Podcasts about World of Warcraft

Episode #217 of the Max Level Podcast. On today's show, Bryan from rpgera.com is all alone, but that's okay, we have some things to go over that are pretty important, like the upcoming update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons! Plus, Turbo Kid on Kickstarter for Kickstart My Heart! Email the show at ldgpodcast@leveldowngames.com with questions, feedback, suggestions, or whatever else you want! Timestamps for this episode are as follows: 00:00:42 - Introductions 00:01:16 - Patreon 00:05:52 - What's New With You?! 00:14:36 - The Sean Waltman Lightning Round (News Roundup) 00:23:56 - New Release Roulette (Week of 10/18/21) 00:31:29 - Animal Crossing: New Horizons Update Direct Dissection 00:50:30 - Kickstart My Heart (Turbo Kid) 01:01:04 - Final Words GAME CHALLENGE LINKS Bryan's Completed Games for 2021 Kyle's Completed Games for 2021 Dan's Completed Games for 2021 Sean's Completed Games for 2021 CONTACT US Website: https://rpgera.com Discord: https://discord.gg/cC73Heu Twitch: https://twitch.tv/leveldowngames Twitter: https://twitter.com/OriginalLDG Instagram: https://instagram.com/bryan.ldg/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/leveldowngaming MUSIC CREDIT Most music tracks were provided by Midnight Danger and used with permission He can also be found on Soundcloud, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube! Kickstart My Heart: "Kickstart My Heart -Eurobeat Remix-" by Turbo Ad Read: "Song of Elune" from World of Warcraft, copyright by Blizzard MISC INFORMATION This episode's Sean Waltman Lightning Round consists of the following being discussed: Battlefield 2042, Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja, The Heroes Around Me, Propnight, PlayStation Plus, PlayStation VR, and GYAAR Studio --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/maxlevel/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/maxlevel/support

On this episode of Happy Hour, the Hamilton Bros. start off with Chris' unfortunate border patrol encounter. The guys continue the spooky season theme by discussing the 1988 film “Killer Klowns from Outer Space”. Later on, Chris tells Alex about his former neighbor's obsession with World of Warcraft - and how far this person would go with his obsession. Finally, the guys question if different sexual expectations can be harmful in the long run.Follow us on social media:Instagram: https://instagram.com/happyhourwiththehamiltonbrosTikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdbwMWV1/Twitter: https://twitter.com/hamiltonbrospodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/HappyHourHamBros/Our website: https://www.hamiltonhour.comTheme song by Austin AcYd. For inquiries: austinacyd@outlook.comStay true, stay real, and stay righteous. 

World of Warcraft could go many different directions in future expansions. In this podcast, Matt Rossi and Joe Perez explore what an expansion fighting against the wielders of the Light might look like.

Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this weeks episode, Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas discuss the WoW Student Art Contest, hotfixes and everything else going on around Azeroth and Shadowlands! Episode #482: The Calm Before 9.1.5! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! Weekly Event – Mists of Pandaria Timewalking World Boss - Oranomonos the Everbranching in Ardenweald Fevered Incantation (Mages) Surging Shots (Hunters) Verdant Infusion (Druids) Desmotaeron World Boss - Mor'geth, Tormentor of the Damned Mythic + Affixes - Fortified, Bolstering, Quaking, Tormented Dungeon Quests - Halls of Atonement, Necrotic Wake PvP Brawl - Deep Six PvP Quests - Random BGs, Rated BGs PTR 9.1.5 Development Notes ABetterABK World of Warcraft Student Art Contest 2021 Hotfixes and much more! Trying to reach the show? You can find us on Discord at The Starting Zone or email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!

Featured Stories - Art Contest, Rodent Prizes, Mushans Win and Velmic and Taliep are in the studio to talk about  their adventure with Tosh in Ardenweald Sponsors: Moonberry Juice and Stormstout Brewery Recorded live at The Lazy Turnip Inn in the village of Halfhill, the Valley of the Four Winds in beautiful Pandaria! Reach us on Twitter @HalfhillReport, @PTaliep, @Toshmifune1, by email at halfhillreport@yahoo.com or on in the Discord channel. Find Toshmifune and Professor Taliep on the Wyrmrest Accord server! Find branded Halfhill Report and Halfhill Ag Alumni Merchandise at https://www.zazzle.com/store/halfhill_report Show Credits and Acknowledgements Opening Music and bumpers: China Town by Audiobbinger Productions http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Audiobinger/Audiobinger_-_Singles_1776/China_Town_1874 Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0: Pandaren Inn Music - Mists Of Pandaria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9l7Zm3Mo8Q Website Banner Art by  Sandra Schnell https://sanii.artstation.com   Logo Art by Toshmifune based on photo by imagesthai.com from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photography-of-cliff-with-sea-of-clouds-during-golden-hour-733172/  All place names, character names and music from World of Warcraft used in the Halfhill Report are the exclusive property of Blizzard Entertainment.  World of Warcraft is a trademark or registered trademark of Blizzard Entertainment Inc in the US and other countries. No copyright or trademark infringement is intended by The Halfhill Report.

On this episode we talk about Bands we liked growing up getting Old, while we play World of Warcraftcheck out our website https://www.themiscellaneouspodcast.org Help support the show!Follow along with the show and see all the pics on Discord https://discord.gg/CdeZDGXSend us a Text, or Leave us Voicemail at our Free Google number 1-(314)-403-0151Email us @ miscellaneouspodcast17@gmail.comTy to music provided Ready-Made https://open.spotify.com/artist/3wWCXXaRMjW2DPpqPSzj5T?si=xRi6ZOiZSnOFJN7fRN

Imke Feldmann is among the first few to have recognized the incredible value and potential of this thing called Power Pivot in Excel (which was the precursor to Power BI).  And did she ever run with it, launching quite the successful solo consultancy and training service!  She exemplifies the helpful nature of the data community through her blog, The BIccountant, where she shares her amazing Microsoft BI tool knowledge. Her background is in Finance and Accounting, but you'll quickly realize she knows a great deal more than just Finance and Accounting! Contact Imke: The BIccountant Imke's Twitter References in this Episode: Imke's Github MS Power BI Idea - Customizable Ribbon - Please Upvote :) MS Power BI Idea - Speed Up PQ By Breaking Refresh Chain - Please Upvote :) Episode Timeline: 3:00 - The value of outsourcing certain business functions, Imke's path to Power BI starts with Rob's blog, a multi-dimensional cube discussion breaks out! 19:45 - One of Power BI's strengths is collaboration, Imke LOVES her some Power Query and M and loves DAX not so much 33:45 - Imke has a BRILLIANT idea about how to improve Power Query and some other improvements that we'd like to see in PQ 52:30 -  Rob's VS code experience, how COVID has affected the consulting business, Staying solo vs growing a company and how Imke determines which clients she takes on Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Today's guest is Imke Feldmann. We've been working for a long time, nearly a year to arrange the schedules to get her on the show, and I'm so glad that we finally managed to do it. For a moment, imagine that it's 2010, 2011, that era. During that timeframe, I felt not quite alone, but a member of a very slowly growing and small community of people who had glimpsed what Power Pivot could do. And for those of you who don't know what Power Pivot is, and that was the version of Power BI, the first version that was embedded only in Excel. And at the time, the way the community grew, we'll use a metaphor for this. Imagine that the community was a map of the world and the map is all dark, but slowly, you'd see these little dim lights lighting up like one over here in the UK, one in the Southwest corner of the United States, very faintly. Rob Collie (00:00:51): And these would be people who were just becoming aware of this thing, this Power Pivot thing, and you'd watch them. They'd sort of show up on the radar, very tentatively at first kind of dipping their toe, and then that light would get brighter, and brighter, and brighter over time, as they really leaned in, and they learned more and more, and they became more adept at it. And this was the way things went for a long time. And then in 2011, out of nowhere in Germany on the map, this light comes on at full intensity, brightly declaring itself as super talented and powerful. And that was what it felt like to come across Imke Feldmann. Rob Collie (00:01:27): Like all of our guests, there's a little bit of that accidental path in her career, but also a tremendous sense of being deliberate. When this stuff crossed her radar, she appreciated it immediately. And I didn't know this until this conversation, but she quit her corporate job in 2013, the same year that I founded P3 as a real company, and became a freelancer. So for eight plus years, she has been a full time Power BI professional. There truly aren't that many people who can say that in the world. Our conversation predictably wandered. At one point, we got pretty deep into the notion of M and Power Query and it's screaming need for more buttons on its ribbon. And Imke has some fantastic ideas on how they should be addressing that. Rob Collie (00:02:14): We also, of course, naturally talked about the differences between remaining a solo freelancer as she has, in contrast to the path that I chose, which is scaling up a consulting practice business. Along the way we reprised the old and completely pointless debate of DAX versus M, I even try to get Tom hooked on M as his new obsession. We'll see how well that goes. Most importantly though, it was just a tremendous pleasure to finally get to talk to Imke at length for the first time after all these years, we literally crossed paths 10 years ago. So it was a conversation 10 years in the making compress down to an hour and change. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did, so let's get into it. Announcer (00:02:56): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please? Announcer (00:03:00): This is The Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast, with your host Rod Collie, and your cohost Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to P3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:03:24): Welcome to the show Imke Feldmann. How are you today? Imke Feldmann (00:03:27): Thank you, Rob. Great. It's a great day here over in Germany. Rob Collie (00:03:30): We have been talking about doing this for the better part of a year. So I'm glad that we're landing the guest, Imke is here. I really appreciate you doing this. So why don't we start with the basics. What are you up to these days? What do you do for a living? Imke Feldmann (00:03:48): I have people building great Power BI solutions these days. Rob Collie (00:03:55): Ah, yes. Imke Feldmann (00:03:55): That's how I fill my days. Rob Collie (00:03:58): I hear that that's a good business. Imke Feldmann (00:03:58): Yeah, it is. Rob Collie (00:04:03): So, and your website is? Imke Feldmann (00:04:06): Thebiaccountant.com. Rob Collie (00:04:07): Is that what you are on Twitter as well? Imke Feldmann (00:04:08): Yes. That's also my Twitter handle theBIccountant without an A in the middle. I just replaced the A from accountant with a BI. Rob Collie (00:04:17): There you go. Imke Feldmann (00:04:18): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:04:18): That's right. So that means that I'm going to make a tremendous leap here, wait till you see these powers of observation and deduction. You must have an accounting background? Imke Feldmann (00:04:29): I do, yes. Rob Collie (00:04:30): See you look at that. That's why I make the money. Okay, let's start there, was accounting your first career out of school? Imke Feldmann (00:04:39): Yes. I went to university and studied some economics or business stuff there, they'll know it's translated into English. And then I worked as a business controller. After that, I took over a job to lead a bookkeeping departments or to work with an area where the numbers came from basically. And then after that, I worked as the finance director, where I was responsible for a whole bunch of areas, controlling bookkeeping, IT, HR, and production. So that was quite a job with a broad range of responsibilities. Rob Collie (00:05:18): So you mentioned, kind of slipped IT into that list, right? Imke Feldmann (00:05:23): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:05:23): There's all these things in that list of responsibilities that all seemed they belong together, right? Bookkeeping, accounting, control or finance, IT. We've run into this before, with actually a number of people, that a lot of times the accounting or finance function in a company kind of wins the job of IT by default. Imke Feldmann (00:05:45): Yeah. It seems quite common in Germany, at least I would say. Rob Collie (00:05:48): I get multiple examples, but one that I can absolutely point to is Trevor Hardy from the Canadian Football League, he is in accounting, accounting and finance. And just by default, well, that's close to computers. Imke Feldmann (00:06:00): Yes. Rob Collie (00:06:01): And so it just kind of pulls the IT function in. Now is that true at really large organizations in Germany or is it a mid market thing? Imke Feldmann (00:06:09): No I would say a mid market thing. Rob Collie (00:06:12): That's true here too. So when there isn't an IT org yet it ends up being, oftentimes it falls to the finance and accounting function. Hey, that's familiar. It's kind of funny when you think about it, but it's familiar. And isn't finance itself pretty different from accounting? How much of a leap is that? What was that transition like for you taking over the finance function as well? We tend to talk about these things, at least in the US, is like almost like completely separate functions at times. Imke Feldmann (00:06:43): It depends, but at least it had something to do with my former education, which wasn't the case with IT. So, I mean, of course on a certain management level, you are responsible for things that you're not necessarily familiar with in detail. You just have to manage the people that know the details and do the jobs for you. So that was not too big an issue I must admit. Rob Collie (00:07:10): My first job out of school was Microsoft, an organization of that size, I was hyper specialized in terms of what I did. At this company at P, we are nowhere near that scale, and there's a lot more of that multiple hat wearing. I've definitely been getting used to that over the last decade, the first decade plus of my career, not so much. Imke Feldmann (00:07:31): Yeah. That's interesting because I basically went completely the other way around. I see myself now as working as a technical specialist and as a freelancer, I don't have to manage any employees anymore. Rob Collie (00:07:47): Well, so now you wear all the hats? Imke Feldmann (00:07:49): Yes. In a certain way, yes. Rob Collie (00:07:51): Okay. There's no HR department necessarily, right, so it's just you. But marketing, sales, delivery, everything. Imke Feldmann (00:08:01): Yep, that's true. Yep. And when I first started, I tried to do everything by myself, but the test changed as well. So in the past I started to outsource more things, but to external companies, not internal staff. Rob Collie (00:08:17): So you're talking about outsourcing certain functions in your current business, is that correct? Imke Feldmann (00:08:22): Yes, yes. Rob Collie (00:08:22): So it's interesting, right? Even that comes with tremendous risk when you delegate a certain function to an outside party whose incentives and interests they are never going to be 100% aligned with yours. Even we have been taken for a ride multiple times by third-party consulting firms that we've hired to perform certain functions for us. Imke Feldmann (00:08:46): Oh, no I don't outsource and your services that I directly provide to my clients. Rob Collie (00:08:49): Oh, no, no. Imke Feldmann (00:08:50): No. Rob Collie (00:08:50): No, we don't either. But I'm saying for example, our Salesforce implementation for instance- Imke Feldmann (00:08:56): Okay, mm-hmm (affirmative). Rob Collie (00:08:57): ... Has been a tremendous money sink for us over the years. Where we're at is good, but the ROI on that spend has been pretty poor. It's really easy to throw a bunch of money at that and it just grinds and grinds and grinds. And so this contrast that I'm getting around to is really important because that's not what it's like to be a good Power BI consultant, right? You're not that kind of risk for your clients. But if you go out and hire out some sort of IT related services for example, like Salesforce development, we're exposed to that same sort of drag you out into the deep water and drown you business model, that's not how we operate. I'm pretty sure that's not how you operate either. And so anyway, when you start talking about outsourcing, I just thought, oh, we should probably talk about that. Have you outsourced anything for your own sort of back office? Imke Feldmann (00:09:52): Back office stuff, yeah. My blog, WordPress stuff, or computer stuff in the background. So security [inaudible 00:09:59] the stuff and things like that, things that are not my core, I hire consultants to help me out with things that I would formally Google, spend hours Googling with. Rob Collie (00:10:09): Yes. Imke Feldmann (00:10:10): Now I just hire consultants to do that. Or for example, for Power Automate, this is something that I wanted to learn and I saw the big potential for clients. And there I also did private training basically, or coaching, or how you called it, hire specialists. Rob Collie (00:10:27): To kind of getting you going? Imke Feldmann (00:10:29): Exactly, exactly. Rob Collie (00:10:30): And those things that you've outsourced for your back office, have there been any that felt like what I described you end up deep in the spend and deepen the project going, "What's going on here?" Imke Feldmann (00:10:41): I'm usually looking for freelancers on that. And I made quiet good experiences with it, I must say. Rob Collie (00:10:49): Well done. Well done. All right. So let's rewind a bit, we'll get to the point where you're in charge of the finance department, which of course includes IT. Imke Feldmann (00:10:58): Not necessarily so. I felt quite sad for the guys who I had to manage because I said, "Well, I'm really sorry, but you will hear a lot of questions from me, especially at the beginning of our journey," because I had to learn so much in order to be a good manager for them. So that was quite different situation compared to the management roles in finance that I had before, because there I had the impression that I knew something, but IT was basically blank. Rob Collie (00:11:30): I would imagine that that experience turned out to be very important, the good cross pollination, the exposure to the IT function and sort of like seeing it from their side of the table, how valuable is that turned out to be for your career? Imke Feldmann (00:11:45): I think it was a good learning and really interesting experience for me just to feel comfortable with saying that I have no clue and ask the people how things work and just feel relaxed about not being the expert in a certain area and just be open to ask, to get a general understanding of things. Rob Collie (00:12:09): That's definitely the way to do it, is to be honest and transparent and ask all the questions you need to do. It's easier said than done. I think a lot of people feel the need to bluff in those sorts of situations. And that usually comes back to haunt them, not always. Imke Feldmann (00:12:25): No, that's true. Rob Collie (00:12:27): Some people do get away with it, which is a little sad. So at what point did you discover Power BI? Imke Feldmann (00:12:35): I didn't discover Power BI, I discovered Power Pivot, for your blog of course. Rob Collie (00:12:41): Oh, really? Imke Feldmann (00:12:43): Yes, yes, yes, yes. I think it was in, must be 2011, something like that. Rob Collie (00:12:50): Early, yeah. Imke Feldmann (00:12:51): Yeah. Quite early. When I was building a multidimensional cube with a freelancer for our finance department, then I was just searching a bit what is possible, how we should approach this and things like that. So we started with multi-dimensional cube because that was something where I could find literature about and also find experts who could have me building that. But when doing so, I really liked the whole experience and it was a really excellent project that I liked very much. And so I just searched around in the internet and tried to find out what's going on in that area. And this is where I discovered your blog. Rob Collie (00:13:35): I have no idea. First of all, I had no idea that my old blog was where you first crossed paths with this. Imke Feldmann (00:13:42): I think [inaudible 00:13:43]. Rob Collie (00:13:44): And secondly, I had no idea that it was that early. I mean, I remember when you showed up on the radar, Scott [inaudible 00:13:51] had discovered your blog and said, "Hey, Rob, have you seen this? Have you seen what she is doing? She is amazing." That wasn't 2011, that was a little bit later. I don't remember when but... Imke Feldmann (00:14:06): No, I think we've met first. I think we met on the Mr. XR Forum on some crazy stuff I did there. I cannot even remember what that was, but I started blogging in 2015 and we definitely met before. Rob Collie (00:14:21): That's what it was. It was the forums. And Scott was the one that had stumbled upon what you were doing there and brought my attention to it. I was like, whoa. It was like... Imke Feldmann (00:14:34): That last really some crazy stuff. I think I was moving data models from one Excel file to another or something like that. Some crazy stuff with [inaudible 00:14:43] and so on. Rob Collie (00:14:44): You obviously remember a better than I do. But I just remember being jaw dropped, blown away, impressed, by what you were doing. And the thing is the world of Power Pivot interest at that point in time still seems so small. The community still seems so small that for you to emerge on our radar fully formed, already blowing our minds, that was the first thing we ever heard from you. That was a real outlier because usually the way the curve of awareness went with other members of the community is that like, you'd see something modest from them. And you'd sorta like witnessed their upward trajectory as they developed. Of course, you've continued to improve and learn and all of that since then. But as far as our experience of it, it was you just showed up already at the graduate level, just like where did she come from? So cool. So you said that you enjoyed the multi-dimensional cube project? Imke Feldmann (00:15:43): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes. I don't know MDX, but I totally enjoyed the project. So being able to build a reporting solution for my own company, basically then for the company I worked for, and doing it live with a consultant with a freelancer on my hand, discussing how things should look like and just seeing the thing form before my eyes and grow. And this was just such an enjoyable experience for me. Rob Collie (00:16:11): So the thing that's striking about that for me is, there's no doubt that the multi-dimensional product from Microsoft was a valuable product. It did good things. But I never have heard someone say that they really enjoyed the implementation process as a client, right? Imke Feldmann (00:16:31): Okay. Rob Collie (00:16:31): You had a freelancer doing the work. So something you said there really jumped out at me, it was, sort of like doing the project live. So the way that this worked traditionally, at least in the US, is the consultant would interview you about your requirements and write a big long requirements document and then disappear and go build a whole bunch of stuff and come back and show it to you, and it's completely not what anyone expected. It's almost like you're on completely different planets. Obviously, if you'd had that experience, you would not be saying that you enjoyed it. So there had to be something different about the way that you and that freelancer interacted. Do you remember what the workflow was like? Imke Feldmann (00:17:16): What we did is that we often met together and just looked at where we're at and what the next steps should be. And we definitely had specific targets in mind. So there were some reports that I had defined as a target, and around these reports I was aware that we needed something that a proper data model, because I also knew that I wanted to have some sort of a general set up that could be carried from Excel as well. So I knew about cube functions, and I knew that on one hand I needed these reports that had formerly been within our ERP system. Also, I wanted them to be in a separate solution that was under my control and independent from the ERP system. And on the other hand, I wanted some more. So I wanted the flexibility to be able to vary this data and for certain other purposes in the controlling department as well. So basically being able to do ad hoc analysis on it. Imke Feldmann (00:18:23): And we met often and I showed a certain interest in how the table logic was created. So I knew that the MDX was over my head at the time, but I showed a very strong interest in which table are created, how they relate to each other, and that was quite unusual. At least this is what the [inaudible 00:18:47] the freelancer told me. Rob Collie (00:18:49): I bet. Imke Feldmann (00:18:50): He said that he doesn't see that very often that clients showed this sort of interest. Rob Collie (00:18:56): Did he say, "Yeah. You really seem to be having fun with this. Most of my clients don't enjoy this." You said that you met very often, so were there times where he was writing MDX while you were in the room? Imke Feldmann (00:19:10): Sometimes yes, because I said, "Well, can we switch this a bit or make some changes?" And sometimes he said, "Well, I can try adjust now." Because he came over for one day or half a day, and then we spoke things through and defined further things. And if we were finishing early, he would just stay and do some coding there. But apart from that, he would work from home and do the big stuff. Rob Collie (00:19:37): OLAP originally it stands for online analytical processing, where online meant not batch, right? It meant you could ask a question and get the answer while you were still sitting there. Imke Feldmann (00:19:51): Okay. Oh, really? Rob Collie (00:19:53): That's what online meant. Imke Feldmann (00:19:54): It's interesting. Rob Collie (00:19:56): It basically meant almost like real time. It's a cousin of real time, that's what online meant at that point, as opposed to offline where you write a query and submit it and come back next week right? So that's what the online and OLAP comes from. Imke Feldmann (00:20:12): Oh, interesting. Rob Collie (00:20:13): We would pick a different terminology of OLAP were it invented today. So something interesting about, it sounds like your experience, and I did not anticipate drilling into your experience with multi-dimensional on this conversation, but I think it's really important is that at least some portion of that project that you sponsored and implemented with the freelancer, at least some portion of the work was similarly performed online. Meaning the two of you were sort of in real time communication as things evolved. And the old model and the vast majority of multidimensional solutions that have ever been built in the world, the MDX powered solutions, were built and an offline model, where the majority of the communication supposedly takes place in the form of a requirements document. Rob Collie (00:21:05): And that was a deeply, deeply, deeply flawed approach to the problem, that just doesn't actually work. So I guess it's not surprising to me that the one time I've ever heard someone say they really enjoyed that multi-dimensional project, that at least a portion of that multidimensional project was sort of almost like real-time collaboratively performed rather than completely asynchronous, right? I guess we want to be really geeky, we could say it was a synchronous model of communication as opposed to an asynchronous one. And Power BI really facilitates that kind of interaction. Imke Feldmann (00:21:41): Absolutely. Rob Collie (00:21:42): The reason why the MDX multi-dimensional model worked the way it did, or there was two reasons, one is a legitimate one on one of them is more cynical. So the legitimate reason is, is that it required reprocessing of the cube for every change, it's just too slow, right? The stakeholder, the business stakeholder doesn't typically have the time or the patience to sit there while the code's being written, because it's so long between even just implementing a formula change sometimes would be, well, we need to wait an hour. And so the attention span of the business person can't be held for good reason there, right? And so that sort of drove it into an asynchronous model. Rob Collie (00:22:23): The other reason is, is that that is asynchronous model turned out to be a really good business model for the consultants, because the fact that it didn't work meant that every project lasted forever. And so that's the cynical reason. But Power BI is not long delays. You change the measure formula, or you add an extra relationship, or heck even bringing in a new table, just a brand new table, bring it in, it wasn't even in the model, now it's in the model. End to end that can sometimes be measured in minutes or even seconds. And so you can retain engaged collaborative interest. Now it's not like you're always doing that, right? There's still room for offline asynchronous work in our business, but really critical portions of it can be performed the other way. And I think that makes a huge difference. Imke Feldmann (00:23:13): Yep. And that's what I like about it. So it's so great to be able to have, as a consultant, to perform really relatively large tasks without any further involvement of other people. Which, I mean, honestly, I don't call myself a team worker, not because I don't love other people also, but teamwork means you have to communicate with other people, make sure that they know what you're working on. So there are so many interfaces that have to be maintained if you're working with other people. And so I really laugh the way I work currently being able to deliver full solutions as a one woman show consultant. That is really a pleasure for me. That's really my preferred way of work, I must say. Because I can really focus on the things that have to be done and I'm able to deliver value in a relatively short time for the clients. Rob Collie (00:24:14): That's a really interesting concept. There are certain kinds of problems in which collaboration, a team collaboration is absolutely necessary. The magic of collaboration sometimes can beat problems that no individual could ever beat. At the same time though, there's this other dynamic, right, where having a team working on a problem is actually a real liability because the communication complexity between the people becomes the majority of the work. Here's a really hyper simplified example. There used to be sort of a three-person committee, if you will, that was running our company P3, me and two other people. Imke Feldmann (00:24:57): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rob Collie (00:24:58): And so all leadership decisions were essentially handled at that level. Well, things change, people move on, right? And so we went from a three person committee to a two person committee. We didn't anticipate the two of us who stayed, right? We did not anticipate how much simpler that was going to make things. We thought, just do the math, right, it's going to be like, well, it's one less person to get on the same page. So it's going to be a one-third reduction in complexity. It was actually double that because we went from having three pairs of communication, right, the triangle has three sides, to a line that only has one side, right? So there was only one linkage that needed to be maintained as opposed to three geometrically, combinatorially, whatever we're going to say, right? It just became- Imke Feldmann (00:25:45): Exponential. Rob Collie (00:25:45): ... Exponetially simpler. And so for problems that can be soloed, you have this amazing savings in efficiency, in clarity, even, right? Imke Feldmann (00:25:59): Yup. Rob Collie (00:25:59): There's just so many advantages when you can execute as one person, then there's the other examples like our company at our size now, even ignoring the number of consultants that we need to do our business, just the back office alone, we need the difference in skills. We need the difference in talents and interests and everything. We simply could not exist without that kind of collaboration. However, when our consultants were working with a client, usually it's essentially a one-on-one type of thing, right? We don't typically put teams of consultants on the same project. We might have multiple consultants working for the same client and they might be building something that's somehow integrated, but it's still very similar, I think to your model, when you actually watch sort of the work being done, there's this amazing savings and complexities. Imke Feldmann (00:26:50): Yup, that's true. Of course I have a network in the background. So when big problems arise where I need brain input, of course, I have a network, but it's not a former company. Rob Collie (00:27:02): And that's how we work too, right? We have all kinds of internal Slack channels. For some reason we adopted Slack years ago before Teams was really a thing. So Slack is sort of like our internal social network. There's a lot of discussion of problems, and solutions, and a lot of knowledge sharing, and people helping each other out behind the scenes in that same way. Again, we do bring multiple consultants into particularly large projects, but it's not like there's three people working together on the same formula. In Power BI, the things that you do in ETL, the things that you do in power query are intimately interrelated with the data model and the decks that you need to create. And imagine parceling that out to three different people. You have one formula writer, one data modeler, one ETL specialist, you would never ever get anywhere in that kind of approach. Imke Feldmann (00:28:00): Not necessarily. I mean, the tax people are the person responsible for the data model. He could write down his requirements. He could define the tables basically. And then someone could try to get the data from the sources. But of course, then you get some feedback that the data isn't there or that the model has to be shaped in a different way. So it has two sides to it. But that's interesting to see that you have the same experience, that Power BI models or solutions of a certain size that can very well be handled by one person alone. And that really brings speed, and flexibility, and agility to the whole development process I think. Rob Collie (00:28:41): You communicate with yourself at what's above giga? Peta, petabit? you communicate with yourself at petabit speed and you communicate with others through a noisy 2,400 baud modem that's constantly breaking up. It's amazing what that can do for you sometimes. So there comes a point in your journey where you decide to go freelance. Imke Feldmann (00:29:07): Yup. Rob Collie (00:29:08): That's a courageous leap. When did that happen and what led you to that conclusion? Imke Feldmann (00:29:13): I made the decision in 2012 already to do that. Rob Collie (00:29:19): Wow. Imke Feldmann (00:29:20): And I just saw the light. I just saw the light in Power Pivot and then Power Query came along and I saw what Microsoft was after. And as I said, I enjoyed the building of the cube, getting my hands dirty, reading about the technologies behind it and so on. And this was what I felt passionate about. And I also had the idea that I needed some break from company politics. And so I just thought, well, I give it a try. And if it doesn't work, I can find a job after that or find a company where I work for at any time after that. So I just tried it and it worked. Rob Collie (00:30:05): So you decided in 2012, did you make the break in 2012 as well? Imke Feldmann (00:30:12): I prepared it, and then I just in 2013, I started solo. Rob Collie (00:30:18): Okay. 2013 is also when we formally formed our company. For 2010-2013, it was a blog. I had other jobs. I had other clients essentially, but I wasn't really hanging out the shingle so to speak, as you know, we're not an actual business really until 2013. And I guess it's not much accident that we both kind of did the same thing about the same time, it's that demand was finally sufficient I think in 2013 to support going solo. In 2012, there weren't enough clients to even support one consultant. And so, oh, that's great. And I think you really liked Power Query too, does M speak to you? Imke Feldmann (00:31:02): Yes. Yes. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:31:03): It does, doesn't it? Imke Feldmann (00:31:04): I really prefer Power Query or M over DAX, I must admit. It has been much more liable to me than DAX. Rob Collie (00:31:15): Oh, and I liked you so much before you said that. I'm team DAX all the way. Imke Feldmann (00:31:23): I know. I know. I know. I mean, of course I love to use DAX as well, but I really feel very, very strong about Power Query. And I mean, I had such a great journey with it. I mean, it was really [inaudible 00:31:35] work for me personally, that I did with it. And it was just a great journey to understand how things work. I mean, this has been the first coding language for me that I really learned. And it was just a great journey to learn all the things and starting to blog about it. And of course, I started basically helping people in the forum, that's where I basically built my knowledge about it, solving other people's problems. And this was just a great journey. And Polar Query has always been good to me than DAX. Rob Collie (00:32:14): This is really cool, right? So you fell in love with Power Pivot, so DAX and data model, right? There was no Power Query. Imke Feldmann (00:32:21): Mm-hmm (affirmative)-, that's true. Rob Collie (00:32:23): Okay. And because we had no Power Query, there were many, many, many things you couldn't do in Power Pivot unless your data source was a database. Imke Feldmann (00:32:30): Yup. Rob Collie (00:32:31): Because you needed views created that gave you the right shape tables, right? If your original data source didn't have a lookup table, a dimension table, you had to make one. And how are you going to make one without Power Query? It gets crazy, right? At least unbelievable. So try to mentally travel back for a moment to the point in time where you're willing to, and not just, it doesn't sound like you were just willing to, you were eager to go solo to become a freelancer, right, with just DAX and data modeling. And then after that, this thing comes along that you light up when you talk about. You didn't have this thing that you love, but you were already in, that doesn't happen very often. Imke Feldmann (00:33:18): It could be that loved DAX at the beginning, but it just started to disappoint me at sometimes. Rob Collie (00:33:29): Oh, okay. Thomas LaRock (00:33:29): It disappoints everyone. Rob Collie (00:33:29): I'm just devastated. Imke Feldmann (00:33:35): No, I mean, it's amazing what DAX can do, but I mean, we all know it looks easy at the beginning, but then you can really get trapped in certain situations. Rob Collie (00:33:46): Yeah. I described these two things is like the length and width of a rectangle, Power Query and DAX. Take your pick, which one's the width, which one's the length? I don't care. And then we ask which one is more responsible for the area of the rectangle, right? Neither. You can double the length of either of them and it doubles the area of the rectangle. So it's really ironic that I'm so sort of firmly on team DAX for a number of reasons. Number one, is that I'm really not actually that good at it compared to the people who've come along since. Like my book, for instance, I think, I look at it as this is the 100 and maybe the 200 level course at university, maybe the first in the second course, maybe, but it's definitely not the third course. The thing that you take in your third or fourth year of university, that's not covered in my book in terms of DAX. Rob Collie (00:34:44): And basically every one of the consultants at our company is better at DAX than I am. And that's great. That's really good. And the other thing that's ironic about my love of DAX over M, is if these two were in conflict, which they aren't. Imke Feldmann (00:35:00): No they are. Rob Collie (00:35:02): Is that I actually was trying for years to get a Power Query like project started on the Excel team. I knew how much time was being chewed up in the world just transforming data, not analyzing it even, just getting things ready for analysis. It's just ungodly amounts of time. And so I was obsessed with end-user ETL. When I was on the Excel team, it was like a running joke, someone would mention in a meeting, "Well, that's kind of like ETL," and other people would go, "Oh no, no, don't say that in front of Rob, he's going to get started and he won't shut up about it for the next 30 minutes." On the podcast with the Power Query team, I told them I'm really glad that no one ever agreed to fund my project on the Excel team because now that I see what Power Query is like I grossly underestimated how much work needed to go into something like that. And I'm glad that Microsoft isn't saddled with some old and completely inadequate solution to the Power Query space, because now that I've seen what the real thing looks like, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, we would've never been able to pull that off." Rob Collie (00:36:14): So the thing that I was most obsessed with is the thing that now that it's actually been built, for some reason, I just find M to be, I don't know, there's like a reverse gravity there that pushes me away. Imke Feldmann (00:36:26): What I actually would like to see is that there's less need to use M in the Power Query product. So first, the only thing I was dreaming about was finally to have a function library that can easily be shipped from then, or that you can download from internet or wherever, where you can use additional functions in your M code. So this was the first thing that I was really passionate about and thought that we should have such a thing in Power Query to be able to make more cool things, or group steps together. But now what I really think we should actually have and see in Power Query is the ability to build our own ribbons and to the query editor. Rob Collie (00:37:13): Yes. Imke Feldmann (00:37:13): Like we have in an Excel. So this is something that in my eyes would really bring a big push to the product and actually would make so much sense for the people who start using these products. I mean the whole Power platform can have so many benefits for finance department, all departments, but I mean, I'm passionate about finance departments. But have you counted how many low-code languages are in there, if you include Power Apps and Power Automate and all these things? Rob Collie (00:37:50): Low-code. Imke Feldmann (00:37:50): And honestly, in order to come up with any solution that makes sense in a business environment, I would say in all of these solutions, there is no way around the code at the end. I mean, you get quite far with clicky, clicky, but I haven't seen solutions where you get around the languages. And now imagine the typical finance people who really they know the Excel formulas and some of them might know VBA as well. And now their server uses new low-code, no-code word, and just get your head around about five or six new languages that you all have to know and learn in order to get something useful and so on. So I think that's just not feasible for people who have real jobs in the business to learn all that. Rob Collie (00:38:42): Well, that's what you're here for, right? That's what your business is for and that's what P3 is for. Imke Feldmann (00:38:48): We get them started and the products are great. And if there are people in the companies who have a drive to learn things and take the time they get their heads around it, but it could be easier. It could be easier with things like that, where we could provide additional user interfaces and just make it even easier for people to build great solutions for them or adapt solutions that consultants had build initially, but to maintain them by themselves and make adjustments to them if needed. Rob Collie (00:39:19): So [inaudible 00:39:20] has an old joke where he says, when he's doing a presentation or something, he says, "That's a good question. And I define good question as a question I know the answer to, right." And then he says, "But then a great question is a question that is covered by the very next slide." So there's a similar parallel joke to make here, which is that, that idea you just talked about with the ribbons and everything, right? So if I said, it's a smart idea, what I would mean is, again, this is a joke, right? I would mean that that's an idea that I agree with and have kind of already had. But if I say it's a brilliant idea- Imke Feldmann (00:39:55): Okay. Rob Collie (00:39:56): ... Then it's an even better version of an idea that I've already had that has never occurred to me. Your idea is a brilliant idea. Imke Feldmann (00:40:02): Okay. Rob Collie (00:40:06): It goes beyond. So I have been advocating privately behind the scenes with the Power Query team forever telling them that they need about three or four more ribbon tabs. There's just way too many commonly encountered problems for which you can imagine there being a button for, and there's no button. Imke Feldmann (00:40:28): Exactly. Rob Collie (00:40:29): And it's like, I don't understand. I used to be on teams like that, but I don't understand why they haven't gotten to this. Because it seems so low hanging fruit. They've already built the engine, they've built the language, right? The language can already handle this, but you actually had two brilliant ideas in there that had never occurred to me. First of all, I'm used to the idea that the community can't contribute libraries of functions, they can't do that for DAX. Imke Feldmann (00:40:57): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rob Collie (00:40:58): That's not even like engineering possible for DAX. And the reason for it is, is that the DAX engine is so heavily optimized in so many ways that there'd be no way to plug in some new function that's unpredictable in terms of what it needs to do. All of these things, they're all inherently interrelated and they make changes in the storage and the query engine to make this function work better and vice versa, because it has to take advantage of the index compression scheme and all of that kind of stuff. It's actually not possible, is the wrong word, but it's actually orders of magnitude more difficult, if not impossible to allow DAX to have UDF, user-defined function type of feature. Rob Collie (00:41:42): I don't think Power Query is like that though. Maybe naively, because again, I'm not on the internals team on the Power Query side. But it does seem like a UDF capability is at least much more feasible- Imke Feldmann (00:41:53): Absolutely. Rob Collie (00:41:54): ... For Power Query, which does execute row by row essentially. Other languages have this, right? One of the reasons that R is so popular is not that R is so awesome, is that R has tremendous libraries of commonly solved problems that you can just go grab off the internet or off the shelf and plug into your solution. Imke Feldmann (00:42:14): I have my own library I've created. You can go to my GitHub and you'll see 50, 60 custom M functions. You can package them in a record and [inaudible 00:42:24] them as a library and your M code, or you could even connect live to them and run them with an execute statement. But this is too difficult, although it's just a couple of clicks, but it's too difficult or at least intimidating for the beginners, who really Power Query beginners who start with the products, I think there's so much potential to make their life easier. And that's not through some coding stuff, or I know this function, I know that function, that's really can only come in my eyes through user interface with buttons. Rob Collie (00:42:59): Yeah, I agree. And just as importantly for me, is that I might actually come around and be like, just as much team Power Query as team DAX. Honestly, my frustration is just the M language and just my total lack of desire to learn it. [crosstalk 00:43:16]. It is what it really comes down to. It's not about M, it's not about Power Query, it's about me. Whereas again, I know the need that it fills is massively important. So it's not that I think it's a bad mission, I think it's like the mission in a lot of ways. I was obsessed with it long before I ever crossed paths with business intelligence, I was obsessed with data transformation, end user data transformation. It's just a problem that's about as ubiquitous as it gets. So let's make it happen. We agree, the two of us, that's it, right? It's like we need to go provide a unified front. Imke Feldmann (00:43:52): I think that that's an idea in the idea forum, I might send the link that you can maybe post. Rob Collie (00:43:56): We want that thing up, voted to the moon. I'll even go figure out what my sign in is on the ideas side. Imke Feldmann (00:44:08): Oh, good luck with it. Rob Collie (00:44:09): Which is absolutely impossible. I have no idea which of the 14 counts. And then I'll try to create a new one and it'll go, "Nah, you're not allowed to. We know it's you, but we won't tell you who it is, what your email address is." So I completely agree. So there's so many problems. I always struggle to produce the list. It's like I need to be writing down the list of things that are crucial, but here's an example. Remove duplicates, but control which duplicate you keep. That's a problem that can't be solved in the GUI today. Imke Feldmann (00:44:48): And you need the intimidating type of buffer that you have to write by hand around it, which is just pain. Rob Collie (00:44:56): Remove dups and don't care which one you keep. Okay, fine. That's a great simple button. There should be an advanced section that allows you to specify, oh, but before you keep the dups, sort by this column or sort in the following manner. Imke Feldmann (00:45:10): Exactly. Rob Collie (00:45:10): And then keep the first one of each group. It's easy for us to say outside the team, but apparently that is a, we just make a joke, right? That's apparently a Manhattan project level of software to add that extra button. Anyway, we'll get that. Thomas LaRock (00:45:27): That doesn't make sense to me though. I'm fascinated by all of your conversation and you guys are a hundred miles away from me in a lot of this stuff, but I could listen to it all day. But no, the fact that Excel can't do the remove duplicates, except for like the first of each one of something, that's a simple group by. In my head, I sit there and go that's easily solvable because Excel and DAX does such great stuff that I would never want to do in TSQL, how the hell do we stumble across a thing that's been solved by straight up SQL language that somehow can't get into an Excel? Rob Collie (00:46:01): Well, let's explain the problem very clearly and see if we're on the same page as to what the problem is, but either way it'll be valuable. So let's say you have a whole bunch of orders, a table full of orders. That is a really wide Franken table. It's got things like customer ID, customer address, customer phone number, but also what product they ordered, and how much of it, and how much it cost. Okay, and a date, a date of the order. All right. And you've been given this table because the people that are responsible for this system, they think that what you want is a report and not a data source. And this is incredibly common. Okay. So you need to extract a customer's dimension or lookup table out of this. You need to create a customer's table so that you can build a good star schema model. Okay. And Power Query is right there to help you. Power Query will help you invent a customer's look up table where one wasn't provided, and that's awesome. Rob Collie (00:46:58): Okay. So you say, okay, see customer ID this column. I want to remove duplicates based on that column. Okay, great. But now it's just that the order that the data came in from the report file or the database or whatever that will determine which duplicate is kept. What you really want to do of course is take the most recent customer order of each customer ID because they've probably moved. They may have changed phone numbers, whatever, right? You want their most recent contact information. You don't want their contact information for 15 years ago. And the M language allows you to solve this problem essentially sort by date, and then keep the most recent, but only if you get into the code manually, and as Imke points out, it's not even if you go into the code, the things that you would want to do, if you do a sort, you can add a sort step to the Power Query with the buttons, with the GUI, and then you do the remove duplicates and it ignores the source. Imke Feldmann (00:47:59): Yes. Rob Collie (00:48:02): The GUI almost tries to tell you that it's impossible, but if you know about table dot buffer. Imke Feldmann (00:48:07): So the question is why do we have a sort command in Power Query when it doesn't give the sort order? I mean, that is the question to ask. But that's how it is. Rob Collie (00:48:16): It sorts the results. It sorts the results, it just doesn't sort for the intermediate steps. Imke Feldmann (00:48:20): Why? No, that's quite technical. But would just be great if such a common task could be done with buttons that is reliable at the end. I fully agree. Rob Collie (00:48:35): So Tom, I think this one's really just an example of, again, I truly think that M and Power Query, just like DAX and data modeling, the Power BI data modeling, both of these things belong in the software hall of fame of all time. It is amazing, Power Query, M, is just ridiculously amazing. It's one of the best things ever invented. Remember this is someone who's associated with being a critic of it. Imke Feldmann (00:49:04): Yeah, you're making progress, it's great to see. Rob Collie (00:49:07): And yet I'm telling you that it's one of the top five things ever invented probably. And I think there's a certain tendency when you've done something that amazing to lose track of the last mile. I think it's more of a human thing. Imke Feldmann (00:49:19): Maybe, but I mean, what I see is that they are investing quite a lot in data flows, which makes a lot of sense as well in my eyes. Rob Collie (00:49:27): All that really does though, as far as you and I are concerned, Imke, is it makes it even more important that they solve this problem. Because it's now exposed in two different usage scenarios. Imke Feldmann (00:49:37): Yeah, you're right. Rob Collie (00:49:39): And I want my data flow to be able to control which duplicates are kept too. So that's what I'm saying. There's all these big sort of infrastructural technical challenges that do tend to draw resources. And it's not a neglect thing. Imke Feldmann (00:49:54): No, no. Rob Collie (00:49:54): It isn't like a willful failure or anything like that, I don't want to paint that kind of negative of a picture. Imke Feldmann (00:49:59): No. Rob Collie (00:50:00): It's just that out here in reality, the inability to do, even if we just identified the top 10 things like this, addressing those top 10 things with GUI, with buttons, what have I think in the world, maybe even a bigger impact than the entire data flows project, right? Because you would expand the footprint of human beings that are advocates of this stuff and then you go build data flows. You don't have to think of it as either or, right? They should do both. It's just that I think it's hard to appreciate the impact of those 10 buttons when you're on the software team. It's easier to appreciate the impact of data flows, which is massive. I don't mean to denigrate that. I think it's crazy good. It's just that this other thing is of a similar magnitude in terms of benefit, but it's harder to appreciate when you're on the software team. It's easier to appreciate when you're out here in the trenches, living it every single day. And every time I run into a problem like this, I have to put my hand up and say to my own team, I have to say, " Help." Thomas LaRock (00:51:02): So a casual observation I have is that you wish for there to exist one tool that will handle all of your data janitorial needs. And that tool doesn't necessarily exist because life is dirty, so is your data and you're never going to anticipate everything possible. Now, should that sorting functionality exist in that duplicates, the scenario gave me? Yeah, probably. But there's always going to be something next. And that's why I go to you and I say, the thing that you've described to me is you need your data to be tidy so that it can be consumed and used by a lot of these features that we've talked about today. And in order to get to tidy data, there's no necessarily one tool. Thomas LaRock (00:51:48): You're a big fan of the ETL, Rob. You know that, hey, maybe I need to take the source data and run it through some Python scripts, or some M, or something first before it goes to this next thing. And that's the reality that we really have. What you're wishing for is the one tool, the one button to rule it all. And that's going to take a while before that ever comes around. Rob Collie (00:52:09): The thing is though, is that M is ridiculously complete. Imke Feldmann (00:52:14): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:52:15): You can do anything with it. And it's a language that's optimized for data transformation. So I know you can do anything with C++ too, right? But this is a data crunching, data transformation, specialized language that is really complete. And its UI is woefully under serving the capabilities of the engine. And so I suppose we could imagine and deliberately design a data transformation scenario that maybe M couldn't do it. Imke Feldmann (00:52:45): No. Rob Collie (00:52:46): I think that'd be a very difficult challenge considering how good M is. Imke Feldmann (00:52:49): I think in terms of logic, M can do anything, but in terms of performance, there is some room for improvements. So because there's a streaming semantic running in the background, and as long as the stream runs through all the steps, if you have complex queries, this can really slow things down. And currently there is no button or command in the M language to cut the stream and say, well, stop it here and buffer what you have calculated until here, and then continue from there. So if you have really complex stuff that would benefit from an intermediate buffer, then you can store that in an Azure blob or CSV, or whatever. Specifically if you're working with data flows, you can create some automatic processes that would enable this kind of buffering. Imke Feldmann (00:53:45): And then you will see that the speed of the whole process that can really increase dramatically because in some situations, the speed in M drops exponentially. And these are occasions where a buffer would really helped things, but we don't have it yet in the engine of Power Query. So this was what really be something else that would be fairly beneficial if we wouldn't have to make these work-arounds through things. Rob Collie (00:54:14): Tom, that just occurred to me, I can't believe this is the first time that this thought has crossed my mind. But I think that you might fall into an abyss of love with M. Thomas LaRock (00:54:28): Well, I'm a huge James Bond fan, but... Rob Collie (00:54:30): Oh, no. I think you would really, really just dig it. Thomas LaRock (00:54:38): I don't think I have time to take on a new relationship at this point. I'm still with Python and R, so I mean, I don't know. I'm not going to disagree, I'm just, please don't start a new addiction for me. Rob Collie (00:54:51): Think of the content though, that you could produce over time. The M versus SQL versus Python treatises. Thomas LaRock (00:54:59): Cookbook. Rob Collie (00:55:00): You were made for this mission Tom. Thomas LaRock (00:55:03): Okay. So we'll have to talk later about it. You can sweet talk me. You know I've let you sweet talk me into any [inaudible 00:55:08]. Rob Collie (00:55:08): That's right, that's right. Come on, Tom. Get into M, you know that thing that I have nothing but praise for, that I just love to death, you need to do that. Thomas LaRock (00:55:18): For you. That's what you want to do, is you want to learn it but [inaudible 00:55:21] through me. Rob Collie (00:55:22): Oh, that wouldn't work. I would be, "Oh yeah, well this is still M." Thomas LaRock (00:55:29): You're going to be like, "Tom, where's your latest blog post on M so I can read it and hate upon it even more?" Rob Collie (00:55:37): No, I would not read. Just as the first step. Thomas LaRock (00:55:42): I'm going to read it, but not leave a comment about how much I hate it. Rob Collie (00:55:45): Let's go back to talking about how we did a bunch of big fat Fisher-Price buttons for me to mash my thumbs in the UI. That's what I need. Thomas LaRock (00:55:54): You know what? I'll do that. I'll open up VS code and I'll just build this one big button, it's Rob's button. Rob Collie (00:56:00): Hey, you won't believe this, but I recently installed VS code. Thomas LaRock (00:56:03): I don't believe it, why? Rob Collie (00:56:05): Well, because I needed to edit, not even write, because I'm not capable of it. I needed to edit an interface, add on customization for World of Warcraft. And the only purpose of this World of Warcraft add on interface modification was to allow me to drop snarky comments into a particular channel of the conversation based on the button that I press. I needed a menu of snarky comments to drop at particular points in time. It's hard to type them out all the time, right? So it's just like, now here we go. I dropped one of those. I dropped one of those. Thomas LaRock (00:56:37): We got to get you a real job or something. You got way too much time on your hands. Rob Collie (00:56:42): That was my number one contribution to the World of Warcraft Guild. For a couple of months, there was the snarky rogue chat. Thomas LaRock (00:56:48): You know that is on brand. Rob Collie (00:56:56): It prefixed every comment in the chat with a prefix, you came from rogue chat 9,000. So that people who aren't on the joke were like, "Why is this guy, he's usually very quiet, become so obnoxious. Look at the things he's saying." Anyway. So VS code. And that also involved GitHub. Because my friend who wrote the stub, the shell of this add on for me is a vice president at GitHub. So of course he puts the code in GitHub and points me to it and then points me to VS code, and I'm like, "Oh, you're making me work now? Okay. But you wrote the shell for me, so okay. All right. I'll play ball." So it doesn't sound like you regret your decision to go solo. Imke Feldmann (00:57:40): Absolutely. Rob Collie (00:57:41): You're not looking to go back to corporate life. Imke Feldmann (00:57:43): Absolutely not. Rob Collie (00:57:44): Not missing that. So what can you tell us about the last year or two? What impact, if any, did COVID have on your business? Imke Feldmann (00:57:52): Business has grown especially the last year. So people needed more reports than ever and solutions. So it really, I don't know whether it was COVID effect or just the fact that Power BI is growing and growing. Rob Collie (00:58:07): I'm sure it's both. So the dynamic we saw during 2020. So 2020 would be the, if you're going to have a year that was negatively impacted by COVID, it would have been 2020. And what we saw in 2020 was that we were definitely not acquiring new clients. We weren't making new relationships at nearly the rate we had been people weren't taking risks on meeting a new BI firm. That wasn't something that there was as much appetite for as there had been. However, amongst the clients where we already had a good relationship, we'd already been working with them for a while, their needs for data work expanded as a result of COVID because it did, it created all kinds of new problems and it invalidated so many existing blueprints of tribal knowledge of how we run the business. When reality changes, you need new maps, you need new campuses. Rob Collie (00:59:04): And so on net, we ended up our overall business still grew modestly over the course of 2020, year over year compared to 2019. But then when the new clients started to become viable again, people started looking, we're interested in making new relationships, 2021 has been a very, very strong year of growth, not moderate, really kind of crazy. How do you keep up with increased demand as a one person shop? Imke Feldmann (00:59:35): Saying no. Rob Collie (00:59:36): You have to make your peace with saying no. At one point in my history, I faced sort of the same thing and I decided not to say no, and instead decided to grow the company. That brought an enormous amount of risk and stress- Imke Feldmann (00:59:55): I can imagine. Rob Collie (00:59:55): ... Into my life that I did not anticipate its magnitude. I'm sure I anticipated it, but I didn't anticipate the magnitude of it. I'm very grateful that I'd made that decision though, because where we are today is incredible. That's a rocky transition. So today everything runs like clockwork basically. We have a lot of growth ahead of us that seems almost like it's just going to happen, we're just going to keep growing for a long time. But we had to set the table we had to build our organism as a company into a very different form than what it had been when it was just me. And that molting process it was very painful. I don't pretend that the scaling decision is the right decision, it's very much a personal one. I've certainly lived that. If the version of me that made the decision to scale the company knew everything that was coming, it would have been a much harder decision to make. You kind of have to have a little bit of naive optimism even to make that leap. Imke Feldmann (01:00:57): I can imagine that once you get these things figured out and with the dynamic that the product has, that has a good chance to get it going into a very successful business, I believe. Rob Collie (01:01:10): Well, with your profile and with the growing demand for these sorts of services, the percentage of no that you have to say is just going to keep going up. Imke Feldmann (01:01:20): Yeah. But I made my decision and that's just fine. Rob Collie (01:01:25): I'm very supportive of that decision. I don't have any criticism of it, again, especially knowing what I know now. But if there's going to be come a point where you're going to be saying yes 1% of the time, and the answer to that is ultimately, well, you just raise your rates, which is also very difficult to do. In the end, it's almost like an auction for your services. You need to run yourself like Google. There's a 40 hour block of Imke time coming up for availability. We'll just put it on eBay. Imke Feldmann (01:01:59): I mean, it's just nice to be able to choose with whom you work with. That's just nice. And I earned enough money, so that's fine. So I'm happy with that. Rob Collie (01:02:12): How do you choose who you work with? Is it mostly based on industry? Is it mostly based on job function that you're helping? Or is it more about the specific people? There's all kinds of things that could... Let's say if I came to your website today, I filled out your contact form, what are the things that I could say in that contact for a message that would lead you to say no, versus leads you to say maybe? Imke Feldmann (01:02:37): What I really like to do is to work with finance directors. So basically not people exactly like me, but I like to see that the managers approached me and they have an interest in the product itself and also therefore an interest to push it into their departments. So this is for me, a very, very good starting point because it's an area I'm familiar with. I know that there's enough critical support to get the decisions that have to be made and maybe also push IT to help with certain things. This is really one of my favorite set ups, I would say. Rob Collie (01:03:19): Yeah, we do a lot of work with finance departments as well. How long does sort of your average relationship run with a client? How long do you end up working with the same organization on average? Imke Feldmann (01:03:31): That's hard to say, that's really completely different. It can be the initial five days kickoff where we set up a PNL statement connect all the finance data and they go along with that. And basically, never hear again, or just occasionally hear again, "Can you help me with this problem or that problem?" And it could also be going on for years, basically with breaks in between of course, but some customers, they come every now and then when they want to expand things. Now I have a customer that I'm working on some hours or even days ever week since over a year by now. Rob Collie (01:04:15): That sounds similar to my experience as a freelancer, when it was just me, less similar to our business today, a little bit less. I mean, I think it's still more similar than not. It's just that the dial has moved a little bit. Imke Feldmann (01:04:32): So how long are your engagements then, usually? Rob Collie (01:04:35): Most of our engagements are, if we start out doing kind of that kickoff you're talking about, we started like a project with people, that tends to not be the end. We don't typically have people just immediately vanish after that because that's usually the point at which, I mean, they've got something working already, very often after the first week or so of working with a client, they've usually got some really amazing things built already at that point. But at the same time, that's really just at the beginning of the appetite. Usually there are things that are

Episode #216 of the Max Level Podcast. On today's extremely delayed show, Bryan, Kyle, and Sean from rpgera.com have been down in hell putting a lot of hours into Diablo II: Resurrected this past week, plus we've got some things to say about NBA 2K22! From there, it's time for another edition of Thunderdome, this time for Q4 2021! Plus, Bud Spencer & Terence Hill - Slaps And Beans 2 on Kickstarter for Kickstart My Heart! Email the show at ldgpodcast@leveldowngames.com with questions, feedback, suggestions, or whatever else you want! Timestamps for this episode are as follows: 00:00:50 - Introductions 00:03:30 - Diablo II: Resurrected 00:15:41 - NBA 2K22 00:29:25 - The Sean Waltman Lightning Round (News Roundup) 00:41:24 - New Release Roulette (Week of 10/4/21) 00:49:23 - Wagers 00:51:36 - Q4 2021 Thunderdome 01:43:17 - Kickstart My Heart (Bud Spencer & Terence Hill - Slaps And Beans 2) 01:48:42 - Final Words GAME CHALLENGE LINKS Bryan's Completed Games for 2021 Kyle's Completed Games for 2021 Dan's Completed Games for 2021 Sean's Completed Games for 2021 CONTACT US Website: https://rpgera.com Discord: https://discord.gg/cC73Heu Twitch: https://twitch.tv/leveldowngames Twitter: https://twitter.com/OriginalLDG Instagram: https://instagram.com/bryan.ldg/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/leveldowngaming MUSIC CREDIT Most music tracks were provided by Midnight Danger and used with permission He can also be found on Soundcloud, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube! Kickstart My Heart: "Kickstart My Heart -Eurobeat Remix-" by Turbo Ad Read: "Song of Elune" from World of Warcraft, copyright by Blizzard MISC INFORMATION This episode's Sean Waltman Lightning Round consists of the following being discussed: Xbox Game Pass, Black Widow: Recharged, Bluepoint Games, Netflix, Night School Studio, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/maxlevel/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/maxlevel/support

Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this weeks episode, Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas discuss the Timeworn Keystones, tips for learning dungeons, hallows end is coming, hotfixes and everything else going on around Azeroth and Shadowlands! Episode #481: Classic, Season of Mastery! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! Weekly Event – Pet Battle Bonus Event World Boss - Mortanis, Bone Construct in Maldraxxus Guile Charm (Rogues) Fujieda (Warriors) Keefer (Monks) Desmotaeron World Boss - Mor'geth, Tormentor of the Damned Mythic + Affixes -Tyrannical, Spiteful, Necrotic, Tormented Dungeon Quests - Necrotic Wake x2 PvP Brawl - Deep Six PvP Quests - Arenas, Epic BGs WoW Classic Season of Mastery Design Intentions and Details PTR 9.1.5 Development Notes Timeworn Keystones ABetterABK Hotfixes and much more! Trying to reach the show? You can find us on Discord at The Starting Zone or email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!

On this week's show, Chris and Justin talk about how New World is shaping up, LOTRO's expansion pre-patch, Dark Age of Camelot's 20th anniversary, Guild Wars 2's Cantha zone reveal, World of Warcraft's self-censorship, whether studios should poll players about development, and how aging MMOs should be handled. It's the Massively OP Podcast, an action-packed hour of news, tales, opinions, and gamer emails! And remember, if you'd like to send in your question to the show, use this link or call in to our voicemail at (734) 221-3973. Show notes: Intro Adventures in MMOs: Elder Scrolls Online, LOTRO, New World News: New World continues to ride the bucking bronco of release, slightly delays server transfers News: LOTRO's expansion pre-patch arrives with Brawler and LI revamp News: Guild Wars 2 shows off new Cantha zone (and improves dyes) News: World of Warcraft yanks a bunch of its flirt and joke soundbites News: Dark Age of Camelot celebrates its 20th birthday Mailbag: Polling players on MMO development Mailbag: Out-of-game MMO promotions Mailbag: How should studios handle declining MMOs? Outro Other info: Podcast theme: "Main Theme" from Dark Age of Camelot Your show hosts: Chris and Bree Listen to Massively OP Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Player FM, TuneIn, Google Play, iHeartRadio, Pocket Casts, Amazon, and Spotify Follow Massively Overpowered: Website, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Twitch If you're having problems seeing or using the web player, please check your flashblock or scriptblock setting.

Anatoly (00:09):Hey, folks. This is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast, and today, I have with me, Packy McCormick, author of Not Boring. Hey, man. Good to have you.Packy McCormick (17:27):Good to be here. Thanks for having me on.Anatoly (00:21):So, You're an author and you're also an investor. How did you get into crypto?Packy McCormick (00:26):Yeah. So, I got into crypto back in 2013. I read Fred Wilson's blog post on investing in Coinbase, bought a bunch of Bitcoin, I think 38 Bitcoin, and then I went on a trip to Oktoberfest, and I felt bad about it, I had just quit my job, so I was like, "You know what, instead of spending money when I'm unemployed, let me just sell this stupid Bitcoin and I will pay for the trip."So, because of that, because of the pain of selling then, I avoided it until earlier this year, later last year, and really, really got back into it as I was talking to a couple companies that I was thinking about investing in and thinking about the intersection of crypto and the metaverse and how an open economy just fits so much better with that vision, since then, I've just gotten deeper, and deeper, and deeper down the rabbit hole.Anatoly (01:18):So, you held Bitcoin because you can sell it? That's just too big of a pain in the ass.Packy McCormick (01:24):I felt so bad about selling it and missing out. I think at the peak, it was like a two million dollar plus mistake, and so I was like, "You know what? I'm out of this for a little while."Anatoly (01:34):That's funny. What do you guys invest in?Packy McCormick (01:39):Yeah. So, I run a small 10 million dollar fund called Not Boring Capital, and we really invest across stages, across geographies, across verticals. For the first, I'd say, half of the fund, it was really traditional investments, I'd say for the second five million in the fund, it's been pushing up against the 20% non qualifying limit. I'm actually investing in my first Solana based project this week, which is yet to be announced, so can't talk about it, but something in the real estate space and something I'm super excited about. But doing as much crypto as I can in there, but I still think some use cases are perfectly well suited to crypto and some are really not. There's plenty of things in Web 2.0 that I'm super excited about as well, so really trying to balance investing across both.Anatoly (02:27):So, by traditional businesses, you mean like software internet based ones?Packy McCormick (02:32):Exactly.Anatoly (02:33):Cool. I mean, I've been in crypto for like the last... I can't remember... it feels like a decade, and I can't imagine what the world is like. So, what are people building?Packy McCormick (02:48):It's a good question. So, today, I talked to a company, for example, that is making it a lot easier for a restaurant to order the food that they need. So, right now, if you're a restaurant and you're ordering food, you're getting a bunch of PDFs from suppliers every week that aren't even searchable, and then you're going through the 6,000 items on there and picking something. So, there are still a bunch of these huge unsexy categories that are completely ripe.There's some security stuff that bridges into crypto, but there's one, again, stealth right now, but is also dealing with some Solana projects on the security side that I'm really, really excited in, but they're also securing Web 2.0 projects. There's some FinTech stuff I wrote about a company called Uni, yesterday. There's definitely a little bit of mental gymnastics that I have to do to be super bullish on FinTech and super bullish on crypto, but I really think adoption cycles are going to be super long and there are some really huge opportunities on that side too. I think everybody is trying to make the existing system that doesn't work, make it work better for people, and so I'm all for things, on either the Web 2.0 Side or in crypto, that make finance better for people.Anatoly (04:01):The mental gymnastics are curious about. I always thought that crypto is just part of this general story of software eating the world. Is that your take on it too?Packy McCormick (04:12):Totally. I mean, I wrote about Solana and I wrote this in the piece, but then I'm a maximalist-minimalist, and that's cross chain, but that's also I don't think crypto is going to eat everything yet or maybe ever. Just like on the internet, Web 3.0 is really about the dynamic interfaces where you could interact with each other. While there are companies like Facebook and Twitter and all of this social media companies that were more interactive, there were a ton of huge companies built during the Web 2.0 Era that weren't social media, that weren't real-time interactive at all, and I think the same thing will play out. I think you need to pick the best stack for whatever you're building at the time. And so I think we'll see a world where a lot of stuff moves to Web 3.0, And hopefully, even things that don't incorporate crypto become a little bit more liquid, a little bit more decentralized, a little bit better for people, but I don't think that crypto is the answer to every problem that the world has.Anatoly (05:05):So, when you look at a company that is building out the basic, "Let's convert PDFs to a searchable interface," that feels like something that should have happened 10 years ago, right, in your mind, at least?Packy McCormick (05:23):Totally. I mean, I think there have been attempts in that space actually, and some of them haven't worked. There have been different approaches. People have tried to do marketplaces and different things like that. I think what changed in that particular case is that over the past year, one, restaurants are super cognizant of cutting costs and getting profitability to the best possible spot, and so they're more willing to try new things. These people are taking an interesting approach without actually changing the interface that the restaurants interact with at all, they're just making everything behind it more powerful. So, things have been tried... there's people that are trying new approaches every day. I mean, I'd say 80%, because that is the literal max that I'm allowed to do is 20% crypto out of my fund, so 80% of my investments are non-crypto, and there's a bunch of stuff that's growing fast and is really exciting.I think the other interesting thing is that there are a bunch of companies that aren't going fully decentralized but are incorporating maybe a DAO in one aspect, where they have members who might be running something and want to vote on what that thing is coming up, or will incorporate NFTs in a particular part of the business where it makes sense. So, I think we'll see that blur a little bit more, but even within companies, they'll be doing some Web 2.0 Stuff and some Web 3.0 Stuff.Anatoly (06:32):So, I guess, in a way, you're bullish on non-crypto on the rest of the world as an investor?Packy McCormick (06:41):Yeah, my worldview is bullish tech and innovation, and I think if you're talking on the... I have a medical device company in the portfolio and a machine learning company that helps make sense of medical documents, and all that kind of stuff, I don't see a need yet for crypto, and maybe there's better decentralized storage of that information in the future, so it's not a centralized entity. And so over time, I think more, and more, and more of it will potentially become decentralized as the tools catch up, but for right now, that's just stuff that needs to improve.There's a company called NexHealth that I invested in that has really complex long term plan to first, sell SAAS into doctor's offices, use that to connect the EHRs, use that to build out APIs, use that to build out a platform, to ultimately try to make it easier for people to just hack on medical products, because right now it's such a pain in the ass to do anything in the medical space. I am super bullish on that kind of innovation because if you ask me what doctor I went to two years ago, I'd have no idea, if you asked me what my stats were, I'd have no idea. So, anybody fixing any of those kinds of things, I'm super bullish on.Anatoly (07:52):Man, I mean, the internet is basically 30 years old, right, at this point, and it's wild to think that we're still connecting just data...Packy McCormick (08:00):Totally.Anatoly (08:02):... data to format.Packy McCormick (08:03):It's why I'm going to be bullish on all of this. The internet is still early in terms of penetration, and then crypto is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of that, so there's just a lot of room for all of this to run.Anatoly (08:13):It feels then like everything is happening at the same time, we're still onboarding the world to the internet or now, part of the internet is being on boarded to crypto. Is that something that you first saw? What do you think about that?Packy McCormick (08:29):Yeah. I mean, I think most of the world... I think well over 50% nowadays is internet connected. I think it's just more and more things that were not internet connected are being tackled. I think a lot of the big obvious opportunities get taken and then people realize like, "Oh, shoot." I think I've seen, in the past week, a couple of companies that are making it easier for truckers to pay for gas and track those expenses. There's just all these big things that touch the physical world, where primitives needed to be built first, you needed banking as a service type things to make it really easy for companies to issue cards, to build it for specific use cases, so I think it's all just a matter of what primitives have been built and then what you can do on top of that. That's one of the reasons I'm so excited about crypto is because you and other folks in the space are building such interesting things for other people to build on top of.Anatoly (09:15):Since you have, I think, a more maybe practical or realistic view, since you're dealing with non-crypto projects that are trying to get revenue, right? That's generally the pitch to an investor.Packy McCormick (09:33):Yes. Over a long enough time horizon, some of them need to get revenue.Anatoly (09:36):What do you see in crypto itself as promising to use crypto in a way that actually increases revenue for that business? What are those things?Packy McCormick (09:48):Yeah. I don't know. One of the fun things about exploring both sides is that I really try, when I look at any crypto project, to understand what business physics laws it's enhancing. Businesses are businesses because people buy things the same way all over the place or people like to make money. People are the same, and I think all of this comes down to people, obviously. Solana comes down to how many developers build on top of it and how many people use that. And so obviously, I think one of the big important things is the ability to build network effects by giving people ownership. And I think the idea of using ownership in crypto to even have negative customer acquisition costs, to be able to essentially make the price of something negative to be able to get adoption, to use crypto tools for retention and network effects I think is one of the big things that excites me.I think it's also just moving way, way, way faster. I mean, look at Ethereum and Solana, right? Ethereum, strong network effects, people building on top of it, and then Solana comes in and looks like the same chart but faster. And so you can get these network effects, but then somebody else will come in with network effects that are even faster, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how those types of things play out.Anatoly (11:05):Negative acquisition cost is a really interesting topic because that's basically yield farming, right, like DeFi? The foundation of DeFi, how I get users is, a lot of these projects give away their coin. Do you think those patterns is something that you're going to start seeing in traditional businesses, like AMC popcorn, if you buy AMC stock is some form of liquidity mining, right?Packy McCormick (11:39):I think the challenging part, right, is that people want either money pretty immediately or they want ownership in something, and it's really hard for Web 2.0 Companies to give away ownership, there's a ton of paperwork involved. There are platforms that are trying to make that a little bit easier, but it's still really hard for them to give away ownership the way that, if you're a DeFi protocol, you can give away your token to attract users in the beginning.So, maybe there will be some things that Web 2.0 Companies steal and bring over from crypto, but I do think that's one of the uniquely beautiful things about it, is that it's this... I mean, we'll see. It's still so early, right? But that it's this beautiful thing where because you're early, you're able to earn more, and then because you were there, you actually support the network and make the network more secure and all that. So, there's actual justification for it, but it's just that shift in who gets the ownership of things, which I think is kind of beautiful.Anatoly (12:35):Do you think that the Web 2.0 properties, or like Facebook, Twitter, that those are at risk for being disintermediated by crypto?Packy McCormick (12:44):Yes. On a long enough time horizon, absolutely. I don't know what it looks like, and I think the early attempts to do it have been a bit skeuomorphic, and that's one of the things that interest me here is that BitClout was, I guess, interesting, but it was Twitter with coins, and I don't think that the next social network will look like Twitter with coins, I think it will look like something that is maybe wallet first, or maybe in the 3D world, or something that looks different but then achieves a very similar end. And so I think, yes, 100% they're at risk, but I don't think that they're at risk from something that looks like a clone but adds a token.Anatoly (13:23):Man, I love that word, skeuomorphic, because that's how I started thinking about it as I'm talking to a bunch of projects that are trying to shove crypto into what is a Web 2.0 thing, a Web 2.0 product. Do you as an investor see that as a red flag or like, "Okay, maybe this might work and you should try it, but clearly, you're going to have to iterate away from it"?Packy McCormick (13:46):I think it comes down to what you're trying to do. I talked to an investor who is way smarter than I am about this the other day, and she was like, "You know what, actually for me, because I invested in the series A and beyond, if one of my portfolio companies came to me and said that they're going to incorporate crypto at this point, that would be a red flag because that means that they don't have product-market fit and they're trying to figure out how to get product-market fit by doing something else shiny." There are other projects, like there was something that I was talking to her that was totally Web 2.0 Based but that asked people for feedback, they were having challenges with retention, they were asking users to submit information, they were thinking about how to reward them, and for something like that, particularly when it's so early, I do think that adding crypto into the project makes a ton of sense.If you're trying to incentivize contribution and improve retention, crypto is an amazing tool for that for the right type of community. So, I really think it depends on what type of product it is, and some things I think skeuomorphic might work in some cases where you're ripping out an internal reward point and replacing it with crypto, I think that can make sense, but when you're trying to just shove money into something to see if you can attract more users, that's when I feel like there's a bit of a problem.Anatoly (14:59):So, Reddit Coins, do you think that's going to work?Packy McCormick (15:02):I mean, they're at least early and I feel like they're such an interesting community of people, and the idea of karma has existed in Reddit for a while, so maybe making that a little bit more fungible and exchangeable is interesting. I mean, there's a bunch of behavioral economics on the idea that if you just pay people for stuff, you actually fuck up incentives in a bunch of different ways that are hard to predict, so it could be tough. When you actually assign a dollar value to something, you make people think about it in terms of the dollar value, and they're like, "Wait, I just spent a day moderating the subreddit for $1? Are you kidding me?" So, I think you need to get that part right, right? Where you can give them a million karma points and it doesn't matter, but then it becomes $1 then there's an issue? So, I think people need to be wary of that, but certainly where there are internal scoreboards, giving people a way to actually monetize that I think is interesting.Anatoly (15:56):Have you looked into play-to-earn stuff?Packy McCormick (16:00):Yeah.Anatoly (20:39):Okay.Packy McCormick (16 :02):I wrote a piece on Axie. I think it's so fascinating.Anatoly (16:05):I'm terrified of a world where everything we do is like, "You got to do this to get your 20 extra cents on your dollar." Right? It just sounds like a nightmare.Packy McCormick (16:15):I know. I mean, I am of the mind that dystopia is probably overstated because people have to opt in at every gate, and so I've had conversations with people where they're like, "Isn't it wild that we'd be spending time in the metaverse? Isn't that dystopian?" And then you think about how we spend a lot of our time right now, we're in a two dimensional screen. Wouldn't it be more fun if there was an immersive environment that we were interacting with here, and would we just continue to choose to do the 2D version until the 3D version got realistic and fun enough that we made the shift? And so there's going to be those gates at all times where people can opt in or not.A lot of the people playing Axie right now are in the Philippines, were unemployed, thanks in large part due to COVID, and so their options were, "Don't do this and figure out some other way to make money or start playing this game, that you might be playing anyway, and actually make money while doing it." So, that's an incredible option that people have, but you also don't see a ton of people in the West flocking to Axie to make a couple of bucks because the trade-off doesn't make sense for them. And so I think the trade-offs have to make sense for people but everybody has agency, to some extent, and will opt in to the things that make sense for them.Anatoly (17:29):When I played Ultima Online, I bought digital items in that game on eBay with a cashier's check. So, I get this idea that you can get really into a game.Packy McCormick (17:41):Totally. And then you stop playing Ultima Online and that money is just wasted, right? And so the idea that you could easily transfer that item to the next generation or person that wants to go all in on the game is nice, it means that you're accumulating something while you play. I think, over time, those experiences will fade more and more into the background and it will feel less like play-to-earn and will probably just be play-and-earn, but there's going to be a transition period where you have to just be bold about it and the play-to-earn piece has to be front and center, but I don't know.We can go to deep down the philosophical rabbit hole on all of this, but there is a point at which, at some point in the future... and I know this is debatable... but at some point in the future, we're not going to have to actually work to eat, to shelter ourselves, to have clothes, all of that, and so what do you do that provides meaning, right? I don't think we're going to evolve into a world where we feel comfortable not having to work for anything, and so people will find new ways to make meaning.Anatoly (18:47):We're going to be NPCs in each other's games.Packy McCormick (18:51):Seriously.Anatoly (18:53):How much do you pay attention to the regulatory side of it? Do you think World of Warcraft is going to have to file W-2s?Packy McCormick (19:06):Man, I do not envy the IRS or the SEC trying to keep up with... I do this all day, every day. I'm fascinated by it and I can't keep up with everything. There's going to, obviously, need to be a total paradigm shift in the way that this stuff is tracked and managed, even taxes. I am going to figure out, at the end of the year, whatever the best tax software that I should use to make sense of everything that I've done all across Web 3.0 This year, but if I didn't, the chances that somebody sitting in the IRS for my small potatoes amount of money is actually going to be able to go and figure out what I did is minuscule. So, I don't know how they're going to do it, but there needs to be a common sense way that doesn't end up in just this constant clash.Anatoly (19:54):Yeah. All my Degen Ape trades.Packy McCormick (24:36):Seriously. I mean, there's a thread that went viral on Twitter a couple weeks ago that was someone being like, "Hey, by the way, did you know essentially that when you buy an NFT, you're also selling your coins at a game and you're going to have to pay taxes on that?" There's going to be a lot of people who get hit pretty hard at the end of the year.Anatoly (20:15):Yeah. I'm curious how that's going to play out. That's wild. I mean, like one of the investments should be like, "Here's tax software for all your crypto shit." That seems obvious one.Packy McCormick (20:28):Yeah, there are a few people working on that. I mean, the other one that I really want to see... I had mentioned this 20% limit. So, if you're not an RAA, if you're not a registered investment advisor and you manage over X dollars, you can only buy 20% non qualifying, and crypto is included in that. I really want to see someone build RAA in a box, and RAA means that you need a chief compliance officer and you need all this stuff. And so somebody who makes that easier to do and easier to set up crypto funds I think is going to make a killing as well.Anatoly (20:58):I mean, that seems like something that the smart contracts should be doing, right? If you're investing purely... Most of that compliance is just transparency, right? It's like, "Am I doing the thing that I said I was going to do?"Packy McCormick (21:10):Totally. But some of it is, "Is there a person here looking over what I'm doing?" The rules are written for a world in which it makes sense for a person to look over something instead of computers talking to each other. So, there's going to be a transition period there, but over time, yes, it makes a lot more sense as a smart contract, and I'm interested to see.Are you familiar with Syndicate protocol?Anatoly (21:33):I'm not.Packy McCormick (21:34):So, Syndicate protocol is I think mostly on Ethereum at this point, but it makes it easy to set up investment clubs, SPVs, a bunch of other things, and so brings a lot of the group investing activities on chain. Is there anything similar on the Solana side?Anatoly (21:50):I don't know yet. The network exploded in terms of people building on it to the point that I can't track.Packy McCormick (21:57):That's awesome. That's a milestone.Anatoly (22:00):Yeah, that's a milestone. It's just like, "Pooh," so now I'm like, "Okay, go back into the weeds, back into optimizations."Packy McCormick (22:08):Yeah. Sorry to turn the mic on you, but I'm very curious. How do you balance your time right now?Anatoly (22:14):Poorly, I would say. I think there was an effort to get the word out to as many developers out there that this is how you build stuff and these are the reference implementations, and now that that's moving on its own, I almost feel like me putting energy there is going to have such a small amount of gain. So, I think of it in value against replacement terms, which is a very dumb engineer perspective, or maybe that's a pretty good one. I don't know.Packy McCormick (22:48):No. I mean, if you can view yourself from a remove like that. I mean, that's the goal of running a company or an organization or a protocol is, "How can I replace myself in as many different spots as possible?" But are you in the Discords? Are you getting Degen on some of these projects and stuff?Anatoly (23:07):I used to be more Discord just telling devs, "This is where the doc started, this is how you unblock that compiler error or whatever." I was in there, and now there's enough people doing that, I'm like, "Okay, I'm useless here." So, in the early days of Metaplex, helping out people set up their Heroku servers or whatever, I spent a little bit of time doing that, but then all of a sudden, our engineers took off with it.I'm curious how you think about DAOs? Are these truly amorphous blobs where nobody knows anyone else and there's some voting mechanism that you trust, or as normal people actually that do this stuff, it feels to me that they are humans that are all know each other and they're coordinating with software?Packy McCormick (23:54):Yeah. There's been a meme going around, I feel like this week, again, on Twitter, where people have been talking about like, "Oh, it's impossible to get fired by a DAO. Why not just get hired by a DAO and then don't do anything because who's going to fire you?" I love the idea, and I love the fact that crypto makes it possible to organize and incentivize huge groups of people across the world and get them to work in the same direction, I also think there's going to be a ton of challenges.People are very used, for the past at least couple 100 years since the dawn of the corporation, people are very used to working in hierarchical structures where there's somebody making a decision. And so I think there will be a balance that gets struck in a lot of cases, like delegation I think will get more, and more, and more popular. And ideally, there's some projects being worked on that I'm excited about where people's on-chain contribution and activity and resume is almost tracked, and maybe you give more power to the people who've contributed the most and proven expertise in a certain area, and all of that. So, I think a lot of things need to be worked out there.I think that we're in the stage now, frankly, where a lot of DAOs will not do as well as a centralized thing would have done, but then some DAOs will just do this crazy emergent stuff that never would have been possible in a normal structure that was a little bit more hierarchical. So, I think we're in the, let 1,000 flowers bloom, phase of DAOs right now where emergence will produce some really interesting stuff, and then emergence will also produce some total failures, and we'll see where it all shakes out.Anatoly (25:25):Corporations have politics, right? There's definitely politics in large corpse, and I feel like small DAOs have politics, and that's typically not true of a startup.Packy McCormick (25:39):Yeah, I think that's true. Although it can happen faster to startup, but the interesting thing that happens at a startup is, if the CEO allows it to be political, it can get political really quickly. And so it's interesting, in the DAO structure, when you don't have a "CEO," that either the community ethos will be away from politics and you'll get shunned and banned or whatever for politicking, or there's no one to say, "Don't do that," in which case, it can get out of hand really quickly. So, if you have a bad CEO, it's probably better to be a DAO, and if you have a really good CEO, there are advantages to having somebody making the decisions.I'm also fascinated to see... and I don't know if you've seen anything on this side yet... but can a DAO build products that are as good as something with a little bit more centralized control? Like products are traditionally made by a visionary, and then a team, who has a clear roadmap and all of those types of things, and is it possible to do that in a more decentralized way?I mean, even Solana itself, one of the things that attracts me about the project, and again, not a decentralization maxi by any stretch of the imagination, is that you were involved, right? And when there were code errors, you were getting in there, you were telling people how to fix them and all of that. And I've talked to a bunch of people, since I read that piece, who were building things on Solana, who site that as one of the reasons that they like building on Solana, is that the team is there to help when there are errors and help direct them towards best practices. So, I don't know. I think something like that model is probably going to succeed.Anatoly (27:18):I can only get blamed myself.Packy McCormick (27:21):Exactly.Anatoly (27:23):At the end of the day, yeah. Balaji had this quote that I've used it a bunch of times, that decentralization is not the absence of leadership but it's the abundance of leadership, and I love it. I also feel like that because of Bitcoin and it's like history. People started assuming that disorganization also was required for decentralization, which I think is bullshit too.Packy McCormick (27:52):Yeah. How do you view DAO versus social token, or I guess more just governance versus upside sharing?Anatoly (27:59):I think tokens are social networks, almost first, and then anything else later, because any community, it's all contracts. All this open source software is reusable. I can take Uniswap, fork it, and then stick some random token on it, and it's as good as Uniswap. You cannot tell me that it's worse in any way, right? It's the same thing, right?Packy McCormick (28:27):Someone should do that.Anatoly (28:29):Yeah. And then that community takes it in a different product direction, right, for whatever reason. I think that really fast fail is probably the most important part of decentralization. Anybody can fork you and then just take it in a different direction and form a community around it.Packy McCormick (28:50):I agree. Which project was it that Justin Sun tried to take over and then everybody just stopped using it?Anatoly (28:50):Steem.Packy McCormick (28:55):Yeah.Anatoly (28:57):And that is, I think, part of the beauty of the space, right, is you can only be a benevolent dictator. As soon as you lose the benevolent part, they're like, "Well, everything's open. F off."Packy McCormick (29:12):It's amazing.Anatoly (29:13):Yeah. Did you follow the SUSHI saga?Packy McCormick (29:19):I didn't follow in real-time. I went back and looked at it after the fact, but I would not consider myself a SUSHI expert.Anatoly (29:26):Do you think that we're going to see these communities stick around for the long haul, like Uniswap, etc?Packy McCormick (29:33):I think that is the billion dollar, trillion dollar, whatever number you want to put on it, question. I mean, I was alluding to it before with these network effects being replaced by things that pick up network effects even faster and faster. I think that's the blessing and the curse that I was talking about. You could remove every single person working on Facebook except for the person who made sure that the servers were up, and people would keep using it for a long, long time. If the people disappeared from Sushiswap or Uniswap or wherever, it just fades away and they move on to the next thing, and that takes off. So, I think virality in crypto has been proven. You can get viral really, really quick. Defensibility over a very long time horizon I think is still TBD.Anatoly (30:19):Where does defensibility come from in Facebook, in your mind?Packy McCormick (30:24):In Facebook, Facebook has a clear network effects, one where I guess if the people on the network decided to stop using it, it would go away, but there's not a clear place that you would all go when you have... Maybe there's switching costs too because you have your whole network mapped, and they won't actually let it be portable. To your point, you can fork anything... you should be able to fork the relationship graph and all of that over time as people build new mechanics to make that happen, and when you can just bring your whole relationship graph with you across Web3, then maybe you just all go to the next place, or maybe there's not even a place, and it is just that your wallet, at some point, keeps track of all the connections that you have, so maybe the wallet is the central point where a lot of the value accrues and the thing that makes everything portable, but I'm not exactly sure. What do you think?Anatoly (31:22):When I first saw Facebook, I thought, "This is a shitty news group. I can run my own mail server and ask my friends." And then you realize that normal people don't want to run their own mail servers or news groups, but you centralize around convenience. Where things centralize around convenience in crypto has, for me, been really tough to pin down. NFTs especially are a really good example of people jumping from one set to another but still maintaining both, right? They're able to be in multiple places at the same time.Anatoly (36:44):I can be a Degen Ape and like a Monkey MBS member at the same time.Packy McCormick (32:12):Where do you think that ends up? Where do you think people end up centralizing, or do they not?Anatoly (32:18):I'm not sure. This is like, again, a trillion dollar question. I feel like if we get to, three, 400 million people self custody with wallets that are doing stuff, we'll start seeing those patterns of like, "Okay, this is like the Facebook, it's a social graph or the... I don't know... the super connected now," something.Packy McCormick (32:42):Yeah. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago, I wrote a piece called the Interface Phase, and it was a little bit like a high kid post where I was like, "What are the interfaces going to be?" But just the fact that the first internet needed Netscape and needed a graphical interface, Web 2.0 needed things like Digg and Facebook that were interactive for that kind of capability, the read-write interface to really be there, and I don't think Web3 has gotten there yet. I do think that either a wallet based thing, and I don't know what that looks like, and I'm not smart enough to figure out what that looks like, or the kind of metaverse. And I think it's such an interesting mistake of history or just a coincidence of history that the tech for the metaverse and Web 3.0 Are peaking at the same time, but a world in which...One of the things I think crypto does well is give physical-ish characteristics to digital things, and so I think a interface that makes that clear will have a lot of value in just making a lot of the stuff that feels a little more ethereal feel more real and tangible, and actually, there will be physical places that people meet up and all that.Anatoly (38:28):So, I think what's interesting about crypto is that it's more like Ultima Online. When I was playing the game, I got a mental model of the map and the ownership of those items because it was persistent. I would go to the thing and I would change something and then come back and it was still there, and your brain, I think, just rapidly just plugs it into the rest of the stuff that it interacts with. If you got a lot of humans all doing this together, I think they'll start forgetting that it's nothing more than a bunch of computers.Packy McCormick (34:23):Totally. I mean it's interesting. I forget the name of the book, but there's a book about the memory competitions and the world memory championships, and the way that they memorize things is by putting different objects throughout a house and then walking through that house, So, we are, I think, a lot better at memorizing things and grokking things spatially than we are... and maybe this is just me talking as a non technical person, but just picturing computer networks without some physical reference point.Anatoly (34:54):I don't have as good of a mental model of space crypto Twitter or like social networks. It's not a map to me in my mind. But with something like experiments like DeFi land and stuff, I think that actually might bridge that because of this ownership thing. And I don't still think it's the fact that I can modify stuff and come back and see it and feel that I'm doing it.Packy McCormick (35:20):Totally. Yeah, people like building, and showing progress, and all of that. I'm going to turn the mic again. How do you view Solana at this point in terms of DeFi versus the cultural side of things or the metaverse side of things?Anatoly (35:37):We don't. I think, to us, DeFi was always I thought was an important part because you look at any kind of markets, NASDAQ, those are the obvious ones, "Oh, yeah, that's probably going to be on some blockchain," but advertisement, right? It's like Google Search shows you a page, they take your data, sell it on an Ad Exchange, and that to market, that's centralized right now, how do you disintermediate it? Oh, you can do that with cryptography, right? And a replicated censorship resistant database. That's it.You can break those things down into marketplaces and remove the middleman. And that, I think, is how we think about it, is like, where does that make sense? And culture NFTs are I feel like that non skeuomorphic social networks. It's not somebody that stuck Twitter with coins, these organically sprung up, right? It's like lodges in the whatever, 1700s, like I'm part of this Masonic Lodge or this club or whatever, right? Now, I'm Degen Ape or whatever.Packy McCormick (36:57):Totally. And right now, I guess, that often manifests itself in Discord where people are hanging out. I've had this conversation with people before in this debate. Do you think there needs to be a decentralized Discord where this lives or where do you think all of this ends up living?Anatoly (37:12):I don't think so. Like a year ago, I thought somebody needs to build a decentralized Twitter, a decentralized Instant Messaging, and the working mechanics of it, being decentralized or on chain, don't change the social impact of it. You're still talking to people. Why does it matter where you talk to them, right? Who cares?Packy McCormick (37:34):Totally.Anatoly (37:37):It's like, I think, stuff where you can start making connected modifications of the same state, that mental model of like, "Hey, we're all doing this thing over here." That becomes a place and that's where people actually do things, but here's where they talk about it.Packy McCormick (37:56):Yeah. And I don't think you can find a more minimally extractive corporation than Discord, and they make less dollars per user than anybody.Anatoly (38:06):Yeah, they're pretty awesome. Also, yeah, the high fidelity audio and stuff like that I think is pretty cool. I think they built it for gamers.Packy McCormick (38:19):Yeah. It's so interesting, and I'm probably going to write about Discord at some point here too, but I've written something called The Great Online Game before, which is essentially we're all just playing this big video game across the internet. And so it's really funny that Discord, which was built for gamers, is where all of this activity is... If you're playing a big video game and the chat app designed for video games, it makes sense as the place that people go.Anatoly (38:43):Yeah. Crypto and the internet is... at least the internet part of crypto is very much a big video game.Packy McCormick (38:49):Exactly.Anatoly (38:50):Are you investing mostly in the US, US companies or all over the place?Packy McCormick (38:54):I'm investing mostly in the US but have done a few in India, I've done Sweden, I've done Canada, very open to doing anywhere on the world.Anatoly (39:06):Do you feel like there's been a shift towards everything becoming Silicon Valley, that it doesn't really matter anymore at this point?Packy McCormick (39:13):The internet is Silicon Valley. A more amorphous idea is Silicon Valley at this point, but I'm in New York, I'm probably 30 minutes away. I'm in Park Slope and the crypto hub has become Williamsburg, and I talk to all those people all the time, and I never take the 30 minute trip over to Williamsburg because I have Twitter, and I have Discord, and I'm pretty much right there with them. So, I don't think physical place matters nearly as much. Gathering in physical places is awesome. I think the idea of conferences, and quarterly team meetups, and all of that kind of stuff is absolutely going to explode. There's a really fun thing about only knowing somebody on the internet and then meeting them in person and feeling like you've known each other for a long time, but I don't think the physical place where you all live all the time matters that much.Anatoly (40:03):Yeah. I think what's weird is like I have a sneaking suspicion that the remote work worlds, everybody's working remote is actually going to mean more people travel and get together.Packy McCormick (40:17):And it's not just going to be like FaceTime and waiting around the office and sitting. When you're together, you're together, and then when you're working, you're heads down working, and I kind of like that.Anatoly (40:26):Do you think people are more efficient that way or is that the natural state?Packy McCormick (40:30):It depends how many Discords. Before this call, I was supposed to be writing and I've gotten obsessed with the Wanderers NFT projects, so I just bought another Wanderer and then was trying to figure out how to display it in my cyber gallery. So, I think there's not somebody looking over my shoulder, so in that sense, maybe it allows you to get a little bit more distracted. But I also think a lot of things coming together at the same time, more and more people are responsible for themselves, and so if I don't work now, then I'm working all weekend, and I have to get the same stuff done anyway. And so I do think that's, hopefully, the natural state of things, is that people are allowed to get their shit done when they want to.Anatoly (41:12):Are NFTs what you're looking at mostly in crypto? Is that the most exciting part?Packy McCormick (41:16):NFTs are, I think, very exciting to me. My first internship was on an energy trading desk. I should want to get into DeFi and I feel like I'm going to get wrecked unless I can spend all of my time getting into DeFi, so I've largely steered clear. I do think that NFTs are super interesting for the reasons that you suggested, and I think that they are a little bit like a social network. I think it's going to be really fascinating to see how these things evolve and the worlds that get built around them. And they're the most tangible crypto thing out there, right? You have an item. I like these Wanderers because there's audio, and they're these eight second clips, and so the richer that you can make them, I think the better, and over time, more, and more, and more things will just be ownable digitally, and I think that's very cool.Anatoly (42:09):I love the trend of like 2DR first, like really low res, because it's like a forcing function in creativity, right? It's actually hard to make something look good with that low fidelity.Packy McCormick (42:22):Totally.Anatoly (42:25):So, I'm a fan of watching the space self, almost evolve, right? This is definitely going to get better, right? You're going to have full scale renders with 3D models and high production stuff in a few years, but it's exciting to see what it is now, right?Packy McCormick (42:42):Totally. I have another portfolio company called Arco that's doing... essentially, it's trying to replace the design software that companies use. So, Autodesk has Revit to do 3D modeling, they're doing the Figma version of that, but then could you just take this physical building that somebody's designed for the real world, turn it into an NFT and let somebody bring it into the digital world? I would love to own the Chrysler Building and then bring it into my world.Anatoly (43:10):Skeuomorphism.Packy McCormick (43:14):I thought about that too when I was trying to write about the interfaces, I was like, "Why are we even thinking about buildings and worlds at all? If you don't have to follow the rules of physics, then why do you?" But I do think, through our conversation earlier about maps, reference points are also important, so you need to, one step at a time, go away from things that people are familiar with.Anatoly (43:34):Yeah. Cool, man. So, this is a really awesome conversation. Thank you so much for being on the show and really getting into it.Packy McCormick (43:43):100%. This was fun. Thank you.

Our newest World of Warcraft podcast is a banger of a chat about Havoc DH together with the fel hammer discord big brains: Shadarek and Atrayen! A great discussion about 9.1 havoc dh and how the spec currently feels in terms of gameplay, talents, covenants, legendaries and performance! Of course we also discuss the spec's major issues and possible solutions too :) Drop a like if you enjoy and stick to MO Cast for the next juicy wow podcast :)

Aprillian, Grand Nagus and Constraxx discuss another week of playing World of Warcraft, Blizzard's greatest MMORPG. The show features audio segments and email submissions from our lovely listeners. Guild Round up from Constraxx Ctrl Alt WoW Episode Ctrl Alt WoW Episode 725 - Light vs Dark If you want to join the conversations on the show, we have a live chatroom with in-game giveaways moderated by chatroom-guru Constraxx. We record Live on our Twitch TVpage! http://twitch.tv/ctrlaltwowpodcast

Featured Stories - Eliandor Drops by with News, and Zhan and Caddfael talk about the Running of the Gnomes (Donation Link for Breast Cancer Research) Sponsors: Stormstout Brewery Recorded live at The Lazy Turnip Inn in the village of Halfhill, the Valley of the Four Winds in beautiful Pandaria! Reach us on Twitter @HalfhillReport, @PTaliep, @Toshmifune1, by email at halfhillreport@yahoo.com or on in the Discord channel. Find Toshmifune and Professor Taliep on the Wyrmrest Accord server! Find branded Halfhill Report and Halfhill Ag Alumni Merchandise at https://www.zazzle.com/store/halfhill_report Show Credits and Acknowledgements Opening Music and bumpers: China Town by Audiobbinger Productions http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Audiobinger/Audiobinger_-_Singles_1776/China_Town_1874 Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0: Pandaren Inn Music - Mists Of Pandaria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9l7Zm3Mo8Q Website Banner Art by  Sandra Schnell https://sanii.artstation.com   Logo Art by Toshmifune based on photo by imagesthai.com from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photography-of-cliff-with-sea-of-clouds-during-golden-hour-733172/  All place names, character names and music from World of Warcraft used in the Halfhill Report are the exclusive property of Blizzard Entertainment.  World of Warcraft is a trademark or registered trademark of Blizzard Entertainment Inc in the US and other countries. No copyright or trademark infringement is intended by The Halfhill Report.

Waypoint writers are paid big bucks to cover video games and can't even make it more than a few hours through the games they cover, including Far Cry 6. We talk about Waypoint's moral qualms with the series along with Kotaku's offense at Twitch streamers being predominantly men, the ridiculous levels of censorship seen in the upcoming virtual reality remake of Resident Evil 4, the ongoing moral purge in World of Warcraft, a hilarious change to how gender is handled in Halo: Reach, and the bad news that Brianna Wu is making a Gamergate TV show.

Frostmourne hungers once again in this cooperative strategy game.

"The Greatest Freak Out Ever" is a YouTube video that was posted in 2009 by wafflePWn. It shows a young guy - preteen age - secretly filming his brother as he freaks out about his "World of Warcraft" game being canceled or some other gamer shit like that. In the video, he screams, paces, removes his clothing and tries to shove a remote up his asshole. It was later revealed that this videos was fake and totally set up but these two boys LOL.In the 2010 video posted by the same channel, John recreates the freak out in a parody of the original video. I can't believe we've made an entire podcast episode about this. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

  Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this weeks episode, Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas discuss the developer blog for Warcraft inclusivity, Classic Season Mastery, MDI Last Stand, hotfixes and everything else going on around Azeroth and Shadowlands! Episode #480: The Evolution of Creative Content! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! Weekly Event – Shadowlands Dungeon Event World Boss - Valinor, the Light of Eons in Bastion Archbishop Benedictus (Priests) Final Verdict (Paladins) Windspeaker's Lava Resurgence (Shaman) Desmotaeron World Boss - Mor'geth, Tormentor of the Damned Mythic + Affixes - Fortified, Inspiring, Grievous, Tormented Dungeon Quests - Halls of Atonement. Theater of Pain PvP Brawl - Packed House PvP Quests - Arenas, Epic BGs Brewfest Sept 20th to October 6th Darkmoon Faire - Live through October 9th Great Gnomeregan Run - October 9th MDI Last Stand Tournament The Evolution of Creative Content in World of Warcraft WoW Classic Season of Mastery Coming Soon PTR 9.1.5 Development Notes ABetterABK Hotfixes and much more! Trying to reach the show? You can find us on Discord at The Starting Zone or email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!

Gabby Dizon is the founder of Yield Guild Games ($YGG), a decentralized autonomous organization that lends video-game assets to professional gamers for profit. Like a "World of Warcraft guild with a balance sheet." Their serious gamers earn around $1,000/month on average, sometimes much more. Remittances from the game Axie Infinity to the Philippines are greater than remittances from Hong Kong.Gabby Dizon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gabuschYield Guild Games: https://yieldguild.io/Other Life✦ Join 5,500 academics, creators, and investors who read the Other Life newsletter: https://OtherLife.coIndieThinkers.org✦ If you're working on long-term intellectual work outside of institutions, request an invitation at https://indiethinkers.org

In this episode: Berzerker rages on public space idiots and gives timely concert advice, discusses the latest Patch 9.1.5 drama, dishes on the latest Activision Blizzard lawsuit updates, and finally gets caught up on where we are in the Warcraft story. Subscribe and download now!

Aprillian, Grand Nagus and Constraxx discuss another week of playing World of Warcraft, Blizzard's greatest MMORPG. The show features audio segments and email submissions from our lovely listeners. Guild Round up from Constraxx Ctrl Alt WoW Episode Ctrl Alt WoW Episode 724 - The Evolution of Creative Content? If you want to join the conversations on the show, we have a live chatroom with in-game giveaways moderated by chatroom-guru Constraxx. We record Live on our Twitch TVpage! http://twitch.tv/ctrlaltwowpodcast

Featured Stories - Art Controversy, The Mushans find a New Hero.  and Velmic does an Inn Review in Revendreth Sponsors: Moonberry Juice, Utopia Skye Foundation Halfhill Market, Stormstout Brewery Recorded live at The Lazy Turnip Inn in the village of Halfhill, the Valley of the Four Winds in beautiful Pandaria! Reach us on Twitter @HalfhillReport, @PTaliep, @Toshmifune1, by email at halfhillreport@yahoo.com or on in the Discord channel. Find Toshmifune and Professor Taliep on the Wyrmrest Accord server! Find branded Halfhill Report and Halfhill Ag Alumni Merchandise at https://www.zazzle.com/store/halfhill_report Show Credits and Acknowledgements Opening Music and bumpers: China Town by Audiobbinger Productions http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Audiobinger/Audiobinger_-_Singles_1776/China_Town_1874 Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0: Pandaren Inn Music - Mists Of Pandaria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9l7Zm3Mo8Q Website Banner Art by  Sandra Schnell https://sanii.artstation.com   Logo Art by Toshmifune based on photo by imagesthai.com from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photography-of-cliff-with-sea-of-clouds-during-golden-hour-733172/  All place names, character names and music from World of Warcraft used in the Halfhill Report are the exclusive property of Blizzard Entertainment.  World of Warcraft is a trademark or registered trademark of Blizzard Entertainment Inc in the US and other countries. No copyright or trademark infringement is intended by The Halfhill Report.

Episode #215 of the Max Level Podcast. On today's show, Bryan from leveldowngames.com welcomes us back to the Max Level Podcast before talking about a few games he's been playing, including Eastward and Hot Wheels Unleashed! We also preview next episode's Q4 2021 Thunderdome participants! From there, Nintendo hosted a Fall Nintendo Direct last Thursday, so you know the drill.. we need to recap and discuss everything that happened. Not a bad Direct! Plus, The Last Relic: Curse of the Lostaways on Kickstarter for Kickstart My Heart! Email the show at ldgpodcast@leveldowngames.com with questions, feedback, suggestions, or whatever else you want! Timestamps for this episode are as follows: 00:00:50 - Introductions 00:01:10 - Welcome back, Max Level 00:04:53 - Q4 2021 Thunderdome Preview 00:08:49 - Eastward 00:14:10 - Hot Wheels Unleashed 00:18:05 - The Sean Waltman Lightning Round (News Roundup) 00:30:06 - New Release Roulette (Week of 9/27/21) 00:39:09 - Nintendo Direct September 2021 Recap & Thoughts 00:52:02 - Kickstart My Heart (The Last Relic: Curse of the Lostaways) 00:58:17 - Final Words GAME CHALLENGE LINKS Bryan's Completed Games for 2021 Kyle's Completed Games for 2021 Dan's Completed Games for 2021 Sean's Completed Games for 2021 CONTACT US Website: https://leveldowngames.com/ Discord: https://discord.gg/cC73Heu Twitch: https://twitch.tv/leveldowngames Twitter: https://twitter.com/OriginalLDG Instagram: https://instagram.com/bryan.ldg/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/leveldowngaming MUSIC CREDIT Most music tracks were provided by Midnight Danger and used with permission He can also be found on Soundcloud, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube! Kickstart My Heart: "Kickstart My Heart -Eurobeat Remix-" by Turbo Ad Read: "Song of Elune" from World of Warcraft, copyright by Blizzard MISC INFORMATION This episode's Sean Waltman Lightning Round consists of the following being discussed: Kirby and the Forgotten Lands, Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars, Chocobo GP, Blossom Tales II: The Minotaur Prince, Aspire: Ina's Tale, Disney Classic Games Collection: Aladdin, The Lion King, and The Jungle Book, Gear.Club Unlimited 2 - Ultimate Edition, Gear.Club Unlimited 2 - Definitive Edition, and Pokemon Trading Card Game Live. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/maxlevel/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/maxlevel/support

Have you stood in the fire? Did you start the fire? Are you on fire at this very moment? Then stop, drop, and roll your way to this episode of the Battle Bards, where the crew put out the flames of music tracks from fire zones, volcanoes, and the like! Episode 201 show notes  Intro (feat. "Firelight" from TERA, "Molten Core Battle" from World of Warcraft, and "Flow Like Fire" from Warframe) "Desert of Fire" from Aion "Burning Steppes" from World of Warcraft "Sleeping Volcano" from Ragnarok Online "Mt. Hotenow" from Neverwinter "Flame Mountain" from Dragon Oath "Navigating the Crevasses of Orodruin” from Lord of the Rings Online "Taimi's Game Part 1" from Guild Wars 2 Which one did we like best? Listener notes from Zinn, Lewenburg, and Psychae Jukebox picks: "Hellwalker" from Doom 2016, "Non-Boss Battle" from Eastward, and "CAS and Build Complete 4" from The Sims 4: Cottage Living Outro (feat. "Gather Around the C.A.M.P.fire" from Fallout 76) Talk to the Battle Bards on Twitter! Follow Battle Bards on iTunes, Stitcher, Player.FM, Google Play, iHeartRadio, and Pocket Casts! This podcast is produced using copyrighted material according to Fair Use practices as stated under Section 107 of the 1976 Copyright Act.

Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this weeks episode, Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas discuss 9.1.5 developer notes, the AWC Finals, Conquest changes, hotfixes and everything else going on around Azeroth and Shadowlands! Episode #479: We want glowing hands! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! Weekly Event – Battleground Bonus Event World Boss -Nurgash Muckformed in Revendreth Frenzied Monstrosity (DKs) Erratic Fel Core (Warlocks) Azj'Aqir's Madness (Warlocks) Desmotaeron World Boss - Mor'geth, Tormentor of the Damned Mythic + Affixes - Tyrannical, Raging, Volcanic, Tormented Dungeon Quests - Spires of Ascension, De Other Side PvP Brawl - Classic Ashran PvP Quests - Random BGs, Rated BGs Brewfest Sept 20th to October 6th AWC Finals PTR 9.1.5 Development Notes Conquest Earnings Increase Nightborne Hand Glow Customization ABetterABK Hotfixes and much more! Trying to reach the show? You can find us on Discord at The Starting Zone or email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!

Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this episode Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas find out what's on the TSZ patrons minds with the September 2021 Patron Q&A! Episode #478: September Patron Q&A! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! Could Blizzard craft a good survey to capture player feedback, do you think after a new patch is launched, a survey sent to the player base about what they did and didn't like in the previous patch would help inform the dev team better than the current system they have? Where do you think gearing from M+, PvP and Raid should be in 9.2 with the coming tier sets? How do you prioritize the opportunities presented by timewalking? Now that they are bringing back Mage Tower in some form for Legion Timewalking. I wonder if they could bring back the Challenge Modes for WoD and Mists Timewalking with some unique transmog? Where do you think I should look for a new raid team that fits my unique schedule? Trying to reach the show? You can find us on Discord at The Starting Zone or email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!

Tom Vasel, Zee Garcia, Roy Cannaday, and Mike DiLisio take a look at a new game that utilizes the Pandemic System, Wrath of the Lich King!

Aprillian, Grand Nagus and Constraxx discuss another week of playing World of Warcraft, Blizzard's greatest MMORPG. The show features audio segments and email submissions from our lovely listeners. Guild Round up from Constraxx Ctrl Alt WoW Episode Ctrl Alt WoW Episode 723 - The Mage Tower Shall Open Again If you want to join the conversations on the show, we have a live chatroom with in-game giveaways moderated by chatroom-guru Constraxx. We record Live on our Twitch TVpage! http://twitch.tv/ctrlaltwowpodcast

Game (not) over! Jules Gill presents 8 Video Games That Fooled You Into Thinking You'd Lost... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Episode #214 of the Level Down Games Podcast. On today's show, Bryan and from leveldowngames.com explore The Artful Escape, another psychedelic trip that'll have you feeling like you're on shrooms! Kyle also briefs us on his adventures in Spelunky 2 over the last few days! From there, a recent NVIDIA GeForce database leak has revealed a ton of potentially unannounced games.. so let's explore that list and discuss some other rumors as well. Plus, Ankora: Lost Days on Kickstarter for Kickstart My Heart! Email the show at ldgpodcast@leveldowngames.com with questions, feedback, suggestions, or whatever else you want! Please consider supporting the show by using our Amazon Affiliate link when shopping online! Timestamps for this episode are as follows: 00:00:37 - Introductions 00:02:16 - So Long, Level Down Games 00:03:36 - The Artful Escape 00:12:14 - Spelunky 2 00:14:40 - The Sean Waltman Lightning Round (News Roundup) 00:35:52 - New Release Roulette (Week of 9/20/21) 00:45:44 - Wagers 00:47:40 - Breaking Apart the Recent NVIDIA GeForce Leak 01:05:00 - Kickstart My Heart (Ankora: Lost Days) 01:09:51 - Final Words GAME CHALLENGE LINKS Bryan's Completed Games for 2021 Kyle's Completed Games for 2021 Dan's Completed Games for 2021 Sean's Completed Games for 2021 CONTACT US Website: https://leveldowngames.com/ Discord: https://discord.gg/cC73Heu Twitch: https://twitch.tv/leveldowngames Twitter: https://twitter.com/OriginalLDG Instagram: https://instagram.com/bryan.ldg/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/leveldowngaming MUSIC CREDIT Most music tracks were provided by @NeonDanTV over on Twitter and used with permission He can also be found over on his Bandcamp page for Midnight Playtime! Kickstart My Heart: "Kickstart My Heart -Eurobeat Remix-" by Turbo Ad Read: "Song of Elune" from World of Warcraft, copyright by Blizzard MISC INFORMATION This episode's Sean Waltman Lightning Round consists of the following being discussed: Marvel's Wolverine, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, Deathloop, Xbox Game Pass, Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed, Outcast 2: A New Beginning, MX vs. ATV Legends, SuperPower III, and SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ldg-podcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ldg-podcast/support

Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this weeks episode, Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas discuss Legion Timewalking, 9.1.5 developer notes, MDI group C, hotfixes and everything else going on around Azeroth and Shadowlands! Episode #477: The Mage Tower Returns in 9.1.5! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! Weekly Event – Cataclysm Timewalking World Boss -Oranomonos the Everbranching in Ardenweald Fevered Incantation (Mages) Surging Shots (Hunters) Verdant Infusion (Druids) Desmotaeron World Boss - Mor'geth, Tormentor of the Damned Mythic + Affixes - Fortified, Bursting, Storming, Tormented Dungeon Quests - Necrotic Wake, Sanguine Depths PvP Brawl - Southshore vs. Tarren Mill PvP Quests - Arenas, Arena Skirmishes MDI Season 2 Schedule Group C Bracket Harvest Festival - Sept 17th to Sept 24th Brewfest Sept 20th to October 6th Reopening the Mage Tower PTR 9.1.5 Development Notes ABetterABK Hotfixes and much more! Trying to reach the show? You can find us on Discord at The Starting Zone or email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!

In the past weeks, there's been an unprecedented hemorrhaging of World of Warcraft players, and an equally unprecedented surge of FFXIV players. Cas is telling Teese all about the potential causes for this, the way it's affected the Final Fantasy online community, and they even talk about how to be a good newbie player. You know, a sprout! -----RESOURCES & MENTIONABLESF.D. Signifier's Video Essay on Bo BurnhamThe World of Warcraft PandemicThose fun lil graphs Teese describesMTQCapture, light of my lil gamer lifeYou can find us on twitter @authorsnotepod and contact us via authorsnotepod@gmail.comFor information about us, pitching yourself for a guest spot, and more, visit www.authorsnotepod.comIf you're interested in supporting this podcast, please consider joining our patreon for exclusive bonuses or donating via our ko-fiOur theme music is by James YaiulloOur cover art is by @nyalliest

Ali Abdaal is a Doctor, writer, podcaster, entrepreneur, and YouTube sensation. Ali has grown his YouTube subscriber base to over 2 million, and writes a weekly newsletter titled Sunday Snippets. Sunday Snippets covers productivity tips, practical life advice, and the best insights from across the web.Ali studied medicine at Cambridge University. He worked as a Doctor in the United Kingdom before taking time off to explore his other interests. His YouTube channel covers medicine, tech, lifestyle, and productivity. Ali also co-hosts a weekly podcast with his brother, called Not Overthinking.After learning to code at age 12, Ali started doing freelance web design and development. He enjoys playing piano, guitar, and singing covers of mainstream pop songs. You can find occasional videos of Ali's music prowess on his Instagram page.In this episode, you'll learn: Ali's savvy insights for growing your YouTube subscriber base A proven formula for writing content titles that get clicks Ali's playbook for taking your podcast to a whole new level Links & Resources The Nathan Barry Show on Apple Podcasts The Nathan Barry Show on Spotify Sean McCabe Pat Flynn ConvertKit Ibz Mo Casey Neistat Sara Dietschy Chris Guillebeau Tim Ferriss Derek Sivers School of Greatness podcast Lewis Howes Dave Ramsey Michael Hyatt Cal Newport Crash Course John Green Hank Green Daily Content Machine Andrew D. Huberman Reboot Dan Putt Tiago Forte David Perell Jim Collins The Flywheel Effect Impact Theory podcast The Tim Ferriss show Seth Godin Scrivener James Clear Ali Abdaal's Links Follow Ali on Twitter Watch Ali on YouTube Check out Ali on Instagram Ali's newsletter Ali's website Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Ali:YouTube can change your life, but you have to put out a video every single week for the next two years. If you do that, I guarantee you it'll change your life. I can't put any numbers on it. I can't tell you how many subscribers you'll have, or how much revenue you have, like a hundred percent guarantee.You will change your life at the very least in terms of skills or connections or friends, or opportunities that will come your way as a result of posting consistently.[00:00:30] Nathan:In this episode, I talk to Ali Abdaal. Over the last four and a half years he's built his YouTube channel from zero to 2 million subscribers.He's who all of my friends who are into YouTube turn to for advice. He's got a paid course. He's got a substantial email newsletter. He started out as a doctor and then has made the switch into a full-time YouTuber. So anyway, I'll get out of the way, but, before we dive into the show, if you could do me a favor after the show: if you could go and subscribe on Spotify, iTunes, wherever you listen.That helps with downloads. If you could also write a review, I really appreciate it.Now it's on to the show, with Ali.Ali, welcome to the show.[00:01:17] Ali:Thanks for having me. This is really cool. I've been following you on the internet in a non-weird way since 2016. I remember once in, I think it was 2018, I discovered your 2015 podcast series all about launching an ebook, and pricing plans, and all this stuff.It was so good. Now we're looking to do eBooks and things like that. Thank you for all the inspiration on that front.[00:01:46] Nathan:Yeah, for sure. Well, it's fun to have you on, it's been fun to watch you grow. I was actually on a hike with our mutual friend, Sean McCabe after he moved to Boise, my hometown. He was talking about you, and I hadn't come across your stuff yet. And I was like, oh, I gotta check it out.And now I'm watching a whole bunch of videos. And then of course we've been internet friends for, for awhile now.[00:02:08] Ali:I'm now a customer of ConvertKit as well, for the last few months.[00:02:11] Nathan:Yeah. Let's see. Okay. So I want to dive into your story and get some context because you have an interesting path of finishing school, like a substantial amount of schooling, and then diving into the world of being a doctor, and then transitioning out of it.What was the plan? Let's start.[00:02:36] Ali:Yeah. for a bit of context, I spent six years in medical school, and then two years working full-time as a doctor in the UK national health service before deciding to take a break. In that break I intended to travel the world, but then the pandemic happened and I ended up becoming a full-time creator on the internet by virtue of the fact that I didn't have a job when it was a pandemic.When I first decided to apply to med school, I'd been into the whole entrepreneurship thing since the age of 12. I learned to code. I started doing freelance web design and freelance web developer from age 13 onwards. So, in school, in high school, middle school, like we call it secondary school in the UK, I'd rush back home from school when I finished off my homework in record time, and then just be plugging away at like PHP or some HTML or some like jenky Java script. I used to make $5 here and there, and be like, yes, I'm, I'm making magical internet money. Every year when, when I was in, in high school, my friends and I would come up with a new business idea.So, we started this multi-level marketing thing and some other random pyramid schemes, and random paid surveys, and whatever we could do to make money circa 2006 to 2010. So, I always had this interest in entrepreneurship, but then when it came to figuring out what to do with my life, I was getting decent grades in school and because I'm Asian, and everyone in the UK who is Asian, their parents are doctors. So, it was like a default path for me to just like, oh, you know, why, why don't I become a doctor? And I kind of reasoned at the time that if I could be a doctor, and also be a coder on the side, that's like a more interesting combination than if I were just a coder or just a doctor.Not that there's anything wrong with either, but I felt the combination would be more interesting because of the synergy. And so I ended up going to med school, which is a weird, a weird reason for going to,[00:04:24] Nathan:Interesting to him, interesting to you, or interesting to[00:04:27] Ali:Yeah.[00:04:28] Nathan:Family friends.[00:04:30] Ali:Oh no, not family and friends, interesting to me, because it would make life more fun and interesting to me because it unlocks opportunities for creating a tech startup or whatever, further down the line. I think at the time I was drinking the zero to one Kool-Aid[00:04:45] Nathan:Well, Peter Thiel[00:04:46] Ali:Yeah, like that, where I first came across the idea that like, innovation happens at the intersection of multiple fields.And so, you know, the printing press was invented by the guy who really understood, I dunno, looms and how spinning yarn worked, but also understood like something else about something else, and combined these ideas to create something cool. So, I always found it in my head that, Hey, why don't I get really good at the medical stuff and be a really good doctor?And then on the side, if I know how to code, then I can like combine those to spin off some, fit some something interesting further down the line.[00:05:14] Nathan:I think that resonates with me of like,I think that people, especially like online creators who go and do one thing very specifically, maybe don't have as much of an interesting angle, to put into it. Like I think that some of what made me more interested.This is like, they're just hypothesizing, teaching like online business and, and marketing is having a design background, even though those are much more overlapping than say, like a big a doctor and, and, you know, a web developer, you know, as you were starting into it. But, but I think having those skills in another area makes you more interesting as a person and it gives you better stories to tell, and then it gives you a better perspective.And you're not like just pulling from the same industry over and over again.[00:05:58] Ali:Yeah, no, exactly. I, I often find that the, the YouTubers that I seem to kind of, and the, and the, and the bloggers as well, who I follow more of are the ones who seem to have multiple interests. And it kind of gets to that question of like, you know, the, the thing that holds everyone back around, like, what's my niche, like, oh, but I have to pick one thing and get really good at that.And yes, that does have some merit to it, but I often also think that, yeah, but you know, how, how can you carve out a niche for yourself? That's a combination of the other, other stuff that you're interested in, And so instead of trying to be the best, I don't know, productivity YouTuber, it's like, you're the only productivity YouTuber.Who's also a doctor who also runs a business that that's kind of how I think about it.[00:06:37] Nathan:Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So, when you're in med school, when you started your YouTube channel or you're wrapping up med school, right.[00:06:45] Ali:That's right. Yeah. So, I started the YouTube channel in my penultimate year, so I, I, I, I done five years of med school at this point. I'd set up a few businesses. I had like two SAS products that I was using to side hustle, income, most my, my way through med school. And then in 2017, when I was in my final year, the YouTube channel actually started out as a content marketing strategy for my, my business, that business was helping other people get into med school.It was like that standard thing. Once you do something, you then teach other people how to do the thing. and it was like, you know, the creative economy before it was really called that where[00:07:20] Nathan:Yeah,[00:07:20] Ali:You kind of follow that model. And so the YouTube channel started.[00:07:23] Nathan:Because you were you teaching people like test prep[00:07:25] Ali:Exactly. Yeah. And it's so similar to pet Flynn story as well.You know, he, he started off teaching people how to do some architecture exam. I started up teaching people how to do the med school admissions exams, and that's kind of transitioned into a coaching business, which then transitioned into the YouTube channel.[00:07:40] Nathan:Okay. And so as the YouTube channel started to grow, like, what were some of those first milestones, you know, as you're getting to, how long did it take for you to a thousand subscribers and then maybe, you know, 5,000 or 10,000? Like what milestones stand out.[00:07:52] Ali:Yeah, so I started in the summer of 2017 and it took me six months and 52 videos to get to the first thousand subscribers, six months in 52 videos. I was putting out two videos every week while preparing for med school finals and kind of neglecting my exams for the sake of YouTube, because I could see the YouTube thing was like, oh, I really want to do this.I think the ROI on being a YouTube or is going to be higher than the ROI and getting an extra 2% in my med school finals. that was, that was the theory. Anyway, So, yeah, it took six months of the channel to get a thousand subscribers, another like four or five months for it to get up to 5,000 subscribers.And at the point where I was at around 4,005,000 subscribers, there were two like really good things that happened. Number one was a collab with a much bigger utuber. his name is Ibz Mo. So he and I got to know each other through university and he had 60 K at the time. And so he and I did a collab which took off and helped the channel get exposure.But also there was a video that I made my, my very first video that actually went viral, which was a video about how to study for exams. now this video is a bit weird because like I'd actually planned for it to happen like a whole year before I made it. So when I started YouTube, I, I sort of consumed the hell out of everything on the internet, around how to be a YouTuber and, Sara Dietschy and Casey Neistat had this thing whereby Casey Neistat, enormous YouTuber, Sarah DG would take YouTube who was smaller at the time.She went from 40 cases. Over to like one through over a hundred, a hundred thousand, basically overnight because Casey Neistat shouted her out. and the way that she described that, and I, that I found in some random interview, like on the YouTube grapevine, was that you, you benefit from a collaboration with a bigger utuber, but you only benefit from it.If there is already a backlog of really high quality content on your channel. And so I took that to heart and I knew that, okay, at some point I want to do a collab with a bigger utuber. And at some point I want to try and make specifically a video on how to study for exams, but I knew number one, I needed to have a backlog of hot, cold, high quality content because otherwise no one would care.And secondly, I knew that it would take me about a hundred videos to get good enough at making videos to actually be able to make a decent video about exams. And so that was like my 82nd or something video, which I, I, I I'd had in the back of my mind for so long since, because since getting started button, you know, I need to get my skills up.I need to put in the quantity so that I can actually make videos that are hopefully.[00:10:06] Nathan:Okay. That's interesting. Yeah, because coming, doing a collab and coming to a channel and it's like, okay, they have four videos. And the one that I saw in the collab is actually the best one they've ever done. Like it's sort of, it doesn't have the same ring to it as if you come in and be like, wow, this is incredible.Like, one of my favorite bloggers, you know, it's separate from the YouTube space, but I got him, Chris Guillebeau was an author and blogger and I followed him in the early days. And I had the experience of, he had written a guest post for Tim Ferris and I was reading Tim versus blogging. This was probably 2011, maybe.And I was like, oh, this is really good. I love it. I think it was on actually on travel, hacking, you know, credit card points and all of that. And so I clicked over to his site and I think. Over the next, like two days, I just read the entire website, you know, Nate, it was like years worth of blog posts and all that, but that was the experience.Right. The guest posts is a collab of some kind and then coming over and you're like, you're just deep dive and consume everything rather than the experience of coming over and be like, oh, okay. That's interesting. You know, and like moving along and the back catalog is what, what, drives that?[00:11:09] Ali:Yeah. Yeah. I had, I had that exact experience with Derek Sivers who I discovered through the Tim Ferriss show and Mr. Money mustache, but it's coming through a temporary. I was like, all right, I'm spending the next week of my life. Just binge reading all of your blog posts that you've ever written for the last 20 years.And now it's like, I've got this information downloaded into my brain.[00:11:24] Nathan:Yeah. I love it. Okay. So one thing that I wondered about is as you spend all this time, you know, on med school and, and then, you know, becoming a doctor, it's a big investment. then you also have this love for YouTube and the channels growing. Like the channel now has 2 million subscribers and, and, this is wild success.How do you think about. Like when you made that switch to YouTube, as your full-time thing and leaving behind, at least for now your career as a doctor, how did you make that decision? How did sunk cost play into it? You know, all that,[00:11:59] Ali:Yeah. So this is, it's still something I think about to this day. It's like, there's this balance between how much do I want to be a doctor? And how much do I want to be a YouTuber? when I made the decision at the time, it was, so it was about actually this time, last year, where I took a break from medicine intending to travel the world, but then pandemic happened and ended up being a full-time YouTuber.And then like back then, what I was thinking was I'm, I'm only going to do this for a little while. Cause this YouTube thing is going well right now, the problem with YouTube and like the creative stuff in general is that there's not a lot of like longevity to it necessarily. Like there are so few YouTubers who are big today that were also big 10 years ago.And so that's the thing that I constantly keeps me up at night. Like how will I continue to stay relevant? You know, X number of years from now. And to me, the medicine thing always seemed like a great, you know, my main hustle is being a doctor and my side hustle is being a YouTuber so that no matter what happens, you know, at least I'll have a, a full back career to kind of fall back on.[00:12:53] Nathan:Pretty sure doctors have irrelevant 10 years now.[00:12:55] Ali:Yeah, I'm pretty sure doctors will be relevant. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't have to worry in that context. in the UK, the way the medical system works, there's also like, after you're a doctor for two years, at that point, there's a very natural gap and a lot of people will take some time out to, to go traveling or whatever.And just so happened that COVID happened to that exact point just as I just, as I left to take a break. But I was, I was on the, the school of greatness podcast with Louis hose, last, last week. And he, he was calling me out on this. He was saying that basically I was bullshitting myself because I think the reason why I was holding onto the medicine thing was a profound sense of risk aversion.It was number one. The what if I, what if I lose everything at least then I'll still be able to be a doctor. And number two, it was a case of like, oh, but. I, you know, my brand was built up of the back of being a doctor. And if I lose that, then you know, who am I, why does anyone listen to what I have to say?Who will care what I have to think anymore? Because now I'm just a YouTuber rather than a doctor, which has like prestige and it has like clout. And he basically just called me out and dismantled, like all of my BS on all of those funds. And that really, really got me thinking. Cause like, you know, ultimately the thing that I care about is teaching and inspiring people.And if I think about, if I could only do one thing for the rest of my life, it would not be saving lives as a doctor. It would be teaching people. And that's the thing that YouTube lets you do and lets you do it at scale. And that's the thing, the internet that today. And so now right now I'm going through this phase of having to really think about like, am I only holding onto the doctor thing because of because of fear. And am I holding onto fear and sunk costs, which is obviously like a stupid thing. do I really want to go all in, on the YouTube stuff and then the business stuff, because my real passion is teaching. I don't know any, any thoughts on that balancing, like the fear and like the sensible decision would like following your passion.And it sounds so cliche, but yeah.[00:14:48] Nathan:Yeah. No, it all makes sense to me. The place that I would go is, you know, as you, cause there's, there's fear on both sides, right? I've given up the, being a doctor and then there's fear of what does this career as a, as a creator, as a YouTuber look like in five years, in 10 years. And I would lean in on that side and try to figure that out.Like who are the people, questions I would ask, who are the people who. You admire, who have had longevity in their careers. Right. Cause in the, in the blogging world that I've been a part of the last I want to spend, I guess, almost exactly 10 years now. There's a lot of people who are not around anymore, you know, like they're still alive.I'm sure they're living wonderful lives, but they don't live internet, you know, internet visible lives anymore. and then also seeing like what, what does your business look like in that? It's how you do dependent? Is it, what does that look like? So as you look five years ahead, this something I want to ask later, but, but I'm curious for now, like five years, 10 years ahead, like what are you doing?What's the, what does your, your audience look like? And what role does YouTube or other things play in[00:15:50] Ali:Yeah. Yeah. I think if, if, if I think about people who have longevity, I think you're one of the examples that comes to mind where you started off as a blogger, and then you did the ebook thing, and then you went into the SAS thing, which is now like, absolutely like, you know, exploded. so that's really cool.The other people who I look to are, you know, people like Tim Ferris, who. Has gotten bigger every year, since before I work, we came out and it wasn't a one hit wonder. We started off with the books and then he did a great job of transitioning into the podcast where now it's less about him and more about kind of spotlighting other people and building this almost the institution of his, his personal brand, which is built off of teaching people.Cool, cool things. yeah, I think about it, like in that context, like the thing that you and Tim have in common is that you've both gone, moved away from being very personal brand heavy and more towards being somewhat institutionalized in your case and convert kit in his case, through his podcast.And that's kind of how I see it for myself in a dream world, whereby let's say five years from now, I'm still like doing YouTube videos and teaching people and I'm learning things. And then teaching people, the things that I've been learning. Cause I, I enjoy that kind of stuff, but it's become, becomes less about me personally and more about kind of showcasing other experts.Building a team and building a brand that can be dissociated from my personal name, if need be.[00:17:09] Nathan:Is there a blueprint that comes to mind? So I think about this, a lot of where, where this goes with the highest leverage point to direct an audience to, I —-wrote an article called the billion Abdaalar creator, that is about like this exactly of, you know, if you have an audience of 10,000 or a hundred thousand or a million people, like, what is the thing that you would point that to long-term.And so I'm always looking for these blueprints that other people have created, right? Like I think, Dave Ramsey would be an example of someone who has taken this.Podcasting a radio show is basically a podcast. you know, and taking it to this extreme of, I don't know what they have, I'm making up numbers, but in the ballpark of like 500 to a thousand employees, they've got like this franchise thing, they've got courses that they're, you know, you can sign up for everywhere.Like it's this massive media empire that I can draw a pretty consistent line from, you know, blogger with 10,000 subscribers or 10,000 podcast downloads consistently to that of like continually working away at it. Not to guarantee you that, that you'll hit that, but you know, there'll be other people on Michael Hyatt or, anything else or there's the software direction that I went.So are there like specific blueprints that you look at and be like, okay, that, but[00:18:30] Ali:Yeah.[00:18:31] Nathan:Of it.[00:18:32] Ali:Yeah. I think for me, the playbook that I'm currently following is trying to be a cross between Tim Ferris and Cal Newport.In that Tim, Tim Ferriss in the context of starting a podcast, interviewing experts on stuff. And I need me to, I probably add someone to that. Tim Ferriss, Cal Newport, and the crash course, the YouTube channel, which is run by Hank and John Green, whereas also taking the Tim Ferriss model of podcast, interviewing other people.And then, then that becomes its own kind of content, which helps people, the Cal Newport model of actually I think he he's done a great job of straddling the two worlds of old world prestige of being a professor at Stanford or wherever he's a professor at a part-time and also being a part-time writer and blogger and internet personality type person.And then like taking elements of those and combining it with like the YouTube airy type thing, whereby I think, I think what's missing from the world of podcasts these days is that there are so many podcasts and there is so much incredible wisdom, which back in the day used to be locked up inside either textbooks or in scientific journals.Now, the people who write those scientific journal review papers are being interviewed on all the podcasts. but they're being interviewed in the context of a three hour long discussion. And yes, you could listen to the three hour long discussion. Yes. You could listen to the podcast clips that they've got, that they've been posting through Daily Content Machine on Twitter or whatever, but it's just not as actionable as someone actually creating a compelling YouTube video.So, you know, you could listen to Andrew Huberman interview, the world's expert on longevity about all the eight different things you should do to increase your life. And very few people would follow that advice because there's no in a digestible format. And so if I'm thinking like what I'm, what I'm thinking is that if we can do the podcast thing, we can do the kind of Cal Newport thing of combining old world prestige with new world, kind of content, and also do it in the format of like YouTube videos that are accessible to the mass market and, you know, a lay person audience that is kind of the combination that I see myself doing over the next like five years.And that feels quite exciting.[00:20:32] Nathan:Yeah. So that target of like the 10 to 15 minute YouTube video, that's really well crafted and architected to have the table of contents and even skip to the sections. And it's like, look, this is what you need. And it's not just what was covered in an hour long interview, but also like, and then we pulled in this and when they referenced this thing, like, this is what they're talking about.We can illustrate it with visuals and everything else.[00:20:55] Ali:Absolutely. Yeah. And that's the thing that I'm hooked. So in the process of building a team around, which is something I wanted to talk to you about because you've built a big team over time, I was speaking to Derek, you're a director of marketing as well about building a team and he had, so he had loads of advice to share.So that's, that's a challenge for me right now. It's like, you know, two years ago, it was just me last year, this time, last year, there were three, three of us full-time well, two full-time. It was me working as a doctor and a part-time assistant, and now there's 12 of us, but now we're hiring another 10 people.So by next month it's going to be maybe like 20, 20 of us a hundred. It's all those problems associated with scaling a team and leadership and management. And that's the kind of stuff that, I've been really as sort of very much on the steep learning curve of, and that I'm very excited about getting better at,[00:21:44] Nathan:Yeah. what's the reason that you're growing the team so quickly.[00:21:48] Ali:Well, let's see, because we just have a lot of money. once, once we launched our, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a good problem to have. We're just like very cash rich and expertise poor as someone described as, We launched our cohort based course part time, YouTube academy this time, last year, it did phenomenally well, I'd been doing classes on Skillshare, which started off as making like a few hundred to a few thousand a month and is now compounded to the point where we make some way between 60 and $80,000 every month, just passive income of Skillshare classes.That means that every month we're just making more and more money. And I see the, I see the numbers going up and I see them go up and I, I see basically like, well, why, why are, why aren't we doing anything with that money other than just[00:22:30] Nathan:Right.[00:22:31] Ali:every year.[00:22:32] Nathan:Okay. So really quick, since you mentioned, are you okay sharing some of the numbers, like the numbers from part-time YouTube academy?[00:22:38] Ali:Yeah. so we launched the first cohort in November last year. I think this year we're on track to do maybe like $2 million revenue and like 1.1 0.5 million profit, 1.6 million profits, something like that. next year we're hoping to take that up to like 5 million revenue. Which again, all of these feel like, like dumb numbers, I'm just plucking out of thin air.Cause it's like, I I've, I'm, I'm really bad at like projecting, protecting financials. Like it's all, it's all just a guess. Anyway, like if we could do four cohorts and sell 600 places, that would be 5.5 0.1 million revenue. It's like, that's actually, that's actually doable, but it's just such a fricking ridiculous numbers.It's like, how on earth can that be doable? It's just like, how, how does it even work?[00:23:23] Nathan:Yeah. Welcome to the internet. And, when you have substantial leverage, like things that were possible, like seemed insane before you're like, oh yeah, I know that math checks out, you know?[00:23:34] Ali:Yeah, exactly. I suppose if somebody, to you for ConvertKit was I think last I checked, you were on 20 million annual recurring.[00:23:41] Nathan:Yeah. We're at 20, 28 and a half. Now[00:23:44] Ali:Well the hell that's going to quickly compounding.[00:23:48] Nathan:The magic of compounding, This is fascinating to me because a lot of, I feel like a lot of content creators are, you know, get to your stage and they're like, okay, what, you know, what Lamborghini should I buy right now?Have you thought about putting the line beginning in your YouTube videos? I'm kidding, please.Don't[00:24:05] Ali:I mean, I've got a Tesla model three, so that was my, a splurge.[00:24:08] Nathan:That was your splurge. Yeah, exactly. you know, so interesting to me that you're hiring at the rate that you are, which is to be totally clear is the rate that we hired at ConvertKit like slow at first of like two or three, four, and then it started to, like started to really take off. And I think in, let me think how long eight months we went from four people to 21 people.And, and that worked really well for us. And we were growing really, really quickly. And, and, like in that time, I think we 10 X revenue, like going. 30,000 a month in revenue to 300,000 a month and revenue. and so that that's absolutely a wild ride. And then we kind of paused there for a second and we like methodically about, okay, what are the roles that we need?How do we build the team culture within the group that we have? How can we invest in those relationships? We also had our first team, like in-person team retreat at that time. and so I think it's really important as you grow a team that quickly to make sure you're really, really, yeah. Intentional about, the team culture, which like, that's one of the things like, what does that even mean?How do you, how do you do that? And the way that I do it is being clear about the mission of what you're building and why. and then investing deeply in the relationships with each person.[00:25:32] Ali:Okay. And what does, what does that mean?[00:25:34] Nathan:Was, so you're hiring all these people, right? And let's say you're hiring from you're very much the face of the.And so if someone's applying to like, oh, I want to work with Ali, right? Like, let's do that. And so they have this relationship with you and what you don't want is this, you'd end up with this hub and spoke model where you're the hub and everyone has a relationship with you and they don't have it with each other.And that's just the, it's a natural way that things are joining, right. Or the way it comes about. I, the same thing when people wanted to start working at ConvertKit, they wanted to work at convergent, but they a lot wanted to work with me. And so you have to invest deeply in turning that hub and spoke into like a spiderwebs where if you're not at the core of it, they all are riffing on ideas.They, you know, understand each other's, families and like individual values and everything else. and that matters more. And so you have to know that the natural state of things is not ideal and you need to like aggressively work, to change that. So that you're less important than your own.[00:26:39] Ali:Oh, interesting. Yeah. That's exactly the challenge that we're having right now where. Still all of the things kind of flow through me, but it's, I think over the last few months, as I've gotten like business coaches and working with, with our mutual friend, Sean, as a coach, as well, and reading sort of dozens of books about like leadership and management and like org chart structure and all that jazz, we're starting to get to a point where I actually do feel like stuff is happening without me.And it's like the best feeling in the world when they're just doing stuff. And I'm like, whoa, wow. That's actually a great idea. It was so well done. And you've actually done this better, better than I would have done this. Whoa. Okay. This is really cool. so hopefully as the team expands, yeah, the, the, the culture thing is interesting.I think so far, I haven't given any thought to culture in the slightest as just sort of happened organically slash accidentally. but one of the exercises that Sean, Sean took me through was the thing of like, imagine, you know, a year from now or three years from now, what is the sort of business that you want to have?Like you go into work in the morning, like what, what do you want to say. It was only after that. I kind of thought about that, that I realized that for me, what that dream looks like, it's actually having an in-person team having like a studio, maybe, maybe in a place like London that we can invite people over to for podcasts and focus for collabs having an in-person team.Or maybe once a once a week, I have brainstorm meetings with, you know, our writers and researchers and stuff, and we figure out what we're doing. Maybe once a week, I filmed stuff for the YouTube channels. And maybe once a week, I sit down to record a podcast with someone cool. And the rest of the time I spend like chilling, or, you know, writing or reading or doing other, working on the businessy type stuff.And we have like a COO or general manager or whatever you want to call it, who runs the day-to-day operations without needing my input. and it was only really when I kind of said that out loud, I'm just going to ask, so, okay, well when you just make that happen and I was like, oh yeah, you're right.I could just make that happen. And then, because I think before I just, I, I drank the remote work Kool-Aid so, so much that I just sort of assumed that you had to hire remotely. Then I realized, hang on, given that this is the sort of business I want to be in where we're all actually in person, because it's more fun.I can just hire people who are only London. And so when we're not doing that, hiring people who are only in London, which feels weird, but it means we also have, you know, a few dozen applications rather than a few thousand to, to deal with, which is, which is kinda nice.[00:28:59] Nathan:Yeah. And that's something that when you get clear on that, and that's why so many people want, besides journaling or whatever, other journaling coaching, any, any form of getting that clarity, it's you realize that you're like following this meandering path and like, and then we can do this and then that, and then you realize like, oh, I can just draw a straight line from point a to point B and just do that now.And it's, it's so powerful and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble because then you won't be at a point, right. Where you say we've built a 25 person team. That's like, maybe there's six in London. And then, everyone else is spread throughout the world and people are loving aspects of that, but then they're feeling like the people in London are getting more time with you and right.And you go and create this major culture problems because you had an intention like, or an internal desire that you never expressed, explicitly. And then once you express that and then everyone's like, oh, okay. So I know that it's them working for you remotely right now. I know that I either long-term need to switch to being a contractor of like, just providing a service, you know, or I need to move to London or I need to fully transition out.Like, and there's like a beautiful clarity in that, that when you just keep it inside, you like no one will, no one will experience.[00:30:17] Ali:Hmm. Have you, have you got any like prompts that you find helpful in this sort of journaling thing and figuring out what you want from the business and from life?[00:30:25] Nathan:So, you and I both share a passion for coaching and I hire a coach as well as name's Dan, from an organization called reboot. so he asks all kinds of questions. one, I was navigating a scenario recently that was just really frustrating. And, he said, okay, I want you to picture when you're 40.So I'm 31 right now. So nine years from now, how would your 40 year old self looking back, you know, basically 10 years be proud of how the situation was handled. And that was a version. So basically the prompt would be like stepping forward, not just, what do you want 10 years from now, but like stepping forward and trying to really imagine that scenario.You know, what's pushing you to do, and then looking like looking back on it as a memory of how you handle this next period of difficult transition or any of that. So that'd be one version. Another is like really pushing on like the five why's and really digging in of why do you want that thing? What do you, what are you actually trying to accomplish?I'm sure there's more, butYeah. Are there others that you use.[00:31:38] Ali:Yeah, that question of why did I come across this? I can't remember where I was like to cite my sources, but, the thing of when, when making a decision, think about what decision your like 10 year older self would have wanted you to make, to be like the best version of yourself.And I've been thinking about that recently in the context of this thing of do I go all in on the YouTube thing or do I just kind of do Hoff medicine off YouTube? And I do think out of 10 years from now, I would have wanted myself to make the decision of actually just going all in on the passion project and just seeing what happens with that.If it doesn't work, it didn't work, but at least having a go rather than feeling kind of pulled in two directions, which are sort of incompatible because of the amount of time commitment that a physical career like medicine takes.[00:32:25] Nathan:Yeah. And it's hard when you're like, if you have a 10 person team and you're, you're the only one that's part-time right. Like that, that will result in, you wish you could spend more time with the team. You, you know, you being the bottleneck and things, you shouldn't be it made me think of like the, on the team side of things.There's a movie called the intern, Robert DeNiro and Hathaway.[00:32:44] Ali:No, yeah. I really enjoyed that. It[00:32:46] Nathan:It's a fun movie.And there's a scene in it. So Anne Hathaway runs this, like a fashion tech startup, but th but there's a scene early on when she's like rushing from thing to thing and everything is going to her for approval and all of this stuff.Right. And I remember watching the, how she's so important. It'd be nice to be that important. And then the second one, you stepped back and you're like, that is a terribly run business. Like, what is she doing? You know, like the whole thing, if she wasn't there, the whole thing would fall apart. Cause no one would have our approval for like the homepage designs or, or whatever else.And so, going back to the hub and spoke thing, that's the, you know, you'd like watch that little clip of the movie and then go, okay. That, but the opposite, like that's[00:33:30] Ali:Yeah,[00:33:30] Nathan:To go.[00:33:30] Ali:Yeah. There's one. So, often, you know, someone in my team will message me being like, Hey, you know, we, we need to discuss item X. can you, me and Angus hop on a call and discuss item X. And these days are reply with, can you and Angus discuss item X? Like, do I absolutely have to be on this call?And they're often like, oh no, I guess you don't. Yeah. You know, I mean, I'm just gonna take care of it. I'm like great, wonderful. and I'm always surprised when that works. it's like, oh yeah, this doesn't work. I actually don't need to be involved in everything. but I guess it's, it is that balance of, and I think sometimes the team does feel frustrated that I I'm involved in too many things.I've heard and they feel like maybe I don't necessarily trust all of their decisions. it's like, you know, my name that is going on all this stuff and I trust, but I want to, I want to be able to verify, like if I ask why was something done? Like why, why that pricing plan, rather than that pricing plan,[00:34:22] Nathan:Right.[00:34:22] Ali:Like a reason behind it beyond, oh, it's just, we just sort of plucked numbers out of thin air.[00:34:26] Nathan:Yeah. So two things that makes me think of is one, creating a culture where asking questions is encouraged and not just, Like asking questions of like, Hey, could you explain this to me? I truly don't understand it, but, but also like asking for, is there a reason behind this? You know, why did you do that?And then the other side, when people come to you and say like, Hey, what do you think we should do? Then you ask them, what do you think we should do?And then going like, oh, well I think X, Y, and Z. And you're like, okay, why do you think that because of this great, let's do that. You know, you have more and more conversations where like people come to you and then they make the decision and[00:35:05] Ali:Yeah,[00:35:05] Nathan:Place.[00:35:06] Ali:Yeah, yeah. I'd love to get to that point. I think I need to do a better job of, of doing that. the most, the most obvious example is like when we're brainstorming video content ideas and we're coming up with titles. so we had a meeting earlier today and, you know, the team came up with a few concepts and like 20 titles for each one.And then I made the final decision. I was like, oh, I kind of liked the sound of like title number five. but what I probably should do in that context is, okay, Gareth, if you were making this video, what title would you go for? And then kind of seeing what happens. And I guess there is an element of like, you know, I, I trust my gut on what makes a good title more than I trust anyone else's in the team Scott's or what makes a good title.But I'd like to be able to either train someone it's hard to train someone for this, like find someone who's got like trust more. And so who, who I can just fully outsource the responsibility of coming up with a decent title for, because it is such a huge part of what makes a successful YouTube video[00:36:00] Nathan:Yeah. Okay. On those lines. When you make a video, do you know how often do you know when it's going to be like a video that really hits?[00:36:09] Ali:Think about 20% of the time.I can, I have a gut feeling that, okay, this could be a banger. and th the way I think about it in my head is sort of in terms of Banga potential. So a video called I dunno, nine passive income idea is how I make $27,000 a week that has high bang of potential, a video call.The power of positive thinking the potential, like that's not going to be back. It's like, okay, can we increase the bang of potential by making the title more clickbait? and so for example, you know, I've been working with a life coach for the last few months. I want to make a video about it. I've been thinking, you know, how, like really the thing I worked with them on was how to figure out what I want from life.But a video called how I'm, how to figure out what you want from life. You know, maybe two out of five bang of potential, a video called I hired a life coach for $3,000. Here's what I learned. That's got bag of potential. And so often it's just like a tweaking of the title where it's like the more click baity and sensationalized the title that is annoyingly often.The thing that chorus that correlates most strongly with how much of a banger is this city you're going to be. And the formula that I try and use is sensational click baity title combined with like very deep nuanced. So that someone clicks on the video thinking, huh? And then they're very, very impressed by the production value by the structure, by the academic newness of it, by how awful it is.I think it's crossed the Pepsi, at least that's the intention.[00:37:32] Nathan:Okay. That's interesting to me. I have this like running fantasy as I teach. People how to build wealth and make money. Like, those are some of my favorite topics. I can talk about them all day. And so I was joking with someone that I was going to do, like these real estate seminars, you know, that you see advertised where it's really scammy or you're really just paying for that person's private jet.You know, or it's like, it's the, the MLM equivalent, multilevel marketing equivalent of whatever. Like I'm going to use the same tactics, but then like actually deliver real value. And like the ticket that I charged would just be like 50 bucks and it all go to, I don't know, clean water, charity water, or something like that, you know, basically saying like, I'm going to hook people in with the same thing, clickbait and then deliver, like substantial value that will actually be life-changing.Yeah. And so[00:38:23] Ali:Yeah.[00:38:23] Nathan:The same thing. I like it.[00:38:25] Ali:Yeah. I think it's a great idea because you kind of need to use the clickbait. Like there's literally no way someone's going to click on something. there's a channel, V very, to cm, which made an amazing video, like a few days ago, about the difference about the importance of clickbait and how, and how much it works.And his overall point was that like click, click bait is kind of the wrong word. There is sort of, I think, I think the two terms where there's this sort of like intrigue Bates, which is that, you know, oh, this is interesting. I want to, I want to click on this. And then there is, I can't remember what he said, but it's like, sort of trashed bait, which is that I'm going to stick a bikini model on a thumbnail and has nothing to do with that.But, and so there's those two, two different ones where like, in a way, the way that you title something or the title of your book or the cover of some. It's so, so important for getting the message across. And we shouldn't see that as being a bad thing. Whereas the word clickbait, it includes, you know, things like what is what what's a good headline designer.What's good marketing coffee, but it really shouldn't because clickbait has, it is a dirty word, but it, it shouldn't be because the cover of something is so important to how that thing is perceived and whether people are going to see it or not.[00:39:33] Nathan:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. How do you think about the thumbnails and then like the, say the first 30 seconds of the video, those are two separate questions, but as both of those in, in driving engagement,[00:39:44] Ali:Yeah. So thumbnail is really, really important. I think on our channel, we were bad at thumbnails. I'm not a fan of our thumbnail style. we're trying to evolve and iterate on it over time whereby the, you know, and so w w whenever someone's an early stage, utuber, it's like, you're, you're uploading the video.And then you think about the title. And then you think, okay, let me find a, still from the video that I can use with someone else, and then maybe you downloaded it, ramp up the contrast saturation, blah, blah, blah, sticker, clarity, filter on it, and maybe put some text on it in Canada. That's like the, the new YouTube, YouTube way of doing it.When you become a little bit more pro you start thinking of the title in advance anything, okay, what's the title of this video going to be, and then you make the video and you've got the title already. but the thumbnail is still a bit of an afterthought because it's, it's quite hard to think about something else.And that's the point where we're at. and the gold standard is where you have full about the title. And you have literally made the thumbnail before you even think about writing the script for the video. And that is a place where we would like to get to. so we're looking to hire like a graphic designer and, you know, a YouTube channel producer whose job it's going to be to work with a graphic designer at any time, because we, we we've got hundreds of ideas at the top of our pipeline, but at the moment, our bottleneck is in developing those ideas, crucially with a decent title of decent thumbnail and a rough talk, rough amount of talking points.And so, yeah, we're doing everything we can to make the thumbnail more of a first-class citizen, because it's just so stupidly important on YouTube. And in fact, often, you know, if, when I've heard YouTubers would like 10 million plus subscribers speak about thumbnails, they view the thumbnail as being even more important than the title, because the thumbnail is the first thing that really catches the viewer's eye.And the first thing that they see. so yeah, I think we do vaginal thumbnails. Well, relatively speaking, and we're trying to improve at it. I think equally the first 30 seconds is just ridiculously important where everyone's attention is so like all over the place, but if you don't hook the viewer within the first like five seconds, you see that huge drop off in engagement.And again, other other YouTubers that I look up to really, really obsess over the first 30 seconds to one minute of the video and when we teach our YouTube, of course, and we analyze like, what makes a good, like what do these sort of 5 million plus view videos happen? It's like often there's like a cut every single second in the first 30 seconds, like some new piece of gear or something happening on screen.It's just like so rapid and fast and really holds your attention. Whereas for the rest of the video, you can kind of switch to a car every five seconds or something happening every 10 seconds, the ten second rule. but certainly the first 30 seconds, like Panama, it's gotta be like really, really, really sharp and on points.Otherwise people just don't watch.[00:42:16] Nathan:Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm realizing that it's true for a lot of channels I've seen grow really quickly are employing the same things. that's something that's I wanted to ask you about on the monetization side is you're selling a high value course, to like a big audience, you know, 2 million subscribers on YouTube.You also have a what? Lower a hundred thousand subscribers on, on email.All right.[00:42:38] Ali:Yeah.130 or something.[00:42:41] Nathan:Nice. What's the, like, how does your approach differ when in promoting that, you know, a new course, like the part-time YouTube academy on YouTube versus on email.[00:42:50] Ali:I think I'm still scared of selling. It's really bad. I need to get over it. I was, so I was really, really scared of selling like a year ago. And when I had the idea for the part-time YouTube academy, it was on like the 16th of August, 2020, where I wrote the notion page about it for the first time I was thinking, okay, you know, this, this is either going to be a Skillshare class.I eat free, or it's going to be like maybe a 50 to $200 kind of self-paced course. And you know, I can really, really over-deliver on content. Cause I know what I'm talking about here. And so $200 is an absolute steal for this. No one's ever going to complain that this is not worth it. And then I spoke to, I think people that you probably know Tiago Forte and David Perell who run their own like cohort based courses.And they challenged me. You know, what if you had to do this live? What if you had to charge a thousand Abdaalars for it, how would it change your approach to the course? And starting to think in those terms made me really changed the way that we did a personal course and it became a high, second thing. It made me realize that actually what the world needed was not, or what needed to be grandiose, like what the internet needed.It was not, another YouTube or making a self-paced course on how to be a YouTuber. The thing that's actually holding people back is the accountability and the community. And these are things that you get in a live cohort. but getting back to your point about how, like the difference in, in setting it.So we actually only advertised it on Twitter and on the meeting list. initially I didn't even mention it on YouTube because I was so scared of mentioning the course on YouTube. And I think the reason I was so scared of mentioning the course on YouTube is a problem with YouTube that I've spoken to a bunch of other creators about, which is that the people who comment on the videos do not reflect the audience at all.[00:44:29] Nathan:Right.[00:44:30] Ali:Like, if you think about who comments on a YouTube video, it's generally kids, it's generally kids with with enough time on their hands to comment on to comment on videos. And so I was always scared. Like, my audience is not going to appreciate the fact that I'm selling a high ticket course. They're going to think I'm a snake oil salesman or something like that.And my audience mental model was the people who comment on my videos. And it took me a little bit of like an epiphany to realize, hang on, the people who I'm targeting are people with jobs. People would like, you know, six figure incomes, people who want to do the creative side hustle and take it seriously.They are not the 14 to 17 year old kids commenting on my videos. And that was such a major like revelation of like, I can actually completely ignore the comments and I can just go by the analytics that tells me like 40% of my audience is age like 24 to 36 in the U S fantastic. Those are the people I want.Whereas on email, you don't really see that as so, so clearly. And so I think, and especially because I've read your stuff. Read a lot around email marketing, but so little around YouTube marketing. I'm much more comfortable selling on email than I am selling on YouTube, but it's, it's something I'm trying to get better on.So,[00:45:31] Nathan:Are you able to track attribution for signups or that kind of thing of what's coming from YouTube versus email now, right? You're doing at least some promotion of it on YouTube.[00:45:40] Ali:Yeah. we actually, so in the first cohort where we did, we didn't promote on YouTube at all. So it was like 50% Twitter, 50% email, I think for the most recent cohort, even now we don't really promote on YouTube very much. It's less just like a very, very subtle casual plug at the start of a video.I think about 30% came in through YouTube and the rest came in through again, Twitter or email.And so, but you know, one of the things that we're hiring for is a marketing marketing manager to basically just lead marketing for the YouTube academy. And that was some of the stuff that, that your pal Derek was was, was helping us with.[00:46:13] Nathan:Yeah, they're good at all of that kind of stuff of taking, I mean, all the things that I did over the years of like, oh, there's, one-off push here, they're entering into like, okay, that was great. Look at the results we got from it. Also, we're going to do it as a system now, and it's going to work like this and it's going to drive consistent results over time, rather than like these spikes or that sort of thing, which I'm good. okay. Something else like in that journey, we kind of left off as you were, you know, I guess the last we're talking about YouTube numbers was, you know, like five, 10,000 subscribers. I want to hear a little bit more about going from that 10,000 to 100,000 and then like, I think it's a huge jump, but a hundred thousand to 2 million.[00:46:54] Ali:I think it is absolutely fancy. It's just the law of compounding and consistency and, you know, the results happen very, very slowly and then very, very fast. And before you know it, you know, Jim Collins, I thing has that model of the flywheel that it takes. It takes a hell of a lot of energy to get going, but once it starts to go, then it, it becomes unstoppable.I think it's, it's the case for any interesting kind of compounding could growth projectory, you know, YouTube channels, convert kits, any software platform that's growing. and so in year one, I think we hit maybe like 20,000 subscribers by the end of it. Then year two was probably the next few hundred thousand year three was the next like million in year four.It's just wrapped up wait, where we just hit the 2 million mark. And then at the end of year four, so it was just, you know, perfectly matches it maps onto one of those exponential growth curves. The scary thing about that is that like, if you extrapolate it further, that means we're going to be on like 4 million subscribers by next year.And that's just completely unfathomable to me because it's like, okay, that's just never gonna happen. And there is a point at which the, the compounding growth curve stops, That's the thing that I worry about. I don't really worry about it. That's the thing that I'm trying to build more and more like pillars of support around the business, a diversification, more into courses, more into books, more into stuff that is dissociated from my personal brand and also from my personal YouTube channel specifically.Yeah, it's, it's, it's weird. It's one of those things we look back on and you kind of forget like, oh yeah. When, when I started, like, I remember like when I started working as a doctor, I had, I hit 50,000 subscribers like that, that, month. And then a year later when I was having my first like appraisal, where they, your supervisor looks at how good a doctor you were.The first thing he said to me was there were 263,000 people following a YouTube channel. How the hell did that happen? And so I have that number in my head is like, oh yeah. Once I, at the, at the end of 2019, when I, when I finished my first year, I was Dr.. That was what. And then it was like my it's my second year of working as a doctor when the pandemic struck and the pandemic, me and my channel really take off because all of a sudden people were sitting home and watching YouTube videos.I think that was when we had and subscribers. and now a year on from that point, we've just had 2 million and it's just been just insane, insane growth. but obviously consistency compounding the thing I always tell my students is that, you know, YouTube can change your life. but you have to put out a video every single week for the next two years.And if you do that, I guarantee it'll change your life. I can't put any numbers. I can't tell you how many subscribers you'll have or how much revenue you have, like a hundred percent guarantee. You will change your life at the very least in terms of skills or connections or friends, or, you know, just opportunities that will come your way as a result of posting consistently on YouTube.And everyone here is that advice. And like, you know, so few people actually follow that,[00:49:43] Nathan:Yeah.[00:49:44] Ali:With me. You know, I've been trying, I've been trying to hit the gym for the last like eight years. Never done it consistently until I got a personal trainer and now I'm actually seeing gains, Yeah, compounding and consistency, which is some of the stuff that you talk about as well.[00:49:55] Nathan:Yeah, for sure. Is there a point in there where you saw things plateau at all? Like right. There was the, a flat part and an S-curve where you started to think, okay, I need to change something or push through this or anything like that, or has it always just been consistent?[00:50:10] Ali:Yeah. So I don't really look at the numbers very much. the way that's, you know, my, my theory of numbers has always been that like the, the numbers were, were always outside of my control. And the only thing that I could personally control were the number of videos I was putting out and how, how good I felt about the quality of those videos.That second one I got rid of very quickly, because I realized that what I feel about the quality of my own videos does not match at all what the audience feels about the quality of my videos. And therefore I'm not even gonna think about that. So the only metric I care about is just putting out two videos a week.The thing that I, I think of more. When it comes to, okay, these are, this is a bottleneck. We have to like push through. It is when the channel starts to feel like it's a bit stale. And there's been a few times, boy for four and a bit years now, or I felt like, okay, we've kind of been doing the same thing for awhile and it worked to get us here, but maybe what necessarily got us there.So most, you know, initially it was like medical school stuff or it's that Kevin doing medical school stuff for a whole year. I need to kind of branch out from this. And it was like student stuff in general. And it was like, okay, I, I'm not, I'm not graduated to the student. There's only so long. I can keep on just peddling the same stuff around how to be an effective student.It's all kind of, of it. I mean, it's, it's obvious, but it's, you know, there are a finite number of things. There's like a few techniques that work really well and you make videos about them over and over again. So it, it feel stale now more, more recently, the productivity hustle lead type stuff has started to feel a bit stuck.And so now we're now thinking, okay, what's the next level? And that was what prompted the idea to start any podcasts that we're what doing, trying to mimic basically the Tim Ferriss show or impact theory or school of greatness, or these other sorts of broadly in-person interview podcasts interviewing like entrepreneurs, CEOs, creators, and other inspiring people about how they find fulfillment in work and in life that's like the spiel for it.And I, I, I hope that will be like the next level, and be able to expand our content beyond just me talking about productivity or me talking about tech.[00:52:06] Nathan:Right.[00:52:07] Ali:Mostly based on that gut feeling of stillness that I feel okay. The writing on the wall is that this is going to decline unless we change something rather than about the numbers.[00:52:15] Nathan:Yeah. That makes sense of figuring out. I mean, it's in the quality of the product that you're delivering, you know, and making sure that you're continuing to innovate their innovative buzzword, but you know what I mean? so one other thing that I see you doing throughout all of this is making sure that it's fun.And so I'm curious for your[00:52:33] Ali:Yep.[00:52:33] Nathan:On like, what's your philosophy around making this fund? why is that important instead of just like, or in addition to the like rigorous discipline?[00:52:43] Ali:This is literally the thing that I'm writing a book about right now, which is that, you know, people have been asking me for it for years, how you said productive. Even when I was in like high school and university people would be like, oh my God, you do so much stuff. Like how, how are you so productive?How do you, how do you will have it? And it always felt a bit like, you know, people, people had this weird image of me that I was some kind of productivity guru. And now the comments on my videos, like, oh my God, he must be some sort of absolute machine. But you know, I, I, I, I line until like 11 o'clock in the morning this morning, the only thing that got me out of bed was a zoom meeting with the team.And I scroll Twitter for a solid, like 45 minutes today. And I wasted, you know, I, I finished up with a call about half an hour before we were meant to start recording. And I was like, ah, How much work are you ready to get done in half an hour at school, Twitter, often Ariba. So I'm just like genuinely really lazy.And all of the people who actually know me know that I'm really lazy and are completely baffled that the internet thinks I'm a productivity group. I think the, if there is one secret that secret is that I just make everything that I do really fun. and so I think that's got kind of two components.The first component is finding things that you already find fun and then doing them. and that's fine. it's, it's, it's quite hard to do that because often the things we find fun are the things that are not really suitable for a career. Like, you know, I enjoy playing the guitar and do I ha I enjoy playing board games.I enjoy watching Netflix. Like it's very hot. It's hard to make a kind of sustainable career out of that probabilistically. Yes, I could become the next ninja, but it's pretty unlikely I could become the next John Mayer was pretty fricking unlikely. and so the, the lever that I try and pull is figuring out ways to make the thing that I'm already doing, figuring out ways to make that more fun. And I think I've just sort of been subconsciously doing this for my whole life, because I don't like doing stuff that's boring. I only like doing stuff that's fun. And I figured out like a few different, different things I can do that. Basically it tricks my brain into having more fun, which makes me more productive, but it also makes my life more happy.And it also means I don't really need discipline because it's like fun. Like, you know, when

Tosh has unexpected visitors to the show. Recorded live at The Lazy Turnip Inn in the village of Halfhill, the Valley of the Four Winds in beautiful Pandaria! Reach us on Twitter @HalfhillReport, @PTaliep, @Toshmifune1, by email at halfhillreport@yahoo.com or on in the Discord channel. Find Toshmifune and Professor Taliep on the Wyrmrest Accord server! Find branded Halfhill Report and Halfhill Ag Alumni Merchandise at https://www.zazzle.com/store/halfhill_report Show Credits and Acknowledgements Opening Music and bumpers: China Town by Audiobbinger Productions http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Audiobinger/Audiobinger_-_Singles_1776/China_Town_1874 Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0:  Bonnie and the Bear Music https://freemusicarchive.org/music/John_Bartmann/Royalty-Free_Soundtrack_Music_Album_Two/90s-sitcom-joy used under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) Pandaren Inn Music - Mists Of Pandaria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9l7Zm3Mo8Q Website Banner Art by  Sandra Schnell https://sanii.artstation.com   Logo Art by Toshmifune based on photo by imagesthai.com from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photography-of-cliff-with-sea-of-clouds-during-golden-hour-733172/  All place names, character names and music from World of Warcraft used in the Halfhill Report are the exclusive property of Blizzard Entertainment.  World of Warcraft is a trademark or registered trademark of Blizzard Entertainment Inc in the US and other countries. No copyright or trademark infringement is intended by The Halfhill Report.  

Technically PVP Show Notes Episode 138 - Stress and Anxiety 7:10 - Need-Greed-Pass 14:12 - Upcoming WoW PVP Events Dalaran Gaming hosts 5v5 1v1 duels.  So teams of 5 that 1v1 duel (pokemon style).  Keep an eye out - https://twitter.com/dalaran_rogueOasis Community to be streaming fun RBG wargames to showcase and raise awareness of the toxicity-free community 17 Sep.  LFM! - https://twitter.com/oasis_w0w/status/1438266384794865666?s=20 Oasis Community 2v2 every two weeks.  Submit your name and they make the teams; no need for partners!  Next tournament is Sep 27th. https://discord.gg/xfJyBJCBlizzard TournamentsMDI Season 2 time trials ended 24 August, so groups have been populated with the top 24 and group play started 3 Sep.  Groups A, B & C have completed.  https://raider.io/mythic-dungeon-international/sl-season-2-time-trials-teams/globalAWC Grand Finals will be Sept 25-26.  Teams and bracket start- https://twitter.com/WoWEsports/status/1432125043006267398?s=20 18:05 - Subject of Analysis Today we will discuss Stress and Anxiety 1:31:48 - WOW PVP NEWS Flark hosted another one of his 3v3 tournaments on 11 Sep.  Prize pool was $600.  Congrats to Weiz, Footgodx, Barndorr for winning! - https://challonge.com/o15oca9tOasis 2v2 Tournament happened 13 Sep (https://discord.gg/xfJyBJC). Congrats to Heckindoggo and Sokchoy for winning! - https://challonge.com/f367rrrvHotfixes - https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/23691036/hotfixes-september-7-2021Dev Update - https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/23724371/world-of-warcraft-news-and-development-updatesPTR LFG changes - Our friend Leeka (drustvar.com) has been testing many of the LFG updates on the PTR.  LFG will now show the player's CR, and you cannot create groups requiring CR above your own. - https://twitter.com/leekatv/status/1435725063165206535?s=20, https://twitter.com/leekatv/status/1433579440005697542?s=20, https://twitter.com/leekatv/status/1433570155028787201?s=20 LFG group leaders can look through the LFG while waiting for their group to fill. - https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/ptr-915-development-notes/1082616 Finding Us Seaney - https://twitter.com/seaneydhtwitch https://www.twitch.tv/seaneydh  Podcast Cohosts Technically - https://twitter.com/Technically_PvP  https://www.twitch.tv/warcraftradio https://discord.gg/qAvRtbP Technicallypvp@gmail.com https://warcraftradio.com/ Andallyn - https://twitter.com/Andallyn1 https://www.twitch.tv/andallyn Bigmoran - https://twitter.com/BigmoranIRL

In this episode Peter and Quinton catch up with VeganPete, cohost of the podcast SheHealsITank, streamer, new dog dad, and IPA enthusiast! We chat about the future of his show, the benefit of taking breaks, and have a very *strange* session of FFXIV character discussion. Check out this Tiermaker list that we created on the show. We can all agree that we hate it. https://twitter.com/Maelstrom_Radio/status/1436540061177323528?s=20 Links mentioned in this episode: Twitch hopes the lawsuit against two "highly motivated" abusers will serve as a warning to everyone else Square Enix Presents at Tokyo Game Show 2021 Online on October 3 There is a Question Block in Houston! Blizzard removing World of Warcraft references to 'sacks' and 'ho's' We'd love your feedback so be sure to reach out on Twitter, on Discord, or send us an email at show@maelstromradio.com and let us know what you want us to play or chat about! Join us live on Twitch, Fridays 6pm PT/9pm ET Please subscribe to our YouTube! Logo and artwork by https://themerrylark.com/ Opening Music by Husky by the Geek Closing Music by Dutyyaknow

Episode #213 of the Level Down Games Podcast. On today's show, Bryan and Dan from leveldowngames.com chat about the early hours of Tales of Arise and found out what the hell Dan has been up to these last few weeks. From there, the PlayStation Showcase 2021 was last Thursday, and boy did it have a lot of information packed into 40 minutes. The guys discuss! Plus, Roniu's Tale on Kickstarter for Kickstart My Heart! Email the show at ldgpodcast@leveldowngames.com with questions, feedback, suggestions, or whatever else you want! Please consider supporting the show by using our Amazon Affiliate link when shopping online! Timestamps for this episode are as follows: 00:00:37 - Introductions 00:01:45 - Dan's Back! 00:09:31 - Tales of Arise 00:15:20 - The Sean Waltman Lightning Round (News Roundup) 00:23:01 - New Release Roulette (Week of 9/13/21) 00:31:16 - Wagers 00:33:23 - PlayStation Showcase 2021 Recap & Thoughts 00:56:24 - Kickstart My Heart (Roniu's Tale) 01:04:09 - Final Words GAME CHALLENGE LINKS Bryan's Completed Games for 2021 Kyle's Completed Games for 2021 Dan's Completed Games for 2021 Sean's Completed Games for 2021 CONTACT US Website: https://leveldowngames.com/ Discord: https://discord.gg/cC73Heu Twitch: https://twitch.tv/leveldowngames Twitter: https://twitter.com/OriginalLDG Instagram: https://instagram.com/bryan.ldg/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/leveldowngaming MUSIC CREDIT Most music tracks were provided by @NeonDanTV over on Twitter and used with permission He can also be found over on his Bandcamp page for Midnight Playtime! Kickstart My Heart: "Kickstart My Heart -Eurobeat Remix-" by Turbo Ad Read: "Song of Elune" from World of Warcraft, copyright by Blizzard MISC INFORMATION This episode's Sean Waltman Lightning Round consists of the following being discussed: Firesprite, Football Manager 2022, Football Manager 2022 Xbox Edition, Football Manager 2022 Touch, and Twisted Metal. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ldg-podcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ldg-podcast/support

Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this weeks episode, Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas discuss the 9.1.5 developer notes, MDI group B, Conduit Energy changes, hotfixes and everything else going on around Azeroth and Shadowlands! Episode #476: Catching up with 9.1.5! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! Weekly Event – World Quest Bonus Event World Boss -Mortanis, the Bone Construct in Maldraxxus Guile Charm (Rogues) Fujieda (Warriors) Keefer (Monks) Desmotaeron World Boss - Mor'geth, Tormentor of the Damned Mythic + Affixes - Tyrannical, Bolstering, Explosive, Tormented Dungeon Quests - Plaguefall, Sanguine Depths PvP Brawl - Temple of Hotmogu PvP Quests - Rated BGs, Epic BGs MDI Season 2 Schedule Group B Bracket Harvest Festival - Sept 17th to Sept 24th Pirate's Day - Sept 19th Brewfest Sept 20th to October 6th PTR 9.1.5 Development Notes ABetterABK Hotfixes and much more! Trying to reach the show? You can find us on Discord at The Starting Zone or email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!

In this episode, Berzerker discusses where he's been for the last two months, all that has happened with the Activision Blizzard lawsuit since it launched, and the loot pinata that is Patch 9.1.5! Listen and subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts!

Aprillian, Grand Nagus and Constraxx discuss another week of playing World of Warcraft, Blizzard's greatest MMORPG. The show features audio segments and email submissions from our lovely listeners. Guild Round up from Constraxx Ctrl Alt WoW Episode Ctrl Alt WoW Episode 722 - I Want The Mount If you want to join the conversations on the show, we have a live chatroom with in-game giveaways moderated by chatroom-guru Constraxx. We record Live on our Twitch TVpage! http://twitch.tv/ctrlaltwowpodcast

Featured Stories - The Mushans Chalk Up Another Win and Velmic and Professor Taliep join Tosh to tell him about their visit to Hook Point in Boralus Sponsors: Moonberry Juice, Halfhill Market and Stormstout Brewery Recorded live at The Lazy Turnip Inn in the village of Halfhill, the Valley of the Four Winds in beautiful Pandaria! Reach us on Twitter @HalfhillReport, @PTaliep, @Toshmifune1, by email at halfhillreport@yahoo.com or on in the Discord channel. Find Toshmifune and Professor Taliep on the Wyrmrest Accord server! Find branded Halfhill Report and Halfhill Ag Alumni Merchandise at https://www.zazzle.com/store/halfhill_report Show Credits and Acknowledgements Opening Music and bumpers: China Town by Audiobbinger Productions http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Audiobinger/Audiobinger_-_Singles_1776/China_Town_1874 Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0:  Bonnie and the Bear Music https://freemusicarchive.org/music/John_Bartmann/Royalty-Free_Soundtrack_Music_Album_Two/90s-sitcom-joy used under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) Pandaren Inn Music - Mists Of Pandaria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9l7Zm3Mo8Q Website Banner Art by  Sandra Schnell https://sanii.artstation.com   Logo Art by Toshmifune based on photo by imagesthai.com from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photography-of-cliff-with-sea-of-clouds-during-golden-hour-733172/  All place names, character names and music from World of Warcraft used in the Halfhill Report are the exclusive property of Blizzard Entertainment.  World of Warcraft is a trademark or registered trademark of Blizzard Entertainment Inc in the US and other countries. No copyright or trademark infringement is intended by The Halfhill Report.

Episode #212 of the Level Down Games Podcast. *Note: This episode was recorded on Friday, September 3. We're aware Sony has already backpedaled on our topic for the main discussion.* On today's show, Bryan and Kyle from leveldowngames.com are here to take a psychedelic trip into Psychonauts 2! From there, Sony is making some bizarre decisions in regards to Horizon Forbidden West and its upgrade path, so the guys tackle that this week. Plus, Goodboy Galaxy on Kickstarter for Kickstart My Heart! Email the show at ldgpodcast@leveldowngames.com with questions, feedback, suggestions, or whatever else you want! Please consider supporting the show by using our Amazon Affiliate link when shopping online! Timestamps for this episode are as follows: 00:00:30 - Introductions 00:01:11 - Quick Updates 00:03:52 - Psychonauts 2 00:12:16 - The Sean Waltman Lightning Round (News Roundup) 00:28:19 - New Release Roulette (Week of 9/6/21) 00:36:57 - Wagers 00:39:04 - Horizon Forbidden West & Sony's Upgrade Policies 00:53:54 - Kickstart My Heart (Goodboy Galaxy) 01:00:02 - Final Words GAME CHALLENGE LINKS Bryan's Completed Games for 2021 Kyle's Completed Games for 2021 Dan's Completed Games for 2021 Sean's Completed Games for 2021 CONTACT US Website: https://leveldowngames.com/ Discord: https://discord.gg/cC73Heu Twitch: https://twitch.tv/leveldowngames Twitter: https://twitter.com/OriginalLDG Instagram: https://instagram.com/bryan.ldg/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/leveldowngaming MUSIC CREDIT Most music tracks were provided by @NeonDanTV over on Twitter and used with permission He can also be found over on his Bandcamp page for Midnight Playtime! Kickstart My Heart: "Kickstart My Heart -Eurobeat Remix-" by Turbo Ad Read: "Song of Elune" from World of Warcraft, copyright by Blizzard MISC INFORMATION This episode's Sean Waltman Lightning Round consists of the following being discussed: Centipede: Recharged, Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2, Cursed to Golf, Big Brain Academy: Brain vs Brain, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Now, and the PlayStation Showcase 2021. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ldg-podcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ldg-podcast/support

Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this weeks episode, Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas discuss the 9.1.5 developer notes, MDI group A, Timewalking M+, hotfixes and everything else going on around Azeroth and Shadowlands! Episode #475: Quality of Life! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! Weekly Event – Arena Skirmish Bonus Event World Boss -Valinor, the Light of Eons in Bastion Archbishop Benedictus (Priests) Final Verdict (Paladins) Windspeaker's Lava Resurgence (Shaman) Desmotaeron World Boss - Mor'geth, Tormentor of the Damned Mythic + Affixes - Fortified, Sanguine, Necrotic, Tormented Dungeon Quests - Mists of Tirna Scithe, Theater of Pain PvP Brawl - Cooking Impossible PvP Quests - Arenas, Epic BGs MDI Season 2 Schedule Group A Bracket Darkmoon Faire - until September 11th PTR 9.1.5 Development Notes ABetterABK Hotfixes and much more! Trying to reach the show? You can find us on Discord at The Starting Zone or email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!  

Wherein we discuss Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, more coronabros coronabro-ing, What We Do in the Shadows' season 3 premiere, live-action Rick and Morty, Mike Richards is out of Jeopardy completely, John Gibson's trip-up (and trip down), more Blizzard malarkey, Higgins' World of Warcraft woes, Cookie Clicker, and Final Fantasy XIV. Starring Ryan Scott, Justin Haywald, and Ryan Higgins.

Aprillian, Grand Nagus and Constraxx discuss another week of playing World of Warcraft, Blizzard's greatest MMORPG. The show features audio segments and email submissions from our lovely listeners. Guild Round up from Constraxx Show Notes for Ctrl Alt WoW Episode 721 - Is Blizzard Actually Finally Listening? If you want to join the conversations on the show, we have a live chatroom with in-game giveaways moderated by chatroom-guru Constraxx. We record Live on our Twitch TVpage! http://twitch.tv/ctrlaltwowpodcast

Many nerds who grew up in the 1970s or 1980s played a role-playing game called Dungeons & Dragons. When computers starting hitting the scene, people quickly began adapting...

Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this weeks episode, Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas discuss the 9.1.5 preview, AWC and MDI are back, lots of hotfixes and everything else going on around Azeroth and Shadowlands! Episode #474: Looking into 9.1.5! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! Weekly Event – Wrath of the Lich King Timewalking World Boss -Nurgash Muckformed in Revendreth Frenzied Monstrosity (DKs) Erratic Fel Core (Warlocks) Azj'Aqir's Madness (Warlocks Desmotaeron World Boss - Mor'geth, Tormentor of the Damned Mythic + Affixes - Tyrannical, Inspiring, Quaking, Tormented Dungeon Quests - Sanguine Depths, De Other Side PvP Brawl - Warsong Scramble PvP Quests - Rated BGs, Random BGs MDI Season 2 Schedule AWC Week 4 Trial of Style - August 31st to September 4th Development Update: A Message to the WoW Community 9.1.5 Content Update Preview ABetterABK Hotfixes and much more! Trying to reach the show? You can find us on Discord at The Starting Zone or email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!

Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this episode Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas find out what's on the TSZ patrons minds with the August 2021 Patron Q&A! Episode #473: August Patron Q&A! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! What moment in World of Warcraft made you fall in love with the game, and if you were introducing someone to the story to catch their attention, what would you show them? With the changes coming in 9.1.5, it seems like some of the suggestions/recommendations that were made during beta of Shadowlands are actually now coming into the live game. Why do you think the dev team was so entrenched in their design and do you think this same decision would have been made had we not been in 9.0 for so long? Is there anything the player base/community could do differently in the future to make their points better on these type of design ideas, because it seems to me this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened in the past few expansions? I think all the announced changes for 9.1.5 are great, especially doing away with conduit energy, and making covenant swapping easy. Do you think these changes are related to the sexual harassment lawsuit? Perhaps the people who were toxic to their co-workers also designed toxic game systems? Or maybe it's simply a desperate attempt to entice players back after the mass exodus of players caused by the lawsuit?  In season one we used to have to buy the conduit upgrade item and then go back to your Sanctum to use it, than come back to Ve'nari and buy another one and keep repeating that process. Can you just buy a bunch of them and go back to your Sanctum and use them one after another? Epic's WoW Memoriam GoFundMe for Funeral Costs Trying to reach the show? You can find us on Discord at The Starting Zone or email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!

Welcome to The Starting Zone Podcast, The World of Warcraft Podcast for New and Experienced Players! On this weeks episode, Spencer Downey and Jason Lucas discuss the last LFR wing boss Sylvannas, customizations coming in 9.1.5, islands coming back and everything else going on around Azeroth and Shadowlands! Episode #472: The Reckoning! is ready for Download! What's New this Week in World of Warcraft! Weekly Event – Pet Battle Bonus Event World Boss -Oranomonos the Everbranching in Ardenweald Fevered Incantation (Mages) Surging Shots (Hunters) Verdant Infusion (Druids) Desmotaeron World Boss - Mor'geth, Tormentor of the Damned Mythic + Affixes - Fortified, Raging, Explosive, Tormented Dungeon Quests - Plaguefall, De Other Side PvP Brawl - Shado-Pan Showdown PvP Quests - Rated BGs, Epic BGs Trial of Style - August 31st to September 4th Surprise/Stealth Patch 9.1.5 Announcement Solo queueing island expeditions ABetterABK Hotfixes and much more! Trying to reach the show? You can email us at TheStartingZone@Gmail.com Have you heard about our Patreon? It's a great way to support the show and goes towards making more content for you! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/thestartingzone Looking for to grab some great TSZ merch? Look no further than here! We've got the shirts, hoodies, mugs, pillows even stickers you want!

Taking Blockchain Games to the Next Level with Vulcan Forged With Axie Infinity selling over $1 billion in NFTs, there's no question that blockchain gaming is here to stay... And it's just getting started. So what happens when you combine a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game like World of Warcraft with a builder game like Minecraft and toss in NFTs with a play-to-earn ecosystem? You've got the future of gaming. And this perfectly describes Vulcan Verse. And today we've got the CEO of gaming company Vulcan Forged, Jamie Thomson, to discuss the future of blockchain games that most of you don't even know exists. But you'll be well informed after this episode. So you've got my sword (and you've got my axe) for episode #542 of The Bad Crypto Podcast. Full Show Notes Badco.in/542 SUBSCRIBE, RATE, & REVIEW: Apple Podcast: http://badco.in/itunes Google Podcasts: http://badco.in/google Spotify: http://badco.in/spotify FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: @BadCrypto - @joelcomm - @teedubya Facebook: /BadCrypto - /JoelComm - /teedubyaw Facebook Mastermind Group: /BadCrypto LinkedIn: /in/joelcomm - /in/teedubya Instagram: @BadCryptoPodcast Email: badcryptopodcast[at]gmail[dot]com Phone: SEVEN-OH-8-88FIVE- 90THIRTY DONATE CRYPTO TO THE SHOW: If you'd like to donate a bit of cryptocurrency to The Bad Crypto Podcast, feel free to send copious amounts to the following locations: $BTC: Bitcoin: 3GMgCH4dFUHSLdrPnLwEsfKPVnLnoGbzGZ $ETH Ethereum: 0x1ccE8A04fa6743eD1D24cA063c7543D43B42F328 $LTC Litecoin: LavXqTWVHebEgVhBXdg3Hue3xEAmgtxLgr $DOGE Dogecoin: DMngvNMX1U8Sg8PkDjCC3UTS8Mmn9RqTP5 DISCLAIMER: Do your own due diligence and research. Joel Comm and Travis Wright are NOT FINANCIAL ADVISORS. We are sharing our journey with you as we learn more about this crazy little thing called cryptocurrency. We make NO RECOMMENDATIONS. Don't take anything we say as gospel. Do not come to our homes with pitchforks because you lost money by listening to us. We only share with you what we are learning and what we are investing it. We will never "pump or dump" any cryptocurrencies. Take what we say with a grain of salt. You must research this stuff on your own! Just know that we will always strive for RADICAL TRANSPARENCY with any show associations.   Support the show: https://badcryptopodcast.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.