- Duration: 51 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01J6J055ZREQG8E342NTVKDCZ3 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J6J055ZREQG8E342NTVKDCZ3)
Transcript
[Austin Schlessinger]: Hey, what’s up, everyone? Hey, guys. [Janet Lee]: Hey. [Michael Houck]: Ram, how’s it going? [Michael Houck]: Good, how are you? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Good, thanks for making time. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I think we had everyone here, so I can just get started. First thing, just want to say apologies for the renewal done for sort of all of our agreements and arrangements with clients, work on subscription. I had noted to Janet that I was going to check in the week before, but I had like a true family sort of horrible crisis that week. So to sort of slip through the cracks on my end, apologies, should have caught it regardless. But yeah, I wanted to apologize for that up front. [Janet Lee]: No worries. Thank you. [Michael Houck]: As far as the main goal of this call, I think it’s just basically to ensure that our process is set up in a way that’s going to be successful going forward. I think we’ve made some adjustments this week based on Janet’s conversations that you and I have had. So, Ram, I want to loop you into those, make sure you’re aware of those, and that we’re on the same page there. If there’s any further changes we should make, please let us know. [Michael Houck]: So I guess I’ll throw it to you to get started. First of all, did you get a chance to take a look at the email I sent over last night? No worries if not. [Janet Lee]: Do you mean email or Slack message, just to confirm? [Michael Houck]: The email, the pre-read for the same. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: I haven’t yet. [Michael Houck]: Okay, well, I can just quickly maybe walk through that unless you had anything that you wanted to share. [Janet Lee]: I think you get started. Can you screen share it so we can see it together of what you were referring to? [Michael Houck]: Sure, yeah. Let’s see, let’s see. Okay, this should work. Okay, so yeah, so this is what I sent over last night. The TLDR, we’re making adjustments to the process that we think will improve the workflow. As far as like sharing with Megaphone and our creator network, we have some proposed ways to make that easier. And then, yeah, I just want to note again about the auto pay. So unless there’s anything we want to add to that sort of list, I can jump into the process updates and we can go from there. OK. [Michael Houck]: Um, so the process side. Basically, now we’ve sort of simplified and streamlined our notion process. So that it’s, you know, I know you guys aren’t in Notion normally as much as we are. And so just to make it super simple, it basically turned into the equivalent of a Trello board, where we just have straightforward sort of statuses. There’s two levels of approval, one for the team, and then the team current quest edits. And then there’s also a column ROM for you to take a look. And we can talk about what the best way to gather that feedback is. So there’s two separate columns for that, which we think will make things simple. [Michael Houck]: And I also pinned the updated version of it in Slack at the top of the channel. So it’s really easy to access. We’re happy to use Google Docs if you guys would prefer. Just sort of needed that guidance from you if you’re like, hey, this Notion thing isn’t working for us. Let’s just use Google Docs. We can do that too. So I guess that would be the first question I’d pose to you. [Janet Lee]: Notion is working okay. It’s just, I think the statuses was confusing before. I think the changes you made made it a lot easier. I think the team and the ROM review, it helps a lot in the other tags now. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. Stephanie, any other thoughts on that? Or are we good on continuing to use the new board in Notion? Just wanna make sure everyone is on the same page about that. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: I only went under the Notion thing once. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: It seemed all right. To me, I think what was more effective was what I did with Janet than providing stuff in Notion and providing feedback in Notion. [Michael Houck]: Got it. Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. I think most of the clients we work with, as I noted here, most of the clients prefer the feedback to sort of be async, but I think we’re happy to sort of do a weekly review with you guys, if you’d like, for the posts that get to the sort of like ROM review stage, or also privately, if that’s easier for you. [Janet Lee]: I think what is helpful is during the team review Stephanie and I already have a book time every week on Thursday because you guys said Wednesday you’ll have a end of day you’ll have it for us so Stephanie and I will riff on everything based on what she knows from working here for a long time and like what we think about what Ron would want And then you guys have that make your rounds of review and then I’ll do another session when I can grab time with ROM in person and then also record that and send it back over. But I think the thing I want to emphasize is like I think you guys sometimes want us to like move things a little bit on the notion board. I think hopefully by recording the kind of the feedback live on the call, that would be enough to like, give it to you guys. And then you guys know how to move it on the on the board. That would be most ideal, I think, for my event. [Michael Houck]: Got it. Okay, I think as long as then we’ll then flag when things sort of reach the ready to post stage in Slack, so that you guys know, okay, these are the posts that are ready to go right now, we can get them scheduled, or they can just be accessible for Ron whenever he’s gonna post them. [Austin Schlessinger]: What would be helpful in those videos is I can totally manage like the notion board and moving things around. But if you guys could just say like, hey, we need edits on this one, and then I’ll know to move it just so we can track like those reviews and where things are, because sometimes there I guess there was a few that like maybe you had reviewed, but I wasn’t really sure what the status of it was based on what That’s super, that’s super fair. [Janet Lee]: We’ll be more explicit on the on the call on the on the recording. I think some of them were like riffing on right. And then we maybe don’t like a couple lines on it. And but we could make it way more clear like he doesn’t like this piece, but overall, it’s pretty good. But let’s get let’s give us another round or something like that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I would add on to that. I think being more specific in what specific parts of the posts we want to change are helpful. A lot of other clients will just leave comments right on the Notion doc. If you guys want to talk over that, we just ask that you be as specific as possible about what lines or what sections. Because I watched through the feedback video you guys sent over yesterday afternoon, and there were parts where the commentary was like, oh, this just needs to be cleaned up or something like that. [Janet Lee]: And then Michael funny story on that we actually recorded a much longer piece. And it was like really detailed and everything like that. And then the recording died. And I was like, Oh my god, and it was super nice to like re say things but but that obviously was not ideal. So in the future, hopefully there won’t be recording issues. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So that’s what happened there. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. No worries, then. As long as Austin feels good about that, then I feel good about that. So, okay. And then there was another note, Janet, that you had shared about LinkedIn. I wanted to pose this question to Ram. A lot of clients we work with will want to just post exactly the same stuff between Twitter and LinkedIn to keep it sort of consistent. Others will say, hey, let’s tweak this slightly to fit sort of the LinkedIn platform. So I’m curious, Ram, what you would prefer. If there’s small tweaks you want us to make for the LinkedIn voice, we can do that. That’s fairly straightforward. But we just need that guidance from you. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: I haven’t thought about it very much. Stephanie or Janet, do you guys have a point of view on that? [Janet Lee]: Um, can you I am familiar that there are differences, but especially like threads do way better on Twitter. And then, you know, there’s a different audience on both sides, right? But in your mind, can you Can you kind of describe a few qualities that you guys do tweak? And then what’s the benefit of it? Do you feel like it will? Because I think everything we’ve written feels very Twitter forward, Twitter first. And then like, do you feel like if we put in the time to make it more LinkedIn friendly? Will we feel like that we do better? And like, what are you guys actually tweaking? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so it really depends on the format of the post for Twitter, right? If the format of the post for Twitter is like a thread with different like tweets within that thread, then just copy pasting that to LinkedIn, the formatting doesn’t translate quite as well. And it might be easier to sort of like, bring it more into like a long form post style with like maybe separate points. In the middle rather than being so distinct from like tweet to tweet to tweet. If the Twitter post is either a short post or just a long form tweet, then you can feel pretty safe about just copying it over to LinkedIn because LinkedIn is pretty similar in that regard. The one difference there is that on LinkedIn, you’re only going to get a maximum maximum of three lines of text in the blink before someone has to click to see more. On Twitter, you can have a hook tweet that’s like, you know, four lines or five lines as long as it’s under 280 characters. So, that’s really the only difference because the hook is so important. Sometimes people like to tweak the hook. [Janet Lee]: hearing what you say we should tweak it if it is like a formatting change here and there and like the bullet point change we should tweak it um and then actually I know that like carousels and like other stuff do really well on linkedin I don’t know if you guys help your clients with that or like obviously you probably do you guys have designed capabilities on on your end or do you even feel like uh that makes even [Michael Houck]: moves the needle there So carousels were very like overpowered, I’d say like six to 18 months ago for like that whole period of time. In the last, really since around the beginning of this year, say like late Q1, LinkedIn has been actually kind of like decreasing their power back to more even with text-based posts. So there’s not as much value in doing carousels. If we want to just make them by catching and make them sort of pop out a really easy way to do it is to use this tool called tweak pick or use Tapio to turn a Twitter thread into a carousel in like a very easy like one or two step process. So that could be an option if we want to try out carousels. It wouldn’t be too challenging. We could help out with that if it’s a matter of [Stephanie Borman]: Here’s what I would recommend. I think Janet and I can go through in our review and just flag which ones we think are appropriate for each channel. I think it’s probably content specific and we can identify that and then go from there. [Janet Lee]: That’s a good point. Is that possible to have like a field and notion? Obviously I know it is, but like that probably we check it off like hey, this is worthy of LinkedIn. This is not and like we’ll do it on the video. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m making a note of that right now. I’ll add that after the call. [Janet Lee]: Beautiful. You can continue. Does that answer your question? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The last thing I was going to say is that if we wanted to design it with the urn and branding and make a really unique carousel template, we don’t have capacity on our team to do that right now. But I assume one of the designers that works with you guys could create a Canva template, and then we could copy paste into there each shot. [Janet Lee]: Yeah, let’s start walking first and then we’ll run later if we want to do like more creative stuff. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Sounds good. Okay. And then the other thing is just like scheduling and posting. So I am very aware, believe me, of the sort of like slowness issues plaguing Megaphone’s creator network tool right now. We are actively in the middle of a database migration that’s been sort of dragging on. For context, when I first built the tool, I built it as like a no-code tool on top of an air table. And now we’ve hired a team of engineers and they’re launching an AWS database, but it’s taking a while to move over. So that’s why things are slow. That will be changing in September, hopefully the first half of September. [Michael Houck]: But in the meantime, I know it’s sort of frustrating to sort of wait for the tool to load and it’s slow. So we can do sort of one of two things. Either, Ram, when you share a post on Twitter, you can drop the link to it in our shared Slack channel and just tell us how much budget you want to put behind it. And then our ops team will put that into the network and get some creators onto it. The second way would be if you use a scheduling tool like Typefully, TweetHunter is another good one, and like SchedBatch, schedule your posts for like a week or two weeks or however long. Because, you know, we have a few in the Notion right now, so you can schedule them sort of in advance. That way, you don’t need to, like, think to go tweet. You just have them scheduled to go live at whatever times you want. And you would just need to let us know what times those are, and then also how much budget you want to put behind it. And we could handle it sort of automatically. We’d have a script set up to pull the tweet in automatically. So it’s up to you which one you’d prefer. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Either could work. I haven’t used TypeFleet, but either one of those could work. [Michael Houck]: Okay, well maybe take a look at Typefully and see if it’s a fit, and then let us know and we can plan from there. The downside of throwing it in the channel is that our ops team has to be online at that time. And I think since you guys are on the West Coast, they’re in the Philippines, there could be some time difference stuff if you post it like late in the afternoon. But if you’re posting in the morning, there wouldn’t be any difference, which is the optimal time to post anyway. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Okay. [Janet Lee]: So Ram, do you feel like it’s likely that you would want to like maybe sit down once a week and then go into typefully and then like schedule out three tweets to go out? Because I think historically it’s been very kind of like shoot from the hip at random times during the day. Do we want to systemize it to be like 9 a.m. Monday to Monday, Wednesday, Friday, something like that? Or do you kind of like it more fluid than that? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: I think right now we haven’t actually had stuff that can go out. So it’s easier to schedule if you have a backlog of things, right? It feels like right now when we have something ready, we push it out and there isn’t yet a backlog. [Janet Lee]: That’s fair. So maybe we go from the first option and then as we feel more comfortable, we can do the second option. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Yeah, but even with what we’re doing now, even if I’m not pre-loading it for the whole week, when I have something ready, I can just set it up for the next morning. [Janet Lee]: Yeah. Yeah, you can. Yeah. So we can get, you know, typefully account. [Stephanie Borman]: Yeah. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Yeah. I just set up a typefully account. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Well, as you guys decide sort of what times you’re going to want to go live and what days of the week or things like that, just drop us a note in the Slack channel. And if that changes, that’s fine. Just keep us updated. Um, and we’ll, we’ll set something up on, on our side to handle it. Cool. Um, and then the last thing I want to show is the notion board here. So this is again, just kind of the new board, super simple. There’s this post approved tab. This is when it makes it past the ROM review, we put in post approved. And then if it’s been published, we’ll move it into scheduled slash published. So right now, we’ve got three more edits from the video you guys sent us last night that we need to do. Two, we edited but left in the team review column because there were questions for you, Janet and you, Stephanie. And then the other ones, we took the feedback you guys shared and we moved them all into the ROM review column. So I think the big next step is going through those and getting them in a state where they’re ready to be approved and scheduled and published. [Janet Lee]: Since we have some more time on the meeting, would it be helpful? I mean, we’re not going to do this every time, but could we actually get them approved right now? Yeah, I mean, unless there’s anything else you guys want to talk about. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, on our side, no. So unless there’s something you guys want to talk about before we do that. I mean, Austin, how do you feel about that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m good for that. [Austin Schlessinger]: Cool. [Janet Lee]: Rom, are there any other concerns other than you just, I think the end goal is like, I mean, we’re happy to like keep Megaphone as a partner as long as they’re actually driving results. And the result is not just like having good tweets. The actual result is like social media growth, engagement on his stuff. Like that’s the end goal. So we can’t just be like, oh, we gave you a lot of tweets sitting there. Like we should also like shepherd us to the last remaining. Goal. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I think there’s, there’s more work for us to do on sort of like, I mean, now we’ve sort of set up the process in a better way, but I think that’s a learning for us of sort of helping you guys get to sort of that end state, that final, like last mile of getting this stuff. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. The finish line. Otherwise we can’t show that it was helpful, you know? So yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So I think as long as there’s no other concerns about that, then yeah, we can totally use the last 10 minutes or so to, to go through these Rom. How do you, how do you feel? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: It’s fine. Yep. And I agree with what Jan said. I think at the end of the day for us, the, uh, the proof is sort of in the, the actual results, not so much in the fact that there was a lot of effort. [Michael Houck]: Totally. Yep. A hundred percent makes sense. We want to drive results with you guys. That’s our, that’s our goal. Um, so yeah, now as we get through this content, as we get it scheduled, uh, you know, we’ll keep track of follower growth. We’ll keep track of engagements, uh, and, and, you know, hopefully that also drives, uh, everything else you guys want to. So, um, okay. So I’ll, I’ll open up the top one here and then, um, I guess take a second to read through it and, um, share any feedback that you, that you have. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: This one is really similar to one that I recently posted. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Right. [Janet Lee]: Yeah, it was. This is the SSN one, but I think Austin added more to it. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: We said it was okay to repeat, but maybe not so soon after the original post? Should we try to get some more posts in between? [Janet Lee]: I think I kind of viewed Twitter, I mean, you guys can agree or disagree, but like, I kind of view Twitter as like a river. I don’t think people have, people have a short-term memory. So I don’t know if that needs to be too much concern. It’s whether or not like you like whatever Austin said in this, like, do you agree with everything here? And it, does this sound like ROM enough? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: It doesn’t sound like me completely. Um, the thing that don’t sound like me or like when the part that says like infant tech, we’re always looking ahead. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Um, I feel like when, when I’m talking about stuff, I might be much more like, straight to the facts instead of the framing. You Parts of that are like talking about social security numbers, permanent IDs that were never designed to the digital age. I like the analogy about it’s like leaving your house keys on the doormat, convenient but dangerous. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Also like the part about like trying to get people to imagine a different future. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: The one piece that’s missing in this, if you actually did a modern ID system, the IDs would only work for the person you gave it to. So if you went to the social security website and got a single use ID number, you tell them it’s for Capital One. And when you give it to Capital One, Capital One can use it, but nobody else would be able to use it. So even if Capital One got hacked, no one would be able to use the number. So there’s also the specificity with who can use it. [Michael Houck]: Well, we can, we can incorporate that for sure. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Yeah. The other thing that might be interesting for this post, you need to do a little bit of research is, um, the kind of ID system that we’re talking about out here, single use revocable. Other countries have it. So if someone can go do some research and get a list of five countries that have this, it would be interesting to point out that India is one. If you can find five countries where people think they’re backward, but they’re all more advanced than the US, it might bring that point out. The US’s ID system is more outdated than, I don’t know what those five countries are, but if you could find five countries, that might be an interesting one too. [Janet Lee]: To piggyback on that, I think it extends beyond the SSN. I think in the discussion with Ram, there were so many other fintech solutions that other countries are ahead of us. And I just want to call out, I think I’ve heard this multiple times, I think Ram likes storytelling in his tweets versus I think like the big generic sentences about like the industry, like the first sentence, right? Like it’s like super, Does that make sense? It’s way better when it’s a story. It feels more personal. So, yeah. [Michael Houck]: More narrative focused, basically. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. I’ll move this one back to edits and we’ll make those changes. Let’s go through the next one here. So this is a shorter one. It’s just like a one-off tweet. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, I wonder if I can make this a little bigger. I can see it. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: It’s fine. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: There we go. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: I think the content is generally all right. It doesn’t stand out a huge amount except for the, like continuous earnings. I’m also thinking of timing. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Stephanie, do you feel like I should tweet this before the product is out? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: People won’t know that there’s like, they’ll think this is like, imagine the future, but we’ll have this out in Q1. [Stephanie Borman]: Yeah, it might be nice to tie it a bit closer to the actual product launch. And maybe create a series of these in lead up to that, Ram? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Yeah. And I think like in line with the storytelling piece, it might actually be nice to talk about multiple things that have moved from batch to continuous. As you can talk about how like TV was batch on the cable company schedule, now it’s moved to continuous. You watch whenever you want, how many episodes you want through streaming TV. Have a few examples like that, and then talk about how continuous is the logical endpoint for batch. Technology always does that. It should happen to payroll, too. [Stephanie Borman]: Yeah. Do you want to start seeding ideation of continuous money now, Ram? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: That’s what I was asking. I don’t know if I should do it now or if I should wait, because it’s not that far away. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Stephanie Borman]: I think as a concept, like as a product construct, if it were to sit sort of at like the meta level, like it’s the platform of which the products come out versus just like direct deposit, right? Like this whole meta concept of continuous money might be nice to start seeding now. And then we can go into the actual product. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Yeah. Yeah. We can do that too. So what I was just talking about, just the idea of continuous without the product itself. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [Stephanie Borman]: I think that’s what we start now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: From my perspective, I think it’s good to be building this up in people’s minds. It’ll make the product launch feel stronger and more cohesive to your personal ethos and beliefs if we start seeding in early. So I think we start with some smaller posts like this about the topic. And then as it gets closer to the launch in Q1, we drop something like a whole thread of why this is just the natural progression of things that we push a lot of attention to. In either the direct lead up to the launch or right after launch about like why we did this. [Stephanie Borman]: Yeah it’s just the way that society is moving and it’s kind of silly that money hasn’t caught up yet. I mean you look at going from like the newspaper to like you got your news at five in the morning by a newspaper and now you get it all day every day in access to your phone. Same with the telephone. You used to have to be home to answer the telephone to get a call. Now you can get contacted All day, every day, at any point in time, the infrastructure just didn’t exist. Pay is the same. They’re paying us on a two to four week basis at some point. What we’re working towards is that’s continually on, right? It’s no different than what we’ve seen technologically. [Michael Houck]: I love that. I think that’s a really smart insight. [Austin Schlessinger]: We’ll appreciate that. Austin, I think we like analogies. Right. I haven’t thought on. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Use more analogies. Stephanie says with all of those examples, they’re always on. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: streaming is always on. Twitter is always on for news. If you move to the mobile phone, it was always on because it was with you. So maybe that might be something to repeat as a pattern. It’s continuous, but it’s also always on. [Michael Houck]: Well, we can incorporate that also back to the some final edits, but I feel like this one, we maybe incorporate some of that terminology and then we can start building a series around this to drip out over the next few months. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Stephanie Borman]: Okay. [Janet Lee]: We do have this till 45. So if you want to whip through it, we still have 15 minutes on the books, just FYI. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I have time. Austin, are you good? Yeah, I’m good. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Let’s keep going then. So this one’s a little longer again. This is three systematic solutions that could revolutionize our approach to financial security. That’s the full post there. So that was a little longer. [Stephanie Borman]: Is this intended for Twitter? Is this like a Twitter thread? [Michael Houck]: This could be as a long form tweet. Um, so Twitter has like, now you can go over 280 characters. If you have like one main point to say versus a thread where it’s like breaking up a list of examples or something like that. So, um, here we have like three examples and we could have each of those be an individual tweet, but this is originally structured as a long form. [Janet Lee]: I think they should be long form, like not, not personally. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: I don’t know if these are the three that would revolutionize our approach to financial security. I mean, like direct supervision of fintechs is sort of this nuanced implementation of how the system works. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: And I think it’s like, it’s a dynamic that’s probably not there 10 years from now. I mean, what’s happening at this point in time is consumers are moving to fintech solutions the regulators are still supervising banks and they want to continue to supervise banks. Eventually they’ll move to where the consumers are. So I think, I feel like this is just like transition because consumers are moving out of banks to fintechs. Eventually the regulators will start looking at the fintechs instead of just the banks. Right now they’re trying to see if they can stop the consumers from going to fintech. But to me, this is less like a transitionary piece. If we were to think of like really large systemic solutions The ID piece is sort of like infrastructure. And you could think of, like, you could almost do a tweet on, like, what are the key components of a public digital infrastructure that you need to have a modern financial system? And out here, we don’t really think very much of, like, what is the public digital infrastructure, but the ID system is part of our public digital infrastructure. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: So that could be one. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: I mean, if you had to look at it at a really high level, you would have the ID, which is also the authentication. And then you’ve got the money flows. Right now, that’s mostly CHP. If you look at the public infrastructure, it’s slow. And then there is FedNow, but no one uses it. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: So that’s moving money would be the second piece of the public infrastructure. And the third piece would be moving data. Government just doesn’t move any data in the US. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Well, those would be the three components of a public digital infrastructure. You can also look at sort of other things in terms of system design. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: I mean, the way we set up, and it’s particularly visible now with inflation and the huge amount of money printing, is that it’s set up to disincentivize savings or to punish savers. If you save money, that money is going to be worth less in the future. If you borrow money, you actually pay back a predefined amount, but that amount is worth much less in the future. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: in a way with all of this huge public deficit, we’re punishing savers and rewarding borrowers. That’s kind of like a design flaw. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: The government is short-term focused where you run up a deficit for populist measures, even though in the long run, what you’re doing is something you would never advocate for. [Michael Houck]: In your opinion, is that a design flaw, as you said, or is that like sort of intentional short-term thinking due to whatever reasons that may be? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: I don’t think it’s a design flaw. If you have a government, the government is always going to try to run a deficit because it has to stay in power. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: And the deficit is never paid within their own term. They always want to be paid in the next government’s term. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: And so you see this, it’s not just in the US where actually, you know, so it is a design issue because some constitutions do not permit deficits. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: And we do, we have no debt ceiling at the moment. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: You could, I mean, if someone was strong enough and there was like enough conviction behind it. If you had something like, if the deficit goes above 3%, you can’t stand for a reelection. The deficit will not go above 3%. Make sure that happens. [Michael Houck]: Someone, I think maybe it was Vivek, proposed that or said something about that. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Yeah. Warren Buffett said the same thing too. He said like, I know how to solve the… [Michael Houck]: Oh yeah, it was Buffett. It was Buffett. You’re right. You’re right. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: And that might be great to start off with, because that is not controversial if he says something. But to take what he said and then show how, because we’re not following that, we’re punishing sabers and rewarding those who are in debt. [Michael Houck]: Well, okay. I, for, for context, I am not taking any notes on this one. Cause I feel like there were a lot of thoughts, uh, but we do have the recording. So Austin, I’ll pass that off to you. And I think there’s a couple of kind of post ideas that came out of that one, adjusting this one based on what Ron was saying at the beginning. But then I think there were a couple other. Uh, other, uh, anecdotes or nuggets. I think we can turn into two more posts from there. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: So, um, yeah, there’s also like a lot of stuff that you can tie to inflation. Um, so this was one was savers and borrowers. The other one that I had, I said, we would not go forward with it, but it sort of is, uh, inflation is what leads to more surveillance because all of the thresholds are like, Hey, like report every transaction about 10,000. And that was said in 1917, where there was like, transaction above 10,000 was so rare. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: But now they never changed that amount. You see the same thing with like, even like with taxation. If your income is above 200k, you pay a certain tax rate, but generally incomes keep going up. And so by not indexing that amount, you’re basically catching more and more people higher tax bracket. [Michael Houck]: It’s a really good insight. It’s so true. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. There’s a, there’s currency transaction report thresholds. They, they haven’t changed this. I mean, yeah, I guess since the seventies, that’s crazy. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Um, okay. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: This will be too political, but with the, uh, the unrealized capital gains tax, if you have high inflation, everything becomes more valuable to you. You have to pay a tax on the inflation. [Michael Houck]: Oh man. Yeah. The capital gains thing is, is blowing my mind right now. I, you know, be catastrophic. Um, if they, they tax unrealized gains, that’d be insane. [Janet Lee]: Um, let’s move on to maybe the next one. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, let’s do that. Austin. I think there’s a couple of things from, from this one that we can, we can come back to. Um, okay. Next one. Uh, biggest lie about money. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: So it doesn’t feel very much like me. I’m not usually giving financial advice. [Stephanie Borman]: That’s what I had said. This feels like kind of personal finance advice. I also want to be careful on like number two, like our customers tend to really struggle. And so like week, $10 you know, um, they just realistically might not have that. So I want to be careful that we're not being patronizing to the customer. [Janet Lee]: But to this credit, I feel like some of this personal finance stuff is, is like pretty common sense stuff that it's like, it won't get us in trouble, hopefully with like financial advising stuff, but like the last part of like tying it back to earn in and like how we help you with like the whole gamut. It, I see merit in that. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Um, this also doesn't stand out. Like these are very. Like standard advice. It's not like I have a point of view on it. It feels like I've like picked up someone's here's the top 10 ways to do something. The one thing that we spoke about this, Jenna, the things that we could do that might be more personal fans like is to do customer stories. [Janet Lee]: Well, good thing because Austin has like 10 in his like docket now. So we should start there. But we actually have a ton more like you guys saw that spreadsheet. I have to figure out on my end how to like pipeline it to you well but like those op-eds I think will give you enough there. [Stephanie Borman]: That's what I I think I would reposition this through ROM's words like we've had a customer who's struggling with medical debt and used EWA as a way to pay their medical bills. If you're in a similar situation here's what Dawn did to help get out of this situation. Like I would position it through the voice of the customer. [Janet Lee]: Ooh, yeah. Specificity too, like an actual rather than generic advice. Yeah. [Stephanie Borman]: Ram, how does that feel? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Yeah. I mean, we did have that one on healthcare costs that I just posted about. Exactly. We wrote about it. We had another one. Stephanie, you might remember him. What is his name? He came here last year and spoke to the company where- Kevin. He invests and he realized that if he gets the money earlier, he earns more interest. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Stephanie Borman]: It's fascinating. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: You find all these really interesting ways in which people use their own wage access. The other one that people are always surprised about when I tell the story, the person from Walgreens, where she And Walgreens, you have different types of jobs. You have one where you're tied to a particular store location, another one where you're tied to a department, like the cosmetics department, and you work in multiple stores. That role where you work in multiple stores pays higher. And when she was offered that higher paying role, she didn't take it because she couldn't afford to front the gas money and wait to get reimbursed. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Wow. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Then when she started using it, and then she got the offer again, and she took up the offer because she knew she had earned it and she could do it. And so she was able to get a higher paying role because of us. [Michael Houck]: That's an amazing story. Yeah. [Stephanie Borman]: I mean, that's like the simplicity of it, right? Like that it's, it's, it's simple, simple finance advice, but through the lens of how a customer has actually applied the behavior and advanced their life. And I think that coming from Ron feels very appropriate. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Similar, like celebrating their birthday on the right day, going to dentist when their tooth hurts instead of waiting until Friday to go to the dentist, things like that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we should totally incorporate this as like a regular content pillar. If we have one of these stories that we're sharing every one to two weeks or something like that, that would be, that'd be really, really good, really powerful. [Michael Houck]: Okay. I'll, unless there's any other notes on this one, I'll move this one back to, uh, to the, the, for Austin to, to edit. Uh, we'll go on to the next one here. [Stephanie Borman]: Let's let this be the last one. Cause I think we've got just a couple more minutes. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Sounds good. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: This is a little similar to one of my other tweets as well. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: There's actually a couple of ideas in this. One is the monopoly. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: It's sort of interesting. The only reason the government is able to keep a monopoly on money is because they also have a monopoly on violence. They're the only ones allowed to run a police force. They could not control the police force. They could not control the currency. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: True. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: So one is monopoly. I might have already dealt with that. The other one that's actually interesting is the supply side. No, I didn't deal with supply side as well, right, in my tweet. I think I did deal with supply and monopoly in that. Yeah, and Ram, just to kind of- I don't know if the Microsoft analogy works very well, If you want to go deeper into this, if you were to look at the long term, In the U.S., the fiat currency supply has gone up by about 7% year. Gold supply goes up by about 2% year. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Bitcoin is a completely different animal. It's got nonlinear scaling, but the remaining dilution from year four is about 2%. And if you look back at the change in prices, if you were to denominate them in U.S. Dollars or in gold, the difference is about 5%. It actually matches. The difference in supply rates. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: So roughly every year things become expensive in gold than in U.S. Dollars because the dollar supply goes up by about 5% more than the gold supply. [Michael Houck]: Basically what you can expect or what you could expect from going off the gold standard is playing out in reality. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Yeah, this, I haven't thought through this, but there is like this question of like, what is the end game when you move off the gold standard? I don't know how it is. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it gets scary and without Bitcoin, I think. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Stephanie, the things that Dan has been working on that we could use. I feel like another aspect that we missed a little bit is history. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: There was one more, I think we may have had this somewhere, which is on income tax. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: To me, that's probably one of the most valuable product decisions ever made was to move to tax deduction by the employers. And it's also a really interesting example of the government co-opting the private sector to complete its work. [Stephanie Borman]: Um, I think that the automation of it, right. And that it did actually benefit consumers. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Sorry, say that again, which one? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: The automation of the income tax? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Yeah, well, initially, it wasn't a payroll deduction. And then the government had problems collecting because people are not writing in the checks. [Michael Houck]: Hmm. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: So you're also asking questions saying, Hey, if I'm giving you this much money, what am I getting in return? When you defaulted it and sort of make it happen behind the scenes where people don't see it, then they ask less questions. But am I getting my money's worth for the taxes I'm paying? Because it's not in your face, every paycheck. [Michael Houck]: Sneaky. Very sneaky. [Stephanie Borman]: What's the point you want to make with that, Ram? [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: It might actually be the sort of the single most, if you think of it as a product decision, where like, Hey, this is just going to be the default in which it works. It's not an opt-in. It's not like it's, we just like, when you set up your account, it happens. It's almost like a product design, but they've got trillions and trillions of dollars in revenue because they have one product design choice. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: It might be too much of a product manager point of view. [Michael Houck]: I mean, we can, maybe we can frame that. In terms of like the impact on people, right. In terms of like how that's impacted their ability to, I don't know, uh, financially like plan their finances or feel about paying the government. Or I think there's a few different angles we can take there. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Another one that you might look at as well is, um, coming back to the national debt is the national is increasing at about $2,000 person per month. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: which is a huge amount if you think of it that we’re all incurring that kind of debt every month. And do we think we’re getting our money’s worth for that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, no, unfortunately not. [Janet Lee]: I know that we’re at the last one. Ram, quick question. You know how we have the research team with like a lot of those reports about our customers and like a lot of different stuff. We currently have an NDA out with with Michael’s team, but like, do you feel like that is worthy of like things to mine through in that research team documentation? Like we have so many different topics that they research about our customers. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Maybe you or Stephanie should go through with the research team as I don’t know if I know completely what all they have. [Janet Lee]: Oh, okay. [Janet Lee]: Got it. [Janet Lee]: Okay. That’s fair. [Stephanie Borman]: The research website should be up today or Monday. So that we’ll have publicly available data that’s gone through legal and compliance that we can, I would start with that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um. Fair enough. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Okay, it’s okay to share. [Janet Lee]: Okay, thank you, everyone. Anything last thoughts? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so just as far as next steps, so just to confirm, we’re going to get back with these changes from you guys. There’s three more for Rob. Rob, if you and Janet want to sync up on that at some point, no urgency there, but the sooner we get the feedback, the sooner we’ll be able to make the edits and get it back to you. And then just confirming we want to keep content production moving forward and kind of keep things rolling. [Janet Lee]: Yeah, for at least another month and drive towards results. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Cool. That would be easy to do is to take our innovation video and write a tweet around that and then put the video in. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Have you all seen the video that we did on innovation? It’s like a minute, minute and a half video. [Stephanie Borman]: I’ll send three. We have three videos through. That would be helpful. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Stephanie Borman]: We’re in the Slack channel. [Michael Houck]: Are the videos, are they horizontal or are they vertical videos? They’re on YouTube. Okay. So horizontal. Okay. Um, yeah, those can work on, on Twitter. Um, maybe on LinkedIn. They could definitely work on Twitter then. [PA Room 10: Curiosity]: Okay. Thank you. [Michael Houck]: Thanks guys. Talk soon.