Starbucks DVD peddlers (Friends)

29:18Assuming a hallucination, that's accurate. Who's hallucinating? You were the - Oh, you're not even - Not me. Jurassic Park was 93. This is not - No. Really? Oh. June 11th, 93. Why do I think - Hold on. It's close enough to 95. I mean - But I thought there was a thing with Michael Creighton had like - Was it the second one? Jurassic World, maybe. Jurassic World is... No, that's the other one. Jurassic Parks? What was the second one? They're going to two parks on this one. It's like Disney. We go East Coast, West Coast. Yeah, exactly. I hit them all. Jurassic Park holds up, though. For sure. For sure.

29:59And the music. Holy cow. I know. These composers overdo everything. I mean, everything. It's like, okay. We're just stalling for Justin. What year was it, Justin? I'm still looking. Okay. They had the Jurassic World rebooted in 2015. Lost World was 97. That'd be the third one, though. Yeah. So I'm trying to find what was the second one called? Jurassic World was the name of it. Maybe that's right. The second one. Screwed up. But I could be wrong. Do you all remember Wizard of Oz 2? With the wheelers and how scary that was? Yeah. you were thinking of the lost world then because 1995 the lost world comes out i think as a book though yeah oh because the new re and you read books so i don't read books i'm just saying i read a lot of my fiction just you know not by reading it all right yeah lost world was the second one and that was 97 and then jurassic park three they went back to the number system was 2001 so yeah it was 93 97 in 2001 there was something in maybe i got the year wrong i thought it was Michael Creighton in one of those years had like the best-selling book, the best-selling movie, and some other element.

31:08It was like a special. Special year. Yeah. It's like when you wear the EGOT award when you wear. Oh, yeah. They don't do that. They don't do that all in one year, do they? But that's when you win a Grammy, a Tony, an Oscar. And an Emmy. I don't know about that. And an Emmy. I always wanted an Emmy because I feel like that would be so. It's like Emily has the Emmy. Right. Right. Well, he did write Twister the year after 1995. Now we're stretching. Just to close one more loop. I didn't realize he wrote Twister. Apparently it did. His best book, in my opinion, was Andromeda Strain. Did that get turned into a movie?

31:41I think, but it was. The book was magic. You should start a book review service. I know. Media with Emily. There you go. The years are wrong, but the thoughts are right. Hey, it's a good segue. It doesn't really matter what year it was. Well, that's somehow a hard segue into DevRel and careers because there's no possible way of getting there with my limited skill set.

32:18Okay, friends, I'm here in the breaks with Annie Sexton over at Fly. and you know we use fly here at changelow we love fly it is such an awesome platform and we love building on it but for those who don't know much about fly what's special about building on fly fly gives you a lot of flexibility like a lot of flexibility on multiple fronts and on top of that you get so i've talked a lot about the the networking and that's obviously one thing but there's various data stores that we partner with that are really easy to use um actually one of my favorite partners is Tigris. I can't say enough good things about them when it comes to object storage.

32:58I've never in my life thought I would have so many opinions about object storage, but I do now. Tigris is a partner of Fly, and it's S3 compatible object storage that basically seems like it's a CDN, but it's not. It's basically object storage that's globally distributed without needing to actually set up a CDN at all. It's like automatically distributed around the world. And it's also incredibly easy to use and set up. Like creating a bucket is literally one command. So it's partners like that that I think are this sort of extra icing on top of Fly that really makes it sort of the platform that has everything that you need.

33:33So we use Tigress here at Changelog. Are they built on top of Fly? Is this one of those examples of being able to build on Fly? Yeah. So Tigress is built on top of Fly's infrastructure, and that's what allows it to be globally distributed. you did. I do have a video on this, but basically the way it works is whenever, like, let's say a user uploads an asset to a particular bucket. Well, that gets uploaded directly to the region closest to the user. Whereas with a CDN, there's sort of like a centralized place where assets need to get copied to. And then eventually they get sort of trickled out to all of the different global locations.

34:07Whereas with Tigris, the moment you upload something, it's available in that region instantly. And then it's eventually cached in all the other regions as well as it's requested. In fact, with Tigris, you don't even have to select which regions things are stored in. You just get these regions for free. And then on top of that, it is so much easier to work with. I feel like the way they manage permissions, the way they handle bucket creation, making things public or private is just so much simpler than other solutions. And the good news is that you don't actually need to change your code if you're already using S3.

34:40It's S3 compatible. So like whatever SDK you're using is probably just fine. and all you got to do is update the credentials. So it's super easy. Very cool. Thanks, Annie. So Fly has everything you need. Over 3 million applications, including ours, here at Changelog, multiple applications have launched on Fly. Boosted by global Anycast load balancing, zero configuration private networking, hardware isolation, instant wire guard VPN connections, push button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. It's all there for you right now. To pull your app in five minutes, go to fly.io. Again, fly.io.

35:19And by our friends over at Paragon, use paragon.com. Check them out. Ship every SaaS integration your users need. With more than 100 plus pre-built connectors, you can add dozens of integrations to your app quickly and reliably with their embedded iPass for developers. And I'm here with co-founder and CEO, Brandon Fu. So Brandon, talk to me about the friction developers feel with integrations, SSO, dealing with rate limits, retries, auth, all the things. Yeah, so there's a lot here. And I think there's a lot of aspects to the different problems that you have to solve in the integration story in building these integrations and also providing them in a user friendly way for your customers to self serve and onboard and consume those integrations.

36:05So part of what the Paragon SDK provides is that embedded user experience, again, what we call our connect portal. That's going to provide the authentication for your users to connect their accounts. That's going to be the initial onboarding. But in addition to that, your users may also want to configure different options or settings for their integrations. A common example that we see for Salesforce or for CRM integrations in general is that your users may want to select some type of custom object mapping. Every CRM can be configured differently, so your users might want to map objects to some different type of record in their Salesforce or different fields in their Salesforce.

36:39And typically, that's what developers would have to build on their own, is this UI for your users to configure these different settings for every single integration. That's also going to be what's provided by the Paragon SDK, is not just that initial onboarding and authentication experience, but also the configuration end-user UX for different settings like custom field mapping, selecting which types of features on your integration that your user might want to configure. And that's also going to be provided fully out of the box by the Paragon SDK. With integrations, different APIs might have different rate limits, they might have different policies that you have to conform with, and your developers typically have to learn these different nuances for every API and write code individually to conform to those different nuances.

37:27With Paragon, because we build and maintain the connector with each of the integrations that we support in our catalog, we're automatically going to handle for things like retries, things like rate limits. And so we look at this as sort of the backend or infrastructure layer of the integration problem that we have spent the last five years essentially building and optimizing the Paragon infrastructure to act as the integration infrastructure for your application. Okay. Paragon is built for product management. It's built for engineering. It's built for everybody. Ship hundreds of native integrations into your SaaS application in days or build your own custom connector with any API.

38:06Learn more at useparagon.com slash changelog. Again, useparagon.com slash changelog. That's U-S-E-P-A-R-A-G-O-N dot com slash changelog.

38:24Emily. Yes. You were the mayor of AWS when I met you. at your own AWS. Hardly. Thank you. What was your, yeah, tell us about your role there and then what happened since then because things have changed. I know. AWS, I ended up, I came in as head of DevOps product marketing, which is awesome. Peter Uelander, who is now the CMO of Mongo, pulled me over. He's incredible, incredible leader. So that was a fun time. And then went over to DevRel, led community efforts, really focused around, especially third-party communities. I think AWS does a really good job of ensuring people who are already bought into AWS continue to be bought into AWS.

39:08I think they have a growth area in reaching developers who are not already AWS fanboys. So that's what I focused on. If you don't call yourself a builder, then you're a third-party community for AWS. I never bought into that term. So if you don't know, at Amazon, And, you know, when you think about developer, they call developers builders. And I just it's like I've never roofed a house. You know, I don't I don't know. I have carpentry. I'm not a builder, though, to be honest, sometimes when you say developer, people like I'll be like, oh, I'm a developer. And they're like, oh, you buy land like you develop land.

39:43Right. No, I don't. I'm not that cool. But yeah. And then after AWS, I left, which was a really good decision. I left sort of jumping off a cliff. I didn't have another role. But it was interesting. like, I don't know if any of you have had this in your career. I was so burnt out and empty that I was just not even showing up the way I wanted to. Like I just needed a break. And it wasn't just Amazon that, that, um, stuck to my soul. It was Microsoft before that Microsoft during the pandemic was a special, special kind of exhausting, but yeah, it took a break. And then in May, June, Forrest Brazil was like, Hey, I have an idea.

40:25Tell me your idea. And I was like, I think we could be making influencer marketing agency and connect companies with influencers and get content creators paid. I was like, I like this. Do you think they'd pay for it? Turns out they do. And so that's what we're, we've been up to all these months. That's cool. It's amazing. Big fans of Forrest for our listener. If you don't know Forrest Brazil, go back in our back catalog. I did a song encoder episode all about him, featuring him on a lot of the songs he's made up over the years. Although now probably it's outdated. He's, he's continued to just crank out amazing cartoons, music, just very talented communicator.

41:05Super talented. And so incredibly creative. Yeah. Yes. And like a classically trained in on piano and I think even voice, I don't know. Very good. So you jumped off the ledge. I did. And you landed. How'd you have the confidence to do that? I mean, you probably were getting paid well there and you're supposed to be happy and all this kind of stuff. I was paid well. Happiness is a different conversation. I ended up leaving honestly, cause I was scared for my health. I, the last five months, my eye was twitching. I'm not even kidding. Like it just would not stop twitching. And I went to my doctor.

41:44I was like, this seems like a bad sign. She's like, yeah, that's not great. Seems like you might be stressed. I was like, no shit. What am I paying you for? Thanks, doc. I appreciate that. And so it was like, well, you just have to remove the stress. I'm like, I can't do that until my stock drops. Thank you. And so I went to an acupuncturist and she actually helped the most. She kind of like made it manageable for the last little home stretch. But yeah, as soon as, as soon as I realized like there wasn't going to be any kind of meaningful change and I wasn't going to be able to be what I needed to be to be effective.

42:22Um, I was like, I can't, I can't keep going. And so, yeah, I just, I made the bold decision and it wasn't, I think a lot of times in my, cause I've made some real bold decisions in my career and people sometimes think that I'm just like bold by nature. I am not. I am driven by like, I don't know. I think it was, it's more of a fear response than anything else. Right. It wasn't like in that moment, like I could revisionist history this and say like, oh, I had a plan and I was going to make sure everything was going to be amazing. I was going to go off on my own, but really it was like, I cannot keep going down this path where I will damage myself, both soul and body and it's like okay we have to we have to stop this and figure out what's next whether that's a new job or something on my own I don't know but yeah Justin or Adam have you ever been in such a precarious circumstance as Emily's where it's like my health is suffering if I don't make a dramatic change I'm going to damage myself you always have to ask yourself can uh can I keep doing this whenever you're really in any position where you feel like strain, I suppose?

43:36I think so. Definitely during the pandemic, you know, there was a lot of pressure on a lot of sides of our lives. So I would say during the pandemic for sure, you know, can I keep going at this clip? Can I keep, is this what I'm doing today sustainable? And if it, if it isn't, how long do I need to keep doing it to get to the next lily pad? And your answer was just to hold out for the next lily pad. Yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of what life is, right? No matter what, you're just like looking for that next lily pad. That's my analogy, at least, right? Like you want to be a frog above water.

44:15Sure. If you go underwater, you got crocs under there. You got things under there that can get you. Yeah, that's going pretty well. Is the floor lava? Is the floor lava? It's the four lava. Isn't it always? Yeah, I think that's spot on to try to do your best to maintain equilibrium until the next lily pad appears. Sure. Because it could be, you know, too far of a leap and you can land in the water. Yeah, but Emily couldn't see any lily pads. She just jumped, right? You didn't have a plan. No, I didn't. I was just like, I know that this, I will die if I continue. Yeah. But were you thinking, I need six months, I need three months, I need a year?

44:49I thought I'd need a month. So this is the lie of burnout. And especially for people who are like, I'll put myself in the high achieving overachiever category. I generally have no ability to recognize my own limitations. And that's not a good thing. Right? Like, and so what happened is I quit, immediately got sick, and was sick for like a month, basically, because I had like held on for so long. And then my immune system was just like, time to rest. And so I had that rest. And then I was like, oh, like I remember in January, I was like, time to start writing. It's going to be amazing. And then there was just, you're empty.

45:32Like you're so far, you've gone through all your gas, you've gone through the reserve tank. There's nothing, there's not even fumes. And so you just have to sit still. And I actually think one of the hardest things to do in our society in this moment where we all run so fast and we operate under so much pressure of like being the best, being better, striving to do better in all things all the time, like sitting still and not doing anything and trusting, like it was really, really hard. and then I went through like this whole identity crisis of what am I without my big cloud career am I even valuable to the industry as Emily Freeman like that that was February and then like March April May was just around mostly cleaning closets I really I my friends will tell you like I went nuts on just tidying and cleaning and neurotically organizing I mean my closets look like a serial killer lives in the house literally cleaning literally like 100 no metaphors here no like literally removing junk buying perfect little containers labeling the containers like a psychopath putting things in i mean it's it's beautiful but yeah it was it's a whole process and i'm just now to a place where it's like oh i have energy i actually like the industry again because i was real real bearish on tech the companies the people honestly like it's just like what are we doing here.

46:56And that's not a good attitude and certainly not a place for creativity and hopeful inspiration, you know? And so, yeah, I needed a break, but I think when you're in burnout, you have this thought of like, Oh, I just take a vacation. It'll be fine. It's like, no, this is years of compounding stress on, on your body, on your mind and your soul. And it has to, it has to heal. That takes time. Isn't that what sabbaticals are all about? Are there companies? I think there were at one point, maybe this was a Zerp phenomenon, but where there are companies that would allow for sabbaticals that were like six weeks, eight weeks.

47:33But those are like once in a career at a company, right? It's not a yearly thing. I had a friend who worked at PayPal and I think he got one every five years while he worked there, which was long enough where I remember him going on multiple sabbaticals. I've known him for a long time. And of course the fear is like, when I get back, am I going to, is my job going to be still there? Cause like they got I replaced you for eight weeks. They start to wonder like, is this person necessary? Of course he had that little bit of a fear in there, but I'm not sure if that's still PayPal's standard, but I know they allowed, I think a six or eight week sabbatical once every five years.

48:04Well, I mean a lot of like how much European companies, it's just like you leave for a month. Right. Like you're, you're, you're gone for a month as like normal vacation every year. Oh, I know it because Natalie Pisanovic, our friend from go time, Natalie, She disappears every August. I'm so jealous. She lives in Berlin, and she works on go time throughout the year. And then she's like, I'll be back in September. I'm like, you're not from around these parts, are you? Where are you going? And back in September and not catching up from August. Like back in September, and I'm going to start in September.

48:38And we'll see where you're at. Yeah, exactly. So there's that, I guess. But what I was wondering, Emily, at any point did you consider, which is kind of cliche, but people are doing it like just trying something completely different, you know, like start a company that organizes closets. Well, I think it's, I didn't even have energy for that. Like when I say I was empty, I was, I was toast. I mean, after the rejuvenating period now versus going back into it. I mean, some somewhat, but I've already reinvented myself so many times that at this point, it's like, okay, you have to like stick with something for a minute.

49:15I mean, I was, I worked in politics and then I worked in PR and then I did nonprofits and then I was writing and then I was in tech and it's like, okay, I do feel like I have learned so much around specifically this industry and even more specifically, like how the really big companies operate, what they need, how they fit into the market. I think the role of like AI and developers in the next decade is really interesting. I want to be a part of that. And so, no, I don't think so. And in all transparency, I mean, like what other industry could we join outside of finance, which is more stressful than this role?

49:57Where could we make the money that we make? There's no other. Even doctors and lawyers don't make what we make, which is crazy. and they have to be trained i know they have more they have more debt exactly for sure for sure more debt yeah it's wild to me but they i mean some of these doctors come out of school if you didn't get scholarships or your parents didn't pay for it you can come out of school with 350 400 000 dollars in debt right it's insane it's insane i think a lot of the thoughts that i've had and adam you as well maybe you can speak to this because you're always talking about boring businesses and kind of brick and mortar.

50:31And my thoughts are always like, couldn't I start a regular business and use my software and tech skills in order to be better than other people at that particular thing? I've never tried it. So it's just a pipe dream, if you will. But Adam, you're always talking about coffee business. Laundromats, what was your other one? Laundromats, storage businesses, they say those just are less likely to fail. They're recession proof, things like that. Yeah, they're more like investments than they are like. Yeah. Yeah. Same thing with like you can translate storage units to like mailbox storage. People don't want to change their address.

51:11There's stress in change. They don't change. They hold off for at least one more year and that might happen two years or three years. And by then you've got enough recurring on that person that you're as a business owner, you know, you kind of protect it or insulate it a little bit. Sure. there's lots of studies on you know those boring businesses laundromats is something that a lot of towns need you know you don't know it until you know it really i mean you got a lot of people who are in between things and just need a place to wash their stuff it's like hey i need to go to a laundromat and you know a high quality one could do a good job don't have a laundry don't have an in-unit laundry i grew up without an in-unit laundry and so it's like you have to you have to go where there's machines

52:15What's up, friends? I'm here with Kyle Carberry, CTO at Coder.com. So Kyle, I've known Coder as the IDE in the cloud, and over time, you've iterated to become a fully open source cloud development environment, a CDE. How do you explain what Coder is and what it does? Coder is a platform to provision you a development environment on any cloud infrastructure. That might be in a VM, that might be inside of a container. But Coder is kind of a developer's route to provision infrastructure for them to write software inside of. We started with the IDE, which is kind of like putting VS code in the browser, which is what most people are certainly familiar with us for.

52:53And we kind of funneled that into more of a platform where people provision the infrastructure. And a lot of people do use a Web IDE with Coder. A lot of people use a local IDE and just connect in. Okay, so what are teams coming to you for? Who's coming to you? What people really come to us for, particularly this problem is really exacerbated if you're a large enterprise, is when you have like 500 engineers that are trying to update like a version of Python. And instead, we allow one engineer to go through that tedious work of updating some scripts or some Docker container. And then you can actually just deploy that in one click to say like 500 engineers and make it really, really simple.

53:27Let's laser focus in on the platform engineer. It is that team's job to provide the best infrastructure, the best platform for their given applications, for their teams. What are some signs or signals for platform engineers to think about when it might be time to consider a cloud development environment like Coder.com? So as a platform engineer, developers might constantly be opening like IT tickets that their computer isn't working properly. They might constantly want to update dependencies, but that's a big mess. You constantly have to email people across your team to say, hey, Adam, could we update from Java 17 to Java 18?

54:05Those are the kinds of problems that people typically have. That's the status quo. You ship people more powerful laptops to improve the build times of your projects. You try to reduce the complexity of your products instead of simply leveraging better hardware. We believe that the future is leveraging the cloud for a lot of these things. You can get more powerful instances in GCP or AWS that can make the build times faster instantly. You can let one developer create a standardized environment and then distribute it to a thousand so that when you're updating from Java 17 to 18, it's just a simple pull request.

54:36You can co-locate your servers right next to something like S3 or a database that you're using in development so that you get immediate data transfers and it's not slow. Many of our customers, which is a crazy thing to say, but they use absolutely massive monorepos and they get clones that go from like 10 minutes or 20 minutes or an hour to simply like a minute or 30 seconds. It's just a lot simpler when all of your engineers are standardized on one centralized piece of infrastructure and then one person can impact the lives of hundreds of engineers. And with that, we don't believe that everything belongs in the cloud.

55:07We think that some workloads are really amazing for it, and some are absolutely terrible. Coder should be a self-serve offering to your engineers. It should not be prescriptive where you migrate all pieces of software development into the cloud. Only the things that really get a lot better by running them in this cloud-native way do we really promote moving. Well, it might be time to consider a cloud development environment. And open source is awesome, and Coder is fully open source. You can go to coder.com, get a demo or try it right now, or even start a 30-day trial of Coder Enterprise. Once again, coder.com, that's C-O-D-E-R.com, coder.com.

55:51I'm curious, though, this idea of influencers on tap. I'm just on your homepage, so I'm just leveraging your headline. I love it. And what was appealing about that to go from the, as you said, the big cloud jobs, this identity even to be like, wow, I can. Yeah. And then I can too. Yes. Like the idea is good and I'm capable. Yes. So some of it is just like, let's see what happens. Which if you don't have that phrase in your life, like I highly recommend just saying, let's try and see what happens sometimes. Usually when I say that something catches on fire. just like literally on fire like my workbench behind me like i yeah it's a problem you're still standing justin you're still standing you're fine you have eyebrows just be careful you're good i haven't my whole life wait have you ever burned off your eyebrows oh yeah oh yeah that's amazing is there more to the story is it worth it or it was the plane with fire is just like did you know flour like like cooking flour can explode but yeah like i yeah you can learn You can blow off your eyebrows pretty quick with some flour and flames.

56:59If you fill an area, like if you can explode a home that way, if you fill like with a fan or whatever, like ta-ta, I'm going to get a call. So, yeah, I think with influencers in particular, I have been an influencer. I don't love that term, but it is the thing that I think people immediately understand what it is. I also think about like content creators or, you know, subject matter experts. influencer is just more of a broad umbrella for a lot of different skill sets. I have been on that side. I've also worked at the companies who need people to speak on behalf of the company while not also being employed there, right?

57:39I think, and I mean, Justin, you've experienced this. When you work at a company, I think you are obviously the most knowledgeable about those products and services because you have the most time to dedicate to those products and services. And there's this layer of, well, you work there. Of course you have to say nice things. And there's a trust. I think I've made a commitment all those years ago when I first started in developer relations, and I think I've held true to it, which is I am never going to come up here and say something that is factually inaccurate. I am never going to blanket represent a product and say it's the best without understanding your situation.

58:16I have on a number of occasions suggested a different product for customers. It's like, well, this isn't going to solve your problem because of X, Y, and Z go over here. That's the only way I think you keep and maintain trust, credibility. And that's, I mean, my reputation is based on authenticity and my credibility and my reputation. I am not going to violate that or my commitment to the community for a paycheck. I'm just not. But still there's this, there's this thought of like, okay, well, are you the most, like, have you actually utilized this outside of the company? And often you haven't.

58:52And so a lot of times companies are looking for folks to either create that content, do deep dives. And that can be long form content, a blog, a tutorial, a video, or short form content. It's, you know, a social post, a LinkedIn post, a video on TikTok or Instagram. And really it's, it's not just about, this is a great product. that's awesome if it is, but it's more about how do you utilize this? Where is this useful? What are the pros and cons about that? And that type of authentic voice for companies is priceless. I mean, they need it, but there's a lot of challenges with that. Yeah. In the year 2024, this is post Twitter and in the year of AI can generate pretty much anything.

59:39How much of that is still, because I feel like the platform platforms play a huge role in any sort of dev rel marketing. And like, if, if the platforms are falling apart, you don't really have the, the reach or the credibility of the platform. Like, yeah, I can't guarantee that a post is going to go anywhere. Yes. Right. Like there's so much of that that's just out of my hands, but also the fact that like AI, any text box on the internet, AI can fill it and, and they can generate credible people. that don't exist and personas that don't even exist and say like, oh, this is someone that will tell you all the things you want to hear and can earn that money.

1:00:17How much of that plays into this? What companies are willing to pay for? Didn't the conference do that though where they generated some people? Yeah. Like last year, wasn't it? What was that conference? They generated women speakers, right? It was women speakers, but it was the same idea, but it was in that case trying to slight the gender skew, so to speak. But it's still the same premise. Like, let me generate somebody to seem credible so that we seem credible. Right. Right. They almost got away with it. Right. But now, I mean, once we remember who they are, they are ruined forever. And we already forgot their names.

1:00:52We remind you. No, it's the best question. And it's like the first thing that people ask, right? Why would this be valuable? AI can do this. And it's yes and no. I mean, yes, you can generate content through AI, and I'm sure it will get better. But that plethora of content developed by machines is actually making real, human, authentic voices more valuable. Because as the market is flooded with this content that is generated, you know, I don't know that this is... If it comes from someone I don't know, then how can I trust this content? But if it comes from you, I know you, I've seen you, I already trust you.

1:01:36When it comes from you, that is so much more valuable. And so we're actually seeing the opposite of what you would think. The existing newsletters, videos, influencers are commanding even higher prices because people know and trust them already. But how does someone get started there? Right. Because like you can't build that reputation without like I can never out content creates AI and computers. Right. Like I could just like, they can make us so much more. I'm like, I have to be really focused on, I want to make this thing and it's going to take me three hours. And what other thing am I not going to do for three hours?

1:02:10But then if I'm getting started today, like, where do you even go? It's, well, it's not about, I mean, quantity. You're never going to beat a machine on quantity, right? It's about your unique voice. I think the thing that separates influencers across the board, and we see this, like when When I place for a client, I'm not just looking for, can this person actually reach this number of eyebrows? Obviously that is important, but it's, are they, are they experts in this specific niche? What is their voice? Are they trusted? Who is their audience and is their audience dialed in? Right. There are newsletters that you can go place a sponsorship in and get way more impressions than you can through Freeman and Forrest, but the clicks and the impressions are worthless to you.

1:02:55And so, you know, we really focus on high value, high impact impressions. You're really dialing into these are specifically the people who are either going to buy and or use your products. And full disclosure, like Emily, you've reached out to me to make content on behalf of someone. And I was never an expert for any of those companies. And so it was like, yeah, this doesn't seem to make sense. Exactly. Yeah. And so that's, it's really important to me to, to work on that and to make sure that that authenticity holds and that the the creators that we work with are going to be the best ones matched with each company that's that's the sort of magic of uh freeman and forrest matching your uh your hitch i'm a yenta yes that's cool i think we need more of this honestly i think that it is a challenge for brands i feel bad for some of the brands out there, they want to have the ability.

1:03:52They don't know how to do it internally. Maybe they don't even have the resources to staff up or employ that person or persons. And sometimes you need somebody inside the company that can think holistically and say, well, this exists, but I've got to put the work in. I've got to go out and interview all these different places. I've got to ask them for proposals. I've got to essentially learn as much as I can about every potential channel or content source. I hate to like label people as these, you know, just widgets kind of thing, but that's the truth. We get, we're in that, in that regard as well.

1:04:29You know, we get reached out to from folks and for us, it's really about, can we help them? And what is their, who are they trying to reach? Do we actually talk to the people they're trying to reach? Is their message clear? Are they in a mature state where that we can even apply help. They need help, but maybe they need to change in order for our help to be adequate. You know, like we can only give you attention. We can't give you the guarantee. Like Justin was saying, I can't guarantee this article goes somewhere. You still have to do the work being you, the brand, your landing page, your marketing, your product, who you are, your actual literal brand, not just your logo has to be where it needs to be to capture, not just simply get pointed to.

1:05:10Yes. And we have learned so many things that I wouldn't have even thought of prior to starting this business. But think about at a company, like I'll pick on the large companies who struggle with vendors. A cloud, to onboard a vendor to one of the major tech companies, six month process, takes forever. So to do that with 20 influencers is impossible. So for us with the larger companies, that's a huge selling point. It's like you write one check, we handle the rest for you. And then two, yeah, it takes an entire, this is a full-time gig. So unless you have a resource for a full-time role to actually scope out influencers, maintain those relationships, make the placements, look at scheduling, look at the type of content, you're not going to be able to do it because we're just experts.

1:05:58I mean, at this point, I know so many of the influencers, where they play, what plays well on their different assets. That is something I could have only learned by doing this 100 % of the time. And so, yeah, there's just, it's been phenomenal learning how this actually operates and the best possible ways to get the biggest ROI for companies. When you say assets, you mean like someone's social network, right? Like where they have a presence or whatever they reach people. Yes. So that's how I think of, like, Changelog is an asset, right? You all are influencers, but it's like a many-to-many relationship, right?

1:06:36But Changelog has many influencers and you all have different podcasts, right? Justin, you're associated with this and other pods and other sort of YouTube channels, et cetera. What assets were surprising to you that people wanted to reach or that you're like, because like, are people advertising on podcasts as much in 2024? Is it newsletters? Is it, I mean, I think that if people had text message access to everyone's phones, right? Like you guys had a group chat, like that would be like the most intimate sort of like, hey, I want to influence, like you're not influencing you, but hey, I want to tell you about this cool thing, right?

1:07:08Like that would be an amazing thing to have for people. But also on the other end, it's like, I have a blog and hardly anyone comes to it. So great question. And circling back to what Jared said at the very beginning, yes, proximity with text messages, sure. And too intimate, too fat. Like it's a violation at that point, right? And so So it's finding this balance. The assets that do the best are newsletters and LinkedIn. Those are the ones that get the highest number of impressions and specifically the highest number of click-throughs. So if you're working on something like getting someone to actually play with a product or experiment or sign up, that's sort of the path where you're going to go.

1:07:50On the other hand, there's awareness campaigns, right? There's companies that are doing amazing work, but they're primarily known in Europe or LATAM And so they want to come into the American market. And that's where you would see a lot more of just a brand lift and see sponsorships of podcasts and more things where you're not actually clicking through. That's not the primary goal. I'm way back on the concept of all of this AI slop has made humans more valuable. Like I'm just, as a human, I'm reveling in the fact that at least for now, that differentiating factor is like they can't copy that, you know?

1:08:31Like they can put out all the stuff they want to. But the robots cannot copy our actual humanity at this point. And so that connection is real. That humanity is real. And as much as if you are a content creator, the more human you can be, the more voice you can have that is you, the better off you are versus trying to churn, I guess, or to crank. Absolutely. Where you can't win that battle. Well, and it's let's take AI out of it for a moment. You know, a lot of times people, especially people who are just brand new, either to the industry or to actually sort of learning in public, they'll say, well, what's the value of my blog post?

1:09:11These things have already been written, but it's not written by you, right? We all come with specific points of view, specific experiences, personalities, you know, people who, who really resonate with me aren't going to resonate with others. And people who resonate with others aren't going to resonate with me. And I think it's finding your voice and really being true to who you are. That's the key to this, not trying to fit a format. I think people, and I'm seeing this a lot and, and I prefer not to work with them. It's like people will try and rise really quickly and build an audience very quickly through being kind of mean or cutting things down or people down, um, being like extra spicy.

1:09:53I think being an influencer, you want to be like jalapeno hot, not, not ghost pepper hot. And it just doesn't, it doesn't feel good. Not just for like brands, but like, these aren't people that I want to watch or be close to. because it's, it's like the emotion hacking, right? Cause like you need the engagement. So you play on people's emotions and the quickest emotion that someone will like engage with is hatred. Right. And they're just like, Oh, I hate this. I have to reply and I have to, it's like, Oh yeah, you could, you can hack your way into that to your blog post point though. I have so many people that ask me about writing and maintaining a blog.

1:10:23And I love encouraging everyone like go own a domain and write a blog, but you don't write for someone else. You write for yourself, right? It doesn't matter. It's been said a million times by other people. you've never said it and you need to say it for yourself. And you're writing the blog post that you can think through the thoughts and you could develop the rest of the idea and write slowly and be a little bored with it. Right. Like you have a bunch of drafts and you're like, I want to pick that one up again. Oh, I thought about that background process is finally finished. I can go finish that, you know, a couple of paragraphs and post it.

1:10:51So it doesn't matter who reads it and why, because you wrote it for yourself. Yes, exactly. And please, if you're listening to this, start a newsletter. I have so many placements and I need more. So please. please start things so I can sponsor them. I would really appreciate it. Thank you. That's a good call to action. Good to go. Yeah. It was a good call to action. Yeah. I was with you too, Jared, though, on this idea that the fact that AI exists in this slop mannerism, it elevates the actual human. And I think the for now is potentially key. The human in me wants to believe that, well, that a human-to-human relationship will always be more valuable than a human-to-machine relationship.

1:11:31Although I've seen the movie Her and I've seen how twisted people can get at some point in life. And you don't know you're twisted because you don't have perspective. You just live in a modern world and modern world is however modern world is. And so acceptability is skewed based on societal acceptability, not just simply morals. Although there's always that outlier or outliers that direct back to the moralistic ways. But I'm happy because that you still require – you can have AI give you a plan. You can have AI give you a list. You can have AI give you slop and or tons of stuff to edit down. and I think for now you can't have AI give you the humanity to initiate engage and be the human in the world you still need someone to not just be like oh this is how you market but more like this is how you connect the dots and the dots are the problem sets with the people with the problem with understanding the pain and and not just simply coming at it straight but more like from a different angle that only humans can do because we think so multifaceted that we see a problem differently then it's not just like oh here's here's problem here's solution connect it's so much more unique than that in the way that you hear somebody's story or a brand story and where they're at and how to get them truly connected with an audience to make that authentic connection it's such a such a magic art to do and it's such it's so hard to do but for some it's easy, but it's still so hard even when it's easy.

1:13:18Well said. Any final words, Justin, Emily, Adam, that was Adam's final words. That's why I didn't offer them to you. I figured those are your last word. Do you want to, you want some more words? We got three minutes. I don't, I don't think we have time for it, but I kind of disagree with what you said. You do. I think that a lot of blog post, right. It's going to be a blog. It's going to be something because there's so much just, there's so much just pattern matching that is just like, people don't realize that like there were patterns to exist. And I think one of the biggest things of AI has done is just like exposed a lot of those patterns.

1:13:49It's like, actually, it's not smart. It's not intelligent. It just matched the patterns from a bigger set of data. And she's like, wow, I found the pattern. Here you go. Here's the pattern back. And also I worked with and know a lot of humans that don't connect to the broader dots. Right. And in cases of like work and things are complex, but also in the cases of maturity and like my kids don't do that. Right. Like there's this like subset of like there are people that can connect the dots. And I love working with those people. I love learning from those people. But some of the smartest people I know remember what the world was like 10 years ago, right?

1:14:22And they're the ones that can connect the dots of, oh, we did this 10 years ago. This pattern is playing out again. And then we can just show you the way forward. And I think that those data sets exist and AI is able to remember 10 years ago better than a lot of humans. Whose team are you on? I don't know. I don't know about this one. But I think the human creator side of it is a lot about imperfection. And it's a lot about the things that like, hey, you said that wrong by accident or whatever. And people are like, oh, but you're not an AI. You didn't do it perfect. It's not a forgiveness thing, but it's like, I see your humanity in that you're still learning too.

1:14:58Right. And I'm with you because I'm learning that at the same time or I'm catching up or whatever. Humanity isn't about perfection. It is about sharing all the little imperfections along the way. I will leave you with what I always tell people. You know, when we look at the perfect people on Instagram or whatever else, the perfect bodies, the perfect hair, the perfect makeup, perfect families, et cetera, et cetera, we don't actually bond with them. People bond with other people over struggle and realness. And I always think of it as clay. When you're making a teapot, you have to scratch the surface of each side before you put the pieces together and have them actually join each other.

1:15:43And I think to your point, Justin, that sort of real, authentic humanity is what allows all of us to come together and to really form those relationships. And that is something that is just impossible to replicate outside of our very broken, emotional, beautiful human experience. Well said. Team human is going to win because Emily said it best. All right, that's our show. Thanks, Emily. This has been awesome. Justin, bye, friends. Bye. Bye, friends.

1:16:22Okay, so it may have taken us too long to find our way to the main topic on this one, but we had a lot of fun along the way. So maybe that's not a bad thing. Part of me thinks these windy, laugh-filled conversations are exactly what ChangeLog and Friends are all about. And the other part of me is like, give the people what they came for, which is hard won tech focused knowledge from people who really know their stuff like Emily. What do you think? We would love to hear from you. Let us know in the comments. Link in the show notes. Here's a deal. During the month of September, I'm trading ChangeLog sticker packs for thoughtful five star reviews or blog posts about the pod.

1:17:01Write something nice, screenshot it or didn't happen and send it to Jared at ChangeLog.com That's J-E-R-O-D at changelog.com with your mailing address. And I'll send you those stickers. Let's do it. One more thanks to our sponsors on this episode. Sentry, Fly.io, Paragon, and Coder.com. And of course, to our beat freaking residents, Breakmaster Cylinder. Thank you, BMC. We love these beats. Next week on the Change Log. News on Monday. Eris Zuckerman talking ergonomic keyboards on Wednesday. and another awesome, but currently TBD, episode of Change Login Friends on Friday. Have a great weekend.

1:17:43Leave us a five-star review if you want some stickers. And let's talk again real soon.