Podcasts about tom there

Patrick delves into the ethical complexities surrounding food waste and potential theft in the workplace. Is it ever justifiable to take home food from work, especially if it's destined for the trash? He shares personal stories and listener emails, ranging from experiences at Sizzler and IHOP to street ministry in Texas. How does one balance company policies with the moral imperative to feed the hungry?   Is it theft to take food home from work even if that food was going in the trash? (01:11) Dave - I used to work for a sanitation company. I was in charge of sorting the trash. One of the first things that I found in the trash was a crucifix.  (05:25) Email – What does this have to do with bringing Christ to the world through the media? (09:29) Cynthia - I would go around to restaurants and take the left over food and give it to the poor. (10:51) Email – Taking from the trash is not stealing Tom - There could be safety reasons or health reasons or marketing reasons why the food couldn't be redistributed or the packaging might have an error in the ingredients. (22:27) Tony - I'm the Corporate Chef for certified Angus Beef. I opened the 2nd harvest food bank after Katrina in New Orleans and we rescue food from hotels and turned those foods and turned those into meals. George - Is it a sin to load up your plate at a buffet and not eat all of it? (29:53) Marty - I used to work in food management for 30 years and we would freeze food to help feed the hungry (32:56) Tony called back to finish his story (38:57) Kathleen - I frequent certain restaurants where the manager knows me and they comp my bill or take out an item from my order.  Is that okay? (43:06) Dennis - There's a good feeding program where I live and when I was volunteering there, the state passed a law that any organization that had unused food had to donate that food. Eileen - In Green Bay, we have an ideal situation, we have Paul's Pantry and St. Vincent de Paul. They feed 200 people daily. (48:03) Matthew - This is a beautiful movement, as the pro-life movement strengthens grows, we need these ideas to give food to the underprivileged

  Today with us on the Incite Change Podcast, Coach Mauro sits down with Tom Swales.   Tom is the founder and creator of The AMT System & The Advanced Movement Therapist (AMT) Certification, an education platform for movement professionals and clinicians that teaches advanced movement and exercise prescription to get to the root cause quicker and solve client's pain.    He is also the founder of COMPHYSIO+ Performance Wellness and has worked with professional athletes and consulted for international and Olympic sporting organizations on their rehabilitation and performance protocols.   Tom takes us through his fitness journey, professional career and how he worked his way back from a major illness which severely impacted his ability to move independently.   Episode Timestamps ●        [01:01] Tom's Professional Background ●        [09:10] Initial Career Goal ●        [12:31] His Football Career ●        [16:50] Determine your WHY ●        [32:15] Applying the System Personally ●        [39:23] Starting from the Floor ●        [44:32] Get up and Move On - 5 Key Points ●        [50:24] The Advanced Movement Therapist ●        [52:45] Be Curious and Have Fun with It   Resources Mentioned ●        The Advanced Movement Therapist ●       COMphysio + Performance Wellness (Concept of Movement) ●        Instagram: @swales.tom   Quotes [Tom] “Manners and kindness goes a long way.”   [Tom] “There's no greater investment than investing in your health”   [Tom] “Evolve what you've learned”   Thanks so much for tuning in. Join us again next week for another episode! Contact us! If you would like to get in touch, leave us a comment! Visit our website - www.healthyincite.com Follow us on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/incitecoaching/?hl=en Like us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/incitecoaching/   

About Tom Ruwitch: Tom Ruwitch is the Founder of Story Power Marketing, where he helps clients discover the building blocks for prospect-focused stories. In 2001, Tom founded the email marketing software and services company MarketVolt — before most business people had even heard of email marketing. He helps execute marketing campaigns to engage with prospects, convert sales, and maximize customer relationships. He sold MarketVolt in 2019 and founded Story Power Marketing. Today, coaches, authors, and other experts hire Tom to power up their stories because most dish out the same old boring content that turns off prospects, and then they feel frustrated and stuck. So Tom helps them transform content from prospect-repelling to client-attracting, turn marketing from frustrating to fun, and convert results from subpar to superb. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Tom. In this episode, Nancy and Tom discuss the following:The best thing that can happen in your content is for somebody to read it see it or hear it and think.Storytelling can be a really important element of the content that you put out.The lesson is delegate and she can tell endless anecdotes or build endless stories to deliver that.You have to write in your own voice, produce videos in your own voice, and tell stories that are drawn from what you discover about your prospects and your clients, not with AI. Key Takeaways: I do not engage with any company for under three months, ideally six months.In the majority of startups and small businesses, all the sales are typically made by the founder or, in small business cases, the president or CEO of the company.I had always wanted to do something on my own.It's interesting how you can be fueled by the sales piece and the environment in which you sell."And what people need to understand that they need to do with their content is they need to inform and entertain and that's where storytelling comes in. When you deliver valuable information in a more captivating way, that's more story powered, more entertaining, you draw people in, you make the content more relatable and you're more likely to be the one to stand out in your niche.” – TOM"I would say that listening and empathy are probably the most important qualities because what it's about is not just tell, tell. This is what I know and I'm going to tell you everything I know. That's not what it's about. What it's about is hearing and watching and empathizing and understanding what is it that my prospects and clients are feeling and how is it that I can transform them from a feeling of, you know, one feeling to another, from a feeling of frustration to relief, from a feeling of fright to courage, from a feeling of stuck to free. It's almost always about emotional transformation. Even in business-to-consumer products, it's that way. But certainly, in business to business that it's almost always an emotional transformation and understanding and paying attention to the feelings of your prospects and clients and using that as the basis to assemble stories is what it's all about." – TOM"There are businesspeople who think that somehow storytelling is not professional, or it's beneath them, and that: “No, I'm going to write a 1500-word white paper”, or “I must be serious”. And my response is that storytelling in and of itself is not a frivolous activity. There are a lot of frivolous, meaningless silly stories that are being dished out. You know, storytelling is a big buzzword right now in marketing and online. And so, there are a lot of people who just think, oh, I'm going to tell a funny story for stories sake, and that's going to be great. Well, no, it's not great unless the prospect or the client can see themselves and unless there is a lesson and meaning in that story. But those who believe that I don't like stories, or I will be considered something less than professional if I tell stories, I think are missing the point of what a good story can do. As human beings, we are naturally drawn to stories and storytellers. There are all sorts of data to show that when information is delivered via story, we're much more likely to retain it. We're much more likely to trust the person who delivered the information. And we're much more likely to act on the call to action. So, you know, anyone who feels like, oh, it's beneath me or I don't like stories, or my audience won't like stories, when done properly, stories sell." – TOMConnect with Tom Ruwitch:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomruwitch/Story Power Marketing: https://storypowermarketing.com/Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/  Connect with Nancy Calabrese: Twitter:https://twitter.com/oneofakindsalesFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/One-Of-A-Kind-Sales-304978633264832/Website:https://oneofakindsales.comPhone: 908-879-2911 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ncalabrese/Email:  leads@oneofakindsales.com

Dream News! Tis a description and an exhortation (and title of just now and more soon council) Caroline hosts Tom Cheetham, “a rogue scholar of the imagination in esoteric Islam interweaving the planes of the real into his continuous and wonderfully whacked-out song.” – Joseph Donahue author of (many books, including) “Imaginal Love – The meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman” Ancestor Ally Mentors, the likes of Hillman, Henri Corbin, and Jung excavated and crafted keys which they are now handing to us. So let's put the keys in the locks, and tease erudition into pertinent practice, the world being on fire, and all.. Tom :”There is an open field of reality accessible to us through the imagination.” Wonder, Curiosity, and Willingness partner with Imagination to open portals of participatory cahooting between worlds…. Because we humans cannot resolve any of the innumerable cruel conundrums we have imposed on our kin – by ourselves. Tis by ourselves that got us it into this pickle. Participatory Animism, Biomimicry, Mutual Aid – the way to go…. https://www.tomcheetham.com/     The post The Visionary Activist Show – Dream News appeared first on KPFA.

In this episode, Anne is joined by special guest Tom Dheere, the Vo Strategist. With over 25 years of experience, Tom knows how to ride the waves of ever-changing technology and market shifts. Discover the secrets to driving traffic to your website through social media, blogging, and top-notch content to keep you ahead of the pack. They share how old-school tactics like cold calling and email marketing might not be cutting it anymore. Boost your confidence with Tom's killer advice on negotiating rates like a BOSS and flipping your approach to snag the rates you truly deserve. Plus, we unveil the controversial truth about Fiverr and how this billion-dollar beast can actually help you charge industry-standard rates… Transcript 0:00:01 - Anne Hey, hey everyone, Welcome to the VO Boss podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I am excited to welcome voiceover business and marketing consultant and VO strategist, Tom Dheere, to the show. As a voice actor with over 25 years of experience, Tom brings a wealth of voiceover knowledge to the table In his one-on-one strategy sessions, diagnostic sessions those sound interesting and his mentorship program, As well as speaker appearances at industry conferences. Tom, I am so excited to have you here today. Thanks for joining me.    0:00:34 - Tom Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to chat with you, Anne.    0:00:37 - Anne Tom, you know it's chaotic out there.    I'll tell you what there's disruption, There's, I say, mass panic, and I think that today more than ever, as entrepreneurs and business owners, we need a strategy more than ever. So I am super duper glad that we are here talking to you about that. So let's get a feel for your take on the industry, because you've been in the industry for gosh over 25 years and I'm sure you've seen it evolve, kind of like myself. Talk a little bit about your experience in this industry and how it's evolved over the years.    0:01:20 - Tom Okay, well, i decided I wanted to be a voice actor in 1994, so I was a graduate school dropout, so I got my. I decided in late 94, got most of my. I got my training in my voiceover demo in 95, which is a cassette tape. I still have it here in the drawer. And then when I got that demo, my coach gave me a little certificate and gave me a stack of Xerox copies of production company listings and said you know, start your good, your cold calling good luck. Because in 1995, there was I mean there was an internet and some websites, but there was no.    0:01:57 - Anne Yeah, there was no social media.    0:01:59 - Tom There was no online casting sites, there was no home recording, there was no digital delivery of audio files, there was no phone patch, there was ISDN. But like, who had that besides? like the, the, the rate, you know the major TV networks, you know. So you had to buy cold called and I called, called for a year until I got my first gig, so until I joined voice 123 in 2006,. That was pretty much, that was pretty much the only way to do it, and also I was going into New York city once a week. Voiceover is unlimited and you'd pay whatever was $35 for a 10 minute meet.    Meet up with a casting director or an agent or a manager which is how I got my, my first manager, who I still have to this day, 17, 18 years later. So my cassette turned into a CD which I was duplicating, burning you know. Oh God, the my post office hated my guts.    0:03:04 - Anne Now mail. Yes, cause.    0:03:06 - Tom I had a long a lawn bag of padded mailers and they'd be like, oh geez, here comes Tom again and like, all right, everybody just gets to the side and just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick you know cause?    0:03:15 - Anne I was just constantly sending it out, yeah, and then that evolved into MP threes. So let's, let's, let's start. I think that there's, there's something, there's a parallel here, a disruption right. Some disruption in the industry right. So it evolved from a tape into a CD, into today, which is all digital right.    0:03:36 - Tom Right And then and then pay a voice bank and voicescom and voice 123 disrupted the voiceover again, again and you know, and now AI is disrupting the voiceover industry. But this is what I say and all my students.    0:03:52 - Anne A pattern Tom. A pattern Tom. Yes, there is a pattern throughout the years, so I don't think that disruption is going to stop anytime soon.    0:04:00 - Tom No, it's going to keep going, and what I like to say is that when the light bulb was invented, it disrupted the candle making industry and nobody cared about the candle makers, except for the candle makers.    0:04:13 - Anne People were saying Oh good I can.    0:04:15 - Tom I can read a book at night without my house burning down. Like that's where everybody was coming from. It's like okay. So the candle makers had a choice They could go to Congress to try to get light bulbs outlawed, they could go la, la, la, la la which a lot of voice actors have been doing especially literally today, this week, on the voiceover groups. Or they could adjust to their candle making industry to accommodate certain parts of the light bulb industry, or they could convert their candle making factory into a light bulb making factory.    So, you can either fight it, ignore it, adapt to it or embrace it. And the voice actors that are going to still be standing for lack of a better term on the other side of AI and whatever the next disruption is, the ones that are adapting, evolving learning, growing, operating from a position of abundance as opposed to a position of scarcity, and not shouting at the rain. They're the ones that are still going to have a viable voiceover career. Yeah.    0:05:08 - Anne Yeah, i'll tell you, it has really it has really wreaked havoc, and I think that you know, gosh, you know, and I've been following it and following it And you know, two years ago on the VO Bus podcast, i mean, i think that you and I can both agree to do due diligence and educate yourself on, you know, evolving technologies or disruptive technologies that can affect your business, and that is so very important that we, you know, truly educate ourselves. And I had done a series of interviews, of which I'm still doing periodically, with you know, large companies, people that are working in synthetic voices, ai companies to kind of get to ask those tough questions like Hey, what's happening here? And are you, you know, is there transparency? You know, what are your ethics? You know, do you have, you know, objectives in terms of protecting?    you know, voices as you go, and I think it's been an educational journey for not just me as a business owner and a voice artist, but for the AI companies as well. I think we are all learning and evolving with technology as we go, and I've had experience doing that myself, you know, working in technology for over 20 years, and I still consider myself working in technology. So, in terms of you know your, your students and and your clients. What is your? what is your biggest tip now for, let's say, people coming into the industry, how to get a handle on this industry and be successful.    0:06:43 - Tom Do as much research as you possibly can. Work with professional coaches who are boots on the ground blue collar voice actors as well like who are actively engaged in the voiceover industry. That's not to say that there's not genre coaches out there, like Mary Lynn Wissner, for example, who is not a voice actor but is an amazing coach.    There are only a handful of people like that, as you know and but people who are actively, who have to continue to grow and evolve with the industry to maintain relevance in the industry And be better than the AIs on a storytelling level as quickly as you possibly can.    0:07:23 - Anne Yeah.    0:07:24 - Tom Because they are getting better and better almost daily. Are they going to completely take over the entire voiceover industry? No, Are they going to. you know, take away a percentage of certain jobs of certain genres, mostly for entry level voice actors Yes, yeah. The trick is how do you get good enough that, when you're starting your voiceover journey, that you're already better than the AIs, so you can kind of leap over?    that hurdle and be a human narrator as quickly as possible. That's going to be the challenge. What I think that means is the people that are more naturally talented, the people who have theater training, the people who have on-camera film and TV training, improv training, those people coming into the industry which are all parts of what defines a better actor are going to have a better chance than people just coming at it from other sectors. Frankly, i mean, a registered nurse has every right to stop being a nurse and try to do medical narration for a living, and I encourage that. I've trained people like that, you've trained people like that over the years, but it's going to get harder and harder if they don't have natural storytelling billing, natural storytelling ability, or they haven't been trained in non-voiceover storytelling. So get as many acting classes as you can under your belt. Get as many improv classes under your belt so you can learn how to make strong choices quickly, which is a key to being a good narrator. Understand the technology and maybe get your voice cloned as quickly as possible.    0:09:05 - Anne That's very interesting. I'm finding that I do have some people, because I did the series and I've been investigating and educating myself with AI companies for the past few years, i've had people ask me, and not all of them want to shout the rafters saying, oh, i'm out there trying to figure out how to get my voice cloned or how to get a synthetic voice. But what's interesting is that synthetic voice, the companies that are creating synthetic voices. They're also evolving and changing on a daily basis, and so it's really important that, as voice actors, you keep up with that, and I'm always a big proponent of if you have a business, you want to understand the market in which you're selling And so part of that market. If the market is changing. And, tom, as a business person, you're all about researching and looking at the market as it evolves over the years. And where do you see the market heading in terms of voiceover casting? Where are we going to be able to get these jobs, or where can voiceover talent find work? And I know that's the golden question, right.    People like they expect a five-minute answer from me. Where can I get voiceover work? But where do you see that evolving and heading as we move on in the future?    0:10:27 - Tom That's a great question, Anne. There will still always be a place for needing agents, managers and casting directors for high end work, class A national commercials, high end video games and cartoons, high end promo, high end in show narration. I don't think that's ever. I don't think that's ever going to change. Casting sites are going to continue to be as relevant as ever and is still the the most effective way for new voice actors to onboard into the industry. Because you can. All you need is a credit card and you could just join the casting site and start auditioning immediately.    The interesting part is going to be the direct marketing part which. I learned the hard way when all of my direct marketing strategies, which worked like gangbusters in 2013, 14, 15, 16, all of a sudden stopped working because, so many of those production companies recording studios that I had worked with through direct marketing strategies have moved to online casting sites just because it's easier for them to curate a roster, manage talent, manage projects.    So, um, ai is going to take a chunk out of online casting sites. It's going to take a chunk out of direct marketing clients the low end stuff and stuff that would never normally get like there's audio books out there that will never get produced unless it's an AI voice.    0:11:51 - Anne It's going to do it out of interest or ergonomics or just sure, whatever that sure whatever the rights holder can, um, can afford.    0:11:57 - Tom So you also new students, when it comes to this kind of strategies, need to figure out what. How does what a success look like for them, Which genres do they want to be successful in And which portals do they need to access to become successful in said genres? So if you want to be on the next Pixar film or be in the next fallout video game, you need to get a lot of training, you need to get a top notch demo, you need to get high end agents and you're going to eventually need to join SAG-AFTRA. That's not. That's not changing for everybody else. You know the pendulum is going to swing, stuff's going to move or stuff's going to move around, but you're still going to need you're still going to need the aforementioned good training, good demo good website, good home recording.    Um, and the ability to keep up with industry's trends by reading blogs, watching podcasts like this um, working with coaches like, like you and me. Um, it's going to what, what percentage of what genre is going to get lost and where you're going to need to go for each of it. I mean, who can? who can say, but if you have, if, if online casting sites stigmatize you, get over it get in there develop your skills develop your auditioning skills.    0:13:10 - Anne That was it. That was the nugget of the day. That was awesome Sound right of the day. Yeah.    0:13:14 - Tom Because online casting sites like I'm. I know because I'm on voice 123. I audition every day and I regularly see clients that are posting casting notices that I used to work with five, six, seven, eight, 10 years ago, who won't take my phone calls anymore because they're on casting sites. That's the only way they'll talk to me And I'm totally fine with that, because you said you got to go where the buyers are. you got to go where the market is going. That's where they are. That's where you need to be.    0:13:41 - Anne I think there's something to say If we just tell every boss out there, you know, first of all, um, be a boss, right And understand that you really have to stop. And I think, take a uh, uh, take a look at the bigger picture. The bigger picture is we're providing a product, uh, to a market, the market. You have to evolve with the market. It's not about you know, uh, oh, my gosh, it's, it's, it's you know your voice over business and your craft and your and your art, which I completely, yes, it is. But honestly, you know, at the end of the day, right, i want to pay my mortgage, right, and if I want to have a business, it always amazes me, tom, how you know you go to conferences and I know you know when, when, cause I used to, i used to teach business classes as well. Whenever you go to see which classes fill up first, it's always the performance classes, it's always the cartoon and video game.    Always those because, well, okay, so they're fine, they they allow the creativity. But, honestly, you know, beyond the fun and the creativity in the booth, you've got to be able to run a business that will make a profit. If you want to write, if you want to do this as a business and you want and you're serious about it I mean, if it's you know, if it's a hobby, that's a difference, that's a different podcast. Sure, you know, and I think that you know what you offer, you know, to people as a, a VO strategist or even just a business strategist, is invaluable. And I truly think, bosses out there, you've got to step back.    Um, and yes, of course you know, create the product that the market is demanding Right, and and also know how to run your business right. And so I love your story that you know the people that used to take your calls no longer will take your calls. You know your calls and now you have to work with them on the platform, and mostly because it's easy and more convenient And I will be the first person to ask any of you bosses out there if you're using any form of AI to do anything. Let's say, create a blog post or, you know, maybe play around and change your headshot And you're using the technology to make your jobs better, more efficient, then you cannot be the person that gets upset if you're not, let's say, evolving along with the synthetic voice aspect of it.    0:16:06 - Tom You know, absolutely.    0:16:08 - Anne I mean. So, as we talk to peer to peer, i think, or pay to play platforms, i think online casting is absolutely. What about Tom? let's talk about what about your website, your online platform, your online storefront? What do you think about that in terms of being able to market your business?    0:16:29 - Tom Okay, it's funny because people coming into the industry, you know most of them realize they need some kind of training and then they realize, oh, i need to record from home. You know I need a demo. And then almost all of them think, well, i need some kind of website. But they don't know why they need a website. They don't know how to build a website and they don't know what is necessary to create an effective website. What I tell my students is that no one is gonna find your website nobody.    There are literally tens of thousands of voice actor websites out there. The odds of them typing in some stuff on Google, bing, yahoo and finding you is virtually impossible. I mean, tomdeercom is over 20 years old and I've been blogging for 14 years, so I've got really good SEO and I rarely get found on it. Anyway, the point is, your job as a voice actor is to drive traffic to your website, and you do that by being on social media, blogging, creating a presence, creating conversations, creating quality content to get them to notice you. And then there's email marketing and cold calling, which I'm sure you realize that they don't work a fraction as well as they used to, because why should they answer the phone of some voice actor trying to talk about themselves, when they're just gonna go to an online casting site to cast their next project. They're already more than halfway down the sales funnel anyway on an online casting site, as opposed to trying to get them into the sales funnel through cold calling and all that.    So driving traffic to your website is extremely important, and then get them to do the most important thing, which is download your demos.    0:18:12 - Anne Everything else, is irrelevant Or click it back. I mean, everything else is secondary to downloading the demo. Right, yeah, but now downloading the demo? now we've got there's the fear. There's now there's some fear that if we allow our audio, you know, freely out there and I, you know I have podcast, you have podcast. Anybody can download this podcast I've been doing it for six years and potentially turn it into a voice.    0:18:40 - Tom Okay, Look everybody. I've been doing this for 25 years. I have done thousands and thousands of voiceover projects. I've probably done tens of thousands of auditions over the years, I guarantee my voice has been cloned without my knowledge many times over.    I guarantee that auditions that I have you, that I have done, has been used for broadcast without my consent or without compensation. Every website that exists is going to get hacked at some point. None of our data is safe, it's just not. All you can do is do the best you can to mitigate your risk. try to be secure. I can't worry about submitting my demo and worrying about it getting cloned.    I mean if I, if I was worried about that, i wouldn't have a career. I would. I'd be quadruple bolting the door and hiding in the bathtub. There's just nothing you can do about it. So don't worry about don't worry about that. Put the demo out there. I mean because the the the odds of it happening are extremely slim, but the longer you're here, the more likely it's going to happen. It's just you know well.    0:19:45 - Anne Tom, i mean, i think I think really again, we we talk about that bad actors, um, which is so interesting in our industry. Now, the term bad actor, right. Had I not really delved in deep to talking to people outside of my own industry, i would not have known what the bad actor meant. Um, outside of, like the literal meaning of it, right, but the bad actors meaning those companies, right, or those people that may take advantage, unfair advantage, um, with the in in clone voices, without permission, create deep fakes, all of those things. There's always that possibility And I had such an interesting conversation the other day with Shyamala Praga, who is very well known in the AI industry.    Um, regarding, you know, laws and regulations and and instead of being reactive which is what we typically are right, reactive, something bad happens and then a law or you know some sort of policy is is established that then, you know, takes care of it. Um, really trying to again educate all of us, not just in our industry but everywhere, that, um, these things could potentially happen and we need to protect ourselves from bad things. Um, you know, what are your thoughts about? I mean, i, like, i really love your, your, your perspective on you can't be worrying about that all the time, but are there any steps that you would recommend to to, let's say, to protect um or to be cautious about that? I mean, i certainly am not going to make my demo not downloadable because I want it to be convenient for people to listen and buy.    0:21:20 - Tom You have to have it. It has to be downloadable because, when it comes to your direct marketing strategies and driving traffic to your website, the odds of them having a voiceover project for you right now, at the time that you have marketed to them successfully and they've actually gone to your website to review your demos, the odds of them actually having a gig for you is infinitesimally small. I can count, i think, on two fingers in 25 years that that's actually happened. Representation and online casting insights are for opportunities now. Direct marketing, driving traffic to your website is for opportunities.    later They're not going to remember you once they leave that website of yours You need to have. They need to walk away with the demo, so they stick it in a folder somewhere in their cloud or on their desktop, so when an opportunity comes along that you may be right, for your demo was right there for them to review, or if again another thing that I always like- to say is that, no matter what in a marketplace and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, there are I will pay for things that make my life easier and make my life more convenient.    0:22:25 - Anne So, for example, i hate, i always use this my lipstick. So my lipstick is reliable, dependable, stays on all day, i don't have to put it on again And I you know I use that as an example product. I pay a lot of money for this lipstick. Now I certainly feel that no matter. Look AI, you know pay to play sites, you know driving down, you know rates. I no matter what. If somebody likes and gangooza right and likes her product, they're going to pay the money and they're going to remember me and they're going to buy it again and again. I'd love to hear your thoughts.    0:22:58 - Tom You go to a department store and there's five pairs of shoes on on the shelf and four of them cost, you know, $75 and one of them cost $800.    Everybody immediately goes and looks at oh, what's this? What's the value of this? Why is it worth $800? Well, if they says it's worth $800, then clearly it must be worth $800. So I will happily spend $800 on this pair of shoes. So most people coming into the voiceover industry are broke and perceive themselves as an employee or a starving artist. They are already immediately devaluing themselves and training voice seekers to devalue them.    So it's a systems of, it's a systems of thought problem. And I'm not going to sit here and blow sunshine up everybody's butt and say you're special, you're wonderful, you're, you're going to. All your dreams are going to come true, because that's not what the VOStratigist does. This VOStratigist does not sell dreams. The VOStratigist sells reality.    My job is to give you objective data so you can set, you can make informed decisions about your voiceover career. But you want to do everything you can to set yourself up for success And the first step one is mindset. Know your worth. Know your worth based on your pure talent, know your worth based on your training, know your worth based on your experience. And know your worth based on what the industry standards are.    Sag After over here GVAA over there, Know what your worth is and comport yourself And it's maybe it's a little fake it till you make it. I don't. I'm not sure you can do that. Having confidence and being confident in your training and your talent and your understanding of the rates, That should empower you to make sure that people aren't buying stuff from you that are shopping in the wrong aisle.    0:24:56 - Anne And also, i would say, as a as a talent just coming in, i don't think you can expect to get into or to become a top tier you know, professional without making an investment. I mean, that's the other thing too. I cannot tell you how many people they'll be like. You know, i really need coaching, but I just I don't have any. You know, they don't have the budget they don't have And, and so in reality, there has to be those things in place. You can't expect to go in and make a ton of money without investing in yourself and investing in that, in that coaching that's going to help you to be the most human voice actor that you can be.    0:25:37 - Tom Patience is one of the most important skills that you need to have as a new voice actor. Everyone wants to start talking for money as quickly as possible and using their funny cartoon voices that their dentist told them is hilarious And that's all. That's all great, but if you can't afford the training yet, build a budget create a savings plan.    be patient, find community theaters or summer theater programs that have free acting and improv training, and develop your foundation of storytelling skills while you're saving money to work with a professional coach like Anne, or work with a VO strategist you know a business marketing consultant like me. There's a ton of things that you can do. But if you dive in when you're not ready or you go with the first demo coach that you can afford and submit to that demo to those agents for the first time, it's not gonna go well.    It's not gonna go well. So I'll never tell anybody not to pursue their dreams, but I will tell everybody to be smart about pursuing their dreams by having. This is what I like to say no matter what you're doing in life, do it with both hands and on a flat surface. Be smart about it, i learned that when I tried to open an Amazon box with a pair of open scissors like this, which we've all done, Oh, yeah, yeah, not yeah. Both hands flat surface.    0:26:58 - Anne Very guilty of that. So then, let me talk a little. let's talk a little bit about rates, because what is your best advice for those actors who might be struggling to find work at their desired rates when you know there is this perceived? you know, race to the bottom, with technology disrupting What, how can they pivot their approach to succeed and get rates that they deserved?    0:27:21 - Tom Learn how to negotiate. And it's not like a Middle East Bazaar where you're haggling over the price of, you know, a goat or something.    It's just the better that you can understand the rate structure of voiceover on a session level and on a usage level, the better, the more empowered you are to educate your clients or potential clients, because for so many casting notices that I see, or so many emails hey, i found you on Google, whatever they've never cast a voiceover in their life.    They haven't the faintest idea what the ergonomics are, what project management is involved or what the rate structure is. Being experienced it's not necessarily a correlation between being professional and experienced. You don't have to be experienced to be professional To understand there is a rate structure. I understand what the rate structure is and I'm able to articulate it to somebody who has no idea how the voiceover industry works. The more that you can do that, the more empowered you are to get industry standard rates and the more empowered you are to educate voice seekers to value you and not let them use cheap rates. Well, i paid this guy five bucks. I'm gonna leverage it to get you to pay you five bucks where you say no, you don't do that You gotta think long term.    You have to value yourself and your fellow voice actors, because every time you accept a ratty rate, you're making it harder for everybody else. Every time you accept an industry standard rate, you're making it easier for everybody else.    0:28:51 - Anne Now, but okay. So then here's the question. Yes, i agree that there should be the thought process about the industry as a whole. However, you will always have those voice actors that it is their business, right? I'm a big proponent of saying mind your own business. That means, don't worry about how other people get their business. In that respect, though, do you know what I'm saying? I truly believe I want people to understand their worth in order to make a bold and take the challenge to actually negotiate that worth with a potential client. So, speaking of five bucks, i know that you had talked to me a little bit about an experiment that you had conducted using the online pay to play the F word, fiverr.    And I personally, i'm one of those people that thinks we need to talk about this because it is a viable marketplace in the well viable it exists in our industry. Let's put it that way you may not agree with it and you may not feel that it values your worth, but what were your findings? What do you think about Fiverr?    0:29:58 - Tom Okay, it had been coming up so much in conversations with my students, with my fellow voice actors, fellow coaches, producers, panelists at conferences And, like I said, my job as a video strategist is to collect objective data so I can help my students make thoughtful, informed decisions about how to move their voiceover business forward. Fiverr is real, it is here. It's a billion dollar company. There are thousands and thousands of voice actors on it. So I needed to understand what exactly it is, why it is and how it works. So I created an account, I followed the tutorials, i looked at YouTube videos, i built a profile and then you build what are called gigs And a gig is basically broken down by genre.    I will narrate I'm an American voice actor who will narrate your explainer video or e-learning module or whatever And then what you do is you build the rate, but you're breaking it down bit by bit. So This is what really fascinated me about it is if someone said to you and I've got an explainer video, how much do you charge? and you probably charge what? 400, 500, whatever sometime around there But if you actually broke down by dollar, how much it costs for you to record the video, how much it costs to edit the video, to clean up, process, format, save, deliver. Do retakes give you permission to use the video in a certain way on a certain platform? if you chop up that $400 into all those little individual things, that's basically what you're doing on Fiverr. So it could say base price $5, but then if you add deliver as a wave file, deliver it within 24 hours you know, we'll only get two retakes.    Mvp, I'll move you up to the front of the line, If you, then if you go da-da-da-da, then the total can be $400. It can be an industry standard rate. Fiverr saying oh, we get everything's for five bucks.    0:32:05 - Anne It's more of a marketing position than anything else. And if you think about that in reality, right, if they're going for that market for the people who don't right, who don't have a lot of money to spend and they want to go for lower priced, saying Fiverr and marketing themselves as Fiverr, get affordable, then absolutely I mean as a business they built for a market where there was a hole And yeah, and now of course, because they have so many voice artists on it right.    that increases their SEO value, which increases, you know, ease, convenience, of use, and so that's what makes them you know the force that they are in the industry.    0:32:49 - Tom Right. So there's three levels on Fiverr And if you earn a certain amount of money and a certain amount of timing, get a certain amount of ratings in a certain amount of time, then you go to the next level and then the top level and the people at the top level charge industry standard rates and they do fine. The trick is kind of punching through that membrane from the first level to the second, in the second to the third. I feel like that's where it can be challenging.    0:33:12 - Anne Yeah, and I feel like you'd have to work that, because I think you have to earn that right, you have to get so many ratings, and I feel like you'd have to actually work the platform for a bit so that you could get up the ratings, so that you could climb up the ladder, so that you could charge industry rates. But, although not impossible, it's a very interesting concept. And because we are talking about it, bosses, doesn't necessarily mean we are condoning that platform, i mean. But if you look at it from a business standpoint, it absolutely, you know it covered a hole in the market and logically I can see how that works.    I absolutely can see how that works Now, do I love that? it makes voiceover seem cheap? No, not at all. And I think to each and everyone out there, it is up to you to make that decision whether you want your brand associated with that brand, because that's a whole other way of doing business, right? So, again, you're almost working for the platform And then that platform represents your brand versus, let's say, for me, i've always been let's do it myself, and you know, seo for me.    I've been online for years and it's worked in my favor And I've built up a great clientele list And I'm very fortunate that I'm able to continue on that. And while I am a member of a lot of pay to place, i don't have time to actually audition. And you know, for me, email marketing well, it's probably not quite as effective. Well, it's hard to say. I still believe that there's effectiveness in email marketing if you've got the right message and you have the right subject line, because people have less and less of an attention span. But it's one of the reasons why I built the VO Boss Blast. It was a way to help direct market talent, so that they didn't, you know, and I basically started it for myself. Isn't that like every company.    0:35:05 - Tom Right, if you create a product you want, help You do it to serve your needs.    0:35:09 - Anne I did it because I was like I don't have time. I want to do the podcast, i want to do VOPs, i want to be you know, i'm coaching, so I don't have a ton of time, so let me just create a direct marketing product that I can use. And then, of course, i shared that.    0:35:24 - Tom I do want to say for the record I have not booked anything on Fiverr. I set up my gig, i made adjustments to my rates because you're supposed to refresh it and try to feed the algorithm. I couldn't. I also did the same exercise on Upwork and it worked similarly and I got the same results. I could not. I could not book anything. I guess that just means I'm not a particularly good voice actor.    0:35:47 - Anne No, I think it's because you didn't have 100% of your right time to really devote to it. I mean, that's what. I think That's a part of it.    0:35:55 - Tom And the other thing is understanding the economies of the voice seekers, absolutely.    0:35:59 - Anne Diversify the economies and understanding of you know, money and how it works, of the country of origin of the voice actor too, absolutely, and Tom, i'll be the first one to say I mean, we've been in this business a long time. If you were on Voice 123 in 2006, right, you remember? Freelancer.    0:36:17 - Tom Oh, i was on Freelancer. Oh good, so was I. And Elanzen and Guru, yeah, i was on all of them.    0:36:22 - Anne So all of those evolved into Fiverr.    Really, that's really it was that it was like who could bid the lowest right? And I will tell you that, as a you know, entering into the online space, i mean that's where I did get some jobs. Now, did I take jobs that were probably not what I was worth? Yeah, I did, i did, but I learned quickly, you know, and it was a tough, it was a tight, it was frustrating because it was always people under bidding And so you get that type of client, but what you do is you learn about where those clients right, those are the clients that don't value your product Not necessarily you but they don't value the product enough to pay the price right.    0:37:01 - Tom They want to pay the cheapest, the biggest of the pain they are.    0:37:04 - Anne Exactly, exactly So. Wow, what a great conversation, tom. This has been so wonderful and enlightening for the bosses out there. I'm quite sure, tom, how can people get in touch with you and work with you?    0:37:17 - Tom Oh, go to vostrategistcom. I encourage you to book a free 15 minute consult. We can talk about any part of the voiceover industry that you want. I also have a video shop where I've got closing in on 30 different videos covering everything in the voiceover industry, from time management to workflow to genre exploration to managing your finances. I also have a great mentorship program where you can do 30 minute check-ins with me once a week, once a month or twice a month. It also gives you access to some of those videos for free. But, yeah, book a session with me, free session with me at vostrategistcom, and I'd love to chat with you.    0:37:50 - Anne Good stuff, tom. Yeah, bosses, today more than ever we need a strategy for moving forward in our business. So go to it, tom. Thank you again. I would like to talk to you bosses about. As individuals, you know, it can seem difficult to make a huge impact, but as a group, we can contribute to the growth of our communities in ways that we never thought possible. Visit 100voiceswhocareorg to learn how And a big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl You too can connect in network like bosses like Tom and myself. Find out more at IPDTLcom. You guys have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.    Transcribed by https://podium.page

“Don't mistake the opportunity for Long COVID with the frustration of dealing with the fast moving world of acute COVID. This is a big opportunity, not only to grow your practice, but quite frankly, to put a massive stake into the ground around the power of root cause medicine and an opportunity to build an evidence base that I think is of huge significance for the whole field,” shares Tom Blue, healthcare entrepreneur. Functional medicine practitioners face two main challenges when growing their practices. One, there is a large upfront time investment required for learning. Second, most insurance providers will not work with functional medicine practices and the burden of cost then falls on the patients, many of whom will not want to invest more into their healthcare. So how do you navigate these challenges and future proof your practice? In this episode, Tom discusses the importance of niching down your outreach to focus on those patients whose needs are not being met by the traditional healthcare system, like those with autoimmune conditions and other chronic pain conditions. He explains that Long-Covid is a key niche to target, because it is underserved and symptoms-based management alone is not sustainable.  He also talks about ways to further future-proof your practice by incorporating health trackers like the Aura Ring and utilizing ChatGPT for creating educational materials.    Quotes “We have essentially handed over control of curating our health care to a payer that only seldom has our interests at heart. So think about what your car or your house would look like, if the only things you did to take care of it were covered by Geico. If you think about the declining state of the American human condition, from a health standpoint, I think a lot of it has to do with this very thing. It's like preventive care, that root cause resolution of things. These are more value judgments than things that pose the risk of financial ruin. So they're not really in the domain of what insurance should cover anyway. But unfortunately, most consumers have yet to wade into that reality.” (8:29-9:10 | Tom)  “If you're wanting to solve pains, focus on conditions that are painful and where the healthcare system leaves people wanting more.” (15:41-15:48 | Tom) “There's this astonishingly large population of people that a year ago, two years ago, were essentially the picture of health and function. And all of a sudden, they can't walk around the block without being completely exhausted.” (16:50-17:05 | Tom) “Unlike a lot of chronic conditions that, like the frog in the pot of boiling water, progress so slowly you're constantly recalibrating what normal is and you forget how good you used to feel, Long COVID is the opposite of that.” (17:23-17:35 | Tom)  “The only way we have to quantify health historically has been our bathroom scale, which is generally a bad news generator. Now that we have tools like an Aura Ring, you've got this high resolution continuous picture of your health in many different dimensions. And there's good news to be found in it.” (26:36-26:57 | Tom) “Don't mistake the opportunity for Long COVID with the frustration of dealing with the fast moving world of acute COVID. This is a big opportunity, not only to grow your practice, but quite frankly, to put a massive stake into the ground around the power of root cause medicine and an opportunity to build an evidence base that I think is of huge significance for the whole field.” (29:19-29:43 | Tom)   Links   Connect with Tom Blue: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomblue/   ====    Thank You For Listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review! Your positive review helps others find this podcast and increase its visibility.   Getting to YES boils down to two things: Saying the right things and saying those things consistently… so if you want to go deeper, check out Uli's one-page “Getting to YES” blueprint and training with the essential 9 persuasion prompts you need to leverage: https://uliiserloh.com/blueprint     Connect With Uli Website: https://uliiserloh.com Facebook: https://facebook.com/uliiserloh   Instagram: https://instagram.com/uliiserloh Youtube: https://youtube.com/uliiserloh  Tiktok: https://tiktok.com/@uliiserloh  Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/uliiserloh/ If you'd like to learn more about Uli's marketing agency and available services, visit https://bigboost.marketing

Getting to the core of what makes a deal backable is at the forefront of anyone who is involved in search. That was the subject of this panel at last year's inaugural EtA Forum, which brought together four people involved in search in different ways to share their experiences. The key theme driving the conversation is, as the moderator, Paige Kohalmi says, “the searcher plus a good opportunity, and the right funding structure, is what makes a deal backable.” These three elements are equally core, and any investor is going to consider those three things closely, giving them equal weighting, before supporting an acquisition. One of the highlights from the panel was when the panellists discussed three different companies, in different sectors and with different profiles. They were asked to choose which of the three they liked most as a candidate for an investment. The fact that all three panellists chose a different first target just goes to highlight how subjective this process can be. Every investor and searcher is going to evaluate risk in a different way and, ultimately, come to a different conclusion. That does drive home the importance of character in the searcher and who they've got backing them, too. The capabilities of the searcher and what they will bring to the business can go a long way to strengthening the numbers sitting behind the business. The panel also covered a subject that is worth keeping in mind, that the downside with search is more protected than it would be with a VC or startup, because the business is already established and earning revenue. There's no point in looking at a business that hasn't proven this or hasn't got strong recurring revenue (or there are clear risks to that revenue), and margins are a key data point that can make a business very attractive. Overall, this is a fascinating panel for anyone who is interested in better understanding the thought processes that factor into deciding which searches to back. Connect with Paige Kohalmi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paige-kohalmi/ Connect with Sahil Shekhar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahil-shekhar/ Connect with Tom McGhie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommcghie/ Connect with Lui Pangiarella: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luipangiarella/ What we discussed: 1:25 Paige introduces the panel and topic for discussion. 2:45 Tom kicks off the discussion with his perspective of placing debt – what makes a deal backable? 4:50 Sahil describes his approach to identifying opportunity and how to find a deal to be involved with. 7:16 From the perspective of an investor, Lui discusses the importance of resilience. 10:43 “Simplicity” is a core concept with funding. Lui and the panel discuss what that word means to them. 12:42 The panel segues to discuss balancing the share of upsides. As someone who has been involved in both search and investment, Sahil shares his perspective. 16:57 Summarising the discussion to date, Paige says “the searcher plus a good opportunity, and the right funding structure, is what makes a deal bankable.” The next question is – is one of these elements more important? 18:26 The panel is presented with three companies, and asked to pick apart the opportunity of each. 25:44 An extended Q & A with the panel. 21:49 Pete provides a summary and analysis of the key findings from the panel. Key quotes: Tom: “The most important thing in deciding whether a deal is bankable from a debt perspective and where we should place that deadline is actually the searcher the people involved.” Sahil: “Both as a searcher and as an investor, you're trying to protect the downside, and to reduce business risk. There is a bit of operator risk, because there's a transition in owner operators, so what you're trying to really protect against is other downsides.” Lui: “Recurring revenue is what we would put as our number one priority. If the business has got 90% recurring revenue, you know that you're going to survive next year. It's as simple as that. It's why project-based businesses don't work in search. Because if you don't replace the revenue that disappears, you've got a failure.” Tom: “From a debt perspective, there is no transactional efficiency in adding mezzanine finance in a deal that might be four or five million dollars. Or even thinking that you're going to do that.” Sahil: “There is more risk for an operator than they would be in a private equity environment.” Sahil: “From the investor point of view, you want to know that the searcher is committed, and will stick through with a company and in hard times… there are some deals where searchers are putting on director guarantees, and underwriting debt themselves personally, or making other significant personal contributions. There are many ways to get comfort on how all-in the searcher is.” Lui: “There is no scenario where the wrong searcher will actually give us the right opportunity and right structure.” Tom: “There is absolutely no benefit to a debt provider to thinking through the future trajectory, in terms of the opportunity upside, if the business hasn't been proven today, or hasn't been performing to this point.”

Beverly Crusher is a Badass, but she needs backup! Picard and Riker try to borrow the re-fit Titan, but Captain Shaw says no. His Number One is a Seven of Nine, and she helps them anyway. And did we mention that Beverly has had another son and we don't know who the father is? #StarTrek #Picard #PicardSeason3 #Seven #Riker #Shaw #Titan #Crusher #Starfleet #Sex -Brought to you by Section 31- Episode 163 00:30 Mix Tape 01:30 Tapeworm 02:20 Slow Jam 03:30 Picard Season 3 03:50 Dealing with Spoilers 04:30 Empress Dreams 05:20 Albert the Prince 05:45 NO KIDS 06:20 1701 07:15 Don't Put DOT in a Closet 09:00 Thanks Patreons! https://patreon.com/starfleetunderground 09:33 Message from Tom: There be Whales where? 10:15 Kirk Mask Horror Movie Mix-up 11:00 Toweling Lana 11:15 Picard Cast visits The View - “Sexually Frustrating” Part 1 - https://youtu.be/jicbeR8xoVo Part 2 - https://youtu.be/vU1FRpys2ac 12:18 Dangers of Spoilers 14:06 Lower Decks Vinyl Soundtrack Release https://collider.com/star-trek-lower-decks-volume-1-vinyl-release/ 15:30 Learning to Curse 16:45 PanCan Update - Jonathan Frakes, Armin Shimerman, And John Billingsley Team Up For Trek Against Pancreatic Cancer https://pancan.org https://purplestride.org 17:50 Captain's Logs 20:01 Star Trek: Picard S3E1 - "The Next Generation" 20:09 Badass Beverly 20:35 Falling Out 21:17 Locked In The Closet 21:28 Healing and Killing People 21:49 Beverly Crusher is Kick-Ass 22:40 Phaser Set to Vape - Don't Vape The Phaser 23:35 Is It Dark In Here? 24:45 25th Century 25:00 47 25:18 Picard's Mix Tape! 25:54 Picard's Old Logs 26:30 Meridian Codec 27:03 Act I - "Directions Are Hard" 28:40 M'Talas Prime 29:19 I Know What A CODEC Is! 29:30 Raffi's Off The Wagon? 30:40 The Painting 31:06 It Was On The D, It Was of The D 31:14 The Fat One 31:31 You Should Follow @gaghyogi49 on Twitter. Also lots of Easter Eggs at https://youtu.be/vt00liGEGg0 32:40 CHEATER!!!! 34:10 Eaglemoss Canon? 34:55 Hellbird 35:45 Riker's Home Life? 38:10 Act II - "Dinner with Dickie!" 39:33 Also, Really Dickish 40:47 Nope. 42:18 Lower Decks 43:47 Deadnaming Seven 45:43 Act III - "Troublemaker" 47:15 Raffi Figures It Out 48:00 Seven Changes Course 49:46 Out of Warp Wake up 51:51 Seven vs Command Structure 53:13 Picard and Riker on the Shuttlecraft 53:57 Act IV - "Not The Momma" 54:42 Picard's Loose Lips 55:15 Getting the Drop on Riker 56:00 One Hit. Done 56:30 Scary Ship 57:30 Cliffhanger 57:57 Who's Your Daddy? 58:45 Beaming Your Ass Off and Dropping It On Your Face 1:01:31 Captain and Number One 1:02:05 Watch The Ready Room 1:04:22 For Annie -Thanks so much for listening! Get some MERCH - https://starfleet-underground.creator-spring.com Patreon - https://patreon.com/starfleetunderground Email: thecollective@starfleetunderground.com Website: https://starfleetunderground.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/StarfleetUnderG Instagram: https://instagram.com/starfleetunderground Facebook: https://facebook.com/starfleetunderground YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/Qtsy16 Check out the Hollywood Food Coalition https://hofoco.org/ Check out the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network https://pancan.org Explicit

Wanderful with Tom Morley “Irreverence, justified” Team Building is needed more than ever in 2023. Face to face onsite interaction. A reason to come together. 200 people drumming. A thousand people singing in harmony. Things we can't do on Zoom.   Tom Morley has a 40- year track record of doing this. Scritti Politti, David Bowie, Madness, Blue Chips everywhere and now you. Exactly where you are. That's Tom's speciality, finding out where you are and starting there.  Following his time in the music business with the 80s band Scritti Politti Tom has developed a truly artistic way of living where every experience leads him to the humorous uncovering of some universal truth. He turns his disasters and successes into Keynote inspiration for tired conference audiences who think they've seen it all. Maybe they HAVE seen it all, but have they FELT it? Have they DRUMMED it? Have they CHANTED it? Have they HARMONISED it? Four decades onstage, first behind a drum kit then being the front man for whole troupes of performers has earned him the name ‘The Stand Up Drummer'. What's he standing up for? You're about to find out. Timeline 00.00 - 00.44 Theme & Intro 00.45 - 05.30 David introduces Tom Morley 05.30 - 10.00 Tom discovers ‘analog instagram' and describes the way he looks 10.10 - 13.05 How the ‘groove' is found at the intersection of discipline, surrender and mischief. 13.06 - 14.07 Addressing the ‘thing' which the audience is thinking. 14.08 - 15.39 Irreverence Justified 15.40 - 21.21 Tom describes his work as a ‘polymath'. 21.22 - 23.00 Scritti Politti Anecdote - Mischief in action 23.10 - 29.02 Making good trouble - re-introducing people to their own creativity 29.03 - 35.27 The importance of dancing around the room - finding the flow - safety in the ‘groove'. 35.28 - 39.03 Playing with the walking rhythm - getting into the groove on the 2nd and 4th beat. 39.05 - 42.34 Don't just walk from A to B - dance to A to B: Bring out the inner-adult 42.35 - 44.24 The Wanderful Exercise: Finding the Groove 44.24 - 48.48 Epilogue & End Credits Quotations “My mantra is ‘we're better than this'. That's what drives me on.” (David) “Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin… all those people… they gave us permission to just jam clothes together.” (Tom) “I look like someone you would want to have a conversation with and that's because I'm shy. I can't really start conversations from scratch, I have to get people to start conversations with me.” (Tom) “The ‘groove' is found at the intersection of discipline, surrender and mischief.” (Tom) “Irreverence, justified.” (Tom) “We are our own powerpoint. We just need to turn ourselves on.” (Tom) “I'm there to re-introduce people to their own creativity.” (Tom) “We are up against the very well funded status-quo.” (Tom) “Drummers… what we do is make it safe for everybody… we keep the groove going.” (Tom) “The irony is, the safer they feel with the groove, the groovier the groove is, the more attractive… then they will feel something new.” (Tom) “We walk in rhythm, so you can play with the rhythm of walking. We pretty much walk in 4/4. If you want to get into the groove, emphasise the 2nd and the 4th beat. Then you get into the groove. It's called the off-beat.” (Tom) “What's the purpose of the dance? It's to dance.” (Tom) “There is a lot to get done. As we do it, lets dance our way there, because we'll get to better places if we do that.” (David) “I'm not interested in bringing out their inner-child. I'm interested in bringing out their inner-adult.” (Tom) Links Tom Morley (Guest) Website: https://tommorley.com/ Twitter: @TomMorley Instagram: _tommorley_   David Pearl (Host) Website: https://www.davidpearl.net/ Instagram: @davidpearl_here   Andrew Paine (Producer & Audio Engineer) Twitter: @ItPainesMe Instagram: @Sonicoyster

Today, you'll hear about public defense from the judge's point of view. Tom Boyd is a former Michigan District Court Judge who currently works in the court administration office.  At one point one of the weakest systems in the United States, his work to improve the indigent system has driven forward the future of Michigan public defense and has left a positive precedent for other states.   The 6th amendment is the ultimate protection against government power that is designed to keep people safe from a government acting out of control.   Many people believe that judges should be held accountable for protecting the constitution, so bettering the public defense system should be more of a priority.  Sharing his unique perspective, your mindset around public defense will be challenged and you'll see that a lot more than you think goes into fair representation for all.    Key Topics and Takeaways:   Tom's background and his role in the Michigan indigent system. [6:01] A judge's function in the Michigan courtroom. [10:21] Some history on the Michigan indigent defense system. [16:01] What gets in the way of constitutionally adequate representation. [21:21] Prosecutors and public defense. [28:03] Ending the plea deal epidemic. [34:57] Tom's experience being on both sides of the bench. [45:42] Where Tom wants Michigan public defense to go. [49:39] Holding prosecutors accountable. [54:00]   Guests:   Tom Boyd, Former Michigan District Court Judge, Michigan State Court Administrator   Resources:   Michigan Indigent Defense Commission   NLADA Report “Race to the Bottom”   Memorable Quotes:   “I want to talk to more than just public defenders. I want to talk to all range of people who are involved in the criminal justice system, because part of reform is going to require that all of the people in the system work together.” (2:07, Hunter)   “When you're the judge at the end of the conversation you win.” (13:35, Tom)   “If we can be crass about it, the judiciary is a service industry.” (22:05, Tom)   “I think that the Michigan indigent defense commission, which is still in its infancy, you know, six years, seven years, something like that. Has established itself as reliable and dedicated to advancement and done a good enough job that there are very few judges who fought the relinquishment of control.” (25:56, Tom)   “There are bad actors in the legal system who take advantage of individuals and they should be found, rooted out, and gotten out of the system.” (48:29, Hunter)   Contact Hunter Parnell: hwparnell@publicdefenseless.com Instagram www.publicdefenseless.com

About TomTom enjoys being a bridge between people and technology. When he's not thinking about ways to make enterprise demos less boring, Tom enjoys spending time with his wife and dogs, reading, and gaming with friends.Links Referenced: LaunchDarkly: https://launchdarkly.com Heidi Waterhouse Twitter: https://twitter.com/wiredferret 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: 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: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's promoted episode is brought to us by our friends at LaunchDarkly. And it's always interesting when there's a promoted guest episode because they generally tend to send someone who has a story to tell in different ways.Sometimes they send me customers of theirs. Other times they send me executives. And for this episode, they have sent me Tom Totenberg, who's a senior solutions engineer at LaunchDarkly. Tom, thank you for drawing the short straw. It's appreciated.Tom: [laugh]. Anytime. Thank you so much for having me, Corey.Corey: So, you're a senior solutions engineer, which in many different companies is interpreted differently, but one of the recurring themes tends to pop up is often that is a different way of saying sales engineer because if you say sales, everyone hisses and recoils when you enter the conversation. Is that your experience or do you see your role radically differently?Tom: Well, I used to be one of those people who did recoil when I heard the word sales. I was raised in a family where you didn't talk about finances, you know? That's considered to be faux pas, and when you hear the word sales, you immediately think of a car lot. But what I came to realize is that, especially when we talk about cloud software or any sort of community where you start to run into the same people at conferences over and over and over again, turns out the good salespeople are the ones who actually try to form relationships and try to solve problems. And I realized that oh, I like to work with those people. It's pretty exciting. It's nice to be aspirational about what people can do and bring in the technical chops to see if you can actually make it happen. So, that's where I fit in.Corey: The way that I've always approached it has been rather different. Because before I got into tech, I worked in sales a bunch of times and coming up from the—I guess, clawing your way up doing telesales was a polite way of describing—back in the days before there were strong regulations against it, calling people at dinner to sell them credit cards. And what's worse is I was surprisingly effective at it for a kid who, like, you grew up in a family where we didn't talk about money. And it's easy to judge an industry by its worst examples. Another one of these would be recruiting, for example.When everyone talks about how terrible third-party recruiters are because they're referring to the ridiculous spray-and-pray model of just blasting out emails to everything that hold still long enough that meets a keyword. And yeah, I've also met some recruiters that are transformative as far as the conversations you have with them go. But some of that with sales. It's, “Oh, well, you can't be any fun to talk to because I had a really bad experience buying a used car once and my credit was in the toilet.”Tom: Yeah, exactly. And you know, I have a similar experience with recruiters coming to LaunchDarkly. So, not even talking about the product; I was a skeptic, I was happy where I was, but then as I started talking to more and more people here, I'm assuming you've read the book Accelerate; you probably had a hand in influencing part of it.Corey: I can neither confirm nor deny because stealing glory is something I only do very intentionally.Tom: Oh okay, excellent. Well, I will intentionally let you have some of that glory for you then. But as I was reading that book, it reminded me again of part of why I joined LaunchDarkly. I was a skeptic, and they convinced me through everyone that I talked to just what a nice place it is, and the great culture, it's safe to fail, it's safe to try stuff and build stuff. And then if it fails, that's okay. This is the place where that can happen, and we want to be able to continue to grow and try something new.That's again, getting back to the solutions engineer, sales engineer part of it, how can we effectively convey this message and teach people about what it is that we do—LaunchDarkly or not—in a way that makes them excited to see the possibilities of it? So yeah, it's really great when you get to work with those type of people, and it absolutely shouldn't be influenced by the worst of them. Sometimes you need to find the right ones to give you a chance and get in the door to start having those conversations so you can make good decisions on your own, not just try to buy whatever someone's—whatever their initiative is or whatever their priority is, right?Corey: Once upon a time when I first discovered LaunchDarkly, it was pretty easy to describe what you folks did. Feature flags. For longtime listeners of the show, and I mean very longtime listeners of the show, your colleague Heidi Waterhouse was guest number one. So, I've been talking to you folks about a variety of different things in a variety of different ways. But yeah, “LaunchDarkly. Oh, you do feature flags.”And over time that message has changed somewhat into something I have a little bit of difficulty to be perfectly honest with you in pinning down. At the moment we're recording this, if I pull up launchdarkly.com, it says, “Fundamentally change how you deliver software. Innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece.”And I look at the last release I pushed out, which wound up basically fixing a couple of typos there, and it's like, “Well, shit. Is it going to make me sign my work because I'm kind of embarrassed by a lot of it.” So, it's aspirational, I get it, but it also somehow [occludes 00:05:32] a little bit of meaning. What is it you'd say it is you do here.Tom: Oh, Office Space. Wonderful. Good reference. And also, to take about 30 seconds back, Heidi Waterhouse, what a wonderful human. wiredferret on Twitter. Please, please go look her up. She's got just always such wonderful things to say. So—Corey: If you don't like Heidi Waterhouse, it is a near certainty it is because you've not yet met her. She's wonderful.Tom: Exactly. Yes, she is. So, what is it we'd say we do here? Well, when people think about feature flags—or at this point now, ‘feature management,' which is a broader scope—that's the term that we're using now, it's really talking about that last bit of software delivery, the last mile, the last leg, whatever your—you know, when you're pushing the button, and it's going to production. So, you know, a feature flag, if you ask someone five or ten years ago, they might say, oh, it's a fancy if statement controlled by a config file or controlled by a database.But with a sort of modern architecture, with global delivery, instant response time or fraction of a second response time, it's a lot more fundamental than that. That's why the word fundamental is there: Because it comes down to psychological safety. It comes down to feeling good about your life every day. So, whether it is that you're fixing a couple typos, or if you're radically changing some backend functionality, and trying out some new sort of search algorithm, a new API route that you're not sure if it's going to work at scale, honestly, you shouldn't have to stay up at night, you shouldn't have to think about deploying on a weekend because you should be able to deploy half-baked code to production safely, you should be able to do all of that. And that's honestly what we're all about.Now, there's some extra elements to it: Feedback loops, experimentation, metrics to make sure that your releases are doing well and doing what you anticipated that they would do, but really, that's what it comes down to is just feeling good about your work and making sure that if there is a fire, it's a small fire, and the entire audience isn't going to get part of the splash zone, right? We're making it just a little safer. Does that answer your question? Is that what you're getting at? Or am I still just speaking in the lingo?Corey: That gets it a lot closer. One of the breakthrough moments—of course I picked it up from one of Heidi's talks—is feature flag seems like a front end developer thing, yadda, yadda, yadda. And she said historically, yeah, in some ways, in some cases, that's how it started. But think about it this way. Think about separating out configuration from your deploy process. And what would that mean? What would that entail?And I look at my current things that I have put out there, and there is no staging environment, my feature branches main, and what would that change? In my case, basically nothing. But that's okay. Because I'm an irresponsible lunatic who should not be allowed near anything expensive, which is why I'm better at stateless things because I know better than to take my aura near things like databases.Tom: Yeah. So, I don't know how old you are Corey. But back—Corey: I'm in my mid-30s, which—Tom: Hey—Corey: —enrages my spouse who's slightly older. Because I'm turning 40 in July, but it's like, during the pandemic, as it has for many of us, the middle has expanded.Tom: There you go. Right. Exa—[laugh] exactly. Can neither confirm nor deny. You can only see me from about the mid-torso up, so, you know, you're not going to see whether I've expanded.But when we were in school doing group projects, we didn't have Google Docs. We couldn't see what other people were working on. You'd say, “Hey, we've got to write this paper. Corey, you take the first section, I'll take the second section, and we'll go and write and we'll try to squish it back together afterward.” And it's always a huge pain in the ass, right? It's terrible. Nobody likes group projects.And so the old method of Gitflow, where we're creating these feature branches and trying to squish them back later, and you work on that, and you work on this thing, and we can't see what each other are doing, it all comes down to context switching. It is time away from work that you care about, time away from exciting or productive work that you actually get to see what you're doing and put it into production, try it out. Nobody wants to deal with all the extra administrative overhead. And so yeah, for you, when you've got your own trunk-based development—you know, it's all just main—that's okay. When we're talking about teams of 40, 50, 100, 1000 suddenly becomes a really big deal if you were to start to split off and get away from trunk-based development because there's so much extra work that goes into trying to squish all that work back together, right? So, nobody wants to do all the extra stuff that surrounds getting software out there.Corey: It's toil. It feels consistently like it is never standardized so you always have to wind up rolling your own CI/CD thing for whatever it is. And forget between jobs; between different repositories and building things out, it's, “Oh, great. I get to reinvent the wheel some more.” It's frustrating.Tom: [laugh]. It's either that or find somebody else's wheel that they put together and see if you can figure out where all those spokes lead off to. “Is this secure? I don't know.”Corey: How much stuff do you have running in your personal stuff that has more or less been copied around for a decade or so? During the pandemic, I finally decided, all right, you know what I'm doing? That's right, being productive. We should fix that. I'm going to go ahead and redo my shell config—my zshrc—from scratch because, you know, 15 years of technical debt later, a lot of the things I used to really need it to do don't really apply anymore.Let's make it prettier, and let's make it faster. And that was great and all, but just looking through it, it was almost like going back in time for weird shell aliases that I don't need anymore. It's, well, that was super handy when I ran a Ruby production environment, but I haven't done that in seven years, and I haven't been in this specific scenario that one existed for since 2011. So maybe, maybe I can turn that one off.Tom: Yeah, maybe. Maybe we can get rid of that one. I mean, when's the last time you ran npm install on something you were going to try out here and paid attention to the warnings that came up afterward? “Hey, this one's deprecated. That one's deprecated.” Well, let's see if it works first, and then we'll worry about that later.Corey: Exactly. Security problems? Whatever. It's a Lambda function. What do I care?Tom: Yeah, it's fine. [laugh]. Exactly. Yeah. So, a lot of this is hypothetical for someone in my position, too, because I didn't ever get formal training as a software developer. I can copy and paste from Stack Overflow with the best of them and there's all sorts of resources out there, but really the people that we're talking to are the ones who actually live that day in, day out.And so I try to step into their shoes and try to feel that pain. But it's tough. Like, you have to be able to speak both languages and try to relate to people to see what are they actually running into, and is that something that we can help with? I don't know.Corey: The way that I tend to think about these things—and maybe it's accurate, and maybe it's not—it's just, no one shows up hoping to do a terrible job at work today, but we are constrained by a whole bunch of things that are imposed upon us. In some of the more mature environments, some of that is processes there for damn good reasons. “Well, why can't I just push everything I come up with to production?” “It's because we're a bank, genius. How about you think a little bit before you open your mouth?”Other times, it's because well, I have to go and fight with the CI/CD system, and I'm just going to go ahead and patch this one-line change into production. Better processes, better structure have made that a lot more… they've made it a lot easier to be able to do things the right way. But I would say we're nowhere near its final form, yet. There's so much yak-shaving that has to go into building out anything that it's frustrating, on some level, just all of the stuff you have to do, just to get the scaffolding in place to write nonsense. I mean, back when they announced Lambda functions it was, “In the future, the only code you'll write is business logic.”Yeah, well, I use a crap-ton of Lambda here and it feels like most of the code I write is gluing all of the weird formats and interchanges together in different APIs. Not a lot of business logic in that; and awful lot of JSON finickiness.Tom: Yeah, I'm with you. And especially at scale, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around how all of that extra translation is possibly going to give the same sort of performance and same sort of long-term usability, as opposed to something that just natively speaks the same language end-to-end. So yeah, I agree, there's still some evolution, some standardization that still needs to happen because otherwise we're going to end up with a lot of cruft at various points in the code to, just like you said, translate and make sure we're speaking the same language.Getting back to process though, I spent a good chunk of my career working with companies that are, I would say, a little more conservative, and talking to things like automotive companies, or medical device manufacturers. Very security-conscious, compliant places. And so agile is a four-letter word for them, right, [laugh] where we're going faster automatically means we're being dangerous because what would the change control board say? And so there's absolutely a mental shift that needs to happen on the business side. And developers are fighting this cultural battle, just to try to say, hey, it's better if we can make small iterative changes, there is less risk if we can make small, more iterative changes, and convincing people who have never been exposed to software or know the ins and outs of what it takes to get something from my laptop to the cloud or production or you know, wherever, then that's a battle that needs to be fought before you can even start thinking about the tooling. Living in the Midwest, there's still a lot of people having that conversation.Corey: So, you are clearly deep in the weeds of building and deploying things into production. You're clearly deep into the world of explaining various solutions to different folks, and clearly you have the obvious background for this. You majored in music. Specifically, you got a master's in it. So, other than the obvious parallel of you continue to sing for your supper, how do you get from there to here?Tom: Luck and [laugh]. Natural curiosity. Corey, right now you are sitting on the desk that is also housing my PC gaming computer, right? I've been building computers just to play video games since I was a teenager. And that natural curiosity really came in handy because when I—like many people—realize that oh, no, the career choice that I made when I was 18 ended up being not the career choice that I wanted to pursue for the rest of my life, you have to be able to make a pivot, right, and start to apply some of the knowledge that you got towards some other industries.So, like many folks who are now solutions engineers, there's no degree for solutions engineering, you can't go to school for it; everyone comes from somewhere else. And so in my case, that just happened to be music theory, which was all pedagogy and teaching and breaking down big complex pieces of music into one node at a time, doing analysis, figuring out what's going on underneath the hood. And all of those are transferable skills that go over to software, right? You open up some giant wall of spaghetti code and you have to start following the path and breaking it down because every piece is easy one note at a time, every bit of code—in theory—is easy one line at a time, or one function at a time, one variable at a time. You can continue to break it down further and further, right?So, it's all just taking the transferable skills that you may not see how they get transferred, but then bringing them over to share your unique perspective, because of your background, to wherever it is you're going. In my case, it was tech support, then training, and then solutions engineering.Corey: There's a lot to be said for blending different disciplines. I think that there was, uh, the naughts at least, and possibly into the teens, there was a bias for hiring people who look alike. And no, I'm not referring to the folks who are the white dudes you and I clearly present as but the people with a similar background of, “Oh, you went to these specific schools”—as long as they're Stanford—“And you majored in a narrow list of things”—as long as they're all computer science. And then you wind up going into the following type of role because this is the pedigree we expect and everything, soup to nuts, is aligned around that background and experience. Where you would find people who would be working in the industry for ten years, and they would bomb the interview because it turns out that most of us don't spend our days implementing quicksort on whiteboards or doing other algorithmic-based problems.We're mostly pushing pixels around a screen hoping to make ourselves slightly happier than we were. Here we are. And that becomes a strange world; it becomes a really, really weird moment, and I don't know what the answer is for fixing any of that.Tom: Yeah, well, if you're not already familiar with a quote, you should be, which is that—and I'm going to paraphrase here—but, “Diverse backgrounds lead to diversity in thought,” right? And that presents additional opportunities, additional angles to solve whatever problems you're encountering. And so you're right, you know, we shouldn't be looking for people who have the specific background that we are looking for. How it's described in Accelerate? Can you tell that I read it recently?Which we should be looking for capabilities, right? Are you capable? Do you have the capacity to do the problem-solving, the logic? And of course, some education or experience to prove that, but are you the sort of person who will be able to tackle this challenge? It doesn't matter, right, if you've handled that specific thing before because if you've handled that specific thing before, you're probably going to implement it the same way, again, even if that's not the appropriate solution, this time.So, scrap that and say, let's find the right people, let's find people who can come up with creative solutions to the problems that we're facing. Think about ways to approach it that haven't been done before. Of course don't throw out everything with the—you know, the bathwater out with a baby or whatever that is, but come in with some fresh perspectives and get it done.Corey: I really wish that there was more of an acceptance for that. I think we're getting there. I really do, but it takes time. And it does pay dividends. I mean, that's something I want to talk to you about.I love the sound of my own voice. I wouldn't have two podcasts if I didn't. The counterargument, though, is that there's an awful lot of things that get, you know, challenging, especially when, unlike in a conference setting, it's most people consider it rude to get up and walk out halfway through. When we're talking and presenting information to people during a pandemic situation, well, that changes a lot. What do you do to retain people's interest?Tom: Sure. So, Covid really did a number on anyone who needs to present information or teach. I mean, just ask the millions of elementary, middle school, and high schoolers out there, even the college kids. Everyone who's still getting their education suddenly had to switch to remote learning.Same thing in the professional world. If you are doing trainings, if you're doing implementation, if you're doing demos, if you're trying to convey information to a new audience, it is so easy to get distracted at the computer. I know this firsthand. I'm one of those people where if I'm sitting in an airport lobby and there's a TV on my eyes are glued to that screen. That's me. I have a hard time looking away.And the same thing happens to anyone who's on the receiving end of any sort of information sharing, right? You got Slack blowing you up, you've got email that's pinging you, and that's bound to be more interesting than whatever the person on the screen is saying. And so I felt that very acutely in my job. And there's a couple of good strategies around it, right, which is, we need to be able to make things interactive. We shouldn't be monologuing like I am doing to you right now, Corey.We shouldn't be [laugh] just going off on tangents that are completely irrelevant to whoever's listening. And there's ways to make it more interactive. I don't know if you are familiar, or how much you've watched Twitch, but in my mind, the same sorts of techniques, the same sorts of interactivity that Twitch streamers are doing, we should absolutely be bringing that to the business world. If they can keep the attention of 12-year-olds for hours at a time, why can we not capture the attention of business professionals for an hour-long meeting, right? There's all sorts of techniques and learnings that we can do there.Corey: The problem I keep running into is, if you go stumbling down that pathway into the Twitch streaming model, I found it awkward the few experiments I've made with it because unless I have a whole presentation ready to go and I'm monologuing the whole time, the interactive part with the delay built in and a lot of ‘um' and ‘ah' and waiting and not really knowing how it's going to play out and going seat of the pants, it gets a little challenging in some respects.Tom: Yeah, that's fair. Sometimes it can be challenging. It's risky, but it's also higher reward. Because if you are monologuing the entire time, who's to say that halfway through the content that you are presenting is content that they want to actually hear, right? Obviously, we need to start from some sort of fundamental place and set the stage, say this is the agenda, but at some point, we need to get feedback—similar to software development—we need to know if the direction that we're going is the direction they also want to go.Otherwise, we start diverging at minute 10 and by minute 60, we have presented nothing at all that they actually want to see or want to learn about. So, it's so critical to get that sort of feedback and be able to incorporate it in some way, right? Whether that way is something that you're prepared to directly address. Or if it's something that says, “Hey, we're not on the same page. Let's make sure this is actually a good use of time instead of [laugh] me pretending and listening to myself talk and not taking you into account.” That's critical, right? And that is just as important, even if it feels worse in the moment.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 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.Corey: From where I sit, one of the many, many, many problems confronting us is that there's this belief that everyone is like we are. I think that's something fundamental, where we all learn in different ways. I have never been, for example—this sounds heretical sitting here saying it, but why not—I'm not a big podcast person; I don't listen to them very often, just because it's such a different way of consuming information. I think there are strong accessibility reasons for there to be transcripts of podcasts. That's why every 300-and-however-many-odd episodes that this one winds up being the sequence in, every single one of them has a transcript attached to it done by a human.And there's a reason for that. Not just the accessibility wins which are obvious, but the fact that I can absorb that information way more quickly if I need to review something, or consume that. And I assume other people are like me, they're not. Other people prefer to listen to things than to read them, or to watch a video instead of listening, or to build something themselves, or to go through a formal curriculum in order to learn something. I mean, I'm sitting here with an eighth-grade education, myself. I take a different view to how I go about learning things.And it works for me, but assuming that other people learn the same way that I do will be awesome for a small minority of people and disastrous for everyone else. So, maybe—just a thought here—we shouldn't pattern society after what works for me.Tom: Absolutely. There is a multiple intelligence theory out there, something they teach you when you're going to be a teacher, which is that people learn in different ways. You don't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. We all learn in different ways and getting back to what we were talking about presenting effectively, there needs to be multiple approaches to how those people can consume information. I know we're not recording video, but for everyone listening to this, I am waving my hands all over the place because I am a highly visual learner, but you must be able to accept that other people are relying more on the auditory experience, other people need to be able to read that—like you said with the accessibility—or even get their hands on it and interact with it in some way.Whether that is Ctrl-F-ing your way through the transcript—or Command-F I'm sorry, Mac users [laugh]; I am also on a Mac—but we need to make sure that the information is ready to be consumed in some way that allows people to be successful. It's ridiculous to think that everyone is wired to be able to sit in front of a computer or in a little cubicle for eight hours a day, five days a week, and be able to retain concentration and productivity that entire time. Absolutely not. We should be recording everything, allowing people to come back and consume it in small chunks, consume it in different formats, consume it in the way that is most effective to them. And the onus for that is on the person presenting, it is not on the consumer.Corey: I make it a point to make what I am doing accessible to the people I am trying to reach, not to me. And sometimes I'm slacking, for example, we're not recording video today, so whenever it looks like I'm not paying attention to you and staring off to the side, like, oh, God, he's boring. No. I have the same thing mirrored on both of my screens; I just prefer to look at the thing that is large and easy to read, rather than the teleprompter, which is a nine-inch screen that is about four feet in front of my face. It's one of those easier for me type of things.On video, it looks completely off, so I don't do it, but I'm oh good, I get to take the luxury of not having to be presentable on camera in quite the same way. But when I'm doing a video scenario, I absolutely make it a point to not do that because it is off-putting to the people I'm trying to reach. In this case, I'm not trying to reach you; I already have. This is a promoted guest episode you're trying to reach the audience, and I believe from what I can tell, you're succeeding, so please keep at it.Tom: Oh, you bet. Well, thank you. You know this already, but this is the very first podcast I've ever been a guest on. So, thank you also for making it such a welcoming place. For what it's worth, I was not offended and didn't think you weren't listening. Obviously, we're having a great time here.But yeah, it's something that especially in the software space, people need to be aware of because everyone's job is—[laugh]. Whether you like it or not, here's a controversial statement: Everyone's job is sales. Are you selling your good ideas for your product, to your boss, to your product manager? Are you able to communicate with marketing to effectively say, “Hey, this is what, in tech support, I'm seeing. This is what people are coming to me with. This is what they care about.”You are always selling your own performance to your boss, to your customers, to other departments where you work, to your spouse, to everybody you interact with. We're all selling ourselves all the time. And all of that is really just communication. It's really just making sure you're able to meet people where they are and, effectively, bridge your point of view with theirs to make sure that we're on the same page and, you know, we're able to communicate well. That's so especially important now that we're all remote.Corey: Just so you don't think this is too friendly of a place, let's go ahead and finish out the episode with a personal attack. Before you wound up working at LaunchDarkly. You were at Perforce. What's up with that? I mean, that seems like an awfully big company to cater to its single customer, who is of course J. Paul Reed.Tom: [laugh]. Yeah. Well, Perforce is a wonderful place. I have nothing but love for Perforce, but it is a very different landscape than LaunchDarkly, certainly. When I joined Perforce, I was supporting product called Helix ALM, which, they're still headquartered—Perforce is headquartered here in Minneapolis. I just saw some Perforce folks last week. It truly is a great place, and it is the place that introduced me to so many DevOps concepts.But that's a fair statement. Perforce has been around for a while. It has grown by acquisition over the past several years, and they are putting together new offerings by mixing old offerings together in a way that satisfies more modern needs, things like virtual production, and game development, and trying to package this up in a way that you can then have a game development environment in a box, right? So, there's a lot of things to be said for that, but it very much is a different landscape than a smaller cloud-native company. Which it's its own learning curve, let me tell you, but truly, yeah, to your Perforce, there's a lot more complexity to the products themselves because they've been around for a little bit longer.Solid, solid products, but there's a lot going on there. And it's a lot harder to learn them right upfront. As opposed to something like LaunchDarkly, which seems simple on the surface and you can get started with some of the easy concepts in implementation in, like, an hour, but then as you start digging deeper, whoof, suddenly, there's a lot more complexity hidden underneath the surface than just in terms of how this is set up, and some of those edge cases.Corey: I have to say for the backstory, for those who are unfamiliar, is I live about four miles away from J. Paul Reed, who is a known entity in reliability engineering, in the DevOps space, has been for a long time. So, to meet him, of course I had to fly to Israel. And he was keynoting DevOpsDays Tel Aviv. And I had not encountered him before, and it was this is awesome, I loved his talk, it was fun.And then I gave a talk a little while later called, “Terrible Ideas in Git.” And he's sitting there just glaring at me, holding his water bottle that is a branded Perforce thing, and it's like, “Do you work there?” He's like, “No. I just love Perforce.” It's like, “Congratulations. Having used it, I think you might be the only one.”I kid. I kid. It was great and a lot of different things. It was not quite what I needed when I needed it to but that's okay. It's gotten better and everyone else is not me, as we've discussed; people have different use cases. And that started a very long-running joke that J. Paul Reed is the entirety of the Perforce customer base.Tom: [laugh]. Yeah. And to your point, there's definitely use cases—you're talking about Perforce Version Control or Helix Core.Corey: Back in those days, I don't believe it was differentiated.Tom: It was just called Perforce. Exactly right. But yeah, as Perforce has gotten bigger, now there's different product lines; you name it. But yeah, some of those modern scalable problems, being able to handle giant binary files, being able to do automatic edge replication for globally distributed teams so that when your team in APAC comes online, they're not having to spend the first two hours of their day just getting the most recent changes from the team in the Americas and Europe. Those are problems that Perforce is absolutely solving that are out there, but it's not problems that everybody faces and you know, there's just like everybody else, we're navigating the landscape and trying to find out where the product actually fits and how it needs to evolve.Corey: And I really do wish you well on it. I think there's going to be an awful lot of—Tom: Mm-hm.Corey: —future stories where there is this integration. And you'd say, “Oh, well, what are you wishing me well for? I don't work there anymore.” But yeah, but isn't that kind of we're talking about, on some level, of building out things that are easy, that are more streamlined, that are opinionated in the right ways, I suppose. And honestly, that's the thing that I found so compelling about LaunchDarkly. I have a hard time imagining I would build anything for production use that didn't feature it these days if I were, you know, better at computers?Tom: Sure. Yeah. [laugh]. Well, we do have our opinions on how some things should work, right? Where the data is exposed because with any feature flagging system or feature management—LaunchDarkly included—you've got a set of rules, i.e. who should see this, where is it turned on? Where is it turned off? Who in your audience or user base should be able to see these features? That's the rules engine side of it.And on the other side, you've got the context to decide, well, you know, I'm Corey, I'm logging in, I'm in my mid-30s. And I know all this information about Corey, and those rules need to then be able to determine whether something should be on or off or which experience Corey gets. So, we are very opinionated over the architecture, right, and where that evaluation actually happens and how that data is exposed or where that's exposed. Because those two halves need to meet and both halves have the potential to be extremely sensitive. If I'm targeting based off of a list of 10,000 of my premium users' email addresses, I should not be exposing that list of 10,000 email addresses to a web browser or a mobile phone.That's highly insecure. And inefficient; that's a large amount of text to send, over 10,000 email addresses. And so when we're thinking about things like page load times, and people being able to push F12 to inspect the page, absolutely not, we shouldn't be exposing that there. At the same time, it's a scary prospect to say, “Hey, I'm going to send personal information about Corey over to some third-party service, some edge worker that's going to decide whether Corey should see a feature or not.” So, there's definitely architectural considerations of different use cases, but that's something that we think through all the time and make sure is secure.There's a reason—I'm going to put on my sales engineer hat here—which is to say that there is a reason that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is our sponsor for FedRAMP moderate certification, in process right now, expected to be completed mid-2022. I don't know. But anybody who is unfamiliar with that, if you've ever had to go through high trust certification, you know, any of these compliances to make your regulators happy, you know that FedRAMP is so incredibly stringent. And that comes down to evaluating where are we exposing the data? Who gets to see that? Is security built in and innate into the architecture? Is that something that's been thought through?I have went so far afield from the original point that you made, but I agree, right? We've got to be opinionated about some things while still providing the freedom to use it in a way that is actually useful to you and [laugh] and we're not, you know, putting up guardrails, that mean that you've got such a narrow set of use cases.Corey: I'd like to hope—maybe I'm wrong on this—that it gets easier the more that we wind up doing these things because I don't think that it necessarily has been easy enough for an awful lot of us.Tom: When you say ‘it,' what do you mean?Corey: All of it. That's the best part, I suppose the easy parts of working on computers, which I guess might be typing if you learn it early enough.Tom: Sure. [laugh] yeah. Mario Teaches Typing, or Starcraft taught me how to type quickly. You can't type slowly or else your expansion is going to get destroyed. No, so for someone who got their formal education in music or for someone with an eighth-grade education, I agree there needs to be resources out there.And there are. Not every single StackOverflow post with a question that's been asked has the response, “That's a dumb question.” There are some out there. There's definitely a community or a group of folks who think that there is a correct way to do things and that if you're asking a question, that it's a dumb question. It really isn't. It's getting back to the diverse backgrounds and diverse schools of thought that are coming in.We don't know where someone is coming from that led them to that question without the context, and so we need to continue providing resources to folks to make it easy to self-enable and continue abstracting away the machine code parts of it in friendlier and friendlier ways. I love that there are services like Squarespace out there now, right, that allow anybody to make a website. You don't have to have a degree in computer science to spin something up and share it with the world on the web. We're going to continue to see that type of abstraction, that type of on-ramp for folks, and I'm excited to be part of it.Corey: I really look forward to it. I'm curious to see what happens next for you, especially as you continue—‘you' being the corporate ‘you' here; that's like the understood ‘you' are the royal ‘you.' This is the corporate ‘you'—continue to refine the story of what it is LaunchDarkly does, where you start, where you stop, and how that winds up playing out.Tom: Yeah, you bet. Well, in the meantime, I'm going to continue to play with things like GitHub Copilot, see how much I can autofill, and see which paths that takes me down?Corey: Oh, I've been using it for a while. It's great. Just tab-complete my entire life. It's amazing.Tom: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.Corey: [unintelligible 00:36:08] other people's secrets start working, great, that makes my AWS bill way lower when I use someone else's keys. But that's neither here nor there.Tom: Yeah, exactly. That's a next step of doing that npm install or, you know, bringing in somebody else's [laugh] tools that they've already made. Yeah, just a couple weeks ago, I was playing around with it, and I typed in two lines: I imported the LaunchDarkly SDK and the configuration for the LaunchDarkly SDK, and then I just let it autofill, whatever it wanted. It came out with about 100 lines of something or other. [laugh]. And not all of it made sense, but hey, I saw where the thought process was. It was pretty cool to see.Corey: I really want to thank you for spending as much time and energy as you have talking about how you see the world and where you folks are going. If people want to learn more. Where's the best place to find you?Tom: At launchdarkly.com. Of course, any other various different booths, DevOpsDays, we're at re:Invent, we're at QCon right now. We're at all sorts of places, so come stop by, say hi, get a demo. Maybe we'll talk.Corey: Excellent. We will be tossing links to that into the [show notes 00:37:09]. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.Tom: Corey, Thank you.Corey: Tom Totenberg, senior solutions engineer at LaunchDarkly. 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 and insulting comment, and then I'll sing it to you.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.

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 18th, 2021Dijkstra's TweetstormWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 18th, 2021.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on October 18th included Edwin Peer, Dan Cross, Ryan Zezeski, Tom Lyon, Aaron Goldman, Simeon Miteff, MattSci, Nate, raycar5, night, and Drew Vogel. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Dijkstra's 1975 “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” EWD 498 tweet > PL/1 > belongs more to the problem set than to the solution setThe use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offenceAPL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums - [@3:08](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=188) Languages affect the way you think It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. - [@4:33](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=273) Adam's Perl story - The Camel Book, not to be confused with OCaml - “You needed books to learn how to do things” - CGI - [@9:04](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=544) Adam meets Larry Wall - [@11:59](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=719) Meeting Dennis Ritchie - “We were very excited; too excited some would say…” - [@15:04](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=904) Effects of learning languages, goals of a language, impediments to learning - Roger Hui of APL and J fame, RIP. - Accessible as a language value - Microsoft Pascal, Turbo Pascal - Scratch - LabVIEW - [@25:31](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=1531) Nate's experience - Languages have different audiences - [@27:18](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=1638) Human languages - The Esperanto con-lang - Tonal langages - Learning new and different programming languages - [@37:06](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=2226) Adam's early JavaScript (tweet) - circa 1996 - [@44:10](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=2650) Learning from books, sitting down and learning by typing out examples - How do you learn to program in a language? - Zed Shaw on learning programming through spaced repetition blog - Rigid advice on how to learn - ALGOL 68, planned successor to ALGOL 60 - ALGOL 60, was, according to Tony Hoare, “An improvment on nearly all of its successors” - [@50:41](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3041) Where does Rust belong in the progression of languages someone learns? Rust is what happens when you've got 25 years of experience with C++, and you remove most of the rough edges and make it safer? - “Everyone needs to learn enough C, to appreciate what it is and what it isn't” - [@52:45](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3165) “I wish I had learned Rust instead of C++” - [@53:35](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3215) Adam: Brown revisits intro curriculum, teaching Scheme, ML, then Java - Adam learning Rust back in 2015 (tweet) “First Rust Program Pain (So you can avoid it…)” Tom: There's a tension in learning between the people who hate magic and want to know how everything works in great detail, versus the people who just want to see something useful done. It's hard to satisfy both. - [@1:00:02](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3602) Bryan coming to Rust - “Learn Rust with entirely too many linked lists” guide - Rob Pike interview Its concurrency is rooted in CSP, but evolved through a series of languages done at Bell Labs in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Newsqueak, Alef, and Limbo. - [@1:03:01](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3781) Debugging Erlang processes. Ryan on runtime v. language - Tuning runtimes. Go and Rust - [@1:06:42](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4002) Rust is its own build system - Bryan's 2018 “Falling in love with Rust” post - Lisp macros, Clean, Logo, Scratch - [@1:11:27](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4287) The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity. - [@1:12:09](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4329) Oxide bringup updates - I2C Inter-Integrated Circuit - SPI Serial Peripheral Interface - iCE40If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Ep 9 - Theory Bites 2: Youth Liberation & The First PrisonWe've got another short Theory Bites! First we discuss Youth Liberation - (I)An-ok Ta Chai, 2004, and then First Prison - William Gillis, 2018 Case Closed / Detective Conan (video)Flanders' Parents (video)Dead Poets Society Dad (video - was that last episode?)Rutger Bregman Real Life Lord of the Flies (article)Angelica's Last Stand (paywalled video)When schools become The Lord of the Rings (tweet) https://www.worksintheorypodcast.com Twitter: @workstheorypodInstagram: works.in.theory Produced, edited, and transcribed by Allyson https://www.forestfreeter.comTheme song by http://woulg.com/Transcript:Works in TheoryTheory Bites: Youth Liberation and The First PrisonElysha: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another Works In Theory - Theory Bites. I am Elysha here from Works In Theory Podcast, and I am here with Tom-Tom: Tom!Elysha: And Nate. Nate: I'm Nate. Elysha: Yes. I don't know why we wanted folks to say their own names, but I did. And they did it. And I love that. So thank you. Nate: Yeah.Elysha: We're going to try and smush two articles together today for this one bite. So this is big bite or two small bites. Both of these articles came from the anarchist library dot org. Which is sort of a loosely moderated library, archive of different anarchist texts. And I wanted to mention that because they're a great resource. If you're interested in browsing around for yourself,Tom: But you shouldn't have to, our podcast is all you need. So don't worry too much [00:01:00] about that.Elysha: Yeah, but just, just so that, you know, the tool is out there, you don't need it. You don't need you. Didn't, it's fine. But like it's, anarchist library dot org, and I just really wanted to mention it for these two texts because, the authors of these, you may not have heard of in the same way that you've heard of Emma Goldman.So we've got two pieces here. I'm really not sure what order we're going to do them in, but we've got one by William Gillis, which is called The First Prison and one by (I)An-ok Ta Chai, which is called Youth Liberation. Nate: So I say, let's start with the youth liberation piece. Both because it's written earlier it's from 2004 versus the other one is from 2018. And because it's a little shorter.Tom: Yeah. So the the premise of this one, the kind of question that I think I took out of it was we treat adults as infallible and self-sufficient children are incapable. But like, is that true? And are we just conditioning children for subservience to the state capitalism, other forms of control? Or [00:02:00] should we treat them with mutual respect and treat it like any other issue, any other anarchist position?And it's similar to the Goldman piece, but I think it's it's got some distinctions. For one thing, I think it's a little more extreme.Nate: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. In fact, you keep saying children, but the author actually would prefer that we say kids.Tom: Oh, you're right!Nate: Yeah, they bring up the fact that children sort of has like a connotation of like "childish", of like, "less developed" you know, just like built right into it. And even though the piece is called Youth Liberation, they said youth tends to refer to teenagers, which is, you know, generally correct.And so what they're talking about as a, gerontocracy like just an overall system of like hierarchy in which adults have domination over kids. Elysha: The piece kind of opens up, asking the question of: how are people in society treated? And you can tell a lot about society based on how they treat their children and they're elderly. And I feel like we're kind of at like, [00:03:00] an era of reckoning with that, at least around here, we had so much trouble with like care homes for elderly people through the pandemic and schools brought up their absolute array of challenges as well.And you know, not all of those are specifically rooted in like how we treat children, but kind of they are. And the idea that yeah - what we're talking about here, that kids are entirely dependent on those structures and require that control that like you have to go to school, you have to decide every aspect of their lives and it needs to be within the structure.Maybe our, all of our lives would be a lot easier if we were a little easier on like those early years. Nate: Yeah, definitely. And you know, you bring up this idea that kids according to our society, like need to be controlled need to like, not be able to make their own decisions because they're dependent, you know? The other says it's an often [00:04:00] unspoken notion that adults are omniscient or infallible or not dependent on help and support while kids are.Which of course is not true. Right? Like adults make mistakes all the time, just like kids do. But we don't base any sort of specific hierarchy over adults that way, like, I thought this was kind of interesting food for thought. The other says:"It all becomes apparent if one reflects on how it proposition to systematically dominate people who are physically ill, injured, ignorant ill-informed, or intoxicated, all of which are also temporary conditions like childhood that would be universally laughed at and dismissed."I guess the idea here is the same arguments that say kids, you need to be dominated. Could also be used to say that injured, ignorant or intoxicated people need to be dominated because, you know, they can make stupid mistakes or they are not infallible or omniscient. But of course we wouldn't say that it's right for those people to be dominated. Tom: Yeah. If we didn't let intoxicated people have free will, we wouldn't have much of a government, [00:05:00] I think. Elysha: Or a lot of art. Tom: That's true too.Nate: It's interesting you bring bec ause we talked about this a little bit offline, but when I was reading this part about the idea that we wouldn't let adults who are, you know, in some way in capable of making their own decisions, we wouldn't let them be dominated.That's actually not exactly true. You know, and I brought up the, the whole Free Britney thing with Britney Spears and her conservatorship. Like the whole idea behind that is that she is not, you know, for whatever reason able to make her own decisions. And therefore, like there are other people who are legally able to dominate her and make decisions for her. The whole Free Britney Movement is the idea that we recognize that's wrong, that she is able to make her own decisions and she should be allowed to make mistakes just like anybody else. But it's all premised on this idea that she's somehow more childlike, you know? And that brings in this idea that, that like, well, why is, why is that accepted for children? You know, I think a lot of the arguments for Free Britney would use [00:06:00] language like, "Well, she's an adult. She can make her own decisions." But like children can make their own decisions too.Tom: Yeah. And like, this comes up a lot with acting, especially where, like children are often taken advantage of by parents and by agents or whatever. They work them a lot and make a lot of money off with the kids and the kids don't see any of it. And usually end up kind of wrecking their lives because it's very traumatic to kind of like have that duality of life where you're seen as a superstar that doesn't make any money and has no will.Nate: Yeah, exactly. It's hard to imagine that these kids would be any worse off if they were allowed to make decisions themselves.Elysha: No doubt. Tom: I have a quote here:"The domination of kids breaks the wills of people and inserts authoritarian programming, so that they can later reproduce situations such as the state capitalism and gerontocracy when they get older themselves."Nate: Yeah. A hundred percent and yeah. So I don't know how you, you all feel about this. Like how much you agree with the idea of youth liberation. You [00:07:00] know, I think I do agree with it and it's broad terms. I don't think I agree with everything we were going to talk about in both of these pieces. One point that the author makes towards the end, which I think is salient and worth keeping in mind is that like these kinds of things that seem really natural, these like hierarchies that seem really natural are like exactly the type of things that as anarchists we should be questioning. Cause every hierarchy at some point was considered natural.Tom: They say:"Youth liberation is not a new idea, a lot of people have written about it and articulated it in different ways. There are already a number of people out there practicing, or at least trying to practice autonomy, respecting ways of relating with kids. With this being the case, it only makes sense for anarchists to have youth liberation fully integrated with the rest of the anarchist perspective, gerontocracy needs to be right up there with capitalism, the state patriarchy and white supremacy as institutions of social control that as anarchists, we aim to destroy."Elysha: Can we spend this into a discussion of one of those other institutions of social control - the piece by William Gillis that we're reading is [00:08:00] called The First PrisonNate: I think it's time to move on to that one.Elysha: One of the main points that we wanted to highlight is the idea that adult supremacy, gerontocracy, paints itself as a kind of meritocracy, you're only denied political agency because you don't yet have mental agency, but there is no mechanism, not a single one under adults who primacy whereby a six year old might prove qualifications to obtain their freedom and equal status.So in this world that we live in, there's nothing a kid can do to prove to you that they deserve to make whichever decision is that you're withholding from them. The only way to do that to gain that freedom is to graduate away from childhood turn 18, turn 14, turn 16, turn 21, whatever the arbitrary number is that all of a sudden means that yes, we can finally make those decisions for ourselves out of nowhere.And this is probably like tying back into some of the other conversations we've had [00:09:00] of not being given the tools of like critical thinking and like that decision making, like that first taste of freedom is like, just when your ID says that you are old enough.Nate: Yeah, or well, and Gillis says in his mind, it's actually that you, the reason the teenagers are given autonomy is simply because they're now big enough to fight back. They're big enough to beat up their parents. Elysha: They can band together for resistance and physically overwhelmed their masters. Would you say, would William Gillis say. Nate: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which is interesting, you know, like, and this. Did give me pause. You know, when you think about it, like it is obviously, if you were to try to explain youth liberation to somebody who'd never heard about it, I think one of their first responses would be something like, "well, you know, kids just aren't smart enough or aren't mature enough to make their own decisions."And then, you know, if you come back, could a child do to prove to you, they were mature enough? Like, would you accept some proof from a six-year-old that they were mature enough to make their own decisions? And, you know, I certainly can't that go, [00:10:00] but that would be so.Tom: That's one of the, I think the major premises in this article is about, you know, if you were suddenly transformed into a child, it's a very like Detective Conan, anime sort of premise of like, if you were a kid, would you suddenly be able to convince people that you know enough to do things without them controlling your life and - probably not, but I don't know. I found it interesting that as time went on, we went from a hundred years ago to, you know, 2004 to now 2018 in this one, it has gotten more and more - I mean, like of course we have cherry picked, we just gotten three articles, but - it just got more extreme sounding. Maybe it's something to be extreme about. Like, it's been a hundred years since Goldman wrote, you know, about the child and its enemies. And we're still basically dealing with the same question: at what point do we treat children like people or sorry, kids. I keep doing that.I honestly think that (I)An-ok Ta C hai made [00:11:00] a pretty good point, that we use children as a derogatory kind of word. So I've been really trying to think about like, should I, maybe I should exercise that from my vocabulary and just say kids.Elysha: Yeah. I'm probably not gonna like fight people over it, but I think it's definitely worth considering just because of how powerful, like the words that we use and their connotations are. Right. The idea of like childish and all those negatives. But it sort of painting the idea of like lacking that autonomy, lacking the good sense to be able to make decisions. And that is "childish," like trying to separate those from the young human individuals in question. Nate: From the kids. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And actually I think Gillis even sort of expands on that a little and, and adds a little bit more weight to that argument. He points out that like all hierarchy is like, whether it be white supremacy, patriarchy, et cetera, like they're all sort of premised on this analogy of the oppressed class [00:12:00] as childish, you know, as more childlike than the oppressor class.So, it's built into the very language of all hierarchies.Elysha: We talk about, you know, what is the root of like injustice in our society. And there is not one that is how it got to be. It gets to be so pervasive. Like just all the different layers that we all get fucked around in the world. And like, yes, absolutely age is one of those.And gerontocracy is one of those right alongside, obviously with different historical weights, of you white supremacy and the other ones that you mentioned, patriarchy.Tom: Yeah, there's a quote in this piece that says:"Every hierarchy, every abuse, every act of domination that seeks to justify or excuse itself, appeals through analogy to the rule of adults over children. We're all indoctrinated from birth in ways of, "Because I said so." The flags of supposed experience, benevolence, and familial obligation are are the first of many paraded through our lives to celebrate the suppression of our agency, the dismissal of our desires, the reduction of our personhood. Our whole [00:13:00] world is caught in a cycle of abuse, largely unexamined and unnamed. And at its root lies our dehumanization of children." Nate: And I think that sort of brings it back to what I mentioned earlier about this sort of like seeming natural, this like hierarchy of adults over children seeming natural. Opponents of this idea of youth liberation might point to like non-human animals, and be like, well, look like every, every species has adults or at least mammals have adults that in birds have adults that take care of children or that are like in charge of children.And I think that, like, that kind of puts me in the mind of, of Bookchin's argument: the hierarchy is different than having different roles. So like, yes adult bird has to feed and teaches children how to fly, but in no sense, does a dominate the baby birds, does it like tell the baby birds what to do.And so I think that we can use that notion of hierarchy as being like, sort of like a systemic thing an institutionalized thing to dispense with the idea that somehow the [00:14:00] hierarchy of adults over children is natural.Tom: Yeah, but appeals to nature- they don't do it for me. So like, even, even if you're able to be like, yeah, but the mama bear, I don't know, puts their cubs to bed at 8:00 PM. I'd be like, I don't care. Like mama bear, can't speak. I need to talk to humans about human things. This also is a pretty I think contentious essay when we talked about it, we were a little, like, some of this maybe is, is advocating for a position, but not giving a lot of evidence as to why I think. And for instance, there was a point in it about the cool aunt and I think we all had kind of, some questions about that. I don't actually have anything written. Does anyone have anything written about.Nate: Well, Hey, let me let me find the quote here so we can give the listeners some context. Gillis says:" The cool aunt, the preschool teacher functioning as an aid relief worker to come briefly to take selfies with you as a prop. They're not co-conspirators, they're the incomplete flotsam, the corpses of children who tried to make it over the finish line intact. Incomplete insurgents into adulthood were worn [00:15:00] down and forgot that mission. They're not undercover children, but the warped remains. Poorly formed adults perhaps, but adults still."He's talking about, people who try to give children more agency, I guess, or try to like respect children more. Yeah. That's not cutting it for Gillis. But like you said, Tom, I'm not exactly clear on why. Elysha: Yeah. Or like what, the alternative is that Gillis wants from us. Nate: Yeah, what would be a complete insurgent or an undercover child. Elysha: Cause there is definitely a gap there that needs to be bridged. Because like we are told like we've been talking about here, like all of these experiences in childhood. Lead us to then reproduce that gerontocracy that same like hierarchy of adults over children.And, you know, the idea here that even the cool aunt, who's trying to show up for you. Like they're still not doing it. And I get like the impulse to be combative at [00:16:00] that, but it doesn't really provide any sort of like, ideas of like how we can make that better. It's just "this sucks." And like, "they're not here for you and no one's coming to free you."Tom: Is the only real solution here that this cool aunt, or this person should like take you from your parents and be like "here's a hundred dollars on a car, have fun. Your life begins now." Like, what is, what is the what is it, the inclination, what are we supposed to do with that feeling? It paints a good picture of, you know, there's the uncle that smokes weed or whatever. And they're cool. They're not real strict and they're not whatever, but at the end of the day you have to go back to your parents. And so I guess they're not liberating enough, so, but I don't know what it would be. And maybe Gillis is just pointing out that these things exist and they're not contradictory to what I'm saying.Nate: Yeah, for sure. And you know, maybe it has something to do with, like, if we're [00:17:00] taking, Gillis' worldview at its word. Because it's so systemic because like we live in a adult supremacist society, a gerontocracy like adults can never be totally complicit because they can always if push comes to shove, resort to ordering children around.But yeah, like, I don't know, that's it just seems like a bleak picture. Like can there not be a John Brown of adults for children? I don't know. So what do you all think about this idea of youth liberation and everything we've read in these two essays and the Goldman piece? Tom: I think it's really gotten me to think a lot about it. Of course I don't have children, so it's hard. I can't put anything to practice. I can only be the cool uncle or whatever which I've been trying to be. My, my partner is doing better than me, even there you know, telling their brother stop yelling at your kids.But I don't know, the main issues I see with this is that it's kind of like a chicken and the egg thing of like, well, how do we get to a point of youth liberation without fundamentally changing all of society? [00:18:00] But how do we fundamentally change all of society without changing now that you're liberating you with? Right. Nate: Yeah, definitely. You know, and I think, I, I agree with you in that, like it's given me a lot to think about. And as I mentioned, when we were talking about the first piece, I think that we should be questioning things that seem natural, hierarchies that seem natural. And I think that there's definitely an amount of adult supremacy in our society.Maybe the answer is something that we talked about in the Dewey episode. That idea that like adults have had more experience and that can guide children while still letting children make the decisions themselves. I don't think it's oppressive to stop somebody from touching a hot stove, right?Elysha: Something that I've been thinking about a little bit is so, near me, there is a Land Back camp. Some of the local indigenous folks have come together and reclaimed some land. There's just so much that they are learning and some of it they are sharing. I heard a really wonderful [00:19:00] conversation about the ways that youth leadership emerges in their land back camp and how really, it feels like it comes down to just giving everyone involved the space to be themselves and just, you know, treating everyone as humans, treating kids as humans because they are, and they have agency and they have ideas and they have passions.A lot of like beauty and like new ceremony and stuff, has come out of teenagers who have proposed ideas for action to everyone and like just the power that comes out of that. I think that Indigenous resistance movements like from what I've noticed, like they do a great job of centering youth as the future. Nate: And just like acknowledging that I good ideas can come from youth, right. You know, there may be some things we know better than kids, just because we've been around longer. But in a sense, this is like that old thing of like, deferring to the boot maker in [00:20:00] the topic of boots.Right? To tell a kid that doesn't know that a hot stove is going to burn them, not to touch a stove isn't being oppressive. Just like plumber is not oppressing me when he tells me how to do something with my plumbing. And what we just have to be careful not to. Turn that into an idea where we always know better than kids in every circumstance, but like you were saying, Elysha acknowledged that kids can teach us things too.Elysha: And there are definitely things that can come with experience. If we're specifically talking about this Land Back camp experience, there are youth there that probably don't know a lot of the traditional, like land skills, like, building shelter and like keeping fire and that kind of thing.That all needs to be taught as well. You're not oppressing people by sharing what, you know, in that way. It's kind of just how building those relationships work. Tom: You know, I was trying to think of like, when did we show respect to kids? When do we treat them as adults? And it's usually when they do something for, I'm going to say [00:21:00] capitalism? Like, you know, they invent something, they, make some progress, some invention or some science thing. I understand that science is not directly capitalistic inherently, but it's kind of like it's in service to it right now. And so, much of what we see of kids as being like, you know, good work is usually you're doing, you know, something that we expect from adults.Nate: Or like,, I don't know, on a more positive example, like Gretta Thunberg.Elysha: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Tom: Which once, once that started you know, kind of bucking against the system, she got a lot less play time. Right?Nate: Definitely. And even that though, like, and this is something that Gillis points out when he talks about "how would you be able to prove yourself?" If a kid somehow like does prove to be incredibly intelligent, skips a bunch of grades and goes to college as a kid, you know, it's like, they're just treated as like precocious, but like, it's not like they get autonomy.It's not like their parents don't get to make decisions. Tom: There's a [00:22:00] really great episode of Rugrats if you've ever seen that that show or that episode where angelica starts a lemondate stand, but like as a capitalist and then the workers basically rise up unionize, start their own stand, like make it a worker co-op. It's really incredible.Speaking of kids working, that's a very dangerous topic maybe to bring up. But I think it's, you know, it's not in any of these pieces, but it's something I think we talked a little bit about and I've been just thinking about it a bunch.When can kids work? What is child labor? We don't bat an eye at Bob's Burgers really, cause it's a family affair, and it's a cartoon. But like that's allowed, right? Like kids can work for their family. I think under the normal age of legally working.Nate: Yeah. And so it like brings up this question of like, would youth autonomy, would youth liberation mean that like kids were free to be wage slaves? But I think, you know, we talked about this a bit offline. I think that, like, what's interesting about that is it sort of like brings up the [00:23:00] libertarian argument of the, you know, the sort of lie that when you become a wage slave, like you're somehow entering into like, like you're, you're choosing to enter into a contract. That you're like, you know, like making a free choice to, to become an employee. It's sort of reinforced by the idea that we don't let kids do it. Well, kids can't become wage slaves because that's a mutually agreed upon contract. And only like adults who are able to make those sort of decisions can become wage slaves.But maybe the answer is just that all work is exploitative, whether it's with adults or with children.Elysha: There's a lot of work that we do that's not really considered work though. Like if we're talking, talking about like, what does it mean for kids to work? We were talking about this a little bit too, and I don't know if it gets too spirally, but like what qualifies as work and what work is appropriate for kids? Tom: And like, I can see if, if you take out the, the need to make money to survive, that opens up a lot more of the dialogue- how do we [00:24:00] determine what's appropriate? And it's kind of interesting because he would still end up with, you know, the parents would probably have some amount of a say over what kind of jobs or what kind of work that a kid would do.But you'd also wouldn't require it, right? It would be a lot easier to figure out, I think those kinds of thorny areas of, you know, what is appropriate, what is not, because it would just be kind of obvious. It'd be like, well, look, this is very difficult work. It's dangerous, children shouldn't be doing it. You shouldn't make your children do it. There's no reason to do it because we don't need money. You know, you're not doing it for a profit or whatever. So it just takes away a lot of those incentives to make people do stupid, bad things at an earlier age.Nate: Yeah, the idea being that is wrong to make kids work because it's wrong to exploit them, to force them to do something they don't want to do. But then like, it's okay to exploit adults. It's okay to force adults to do something they don't want to do, but maybe, we just shouldn't be forcing anyone to do anything they don't want to do.Tom: Thinking about, you know, the inverse of this, what happens with [00:25:00] youth liberation and the common conception I think of what that looks like is something like Flanders parentsin The Simpsons where it's just like, "we've tried nothing, we're all out of ideas."Like they don't know how to raise their child, they don't do anything. And I think that can be something that can be done, but I don't know, like where, what is the middle ground? Is it actually true? Like as someone, without kids, I don't know what it would be like to not punish children or to punish children.Right. Like, I don't know the actual material consequences of what happens when I make a decision based around my own personal belief system or whatever. Like does it play out? And that's the thing that I think is missing from these essays, maybe. And I don't have a clear understanding of what it is. And that's, I think again, like what the Dewey book was trying to get at was more structure around that.Nate: Yeah. So you're saying the popular conception would be, well, if we don't force kids to do stuff that just kinda like run wild and [00:26:00] be like terrible little brats or something.Tom: Yeah, Yeah.Nate: Again, like with us not having kids talk to say whether that's true or not, but, I think that, especially like in the Goldman piece, she talked about, well, no, like children are humans who can come to their own conclusions of what's good and bad.And, you know, I think that these authors would, would say that that's not the case that letting kids do what they want is not going to lead to total chaos. And like you said,in Dewey, he says we can guide kids and use our experience to suggest to them what might be the best experiences to have.But that doesn't necessarily have to be the same thing as forcing them to do what we want them to do.Tom: Yeah, not to answer my own question, but there was that Lord of the Flies article, which I'll link in the show notes, but where, you know, a lot of people look at Lord of the Flies as an example of what would happen if kids could do whatever they wanted. And that it would just be like just terrible tribal chaos, basically.When really it just ends up being like trying to do the right thing, do the best thing as you can. Nate: Yeah. And she was saying something like, you have to [00:27:00] basically this argument that we've been talking about, that you have to like force rules on kids or else it's going to be Lord of the Rings/Lord of the Flies.Tom: But always trying to steal your precious.Nate: Yes.Elysha: It was a bad tweet, but we could link that in the show notes too. Tom: Yeah, I'm good. Elysha: All right. Well, we did it. Thanks for making your way through another Theory Bites with Works In Theory Podcast, and we will be back when we're back! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Notes from Tom:There's no one-size-fits-all software solution, so there's no one-size-fits-all approach to vetting software. When looking to vet HR software, Phil suggests taking an approach similar to that of a toddler. Asking the questions "why" and "how" over and over. Most people stop at the outermost layer when they're searching for an HR software solution. They might download a general RFP template and have vendors complete it, ask a few peers about the software they love or hate, and use that information alone to make a purchase.Ask questions internally about what you need your software to do for you and why. Decide on the one or two most important modules before you even start to shop.That way, you'll narrow your focus and quickly eliminate vendors that don't support the functionality you need, while floating to the top vendors that do those things very well.When asking questions you might ask:What do you like most about X software?How does X software enhance/detract from your daily experience?What are your favorite and least favorite features? Why?Phil says that shopping for HR software is more art than science. That's because vetting, selecting, and purchasing software involves much more than ticking boxes related to security measures and feature offerings. There are other, subtler signals to look out for. For example, we discuss taking a holistic assessment of any vendor's company health, along with other strategic markers.Keep an eye on indicators of health that might not show up in sales decks. Things like:High net retentionHealthy finances: profitability, employee headcount growth, investment in R&DFrequency of updates/code releasesPaying attention to metrics like these positions you as a sophisticated buyer, which in turn leads to a better overall buying experience. 

Phil’s guest on this episode of the IT Career Energizer podcast is Tom Gilb, the author of ten books and hundreds of papers on requirements, design, project management and related subjects. His ideas on requirements are the acknowledged basis for CMMi Level 4, which were based upon his pioneering book, ‘Software Metrics’, where he also coined that term. Tom has lectured at universities across the globe, and has been a keynote speaker at multiple technical conferences. In 2012, he was named an Honorary Fellow of the British Computer Society. Tom joins Phil today to discuss his extensive business journey, his outlook upon the analytical approach to solving problems, and why the future of IT may lie in adopting an engineering approach.   KEY TAKEAWAYS: (4:08) TOP CAREER TIP Always try to volunteer to help people who may be facing a challenge. Gain permission to help, make friends and learn along the way. Even if you aren’t always successful, you will mark yourself out as a useful colleague.   (9:08) WORST CAREER MOMENT Tom tends not to think of his career in best or worst terms, but there have been scary moments. The most memorable involved his being asked to solve a complex problem by Israeli rocket scientists. Tom succeeded, despite his reservations, and was rewarded by having his computer confiscated!   (14:15) CAREER HIGHLIGHT Working in India, Tom was able to convince the workers there to increase the quality of their workmanship instead of selling themselves as the cheapest. Soon all the workers were accredited, and competing on a global scale, which in turn changed the face of IT services in India, which became a leading force.   (19:20) THE FUTURE OF CAREERS IN I.T We need to do better in terms of failure rates when it comes to IT projects, which often leaves our clients disappointed. By adopting engineering principles, we can increase our agility and reduce the failure rate to rubble. It’ll take time, but it is incredibly exciting.   (22:42) THE REVEAL What first attracted you to a career in I.T.? – Being a typical nerd, Tom was attracted to IT because of the technical challenges and opportunities. What’s the best career advice you received? – No matter where you are career-wise, study. Keep on educating and training yourself. What’s the worst career advice you received? – What would you do if you started your career now? – Invest in learning basic skills, hone them in practice, and be more open and alert to the prospect of radical change. What are your current career objectives? – To ensure that all the lessons learned during his long and varied career, can be taught and disseminated to the next generation. What’s your number one non-technical skill? – Quantification – the ability to quantify any critical variable, and any other value. How do you keep your own career energized? – Always make sure you’re having fun and doing the things you love. What do you do away from technology? – Tom is an avid reader on all subjects, and tries to read around 35 books per year, as well as studying and absorbing history on television.   (42:11) FINAL CAREER TIP Select the guiding books you read very carefully. There are far too many IT books out there, containing poor advice. You can filter out the not-so-helpful ones by looking for authors who use case studies and proven data that resulted in successful outcomes.   BEST MOMENTS  (4:44) – Tom- “I would use a combination of persistence and intelligence and creativity, and I would solve the problem that nobody else could solve” (7:58) – Tom - “Where others give up and say “It can’t be done”, say “Well that sounds like an interesting challenge”” (17:53) – Tom - “I was able, with simple observation, to participate in building up the whole Indian IT economy” (22:33) – Tom - “There are still this 95% of people who persist in treating a large IT system as though it’s a programming problem” (33:38) – Tom - “You need people and books to help ideas survive”   ABOUT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil Burgess is an independent IT consultant who has spent the last 20 years helping organizations to design, develop, and implement software solutions.  Phil has always had an interest in helping others to develop and advance their careers.  And in 2017 Phil started the I.T. Career Energizer podcast to try to help as many people as possible to learn from the career advice and experiences of those that have been, and still are, on that same career journey.   CONTACT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms:   Twitter: https://twitter.com/philtechcareer LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/philburgess Facebook: https://facebook.com/philtechcareer Instagram: https://instagram.com/philtechcareer Website: https://itcareerenergizer.com/contact   Phil is also reachable by email at phil@itcareerenergizer.com and via the podcast’s website, https://itcareerenergizer.com Join the I.T. Career Energizer Community on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/ITCareerEnergizer   ABOUT THE GUEST – TOM GILB Tom Gilb is the author of ten books, and a specialist in requirements, design and project management. He has acted as keynote speaker at technical conferences around the world, and in 2012, wwas named an Honorary Fellow of the British Computer Society.   CONTACT THE GUEST – TOM GILB Tom Gilb can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms:   Twitter: https://twitter.com/imtomgilb LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tomgilb Website: https://www.gilb.com

EPISODE INTRODUCTION:Dr. Tom and Mr. Mike introduce Dapper Effects Live’s new Podcast spin-offshow, titled ‘The Dapper Debrief’. Hosted by none other than Mr. Mike a.k.a.Audio Velvet himself; this fun, lighthearted podcast is designed to support ourmission of helping men live with confidence and swagger, by providingstimulating conversation, and combining humor and helpful tips. This fastpaced, short podcast experience will inform, encourage, inspire and motivateyou; and give you a great start to your weekend. On episode 12 Dr. Tom & Mr. Mike discuss:The Dapper Debrief, which is a 10-15 minute show airing every Saturday!It is available on ALL of your favorite podcast platforms. Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, Podbean, etc...The Dapper Debrief will...Discuss Dapper-worthy news and current eventsHighlight dynamic people doing dynamic thingsShare positive, uplifting stories from our diverse, dapper communityFashion and men’s grooming tips and talkHighlight both famous and local ‘Dapper Ambassadors’ Fun, jokes...and mature, respectful ’grown-up’ talk We welcome any topic suggestions or show ideas.We here at Dapper Effects would love to feature you, or someone you know who is doing amazing things, and/or making a positive impact.Please comment and join the conversation! Like, follow, share & subscribe. Join the Dapper Community!  “Dapper Effects is NOT a lifestyle brand. Being Dapper is a part of who you are” - Dr. Tom“There’s nothing wrong with self-promotion. Sometimes you gotta promote yourself!” - Audio Velvet  Stay tuned for the next Dapper Effects Podcast! LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:Charlie The Barber Follow Dapper Effects on InstagramFollow Dapper Effects on FacebookJoin the Dapper Effects Lounge

In this episode, Joe interviews Tom and Sheri Eckert, organizers of the Oregon Psilocybin Therapy Initiative. The IP 34 is the bill that would legalize psilocybin therapy. 3 Key Points: IP 34 asks the Oregon Health Authority to create a licensing system that will create a regulated program where Oregonians suffering from depression, anxiety, trauma and other challenges can see a licensed and trained facilitator to receive supervised psilocybin therapy. IP 34 was written by licensed therapists in Oregon along with the country’s leading advocates in the field. It is supported by healthcare professionals, treatment providers, veterans’ groups and community leaders across the state. There has been a multitude of studies from leading medical research institutions such as Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and NYU showing that psilocybin therapy works. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on iTunes Share us with your friends – favorite podcast, etc Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics Show Notes About Tom and Sheri began their interest in psilocybin research about 5 years ago when they read an article in The New Yorker by Michal Pollan They realized how powerful psilocybin was for clinical work They are both therapists, and were inspired to find out if there was a way to create a modality that allowed them to provide psilocybin therapy to help their clients Psilocybin Assisted Psychotherapy Psychotherapy is supposed to be experiential, the breakthrough is where the change happens Sheri says that psilocybin therapy gets all parts of the brain in communication together “The more intense the mystical experience the more clinical outcomes that are achieved” - Tom Ballot Initiative They started in 2015 They wanted the breakthrough studies and the research proving low risks to work for them The psychedelic community was very helpful They went through rotations with the way the initiative was written They like the therapy model, its safe, careful and mindful Clause Joe asks about a Supremacy Clause, where the state supersedes local districts This initiative does not get in the way of any other initiative There are angles on all different types of drug policy reform There is nothing in the IP34 that blocks any other initiative like decriminalization We are all a part of the big picture, we all need to work together GMP Psilocybin They wanted to keep this in the frame of non-commercialization Their goal with this is not about money, it’s really about the healing “We are trying to move forward a healing modality to help people, we are trying to legalize psilocybin assisted psychotherapy” - Tom There is a part in the initiative that says measures will have to be taken to make sure the psilocybin is ‘food grade’ standard or in general just clean and safe Oregonians to Sign the Petition Download the petition, sign it, and mail it in Final Thoughts Sheri says that the team behind the initiative is inspired by what is happening globally around psilocybin and research They are right at the end of their signatures, but they need help to reach the goal “We've got to see the bigger picture here, and get behind it.” - Tom Links Website About Tom and Sheri Eckert As husband-and-wife founders of the Oregon Psilocybin Society (OPS) and authors of the Psilocybin Service Initiative (PSI), Tom and Sheri Eckert have set in motion a historic campaign to legalize Psilocybin Services, also known as Psilocybin Assisted Therapy, in their home state of Oregon. A growing number of Oregonians are getting behind the idea, largely in response to the latest science. The Eckerts, with a growing army of volunteers, are spreading a truth held increasingly self-evident: that the psilocybin experience, when facilitated under safe and supportive conditions, can be a life-changing gift.In addition to their activism, the Eckert’s own and operate “Innerwork” – a private psychotherapy practice serving the Portland metro area. Included in their catalog of services is their groundbreaking “Better Man” program, which is shown to neutralize intimate partner and family violence. Sheri has been awarded a Cosmic Sister Women of the Psychedelic Renaissance in support of her presentation at the Spirit Plant Medicine conference. Get a 30 day free audible trial at audibletrial.com/psychedelicstoday

Combine the open road and exquisite classic cars with a trip to the Motte Historical Museum in scenic Menifee, CA. The Motte Historical Car Museum is off the beaten path.  But when you go you'll surely agree it's well worth the trip. Menifee in Southwestern Riverside County plays host to the cozy museum with a collection of very cool classic cars.  And they're displayed in a building that, while fully restored as well, helps turn back the hands of time just like the vehicles it houses. Who else but our own Professor, Clinton Quan, made the recent trip and shares the complete report in this iDriveSoCal Podcast.  Click play below and take a look at some of the classic beauties he spotted during his trip. ***Transcription*** Recorded in Los Angeles, CA The Motte Historical Car Museum - Menifee's Hidden Automotive Gem Clinton "The Professor" Quan: They're like, "Wow, I didn't realize there are so many car shows and I didn't realize that there were so many car museums." Tom: This is the Motte Historical Museum, out in Menifee, California Clinton Quan: There's definitely cars from the 1920s, Tom: Made me think Great Gatsby. Professor: Yes. Tom: Like, that time period, right? Tom: Welcome to iDriveSoCal, the podcast. All about mobility, from the automotive capital of the United States, Southern California. Tom Smith here with the good Professor, Mr. Clinton Quan. Say hello, Clinton. "Made me think Great Gatsby." Professor: Hi, Tom. Tom: Hello. This podcast, we're talking about another automotive museum, one that the good Professor kind of pulled out of his bag of tricks… I don't know. We've almost come to a year of doing the iDriveSoCal podcast and you're still surprising me with some of these little pocket events in museums and whatnot that you find. So, keep that up. Let's see how long you can keep that up until I'm like, "Oh, this one again?" Professor: I'll try. But I think a lot of people are really surprised at how many car museums and automotive events in Southern California. Tom: There's so much. 1931 Cadillac Professor: Yeah. Tom: There's so much. Professor: Because a lot of my friends, they're like, "Wow, I didn't realize there are so many car shows and I didn't realize that there were so many car museums." Tom: Yeah, all you got to do it look and you can keep yourself busy year-round. Professor: Yes. Tom: And hey, partially that's what iDriveSoCal's gonna help. We're gonna be a... Is the right word "repository?" Professor: You could say that. Southwestern Riverside County Tom: I'm making myself laugh because I'm thinking about other... And whatever. So as we have been, your go-to place. iDriveSoCal.com. Professor: Resource. Tom: Yeah, your resource. Thank you. But not only automotive but also the future of mobility. And a lot of the future of mobility is... Well, we'll see what it's gonna be, but it's an exciting time, right? 1924 Electric Ford Model T Professor: Yes. Tom: But for always and all time, there's going to be a large segment of the population that happens to be in love with cars. Cars that are coming out of manufacturers right now, rolling off the assembly lines right now, and for some time to come. For a long time to come, and certainly, the history. Professor: Yes. Tom: And this is the Motte Historical Museum, out in Menifee, California, which I guess that's considered Inland Empire? Professor: I believe that is considered the Inland Empire. It's a little east of the city of Perris, which is spelled P-E-R-R-I-S. Not to be confused with what everyone assumes. "It's a little east of the city of Perris... it's off the 215." Tom: Of course, I've buzzed by there and I know that I've buzzed by Perris, as well as Menifee, and I don't know what else comes to mind for Menifee, but I know I've been through both. Professor: Yeah, it's off the 215. Tom: Okay. So,

Air Force One draws attention everywhere it goes, even the retired version at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. And nearly a half-million visitors a year tour the world's most iconic aircraft.  Well, one of them anyway. Continue reading below or listen to the podcast during my private tour of Air Force One! ***Transcript*** Recorded February 12, 2018 John: It technically flew seven different presidents. President Reagan put the most mileage on it. I don't know what the exact number of that mileage is, but he definitely flew a great deal on this plane much more so than any other president. This was the aircraft that took him to Germany for the famous "tear down this wall" speech. Anything that was classified or I guess you'd call "secret" that was all removed prior to our obtaining the aircraft. There are no escape pods. Additionally, there are no hidden guns or bombs or anything else that can be released from the aircraft, so there's nothing like that and a lot of that are the fantasies in Hollywood that they portray in movies. The Home of Air Force One: The Ronald Reagan Library Tom Smith: Welcome to iDriveSoCal, the podcast all about mobility from the automotive capital of these fine United States - Southern California. I'm Tom Smith, and in honor of President's Day, we are sitting underneath Air Force One at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. John: Correct. Tom: Okay. And that is John Lehne who's the building facilities manager here for the Ronald Reagan Foundation, which runs the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. John: Correct. We are part of the library... the foundation actually supports the library. It is actually run by the government, National Archives Administration. The Air Force One pavilion, which we are sitting in right now with the Air Force One plane, is operated by the foundation. So this is a little unique part of the library. Tom: So there you have it for the specifics. But what the exciting part is, literally I'm looking up at the belly of Air Force One and it's a pretty cool thing. We got some really neat pictures. John was nice enough to walk me through the plane, little private tour, got a couple of pictures. I wasn't able to sit in President Ronald Reagan's office chair, but I did sit at the conference table and that was pretty darn neat. So, John, thank you so much for that. Tom Smith sits at Conference table aboard Air Force One. John: You're very welcome. How Did Air Force One Get to The Regan Library? Air Force One at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Tom: How did this plane get here? When you come to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Air Force One pavilion, you can see a cool pictorial story that's told on how actually the building was kind of built around the plane. “It was almost like the ultimate ship in a bottle type of construction.” John: They put the superstructure, the building up. The plane had flown in a little prior to that, and they disassembled the plane, towed up here in pieces, except for the fuselage was one solid piece. They did the superstructure of the building, pulled the plane and the pieces into the building and literally put the plane back together inside the building. Stripped the plane, repainted it, shrink-wrapped it, and then they finished the building around the plane. When they were done with the building, they unwrapped the plane, cleaned it up, polished it up, then put it on display. It was almost like the ultimate ship in a bottle type of construction. Tom: And the plane landed actually at San Bernardino International Airport. John: It flew out from Andrews Air Force Base and landed here in California and then it was trucked from that airport, from the San Bernardino Airport to Simi Valley and ultimately here to the Reagan Library. Tom: There's a cool picture where you see the fuselage of the plane next to the wings of the plane next to the dirt mounds that are ...

Tom Nardone is a mailman turned house flipper, author, speaker and coach. Today he shares how he found his true calling from what he saw everyday and how economic downturn led him closer to Christ. He grew his business from a side hustle to a career by taking advantage of what God had already put right in front of him. Tom demonstrates the importance of looking at what you have and not what you don't have. Listen to Tom's story now! Stories Tom shared: Finding Christ at a youth meeting when he was 12 Seeing the world differently after giving his life to Christ How God showed him that his wife was the right woman for him Realizing that being a postman was not his highest calling How the real estate crash of 2008 affected him The books that helped him remember his relationship with God What God said to him while praying at a stoplight What being conformed to Christ's image looks like in his life Coaching people who flip houses Great quotes from Tom: There are a lot of promises God makes to us that He wants us to hold him to. Whether it's ups or downs, enjoy the journey. Resources we mentioned: Battlefield of the Mind: Winning the Battle in Your Mind by Joyce Meyer Destiny: Let God Use You Like He Made You by Tony Evans Tom's website: millionairemailman.com Text: mailman to 31996 for a link to download his book Notice: JavaScript is required for this content. The post Tom Nardone and Opportunity in the Ordinary appeared first on Eric Nevins.

Tom Poland is a Marketing Mentor who started his first business at age 24 and has gone on to start and sell four others, taking two of them international. In that time he’s managed teams of over 100 people and annual revenue of more than 20 million. These days Tom’s thing is “Leadsology: The Science of Being in Demand” which is a blended learning program that gives professional advisors a model for generating a flow of high-quality, inbound, new client enquiries into their businesses almost every week of the year. Over 2000 business owners across 193 different industries and 4 continents have been through his programs and many have gone on to add millions to their earnings and their testimonials are available on his website. Tom’s work has been published in 27 countries and he’s also shared international speaking platforms with the likes of Michael Gerber of E-Myth fame, Richard Koch from the 80-20 Principle, Brian Tracy and many others. Find Tom at http://www.leadsology.guru   Here's the transcript from the interview Hugh Ballou: Greetings, welcome back to Orchestrating Success: Converting Your Passion to Profit. Today, this session, we are going to focus on your message. How do you really let people know what your superpower is? I am recording this in the evening in Virginia, and my guest for the interview is drinking his morning coffee in Australia. Tom Poland, welcome to the podcast. Tom Poland: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where the heck everyone is. It’s morning here tomorrow. Hugh: It’s always interesting making appointments with people. I’ll call you at 2:00. Okay, what time zone? Tom: Which 2:00? Hugh: In your case, it’s Thursday here, but it’s Friday where you are. Tom: Correct, yeah. Coming up on 20 past 8 in the morning. Hugh: It’s 6:18 pm here in Virginia. Tom, you and I connected somewhere. You graciously invited me to this small group encounter that we had a week ago, a video session where you taught us some things about marketing. You taught us about our message. You taught us about quite a few things. I took a whole bunch of notes, and then you gave us one of your books. Tell us who you are, what is your superpower, and how did you develop this? How did you get where you are today? Tom: Great questions. Tom Poland. I call myself the chief leadsologist at Leadsology. Presently, I live near the beach in Castaways Beach in a place called the Sunshine Coast in a place called Queensland, Australia. It’s about nineteen hours’ drive north of Sydney. A pretty long way up the coast. Australia is like the US. It’s quite a big country. The difference is 80% of it is desert here. Back to what I am doing. My superpower is lead generation. I work with people who are marketing the invisible, people who have an idea, a service. Most of what we’re going to talk about will apply to people who have physical products as well, whether you are making sandals or you are a New Yorker acquisition consultant. The principles are the same. How you apply them is a little different depending on whether you have something that’s invisible or something that’s physical. The magic is around setting up four separate lead generation systems. There is a weekly flow of high-quality inbound new client inquiries. We don’t do cold-calling or anything dumb like sending out 10,000 letters to anyone. We don’t do trade shows. All those things deposition the person providing the service or advice. That is the superpower. It’s creating these four different lead systems so the leads are coming in systematically, automatically into the person’s business. How I came across that—good question. When I was 16, my father suggested I leave home because he said I knew everything and I could start forgetting things soon if I didn’t leave home. So I did that. I left home. A few years later, in 1995, I found myself in a very similar mindset. I had come out of a senior executive role in a multi-national corporate, and I started my own business again. I thought I knew something about sales and marketing since I had spent 20 years in corporate. So I set up the new business and put all this marketing in place, and nothing happened. So I literally flew and sat at the seat of great marketing masters and read every book and went to every workshop I could. I am a pretty good implementer; I put everything in place, and the best I could do was break even on my marketing efforts. I sat down and thought, I gotta figure this thing out myself. I put all the books away and put all the workshop notes away and started what is now known as Leadsology. I discovered, Hugh, there is a whole bunch of people out there that are really good marketers, but when you actually buy their stuff, it turns out their marketing is a 10 and their product is a 2. Most of your audience and my clients, when I start working with them, they have a 10 service. If they could get in front of the right people, then the conversions happen, and the clients love them. Most people have a 10 service trapped in a 2 marketing. That is what Leadsology is all about. Sorry, I knocked over my microphone in my excitement. That’s how my Leadsology journey started: trying to figure this thing out as a coach, consultant, and trainer. How do you get the leads coming in without having to stay awake all night stressed about it and without having to engage in these random acts of marketing? Hugh: Random acts of marketing. You used a word there I tried to capture. Cold-calls and what I call push marketing, you used the word… What is the word you used? Tom: Deposition. Hugh: Deposition? Tom: One of the most powerful psychologies known to mankind is reverse psychology. If I had kids at home and it was raining outside and I said to the kids, “Don’t go outside and play because it’s raining,” then the first thing they are going to want to do is what? Hugh: Go outside and play. Tom: Yep. I said to my teenage daughter, “I’m going out with your mom. We’re going to a nice restaurant. We’re leaving the second car here, and the car keys are over there. Do not touch the car keys. Do not drive that car.” A more subtle degree is this. There is a spectrum. The moment we know we can have something, our desire for it decreases. People get blasé. They get apathetic. I can have that anytime I want. What else is there? Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, can have it, don’t want it, is the sweet spot called reverse psychology where people will want more of what you’ve got if they think they need it more than you need their money. Hugh: Say that again. That is a key piece of information. Tom: Let me say I’m a prospective client of Hugh’s, and I’m thinking if I should work with Hugh or not. If Hugh is sending out mail drops and offers every day of the week and I’m getting bombarded with “Pick me” from Hugh, I get apathetic about that. I can work with Hugh anytime I want; he obviously needs more clients because he is sending all these offers out, and every time I go to a trade show, he’s there and he is always handing out brochures. I’m getting letters and emails. Maybe not on Hugh. But if I perceive my belief is that I need what Hugh’s got more than Hugh needs my money, I get much more interested. Hugh: Wow. Tom: Cold-calling depositions that. Can I work with you? Going onto LinkedIn and going, “Hey, we do SEO. Do you need help?” depositions that. Sending out 10,000 letters or direct mail pieces depositions that. What we want is to invoke that sweet spot psychology where your audience perceives they need you more than you need their money. Hugh: Wow. That is just the opposite of what the marketing people are trying to tell us to do, isn’t it? Tom: Hugh, it’s so different if you are selling a product. Particularly, if it is a commodity, then it will come down to price. There is a massive gulf of difference between marketing a thing and marketing a service because a service is actually a relationship. It’s like going into a marriage. If I am buying a house off of a realtor, and I don’t like the realtor, then if the house is okay, I will still make the buy because I don’t have to live with the realtor. But if I am looking for a wife, which I kind of was 12 years ago, that prospective bride whom I fell in love with instantly and could have married her on the spot, within 90 seconds I was gone. If I had gone up to her and said, “Look, I’ve just fallen in love with you. My name’s Tom by the way. Could we get married, or at least could I come home with you tonight?” When you are offering a service or advice—I didn’t do that honestly, we had some dates first, anyway—but when you are offering a service or advice and are popping the question to people and going, “Work with me,” it’s like going, “Marry me.” With a thing, when we buy it, that relationship is over. We are left with the golf clubs or the boat or the house or whatever. But with an advisory service, consultancy, training, coaching, architecture, CPA, even a lawyer, we’ve gotta enter into a relationship of trust with this person. That means we are probably going to have to have a few dates first before we pop the question of engagement. Hugh: That is so good. You and I had talked before we went live about coffee, and we both have this love of freshly ground, brewed espresso. I talked about doing the beans, and sitting over here on the couch, my bride of we’re starting 12 years next month, she’s a conductor and I’m a conductor. We met at a church music conference in the same room, and we crossed paths. I was smart enough to pay attention. It took a year to build a relationship and have conversations. It was a year before we talked again. I understand that dynamic really well. You know what? I got it right. It’s not about pushing. There is a synergy here with what I teach my clients. Leadership is a position of influence. We influence people, and we don’t do it by telling people what to do if you are responsible for a team. You create the space for people to raise a functioning around the common purpose. There is synergy with what I teach. I have the invisible, which is my coaching, my facilitation, my culture creation for corporate clients. But I have something in the middle. It’s not a product; it’s an online program. Where does that fall? Is that the invisible? Is that a product? Tom: That’s the invisible. So is software by the way. There are a few exceptions. Software, is that a thing? Software development fits in with the invisible as well. I developed and had a software business quite a number of years ago. It’s selling the invisible. Online courses and programs, there is a duration, whether it’s eight weeks, six weeks, six months. I have to be able to trust three things when I buy into that program. I have to be able to validate Hugh and say, “I trust Hugh. He cares. He has integrity. He’s going to be reliable.” I have to validate the service or program. This is true with an architect, consultant, coach, whatever. I have to validate the service. Does this service have integrity? Is it a fit for my needs? The third thing that most people trip up on is: am I going to implement when it comes to a program? I bought these programs before. I have done these workshops before. I got excited, took all the notes, and came back to my business, and then the emails came in or the meetings happened, sitting in this nice little folder in a pile somewhere. There are three points of validation. The first one is: Do I know, like, and trust Hugh? The second point is: Does the program have integrity? Is it going to fit my needs? The third point is: Will I actually use this thing? Hugh: Do they use it? Is it so hard I can’t do it? That’s a big deal. Tom: Implement. We have all bought those $197 downloadable workshop training things and gotten excited. Where are they now? I don’t even know where they are. They are sitting in a digital file somewhere. I have a password to that membership site somewhere, but I don’t know where it is. When it comes to programs, and it’s a bit of a red herring I guess, but whatever we do, whatever service we deliver, if people don’t implement it and get value. Even though it might be money in my bank account, I want people to implement because I want them to get value because I want the good karma. Hugh: How do you define red herring? Tom: Implementation is off the subject of marketing. There is an indirect link in that if people implement it, then they get value and refer. There is an indirect link. Hugh: Your site, we are going to give them a special link before we’re done here. Your link is leadsology.guru. You are in fact the guru. You’ve written some books. Tom: I am a little embarrassed every time I hear that .guru, but .com was taken. We tried to buy it. So it’s kind of like these people who write their own bio and say, “I am the world’s expert on XYZ.” Who said? Hugh: Well, it was there. Tom: Leadsology.guru, yeah. Hugh: It was predestined. You were pulled into that. I have one of your books. It’s in my digital folder queued up to read over the holiday here. We have a holiday in America. Read that to me. Tom: Is that Leadsology: The Science of Being in Demand? Hugh: Yes, that’s it. Leadsology: The Science of Being in Demand. Oops, I am making a note. It’s a science. Tom: Yeah, it is. Hugh: Can people find that on Amazon? Tom: Yes indeed. Kindle, paperback. Hugh: Who needs that? Who needs your methodology? I assume the book gives people an overview and gives them what you didn’t find in the seminars and the courses you took before. It gives them a snapshot or maybe some courseware. Tell me what’s in the book and who needs it. Tom: The book is for anyone who is marketing the invisible and who wants the security and pleasure and enjoyment, satisfaction if you like, of having a regular flow of new clients coming into their business. It’s a systemized approach to lead generation. The book is quite extensive. Some books you buy and end up disappointed because they tell you what you need to do, but they are very light on how to do that. I get into all sorts of things there. There are ten parts to the model. We start with what did you call it? Your superpower? I call it your magic. One thing for example I say to people is you can’t have seven types of magic. A Canadian client of mine who is a consultant/trainer/coach, Susan, who is a genius at what she does, but she had like nine different things on her website you can pick from. It’s 360 degrees, leadership training, productivity, engagement, human dynamics, whatever that is, organizational change, and Susan was very good at all of these things. I have no doubt about that. The first thing I said to her was, “Pick one.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “You can’t market nine things. You can market one thing. Everything else needs to go off your website, off your LinkedIn profile, off your business card. You are going to market one thing. Why don’t you get clients happily engaged in that one thing, getting great value, so they can ask, ‘Susan, what else have you got?’ Then you can show them the other stuff.” The book goes in a step-by-step model with ten parts to it. It starts with your magic/superpower. Pick one. The first four parts are about your magic, pick one; the market, which is all about focusing your niche; the message, which is the session we had last week on the marketing message and the three characteristics that create an effective marketing message that cuts through and motivates someone to want to know more; and finally the mediums. The mediums are quite important. For example, the medium could be a webinar, a book, an online session, a lunch-and-learn, a guide of some sort, a challenge. A lot of different ways you can attract people into your list and give them great value. But the mediums are interesting because the mediums have to fit. They have to fit first of all your style, your personality. For some people, running webinars makes them feel like they want to be physically ill. My wife calls herself an e-tard. When we met, she barely knew how to do email. But you know, she is getting better and better. For someone like my wife, running a webinar would cause her sleepless nights for weeks. Don’t do that because it’s not part of your personality style. Pick a medium that fits your personality. I love writing. I could just lock myself up in a cave with a keyboard, and I could write 24/7, just about. Pick a medium that you’re inclined to want to engage in because then you will actually do the frickin’ thing instead of saying it should be done. Pick a medium that works with the market as well. If I was marketing to tradespeople, say plumbers, I wouldn’t pick webinars as a medium because it’s not a medium they are naturally instinctively drawn to. If I was talking to consultants, I would certainly pick webinars because they are in front of computers all day. You have to match the medium to the market. I got Monty the Marketing Wonderdog here. He is a Border Collie, and he has a dinner bowl out back. I have a beehive as well. If I get a bunch of flowers and put them in Monty’s dinner bowl, that is going to be a hard sell. But if I put it in the beehive, then they are all over it. Vice versa with a nice steak. Put it in front of the bees, and they’re not too interested. Put it in front of the dog? There is no selling required when you match the message to the market and the medium. Zero selling required. It’s like bees onto flowers. Hugh: There are certain trends in what people are doing online. I think it changes from time to time. What worked last year doesn’t work this year. Sometimes what worked last week doesn’t work this week. You’re honing on some fundamental principles that probably supersedes the fad of the day. Is that making sense? Tom: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. If you want to go to the highest helicopter view, the strategic view of lead generation, there are two things that intersect when the lead is generated. That has been the case for the history of mankind for thousands of years, and it will always be the case. Whatever changes with online funnels or Facebook advertising or social media, whatever else changes, this never changes. A lead is generated when an ideal client is intersected with an effective marketing message. An ideal client is someone who is aware of their need, so my ideal client is not waking up in the middle of the night, they are waking up in the middle of the morning and saying, “I have to get some systems in place to get leads.” They are aware of their need. They have the money and the timing is perfect. Those are the three characteristics of my ideal client. When that person sees my marketing message in almost any form, and there is about 12 different forms they can see it in, they get interested. That is how inbound inquiries are generated. Hugh: That is how we connected. Somehow, I was interested in meeting you. We have talked twice now and emailed. I am fascinated by what you do. What do you think it was that got my interest? Do you remember how we connected? Tom: Yes, we connected through LinkedIn. I invited you to a marketing message maker session. I made a bit of a song and dance about the fact that I was a bestselling international author blah blah blah. There was some credibility in there. Don’t get offended at this, but you were metaphorically speaking a bear in the woods. My message via LinkedIn, we established a 1st-level connection first. I had given you something. I think it was a little bit of a guide like this PDF. We had a couple of little mini dates. Then I invited you to this marketing message maker, which was essentially a 75-minute session where I was showing you how to create a marketing message that cuts through and motivates an ideal client to want to know more about what you do. I said leave your credit card at home because there is nothing to buy. We minimized the sense of risk or just another sales trap. When I talk about a bear in the woods, the metaphor is this. This describes how Leadsology works pretty well and how you don’t need any sales or manipulative sales techniques. Imagine there is a big forest and there are a bunch of grizzly bears all asleep. I have some honey in a honeypot. I want the bears to eat my honey. The bears are a metaphor for potential clients, and the honey is a metaphor for what it is I do. I think, How am I going to get the bears to eat my honey? I go to a bear-eating-honey seminar. The guy stands up on stage and is holding this big, long, stick with a sharp point at the end, a lance. He says, “Look, I’ve done this. If you want the bears to eat your honey, this is how you do it. You grab the stick, go running through the forest, find a grizzly bear, poke it really hard on the bum to wake it up, and then you wave the pot in front of the bear’s nose. If it is hungry, it will eat the honey. If it is not hungry, it will eat you.” That is selling. That is going out with your marketing message, annoying people, poking them with a sharp stick going, “Pick me, pick me, pick me.” With Leadsology, what we do is put the honeypot outside the forest, and the bears that are hungry will start dreaming of swimming in honey. Then they will wake up and go, “Darn, just a dream. But hang on. I can still smell the honey,” and they come out of the forest. That’s what Leadsology does. Leadsology is a series of four honeypots, each systemized, different mediums, going to the same market with the same marketing message, and the bear is coming out of the forest. People are making inquiries. Hugh: So it’s imperative that your message is very clear. You have one product, and you are targeting a specific person. Tom: The message is what I call the first domino. You see those Guinness Book of Records. You line up one thousand dominos, and you only have to push over one domino and the others go on their own. The marketing message is not what people think it is. It’s not a USP, it’s not an elevated pitch, it’s not a slogan, and it often even won’t mention your service or product. But it’s got to be benefit-rich and differentiated, so it’s got to sound like nothing anyone else is saying. It’s got to contain some specifics. That is where the magic lies in those specifics. Hugh: What are the top things that people do wrong? Tom: Number one they do wrong with their marketing message is they tell people what they do for a living. I am an accountant, and I help with your taxes. I am a marketer, and I will help you get your leads in. I am a Facebook Messenger bot guru, and I help you get a better open rate. Hugh: Why is that a mistake? Tom: Because people don’t want Facebook Messenger bot gurus, and they don’t actually want bigger open rates. They want the thing the bigger open rates give them, which in this particular example we are talking about, a very exciting product. You can get a 100% open rate with them. But people don’t want 100% open rates. They want the thing the 100% open rate gives them. In this marketplace, this particular marketer is an online marketer, whose marketplace are beauty salons. Beauty salon owners don’t want Messenger bots, and they don’t want 100% open rates. They want more bums in their seats every single day, please and thank you very much. His marketing message should not be, “I am an expert on Facebook bots,” and it should not be, “I can get you 100% open rates on messengers.” It should be, “I can get you another two customers walking through your door every single day without any print media, advertising, or cold-calling.” That’s it, period. If you are a beauty salon owner, you want two more extra customers every single day. That’s where your profit is. I don’t know if it’s two or five, where the sweet spot is. The sweet spot in the message, if you are talking about specifics, has to be big enough to generate desirability, but it has to be small enough to generate believability. If he goes out and says, “I can get you 50 new customers every single day,” even if that is true, people aren’t going to believe it. It’s not going to work. If he comes out and says, “I can get you a new customer every single month,” no matter how excited he says it, people are not going to get turned on by that. I don’t know what the number is for the sweet spot, but something like another 2-5 customers every single day. When that beauty salon owner hears that, then they will want to know more, and that is when the lead is generated and the inquiry is made. The question at that point is: How do you do that? That is when messenger bots come in, not before. Hugh: Okay. Boy this is really helpful. It’s unique. I just changed my LinkedIn messaging from what I do to what my results are like two weeks ago. I am amazed. Between Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, I have like 250,000 followers. Tom: Wow. Hugh: I am amazed that 249,500 of them are just pushing out, “Buy my thing. Buy my thing.” They haven’t done any dating. They haven’t built any trust or credibility. Tom: There is no validation. Hugh: It is just amazing. There is a whole bunch of noise. Somehow, you got my attention, and you cut through the noise on LinkedIn. I don’t know how that happened, but you got very skilled at that. You have a way of getting right to it and attracting the right person. When I say, “Who needs you?” people like a consultant, people like a speaker, people like a coach, is that the space of invisible? Tom: I have done a lot of work with architects, accountants. Right now, I have a merger acquisition consultant, an American guy who is operating out of London, works a lot in Europe. His specialty is matching big companies up with smaller tech companies so they maintain a competitive difference. An architect operating out of Oregon who designs luxury apartments in China. A foreclosure lawyer in Philadelphia. It’s pretty diverse. Merger acquisition consultant in Germany. A lot of clients in Australia and New Zealand. A lot of trainers, coaches, consultants. Wealth planners. A new client who is—forgive me, Kevin, I can’t remember where you are, but he is somewhere in your country—he has developed a business where he operates a brokerage for real estate agents. He gets the listings, which is the hardest thing to do, and he brokers them out to real estate agents. So it’s a service. The physical product is there, of course, but he is not directly selling the physical product. So it’s anyone who has a service or advice or develops software; that is the exception—who wants to quit stressing about where the leads are coming from and have predictability. A lot of good consultants- The classic is they are really good at what they do, so they get a lot of word-of-mouth referrals, which is great and can go on for a few years, but one day it will dry up. Who knows. Something weird happens, like a dictator fires a missile over Japan. That would never happen, right? Hugh: That would never happen. Tom: Or someone drives a tank into a desert in Kuwait from Iraq. I don’t know. Stuff happens. Or there is an election. And everything slows down. For some reason, word-of-mouth marketing dries up. Then they go, “Oh wow, I don’t control this thing. There are no buttons I can push or levers I can pull. I need some predictability around lead generation.” Those are the people who need Leadsology, the people who want to set up four different systems so the leads are coming in from four different sources. Hugh: For instance, you said that before, and I meant to ask you. Give us an example. Tom: Sure, okay. Let’s just put social media to the side at a moment because it’s not a lead generator. It’s great to keep people’s brand in your brain until they are ready to buy. So you should be doing social media. A blog, a podcast, Facebook, something to keep your brand on the brain until people are ready to buy. But the direct lead generators: a book when it’s well-written will bring in leads. One of the things I do, when you open the book up, you will see this page here. Leadsology Resources. And there is a bunch of free stuff. We drive people from the book back to the website. We have a few dates with them, as many as they need until they start to validate that Tom is an okay guy and the services are effective. A book is one of those mediums. A webinar can be a medium. You attended what I call a makeover session, a group of people, the bears who come out of the forest interested in a marketing message makeover. Those small sessions. Breakfast meetings or lunch-and-learns, they are all mediums with which you can get your message out to the marketplace. There is a lot of them: surveys, diagnostic tools, interactive models. What I was saying before just to refresh people’s memory is that choosing the mediums, and there are a lot of different ways you can get your message to the market about your magic through the mediums, is it has to fit your personality. You have to look at it and go, “Yeah, I can do that. I quite like that actually,” whether it’s a webinar, book, whatever. It has to fit the marketplace, meaning it has to fit the market. Flowers in Monty’s bowl is not going to work. And finally, it has to fit your budget, be it your time or financial budget. Most people have one medium. Most people do one thing to get leads. I don’t know if they go to a business networking medium, which depositions them. Or they do webinars, or they have a book. It’s like a one-legged stool. Eventually, a one-legged stool tips over. I want my clients to have four legs on their stools. Four different ways that the leads are coming in. Each of those ways is systemized, whether it’s a LinkedIn strategy, whether it’s a webinar strategy, whether it’s a Facebook or Google Adwords funnel taking you through a series of steps, they are all systemized. We have security because we have a diversification of leads. I see this lady in the States with something like $800 million in the lottery. She is not going to put it all in one place, I hope. The uncle needs to invest in his business—don’t give it all to the uncle. Here’s $800 million; make me some money. The security comes in the diversification of the lead generation. Hugh: So you said earlier that social media is not for lead generation, but that is how you got me interested. Tom: Social media- LinkedIn, is it social media? Probably. LinkedIn is good to keep the brand on the brain until people are ready to buy. Most of the posts you get on LinkedIn have the wrong reasons. They have a message that is like putting the flowers in Monty’s dinner bowl. People post articles on LinkedIn, and they get traction. It doesn’t matter if you have 500 reads if you got no more connections or followers or subscribers. Then you haven’t really done a lot. Put aside the fact that the messages are not often aligned to the marketplace. Social media is best for keeping the brand on the brain until people are ready to buy. By all means, have a LinkedIn strategy. Post on LinkedIn some good quality stuff. But understand that you are not going to get a lot of people going, “I want to work with you please.” This is a great example of a terrific added value social media thing, a podcast in this case, that is going to help keep Hugh’s brand in people’s brains until they are ready to buy. Hugh: You associate with people who are competent, and it raises the value of your brand. Social proof. You have a photo of me with Tom Poland, and it raises the value of me because of your credibility. Tom: Some people would debate whether it raises your brand, Hugh, but I’ll accept it. I’ll drink to that. It’s water by the way. Hugh: People can decide for themselves when they hear it. There is a lot of really rich content here. I really resonate with this because I show up in groups and I am starting- I just moved to a new city, so I am starting a series of lunch-and-learns. I am targeting people who run charities, nonprofits. Some of the programs I offer are specifically tailored for them. I have 31 years of experience in that market segment. I am also doing other places. I show up where my clients are. The other segment is mid-cap corporations, $5-50 million in revenue. That is a sweet spot, so I am showing up where those people hang out. I think one of the mistakes people make is they attract the wrong people. This came up in the session I was on. I asked you point blank, “What happens when you keep attracting broke people?” You had a really good answer. Do you want to have a go at that again? Tom: Yeah. Unfortunately, I only have a couple minutes left so let’s touch on that. There are a series of filters you can set up depending on which part of the process people are in. Typically, what happens in my sort of business is say I am an international law firm, book a free consult, and then I am in danger of talking to a lot of people I can’t actually help significantly because they can’t afford to do anything with me. It’s actually worse than not speaking with them because I can tell them what to do, but if they go and try to do it, they will probably mess it up because there are so many subtleties to it. They are wasting time and effort and will end up disappointed. It’s not good for them if I speak with them for free, and it’s not good for me if I speak with them for free. It doesn’t really make sense. But if I charge $1,000 an hour regularly, then I will say, “I will give you an hour but just charge you $100.” That’s a filter. That cuts all those people out I can’t help. I am doing a disservice to them by meeting with them because it gives them false hope. If I am doing an event, charging $20 will kick a lot of tire-kickers out. Or you can set up an enrollment page where you actually have to click some buttons and say, “Yes, I understand that in order to implement what I hear at this lunch-and-learn, I will probably be required to make an investment. I’m okay with that.” You can put in filters depending on where they are and how much you want to fill them out. If I was going to a new city and doing lunch-and-learns, I wouldn’t put in any filters. I would get my ass out there and build the list and accept the fact that not everyone is going to be perfect. Hugh: I love it. Tom: The type of honey you put out will attract certain bears. Hugh: We’re going to give people a link to leadsology.guru/five-day-challenge. That is a gift you are giving people. It’s a five-day challenge. They have to do a little work, but they will learn something, right? Tom: More than that, they are going to get more leads in. They are going to get a new client. If people do what I tell them to do in this challenge, it’s like 15 minutes a day over five days. It’s not hard. I get so much positive feedback for this because you will actually put into place your first marketing system potentially, you will generate five fresh, inbound inquiries, and convert at least one of them into a feedback client. Hugh: Tom Poland, you have offered great value to the listeners of Orchestrating Success. I am going to ask you- I know you have no minutes left. Just give us a closing thought or tip for this interview. Tom: Okay. The closing thought is, just be smart enough to know how dumb you are. That is the secret to success. The enemy of growing is knowing. I wouldn’t represent myself in court because I’m not a lawyer. Don’t try to do this at home. Find someone who can teach you how to do lead gen because it is a science, and it doesn’t have to be me. Just be smart enough to know how dumb you are with marketing. Hugh: Tom, thank you for the gift of your time. I thank you, and my listeners thank you. This was so great. Tom: Thank you. What a pleasure. I look forward to continuing the conversation. Cheers.  

In 2008 Tomislav Perko had it all. A successful stockbroking career in his home town of Zagreb, Croatia saw him eating in fine restaurants, wearing fine suits and living the good life. It was perfect – until the financial crisis saw him lose his and his families investments and left him deeply in debt. He had been offering couchsurfing space to travelers including Josh Cahill and their inspiring stories of traveling for little or no cost got him thinking – could he travel the world with no money? Eventually he took the plunge heading off on a 5 year odyssey which included sailing the Indian Ocean and surviving on an average of $10 per day. His adventures gained him attention including the opportunity to Ted Talk, and he has now gone onto to sharing his stories with audiences around Europe. You can find out more about Tomislav at his blog www.tomislavperko.com What I learned from Tom: There are really only 3 travel costs you need to control; transport, accommodation and food. Tom was able to reduce his transport by hitchhiking, and his accommodation by couchsurfing leaving only the third as an issue. Sometimes he could reduce his food costs to nothing by dumpster diving behind supermarkets or grabbing food off diners plates after they left. Volunteering is a great way to live for free. Tom would either pre-arrange a volunteer stint through an organization like WWoof, Helpx and Workaway or look to help out locally when he arrived at a venue. In these cases he was able to cover his food and accommodation in return for a few hours work. It was interesting to hear his experience after 5 years of wanting to start settling down. Much like Audrey Scott and Daniel Noll who set up their Berlin base after too many years on the road many travelers do reach a point where constant travel becomes hard to sustain and the need to find a base for shorter journeys is strong. Hitchhiking is always perceived as dangerous but Tom only had one incident of theft during the 5 years – as we say the world is safer than the media portray.

Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale join us to talk about the road to Ember 2.0 and "Fast Boot". They share insight about why they stick to a 6 week release cycle, and why they think JS frameworks might be the future of all web apps (especially content sites). We also chat about what "indie open source" means, and exactly how much design goes into the Ember project and community. Yehuda Katz (Twitter) Tom Dale (Twitter) Tom Dale's Klout score is 66 Tilde.io Erik Bryn Yehuda at Hack Summit: "Indie OSS" HTMLBars FastBoot: Ember's Server-Side Rendering solution Tom on Shop Talk Show on Server-Side Rendering Rendr JS Yehuda's RailsConf keynote: "10 Years!" Skylight.io: Make your Rails apps faster with actionable insights Transcript: FILE NAME: The Frontside 16 - Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale Talk About Javascript DURATION: 55:59 minutes CHARLES: Everybody, welcome to Frontside the Podcast, Episode 16. We've got Brandon and Stanley here with me on the podcast and some very special guests who need no introduction, so I'll let them introduce themselves. TOM: Maybe we just start with Yehuda because he's the most famous. Are we starting by number of Twitter followers? STANLEY: Actually, Cloud score. TOM: Yeah, it's Cloud score based. YEHUDA: I think Tom has a higher Cloud score than me. BRANDON: All right, Tom. Go for it. TOM: Hey, what's up? I'm Tom. I had the idea for Ember JS in the shower. [Laughter] YEHUDA: Hey. I'm Yehuda. I work on standard stuff and Ember a lot these days, and now Rust also. TOM: Yehuda just joined the Rust core team. I don't know if you guys saw that. BRANDON: I did see that. Rust is a programming language. YEHUDA: Programming language. STANLEY: Are we going to get to talk about that later? BRANDON: Sure. TOM: We can talk about whatever you want. I'm not going to have any insights on that. YEHUDA: We'll have some insights. TOM: Yeah. I don't know if you guys ever saw the Pokemon Movie, but basically Yehuda is reenacting that with core teams. You've got to catch them all. [Laughter] BRANDON: That's great. STANLEY: That's not just the movie, Tom. That's literally everything around Pokemon. TOM: Oh, okay. STANLEY: That is the tagline. TOM: I will definitely defer. You seem like an expert here, Stanley. STANLEY: You know; I know the most important facts of all time. BRANDON: Stanley is on the Pokemon core team actually. STANLEY: I actually just made a new Pokemon that's like a guitar, a chair, and a microwave put together. BRANDON: What's it called? STANLEY: Rock-On. TOM: That is the worst Pokemon name I have ever heard. [Laughter] TOM: Oh, my gosh. BRANDON: All right, well, off to an auspicious start here. So the two of you and Leah formed the original core team for Ember. Is that fair to say or were there other people involved at that time when you kind of were switching SproutCore 2.0 to Ember? YEHUDA: I don't think I would call the original group that switched SproutCore over to Ember necessarily the core team. I would say that there was a bunch of people that were working on what was called SproutCore 2 at the time at Strobe, and it doesn't -- what we were doing there doesn't really meet my requirements for a good core team or a good Indie Open Source project. But one of the things that we did after switching over to being Ember and announcing the separate project was to make the core team more like what I would want. TOM: Well, I would say that there was never one moment where we were like, hey, let's create a core team. I think one thing that I learned from Yehuda about managing an open source project is that it is extremely important to start delegating way before you feel ready or comfortable. So there was a point early on where we were just totally overwhelmed as people started using it and people came along and were interested. And so we just gave them commit bit without really thinking about the bureaucracy of it or the structure of it. And then it definitely got to a point where it was like, "Why is there no core team yet?" because there's a ton of people with commit. So we should probably think about this a little bit more. YEHUDA: Of the people who are on the core team now, Erik, Chris, and Steph were all involved extremely early. I think Erik Bryn was the second contributor. Well, the first contributor after people working at Strobe, and Chris and Steph got involved really early because they were building an app on Ember that was very, very mobile focused. Well, it's a mobile app, and so they needed heavy performance, and we were not necessarily focusing on that, so they got involved pretty early also. BRANDON: And you gave a really awesome talk about this recently at Hack Summit. We'll throw the link to that in the show notes. I thought it was terrific, and I thought there was a lot of amazing ideas that were clearly born of painful experience. And I want to talk about that in a moment and kind of basically running and maintaining an open source project that keeps the open source ethos, I think, was kind of the thrust of the talk and keeping the Web and Open Source Indie. But before we jump into that, I wanted to get kind of a -- without going into, like, a full state of the union, there's a really lot going on in the world of Ember right now. It can be actually kind of hard for individual developers to just keep up with the news of it. There are just so many cool things happening at once. And there are a few things in particular that I wanted to get an update about. You guys are doing some really interesting stuff right now, but some things that are shipping soon: HTMLBars is actually happening. YEHUDA: It's in the beta. BRANDON: Yeah, it's in the beta, so people -- we tested it in our app already, and with one exception with, I guess, Ember list view isn't quite ready for it yet, but. YEHUDA: I think that's ready now too. BRANDON: Oh, really? TOM: Yeah, that just got updated. BRANDON: So, yeah, it was phenomenal. I mean it just works. Like, it was pretty amazing. So the benefit to users for that has been kind of already gradually been implemented where the metamorph tags in the DOM were gone. TOM: Right. BRANDON: What else can people expect to see once HTMLBars is in place? YEHUDA: So let me just reiterate a thing that you just said that maybe people weren't clear about before I let Tom a little bit about HTMLBars, which is, one of our major goals now and probably forever is to continue to update things incrementally and without breaking apps. And that's something that takes a lot of effort, so I want to reiterate it because it's probably the driving force of everything that we do, so like you said, there's a lot of news. We've been talking about a lot of stuff. We can talk for hours on it, probably. But the key thing is that a lot of times you hear there's a lot of news in a project, and it feels overwhelming. It feels like, oh, my God, if there's that much news, it probably means I'm going to have to spend the next five years catching up with all the things that are happening. And with Ember, our major goal is to make sure that all that, all those new features don't affect your app. I mean there will be a 2.0, and at 2.0 there may be some breaking changes, but even with the 2.0, all the breaking changes will land before 2.0. They'll land on the 1x brands together with deprecation warnings so you'll learn about them as you upgrade. TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: And so I think this is the driving force of everything we're doing now. TOM: Yeah, I think, with 2.0, it's not like oh, my gosh, there's all this new stuff I have to learn. Instead, what it's going to be is us removing stuff that you probably never even learned about anyway. YEHUDA: Or that we told you in 1.10 or 1.11 to switch away from and you had plenty of releases to remove. TOM: Yeah, you'll have ample warning, and you'll definitely -- it's not going to blindside anyone. But I think this is exactly the point is we're on a six-week release cycle, and it is impossible to do big bang stuff in six weeks. Right? Think about any big software project anyone listening to this has worked on. It's hard to build a huge thing in six weeks, which maybe seems like a limitation, but actually I think we both see that as a huge strength, which is that it really forces you, as an engineer, to think about, okay, I want to move mountains. But I need to do it six weeks at a time, so how do I basically touch back down to reality as often as possible? With HTMLBars, if you think about it, it's a pretty dramatic thing, right? We're basically entirely replacing the rendering engine of this pretty large JavaScript framework, which in some sense is like trying to change the engine on a 747 mid flight. And the only way that we can get away with doing that is to do it very incrementally. And the only way we can do it without breaking people's apps, I should say, is to do it incrementally. Step one was metal-views, which removed metamorphs. But, fundamentally, all view rendering was still string concatenation. And then the next step after that was to get actual HTMLBars in with creating DOM instead of creating strings. YEHUDA: There was actually another step in between, which was to change all the -- so the internal, whenever you use a curlies and handlebars, those curlies, in the old version of the templating engine, would go and they would have ad hoc code to observe something, observe paths, and there was all this complicated code at each point where a curlies was used anywhere in the templating engine, and the new system -- and this is again behind the scenes, so it's easy for even Tom to have forgotten about it. We refactored everything internally so that it used a stream-based system so that all the parts of the templating engine don't have to know exactly how that's all structured internally. And that makes it a lot easier to do performance optimizations, but also makes it a lot easier to avoid mistakes and bugs that cropped up from time-to-time. So that was another step in the direction that was necessary to get all the way to the end. TOM: So now that's in, and I think the next step is to actually -- the next step will be now that we've got HTMLBars integrated in a backwards compatible way, the next step is introducing nice, new syntax. So just one example of this is this gives us the ability to remove the bind-attr helper. Most people that I've noticed when I'm teaching them Ember intuitively think that they should be able to do attrf equals curly, curly URL, and that doesn't work together. You have to do bind-attr. But because HTMLBars is a much smarter parser, we're able to have that context, and we can actually just dramatically simplify the whole model. BRANDON: Okay. And you also answered another question I had, which was, there are a lot of people basically talking about how they should be building apps for 2.0 friendliness, but it sounds like if they stay with the point releases, there'll be very little work involved in moving to 2.0. So you don't have to kind of like today sit and architect your app in a certain way as long as you're staying up to date with the point releases. Would you say that's relatively accurate? TOM: Yeah, I think so. 2.0 is not going to have any new features, and one feature that Teddy Zeenny is working on for the Ember Inspector, you know the Chrome and Firefox plugin for the developer tools, is adding a deprecations pane. So what we expect to happen is that people should just keep upgrading their apps on the 1x point releases and then, every upgrade, you may see one or more deprecation warnings pop up, either in the console or in this pane in the developer tools. And you just fix those at your leisure. Then when 2.0 comes out, all that will happen is that the payload size of Ember will shrink. YEHUDA: Yeah. I think another way to put all that is, when we looked at React, so we looked at React a lot as part of the run-up to 2.0 for the past, like, six months. And when we looked at React, initially we saw a programming model that actually wasn't that different from how we thought people should build Ember apps, so things like you should have data flowing down from a single point and, in Ember, that single point is the model hook in your route, and then we always thought about data flowing down. And you should have events bubbling up, and you should use actions mostly for communication. I remember Erik Bryn very, very early on said, "I think people are overusing data bindings. People should use events more." And that's when we started adding the evented system to a bunch of the parts of the framework. TOM: Actions. Actions weren't there originally … two-way bindings. YEHUDA: Well, we added actions, but we also added, like, Ember.evented. TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: And I think we kind of knew all this, right? And so idiomatically the way that Ember 2.0 works is actually not that different from how we thought Ember 1.x should work, but I think one of the things that ended up happening is that because data bindings are so -- two-way data bindings can be very nice and clever, a lot of times people would reach for two-way data mining because it was the first thing that was sitting there. And then they would end up building somewhat complicated systems that rely on communication through two-way data mining. TOM: The syntactic sugar pushed you in that direction. YEHUDA: And so a lot of what Ember 2.0 is is about making syntactic sugar more honest about what is the right default, and that does mean that there may be applications that were heavily relying on communication, especially communication channels through two-way data bindings. And that will work much less nicely in Ember 2.0, and it might feel painful to upgrade if you're trying to be both idiomatic and upgrade to 2.0 at the same time. But I think, for most people who are using actions and were using data down through the model hook, I think a lot of it will feel very familiar, will feel very much like how you've been doing things all along. CHARLES: Cool. I actually had a question about HTMLBars landing, and that's when we upgrade our apps, everything should just work seamless. Like Brandon said, we actually did a spike of that, and it mostly seems to be the case. You said that there are no new features, but are there more, like, newer development stories around? Like, given that the templating engine or the view layer understands the DOM, what power or APIs will users have to interact with it, like to do animations or bring things in and out and stuff like that? YEHUDA: Oh, yeah. CHARLES: Is there any of that stuff planned? YEHUDA: I don't think we meant to suggest that there are no new features in number 2.0. Just that they will land in the 1x series, I think, is the point. CHARLES: Ah, right, right. I see. TOM: I think probably the biggest feature is just speed. And I think, also, what HTMLBars' architecture unlocks is the ability to better integrate with other libraries by adopting kind of a diffing approach similar to what React does with the virtual DOM. Basically, in my mind, HTMLBars is all about a bunch of infrastructure work that allows us to make the programming model feel more natural for people who are…. YEHUDA: One way to think about it is that it's the first templating engine that was ever built specifically for Ember. Handlebars templating engine before was built as a general-purpose templating engine, and we pushed it as far as it could go to be real useful for Ember. But things like bind-attr and the metamorph tags kind of crept in as necessary because the templating engine wasn't really built for this purpose, the exact purpose that Ember was designed for. And the HTMLBars engine, part of it is that it's DOM based, and part of it is that it supports diffing, and part of it is that it's faster. But I think, ultimately, it allowed us to look at a lot of areas that are annoying about using templates in Ember and make them nicer. And, yeah, so I think that it's -- TOM: I'd say it also unlocks things like we're working on server side rendering right now, and a lot of that is due to the power of HTMLBars because we can run it in so many different environments, and we can model all of these things as streams internally. It gives us a lot of flexibility about what we can do with your applications. You know, we can do things like server side render your applications even though, of course, you never designed your app for that case in mind. But because of how expressive the templating and, in fact, the entire application architecture is, and because we all agree as a community that this is how we architect our apps, it unlocks a lot more stuff. And I think there'll be more things like server side rendering in the future that we all benefit from by sharing this very declarative application structure and very declarative templating language. YEHUDA: Yeah, I mean honestly, under the hood, the fact a lot of the innovations of the templating engine are not things that any user will ever see directly because they're just implementation. And if we wanted to go around pimping things like streams or the way that the diffing algorithm works internally and the way we clone fragments and all this stuff, we could probably spend a lot of time pimping it, and maybe that would even make a lot of people, some people happy. But I think you'll see, over the next year or so, these things will all lead towards better features or to more features that will be nice, and that's how I think we'd like to roll -- TOM: I think Web components integration is a big one. YEHUDA: Ah, yeah, that's a good point. TOM: I think HTMLBars makes it very easy. And so, in terms of actual improvements coming on top of HTMLBars, the component syntax, instead of being curly, curly to indicate that you want a component, you'll be able to use just regular angle brackets, so that'll be nice. And another thing that we're really keen to get rid of is: You know how today when you're building an Ember component if you want to customize the element associated with that component, you have to say, like, tag name, class name, bindings. You guys know what I'm talking about? BRANDON: Mm-hmm. TOM: So that's kind of annoying because all of those special properties on the component class that you used to customize the element are all duplicating features that already exist in the templating language. So it's just kind of this weird bifurcation of the programming model where, if you want to customize the element for this top level, do it in JavaScript. Everything else, do it in the template. So HTMLBars will allow us to allow you to customize your component element purely in the template, and you won't have to -- basically there are far more cases now where you'll be able to get away with a component that's just a template file, and you'll reduce the number of JavaScript classes in your app. YEHUDA: Yeah, I think, from a high level, the biggest -- the high level of the internal technical improvements are largely that it allows for contextual work. So the old templating engine wouldn't necessarily know that you're inside of an attrf when you have curlies, so we would have to spit out a bunch of extra stuff and maybe make you use extra helpers. It wouldn't necessarily know that you're in image FRC or a video tag or a component. It wouldn't be able to tell if you were using a polymer component that implements the bind protocol, right? But the new templating engine basically lets us see exactly what's happening at every curly, and that just has a large number of positive effects. BRANDON: So you said something else that I felt like was a good segue into the next part of the discussion that this basically allows you to do server side rendering, which you guys are really, like, in the thick of it right now. But for me, a lot of the talk I've seen a about server side rendering comes across as a little inside baseball. There's this sort of discussion between people who are really into React because they're suddenly doing a lot of stuff with server side rendering, and they're seeing some benefits out of it. And you see this stuff kind of pop up in the JavaScript community, but I'm curious to know if you guys can explain a little bit about the benefit of server side rendering that this is a major new feature coming to Ember now. YEHUDA: I'll let Tom maybe give the full pitch, but I think one thing that I feel somewhat strongly about is that, for most people, if you don't have a system that actually gives you something that works pretty well out of the box, in other words it doesn't ask you to do a lot of the work yourself, the idea of isomorphic server side rendering where you run your same app on the client and the server, I don't think that that ends up being worth it. And if you look at a lot of apps that use Ember today, a lot of them have spent relatively little time building non-isomorphic solutions for specifically SEO that have been very, very cheap in terms of time and very, very effective. But I think there's the: I want to not have to write that, even that little bit, and I think that that you get a lot of benefits out of if you just have your framework do it. In other words, if it's not just like your framework does 20% and you do 80%. If it's your framework does 95% and you do maybe a little bit, or you have some constraints, I think that is worth something. And I think the rehydration of fast boot is worth something, although that has even more issues and even a larger percentage that most people have to do on their own. Basically, I think the TLDR for me is that I've always saw server side rendering as indeed somewhat inside baseball because, for most people historically, and I think this is even true largely about React, the solution that you're offered is the framework will do a little bit for you, and you have to go figure out a lot of the details about how to make this work for real. And I think most people just don't have the time to figure all those details out. TOM: So it's been kind of interesting to watch this play out over the last year or two because I think there's been a big split between the JavaScript application community and old school people that create content for the Web who are really keen on this idea of progressive enhancement. And so there's kind been this split. And, for me, for a long time, I personally didn't really care about this case because, in my mind, JavaScript apps were really good for what I'll call workspace apps, which is most of them are behind a login. You log in. You have these very rich interactions. You're editing something. You know, I worked on the iCloud apps. It's a feature, not a bug, that Google can't index your calendar and your email, right? So to me that was the use case for JavaScript apps. But that was until I saw content sites. Like, I remember the first time thinking, "Wow, maybe JavaScript apps are actually the future of all Web applications," was when I saw Bustle, actually. When I saw Bustle, it was just a content site. It was just news articles. And if you would've asked me, I would have said you should probably use Rails or some other server rendered framework for this. But then I saw it, and it felt just like a website. I couldn't actually tell the difference other than how damn fast it was. And I kind of had to step back and question all of my opinions about how people should be building these kinds of applications. And especially for content sites, I think that the server rendering is really important, right, because historically your user has had to download all of this JavaScript and all that JavaScript had to be downloaded and evaluated and run before they saw anything. So having the ability to bootstrap that process on the server and have the first bits that the user starts downloading not be the JavaScript payload, but be HTML and CSS, so that the first thing that they see is useful, I think that's really going to change how people build applications because you get the benefits of server rendering while still retaining the kind of interactions that you can build with something like Ember that you just can't do with Rails. YEHUDA: But again, I think people trying to do this on their own and taking maybe a half solution and then trying to figure out how to make this work reliably ends up producing things that are pretty buggy and feel pretty bad on first boot, or they end up requiring tremendous amounts of engineering resources. And it's possible that, like, huge companies can make this work. But I mostly think about startups, and startups simply do not have the engineering resources to take on the server side rendering task on their own, so this is why I think we care about it for Ember because, as Tom said before, Ember is already pushing you down a pretty conventional path, and we think -- our hope is that by having people do that conventional path and us taking charge of server side rendering will have something that works mostly out of the box for a lot of users. Again, assuming they follow some additional constraints about what you're allowed to do on the server. TOM: And I think we should be clear here because there's, as always happens, there's ambiguity in the terminology. So first is the term isomorphic app, which I don't really love that term, but I guess we better get used to it, Yehuda. YEHUDA: Yeah. TOM: But there's really a spectrum. On the one side of the spectrum you have something like Airbnb has a library for Backbone called Rendr (with no e - well, one e, but not the second e). And that kind of lets you wire up some of the server side rendering. But again, it's very, very manual. And the whole purpose of this is just to make sure that the first thing that you deliver to the browser is HTML and not JavaScript so that the user, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled or they're on a slow connection or whatever, they get something useful. But then on the other side, you have things like Meteor or Asana where the whole idea is -- and to me, I'll be honest with you. It strikes me as extremely silly, but the idea is that you're writing both your server and your client in the same code base, and then you're deploying them both. You describe it, and it sounds like this magic bullet, but it also just seems really silly to me. YEHUDA: Well, I think the fact that even the first releases of Meteor had if Meteor.isClient and if Meteor.isServer, and even the first demos had large blocks of content…. TOM: Yeah. Conditionals. Yeah. YEHUDA: Basically means that people hadn't really figured it out exactly right yet. TOM: Yeah, the point is that even if you have a client side app, your server still has a lot of responsibilities, especially around data access to the database, authorization, authentication, and so on. And putting that in the code base with your UI and your drag and drop code just does not make any sense to me. So I want to be clear to everyone listening that that is not what we're going for. The idea is not that you're writing your json API server in Ember. The point is that you're writing the same old app. In fact, we hope that you don't have to make any changes to your app. And you can deploy it, and it will do a render using the same code. It's basically like your app running in a browser on the server, and then we'll have some way of -- YEHUDA: Except not actually a browser. TOM: -- it's actually a transferring state. YEHUDA: Except, importantly, it's much, much cheaper than being an actual browser. We're not using phantom JS or a zombie or anything. TOM: Right. Conceptually a browser, but we don't want to pay the cost. Phantom JS is a source of great pain for many people, ourselves included, so we want a pure JavaScript environment. But conceptually it's a browser. YEHUDA: I think the reason I hopped in there is I just want to be clear that the goal of conceptually a browser is actually not to be a browser, but to make Ember itself internally abstract enough so that the most expensive parts of being a browser can be replicated in a cheaper way on the server. Obviously the most important part of that is the DOM. And that's the part that React worked out for server side rendering is use the virtual DOM on the server and not a real DOM, right? And that means you don't need real phantom JS and the full scope of DOM. But there's also other stuff like how your routing works and how the model hook runs and how it makes requests, how it makes "XHRs" to get the data in the first place. Right? There are a lot of details if you think about what it takes to boot up an app in the first place. For us, the goal is to go through that whole process of booting up an app all the way through, but not including the did insert element hooks in your DOM and make sure that all that stuff doesn't require -- it has really constrained and clear abstractions, right? So rendering has a render abstraction and routing has a location abstraction, and the DOM has the HTML bars, little dom, lower case dom abstraction, right? So instead of saying we're running it inside of something that pretends to be a browser, we're saying Ember doesn't actually care whether it's in a browser or not, but it has very, very clear abstractions for what it means to be a browser. BRANDON: Okay, so is there--? It sounds like it could be a little like -- is this a little ways off? It sounds like there are a lot of benefits. Like, if you see the hand rolled stuff that Discourse has done, clearly this is something that Bustle cares enough about to sponsor, this is probably a little ways off for Ember developers. Is there anything that you want people doing Ember to know right now about server side rendering in terms of how it's going to affect them or some of the technical stuff that you're learning through this or anything like that? TOM: I think we've been thinking about this particular problem for a very long time. And in fact, we've intentionally designed the architecture of Ember specifically to handle this case, even from the beginning, even like three years ago. We knew that this is something that we wanted or at least we didn't want to paint ourselves into a corner around. So I think there are two aspects of this, and one of them, I think, is pretty well bounded and pretty straightforward. The other one is definitely going to require a little bit more research. The first step is simply getting rendering happening on the server. So because we designed Ember for this case, we were actually able to get Ember as a framework booting up in node in about a day's worth of work. So a couple things have crept in. There were areas where we had been a little bit sloppy and introduced dependencies on things like document.body, jQuery, things like that. So it was about a day to kind of encapsulate those, make sure that they weren't hard requirements for booting the framework, and that was about a day's worth of work. And then, by the end of the week -- we've only been working on this for about a week now -- at the end of the week, we actually had an app booting in node and handling route requests. So in terms of progress, it's been really great. But I guess all that we're saying is that, in a week, we were able to capitalize on the last three years of work we've been doing. That's not as impressive as it sounds. YEHUDA: It was nice that there were relatively few regressions, right? TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: That the list of things where people were accidentally doing things that assumed the browser was actually relatively small. TOM: Yeah. And the way that we did that is basically introducing an abstraction that provides your environment to you, so a node that's different than in a browser. So that's the first part is to get the app booting, and the second part is to get it rendering. I think what's really cool is that, even though HTMLBars, of course, is a DOM based rendering engine, or despite that, we still use an abstraction around DOM access. What we're going to be able to do when we start, again, in earnest tomorrow, on Monday, is basically replace that DOM helper that we used to create DOM in the browser with something that we'll be able to build up strings so that you can build up your HTML on the server and serve that to the client. That's step one: rendering. I think we'll be able to make quite quick progress on that. I would guess probably about -- I don't know if I should give timelines here. I think we're ballparking around a month before we can at least beta it, the server rendering. BRANDON: That's a little faster timeline than I had assumed. TOM: That's purely rendering. I want to make clear that that is purely for things like SEO, for Web crawlers, for curl, things like that. Then the next phase after that, and this is where it gets into the tricky bit, is being able to -- YEHUDA: Rehydration. TOM: -- is rehydration, what people call it. What we call fast boot. And with fast boot the idea is that whatever state that we use to build up your application on the server, we also transfer that state, not just the HTML, not just the output, but the state that we use to build that output is somehow seamlessly transferred from the server to the client. And the client basically just takes the HTML that we've given it and reconnects all these bindings and goes from there, so it's totally seamless to the user. YEHUDA: And I think there's some complexity there. For example, there may be some part of your page that you can't actually render on the server because it says, like, "Hello, authenticated user," with the user's name. So thinking about ways to make sure that you can mark those as needing to be rendered on the client without causing jank. There's a bunch of stuff like that where, at first glance, it seems not too bad, but I guess the high level if there's a determinism issue, right? So the goal is to make sure that roughly what you did on the server is the same thing that you do on the client because if it's too far off, then you end up having to throw -- no matter how smart our algorithm is, we're going to end up having to throw away everything and replace it again. The idea is how to structure your app, how to structure the way that you set up your app in Ember CLI so that you tend to be putting out output that's deterministic on both sides. And, like Tom said, I think state is maybe overbroad. It's mostly modeled batter, right? Making sure that the model batter that you got on the server is equivalent and transferred together with the HTML payload so that the model hooks that you have in your client will not have to go make another XHR. They'll just have the data that the server already collected, and then hopefully rerender an equivalent DOM on the clients with relatively low…. TOM: There are just a lot of tricky cases, like imagine you have a bound helper that shows relative dates, like 30 seconds ago. So you have a clock on the server, and then you have a clock on the client. How do you reconcile those two? YEHUDA: Yeah, so the good news there -- the good news with all that, without getting too much into the weeds, is that the HTMLBars' engine is already broken up between rendering the parts of your DOM that are static, that are like the hello, the text hello inside of an H1, and updating the static parts with dynamic content. And today that's purely a performance optimization, and so that we could use the same document fragment over and over again after cloning, but that will also allow us to use server rendered content where, instead of expecting to have an empty text node that is to be filling in with dynamic content, we'll have a filled in text node. And we see, in that case, Tom, that the time that is in there already is not the correct time. It's not the equivalent time, and so we'll update it. So that's sort of like the React diffing strategy. I'm less worried about, like, there's a single text node with the wrong content because I know we can deal with that. And I'm a lot -- although if it's too much changes, it will look very bad. It will look very janky. I'm more worried about, like, this entire conditional change. So you're looking at something and then, like, your sidebar swaps out for a different sidebar, which I think would be a pretty unacceptable UI. CHARLES: Obviously there are a lot of different server side environments that people use. What requirements of the server is there going to be if I'm using a Rails app or something in Python or Java or whatnot? How am I going to interface to this? TOM: Well, you definitely need a JavaScript runtime, right, because your Ember app is written in JavaScript. Unless you're planning on pouring it into Ruby or whatever, we're definitely going to require JavaScript runtime. And I think we're starting with just supporting node. But what I would like to see, and maybe you guys can write this, is a Rails gem that you can install that will install dependencies in everything and basically get set up in a production environment. YEHUDA: I think one thing people often forget is you can definitely -- you could you have a node app running. People try to embed JavaScript. They try to use, like, The Ruby Racer, and embedding JavaScript is quite a disaster. BRANDON: [Laughter] I'm sorry. I don't know if you know. Charles wrote The Ruby Racer, and it is a disaster. STANLEY: It's cool. It's a disaster. YEHUDA: So let me be clear. It's a great idea. I use it a lot, but it just fundamentally doesn't now work. Right? It fundamentally cannot -- you cannot embed two VGCs in the same process. BRANDON: Right. YEHUDA: Okay. BRANDON: This is the greatest moment in the history of our podcast. I just want to say that. CHARLES: No, I know. There's no way to collect…. YEHUDA: Yes, exactly. CHARLES: -- for example. YEHUDA: I was about to use cycles as an example. CHARLES: The APIs just don't exist. YEHUDA: Yeah, so basically cycles, so this is why. The reason why I feel strongly about this is that we use Rust for Skylight, which is our product. And we need to embed something, and I would never in a million years embed something with a garbage collector. And I think The Ruby Racer was a pretty good -- I think, for constrained cases, it works fine if you know what you're doing, but people basically tried to use it as, "Oh, I'm just going to write part of my program in JavaScript. And, by the way, both languages have closures, so good luck," basically. The Ruby Racer is cool, but I would not -- I don't think that that's the correct strategy for having long-running JavaScript programs like Ember, like complicated stuff like Ember. I think a better thing for people to do would be to figure out a simple IPC protocol so that they could run their Ember app and then have a simple way of talking over a socket or something with the node app, so booting up your Rails app will also boot up the node app. And, if necessary, and you're serving through your Rails app, you could communicate. TOM: I think, to be clear, the Ember app, even when running on the server, still talks to the database server using json, right? So it's the exact same data marshalling flow. It's just presumably it'll be a lot faster because probably your API server and your application server are in the same data…. YEHUDA: Well, at a minimum, it'll be a lot more consistent, right? TOM: Yes. YEHUDA: I think when people -- when Twitter complained about somebody from some country connecting and getting a really slow connection, the issue there was that they were downloading the app shell and then who knows how long it took to download the json payload, right? But if the json payload is coming from the same data center, then it's, by definition, going to be downed within some range, reasonable range. BRANDON: Okay. Awesome. I'd like to shift gears and spend a couple minutes talking about something that most of the questions that I had originally for this were actually answered in your talk. But I'd like to go over it just a little bit. You alluded earlier to the way that you're running Ember as an ideal, sort of your ideals, discovering your ideals about open source projects and the Indie Web. And I think it's a really important topic, and I want to ask a little bit about that because I don't think a lot of people understand this. I think, especially I see in the JavaScript community, a lot more people establishing open source projects that are corporate run and that being considered a benefit rather than a drawback. And I've seen you push back on that a little bit, and I wanted to ask you, Yehuda, about what your definition of the Indie Web is and why you specifically run the Ember project the way that you guy run it. YEHUDA: Sure. I think there are basically two parts of what it means to be Indie, and the second one sort of derives out of the first one, but I think it's -- you wouldn't necessarily arrive at it yourself, so I'll make it explicit. The first one is that you have a diversified core team. What I mean by that is essentially diverse in all the ways you could possibly think of, and things that I learned from other projects are, like, functionally diverse. So make sure that if there's a person on your team -- if there's a person around somewhere running your events or doing documentation or doing evangelism or running user groups, make sure that if there's a person who is very skilled at doing that that they are the top person on your team in charge of that. The counter, the alternative that I've seen a lot in the open source community is that the person running events essentially reports to the core team, right? There's a person who is maybe a professional event runner, and they are not in charge of events. They're in charge of coming up with ideas for events that they run by the core team, and the core team decides yes or no. The problem is the core team has no skills in doing that, so this person ends up spending huge amounts of time being frustrated trying to explain to the core team something or other, right? That would be the equivalent of somebody on the core team writing some area of code, having to come to the rest to the core team and talking about really tiny, nitty-gritty implementation details. Of course, unlike code where I think people have an intuitive sense that you're deep in the weeds of some performance thing, and I don't really understand that. In a lot of areas that are not code, code people have a very high sense of their own understanding, right? The core teams, I've seen a lot of core teams that people come and they say, well, I happen to know a lot about how people want to read docs in this country and so I'm going to help with the translation effort. All of a sudden the core team is an expert on, like, Indian documentation. And they have all these opinions that are totally unwarranted. Step one is have a functionally diverse group of people, and have people that are not necessarily hardcore coders, but are talented and professionals in their area. Have them do that work at the top level. And I spent a little time on this just now because I feel strongly that this is an area that people miss, and it's just an area that code people are too high on their own supply. They're too impressed with their own skills. They cause a lot of pain for the people who are good at areas that are not hard-core code, so that's one. Two is be diverse in terms of the set of people that own decision-making in your project, so this is what you were talking about with the company run open source, and this is something companies can do. I've seen, for example, I worked with the Rust Project, and the Rust Project originally started at Mozilla. But they've been spending tremendous amounts of effort to try to increase the set of people who are on the core team of Rust that are not working at Mozilla. And this is something that maybe takes a lot of effort once you have an established project at a company. There's all the internal company politics you have to deal with. But the reality is that if you have a project that's at one company, you're kind of at the whims and the mercies of that one company's how they do resourcing, whether they think it's important, what their actual goals are. Maybe the thing that they built the project for doesn't necessarily match what the community is doing, right? So become diverse in the companies that own it. I think projects like Rails, Postgres, Ember, increasingly Rust are good examples of this. And, of course, I mean the regular meaning of the word diverse here, just because if you become more diverse in all areas, you actually find yourself being more function diverse just because of who ends up being in what areas. You end up finding yourself having a lot better insight. You end up sitting in a room, and when there are people of diverse backgrounds, the kinds of questions that people ask. And I can only say this. This is the thing that I've noticed personally. It's not a thing that I can empirically measure. I've just noticed that the kinds of questions that people ask, when you're diverse in all kinds of ways, ends up being -- they end up being stronger, better, and they end up pushing back on the kinds of decisions that you can make as a monoculture with group think, right? The harder it is to have group think, the harder it is for everyone to sit around and say, "You know what we're going to do? We're going to rewrite everything," right? That kind of thing is hard to do when you have a lot of people with a lot of different backgrounds with a lot of different interests. So that's, I think, the higher order bit of what in the open source means is be very diversified in a lot of different ways. But there's a specific thing that I think comes out of it that is very important, which is to do the work that you're doing incrementally. Again, the reason I think that this is a derive is that if you have a lot of people with a lot of different interests with a lot of different projects, I think it becomes very difficult for you to do full on rewrites because everybody has interests, and maybe a few people are excited about doing a rewrite, but everyone else says, "Oh, my God. What about my app?" Then you have the docs guy saying, "Oh, my God. Now we have to maintain two sets of docs?" And you have the evangelism guy hearing all the pushback from the community about the rewrite. So it becomes very difficult for you to have this situation where you're not doing things incrementally. But I think, in my talk, I spend some time on what it means to do things incrementally and what the benefits are and how to adopt the six-week release cycle and all that. I talked about that in more detail because, even though I think it's a natural consequence of being diversified, it's also something that you have to think about if you want to do it well. BRANDON: Yeah. It seems to me that that would require, like it's kind of a chicken and egg deal, but to me it seems like there was a lot of discipline in switching to a six-week release cycle, and that's important. It seems, for us at least as consumers of Ember as an open source framework, that's benefited us greatly. We find the framework much, much easier to keep up with on the six-week release cycles than pretty much most other open source projects we've worked with. YEHUDA: Which is kind of like a paradox, right, because you expect that six-week release cycle means you can never keep up with it because it's always changing. But in fact, six-week release cycle means you don't have time to ever change that much. BRANDON: Well, and even for apps that go dormant for a while, we find that, okay; we'll bring it up to one. Bring it up to the next one. The upgrade path becomes extremely obvious. YEHUDA: Yep, exactly, and there's deprecation warnings, and there's ... I think people should watch my talk on this specific area because it took me 15 minutes or something to lay out the whole thing. But I think the basic idea of just doing things incremental, and incrementally has this bad sense. It's like, oh, maybe you're hunting for the local maximum or something. All I mean by incrementally is the same way that the human body replaces its cells, right? You don't do it all at once. Maybe over an extended period of time, the thing that you're looking at is completely different. But because you did it a little at a time, you were able to move the whole community together in the direction instead of people, many, many people getting left behind, which is what used to happen a lot with Rails. I think Rails has gotten better at this over time. But it used to happen, like Rails 3 came out and a lot of people were stuck on Rails 2.3. BRANDON: I think when people hear incrementally, they can think about possibly incrementally be led in circles, right? You could incrementally be every day wake up and decide to change one degree or the other. What matters is if you have a compass that's pointing somewhere. For the Ember project, that incremental stuff doesn't work unless it's pointed somewhere very clear. And you and Tom are basically the keepers of that vision. And I wanted to ask about that, what the vision of the framework is that keeps guiding everybody. Is it sort of implicit to the project? As you use it, you recognize it. Or is it something that you've explicitly outlined somewhere? YEHUDA: I'll take this for a second and then Tom can jump in. I think, fundamentally, the main vision is just we ultimately wanted to have a full stack solution that solved the majority, the vast majority of the problems that a regular person would have writing a Web app, but we knew from the beginning that if we tried to take on that whole project, I mean even Meteor, who took on that whole project, is still struggling to have to complete the vision. And they tried to sort of boil the ocean. And so, we knew from the beginning that we were going to get it wrong if we tried to do a CLI tool and a framework and a data library and all this stuff all at once. And so I think we started off with the V in MVC, basically, right at the beginning and added routing and other stuff over time. But the mission always has been to build the thing that's a full stack of what you need to build front-end tools. Tom, you can take it from there. TOM: Yeah. I think, in the JavaScript world, I think, because JavaScript for so long was treated as a toy language that people didn't do serious stuff in, it attracted a certain type of developer who is -- which is a totally legitimate opinion, but they tended to be kind of hackers who would do these one-off experiments. And because of that, the notion of convention over configuration and having shared solutions is still a somewhat surprisingly controversial opinion in the JavaScript community. And so I think the role, as you said, for Yehuda and I, is to basically be willing to stand up and take the tomatoes that get thrown at us and say, "You know what? No, there is benefit in having a shared solution, especially when it's not just one-off hackers in their basement, but when it's a team of engineers working at a company, and you have a product that you need to ship, and it needs to have good interaction. It needs to be done yesterday. Those people need tools too. People like that deserve tools." And I think that's our goal is to have a framework that will last for at least the next ten years that is willing to incorporate good ideas as they come out and as they're embedded, move the community together, as Yehuda was saying, but without chasing the hype dragon where every six months: "Throw away everything you know because the next big thing is coming out. Rewrite your apps." I see Ember as a way of kind of tempering that instinct for engineers to chase the new and shiny constantly in a way that basically we have a community that agrees together what the next big thing is, and then we start moving towards that. I think, right now, major things that we're thinking about are one server rendering, as we talked about. Getting the CLI tools in place, that's a thing that we've wanted for a long time. But as Yehuda said, we didn't want to try boiling the ocean. And then the new HTMLBars view layer, which unlocks a lot of the cool things that React is able to do around, like, DOM diffing and so on. YEHUDA: Yeah. I usually tell people -- recently, I've come to a line, which is, if you want to tell me that there's not a place for shared solutions in some area or some abstraction, I think the burden is on you, actually. I think people in the JavaScript community, and there's a small group in the Rails community that feels the same way, they assume that the burden is on the person who is trying to abstract, right? If there's a common problem that a lot of people have, they think it's your job to prove that abstraction is a good idea. I think it is your job to prove that a particular abstraction is a good idea. But I think my de facto, my default position is that if a lot of people are solving the same problem that there's a shared solution worth hunting for. And I would say the JavaScript community is really -- big chunks of the JavaScript community are pretty anti this approach. But I think it's really the only way that you could build -- like Tom said, the only way you could build projects with large teams is to have some sense of what the shared answer is and to not have it be some genius on the fourth floor somewhere that does everything. And if you want to make any changes, you have to go to them. I've seen a lot of companies that work like this, and it works fine. Anther facet of this is that pretty much every company deciding to adopt, like, Ember, Angular, React, or Backbone, whatever, they do like this "taste test," right? A taste test is like a two-week project where they see which one is faster. By definition, the taste test doesn't successfully analyze what happens over a longer period or when you have a bigger set of developers, right? It's by definition optimized for short projects with a small number of developers, and so -- TOM: And usually it's the guy on the fourth floor conducting the taste test. YEHUDA: He's either conducting it or he is actively attacking it, right? He is saying we should not -- for example, Firefox OS refused to adopt any framework for an extended period despite the complaints of many people on the Firefox OS team because of the fact that they had a religion against frameworks. They didn't like frameworks as a concept. I've heard this from large numbers of people working on the periphery of Firefox OS and many complaints, right? And so I think we, Ember, one of the things we had to learn was that we can't get away with just saying that. We can't get away with saying, oh, you'll learn. If you just use Ember for a year, you'll figure it out. We had to really improve the getting started experience. But I think, on the flipside of that, there's no way that we could ever -- even if we get to be as nice as to optimal getting started framework, getting started tool, we're always going to have benefits that are not part of that that are very difficult to see when you're doing a quick analysis. Actually, recently we've seen a lot more big companies come out and talk about the benefits of Ember for long-lived projects, and I think that helps a lot just having people testify that they used Ember for a year within a team that wasn't three people, and they found it to be productive in these specific ways. I think that's helped a lot of people feel comfortable. BRANDON: That's been my experience, certainly, as well, just seeing that increase. I think everybody should -- honestly, I believe everybody listening to this should drop what they're doing and go watch the Hack Summit talk. I thought it was phenomenal, and I think it made me think a little differently because it's a little confusing out there, like what some of the tradeoffs are in these open source projects that are run in that kind of echo chamber. And the fact that you guys work so hard to pierce the echo chamber is really cool. I know that there may be some technical questions. We don't get a chance to have you guys on the podcast very often, obviously, so I wonder if anybody has any more questions. STANLEY: Before we get back to technical questions, I just want to cut in and say I really like Yehuda's talk from Rails Conf as well. It was really eye opening for me as somebody new to the Rails community, even though Rails has been around for a while, and kind of understanding the value of shared solutions and kind of the philosophy behind that. YEHUDA: Yeah, that was definitely the first time I tried to formulate a general theory for what shared solutions look like and why they're good, and essentially why Rails hit the nail on the head with the right amount of shared solutions and where the experimentation is happening and all that stuff. STANLEY: Cool. Back to you, Charles. CHARLES: I just had a quick question I wanted, before we wrap up. I had another question about the server side rendering, kind of a general one. I know I've definitely been burned by server side rendering in the past, you know, because it's been something that people talk about on and off, it seems like, for the last five, six years. I remember when mustache first came out. The first time that I tried it, it's like, oh, I've got this templating thing that I can run inside on my Rail server, and I can run it. There's a JavaScript implementation too. One of the things that I found was I was able to get up running very quickly, but then I felt like I was eaten alive by the edge cases. It was actually -- I think it was a blog post that you wrote, Tom, where you were talking about kind of the justification for resolving, always resolving RSVP promises asynchronously. Because, to not do so, have a different context, different stack sitting on top of the resolution was like releasing Zalgo into your application. I actually, when I read that thing about promises, it actually made me harken back to my experience with server side rendering. I was like, oh, with server side rendering I was releasing Zalgo onto my client. I had a very different context. TOM: Yeah, the thing you're describing is sharing templates across two different apps, right? CHARLES: Right. TOM: The data model diverges, and then the things that you need diverge. That specifically is something that we are going to avoid. The idea isn't, oh, you can reuse your model on the server, and you reuse your templates on the server. The point is it's your app, the same exact app, same code base that you would run in the user's browser just happens to be running on the server. YEHUDA: And I think there's also -- I think there's another important point, which is that if you look at how people do SSR, I think historically people have said, "Well, I'm going to use a view layer that's very good at SSR." And then you would have this pile of hacks that was involved in booting up your app. Honestly, Ember, in the beginning, had piles of hacks used to booting up your app. I definitely remember that period. Now the view layer maybe is very good at running on the client server and, like you said, originally was just like the template. But now maybe the whole view layer is good at it. But now the process of actually booting things is a source of non-determinism. You're saying Zalgo. I'm saying non-determinism. Zalgo is a better word. CHARLES: [Laughter] YEHUDA: And Ember has definitely held off on tackling server side rendering seriously until we felt confident that we had the full stack handled. In other words that, as a framework, we had the whole lifecycle handled. Then actually, if you look at technically what we've been doing recently, a lot of it is like separating out. We have an application right now, an application only -- there's only ever one instance of it. Now we're saying, well, there could be multiple sessions. And so we're really looking at the whole lifecycle of the application and, because we own the whole lifecycle of the application, we can actually feel confident that the path that we're going through is correct, so that's one part of it. The other part of it is essentially what React figured out at a high level. I think what we're doing is equivalent, which is you don't necessarily assume that you got exactly the same thing on the client server because probably in practice there's always going to be some thing or other, like the clock case that Tom talked about, or the hello Yehuda case that I talked about before, the authentication case. What you do is you rerender the template, and you don't say if it's not exactly the same, throw it away and start over. You say parts that are the same you can keep, and parts that are different you replace. Therefore, it's not so much a whack-a-mole problem. It's more like how much replacement can I tolerate and have it not feel janky, right? So you go use it, and if you see that there's an area that's popping in and replacing, that's an area that you have to go and figure out so, first of all, it will work. Right? It will work. It will not be broken. It might feel a little bad, and that's an area for you to go and improve the Zalgoishness of your solution. In practice, in Ember, it will almost always be something weird like you're relying on a non-deterministic DOM API or something like this, or you're relying on some XHR that even though we serialized it, you're getting a push notification, and it's different, and it happens quickly, so it's janked. Right? I think the basic point of try to control everything and also only replace things that are needed will get you to a much better starting place out of the gate with Ember than you will have if you try to do the old solutions. It may turn out to be a lot of work. And if it turns out to be a lot of work regardless, then I think it will still, even with Ember, be a thing that is used by people who really need it and not so much by people who don't. But I'm hopeful that the fact that we own the whole lifecycle of your application will let it be useful for a bigger set of people than people who are desperately in need of it as a solution. BRANDON: Awesome, so I think we're going to wrap up. Is there anything you guys want to give a shout-out to or anyone? YEHUDA: Please sign up for Skylight to make your Rails apps faster. TOM: Yeah, please. Make my Christmas a merry one. YEHUDA: We didn't talk about this at all. TOM: And sign up for Skylight. YEHUDA: We didn't talk about this at all, but Tom and I, much of our day job is working on Skylight. And if you watched my talk at Hack Summit, one of the things that I advocate and I really feel it in my gut because of Skylight is I advocate spending, even if you're full time in open source, spending some time, even a day a week or two days a week, would help a lot working on something that you have to maintain over the long haul because, like I said before, maintenance over the long haul is very difficult for you to market. It's something that you have to feel in your heart. If you're working on an open source project, work on -- use it for a real thing that you spend significant time on that you have to maintain over the long haul so you could feel, in a year, whether you're practice is holding up to being maintainable. And, yes, now that I've talked about Skylight for a second, please sign up. This is how we fund our ability to do any open source. Working on Skylight has definitely been the most enjoyable thing I've done in my career so far in the sense that I've had a lot of control over it, but it's also the most harrowing in the sense that we are responsible for getting all the revenue, so please sign up. BRANDON: All right, well, thanks very much, you all, for coming on. Everybody, go sign up for Skylight. It's very cool, very beautiful, and very actionable insight for Rails apps. Tom, Yehuda, thank you so much for joining us on this. It's been super enlightening. Again, everybody, please go watch Yehuda's talk on keeping the Web Indie. And if you've got a little extra time, the Rails Conf talk on layers of abstraction is also, I found, something that changed my views on a lot of stuff as well. Thanks again, both of you all, for coming on. YEHUDA: Thanks a lot. TOM: Thank you, guys. BRANDON: All right, talk to you later. CHARLES: Thank you, guys.