example, Jen, yourself, as another [inaudible 00:03:35] channel for your content, where, you know, Nuvello will ultimately, hopefully, become the ultimate go-to resource or channel professionals and practitioners, you know, for knowledge, tools, and benchmarks. Jen: I think that's great. I mean, I know...I was speaking with one of the product marketing managers over at Salesforce a couple of months ago, and he was asking me, you know, "Where do people go to learn about, you know, channels sales and marketing? Where do they go to [inaudible 00:04:07] best practices and hear, you know, from each other?" You know, and I looked at him, I said, "Well, we're trying to create that ourselves, right?" So there hasn't been, really, a really strong kind of third-party resource for a channel professional to consume, you know, current content. So I think it's awesome. I think it's a really great resource that this community truly needs. Tim: Well, thanks. You know, so combined with, you know, the knowledge content that Nuvello produces and the Nuvello network produces along with that the tech vendors produce, a lot of it is...well, in fact, all of it, for 2017, is going to be, you know, free. And, you know, ultimately, if we get to the point maybe next year where, you know, some of the Nuvello research, you know, might be, out [inaudible 00:05:17] associate with it, it's still gonna be, you know, very, very inexpensive. We're targeting companies really $50 million and above in revenue. So, again, one of the goals of Nuvello is to reach what we call the mass mid-market, which is different than other approaches, you know, taken in the industry. Jen: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know, I have you here. I wanna pick your brain about a couple of topics related to channel and related to, you know, sales and marketing technology. The first is that, you know, you've been, over the years, very passionate about the fact that far too many channel organizations underutilize technology and enablement and growth of their channel partners. So, you know, I wanna dig in a little bit. What have you seen or what have you experienced that's particularly concerning about this? Tim: So I had the opportunity...just giving you an example, Jen. I had the opportunity, a couple weeks ago, to moderate a panel at a channels conference. And one of the things that I did, I ran it kinda like a jeopardy game, at least [inaudible 00:06:33] beginnning. I asked, you know, digital transformation, you know, and so that was the answer. You know, what is the question? And you could well imagine that, you know, the three panelists came up with three, you know, quite different definitions for digital transformation, which tends, you know, to be the watch word of 2017, right, 2016, not [inaudible 00:06:55]. When I drilled down with folks that I'm working with and this particular topic comes up, it usually winds up being in the area of how we are going to, you know, change some of our process, just automate those process who's using modern technology for our customers. Almost always the case. It never comes up that we want to apply some of this digital transformation-thinking to our channel partners. Now, what's ironic, though, is that if you...I mean, the same sort of benefits could be realized, right? So why do you want to affect digital transformation capability for your customers? To have more loyal customers, right, to have them do more business with you, to have them spread the word as advocates. You know, the same exact benefits and results can occur if you apply those sorts of principals and techniques and technologies to your channel ecosystem as well, more loyalty, more loyal channel partners, more invested channel partners, bigger advocates of what you do. And the very few examples I've seen of tech vendors and manufacturers and other B2B companies that have made this sort of chan-tech investment have reaped big benefits in doing so in terms of, you know, loyalty, productivity, and/or advocacy. Jen: I think it's a really great...actually a great bridge to...I wanted to ask you next about customer success. And you've sort of hinted about, you know, building advocates and evangelists some under your channel partner group in SaaS in particular. When you think about like those $50-million, you know, fast growing mid-market organizations looking at channel, a lot of those players are gonna be software as a service organization. There's a lot of talk in the SaaS industry about customer's success, you know, evolving beyond just like client services or support. So can you share a little bit about where do you think channel sales and customer success either have been or need to intersect, you know, like today and then moving forward into the future? Tim: And it's a great question. One of the things that I would kind of warn against is there is...and I've heard there's starting to be a slight little backlash, for example, the managed services provider segment of the channel industry. The very reason is that customers are saying, "You know, we had a three-year contract with you and we never saw you," right? "You know, you may have done a good job but, you know, there's someone else that's come along with greater economies at scale who can do the same, apply the same service at a lower price." And you drive yourself into a commodity type of a business environment, which is where I think most SaaS vendors and most channel partners don't want to be. So, you know, I think channel partners have a vital role in, you know, kind of what their original purpose was. And one of the original purposes was that they had reached into segments of the market. And I'm talking about physical live face-to-face reach in the segments of the market that a tech vendor perhaps did not. And, you know, automation is great. You know, digital transformation is great. But I think, you know, channel partners have to maintain that personal relationship and that full life cycle enablement of technology solutions from, you know, building the business case to, you know, driving adoption that is ultimately what's going to make the difference between customer success or not. Jen: That's a really great point. I think, you know, the key that I see there is continual collaboration, you know, between the vendor nor the supplier and those partners. As those partners have that face time with those customers, ensuring that that knowledge is transferred from the partner back up to the supplier. You know, typically, when we talk about knowledge transfer challenges, we tend to be a little short-sighted and think about it only from the perspective of how do I get all of this information about my product to my partners versus also looking at how do I get feedback and how do I get, you know, consumption information from customers via partners back up to, you know, the supplier who's creating the product. So... Tim: Yeah, I think that's a key point, Jen. Most solutions, I think, today going forward are going to be ecosystem-delivered and supported solutions, right? So it's not that, you know, a tech vendor...I mean, you know, you turn back the calendar five years and there was this great fear that cloud software as a service was going to disintermediate the intermediaries, right? Who needs the channel partner? But that's turned out not to be the case. And, you know, the solutions are so involved and, you know, have so many tentacles even beyond the software aspect itself that you need to have all of your ecosystem forces aligned so that it appears to be an ecosystem of one entity even though it's really not. And that's, I think, where technology can really benefit. And it's absolutely required to provide one aligned phase to the customer where multiple ecosystem parties actually maybe involved in delivering value to the customer. Jen: You know, one of the questions I get asked by a lot of CEOs at SaaS startups, you know...people are listening to this podcast or they're consuming content and they're talking to their colleagues about, you know, building these ecosystems, and a lot of them say, you know, "When do I start to build a channel partner program? Like, is there a certain revenue size I need to be at? Is there a certain gross stage I should be at?" You know, I'm curious. Like, you know, what do you think? You know, for a company who's just thinking about going to market via a channel partner program, is there a better or a best time for them to actually execute? Any words or wisdom that you have? I know a lot of our listeners are more emerging companies. Maybe they're not at that like $50-million a year stage yet. You know, what advice can you give them? Tim: Well, and so that $50-million number is kind of, you know, the magic mark, right? I think that's when most companies do start to consider channels. And I think the reality is that most companies wait too late to start building their channels strategy and their channel programs. And they only do that when they see, you know, this revenue curves begin to flatten out a little bit. They wanna keep it going in a true northerly direction. I actually think that companies should probably start, well, I would say at the $20-million market peak mark. But, you know, if it was me, if I was the CEO of a SaaS startup, I'd start from day one. I'd have channel be part of my strategy. I don't know if you ever, you know, watch "Shark Tank" on [inaudible 00:15:12] or if any of the audience, but one of the common questions, you know, that Robert or Kevin or Mark will ask is, "What is your distribution strategy?" You know, and these are pretty small companies on "Shark Tank." So I think there's a lesson to be learned from that. Jen: Yeah, you know, and I like to take a page out of [inaudible 00:15:37], you know, she asks, "How does your customer want to buy?" And I think, you know, that's something that I'll always kind of go back to those CEOs and say, you know, "How are people buying your product now? How are you supporting them right now? You know, what's working for you in this direct environment? And make the channel an extension, a natural extension of what you're already currently doing." And, you know, we're starting to see a lot of the companies, you know, building channel programs or thinking about building channel programs, you know, quite a bit earlier. You know, that's faster a few weeks ago. And it was a big topic of conversation which, for someone who geeks out on channel partners, that's awesome for me to hear. So I think we're gonna see that number, that kind of typical revenue number for starting. I think we're gonna see that drop especially with these companies that are just growing really fast and wanna maintain that momentum. Tim: I think that would be good for all parties involved, tech vendors, channels partners, and particularly customers, if they did that. You know, the one thing that I would kinda leave on this note is think about some of the largest companies in the world, you know, consumer-oriented companies. Just take, you know, Coca-Cola. You know, one of the things about Coca-Cola is you can buy Coca-Cola products almost everywhere in the world through various different types of channels. And, you know, take a lesson away from that in that, and you said it, different customers want to buy in different ways from different entities in different geographies, and try to serve them all or as many as you can, you know, with the resources that you have at your [inaudible 00:17:30]. Jen: Perfect. That's a great example. So, Tim, you know, you're just introducing this firm, Nuvello. I know you've already got a few roadshow symposiums that are on the docket for this year. You've got one just kicking it off in San Francisco. You got it going to Boston, Atlanta, going over to London and Singapore. It's super exciting. So who's the right kind of person to attend one of these symposiums? And then, you know, if I am that kind of a person, you know, what can I anticipate by attending? Tim: Well, yeah. So, again, we're hoping to help, you know, channel professionals and go-to market professionals in terms of, you know, their strategies, their models, their recruitment, their onboarding, their technology, utilization. That's gonna be a key, key factor. You know, those people that are involved in those sorts of decisions and the execution of those decisions. So, you know, we hope for a pretty broad audience. Different symposiums will have slightly different audience flavor. I'll give you an example. You know, we'll address this later in the year. We are going to try to actually bring in a couple of ex-CEOs, retired CEOs that were at the helm when their companies became quite successful via their channels. You know, that might indicate a different type of audience, you know, slightly. But, you know, for the most part, particularly for these few roadshow symposiums, we're looking for those people that are, you know, really involved, I think, in, you know, the fairly early stages of their channel-taking and their channel-development. Jen: Wonderful. And so if people are interested in, you know, taking a look at those symposiums, they just go to nuvello.com? Is that correct? Tim: Yes. Yeah, that's right. Jen: Perfect. Perfect. Well, so, before I let you go, Tim, you know, we talked channel, but I like to ask some more personal questions of all our podcasts guests here, just to learn a little bit more about you. Are you opened to that? Tim: You should go for it. Jen: All right. Okay, so my first question for you is what is your favorite city? Tim: My favorite city? Jen: Mm-hmm. Tim: I'm just going to...my favorite city...it's not Phoenix. I'm sorry, Jen. Jen: That's okay. That's not mine either. Tim: [Inaudible 00:20:26]. One of my favorite cities is Ottawa, Ontario. Jen: Oh, nice. I have to dig. Okay, what do you love about Ottawa? Tim: You know, I think it's like the [inaudible 00:20:43]. So it's not too big, it's not too small. You know, there's lots to do. The people are great. It's safe. It's a four-weather climate, obviously, which I like. And it's got, you know, a lot of culture in it and a lot of sports activities, so professional sports, participant sports. So it just had a lot of things, you know, going for that I like. Jen: Awesome. I love it. Second question for you, are you an animal-lover? Tim: Well, yes, in general. Yes. Yeah. Jen: Okay. But you're not gonna be inviting any into your home anytime soon? Is that what I'm hearing? Tim: I have a couple of animals, actually. Jen: Oh, you do. Okay, question number three. Mac or PC? Tim: I'm neutral on that. I have one of both and I actually use them both about 50% of the time. So I'm an agnostic when it comes to that. Jen: Oh, nice. My last question for you is, let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip, where would it be to? Tim: Probably African Safari. Jen: Sounds very nice. Well, thanks, Tim. And thanks for answering some of those more fun questions. Thanks for diving into some of those deeper questions about channel. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally after hearing this, what's the best way for them to do so? Tim: You know, there's a contact us at nuvello.com which, you know, if they wanna email me, the phone numbers are there. And, you know, you can also book my calendar at nuvello.com as well. So if you wanna, you know, actually schedule a time to talk with me, I'm open to that as well. Jen: Wonderful. That's a really good resource, and we'll go ahead to link to nuvello.com from this podcast. Again, thank you for your time. I greatly appreciate it, Tim. It's been great catching up with you. And thanks, everyone else, for tuning in. And check us out next week for an all-new episode of "The Allbound Podcast."

03 The Importance of Building Muscle

The InForm Fitness Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 27, 2017 20:58

This episode Adam discusses the importance of building muscle beyond just looking good at the beach or in a cocktail dress. You will learn about of the profound effects building muscles safely has on all the organs of your body. Some questions answered in this episode are: Will I become more “toned” working out with low weights and high reps? What is muscle failure and is it necessary to build muscles safely. What is the dose-response relationship and how does it apply to building muscle? If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. To purchase Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Once-Week-Revolution-Harperresource/dp/006000889X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485469022&sr=1-1&keywords=the+power+of+10+book Ilf you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com The transcription to this episode is below: 03 The Importance of Muscle - Transcript Intro: You're listening to the InForm Fitness podcast, 20 minutes with New York Times, best-selling author, Adam Zickerman and friends. Brought to you by InForm Fitness, life-changing personal training with several locations across the US. Reboot your metabolism and experience the revolutionary Power of 10, the high intensity, slow motion, strength training system that's so effective, you'd get a week's worth of exercise in just one 20-minute session, which by no coincidence is about the length of this podcast. So, get ready InForm Nation, your 20 minutes of high-intensity strength training information begins in 3, 2, 1. Tim: Alright. Welcome back to the InForm Fitness podcast with Adam Zickerman. My name's Tim and we are at episode three, The Importance of Muscle. We'll get down to that in just a minute but listen to that music in the background. Just kind of get that -- it's got a good groove to it. Don't you think guys? Adam: Mhm [affirmative]. Tim: Yeah? Mike: I sure as hell think so. Tim: [laughter] And of course was Mike Rogers, GM of InForm Fitness in New York City, who wrote and performed our theme music. What's the name of that song, Mike? Mike: That song is called, “Allergic To The Medication.” I actually co-wrote that with my partner, Brian Lord, who currently lives in Portland, Oregon and hence the demise of the Hypertonics, that was our band. Tim: [laughs] Mike: But, you know, every once in a while, we pop out and we have a show every once, you know, to bring back the love but yeah, that was one of our favorite songs. Tim: Well, we're going to put you on stage at our one-year anniversary show perhaps, maybe and we'll have a show in New York and LA because that's where we're broadcasting from or podcasting from. Alright. Let's get into it, guys. Let's dive in. So, we've had a couple of episodes under our belt now. And if you haven't had a chance to listen to episodes one and two, we invite you to go back and do so. Episode one, we talked to Adam Zickerman in great detail about Adam's history, what led him to building his empire at InForm Fitness and this slow motion high-intensity workout which is what this podcast is all about. This show is for those that are looking to supercharge their metabolism, increase cardiovascular endurance and build muscle. That's what today's episode is all about, building muscle or just, The Importance of Muscle, beyond the obvious, guys. The obvious is, you know, functionality. We want to look good and get as many right swipes for all of you single people out there [laughs] I suppose. Adam, walk us through the importance of muscle. Not just the obvious, the things that we're all aware of. Well, actually I do want, you know -- yeah. First of all, the obvious is not so unimportant. I mean, there's so many things but let's start with the obvious. Mhm [affirmative]. I mean, I guess the one obvious thing about building muscle would be looking better. Right? You know, looking chiseled, looking defined, looking strong, looking fit and that's an aesthetic thing and that's probably the obvious one. To me though, especially for baby boomers, I'd have to say that's probably fifth on the totem pole of importance, you know. To me, probably the most important thing about muscle is the strength aspect that it gives you. To me, that is the foundation of any fitness program. Do you find that that is more prevalent, the importance of strength to, say, baby boomers because that's when the age group that starts to notice that they're not nearly as strong as they once were, is that why that's at the top of their list? That's exactly when they start to realize what's important in life. [laughs] They have the family. They got the girl or they got the guy. Right. You know? They sell the BMW. They get the minivan and now they don't want to be in pain anymore. [laughs] Now they want to be able to go play sports with their kids and not be in pain and to enjoy life and to not exacerbate or have the injuries they've had of their youth start creeping up on them. What this does, what strength gives you, it buys you more time to be pain-free because those injuries they're lurking and as soon as you start getting weaker, those injuries start becoming more pronounced. The main way I think to keep those things at bay is just to not lose any muscle strength as we get older. You know what I've noticed from all the years I've been training and really, really thinking about this and living it as well is that around age 30, you know, people, both men and women are losing muscle just from the nature of aging. Maintaining that has become and should become the priority in our life. I mean, everything sort of slows down a little bit. We start to store a little bit more fat. Our joints get a little weaker. When we're playing sports, the little injuries that used to go away in a day or two sometimes linger a little bit longer, those little aches and pains and I mean, I'm an active guy and so that happens. A lot of it, what women think is toning, “Oh, I want to tone up. I want to tone up. I want to tone up.” Well, girls, that's muscle. That's what it is. It's muscle and you get, you know, and you're not going to bulk up, you know, and get -- you're going to be the best you can be. Right, Adam? Why don't we talk a little bit about bulking up? Alright. The thing about muscle is this, we all think that if you work out one way, the muscle will respond one way and if you work out another way, the muscle will respond the other way. For example, if you do -- the old adage is if you do heavy weights low reps, you'll bulk up. Your muscles will get big and bulky. And the other thought would be if you do high reps, then you get toned. You get cut. That's like ridiculous. Alright. When a muscle gets stimulated, when a muscle is fatigued, it makes itself stronger and the way it makes itself stronger is by creating more, what they call, myofibrils which are the cells within a muscle fiber and the muscle fibers get thicker and thicker and stronger and either it's stimulated enough for that to happen or it's not stimulated enough for that to happen. Period. It's not like it's going to bulk up one way -- a myofibril is a myofibril. It's the same. That's the reaction. More myofibrils, thicker muscle fibers. So, Adam, when I started my workout with Sheila several months ago and she was explaining this work out through the Power of 10, the slow motion high-intensity strength training system that you developed at InForm Fitness. Sheila did a great job. I loved the word she used when I was in the middle of the workout. I was getting a dose. I feel like I'm getting a deeper penetration into the muscle. Am I visualizing that correctly? Are there different types of muscle fibers that are being stimulated through this protocol? Right. Well, first of all, let's talk about dose and usage of the word dose. I'm so glad that you that resonated with you. Very much. That that made that kind of affected, “Oh, like,” because, you know, Doug McGuff author of Body by Science talks -- had a whole chapter in his book, Body by Science, about the dose-response relationship. And Sheila, you used the word ‘dosage' because in her head that's how she sees it. Mhm [affirmative]. Because that's exactly what it is and the dose-response relationship that McGuff talks about is a relationship that every medical student, every doctor has to know and deal with. And that is understanding the dosage of a certain medicine to get the proper response. And doctors all know that they have to balance just the right dosage to get just the right response because if the dosage is too little, there's not going to be a response. Or too much. And if a dosage is too much, it becomes toxic. So, this it's balancing act of having exact right doses deal with whatever needs to be dealt with. Now, exercise is exactly the same way because medicine is a dosage and a high-intensity exercise experience is a dosage. And while we need to do it individuals, understand what dosage works best for us to get the response we need. And that dosage in general, on a bell curve of the human population, is about once a week that dosage. It can vary for the individual by days and even weeks for that matter but you have to start somewhere. When you look at the general population, it seems that one week, one work out per week, you start seeing progress, you start seeing muscle strength and muscle gains. Wow, that fast. But this type of workout. Not just any workout, right? If anything -- And the analogy works really well with more or less than you need. If you have too much exercise, well now we're getting into my personal story about how my boss said I didn't look very good even though I was always very fit because I was tired, I was overtraining. I was getting hurt a lot and then you have the opposite. You have people that, you know, they do it half assed. Let's face it. They go through the motions. They go to the gym. They're talking and reading People magazine and they're not really getting any real doses even though they might be spending a lot of time. Point is, they're not going to get any response. The dosage is too weak. Yeah. I think we're always trying to figure out how to create this balancing act and it is a little difficult sometimes because we're all individual. We're all very different. Some people can benefit from going two times a week, sometimes one time a week is absolutely appropriate. And the thing is, I think depending on what you're doing and how intense you're doing it, we have to try and figure this out. And figuring out the right dose, you know, we always start on a conservative level when we're trying to understand peoples' bodies but then -- and then it usually becomes very intense very, very quickly. But understanding this dose-response relationship I think is one of the most important things in how we think about our health in all aspects. From what we're eating, to how much we're sleeping, to the how much in the frequency of our exercise. So, it's something that is worth everyone thinking about a little bit. And one of the thing that, you know. I -- that really had an impact on me when I first heard this is, and Adam said it, was the fact that muscle dictates to the rest of the body what happens. Basically, the muscle is the most demanding tissue in your body. So, when you place a demand on that muscle, it makes the rest of the body stand up and pay attention. Mhm [affirmative]. Right? Well, now you're bringing up something different now. So, we got the dose response thing which means, you know, you have the right stimulus. Alright and therefore you're waiting for the right response. The response that we're looking for is strength. Now, what does strength, getting back to the beginning of this podcast, what does strength give us? Why is strength -- why is muscle so important? That's what Sheila was referring to now when she talked about the demands of muscle. Right? The demands of muscle -- another analogy I like to make is like the demands of a population. What happens when a lot of people start moving into a new town and start developing a new town? Alright. The more people that move into that town, the more services need to be built to service those people. Alright. You'd have to have more restaurants. You'd have to have more supermarkets. You'd have to have a better transportation system. Everything has to improve to meet that demand. The utilities, new electrical units whatever that they call that stuff when they build out a city. So, that's the demand and demand is the people. So, when you're building muscle let the demand [inaudible 11:54]. The more muscle that you put on your frame, the more demands you're making on your body to meet those demands. And what does that mean? That means the heart, the transportation system, has to become more efficient. The infrastructure of the town has to improve. The roadways what do you -- well that's our bones. That's our skeletal system. Once again, that's it's more of a common fact that people understand that building strength will help with bone density. The idea of strength training and exercise and staving off the effects of osteoporosis has been known for a while now. Well, it's because when you have strong muscles, again, the bones have to support those new stronger muscles and they become more dense. So, question I have, is you bring that up and that's a fantastic analogy of the demand and supply and using that city analogy and you're talking about with the building of the muscle, the strength training and its effect on various parts of the body like Sheila introduced a minute ago. What about organ functionality? You mentioned the heart as well too but does that also -- does building your muscles and becoming stronger also help you with other functionalities? What, like say, for digestion? Exactly. [Inaudible 13:07] digestion, our ability to utilize -- our glucose metabolism improves. That's a very interesting point because when I talked about these factors that I wanted to have separate podcasts about. One of those things, the research being done on myokines. Myokines are these proteins that are generated from the muscle after high intensity exercise. They have anti- inflammatory properties but they also have what they call organ crosstalk. Your muscles can release these myokines and talk to other organs in your body to have them perform better. Mhm [affirmative]. Like the pancreas is actually utilizing insulin better. The liver's ability to store more glucose improves. All these types of things, the mobilization of body fat for fuel improves as a result of these myokines being generated from the muscles. That really high intensity exercise can only do for you. So, and this is recent stuff that we're learning about. So, it's called organ crosstalk. So, when you never thought in the past that high intensity strength training -- it only lasts 20 minutes once a week mind you, have these profound effects. Not just on our strength and getting rid of our aches and pains and allows us to put something in the overhead compartment in an airplane, but to be able to actually improve a digestion to be able to help us mobilize body fat in a more efficient way. Fantastic stuff that we're just learning about, anti- inflammatory properties. It's beyond what I ever thought possible. And the thing that just really, really turns me on about this is the bang that you -- [Crosstalk 14:52]. Tim: [laughs] Adam: The bang that you get for your buck. I mean we're talking about yes, an intense experience but we're talking about a 20-minute intense experience on an average of once a week to have these really profound effects occur. I mean you'd think that for those types of positive effects you'd have to work out every single day, hours at a time, to have these things happen. Tim: Mhm [affirmative]. Adam: But, no. So, to wrap up what we're talking about as far as the importance of muscle, of course we started with aesthetics. Everybody wants to look good and one of the challenges that we have as trainers in our field, in our particular business, because we're not selling the pipedream about you're going to look amazing. And this is the problem because everyone expects exercise to give them the body that they want and to lose all the, “In once a week I can look like this?” Well, no. I mean body fat loss is also another part of it and nutrition is as important as the strength training part. Now, what I want to point out all the time to people when they say because you can see the disappointment in their face when you hit them with that dose of reality that no exercise program is going to make them have that hard body that they're looking for if they're not watching what they eat. Everyone wants that exercise to be the magic bullet for them So, they first go, “Ah, are you kidding me? You're telling me that this once a week work out is not going to like give me -- and I'm not going to lose 30 pounds the next 30 weeks this way.” Well, no. Not from the exercise alone but let me tell you something, if you don't lose a single ounce here but you come here once a week and you work out really hard, you're going to be getting so many other benefits and you're going to have a lot of benefits and still be overweight. [laughs] I'd rather be strong and overweight than weak and overweight. Tim: Mhm [affirmative]. Adam: Now, if you want to be strong and svelte, then you got to do the nutrition part too. And you can make that decision whenever you want to make that decision, but if you just did this. If you make the decision to do this once a week, you've found the fountain of youth and you might be overweight but you found the fountain of youth. Your bones will be stronger as a result of it. Your glucose metabolism will be a little bit better because of it and these are things that people don't see and this is the challenge. When I try to tell people, forget about the fat loss, you're getting all these other benefits, they're like, “Eh, I just want to look good in a cocktail dress.” Like that's almost all that matters and it drives me nuts because there's so many more important things about strength training than just losing body fat especially since weight training or any other exercise [gets louder] is not all that good at helping you lose body fat anyway. Mhm [affirmative]. I mean I just never got that. It's about these incredible profound things that we're finding out are happening, just from 20 minutes of intense exercise. That's what I want to say in conclusion of all this. That you should understand that there's so much more than meets the eye. I mean, the weight loss and looking good is a tip of the iceberg and when you go underneath it's like, “Oh my God, look at all this.” Just do it. Well -- just do it and all this takes is, I don't know. What? Five to seven exercises to supercharge your metabolism, increase cardiovascular endurance, and it will make you leaner and it will make you stronger if you follow those three pillars. Again, Adam, tell us what the three pillars are please to support the Power of 10 in this protocol. Exercise, to maintain muscle mass. Nutrition, that will help foster fat loss. And of course, the secret weapon, and what came up in a way with our discussion on dose response, enough rest. This is the third pillar, rest and recovery. Which is the response part of the dose and response equation. Now, that is all explained in detail in Adam's book which you can get at amazon.com. It's right here, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution. I've got highlights. Everything's highlighted in here. I've got tags. I'm going through it and really digesting this information and it's changing my life and you can do the same thing as well. There are several locations if you'd like to try to work out for yourself in California, Colorado, Virginia, New Jersey and New York where Adam and Mike are. We invite you to join InForm Nation. And to find an InForm Fitness near you, just visit www.informfitness.com and when you call, please mention the podcast and maybe they'll throw some swag your way. I think we're working on some swag. Aren't we Sheila? You talked about some InForm Fitness shirts and what do we got? Yup. We are. Yeah. Tim: Alright. Sheila: We're working on some InForm Nation shirts. Yeah. Tim: InForm Nation. That's right. We're looking for you to become a member of folks is InForm Nation. And now, if you have a question for Adam, Mike or Sheila or a comment regarding the Power of 10 or something we've talked about here on the podcast, you can shoot us an email to podcast@informfitness.com. You can also record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. And pretty soon we're going to start including some phone calls, some questions and some comments from our listeners. The phone number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3 and hopefully we'll go ahead and get some of those pretty soon to start including those on the podcast. And finally and very importantly, if you wouldn't mind, please, if you like what you hear, if you want more of these shows to continue to be released through iTunes and SoundCloud and Stitcher Radio and Acast and wherever you might be getting your podcast from, please leave us a review and subscribe to the show. That will ensure the success of this program and make sure that we have more episodes coming your way. Alright guys, great discussion today on muscle. The definition of muscle and why it's so much more important to build and maintain than just to look good in a cocktail dress. Thanks guys for joining us today. Good job. Adam: [laughs] Tim: I'm Tim Edwards reminding you to join us again next time as we open up a series on intensity, high intensity in your work out. We'll define it and discuss the many benefits that await you by joining InForm Nation. Thanks for listening to the InForm Fitness podcast, 20 minutes with Adam Zickerman and friends on the Inbound Podcasting Network.

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06 Benefits of High-Intensity Weight Training

The InForm Fitness Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 27, 2017 22:56

Coming up in this episode we'll weigh in on the immediate physiological benefits of high-intensity training. What is the difference between weight training and weight bearing exercises? And steady state exercise, what is it and how does it compare to high-intensity weight training? _________ If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. To purchase Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Once-Week-Revolution-Harperresource/dp/006000889X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485469022&sr=1-1&keywords=the+power+of+10+book Ilf you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com The transcription to this episode is below: 06 Benefits of High-Intensity Weight Training - Transcript Intro: You're listening to the InForm Fitness podcast, 20 minutes with New York Times, best-selling author, Adam Zickerman and friends. Brought to you by InForm Fitness, life-changing personal training with several locations across the US. Reboot your metabolism and experience the revolutionary Power of 10, the high intensity, slow motion, strength training system that's so effective, you'd get a week's worth of exercise in just one 20-minute session, which by no coincidence is about the length of this podcast. So, get ready InForm Nation, your 20 minutes of high-intensity strength training information begins in 3, 2, 1. Tim: Welcome in to the InForm Fitness podcast, 20 minutes with Adam Zickerman and friends. I'm Tim Edwards the founder of the Inbound Podcasting Network back with Adam's friends and colleagues. Sheila Melody from the InForm Fitness Toluca Lake location and Mike Rogers from the New York City location. And across the hall from Mike is the founder of InForm Fitness and author of the New York Times best seller, Power of 10: The Once-a-week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution, Adam Zickerman. Coming up in this episode we'll weigh in on the immediate physiological benefits of high-intensity training. What is the difference between weight training and weight bearing exercises? And steady state exercise, what is it and how does it compare to high-intensity weight training? Adam, Mike and Sheila, good to have you back on the show and looking forward to today's discussion. Adam, let's start off with the debate between high-intensity training and your, say, run of the mill exercise routines that we're all familiar with. Adam: Why is high intensity so important versus just getting on a treadmill and doing that steady state, getting the heart rate up a little bit and spending the time, maybe an hour, every single day, which is generally what's been recommended and why do I say, and why do plenty of people in my camp say, that's the, you know, big deal. I mean, like, you don't have to do all that. And this is what we're finding out. First of all, a lot of people like to say to me that I don't think that steady state cardio is worth anything. I don't say it. Plenty of studies have shown that the physiological benefits that we see can come from steady state exercises. Certain markers have definitely been shown to have improved. Tim: I have a question Adam, if you don't mind, for the layperson like me, what is steady state exercise? Adam: Steady state exercise is doing cardio to the point where you can read People magazine for a while. Tim: Got you. Steady state cardio is the kind of cardio that passes the talk test. That you can have a conversation with somebody next to you while you're doing it. And steady state cardio gets your heart rate up maybe 20/30/40 percent above its normal heart rate sustained, steady state. Got you. Sustained. Steady-state activities as such has definitely been shown to cause certain physiological improvements. They've been shown to raise certain markers that we look for. Some of these markers are oxygen consumption, improved oxygen consumption. They call it the O2 max. Certain anaerobic and aerobic enzymes go up. Glucose sensitivity is improved as a result of steady state exercises. These are all good things. You want to be able to handle glucose better. In other words, somebody that is out of shape, their ability to -- if they eat something that has sugar in it, their ability to metabolize that sugar is very slow and keeps your blood sugar up high and that leads to obesity and all kinds of metabolic problems. All these kind of markers are improved from steady state activity. What I'm saying is you don't have to spend that kind of time to improve those markers to that level. Turns out, you spend a lot less time doing it but it's a lot more intense actually, you can improve those markers equally and that's what the McMaster's studies have shown. At McMaster University in Canada they compare steady state activity and the markers of improvement to high intense exercise. And you'd think that the group that did the steady state activity for like for hours a week versus four minutes a week, that they would have at least a little bit better improvement of those markers compared to just four minutes of exercise but as it turns out there was zero improvement compared to the high-intensity group. In other words, the marker that went up for the steady state group, hours of exercise per week were no better than the group that just spent about four minutes a week exercising at a much higher intensity. So, it begs the question, why are we doing all that steady state activities if the markers that we decided are markers of improvement -- if high-intensity exercises are improving those markers equally, why are we taking the scenic route. So, the question is this and this is it. I don't think that if you like to do steady state cardio and you want those physiological improvements, we're all big boys and girls, go ahead and do it. If you want to spend the four or five hours a week doing it, fine. If you also understand the risks associated with doing four or five hours of exercise a week at a steady state level. If you understand those risks because a lot of people don't understand but if they did understand these risks because they still want to do it that way because that's what they like to do, it's certainly better than sitting on a couch doing nothing and those risks are orthopedic risks and overtraining risks of course. And, you know, quite honestly, some people don't see it this way but I see it as a risk of time, I mean -- Tim: For sure. Adam: You only have so much time on this Earth. I mean, like, I don't want to spend four hours a week of my time exercising if I don't have to. I'd much rather be with my family. Tim: Mhm [affirmative] and that's the part that's most attractive about this exercise, your exercise, the high-intensity slow motion strength training system as opposed to riding a bike for four hours a week. I mean, who has time to do that unless it's something that somebody really enjoys to do or they use it as a recreational activity. I do not have four hours a week to work out and I'm sure the majority of the people listening don't have four hours a week to work out especially when the benefits are equal [laughs] if not better. Adam: Well, that's the point. So, we have choices. So, we have choices. When someone says you don't believe in cardio, you don't think people should do cardio, I'm like, you know, we have a choice and I have mentioned scenic route before. I mean, some people like to take the scenic route. Again, it's a choice and most people I think want to just get it done, get it over with. And the people that want to take the scenic route, take the scenic route but I think a lot of people that take the scenic route, number one, don't realize it's just a scenic route, that there is even an express route. And number two, the people that take the scenic route, they don't know about the side effects of it and maybe they'd think twice about it if they knew what the side effects were. I think exercise programs don't have enough disclaimers with them. You know when you see a drug commercial on TV, they always have a disclaimer at the bottom. Tim: Yeah. [laughs] Adam: They read really fast and really small letters. Alright. Well I think, for the most part, that's the way the exercising industry kind of covers their butts but they don't really tell you truly what the risks are doing these types of activities and that's sad. Tim: So, in addition to the obvious benefit of becoming stronger, what are some of the other direct physiological benefits that we can enjoy as a result of this protocol? Adam: Well, there's a lot of anti-inflammatory responses and free radical absorption responses that occur when you push the muscles that deeply we're finding out. This is kind of new stuff. I mean, last five years or so. When you work out that intensely the muscles are starting to produce things that really have more profound effects and like you just mentioned, just getting stronger can affect our immune system. It could affect how we deal with free radicals. The fact that we're balancing the intensity with plenty of rest, allowing the body to do these things. So, you are actually enhancing your immune system as opposed to actually the opposite where your immune system is actually run down and you get more vulnerable to sickness because you're over trained. So, the balance there is very important. Yeah. I mean, the immune system, I think the immune responses, that's a huge thing because we always think about that's how we keep our body's, you know, to be able to fight disease and everything but you know something, I think even more direct and we talk about just strength training in general. We know strength training in general, you know, it, you can -- when you have a program, hypertrophy, increased muscle sizes is a benefit, burning fat is a benefit, cardiovascular endurance is a benefit and it's interesting. And Adam, I don't think no one describes it better than you do, about what the effect of intensity has on hypertrophy or fat burning for example versus a steady state stimulus. I mean, when you're pushing the body to that level of intensity, it sets off a cascade of things and basically all the systems -- it's a supply and demand thing. When you're producing -- so, intense exercise, that kind of demand and the muscles are growing and require constant demand, all our systems need to meet that demand. Osteoporosis, the bones have to get stronger when the muscles are stronger. The cardiovascular system has to become more efficient as your muscles become stronger. The integrity of your joints need to improve if your muscles around those joints are stronger. Your digestive system needs to keep up with the demands of more muscle and high, intense exercise. Temperature regulation is improved as a result of this. When noticing all kinds of benefits just because you're spending 20 minutes to push your energy systems to their max. Yeah and the other thing that I just want to make very clear is that how safely we achieve that intensity with this Power of 10 workout because, you know, you can get the intensity, CrossFit or those other things that people are doing, that's intensity, yes, but it's very injury prone. And by going very slowly it is really amazing when people try this for the first time. They don't believe it and then you get them on there and just by simply going very slowly with the right amount of weight in the perfect form, how deeply and how quickly they can achieve that muscle failure or that deep intensity. You know how you have to think of this is meditation with weights. Hm [contemplative]. Mhm [affirmative]. Going to muscle failure is very similar to meditating. You have to focus on one thing and not -- and try to cancel out all the other distractions. And you have to accept the fact that there are going to be other distractions. In the occasion of reaching muscle failure the distractions are, you know, the big obvious one is the burn. The absolute discomfort that comes from going to muscle failures. You have to kind of ignore that burn and realize you have a very specific goal and that is to reach a certain level of muscle fatigue and you have to breath properly through this. You can't hold your breath. You can't do all the gyrations and histrionics associate -- those are distractions. So, what you're trying to do, just like meditation, is focus, as like meditation on the breath, here you're focusing on the movement on the objective muscle failure and as soon as a distraction comes in, what do you do? You note it and you bring yourself back and this is -- you never perfect it. I'm doing this workout for 18 years or more and you're never perfect at it. And when you think of it that way, I think all of the sudden, intensity is not so bad. So, Adam, let's say we have somebody listening in an area where InForm Fitness is not located and they're interested in doing this workout but they don't have the actual machines that you have there in your InForm Fitness facilities or gyms. Can this workout translate to free weights or Nautilus machines they could find at a gym where they might be located or maybe even just body weight exercises? Does it translate across the various platforms? Yes. Principles of lifting weights slowly, keeping it safe, crossing that threshold of intensity can be applied using almost anything. My father, I remember building stuff in the garage with my dad growing up and he had all hand tools. And I would say, you know, why don't you get one of those nice electric routers or hand sander, you know, like the electric sanders and things like that and he's like, a good craftsman never blames his tools. Hm [contemplative]. Point is my dad didn't have the money to buy this kind of stuff but he still didn't let that stop him from building some really cool stuff for the house. And that comment always stuck with me and to achieve muscle failure, to work out intensely according to muscle and joint function safely, you don't need to have our fancy retrofitted equipment that we spent lots and lots of money on [laughs] because if you're going to do this for as a business, a good craftsman will also tell you he'll use the best tools available if he had the opportunity. So, yes, you can absolutely do this with anything because you have to just reach intensity and you want to try and do it as safely as you can and you want to keep it as brief as possible. Tim: But if you are within the area or within driving distance of an InForm Fitness, it certainly would be to your advantage, clearly, to jump onboard, join InForm Nation and try this out for yourself. And if you would, remind our audience of the markets where they can find an InForm Fitness place. Adam: Sure. I mean, there's a reason why I spent all this time and money on this retrofitted equipment. You know, we're in New York City. We're on Long Island. We're in Burbank, California. We're in a couple places in Virginia, Boulder, Colorado and of course people in these areas are really enjoying the service of using equipment like this with a trainer that kind of has taught them the whole way how to go into that level of intensity and how to find that Zen master in each of us. But again, you know, lifting weights slowly or pushing your muscles to their ultimate threshold, exhaustion point, doing that safely, doesn't take much, doesn't take much. A set of wall squats, a push-up position, a plank. Doesn't take much to stimulate this type of change, now, there are all kinds of people, all kinds of orthopedic issues, motor skill issues, genetics, where having a trainer, of course, is a benefit. Tim: Mhm [affirmative]. Adam: But in theory, anyone can do this, with anything and I know the subject is equipment versus free weights or our equipment versus any other kind of equipment. Not too long ago I was interviewing a trainer who was thinking about becoming a trainer at InForm Fitness and I'm talking about the equipment and the special cams and the low friction and how -- and all the body mechanics and matching resistance curves of the machines with the strength curves of the human body. And I got into all this biomechanics and I'm thinking he's like eating all this stuff up, like, this is like unbelievable and in the end he was like, you know, I think this would be a little bit more varied, I'm kind of thinking I don't want to limit myself to just equipment like this. You know, I think free weights is important and all kinds of different exercises, you know, for a well-rounded workout should be applied. And I was like, this guy did not hear a single word I said for the last 12 weeks, honestly. He didn't get it. He says, you know, you're a little bit more machine -- you're like a machine based company and I'm thinking I don't know if I want, as a trainer, I want to limit myself to a machine based type of protocol. You know, I was like, oh boy. Either he didn't listen or I didn't do a good enough job in explaining what we're all about because his takeaway was we're a machine based company then there was some kind of miscommunication going on because I really, I mean, I have this beautiful pulldown machine that I personally don't use because I like to do chin-ups. You know, it -- but the pulldown machine is great and it should be used by a lot of people. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. And you have in your book too. In your book, there's a whole, like, the last, you know, part of the book is all exercises you can do at home, right? Of course. Yeah and for those that have stumbled across this episode and haven't had an opportunity to listen to some of the early episodes, the first few episodes of this podcast, the book is called Power of 10: The Once-a-week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution with Adam Zickerman. Of course, you can pick this up at amazon.com and I would imagine there are some bookstores across the country that carry it as well too and you have these as each one of your facilities too. So, explain the difference Adam, between when women come in and they're told that they need to do weight bearing exercise in order, you know, to stave off osteoporosis. What's the difference between weight bearing exercise and weight lifting? Is there a difference and what is it? Yeah. I don't know what -- there's seems to be a lot of confusion because I don't think doctors are explaining to their patients clearly enough what they mean by weight bearing or even if they know what weight bearing is because a lot of doctors are a little paranoid to get and recommend their patients, especially if they have some kind of osteoporosis or some kind of orthopedic issues, I think they're a little nervous telling them to start doing a high-intensity program. So, what they do is just say weight bearing. I guess they can't get sued for just saying do weight bearing exercise. And weight bearing has become such a ubiquitous word if you will. It almost means anything as long as your active. Like a walking program by some is considered weight bearing exercise. Especially if that person doing the walking program has a big butt. [laughter] You're bearing your own weight. That's weight bearing. That's right. Well -- Yeah. Weight bearing is like Zumba. To me that's not what weight bearing is. That's not -- to me, weight bearing is high intensity exercise. Pushing the muscles to their max. That's what weight bearing exercise is to me. A walking program doesn't qualify. Jogging doesn't qualify. Lifting five pound dumbbells to music while you're riding a bike does not qualify. You have to go into the zone. You got to push yourself to your limits. Doesn't have to be long. Doesn't have to be unsafe. Doesn't have to be with fancy equipment but you got to do that and that's weight bearing exercise. So, Adam, are there opportunities for other professionals in this industry who have been listening to this podcast who really are starting to subscribe to this high-intensity slow motion strength training system, enjoying the science behind it and all that you and Mike and Sheila have to say, they might be able to get in contact with you about maybe getting certified to teach this in their area where an InForm Fitness is not located. Yes. As a matter of fact, I just got back from San Francisco with a group of six people for exactly that. There was an owner of a gym up there that wanted to get all their trainers exposed to this and certified in how to teach this exact type of training. So, I just did a 12-week course with them, Skype and lectures and then a workshop at the end for two days and then boom, they're off and running. So, you have a curriculum in place to go ahead and bring -- Yeah. The curriculum I've been working on for, like, the last five, six years. Mhm [affirmative]. Every time I give this course it gets better and better and better. And I just want to add from personal experience, it's one of the best things that I've ever done is to take that certification course from Adam. And I've also been through probably two or three different, probably three different groups of people that he has certified including some of our own trainers and if anything, you learn, you know, this whole new way of exercising which you can take with you for the rest of your life. And a lot of people imagine that are getting in touch with you like the folks in San Francisco, they already have a gym. They already have members. They already have a client base and they're just going to teach this new method, something that they haven't taught before. Sheila: I was just going to say that we've actually had people call us up and say, you know, I know that we're not -- you know, there's not an InForm Fitness in my area but I read the book, I wanted to learn this. Can I just -- I'm going to fly in and can I do a little mini-workshop which is like a consultation or whatever. We'll take a couple hours with you and work with a trainer and show, you know, show them how to do this. And we've had several people, like, fly into Burbank Airport. And, I'm serious and I was like really. Do you really want to do this? And yeah, we've done it. So, that's always something. If you're kind of close but you're not really close, find a trainer that is certified in this and then just, you know, pay them to go through it with you. Tim: Yeah. That's a great idea. Or perhaps if you'd like to hire Adam directly to train you or your staff to offer this slow motion high-intensity training to your clients, just send Adam an email or a voice memo from your phone to podcast@informfitness.com. You can also leave us a voicemail by calling 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. That's 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. And to join InForm Nation for yourself to give this workout a try, just visit informfitness.com for phone numbers and locations nearest you. That puts the wraps on this episode. We are close to that 20-minute mark in the podcast which means if you began your slow motion high intensity workout when this podcast started, you'd be finished with your workout for the entire week. Join us next time as we learn more about the equipment necessary to perform the Power of 10 and we'll discuss age limits for this very unique and effective workout. How young is too young and how old is too old to begin? And please, don't forget to subscribe to this free podcast from whichever platform you might be listening from, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher Radio, Acast and even YouTube. And please, rate the show and leave us a review. It only takes a couple of minutes and will ensure the continuation of this podcast. For Adam, Mike and Sheila, I'm Tim Edwards and we appreciate you listening to the InForm Fitness podcast, 20 minutes with Adam Zickerman and friends right here on the Inbound Podcasting Network.

tv amazon california canada new york city power earth san francisco new york times colorado benefits soundcloud weight principles skype acast reboot long island crossfit zen boulder colorado lifting steady temperature hm sustained burbank zumba o2 osteoporosis glucose nautilus mcmaster jogging stitcher radio weight training ext high intensity mike rogers mhm tim edwards ilf tim yeah adam you adam well tim so tim for inform fitness inbound podcasting network sheila melody

07 Machines vs. Free Weights vs. Body Weight

The InForm Fitness Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 27, 2017 21:23

In Episode 7 of the Inform Fitness Podcast, Adam Zickerman, Mike Rogers, Sheila Melody and Tim Edwards discusses the pros and cons of high-intensity strength training with free weights versus machine weights versus your own body weight. You will learn more about the type of equipment you can expect to use with your very own personal trainer at Inform Fitness. To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you visit www.InformFitness.com If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. You can join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. To purchase Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Once-Week-Revolution-Harperresource/dp/006000889X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485469022&sr=1-1&keywords=the+power+of+10+book Ilf you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com The transcription to this episode is below: 07 Working Out with Machine vs. Free vs. Body Weights - Transcript Intro: You're listening to the InForm Fitness podcast, 20 minutes with New York Times, best-selling author, Adam Zickerman and friends. Brought to you by InForm Fitness, life-changing personal training with several locations across the US. Reboot your metabolism and experience the revolutionary Power of 10, the high intensity, slow motion, strength training system that's so effective, you'd get a week's worth of exercise in just one 20-minute session, which by no coincidence is about the length of this podcast. So, get ready InForm Nation, your 20 minutes of high-intensity strength training information begins in 3, 2, 1. InForm Nation, thanks for being with us once again. I'm Tim Edwards with the Inbound Podcasting Network. We have Sheila. We have Mike. And we have Adam, the founder of InForm Fitness and New York Times best-selling author of Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution. That's what this show is all about, supercharging your metabolism, increasing your cardiovascular endurance and getting you leaner and stronger to enjoy your health and your life to the fullest. In today's episode we'll discuss working out with free weights versus machine weights versus your own body weight and the equipment you can expect to see when becoming a member of InForm Nation. Mike, let's start with you. Give us a quick rundown on the type of equipment InForm Fitness uses to support the Power of 10. In regards to the machines versus the free weight versus body weight, you know, InForm Fitness, here in New York, we have the Rolls Royce set up here as Adam said many times before and all of the locations in California, Virginia, etcetera. Our machines, they're outstanding. They're made by Nautilus. They're made by MedX and they're all retrofitted for our style of weight training to accommodate for the strength curves of the body. I never knew what a strength curve until I got certified and went through all this, you know, information. Basically, it's like when you start out a movement, like what Mike just said, you know, you go through this movement in the muscle group that your isolating. At the start of it you're normally a little weaker and then there's a point in that movement that you're the strongest and then there becomes another point where it's weaker. And what we want to do is stimulate that strongest part of the movement. So, if you're in the middle of this, you know, compound row and in the middle of it where you're strongest you can do 150 pounds but at the back you can't or at the very beginning it -- the equipment allows for the resistance to fall off where your strength curve is the weaker part and then you get that -- the best stimulus in the middle of it. If that [crosstalk 02:59]. And this cannot be accomplished, I'm sure, with free weights or regular machines that you would see at a conventional gym. There are tricks. You can simulate cams on free weights if you know how to use them properly. Like a lateral raise, you wouldn't be standing straight up. You lean to the side while you did a lateral raise, you actually in effect create a cam that's proper and congruent. So, if you know what you're doing, if you understand the limitations of free weights and how to work around them, you can have a very intense and safe workout. One thing that I think we overemphasize that people give more importance in, is actually needed is this thing, this concept called full range of motion. That we need to go through a full range of motion and some people in the older generation might remember this but there used to be, you know, a protocol called statics or isometric training and that's where you don't move at all. They don't go through any range of motion at all. You just fatigue the muscle just by pushing and using the muscle in a stationary position but pushing as hard as you can until it exhausts and you got good results from doing statics or isometrics. The range of motion for a lot of situations in trying to maximize that range of motion can end up being a very dangerous situation. When you're at the extremes of the range of motion, those are the most vulnerable parts of the muscle, the most stretched position. That's where things tear and go a little and get really dangerous. I like to stay right in that midrange and if unless you have specialized equipment, you should stay in that midrange and avoid the extremes. Only with retrofitted equipment where the machine makes it actually lighter where we're right in our most vulnerable and weakest positions. So, the weight is not being taken over by the connective tissue because the muscle can't handle it all right in that position. So, that's why we retrofit our machines and we do get a little bit more range of motion using machines like that. But again, I'm -- I don't really care about maximum range of motion. It doesn't matter. You can strengthen a muscle group or single muscle by just working it really deeply in a static position. In its strongest position. In the middle position. I think, you know, Adam I think one of the best examples of that is the leg extension because of all the controversy and all studies and all of the, you know, it's -- over the last -- as long as I've been a trainer there's been a lot of news articles and studies that said the leg extension is absolutely the worst machine and one of the most dangerous machines in the gym and the thing is -- well, the question is, how are you doing the study? How are they doing the exercise? How is the leg extension set up? And, you know, for example, our -- you know, Adam can describe probably the best exactly the alignment of the seat and how it drops off at the top and you know to -- I mean where if he doesn't do that, if you are going through a fuller range of motion, you are putting your knee in a lot of jeopardy at a regular gym versus at -- our leg extension makes that accommodation if you're going to a fuller range of motion but as Adam just sort of stated, it's and often in many cases, it's not necessary to do so. A leg extension is a rotary movement. The rotary movements are more challenging for free weights and the leg extension does have risks associated with it if you don't -- so our leg extension machine has a lot of retrofits done to it to make it a safe machine and exercise. Without getting into all the details, if somebody was to say to me, I want to do this exercise on my own and I belong to a gym, what should I do? I would not have them do the leg extension machine because I don't know what kind of machine they have and it's harder to use that correctly. I would stick him on -- I would keep them on the basic leg presses. That's what you can do on your own or a wall squat is even safer in these compound movements versus the rotary movements. So, right there would be how somebody can do this on their own just knowing what machines to avoid, what exercises to avoid and what is more effective given that you have crude equipment or free weights available to you. There's ways, again, of having an incredible workout in a full gym and avoid 90% of the equipment that's in that gym. Adam, you have state of the art equipment at all of the InForm Fitness locations across the country. Can you briefly just kind of run through this type of equipment that you have? What makes it so special for InForm Fitness and this type of workout? The key to this type of workout -- the impotence to this workout in general, lifting weights slowly was to make it safer and the special equipment is just one more step in that direction of making it safer. And one way you make exercise safer is making sure that while you're fatiguing a muscle, you're not doing anything harmful to the joints around that muscle and that's where the specialized equipment really shines. Because when you go through a range of motion through a particular exercise, let's take the bicep curl for example, when you start the bicep curl when your arm is straight versus when it's bent at a 90 degree angle that change and range of motion, your muscle is not the same strength. It's much weaker when you start to position -- 20%, about, weaker, than it is in the 90-degree angle. So, if you could handle 100 pounds in the strongest position, that means you can only handle about 80 pounds in the week position. And what does this macho, tough guy do when he wants to do bicep curls? He takes the most weight he can handle which is 100 pounds in the strongest position. So, he takes 100-pound dumbbell and he starts in the week position that can only handle 80. What's going to make us the other 20%? Well, I can tell you this, whatever is making it up, it's not good. [laughs] Because that's the connective tissue of the elbow, of the shoulder, of the back needing to heave and hoe just to get that extra 20%. And there's no good that comes from that. And if you do that regularly for all these kind of exercises for all the joints, all the time, there's an insidious negative effect to all that because you might not have tendonitis on day one doing that but if you keep doing it where you're straining the joints and in order to lift a weight in a certain position, over time it's going to bite you. So, our equipment just makes it lighter in the weaker points and makes it heavier in the strong point so it matches that strength curve. And therefore, you're not straining the joints and connective tissue is not doing the work of what the major muscles should be doing. Tim: So, as we wrap up this episode on machine versus free weights versus body weight exercises, Adam, you did say that you don't need to be at an InForm Fitness location in order to perform a high-intensity slow motion strength training system. There are safe ways to go about this with free weights and body weights but you do need some type of a trainer and some education before you take this type of a workout outside of an InForm Fitness gym. Adam: Yes, you do. And it doesn't take a lot. Knowing some of the pitfalls of free weights and certain exercises, knowing to stay away from some of the dangerous things, it wouldn't take too long to know more than most trainers out there actually. [laughs] Tim: Well, a good first step might be to pick up Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once- a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution. Inside the book you'll find several workouts that support this slow motion high-intensity strength training system whether you use free weights, your own body weight or are fortunate enough to live near an InForm Fitness location. By following the three pillars Adam discusses in his book along with just a small investment of 20 to 30 minutes a week, it won't be long until you start seeing some measurable results and achievements from your newfound strength. Adam: How about, “Hey, Adam, guess what, for the first time I was able to put my stuff in the overhead compartment in the airplane without some young gentleman offering me any help. I did it myself.” How about that small achievement that is a big deal to a lot of people right now? Just the everyday tasks alone is worth it. A very small price to pay, truly, 20 minutes -- [Crosstalk 11:36] that's the real functional training right there. [laughs] Yeah. And then I'll take it to the, you know, older, to the senior crowd I heard one of our friends Greg Burns who had some very senior -- they were probably in their late 70s. They loved going on cruises and the wife had been very upset because they couldn't go on cruises anymore because she had to -- she couldn't, like, walk around that well. They started working out, doing this workout and within the next year -- like they did it for about a year and they went on a cruise and she was so happy. She felt like she had their life back again because she didn't have to have a wheelchair. She could walk around on her own. It's that kind of a level. It goes from snowboarding, gardening, whatever to simply being able to walk and balance yourself. Yeah, I've heard -- I've recently also same thing, senior used to have to go up the stairs, like, you know, up one step and meet the other foot with the other foot and then up the next step and so like -- and then would go on from that to one step to the next step to the next step to the next step. So, it's like little stuff like that and -- Right. It becomes very noticeable. And what is this older person going to do if they didn't have us? Like what other kind of strength training that involves the necessary intensity. What are they going to do if it's not this? What is an older person that has problems walking up a flight of stairs, for example, as simple as that one flight of stairs they have major pain and problems with it, what are they going to do if they are that far gone already that they can't even walk up a flight -- what else are they -- what is their option? A walking program? I don't think so. What is it? No. They got to strength train. How about -- they going to join a CrossFit class? [laughs] Like physical therapy is the other option. [laughs] They may find other exercise alternatives but probably one that's not going to -- they might not hurt them along the way, you know, I mean, it's very difficult to do that and that's why we -- They have to strength train. They got to strengthen the muscle. They got to do it without any force because they're so week already the last -- they can't afford any additional force that's not necessary. They can't afford it. They'll break. So, let me ask you this then. So, how old is too old to call InForm Fitness and say, I'd like to sign up for a high intensity slow motion strength training program. How old is too old? That's a good question. Dead. [laughs] Honestly, I don't think we can answer that question. [laughs] I don't know if there's an answer to that question but we can say we have people in their 90s. We have a 92-year-old woman who's on our website. We have a nice video of her and we've had another 90-year-old who would still be here but she moved to Baltimore, remember, Adam? Yeah. Yeah. So, it's like -- we have several in their 80s, several in their 70s, lots in their 70s. More than several. Yeah. More than several. Yeah. Lots and lots. It's -- so -- We forget they're in their 70s, Mike. Yeah. Yeah. I mean -- It's unbelievable. That's true. Adam: Honestly, like, anybody that's over 60 and working out here, I think they're all 60. Like I basically say, yeah we have a lot of people in their 60s but it turns out that a lot of the people that I think are in 60s are actually in their 70s. Tim: So, we found the fountain of youth at InForm Fitness and is not a magic pill. There's work that goes into but like Adam was saying, a 20 minute a week investment is about as minimal as it gets. It's safe and it's effective and we've interviewed people over the last couple of months, Sheila, with the videos that we've been producing that I think they're in their 50s and I'm not kidding, with no exaggeration they're in their late 60s or early 70s and Keith comes to mind in particular. Sheila: Yeah. Keith is [crosstalk 15:10]. Tim: We're going to be talking about Keith here coming up shortly in another episode, a very charismatic gentleman and I think he's 70 something. Is that correct? 71? Sheila: 72. Tim: He's 72 for goodness' sake. My gosh, I thought he -- Sheila: And he's like solid muscle. Tim: Yeah. Sheila: And talk about intense. He just really goes intense. You know? Tim: So, if we have people listening we know just looking at demographics a lot of older people, baby boomers don't necessarily listen to podcasts but we know their kids do or their grandkids do. So, if you're a child or a grandchild of somebody that you love that you think could use some physical conditioning, you might want to give InForm Fitness a call or check them out on the website so -- Sheila: Well, not only that. I don't want to seem like we're only for old people too. We have, you know, younger people that are -- you know, we have 15-year-olds. We have a number of, like, in their late 20s to, you know, early 30s. And they don't have time. You know, they're trying to build their lives. They're working. They're starting to get into their, like, the peak of their, you know, careers. And they love this workout. You know, so, we have a, you know, grandson and a grandmother coming in and, you know, it's funny because he was like, look, you know, my grandma can lift more weight than some of the girls I know. Tim: [laughs] That's awesome. You know, which is true because she's been coming in religiously and just doing it, you know. Just slowly building and consistent. The workout is certainly for everybody. I have an 11-year-old client. I have athletes, very serious athletes here and it's for everybody. The whole point before was just that because a lot of people get very concerned about how much they can actually exercise when they get into their golden years and even up to like their 90s, which we have them here and they're thriving so. The limit is pretty much nowhere. There is no limit. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think the only limit -- there are two limits. There are definitely some orthopedic or medical [inaudible 17:17] indications to exercise that. True. True. That's how we gauge whether there are limitations to this, not age. Age in of itself, it doesn't matter. It's really the state of the person. There are some medical issues that needs to be dealt with and cleared with some medical doctors but the other limitation that I think that exists more than anything else is the mental limitation. Mhm [affirmative]. You know, I mean, if you can get somebody to kind of let go and really push themselves to an uncomfortable level that they might not be used to, if you can get them to break through that barrier, it opens up a whole world in a profound way, way beyond just getting stronger actually. Not just to their physical abilities but if -- you know, when you're physically pushed to the point of failure in a specific movement, I know for a fact that that mental shift can also take place in anything you do in life. I believe that what we learn in those seven or so exercises in that 20 minutes can be applied outside in every area of your life not just in your body. I mean, I think absolutely, when we push ourselves in almost any capacity and then afterwards we take a proper rest, our body grows, our mind grows, our, you know, like, you wouldn't -- if you didn't sleep, your memory wouldn't improve. All these things, all of your cognitive abilities and it applies to everything and that's where, how do you do that in a safe fashion is and I think that InForm Fitness and the method that Adam has developed here is your best option. That was really cheesy. I kind of liked that moment for a while. Yeah. [laughs] Were we getting deep? You know a little cheese every once in a while, you know, as long as you're not lactose intolerant. I guess. [Inaudible 19:01]. [laughs] Never underestimate the power of cheese. I'm not lactose intolerant. I'll go there all day, Adam. [laughter] Yeah. Just cut back on putting that cheese in your mouth if you're looking to shed a little fat while you're building your muscle with the Power of 10. Again, check out Adam's book for a simple and handy list of food that you should avoid and enjoy in chapter 3, nutrition, the second pillar. We'll provide you a link to Adam's book in the show notes. Well, that episode went by fast. If you started your high-intensity training with InForm Fitness at the start of this episode, you'd be wrapping it up about now just like we are. Hey, we're going to be kicking off a new segment called, Fitness Fact or Fiction, in the next couple of episodes. So, if you would like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question, maybe you have a comment regarding the Power of 10 or maybe you saw something on your Facebook feed regarding the many fitness trends that are making the rounds, send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. You can even give us a call at 888-983-5020, Ext. 3 to leave your comment, question or suggestion. All feedback is welcome. And seriously, this is very important to us, the best way to support this show and keep it free is to subscribe to the podcast right here in iTunes or wherever you might be enjoying your podcast. Of course, it is absolutely free to subscribe and we would love it if you left us a review. Hey, our next four episodes promise to be both entertaining and educational. In this podcast you've heard a lot about weightlifting but not a lot regarding cardio. Should you hang onto that treadmill that's collecting dust in your garage or continue paying for that spin class you hardly ever go to or is the cardio you need included in your 20-minute workout with InForm Fitness? We'll discuss the cardio conundrum and fat loss in the next two episodes. Plus, we'll be speaking with a very talented musician who's lost 118 over the past two years by adding the Power of 10 workout to her weight loss program. We'll catch you next week right here on the InForm Fitness podcast. For Adam Zickerman, Mike Rogers and Sheila Melody, I'm Tim Edwards with the Inbound Podcasting Network.

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How U.S. FinTech Stripe Broke into Low-Tech Japan – Daniel Heffernan

Zombpocalypse Now - Team Zombie Discusses Undead Things

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 26, 2016 53:29

Stripe’s Japan market entry did not go according to plan. Things worked out worked out well in the end, but they did not go according to plan. Stripe is one of the world’s largest payment processing companies, but they remained flexible and agile enough to take advantage of some of the surprises they faced in Japan. Today we sit down with Daniel Heffernan, the Japan head of Stripe, and he walks us through what happens when a technically sophisticated and streamlined FinTech company comes face-to-face with the very low-tech and slow-moving processes that make up FinTech in Japan, and how they made it all work. They faced complex, lengthy technical specifications delivered in three-ring binders and un-copyable, printed documents, and they dealt with the Japanese aversion to integrating directly with banks and financial institutions. They even planned to support some of Japan’s more unique payment methods until surprises during development made them change course. Stripe’s entry into the Japanese market is both an essential case study for any FinTech company considering coming into Japan and an entertaining story for those of us with an interest in business in Japan. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Links & Resources Check out Daniel's blog Follow him on twitter @danielshi Find out more about Stripe Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the CEOs breaking into Japan’s. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Stripe is one of the largest credit card payment processing companies in the world and their Japan market entry did not go according to plan. It went well, mind you, but it just did not go according to plan. Stripe was agile enough to take the changes and surprises in stride. Today, we sit down with Daniel Heffernan, the Japan head of Stripe, and he walks us through the process where one of the most technically sophisticated and streamlined fintech companies in the world came face-to-face with a very low tech and manual nature of fintech in Japan, and he explains how they made it all work. From detailed, extensive technical specifications that were delivered as uncopiable, printed documents in three-ring binders, to the Japanese aversion to interacting directly with banks and financial institutions, to trying to support some of Japan’s more unique payments, and some of the surprised they discovered once they began work. Stripe’s entry into the Japanese market is both an essential case study, for any fintech company looking at Japan, and an entertaining story for those of us with an interest in business in Japan. But you know, Daniel tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from out 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 Daniel Heffernan of Stripe and we’re going to talk about Stripe’s market entry into Japan. And you guys have just officially launched officially but let’s back it up and talk about when you first came in. What was Stripe’s main motivation of coming into Japan in the first place? Daniel: Well, when we started looking at Japan, we looked at it kind of like we do every other market that we considered. There are a few things we look at when we’re trying to decide whether to go into a market. One of them is the size of the e-commerce economy. Japan is pretty big. Last year it was about $130 billion, which is significant. That’s actually number 4 in the world. So you have China and U.S., are giants at the top, then it’s kind of a big jump down, and you have the U.K., and Japan is actually just behind the U.K. If you think about it from a population point of view, it’s really weird because the population of U.K. is like half of Japan. Tim: Yeah, I find that surprising from both a population and an economy point of vi...

china japan japanese ceos broke fintech stripe resources check heffernan low tech tim yeah disrupting japan tim romero daniel well

ZOMBPOCALYPSE NOW: PREACHER Man's A Comin'

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2016 25:56

With both Walking Dead series on their season and mid-season breaks, #TeamZombie continues its new Zombpocalypse Now podcast by turning the baleful eyes of Mr. Harvey and Mr. Adair onto AMC's newest supernatural thriller: Preacher. DUSTIN: You do realize that we recorded this last week, right? Like a week ago, last week. TIM: Yeah, but we had the mid-season finale for Fear the Walking Dead last week and the premiere of Preacher, and then nothing this Sunday, so... DUSTIN: So you thought you'd keep us on a weekly schedule, with the second episode of Preacher coming out June 5th. I suppose this is acceptable. TIM: Gee, thanks. Anyway, unlike our reviews of The Walking Dead, where we both had read the comic book, you haven't read Preacher. DUSTIN: Nope. And you have, so we get to have both someone watching it with fresh eyes and the view of a fan of the comic. Should be fun.

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ZOMBPOCALYPSE NOW: PREACHER Man's A Comin'

Zombpocalypse Now - Team Zombie Discusses Undead Things

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2016 25:56

fear walking dead preachers amc fear the walking dead adair tim yeah zombpocalypse

ZOMBPOCALYPSE NOW: Everything Old Is New Again For #TeamZombie

Zombpocalypse Now - Team Zombie Discusses Undead Things

Play Episode Listen Later May 19, 2016 36:30

Season 2, Episode 6 "Sicut Cervus"Written by: Brian BucknerDirected by Kate Dennis Dustin: The title means Like a Deer. Tim: Yeah, I looked it up too. Dustin: Religious themes for a show that basically teaches that faith is futile. Whatever. Hi folks, it's Dustin and Tim recording Zombpocalypse Now for Horror4Me and SciFi4Me. It's just the two of us again, as it so often is, but we're used to that by now. Here we talk about AMC's Fear the Walking Dead, which we find an arduous watch, but a fun discussion, and one we hope you'll find fun too. Unlike this show. >Dustin: You take too long.

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ZOMBPOCALYPSE NOW: Everything Old Is New Again For #TeamZombie

Zombpocalypse Now - Team Zombie Discusses Undead Things

Play Episode Listen Later May 19, 2016 36:30

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008 MISSING: ELIZABETH SALGADO'S FAMILY SPEAKS

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 29, 2016 19:31

Tim: Several months ago, a woman named Elizabeth Salgado was last seen walking down the center street in one of the safest cities in the United States - Provo, Utah - and she went missing. Somebody apparently took her, and that left a family in absolute shambles. I have two members of that family here: Elizabeth’s mother, Libertad Edith, and Elizabeth’s uncle, Rosenberg Salgado. Thank you both for coming on the show today. Can you tell me what happened, or at least what we know about what happened to Elizabeth, and how that affected you and how that affected your family? Rosenberg: First of all, just so you know, Elizabeth Salgado was a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She wanted to come here to Provo, Utah, because she wanted to be associated with people that they had the same religious beliefs, and wanted to progress in her life and be able to open more opportunities in her life, and wanted to be in a great place, safest place on earth. And she thought that this would be, like, the best place on earth for her to be learning English. Unfortunately, three weeks later, on the 16th of April, she went missing, and as of right now we don’t have any leads, nothing that can help us believe to be able to find her. We are working also with the police department. They said the FBI is also involved, but right now there are no leads at all. Our family has been suffering a lot. My dad died because of the stress that we haven’t been able to find my niece. My sister is having high blood pressure problems and the father of Elizabeth is having high blood pressure problems as well because of the stress that we haven’t been able to find my niece. So it has been a terrible experience for a family. It is something that we never thought this was going to happen to my niece, especially in a city that is so safe. I mean, to me, we felt like probably Utah was just the safest place on earth. Tim: Sure, yeah. You know, I’m so sorry. We’ve been working on this investigation as you know, and it is a difficult case. It’s like she just vanished in the thin air. You know, it’s something that we, at Operation Underground Railroad - we see this all the time. We see it everyday. It doesn’t do anything to normalize the situation or to downgrade the pain at all. But I want to ask, before you lost Elizabeth, what was your idea or thoughts on things like trafficking and this kind of crime? Was it something that even touched you or affected you or that you knew about? Rosenberg: Honestly, before my niece went missing, I didn’t even think that existed that kind of problem here in the...I mean in this country, or any country in the world, because I think it’s something horrible, you know, people they go through that. I honestly didn’t even think it existed, to be honest. So I wasn’t even aware of that until right now, that now we are going through this, and that I feel like I want to even help out more people to be able to rescue these people because it’s terrible that you are going through this experience as a family. As a family member, we are desperate, we are... I mean, you can’t even live a normal life - you can’t even sleep thinking where your niece is, what happened to her, and why are they doing this to an innocent girl. So it’s something that we actually didn’t even think that this problem existed, to be honest. Tim: Yeah...I’m so sorry. Again, thank you so much for being willing to talk. What we are seeking is a solution, right. The purpose of Slave Stealer podcast is to make people aware. Unfortunately, the way you learned about it was absolutely horrific. There’s no worse way to learn about it. Have you learned anything? Have you... Could you help us? Because we don’t claim to have all the answers, right. But we are trying to find those answers. And so I ask you, and in a minute, I am going to ask you to talk to your sister - of course she speaks Spanish and we’ll have you translate her feelings about this as well. But again, I am speaking here with Rosenberg Salgado, the uncle to Elizabeth Elena Salgado, who, in April, was apparently kidnapped. She vanished in one of the safest neighborhoods in the world, in Provo, Utah. Rosenberg, what do you think needs to happen to minimize this kind of crime? Rosenberg: To be honest, I mean I feel like if a lot of people that were contributing to be able to rescue more people and now that I am aware that this organization exists, I’m even trying to see if there are any companies that they can donate time and money for you guys to be able to help out and rescue all the people in the world that need to be rescued. Because it is just terrible that families...they go through this and I feel like if there are a lot of people trying to contribute just a little a bit, it can make a better world. Tim: Right, right, and I couldn’t agree more with you. If everybody knew how large this was... And they just don’t. It is hidden. But it is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. It is billions of dollars into the kidnapping and selling and abuse of people, whether it’s slave labor or sex trafficking. People need to know because we can’t solve this problem unless everybody knows. When we talk about these numbers, millions and millions, it’s important not to let those numbers desensitize us in any way because each of those numbers has a story attached to that, right, like yours. There is pain attached to it. There is lives altered and changed forever because of that, and it is important to know and recognize that there is that kind of a story behind every single number that equals and adds up to millions. That’s the kind of pain and suffering we are talking about. I think that your story really will help people to see it and wake up. Now, in terms of Elizabeth herself, what can people do? What can people do to help you specifically? I know that there has been an award offered for information. Tell me about that. Rosenberg: Right. There is a $50,000 reward that whoever gives us a lead that will help us find my niece, they get the reward. And also, I feel that a lot of people... If they are on the streets or, you know, they can be looking around to be aware if they happen to see her. My niece went missing during the day. I am sure that somebody knows something or somebody saw something. We are just asking the community that whoever knows something just please have compassion on this girl and just tell us what they know. I mean, they need to put themselves in our own place, and if this was your niece, you would want the whole world to help you find her. You will want everyone to be looking for her. And if they even knew - I mean, you know - the pain we are going through... It’s just terrible. You can’t even describe what we are going through. I mean, I can’t even find the right words to be able to describe what we are going through because it’s just impossible to describe everything that we feel as a family...besides that, praying and also fasting to be able to help us to find my niece. I feel like if they see also anything suspicious in their neighborhoods, even if it isn't significant, it can be significant to us. Tim: Yeah. Rosenberg: Just whatever they know. Because sometimes people, they might feel, "Oh no, I mean, I don’t think that this is something that can help them to find her." I mean, you know, for people that they have the experience, they might be able to be, "Oh, yeah, this is significant so let’s try to look at this lead," and so whatever they know, they just need to tell the authorities. Tim: Thank you so much. I’d like you to please ask your sister if she has any message to the world. If she has the whole world listening right now and she wants to tell them about what she’s learned about this problem, or if she has a message she wants to share about Elizabeth or even to Elizabeth - what would she say and would she be willing to say it? And if could you please translate that. Libertad: Muy buenas tardes a todo los, a todo la comunidad y a toda las lugares en que me están escuchando. Rosenberg: Good afternoon to everybody, everybody who is listening to me. Libertad: Este, quiero decirle que antras corrido ocho meses desde la desaparición de mi hija Elizabeth Elena. Rosenberg: I want to tell you that it has been almost eight months that my daughter disappeared. Libertad: Es mos passado muchos desafíos. Rosenberg: We have been going through very hard times. Libertad: Ansi de muy llenos de sufrimiento, de angustia y de dolor. Rosenberg: A lot of suffering, a lot of anxiety and a lot of pain. Libertad: Es un dolor inexplicable. Rosenberg: It’s a...pain that is...that we can’t even explain. Libertad: Nosotros hemos hecho estan impossible... Rosenberg: We have done the impossible... Libertad: ...por buscarla. Rosenberg: ..to be able to find my daughter. Rosenberg: We have gone through events to be able to pass flyers. Libertad: En mos sido a Palo Alto, California. Rosenberg: We have gone through Palo Alto, California to Facebook to be able to see if they can spread up the word for her. Libertad: Y hemos tocado puertas. Rosenberg: And knocking on doors. Libertad: Es una búsqueda incansable. Rosenberg: It’s a tireless search. Libertad: No vamos a parar... Rosenberg: We won’t stop... Libertad: ...a encuéntrala. Rosenberg: ...until we find her. Tim: Rosenberg, could you ask her what she has learned about this problem in general? I imagine she’d never imagined...she never thought this would touch her life. Tim: And, if she knows, what she would do... If she were the king of the world, what she would do to help solve this, not only for Elizabeth, but for everybody? Libertad: Como reina del mundo, le pediría ayuda a todo los...a todo los medios de comunicación de cada país... Rosenberg: As the king of the world, I would like to ask all the countries to be able to help us find her. I mean, you know, the communication, like any probably news and all over the world to be able to help us find, I mean, you know, people who are missing. Libertad: ...para que difundiera sus photos. Rosenberg: So that they could spread out the word. Tim: Well, I think she hit on it, I think she hit on it. I like what she said. She said there needs to be more communication with countries, right? And that made me think of something that... I don’t know if you are aware of this. The House passed a bill last year. It’s H.R. 515 - it’s International Megan's Law. Megan's Law, of course, is a law that takes criminals who have been convicted as sex offenders - child sex offenders. And after they finish their sentences, they are not allowed to live near schools, they are not allowed to live in certain places. And that’s Megan’s Law. And most states have adopted that law. The International Megan’s Law does it internationally. So if we, in the United States, have a known convicted child sex offender and that person is traveling to Mexico, then the U.S. government will notify the Mexican government. And tell them: "Hey, this guy is coming to your country. You should know this." It also creates something called 'angel watch', the Angel Watch Center. And what it is...it’s a place where government officials and non-government officials like Operation Underground Railroad - we can all meet and talk and make sure we know who the bad guys are and be in communication. I mean, I think that, Libertad Edith, I think you have... I mean, that’s what you essentially said. And the problem is right now, if you can believe this, it has been sitting in the Senate for months and months and months and they can’t get it through the Senate to create what is a solution - the very solution that the mother of a victim has, on her own, naturally kind of brought out as one of the solutions to this problem. Here we have this and it’s sitting on these senators' desks, and they are not even caring about it. They are worrying about things that are far less important than the kidnapping and the abuse of children. To me, it is absolutely outrageous. And I want to ask you both if you would help me with something. We are starting a campaign to finish, once and for all, this bill and get it passed and get it implemented: International Megan’s Law, H.R. 515. Would you be willing to help us? Would you be willing to be witnesses in this and be a voice from someone who knows the reality of this problem? Would you be willing to help us be loud and get the Senate to pass this bill and get it implemented and use it to start saving kids? Rosenberg: Of course we will be willing because we know what it's like when you are going through this pain. So it’s been, it’s been very hard like I’ve told you before. It’s impossible to describe what we are feeling and I feel like if they pass this bill, I mean, it will be... It will actually help out the whole world. And I think, I mean, you know, when my sister was saying about having other countries communicating, I mean, you know, to be able to help us spread out the word so a lot of people they can be aware that this problem exists. Because I’m sure that a lot of people...they are not even aware that this problem exists. Tim: Right. Rosenberg: They don’t even have an idea that we are going through this right now. I mean, before my niece went missing, I didn’t even think that there was sex trafficking at all until now that we are learning more about, "Ok, what could have happened to her?" Tim: Right. Rosenberg: And so, you see all the options and now we are like, "Let’s make this world a better place, and let’s try to save everybody that is going through this." Tim: And you are now in a position of influence. I mean, you are in a position because of what you have been through. You are witnesses. Rosenberg: Right. Tim: You are witnesses in a way that most are not and you can stand up, and I appreciate you doing that. I know you both. I’ve met several times with you, and I know you are willing to do that and we appreciate that. Another question I want to ask you is have you seen social media make a difference in the search for Elizabeth? And is this something that you think we should be utilizing more, perhaps the police should be utilizing more? Because it’s all about communication, right? You start this investigation - I know because I’ve been on many of these. The first thing you look for is a witness. You need information: where is she? Someone knows. Who knows? It’s all about disseminating information, requesting information, finding information. How do you do that? I mean, we do it every day with social media. Have you guys utilized social media at all in your efforts to find Elizabeth? Rosenberg: Yes. We have tried to put a lot of advertisements on social media, you know Facebook and - everybody is always on Facebook - but I feel like the police and the FBI, they can also get... When these cases, they happen, they can actually spread out the word and have a connection also with Facebook: "Let's stop the crime." I mean, you know, let’s actually... "Whoever knows something about this person, please let us know,"or "If you guys have seen this person, just let the authorities know." I feel like that would help out a lot, because a lot of people... They are using social media, they are always there, they know what’s going on, and I have known that...I mean, you know, like for example - when on the news they are trying to find somebody that social, they put it on social media, and then people, they start commenting, and they say, "Yes, I have seen this person," or whatever. And that would help out so much. I mean, you know... So if the police...they can actually have also connections with all those big social media networks. I don’t know, I mean, I feel like it can be a big help. Tim: Well, let’s work harder to make sure we are utilizing social media to the best of its ability. We are building software here at Operation Underground Railroad that will help the police identify where these people are, who are the perpetrators of this most heinous crime, and it really is the way you need to attack this problem. So I want to thank you both for coming in, and this is by no means the last meeting we’ll have with you. We know we have so many things; we’ve talked about so many projects that we want to work on. Most important, of course, is the search for Elizabeth; after that is what else can we do, what else can you do with us to help others? Because like I said, there’s millions in this position. And just because we don’t know about it - because it is such a hidden world - doesn’t mean that it is not there. People need to know it is there and people like you who are willing to come out and talk about it - you are the best witnesses because you are going through it. You are going through this hell. So I can’t thank you enough for having the courage to come on and talk about this because we believe that what you are doing is saving lives. Rosenberg: Thank you so much for inviting us and we appreciate everything that you do to make this world a better place. I feel like if there were more people like you in this world, this world would be a better place. And if everybody can contribute to be able to rescue these kids that are slaves, if they can contribute to be able to help you out, this world would be so much better. And thank you very much for doing what you are doing. Tim: Well, thank you both so much. I have a wonderful team that makes it happen, and of course the contributions are what keep us in place. So please, everyone, check us out at ourrescue.org and help us. Help us so we can help people like the Salgado family. So thank you both so much - thanks for coming on and let's continue this fight together. Libertad: Y a Elizabeth Elena... Rosenberg: And Elizabeth Elena... Libertad: ...si me estás escuchando... Rosenberg: ...if you are listening... Libertad: ...quiero decirte hija... Rosenberg: ...I want to tell you... Libertad: ...que no nos vamos a rendir hasta encontrarte. Rosenberg: ...that we won’t stop looking for you until we find you. Libertad: Tenemos buscado por cielo y tierra y mar. Rosenberg: We have been looking for you all over the place. Libertad: Y desde el día que desapareciste... Rosenberg: And from the day that you went missing... Libertad: ...nuestra vida cambió completamente. Rosenberg: ...our lives have changed a lot. Libertad: Te amamos. Rosenberg: We love you. Libertad: Te extrañamos... Rosenberg: We miss you... Libertad: ...y queremos ver tu cara angelical. Rosenberg: ...and we want to see your beautiful face. Libertad: Necesitamos tenerte en nuestros brazos. Rosenberg: We need you in our lives and be able to hug you. Libertad: Sentimos a nuestro corazón... Rosenberg: We feel in our hearts... Libertad: ...un gran vacío... Rosenberg: ...an empty hole... Libertad: ...porque nos has te falta. Rosenberg: ...because you are missing in our lives. Libertad: Te queremos tener de resto con nosotros. Rosenberg: We want you back in our lives. Libertad: Te extrañamos mucho... Rosenberg: We miss you a lot... Libertad: ...y queremos volver a ser feliz como antes. Rosenberg: We want to be happy the same way that we were when you were with us. Libertad: Necesitamos encontrarte. Rosenberg: We need to find you. Libertad: Y a los que te tiene... Rosenberg: Whoever has you... Libertad: ...les pido por favor... Rosenberg: ...I’m asking you ... Libertad: ...que tenga compasión de nosotros. Rosenberg: ...please have compassion on our family. Libertad: Nos han hechos sufrir mucho. Rosenberg: You guys have caused a lot of suffering in our lives. Libertad: Y les suplicamos... Rosenberg: And we are begging you... Libertad: ...que la entreguen. Rosenberg: ...to please give us our daughter back. Libertad: Que lo consideren como si fuera el hija de ustedes. Rosenberg: To please have compassion on this girl like if she was your own daughter. Libertad: Le pedimos al padre celestial... Rosenberg: We ask our Heavenly Father... Libertad: ...que mandes de ángeles celestiales. Rosenberg: ...to protect her with her angels. Libertad: No le hagas daño. Rosenberg: Please, don’t hurt my daughter.

united states jesus christ family california church english house mexico law spanish missing utah fbi saints mexican senate heavenly father libertad rosenberg palo alto provo salgado operation underground railroad tim you tim yeah tim well tim thank megan's law tim right slave stealer angel watch center

007 MONTEL WILLIAMS VISITS WITH TIM

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 24, 2016 26:22

Tim: Welcome to Slave Stealer podcast! This is Tim Ballard and Mark Mabry talking about the darkest plague that exists on this earth today and seeking the solution. We have a guest on today that, I think, is part of the solution. I really believe - and I have, for years, believed - that the reason we can't put our arms around this problem and squeeze it to death - this problem of trafficking and human slavery - is because people don't know it's there. They don't believe it's real. Or they see something and they turn their head as fast as they can. And so, at Operation Underground Railroad, we have a unique approach, I think. We're not just waving this banner of darkness. There's a lot of organizations - and God bless all of them for what they're doing. The programs that are about awareness often are just waving a flag of depression and darkness, and you look and you're like, "Eek, oh oh yeah, here's my five dollars - now never contact me again," and off they go. They don't want to see it. That's not our message. Our message is light. Light. Light in the darkness. Because we provide a solution. We're going in and extracting. We are providing law enforcement with tools: digital tools, computer tools, training, undercover tactics - everything you would need to know to run an investigation. Mark: You're staring the bad guys in the eyes. Tim: That's right. Mark: And how many organizations actually touch the bad guy? Tim: Yeah, we touch the bad guy, we throw his face in the ground and put him away. That's what we do! And that is light - that's hope. And so, we try to push out that light. And one of the ways we do that is by showing people what we do. There's a team of cameras that follows us around, and we show people what we do. And when those traffickers go away, the world gets a little brighter. And when the next trafficker goes away, the world gets brighter still. And that's the light that we're building. See, Montel Williams - who is our guest today - he understands that. He understands that if you shine a light, people will get on board. If you shine a light, the bad guys hate that light! So they're going to go away. If they don't end up in jail, they're going to be so antagonistic to that light that they're going to crawl up like little bugs and go away. And hide. And Montel gets that. And he's the kind of voice that we need to be loud and proud and share this light. So that's going to be his message. Mark: He's a passionate guy. As you're saying, he blew up Facebook a couple of times this year, and Twitter. And even in our conversation with him, he starts out kind of a low simmer and then just crescendoes. And I think you guys will enjoy... Tim: Yeah, yeah. You don't want to get in his way, man. Mark: No. Tim: When he starts moving, you do not want to get in his... I do not want to be a trafficker in the path of Montel Williams when things get hot. And things get hot with this guy. Mark: He was a Marine, he attended the Naval Academy, he had a career in the military. People don't realize how bad he actually is. Tim: Oh yeah, no no. He's...he's tough as nails. Mark: And he delivers, so it's a great interview. Tim: Yep. Mark: Let's go to it. Tim: Alright, roll it! Mark: Tim started to tell me about how you guys met, but his version was really weak compared to what I think yours probably is (no offense, Tim). Montel: It was literally the morning after the Stadium of Fire. I went up to the breakfast lounge in the place we were staying at, and literally, you know, Tim walked in the door and shut me down. And his speech was just ridiculous the night before. You know, I work on a lot of issues. I’m involved in things that most people don’t even have the slightest idea that I’ve been involved with for years now. Everything from...veteran issues, but I’ve also been deeply involved in trying to help heal some of the wounds that our veterans have faced from war. And those wounds are deep, especially when it comes to traumatic brain injury. And I was blessed to be able to get involved in a process...a study with a medical device that now is going to - over the next year to two years - prove out to be one of the first lines of defense, I think, for many symptoms of traumatic brain injury. We are in the middle of...doing one of the most comprehensive traumatic brain injury studies the world has seen at three centers of excellence. And I only say this because, you know, I’m involved in issues. And why? Because, you know, I got involved... I'm a board member of Fisher House. I was visiting our soldiers 3-4 years ago for...almost every three weeks, I was going down to see every new batch of soldiers that had flown in from Germany or from London, and just going down and visiting troops. So, you know, I’ve been moved by that issue, and then I’ve been involved in things from teen suicide prevention - it’s another issue that I’ve been in for, that I’ve been working on. And then to sit in that room and hear Tim discuss the mission - his emotional, moving story about saving children’s lives. Mark: Anything you remember in particular - like a line that he said, something that stuck? Montel: You know, I mean, I could say, sitting like...as I sit here right now and I think about what Tim had to say...you know, there was a call to action. There was a call to step up to the plate and understand what’s going on. And even though I understood as I was sitting at the table, I’m looking at the reactions of the people in the room around me, and you can look and see that some of these people...even though you hear about it, you see it on the news - it goes right over their head. It wasn’t until, I think, they caught the emotion that is involving what Tim had to say, that I saw the emotion start to well up in them. So again, I walk into this lounge, and I was again blown away. All I felt was that I needed to do whatever I could to help Tim make his mission more complete. So, you know, I think I said immediately - "Whatever you need from me, whatever you want from me, I’m there. And let's go." Tim: I think it was your birthday, wasn’t it, Montel? Montel: Yeah, as a matter of fact, it was on my birthday. As a matter of fact, it was on my birthday. It was the 3rd. That’s right. The night before was the event on the 2nd, and I had brought in four of [inaudible] dinner. One of the other award recipients was Master Sgt. Cedric King, who is a double amputee, a war hero of extraordinary proportion, who was on that stage. So it was very moving the night before to have had him come in and then to meet Tim. And then I wake up - it's the 3rd - and I told, you know, all the guys from the stadium...I said, "Look, I need to have at least that one day off." I was going to chill. Honestly, I think I worked for about an hour on the phone, just coordinating - trying to figure out who I was going to talk to as soon as we got past the holiday to figure out how we were going to come together. Tim: Man, it was an amazing experience for me. I mean, I was starstruck - I'm not going to lie - when you walked into the...you know, because the night before, I knew you were in the audience, and I'm like, ‘I wonder if I'll get to meet Montel.’ And then, the next day, I'm getting hot chocolate with my kids, and there he was! It was a small little kind of kitchen, you know, and there he was, face to face. And it was an emotional moment for both of us, I think. Montel: Yeah, yeah, really - an extremely emotional moment. And that’s part of the reason why I think I just really need to help and try to be involved. I have people who are of like mind, who think the way I do, who have been in my corner in my entire professional career, and especially the media. And, you know, those people are very vocal, and they want to be heard. And I think if I reach out to them and let them know that we are involved and we are going to now do some things that before today, I think, have not been done. Yeah, we call out some of these pigs - you know, there are so many shows and it comes and it goes. I want to really, really figure out a way so we get the message out there that is a continual message - in the face, bigger than, you know, the campaigns that they are running right now nationally to stop people from smoking. If you are so stupid that you’ll put a cigarette in your mouth right now and wreck your lungs, then I would rather take the money that’s being spent there to put a message out right now that our children are being exploited, raped, and sent around this planet, and you...really... If we can’t get to an understanding and get that in people’s faces, so much so... I hate the commercials that they have been running, you know, where you have the people who are in the hospital on the third lung, and they're showing me all the body parts of people who are ravaged by cancer because they are smoking. I want to show people the ravaging of what’s been happening with our children - get it in your face so hard that you say, "Enough, don’t show me that anymore!" and you do something about it. Tim: I love hearing this, Montel, because a confusion to me is why are we not seeing that, even in politics and in debates. It should be... I mean, this is the fastest criminal enterprise on the planet. Why aren’t we talking about it? What’s the reason, do you think, that people are shying away? Montel: Why is it growing so fast? Why is it growing so fast? Tim, I bet you, man, you’ve got this, man. Look, it’s growing so fast because of, I think, money. You know, we have the largest disparity of wealth in the world, but we have the largest number of millionaires, uber billionaires, millionaires, hundred... guys, people who have wealth, sitting around, that think that their wealth can hide them and keep them hidden from the truth. It got to be because dude, I mean, you know, the plane tickets cost money. To be able to buy a child, it costs money. You know, to be able to do this and not have anybody catch you: it costs money. And that’s what’s happening. And so why aren’t politicians talking about it? I don’t want to be a pig when I say this, but maybe some of them have friends or relatives or cousins that they know are the people doing this. Because that’s the only reason why this would not be... You know, it’s like all day long - I’m out here, I went snowboarding today, you know. This is the open season and it’s a beautiful day today, but then I realized I had this interview to do with you, and all afternoon I’ve been like...it’s been, you know, my heart’s pounding because I’m just so angry. And it’s just the same reason why, in the last three weeks, why all we keep hearing from our politicians is how quickly they want to send another American child off to die. They really...they want to go put 'boots on the ground, boots on the ground,' - you can’t even pay for the health care for the ones we have that have already put the boots on the ground! Tim: Yeah. Montel: But we want to put them on the ground. And yeah, we may need to, but let’s be a little bit more compassionate in our rally to send them off to battle. Now, if we're willing to do that, and these politicians are jumping up and down in every one of their debates to say those things, why do we not - in the same conversation and debate - talk about how are we going to help heal the delays in the treatment of those who have already served? We can’t say that because we know that we have...their friends are the ones who are part of the problem. So I’m starting to think that maybe that’s what's going on. We've got too many people of wealth who are hiding, just the same way as we have terrorists who are living double lives as Americans. And we’ve got rich people who can afford to do this - living double lives - they're right under the surface and we're letting them get away with it. And I’m open Tim - you know. dude, I’m not afraid. I am NOT afraid. I will take that shot, my friend. Tim: And we need you to take that shot - we want you to. And you know what we do. If these guys want to get into the market cause they want those kids, we meet them there and that’s where we can expose them. We meet them there - we’ve already done it dozens of times, hundreds of kids we’ve pulled out, over a hundred travellers or traffickers in jail... I think you and I were talking about this when we met over the 4th of July. It’s about shining those faces of those guys who are hiding - shine them everywhere, put them on billboards, make everyone know that you CANNOT hide behind your money. We will meet you in the dark place and we will expose you once you are there. Montel: I'm telling you... Call them out - that’s what we've got to do. So, you know what? You know, it’s going to be holiday season, we're going to take a little break, alright? I want to hit the ground running in January if we can figure out...like I’m working on some projects right now. You know, I'm working on a couple of projects right now that are media projects that... You know, if I do some things for some people, then maybe I can ask them to do some things for us. Let’s figure out a way then we can get something on the air - I mean, you know, ‘America’s Most Wanted,’ you know, whatever. Tim: Yeah. Montel: I got happy, I got tired. That did a lot of good in some cases because you did cover some of those cases of child abuse, but I really think that we need to have a steady stream - not just the TV show, but I’m telling you, like, I would love to right now in the middle of this live CNN... I’ve got CNN on and the second they go to commercial: bang-bang. I want to jump right to a commercial about a child that has been exploited - this is going on, and this is the guy who worked in Chicago at such and such bank, was a bank president, he lived in this neighborhood, this is his family, and you need to understand that this guy thought he was getting away with it, and he’s been doing it and now he's crying like a stuffed pig because he’s in jail, and he knows that when we let him out in the population that they don’t like little child molesters like that, and while he's crying like a piggy, he's talking about the fact that he’s been doing this for the last 10 years and got away with it right beside you. Tim: That’s right. Montel: How could you let this person live next to you?! That’s the story that needs to be told, man. Tim: Yes! Yes it is! Montel: And I want to help you tell them. Tim: And we need your help. We can get into the dark and shine the light, pull them out, but we need people like you to make it loud because we’re still learning how to do that. So we appreciate that. Montel: Well, just the fact that you're blogging right now, and the fact that people are going to tune in. Maybe they'll listen to me today. They'll say, I want to see what they're going to do. Montel, please, what are you going to do? You know, this could be a regular from us. Let’s come together every couple of weeks and let's talk about the plans that we put in place, the things that we can talk about. I also, you know, it’s like...you know, I think in some ways... I worked in intelligence my entire time I was in the military. I had top secret inside clearance - I can say that right now. I had one of the highest clearances that the military had at the time. I ran a couple programs. I get part of the problem that we are having right now when it [the military] looks at international terrorism. The problem is the fact that we keep giving out all the secrets. We keep telling them every level of encryption that we have the ability to break so they can find a new one that we can’t break. I don’t want to give them too much - I want to show America while you can complain all you want about the Taliban, you know...we're going to fix that problem. You haven’t even blinked at trying to fix the real one. Let’s fix this one, because this is the one that’s going to destroy us from within. We can see the devastation now in children as they grow older and older and now have the revelation of what was done to them. Those are the ones that weren’t even trafficked. Tim: Right. Montel: So, you know, I mean, honestly, America’s got a reckoning. And, you know, we can’t put one... You know, it’s like, you know, do you pick the worst problem and put that first, or do you fix the problems you have? I say we go after both of them at the same time, and I think America has got the stomach for it. It just hasn’t heard the voice loud enough. And I have a voice of couple of people that I think might want to bring this forward as part of their national campaign. Mark: I was going to ask you about that, Montel. I know, from your social feeds, you are a friend of Governor Kasich, and I about came out of my chair with glee the other night watching that debate, and I heard the words ‘human trafficking’. Montel: Yes. Mark: And they came out of his mouth, and those words have not been uttered in a presidential debate, in the last couple of debates. I need to go to do a word cloud or something to find out, but he did it. And so, we have a little segment on our show, called ‘The Big Ask’ with a K. And, I have a big ask for you. I thought...you know, when I heard him say that, I was waiting for somebody to wax poetic and do something lofty on trafficking, but of course they went right back to Donald calling Jeb not powerful, or whatever his word was. So, here’s my big ask for Montel Williams: I want you, because I know you are capable and I’ll be probably in tears by the time you’re done, to picture yourself on the stage, cameras on you - it is Montel Williams’, 'I want your vote for president, and my platform is human trafficking.' Can you give me that lofty speech that will make me hear the music coming in by the end? Montel: You know how they give you the highlights before the debates... Mark: Yeah, get me fired up a little bit. Montel: You know, maybe what I should say is that if right now we are living in a time in America where the entire focus of the nation...in some ways, I understand, because there has been enough fear-mongering to make us believe that the entire focus of everything we do as a government should be focused on terrorism. But, you know, America has to continue to survive, has to continue to grow, has to rely on its most sacred treasure, and that’s America’s children. Now, I don’t care what source you listen to, what side of the fence you're on: Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal. It doesn’t matter. If you are listening to all of your pundits, they will tell you at worst case, worst case in this country today, we have probably, okay...twenty, forty, fifty, let’s say there might have been a hundred terrorists who snuck in - they are under the radar, we need to put money in finding them. I agree. But, excuse me, we have 1.5 million children who are victims in 2012 to human trafficking, and we know that 85% of them have been trafficked for sex. And these are children, American children. So, I say that that’s a million and a half lives that from this point forth will forever be changed, a million and a half a year. In fifteen years, they got 20 million children who have to as they grow to adults, as they’ve been saved, brought back into the society and trying to be contributing numbers to that society. I say we got the Taliban under control. I don’t care if it’s two years, three years - it’s thirty years. This is part of America’s structure, America’s fabric. So, I can stand around and argue about who’s got more money in the bank, who thinks that they are tougher at fighting bad guys who are trying to hurt us ideologically. I want to find out who’s tough enough to turn in their neighbor, who’s tough enough to fight the fight of saving and preserving America’s future beyond the next five years. So, 2.5, 1.5 million...on the other side of ridiculous. The United States alone should be in the position to raise enough money to impact this, and we will send money everywhere else in the world. We will fight everybody else’s problem to try to force something down on someone’s throat that doesn’t want it, and we are willing to protect America’s precious treasure right here. I don’t know... If you want to protect America’s treasure, vote for me, if you want to continue on this normal...pick the other guy. Tim: You got my vote! Mark: Montel 2020, baby! Woo! Tim: I love it, I love it! And, now the good thing is that we are going to do something about this, and I hope we can have you back on the show many many times as we develop our plan and say the things we can. But let’s do this! We’re going to do this. Montel: Let’s do it! Now, you got me to say publicly, I make it as a public promise, man. I’m working with you - we'll get this done. Tim: Awesome! We love you, man! Thanks so much! Montel: Thank you, sir! Mark: Montel for president, baby! You said, you know, the government is leading, but in terms of being loud about it, how often do you hear nationally-placed officials talking about human trafficking in prime time? Tim: They're not! And that’s where the leadership is lacking. There’s no strong leader in all of our potential leaders. It’s not even on their agenda and I don’t know why it’s not! I don’t think they all have friends...I mean, that’s an interesting point that Montel brings up - I don't think it's like they all have friends who are engaging in this kind of stuff. I mean, I’m sure some of them do. I think it’s a dark topic that no one wants to talk about. It hurts to talk about it. Mark: It’s weird because governments usually... These guys will go on talk shows and talk about something then not do anything about it, but this is the opposite. It seems that they are legislating and making a little headway, but they're not talking about it - it’s lacking the component that we hate the most, generally speaking, that is, the flapping gums of politicians. Tim: I think the reason... It’s not that they don’t know... Mark: Yeah they know, they just... Tim: They know it’s an issue. Here’s why they don't talk about it. Look, they're pandering, they are all pandering to voters, right. They need voters to weigh in. So, I really do think this: if they believed that the voters knew what was going on, they would talk about it. But they are saying to themselves, why am I going to introduce a new topic? - relatively new, right. Why am I going to introduce a topic that’s not going to help me get elected because the electorate doesn’t know? And if they don’t know, they don’t care. So let’s talk about things that we know they care about. So our job, more than try to convert or try to influence these candidates or elected leaders to do something... I think our job is to light a fire under the people - the Harriet Beecher Stowe approach, where she lit a fire under the people. They read her book by the millions, and they said, "What is going on?! I didn’t really know - I mean, I heard of slavery, but I’ve never seen it. I’ve never travelled down there, in the South, and saw it," and she lit a fire there. And then they got so loud that folks like Abraham Lincoln and others had to respond. Mark: Yeah. Tim: And the response ended slavery. So I really think a lot of this is exposing this issue, shining a light, letting the people see. When the people care, the candidates will care. Mark: And, it seems like Montel... He’s one of those populist heroes in the last two decades - had a huge show in the 90’s, he’s got total social clout now, he’s moved kind of into this activist realm, and he’s got tons, his hands on tons of pods, but it’s that type of guy that can talk to big groups. And the talk show people - Oprah, Montel, you know, from the heyday of afternoon talk shows that would make people cry every afternoon...that would be, seemingly, a way to engage people. And he could be that guy. Tim: Yeah. He’s going to be that guy. I mean, he’s that voice we are going to need. And he’s not going to be a ‘one and done interview’ - he is committed. I spent a couple of days with him, over the 4th... Man, I’m telling you he believes this. He believes in it, and he is going to help us. Mark: Yeah. Tim: He's going to be instrumental. Tim: This show is sponsored by one of my favorite companies on the face of the earth, Hylete. In fact, I’m wearing - let me stand up so you can see - I’m wearing Hylete shorts right now. Mark: Those are really handsome. Tim: I wear Hylete shorts pretty much every day, because here at the headquarters of Operation Underground Railroad is a CrossFit gym that is very fruitful for the foundation. All the money that we make in the CrossFit gym comes back into the foundation. So we’re grateful for the CrossFit gym, and we’re grateful to Hylete who’s been a proud sponsor, who’s been able to not only outfit some of our guys, but make some awesome contributions. They made an OUR shirt, Hylete OUR shirt - their clothes are designed for intense fitness, like CrossFit. They made a Hylete/OUR shirt that all the proceeds came back to us, and we’ve been able to make thousands of dollars, and we continue our partnership in the coming years. So thank you to our partners and friends over at Hylete. Buy their clothes, and go work out!

united states america god tv american chicago man americans germany fire south cnn oprah winfrey republicans democrats 4th of july honestly marine crossfit stadiums taliban visits abraham lincoln woo trafficking naval academy most wanted jeb eek tim ballard operation underground railroad montel big ask montel williams harriet beecher stowe master sgt markit fisher house tim oh mark no mark yeah tim you tim yeah timman governor kasich hylete mark let mark tim tim right mark mabry slave stealer

006 AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, C'MON NOW.

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2016 16:34

Tim takes on a recent initiative of Amnesty International to "Legalize" prostitution. His issue with their policy lies in the difference between "legalization" and "decriminalization". He argues that what they are proposing would endanger more children and ultimately undermine the efforts of many people to save kids from sex trafficking. Tim: Hi! Thank you for joining us! This is a very special bonus edition of the Slave Stealer podcast. If you have been listening to us for a while, you know that there are a lot of aspects to human trafficking. So many drivers, so many factors. Sometimes we don’t always get the chance to elaborate within the context or whatever it is that we are talking about, but one big issue that deserves more treatment is this current push by Amnesty International to legalize all prostitution. What they are trying to do now is go out to all the countries and influence them to legalize this work. Now, there is some merit to parts of their argument, but I contend, and I contend passionately, that this legislation, if it got that far, would absolutely devastate millions of children who would be caught up in the wake of prostitution. They would be caught up in the wake... They would be caught up as victims, they would be rapedthemselves. So after we spoke with President Vicente Fox of Mexico, we got on the topic of Amnesty International’s plan, and I think I got a little fired up, so I want you to go ahead and hear what I had to say. So, let’s go and roll that. Tim: And, people don’t believe us sometimes - "Oh bull crap, we don’t believe that"- or they will see a trafficking case, we will show footage and they see what looks like a victim going willingly into this place: "Well, they walked in. They weren’t dragged in by chains." And, I get it, but it is also very offensive because I know that these kids are slaves. I see them before and during and after. We could have Elizabeth Smart come in sometime and talk about that. Don’t say anything like that in her presence because she received that criticism: "When you were in captivity, why didn’t you just run away? Why didn’t you tell the policeman who you were when he confronted you with your captors in the library that day?" And she will tell you that a child’s mind doesn’t think like an adult’s mind, and it can be very easily manipulated and really brainwashed and rewired to the point that when Elizabeth was rescued, she didn’t even admit who she was. She was still denying who she was as she was even put into the police car and taken to her father, ok. And that’s the thing people don’t understand about human trafficking, and so they misidentify the victims. Police departments have been doing it for decades. I think...in the last decade or so, I think they are trying to get out of this where they treat all prostitutes as criminals. They didn’t even stop to ask the question, 'How did she get here?' Maybe she is 19 years old, but did you know that she was kidnapped at 12 and forced into this life? And yeah, now she is acting out, and she is yelling and cussing at you, and she "doesn’t want to be rescued." But she is a victim, and she needs to be treated as a victim until you figure out what is going on. And a lot more needs to be done there, but progress has been made where these women and children are not being seen as criminals anymore but as victims, but much more needs to be done in that area. Mark: That is a legislative issue, obviously. Are those national statutes that need to be passed or are they local? Explain prosecution of prostitutes. Explain that whole dilemma to me, I don’t get it. Tim: There is some legislative there, but there is also a lot of just how you administer or how the law enforcement administers or what questions they ask, right. Because to be prosecuted for say prostitution, requirements within that statutes have to be met. And part of that is willingly, and it was your intent to do these things. And it is easy just to make the assumption, 'that was your intent, you wanted to do this, and so you’re guilty.' So sometimes, it is not just the laws. The laws can be clarified, sure - you can always, you should add a requirement and say even if this prostitute, this person you have brought in...even if they are an adult, you have to prove that they meant to do this, that they wanted to do this, that this was the life that they chose. Mark: They weren’t coerced. Tim: They weren’t coerced into it. Mark: Ok. Tim: And so the questions, but the questions... The problem is, even when you have decent legislation and decent statutes, you don’t have law enforcement asking the questions, digging deeper: "Who are you? Where did you come from? How did you get into this? How old were you when you got into this?" And if they would ask that, then they would see that there is coercion here. They are not going to bust out their pimps. Mark: No, they are scared to death. Tim: They are scared to death. Their pimps have been beating them for ten years, since they were ten years old. So, you have got to stop and ask the question. You need experts in the field - social workers, psychologists in the field - to be able to be there and take this victim aside and talk to them. Frankly, in my mind, every country, every jurisdiction - whether it is federal, state, whatever - they all need to have legislation that decriminalize prostitutes altogether, absolutely. Every prostitute, in my mind, should be treated like a victim. Mark: So, you are saying legalize prostitution? Tim: I am not saying... No, you don’t legalize prostitution at all. You legalize prostitution and that means that the pimps and the johns get away. Mark: Ah. Tim: You criminalize 100% for pimps, for johns. Mark: But you can’t criminalize the prostitutes... Tim: You don’t criminalize the prostitutes. Mark: I like that. Tim: Yeah, I mean, there is Norway and Sweden who have both adopted that, and it is very effective. What happens there, when you do that, is those countries and those cities stop becoming havens for sex, for paid sex. Because you are criminalizing the johns and the pimps, johns and pimps don’t want to work there. Mark: So what you’ll have are a few entrepreneurial women who are kind of like 'Ma and Pa' stores, but you wipe out the industry? Tim: Yeah. You would wipe out the industry because the pimps and johns can’t... They are scared to go there. Mark: Yeah. Tim: And this is a huge debate right now going on with the Amnesty International’s new policy this summer they came out with in August, I believe. They came out with the sex worker shield where they are basically wanting to decriminalize prostitution for everybody - pimps, johns, and what they call sex workers - and make it legal. The idea is bring it all out into the light, and then you can take care of the sex workers and treat them like legitimate workers. You know, it is all focused on helping the sex worker. That’s their choice - they want to be a prostitute, support them, help them. And to do that, you can’t criminalize the pimps who, in Amnesty International’s words... This is very controversial. I mean, this is Amnesty International who is supposed to be looking out for the victims. And they feel like sex workers - who they call sex workers, others might call prostitutes - have been victimized and demonized and not supported in their occupational endeavors. And the problem is, is by decriminalizing this - and I see this in my work - by decriminalizing the whole process so that the sex workers can be seen as legitimate workers, like any other professional in the world and be given all the benefits... Mark: I think the middle management and HR and marketing...they get all the departments wrapped around them: "Hey, go see the marketing guy!" Tim: That is right! Mark: "Make a brochure on this chick." Tim: That is the idea! That is the idea, like you are not letting them live their dream. Mark: Wow. Tim: And then the argument is this - let’s play with it a little bit because there is a strain of logic to it, right. So, the idea is you get them structured that way and then the government...because then my question is, "Ok, what about the kids?" Two million kids or more are being trafficked, sold. How do you protect them in this? Amnesty International says, "It is very easy!" All you do is you tell these jurisdictions and the police officers... These pimps get licensed; they are a licensed business. You go to them and they have to show that they are not selling minors: "We don’t sell minors. Here, look - it's all willing adults." Mark: "Look at our brochure!" Tim: "Look at our brochure! It is very clear." Mark: "No kids!" Tim: And I am thinking to myself, "Ok, you are talking about these underdeveloped countries that, at Operation Underground Railroad, we are filling up their gas tanks so they can drive from point A to point B. You are telling me that your police force is going to have enough resources, time, manpower, so forth, to go and regulate these legitimate brothels to make sure that there are no minors?!" Do you know how easy it is going to be if you are Fuego, right? Fuego, who is the guy… Mark: I remember Fuego. Tim: We met Fuego on the beaches of Colombia and... Mark: And you took his hat! Tim: I still have his hat. I still have his hat. Mark: That guy is such a douchebag. Tim: Can you imagine… Can you say douchebag on this show? Mark: Hey, if I put a little E next to the...we are now explicit. Tim: Ok. Mark: No, douchebag is not explicit. Tim: Is "Slave Stealer Radio" an R-rated show? Let’s just talk about this and figure that out. Mark: I think we are PG-13ish. Tim: I just want to know what I can get away with. Mark: In context, we’re probably considered like an X-rated show just given the general theme, but we don’t really get explicit yet until we get you on the wrong moment. Hopefully we edit that out. Tim: Ok! Mark: Yeah. Tim: So, Fuego... You imagine Fuego, right. How hard is it going to be for Fuego? This is Amnesty International’s plan - Fuego should be a legal vendor as long as they are adults. The kids will be safe because they are safe with Fuego, aren’t they? You spent time with Fuego. Would you trust a 12-year-old girl to Fuego? I mean... Mark: Friendly guy. Tim: Here is what is going to happen: he will line up his 18-year-olds and 20- year-olds, and he’ll say, "Here’s all I got!" And those cops are not going to go the two miles down the road into the little storage facility, right, or the tractor trailer with the ten 12-year-olds and the three or four 9-year-olds. Mark: And they are not going to check his phone to see... Tim: No! Mark: ...you know, all the 10-year-olds with pagers. Tim: Right! He will have those, he will sell those. They are premium! You are going to sell those for $1000; these 18-year-olds you are going to sell for $300. He is going to have those. The infrastructure to sell those little kids is now supported by the state. And he will be able to make money, he will be able to invest whatever he makes legitimately, he will pay his taxes and everything else. He will be a businessman! He is going to sell the premium because it is too easy and now you have just supported his infrastructure. How are you going to protect those kids? Amnesty International decided to ignore those kids. Those twelve kids in the back of the tractor trailer down the road - they have ignored them. And now, guess what? You have created an absolute sex haven. And let's say that they decriminalized it like this everywhere in Cartagena. Every gross tourist from America, Canada, and Germany, and everywhere else - they are going to go to Cartagena, they are going to enjoy the adult sex, and then they are going to make a deal with Fuego on the side and say, "Hey, where do I get the 11-year-olds?" "Well, you come to this other place down the road." And it is a booming business. I am absolutely just astonished and sickened that Amnesty International could be so incredibly short-sighted and idiotic that they don’t see that they are completely neglecting the children. They are creating safe havens. They are making it so easy for the johns and pimps to rape children. Mark: That is pretty inflammatory. Tim: It is inflammatory! Mark: You just called them idiotic. Tim: They are idiots! Mark: What if we need their help? Tim: Well, we won't need their help. Mark: Ok. Tim: But do you know who does need their help? Fuego needs their help, and apparently he is going to get it. Mark: So, an entire industry... You might shut down an entire industry. There might be jobless Fuegos all over Colombia, all over Mexico. Tim: How sad. Mark: Have you ever ordered the 'Sin City'? Tim: No. Mark: Smashburger. You go down, and it is kind of like In-N-Out burger. You can show up and there is the menu, right, there is a Smashburger menu (and they are not a sponsor of this show), but you can order the ‘Sin City’ which is not on the menu. And it is kind of a niche thing for people to go in and they give you the wink and they say, "I’ll take the Sin City." Tim: It is like In-N-Out burger, it is the same thing. They have their Animal Fries, Animal Burgers. Mark: Yeah, the Animal Style. Now, I see prostitution becoming like that. Tim: That is exactly right! Mark: Under the Amnesty plan. Tim: Absolutely! It is exactly what it is. Mark: I’ll take Sin City (wink, wink). Tim: It is exactly what it is. Mark: She is in the back alley. Tim: It is exactly what is going to happen. Mark: It is a brand extension. Tim: It is exactly what is going to happen. And we know this! I know this! I know these guys! I have negotiated with them undercover, I sit across the table from them. And if it was legal to sell, for him to sell adults - which it is not in Cartagena frankly, ok. But if it were, if we all follow Amnesty International, and if they make it legal, and I am sitting across from him... Think about this, just play it out in your head - I’ve been there a hundred times. "Hey Tim, come to my office with the sign that says, 'Beautiful women for sale,'" right, because this is a legal business. I walk in there... I mean, we have set him up, he is totally legitimate. And you don't think we are going to have that little 'Sin City menu' talk? Absolutely we are going to! Because he is going to make double or triple off this sick, horny American who is sitting across from him. Mark: Yeah. Tim: Right? It is so unbelievable! When I saw Amnesty International’s policy, I thought there is no way, there is no way they are going to vote. Sane minds will prevail here. And they didn't. Mark: Who voted for it? Tim: It is the board of Amnesty International. This is a powerful organization that has done good in the world - they are all about human rights. They have done good in the world to protect innocence. Mark: Well, traffickers are humans. They have the right to traffick. Tim: Traffickers have rights too, I guess. Mark: Apparently. So now... Tim: It is unbelievable. Mark: So now, Amnesty International, for the uninitiated like me, Amnesty International now goes and lobbies the UN, they lobby Washington, they lobby... Tim: They lobby countries all over the earth. They will be going and saying, "You need to decriminalize prostitution!" And don’t get me wrong, I totally believe in decriminalizing prostitutes. They should all be treated as victims, absolutely, even if they are saying, "I’m here because I want to be - arrest me!" No, we are going to treat you like... We don’t know your story. I agree with that, that’s right. But what they do is, because the sex worker can’t provide her service if johns are scared to come buy them. So, who they are really protecting are the johns and the pimps. And they say that in their legislation, or in their proposed legislation. They say that... They don’t call them pimps, they are very careful with all the wording, but they call them 'security': 'security for the prostitutes'. Mark: They call them security? Tim: They need to have their infrastructure, they need to have their security, which means that there could be other people helping and facilitating in their business. So, it is unbelievable. Now, will there be a prostitute that would benefit from this? Will there will be a prostitute that would say, "I truly do want to be here"? Absolutely! I believe there are prostitutes who want to be there. And might they say, "We need this policy so that we can sell ourselves freely and be sex workers by choice," and all this, and this would help them. Yes, that would help them, but you have to weigh that against the twelve 12-year-olds who are sitting in the tractor trailer down the road from the legitimate brothel. Mark: Whom you have seen. Tim: I have seen them! They are everywhere! There are 2 million of them. And you have completely thrown them under the bus because you are so worried about the few prostitutes who want to be there, who love their job, and whatever. Mark: The company guys. Tim: I can’t say I am completely unsympathetic to that - maybe that is what their choice is and I am a libertarian in that way. I want people to be able to choose. But it is a balancing act and when you are choosing that over the children who will now be raped because you have provided the infrastructure for them to be raped, you are in the wrong. I mean, it is so clear that you are in the wrong. I know from our perspective, you know, we spend a lot time in the trenches and we see this. Perhaps the folks from the Amnesty haven’t. I have to assume they haven’t seen this, and see how easy they are making it now for children to be raped.

america american canada washington mexico germany police sweden colombia norway explain pg fuego sin city amnesty international sane amnesty cartagena legalize in n out operation underground railroad elizabeth smart fuegos vicente fox beautiful' m'a markit smashburger animal style mark you mark no tim it mark yeah mark well tim you tim yeah tim how mark so tim no tim well tim there mark they mark who tim so tim here mark hey tim right tim can slave stealer

005 THROWBACK THURSDAY, IMPERIAL VALLEY CA

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2016 16:40

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.

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004 MARISOL NICHOLS

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 6, 2016 31:19

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.

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003 Pornography! A Root Cause of Child Sex Trafficking.

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 1, 2016 5:12

Timothy Ballard has met and arrested hundreds of child traffickers. They are different genders, ethnicities, ages, and religions, but what was the one thing they all had (have) in common? An addiction to pornography that started years before. In this bonus episode, Tim sites recent research about the effects of pornography on the human brain. He and his team, known as Operation Underground Railroad, often begin investigations into trafficking by following the trail of child pornography directly to traffickers on their way to act out the very things they have been watching in the videos. [caption id="attachment_12137" align="alignright" width="49"] In Episode 003 of the Slave Stealer Podcast, Timothy Ballard points to pornography as a root cause of child sex trafficking. This infographic, by FightTheNewDrug.org supports his claim with anecdotes and evidence.[/caption] Full Transcript: Intro: You are listening to Slave Stealer. Timothy Ballard: Ok, welcome to Slave Stealer podcast, this is a bonus edition. This bonus edition has to do with the topic of: Pornography. Not something people love to talk about, especially, the evil effects of it. But it was a tangent, that we started talking about as a result of the Vicente Fox interview, that we did recently, and it is my opinion, and I think science backs it up, that pornography is, in fact, creating a lot of the demand that we are seeing for child sex. This is me diverging from a conversation about Vicente Fox, and I am hitting pornography, and talking about the true evil that it can be, and creating sex addicts who hurt kids. So, roll it! If you saw the amounts of child pornography, that are being transferred and distributed every single day, and we know this, because we have worked these cases with our partners. It is stunning! It is mind-blowing! And, the largest consumers of pornography in the world are from the United States. So, we are producing these sex addicts. And what are we doing about that? And, I am not satisfied with what the U.S. Government is doing about that. Mark Mabry: What do you propose they would do? Tim: Well, one thing is, we need to start talking about the evils of pornography. This is not popular. Why? Because 98% of guys are stuck in pornography. Mark: Do you think 98%? Tim: I think so. That is what the studies say. Mark: 98%? Tim: Yeah. Mark: Of guys? So, between me and you, you are looking at pornography a lot? Tim: I am in the 2%. Mark: Me too! Tim: Ok, well, congratulations! Mark: It must be Chris over there, our sound guy. Tim: Yeah, Chris. How is your porn use these days? Chris: I guess, I am in that 98%. Mark: Oh, great! Wrong answer! Tim: So, what is hard about porn, the porn issue is, that not everybody, by long shot, who looks at pornagraphy, is getting end up raping children. But, I would say, 100% of men who rape children are porn addicts. And so, like anything else it needs to be education around it, like it can be a drug. Pornography can be a drug. Mark: Yes. Tim: Especially if it is in certain levels, and it becomes an addiction, like any other drug. Like alcohol is a drug, right? So, people need to drink responsibly. We need to educate people, kids especially, about what pornography could lead to. I have arrested dozens and dozens of pedophiles. I have interrogated dozens and dozens of pedophiles over my career as a special agent, and also in the work we are doing with Operation Underground Railroad. And every single time when they talk, they talk about how it all started when they were 12 years old, when they picked up a Playboy, or they looked at this naked picture or whatever, and their mind starts going there, and then it is a progression. And, the science backs it up. You can go to our friends at fightthenewdrug.org, and they talk all about the science behind what this pornography... how it is in fact a drug. I mean, it over-stimulates the frontal lobes of the brain, it creates shrinkage in the brain. It creates brain damage. And, what happens to people who are addicted to it, it is not the naked pictures they are addicted to. What they are addicted to is the chemical reaction, the dopamine, the endorphins that the images produce in their brains. That is what they want, and they will do anything to get that. And, when the naked pictures aren’t working anymore, just like marijuana eventually starts to wear off on the use - I need to progress to something more powerful to get that same chemical reaction - and, frankly it is very similar chemical reaction to pornography. So, they need something to... they just want that reaction, they want that dose of dopamine. They know their brain can give them, but they have got to shot their brain now, because the adult stuff, the legal stuff ain’t working. Mark: When we were… Tim: So what they do..wait! Mark: Dude! I heard what you were saying. I am not interrupting.. Tim: But, I am about to end it. I am about to give my final line and you cut me off. So, what they turn to is Mark: It is a long final line. Tim: Well, it is powerful. Mark: Alright, let’s go. Tim: What they turn to is child pornography. That becomes their heroine, their crack, cocaine, and it shots their brain enough to get the reaction they need. And, these guys are almost brain-dead at this point, but they need something, and then when that wears off, they travel to Cancun, Mexico to find a child. And, again, a very small percentage of porn users end up in Cancun, Mexico, but there is enough, that there is 2 million children who are being sold for sex in the world. Ending: Get more Tim and Mark at slavestealer.com.

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002 Meet Timothy Ballard Part II