Raw Data By P3 Adaptive

Hello friends! Today’s episode is like no other! We learn the inside secrets to creating an internal Power BI community within an organization from none other than Khaled Chowdhury, Global Director, Data & Analytics with CMC Materials. Khaled is one of the doers who took what he learned from training, rode the excitement after class, and achieved buy-in at his company by tackling a huge project using a free resource over a weekend. When the powers that be were shown his quick, agile, and cost-effective results compared to the expensive, labor-intensive method formerly used by the company, they were sold.  Khaled is a Power BI champion of the highest level after overcoming the “it's too cheap to be a good tool” perception that is cost-assigned value. Pulling from his extensive background in building and transforming world-class teams, leveraging technology, and driving adoption, Khaled opines that most projects fail because new technology is seen as an invasion versus a revolution. Invasions happen from outside the organization, revolutions start from within.  Perception, he says, is always key to implementation. If you are implementing a Power Platform project of your own, you can’t afford to miss this episode.  All of this and more on today’s episode! In this episode: Superman Turns Back Time Dave Gainer on Raw Data by P3 Adaptive The Curse of Knowledge The Great Wine Label Swap Study VLOOKUP replacement on P3 Adaptive Blog Analyze in Excel Mike Miskell I'm Winston Wolf Big Fish moment from “That Really Movie” Keanu Reeves John Wick Training video Borg Assimilation

Hello friends! Today we welcome one of the big guns of analytics to our show, Diego Oppenheimer. He is an entrepreneur, product developer, co-founder of Algorithmia, Microsoft alumni, rugby aficionado, and current Executive Vice President at DataRobot. Nothing is off the table in this romp through topics that run the gambit from machine learning to quantum computing. Even string theory gets a mention. Make sure you have had your coffee for this one, though, as the conversation takes a technical turn not often seen on this show. Rob and Tom engage with Diego in a lively debate on complexity versus flexibility of tools. Shockingly, this guest manages to tweak a host’s nose (through no fault of his own as times and DBA roles have changed and evolved). Today’s conversations with Diego have inspired a new classification of the data gene: data enthusiasm. This rare variation is not often seen in the public sector but allows people like Diego to brazenly assert to business owners and stakeholders that he can show you things about your business you don’t even know . . . and be completely accurate. Buckle up and crank this one up. You won’t want to miss a single minute as the data gets raw. References in this episode: Wolf of Wall Street Goodfellas World Simulation

Today, on Raw Data by P3 Adaptive, our special guest is Priscilla Camp, tech blogger, Power BI enthusiast, user group leader, and data diva.  Joining us from sunny Orlando Florida, Priscilla shares her Accidental DBA story. Like so many others, she began her evolutionary process in IT where she learned there are better, frictionless methods to fine tune data. Now, her skills are shared via her I.T. Data Diva blog to help others navigate the process. Also on this episode, we get her take on mixed use of SQL and M to cleanse and transform data. Her advice to SQL users: Always use Power Query for dates. You can find Priscilla on Twitter @ITDataDiva. References in this episode: Orlando Power BI User Group Alligators in ice Data and AI Central Florida SQL Saturday One of the World’s Most Amazing Humans, w/ Matt Allington Accidental DBA Power Query Date Handling Expertise: Read our blog on consecutive dates in Power Query. Se7en Cover Hawk DA-100: Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI – Tips to help you succeed P3 Adaptive Hiring process -yes, we're hiring Surfing the Changing Seas of Data w/ Chris Webb

Hello friends! Today on RawData, P3 Adaptive’s very own Chris Haas relays not only his Data origin story but also shares with us how he came to join the P3 team. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, along comes Escher’s waterfall to send you around again. In his role as ad hoc data therapist, Chris has the unique opportunity to see our clients grow and learn to ask the right questions.  His insight: The journey of discovery along the way transforms both the business and the user as they learn that true value may not necessarily be found by having a single answer. Also in this episode, Rob and Chris redefine the phrase “fast fail” transforming it into rapid discovery and development. Chris explains that clients should never be afraid of rapid-fire development as speed is more important in open development to learn what works, is relevant, and should be explored further. References in this episode: Star Wars Episode 1 Intro Beautiful Mind The Hangover Beautiful Mind Parody 500 Hats M.C. Escher's waterfall Rocky Training montage Charlie Chaplin 80's IBM Commercials Grief Bacon High Wire Brewing Raw Data with Austin Senseman Strange Brew Beer Truck

Today on Raw Data by P3 Adaptive, our guest is the mysterious Scree from the Undead Lords Guild. Choosing to remain anonymous, Scree brings his data and Power BI experience from his ‘day job’ in an informationally protected industry to his hobby and passion: gaming. Being part of the admin team gives Scree the opportunity to showcase his mad data skills and proves that you never know where a data person is lurking.  Also, in this episode, we learn how a gaming guild uses data to track membership to determine engagement. The data paints a picture of what games are being played and for how long giving the admin team an idea of which games to target for participation. Yes, even gaming guilds work towards goals and use data. After all, guilds are also content providers. All of this yet they still fit in Power BI and more. You won’t want to miss this episode! References in this Episode: Neverwinter Nights World of Warcraft Mystery Shoppers King of Kong Documentary Office Space Flair Scene Raw Data with Coach Chase Hargis CoverHawk NoCheckDowns Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today we welcome as our guest, the mysterious Scree. By day, he is a Power BI consultant, working for a consulting firm. But by night, he's one of the Undead Lords. No, he's not into black magic. It's a gaming guild. But as part of that gaming guild, he does use Power BI to measure member engagement. And folks, the stakes are high because the Undead Lords are gunning for the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest running gaming guild. It's not just fun and games people. And that application of Power BI, or really any technology to one's personal pursuits became kind of a theme of our conversation. The question we had was basically, if you use the technology at work, but you don't use it in your personal life for anything, are you really that into it? And if your answer is yes, that you do use it as a hobby, then he and I share the opinion that that is far more important than any sort of formal training. Passion beats degrees. Rob Collie (00:00:56): Like the majority of people who've been on our show, Scree took a very, very random path through the world of data to today, starting in an unlikely place. The sales floor of a Best Buy in 2009, where he was on the receiving end of analytics. With no power at all to impact the creation. And that's a little unusual. I think most people in our space, their first interaction with it is almost like organically. They're involved in the creation from the get go. I mean, that's what the VLOOKUP in Pivot Crowd is about, right? But even as a pure consumer of reporting and analytics, Scree recognized the value of it immediately. And in his next job, working in sales at a bank, they gave him access to Salesforce, and he never looked back. Rob Collie (00:01:40): We also talk a little bit about the challenges of hiring these days. And we absolutely would've talked about Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. But sadly, we recorded this episode before that news broke. Might have to have him back on just to talk about that. Anyway, it's not often that you have an Undead Lord on your podcast. So, let's get into it. Announcer (00:01:59): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Announcer (00:02:06): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast with your host, Rob Collie. 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 (00:02:27): Welcome to the show the mysterious Scree. How are you today? Scree (00:02:32): I'm good. Rob Collie (00:02:33): That's how I know you from Twitter is Scree. And of course, then I follow the link on the Scree profile and what do I find? I find a gaming guild, right? I say that as if I don't know what that is. I do definitely know what that is. Scree (00:02:50): Yeah. The Undead Lords. One of the oldest running guilds ever. We're actually going after the Guinness Book of World Records for that. Rob Collie (00:02:57): No way. Scree (00:02:58): Yeah. They were formed in 1994. Rob Collie (00:03:01): What? Scree (00:03:01): And the current record holder was formed in '96, so we're coming for them. Rob Collie (00:03:07): Okay. So, '94. What game would've necessitated a guild in 1994? Scree (00:03:13): Yeah, it was an AOL game called Neverwinter Nights. Rob Collie (00:03:16): Okay. Scree (00:03:17): I don't know if you guys remember the old Gold Box Dungeons & Dragons PC games? Rob Collie (00:03:21): Maybe. You're talking Luke and I are very much old school. An episode that went live at the end of the year, includes a vignette or two about our Dungeons & Dragons, actual role playing tabletop days. Scree (00:03:36): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:03:37): But, yeah. I'm aware of the existence of D&D theme computer games. Scree (00:03:42): They were really big back in the '90s. A studio converted one of them. Rob Collie (00:03:47): Oh, look at that. Do you see what Luke's showing? Scree (00:03:49): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:03:50): The OG monster manual. Scree (00:03:52): Wow. So, yeah. This guild basically started playing one of the first online graphical MMOs. And back then, guilds were just essential to being able to do anything in any game. Rob Collie (00:04:04): I didn't even know that there were MMOs until, Ultimate Online is the first one that I was aware of. And I didn't play it. I just knew of it. Scree (00:04:12): Yeah, they went there after NWN. Rob Collie (00:04:15): I guess, the idea of a gaming guild, I wasn't really aware of it until one of my friends was playing the Tribes, first person shooter. Scree (00:04:24): Yep. Rob Collie (00:04:25): He's actually been on the show, Connor Cunningham. I remember them taking a group picture in the game. I was like, "Oh, that's kind of cool." Scree (00:04:32): I joined them more recently, earlier this year. So, I haven't played with them since '94. They've just been around since then. Rob Collie (00:04:40): But the reason we've crossed paths on Twitter is nothing to do with gaming, because even when I do play computer games, I am very much one of the casuals. I'm one of the ones that just fills out the ranks of a guild as ballast. Scree (00:04:54): Sure. I know the type. Rob Collie (00:04:56): But we crossed paths on Twitter because of Power BI. Behind the scenes, does Undead Lords use Power BI to run the guild? Scree (00:05:02): I wouldn't say to run it. It's really kind of in its rudimentary state right now. But I've worked on it as part of a side hobby. So, some of the reporting that I do for my work, we do a lot of healthcare clients lately. I work for a company that was just acquired and they do client contracting for any number of services, mostly tech related services. Engineering, the hard science type stuff. But they've expanded into their data exploration toolset, so to speak. So, we've got people who know data engineering, data science, AIML. And then people like me who do more of the front end reporting work. And a lot of the stuff that I work on, I just can't show. So, if we want to show anything, I have to work on things on the side to be able to showcase my talent. Rob Collie (00:05:47): Yeah. Scree (00:05:48): So, for a long time, I was working on stuff for UDL. That's the shorthand we use for the guild. And UDL, we also use a chat application called Discord. I don't know if you're familiar with it. Rob Collie (00:05:58): Oh, yeah. Very much. Scree (00:05:59): Just like Slack or any of the chat tools that are out there. But Discord has a couple unique features that make it super nice for a gaming guild. So, one of the things that we've been able to track is when you play a game, Discord shows your status as now playing X game. Rob Collie (00:06:13): Right. Scree (00:06:14): So, for probably the last 18 months, I've been scraping that data as it comes across so I can track, one, what games we're playing. How long we're playing them. Who's playing them. And basically be able to paint a picture of activity and organization. Just what games are out there that people are actively engaged with. So, yeah. We have been using it just to kind of get an idea if we're not sure if someone's actively participating or contributing, we can go hop in and go look at their status and take a look at what they've been doing. So, it's kind of a little big brother-y. Rob Collie (00:06:45): And who doesn't need some big brother in their gaming guild? Scree (00:06:48): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:06:49): You have to, right? It's an organization working towards a goal. That's always been one of my tensions with it is, see I'm playing a game to relax. Scree (00:06:57): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:06:58): And a lot of people play games. I'm not critical of this. It just isn't me. There's a certain excellence that's trying to be brought to the picture, right? It's very serious. Scree (00:07:07): And that's the thing. We're a hardcore competitive PVP guild. And maybe the hardcore piece is in question right now just because of how long the guild's been around. And a lot of the original founding members are now 40, 50, 60 with kids and commitments. So, it's kind of hard to say we're going to log in like teenagers and no life it for the weekend. But there's still a level of information that I've been working to bring towards the guild, just so they have the insight. Whether they use it or not is irrelevant. And it's really easy to hide. If you don't want someone to know what you're playing, you just turn off the statuses and my bot can't track what you're doing. By and large, most of our members understand that if they are going to go play some ridiculously embarrassing game, they can turn it off and I can't watch it. Rob Collie (00:07:54): Discord, by the way, is the best way for me to get ahold of my college aged son. Scree (00:07:58): Yeah? Rob Collie (00:07:59): It trumps cell phone by a mile. He's not going to answer a phone call. Maybe he'll answer a text. But hit him up in Discord and you've got a 50/50 chance. You know? Scree (00:08:10): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:08:11): I get to know what he's doing. Oh, look, he's playing Halo again. It's like checking in. Scree (00:08:15): Yeah, in 2022, we're looking to go even further than what we've been doing. And I want to keep track of how many messages people are typing. How long people stay in voice chat so we can see, are they talking while they're playing, or listening at least? And just to get a better sense of the engagement with the guild. And we combine all three of those metrics together is the plan to get a total guild engagement score that we can measure for each member. And if members fall off and aren't as enthusiastic about playing with us, we can reach out and find out why. So, guilds these days are really a content provider for most games. The games themselves have some content. But guilds can provide more to it. And so, just by engaging those members, I think we can keep the reign of 30 plus years going for this organization. Rob Collie (00:09:01): So, the 1996 record holder, have they dissolved? Scree (00:09:04): No, they're still active. Rob Collie (00:09:05): Okay, all right. So, you're on their heels, two years behind. Scree (00:09:09): Two years ahead. However you want to frame it. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:09:12): It's like this really long running game of chicken. No, no, no. You give up. Scree (00:09:17): Right. Yeah, and the record is kind of suspect because it's consecutive running guild. You had to have played consecutively for that entire time. But the actual Guinness record says you can have a six month gap in between two games. No more than six months. Rob Collie (00:09:34): Okay. Scree (00:09:35): So, we don't get to see what their record actually looks like. Rob Collie (00:09:39): I see. Scree (00:09:39): So, we're not sure exactly if they were active the whole time. Rob Collie (00:09:43): This is the seedy back alley truth of the Guinness record for guilds. Now we're really getting into the nitty gritty here. You know? Scree (00:09:50): Yeah. But we want it. It's just hard. A lot of the records from that time are not great. You need screenshots and dates, and back then, screenshots didn't have dates. Rob Collie (00:10:00): Yeah. Scree (00:10:01): It's an uphill battle. Rob Collie (00:10:02): Have you seen King of Kong? Scree (00:10:04): No. Rob Collie (00:10:04): You got to watch the documentary, King of Kong. Oh my God. You want to talk about dirty, dirty, dirty shenanigans with regard to world records. And again, in a space that you just wouldn't expect there to be corporate espionage. You know? That is a hell of a movie. Scree (00:10:23): I'll add it to the list. Rob Collie (00:10:24): Yeah, oh my God. Yeah, King of Kong. When I asked if you used Power BI to run the guild, that was just a joke. Scree (00:10:33): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:10:33): I wasn't expecting there to be anything there. Sounds like there is. You actually are. And I completely identify with this. There's multiple facets of it. First of all, you can't share anything publicly that's actually production data. Like the stuff that you do in your day job is almost by definition, super, super, super sensitive. Scree (00:10:53): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:10:54): One of the jokes I make all the time is, "We do two things here. We work with data and we sign NDAs." Those are our two core competencies at P3. And if it's not valuable, if it's not sensitive, we probably aren't working with it. Scree (00:11:07): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:11:08): Also, you can't always bring that personal enthusiasm and energy to every last project that you're working on. Most business projects with Power BI actually are pretty stimulating and engaging and fun. That's been my experience. Scree (00:11:22): Sure. Rob Collie (00:11:22): But you can't bring the creative passionate flare to its full strength with it until you take it into something that's in your personal life, or your hobby. And this is why, for example, we ended up sinking so much time and effort and money into things like our no check downs site, which is NFL football visualized. And that, in turn, spawned the whole CoverHawk thing with Coach Chase Hargis. It's cool to have public facing examples, in particular, where you can dial up that consumer angle to it. You can make it really, really, really consumer friendly. Does Discord, when you want to go and share one of these reports back to the guild, how do you do that? Are you just taking screenshots? Scree (00:12:09): I can share the report with the public. It's an early work for me, so I haven't touched it in probably two years now. So, it's not really a great example of my current work. Rob Collie (00:12:19): Sure. Scree (00:12:20): So, when I originally got started, I was making a website for this game that we were going to go in and play, and I learned how to do backend dev work with JavaScript. And there's a JavaScript library for Discord. And that kind of facilitated learning how to scrape Discord. Make a bot that works in Discord so you could run commands and do things against that bot, the guild could. So, I don't do programming for my job. I'm not professionally trained. I have a high school comp sci AP test, and then maybe a couple courses in my undergrad. But I never professionally trained on any of it. I do programming on the side, again, for my hobby. If I'm going to work on something on the side, I'm going to challenge myself to learn something new. And so, this was kind of that angle I started on a long time ago, was learning how to program. And then, how do I visualize this? Scree (00:13:11): And at the time, I was learning Power BI for my job, and decided, why not use this? So, I made a database that all this data's being trapped and captured into. And then, a front end API that connects with that data and then Power BI scrapes from that. I've written out this whole infrastructure basically for this report that maybe three or four of us use right now, at most. Again, it's just one of those learning things where I'm not just the guy who takes the data and does things with it. I was involved deeply all along the way of gathering the data and storing it. And how do I share that? And how do I make that into a visual front end using Power BI. And I've learned a lot of valuable lessons there that I use in my work because I've done all those things. So, I know where we can do certain things to make the data cleaner or where you should do them. And where you absolutely shouldn't. Scree (00:14:03): So, 400 million entries of people logging in and logging out of Discord's not the one you want to do transformations on in Power BI. So, just small things along the line that lessons learned and always index your databases. That was a fun one. Rob Collie (00:14:18): Yeah. I want to pump something up here, which is that these sorts of side projects, like what you just described, those are the real thing. This is where real programmers come from. For example, you had to opt in to take an AP computer science course in high school. What I've come to realize is that, that sort of volunteerism is much more important than any sort of formal training when it comes to programming. I've had the formal training. I'm a card carrying comp sci major. I've got a bachelor's degree in computer science. Look at that. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And I'm just not into it. I'm just not into programming at all. It doesn't speak to me. VBA, okay, fine. Give me some VBA. Rob Collie (00:15:00): But all of the good stuff that I've ever done, all of my shining programming projects, all of them have been personal projects. And right now, if we were running a software org where we were primarily a bunch of programmers, if that's what P3 was. Now, we do programming for sure. But we don't put ourselves out there as a software development shop. That's not our core competency. But if we were doing that and I was involved in the screening process for potential developers that we were going to hire, I would be looking primarily for what they do with their spare time. If they go to work and program and then when they clock out, they don't do any more programming, I don't know. I'm going to decrement their value. I'm going to say, "Nah, that's a check minus." Scree (00:15:40): Yeah, but at the same time, if someone comes to you with a COVID Power BI dashboard, are you doing a jig around the table? Because I've seen enough of those to vomit. Rob Collie (00:15:49): Oh, yeah. There's plenty of those. In fact, we're in the process right now of retooling our interview. And it definitely does not involve a show us your best COVID dashboard. Scree (00:16:01): And I get it. What dataset are you going to work on that's not proprietary? Rob Collie (00:16:05): Yeah. Scree (00:16:05): You're going to use the most prevalent one that's out there. But, oh man. Rob Collie (00:16:08): Yeah. And talk about data quality issues, right? Scree (00:16:10): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:16:10): Depending upon where you got the data, your model can conclude we're all dead already. Scree (00:16:16): Yeah, or China still has only had 6,000 COVID cases, or something. Like, it stopped. They don't have COVID anymore. Rob Collie (00:16:24): I had a high school teacher in history class that told us, "There's so many problems with history, folks." At the very beginning, he went through all the different flaws in the story. He's like, "People forget. People write things down wrong," whatever. And then he goes, "And also, people lie. They just lie." And you never really know what you're getting. We weren't there to witness it, so we're trying to piece together what actually happened. That's certainly true with all the various different places you can get COVID data. Scree (00:16:51): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:16:52): Look at Florida. Wow, they're doing great. Scree (00:16:54): But I do agree with your original ... Like, if you're not working on the stuff outside of work, is it really something you're passionate about? And if you're not really passionate about it, are you really better than someone who is? Rob Collie (00:17:05): Yeah. Scree (00:17:06): And I question that. Again, I don't expect it out of teammates and peers. But it definitely sets them apart when they do, right? They've probably run into more things. It's a matter of experience. The joke right now in the Power BI LinkedIn is everyone's looking for five to 10 years Power BI experience, when Power BI's only been out for really five years. Six maybe. Rob Collie (00:17:27): Yeah. What a silly metric by the way. Years of experience. You know? It goes back to the gaming metaphor, right? You need someone just to sort of put in some time and grind and grind, and grind, that's different than someone who's actually really good at it. Scree (00:17:40): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:17:40): Off and on, gosh, I think I took a 12 year break, or an 11 year break from gaming, really of all forms. 11 years clean is what I call it. 11 years clean of World of Warcraft. And when I went back, I went right back to classic, which is the thing I'd been playing before when I quit. And I'm no better than I was, right? Scree (00:18:01): My wife would be lucky if I was 11 days clean. So, kudos. Rob Collie (00:18:05): Now, my life doesn't support, at all, the idea of being part of a really active guild that's doing these 25, 40 person deals that run for hours, and you're not really sure when they're going to end and all of that. That is not compatible with my life anymore, at all. You were saying you weren't formally trained and all that. And I want to say, who cares? Scree (00:18:25): Yeah, even Power BI. Who gets formally trained? Five years ago, there wasn't any formal training. Back then, you just did it, and if you didn't, you found someone who had done it before, and you learned. I was there at the ground floor and there was no formal training. It would've been irrelevant because the application has grown and expanded and evolved by leaps and bounds. Every six months there's a huge release or feature set that comes out that just changes the game on its heels. I mean, it helps if you involved five years ago, and now you understand all those changes and what they were. And maybe nowadays, the formal training's probably necessary because the app has grown to that point where I don't understand how you pick it up on your own. There's just so much to it. Rob Collie (00:19:10): Well, surprise, surprise. You're not going to find me to be a big believer in formality. Let's say we looked at all of the different training and instruction options available in the entire universe for Power BI right now, how would we go about defining whether one of them was formal or not? When P3 runs a three day training that is open to the public to sign up for, as opposed to the ones we do privately for individual companies, is that formal? I don't know. I mean, it's certainly real. Scree (00:19:40): To me, I'd say formal training would be, yeah, anyone putting on an actual training that has some sort of professional experience. Yeah, I don't think you have to get more specific than that definitely. Rob Collie (00:19:52): Because the other end of the spectrum is something you might not have been exposed to. I call it the training factories. There's a small number of people behind the scenes that are just churning out training modules on topics that they have no experience in whatsoever. Scree (00:20:06): Yeah. Yeah, the Power BI grifter. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:20:08): This is by no means limited to Power BI. It's everywhere. I watch these people operate. They're like, "Oh, what's new and hot today? Okay, I'll go make a training for that." I go look at the training. I'm like, "Well, this person's never touched this in any sort of real environment." However, they make a ton of money selling those scripts, those modules to all of these training centers throughout the country. And so, if you want to go get some worthless certificate that says that you've completed a Power BI training course, you can go get it, and you would've gained a lot more with your time there if you'd just been screwing around with guild data, or NFL ... Whatever. Some sort of personal hobby dataset. Scree (00:20:45): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:20:45): Whatever time you spent following the flow chart. And it's not even a flow chart, right? It never branches, these training scripts. I guess for me, I start getting the alarm bells. Oh, well I went to a training center and I took one of these training factory classes and learned nothing. In fact, probably learned some really bad things that were net negative for my understanding of the tool. Scree (00:21:05): Yeah. I mean, I've run into some of those just doing what I do, consulting. In larger companies, it's more obvious where they've held a company-wide training on Power BI and you get people who are making reports and breaking capacity all the time. It's usually those people who are to blame because they took that training and they think they know what they're doing, and had no understanding of the underlying stuff because it was just a cursory glance at what Power BI does. But that's common. You're always going to have different levels of skills. Rob Collie (00:21:33): Let's rewind and say as much as 10 years ago, I was providing formal training on Power BI. Instructor led formal trainer. I just didn't call it that. I didn't wear a tie. Scree (00:21:46): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:21:48): No tie required for this. So, along the same line, I was recently asked to help a recent college graduate who's sort of a distant relative of mine, with his job search as a CS grad, computer science grad. And started with his resume. And as I talked to him, the thing that I was most interested in, that I thought was the best signal that he could send to potential recruiters who were reading, scanning through resumes at 10,000 per minute with OCR, or whatever. He had done this project. He had built a Discord bot for he and his friends to make real time wagers against each other like who was going to win certain games and things like that and keep score and everything. I'm lik, "Oh, no, no, no." And it wasn't even on his resume. That needs to be first. Not in your project list, right? Not the thing that you were forced to do in your senior project course to get your degree, because you look at that and you're just like, "Oh, this reads like every other senior project course ever." Is just so vanilla. Scree (00:22:46): So, I've actually heard that a lot of software engineering firms will actually scan resumes for GitHub addresses. Rob Collie (00:22:53): Wow. Scree (00:22:54): And if you don't have one on there, then it shows that you don't really have a portfolio of work that you could show off, which is how you would basically show your familiarity with subject matter off of a resume. Rob Collie (00:23:07): I need to circle back. Scree (00:23:08): So, all side projects should go into that GitHub repository and link that in your profile. You're going to find hiring managers who are going to want to go, "How does this guy program? Does this code even look good? Is this someone I can train?" So, he should probably spend some time cleaning it up because I've been in his shoes. Does he comment his code? Probably not. Is it one big file, or should it be multiple files? Those are the kind of things that maybe he could spend some time on while he's looking for a job. Rob Collie (00:23:35): Hey, you know, that's why we do these podcasts, right? I believe all of those things. Those things you just said, they make total sense to me. He submitted his resume to a bunch of places, the big places, and didn't get any follow up. I'm thinking, well there's got to be something, either a red flag in your resume that's disqualifying you. Or a lack of a green flag, something that they're looking for that's not there. GitHub address. Scree (00:24:00): Well, it could also be school. Rob Collie (00:24:01): Yeah, that's true. Scree (00:24:03): Maybe. I'd be really interested to see how many local school people they hire at Amazon. It's probably none. Well, Amazon maybe does it. But Facebook and Google. Rob Collie (00:24:14): It's so weird. It's such a departure from the Microsoft that I joined. Famously, Gates didn't even graduate. Right? They never asked for my transcript. Never cared about my grades. Never validated that I had graduated. In fact, my office mate when I first got there, hadn't graduated and hadn't told anyone and was just still finishing his coursework. And it was more of a prove it mentality, as opposed to pedigree. Scree (00:24:41): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:24:41): I really like that. We have gone with that mentality at P3 completely. Pedigree means nothing. What you can do is everything. And that cuts both directions. You can have a great pedigree and be relatively not competent. Scree (00:24:55): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:24:56): And not curious. So much of what we do relies on empathy and humility and emotional intelligence and real world connection with other people. And also, confidence and humility at the same time, the perfect blend of it. And these are things that there are some 22 year olds that absolutely possess these qualities. Hats off to them. I didn't possess these qualities at least until my late 30s. Scree (00:25:24): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:25:25): We have people who work at the company who are definitely younger than that. But it just took me a while. I think refinement and experience is crucial to us. And frankly, people at our company, we support them, we onboard them. There's plenty of support behind the scenes for anybody who's running into difficult problems. But there is no shallow end of the pool at P3. We don't get to dictate to our clients how difficult their problems are. Scree (00:25:50): Sure. Rob Collie (00:25:51): And we don't even really know going in. So, basically everyone's got to be a black belt on their first day. Scree (00:25:57): I think it's just more to the bigger picture of there's not 100,000 five year veterans with that kind of skillset like you guys have. Rob Collie (00:26:08): Yeah. Scree (00:26:08): And what's your solution if you can't find any? Just not provide that service? I think companies have to find a way to provide that service if there's a demand for it. And so, I think it's going to require a big shift. I mean, Power BI has been growing leaps and bounds. The fact that it's tossed in now for clients who already have a basic Office package for their corporate environment are finding it's a more cost effective solution than something like Tableau. Rob Collie (00:26:34): Oh, yeah. Scree (00:26:34): Why would you waste the money paying for two different packages when you already got one of them included. So, I see a lot of companies switching to Power BI and then struggling to have any meaningful talent in it. If they weren't working on it before, and these people are long time veterans in their company, well they're certainly not going to have the experience ready to go when you guys pull the trigger to move. So, that seems to be where I'd say, I don't know, out of my last five clients, there's probably four of them who have switched to Power BI and just don't have a huge amount of talent in it. Rob Collie (00:27:03): And of course, this is central to our business model, is that we have a concentration of talent that is rare. And increasingly, we're rethinking the way that our marketing activities work. We call it grow dev internally. I'm a big believer in verb over a noun marketing. Well, we could just sit around and do marketing. What does that mean? Let's go grow the company, right? And for the longest time, that has meant client growth. Finding new clients that we can help. It's increasingly become both. It's a supply and demand. We also need to be turning our attention to recruiting and it's the same sort of digital funnel with different twists and turns in it for sure. But we're in the envious position, or the good problem to have. We are now finding new work quite a bit faster than we've even been hiring. I think we have the riddle cracked. I think we can continue to hire the right kind of talent at the pace that we need. It's just that we need to invest more specifically in that activity than what we have in the past. And so, this is an exciting new problem for 2022. Scree (00:28:13): It's just a tough time to find talent. I mean, we've had an open call for Power BI talent and Tableau talent for months and months, and months, and we just haven't been finding anyone. I think we brought on someone a couple weeks ago and I was kind of flabbergasted when I interviewed her that someone like this was available because we've been looking and we couldn't find anyone. Rob Collie (00:28:32): Yeah. Scree (00:28:33): It's just a weird time. And I think it's probably more true of software engineers, because there's so much more competition for being able to move anywhere, remote only work. And it's just kind of turned the field on its head because why live in San Francisco and pay $4,800 dollars for a closet when I could go live in Idaho in a mansion and pay the same amount, and make the same amount of money doing it. So, I think it's turning the whole industry on its head, and it's making job searching and hunting for talent so much more competitive. And I'm sure that's true of every industry. But some of the more technically inclined fields, it's probably tougher than others. Rob Collie (00:29:07): Yeah, COVID, obviously is a bad thing. But we were forever remote only. And that was a big advantage for us for a long time. We were a 100% remote workforce. Before it was cool. Before it was COVID cool. If you looked at a map of where our people lived, we certainly had employees in big cities. But relative to population density, our employees were not concentrated in big cities the way that you would typically expect, just based on population, right? And so, yeah. People who were, sometimes even two hours from a major airport were on the payroll and they're awesome. And those same people who live in those non metropolitan locales, there are a lot more employers competing for those same people, for sure. Rob Collie (00:29:50): All right. So, this usually one of the very, very, very first questions I ask somebody. But we started with games and guilds and Undead Lords. We had to go there first, right? So, computer science AP class in high school. I did not do that. It was available to me, but I didn't. I showed my stripes early. Mm-mm (negative). No. Uh-uh (negative). But when did you start working with data in a way that you would consider where you first discovered the itch, like, "Oh, I could do this?" Scree (00:30:18): So, I've worked in sales for a significant portion of my professional career. Both at Best Buy and then at a bank that's based out of Chicago. Best Buy was developing into this as I was working there, and I worked there for almost 10 years. But they started coming out with metrics and stats of sales level, employee level performance, kind of showing you what you've sold over the last month, and attachment rates, et cetera, et cetera. And as a sales department manager, I started tracking performance of our teams and just getting a little bit of a taste of what it looks like to actually turn register transactions into some sort of data that gives me ... I mean, for context, before this existed, you basically had employees writing down what they were doing and hoping that that was accurate or even truthful at the time. There was no way really to verify it short of printing out hundreds of receipts for every single sale that an employee did. And it was just too monotonous to measure and maintain that. Scree (00:31:20): But we had several times throughout my career where they tried doing that. Sales manager come with this brilliant idea. So, when it finally became automated, it started to make the whole process a lot easier. And it just opened my eyes to, okay, now I know who's really bad at selling X. I can go coach and train them to get them better at that. And I don't have to worry about the data integrity piece, which is what we probably spent most of our time worrying about, which wasn't even something that should have been something we wasted a moment of effort on. But again, the data integrity piece was so critical to be able ascertain who's doing what, I think we just lost the road through the forest there. Scree (00:32:00): So, near the end of my career at Best Buy, we did start automating the process and the data became so much more eye opening to me as to, "Oh, yeah. Now we can actually use this." Course correct employees and train them in the right ways. And when I went to the bank, we did a lot of the same things there. All the personal bankers were weighed and measured based on performance. And you were given a ranking out of the whole company, and everyone was trying to compete to get to the top. So, again, that data piece was just always constant in my peripheral vision. So, when I moved on from that and went into E-commerce, that's where the data metrics piece, it was overwhelming. If you work with Amazon at all, like a seller, they have data on things that I'd say 90% of the people have no clue what it is or how to use it correctly. So, I worked for a firm that actually did that kind of work with them and said, "Hey, here's the important metrics you need to understand. Here's the things that you have to focus on." Running of reports and stuff like that. So, it's been an evolution throughout my career seeing data and seeing the value of data. Scree (00:33:04): And then, obviously my side projects have gone into the whole how you gather data and collect it and store it. So, it all kind of came together there, I think at the end as Power BI was really kind of rocking and rolling. Rob Collie (00:33:17): Going back to the Best Buy story for a moment, if you can remember. This might not be the resolution that you record at those moments. But, maybe. When you go from a subjective measurement of your employees or a team in terms of how well they're doing, it's so heavily weighted towards, as you walk around the store, you witness a customer interaction, and that one interaction weighs really heavy in your picture of how this employee operates, whether positive or negative. Right? It becomes this out sized dominant piece of information. And then also the way that people talk to you, the way that they are able to portray themselves to you, of course, you're vulnerable to being mislead there. And then on the flip side, people who don't represent themselves well, right? So, do you remember being surprised at what the objective data said and how different that was from your subjective opinion at the time? Scree (00:34:08): Yeah, especially when the automated system flipped in and we were getting real time data as to who was doing what. I remember that first month just being blown away by it because you're right. When we would coach and train an employee, we'd follow them and shadow their interaction with a customer. And so, we'd be listening to the whole thing, kind of secretly and not so secret. Because you'd see this manager hovering around the interaction. And it wasn't a good indication of how the employee operates when you're not there. They would always do everything that they were required to do, short of them forgetting something, which inevitably, they always did. That's the red flag, right? If they forgot to do something when they're being watched, chances are they're not doing it when they're not being watched either. But you didn't think about it at the time. You just chalked it up to maybe being nervous that they were being observed. Scree (00:34:55): But, yeah. The datasets were completely different. We'd have people that were turning in numbers that didn't align with what was showing up automated. And I remember there being a lot of turnover at that point, in the coming months because the people who were casting themselves in a better light weren't actually doing that good. They'd have one interaction per day that was stellar and the rest were complete garbage. And they'd show off the one really good thing. And then you'd run around and brag about their performance on that one really good transaction, and then they'd secretly be on the other side of the store just ringing people up without offering them anything, like all the Best Buy stuff that you're supposed to offer. Scree (00:35:30): Yeah, it was kind of eye opening. And it was great. It was like the big brother effect, right? You're able to see the total picture, and before that we couldn't. It was eye opening to me. And it helped, honestly, a lot of our employees who weren't good at sales admit that because they couldn't hide it anymore, and then they would come forward and ask for help. But then there were some who didn't really care to improve. They were just there for a paycheck. And so, those employees have to go too at some point. Rob Collie (00:35:59): Yeah, it's like the old prisoner's dilemma thing again, right? It's in everybody's best interest to simultaneously come forward and be vulnerable and admit that they're not very good at things. But if only one of them does it, then it's not going to go well for them. You know? And so, no one does. But then, when you level set the objective reality for everyone, there is that moment of relief for some people. I can imagine that they are able to improve and be helped to improve. Scree (00:36:26): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:36:27): Yeah, I wouldn't have thought about that. So, sometimes the big brother thing isn't all bad. Scree (00:36:32): It is and it's not. So, I was there at Best Buy during the 2009 recession. Rob Collie (00:36:37): Ooh, fun. Scree (00:36:38): So, you've got sales goals that were generated a year before. So, completely ignorant to the whole the economy sucks now. Everyone's fired. And they're like, "Well, you're not hitting your goals." And I'm like, "Yeah. Have you looked at the store? There's only three people in the store." Well, go sell to them. Just cognitive disconnect because the upper leadership's wondering why all of a sudden we're not hitting goals. And it's like, "Are you paying attention to the news at all?" It was harsh because then you're able to actually see line level employees who aren't generating sales. But is it really their fault? It was just a weird time. I wasn't a fan of being held responsible for economic situations. And that's really what we were doing, is holding employees to that accountability, which is nonsense. Rob Collie (00:37:22): That's no good at all, no. Almost like a new principle just came to me as you were telling that story which is thoughtlessness gets magnified by layers of management. Scree (00:37:32): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:37:32): It's just so easy. Default state is thoughtlessness. Just hold the wheel steady if that's the mentality. As that mentality flows down an organization, it only gains momentum. Scree (00:37:43): Yeah. And one of the offshoots of this whole thing was that we had all these middle managers who kept visiting our stores. Well, Best Buy decided that, maybe the middle managers don't really serve a purpose. If we're going to miss our goals, then they're not really useful. So, basically got rid of most of the middle managers. And I remember when I learned this, I was wondering why they hadn't been coming at us as hard about missing goals. And it was because the people that they were accountable to weren't there anymore. So, the pressure stopped flowing down hill when they made these changes. But never truly went away. And then, shortly after the recession, it was the whole people were using Best Buy as a showroom. They'd walk in with their cell phones. This was the big new thing. They'd look at what they wanted and then go price shop and you'd inevitably find this stupid site, BNH of Maine or something. And it was every TV was 50% off with no taxes. And then people would be like, "I want this for this price." And we're like, "Get lost." Because you'd have to pay like $1,200 in shipping to get it. So, it was like go for it. Scree (00:38:46): It was so prevalent that we were coached and trained on how to sell to people who had their cell phones out. And I'm like, at that point, are they really going to pull the trigger from us? But, we were able to convert some of them. Rob Collie (00:38:59): I had a client years and years ago that one of their lines of business was shopping at Best Buys and places like that on behalf of the manufacturers. Does this sound familiar? Scree (00:39:13): Sort of. Rob Collie (00:39:14): They would go in there to see if all the Best Buy stores, for instance ... Best Buy wasn't their only place that they deployed these anonymous shoppers, right? Scree (00:39:22): Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Secret shoppers, they call them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we had those. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:39:26): But this was very specifically aimed at verifying if the, I don't know, the new Sony TV was being displayed properly. Scree (00:39:36): Yep. Rob Collie (00:39:37): Was it playing the right video? Was it on the end cap as agreed to in the contract? Scree (00:39:44): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:39:44): Were the fliers out or whatever, right? And then, eventually, all of that human intelligence flowed up into spreadsheets that these people I was working with were having to report on. And then, they needed to use Power Pivot at the time to help bring that whole process under control. Were you ever on the receiving end of a manufacturer complaining about the ... Scree (00:40:05): When I first got hired at Best Buy, I was actually their marketing manager. So, I would set the end caps and stuff like that. So, I was directly exposed to these people. They'd come to me and say, "Hey, this isn't supposed to be here. Can you remove this?" Because they couldn't touch anything, so it was always, "Can you do this? Can you do that?" Rob Collie (00:40:21): Yeah. Scree (00:40:21): And then I'd have other people who were like, "Can you just sign off that I was here." I would just have to sign their stuff. So, yeah. Those people were fine, because ultimately they didn't care. They were just collecting a paycheck. They weren't super picky. If something was wrong, they'd just write it down and we wouldn't even hear about it. And to be honest, we would never even hear from Sony saying, "Hey, your end cap is improperly set." So, even if it was wrong, we never heard anything. So, I don't know what those people were getting paid for or where that message was going to. Rob Collie (00:40:48): Oh no. Scree (00:40:49): But we did have secret shoppers, people who would come in and act like they were buying stuff from us. And then, they would buy stuff and their entire motive was to find out if you offering everything that Best Buy should be offering. And so, were you wearing your name tag was the big one. Were you able to identify this person by their name tag? And you got reamed by corporate and senior management within the store if you didn't have your name tag on. Did you offer them a warm greeting. It was just like spot checking. And we'd always get a kick out of it when a manager or an assistant manager got interviewed by these people and didn't do, and then they'd throw it in the garbage because they didn't want anyone to know that they didn't do what they were supposed to. Rob Collie (00:41:33): Reminds me a little bit of the flare in Office Space. Scree (00:41:38): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:41:39): 12 pieces of flare is the minimum. But this guy wears 20. Well, why don't you just make 20 the minimum? Ah, I don't think ... Scree (00:41:48): And it was always so random too. We'd get two visits of these a month. Sometimes we'd have the same employee get interviewed twice and you'd get a score at the end. And it was just a kudos piece, a coaching piece. Hey, this person sucked. Can you go coach and train them? But if that employee was our number generator in revenue for the store, based on the actual data we had, then we just basically ignored those. I don't know. It was one of those weird, cognitive dissidence pieces where you'd look at the data versus this random one off interaction, because a lot of times these people didn't know how to actually role play with a customer. So, it was just an awkward interaction to begin with. Rob Collie (00:42:24): Oh yeah. Scree (00:42:25): Because they're faking like they're buying something, and that they're generally interested in what you're trying to sell them. Rob Collie (00:42:30): That's right. They might not be interested in that thing, and it's not their money that they're parting with. Scree (00:42:36): Right. Rob Collie (00:42:37): It's very tricky to make it real. Scree (00:42:40): You'd get some very non social people. And this wasn't a high paying gig. Rob Collie (00:42:45): Well, that's realistic. Scree (00:42:46): I think they got $20 bucks per mystery shop. I don't know how you make a living on that driving around to all the stores. Rob Collie (00:42:52): I mean, this is the economics of operating at scale in a people-centric industry, is amazing. And this is why I am so blown away by Starbucks. In the way that McDonald's is often talked about, and they'd even self identify as more of a real estate company than a fast food company. I think Starbucks is an HR miracle. Think of the complexity of what the team at a Starbucks has to juggle at all times. Are you a Starbucks client? Do you frequent Starbucks? Scree (00:43:28): No, I'm a Red Bull client. Rob Collie (00:43:30): Red Bull client. Okay, that's a choice. We just choose different delivery mechanisms. Scree (00:43:38): Basically. Rob Collie (00:43:39): There are, factually speaking, probably like a billion different combinations of things that someone can order in a Starbucks. Even if you're just limiting it to one drink, there's got to be a billion possibilities. Scree (00:43:52): Yeah, I believe it. Rob Collie (00:43:53): And some of them are on menu. Some of them are off menu. And the pace at which they have to operate, sustained pace, it's unbelievable. And I think with COVID, it's even gotten worse. I think Starbucks are more busy now than they've ever been, in a weird way. Scree (00:44:09): I believe it. Rob Collie (00:44:09): And the clientele at a Starbucks, let's just say that it skews towards entitled. Scree (00:44:17): Yeah, I'd say so. You're paying $14 dollars for a coffee, yeah. Rob Collie (00:44:23): The incidents of jerks that you have to deal with. And also, by the way, these aren't just people in their natural state. They're also people who are in a hurry. And it's just so easy to get it wrong given all the combinations and everything. And the complexity of all the orders. The intensity of the customers and their expectations and everything. And every time I go in a Starbucks, I just stand in awe. Starbucks baristas I think are ... I don't know what they're paid. Ignoring pay for a moment. The fact that it's even possible to have this many high performing people deployed in this manner at a given point in time in the universe is just incredible. I think there are entire businesses that could be formed just on the idea of going in and poaching baristas from Starbucks. Scree (00:45:14): I looked it up. Rob Collie (00:45:14): All right, what do we got? Scree (00:45:15): Less than $13 dollars an hour, national average. Rob Collie (00:45:19): Really? Even now? My son went and got a job, his first job ever this summer at Home Depot, and they paid him $15 an hour. Scree (00:45:26): And it's national average. Rob Collie (00:45:27): Oh boy. There's got to be better benefits or something. Scree (00:45:31): Yeah, I imagine they have decent ... I mean, it seems like they have got benefits. But still, yeah, you'd expect them to be paid more. Rob Collie (00:45:37): And whatever the number is, I'm sure it's not enough. I don't think it's just a training thing. I think it's also their ability to screen. They find just amazing people that, I would say that half the people that I interact with at a Starbucks are people that I wish I could hire in some capacity. That's the impression I come away with. Just really, really, really impressive. Maybe that doesn't apply to secret shoppers at Best Buy. Scree (00:46:00): Probably not. But it is an impressive achievement that they've been able to find people who are willing to do that for as little as they seem to be making. Rob Collie (00:46:08): Well, Scree, I think you should temporarily suspend your Red Bull habit just for a week, and develop yourself some sort of really obscure boutique order. If you need me to just come up with one for you, I'll give you what I usually order. Go in, slap your money down on the barrel head, and tell them, "I want a quad grande one pump mocha, please." That's a relatively simple order. It doesn't have that many words in it. I think it's a six word order. I saw on Facebook the other day a meme that if your coffee order has more than five words in it, there's something wrong with you. And I'm like, "Damn, I've got six." Just barely over the threshold. But then just watch the system spring to life and watch all the other things that they're doing. Watch all the things that they're juggling, and even avoiding running into each other. And it's quite an operation. And I think most people take it for granted, but I just stand there in awe every time. Just, wow. Scree (00:47:01): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:47:02): So, back to Best Buy for a moment. Those reports, they were just coming at you. You weren't part of preparing them? Scree (00:47:07): Not at all. Yeah, it's all internal behind the scenes stuff. We would just refresh them. Rob Collie (00:47:11): But it would still give you, a light bulb would go off for you. Like, "Oh, this is different." This objectivity and automation. Did you have any idea what sort of tech they were using, or was it just built into the point of sale registers almost? Scree (00:47:26): I don't know what backend they were using. I couldn't even have told you. It was all obfuscated to the point where there was no recognizable anything on our end. Rob Collie (00:47:34): There was probably reporting services or some equivalent. Scree (00:47:38): Yeah, I'm sure. But, yeah. I wish I could've seen it. But, no. I never actually got a chance to dive into that piece with them. I jumped into a gaming role with them. They launched a gaming department, and within six months it had flopped. And so, they offered all the gaming managers severance packages and I took it and left. I fled. I was like, "I'm done with Best Buy as a career." And it helped me get out of that whole retail sales industry. It was awful. Rob Collie (00:48:04): Escape velocity. Scree (00:48:05): I had started dating and then was about to get married, and I was like, "I need to get out of here." I can't do the whole random schedule every day and not see my wife most nights. So, I'm like, "I'm going to go find a job in banking because they have the greatest hours." You know? And it took me four or five months. But it's still a sales job, effectively. I mean, banking is still sales. So, got in and did great there for several years. Rob Collie (00:48:31): Having business accounts at banks exposes me to a level of sales coming at me from the bank that I'm unaccustomed to as an individual banker. Scree (00:48:44): Yeah. It's just a different type of sales, and you just had to know your clients well enough. There were times you didn't want to sell to them, if you were just building a relationship. If they're just opening an account, chances are it's not the right time to offer them the entire gamut of services that we offer. Get them what they came in for, set them up, contact them again a week later, and then work from there. There were tips and tricks that I learned through my time there. And honestly, in some ways, banking was easier than retail sales. I didn't have to waste time answering what an HDMI cable is, or a UBC cable because everyone would mispronounce, and I'd just look at them confused for 10 minutes. The tech support piece was removed from my plate and it meant more honest conversations with clients. So, I preferred it in the long run. Rob Collie (00:49:33): Yeah, it's a bit more straightforward transactional rather than upsell. That makes sense to me. Scree (00:49:37): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:49:38): So, at the bank, you were also, I would assume, were on the receiving end of reports, rather than the construction end. Scree (00:49:45): Sometimes. When I was there, they actually launched Salesforce. We transitioned our entire client management system over to Salesforce. So, I was a super user that piloted this rollout. And Salesforce had all sorts of interesting information embedded within it that we didn't have access to before. And I kind of data mined the shit out of it. So, I knew when mortgages and home equity lines of credit were coming up and needed to be renewed. And so, I had lists of every loan coming due in a hundred miles of our location and I had reached out to all of them. So, just stuff like that, that I knew no one else would have any inkling of how to do it because they just aren't tech savvy. Rob Collie (00:50:30): That's so cool. That had to have been a big transitional moment for you. A number of years on the receiving end as a consumer of these reports and seeing the value of them. So, therefore, developing the appetite. Developing the sense of business value. And then, one day someone shows up and says, "Oh, look, here's the menu." Scree (00:50:51): Yeah. I do remember getting my hand slapped down, though, pretty hard, because I was stealing loans from other branches. Rob Collie (00:50:59): Too effective. Too effective. Scree (00:51:00): The bank manager started catching on that I was calling on their clients and were like, "What the fuck?" So, they had conversations. They're like, "How are you getting these lists?" And I was like, "What are you talking about? These people naturally just wanted me to call them." The gig was up at that point. And so, I showed them how I pulled my list. And then every branch manager had to run their own list and distributed it to their employees. Said, "You get this client, you get this client." And so, after a few months of me stealing half the sales in the region ... Rob Collie (00:51:34): On net, they won out from this, right? Because they learned new behaviors as a result of what you were doing. Well, we should all be doing this and making rules around it. Scree (00:51:44): Yeah. And I think ultimately, being able to see loan data inside Salesforce was an oversight on their part. Rob Collie (00:51:51): Yeah, probably. Scree (00:51:52): But it was meant so that if you went into a customer's profile on Salesforce, you could see all of their accounts. So, you would know that they have a business account or a personal account, or a credit card, or et cetera. And so, you wouldn't have to go cross reference it with a different system every conversation you had. You would have a customer call in, you'd pull up their Salesforce, and you'd be able to see everything at a glance. That was the intent. Now, the sad secondary effect was that all the accounts were in Salesforce and it made it really easy for me to run queries against it. Salesforce was built as a super simple tool to run searches and find clients that meet certain patterns. And so, I was just ahead of the curve there. And it helped that I was kind of tech savvy going into it. You had a lot of older banker types who were 50, 60, who didn't want to use computers in the first place, and I'm eating their lunch month after month because of the insights that I had at that point. Scree (00:52:49): But at the same point, there were also some really funny moments where I would have a conversation with a customer and they were nuts. Like someone's calling in asking about UFOs or something, and can a UFO get into my account. My modem's making a noise. Does that mean someone's hacking my bank account? And I'd be like, "What did I just walk into?" And I'd go into their Salesforce profile and there's no notes. So, I would leave these really detailed hilarious comments so that if anyone ever went to that client's profile again in the future, they'd get to see the nut show that the person was. Rob Collie (00:53:20): Yeah. Scree (00:53:20): And I would get random texts six, eight months later of people cracking up reading my notes. So, small little pieces of joy like that, that come back tenfold. He was like, "That guy is nuts. I was reading your note, and it made me laugh." Rob Collie (00:53:36): Can UFOs get into my bank account? Well, if they want to. Scree (00:53:41): Yeah. I was like sure. Rob Collie (00:53:43): If they can traverse the galaxy and get there- Scree (00:53:45): Well, you're not a good bank then if you let UFOs into my account. Well, yeah. You know, you should probably take your money elsewhere. Sorry. Rob Collie (00:53:51): Yeah. Go find one that advertises as UFO proof. Scree (00:53:54): I mean, you could just tell them you wrapped the safe in tin foil or something, and he's probably fine. But I'd say Salesforce was probably the first time where I actually had the opportunity to interact with the data on my own, on my own terms. And that was just further evolution of my course towards data. And that's where I started my MBA when I was at the bank. Rob Collie (00:54:12): Okay. Scree (00:54:13): And I kind of knew that that's the direction I was going to go, was trying to pick up courses that were data based or data oriented to the extent that I could. I mean, you only had like four elective classes out of the whole program. So, three of the four were in that field. Rob Collie (00:54:27): Just so I can background this against other technologies and where they were in their evolution, roughly what timeframe are we talking about here when you were at the bank and doing your MBA? Scree (00:54:37): You know what? I'm going to cheat. I'm going to go look at my LinkedIn profile and tell you. Rob Collie (00:54:41): But see, go to the objective source. None of this subjectivity. This is what we've been talking about. This has been a theme of the whole conversation. Scree (00:54:46): 2013 through 2017. Rob Collie (00:54:49): Okay. So, in 2013, I was full on in on Power Pivot. In the early days of the blog. I was writing two articles a week and sustained that for some number of years. I was already way, way, way in. But the market didn't really know about it. Just going back to Salesforce for a moment, just out of curiosity, how far were you able to get just using the Salesforce UI to construct queries and reports, versus how often did you have to dump it to Excel to get where you needed to go? Scree (00:55:19): I created spreadsheets that we could share with our team. So, eventually, like I said, when the gig was up and we actually had to start tracking this on our own, it was up to the individual managers to assign and keep track of when loans that were maturing needed to be called on. And so, I converted a lot of those reports into Excel file formats. But that was merely just out of ability to share them. Rob Collie (00:55:41): Just portability. Scree (00:55:42): Yeah. Yeah. But in terms of Salesforce, we didn't really interact on any level beyond just using their UI. Rob Collie (00:55:50): Yeah. It's when you get into, "Oh, I need to cross reference this report with that other report. Or there's a calculation I need to perform that that field isn't in Salesforce yet." Those would be the times which you'd have to dump for further analysis. Scree (00:56:03): And it was funny because at the time as a super user, I had access to probably more features than eventually we got paired down to. And I was working with this one guy who was the manager in charge of this transition, and he ended up going to work for Salesforce. So, I thought it was interesting, his evolution, watching him go off. I never kept up with him. But it was just interesting to me to see someone who was responsible for rolling out Salesforce to our company, end up going to work for the bigger team. But he always helped me run custom reports if I needed them. If I ever wanted to say, "Hey, is this something that's doable?" He'd be like, "Yeah, sure. Let's do it." And we'd run crazy stuff to just get an idea. We were trying to isolate when people didn't have accounts, which was slightly harder to look up in the Salesforce than people who did have accounts. The not wasn't really a function baked into the UI. Rob Collie (00:56:56): Yeah. Yeah. Scree (00:56:57): So, he was able to help us limit it by geography and location. Rob Collie (00:57:01): Just dying now to use the DAX EXCEPT function against these two lists. I've really gotten into the EXCEPT function lately. That's one of those sentences you'd never really expect to hear. Let me tell you, I'm really liking the INTERSECT and EXCEPT functions these days. Scree (00:57:20): You know it's funny because I see lots of time and effort spent on DAX and I've been doing this for five or six years now. And with one exception, I've never really had to do complicated DAX. Rob Collie (00:57:34): Interesting. Scree (00:57:36): If you focus all your time on making a great data model, the DAX kind of writes itself. Now, there's situations where you can't write the data model because it's already made and some of the DAX can get a little messy. But I've never run into a situation where the DAX was so convoluted that I'm scratching my brain for something. Rob Collie (00:57:55): Well, it might be, without seeing the business problems and the datasets that cross your desk, I really can't know. Right? Scree (00:58:02): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:58:03): First of all, I completely agree that get the data model right and the DAX isn't hard. Get the data model wrong and the DAX is impossible. Scree (00:58:10): Correct. Rob Collie (00:58:11): That's certainly true, 100%. Secondly, something that's been coming up a lot in recent episodes of this show anyway, is just how much of a turnoff I would find on the internet today if I was going to try to get into DAX. The stuff I would run into on the internet today would scare the hell out of me. I would want nothing to do with it. It's crazy. So much of the DAXs on the internet right now is this hyper optimal, almost like ivory tower flavor that its whole philosophy is go in construct all of these virtual tables using DAX as a sophisticated query language. And then at the last second, collapse those virtual tables down with arithmetic. It's kind of like violating my noun and verb principle. Scree (00:58:55): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:58:55): The way I write DAX, the way that I learned to write DAX was very verb oriented. Go do this for me. Right? A calculate of a date's YTD, right? Go do this. Go give me the year to date sum of this. It's very command oriented. It's a verb. But it's taken on a very noun dialect lately. Go build this thing. It has a loose corelation with the answer that I want. But then, in the last minute with a flourish, collapse this thing that I've built, this glistening structure, collapse it down to a number. If I were completely new to DAX, I would go, "Oh my God. This is not for me." So, there's all of that. And then the thought I'll leave you with on this topic, the thing to chew on is that sometimes the reason why I find myself in complicated DAX ... Again, my DAX is not going to be as complicated as the ones I run into on the internet most of the time. But the reason I find myself using things like the EXCEPT function and the INTERSECT function are because my ambitions have been teased. Rob Collie (00:59:59): If you're not hungry in the morning, you can walk around a long stretch of the day not hungry. Then if you take a bite of something, invariably, you're going to be hungry, really hungry 30 minutes later. You've awoken the beast. I think there's something like that with DAX as well. Scree (01:00:15): I think it ultimately comes down to how the clients are ending up using the reports. And DAX is sort of a derivative of a desire to show something that's not immediately obvious from the data itself, the raw data. Rob Collie (01:00:29): Yeah. Scree (01:00:29): So, most of the clients that I work with, they're really fundamentally just getting started with Power BI. And so, they're trying to show their data in an efficient way. That isn't to say they're trying to show insights that that data is telling. They're just trying to show the data. And once you get into the insights piece, that's probably where the complicated DAX starts to flow out. And I just don't see that very often because we're getting a lot of those learning to walk people first. Rob Collie (01:00:59): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Scree (01:01:00): The ecosystem that gets them to a Power BI report is also pretty convoluted. It's not just the Power BI site, but the data stores. How are you connecting? What is the transformations? How does that data get in there? And so, a lot of time and development gets spent on that. And that's what I think a lot of our clientele tend to spend that initial contract piece with is getting the data into a place that's usable and then converting that into a report. And the insight piece is one of those nice to haves down the line, but it's not something that a lot of clients have an ability to speak to right off the bat because they haven't seen the data in a presentable way yet. My guess is DAX comes into play more towards that second half. Rob Collie (01:01:41): I agree. That very much is in line about what I was saying about ambitions. As your ambitions grow, the depth and the complexity of the DAX that you start to wield goes up. And it's an amazing language. We're fortunate, I think, in that we tend to attract the kind of clients who really are looking to ... They're not just looking to replace what they currently have. They're not looking at a new way to visualize numbers that they already have. They want to get to the metrics that they've never had, and they know that they're out there. They know that there's something, that they could be operating off of a much smarter way of visualizing everything. And it's not just about automating all the things that they're already doing. It's not just about getting the manual workout. Now, there is a lot of that too, of course. Scree (01:02:25): Yeah. I think I've just had the downside of not getting the really fun stuff yet. Rob Collie (01:02:30): Well, you will. You will, especially if you maintain an ongoing relationship with some of these clients over time. They will start to as they get the initial problem space as they conceived of it. As that gets addressed, some of them anyway, will naturally zoom back and go, "Oh, there's a frontier here." And they didn't even perceive the universe outside of that border until they populated it. Until they got it handled. For example, at some point, I will produce and share on Twitter a word cloud of the wordigamis from this episode. The words on this episode that had never appeared in an episode of Raw Data before today. And those words will be sized, by the way, in the word cloud, based on their rarity in the English language. Their usage in the English language. And the number of times they were used in the episode. So, now's the time to drop some vocab. You know? Let's get it into the cloud. You know? Rob Collie (01:03:31): And of course, I could probably do that in Power Query if I was good at it. But I look at it and go, "Oh, I can do this in DAX." And this is where my good friends the except and intersect function come into play. And believe it or not, even on approaching million word dataset of all the words ever spoken and transcribed on this show, it's just lightning fast. It just chews it right up. There you go. There's your word cloud. It's so cool. Scree (01:03:55): So, I've only been in the consulting area of Power BI since May. Before that, I was in a solutions firm that did E-commerce work, right? And so, I worked on the same product for years. And so, the needs of that were very different than client based. So, I haven't really worked with tons of clients yet. So, I think you're right that over time, we'll see them evolve from learning to walk to running, to the point where I need to get there. So, it's mostly my newness to the whole consultative piece that's limited by exposure to that. Rob Collie (01:04:29): Yeah, and that's nothing but good news. You know? You've already got a toolset that's doing amazing things for you, and you're good at it. And to know that there isn't a ceiling on what it can do, or if there is, that ceiling isn't crowding in on your head already. There's head room to grow in terms of your capabilities and in terms of the value you can bring to people. It really is just a hell of a toolset that can address so much breadth and depth. I've said it before, I'll say it again. It belongs in the software hall of fame, if there were such a thing. Maybe they should open it up right next to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. I'm sure they would get the same number of visitors. Everybody loves the software hall of fame. Scree (01:05:08): I like the GitHub repository notice that your data's going to be stored in a vault in, where is it? The Arctic. Have you seen this? Rob Collie (01:05:18): No, I haven't. Is it right next to the seed vault to save humanity, all the seeds? Scree (01:05:24): I guess. But if you ever commit work, it says, "Hey, your code qualifies to be stored in the Arctic." I think it's the Arctic. Rob Collie (01:05:33): Really? Scree (01:05:33): It's been a while since I've actually logged in. But it always cracked me up. I'm like, my code for the Undead Lords is being stored in the arctic because that's going to be hugely critical for mankind to bounce back. Rob Collie (01:05:45): That's right. That's right. Yeah. I wonder what criteria they use. Scree (01:05:50): I think it's just about everything. Rob Collie (01:05:52): Really? I mean, I have one add on for Warcraft that I didn't even really write. A friend of mine is a VP at GitHub and wrote all of the guilds. Or he and one other partner in crime wrote very, very, very elaborate EGPG client server add-on for WoW. It's something else. Integrated between the guild website and the endgame add-on. Real time bidding. Real time scoring. It's crazy. And I was like, "Hey, I need an add-on so that I can make snarky comments in the raid." And the comments are all of a particular formula. There's only certain forms of these snarky comments that are just boring. It's just tedious to type the same comment over and over again. So, I need a push button interface that you can drop the right snarky comment at the right time. Again, that's the value that I brought whenever they took me on a mission. Rob Collie (01:06:48): That code is probably in the arctic too. All that really was, was a string table that I filled in. Scree (01:06:53): Humanity is saved. Rob Collie (01:06:54): I know. I know. If you ever need, Rogue Chat 9000 is what I called it. My chief contribution for sure. What have we not talked about that we should have? Is there anything that we haven't gotten into? This is like the elective phase of the conversation. Oh, I never asked you, what games is the guild into right now? You mentioned there's a PVP guild. So, for people who don't know, player versus player guild. Scree (01:07:20): Yeah, it's mostly people killing other people in virtual games. They're super aggressively playing New Worlds right now. Rob Collie (01:07:29): Okay. Scree (01:07:30): Amazon's New Worlds. I don't know if you've heard of it. Rob Collie (01:07:32): Nope, I hadn't. Scree (01:07:33): It's Amazon's first actually released game. They've had a few that got scrapped along the way. It's had a tumultuous launch. Rob Collie (01:07:40): Well, I mean, any good game does. Scree (01:07:43): Seemingly, it's the norm now. But yeah, we still got a good 30 or so people playing it. Rob Collie (01:07:48): None of you are running around Warcraft. Scree (01:07:50): I am not actively playing it. I had too much on my plate for work the last couple months. So, just no time and no energy. Rob Collie (01:07:58): Just like me. Work life, professional life, personal life, and then, what? No, I am not treating this game as an IT problem, which is what you kind of have to treat it as. The number of interface modifications and macros and things like that, that my friends use in Warcraft is just insane. Scree (01:08:18): Yeah. I used to play it and I remember spending almost as much time on my UI as I did playing the game. Rob Collie (01:08:25): Yeah. Scree (01:08:26): So, I was in the same boat. Rob Collie (01:08:27): I don't need a development problem in my gaming. Scree (01:08:31): You know what's interesting though about WoW and its history is that the game's mechanics in the game actually had to evolve and become more difficult because of the UI capabilities that the designers gave the player base. Rob Collie (01:08:46): Yes. Yeah. Scree (01:08:47): So, they had to make the end game problems more challenging because the players were creating UI solutions to all the problems that they threw at them. Rob Collie (01:08:53): Yep. Scree (01:08:54): And so, it became this ... Rob Collie (01:08:55): An arms race. Scree (01:08:56): Arms race. Rob Collie (01:08:57): Yeah. Scree (01:08:58): And I always found that hilarious, because normally a game developer would just say, "All right, well we'll just turn this off and then you have to play the game our way." But they didn't do that. They let the player base create tools. It's smart. I remember it came to a head during one of the expansions that I played in where someone wrote a mod that told you where to run to in the 3D space. Rob Collie (01:09:23): Yeah. Scree (01:09:24): So, it said, "This is safe. Run here." And that became so egregious because it basically played the game for you. It wasn't that something was happening that you needed to run from. It was, "Go here and you won't get hit." And that was so egregious that they ended up turning off some of that arms race functionality. Rob Collie (01:09:44): Mm-hmm (affirmative). They're smart, right? I used to tell people on my team that worked for me at Microsoft that every feature take back, everything we took out of the product had an absolute value of impact. It's like 10X of every add, everything you added to the product. So, you've got to be really, really careful about take backs. Blizzard took the right approach. They opened Pandora's box, and rather than try to slam the door shut by neutering and negating and disabling KPI capabilities, they just made the game harder. And it's the same thing with as the play balanced over the years when they discovered that a particular class of character had an advantage over everyone else. The knee jerk response is to take away that advantage. To dial down or nerf the capabilities of that one class. And so, when they could, they didn't do that. When they could, they just introduced capabilities in other classes. They would balance by adding rather than removing. Rob Collie (01:10:42): It's a really delicate, delicate balance. It takes master craftsmanship, essentially. It was something to watch. And then, some time after I quit playing, apparently the wheels completely came off of the whole enterprise and the whole game went in the tank. And I never got to witness any of that. I sold at the top apparently and got out. Scree (01:11:01): I did too. Rob Collie (01:11:02): But now we're riding that same rollercoaster back up to the top of the hill. I'm in the level 70 expansion right now, second time around. I'm looking forward to the level 80 classic expansion. And then we're not sure where they're going to go next. Scree (01:11:18): I can't believe that they found as large of an audience for this as they did. It's the most unbelievable thing. Rob Collie (01:11:25): It's insane, isn't it? Just imagine a game released in 2005 and people are still playing it today in basically the same form. Scree (01:11:34): More people played it today than did at launch. Rob Collie (01:11:38): Really? Oh my God. Scree (01:11:40): I think that was what I saw. Rob Collie (01:11:41): That's crazy. Scree (01:11:42): But, the audience is bigger now, right? So, they grew the audience by leaps and bounds. Rob Collie (01:11:48): I guess that's true. The people who were playing in 2005 weren't 80 years old, right? So, we're all still around. I mean, almost everyone I play with is so much younger than me that if they were playing at first release, they were like 13 years old. Scree (01:12:02): Or not even born yet, which is the case with a lot of the people who are playing Classic right now. So, maybe that's their audience is the people who've been ripping on WoW being so easy, "Back in our day." And these people wanted to go get a taste of that. I don't know, maybe. Rob Collie (01:12:21): Have you seen that they've now released WoW Classic: Season of Mastery. Have you heard of this? Scree (01:12:26): No. I tapped out of Classic about, I don't know. Rob Collie (01:12:30): So, that's like classic, classic. Season of Mastery is like all the rating counters have been slightly buffed up. Scree (01:12:40): Oh, God. Yeah, no thanks. Rob Collie (01:12:41): So, basically that they have the same level of challenge overall that they did at first launch before everyone figured everything out. Before all the interface mods got so good and all of that. Again, it's an add. They didn't take away the capabilities. They just made the raid bosses harder. Scree (01:12:58): No thanks. Rob Collie (01:12:58): You don't want to go back and wipe on veil over and over, and over, and over again. Scree (01:13:03): We did. We did. I just don't want to do it again. I've already done it twice now. So, a third time, not in the cards. Rob Collie (01:13:12): This was a gaming heavy conversation. It's not for everyone. But we got a lot of good, good stuff in about data along the way. Of business data. If you're just here for the business data, we covered that ground. Hopefully that gave us an excuse, air cover for us to talk in this gibberish that five people listening are going to understand. Like, veil. What is veil? You don't want to know. Endless frustration and in-fighting. All right, man. Well, I've really appreciated this. I've enjoyed it. Nice to connect with someone who all I have none of them is an avatar on Twitter. I love that kind of experience. Thanks for being open to doing this. You're putting yourself out there, and I appreciate that you did it. Scree (01:13:55): Thanks. I had fun. Announcer (01:13:57): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Have a data day!

Tim Rodman revisits his backyard BBQ education in PowerPivot. Not just any BBQ, this one hosted two corporate powerhouses casually chatting analytic software over the grill. After this informal introduction, Tim went on to become yet another Power BI OG. Flash forward to current times where his experience with Acumatica paired with his background in accounting, ERP systems, and Excel makes him uniquely qualified to build better reporting. Imagine a blank slate where insights that never existed before in an organization just seem to manifest. Unexpectedly, in this episode, we learn the true nature of mega drilling machines. From Tim’s description of these machines, it’s easy to imagine them as metaphorically linked with Power BI: nimble cutting discs making multiple, surgical cuts that cause little bits to fall away creating colossal tunnels underground– small, incremental changes creating a path to actionable insight. Contact Tim and check out his website, AUGForums.com References in this episode: Better Call Saul Bunker Build Independence Day Checkmate TMNT Drill Tim's First PowerPivotPro.com Blog Post on Self Serve BI Adoption Tim's PowerPivotPro.com Blog Post on Data Nirvana Raw Data with Lori Rodriguez Raw Data with Ken Puhls Raw Data with Brad and Kai from Agree Media Hitler Hits A Breaking Point with Tableau Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends! Today, we're jumping into the way back machine because our guest is Tim Rodman. If you rewind about eight or nine years, people from Microsoft would periodically ask me the same question over and over again, which is how are people hearing about Power Pivot? And my answer was always, it's a million different individual stories. And one time, shortly after I met Tim, someone from Microsoft asked me that question, and without missing a beat, I said, well, there's the barbecue vector. They of course blinked and said what? And I said, well, this guy I just met, he learned about Power Pivot at a neighborhood barbecue from a neighbor who had just taken one of my classes. And that chance conversation with a neighbor at a neighborhood barbecue in July of 2012, launched Tim on a completely different career trajectory. Tim was also one of the founding members of the original Power BI User Group in Cleveland, Ohio. And that's where I got to know him personally.   Rob Collie (00:00:54): I can't know this for sure, but I think there's a reasonably good chance that Tim and I invented the ConcatenateX function at a bar across the street from the User Group afterwards. He and I lost track of each other for a few years, but he's back on the scene now. And talking to him was almost like a time capsule of sorts reminding me of things that I used to be saying. And one of those things that he reminded me of, which is just as relevant today as it was back then, is that the number one output of Power BI are numbers that didn't exist, numbers that your business needed, but that you could never get. I think that's a great theme, and I'm going to go back to saying it.   Rob Collie (00:01:31): He's a savvy operator in the world of ERP systems, and specifically is a big deal in the Acumatica world. We talk about all of that of course, we get into all sorts of interesting nooks and crannies, because he's a very interesting person. It was fantastic catching up with him. I hope you enjoy it as well. So let's get into it.   Announcer (00:01:49): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?   Announcer (00:01:53): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast with your host Rob Collie. 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 (00:02:15): Welcome to the show. Tim Rodman, it has been a long time. I am so glad to talk to you. How are you today?   Tim Rodman (00:02:21): Doing good. Thanks for having me on I've been list thing back through some older episodes, and it's really cool to actually be a guest on here. This is great.   Rob Collie (00:02:29): Really, really excited that we get to do this. Now, where do you live these days? Are you still where we met?   Tim Rodman (00:02:33): No, we met up in Cleveland, Ohio. I'm now about two hours south in Columbus, Ohio. So still pretty close to you. You're still in Indie, right?   Rob Collie (00:02:40): Yep. Still in Indie. You've halved the distance. It's a two and a half hour drive. Although it's weird, when we go to visit Jocelyn's parents in Elyria, we go the north route. We go north from Indianapolis and then shoot over past Cedar Point. But if we're going to the east side of Cleveland, we go the completely different way we go through Columbus. It actually makes quite a bit of difference in arrival time.   Tim Rodman (00:03:00): Interesting.   Rob Collie (00:03:00): Yeah. Yeah. The boring routes between Indiana and Ohio. That's what people tune in to hear about. They're like, oh-   Tim Rodman (00:03:08): It's very flat.   Rob Collie (00:03:09): I should optimize my route.   Tim Rodman (00:03:13): Yeah.   Rob Collie (00:03:14): All right. So why don't we get in the way back machine, first and foremost, how did we cross paths? How much of it do you remember? I'm going to lean on your memory a little bit. I'll jump in with the things that I remember.   Tim Rodman (00:03:25): Well, I didn't trust my memory, so I jotted down some notes here.   Rob Collie (00:03:27): Ah, comes prepared.   Tim Rodman (00:03:30): Yeah. I'm prepared here with my notes. Actually you put at the top of my first blog post on your blog, which was back in April 2014, you put some of the backstory at the very top of that. And I went back to the dates on it, which was July of 2012. So July of 2012, you're not involved yet, but I'm down the street at my neighbor Andy's house in the backyard with a bunch of other neighbors having a barbecue. Andy and I start talking about work, and he brings up this thing called Power Pivot, because you were recently at his company.   Rob Collie (00:04:07): Yep.   Tim Rodman (00:04:08): Teaching it to them. So that was my first introduction to Power Pivot, July 2012. And then we crossed paths first in September of 2013. So a little over a year later at the Inaugural Excel User Group meeting. Although I like to describe it now as the world's first ever Power BI User Group meeting.   Rob Collie (00:04:31): Yeah. Cleveland was patient zero for these user groups. Yeah. Okay, so it's really funny, your neighbor Andy, there's a guy that I'm in contact with every 18 months just sort of randomly. Not your neighbor, Andy, but it's just enough time between that I completely forget that he is not your neighbor, Andy, that introduced you to Power Pivot at a barbecue. And I go, oh, that's right, you're the guy that hooked Tim Rodman. And he goes, oh Rob, you say this to me every time. I am not that guy, but thank you. But yeah, so the barbecue route, you've got to have a real comfort with your neighbors if you get to that point, you know?   Tim Rodman (00:05:12): Well, I think it showed how excited he was about it. And what hooked me about it was when he told me his company size, because the company he worked at I think was doing around $800 million a year in revenue at the time, and the company I was at, we were doing around $300 million a year in revenue, and I was outgrowing Crystal Reports, and SSRS, and the stuff we were trying to throw at problems. And so it caught my attention that here's a guy who's at a bigger company and he's using Excel.   Rob Collie (00:05:42): Turbo Excel. Yeah.   Tim Rodman (00:05:43): Because his tools weren't doing the job either, and that definitely piqued my interest.   Rob Collie (00:05:48): Which is really funny, right? $800 million in annual revenue, $300 million in annual revenue. What I have come to realize is that on the grand scale, the overwhelming majority of companies are smaller than that. Now, the majority of total revenue in the world is heavily weighted towards the high end. Right? So the giants do comprise a very large overall percentage of business conducted in terms of dollars, right? But in terms of absolute number of businesses, there's a very, a very long tail that is well below $300 million in annual revenue. And these tools scale up and down that spectrum as if they're not even missing a beat, it doesn't matter how big you are. The only real limit is there's a point at which you're so small that the percentage efficiency gains you would realize by getting a better data strategy together might not be worth the time you put into it. But even that, you've got to be really small for it not to matter.   Tim Rodman (00:06:45): Yeah, totally agree.   Rob Collie (00:06:46): You've got to be making cupcakes out of your garage. Before it doesn't make a difference.   Tim Rodman (00:06:53): Napkin math, right? That's when it scales too far down.   Rob Collie (00:06:57): So now it's almost the opposite in a way, Power BI is so official. Whereas Power Pivot was Turbo Excel, like Excel Plus. You had this relief that a company bigger than yours was already using it. That was promising to you. It sort of allowed you to lean forward. Now if those two revenue numbers had been reversed, maybe you wouldn't have. You were a $800 million and they were $300 million. Now of course, it shouldn't make a difference at all, but when you don't know anything going in, of course it makes a difference. But now I think we have the opposite problem where Power BI is so well respected and entrenched and it feels solid, that I think a lot of companies think that they're too small for it, which is not true. And gosh, in terms of pricing, oh my gosh, the pricing for smaller firms, Power BI is priced in a way that the mid-market can and should be devouring it. Perhaps even more aggressively than the enterprise.   Rob Collie (00:07:45): So I mentioned to my wife, Jocelyn, today that today's podcast guest is someone that she knew, someone she met, I told her who it was and she goes, oh yeah, he worked the drilling company. And I'm thinking to myself Rigid Tools or DeWalt, but I go, oh, she said the big drilling, and I'm like, all right, yeah. The big drill. That is correct, right? I mean, I remember, as soon as she said that it all came back to me.   Tim Rodman (00:08:09): Yeah, that's right. It's called the Robbins Company. Now I haven't been there for many years, but it was a very cool company to work for. And I thought the same thing going in, I pictured a giant DeWalt handheld drill that you go into the earth with, but they're actually flat. And so, what put them on the map was the chunnel from England to France, that project is what put tunnel boring into like, all right, we can really do this, because it was just a very notable project. They actually drilled, I believe it was four out of the six tunnels. So there's two for roads, two for trains, and two for utilities going from England to France. And I think four out of the six were the Robbins Company. And these giant machines, they're longer than a football field, but the front is actually flat. It's not a big drill like you would see in a cartoon, right? When a cartoon character's going through the earth, they've got this drill.   Rob Collie (00:09:04): Yeah, it's not the teenage mutant ninja turtles version. Yeah.   Tim Rodman (00:09:07): It's flat. And they have these little discs. They're very similar to a disk that you throw in track and they stick out. So they're just cutting sideways into the rock in multiple places. And then a little bit falls off. It goes a little further, a little bit falls off. Really neat company to work for, a really neat product. Fun product.   Rob Collie (00:09:28): Yeah, and then Elon Musk goes and forms the Boring Company. Did the Boring Company, do they make their own boring devices or do they just use the boring devices?   Tim Rodman (00:09:40): Good question. I had moved on when I first heard about the Boring Company. So, yeah, I don't know.   Rob Collie (00:09:46): The Hyperloop, right? It's going to replace, in theory, I'm crossing my fingers it will replace airline travel. Giant air evacuated tubes under the country, just zap from place to place like there's pneumatic tubes at the bank.   Tim Rodman (00:09:58): I got one more story kind of in that same vein. It is interesting to see the customers of these machines. I didn't have a front row seat, I was in the IT department, mostly working on the ERP system, but I did hear stories. They would sell it to another country and that was it. They weren't allow to know what was happening after that. So when you get underground, things do get pretty interesting, especially internationally. This is an international company doing a lot in China and India, especially. It's just kind of interesting to make up your own stories about what they might have been drilling for.   Rob Collie (00:10:31): Wow. Wow. That is insane. Have you been watching the show Better Call Saul?   Tim Rodman (00:10:37): I have not.   Rob Collie (00:10:37): It's like a prequel to Breaking Bad, and there's a giant basement that figures prominently in Breaking Bad, and in Better Call Saul, they show the construction of this basement. And it's very, very similar. It's really cloak and dagger. They're interviewing different engineering teams to come in and do it. But the engineering teams get blindfolded in a different city at an airport and driven across the country, and they have no idea where they are. The team that eventually ends up doing the work spends six months sequestered. They have no idea where they are in the world.   Tim Rodman (00:11:05): That's interesting. Yeah, satellites have mapped out everything above ground, right? If you want to be discreet, you got to go underground. Be interesting to know what kind of things are going on out there.   Rob Collie (00:11:14): But that's not what you're up to these days. So you are wielding Power Pivot at the Robbins Company. It was during that era that we got to know each other, but at some point something else pulled you away, right? What's been your path since then?   Tim Rodman (00:11:28): So here's where I had to go back and look at the date. So it was July 2012 that talked to my neighbor, Andy. And then he came over probably within two or three weeks after that. At night after the kids were asleep, pulled out his Excel files and started showing me some of the stuff that he was doing. And then I got really interested.   Tim Rodman (00:11:47): And so, somewhere between July and then I was at that first user group meeting in September of 2013. But then in April of 2013, kind of in between there, is when I first got my hands on installing a new ERP product called Acumatica. And I've always been more in the ERP space. I started off in accounting at Deloitte as a financial auditor. So I was always very close to the accounting side of things. And I got into ERP kind of by accident, ERP is like your back office systems. SAP and Oracle are the well known names for big companies. QuickBooks is the well known name for tiny companies. And then there's a whole mid-market for everyone who's generally between $10 million a year and a few hundred million a year. You're kind of in that mid-market space. There's a bunch of different ERP products, and Acumatica caught my attention because it was pure cloud, pure HTML, from scratch written and starting in 2008. I started getting into that at the same time that I was doing Power BI. So I had this interesting struggle of I've got two really cool, cutting edge products that I'm in on the beginning, or relatively early on in. Which one is going to win as I'm struggling? So I struggled with that probably for about a year or actually more, maybe more like two years, because it included, even after that September 2013, first user group meeting.   Rob Collie (00:13:19): So you were struggling with which of these two exciting new technologies to really throw yourself into.   Tim Rodman (00:13:25): That's right.   Rob Collie (00:13:26): In the end, did you come to the conclusion that that was a false dichotomy, and it was really both?   Tim Rodman (00:13:32): In the end, I think it was right at the time to decide that I needed to pick a focus. But yeah, I agree that that gets to what I'm doing now. They go together very well, but at the time, I feel like I did need to pick one bucking bronco to ride on. These kind of early software products, you want to devote your attention to it. And so, I'm glad that I did focus on Acumatica.   Rob Collie (00:13:56): Okay. And so, when you say focused on Acumatica, did you leave your previous job and become an Acumatica implementation consultant? Is that first direction that you were going?   Tim Rodman (00:14:06): That's right. I kind of worked with the product from April of 2013. That's when I first got my hands on it. And between then and September 2015, I was still at the Robbins Company learning Acumatica in the evening. And then September 2015, I went to work for Acumatica and was mainly involved with implementations for about five years till last November 2020.   Rob Collie (00:14:32): Okay. So for five years you were an Acumatica employee, not like a partner, like the Microsoft model, where Microsoft has a million partner companies that help implement their stuff. It wasn't like that, you were an employee.   Tim Rodman (00:14:44): Well, I did bounce around. In those five years, I was at Acumatica then I was at two different partners, which was actually fairly common, because things were moving around so quickly, but I was doing basically the same job the whole time.   Rob Collie (00:14:56): Okay. All right. So there was basically the same sort of implementation, but depends upon timing and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes the checks coming from this firm versus another firm. That makes sense to me. You said that was for five years. So now what is Tim Rodman up to?   Tim Rodman (00:15:10): So since last November, a little over a year now, I've just been independent. It was kind of middle of the COVID and with the way we were caring for the kids, we got two elementary school kids.   Rob Collie (00:15:22): Oh boy, yeah.   Tim Rodman (00:15:22): I was basically working part-time anyways. So the benefits were gone. My wife was working just enough to be full-time at her job and get benefits. So I'm already in like this hourly phase anyways. So I'm like, hey, why don't I just give this independent thing a shot? So for about a year now I've been independent just doing reporting in Acumatica. And because of that, Power BI has come back in a bigger way than when I just learning Acumatica.   Rob Collie (00:15:54): [Taxes 00:15:54], back on the menu boys.   Tim Rodman (00:15:55): That's right.   Rob Collie (00:15:59): Fantastic. Welcome. Welcome back. Yeah. So that's neat, right? One of the things that comes up pretty frequently on this show is that life and career are more like the decathlon than like any single track and field event. And on the one hand, you'd think maybe that's too specialized. Acumatica reporting, seriously? But no, if I wanted someone to help me with Acumatica-based reporting and analytics, come on, it's the Rodman. That's who's going to be.   Tim Rodman (00:16:31): I really like that decathlon point that you've made. I've heard it on previous episodes. I totally agree with it. That's been my experience this past year. I went down into a super niche. I know Acumatica from an implementation standpoint, I like reporting the best, and I spend most of my time on that. Is there really a market for that? And I found, yeah, there is because most the consulting companies, your model is to sell an ERP product and implement an ERP product. After the company goes live, then you're still going to support them. You're still going to write reports to them when they need, but largely your model is to then go move on to the next one, sell and implement. So all I do, all day, every day is reporting. I'm not distracted by implementations. And I found that to be really nice, not just from a knowledge standpoint, but from a muscle memory standpoint, my fingers have more knowledge in them just being familiar with where to click, to do certain things, because I'm doing it all the time. I'm not having to reteach the muscle memory every month or so when I actually get around to writing a report.   Rob Collie (00:17:41): Yeah. So much domain knowledge, so much tribal knowledge built up. Even if you take on a new client, working with a new company for the first time, you already know two thirds of the story. Almost everything there is to know about Power BI. Like you're very, very comfortable there. You know everything about the plumbing of Acumatica, what its quirks are. All that kind of stuff. It's eccentricities. You know where the defined things. And then all that's left is whatever particular business problems that they're confronting that are somewhat unique to them. And that stuff's fun. That's just a fun thing to get into, in my experience. So you save a lot of time, not just time, but also really boring time. Learning all that other stuff is usually like, even if you're able to charge the same hourly rate for it, it just doesn't feel the same. It's not as much of a satisfying existence doing that boring stuff. And again, we're not talking about the tunnels here. We're talking about the actual not exciting version of...   Tim Rodman (00:18:32): Well. Yeah. And I think that goes back to getting up to speed on a product. And to me, as I was getting up to speed on Acumatica, the hardest question was not to know what it could do. It was to know what it couldn't do, because if someone asks you, can it do this? And if you're going to say no, you've really got to be confident that you've covered all your bases there. Right? And that's where I am glad that I focused on a product and just got to know it well so that I could be confident. And then, as you say, the fun stuff, which I think is also the value add stuff, the important stuff, the softer side, the business side that now is what I get to focus on knowing that I have a solid set of Craftsman tools in my tool belt.   Rob Collie (00:19:12): Yeah. Aren't most ERP systems supposed to come from Germany? Is Acumatica a Germany-based organization or does it come from somewhere else?   Tim Rodman (00:19:20): It's not, it's close. It's Russia.   Rob Collie (00:19:22): Really? Okay.   Tim Rodman (00:19:23): Similar engineering mindset.   Rob Collie (00:19:25): I see, I see.   Tim Rodman (00:19:27): The core developer team, they got international offices now, but still the core team is in Moscow, Russia.   Rob Collie (00:19:34): I actually have opinions on this. I think there's a huge difference between what little experience I have with this topic, which doesn't stop me from opining. There's a huge difference in engineering philosophy between the Russians and the Germans. All you have to do is go look at World War II. The Russians have a very, very keen sense of how things are actually going to be used, and they do not over engineer beyond that. The German philosophy is you over-engineer everything. There's no question that the best tank of the war, maybe the best three tanks of the war were all German designs, but that's with an asterisk, when they were running. There's parallels in the BI world.   Rob Collie (00:20:06): Every day at an Air Force base in the United States, or any Air Force base that the United States operates, there's this ritual will where everybody who works at the Air Force base, no matter what their job is, they all get out and they form this big wide line and they walk the entire length of every runway picking up pebbles and all the little detritus that might get sucked into an intake and ruin a bajillion dollar airplane, right?   Rob Collie (00:20:26): Whereas, the Russian philosophy is you could take a big handful of mud and just throw it into the intake and it just makes it stronger. And so much of the old BI world was that really sensitive, clean room environment mentality that just does not survive contact with the real world. I think a lot of German engineering, not all of it obviously, but the most representative outlier example of the culture is an over-engineered machine that doesn't stay on the road.   Tim Rodman (00:20:54): I hadn't considered that. I could see that from an ERP's perspective. You look at SAP, that's the most notable German ERP product, and it is very much that. You do things a certain way and it's very precise. The Acumatica approach is much more of a minimum viable product approach. They launch stuff and then if it gets used, then they bother to make it run better and stuff like that.   Rob Collie (00:21:21): Microsoft has made this transition from being the on-premises, release every three to five years software to very cloud-based, MVP-based approach. And that I'm amazed at how well they've pulled that transition. It is a very difficult cultural change to make within a company. Set aside the workflow and technical changes, just the cultural changes is just like, and that all happened after I left. So if I ever went back to Microsoft, that would be in a completely foreign land. I wouldn't recognize it today. I do wonder how many big, established companies are able to truly make that transition and make it work.   Tim Rodman (00:21:54): I'm definitely watching Microsoft very closely. They're what they now call Dynamics 365. Before they swallowed up four ERP products around 2000.   Rob Collie (00:22:05): Yep.   Tim Rodman (00:22:05): Maybe like 2000 to 2005.   Rob Collie (00:22:06): Yep.   Tim Rodman (00:22:07): They were Axapta, Division, Great Plains, and Solomon. They branded Axapta's AX. Division, NAV. Great Plains, as GP and Solomon is SL. Well, Great Plains and Solomon have kind of fallen onto the maintenance mode. And now the two horses are AX and Division, which they confusing, if I'm current on this rebranded AX, as Finance and Operations, and NA Vision as Business Central. So Business Central is more in like the mid-market space that I'm in, but I'm definitely keeping my eye on that. It looks very interesting, especially with something I've seen them call the Dataverse. If they could really pull off a different style of database that allows you to go in and write power apps that are first class citizens in an ERP system, that all utilizes a common database on the backend, I think that's the general idea of their Dataverse. They used to call it Common Data Model. That's very interesting to me, but retooling an ERP system is quite a beast.   Rob Collie (00:23:11): Yeah.   Tim Rodman (00:23:11): It's a multi, multi year job. So we'll see if they can pull it off. But yeah, culturally if you're talking Microsoft's changes, it's very interesting to see what they do from an ERP perspective with that new culture.   Rob Collie (00:23:24): Does Acumatica include a CRM component?   Tim Rodman (00:23:27): Acumatica does. They're actually kind of rare in that respect that they built it into the core from the very beginning. So even if you aren't licensed for the quote-quote CRM area. Opportunities and leads, you still have the ability to track activities on anything, even like accounting journal entries, if you want to. So yeah, that philosophy was baked in from the very beginning, which I think is a pretty good competitive advantage.   Rob Collie (00:23:53): So it is neat to see systems that aren't sort of the usual suspect, right? Like Acumatica seems relatively new, relative to something like SAP anyway. So it has a CRM in it.   Rob Collie (00:24:03): Relative to something like SAP anyway. So it has a CRM in it. We started of course in the most random hodgepodge way possible here at P3, we just grab a system off the shelf, grab another system off the shelf. The joke is, well that's best of breed. Now it's the random collection of stuff that we happen to buy at certain points in time, right?   Rob Collie (00:24:17): And you mentioned how long it takes a company like Microsoft to retool an ERP system. But holy cow, once you adopt one, you're stuck, even as the benefits of switching might pile up over time, so does your entrenchment, for instance, we're on Salesforce, CRM, it's so central to our business, that it leaks into other places too. It has integrations all over the place and you can't tear that thing out. Your entire nervous system would go with it if you try to get that parasite removed, like the alien.   Tim Rodman (00:24:48): And I think that speaks to an important difference between ERP ecosystems and what I'd call data or BI, any kind of data ecosystem. A data person is much more apt to just grab the best tool for the job, or whereas an ERP person is just much more entrenched. The ecosystems tend to live separately. There's these vendors that we call ISV vendors, which are independent software vendors that they'll plug into the various ERP products.   Tim Rodman (00:25:16): So they'll go like to the different conferences for all the different ERP products. But for most people who are really an expert on a particular ERP product, that's all they have time for. They don't cross paths with other ERP systems, just because of that, it's very... An entrenched nature. You get really into the weeds in terms of how you execute certain things. And you're just kind of stuck with what you got.   Rob Collie (00:25:40): How humane is Acumatica when it comes to giving you access to the data? SAP is famously difficult to get data out of. One of the reasons I'm sure behind the scenes for all of this is that an ERP system. any ERP system that is very open with its data is easier to replace. Just run a bunch of exports, right? Or so goes to the paranoia anyway. Maybe that's not true. There was a time when Microsoft very closely guarded the formats of the office document, the specifications for those as if those were the reason why the office couldn't be copied, turned out that wasn't the case at all. The reason office can't be copied is all the behaviors of the application, not the nature of the file format structure.   Rob Collie (00:26:25): So it turned out like completely opening that file format structure didn't damage or endanger the offices standing in the market at all. But for a while, there was a fear that it would. So I know entire software companies that are built strictly on the premise of trying to make and succeeding, actually of making SAP data a much more easy to consume, like in a data Mart format than in its native 55,000 tables of SQL or whatever of Oracle, whatever. So when you need to get data from Acumatica in order to build reports, how much secret handshake is involved if any?   Tim Rodman (00:27:05): Before I respond to that, let me explain why I stayed in the ERP path. So I always look at things through a reporting angle, but I look at as two sides of a coin, you got heads and tails. Heads is the business per process side of things, tails is what I just call the reporting side of things. You can throw a BI at it or whatever. I just call it reporting, because that's the word that I find people most commonly use. But I find that to be two different sides of the same coin, where if you touch process, without keeping in mind reporting, you're asking for trouble because you're just going to be in the Lean Six Sigma, make things so efficient, but we don't even know why we're making it efficient type of a world. I don't want to be there. Then on the other side though, and this is why I stayed in the ERP world, I didn't want to just go down the reporting path and be just data analyst without understanding the business process side.   Tim Rodman (00:28:02): Because I think as you probably experienced, you can never touch data without touching garbage and the data janitor side of things and missing data. So to be in a system where you now have the ability to influence the process and maybe customize the screens or change the way things are captured in order to fill in that missing data, you're in a much better position to deliver more comprehensive reporting. So that's my look at it. And from that angle, when I was looking for a new ERP product, that was one of the things that was very important to me. And one of the things that caught my attention with Acumatica from the very beginning was just how open the technology was. So like for example, I looked at NetSuite for a number of years, but every time I tried to figure out how NetSuite worked, I couldn't get my hands on it. It was like a black box.   Tim Rodman (00:28:56): Whereas Acumatica, I read about it on a blog post somewhere. And a couple months later, I was talking to a partner and he's like, "Okay, how about I just let you into my university account and you can download it, install it yourself." So even though it is a cloud, most people deploy on cloud in the Acumatica Amazon data center. You can also take the same installation file and install it on your local machine. So at the end of the day, it's just a backend database and having the ability to, if I wanted to, move it out of the cloud and move it locally, which you can do, that was really important to me because I cared about accessing the data to your point.   Rob Collie (00:29:38): Okay. All right. So let me keep pressing you on this point, however, I can use the cloud or I can stall it locally. Great, great, great. There's sort of like this sense of physical possession, but SAP was, and probably remains to this day very often deployed on premises and still is about as opaque as it comes when it's time to get access to the data. Does Acumatica force you to design reports that are ultra ultra ultra detailed and then export them to CSV format in order to get it into Power BI, which would be a very common thing. Does it offer any like integrations or direct connect type of APIs? What does it really look like? When you go into Power BI and say, okay, get data from Acumatica. What are you actually getting?   Tim Rodman (00:30:23): So there is some pre-built stuff and they are in the Power BI I don't even remember what you call it, like templates or whatever that area is. Last I look, it was mostly CRM data that's pre-built there. But they did do so. Something back in 2015, and I actually did a guest blog post, another one on your blog in June of 2015. Got it right here on my notes to highlight what they did in 2015. They were, I believe the first ERP product to embrace OData. Which now Microsoft has done as well in their ERP products. But I really like the way that they did it because I've tinkered a little bit with business central and it wasn't quite this easy, but the way Acumatica does it is, you design a query using a screen, it's called a generic inquiry and you do it graphically.   Tim Rodman (00:31:11): You pick your tables. You do your joins. You're essentially doing a sequel query, but you're doing it graphic. And then you check this one little box that says, enable for OData. So you could pull data from any table you want, join it together however you want, group it, filter it and then enable the thing for OData so you can connect it from Power BI, which is the reason why that feature there is huge to me. And that's why Power BI is coming up more and more in conversations with clients.   Rob Collie (00:31:43): Okay, cool. So do you find that the throughput of OData is sufficient? Is it a relatively slow query or is it returned kind of snappy or we're not typically dealing with billions of rows, I wouldn't think, but that's one of the things that I'm always a little concerned about with these XML driven type of APIs. I've asked the question now, five times, I feel like I should ask it [inaudible 00:32:05] I don't really need to, you know what I'm asking.   Tim Rodman (00:32:10): No, you got it. It's definitely slow. Now, when you connect to Acumatica from Excel, at least I haven't tried it in Power BI, but from Excel, at least it knows to use the JSON rather than the XML, which is a little friendlier, but it's still slow. I'm not to the point yet where I'm doing anything at massive scale. My thought is you would throw a Power BI premium license at it so you could do the incremental refresh because Acumatica does retain all the last modified information on all the records. So you'd be able to do that. But where I'm at right now with clients is, and I use your line all the time. And I most of the time credit you for it. Maybe not all the time. Most of the time I credit you for it. And the line is that, look, we're here to create numbers that never existed before in your organization. So I'm really not concerned about speed right now, I'm not even concerned about refresh right now.   Tim Rodman (00:33:02): I remember when we talked about back at the user group in 2013, when we talked, I remember you pointing out to me that most of your data sets were just CSV files, because you're just trying to show people calculations that they never even knew were possible. And once you blow their mind with that and you open those doors to all these sorts of different ways of looking at data than they even realized ever existed, then you can deal with the larger datasets, all the technical stuff that everyone wants to talk about. But to me, that's not the point. I just listen to your at Ken Puls podcast episode and he made the point that he still primarily lives in Excel with Power Pivot. And I do the same thing primarily for the reason that I'm communicating now in an application that you understand. And that's my whole goal. I'm just trying to get you in the door here. We're not trying to get too fancy yet. Just get you in the door.   Rob Collie (00:33:54): As a side note, I definitely need to connect you with the Excel team. They're hungry to talk to people like you who are still very much living in the modern Excel environment and not so much in the Power BI environment for good reason, one of them is so much more graphically sexy and has its own dedicated marketing and everything. Whereas Excel is this does anything tool. They can't just go out and promote Excel as the power tools that are within it. They have to do everything. They've got to cater to every kind of user as well.   Rob Collie (00:34:26): Power BI gets a much, much, much less diluted version of its own marketing than the Power BI equivalent hiding in Excel. It's a lot easier for Microsoft than for the Excel team and everybody to run into Power BI customers than it is to run into really hardcore Power Pivot customers. And I really think they need to meet you. The team does occasional meet the real world, meet the customer over a web meeting. I did one of those with them recently, and my main message to them was you need to talk to other people. I can tell you my story, but this is still going on out there and I'm not actively practicing it anymore. So if you're interested in talking to a whole bunch of Excel people about Power Pivot, let's hook that up.   Tim Rodman (00:35:03): Sure. Yeah. I will say that even though I introduce an Excel, I still view Excel more as a prototyping tool. I like to describe it as more like working with clay than working with concrete. I still do a lot out with the Acumatica reporting tools, but it's more like concrete. You make a report and someone's like, "Oh, I want to see this by item instead of by a customer." Then you got to get out the jackhammer, tear it down and report the concrete to make the report. Excel just much more malleable, right? So it's more my prototyping tool. The end results still might wind up with one of the Acumatica reporting tools or it might even wind up in Power BI. So another thing I like about Acumatica and I'd love to get an answer from someone, maybe you, anyone on this, you can embed Power BI back inside of Acumatica.   Tim Rodman (00:35:56): They've got a couple screens that they made where all you need is a Power BI Pro license on the Power BI side. And then you do it inside Acumatica. You sign up for a secret key on the Power BI side. You plug that in to Acumatica. And now I can drop reports on the Acumatica menu that are Power BI reports from powerbi.com. And I can assign security to those reports using the regular Acumatica security. So I have done that a few times, but Excel still my prototype, but then it might wind up permanently living in powerbi.com.   Tim Rodman (00:36:33): So my question is from a licensing perspective. So from a technical perspective, I know all I need is a Power BI Pro license. I plug that in, it works. And from the Power BI side, as far as I can tell, it looks at it like there's one user called Acumatica that's doing all the requests for reports. From an Acumatica side, I could have 10 people that are using that report. From a technical side, I know it works. From a legal side, I don't know if I'm supposed to buy Power BI licenses for all 10 people. And then how am I even supposed to monitor how I know how many people are really using it at that point? I'm not sure.   Rob Collie (00:37:14): I know that we've done quite a bit with Power BI embedded at this point. So someone on our team probably hasn't answered, there's always a little gray area in all Microsoft licensing. Sometimes it experiences there's been a little bit of don't ask, don't tell kind of gray area. You're saying that you're still managing to enforce row level security?   Tim Rodman (00:37:33): No. Okay. I give up row level security, which I'm okay with. Because again, after creating numbers that never existed before. So I give that up and I just get one user and I let everyone view that report who has access to it.   Rob Collie (00:37:46): So the gray area here might just be that okay. If you're willing to give up row level security and you're willing to give up usage reporting, right? Because only have one user, you only have one level of security there's no granularity there and there's also no granularity of user. I don't know, but I am not very close to the licensing stuff. I'd hate for anyone to be listening to this going, "Well, Rob Collie said it was okay." Like, Nope, no I did not.   Tim Rodman (00:38:10): And that's not what I'm looking for. This is a, "Hey, is anyone out there listening know the answer?" Because what I wonder is, is it more like a SQL thing where I can download the SQL developer edition, which has all the SQL functionality and nothing's going to stop me from using that in a production environment. Legally though, I shouldn't do that. Is this that same situation? If it is, it just seems strange that in 2022, I'm not going to get busted for more multiple people accessing Power BI. It just seems weird to me. So that's why I don't know if I'm missing something.   Rob Collie (00:38:41): It's just a matter of where they pay attention. Here's another way to say it is that, I bet that none of your clients make Microsoft's radar in terms of like there's even a salesperson assigned to them.   Tim Rodman (00:38:52): And that's kind of my explanation to clients at this time. It's like, "Look use at your own risk, but yeah. Is anyone going to care at this point? I don't know."   Rob Collie (00:39:01): So who owns the Pro licenses who's paying for them? Is it your clients or is it you?   Tim Rodman (00:39:06): The client would still pay. So yeah, that's where it's not quite embedded. My understanding of embedded is you're a software vendor. You're using Power BI on the backend and you bake it into your application. That's not the case here. We've got a client who buys their own license. They plug the keys into their own Acumatica environment, which was an off the shelf product, not something they created themselves. So yeah, it's kind of an interesting situation.   Rob Collie (00:39:28): We recently talked with Mary Fealty from Ireland and she runs a Power BI consulting practice. It's focused on like an industry that she knows very well. And she went to the trouble of having Power BI embedded implemented on her website. So her clients log into her website for their analytics, not to powerbi.com and never see any of the really scary, intimidating Power BI website Chrome, all the stuff, all the menus and all the bells and whistles that distract from the actual report. And I'm assuming you probably aren't seeing all those distractions in this lowercase E embedded story in Acumatica, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to embed and suddenly be looking like an eye frame to the entire Power BI workspace. Maybe that is what it Is.   Tim Rodman (00:40:20): No you're right. And that's what I like about it. It's very clean and really no one knows it's Power BI, but it's still interactive. You can still click on my slicers, drill down, stuff like that.   Rob Collie (00:40:29): So depending upon various sensitivities and things like that, I mean, one option for you would be to long term, big picture, blue sky thinking here would be to implement your own instance of Power BI embedded, pay the monthly premium All You Can Eat model and then none of your clients would even have that question anymore and they wouldn't have to buy any licenses either, you would be their only provider of all this. You'd have a stickier service as well, but at the same time they might be really nervous about now there's one more place where their data is exposed. Their BI is living in your... And it could still be embedded back by the way, just an idea.   Tim Rodman (00:41:09): It's a good point. There's actually a company in the Acumatica space. I'll give them a shout out, called DataSelf. And they do that. They started with Tableau actually. And now because everyone's asked them for Power BI as well, they're doing Power BI, but they basically our software company they're taking care of the licensing on the back end and delivering it up on the front end.   Rob Collie (00:41:29): Yes, DataSelf. Come to the dark side. We have cookies.   Tim Rodman (00:41:34): I love by the way, your YouTube video that you did, which I didn't realize was you until I heard it on the podcast, the one with Hitler. Oh, that one was awesome. The Alteryx licenses comment specifically was just awesome. I was falling off my chair when I heard the Alteryx licences.   Rob Collie (00:41:51): There's some serious insight baseball in that. We had like a year before, maybe two years before been at one of the large four accounting firms doing some work or at least some training, it was like a bake off. We were representing Power BI and Tableau had parked multiple of their own full-time employees in the offices at this firm. All they were was just do whatever you want. The reporting minions, build whatever you want. Because the Tableau licenses are so expensive, it made sense to just eat three employees on this account and Microsoft wasn't sending anybody. We got brought in by the accounting firm to represent the side, right?   Rob Collie (00:42:29): That just shows you the difference in business model between the two companies. When you have an extra zero on your price tag, you provide a lot more support, a lot more direct support. We were in there and it wasn't just Tableau, Alteryx was there and they had people on the ground. Wow, this is heavy. This is so heavy.   Tim Rodman (00:42:46): Crazy.   Rob Collie (00:42:47): Yeah. The one thing in there that I wish I hadn't done was explicitly name Power BI. That video comes off a little bit more like super, super, super partisan rather than just like telling the true joke about what's going on with Tableau, right? But oh, well, that video is modest success has still been like the most viewed thing I've ever put on YouTube.   Tim Rodman (00:43:11): It was well done. Just the lines were very well thought through, you could tell.   Rob Collie (00:43:16): There was a spreadsheet of the original, like the original German. And what I translated to was like when he said something repeatedly, that was very clearly the same word, I had it be the same thing in the English pseudo translation. You got to take an artisanal approach to Hitler Lampoon videos. But yeah, I didn't link that to any of our official accounts or anything, that was a burner. I'm glad you enjoyed that.   Tim Rodman (00:43:41): Well, I think it also highlights what I think you're very good at, which is communicating to I'll call it the masses, which is a lower price tag, so maybe you don't like to describe it that way, but even your book, your very popular book, that's what got me hooked. I mean, Andy is the one who opened the door, but then the book is what really got me in to Power BI and you made it clear very early on in that book about the whole calculate numbers that haven't existed. You might not have used that language, but it was very clear to me that Power BI was good at that. And when I first met you at that first user group, I'll go back to September, 2013 again, after we met at, I think it was a Microsoft office there in Independence, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, we then go across the street with just a few of us. Whoever wanted to, I think it was Mavis Winkle.   Rob Collie (00:44:34): Yeah, that's right.   Tim Rodman (00:44:37): I brought my laptop over there. I was the only one who brought my laptop and we're just sitting there at the bar. I pull out the laptop and you're asking me questions about what I was trying to do. And I was trying to write this Dax that would give me something that I think is a very common situation in ERP systems because ERP systems have a lot of one to many relationships and users though don't really understand that. When they're asking for something, they'll describe, "I want you to give me a list of purchase orders maybe and on those purchase orders, I want you to give me the date that it's supposed to get delivered." That's the way they're thinking. Purchase order, date. But in actuality, I just saw stat on this the other day. I think it's something like 52% of purchase order lines, wind up changing their delivery dates, especially nowadays with all the supply chain issues, right?   Tim Rodman (00:45:33): So that what ends up happening, even if you were lucky enough to place that order of 50 products with your supplier. And even if they put the same data on all 50 products, the chance of that not changing is very slim. So reality, you've got more multiple dates. So I was just trying to do something very simple. They just wanted to see it all in one cell in Excel and they just wanted, all right, if it's multiple dates, sure. Yeah. I don't believe it. But if that's what you say, I just want a comma delimited list. And that's when you, Rob Collie mentioned something that was coming called concatenate X. And I was like, "Oh, this is very interesting." And it didn't exist yet, but you already knew the problem. And I was very fascinated by that.   Rob Collie (00:46:17): So the way I remember it, we're going to take your memory as superior on this topic. But let me just tell you the way that I remember it, the way I remember it is that you and I were sitting there, in the course of that conversation, we came with the need for concatenate X.   Tim Rodman (00:46:31): Oh, that makes it even better than I remembered it.   Rob Collie (00:46:35): And then I went back to Microsoft and said, "Hey, can we have concatenate X?" And we eventually got it. The world would've discovered this a million times over as time went on, right? But I think that was the first time that I encountered a need for that concatenate function that didn't exist. There was no way to do it either without the concatenate X function.   Tim Rodman (00:46:55): Well, there was, but it was ugly. There was. I had something, but it was super ugly. I didn't like it.   Rob Collie (00:47:00): You don't want to feel dirty.   Tim Rodman (00:47:04): Yeah. You don't want to take forever to run and yeah, yeah. I know though, you came up with the name on the spot. So either you just named that on the spot, that's why I assume that you had already had this in mind.   Rob Collie (00:47:17): And again, I think it would've been a very, very, very obvious function name to Microsoft as well. Once we recognized that we'd gotten down to behind the scenes was this virtual table of strings. And we wanted to concatenate them all together. That is an X function. That's an iterative X function. Like the sum X function will go over that same table that you've generated in your measure.   Rob Collie (00:47:39): You're like three quarters of the way through the measure and you've generated this table and then some X will iterate over those and sum them up, right? We needed a text aggregation function of like sum X or average X or whatever, but I didn't have anything to do with writing the spec for how the concatenate function is built. They didn't even tell me they were doing it. I told them we needed it on this email exchange that very night or the next day, like how cool would be to have concatenate X. We just ran into a need for it. And...   Rob Collie (00:48:03): Like, how cool would it be to have ConcatenateX? We just ran into a need for it. And no one told me that they were doing it and then it just showed up.   Tim Rodman (00:48:06): Interesting. Well, that makes it even cooler. I love the function. And I also like how at the end, they give you the ability to say, I forget exactly how the arguments work, but something like, "All right, if I wind up with more than five values, I can display whatever I want". So that is just beautiful to me. Depending on how much space I have, I can say, "All right, show three dates, maybe".   Rob Collie (00:48:25): Yeah.   Tim Rodman (00:48:26): If it's more than three, then I can just display a message that says, "More than three dates".   Rob Collie (00:48:30): Yeah.   Tim Rodman (00:48:30): It works great. Especially on ERP data.   Rob Collie (00:48:32): Yeah. It was just a beautiful, beautiful thing. And I was so happy when it showed up. Now of course it might have been Tim that someone else had already been pressing for ConcatenateX. And it's just that I didn't have visibility into that. So my email to Microsoft that didn't pick up a lot of traction might have been because they were already working on it. Who knows, right? Until I know otherwise I will say that there is a reasonably good chance that you and I were the first place that the world discovered that it needed ConcatenateX. We were the reason that got implemented when it did, as opposed to later.   Tim Rodman (00:49:04): Well and there's one thing for sure. I was very happy that I brought my laptop to the bar.   Rob Collie (00:49:09): I was too because I was so geeked out about the idea of ConcatenateX. There's a blog post on my blog that used to get a lot of traction where I invented ContainsX, iterate through a table to see if it contains a string. And I think now today with functions like accept and intersect, in the DAX language, which didn't exist back then, I think ContainsX would be a much easier thing to do today than it used to be. The ContainsX post, the way I did it, the way I had to do it back then was really, really difficult. Very hairy, not fun. And it's much easier I think to use these new functions. But I don't know, I haven't tested that particular scenario. Those were fun blog posts to write though. And they used to get a lot of traffic. I don't think they do anymore. Because I think DAX has moved on and gotten better but ConcatenateX was a must have. There was just that there weren't really any of acceptable workarounds for that problem.   Tim Rodman (00:50:03): Well, I will say though that I am not a DAX master by any means.   Rob Collie (00:50:08): Neither am I anymore.   Tim Rodman (00:50:10): I feel like though I am still able to deliver value to clients. All going back to that numbers that never existed before. So take ConcatenateX as example, one simple function that you can use that does something that's very difficult to do otherwise. And it's just opening the door to these possibilities that you never even thought about before. I just did the other day for a client. This is the Sarah problem example, the bubble up type of situation.   Rob Collie (00:50:37): Yeah.   Tim Rodman (00:50:37): They just wanted to flag some stuff. So I went back to those blog posts that you've written and without fully understanding all the DAX, as long as it doesn't take forever to run and I can validate the numbers. I'm good with it. And the DAX doesn't look totally crazy. Like it's not understandable. I'm able to do really cool things with essentially Excel skills. And I was skeptical about this at first. I remember you turned to me one time during the user group and you're like, "Oh, Tim's got a question, Tim, the skeptic". You called me the skeptic. It's just my nature, I am skeptical about things. But it's really proven to be the case that a guy with primarily Excel knowledge is playing with DAX and I kind of have the feel for what I'm getting out of my league and I back off but it's still okay. I'm still able to deliver cool stuff. It's great. I love it.   Rob Collie (00:51:26): When I used to teach classes, one of the things I would try to drive home for people is that your first job is to go out and really suck at this stuff, really suck at DAX, really be bad at it. Because when you're bad at DAX, you're already a superhero. You've just got super powers. You just haven't learned how to control them yet. And you don't have to be, you don't have to be a master. And that's something we've talked about a lot recently, I think on episodes that we've recorded but I don't think have released yet. How put off I would be today if I tried to join the DAX army today from scratch? So much of the DAX are on internet sites these days like blogs, et cetera, is so hyper optimized, sophisticated and it works backward from the query.   Rob Collie (00:52:07): It works backward from creating the right table. And then only at the last minute does it do the math over this virtual table that's been created. Whereas the original dirty alleyway street fight version of DAX that I was practicing was more about the verb. It was more about the thing we had to go do. And ignoring these virtual tables as much as possible until you got deeper and deeper and you had to learn more and more about virtual tables. And there's a reasonably good chance that I would look at today's DAX articles and such and go, "Oh no, this isn't for me". But the real test of it is the value you can deliver. And I'm not a DAX's master either. Everyone at the company is better at DAX than I am. I will on occasion have to go asking for DAX help from our own team and they always solve my problem. And I go, "Wow, that's great".   Tim Rodman (00:52:57): Well, I think that's the power of the community speaking right there, right? I mean, that's going back to the Excel example to why Excel is so popular. It's not because the functions are named the best and do the brutally most efficient calculations. Why is Excel popular? Because I can go on Google and Google my business problem language of what I'm looking to do. And I can land on a blog post that shows me how to do it. It's the same with DAX now, right? I can just kind of Google what I'm trying to do and I can pretty quickly, usually land on something very often. One of your old blog posts that kind of walks me through, not just how to do it but the philosophy on why you took that approach. And that's good enough. I understand what's going on. I don't know the super technical details of it but it solves the problem and I move on.   Rob Collie (00:53:46): Yeah, it's Decathlon again, right? You need to be credible in every event, 90th percentile at every event. And that at Decathlon is 99th percentile all overall. That's good enough. So yeah, there are a few things that I've been writing down as we go here. So have you ever met Kellan?   Tim Rodman (00:54:02): I don't think so. There was one person I was on a phone call with, I can't remember who it was. I don't think so though. Not Kellan.   Rob Collie (00:54:08): Oh the two of you would get along famously. He's the business process architect, Rain man genius behind the scenes here at P3. And not even really behind the scenes, I mean he runs the thing. So anyway, the things you were saying about you can't influence process without paying attention to reporting. You don't want to just be stuck on the reporting side without the ability to influence process. That sounds like good Kellan Danielson and Yoda wisdom that you were laying down there. Like I started getting my, this is Kellan Twitch. So if I think about it from like a CRM perspective, you want to influence the quality of the data that's being captured and entered by human beings.   Rob Collie (00:54:51): So just really simple example, if you can go upstream and you can introduce better data validation on a particular form field that ensures that it doesn't have any letters in it or something, right? That can have an enormous impact. That's the most simple example of that. Is that how you look at it? When it comes to reporting, the business process, not just the process but also the software and the UI that implements that process. It's upstream from the reporting. And if you can filter the junk proactively, then your reporting is not breathing so much carbon dioxide.   Tim Rodman (00:55:29): Absolutely. The way I like to describe it. And I think this comes from my accounting background and the way I describe ERP systems to people is that accounting is the graveyard of every ERP transaction.   Rob Collie (00:55:42): Oh, I love that.   Tim Rodman (00:55:42): Unfortunately, a lot of accountants-   Rob Collie (00:55:44): Can you say that one more time? I just want to hear that, I want that twice on this show. Do it again.   Tim Rodman (00:55:52): To me accounting, specifically, the Journal-Ledger is the graveyard of every ERP transaction. An ERP system is designed around the Journal-Ledger. A CRM system is designed around the customer but an ERP system is designed around the Journal-Ledger. So that everything flows downhill into the accounting department. Now it's the graveyard but there's still a lot of what I'll call Zombie transactions that go on because the accountants are stuck in their cubicles. They don't want to go outside the cubicles to fix the sludge that's flowing downhill. So they just correct things in the Journal- Ledger with all these zombie transactions. And it's a nightmare situation but I like being in the position to say, "Hey, how about we go upstream? How would we fix it there? Then your month end process close is going to be a lot easier." So one thing I like designing in Acumatica, there's a dashboard utility that you can do in Acumatica.   Tim Rodman (00:56:51): Nothing like Power BI but it's all right. And I like designing what I call a stuff that should never happen dashboard. And it's got just a bunch of widgets on it. They're very simple KPI widgets that just have a number. And if the number's greater than zero then it's red.   Rob Collie (00:57:08): Yeah.   Tim Rodman (00:57:09): If the number's zero then it's green. So all those situations that I find rather than even trying to fix them yet, I just put them on the dashboard and then you can at least look at the dashboard. If I see any red widgets on there, I click in and I find the transactions that I need to fix. That right there helps but it's even better, like you said, if you can go upstream and fix it, wherever it got entered.   Rob Collie (00:57:31): I love the philosophy behind that kind of report. A report that if I everything's right, it's empty. Exception reports like that are glorious. And the way you construct them is in a way validating that things are operating the way they're supposed to. And I love that kind of stuff. I think that is more and more of the world's reporting should be designed that way. Not everything fits that mold but sometimes all you're doing is looking at a report full of numbers, trying to find a place where two numbers are different when they shouldn't be. Well, then just make the report that goes and does that for you goes. And computers are really good at this sort of thing, comparing two numbers over hundreds of rows or thousands or millions, whatever. And just let me know when there's an exception.   Tim Rodman (00:58:11): I think that's an interesting point you just made. I have a philosophy on that, that I think that why people accept that has a lot to do with paper, historically. So if you think about someone's DAX, historically. One, it was a lot larger than our DAX now. And why? It was so I could have stacks of reports sitting on the DAX. Yeah. And why did I have stacks of reports? Because that was the only way to get the data out. And what did I do with it? I just sifted through the pages. Sometimes I manually added stuff up or I was looking for just those few numbers. And that's just what I was used to doing in a paper world. So it kind of just carried over to the digital world. And we're not quite there yet where people are saying, "Why don't we just skip that step and just highlight the stuff that we need to care about, right?"   Rob Collie (00:58:51): Oh, I completely agree with you. And I think you can take that as even a more general principle, which is that so many of the things in the business world today that we take for granted are merely the artifacts of how hard it would've been in the past to do it differently. For example, one of the reasons why certain organizations run on these weird custom calendars that are four week, five week, is because, gosh, like there's no way for us to compare months against each other because they have different composition of weekdays and weekends. In a lot of businesses that makes a big difference. Some businesses are weak on weekends or slow on weekends and others are exactly the opposite. And so the ratio of weekday and weekend days in a month is going to heavily skew your numbers.   Rob Collie (00:59:35): So the solution was to just completely throw out the calendar and change the entire calendar to compensate for this. Whereas if we'd had DAX from the beginning, we might have said, "Hey look, no, we can calculate a good denominator here". We can do that sort of the weighted average of composition of each month and sort of level set for fairness to make it an apples and apples comparison across months, across periods. And now we wouldn't have to carry around all of this tremendous weight. Another version of this is I ask, why is revenue dollars typically the first column in almost every report? It's not the most insightful metric for managing your business. It's just the easiest number to calculate.   Tim Rodman (01:00:13): I totally agree with that. Well, same with your dates thing. I think in a lot of ERP systems, you can only run it by financial period.   Rob Collie (01:00:20): Yeah.   Tim Rodman (01:00:20): So people had to make the financial period more granular to your point because they couldn't go all the way down to the date level or would overwhelm the calculation engine. Yeah, absolutely.   Rob Collie (01:00:28): So there's an opportunity. And this also rears its head in, I'm going to get a little bit out over my skis here, just a little bit but not too much, which is a lot of reporting has historically been tied to the monthly close. Because just the amount of labor that goes into everything, it's not something you can repeat more than once a month. Well, we can only close the books once a month because it's so labor intensive and that's the only time that the numbers are going to be right. And so we only find out our number at the end of the month and it's like surprise. "We thought we were doing well this month but nope we didn't. And it's too late to change anything. So just everybody just cross your fingers and grit your teeth and next month will be better, right?"   Rob Collie (01:01:03): This non actionable version of BI that got this reputation for being rear view mirror only. And so often what one of the themes is you just go in to any organization and find the reports that are only generated once a month and start generating them daily. And suddenly they're now actionable. It's the same number. It's just that you get a preview of what the end of the month is going to look like five days in and the opportunity to make a change. It's all about the action.   Tim Rodman (01:01:27): It's the same premise behind the stuff that should never happen dashboard. Who that resonates the most with is the accountant because it takes them a lot longer to close the month when they find that bad stuff that they need to clean up. The problem isn't just that they need to clean it up all at once at the end of the month. The other problem is no one remembers why it happened because it happened two weeks ago.   Rob Collie (01:01:47): Yeah.   Tim Rodman (01:01:48): If I can know when it happened, it's fresh in everyone's mind and it's a lot faster to clean it up. Yeah?   Rob Collie (01:01:52): Yeah. So good. Right. Two weeks in business is a long time. A lot of memory gets lost in that. I can completely see that. You're talking about these numbers that don't exist, right? It's been so long since I've said that. And it's not because that saying has lost its power. I've just forgotten it. I hadn't heard that in a long time. We're creating the numbers that didn't exist before, the numbers you either really badly wished you could have or wouldn't have even dared to imagine that were possible, is very often even that second category. I think the closest thing that I say to that these days is faucets first. What everyone needs is water. So let's go build a faucet. And if we need to run a hose to the faucet rather than some sophisticated stainless steel pipe or a copper pipe, we don't have to even go into pecks for this. We just need a hose and everyone's going to get a drink and everyone's going to hydrate.   Rob Collie (01:02:39): And we're going to be better off. Do that first because you don't even really know how much water you need out of the faucet or where the faucet should be located. And BI was so forever a plumbing first endeavor which was just an epic fail. Just never worked. Never once. I was still challenged for the world to show me the BI project that was plumbing first and was actually successful. And then whenever someone submits a candidate for this, we just go look at it and say, "Oh look, look the export to Excel button is just being worn out".   Tim Rodman (01:03:12): The most popular reporting button. I use that line a lot as well. I love that line. I actually experienced this recently with the client. They wanted to report on their phone call data. So for their industry, as a lot of checking in with their customers, otherwise they don't necessarily get the orders. They go somewhere else and they wanted to mash-up the phone it with the billing data. And at first we started to attack it the old way. It's like, "Ah, well there's an API available that we could use to suck in the data on a nightly basis, blah-blah". But eventually I'm like, "Ah, how do we just tack it from the other angle? Let's just get one data dump and let's build the report".   Tim Rodman (01:03:49): We did it in Excel with Power BI. And once we had what the end result looked like and they were thrilled with it and now they're using it. Now you're motivated to go kind of back into the plumbing, right?   Rob Collie (01:04:02): Totally.   Tim Rodman (01:04:02): And that's what we did. Now it lives in powerbi.com but it didn't start there. It started in Excel and that's the hardest part, getting momentum, getting off the ground, finding that end result and then working backwards. That's just technical stuff. right?   Rob Collie (01:04:15): I think people often will get confused when I'm talking like this and go, "Wait, do you have something against good high quality plumbing? Do you have something against data marks and data warehouses?" I am like, "No, I do not. If that exists, I'm going to start there".   Tim Rodman (01:04:30): Agreed.   Rob Collie (01:04:30): But if it doesn't exist, I am not going to get hung up on it. Because I'm positive. We can be delivering amazing business changing results within a matter of a week or two at the most. Even if we just don't worry about the plumbing for now, we can get there. And one of my earliest clients when it was still just me, the whole project started with exports from Cognos that were dumped into a desktop SQL because we didn't have Power Query yet. There was no other way to ingest text files. Dumped into desktop SQL and all this dashboard did, this scorecard was reverse their stock price decline.   Rob Collie (01:05:07): And no one was complaining as the stock price went from trending down to trending up. No one was complaining about the fact that every week or whatever someone had to go and re-run an export and dump it back into SQL, right? This went on for like 18 months. Changing the fortunes of everybody, like the shareholders were happy. And then they finally said, "Okay, all right, we're burning a little bit too much labor here. Let's go and bite the bullet and that was a longer project." That was the apex predator of a plumbing project, right? Because the reason the export happened from Cognos is because the relationships with all the operational systems that fed ultimately up. There was all this security and nuance about schema and everything that had only been captured in the Cognos universe.   Rob Collie (01:05:50): Actually business object is the one with universe but whatever, anyway, a lowercase universe for anyone who's out there. Wining in pain right now. Either way, they're both gone, we're replacing all of them. So they had to go back to raw from the metal ETL. I mean that was a big project to get the manual refresh out of the loop. But it was one of those things where you could sort of confidently execute the project. You knew exactly what the ROI was.   Tim Rodman (01:06:14): And that's I think the key right there. You know justification for the spend. Yes, absolutely.   Rob Collie (01:06:19): So the people who get upset at me when I say, "No, don't build the data warehouse first". If I'm on my game that day, I said, "No, data warehousing follows what we do". Where we usually there's an uptick in ETL, eventually relative to even before, we're not the end of it. We're not the asteroid that eliminates ETL. ETL multiplies after we've been working somewhere for a while because there's ROI in it. It's provable, it's concrete. Whereas these people have been burned so many times by the plumbing first philosophy that they don't want to a green light any more plumbing projects. Now it's more like as tactical plumbing projects, those add up to be more time for the data warehousing pros and the ETL pros and all of that than they would've been spending otherwise on their one glistening shining monolith to rule the all that never finishes.   Tim Rodman (01:07:06): This is not an environmentally friendly analogy here but maybe we've got a forest and farms analogy where you're going through and all these trees are these very challenging business problems, right? We're chopping down trees here and clearing more space for farmland. We're not anti farming. We're making room for more farmland, right? To your point, there's going to be more data warehouse work on the backend for you. So we're working together here.   Rob Collie (01:07:29): Yeah. It's just that we don't cut the tree down immediately. We walk around the forest a little bit. We blea some paths and then maybe we'll go back and clear the trees, whatever.   Tim Rodman (01:07:38): Oh yeah, there you go. Maybe we're more surveying. Yeah. We're finding a way through the forest and then you come back and build the road. Yeah. Maybe that's better.   Rob Collie (01:07:45): You're right. There's no PR or value in us in this metaphor. Right? Either way we're going to clear cut.   Tim Rodman (01:07:53): Yeah. It's not a good modern analogy.   Rob Collie (01:07:55): All right. Well, one day as a lumberjack would probably be one day too many for me, I would not farewell. So, okay. We talked about the value in being able to go upstream from the reporting. But what about the flip side? What about going downstream from the reporting? So you think about it being a loop. So data comes out of these business processes goes into the reporting. You have great example, your exceptions, right? So your exception calls out. There's something wrong here. All right. This is something that I think another way that things are going to be growing, coming up is that exception report. Now I'm going to pick on it a little bit without knowing anything about it. So if I'm wrong about this, I'm about to say then perfect. I'm exonerated. Because I actually don't know any of the details.   Rob Collie (01:08:38): This is a safe place. Think about that exception report. It tells you there's a problem. But then it sits there and says, "Good luck. Go solve that problem, right?" The report gets to take a total pass. It gets amnesty from being involved in helping you solve it. When reporting is doing its job, it basically helping you come to the conclusion that there's actions you need to take. Information and a vacuum is worth nothing. It's only when it translates into improvement and actual improved action that it makes a difference. Okay. Why does the dashboard at the piece of software? Why does the report get to bow out of the action taking process? It knows all the context, right? It knows the things that are mismatched. It knows the systems. In some sense, it knows the systems or at least it combined with the report author and the Power BI people.   Rob Collie (01:09:24): We know the systems that it came from. Why not have a button right there that says, "Help me go fix it"? What typically happens is you have to leave the context of the report. Completely shift gears, go sometimes even log in to a different system, one of the operational systems. And then look back at the report. What was the ID on that again? Oh, okay. I got to go search for ID. 63157. Increasingly I'm trying to, the times that I actually do build business focused reports, which usually happens in our advertising, analyzing our advertising spend and effectiveness here. I will try to include contextual links, the calculated column of a concatenation of something. So I can go to the salesforce record of this lead and to further explore, it's like a drill down like a drill through a drill across type of thing.   Rob Collie (01:10:13): And the way that Microsoft, this is going back to your point about keeping an eye on dynamics in that side view mirror. One of the things that are up to and this is something we talked about relatively at length on the podcast with Lori Rodriguez, if anyone's listened to this and is interested in hearing more about this. Go listen to the Lori Rodriguez's podcast, which I think is the longest one of all time.   Rob Collie (01:10:35): But I think that closing that action loop is going to be one of the ways in which BI tools are going to be evaluated going forward. BI has never until very recently been able to remotely deliver on its initial promise. The promises that the BI industry were telling 30 years ago were never fulfilled. There was never a happy zone where you actually got it under control and you actually did a good job of BI. But what we found is that our clients start to get the BI monster under control. They start to realize that, "Oh yeah, this is just part of a bigger story". And so I think that BI is not going to get the excuse. It's not going to get the free pass to get out of jail free car when it comes to taking action. And so this is where Microsoft's strategy, when they started calling this stuff Business Apps, it all started to dawn on me about a year and a half ago.   Rob Collie (01:11:21): Remember the scene in independence day, where they start to figure out what's happening. They see the countdown, they go, "Oh, checkmate, right?" They know that the of the attack is coming before it actually happens. That's kind of the feeling I got when I started putting it all together. I'm like, "Oh, no look out everybody, here it comes. It's coming in slow motion. And there's nothing you can do about it". Which is the whole Power apps thing. The flows thing, all of these Power Virtual Agents, all of this stuff is the condensed version of it. If you start to view BI as a form of middleware because it's having to touch different systems, maybe there's some exceptions in your world with Acumatica but most of the time, what we find is that the ERP have-   Rob Collie (01:12:03): Your world with Aragami. But most of the time, what we find is that the ERP has, let's say, some large fraction of the data that's relevant to some report. But there's other systems, there's other line of business systems that are outside the ERP that are just as relevant, and in order to get an end to end view of how things are performing, and Power BI is so good at this, right? The splicing, it happens with a star schema and the data model, and it's just so effortless. You think of it as this bridge between systems, but it's read only, it's read only middleware.   Rob Collie (01:12:29): Well, you start to view it as, okay now that purpose of that middleware is to tell you things that you should probably be doing to improve. Now, you can get the old fashion middleware that take action, more transactional middleware. And why can't that take off from inside the Power BI report itself? And there's so many different levels of ambition there. The least ambitious is the kind I just described with the calculated column and the hyperlink, at least don't make me re-navigate to the same context again, because the report knows.   Tim Rodman (01:12:57): When your point about the hyperlink, yeah, before it gets even fancier, that's huge. The simple lowly hyperlink is the reason why, in my opinion, web-based applications are a big deal. Because like in Acumatica and I'm sure it's similar and other truly web-based systems, the transaction number is built into the URL. When I navigate to a record, the URL has that record ID in it. So if I build a hyperlink that has that record ID, I go specifically to that transaction, not just to that screen. That ability to click on something was something you couldn't really do in desktop applications. And you might be sitting there thinking, Tim, who uses desktop applications anymore?   Tim Rodman (01:13:39): Well, in an ERP world, still most of the systems were designed like in the 1980s. And because of that whole, once you're in it, it's hard to get out of it. It's still very, very common. So yeah, even just there, if you just do that calculated column with that hyperlink, I think that's a big deal. Because I'm one click now right to the transaction where I need to make the change.   Rob Collie (01:13:59): That's the least sophisticated version. And the most sophisticated version is that they're is a button in the report. You can increase quantity, "Oh we need to order three more widgets or 30 more or 300 more to fill this warehouse back up before it runs out." Right? Why not just to have the button right there that says, "Okay, order 300 or transfer 50 from warehouse six or whatever." Right? So, it could be directly integrated into the system. Now, [Louie 01:14:24] on that same podcast said, "Why doesn't it go the other way though? Why don't you go into the ERP system and have the reports just as like contextual popups there?" And I didn't even really understand a hundred percent what she was saying at the time, but turns out [Nar 01:14:39] on our team, just listen to that podcast. And then sent me this link to MicroStrategy.   Rob Collie (01:14:44): I thought that MicroStrategy had converted themselves 100% into a Bitcoin trading operation. Because they've got a very... They're led... They have eccentric leadership let's say. But now, they have this thing, I forget what they call it, I think they call it Hyper-Intelligence. And it looks to me like it's a browser plugin that allows micro strategy reports to be attached to objects in your Salesforce, in your ERP, if it's web-based, right? You're in.   Rob Collie (01:15:09): And there's probably something where you... I was hypothesizing this and I think he's right. There's probably something where you can identify certain HTML tags and say, "Take this dimension value out of this tag and use it to filter the report."   Tim Rodman (01:15:22): I see some training software that takes a similar approach, right? It knows when you hover over something or click on something then that relevant video or whatever pops up. Yeah.   Rob Collie (01:15:30): I've got a long history with browser plugins. Because I saw them deployed for the first time when I was working at Microsoft in the late nineties, there was... Office deployed this thing were it allow you to comment on any webpage, insert comments into any webpage. And the way it worked was you just, the comments weren't being stored in the webpage, because the webpage wasn't owned by the system. You could make a comment on an ESPN article. The comments were stored in this Office database, this Office server database that predated SharePoint, and the browser plugin knew what webpage, the URL and what element you commented on. And that's how it could pull up... So we could have like threaded conversations on webpages back in the late nineties.   Rob Collie (01:16:10): Also, when we had Kai and Brad on the show in one of the earliest episodes, one of our entire earliest products was nothing, but a browser plugin that took over from Facebook. It's really funny story, if you haven't heard that one.   Rob Collie (01:16:25): So, browser plugins are pretty amazing. And I looked at that and now I looked at that and I was like, "Oh, this is hot. This is a way..." As far as I know Microsoft hasn't explored this particular thing yet. That would be a really amazing. And it not difficult at all for them to do. I think this is a well within their capabilities and their platform. They could probably have that going in a couple of sprints.   Tim Rodman (01:16:46): Why I think Dynamics 365 is very much on my radar is, I would define it this way... Technically, I don't think would actually be this. But I think of it this way, if you just design an entire ERP application in Power Apps, that's essentially, what's interesting to me about it. Because now, Power Apps can be inside Power BI, Power BI can be inside Power Apps and you now have the flexibility on either end, to your point, to put the report on the data entry screen or to have the button on the report.   Tim Rodman (01:17:16): And because it's all a first class citizen in the same platform, you'd be able to do that. And I think part of the trick there is the back end and that's the Dataverse/common data model part of it. If all the data's getting stored in the same place. And I think that seems to be where they're headed, that's a pretty compelling scenario.   Rob Collie (01:17:35): Well, I do think it bears watching even if the picture I'm painting is correct, this is still very much check-mate in low motion. It's not like we're four weeks away from the extinction of salesforce.com   Tim Rodman (01:17:47): Case in point, most mid-market EERP systems are from the 1980s, making one of those things go away is almost impossible.   Rob Collie (01:17:54): But Microsoft can play the long game here. It's like every year the oxygen content and the Salesforce bubble drops by half a percent.   Tim Rodman (01:18:08): I totally agree with you there.   Rob Collie (01:18:09): "You're breathing a little heavy over there, Salesforce? How's it going? I wouldn't worry about it Salesforce is no big deal, just atmospheric irregularity."   Tim Rodman (01:18:19): Your only hope is Satya getting replaced with a Steve Ballmer number two, that's the only hope you have.   Rob Collie (01:18:24): I don't think that's going to happen. I had a much greater affinity for Ballmer than I did for Bill. I think it's justified, but it also bothers me that Ballmer gets such a bad rep. Because he was a leader that I actually wanted to work for. I wanted to do better for him. And I did not get that feeling from... Bill had no desire to develop or encourage or inspire anyone.   Tim Rodman (01:18:51): Yeah. I'm not talking about personal level. I mean just more as a strategic, the business Apps versus the phones and the retail stores, on that level purely.   Rob Collie (01:19:01): Totally, totally. I get that. I'm not any good at that. I wouldn't be able to lead a multi-billion dollar organization like Microsoft in a chaotic time like that either. So, I'm very sympathetic to that. And so then it just becomes personal to me. Like, "Who would I actually want to work with? Who would I want to work for? Who would I want to pledge my sword to?"   Tim Rodman (01:19:17): I got to circle back on something before we run it out of time. I won't say his last name, but a guy named Tony that I work with at the Robins company. So, I'll go back to the first guest blog post I did on your blog was April, 2014. And what I was experiencing or on the beginning of experiencing was the whole idea that you laid out in the book, which was more business first, not IT first, business led. And so I was trying that out at the Robbins Company, of, "Hey, how about instead of IT creating all the reports..." We had hundreds of reports and we just kept creating more and creating more. "How about we try empowering the business users to create their own reports?" So we did that with Power Pivot. We've built a little data warehouse that gave you easy access to the data, and then tried showing people how to do stuff with Power Pivot.   Tim Rodman (01:20:07): And I'd say we had at least a couple of successful people that came out of that. And one of them was Tony. Who actually I believe in the past year or so, made it through your interview of death. Although, he is working at DataSelf currently, that's where he ended up landing. Point is that the whole business first, even with Power BI, it can succeed. Tony was on the business side, but he totally dove in, loved the stuff and became self-serving in a sense in terms of being able to self propel himself to continuing to learn DAKS, and all that stuff.   Rob Collie (01:20:43): Yeah. And I think that there's still institutional resistance to this idea, big time, but it's not as open anymore. The idea that the business should be closely involved in the creation BI has, I think has become relatively non-controversial. I enjoyed it when it was controversial. It was more fun in some ways, but it's better for business when it's not. There's still tremendous resistance underground in IT circles in certain places anyway. All the time I'm running into examples where I see, especially large enterprises, by default attempting to use Power BI as just the new SSRS. They're try to pigeonhole it as visualization. It's just the thing that's at the end of the query drive train, that's still missing the point.   Tim Rodman (01:21:24): Let's Still do all the ETL, all the data warehouse outside of it. And we'll just slap Power BI for the visual layer. Yep. definitely seen that.   Rob Collie (01:21:31): It's not even the last mile, right? It's the last three feet, that's how they view it. Look behind the hood of those Power BI reports, and every one of them is powered by one wide franken table view out of SQL. You're just like, "Oh, Dios mio."   Tim Rodman (01:21:43): When I think, you've made this point on previous episodes, that say in a sense you might say that challenge has been overcome, but I think it's cropping back up again, because of Power BI success. I think you've made this point on previous episodes, that now Power BI is so well known that it's in organizations, they don't even know what it is, right? So they don't even know about the need for a star schema and measures and all that. So, I think it is maybe coming back around as the same problem, but with different symptoms that you have to look for, if you want to attack it.   Rob Collie (01:22:16): Yeah. Now it's being adopted a lot of times because it's so cost effective compared to the competition and it's become the responsible choice. The reason why the Excel crowd took to it, at least initially, like in our classes in particular, like is because they've been doing things in Excel the hard way for so long. And they're so personally motivated to not do that hard way and that limiting way. So, in order to break out of that shell, you had to start doing things a little bit differently. You had to learn about lookup tables, dimension tables, and why you need them. And don't hard code a year into your DAKS, use data ad. So, that formula works everywhere.   Rob Collie (01:22:54): You just, all these things that you are motivated to make that change. IT very often, it's like, "Okay, well this is the new tech, we'll plug it into this role." And a lot of times the software is like that, right? You upgrade or purchase a software in a particular role and you still have to do a lot of shimming, but it's interface with the world is the same. It plays the same role. Power BI does not play the same role when you're doing it, right? So when you said you got this person, you're going to name by my first name, but you weren't going to give the last name, I was positive that different first name was going to come out of your mouth.   Rob Collie (01:23:23): Because I have a similar thing to say, I've been this whole time to say it. I have no idea if you're aware of this connection, you probably are, but it'll be fun either way, but it'll be delicious if you're not aware of it. So a few years ago I ended up having some relatively serious business conversations with someone who was out of my league, not just out of my league, but also like a different flavor, very much the executive that's like, "Don't waste my time." Type of executive. "I'm not playing games here." That kind.   Rob Collie (01:23:54): Which, even if I reached the level of success this person has, I wouldn't be like that. So, it was like, there were two problems going on, I was out of my depth and going cross species communication. And so, I was not acquitting myself well at all in these conversations. This guy, every time we interacted, he just came away, I think, with a lesser impression of me. Every single time. It was like every time I said something, he just would like shake his head like, "Oh, oh my sweet summer child." Right? Over and over and over again. And so like, he just wrote me off.   Rob Collie (01:24:23): And now, years later I would approach the same conversation in a very different way. I've learned a lot. I've changed a lot and I do a better job, but I just kept faceplanting with this guy. And then after he wrote me off, months pass and all of a sudden now the blue, I get an email from him. And it says, "Why didn't you tell me you knew Tim Rodman?"   Tim Rodman (01:24:44): I think I Know who this is. but keep going.   Rob Collie (01:24:46): This was like the one time that I had any leverage at all on him. And I'm like, "Oh, yeah." And I reply back, I'm like, "Of course I know Tim Rodman, how do you know him?" So, that reopened the conversation. I swear, just him finding out that you and I knew each other, it was enough for him to reopen the conversation with me. And then, I faceplanted again. And he wrote me off again. But you almost resurrected that without even lifting a finger.   Rob Collie (01:25:20): It turns out that the thing we were talking about turned out to be not even be necessary. We didn't need it. At the time I thought we might need this relationship. And so I was still trying, but I'm older, I'm wiser, and I've had more at bats. But this is a relationship I am permanently like his Bozo zone. That's how much weight your name carries. He temporarily thought I was less of a Bozo, until I re-convince him.   Tim Rodman (01:25:51): It's amazing when you start blogging, right? You just have no idea who read your stuff and what they think about you. And I think it's a blessing and a curse. I almost wonder, actually, I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. There's a person I was following who worked at Microsoft for a while, Jen Underwood. And I heard her make comments on a podcast, something about blogging, she wouldn't do it again, if she could start over. And she is like, "I estimate that I probably lost over a million dollars through that dumb blog basically."   Tim Rodman (01:26:23): And actually, you can't even find her blog anymore. I think for technical reasons, she was getting so much spam and stuff that the site went down or something. But I'm curious actually your perspective. Blogging is just giving stuff away, and you don't even get the return 90 plus percent of the time. How do you sit with that nowadays looking back?   Rob Collie (01:26:42): It's a complicated answer. Well, first of all, P3 wouldn't exist if I hadn't blocked. There's no two ways about it. There's so many ways in which it wouldn't have existed without the blog. I wouldn't have even discovered how awesome this stuff was if I hadn't blogged about it. But that's something that a lot of people I think don't know, or even if they were reading back then, they don't remember is that... Well, actually I never really told anybody either. I came clean about it over the years in the blog. But the beginning, I didn't think it was going to be any good. I was just writing blog to find a job, because I had to move to Cleveland, my clock was running out of my Microsoft career because I was in Cleveland. And so, I wouldn't have discovered how good the tools were.   Rob Collie (01:27:21): I wouldn't have then known that the consulting industry was going to need a real makeover from scratch makeover. And so, the idea of building a consulting firm in a new from the ground up was part of that discovery process. And then, all of the original business that I had as a consultant, came through the website. And of course you're right, my website traffic tells one story, and then the number of clients tells a different story. Lot, at least two zeros off of the number. You're like going for a very small percentage. Converting one of your blog readers into customers is amazing, in terms of actual quantity of people. And it was just the blog for so long, that was our biz dev. It was our advertising, it was everything. People would just hit us up, despite the blog looking silly and lots of stick figure illustrations.   Rob Collie (01:28:09): And even those were like really, really polished compared to the origin illustrations I was using. A lot of times people would read the blog and not even know that we were a company. So, it was a crucial bootstrapping device in so many ways. I refined my voice. I learned what worked. I learned priceless amount of wisdom, built up in the course of writing that blog for so many years. And I have no regrets about blogging, I think it was great.   Rob Collie (01:28:33): Now today I went and enter the Power BI blogosphere today, because it's just so heavily diluted. So heavily competed. There's so many players in that space and we've been out of that game. I've been out of that game for so long, that the vast majority... Well, not vast, but certainly the majority of people who are using Power BI today, have no idea about there was this thing, power pivot pro.com. So it's a different ROI today.   Rob Collie (01:28:56): Now at the same time, think about giving things away for free. Look at the podcast. We're still in, we're not giving away formulas for free here, but people who are listening are deriving some degree of professional benefit from it, at times, it doesn't have to be every minute of every podcast, right? And we give it away. We're not charging for it, anything like that. So, we're still in the free content biz. We have some other things in the works that are even more ambitious. In the spirit of free content. Writing a lot of blog posts about DAKS would be, for us that's yesterday in our life cycle, we have moved to the next stage of things. And that's not really where the customers are necessarily. The richness of customers... The density of potential customers isn't necessarily, unfortunately it's not found where the formula writers go. Because the formula writers, they don't end up being in charge as often as they should be.   Tim Rodman (01:29:45): I'm not even necessarily trying to put dollars on things. When you put content out there coming back to what opened this topic was, you make connections that you don't even realize half the time. Right? So you definitely get a return in terms of you learn a ton of stuff and doors do open. But I think the weird thing about it, is many times connections are made that you have no idea about. To bring it back to what brought this up, right?   Tim Rodman (01:30:08): And there is something that's like, you don't get to participate in that, right? You don't even get to see that part of it. You just put something out there and it goes out into the universe and maybe never returns, right? And there's something a little sad about that part about it. But I agree that overall, it opens doors and it connects you to opportunities that never would've been there.   Rob Collie (01:30:28): And if I had more time, and I had something interesting to be blogging about, and I actually do it just doesn't happen to be DAKS anymore, right? I would love to go back to writing in a public sense. I would write on different topics. I probably wouldn't write on Power BI.   Tim Rodman (01:30:43): That makes sense to me, it's a trailblazing medium blogging, right? When you're cutting that path through the forest, blogging is just a great way to keep your sanity and even for yourself to go look years later at what you were learning at the time, right? But yeah, once you're rolling, it's just a lot of work for maybe not as much output.   Rob Collie (01:31:03): And then just the personal satisfaction. I just don't think that I have nearly as much to contribute on an incremental relative basis to what it's already out there today, relative to what I could have before. Why would my DAKS' post be any more useful than someone else's. I am debating writing up a word Aragami model.   Tim Rodman (01:31:21): Ooh, what's that?   Rob Collie (01:31:23): Have you been exposed to a word Aragami thing?   Tim Rodman (01:31:23): I don't think so.   Rob Collie (01:31:24): The idea is a word that appears in the podcast for the first time in its history. So, Acumatica is never appeared in the podcast until today. However, Acumatica is going to get filtered out of the word Aragami game because it doesn't appear in our 200,000 word Corpus dataset of most commonly used English words. It's not an English word really. It's a proper... It's a brand name, right? So Acumatica is not going to count as a word Aragami. But we get transcripts done of every podcast. For example, go look at my Twitter account or the P3 Twitter account.   Rob Collie (01:31:55): Most of the tweets lately from those two accounts just in the last few days have been the word Aragami word clouds of certain episodes. So think about the analysis that goes into that. We have to take these text files of transcripts, feed them through Power Query, QRL all of the headers and I stamps and all of that, and then ultimately split every sentence on every space and turn it into like a nearly million row table of individual words and who spoke them and when, and then do this really crazy like year to date or inception to date type of greatest formula in the world pattern. But looking for whether this word has been used before.   Tim Rodman (01:32:32): That's sound like a good blog post. Well, it's one of those things too, right? Whether the blogs are worth it or not. I think both of us would say they are. One thing for sure, I sure appreciate all the blogging you did years ago. It turned a corner for me in terms of even what I'm doing now. And I'm sure there's many stories that you don't even know about that change people's career paths, because of all the content you put out there.   Rob Collie (01:32:53): It has been like this really validating and rewarding victory lap thing about having some of the people on, the OG crowd, right? That was hanging around the campfire back then, seeing all the great, awesome things you all went off and did, it's cool. It's cool to have helped inspire that thing and helped jumpstart it. All I was, was just some number of months ahead of you on the discovery curve. "Hey folks, really cool stuff over here, check it out."   Tim Rodman (01:33:18): Yeah. It's a good trail blazing medium. That's why I started blog about Acumatica. It was really a way for me to take notes, but do it publicly. Yeah.   Rob Collie (01:33:26): All right. Well, what we're coming around to is that there's someone who was reading your blog, who is a big gun and somewhere along the way reading your blog after saying, "Oh man, that guy's a Bozo." He's like, "Wait, wait, wait, this name matches. This name that Tim is talking about is someone who was really important and valuable to him. Is this Bozo?"   Tim Rodman (01:33:51): Well, I'm glad I give you another chance even though you faceplanted again.   Rob Collie (01:33:56): Yeah. Again, I think that if that relationship needed to be reestablished, we could probably do that today. I never do anything right the first time.   Tim Rodman (01:34:02): Maybe he listens to the podcast and you have no idea. So this will come back around.   Rob Collie (01:34:05): Oh, I seriously doubt it. Maybe I will send him a link to this episode when it goes live and say, "Hey, your ears are burning and this one, man." So, yeah, podcasts are supposed to be partially about promotion. Give us your website. Someone's listening to, this is going, "Oh, yeah. Heck yeah. We're in Acumatica. We need to talk to this guy." How do they find you?   Tim Rodman (01:34:28): I got a terrible website name right now, it's augforums.com.   Rob Collie (01:34:33): A-U-G...   Tim Rodman (01:34:34): A-U-G.   Rob Collie (01:34:35): Forum?   Tim Rodman (01:34:35): Forums, with an S. F-O-R-U-M-S .com. The idea was to be the AUG was Acumatica User Group. It was to be the forums for user groups. I haven't completely given up on that, but I was just at timrodman.com. So you can actually type in timrodman.com. It takes you to augforums.com. If you look up on the top there, click the consulting page and you can read about what I'm doing from the consulting side. It's got my email address on there.   Rob Collie (01:35:00): Awesome. Awesome. Well, sir, I really appreciate us doing this. What a treat.   Tim Rodman (01:35:05): Great talking with You.   Announcer (01:35:06): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive, help your business, just go to P3adaptive.com. Have a data day!

Lars Schreiber is another one of the great examples of the human element of data that we love!  He's an MVP, a long-standing member of the Power BI Community, and his passion for the Power Platform is quite catchy.  Catch up with Lars at his website, Self Service BI Blog! References in this episode: Lars' Podcast with Jeffrey Wang Lars' PowerPivotPro Blog Post from 2014 Episode transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Today, we continue our tour to force for 2022 by welcoming MVP, Lars Schreiber to the show. You might know him today as a member of the Power BI community, and also a host of a podcast, which we're working on backstage for me to be on his podcast, because you know, fair is fair. But I've known Lars for a very long time. He was actually one of the OG readers of the old Power Pivot Pro blog. Not just a reader, he was actually also a guest blogger. The fact that he wrote a guest article for our old website eight years ago, led to a somewhat familiar conversation about how as you get better and better with Power BI you're increasingly embarrassed by your past work. That might sound familiar to a number of you out there. In that vein, we also discuss how a lot of the DAX in particular on the internet these days, I can't imagine how intimidating that must be to a beginner. Rob Collie (00:00:53): On the less technical front, we talk about how he went solo without securing base of customers firsthand. He just sort of stepped off that ledge, things turned out well for him, but didn't exactly go the way originally that he expected. We talk about some of the nuances of the German language. We also get on the way back machine, and talk a little bit about how Microsoft Office internationalized its product back in the late '90 and the very special and funny role that German played in our lives back in that point in time. We talk about the disturbing trend of Power BI being used, not as an analysis tool, but as a PowerPoint replacement where literally people are using Power BI to draw charts to display conclusions that they've already reached using their gut. We talk a lot of out the power of naming. He asked me a very interesting question about the origin of the Power Pivot name. We talk a little bit about the pros and cons and the strengths of that name and the weaknesses. And in general, we had a blast. Tom might have gotten a little bit over his 7% threshold in this episode, so we're going to be keeping a close eye on that if you know what I mean. So without further monologuing, let's get into it. Announcer (00:02:04): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Announcer (00:02:11): This is The Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast with your host Rob Collie and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can for your business. Just go to P3adaptive.com. Raw data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:02:35): Welcome to the show. Lars Schreiber, is that how you would pronounce it? How do you say it in Germany? Lars Schreiber (00:02:40): I say Lars Schreiber. See there's that extra syllable it, is a three syllable word when you do it right. There's a little pause, little breath in the middle there. Anyway, I'll never master that, like I never mastered rolling my Rs in Spanish. Really, really happy you're here. I know it's late for you. You're from Germany, are you in Iceland right now? Lars Schreiber (00:03:02): No, I would love to be, but I'm not in Iceland. I'm in Hamburg, where I live. Rob Collie (00:03:06): What does loving Iceland on your Twitter bio mean? Lars Schreiber (00:03:10): It means I'm loving Iceland. The country is amazing and the people there are amazing too, so I've been there three times on vacation, and this country is nothing but beautiful. We've Rob Collie (00:03:21): Been there once as a family a few years ago. It was just an epic trip. I mean, holy cow, it is an amazing country, isn't it? Lars Schreiber (00:03:29): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:03:30): And apparently I know that, you know this because you've been there. Here's a little unexpected Iceland trivia; some very, very outsized percentage of the aluminum refining in Europe takes place in Iceland, because it's a very, very electrical intensive process and they just have free power geothermal and hydroelectric. They just have endless electricity in Iceland. I guess we should also expect them to be at the forefront of Bitcoin mining in Europe as well, right? All right. So loving Iceland, but not living in Iceland. Lars Schreiber (00:04:05): No, unfortunately not. My wife wouldn't go there, and honestly, I wouldn't know how to earn my money there because I know nothing about sheep, and they have so many of them and earn their money with that. Rob Collie (00:04:17): But Lars, they also have horses. Lars Schreiber (00:04:18): Yeah. I know. I know nothing about horses as well. Rob Collie (00:04:21): They have both professions. Lars Schreiber (00:04:23): They do. Reykjavik is a beautiful town, but when I want to live in Iceland, I don't want to go to a big city. I want to see the countryside and see all the waterfalls and stuff, and I wouldn't know how to earn my money there, so I stay in Hamburg. Thomas LaRock (00:04:37): Iceland is the one with the Blue Lagoon, right? Lars Schreiber (00:04:40): Yes. Thomas LaRock (00:04:40): Reykjavik? Lars Schreiber (00:04:41): Yeah, exactly. Thomas LaRock (00:04:42): I want to go there. Lars Schreiber (00:04:43): It's a beautiful place. But I guess the Blue Lagoon is the most tourist made thing of Iceland. You don't see Iceland there really. Rob Collie (00:04:52): It is by far the most tourist trappy place in the country. However, you still got to do it. I mean, there's nothing quite like getting off the airplane like we did, the overnight, you never really even slept, you're just like blurry eyed. You drive in the cold because you know, even though it's June, it's still cold in the morning, you drive to this place, you don't speak the language. They speak the language, they speak English. Still it's very disorienting when you haven't slept. By the way, we changed in the airport, bathrooms at RA Vic airport into our bathing suits, but then put winter coats back over the top of them, went to this place. You go in, you freeze to death, and then you get in the warm water, and then you have cocktails. The weirdest sequence of events, one of the weirdest anyway, end-to-end. The flight for you isn't quite as long. I wouldn't think. Lars Schreiber (00:05:35): It's two and a half or three hours from here. Rob Collie (00:05:37): It was surprisingly short for us. Those polar routes like six or seven hours, but it was still overnight and didn't sleep and all that. So Lars, this is what we do on the podcast about data; we talk about Iceland. Thomas LaRock (00:05:49): The Iceland podcast. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:05:51): Yeah. Raw Data, a show about Iceland. Have you snorkeled with the dry suit in that river, essentially? The spring that runs between the North American tectonic plate and the Eurasian plate? Lars Schreiber (00:06:04): No, I haven't. I've seen a lot in Iceland, but I didn't do that. Rob Collie (00:06:08): Well, I mean here of Mr. Fancy pants, he's been to Iceland three times, but he hasn't snorkeled the tectonic divide. Lars Schreiber (00:06:16): Did you you do that? Rob Collie (00:06:17): We did because my wife planned our trip and she's amazing. We did do that. It's pretty awesome. Okay, so you said it'd just be so hard to imagine earning a living, living in Iceland, even though they offer sheep, and horses, and aluminum refining, and power, and the Blue Lagoon. You could work there. So how do you earn a living today? What would you be leaving behind professionally if you left Hamburg? Lars Schreiber (00:06:43): Honestly, I'm living my dream right now. I'm a freelancer, earning my money with Power BI. And because my background is business administration, that was not really what I was supposed to do, but I always liked to do this day data stuff. Starting with Excel, then doing a lot of VBA then Power Pivot with and without space in the middle. Rob Collie (00:07:06): Yeah. You were one of the OG, the originals. Lars Schreiber (00:07:08): And back in 2018, I decided to become a freelancer and it works out. It's fun. Rob Collie (00:07:13): So you built a client base for yourself, geographically around you in Germany. We've had a number of people on the show who are similarly living this dream, who at some point, like 2018 for you, went rogue, went solo. Not really rogue; solo, independent. And one of the things I always like to ask people is, how did you know when it was the right time? And it's a leap? Did you already kind of have clients lined up? That's usually how people do it; they're already trying to know they're going to have plenty of work to do. How did that go for you? Lars Schreiber (00:07:45): I always had side projects next to my employment. And back then it was VBA. I always had VBA projects for clients and I did a lot of VBA for reporting. And when Power Pivot came up and Power Query and of course, Power BI with its visualizations, all that. Yeah, I could ignore VBI, didn't write email line of VBA anymore, and I did it with this. And because you're asking for, "What was the initial point where you decided to become a freelancer?" That was something that was maybe not the best idea to use that as a starting point. That was my MVP, and I was working in the community, and many people knew me in the community, but I misunderstood being recognized in the community, and having a client base. That is something completely different. And when I became an MVP in 2017 and I always wanted to be a freelancer, I looked at my wife and she said, "Do it." And I said, "Okay, if not now, then never." And I thought, "Okay, now the clients will come and they didn't come in the beginning." Rob Collie (00:08:53): I'm so sorry. Lars Schreiber (00:08:54): It was a tough time. It was a lot of learning, but it works out now. Rob Collie (00:08:59): But I think the truth about the MVP program, like so many things, is kind of in the middle, and in the middle of what, right? In the middle of what non-Microsoft people think of it from the outside looking in, which is this glowing thing on the hill. Like you thought, "There you go. There's the badge. Now where's the money?" Right? But the other endpoint is the one that I had, which is as an insider. When I worked at Microsoft, I loved the MVPs, and I was frankly even intimidated by them. But having that insider knowledge of the program, it was like too familiar to me. And so, I might not have valued it as much as it should have been. And I eventually ended up bowing out of the program because I don't want to do the paperwork anymore, to be perfectly honest. Lars Schreiber (00:09:45): That's the reason why you're not an MVP anymore? Thomas LaRock (00:09:47): I know it's sad. Rob Collie (00:09:48): I know it's so sad, right? And then there were a number of years in there in between where I was like, "Ah, I should really get that back," but I wasn't doing enough in the community to really make a case for myself during those years. Now with the podcast and everything, we probably are doing enough now, but it's got to bubble to the top. So how did you and without giving away any secrets, obviously, what was that process like? Okay, so you have the MVP, you hang that on your website, and you just sit back and go, "Okay, here they come." And then they don't. What do you do next? How did you recover from that? Lars Schreiber (00:10:20): Honestly, I'd never do something special for becoming an MVP. I blogged. I started podcasting a lot later. I'm creating videos now. And I started doing it just for fun, because I didn't know anyone who did Power BI back then. I had one friend that I could infect somehow with this virus. Oh no, we shouldn't use that word anymore. Rob Collie (00:10:41): It's okay. It's okay. We can talk about the R zero, the R not value of Power BI, right? Lars Schreiber (00:10:47): No, I meant the word, "Virus." Rob Collie (00:10:49): I know, but still it's an appropriate metaphor. We talk about Kevin Overstreet still proudly calls himself, "Patient zero for Power BI," at Eli Lilly, which is a pharmaceutical company. Right? So we're cool. "Virus" is not a canceled word. We're still okay with it. I think. Lars Schreiber (00:11:06): Good. Good to know. Rob Collie (00:11:09): That's how my blog started too. There was a little bit of professional interest in it. In the beginning, I needed a resume outside of Microsoft. That isn't what powered me to write two post a week for five years. It was excitement, it was enthusiasm. People were always asking me like, "You're pouring all this effort into this blog. Do you know how it's going to ever pay off for you?" No. I got a vague sense that it probably will, but I don't know how. That's fine. Lars Schreiber (00:11:33): And look how many people do you have influenced with what you did? I know Matt Ellington is someone, I know he was influenced by you. You already had [inaudible 00:11:43] on your podcast. She was influenced by you. I read your blog posts back then in 2012, '13, I guess, and I started thinking, "Why isn't something like this there in German language?" And this is how I started my blog. So you influence a lot of people by doing that, I guess, without having the idea of doing that. Rob Collie (00:12:05): It did feel like a religion of sorts, right? But a good one, like a really good fundamentals, like everyone should know about this. And it is really cool to know that I did help ignite so many amazing people. A lot of people who are working in Power BI today have no idea, they don't even know who I am. It doesn't matter. And that's good news. You want something to be so popular that what happened 10 years ago? "What? That was something going on 10 years ago? Most people heard of Power BI five minutes ago. And you look at it, look at the number of people who are producing amazing content and essentially, discovering and inventing new cool techniques all the time. This virus has really gone. Thomas LaRock (00:12:48): Pandemic. Rob Collie (00:12:48): Has gone pandemic. I don't know if we can say, "Pandemic." "Pandemic" is probably a canceled word. Lars Schreiber (00:12:53): Yeah, but I get your point. Thomas LaRock (00:12:55): How else are you going to explain a virus that has left containment? Rob Collie (00:12:59): Seems like, "Pandemic" might have a negative connotation. I know, "Virus" does too, but, "Pandemic" is a bridge too far. Thomas LaRock (00:13:04): Cancer has a pretty negative connotation, but we haven't canceled that word. I think pandemic will be safe. Rob Collie (00:13:09): Hey Luke, can you edit that out? Tom just said a bunch of really dreadful stuff. Thomas LaRock (00:13:14): This is why I'm never on the podcast. Everything gets just cut. Rob Collie (00:13:19): You know those episodes where Luke's voice at the beginning says, "With your host Rob Collie," and he doesn't say, "With your co-host," well, Tom was there. We just edited the hell out of him. No, he wasn't. We don't do that. So you didn't deliberately become an MVP, but after you went solo, after you decided to turn professional, to turn independent, you mentioned that at the beginning, it didn't just happen. There weren't just clients. What did you do then? How did you react to that? Because you're okay now. Lars Schreiber (00:13:52): Yeah. I didn't change anything. It was just a matter of time. It's necessary that people get to know you, and if it's a bigger company, of course, different people from within the company are asking for help. So, that's actually the case when I give trainings. I'm a trainer and a developer for Power BI, and when I give trainings for bigger companies afterwards, 50% of the attendees ask questions that makes you more projects and more money, of course. And that takes time. So I just decided to give me that time. And the good thing was, my wife is working in IT, so she learned something really important, not like me. And she said, "Do it," and if you don't earn so much money in the meantime, we can take mine." That was a big help, of course. Rob Collie (00:14:36): It's good to have the safety net. Lars Schreiber (00:14:38): Yep. Rob Collie (00:14:38): It's still a big leap. So you didn't have the portfolio of clients waiting in the wings when you went independent. Lars Schreiber (00:14:47): Yep. Rob Collie (00:14:48): That just magnifies the size of the leap. So the amount of courage and tenacity, you have to really stick to it in a situation like that. So well done. Lars Schreiber (00:14:57): And I guess we shouldn't ignore one fact. In Germany, Power BI wasn't a thing a couple of years ago. Rob Collie (00:15:06): Oh. Lars Schreiber (00:15:06): I guess when Power BI desktop or Power BI Designer Preview started in the beginning of 2015, nobody in Germany knew what Power Pivot was and even Power BI started a couple of years ago, maybe 2018, maybe 2019. There were so many people who didn't know about it. And I have no data, no good idea why it's like that. But I guess, it's because in Germany, people don't like to read English stuff. And there still wasn't so much good stuff in German. Now with Office or Microsoft 365, many people just see, "Oh, there's Power BI, and it is like Excel, so we all should be able to use it." We all know it's not like that, but that's the marketing behind it. Rob Collie (00:15:51): One of the reasons, probably for the delay is that the German translation of the applications just takes longer. They need more space. The words are longer. This is an old joke; I was around at Microsoft when they went to, they called it Worldwide EXE- Lars Schreiber (00:16:07): EXE? Rob Collie (00:16:07): E-X-E, like the executable files? Lars Schreiber (00:16:10): Ah, yeah. Rob Collie (00:16:11): Worldwide EXE, meaning in Excel.exe, going forward the worldwide EXE campaign that swept through Microsoft office, the engineering teams probably I think when the Office 2000 cycle. So basically the idea was is that if you took Excel EXE under a microscope and looked at it, you wouldn't find any English sentences in it anywhere. Basically all of the strings that populate the UI, the labels for buttons, the help, all of that would be moved out of Excel ECE into separate DLLs. Separate delayed load library files per language. Rob Collie (00:16:54): So Worldwide EXE meant, for the first time ever the Office apps were going to be written in a way that was completely language neutral. There'd be nothing in the exit files themselves, the actual application files themselves, that was language specific. And it would hydrate itself from its com companion DLL, for whatever language you told it to be. And up until then, it wasn't like that. There was a German version of Excel.exe, and an English version of Excel.exe, and they decided to go this more modular way, right? And because this was a big effort at the time, I spent a lot of time with localization engineers, whose job is to man manage this process, but also get all of the strings rewritten in every different language, all bajillion languages that Office gets delivered in. Rob Collie (00:17:42): And there was a joke going around and I think you can still find it on the internet today, it wasn't a Microsoft joke. What we would do by default as program managers, we would say, "Okay, well here's the English sentence or the English label that is required for this error string," or there's an error message that pops up. We provide this, however many characters, let's say it's a 200 character English phrase. Okay? And then the developers would say, "All right, well, we probably need to pad that a little bit; maybe 256 characters, because the different languages will be different lengths, right?" But then German would come along and require 400 characters, so I don't think this'll be nearly as funny to a German as it is to an American that worked in software. I think the joke is something like the list of translations for English words. So English word, "Dog," German translation for dog is, "Scratching, sniffing, wolfing woofer," or something. It's a made up word, right? Lars Schreiber (00:18:37): Yeah. Okay. Rob Collie (00:18:37): But it conveys the fact that the German nouns basically contain all kinds of verb of what this thing does. It's a very long description. It's very long-winded description of what this thing does. "Panting, scratching, sniffing," whatever. Okay? And then, "Dog catcher," the word for that in German is, "Panting, scratching, sniffing, catcher." Lars Schreiber (00:18:57): Because we're combining all the words. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:18:59): Yeah. Right. The joke was you've really got to account for those Germans. Over, and over, and over again, we'd make this mistake; this string allocation is too small. You need to bump it up for German. But then we also found out that Swedish was even worse. So. Lars Schreiber (00:19:12): And try Finish. Rob Collie (00:19:13): We never did finish. All right. Well Luke, you can decide whether that joke is worth leaving. Thomas LaRock (00:19:23): I want to hear the data origin story. I don't think we have that yet. Rob Collie (00:19:27): No, we don't. We don't business background. Right? Lars Schreiber (00:19:30): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rob Collie (00:19:31): What's your first collision with data? What was the first time you encountered Excel or similar, and started getting that itch that this might be something that appeals to you? Lars Schreiber (00:19:40): I started working as a business control and I always saying I was a financial controller, but I guess that's not correct. I was a business controller doing budgets, and forecasts and stuff. Rob Collie (00:19:51): You can call it whatever you want. People over here in particular, right? But they might call it financial. We've had this on the podcast before. If you work outside of finance, you call it, "Finance," but if you work in finance, you call it, "Finance." Lars Schreiber (00:20:04): I will try to remember that. Thanks. Thomas LaRock (00:20:06): Nobody says that, I don't know what he's talking about. Rob Collie (00:20:10): We still call it, "Finance." That's fine. Business controller, financial controller. I can't tell the difference. Lars Schreiber (00:20:14): Me neither. That's why I left that job. No, just kidding. I just liked Excel. I liked helping people because it took just a couple of months and people noticed that I know that software, and they came to me and asked me questions and I could help them. And I liked to help people, especially with data. And when you see people sitting in front of Excel and trying to build a sum using their calculator, they're having in their left hand. There's something you've got to do Rob Collie (00:20:41): Call to action. Lars Schreiber (00:20:43): Yeah, exactly. And I replaced a guy who created a lot of code to extract data from a mainframe, all these big pixels on a black screen, and trying to read out the data. Something you would do with a Power Query with a couple of clicks now. But back then, it wasn't possible. And we read all the data from the screen into an Excel file, to being able to analyze the data, and to reload it into other systems. And I somehow was the guy who had to maintain that file and that code without knowing anything about VBA. And I just learned it because I was interested in and that's how all that started. Rob Collie (00:21:24): Your description of the person you're looking or shoulder and they're using Excel, and they've got a calculator on the other hand, you know, when a dog or a child falls into a river, and someone jumps in and saves them, and then they're interviewing the hero on the news afterward, and the hero is just saying, "Ah, I just did what anybody would do in my position. I had to do something," right? That's sort of the same feeling you get when you see that happening in Excel, right? It's like, "Well, I just have to," you got to jump in and save the baby. We should have similar shows where we entered. "Yeah, boy, that was a close one. They were almost going to waste the rest of their life adding that up with the calculator, but I rescued them." Lars Schreiber (00:22:07): The thing is usually people are sitting in an office for 20, 30 years, and nobody tells them how to use the software they put on their PCs. Yeah, "Here's Excel. Here's Word. Here's PowerPoint." I'm loving the Power tools we are having right now, but I never knew how mighty or how powerful PowerPoint is. I never used it the way you could do. And I have some friends who are deep into the PowerPoint thing, and there's so much to learn. But if nobody shows you what's possible, you will never learn. Especially if you have no idea what you could look up, what you could solve with this tool. This is why I always, when I give a training, especially in Power Query and I have a basic training for as an introduction, at the end, I always give a demo for what's possible too when you learn a bit more about M or learn a bit more about how to use the UI, because people need to know what's possible to invest the time, and energy, and maybe money to get to that point. If they don't know that they will never try to get there. I'm Rob Collie (00:23:17): So glad you do that. Thomas LaRock (00:23:18): I like that. Rob Collie (00:23:19): I'm partly glad you do that. Because it validates something that I've been doing for a number of years. I don't really teach a whole lot of classes anymore. I certainly got a lot of reps. I've taught a lot of classes. Lars Schreiber (00:23:28): I can imagine. Rob Collie (00:23:30): Over time, what I started to do, in a typical two day training is I started teaching a less and less ambitious curriculum over time. When I first started out, I was trying to dump everything I know, everything I'm capable of doing, I was trying to make everybody capable of doing that in two days. Really not realistic. I couldn't have been a student in my class and learned it in two days. It's just no way, right? I had learned it myself over the course of years at that point. So I started to do the same sort of thing; so I started to not take people nearly as deep into DAX. I'd move more slowly and I'd take them less distance total. However, I would do something very similar because I felt, even though this was the right thing to do for people, I was also short changing them, I was doing them a disservice. Rob Collie (00:24:17): So then I would take a break and say, "Look, okay, everyone, you can just take your hands off your keyboards. You don't need to try to remember any of this. You don't need to learn how to do this; I'm not even going to try to teach you. I want to show you just some amazing capabilities that you know to look for." Oftentimes, I give them a Google search so they could find the blog post that explained it in detail when they needed it, they could write down the Google search, things like that. But yeah, like the art of the possible; you've got to stretch people. There've been so confined in this little jail by the tools that they've had available to them and that they've known how to use, right? It's natural, when you take the walls down off of that jail, they just stand right there on that square of concrete. And so it's like, "Hey, let's go run around the yard. It's a big, big, big world." And I found that, just showing them what was possible would people excited, and as long as they knew it was there, they could go find it later. Is that similar to what you do? Lars Schreiber (00:25:12): Yeah, exactly. I guess because we have this podcast episode today, I was thinking about the past 10 years, because I started in 2011 with your blog posts and your DAX stuff, and that made me think of the last 10 years a bit. And when I was at my first employer, that was a supermarket company, I would've killed for what's possible with Power BI desktop today; just putting the longitude and latitude on a map and having all the stores on a map. I tried to solve that back then with a VBA script and Google Earth, maybe you remember that desktop top application that you could download. And I didn't write that code myself, but I found it somewhere, and someone created a code that in combination with Google Earth made it possible to put little icons on a map where all those 300 stores were and see it in Google Maps and a browser, that was so freaking amazing. But if you see how easy it is, if you have longitude and latitude, and probably a desktop, you can't believe it. But if you have never seen that, this is possible with that tool, you will never try to learn it. And this is why you need those ideas, those demos. Rob Collie (00:26:25): Ambition expanding. Strengthen the ambition muscles, not just the capability muscles. Lars Schreiber (00:26:32): And I think that's my personal experience. Not just with me, but also many others; many people learn new stuff in their spare time, not during the working time, because their employer doesn't give them the time to do it ever, or they don't think it's time to invest. So you have to tell those people why they should use their spare time, which they usually should use for family or hobby to invest it in something new. And they need to know why it is the right thing to do. Rob Collie (00:27:04): Have you ever been hired for training twice, by essentially the same people, to teach them the same thing again? Lars Schreiber (00:27:14): The same people are the same company? Rob Collie (00:27:16): Same people, same topic. Lars Schreiber (00:27:19): No. Rob Collie (00:27:20): What I'm really getting at is, I have. That happened to me once, just once. And it was because the first time, even though they, "Learned it," they didn't go back to their jobs and use it. You said the spare time thing, right? Lars Schreiber (00:27:36): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:27:37): Well, when people go to training, it's sort of negative spare time. Their regular is still continuing to pile up demands during those days that they're in training. And so, it creates this debt. The first instinct is, "Let me go clear out that debt and then I'll go apply the new stuff." Slippery slope. One year later, you Rob Collie's back teaching you the same thing again. That spare time thing, it's the truth, right? The full time job, it looms large over learning new things. It's the enemy, the opponent of learning new things. I'll say it this way: you've never been called back to teach the same thing to the same people yet. It still might happen. Lars Schreiber (00:28:23): Yeah, it could be, but it wasn't the case so far. But because we were talking about this spare time thing and learning thing, when I saw Power Pivot the first time, I simply didn't understand what it was. I didn't understand its analytical database. I thought it's a bigger Pivot Table. But when I started learning what it really was, I noticed that's different than learning, how to use the V look up in Excel. And I also noticed when I don't get projects at my current employer, and I didn't get any, I need more time to learn it. So I decided to change my contract with my employer, so that I didn't work on Fridays, so I could read those books and learn this stuff. Rob Collie (00:29:05): Wow. You were the only person in Germany reading English books. Lars Schreiber (00:29:10): No, for sure not. But back then, there were only English books. That's the case. Rob Collie (00:29:15): That's amazing. That's a soundbite. It was so compelling, even though you didn't understand it all yet, it was so compelling that you needed to restructure your employment agreement to give you 20% of your work week back to learn it. That's deliberate. That is deliberate AF, as the kids might say. Lars Schreiber (00:29:38): Yeah, the thing is, I wasn't happy with being in control because I like the data stuff. And I was thinking about going back to university and studying IT, but I wanted to do this BI thing and I couldn't study business intelligence whatsoever. Then I just talked to my wife and she said, "Okay, then do it on your own." But of course, I needed the time for that. So then I decided to read the right books and do it on my own. Rob Collie (00:30:03): When you say it so casually like that, it's one thing, but as an outside observer, that's just a very conscious process. I don't think I've ever had anything in my life, my career, play out that consciously. It's just this bounce, bounce, bounce down the mountain, a little bit of control, but not that much. I didn't even know when I started blogging about Power Pivot that it was going to turn into my next career. I discovered that. Lars Schreiber (00:30:31): But what you can't ignore is that I had you as an example. I could see it works somewhere. It works in the US, it for Rob Collie and for Matt [inaudible 00:30:44], and it will work in Germany and the other parts of the world as well. And of course, I couldn't know how many clients I could get in a certain amount of time, and I also didn't know if I can make a living of it, but I knew I wanted to do this thing maybe as an employee, maybe as a freelancer, but I wanted to do that stuff and therefore I needed to learn it. And that takes time if you have no clue about Star Schema, and what's a proper ETL process, I did know all these things, but I was willing to learn it. Rob Collie (00:31:19): Even though I worked on the product, Power Pivot, your experience learning it, it was very similar to mine. I mean, we were coming at it from the same backgrounds; the Excel and VBA. I'm sure you can run circles around me in VBA. I know that you haven't been doing a lot of it lately, neither of I, but peak Lars against peak Rob and VBA, I'm definitely going to take you in that contest. We still came from the same place. I'd heard about Star and Snowflake Schema forever. It was one of those things that I just let wash over me. I didn't didn't really know what the difference, didn't care. It sounded cool, but I understand it. Now Power Pivot was the reason to learn what those phrases meant. Lars Schreiber (00:32:01): There's a question I wanted to ask you forever; do you have a clue who was responsible for giving the Verde pack engine, that name, Power Pivot? Rob Collie (00:32:12): I do actually, or at least I know the person who is heading up the effort, her name's going to escape me at the moment. I have to go through some really, really old emails. Basically, the product manager, marketing coordinator for Project Gemini was working with the naming firm. Microsoft will bring in a branding firm that helps them name things when they're actually going to name something; they almost never name something. Especially in the old days, they would give a really boring name like Microsoft SQL Servers, Analysis Services, it was the German approach, right? It was the, "Pant, scratch, sniff," right? But every now and then they'd want to invest to actually name something. They'd bring in some pros. And sometimes those pros, the, "Professionals" were awful. I think I'd already moved to Cleveland at the time when they were naming it, but I was still a Microsoft employee, and I know the product manager for Project Gemini, she led the process. I ended up collaborating with her a couple more of her roles that she had at Microsoft afterwards, which is why I really regret that I don't remember her name at the moment, but she came back with Power Pivot from working with the naming firm. Lars Schreiber (00:33:23): The reason why I'm asking the following; when I was a VBA program, a VBA developer, I had a problem and I talked to the IT, "Hey, can you help me with VBA?" They looked at me and said, "Hey, VBA is not really a programming language. We don't know anything about VBA." And then, I talked to my other controlling colleagues and asked for help. And they said, "Hey, I'm not an IT person. I'm not a developer. I know nothing about VBA." So you were this island, you were almost lonely with your topic. Lars Schreiber (00:33:53): And coming back to this Power Pivot thing, I think the name is really confusing, because suggesting this thing has something to do with the Pivot Table, and it does not really need to have connection to it. But on the other hand, it's really smart because imagine you go to a person and say, "I know you're a business person, but please help me doing a business intelligence data model, and help me creating such a report." Nobody would say, "No problem. I'll start doing it." But you put this little icon into Excel, simply completely different engine opens up, but it seems like being in Excel. And it ha a name that sounds familiar with the word. And suddenly people try to do things they would have never tried in a different application. So, Power Pivot was a really good name for making people using it. But for me, it took a while to understand it's not the Pivot Table that is on Power. Rob Collie (00:34:59): When you're using Pivot Tables, like normal Pivot Tables, back in the day, regular Pivot Tables. You're not thinking at all about the engine behind the scenes that's crunching the numbers to produce the Pivot Table. In fact, it was kind of a jaw dropping surprise to me when I was on the team and someone explained to me that the Pivot Table calculation engine had nothing in common with the calculation engine for the sheet, like the normal Excel grid. They don't share a single line of code; they've got nothing in common. Lars Schreiber (00:35:30): Interesting. Rob Collie (00:35:31): It's a completely different beast. It's like this whole calculation engine behind the scenes. And the really technical people at Microsoft would refer to that, sometimes they'd call it the Pivot Cache. Now I know the Pivot Cache is also... Oh, it's been a long time since I've used that word. Do you remember that word? "Pivot Cache?" Lars Schreiber (00:35:46): Sure. Rob Collie (00:35:47): Man. That's a blast from the past. This was the thing that made your file more than twice the size if you duplicated the data, right? So most people thought of the Pivot Cache is just the extra copy of the data, but that Pivot engine, that's the thing that got swapped out by Power Pivot. Take this really clunky one table at a time, no relationships, no advanced formula language at all. Just swap that out behind the scenes and plug in this other superpowered one, give it the same interface. Really, the only way that Power Pivot could surface its data in Excel, most of the time anyway, was through a Pivot Table or a Pivot Chart. There were cube formulas as well, obviously, but naming is so hard. Even Pivot Table is a disaster. It was a terrible name. Lars Schreiber (00:36:33): Why? Rob Collie (00:36:33): Well, what is Pivot? Thomas LaRock (00:36:36): Yeah. You got to make me look it up. So SQL Server has Pivot and Unpivot and I thought that was some antsy standard. Rob Collie (00:36:42): I don't know, but the average Excel person in 1998, who is supposed to be adopting Pivot Tables, right? Has no what the SQL syntax of Pivot and Unpivot. I tried to rename it Summary Tables. It speaks to the novice better. Because I'm not a sequel person, I still to this day do not equate Pivot with aggregate. They're not the same noun at all. They're the same verb. They have nothing in common. Lars Schreiber (00:37:08): I'm afraid I'm missing the correct words for it now, but a Pivot is a point where you can circle things around. I guess it's a French word. I'm a quite sure it's Pivo? Rob Collie (00:37:19): Oh, Power Pivo. A Pivo Table. Lars Schreiber (00:37:22): I might be wrong, but it's about this circling things around the single point. And I guess that's the main criteria of a Pivot Table; slicing, and dicing, and making columns rows, and row columns. Rob Collie (00:37:34): Yeah. Swapping rows and columns on a Pivot Table is the only thing that really remind me of pivoting. It's like a twist or a transpose, right? Pivot and pace transpose seem to be similar concepts to me. I just want to swap rows and columns, but the number one reason to create a Pivot Table isn't to swap rows and columns; it's to see what the data's telling you. It's to roll up 40,000 rows into grouped subtotals. To me, Tom, even in the SQL world, it has more in common with group buy. Thomas LaRock (00:38:04): So, no. Rob Collie (00:38:06): Oh shit. Now's where I actually have to learn something. Thomas LaRock (00:38:09): So I'm sorry, you said more in common. And so I don't want to say no to that. To me, there's two different things. So Pivot is not an antsy standard, but I want to say group buy roll up in cube are. I think those are common aggregations, and part of [inaudible 00:38:25] standard as to how the engine should return the results. The biggest thing is how data gets stored, and then you need to transpose the rows into columns, and you want to perform an aggregate on the column now, which used to be rows. So there was a need for that, obviously, but that's not an antsy standard. It's definitely in TSQL. So Microsoft saw that this was a need and started building that out, but now just the concept of this for me, that first of all, that it wasn't in Excel yet, or if it wasn't Excel, it was all done by hand and macros and things like that. And clearly, somebody said, "Wow, they're spending a lot of time building these macros when we could just make magic happen for them." Thomas LaRock (00:39:06): But I've written before, and I've talked to you about the idea that you could just put your data in Excel and perform these operations in the matter for a few clicks, as opposed to needing to know a language, is just so powerful. If you said to make it a Summary Table, I'd be like, I don't want to do some, I want to do an average. I want to do all these other things. Rob Collie (00:39:25): Summary doesn't mean, "Sum." It just means- Thomas LaRock (00:39:30): But I think it's also a bad name. Lars Schreiber (00:39:31): Let's call it, "Aggregation Table." Thomas LaRock (00:39:33): Aggregation Table comes close, but I hate the way it sounds. Rob Collie (00:39:36): Yeah, it's a little, it's a little too nerdy. I'm going to have to say that, nah, you're wrong, summary's better. Thought about this for a long time. But here's the thing; it doesn't have to be perfect to be infinitely better than Pivot Table. Thomas LaRock (00:39:49): See, I thought Pivot Table was fine. I don't have a problem with Pivot Table. Rob Collie (00:39:52): We take it for granted. So, you said it was kind of mind blowing that Pivot Table. Weren't always in there. You know what? They're still not in there. Right? For the majority of Excel users, they're not in there. Thomas LaRock (00:40:05): Oh, yeah, I know. Rob Collie (00:40:07): They're not using it. I mean, you wouldn't believe, sitting next to an electrician on an airplane flight one time, he's describing to me this Excel process that he has to hand off to some cell consultant can pay him a lot of money and all this kind of stuff, right? And I'm sitting there listening to him and going, "This sounds like a Pivot Table." And I just, so I took my laptop made some data for him, like, "Okay, many feet of conduit blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And then I create a Pivot Table, and I went [inaudible 00:40:34], and he's like, "What?" And then, so I'm talking to him about it, 20 minutes goes by and he leans over to me and says, "Hey, can you show me that again?" He's like, "I really want to remember it this time." Like Lars was saying the beauty of the Power Pivot name was that it was building off of something that people already knew. Now at one point, one of my jobs at Microsoft was to try to get more people to know Pivot Tables. When I worked on the Excel team, that was one of the things that I was overseeing anyway. I've wrestled with this problem a lot. And I kept coming back to, "Oh God, I wish we could change the name." And we couldn't, so. Pivot, didn't speak to the Excel audience. Thomas LaRock (00:41:12): Right, I get that. Rob Collie (00:41:14): From zero. But once they're on side with Pivot Table, you leveraged it with Power Pivot. Thomas LaRock (00:41:20): Would it make you feel better to know that the concept of Pivot and Unpivot is also in Python code? Rob Collie (00:41:25): I'm not surprised. Thomas LaRock (00:41:27): But, clearly there's a need for the concept of rows to columns. Because that's what we're talking about, right? Rob Collie (00:41:33): Yeah. But those processes don't necessarily mandate aggregation. Thomas LaRock (00:41:38): No. Rob Collie (00:41:38): And the Pivot Table is like Lars said, the aggregate table, even though it doesn't roll off the tongue in English, right? That's what it does. It's not to take your 400 rows of data and turn it into a different 400 rows of data or in the a case of Unpivot, an Unpivot operation actually you end up with more cells. You end up with a larger square footage of data than you had beforehand. Whereas a Pivot Table is a cruncher. Pivot Table's always going to be smaller than the input. That was the mission, anyway. Naming, I'm obsessed with naming. I don't know if you can tell. Let's name some things. What have we got that we wish we could rename? Thomas LaRock (00:42:20): Perview. Rob Collie (00:42:20): We've talked about it on this show, right? Thomas LaRock (00:42:22): It's a fancy data catalog. Rob Collie (00:42:24): That's right. We were talking about this with John Hancock, where his software that catches underage predators. Thomas LaRock (00:42:29): Perview. Rob Collie (00:42:32): Exactly. Thomas LaRock (00:42:32): It's Perview. See, I understand that purview is an actual English word and what it means and all that. I just don't think in terms of a service, it was likely the best choice. It is descriptive, but I don't know. Rob Collie (00:42:49): In the spirit of international relations, we should probably explain to Lars why this is funny. Lars Schreiber (00:42:53): That would be nice. Yes. Thanks. Rob Collie (00:42:57): All right. So the English word, "Purview," what is the definition of that word? Thomas LaRock (00:43:01): Well, I'll just go look up the definition. It's so hard. It's hard for me to explain. Rob Collie (00:43:05): See that Lars, even we don't know English, Thomas LaRock (00:43:08): "The purpose or scope range or limit." Rob Collie (00:43:11): But there's also the English word, "Pervert." So John Hancock's company, they fight crime. And the free version for law enforcement is catching child predators. And for good reason, they just can't charge for that. That's free. And so, I think on that podcast, we stumbled into the joke, we're talking about Azure Purview, and then we realized that, "Hey, that'd be a name for John's software is perv view." Lars looks so pained. I wish we had a screenshot of the agony. Thomas LaRock (00:43:45): You ready for this? A story I heard years ago. Hyper-V, but when they first wrote Hyperv somebody looked at and, "Hyperv? What is this Hyperv thing you have?" And the guys at Microsoft, like, "Hi Perv? How do you get Hi Perv?" And they're like, "No, seriously. That's what that says." And they're like, "No, it's Hyper-V." So they put the dash into Hyper-V. Rob Collie (00:44:10): Yeah. See, there you go. Naming, right? That's the naming department. That'd be the naming person's purview. Putting the dash in Hyper-V. Thomas LaRock (00:44:16): Make sure somebody says the word, "Hyper" and not, "Hi perv," right? Rob Collie (00:44:20): That's right, yeah. Lars Schreiber (00:44:21): Especially when you're an international worldwide company. Many different cultures will interpret those things differently. Thomas LaRock (00:44:29): Well, that happens all the time. Yeah. Lars Schreiber (00:44:30): I can remember that.I talked to Michael Russo and they're doing this, how do they say hello to all the people in their videos? They they're using an Italian hello ciao or something. I'm pretty sure it's something different. And he said, "There are many people who don't understand that, don't understand it's hello in Italian." And so you really have to do it waterproof or bulletproof what you're doing there, and still people will misunderstand what you're saying. And I guess naming is a very hard thing to do. Rob Collie (00:44:59): Yep, especially those Germans in there 80 character words as we've Thomas LaRock (00:45:05): Discussed, that's one of the jokes, like, "Is there a long German word for," and then say something, and then there's almost always an answer. Usually, it's just something weird. Like, "What's the long German word for when you are alone in stress eating all by yourself," just something weird. And you're like, "Oh yeah, there's a word for that." It's like a feeling emotion or whatever. It's just, there's all these little things that you can always ask for whatever scenario, "Is there a long German word," on Twitter and then somebody will give you an answer. Lars Schreiber (00:45:34): Sometimes I have to laugh about it myself because when you read it, it's funny. But I read once German is a difficult language. They have one word for driving somebody over with a car, hurting someone with a car is [foreign language 00:45:49] and [foreign language 00:45:49]. If I say [foreign language 00:45:52], then I drive somebody over. And if I say, [foreign language 00:45:56], so I pronounce the A more than everything else, then I circle around him. Rob Collie (00:46:00): Oh, okay. Lars Schreiber (00:46:03): So it's the same word for two absolutely different things. Rob Collie (00:46:07): Uh-huh (affirmative). Yeah. Lars Schreiber (00:46:08): But I had to read it on Twitter to recognize it myself. Thomas LaRock (00:46:12): It's the same word. So it's spelled the same? Lars Schreiber (00:46:15): It's spelled exactly the same way. Yeah. Thomas LaRock (00:46:16): So, you can only hear the difference? So for example, if this was in a police report, This one word, "Did he drive over him or around him? It's not clear to me." Lars Schreiber (00:46:26): You can get it from the context when you read it. It's better to hear somebody saying it, yes. Rob Collie (00:46:32): There a command version of this word? Meaning like you tell someone to drive around them, or you tell someone to drive over them? Because this could get really, really dicey, like a written order. Thomas LaRock (00:46:42): And you're what? In the mafia? Rob Collie (00:46:47): Yeah. Well, I mean, lives could hang on the balance here. Thomas LaRock (00:46:50): So we started talking about Iceland, and now we're talking about long German words. Rob Collie (00:46:54): You're right, we should bring it back the real stuff. So in terms of the work that you do, what can you tell us about it? Is it lots of clients? Is it a handful, or one that you spend most of your time with? Like Inca, do you find yourself staying close to home in terms of what you originally were working on, even though you didn't want to be a controller, are you mostly working with controllers now? Or are you kind of all over the place in all kinds of different data fields? Just give us some of the texture. Lars Schreiber (00:47:18): Of the texture. I guess my work is pretty close to what Inca does, but I have more clients than her. By the way, she's a good friend of mine. This is why I know that I have, I don't know, I guess 30 or 40 customers. And I remember you have written blog post about how Power BI, Power Pivot will change the VI consulting, having many clients, but just for a short period of time, just showing them what's possible, and then maybe a bit of coaching, and then they're doing it on their own. This is exactly what I'm trying to do. My ideal customer, my typical customer comes from a technical, non-IT department, so from marketing, or controlling or finance. Finance? Rob Collie (00:48:03): Finance. But when you say that you have to take your pinky finger off of whatever you're drinking. Lars Schreiber (00:48:07): Yeah, next time. Rob Collie (00:48:09): Finance. Lars Schreiber (00:48:14): And I'm trying to make their life easier. So I do three things; I develop stuff and they're not interested in how I did it. That's not the usual case. The other side is, I give trainings and show them how they can do this stuff on own. That typically doesn't work right from the beginning. Because when I give my basic trainings, I always say, "I have a lot of experience in martial arts, but 10 years ago," and I say, "This is my one day women's self defense course. After that, you won't be able to defend yourself properly, but you know what you're dealing with." And so people know what's ETL, what's a data model, what's a measure, what's a report, and what comes after, because afterwards I show them, usually people think Power BI is Power BI Desktop. Yeah? And they have heard there's a free version of Power BI, which is called Power BI Desktop. So you have to show them that there is another world behind this published to web, or publish button. And so those people usually come to me afterwards for consulting. And this is what I do; I build solutions, but show them always how I do it. I want to transfer my knowledge, because even if it doesn't sound logical for a consultant, I don't want to see my clients again, for the same reason. Rob Collie (00:49:30): Mm-hmm (affirmative). I completely understand that. The traditional consulting move in certain situations is to hoard the knowledge from your client, so that they're dependent on you. And they have to come back to you for over, and over and over again. Well, even if you set aside for a moment, the ethics of that business model, or whether it feels fair, set that aside for a moment; it's boring to be the one that has to do that same thing over, and over, and over again. Why not show them how they can write the different version of the calculate measure, right? If all they need to do is just copy paste the formula and change the base measure, the year to date, version of spend, you wrote that formula for them, but you didn't write the year to date version of revenue. Well, come on, they can do that, right? Rob Collie (00:50:17): And I know we've got calculation groups, and all kinds of whiz bang things. Now we didn't have those back in the day. We hacked, we hacked the Power Pivot files. We literally hacked them to duplicate measures across families like that. So, I completely understand. Have you ever found though that you run into clients that just don't care? They don't want to learn? Even though you're dying to transfer the knowledge, they're just sitting there going, "Oh, come on. I love the report. I love it. Just keep more of this let's keep going. Don't try to teach me. I don't want to learn. I don't want to be you." Have you run into that at all? Lars Schreiber (00:50:53): That's a good question. I need to think about it a bit more, but I don't think that I had people who didn't want to learn. I had one scenario, one training I gave for a company and there was a person, a woman who seemed to be good at Excel, that's what she said. And in the end, I noticed she just knows how to use the SUM function and nothing else. Which is okay, just tells you about how people think about themselves. Rob Collie (00:51:22): That's right. Yeah. And also how they think about Excel. How deep is it? Lars Schreiber (00:51:26): Yeah, exactly. And when I did one day of training in Power BI Desktop, and everything was fine until we wrote the first DAX measure. And then she said, "Oh, are there more formulas? Do I have to remember all those formulas?" And I just did this some and the SUM and a SUM X nothing else. "Oh, is there much more?" And in the end, after two days, one day of training and one day of consulting, I ask her, so what do you think about PA BI now? And she said something that made me almost stumble out of the room, but then made me think about it a bit deeper or a bit more. She said, "Power BI is nice, but most of what you can do with it, I can do better in PowerPoint." And I was, "Has she been in the same room with me during the last two days?" Lars Schreiber (00:52:13): But then I noticed what they wanted to do was creating reports with comments, what you usually do in a PowerPoint presentation. And it took me a while to make her aware that what you do with Power BI is one step before, or you create the comments, you find the structures, the reasons why you have 1 million in turnover less than last year. So the difference between having an analytical report and a report you can print out as a PDF. And to notice that, that changed the way I deal with people. When they say, "Hey, I need this or that," I first of all, ask them, "Do you need an analytical report? Or you need something you can print out afterwards and put on the wall?" And I try to find that out right at the beginning. And that was pretty interesting for me. Quite lately, in what I do, I guess it was two years. Rob Collie (00:53:05): Ago. I'm going to make a guess that this particular training client, that company is in the management consulting industry. It sounds like a McKenzie, am I close. Lars Schreiber (00:53:16): No, they were in advertisement, but it could have been. Yeah, sounds like that. Rob Collie (00:53:20): As you were saying, Power BI is the step before that. You're finding out why, why that's like this. Right? I was just thinking to myself, "Oh, this audience," the reason why I came to the conclusion that this was a management, it was like, "But this audience, the people you're talking to, they already know why. They already know what they want to say." Your analysis might conflict with that. They're not, "No, no, no. Don't let the facts get in the way of a good narrative." Right? They already know what they want to say. Now, they want to invent the data in the charts to back it up. It's really hard in Power BI, because all it does is add up the numbers that tell you the truth. Rob Collie (00:54:00): All right, advertising, you know what, for my purposes, I'm going to round manage consultant to advertising agency. I'm going to call myself correct. These two industries have that same thing in common; they already know the narrative. Lars Schreiber (00:54:14): Yeah. Maybe. Rob Collie (00:54:16): Now they just need to package it. Lars Schreiber (00:54:16): It was a huge learning for me. Thomas LaRock (00:54:18): They're data riven as long as the data supports their preconceived ideas. Rob Collie (00:54:23): Yeah. And once you've understood that way, why do you even need the data? Just dispense with all that pointy headed geek work, and then let's get down to the business of making money. That's so funny. Well, we have a little bit of experience with this. Someone who used to work with us, went to work for, let me be very vague, for a very, very large consulting firm. General purpose, big, big, big consulting firm. His reports back from the trenches sound like, "I am really only using Power BI as a PowerPoint substitute." They wanted a Power BI expert. They poached him from us, all's fair. And now, he's the data driven PowerPoint guy. Thomas LaRock (00:55:10): Wow. Lars Schreiber (00:55:11): Power BI is PowerPoint for data. Rob Collie (00:55:13): Yeah. That's a good ambition. We've got a little ways to go yet, I think. You mentioned PowerPoint being deep. How deep have you gotten into PowerPoint? I had the same revelation somewhere around, I don't know, 2014. "Oh my God, where have you been on my life, PowerPoint. I didn't know all the things you could do for me." Are you a big slide master? Do you put a lot of effort into slide decks? Lars Schreiber (00:55:36): Not really, but I know how to use morphing. I like those effects a lot. But the problem is how could you say how deep you're into a tool, if you don't know the whole tool? That's why all people are Excel masters, and they are not. Rob Collie (00:55:50): There's a joke that I always used to tell in my training classes, which is: you ask someone how good they are at Excel and whatever answer they give you, invert it to get the truth. If they say they're good at it, they don't understand what they're signing up for. They don't know how deep it is. Because someone who's actually good at it is going to hedge. Lars, you're really good at Excel. You might be a little rusty like me, but you're really good at Excel. Certified good. But if I ask you on the street, you don't know me, whatever, how good you are at Excel, you're not going to say, "I'm in the 99th percentile." Lars Schreiber (00:56:23): For sure not, no. Rob Collie (00:56:24): You are not going to say that. That would be true, you are easily in the 99th percentile in the world on Excel, easily. But you're not going to say that. You're going to say, "Well, Hmm. Yeah. I can do some things." Because you don't know what's coming next, right? If you say you're good at it. And I say, "Oh man, those database functions. Right? Huh? You know the database functions?" You'd be like, "Um, maybe." If I say I'm really good at Excel and the very next thing that comes out is array formulas, I know I'm in trouble. Lars Schreiber (00:56:57): Yeah. Me too. Rob Collie (00:56:59): I'm like, "Control, shift, enter, right? That's yeah." Lars Schreiber (00:57:02): It's a good book. Rob Collie (00:57:03): Yeah. It's a really good book. And those are the formulas you can't debug. It's like the DAX of Excel, but harder and less capable in my opinion. Yeah, so someone who tells you they're really good at Excel and then you find that they know the SUM function, well, they're the one that graduated from using the calculator 12 months before next to the Excel. And that's a huge change, right? It's an infinite change in expertise. So how could you perceive it as anything but, "I'm really good." Are you branching out into the broader Power platform very much? Staying closer to home and primarily Power BI, what do you find yourself getting into these days? Have you tried Perview? I hear it's really good. Lars Schreiber (00:57:47): No, I haven't tried that. The thing is I work from home, also before the pandemic started because I have three and a half year old twin boys here and yeah, my wife and they need me at home. So today's world with all teams and Zoom make it possible to earn the money from home. And, the thing is, time is limited and you know how fast the Power BI platform grows. And honestly, I always think I know too less. That's a personal problem, I know, but that makes me think I haven't got the time and energy to dip my toes into Power Automat, or Power app or something like this. No, I haven't tried that yet. I am willing to do so when it makes sense, but I didn't do it until now. Rob Collie (00:58:34): I have that in common with you. Our company does all these things, but I personally am still very close to home. If I'm using the tools myself, I'm really just using Power BI. But in terms of our client engagements, we've really diversified quite a bit. And it's not because we wanted to diversify; it's that our clients' needs started to mature. What we found is that, once they start to get the BI problem mostly under control for the first time ever, they've never have been anywhere close to that, they take a step back and their focus zooms out a little bit. And that's when it dawns on them that, it sounds like a cliche, but BI is really just one part of the overall improvement system. Lars Schreiber (00:59:20): Sure. Rob Collie (00:59:21): So they start to focus more on the inputs and outputs, the human processes that the dashboard, the report might recommend or suggest. How do you make that more convenient? How do you tie it closer into the workflow, essentially? Right? And so it tends to grow outward as the BI problem starts to stabilize a little bit. Lars Schreiber (00:59:41): There is no doubt that the Power platform is a huge thing and that this no code, low code environment is something that will Be successful in the future. For sure. But I'll learn something from a good friend of both of us, Matt Ellington. You have to know when you have to ask for help, and you can't know everything on your own, or for yourself, or what's the right English at this point? And this is what I do; I try to put my strengths together and just consult for Power BI. That's why I don't offer VBA consulting anymore. I just don't do it. I didn't do it for the last three years or four years. And this is why I don't offer service at this level. Rob Collie (01:00:20): And that's wise. Super wise. We got dragged into a VBA project recently, and I was telling everybody ahead of time, "I don't know folks. I think we should pass." And sure enough, you just get into this really obscure stuff. People come to me like I'm like, "I have no idea. You're asking me about some really, really obscure nuance of the object model and how it behaves. Now we need to go find the three people in the world know the answer to this." Used to be five, but now we're down to three. Specialization is amazing, right? I wouldn't be doing things any differently than you if it was still just, me for sure. I mean, there's no two ways about it. I've really only learned three or four really hard skills in my whole life. It's a very short list of things that I've learned to the level where I can claim competency. Excel is one of them. DAX and simple data modeling is another. I can't even really claim Power Query. I'm not very good at it. You talk about knowing when you need to ask for help; whenever I write Power Query, I need to ask for help. I know that it's coming, just a question of when. Lars Schreiber (01:01:29): Yeah, but there is so many amazing people in the community right now. Every time when I think my Power Query solution is good. I talk to [inaudible 01:01:37], I recognize, no, it's shitty. Rob Collie (01:01:38): Yeah. Lars Schreiber (01:01:39): And when you think you have master your DAX measure, and then you read the next article by the Italians who tell you something about shadow filter context that I still don't understand. There's no way you can think you mastered something. Rob Collie (01:01:52): Shadow filter context. I never even heard of it. This is a rumor it's like Bigfoot. It's a Loch Ness Monster. There's no such thing. It just blows me a way that I can look at people's DAX today and have no idea what it's doing. Not just the daks language, but the dialects that people have adopted, the style of DAX that a lot of people now write. I get the sense that the things that are being written, I can write formulas that do the same thing. My formulas will be about 1/10 the character count. It's just that at scale, my formula's not going to perform very well, compared to this multi-paragraph thing. I like to tell myself that. It might be that I couldn't have written the formula at all. I don't know, but every now and just for grins, I just crack open to the random DAXs article on the internet, just so I can laugh at how mind blowingly out there it can be, relative to what I understand. If that had been the way DAX was when I was getting started, I would've never approached it. I would've never learned it. I would've never gotten in. If it looked to then the way it does now, I would've said, "No, not me." Lars Schreiber (01:03:00): But, what you did for the community, at least from my point of view, was a huge deal because I can remember that I bought the first book of our Italian friends, and I simply didn't understand what they were talking about. The first book I ever read about Power Pivot was from Mr. Excel, Bill Jelen, and it's basically a number of formulas explained what they're doing, but without concepts and data modeling whatsoever. And the second book I read was from the Italians, and I had no clue what they were talking about. And you explained it for the Excel user, and that made a huge difference. The audience that should use Power Pivot. So that made it possible for me to dive into this topic and then read further books. Rob Collie (01:03:48): I have this visual in my head of I'm down on my hands and knees, and you're using me as a stepping stone. You're stepping up on my back to get to the Italians. So the book by Mr. Excel, Bill Jelen, I read that same book. He and I both acknowledged that it was essentially a tour of the UI. "Here's what every button does," and some examples and things like that, but he took a pass just completely didn't address the DAX language. It was too ambitious of a project at the time he wrote that book, I didn't know DAX. Lars Schreiber (01:04:22): Right? Rob Collie (01:04:23): There's no way he could have known DAX. Talk about naming, and naming mistakes and things that you regret. The reason my first book was called DAX Formulas for Power Pivot, we envisioned it as a companion to his book. Lars Schreiber (01:04:36): Ah, interesting. Rob Collie (01:04:38): "You've had the UI tour, now let's talk about the formulas." It ended up being more than that by the time I was done, but the name was stuck. We'd already put it in the catalog and I didn't even think we should change it. Lars Schreiber (01:04:50): How can it be that you didn't know DAX at that point? Rob Collie (01:04:55): Easy. Because I don't learn things. It's a better question, how did I ever come to learn it? So I had sort of two separate dates of leaving Microsoft. I had one in April, 2009. I found out that I was basically losing my court case, and I had to move to Cleveland to be with my kids. I wasn't going to be able to keep them in Seattle with me; their mom was going to take them to Cleveland. So I had a lot of things to get in order, and it wasn't until February of 2010 that I officially left Microsoft. But in the intervening 10 months, other than getting relocated and moving to Cleveland and all of that, and selling my house in Seattle, during that time between April of '09, after that is when the DAX language first started to truly appear, even in the internal builds of Project Gemini at Microsoft. The calculate function didn't exist, I don't think. It didn't exist or it just recently been conjured about the time I stopped going into the office. Rob Collie (01:06:00): So I learned DAX from the outside from a great distance, and I might as well have not have been a Microsoft employee when I was learning it. And I had nothing to do with it. I had nothing to do with it's design. I wish I could claim I did, because it's so amazing, but I didn't, I had nothing to do with the DAX language. I had originally been involved, but none of the work that I did ever made it into the product, because it wasn't as good. What they came up with later was far, far better. My thinking on the topic wasn't very good. Lars Schreiber (01:06:32): I had Jeffrey Wong on my podcast to that topic. Rob Collie (01:06:35): Yeah. And you know what? I think I actually listened to that one. Lars Schreiber (01:06:37): Okay. Rob Collie (01:06:38): And I don't consume anything. So that's where the first time I ever heard Jeffrey make the distinction, and it's an obvious distinction once you hear it, but the distinction of Power BI being a model-centric BI tool, whereas all the competitors are report-centric. Heard that on the Lars three syllable Schreiber podcast. And I've been using that a lot since then, so I appreciate you having Jeffrey on the show so I could have that lingo. Yeah. So Jeffrey's one of them, for sure. Jeffrey, Marius, Amir, Howie. Sure there are a couple others in there that I'm forgetting, but this was the task force, and they worked long nights just arguing over the design of the language. Amir eventually had to start using a trick, and he would tell me this during the day. "So what I do is I just tell everyone we're not going home until we decide this." Lars Schreiber (01:07:33): Wow. Rob Collie (01:07:35): That was the only way that they could reach consensus sometimes. No one gets to go home to their families until we're... People would tend to abandon their positions a little bit more gracefully under those circumstances. It's a very, very argumentative team in a mostly good way. Rob Collie (01:07:53): The huge advantage I had, I had two big advantages. Number one was I had nothing but spare time. We talk about the tyranny of the full-time job, and how it's the enemy of learning new things. I didn't have a full-time job then. My full-time job was really to learn about and blog about... That was sort of the deal that I'd kind of handshake made with Microsoft was, I'm not in the office, I'm not doing my normal job, but in this interim period, I'll advocate for you. And I did. And along the way I discovered, "Oh my God, I can actually learn this. It's actually really, really good. It's way better than I thought it was going to be. Oh my God, I'm going to stick with this even after I leave Microsoft, this is going to be the thing." I had no idea that was going to be the outcome. Lars Schreiber (01:08:34): But you had a good idea of what it would become in the future, that it would revolutionize how people deal with data. And that was well, the big thing? Rob Collie (01:08:46): After a few months I did, but I promise you when I launched the blog, I did not know that. Not at all. Lars Schreiber (01:08:53): When the idea of Power Pivot came up, did Microsoft have an idea of the Power platform or at least Power BI platform? Was it planned back then? Rob Collie (01:09:02): No. No, not that I was aware of at all. Have you managed to get Amir on your podcast? Lars Schreiber (01:09:06): No. I have planned that for a longer time, but [inaudible 01:09:11] did a very good episode with him and he asked a lot of questions I already had. So. Rob Collie (01:09:15): Yeah. The format of this podcast, we're lucky. It's basically just get together and chat. If you don't prepare questions, you don't get concerned about what other people have already asked on other shows. Our lack of preparation is a feature. It's genius. Lars Schreiber (01:09:35): That's something cannot do with my podcast, because English is not my native language, so I really prepare the questions, not only what I ask, but also how I will ask it, so that the person I'm asking will definitely understand what I'm talking about. But yeah, if you can do it in this relaxed form like we are doing it right now, it feels comfortable, that makes fun. It's entertaining. I like it. Rob Collie (01:09:57): Well, Lars, I have really enjoyed this. Is there anything that you were expecting me to ask you, or hoping that I was going to ask you that I haven't? Thomas LaRock (01:10:06): Or wishing we didn't ask you? Rob Collie (01:10:09): There's always that. Lars Schreiber (01:10:10): Honestly, no. I was just very excited for this episode because you were my starting into this journey. It's definitely like that. And I can remember in 2014, I published my first English speaking blog post on your block. Rob Collie (01:10:28): That's right. Lars Schreiber (01:10:29): That was a very special point in time for me. And since then I thought, "Okay, nothing is impossible. Just try it." Rob Collie (01:10:37): Hey Luke, let's make sure we look that one up and link it in the description. Lars Schreiber (01:10:41): No, don't do so. I read the article today. It's shit. Thomas LaRock (01:10:47): Oh, we are keeping that. Rob Collie (01:10:47): Hey. Oh, come on, why not? I that's part of it, right? That's the other thing I always tell people in my classes back when I taught them was, "Your first go goal is to be bad at this because when you're bad at this, you're amazing. The version of you that is bad at these tools is going to be so freaking capable, relative to what you're used to. Yeah, but you're going to keep getting better, which is going to shock you. Every three to six months, you're going to look back at things you did three to six months ago and go, "Oh, I was so cute back then. Look how adorable I was. I had no idea what I was doing. Oh, it's embarrassing. The way I did that."" Then I would tell them most of the time, when you are embarrassed by something you did in the past, you will not go back and fix it, because that thing that you built is already working and working so well, and everyone that's using it is loving it. And there's more ROI in doing new magic, in new places than going back, correcting something that only you care about." Rob Collie (01:11:48): Think about it. You know this Lars, right? You've been around the website long enough that I carried around an extra [inaudible 01:11:56] in the greatest formula in the world pattern in my first book, and defended why it needed to be there, and explained in great detail why it needed to be there. On Twitter recently, someone showed me a picture of their original DAX Formulas for Power Pivot Book, and I'm like, "Oh, does that copy the extra [inaudible 01:12:14]?" They're like, "Sure does." How about this? If what you wrote in 2014, if you weren't embarrassed by it, if you didn't think it was very good, if you still thought it was good, that meant that you hadn't evolved in the intervening seven years. Lars Schreiber (01:12:31): Exactly. Rob Collie (01:12:33): Of course you've evolved. Lars Schreiber (01:12:34): That's how I like to see it. It's good if what you did in the past is not completely shit, but that you make an improvement is hopefully what happens. Rob Collie (01:12:47): All right. I'm going to go look at your 2014 article. I'm going to make a decision. Come on, you can't get any worse then publishing, printing 10,000 plus copies of a bound volume that dedicates an entire page to explaining why this all is necessary when it's not. One of my earliest blog articles, I didn't realize yet that I didn't know the words filter context yet, but I didn't know that filters didn't travel both directions over a relationship. I didn't understand that yet. I'm really grateful now that they, by default, only travel one direction makes things a lot more predictable. But I didn't know that then. And I published an article where, "These are the right numbers," and Casper who wasn't at Microsoft yet, he wrote in some comments and said, "Ah, I'm not getting the same, I don't think that's the right answer." And I'm like, "Of course it is." And then I go looking at it. I'm like, "No, you're right." Lars Schreiber (01:13:48): He was on your show as well, right? I have heard this story before. Rob Collie (01:13:53): I was dividing by the whole calendar table, and thinking I was dividing by the number of days that were active in the fact table. Nope. Lars Schreiber (01:14:04): But on the other hand, because you learned it that way, you know how to teach it to people who have never heard about filter context, row context, because you have been there. Rob Collie (01:14:15): The jargon free zone. Lars Schreiber (01:14:16): Yeah. Rob Collie (01:14:16): Being a bad learner, I think that's a fair label to attach to me, being a bad learner. Made me a better teacher. Lars Schreiber (01:14:24): Are you kidding me? That's my motto for last 10 years. Yes. Rob Collie (01:14:28): I'll leave you with a thought; you pointed out that now it's a remote work culture, and you're working from home and everything. Iceland calls. Oh, but your wife has a job still tied to the region, so. Lars Schreiber (01:14:41): The thing is, if I go to Iceland, I have not only remote relationship to my customers, but also to my wife and my boys. Rob Collie (01:14:49): I'm super happy where you found yourself; living the dream. Not many people get to say that. So congratulations. Long road. Lars Schreiber (01:14:56): Same to you. It was a pleasure being here, thanks for the invite. Thanks for the work you did. You influenced many, many people, one of them. I have been, thanks to you. Rob Collie (01:15:05): Talking to people like you with stories like these, it's the coolest. To be perfectly honest, it's even hard for me to emotionally believe that I played a role like that for someone like you. It's hard for me to believe that you didn't emerge fully formed, you know? It's just so authentic. It's just a really touching thought. It's a good thing what we've done. Announcer (01:15:26): Thanks for listening to The Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to P3adaptive.com. Have a data day

For the second part of our 2022 New Year double feature, we sat down with Olivier Travers.  Olivier has had quite the data journey that has taken him from France to Germany, Portugal, Italy, and finally, to Chile where he serves clients all over the world as a Business Intelligence advisor and consultant...an expert in Power BI, he's focused on data visualization, SaaS integration, and software architecture! He also knows quite a bit about MMA and Brazilian JuJitsu, and a spirited discussion on who would win in a fight ensues! Check out Olivier's website HERE! References in this episode: The Ascent of Money PBS Documentary Narcos: Mexico Raw Data with Shishir Mehrotra Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. If you don't yet know why we're releasing two episodes in a single week, just go back and briefly listen to the intro at least, to the Jeff [McNeily 00:00:09] episode. Our guest for this episode is Olivier Travers. Now, Olivier is kind of like a Microsoft data platform international man of mystery. And of course that's the subtitle to Austin Powers. But I think Olivia is a little bit closer to the James Bond end of the spectrum that inspired that. He's just your average French citizen who moved his family to Portugal, and now has spent the last decade and a half in Chile. Pretty standard stuff. And that international flavor pulled us in some unexpected directions. We pretty quickly got into the topic of international trade and the role that different currencies from different nations play on that stage. There are some positively fascinating aspects of that domain that, believe it or not, citizens of basically every country on earth are familiar with, except for American citizens, because the dollar holds a very specific role in international trade. And it just never comes up in the USA. Rob Collie (00:01:06): Continuing that James bond-like theme, we talk a little bit about his jujitsu hobby and exactly how long it would take to make me give up. Spoiler alert, not long. In general, he's just a very calm and deliberate person. So as you're listening to this, try to imagine him wearing like a white tux sitting in Monte Carlo, playing baccarat. Rob Collie (00:01:25): On the technology front, we spend a pretty reasonable amount of time talking about Power Query, pros and cons. We talk a little bit about the idea of using Power Query as like a SQL macro recorder. We again lean on Tom to get him into Power Query. I feel like we got him a little closer this time, but still not quite over the edge. Just top to bottom a fascinating fellow, and I hope you agree. So let's get into it. Announcer (00:01:52): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Announcer (00:01:56): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast, with your host Rob Collie, and your co-host 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 (00:02:20): Welcome to the show. Olivier Travers ... that's a exactly how it's pronounced in the native tongue, yeah? What does it sound like when you say it? Olivier Travers (00:02:28): [foreign language 00:02:28] Well, that's only with other French speakers, so Travers is good enough. Rob Collie (00:02:34): I think you should deploy that more frequently than just with French speakers, because the French speakers won't be as impressed with it. It sounds so good. Rob Collie (00:02:42): Now, it does put a lot of pressure on the other person you're introducing yourself to, right? It puts a lot of pressure on them. But depending upon the situation, maybe that's appropriate. Damn. One more time. Olivier Travers (00:02:53): [foreign language 00:02:53]. Rob Collie (00:02:53): Oh, so good. End of episode. Hang it up. Let's go. Olivier Travers (00:03:00): It's hard to top it. Rob Collie (00:03:02): All right. So you're just the average Frenchman living in Chile? Olivier Travers (00:03:08): Yeah. I don't know what's average about that, I guess. Rob Collie (00:03:12): It's such a cliche these days. We're really tired ... oh, another one? Olivier Travers (00:03:17): There are so many of these, right? Rob Collie (00:03:19): Is there anything about that origin story? How long have you been there? Olivier Travers (00:03:22): We've been there for 14 years after spending four years in something in Portugal. So we left France 18 years ago now. Rob Collie (00:03:32): Wow. World traveler. Do you have Chilean citizenship? Are you still on some sort of long visa or ... ? Olivier Travers (00:03:40): It's close enough. I have permanent residency. So for most intents and purposes, it's the same. I can vote in any election, but I don't think you can be president or buy land at the border. There are a few things that are off limits when you're not a citizen, but by and large, you it's the same. Legally, in most instances, I would be represented and have the same rights and obligations as a citizen. Rob Collie (00:04:07): Can't buy land at the border? It's very specific. Olivier Travers (00:04:10): Well, I don't think they're the only country that does that, is they don't want some citizens from the country at the other side of the border to buy and seed that land to Argentina. Rob Collie (00:04:22): I see. So it's like a Crimean Peninsula situation. Olivier Travers (00:04:26): There's not a lot of trust in the area, generally speaking. Thomas LaRock (00:04:30): You're in Chile, but you're from France. And as far as I know those two countries don't border each other. So I would think they would let you buy land anywhere, but ... Olivier Travers (00:04:44): Probably they wanted to have something generic. You don't really ... a law made of exceptions is not really good law, so probably they wanted to have a generic case. And also you could say, well, you can be anything, but we don't trust your loyalty since you're not a citizen. So I'm guessing that's the Russian element. Thomas LaRock (00:05:01): This is weird to me because I don't know that we do this in the US. Rob Collie (00:05:05): No. We're not really concerned about being invaded in this way. The world's largest military by far tends to not be quite so worried about selling an acre of land. Thomas LaRock (00:05:16): It's the Canadians. You can have North Dakota, all of it. What do we care? Buy all the land you want. Olivier Travers (00:05:24): You can always invade Canada any time anyway, so ... Rob Collie (00:05:28): And Mexican cartels don't really need to own the land on the other side of the border to tunnel under or whatever they're doing, right? And it's just part of NAFTA. Olivier Travers (00:05:36): The drug trade, you mean? Rob Collie (00:05:38): Yeah. I just got finished watching Narcos Mexico season two or three. Olivier Travers (00:05:42): Don't spoil it. It's on my backlog. Rob Collie (00:05:45): It's a really good show, but it's semi-documentary. NAFTA plays a big role in the most recent Narcos Mexico season. I'm not spoiling anything, but who needs elaborate smuggling when you have an open border for commerce. The only reason you need to dig a tunnel under the border is to try to break someone out of prison or something. Olivier Travers (00:06:07): There are some edge use cases. Rob Collie (00:06:09): Yeah. Still some use cases. But again, whether you happen to hold an American ... USA passport, doesn't stop you. Rob Collie (00:06:15): Okay. So world travelers, you said we, so you're not alone. You have a family. Olivier Travers (00:06:21): I'm there with my French wife and our two kids. Our daughter was born in France three years before we left. Our son was born in Portugal, then we moved to Chile when he was still a toddler, so they grew up mostly in Chile, which makes them, I don't know what exactly. I don't think they know either. French, but not quite. Rob Collie (00:06:39): So was it an itch to see the world? Olivier Travers (00:06:41): Yeah, I'm sure it looks that way. There was a bit of a method to the madness. So the itch, there was an impulse. Let's put it one way. There was a strong urge to leave France. I was spreadsheeting public deficit over 40 years and I was ... you can and put whomever in power and they're still running a deficit year after year for 40 years. So just no way this is sustainable. It's not a good environment for entrepreneurship and to raise kids. So I'm out of here. I love French culture and the food and the landscapes and the architecture. It's great to go on vacation. It might be a good place to retire. For me, it was not the like to raise a family and have an active life. Olivier Travers (00:07:21): So we wanted to get out of France and originally went to Portugal, where it fit my motto, which was more send, less taxes. So check two boxes in one move. But then most of my business was in the US where I was eight hours ahead of the US for one, and number two, at that time, the Euro was really getting expensive relative to the dollar. So even in a relatively local area such as Portugal, I could only stretch my income so far in terms of actual purchasing power. Also, there was a kind of real estate bubble and we wanted to buy a house. So planets were not aligned for us to stay long term in Portugal, even though we like the place. Olivier Travers (00:08:02): So it was okay, where do we move that? We get closer to the US. And first we consider moving to the US itself. We looked at Austin, Texas fairly closely. But if you're not a student, if you don't have a big company sponsoring, et cetera, US immigration is not that easy. In my case, I looked at E5 visa where I had to put some money on the line where I was not sure I would be able to stay long term regardless of the investment, so it was. This is a lot of risk they're asking me to take, can I get the benefit of being closer to the US and having a better exchange rate without moving to the US? So we looked at the entire Americas from Canada down to Chile. And Canada was too cold. Mexico already had a drug war. Rob Collie (00:08:47): Oh, did you hear that? He said that. Already had a drug war. We need to go someplace where we can start a drug war. We don't want to compete. Olivier Travers (00:08:55): Why compete if you're going to smuggle? Be a leader. You saw right through me. Rob Collie (00:09:00): Yeah. I just watched three seasons of why moving to Mexico might not have been the move at the time. Yep. Olivier Travers (00:09:05): And I've done a couple data projects with Mexicans and those were the most lovely, easy to work with, serious people I've I've worked with. And I understand from talking with them that the security situation is really in certain states. It's not the whole country. And Mexico is a large, fairly populated federal country, so it's not all over the place. But you have places where it's pretty much a war zone, not an improvement from Europe. Olivier Travers (00:09:30): And you could say to some extent that's the case ... with variations, but for lot of Central and South America. We looked at Brazil. There was affinity with that from Portugal, but Brazil has European bureaucracy with third world efficiency. So not a great mix. Even though we love Brazilian culture like sports, my wife practices, [inaudible 00:09:50] I practice Brazilian jujitsu. We have Brazilian friends. They themselves, when they can't move to the US or other places, a lot of the time. The security situation in Brazil, not middle class suburb America. So we ended up with Uruguay and Chile on the short list. And Chile at the time had better internet access than Uruguay, so that sealed the deal for us. Rob Collie (00:10:14): This is the most deliberate journey of all time. I love it. Olivier Travers (00:10:17): For something random, right? So yeah, there was a spreadsheet, there was banking, advisory notes and cannabis reports and whatnot. And then talking to people, trying to get a bit of the real deal as well. But then you end up really discovering things when you live there, it's always different from what they tell you. But yeah, we're still there. So far, it's worked out pretty well for us. Thomas LaRock (00:10:38): So I have a quick question on all of that. Wonderful journey, by the way, and I love the thought process. Now, you were working on ... you said you were tracking deficit and GDP, and you were looking at the 40 year history, and I'm guessing you built a bit of a prediction as to where things would be. So after 18 years, how's that trend line? Has it continued in the direction that you looked at 18 years ago? Olivier Travers (00:11:03): I'm in the political dynamic where you can have left wing, right wing, and the mix, the combination of both between executive and parliament. It stays the same. It's the same course that adjusts the margin to slightly have less deficit. But there's no structural changes that can really change the course for good. Olivier Travers (00:11:24): I think the numbers are slightly worse than I thought. I thought some countries would've gotten out of the Euro, not just the European union, like what happened with Brexit. Actually in my forecast, Italy, would've gotten out about eight, 10 years ago and that's not happen yet. And they pull out all the stops with Greece, with the whole whatever it takes policy where we have magic money now. Olivier Travers (00:11:46): But the fed does do the same in the US. And the Bank of Japan was a pioneer of creating fake money by their trillions of dollars. So now everybody has funny magic money. For me, the way I look at it is like a road runner who doesn't know he's up in the air and should fall until he looks to the ground and then reality catches up. So how long can we run up in the air? I don't know. Funny money works until I guess it doesn't. Right now, we are having inflation like we haven't had in 40 years, so I'm guessing maybe not forever. But for sure the macro forecast was fairly good, fairly accurate, but the political ... because I would say that what Central Banks do right now is more policy than pure economics was no, I didn't see that. I didn't think they would just unleash free money. It's not even truckloads. I mean, there's no vehicle to hold all the streams of dollars at this point. Rob Collie (00:12:35): Okay. So I had no idea we're going to be talking about this, but I love it. So I have to continue along Tom's line of question. I have to jump in here and oh so gently ask you, do you perceive any irony in escaping from the printing fiat regime of the average Western government, such as France, to the relative safety of South America. You know what's going on over in Argentina, right? And are you familiar with the history of Chile? Olivier Travers (00:13:08): Pick your poison. Right now we have elections coming in on Sunday, presidential elections, and I'm waiting for the result to come out with trepidation because I'm okay with one result. Sophie is my wife. Where do we go next in the next two, three years? And I've done a bit of business in Argentina, a beautiful country, great food, great people, but you don't want to live there. You don't want to live where there's 40, 50, 100% inflation. It's insane. Chile on the macro perspective was much more stable. It had a primary surplus until a few years ago, but now the demographics are catching up. They've been a bit less responsible. The difficulty for countries like that is they need to invest more, but they don't necessarily have the human capital to know how to invest responsibly and in a way that's going to have an actual multiplicative effect. Olivier Travers (00:13:54): So where they look at the first world with envy and think they can get there, but how do you bootstrap that when you don't really have that culture yet? Even just personal discipline ... I mean, you, you're not going to become German overnight. So you can say, "I want to copy and pay something from Denmark or Sweden," but the discipline of the day-to-day interaction and sticking to deadlines and saying what you will, say and doing that then, it's a different culture. Olivier Travers (00:14:21): There is an irony to that. Japan has a messed up economics, but somehow they're sort of spurted for two decades of being flat, but not completely [inaudible 00:14:32] either, who's really performing well these days it's hard to pin down a country that is going to have some sort of imbalance somewhere in their numbers, metrics, policies. Rob Collie (00:14:41): Two stories that seem very relevant here. The first one, I don't know if it's true. It's anecdotal. It's a legend perhaps. There's a story about this guy in mid-1930s Europe who saw it all coming, saw the conflagration, saw that it was all going to burn again, maybe worse, and knew. And so did his homework, didn't have the internet, did his homework and said, "We've got to get out of here. We got to get out of the way of this." So packed up and moved his family to the other side of the world in a place that would never have had any of these problems, an island in the Pacific called Guadalcanal. Olivier Travers (00:15:18): Yeah, it's ... or you could ... I'll go to Hawaii. I'll just surf. For five years, I'll just sit another one out. What can happen? Nothing can happen, right? So no, it's really hard. Rob Collie (00:15:32): Yeah. Didn't see in his research the staring match going on between the United States and Japan over resources and embargoes and things like that. Olivier Travers (00:15:40): I don't know that it's going to be a better outcome. I will retain some sense of personal agency and free will that I think I was deprived of in my home country. And some other people will say, "Well, France has a great safety net and whatnot." And if that's what they like, then great. I'm more of a libertarian. I'll make my own life and get the benefit and also the drawback of my own decisions and mistakes. Rob Collie (00:16:04): So the other story is my wife and I went to Israel on business nine years ago and all the prices in Israel on all the menus and everything have the letters N.I.S afterwards, N period, I period, S after it, where the dollar sign would go, where the number of euros, not in front of the number, but after the number. Rob Collie (00:16:25): And eventually I had to go look this up. It's the new Israeli shekel. Not the old shekel, the new shekel, which was issued in the 80s, the 1980s. So this is ... in many ways we think Israel has much, much, much more in common with the west than most other regions of the world. Rob Collie (00:16:42): And in the 1980s ... and actually my friends at Microsoft who grew up there told me that there was a moment in time when their parents went down to the bank and paid off their mortgage with a handful of change out of their pocket because of this runaway inflation, that was eventually ... they just redenominated the shekel. The new shekel was worth 10,000 or a hundred thousand of the old ones. And so people started getting paid in the new Israeli shekel. So now they were getting paid essentially like a hundred thousand times as much based on what their previous debts were denominated in, which was the old shekel. And they go down and they pay off their house. Rob Collie (00:17:20): And Israel is in a tough spot, geopolitically. The whole borders thing ... we can talk about the borders and who's allowed to own land on the border. That gets very contentious pretty quickly. And they had experienced runaway inflation in the 1980s, while we were all alive and paying attention, and they didn't fall off the planet. Rob Collie (00:17:39): So I'm with you. I've spent long periods of my life, very, very, very concerned about these sorts of things, and at the same time, slowly coming around to also tempering my concerns. It's amazing the things that human society seems to be able to survive, even when it seems like there's just no way that it could, right? A six order of magnitude or five order of magnitude revaluing of your currency to essentially catch up against runaway inflation, you would expect utter collapse. And if you had enemies, they would overrun you at that moment. Olivier Travers (00:18:13): It's easy to overstate ... economists have forecasted a nine of the past three crises. So the old joke where you can't live and be consumed by worry all the time when you there, and there's balancing elements. That said, last time, you also had high inflation in the West. Not to that extent that the US felt compelled to issue the new dollar, but [inaudible 00:18:35] they could, when a house used to cost five or 10 grand, and now it's $500,000. You have a new dollar by a factor of a thousand right there between the 50s and now. Rob Collie (00:18:44): I agree. I think the difference here is in the United States is that we don't have to redenominate. We just print it to the new level. Olivier Travers (00:18:50): It's the privilege of being the reserve currency of the world. And China is trying to balance that and is not catching fire. The Euro is a fraction of the dollar in terms of trade. Rob Collie (00:18:59): So China actually is catching fire at the moment in the way that you don't typically hope for. Rob Collie (00:19:04): Yeah. So reserve currency, this is a phrase that I almost never hear come out of an American's mouth. Olivier Travers (00:19:09): Yeah. Because it's like you're fish swimming in water. You don't know that since all around you they have that benefit. Rob Collie (00:19:14): Americans don't know what a reserve currency is. Olivier Travers (00:19:17): The other countries need to have dollars. Rob Collie (00:19:19): You've got to be a real weirdo. To be an American ... Whenever I'm on an international flight and I'm sitting next to someone who's not an American, I lean over and say, "Hey, do you know what a reserve currency is?" Nine out of 10 times, they do. Olivier Travers (00:19:30): Well, if you go to Argentina, that's really ... everybody needs to be somewhat of an expert on macro economy, because for them, inflation is like you're making daily spending decisions based on these things. Anywhere in south America, really, everybody will know the exchange rate with the dollar. Even in Chile, the Chile is not dollarized. Olivier Travers (00:19:48): The dollar is used a way to express sums of money, because Spanish doesn't really have a word for billions, so you have to say a thousand millions and then you have thousands of thousands of millions of pesos. That's a bit ridiculous. So large sums of money, they tend to speak in dollars, but not because that's actually handled in dollars, just as a shortcut. And you know the exchange rate with the dollar, because if you're going to buy with just [inaudible 00:20:10] or what. But you have countries in South America which are dollarized otherwise informally. Like in Argentina, the dollar is really what holds value against the peso, which is a complete joke. So people have to have that awareness in their daily life, even if they're not in the international trade business themselves. It's a different outlook. Thomas LaRock (00:20:31): I love how this podcast cast has become a discussion on international and monetary policy. And I'm sure the listeners are just going to enjoy this pivot if you will for the next hour. Thomas LaRock (00:20:43): I wanted to mention this documentary I saw years ago called the Ascent of Money. I don't know if either of you have seen it or heard about it. Olivier Travers (00:20:51): Yeah. The one in Ferguson. Actually watched that with my son a few months ago. Thomas LaRock (00:20:54): So it's brilliant, and I would recommend anybody listening that hasn't seen it should probably watch it as well. I think it's worth the time. Thomas LaRock (00:21:01): But the other thing, more importantly, is for a Frenchman to be criticizing how numbers are done in a different language. You, sir are from the land of four 20s because you don't have a word for 80. Olivier Travers (00:21:17): That's true. Wait until you hear about 90. That's four 20 10 plus 1. 91. [foreign language 00:21:25] Four 20 11. Thomas LaRock (00:21:27): I just had to mention that. Wow. Yeah. He's criticizing Spanish. Olivier Travers (00:21:32): That's the French origins for you. Rob Collie (00:21:34): We just finished recording a podcast with Lars Schreiber, who's German. We were joking about the way Germans make words is they just take a sentence and take all the spaces out and call it a word, right? It turns out that the French looked over the border and went, "Oh no, uh-uh (negative). Oh, you're not going to run unopposed. We're going to do this with our numbers." Why don't we just count to 91? As we count out loud, that becomes the word for 91. It's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I wonder if this has some weird side effects. In France, no one ever wants to price any at 80. They're just like, "No, just make it 79." Olivier Travers (00:22:10): When you say it in French, you don't think about the root what you're saying. It's just a word. It's just a sound. You're not breaking down, oh, I'm actually saying four multiplied by 20. You're just saying [foreign language 00:22:22] and that's it. Rob Collie (00:22:22): Tom, did this documentary explain to you what a reserve currency is? Thomas LaRock (00:22:26): I don't remember that, but I fascinated with how money moves and flows around the world. And when you start to understand even why some countries have wealth for the past few centuries and that wealth could have been elsewhere had a couple of bankers in London, decided to fund France instead of England, it's really amazing when you just see and track the wealth over hundreds of years, and now understanding how and why China is basically such an economic power. And I think the important lesson is knowing that none of this is permanent. The money flows in, and then the money flows out. Rob Collie (00:23:08): Well, let me finish springing my slow motion trap. Luke, Tom, as American citizens, do you know what a reserve currency is? Thomas LaRock (00:23:18): Oh, that's what the federal reserve has. Rob Collie (00:23:22): The world has had a reserve currency for a very, very long time. It wasn't always what it is today. Thomas LaRock (00:23:28): Are you going to say it's being backed by gold? Rob Collie (00:23:30): Similar. Basically the reserve currency ... I'm going to explain it, and then Olivier can explain it for real. When it comes to reserve currencies, I'm like a slightly improved American. Basically, it's the currency in which international trade can be safely denominated at all times. Thomas LaRock (00:23:47): So Bitcoin? Rob Collie (00:23:48): That's actually the danger. And I've got a cryptocurrency expert themed lined up for soon as football season's over. We're going to go after it. We'll come back to that later. But if you're in France ... let's say you're pre-Euro France, and you want to buy something on the international market. You're a company and you need to get supplies from Brazil. You go to Brazil and say, "Here, I'll pay you so many Francs for your steel or whatever." And they go, "What am I going to do with Francs? Can't you pay me in my local currency?" And you go, "Oh, come on. I don't have any of that." But it turns out if you pay in dollars, everyone's happy. Olivier Travers (00:24:33): It's just the depth of the currency market so you have liquidity. You have almost no spread. Otherwise, if you want to trade in your own currency and there's ... you're going to be stuck. You're going to ask for a huge spread if there's liquidity all. So at some point, Russia, for instance, was non-convertible. They were trading. I'll sell you weapons for oil or timber or whatnot because the currency itself doesn't have liquidity, ergo, it's hard to access its value, because it could be worth double or half of it next month. You're stuck with it. Rob Collie (00:25:03): If you accept a large quantity of Francs, it's going to take you a little while to resell those. Now you have to go back to the international market and sell those Francs and trade them in for your own currency to use it again at home, right? First of all, it's a hassle to go sell those Francs, right? It's not a lot of fun. By the time you're done offloading them, Olivier's right. It might be worth much less. There's a huge risk there. It's really, really crazy. So because the dollar is the world's reserve currency, one of the side effects of all of this trade being denominated in dollars is that everyone holds dollars. Olivier Travers (00:25:38): Our currency, your problem. Rob Collie (00:25:40): Every country on the world is holding onto large supplies of dollars so that they can go buy things on the international market, but also because they just sold a bunch of things on the international market. Exactly. So when the United States dilutes its currency, the world pays the depreciation. Of course, when the dollar loses its value, American savings accounts also lose value, but the rest of the world loses it too. And so it's much, much, much safer, it's much easier, this tremendous privilege that the United States has that no single American citizen seems to be aware of. So all these things that are trying to attack and displace the dollar as the reserve currency, this is the single greatest threat to current American way of life and current American national security, all of that, is if we'd lost that privilege, we'd actually have to play fair. Olivier Travers (00:26:33): You'd have to pay for the real price for things. You'd also be exposed to fluctuations that right now everyone else is exposed to. So if the dollar goes up and down, it's everybody else's currency exchange risk. American companies see that when they have to [inaudible 00:26:47] earnings from say the Eurozone and then, well, we grew by 20% in Euro, but Euro gained 10%, so in the end it was just plus 10% in dollars and whatnot, you'll see that in SCC filings ... American companies have such a huge local market, it's not as material to say for the average German company, which is 70% expert-driven, so where they need to control that so much more, because it affects their balance sheet and their real operating income every year. An American company could be, well, it's just extra money. We leave it abroad for tax reasons and whatnot, but we can be happy with 80% of our revenue in the US, such a huge consumer market, huge B2B market. What you need other countries for is gravy. Rob Collie (00:27:31): Now where things get a little hazy, where you end up in the realm of conspiracy theories that might be true, but also might not be, I've read things like the real reason that Saddam Hussein got taken out the second time around? This is the conspiracy theory. Okay? The real reason is, is that he tried to sell oil in a currency other than dollars. So the story goes, whenever you try to sell oil for something other than dollars, if you don't have nukes, you don't exist anymore. Olivier Travers (00:28:04): Well, without those extremes, you see how ... for instance, how China is pressuring any country that says we're going to recognize Taiwan or have dealings with Taiwan, is going to be under huge pressure. A mix of incentives, like they will bribe countries, Jamaica or whatnot, Caribbean islands that have sometimes recognized Taiwan as a sort of defacto country. "Oh, well, if you'll get a $2 billion investment if you stop doing that." I think they we're doing that with a small European country this week, play more of the stick as opposed to the carrot policy of, well, bad things are going to start to happen to you if you don't stop your shenanigans, because of China. So I don't know how all, all this relates to data, but it is very data-driven. Rob Collie (00:28:46): This is the curious mindset that keeps picking at a story to find out what the next level down is. When I got ahold of all of this stuff, probably, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago ... we're going to change gears in a second. But it actually kind of started for me when I was sitting around at Microsoft going, "We have a 40 billion dollar cash hoard ... " this is in the 90s or whatever, right ... as a company. And I asked myself, "Why aren't we splitting that up? There's 15,000 of us here. I don't know. Why don't we get together and just divvy it up," right? And I knew that we weren't going to, but I didn't have the precise reasons why. As I started to pick at that string, slowly over the course of years, it kept leading me into all kinds of new places and everything, and really truly understanding how the financial system works and what it means to be a publicly traded company and all that kind of stuff. And then eventually it led me into all of this stuff. Rob Collie (00:29:40): And I kind of came around to the conclusion that, like you said, the economists, the famous economists either don't know anything or are deliberately ignorant to keep the music going, and everything is so damn complicated that you end up trying to avoid, try to play it, try to surf it, and you end up in Guadalcanal at the opening of World World II. Rob Collie (00:30:00): And so I went this long, long, long, global journey in my mind anyway, there and back again, Bilbo Baggins, right? And all I did was just come back to where I am today and go, "Okay, so what are we going to do today with the people that I know directly? How are we going to build a good business?" And all of that. But I had to go on that long, protracted journey. Rob Collie (00:30:24): And if you met me at various points along that journey, you would've discovered me in varying degrees of radicalism in a way. "Because you don't really know how things work. Let me tell you how things really work." And I think I know how things work now better than I ever did on that previous points on the journey. But I'm kind of more moderate now about it because everyone's on the take, including us. Olivier Travers (00:30:47): Right. I think there's a bunch of red pills. A single red pill doesn't unlock the whole thing. So you think you understand it and then wait, you're telling me LIBOR rates that underpin any mortgage in the world, or almost, you're telling me that those currency exchange rate that we're talking are rigged? And that's not a conspiracy theory. There's been criminal charges on the biggest markets in the world. Rob Collie (00:31:12): Brutal fines have been levied that were equivalent to 0.001% of the profit gained by rigging it. Olivier Travers (00:31:19): Yeah. So it's hard to get the whole encompassing, oh, I know, I understand, top to bottom, and from the macro ... from the universe down to what happens within a cell perspective at each zoom level, which I guess it goes to what we do with BI, which is how can we drill down from show me the main cash flows of a company down to how much money do we make in North Dakota before it was sold to Canada last week on the red widgets? Rob Collie (00:31:47): It's the North American Crimean Peninsula. Olivier Travers (00:31:50): Weren't there were plans somewhere in the US history, semi-seriously some president considered invading Canada, or ... ? Thomas LaRock (00:31:57): I'm not sure we considered it. But yes, plans for the invasion of Canada did exist. Rob Collie (00:32:04): I think I saw this in the South Park movie, right? Isn't that when this happened? Thomas LaRock (00:32:09): I don't believe that there was any seriousness about it. I'm sorry. Let's say after the War of 1812. I look at it and to me it's almost like it was busy work. There was somebody in the cabinet at one point and they're like, "Hey, you know what would be great? Give him something to do that we'll keep him busy. Tell him we're looking to invade Canada. Have him drop plans." And he spent two months on it and he came back with everything like, "Oh, that's great. That's great. Now what can we give him to do?" Just to keep him out of the way for a while. That's how I've always thought of it. This wasn't a real project. This was something to just keep somebody else busy. Olivier Travers (00:32:43): If you read the Federalist Papers, the state of mind of the founders of the US and of 18th century competition with Spain and the potential war with Spain was a big deal. It was right there in the main list of being able to thwart this huge competitor and a potential enemy 250 years later to Spain. Don't you go there once a week to race bulls or have tapas? How's that a foe? Rob Collie (00:33:08): It turns out that the Americans ended up being the perfect engine for warfare over the last few hundred years, right? Tremendous amount of resources, not easy to invade geographically, and a bit of a chip on it shoulder. We were attempting to make that right turn into BI. But we talk about BI a lot on this show and we're going to come back to it. But I saw it in your Twitter bio. Before you even mentioned it, we were going to go there. We're going to turn this into an episode of the Joe Rogan experience. Olivier Travers (00:33:34): Three hours? Rob Collie (00:33:35): We're going to talk about ... Olivier Travers (00:33:36): Mushrooms? Rob Collie (00:33:37): Brazilian jujitsu. Olivier Travers (00:33:38): Oh yeah, don't get me started. Rob Collie (00:33:40): Let's get you started, because we've never talked about Brazilian jujitsu on this show. When did you first get into that? Olivier Travers (00:33:45): Well, so I did judo as a kid and teenager a little bit in France. It's like wrestling in Midwest, in the US. It's what you do when you're a kid to bulk me up a little bit, give me confidence, and I did. And then I did other sports, but no wrestling of any sort. And I really needed to get back into shape. And I started getting a bit judo a few years ago. But in the end, when you're middle-aged, something that's really focused on takedowns, and high amplitude at that, is a bit hard on the body, so it's just the recovery. Olivier Travers (00:34:13): Brazilian jujitsu does takedown, but is mostly focused on [inaudible 00:34:17] fighting. For people not familiar with it, if you look at MMA UFC fights, when they're on the ground, most of what you see is a combination of wrestling and Brazilian jujitsu. So a dominating position and finding some way to choke out or apply a joint lock on you, shoulder, arm lock, leg lock of any sort. But because it's ... you have less explosion than in judo, because you are on the ground for the most part, it's a bit less harsh on the body. You can train more often. Olivier Travers (00:34:46): And yeah, I fell into that rabbit hole about seven years ago, which for me is the fun way to do something that's very physical and a very serious role in one swoop. So when I was young, I could go and work out and bench press. I've lost any interest. If it's not fun, I'm not going to do it. I will go and have a run every two months. That's just not a way to stay in shape. I'm limited by just my recovery time, but I'll do it as often as I can. So I train three, four times a week. And it's never ending, the techniques and the counters. You think you've got it figured out and then, well, but if you move your arm in that way and your head in that way, then you can get out of that position and reverse it. So it is really fun. It's not for everyone, but I find it extremely fun. Rob Collie (00:35:33): I've never done it, but I have heard it described over and over again as almost akin to chess in a way, right? There's a physical component to it, obviously. Everything has to be physically expressed. But it is a very cerebral thing. I'm assuming that Chile, you guys use kilograms and not pounds. Olivier Travers (00:35:49): Yeah. It's metric system. Rob Collie (00:35:51): How many kilograms do you weigh? Olivier Travers (00:35:53): I'm about 80. So I think that's 170, 175? Rob Collie (00:35:56): 178, 175. Okay. So I'm 220. I'm middle-aged, like you. I've never done any organized wrestling or jujitsu. How many seconds does it take you to make me give up? Olivier Travers (00:36:13): Do I want to work for it or do I want to throw yourself into the submission? Rob Collie (00:36:17): You're competing in a worldwide competition to submit Rob Collie as fast as possible. Olivier Travers (00:36:22): Are we starting standing or on the ground? Rob Collie (00:36:24): Tell me both ways. Olivier Travers (00:36:26): Short of striking, but you don't want me to take you down and you're going to exert your weight and strength. Rob Collie (00:36:31): Okay. I'm fighting for my life. You're competing in an Olympic sport where every 10th of a second matters. Olivier Travers (00:36:37): 40 pounds is nothing to sneeze at. I don't know your overall condition, if you do other sports or whatnot. Do you have any cardio otherwise? Rob Collie (00:36:44): I don't know if you have it down there, Orange Theory Fitness. I do that, let's say, three to four times a week. It's high intensity interval training. Olivier Travers (00:36:52): Yeah. So you're in good shape. So it might take me a minute, two minutes just for me to protect myself and not put me in a bad position. If it's on the ground and we're chilling, you want to practice Brazilian jujitsu, you want to go into that game, then 20 seconds, 30 seconds. Because your energy ... you'll try to, for instance, [inaudible 00:37:12] you'll try to throw my legs, et cetera. You'll go in a direction. You'll go way too much in that direction, and I'll take your back ... untrained people do sometimes silly ... they don't do jujitsu. So sometimes it puts you back in more of a real fight mode. If you know jujitsu and then you're 220 ... one of my spar partners is 220 and muscular, 220, 28 years old. That's work. Yeah. He makes me work. Rob Collie (00:37:36): I don't want to play against him. Olivier Travers (00:37:40): You don't want to oversell it. Technique doesn't overcompensate everything. Attributes, it's strength and speed and everything through technique. But if you're a complete newbie and short of strikes, which completely changed the game. So if it's MMA, it's different. Rob Collie (00:37:55): I don't have any training in that either, so it wouldn't matter. Olivier Travers (00:38:00): I did that a bit, and then I realized I didn't like to get punched in the face. Kneeing other people or elbowing them or punching them is great. But being on the receiving end, I was ... nah, I'm just not going to do that. Rob Collie (00:38:13): That's actually surprisingly common, even at the highest levels of these combat sports. There are some people who very clearly are not into being hit. Olivier Travers (00:38:21): And especially if you're hit in the head. You're exposed to other risks like CRT, like concussions, et cetera, and it could affect my work. I mean, I got hurt several times last year. I got a displaced rib a little bit. I couldn't sleep well for a week. I got my eye scratched with someone's nail a couple times, and that's really painful. I got tweaked fingers. You get hurt. Olivier Travers (00:38:43): But then many of those issues, you can get playing soccer or going on a bike ride with your kids. So it's not like it's the only sport where you can get hurt. You can control to some extent, and also selecting your aspiring partners, gym culture, et cetera. You can control to some extent the level of risk that you're comfortable with. I warned you. Don't get me started. Thomas LaRock (00:39:04): I wanted to. I think the secret here is because he's going to be expecting you to do ... or you're going to be doing ... you have to keep him off balance by not doing those things. So I would suggest you just do nothing. Rob Collie (00:39:17): You know what I'm going to do? Thomas LaRock (00:39:18): Just stand there. Rob Collie (00:39:19): I'm going to walk into the ring or the octagon with him and I'm going to immediately go into the crane kick position from Karate Kid. Like as far as I can tell, that is an unbeatable technique. Thomas LaRock (00:39:30): You have to do what's unexpected. You have to do things that he's never seen before, and by doing those things, you'll last longer. You ain't going to win, but you could last longer. And now, this is the important thing, is there's an over-under here and there'll be some wagering. And what I need from you is I need to know if this is a sure thing. So I want you to try all of those weird things and let me handle the money side. Olivier Travers (00:39:54): The doing nothing is funny actually, because beginners will try that after a couple of weeks of trying too hard, and then they realize, "Everywhere I go is a trap. Oh, there's an arm right there. Oh, he's choking me out. How does that guy have my back when I thought that was winning two seconds ago?" So at some point there's like, "I'm going to try and sit there and see what happens. And then while I'm going to push you, I'll go get mount and you'll get choked in 10 seconds as opposed to 20." So you can scratch that off the list. Doing nothing is not an option. Thomas LaRock (00:40:26): See, he's just saying that because he knows that's really the answer. He's throwing you off. Rob Collie (00:40:31): The next three months, I'm going to practice rolling into a perfect ball like an Armadillo and just rolling around. There's nothing you can grab a hold of. Olivier Travers (00:40:38): My son does that. It was, "Oh, that's my technique. I invented it. I called it The Ball." I'm like, "That's not going to work for long, son." Rob Collie (00:40:48): Ah, smart kid, smart kid. Olivier Travers (00:40:52): He was very proud of himself. It's funny, my son is a French guy raised in Chile, and somehow default speaks in English. It's like some kids have been raised by wolves, he's been raised by the internet seemingly. So he's like, "Oh, I call it the ball ... " with his. He has a very good American accent. The ball is not a thing. That's not going to work. Rob Collie (00:41:11): I just have a real ... it's like a fascination with things that are expressed physically, but that involve technique and end up being just gigantically superior. If I were really rich, a big part of my life would be spent going around just getting absolutely smoked by people in their various fields, right? Rob Collie (00:41:36): I remember watching Marshall Faulk the football player and thinking, "Okay, how narrow does the hallway have to be for me to be able to actually get two hand touch on Marshall Faulk if he's trying to get past me? There's a point at which the hallway just wide enough that I'm never going to be able to make contact. His job is to get past me. We're in a hallway. He's still going to get past me. I don't have to tackle him. I just have to touch him." Stuff like that, I'm always fascinated by it. If you make it to Indianapolis, you make it to the States anytime soon, Olivier, or even not, let's film this. It'll be two social media stars, Jake Paul fighting ... Olivier Travers (00:42:13): Tyron Woodley. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:42:15): Right. We'll just use this. Olivier versus Rob. I'll get 15 minutes of training and then you'll just smoke me. Olivier Travers (00:42:24): Usually it takes about a year, I would say 12 to 18 months of training, to not have too much trouble with a brand new beginner, except with their linebacker, taking outside professional athletes with a serious body mass. But outside of that, the average newcomer, even if they're lifting, a regular Joe just doesn't stand a chance ... again, outside of striking. Striking has always that one punch, bigger chance you can knock out almost anyone, right? You connect well on the jaw or temple, you could knock out almost anyone. But you'll break your hand in the process. Rob Collie (00:42:57): I'm as likely to hurt myself throwing punches. So I'm going to ... no striking. Tom, did you have something there? Thomas LaRock (00:43:05): I'm amused that you think you have a chance. Rob Collie (00:43:06): Look, I'm betting on me. Thomas LaRock (00:43:08): The thing is right now, Rob, what's happening is your mind process thinking about this is you're thinking as if you're still 20 years old, but you have the wisdom of something smarter. You don't think you're a middle-aged man in Indianapolis. Rob Collie (00:43:23): No, that's true. That's totally true. That's totally true. I can't move at the same speed. However, I would pick me today over the 20 year old me in a fight. No doubt about it. I would tear up 20 year old me. I am so much thicker, stronger, bigger. I was still filling out when I was 20. Thomas LaRock (00:43:39): Now, that's fair. I haven't seen you in the ring. I haven't seen you compete. Rob Collie (00:43:44): Well, neither have I. Rob Collie (00:43:48): All right. You're in Portugal before you move to Chile. Most of your clients are in the USA at that point. You need a time zone change above all else, and maintaining the sunshine. I understand these are important KPIs. And that was what year, roughly? Olivier Travers (00:44:04): 2007. Rob Collie (00:44:05): Okay. 2007. So let that sink in, dear audience. There was no Power BI. There was no Power Pivot. So what were you doing? I glanced through your blog articles and I was seeing all kinds of things that they're just general technical stuff. How'd you define yourself as a professional? What was your primary marketable skill? Olivier Travers (00:44:25): Right. So at the time, I had a couple ventures where I was involved in an operational capacity, more than ... I went back and forth with consulting. So I had for a while a gig where I was managing a series of B2B blogs, trade publications, but on the web in newsletters. So I focused on that for eight years or so, something like that. Olivier Travers (00:44:46): So in that case, I was more the general manager and that was more of a content business. I applied data to running the business. I had my dashboard for sales and finance. And also as a publication ... actually I contacted you when you were about ... what was it, Pivot Stream? 10 years ago. Because where I was trying to get a retail trade publication out the ground, and they were already retail publications, magazines, and I wanted to something that was data-driven. And I saw Power Pivot, but I was ... I need something that is hosted that I can embed in my own website. Olivier Travers (00:45:18): And then I was trying to have a same store sale tracker going on. I wanted to have something that was across retailers with Walmart and Target saying, "Well, here's the store to store comparison where you don't take growth in terms of numbers of stores into the equation." You're looking at the existing base and you see whether business is growing pretty much organically. Olivier Travers (00:45:38): So it's a metric that some investment bankers will try to compute. And you see some numbers sometimes, but there was no real dashboard of same store sales. I was trying to build that out, for instance. So that's one area where I was trying when ... now we are talking 2010, 2011, where I wanted to have pivot tables on the web for subscription services or stuff like that. And I don't think the technology was quite there yet at that time. So we ended up having one off spreadsheets, more of an ad hoc, a bit podunk, to be honest, but a handcrafted approach to that. Rob Collie (00:46:11): Artisanal. Olivier Travers (00:46:13): Very artisanal. And that was part of the problem. I never made that scale where it became a sustainable long term business. So when ad sales creator, post-2007, 2008, things became faster. We tried to increase content sales subscription and sort of made do for a while. But in the end, that was not enough. So I went back to consulting, leveraging my operational skills, and I would say my breadth of experience, as I think now it's apparent from the various countries, various businesses, industries, languages. Olivier Travers (00:46:44): I'm a specialist in generalities. I'm not the best at anything really, except maybe being good at a wide variety of things. So what I'm good at, I would say, is from that background is diving in something where I'll get to understand maybe the key drivers for your business in your industry, in your country, whatever that is, fairly quickly. So the business and the acumen, I would describe that, generally speaking, drives and then the technology follows. So yeah, Power BI is a good tool. We'll use Power BI, but we can use other tools as well. I don't to think of myself as a one tool guy. I think that's not good job security. And also then you become the hammer that is only seeing the nails everywhere. I don't think that's good service for clients. Rob Collie (00:47:24): Go back to the jujitsu metaphor. You need all the tools so that you can show those beginners that there's no escape, no matter what they do. Olivier Travers (00:47:32): In this case, it's not as antagonistic with our clients. You try to make that more of a corporation, a partnership, but yeah. Rob Collie (00:47:39): The opponent is the problem. The problem tries to wiggle out this way. "No, no. Uh-uh (negative). Submission. Arm bar". So do you remember what it was, or how you even discovered Power Pivot as early as you did? Because you're right. We were in touch back in my Pivot Stream days, which ended in 2013. So that puts you in the first 0.000001% awareness worldwide of the existence of Dax, the existence of the verte pack engine, [inaudible 00:48:10] whatever was behind Power Pivot. You'll never randomly bump into someone in your life that discovered it before you. You might be at a conference or something. In the random world, you will always be number one to have discovered it. Olivier Travers (00:48:24): So a couple ways to look at it. First off, I used Excel from when I was in business school. I had a side gig with a local computing PC assembly company. And the CEO of that company hired me on the side to create a monthly price striker, a dashboard of all the competitions. So I was spending my Saturdays reading the monthly PC shopper magazines and typing in the data and charting specs and this hard drive and that monitor and that much ram. Then here's the graph of everywhere, and you're here. My first dashboard was 30 years ago. That was Excel. And I also did a bit of sales for that guy. At the time, I sold 17 or 18 286 PCs to my business school. So I went to the IT of my business school like, "I want to sell you computers." They're like, "Okay, what's your quote?" Olivier Travers (00:49:12): Then I worked at Microsoft in the mid-90s and that was obviously a tool where there was a lot of use. There was a data warehouse for sales numbers called MS Sales, very creatively, as you would expect from Microsoft. And I would go and create those awesome pivot tables. And I would macros refreshing them from that data warehouse in I think '97. And I would show that to my peers and colleagues and they went, "How do you do that? Where is that even coming from?" I was, "Let me show you." Olivier Travers (00:49:39): I was in charge of larger country sellers, the companies selling to the select at the time, licensing mass deals. And I was able to go and meet the CEOs and CFOs of those resellers, partners of Microsoft saying, "Well, here's exactly how much you're selling," in Francs at the time, and this product line against that type of license in that region. So we had already a fairly good breakdown. So it was all pivot tables. So I wanted ... for the publication business I was telling you about, I wanted to have pivots, but for the web. And before that, maybe there was something for SharePoint I don't quite remember. Rob Collie (00:50:13): Yeah. Excel Services. Olivier Travers (00:50:15): Yeah. There was a startup ... I don't remember the name, that that's something that ... like the first pivot technology I saw, maybe a year or two, and they were purchased by whomever and they sort of killed it. I was on the lookout from the 90S for a pivot on the web. And then it took forever to materialize into something that is now credible without blowing in your face. Took 10, 15 years to really happen, I think. Olivier Travers (00:50:40): Power BI now is mature. I looked at Power BI desktop designer. It was not [inaudible 00:50:45] was not called Power BI Desktop, but in 2015 ... I was, "This is complete garbage." I was playing with Tableau at the time. I blogged about it, saying, "Microsoft has the work cut out for them," because it was buggy. The visuals were fairly crappy. But you could see the intent was better than the whole Silverlight Power View fiasco, which was ... I could have told you that was a technical dead end. What committee came up with that architecture? Rob Collie (00:51:08): Oh, I know. Olivier Travers (00:51:11): You know where the [crosstalk 00:51:12] is? I buried it. Rob Collie (00:51:12): Yeah, but the people that were involved in that, they also have very, very selectively short memories. Not my department, mm-mm (negative). Thomas LaRock (00:51:20): Are you saying somebody kicked Mr. Silverlight? Rob Collie (00:51:23): I saw a tweet today ... Olivier, we'll give you a little background here. This is a National Football League coach, urban Meyer. The funny thing about NFL coaches' contracts is that they're almost always guaranteed. Five years, 7 million dollars a year, and if I fire you, you get the rest of the money. It's just an incredibly perverse incentive. Olivier Travers (00:51:46): Well, I was about to say, what are my incentives? Rob Collie (00:51:46): Yeah. It just turns out that you rely on the demographic being so competitive that they don't want to go out on their shield. That's not how they want to go. And I think Urban decided very early in his tenure with the Jaguars this year that, nah, I'm just going to keep being awful, like just really awful until they have to fire me. And I saw a tweet today that said ... it didn't even mention who it was about. You didn't have to. Everyone knew. It said, "We just witnessed a masterclass in stealing tens of millions of dollars in plain sight." Olivier Travers (00:52:19): Yeah. Silverlight was really that architectural ... let's compete with the product that's going to be phase out by the entire market in two years. Yes. I'm saying that a bit with hindsight regarding the fate of Flash. But really Web 2.0 was already well established. Dynamic HTML was already a thing. What are you doing? What is this Runtime? The .net ... I mean, it was like architecture from the mid-2000s, 2005, that they tried to pursue eight years later that it made no sense. Why not ActiveX while we were at it, right? Rob Collie (00:52:50): I mean, at least we'd been there. Well, not to go there again, I think. But it is weird. In 2014, 2015, I was visiting Shishir Mehrotra, who we've had on the show, when they were working on their startup. It's now called Coda. And they were writing the whole thing from the ground up, this entire office suite application, writing the whole in JavaScript from the ground up. And I was sitting there just scratching my head. JavaScript. JavaScript? Really? The thing that makes the web control flash in HTML? The thing that even is downstream from the server code in the web apps and web pages today? Yeah. It's come a long way. It's the new C++. Olivier Travers (00:53:29): Yeah, I remember seeing the first cross-browser drag and drop in some financial web app 15, 16 years ago. And I was, "Huh." I liked to see it because I was doing some web coding and I had developers working with me and that was ... and now you're thinking drag and drop and all those affordances that you have on the desktop. We expect them by and large to have them in the web browser, right? But go back 10, 15 years ago, that was edge demos, not something that you would expect to really work, the whole cross-browser thing. As long as Internet Explorer was around, that was a big deal. Now everything is Chromium, that's, to a large extent, not an issue anymore. Rob Collie (00:54:05): We just had another wordagami, affordances. I remember when I was first introduced to that word five years in my Microsoft career. And it was new to all of us. Oh, a new way to say capability or type of UI. It was like an all purpose word that sounded cool. I think it had about an 18 month lifespan at Microsoft. We burned through it pretty quickly. But it is a good word. Olivier Travers (00:54:25): I think it's a bit more specific than functionality because it's about the way that it responds. So for me, it's almost something that's tactile, click and I see that it feels like the button can be pressed. If you look at the affordances in a game, any game where you interact with 3D objects, like things magnet and click and there's noise and there's boom, and you see that things connect or not. Olivier Travers (00:54:47): Why do we have business applications that feel like they're mainframe screens from the 70s? Why don't you apply what's done in the gaming world where it's much more like tactile almost? It's virtual, but you feel like it's boom, it's clicking. You feel like a physical emulation of a physical mechanism on screen and reinforced with haptic reactions on your phone, made data entry possible. And if you don't have the haptic feedback, it doesn't quite work to type on a smartphone. Right? That's what I think the breakthrough with the iPhone. Olivier Travers (00:55:19): Now, apply that to those dead UIs in business software. Have you looked at what's been going on in gaming for at least 20 years? I feel everything in terms of what we accept as adequate performance is laughable in the business world. You have a whole generation of managers that go 120 FPS or 240, just because oh, 60 is not quite ... we're coming from a world where TV is worth 24 Hertz, 24 images per second. Now you're pushing 120, 240, and you're locking that frequency. And then we're there waiting for five seconds for a screen to refresh. And you have a blank screen in between. What is this? I want to send every enterprise software developer working for a gaming studio and learn what's real acceptable frontend performance and come back and lock us out of the ... like I feel we have something that's shinier and better than it used to, but only marginally. There's a leap when you go into a game, and boom. Olivier Travers (00:56:15): I have three screens. The main one is a 49 ultra-wide. And I have two 27 on top, so I can feel like a trader, even though I don't trade anything. But play a more ... say a driving game on a screen like that, it's amazing. And then you go back to Teams and you're like, okay, how do you get that level of streaming? I would say bottlenecks. Don't get me started on downloading data from SharePoint. Say you're, oh, five megabits per second. Wow. Welcome to, I guess, 2002 broadband. Rob Collie (00:56:45): Oh, well SharePoint, it's running a lot of complex garbage SQL queries to ... let's not go there. So we should send like the CarMax that made Doom ... we should send them to be technical fellows on the intelligence platform at Microsoft, bring some of that quality and response time and production value discipline. Olivier Travers (00:57:03): Yeah. I think it's the expectations. We've just grown accustomed to, well, if you wait two seconds and nothing happens, that's good. That's fast. If you play a competitive P2P, player against player game online ... I think you played World of Warcraft. I used to be sort of semi-hardcore casual 15 years ago. Rob Collie (00:57:23): Yeah. Me too. I haven't played World of Warcraft in about, I don't know, five hours. I was on earlier. Just doing some auction house work, folks, I wasn't ... Olivier Travers (00:57:31): Yeah. I've done that. I've done the arbitrage. Rob Collie (00:57:35): I know you have. Olivier Travers (00:57:36): You know I have, right? And so ... and I have that transparency. Rob Collie (00:57:43): Have you done any cross-server arbitrage? Olivier Travers (00:57:45): I've done cross-faction where you swam for 20 minutes to get to the neutral auction bay in Booty Bay or whatever, and then you could buy, but you had to make sure that people were not scamming your trades because you had to go on the open auction. I made 67 gold in two months. That was the game. Rob Collie (00:58:02): Just making the gold, right? In fact, I'm trying to give the gold that I'm making away to my friends and they're like, "I don't want to have to pay it back." I'm like, "You don't understand, this is the game." Olivier Travers (00:58:11): I'm hitting the limit. I'm hitting the account limit. So anyway in those games, a hundred milliseconds, 200 milliseconds ... 200 milliseconds is about human eye to finger reaction time, more or less. It increases a bit with age. But you know how that's the difference? We're talking a fifth of a second. You're going to perceive it. But then we accept we're saying three seconds is fast. That's an order of magnitude slower than it should be for people not to start having their ... your brain is already starting to wonder and open other tabs. Power Query, I love Power Query as a tool, but it's impossible to be in zone with Power Query. You cannot be productive in the sense of I'm in a task and that's all I do and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. For me, I can't just be there waiting for the next step to refresh because I changed an earlier step and all the evaluation to go on for 30 seconds ... it just doesn't work for me. Rob Collie (00:59:01): I feel your pain. You should see our Power BI report that measures are advertising effectiveness, connects to an Azure data warehouse. And the way that it's structured is the way that Google, for instance gives us data. It's just tremendous overkill. So it ends up with you kick off a Power Query, anything that triggers the refresh preview, go get a cup of coffee. Olivier Travers (00:59:22): Yeah, exactly. So you have to start computing, is it worth it for me to create a view that is just a thousand rows that I'm going to develop all the ETL from? Can I build that to the client? Is it fair? Is it worth it? And you're like, "No, I won't do it," unless that's really marque project that you're going to keep making and adding to. But oftentimes it's not worth it and you're just there frustrated that it's not faster. Rob Collie (00:59:45): And of course, with those sub views, those sample data sets that you would use to develop against, part of the problem is that you still need to validate that your answers are correct. And you can't validate artificial numbers in any way. Olivier Travers (00:59:57): Yeah. Because it kills your profiling. So then if you are trying to find exceptions, you can't do that with just a thousand random views either. So yeah, that's an issue. Rob Collie (01:00:06): Nope. Nope, nope, Nope. Tom's going to fix all this for us as he learns Power Query over the holidays. Thomas LaRock (01:00:12): Oh, is that what I'm doing? Rob Collie (01:00:13): Oh yeah. You're going to splice that together with SQL, and you're going to develop a school of operating with Power Query and SQL that will be called The LaRock School. You know how Matt Allington named my way of laying out tables in the Schema view of Power BI the Collie method? If I can have something named after me like that for just arranging things in two rows, I think you can actually contribute something of far greater value to the world and we will make sure that the name sticks. Thomas LaRock (01:00:44): Yeah. I'm good. Rob Collie (01:00:47): Such disappointment. Thomas LaRock (01:00:48): Well, it's Raw Data by P3, not by LaRock. So ... Rob Collie (01:00:53): Listen, this is a point in time, Tom. This is the pre-LaRockian method, the pre-LaRock School era. Thomas LaRock (01:01:00): True, because it could be just Power Query all the time. Rob Collie (01:01:03): Well, Power Query and SQL, the two of them together. Thomas LaRock (01:01:06): Together. Olivier Travers (01:01:07): Oh, I see a query folding winter of love for you. Rob Collie (01:01:12): I agree. Until Tom is throwing query folding around like the word affordance ... Thomas LaRock (01:01:17): There's so much out there yet for me to learn. Rob Collie (01:01:22): Ich bin ein query folder. Thomas LaRock (01:01:24): There's so much and it can be hard for me to have focus on tackling any one thing. Rob Collie (01:01:33): I totally get it. That's why I'm here for you. Thomas LaRock (01:01:35): So is Power Query a thing for me right now? You know what? I don't know Rob Collie (01:01:41): Top of the stack. Thomas LaRock (01:01:41): I don't know. Rob Collie (01:01:41): You owe it to yourself, to the world. Olivier Travers (01:01:43): Here's a third thing that I did with query folding that I'm told, "Oh no, you should not do that," but I think the rationale for not doing that was a bit being a purist, is you can look at the SQL generated by our query underneath. You get the query. So I thought, well, do the ETL there and it's a defacto SQL generator, and then lift that query and create a view with that. Do you think that's really bad because it's poor SQL that it writes? Or do you think that's brilliant? Thomas LaRock (01:02:10): I won't say poor because I'm not sure it's that good. Rob Collie (01:02:12): Here's your in. You're a DBA by trade. You like to complain about things. You like to criticize, right? That's your people. Thomas LaRock (01:02:18): Even if I go into Power Query and I, like Olivier said, we can look at the SQL that gets generated, and I'm certain it's not optimal. But I'm also certain I have no idea if it would be even possible to have a machine generate optimal code. And on top of that, what I'll say is going forward, the engines are going to be smarter and smarter and they're going to be able to take that code at some point, make a recommendation. Thomas LaRock (01:02:47): For example, I happen to work for a company who can already do this for you, right? We can look at what you're doing and we can make suggestions as to how to optimize certain queries. So that already exists. I imagine that'll get baked into the engines at some point and things get better for everyone. Thomas LaRock (01:03:04): But if I could do it in a way that would be helpful, but I don't know enough about how it actually gets generated. So I wouldn't know enough to say, "Hey Microsoft, instead of doing it this way, you should probably do it this way." But yeah, if I could help, if my involvement with Power Query and SQL could actually help move things in a forward and positive direction, I'd love to be able to do that. I just don't know that I can justify the time on that versus all the other shiny things I want to be doing. Olivier Travers (01:03:32): Also, you could say it's a suboptimal optimization where the computing has been let's just throw more hardware at the problem, generally speaking, the last however many decades where it's hard engineering scarce power to go and do those marginal optimizations because you have to go deeply into the code as opposed to just buy Power BI Premium and you go from say for PPU, for 10 bucks to 20 bucks. Unless you have a massive number of users, it's trivial the amount of extra money to unlock, applying much more computing resources to the same issue. And then apply your human talent to things that you have no readily press a button and apply more hardware power to solve the issue, I guess. Olivier Travers (01:04:13): So I think in many cases, there's the, well it's okay-ish and good enough when we amp up a bit the resources against it, as opposed to, well, now it's a bit of an 80-20. To push for the 20% in extra performance, we have to double the amount of engineering talent. And that talent might be deployed into brand new problems, for instance, as opposed to chasing marginal utility. Thomas LaRock (01:04:38): Here's the thing though. If they gave you information about the statement or if you could get information from the statement the first time it was run, let's say out of the Query Store ... so here's the thing. You go into Power Query, you generate something, we go and we look at the SQL and I tell you it really isn't the most optimal thing in the world. But the generation of that code doesn't know if it's being run once by one user one time or a million times by a million users. It has no idea about scalability. It's like, "Here, here's the answer that you were looking for." And now a human is going to have to figure out if we need to make that thing scalable. Thomas LaRock (01:05:13): So if you were just given information at the bare bones level that said, "By the way, to let you know, this was 10 gabillion, logical reads, logical IO, things like that. It's fine if you're just going to run this once, but if two people need to run it, you should probably look into making this code better, because chances are that's not optimal." And if you just had that information, now you can talk about the human part and say, "Hey human, go focus on the ones that we can see are being run multiple times and consuming the most resources, because maybe instead of throwing hardware at that, maybe we should spend your time and salary on fixing those queries first." That at least would be a step in the right direction. Olivier Travers (01:05:52): That feeds back into how much human talent are we wasting. In the case of Power BI, that would be an issue for [inaudible 01:05:58] query or for the author waiting, getting their coffee while Power Query is refreshing the preview. But otherwise, if you're doing imports on the scheduled ... it doesn't matter. Just schedule it where by the time your users need to have the fresh data, it's in there in memory and that's it. Olivier Travers (01:06:12): So I think that was more ... the impedance was do your authoring once and maybe you wait a little bit, but the UI sort of makes up for having to write manual queries. So [inaudible 01:06:22] net is still productive ETL even though you feel frustrated. And then it's important, and now you can schedule however many times. As long as your query doesn't run out, by the time you need to refresh again, you're good. I guess that's how they saw sort of making those trade offs. Rob Collie (01:06:37): I'm just sitting here feeling very, very satisfied with myself, almost like this puppet master, as I listen to Tom suddenly start to enthusiastically spout off about some of the implications here, some of the directions it could go. I mean, this definitely isn't the sound of Tom getting engaged with the Power Query SQL server interface, now is it? Nope. Definitely not. It's not what that sounds like. Now, by taking the victory lap here, I'm probably sabotaging. If I was truly a puppet master, I would sit back and say nothing, just let Tom get started. But he's in, folks. I can tell. Thomas LaRock (01:07:12): Yeah, I'm going to download it right now. Power BI for Mac and I'll have it up and running here in no time. Olivier Travers (01:07:18): I'm losing track of the reverse, reverse, reverse psychology there, so I'm not sure who's getting whom there. Rob Collie (01:07:23): And we're losing respect for Tom and his Mac. These things happen. But you started to ask that question about query folding a few minutes ago. Just look up Power Query query folding. And by the time you're done, Tom, by the time you're done reading that ... in fact you should just stop right now. You shouldn't read that because you're going to get hooked. Thomas LaRock (01:07:41): Do this. Don't do that. I feel like George Harrison. Just tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it or not do it. Rob Collie (01:07:47): So you started to ask that question, Olivier, about query folding, and I'm like, "Oh god, here it comes. I am not going to have any opinion at all on this. I'm not even going to understand the question. I'm going to look really silly." But then you got to the end of the question and I'm like, "Oh, I do get this." So using Power Query essentially like as a macro recorder. Olivier Travers (01:08:05): And that's what it is. Rob Collie (01:08:06): To then write some SQL for you. Because it's one thing if it's a macro recorder that writes M for you. But now you've found macro recorder prime. It's even producing SQL statements that you can use. Okay. And then you can take those SQL statements, however clumsy they might be because they're machine-generated, like they always are, and move that SQL statement to the server, closer to the source, and have it run that and therefore simplifying your Power Query script. You connect to the view that you create with that exported SQL essentially. And hopefully it's a sip of coffee from now on when you make a change to your Power Query and not going and brewing one, drinking it, thinking about another one, and then going back to see if it's done. Olivier Travers (01:08:51): So when I did that, I thought that was brilliant. And I felt a little dirty, which makes it feel even better. But then for some reason, my data flow would not refresh. I would not get the latest data, and I was ... nobody's ... that I see is talking about this online, that kind of an edge case where I'm going to waste more cycles trying to troubleshoot this than moving on with my life. So I thought I should bring that up. Rob Collie (01:09:13): Tom's got you covered. He's coming for it. Until you said that part where the data flow didn't work anymore, I was prepared to give this the Rob Collie Two Thumbs Up Seal of Approval, right? Number one, it's clever. Number two, it works, right? This is where at least one of the thumbs gets retracted. Not quite a two thumbs up. But the third one is, is that it's dirty enough that going to upset people, who are the kind of people that when they get upset, that confirms you're on the right track. Olivier Travers (01:09:43): The projects I do, I either do departmental projects within large companies or enterprise projects within small or medium companies, right? I don't do huge enterprise projects with enterprise companies. So there's the value of being expedient. And usually I don't deal with IT. I deal with a CEO or a business owner or a CFO. I'm going to lose them fairly fast. If I go into the nitty gritty of my [inaudible 01:10:09]. I try to explain them that it's not a black box to establish trust, but at some point that's established and I can skip on some of the technical details and just focus on, yes, we have this challenge. We're going to solve it this way or that way. And we'll get the clean data that we can chart it. So it's not the most elegant. It's not something that's going to win architectural design awards, but it works and lets me stay within budget constraints where I'm still going to focus enough time on the end user result and value and adoption and everything else, as opposed to I spend 80% of the time cleaning up the damn data. Rob Collie (01:10:43): And even the SQL that's generated in that situation, at least that's potential starting point for someone who's really good at SQL to go look at this and go, "Okay, I can write this functionally equivalent in a better way, but in a way it's the clearest possible specification," because you see the code and you can run it and you can test for the equivalent of result. Olivier Travers (01:11:03): If the result is right. I did the transformations I wanted. So it is the right query in terms of what is spitting out. Are the inners clean and performing? Well, it is or it is not an issue. Maybe your SQL server or VM is slipping 95% of the time anyway, so we're wasting resources in some way by not using them, you could argue. Those are trade-offs. Yeah. It's generated art. It's logo by computer. Maybe that's good enough for 80% of or whatever. Or maybe it's good enough for prototyping, and then by the time you know that it's actually the query you need for the data that your CFO wants to see, then have it written properly, and you'll probably drop a Power Query by then and do it with the ADF and have a proper data warehouse and whatnot, and sell them on CNAPS and upsell on mid six figure consulting. Rob Collie (01:11:51): We were sent to put an end to that as sort of our credo. So where are your clients largely geographically today? Are they USA, given time zone? Have you put down a lot of local business route in Chile? Olivier Travers (01:12:06): Yeah. The local stuff I do once in a while. I used to push for more to get it when it was easy to get face to face with people just because I was craving getting out of the office. It's not been possible for the last couple of years, so I've not pursued that nearly as aggressively. Also, pricing is a bit more of an issue relative to first world countries. So the US is large part. I have a project right now in Canada. I've worked as far as Australia, where I have a slice of two hours to get them on the phone early in the morning. So you have to work a bit to make it work. But if you look at the curve, then it's mostly the US, and then a bit of this, a bit of that. Rob Collie (01:12:42): Are there user groups for Power BI and things like that in Chile? What's the local talent level? Olivier Travers (01:12:47): There's a user group. Again, back then, when it was easy to connect physically, I went and spoke a couple times, demoed maps and also how to connect to APIs. Had a lot of fun doing that. And then COVID happened. So I already do enough remote. I don't want to just be stuck to remote on the user group, so I have not been that active. And you see that the same thing in Brazil, they're getting there, but they're still a bit more of a state traditional IT approach to things, generally speaking. Olivier Travers (01:13:13): Also just the business culture is risk-averse and very hierarchical, so it's harder for people who are not in a clear chain of command to go and do something. So it's a bit more of a top-down, here's the exact requirement, you're trying to do my job for me. That's just not going to work out. Let me worry about that. What is it that you want to know to drive your business? Don't tell me that I need a gauge or ... you can give me preferences. I'm not going to be an absolutist again, but give me guidance. Don't give me directives. Otherwise hire a junior staff. Don't hire a guy who's been working for almost 30 decades. Rob Collie (01:13:45): I love your avoidance of the absolute. Because as we know, only a Sith deals in absolutes. Olivier Travers (01:13:51): I never speak in absolutes. Rob Collie (01:13:54): Well, Olivier, this has been great. I'm glad we got to catch up like this. Thank you so much for making the time to be here. Olivier Travers (01:13:59): Thanks for having me. This was really fun. Announcer (01:14:01): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Have a data day!

We're starting off 2022 with a dual release party! Our guest for the first part of the double feature is Geoff Mcneely, a very interesting human!  He has a degree in Anthropology (we can check that one off of our interesting background list!)  He's a Power BI OG, starting one of the first two Power BI user groups (Rob having started the other). He's a full-time Power BI professional working for Microsoft who has a strange distinction of being a non-Full-Time Full-Time employee (we will explain)! Happy New Year everyone!  Have a Data Year! References in this episode: Surface Table Parody Commercial   Al Michaels Calls Surface an Ipad   Phish - Theme from the Bottom 

It's the last episode of Raw Data for 2021!  Thank you to all of our awesome guests for taking the time to tell their stories, and thank you to everyone that listened to us and supported this fun little thing that we do! This week's episode is a bit of a fun departure, as we peel back the curtain and talk a bit with Luke Pirozzoli, producer of Raw Data and Operations Manager at P3 Adaptive!  A story not necessarily data-based, but certainly as winding and different a path as any! We have some great episodes already recorded to start 2022 with a bang!  Happy Holidays! Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. This is going to be our last episode for calendar year 2021. We've looked at the data and the data's very clear. Podcast listenership falls off during the holidays. Rob Collie (00:00:12): So today I thought we'd do something just a little bit different, little bit shorter, little bit of a lighter weight episode relative to our nearly two hour marathons we usually do and we're going to take a little bit of a peak behind the curtain and the subject. Rob Collie (00:00:24): The guest of honor for today's show is going to be none other than our good friend, Luke Pirozzoli AKA Luke the producer. There's been a lot of talk on this show over the last year and a half about career paths, career arcs, career changes, accidental career changes, happy accidents usually. Rob Collie (00:00:44): We're going to continue that theme today because Luke has definitely gone through one heck of a career change in the last year and a half, or has he? Rob Collie (00:00:53): Also, in this episode, we do a little bit of a review, a little Power BI review of the written transcripts of all 50 plus episodes to date. We throw out some glamor statistics. Rob Collie (00:01:06): And as a particularly outlandish bonus, at the end of this episode, the very, very end, you can hear the I think 11 minute audio of the one time that I called into Luke's radio show years ago. It's a little embarrassing. It's pretty funny. We'll let it roll uncut once the trailing music goes down, definitely stick around for that. Rob Collie (00:01:26): So he's listening to me record this introduction right now. Now he knows what we're going to talk about. I hope he's ready for it. So let's get into it. Announcer (00:01:34): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Luke Pirozzoli (00:01:39): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast with your host Rob Collie and your co-host 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 (00:02:02): Welcome to the show, Luke Pirozzoli? Pirozzoli? No, Luke, Pirozzoli, welcome to the show. It's a little bit ironic, isn't it? Because you're always here, aren't you? Luke Pirozzoli (00:02:16): I am indeed. Hey, Rob. Hey, Tom. Oh. Tom not here. Rob Collie (00:02:23): Not yet, anyway. Tom might be joining us midstream. So you're basically here for every minute that we're recording over the course of what was it? How many shows have we done now? Luke Pirozzoli (00:02:33): What was it? 57, 56. What did I say? Rob Collie (00:02:36): We're actually recording our 60th right now, aren't we? And I think it's got to be a little weird for you, being such a silent member of the booth for so many episodes. Rob Collie (00:02:46): When until what? Semi recently, a year, year and a half ago, you were an on-air personality that did a lot of talking all day long every day it seemed like. Until late summer of 2020, what had you been up to professionally? Luke Pirozzoli (00:03:06): For a great deal of my 20s and 30s, late 20s and 30s and even in my 40s, I was a radio producer in Southeast Florida. I think I've lived in five or six counties on the Southeast side of the state Broward-Palm Beach. Rob Collie (00:03:24): Look at you world traveler. Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (00:03:27): Yeah. Just Southeast Florida. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:03:30): It's like, there was that Johnny Cash song, I've Been Everywhere, man. But it's like your entire list is like cities in south. Like, there's a little corner of South Florida. Luke Pirozzoli (00:03:38): It's all me. I am Florida man. Yeah. I've worked for iHeartMedia, formally Clear Channel, formally something else. But when I started with the company in 2003, it was Clear Channel at the time. Luke Pirozzoli (00:03:55): And then it went to iHeartMedia and yeah. For 17 years, I was in FM Talk Radio, which is a fairly exclusive club. A lot of people do Talk Radio, a lot of successful Talk Radio, not a whole lot of FM Talk, certainly no FM Talk stations. And I was a member of that very elite crew. Rob Collie (00:04:19): Yeah. And you broke into radio sort of the old fashioned way right. Decades ago now you're just sort of like hanging around the radio studio. Is that right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:04:27): So I was working for Mosquito Control in Indian River County. I moved to Vero Beach out of "college." I went to Gainesville, UF. Go Gators! For eight years. I got a two year degree, very proud of my statement. Rob Collie (00:04:42): That's a 25% efficiency. Eight years, two year degree. Luke Pirozzoli (00:04:49): I had a lot of fun. It was a very average student because I didn't go to class very often, but I was an entomology major for a while until I ran into organic chemistry. And couldn't rattle... Rob Collie (00:05:03): That was the Boss Battle. That was the... Luke Pirozzoli (00:05:05): Yeah. Boss Battle that I failed. I ran out of quarters. Rob Collie (00:05:10): Just like, just grab the controller up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right. Luke Pirozzoli (00:05:13): I actually worked for the College of Entomology for quite some time. I had a fascination with insects. Rob Collie (00:05:20): Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (00:05:20): Morphology and biology of... But the chemistry of what I needed to kind of fulfill the major was not in my cards. Rob Collie (00:05:29): Think about all the different semi exotic backgrounds, educational backgrounds so many of our guests have had. We've had the marine biologist and the, what was it? Medieval archeologist. Luke Pirozzoli (00:05:41): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:05:41): An entomologist, the bug guy. That'll take the Pepsi Challenge with some of these other things. Right? I do remember there being a point in your life where you're like, "Oh my God, man. I'm going to go do this radio thing. This is awesome." Luke Pirozzoli (00:05:57): I just listened to this... I started flipping around the radio stations locally because that was before smartphones, and any kind of streaming services at all in 2000. That's when I moved to Vero and got that job. Yeah. County job was great job with great venues. I just wasn't happy. I was listening to this radio station that I found. This very dirty, very raw, very tawdry. And for a 27 year old me, I was like, "Oh, that's cool." I'd been familiar with Howard Stern and Bob and Tom, and like the Big Heavies. But these guys were local and I'm like, "Wow. Like these guys are right in the backyard. Like what?" And they're talking about these places that I wanted to go, like these bars and these clubs. And I'm like, "Yeah. Party me!" And my young self, I was single. Luke Pirozzoli (00:06:40): I was making decent money working for the county. And, again, listening to this radio station, I wanted be a part of it. It sounded fun. The personalities were very funny. The callers were great. No topic was off limits. Listening, it was just fun. And so there I am, hanging around the radio station bothering the operations manager for about a year and a half. Actually, there's something else in there. A big piece of the story that I should add. I won a flyaway contest with the show called the Love Doctors on at the time it was Real Talk 927. And they had another little station that they added, 1017. And so they were flipping around frequencies, but always the Love Doctors, they had been a heritage part of the radio community for like 30 years. And these guys were funny. They were really funny. And they gave away this, you hear that dog? Rob Collie (00:07:32): Yeah, that's fine. Luke Pirozzoli (00:07:34): They gave away this trip that I happened to win. And the air producer at the time, Dano. Rob Collie (00:07:40): Oh! Hey, Tom. Tom's jumping in now in midstream. He has no idea. He has no idea what we're talking about. Let's sum up. End of your podcast. I decided that we would feature Luke as our guest and we're getting Luke's bio, we're getting Luke's origin story, which is a bit different from others. We're right at the point where he's transitioning out of his, it was an eight year, two year degree in entomology, the study of insects. Luke Pirozzoli (00:08:10): Correct. Rob Collie (00:08:10): And he was working for the county in somewhere in South Florida, which is the only place that Luke is allowed to live. And he's listening to this alien voice that's speaking to him like God. It's these local radio DJs, these talk show DJs that are... They're local to him. What year is this, Luke? Luke Pirozzoli (00:08:29): 2000. I found, I moved to Vero and then found the Love Doctors. Rob Collie (00:08:34): Okay. So he's working in Mosquito Control for the county, which you wouldn't think would give him a lot of time for other ambitions and dreams, but it turns out it did. And so he's eyeing this radio job. Now you're caught up. You're digesting the story so far? Thomas LaRock (00:08:49): If you could bring me up the speed, remind me who's Luke again. Rob Collie (00:08:54): Yeah. He's the one that speaks 7% less than you on... Thomas LaRock (00:08:59): That's not possible. I'm only at 6.9%. Rob Collie (00:09:01): Oh yeah. I was rounding. Thomas LaRock (00:09:07): Luke. I kid Luke, because he knows I love him. And he's awesome. And I think this is a great idea. So backing up a little bit, I'm very interested to know more about his origin story, but also the two of you, the origin story, and also the idea that, Rob, you've managed to hire and then fire, I don't know how many friends of yours throughout your life. Rob Collie (00:09:29): Yeah. Luke does represent a suspension of my recently acquired rule of not hiring anybody that I knew beforehand. But yeah, when I first got into business like this, I think it's a reasonably common instinct. Oh, let's go get the band back together like in Blues Brothers, like we'll just go collect all these people. And it turns out that having a prior relationship is almost like a contraindication of future success working together. Thomas LaRock (00:09:53): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:09:54): It's not even just like random chance. Like I think it's actually harder because those relationships, I guess, bring with them a history and expectations that don't really fit the professional world. I'm not even saying like expectations of favoritism or anything like that. I just think it started off as a personal relationship. You know the saying, "Liquor before beer and ever fear. Beer before liquor and ever sicker." Rob Collie (00:10:17): I think it's cool to work together and become friends, but being friends and then working together is like kryptonite. In addition to not working out most of the time, you also almost inevitably torture a relationship along the way. I had gone cold turkey, I was clean. I was excited. I had gotten my P3 number of people that I had known before P3. People at P3 other than my wife, which, for obvious reasons that one stays. I had gotten that number down to zero. Ah, and then I was like, "Oh and oh. I think we might have to suspend the policy. Just for a moment." Luke Pirozzoli (00:10:53): You wanted to start a podcast. Rob Collie (00:10:54): That's right. Luke Pirozzoli (00:10:54): And we were talking about my radio experience. We're also going back to 2003 when I started at iHeartMedia. And that's where we were discussing before you came in Tom. Obviously the 28 year old me, and you talk about it, Rob, how your younger self wasn't ready to do the things that you're doing now. Neither was my younger self. I didn't have the skills that you needed. I might have had the... Maybe the personality that would fit. But little else, I would imagine at the time, yeah. I just loved the concept of being a radio guy. It's a local celebrity at... Again, this is the mid to late twenties me. Rob Collie (00:11:36): All right. So, Luke, at this point in your life, you're listening to this radio show and you're like, "Ah, I think I... This is awesome. Maybe I could even do this." I got to ask, were you like one of the regular callers at this point? Luke Pirozzoli (00:11:47): I was a very irregular caller in that I didn't think my life was interesting enough in compared to the other callers. I mean, they had... Again, we're talking pre Janet Jackson Super Bowl where the FCC got involved in media. And so this local show and this local station was ridiculously hot talk. It was hot talk. Like Howard Stern at his worst. These guys were doing the same stuff only on a local level and slipping under all the radar, for sure. The FCC radar. Rob Collie (00:12:20): It wasn't Bubba the Love Sponge, was it? Luke Pirozzoli (00:12:22): No, he's a Tampa guy. We were very aware of Bubba, because I worked in Morning Radio in Miami for a little bit of my career as well. That was probably the peak of my professional status, I guess, because Miami's a pretty big media market. And More Morning Radio was pretty big. Rob Collie (00:12:44): To show you how big Luke was at that time, I went down in, I think, 2017. Down to Fort Lauderdale to meet with a client. And I said, "Oh, why the heck not? Why not look up a couple of friends from down there that I haven't seen since early middle school?" That turned out to be mm, interesting. Right? That was an interesting thing. So these guys are hanging out in my hotel room. I haven't seen them in forever. These people were on the scene in my life at the same time Luke was, they overlapped. So these people knew Luke from back in the day. While I was talking to them, Luke even comes up in the conversation between the three of us talking about this guy that was this producer on this radio show in Miami. Rob Collie (00:13:29): And it just was a random thing that came up and they didn't even know that they were talking about the Luke that they knew from back in the day. They had no idea that that was the same guy, because when I vanished from the scene, they lost touch with each other. And they knew like half of Luke's life story at that point. They're like, "Oh my God, we knew this and this and this and this." Right? And they didn't even live in Miami. They lived in the Fort Lauderdale area. So it was pretty funny. Luke Pirozzoli (00:13:53): And that we were talking heritage radio stations or radio shows certainly in this show, the Love Doctors and the morning show that I was on. Paul and young Ron at the time. Now, it's just the Paul Castronovo Show. It was pretty cool to be a part of that kind of big time thing. I mean, all the biggest comics came through there. The biggest musicians, not that they would hang out with us, but it was just a big scene. Rob Collie (00:14:19): For example, like our celebrity number, Tom, is down to one for a lot of celebrities via Luke, right? Thomas LaRock (00:14:26): Oh, right. Rob Collie (00:14:27): Like our Sammy Hagar number. Right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:14:30): That's Sammy Hagar. John Cleese. Rob Collie (00:14:33): John Cleese. Luke Pirozzoli (00:14:34): And it's pronounced Cleese as from the man's mouth himself. Because you don't say cheese, you say cheese. Rob Collie (00:14:40): You don't say cheese. Luke Pirozzoli (00:14:42): You don't say Cleese, you say Cleese. That's exactly what he said. Oh, man. Yeah. So I was an irregular caller. They had a segment where it was like one liners at the end of their show called the Quickies. I was a master at that because it was hit and run stuff. I would write stuff during the course of the day. I would listen to the show. I would do callbacks to something that happened early. And I would just have... It was hit or miss, but when I made them laugh, that was, for me, that was like, "Ah, yeah. Great." And they were giving away this Jamaica trip for several listeners. They were going to do... They were going to broadcast from one of the resorts down there. And I was one of the lucky participants in that trip. And I got to know the producer, Dano, and the guys a little bit. Again, for about a year after that I was emailing the operations manager, just like, "Give me a job. Anything, whatever. I don't care. I'll quit my awesome job and work for you for nothing." This was my mindset at the time. Rob Collie (00:15:36): You're starting to sound like Jeff Sagarin. Constantly pestering the guy at USA Today. Luke Pirozzoli (00:15:41): Yeah. Thomas LaRock (00:15:42): That's awesome. Luke Pirozzoli (00:15:44): But it's persistence. When you see something you want, I don't give up easily, especially when it's so attainable. And I knew I had maybe a room to expand some skills that I know I didn't have. I'm like, "Okay, I can learn all this stuff. It's just computers. Right? Computer operated software. I can do that. It can't be that hard. Right? I know some of the people that are already doing it. It can't be that hard." Rob Collie (00:16:11): He's talking about the radio show now. He's not talking about Power BI and the... Luke Pirozzoli (00:16:15): No, not... No, no. Exactly. And I'm one of the few people at P3 Adaptive that does not have the data gene. Does not like... My Excel use is probably less than some of your children and grandchildren, some of you listening. Rob Collie (00:16:32): I want to point out that the data gene is not... Here's the thing. You might have it dormant and still just haven't encountered that kind of that Eureka moment where it lights up. Now, if you've been heavily exposed to data and spreadsheets and you just like are repulsed by them. Okay. No data gene for you. Luke Pirozzoli (00:16:53): Is there anything in the middle because I'm not repulsed. And I do... I'm curious by nature. So all the data that's... Everything is data. I know this, especially in the last year and a half. I've learned so much about things, especially in the business world or not even in business world, just the world. Rob Collie (00:17:08): I suppose maybe you can be heterozygous for the data gene. Thomas LaRock (00:17:13): Oh. Rob Collie (00:17:14): Whereas the most of us that like that "have" it, we're homozygous. Thomas LaRock (00:17:19): Okay. Luke Pirozzoli (00:17:20): So you're adding those two words to our Wordigami? Rob Collie (00:17:23): Wordigami. Yeah. That's right. Heterozygous and homo. Luke Pirozzoli (00:17:26): Please. Rob Collie (00:17:26): Cha ching, cha ching. Increment the counter. I was going to do a distinct count of words. Like actual unique words used on the podcast. Because we have it in our transcripts. Right? I don't have that ready yet, but we are going to have that. Oh, we could do that. Like the beginning of every episode with 7,112 distinct words in use. We've really used the English language folks all 7,000 words ago. Thomas LaRock (00:17:55): Oh, we have used it and abused it. Rob Collie (00:17:58): Ah, yeah. I wonder. I wonder how many... Thomas LaRock (00:17:59): Like sailors on shore leave. Rob Collie (00:18:01): Now, I... So just as a little preview here for everybody. I mean, I have this Power BI model with not all of our transcripts, because not all the transcripts are done. Some of the more recent shows the transcripts aren't ready yet. Yeah. I have 50 transcripts in this Power BI model. Every word. It's really fascinating. Thomas LaRock (00:18:17): That's post-production, you said? Rob Collie (00:18:18): As post-production. Yes, that's... Thomas LaRock (00:18:20): Because I want to know how much of my stuff's been left on the cutting room floor. Because I think you're keeping me down. Rob Collie (00:18:25): We will never know. Thomas LaRock (00:18:26): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:18:26): We're not going to provide you the denominator, Tom. Thomas LaRock (00:18:29): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:18:29): It's unknowable. We're not going to send off the Raw files for transcription. I mean, that would just be a waste. Luke Pirozzoli (00:18:36): It would be. Thomas LaRock (00:18:36): Well, that that's the stuff that's going to get us in trouble. Rob Collie (00:18:38): I don't know. I think though, it's likely that we cut me at a higher percentage than we cut you. Thomas LaRock (00:18:44): Oh, I'm sure. Rob Collie (00:18:45): Your percentage goes up in post-production I'm thinking. We need to get back to Luke's story. But let's just say there's been already kind of a running joke going on that started backstage and no one knows about it. Is that we've done an analysis of Tom's average mic time based on words spoken over the lifetime of the podcast and he's at 6.9%. 6.9% of the word spoken on this podcast. Now, by the way, this is not counting episodes that you weren't on. If you weren't able to make an episode, right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:19:19): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:19:19): We're not going to count that against your total. Our DAX takes that into account because we're serious. We're serious people here. Luke Pirozzoli (00:19:27): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:19:27): And yeah. And I actually had to scratch my head for a moment. Because I was very rusty at DAX. I was rustier at DAX than I realized when I was doing this. All right. So you persistently break in through the Jamaica thing. Next thing you know, you're in this damn near 20 year career, right, of radio taking you all over the expansive region known as South Florida. Luke Pirozzoli (00:19:49): Yeah. And I had been fired once. I've been laid off once and came back both times. Rob Collie (00:19:56): I thought you'd been fired and laid off a lot more than that. Those are rookie numbers. You need to pump up. You worked in radio. You've only... Only fired one time? Laid off one time? Luke Pirozzoli (00:20:06): For most radio people, that is the case because there is... It's funny. There's a saying, "you haven't made it in this business unless you've been fired at least three times." And there are people that move constantly. I was not willing to move away from my family to move across the country. I just wasn't... I wasn't down with that. Rob Collie (00:20:23): I see. I see. So you're saying you quit radio before you've been fired three times. Like you didn't have the tenacity to stick with it now, did you? Only 18 years of it? You quitter. Luke Pirozzoli (00:20:34): Yeah. I just... At some point, I was just like, "I can't... At this point, I can't do anything else. I can't. I've been doing this so long." Then I started getting worried. I'm getting older and I'm not... And radio really, terrestrial radio is not a up and coming business with a huge upside and a future. It really isn't. Rob Collie (00:20:55): That might be the first time terrestrial has made it onto the show. I don't know. We have to go to the record. Luke Pirozzoli (00:21:00): Cha ching. Rob Collie (00:21:00): Yeah. I don't know. Maybe. If it had before it came from Luke, right? Terrestrial, meaning not satellite radio. Luke Pirozzoli (00:21:08): Correct. Thomas LaRock (00:21:09): But isn't all radio technically terrestrial. That's its origin. Luke Pirozzoli (00:21:13): I can give you some email addresses where you can lodge your complaints, Tom, about what they call it. I'm sure they'll change it just to suit you. Rob Collie (00:21:21): I mean, when the radio waves are up in orbit, they're not terrestrial, but they have to come down here for us to hear them. Right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:21:28): And their origins... He's right. Their origins are all terrestrial. Unless, we're broadcasting from some source. Rob Collie (00:21:35): From the space station. Howard Stern coming at you from the ISS. Thomas LaRock (00:21:38): Oh my God. I can't imagine shacking up with him for like a month. Rob Collie (00:21:42): Oh yeah. Imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (00:21:44): They shot Shatner and Strayan into space. Right? She started the space... Rob Collie (00:21:50): All right. So there's all kinds of wacky things. At one point during your radio career, you won a local tournament, a satellite tournament, and went to the World Series of Poker. You were in the Main Event out in Vegas. Luke Pirozzoli (00:22:03): Yeah. Before that... Yes, I was. Before that... In 2011. Before that I had won a pretty decent cash in an online tournament before Black Friday where the feds shut down Full Tilt and PokerStars and all the other poker sites for operation of the US. And it was a $200 buy-in, I finished, I think, fifth. And it was $25,000 and I got all my checks. Yeah. And then not too long after that, they shut it down. And anybody that had money in Full Tilt or PokerStars kitty, they lost it. I don't even know if they still were able to get it back to this day. And yeah. So I won that 25K and then I did win that trip to Vegas and the $10,000 Main Event buy in and I got bumped out on day two. My pocket kings got cracked pre... Like we were all in preflop. I had kings, he had tens and he spiked the 10 on the flop and I didn't draw it on them. So that was the end of that Rob Collie (00:23:03): Yep. Ball game. Luke Pirozzoli (00:23:03): Yep. What are you going to do? I'll never forget it for the rest of my life. Rob Collie (00:23:08): You wake up in the middle of the night. "Tens! Tens!" Luke Pirozzoli (00:23:12): Yeah. Yeah. What are you do? I saw one hand. I mean, I know. I kind of geek out on poker because I played a lot, especially online because it was so easy to cram in numerous games. And one of the guys had... He flopped a full house and he was up against quads. The other guy had quads, flop quads. Rob Collie (00:23:31): I'm going to jump in here. When he says quads, he means someone had four of a kind. Luke Pirozzoli (00:23:35): Four of a kind. A very, very good poker hand. Full house is a damn good poker hand, not as good as quads. Yeah. And it was crazy. Obviously the guy with quads knew he had it, but the guy with the full house is like, "What does this guy have? He can't have quads. He can't have it." Oh, what a brutal beat. That's way worse than mine. Way worse. Rob Collie (00:23:55): Yeah. I want nothing to do with something like that. That sounds awful. Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (00:24:00): It was fun. But yeah, again, when I met my girlfriend and I live with her and her three kids. Now, my step kids essentially. They really are. I've adopted them as my very own. So I've kind of calmed down all my single guy lifestyle. Rob Collie (00:24:18): No more late night cash games with the local police union, like in Rounders. You're not hanging out with Worm anymore. Luke Pirozzoli (00:24:29): That's right. Rob Collie (00:24:29): You got KGB, you got to watch out for him. Luke Pirozzoli (00:24:32): That's right. John Malkovich. Rob Collie (00:24:33): So no, Tom. Oh no, no. No data gene for this guy, but oh, he's got to be in there calculating probabilities on hands and all that kind of stuff, which... Luke Pirozzoli (00:24:40): Fair enough. Rob Collie (00:24:41): Kind of gives me the willies. I want nothing to do with that kind of thinking when I'm just sitting at a table and it just... No. Uh-huh (affirmative). So you're right. I wanted to do a podcast. Didn't know what I was doing. And by the way, folks, if you've been listening for a while and you're like, "Ah, this podcast sounds really good. The people on the podcast sound really good." Well, that's because of Luke. The intro, the outro, all the editing, the quality control. And, Luke, when you're doing all the editing yourself, which we're... I mean, we've been working very hard. I've been just absolutely beating you to get you to stop doing this all on your own while telling you at the same time, "But don't compromise the quality." Luke Pirozzoli (00:25:25): Yeah. The ogres dilemma. Like what am I supposed to do? Rob Collie (00:25:26): Yeah. For a show that we record two hours of audio and it ends up being like an hour and 40 minutes when we publish it. How many hours on average have you been syncing into that two hours of audio to create a show? Luke Pirozzoli (00:25:41): Yeah, it takes about 12 to 15 hours per episode. And sometimes it's a lot less than an hour 40. I think it's closer to about an hour 20. I mean, data. I would say that it's closer to like an hour 20, hour 25 average time per episode. I know our Chase Hargis episode, our most recent one, was only 40 minutes. Rob Collie (00:26:00): Snackable, by Rob. Luke Pirozzoli (00:26:03): That's right. You should snack it. It's a great episode. Rob Collie (00:26:06): Yeah. That's how much effort, right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:26:07): Yeah. 12 to 15 hours. Rob Collie (00:26:07): 12 to 15 hours. Six to seven times the raw length of the audio. That level of perfectionism is much appreciated. I love it. And then I tell you, now we should do that, that same level of perfectionism, but in less time. Luke Pirozzoli (00:26:24): Yeah. Well, that's where the wonderful world of outsourcing that you've introduced me to. And there's a vast... Rob Collie (00:26:30): Oh, so wonderful. Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (00:26:32): Group of skilled people and some not so skilled that I'm finding out. Rob Collie (00:26:36): There's skill and reliability. Right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:26:39): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:26:39): And delegating something that you have... This is in general, when you take something very seriously. Like when it's almost like a matter of honor and principle to you that it be excellent. That's one of the hardest things in the world to effectively delegate. Luke Pirozzoli (00:26:52): Yeah. And that's the situation here. If I hear something that doesn't sound right, a raspy breath, some people have phlegm in their throat. Or there's a nose breathe or something I don't like the sound of something. I'll try and get it out. I'll at least try. If there's an um or an ah, or you know, or a like. We all do it. Very, very few people are able to speak without those words. And I get rid of them all. And it takes a long, long time. Rob Collie (00:27:26): Although way to go. Giving away a secret. We all sound so much smarter than we actually are after you take out all of our hesitation. Luke Pirozzoli (00:27:34): You sound as smart as you actually are. Every guest of... Every one of these folks are exceptional human beings. Rob Collie (00:27:42): Oh, I appreciate that. Luke Pirozzoli (00:27:43): That we got on this show. Rob Collie (00:27:43): Luke demonstrating the principle of sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth. Luke Pirozzoli (00:27:50): Even Tom. I feel that way about even Tom, I feel that way about him. High praise, sir. Rob Collie (00:27:53): Oh, 6.9% of that time. Luke Pirozzoli (00:27:57): Jigiddy. Rob Collie (00:28:01): Every 10th of a percent matters when you're down in that range. Right? Okay. So wanted to do a podcast knowing sort of that I know nothing. I call you up and say, "Maybe we do this part-time." And then I quickly started thinking, "No, let's get you on full-time." And you had to get to the point where to suspend the rule of hiring someone I know. And no one told me I had to have this rule. This was a rule that I learned the hard way and sort of implemented for myself. Instead of making it my decision, I had to meet Kellan. Kellan, what do you think? Right? Rob Collie (00:28:33): Because basically the question was, how long is it going to take him to produce an episode of the podcast? I mean, like we record for a couple hours, it'll take him what? Like 45 minutes to clean that up. I mean, he's not going to have that much to do. He's going to have room to do other things. Kellan got to know Luke and came back and said, "Oh yeah. We can use the hell out of this guy." And I'm like, "Really? Luke, you sure?" Luke Pirozzoli (00:29:00): Tom referenced something earlier about our relationship, Rob. We also haven't discussed that you are my oldest friend in the universe. This is how I describe it. My oldest friend in the universe. Third grade. We were seven years old. Rob Collie (00:29:14): Other than family, you're the person I have known the longest. That I still talk to. Yeah. Third grade, eight years old, Mrs. Lumbards class. Although, were we? I don't... Were we in the same third grade? Like homeroom? Luke Pirozzoli (00:29:31): I don't think so. Rob Collie (00:29:31): I had Lefkowitz for third grade. Luke Pirozzoli (00:29:35): Your memory is way better than mine for certain. I know that we were aware of each other and started conversing, but we didn't really start clicking until we were in the same class. Rob Collie (00:29:47): Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (00:29:48): I think that's when things just ramped up and then we started hanging out. Rob Collie (00:29:50): That's fourth grade. That was the Mrs. Wenig years. That's back when my brain was still like accurately recording memories. The writing head has sort of gotten a little bouncy on the disc in later years. And, Tom, we were programming together. Not because we wanted to, but we were told to. Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (00:30:12): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:30:12): Before Halloween, I saw a Tweet that it... It just busted me up, which was on this Halloween. I'm going to go as formerly known as gifted child. And I'm just going to wear my normal clothes and people are going to keep coming up to me and asking me, "What are you supposed to be?" And I'll reply, "I was supposed to be a lot of things." Thomas LaRock (00:30:40): I love that. Rob Collie (00:30:42): So Luke and I were in this gifted class together, and this was a very almost like hippies seventies leftover thing. Right? Like this idea that I don't know that they even use this word anymore. Or if they have things like that anymore. I don't... My kids I don't think were ever even tested for such a thing. Seems like this has gone extinct. I remember in like first grade walking through the library one day and there was suddenly, there was this giant inflatable bubble and there was a teacher and like five kids sitting inside of it. And I was like, "Holy cow, that's awesome. Why don't I get to sit in a bubble like that? I've got to go learned stupid..." Like I knew what I was about to have to go do was going to be really boring. Rob Collie (00:31:26): It wasn't going to be nearly as cool as sitting in this bubble. Right? And wouldn't you know it, I got tested a few weeks later. I was really resistant. My mom's said I had to go get tested. I'm like, "I don't want to take no stinking test. I don't want to go for a stinking test." But she could have just said, "Look, this is the test to see if they'll put you... If you get to go hang out in the plastic bubble." And I would've been like, "Aw, sweet." Next thing you know, a few months later I'm sitting in that bubble and all the other kids are walking by to go like study whatever boring thing they're about to do. Rob Collie (00:31:59): And I'm like, "Ah, suckers." I don't know that it had anything to do with actually developing me in any positive way. I think all it did was give me some sense of exceptionalism that was undeserved. This is probably why they retired this whole concept. But so like basically every day, maybe not every day, but we'd get pulled out of our respective home rooms. It shows you how much they cared about the curriculum being taught there. Like we just totally take you away from it. It doesn't matter. Luke Pirozzoli (00:32:28): You don't need it anyway. Rob Collie (00:32:31): It's so pointless anyway. Right? And they would send us off to this other classroom to like have fun. Like holy cow, what a great thing. So Luke and I met under sort of like the most positively influential circumstances. Right? How can you not be happy while you're off doing fun things? It was like that hour or two of the day was usually better than if you'd been allowed to stay home. Luke Pirozzoli (00:32:57): Yeah, definitely. And we also shared a love of role playing games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons at the time. And many, many others. Rob Collie (00:33:05): Luke introduced me to this. Seriously. Again, snapshot memory. I remember we're walking through this one hallway on the way to the cafeteria in Morrow Elementary. And you're like walking next to me going, "Hey, you ever play Dungeons and Dragons?" And I'm just ignoring you. I'm just flat out ignoring you. Luke Pirozzoli (00:33:23): Well, I've gotten used to that over the years. Rob Collie (00:33:25): I want nothing to do with it. I'm just like... But I'm not even turning around and answering your question. Like, that's how derisive I am. I'm like an eight year old blowing you off. But you, just like with the radio station, you kept persisting this Dungeons and Dragons thing. So I wasn't into it until... Luke Pirozzoli (00:33:46): Until I wore you down. Rob Collie (00:33:48): Yeah, that's right. Luke Pirozzoli (00:33:49): I just wore you down. Rob Collie (00:33:50): And boy, did I take to it? Oh my God. Luke Pirozzoli (00:33:53): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:33:54): I've actually played some Dungeons and Dragons with my kids. Like years ago. They really loved it. They were really into it up until about the time they got a hold of their smartphones. Luke Pirozzoli (00:34:05): Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Rob Collie (00:34:07): And the same thing with the Xbox. Dungeons and Dragons is a cool thing to do if you don't have an Xbox. Luke Pirozzoli (00:34:14): Like a game like Skyrim, or Skyrim, or whatever you call it, or Warcraft or any of the games that we're into now. It's like that in another dimension. It's another level of reality and the imagination has gone sadly. Rob Collie (00:34:27): Yeah. Yeah. So regular classrooms in this school that we were at, they might have had one computer in them, like one Apple or two, but probably none is my memory. I don't remember there being any, but in this gifted classroom, there were like 20. They had us programming, like an Apple BASIC. They had us programming in a thing called Logo, which is a turtle that you tell to move around the screen with a pen that can... You can tell the... You have like pen up and pen down commands. So it's kind of almost like Etch A Sketch that you program. Luke Pirozzoli (00:35:03): Too bad they didn't teach you Python. Rob Collie (00:35:07): Yeah. Yeah. I know that would've changed everything. Wouldn't it? I mean, yeah. You got to ease people into these things. So that was the origin story, but then eventually I moved away. Right? Then we kept in touch. We see each other in the summers, things like that. Luke Pirozzoli (00:35:19): Yep. My dad would, because he's too cheap to fly us. He would drive, he would come down from Tennessee and pick us up in South Florida and then he'd drop us back off at Rob's family's house. And I would hang with them for like a week or so. Rob Collie (00:35:32): Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (00:35:33): Yeah. And we always maintained touch. It was sporadic at certain periods of our lives, but we always managed to get together and we always managed to catch up throughout the years. And it's hard to do sometimes with some of your old friends and you're working at Microsoft. We had talked through those years. I didn't know. It was as eye opening and challenging and crazy as I'm learning, listening to every single one of these fantastic podcast offerings. Rob Collie (00:36:01): Yeah. Gifted class in third grade is where I learned to think I was special. Microsoft is where I learned to think I was not. Luke Pirozzoli (00:36:07): How about that? I knew you were also starting Power Pivot Pro at the time in 2013 and later turned into P3 Adaptive. I knew about it, but I didn't know how incredible the tools were. I didn't know how incredible the people were. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew podcast editing and I know people. Rob Collie (00:36:30): It's a gateway drug. Luke Pirozzoli (00:36:31): Yeah. It is. It really is being in talk radio for all these years. Talking to all these people over time. I hope I've filled the holes that were required thus far. Rob Collie (00:36:41): Hey, Luke, can we cut that part out? Just kidding. Thomas LaRock (00:36:47): Yeah. Just kidding. No, we're going to leave the part where we talk about Luke filling holes. Rob Collie (00:36:51): Yeah. That's what he does, man. It doesn't matter what size, shape, whatever. He's in there. Luke Pirozzoli (00:36:55): That's right. That's right. Rob Collie (00:36:57): So as time has gone on Kellan has proven correct. Because you've been taking on more and more things. When he got to know you before we hired you, he was like, "Yeah. Okay. He's a podcast guy. Great. He's an audio guy. He's a producer. But he's also, he doesn't know it. He's also an operations guy and we're going to use him on the operations side of the house." And I'm like, "Oh yeah, I don't understand any of that operation stuff. That sounds great." That's the stuff you're really good at and I've proven to not be. So fantastic. It's all a mystery to me. Rob Collie (00:37:30): One of the general themes that I really, really like about our team is that most people come to work for us, they don't change what they're doing. Most of the people we hire are consultants. Most of them weren't consultants before, but they're at least Power BI wizards and they continued to be that afterwards. Right? Your arc is that you're now doing things that you've never done in your career. There's some things that you're working on now that two years ago, you'd probably have been like, "I'm going to be doing what?" Luke Pirozzoli (00:37:58): Yeah. Never heard of the tools, some of the software that we use, and the things that we use. It is just... It is. It's all new to me. And we talk about the imposter syndrome thing and I'm not a consultant in that space, but I'm still in... I have it. I've had it for a while and it predates me coming here. I'm sure of that, but yeah, definitely exposed to a whole new realm of tasks and things that I do. And including kind of retooling our security operations, the whole URL change that we did. Rob Collie (00:38:37): Yeah. You're a project manager on the switch from the powerpivotpro.com to p3adaptive.com. Luke Pirozzoli (00:38:44): Yeah. And, of course, I'll give Alex, our web dev, major props because he busted his hump to get that done. He did most of the heavy lifting. I just kind of made sure that we had everything under control. Rob Collie (00:38:56): Yeah. But technical project manager for two relatively massive... Hey, guess what? You're learning what IT is like. Right? It's thankless. I mean, when it goes right, no one notices. Luke Pirozzoli (00:39:13): Yeah. It's true. And in this incorporating something new and kind of rolling something new out, it's still not quite right yet. That's what's so great about the team. They're not able to do certain things, but they're not like, "Oh my God!" Nobody's panicking. Nobody's freaking out. Nobody's angry. They're just like, "Ah." And they know I kind of... The way I am. Everybody that sends me a message is my first priority. That's kind of how I operate. Rob Collie (00:39:42): Sounds like you're vulnerable to a denial of service attack. Everyone's listening to this now like, "Oh, I know what to do. I'll just send them a couple of emails." Luke Pirozzoli (00:39:52): Well, depends on who you are and you got to move the company. Rob Collie (00:39:54): It's Luke P at P3 Adaptive, folks. If you want to completely gum up the works, just send him an email and ask him to calculate the first 45 digits of Pi by hand in binary. Luke Pirozzoli (00:40:07): Yeah. I love hearing from new people. Rob Collie (00:40:10): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I asked Kellan recently. I'm like, "I didn't have any reason to distrust you, Kellan, when you sort of screened and interviewed Luke. Now that you've kind of proven correct, Kellan. Like he's doing things that you thought he could do for us. And it's going really well. Like now, I'm actually interested. What was it that you saw?" And his answer was like, "I've been running into people like Luke, not frequently, but enough of them over the years that you just sort of know them when you see them." I'm like, "Okay. All right. Well, I mean, that still doesn't really answer my... But it satisfied my curiosity." Yeah. I just asked him that recently, by the way. But the one thing that is, I think, common... Rob Collie (00:40:50): Well, first of all, you mentioned imposter syndrome, which if no one's determining says this before, like imposter syndrome is an inevitability. All you need is integrity, and then to be in a relatively high performing environment. That's it. Integrity plus high performing environment and imposter syndrome is you should like mathematically, like do the algebra and out comes the imposter syndrome. But hey, like you said, you have been the face of rolling out Intune at our company. You should be hated, just absolutely despised. I'm going to roll out this thing that makes it sometimes impossible to log in. It's going to... It's really going to mess your shit up. Rob Collie (00:41:33): And if all goes well, all it will do is prevent something. We'll never have the problem. We'll never know that it saved us. Luke Pirozzoli (00:41:41): Yeah. And that's true. And so far it's been a great tool and kind of give credit to the freelancers that we hired. They were very good. Initially I had an individual that he was good, but he also he thought he could do it. And he couldn't because he had so much other stuff going on. Rob Collie (00:41:59): Yes. Luke Pirozzoli (00:42:00): And we needed something done rather quickly. And so I had to jump off of him, but I almost screwed myself because I waited too long to make the decision to move to another individual. Rob Collie (00:42:13): Oh, yeah. That's tough. Right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:42:14): Almost screwed us. Rob Collie (00:42:15): There's lessons... Right. There's lessons to that, right? That's the problem. That's why people are so hesitant to hire a data consulting firm. Luke Pirozzoli (00:42:23): That makes sense. Rob Collie (00:42:23): By the time they reach the point where they've realized that it's not working out, it's going to be too late. And people are sort of like pot committed at that too. You just sort of got to write it out and you got to write it out in a really, really awful, terrible self destructive way. And so yeah. Hiring a consulting firm, it's like you're inviting someone into your house and nine out of 10 chance. It's a vampire. Luke Pirozzoli (00:42:53): I would imagine there's a lot of research and maybe sometimes not so much. I'm sure it would surprise me how many companies make a decision like that to go with a consulting firm without really doing a heck of a lot of research. I would hope not, but I don't know. Rob Collie (00:43:10): Well, I mean, I don't know. It's not quite nine out of 10, but at least four out of five of the external vendors we've... Professional services, companies that we've outsourced things to have been a mistake. Right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:43:23): Yeah. I mean, how do you know that? You do your research and you talk to them and they don't deliver what they say they can deliver. It's like, what the hell happened? Rob Collie (00:43:34): We come in peace. Luke Pirozzoli (00:43:35): Yes. Rob Collie (00:43:35): P3 Adaptive. We are not here to drain your blood. Luke Pirozzoli (00:43:37): No doubt. Rob Collie (00:43:39): All right. So this "short" little episode is as usual running really long. We promised the people some stats. One of the things we do here. And when I say we, someone other than me, feeds every finished audio track, every audio recording of the show to a transcript service and they do a great job. The transcripts are really good. Luke Pirozzoli (00:44:03): Should I give them a plug? Rob Collie (00:44:04): Yeah. Who is the transcript service? Luke Pirozzoli (00:44:06): Rev.com. Rob Collie (00:44:07): Rev.com. All right. They do a great... This is the first time we've ever had, what resembles an ad in our podcast. And if you go there and you use the code "raw". You'll get a 0% discount. Luke Pirozzoli (00:44:23): They do a pretty good job and a great turnaround. Rob Collie (00:44:25): Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (00:44:26): And they... Well, I mean, and I'll say this, and I told their reps the same thing. Their automated service, meh. Their live humans, very good. Rob Collie (00:44:33): Yeah. It turns out humans still needed. Luke Pirozzoli (00:44:36): Yes, indeed. Rob Collie (00:44:37): I mean, especially a podcast like ours with all the weird phrases that get used and everything. All this insight, baseball sometimes. Luke Pirozzoli (00:44:43): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:44:44): Plus I'm a weirdo. So we have all these podcast transcripts, and guess what? They're in dot text format. Oh. So you know what we can do? We can feed them through Power Query and puree them and bring them into a Power BI model. And all of this has happened basically over the weekend. The idea came to me late in the week. I did need some help. Ed Hansberry on our team came up big for me a couple times. And then, of course, I'm really rusty at DAX. Mark Beetle had to catch a DAX mistake. I'm like, "I know something's wrong here, but where is it?" I feel like I'm one of the students in a class I used to teach. Rob Collie (00:45:19): Right? We're going to be publishing some of this. I think so watch the Raw Dat, Twitter account, watch my Rob Collie Twitter account, and watch the P3 Adaptive Twitter account while you're at it. We've got a family of accounts here. 53 of our shows have transcripts at the moment. And I think that's 53 out of 59, or 53 out of 58. We have a few that for various reasons, we haven't got transcribed, but in the 53 transcripts we have, again, let's do #meaninglessanalysis. Ready? A lot of Power BI. I was texting today with Dave Gainer. Dave gainer, who was on our podcast. He sent me a quote or a thought. I'm not sure if it was something he thought of or whether he's quoting something. Because he's always sending me quotes. Luke Pirozzoli (00:45:57): He's a quote guy. Rob Collie (00:45:58): Oh no, he read a good one. Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions. And I had just sent him a picture of the Wordigami word cloud for his episode. And I said, "Oh, perfect. Me subverting sophisticated industrial strength tools for the purpose of making Wordigami word cloud visuals is very much an example of that." Happiness is an expression of the soul and considered actions. There you go. Luke Pirozzoli (00:46:26): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:46:26): So this meaningless analysis is brought to you by happiness. Luke Pirozzoli (00:46:30): Aw. Rob Collie (00:46:31): And by the way, these analyses shouldn't be possible. Power BI is not designed to do this kind of thing. It's like a kryptonite task and it's a layup. Power BI just blows it out of the water. No problem at all. It's unreal. I'm like having trouble sleeping, because I'm thinking about, "Oh, I could add that feature to the model." I'm back, but I'm... Luke Pirozzoli (00:46:52): And that's typically how it goes, right? When you're building something, and this is coming from a person who does not do any of this, as we've covered. That's a typical kind of process where you start realizing things that it can do along the way as you're building something. Rob Collie (00:47:07): Yeah. You're peeling the onion of possibility. There you go. There's an original. Luke Pirozzoli (00:47:10): I like that. Rob Collie (00:47:10): There's an original quote. That was the first time ever. Luke Pirozzoli (00:47:13): Write it down. Rob Collie (00:47:14): Brand new sentence, as they say on Reddit. Okay. Luke Pirozzoli (00:47:17): And you also... By the way, you also did this, as you mentioned. You were thinking about it and over the weekend, like a two day period of work, and you and a couple of other members of the team that you had to tag in briefly. Rob Collie (00:47:28): Yeah. We're recording this particular segment of this show on a Sunday. It's going to go live in a couple of days. The entire Wordigami word cloud happened today. I was able to do that with no help. Luke Pirozzoli (00:47:41): That's amazing. And so another kind of uneducated question, why would this... You said early that it shouldn't be possible or it shouldn't be used for this or something along those lines. Rob Collie (00:47:53): At its DNA, Power BI is a numerical aggregation tool. You take rows of data that have digits in them and you're performing things like sums and averages. And then you get really fancy and you start doing filtered and trended versions of those same calculations. Just to give people an idea here. So in those 53 transcripts, there are 781,355 words. Luke Pirozzoli (00:48:17): That's almost a million. Rob Collie (00:48:18): Yeah. If you extrapolate that from the fact that we're missing a few episodes, transcript wise, we're well over 800,000 words spoken on the finished podcast. Now, of course, the cutting room floor probably has a couple hundred thousand words. Right? That got cut out of, for sure. Right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:48:34): No doubt. Rob Collie (00:48:34): So we've definitely spoken over a million words, but thanks to you, the audience has been spared that 200,000 word cruft. Luke Pirozzoli (00:48:43): They weren't ready for all of those words. Rob Collie (00:48:46): They weren't. And so many of them are like, blah, blah, blah. Like um's and ah's and stuff. Luke Pirozzoli (00:48:51): Sure. Rob Collie (00:48:52): So to do the kinds of analysis that you're about to hear, some of them is a little bit more straightforward. So for example, 321,000 of those 781,000ish words were spoken by me. If you're using Power or Query to count the number of words in a sentence, which is sort of how the original version of this model works, now you've just got a number and it's got a person's name next to it. And so it rolls up really easily, right? And so you can really quickly find out what my total is. And you can find out that I speak for 41.2% of the air time of the show. If you just base it off of word count, which is I'm sure a very, very, very good approximation of air time. Right? And I was concerned... Luke Pirozzoli (00:49:32): Oh yeah. Rob Collie (00:49:33): I was concerned when I was running these numbers that I was going to find out that I was like 65% of the air time, and I wasn't letting guests talk. But 41,2% and Tom at 6.9%. So even combined, the two hosts are under 50%. Luke Pirozzoli (00:49:47): A great number. Rob Collie (00:49:49): But the place where it gets tricky is when you start talking about word uniqueness, right? So these aren't sentences with numbers anymore. Right? It's like the actual words matter. So Hugh Millen is the champion in one sense, which is 109 of the words that he spoke on his podcast episode were and are completely unique words in the history of the show. No one else has ever used any of those 109 words before him or after him. And if he said it and I repeated it back to him, it wouldn't count. It wouldn't be one of the 109. Right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:50:22): Okay. Rob Collie (00:50:25): Like to do that analysis is nuts, right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:50:29): Like to think to do it or to actually do it? Rob Collie (00:50:33): I mean, okay. So on the one hand, I knew that Power BI could do it before I started. Luke Pirozzoli (00:50:36): Okay. That helps. Rob Collie (00:50:38): But like the fact that... It's just like every now and then you use the tool for a purpose that's so far outside of its original DNA. Its original origin story and it still just breezes through it. And you just sit there and it's just amazing. I haven't had this feeling for a while because I don't get to use the tools nearly as much as I used to. Luke Pirozzoli (00:50:57): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:50:57): You almost feel like you're inventing something, right? If you're working with a tool set that allows you to feel like you're inventing, that's pretty awesome. It's a real testament to just the incredible nature of the tool set. And it did not bog down. Rob Collie (00:51:12): Like if you think about it in a really dumb sense. If you have 800,000 words and you need to compare one word to all the other 800,000 words, but you need to do that for all of the words, you're constantly having to do 800,000 squared. Luke Pirozzoli (00:51:26): Ooh. Rob Collie (00:51:26): String comparisons, which would just melt your machine every time you click the filter. But the thing is just like, "No. No big deal. I got you." You make a click and it's like, "Yeah, lay up. Here you go." Luke Pirozzoli (00:51:37): Just handles it. Rob Collie (00:51:38): "Here's your new results." Right? Going into unique words. The reason for it was because of our now ongoing Wordigami joke. Like when someone says a word on the show, we're like, "Ooh, big word. Fancy." It's the first time we've ever heard the word on the show, Wordigami. We now have the technology, folks. We are going to, if you go look at our Twitter account. You're going to be seeing.... Already. We've already... Some of these have already been shared. We're going to be showing the Wordigami word clouds for words that were first used on a particular episode. Now, if they're used later, fine. That original episode still gets to claim they were the one that introduced it and their Wordigami word cloud will have that word in it. And the subsequent episode won't. So it gets harder and harder to score a Wordigami over time. Luke Pirozzoli (00:52:18): Yes, it does. And that's what... That was my question. It seems like the first episode or the first handful would have the distinct advantage. Rob Collie (00:52:24): Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (00:52:24): Hugh's episode, I think, was in the top, like the first 10 maybe. I don't remember. Rob Collie (00:52:28): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. So, even in the chart that I've shared privately behind the scenes with y'all, I filtered out the first few episodes. It just skews the entire chart. Someone gets to be the first person to use the word the. Luke Pirozzoli (00:52:38): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:52:40): Nope, that shouldn't count. But also to make the word cloud more interesting. This is where, again, where things get even crazier. I found a premium source of data that examine like a billion words of random sample of English language and ranks the top 60,000 root words. And I think the top 200 and something thousand words in terms of their usage within the English language. So when you see us posting these Wordigami's, the words that show up there... First of all, were never used on a previous episode. Secondly, the sizing of the word is determined by a very proprietary formula that blends the rarity of the word in the English language with the number of times it was used in the episode. So rarer words get a bigger representation in the word cloud than really common words. That just happened to be the first time it was used. Right? So like archeology, it looms large in Donald Farmer's Wordigami. Luke Pirozzoli (00:53:41): Yeah. That makes sense. That does make sense. Rob Collie (00:53:45): Yeah. Goblin, I think, was only maybe used once, but it's in there. It scores highly. So it's impressive. We might even do some blog post, something to talk about sort of how this was all put together. It's a neat little model. Luke Pirozzoli (00:54:00): The output is cool too. It's pretty. It's really cool. Rob Collie (00:54:03): That's what Power BI does, man. It makes the stuff pretty. Other thing I was going to share is that in terms of airtime, the guests who have consumed the most airtime. Here's the top five. Shishir Mehrotra, 76.2% of his episode was him speaking. Luke Pirozzoli (00:54:20): That blows my mind. Rob Collie (00:54:21): Yeah. John Hancock, 74.6. Chris Rae, 71.4. Jen Stirrup 66.0%. Chandoo 65.6%. So the top five are all founders or co-founders of their own business. Luke Pirozzoli (00:54:40): Ah. Rob Collie (00:54:40): Kind of interesting. Right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:54:41): Maybe more assertive individuals. Rob Collie (00:54:43): And It might be, you get used to it, right? You get used to talking if you found your own business, even if you don't want to, it's going to come for you, right? Luke Pirozzoli (00:54:50): Yeah. You can't avoid it. Right? Rob Collie (00:54:51): But also, in a way, the companies that they found are like ways of expressing an idea and a feeling that these people had. Expression sort of was there before even the company happened. And so it makes sense, I guess, in a lot of ways. Right? But it was neat to see that. That's not random. Luke Pirozzoli (00:55:10): That is a deep analysis, Rob. That's pretty good. Like I never would've thought that. Rob Collie (00:55:14): The next four are all, in terms of airtime, are all current or former Microsoft employees. Adam Saxton, Donald Farmer, Denny Lee, Chris Finlan, and Jeff Sagarin rounds out the top 10, which is amazing. That was a two guest episode. There were four people talking on that episode, two hosts, two guests, and he still pulled down 61.9% of the words in that episode. Rebounds. He's a rebounder. He's pulling down those words. It's Sunday evening, this is the holiday week addition. We should go spend some more time with our families. Luke, I appreciate you jumping in here for the final bit on a Sunday. And don't forget as the music trails off at the end of this episode, Rob calls the Love Doctors from what like 2018, maybe 2017. I think it was '18. Luke Pirozzoli (00:56:01): Yeah, that should be right in there. Rob Collie (00:56:01): I think it was 2018. Luke Pirozzoli (00:56:03): Yeah. What a great moment. Rob Collie (00:56:05): Yeah, it was really funny. Luke Pirozzoli (00:56:06): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Have a data day. Dano (00:56:20): As promised. Luke Pirozzoli (00:56:21): Yeah, my buddy's on. Dano (00:56:22): We welcome Luke's childhood friend, Rob, to Real Radio and welcome to the Love Doctors, Rob. What's up? Rob Collie (00:56:29): Howdy everybody. How are you? Dano (00:56:31): Howdy, Rob. Dr. Glenn (00:56:31): All right, Rob. Dano (00:56:32): Great to hear from you, man. And thank you for calling in. We were telling stories. I don't know if you've heard the story. I'll give you the in brief on this, Rob. There was a 16 year old girl who was debating back and forth nervously about jumping off a 60 foot tall bridge into some water below and her 19 year old friend wasn't having her indecision. So she pushed her off of that bridge. Well, that girl that... Rob Collie (00:56:54): Ah. Dano (00:56:54): Do you remember the story? Did you see the story? Rob Collie (00:56:56): I have seen this. Yeah. Dano (00:56:57): Okay. The girl that did the pushing, the 19 year old teenage girl was sentenced yesterday or Wednesday to two days in jail and 35 hours of work, community service. She's got to do some work involved with that, Rob. But I thought to myself, let's tell the worst things you've ever done to a best friend story. And wouldn't you know it, Luke was the first to pony up with the story. And my apologies. How is your site nowadays? Rob Collie (00:57:28): Oh, my site's okay. Because the eyeball is mercifully spared, but it's more the psyche. Dano (00:57:35): The mental scarring. Dr. Glenn (00:57:36): Oh, no. Dano (00:57:37): The mental scar you've carried all these years and night sweat, night terrors. I'm not making light of the PTSD out there by any means, but, I mean.... You need medication for what you did, Luke, to your friend. Luke Pirozzoli (00:57:50): We won't even get into the bed wedding, Rob. Rob Collie (00:57:52): You SOB. Dano (00:57:52): Oh man. Rob Collie (00:57:52): Really? Luke Pirozzoli (00:57:55): No! This is me apologizing, man. This is me apologizing. Dano (00:57:59): That's a hell of an apology. You just said the guy wet his bed. Dr. Glenn (00:58:03): He probably still does. Dano (00:58:05): Rob, did you get a physical scar on your face from it? Rob Collie (00:58:09): I was told this was going to be a healing. Dano (00:58:12): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:58:12): It's not piling on. Dano (00:58:15): We're not... No. No wellness around here. Announcer (00:58:18): I hear he's a bed wetter. Luke Pirozzoli (00:58:21): Seriously rather... That's a good question, Rob, that pencil that I threw at you now. So let's... Dano (00:58:27): Back up so you can rehash the story please, Luke. Luke Pirozzoli (00:58:30): And you can fill in the details as you remember them, Rob. We were at your house. We were kids, maybe 10, 11, 12 in there. And we played role playing games, including Dungeons and dragons. And we were arguing over something. Do you remember what we were arguing over? Rob Collie (00:58:45): Yeah. Doesn't surprise me that you've forgotten. Dano (00:58:54): Gee, what's he alluding to? Rob Collie (00:58:55): See the mind flayer had its back turned, and everybody knows that it doesn't get its dex bonus onto hit when it's got its back turned. And my Fort team on the D20 was more than sufficient to hit the mind flayer and interrupt the mind drain that it was casting on the cleric. Dano (00:59:13): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:59:14): You said it still kept its dex bonus. And that was just, it just kind of escalated from there, didn't it? Dano (00:59:20): Oh man. Luke Pirozzoli (00:59:21): Boy, that memory isn't imprinted on your brain at all. Jesus. Rob Collie (00:59:24): Yeah, not at all. Luke Pirozzoli (00:59:25): Now, it's coming back to me and there was a violent act perpetrated by you. The way that you had your... Rob sharpened... He took pride in the sharpening of his pencils. Like they were all even, they were all like needle sharp, and all did I was just fling one of the pencils towards, unfortunately, your head almost gouging out your eye in the process. Rob Collie (00:59:49): Yeah. I mean, the sharpness of those pencils might be a sign that maybe my problem started a little before. Rain Man obsession with those pencils. Dano (01:00:00): Oh, I'm with you. Rob Collie (01:00:02): Yeah. If I remember it, actually the lead of that pencil actually stuck just sort of beneath the surface skin. Luke Pirozzoli (01:00:10): It did. Rob Collie (01:00:10): To my eye. We were just like sitting there in shock, like, "Okay, that just happened." Dano (01:00:15): Were you horribly scarred? You could no longer get dates. Women would run screaming from you because you were so horribly disfigured. Dr. Glenn (01:00:22): Yeah. It looked like one of those gang tattoos with the tear drop. Rob Collie (01:00:25): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've been trying to figure out my whole adult life where it all kind of went wrong. The therapists have gone through all the obvious candidates. Like my parents divorce, the death of a pet. That kind of thing. That never led anywhere. It always comes back to this. It comes back to this crucial moment in my formation and I never got an apology, or more importantly for the justice of it all, an acknowledgement that the mind flayer really should have taken that mace to the back of the head. Luke Pirozzoli (01:01:02): It not about the injury. It's more about the game. That's how serious my friend Rob is about his gaming. Dano (01:01:07): Hey, once a nerd, always a nerd. Luke Pirozzoli (01:01:09): You're damn right. Dano (01:01:09): And you own it. Own it. Luke Pirozzoli (01:01:12): Yeah. Rob, I do want to take this time to... Dano (01:01:14): Hold on. I think we need the appropriate violins, if you don't mind. Or maybe Lonely Man, Jimmy. If you wouldn't mind, Lonely Man would be the perfect bet music is... Luke, why you looking trite over there, man? Good for you. Luke Pirozzoli (01:01:29): Well, this is a healing moment for all of us. Dano (01:01:30): I can hear it. I know Rob is in need of it. Rob Collie (01:01:33): If only I were there to see the look of contrition. Luke Pirozzoli (01:01:36): Oh, you can go to a realradio943.com and click on the Love Doctor's webcam and see my ugly mug right in your face. Dano (01:01:43): And you can see... Rob, you can see the remorse. Luke Pirozzoli (01:01:49): Sponsored by... Rob Collie (01:01:49): I'm going to have to get the recording of this. I'm not near a device at the moment. Dano (01:01:55): That's all right. It'll be on a podcast for you. Luke Pirozzoli (01:01:56): By the way, this apology on the webcam is sponsored by Tropical Auto Sales. Dano (01:02:00): Thank you, Tropical Auto Sales. Hey, even our apologies we get paid for. Luke Pirozzoli (01:02:04): That's right. Rob, I am so sorry that I almost destroyed your life. Dano (01:02:11): Yeah. Luke Pirozzoli (01:02:12): By throwing that pencil at your eye, I was really aiming for the other eye. Dano (01:02:20): Nice, Luke. Luke Pirozzoli (01:02:22): And I'm really sorry if after all this time... I didn't realize every time I moved my hand, you flinched. I mean, I know of the other psychological trauma that I've inflicted on you over the years. Nothing compares to this moment. And I just want to say that I'm truly sorry. I am really, truly sorry that I almost again destroyed you life. Dano (01:02:49): Blinded him, blinded him. Luke Pirozzoli (01:02:51): Blinded you. Dr. Glenn (01:02:52): The man... Dano (01:02:52): Oh, Rob, hang on, because yeah. I'll be honest with you. It wasn't enough for me, but yeah. Glen, what? Dr. Glenn (01:02:58): The man, Luke... The man probably has never picked up a pencil for the rest of his life since that day. Dano (01:03:05): Failed every Scantron test because of you. He's scared of them. Luke Pirozzoli (01:03:08): That's not true. Rob. My friend Rob is a genius. Dano (01:03:11): Yeah. He didn't... Luke Pirozzoli (01:03:12): Wait, just real quick. Dano (01:03:14): Think the answer. Go ahead. Luke Pirozzoli (01:03:15): What was your triple major, Rob? Rob Collie (01:03:17): Computer science, maths, and philosophy. Luke Pirozzoli (01:03:21): Triple major y'all. Dr. Glenn (01:03:22): Wow. Dano (01:03:22): Okay. Luke Pirozzoli (01:03:23): And he went to a very esteemed school. Rob Collie (01:03:26): My parents bought me in with... Dano (01:03:27): Good for you. Luke Pirozzoli (01:03:30): You can ask Dr. Dre. Rob Collie (01:03:32): Yeah. Dano (01:03:34): I don't know. Rob, I could hear the remorseful tone, but I don't think it's enough. What are you willing to do for Rob? What would you like Luke to do for you, Rob? Rob Collie (01:03:44): I think we need to replay that whole scenario. We need to relive it. They call it experiencing. It's a form of therapy. Dano (01:03:51): Okay. All right. So you need to recreate. Rob Collie (01:03:53): We need to reexperience that whole scenario in a safe place. Dano (01:03:57): Yeah. Okay. Rob Collie (01:03:58): Where I know that it's safe. Dano (01:03:59): All right. Rob Collie (01:04:00): We can arrange that at some point. I'm sure. But that's what needs to happen, I think. Luke Pirozzoli (01:04:05): So does that mean I have to prevent myself from throwing the pencil at you or I have to throw it at you again? Dano (01:04:09): No, I think you need to jam a pencil in your eye. Dr. Glenn (01:04:12): Oh, there's not going to to be a pencil anywhere near that game if Rob has his way. Dano (01:04:16): And a really sharp pencil. Rob Collie (01:04:19): Yeah. Like we're in a padded room with nothing. Luke Pirozzoli (01:04:25): Just think, Rob... Rob Collie (01:04:26): Some missiles. Luke Pirozzoli (01:04:26): How cool do people look with eye patches? Like you could have had a cool glass eye like Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York or worn an eye patch. Dano (01:04:33): Eye patches are cool, Rob. I'm sorry. Luke Pirozzoli (01:04:35): Like Representative Crenshaw. He looks cool as hell. Dano (01:04:37): He's kind of a badass just by the look. Does that make you feel better, Luke? When you tell him that? Luke Pirozzoli (01:04:42): Oh, he would've looked badass with a patch or a glass eye. Dano (01:04:45): And a fake eye. Does that make you feel better for what you did to this guy? Dr. Glenn (01:04:48): Yes. Luke Pirozzoli (01:04:50): I might gouge my own eye out just so I can have a patch. Dano (01:04:53): I think you need to. You know how they say fall on the sword. I think you need to put a pencil in your eye and just fall forward, stiff as a board, and let it hit the floor. Luke Pirozzoli (01:05:00): All right. We'll do it on Facebook Live. Dano (01:05:03): When we get around to it. Luke Pirozzoli (01:05:04): Yeah. Sometime. Dano (01:05:05): All right, Rob. My deepest and sincerest apologies for Luke's actions 25 years ago, 30 years ago. I'm sorry. Rob Collie (01:05:12): Well, it means so much coming from you. Dano (01:05:13): Thank you, Rob. Thank you so much. Dr. Glenn (01:05:15): Yeah, we have to apologize for our cohorts behavior, man. That's what it's come down to. Dano (01:05:20): I mean, right off the bat, Rob knows I would've been a better friend. Shame on you. Luke Pirozzoli (01:05:23): He's only been on the phone with you for nine minutes, and you're already a better friend. Dano (01:05:27): That's true. This is true. Dr. Glenn (01:05:29): Rob, call me anytime, man. We'll get together for beers. Rob Collie (01:05:33): What are you doing next Thursday? Dano (01:05:36): I'll be here for a while, but I'll have Luke drive me to our location. Rob Collie (01:05:40): Sounds great. Dano (01:05:41): Okay. He can dictate our entire conversation in sharp pencil. That's a beautiful thing. Rob Collie (01:05:48): Thank you so much for facilitating this intervention. Dano (01:05:51): Yeah. What we had here, Rob, is a moment of closure. Rob Collie (01:05:55): Yeah, it was touching. Dr. Glenn (01:05:57): It was. Rob Collie (01:05:57): I feel touched. Dano (01:05:57): I'm touched. Rob Collie (01:05:57): Do you feel touched? Dano (01:06:00): I do. I always feel touched. You should feel me at seven o'clock. Luke Pirozzoli (01:06:02): I'm touching myself right now, Rob. Dr. Glenn (01:06:03): People tell me I'm touched all the time. Dano (01:06:05): No, you definitely... He is definitely touched. Luke Pirozzoli (01:06:08): Explains a lot of my behavior. Dano (01:06:10): Rob, you can make a case study out of this guy. Luke Pirozzoli (01:06:14): Rob, it was good to hear from me again. I'll give you a buzz sometime over the next couple of days. Rob Collie (01:06:20): Sounds good, man. Dano (01:06:21): Take care, Rob. Thanks for the story. And again, I'm sorry. Dr. Glenn (01:06:24): God, we have to apologize for him. Dano (01:06:27): Awful. I bet... Yeah, what? Luke Pirozzoli (01:06:28): I thought that went well. Dr. Glenn (01:06:29): I think so too. Dano (01:06:29): Well, for you, maybe. Dr. Glenn (01:06:31): I hope he feels better. Dano (01:06:32): Yeah. He's still getting the night tremors. Luke Pirozzoli (01:06:34): I'm telling you that dude is a frigging genius. Dano (01:06:36): I don't doubt it. Luke Pirozzoli (01:06:37): I think he got like 1550 on his SATs. Yeah, it was ridiculous. Dano (01:06:43): What? Luke Pirozzoli (01:06:43): Yeah, it was... That guy is amazing. Rob Collie (01:06:44): Hey look, did you leave the part in about my amazing SAT scores? Luke Pirozzoli (01:06:47): Oh, oh, of course, I did. Rob Collie (01:06:49): That's my man. There's an achievement that means absolutely nothing