00:05
You're listening to the Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? It's Ryan Alford. Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. We are.

00:20
extremely excited to be joined by our guest today, Michael Loeb, who is the CEO and founder of Loeb Enterprises. Michael has a very distinguished background in marketing, in venture capitalism, in sales, in lots of stuff. Michael, really pleased and thankful to have you on the show today.

00:41
Uh, why thank you, Ryan. Uh, you forgot to mention voodoo. I'm pretty good at voodoo. Uh, you know, there's one thing in watching all of the interviews you've done, uh, you're a humble, humble soul. Uh, maybe your friends don't know you that way. I don't know, but all I'll say is, you know, to do the, some of the things you've done watching you on stage and watching, you know, some of the other presentations, keynotes and all that, uh, you're very humble. And I appreciate that. But, but I, I, you do have. Uh, a very, uh, distinguished

01:11
and you know we really appreciate you coming on the show. I am happy to be here. Great. How are things going there in New York? You guys keeping hunkered down?

01:24
Oh, I think like the rest of the world, the answer is yes. And today happens to be snowing, which, uh, more and more of a rarity. It is. Uh, the, uh, it sounds like you guys might be coming out of some of the lockdowns. Uh, are they getting any better there? And you know, all you can see is I lived in New York for a while, but it's been six years and can only imagine, you know, the struggle that's been, but things getting a little better or you guys seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

01:53
I can tell Ryan that you lived in New York for six years because of your New York accent. Hahaha.

02:02
You know, the answer I think is no. The struggle is that if you're a restaurant, you still have to have outdoor dining. You can't have indoor dining. They have pitched every form of tent and teepee for people to dine outside with all manner of heaters. But when the temperature drops below 30, it's really hard to conduct any sort of business outside. So, you know, a lot of the trappings

02:32
The restaurants, the bars, the theaters, museums, none of that is really back. And you combine that with everybody working from home.

02:46
uh... and also the high taxes in new york that our governor is proposing to make even higher uh... to pay for some of the bills and kind of our week leadership uh... particularly in new york city and it's uh... a formula for some pretty scary stuff new york went through a you know fifteen-year period maybe even arguably longer high murder rates high crime rates a lot of dirt and filth

03:16
the city and those were in the 80s and to a lesser extent the 90s and good management kind of put that on a good path, great path and now we're you know those of us who have been long-time residents are concerned that that's going to get reversed. We shall see. New York is not alone. Yeah well best of luck with that. I only pretend to have solutions for

03:46
either above or below my pay grade not sure which one but we'll leave that for another day. Michael, I would like to give you know obviously you've done interviews you've done keynotes we do have a lot of ad and marketing people that I'm sure have heard your name around but I'd love to give everyone let's start with you know that synopsis of your career and your background and then let's get into some of your latest ventures.

04:14
Alrighty. So, um, there is no such thing as a synopsis of my background because it's just too rich and textured and, um, lengthy that, uh, no redaction could actually work. How's that for humility? I take it all back. I'll do the, I'll do the best I can. So, uh, I am, I am a serial entrepreneur. Um,

04:41
you can attach the last name entrepreneur to the first name serial and it's about the only thing that can follow the word serial that is in any way positive.

04:52
But I didn't start out that way. I joined Time Warner, Time Inc. at Time Warner. Time Inc. was the most powerful publishing company on the planet at one time. And I actually followed my dad into that business. My dad was a

05:13
renowned journalist, I think that word is fair. And I went on the business side and had the pleasure of managing Sports Illustrated. You're talking to the man who has the patent on the sneaker phone and the football phone and had something to do with the idea of sports blooper videos, which were premiums for Sports Illustrated. And kind of as a prize for my

05:43
good efforts at SI. I was awarded the privilege of launching Entertainment Weekly and was paired up with an editor and kind of like

05:55
A product manager say at Coca-Cola where the product manager has everything to do with the marketing of the product and nothing to do with what is inside the can. At Time Inc. we had the division of what they call church and state, church being editorial and state had nothing to say about that. And so the thought of entertainment really is something quite precious and effete.

06:25
It was going to be about books and poetry and very erudite stuff. And for me, Entertainment Weekly was going to be, you know, swap out Sports Illustrated, put in the concept of entertainment. It was going to be the big three forms of entertainment, which is to say, you know, TV, music, and movies. And it was going to be a fan's magazine.

06:50
distinguished from people in as much as what Sports Illustrated, when you have a subject, you go, you know, it becomes a 10,000-word article and a whole lot of pictures. But that was not to be. I was selling one magazine, and he was creating a different one, which is the formula for failure. And indeed, both of us in fairly short order were shown the door.

07:20
I'm the only company that I ever wanted to work for. And I had decided that instead of jumping off a bridge, which is fairly permanent when it comes to a decision, I was gonna try my hand at starting the company outside of Time Inc. That I was trying to start inside of Time Inc. And that was the notion, and it sounds very quaint, of billing magazine subscriptions to credit cards. At the time,

07:50
which is we're talking the 90s. Some of your audience actually was foreign at that time, but in the 90s, it was a known fact that credit cards and magazines and credit cards and newspapers didn't live well in the sandbox together. And we introduced this notion of getting that subscription on a credit card and maintaining it on a credit card. The trade term is negative option, which means

08:20
renewal and doesn't ask you, it kind of affirms that, you know, yes, you're going to be billed again because your subscription has last and here's the price and if you want to cancel, this is how you do so. Versus an affirmative renewal, which they would pepper you with renewal notices followed by bills and you had to affirmatively confirm the subscription, check the box.

08:43
send it back and that would get followed up by a bunch of bills. As you can imagine, when you renew people, when you take inertia and remove it from one shoulder, which is the inertia is your enemy, and put it on the other shoulder, which is inertia is your friend, you find a dramatic difference in the retention dynamics of a subscription.

09:13
In fact, time on file grew by about two and a half X. That was the big insight on Synapse. We built a platform that did everything I just described, which had a lot of complexity in as much as you're working with thousands of film and houses for thousands of magazines. But what we also did, Ryan, was sell the subscription in addition to maintain it. That company grew and grew.

09:43
Sounds very quaint, but we did it with no outside capital. I'll explain the we in a second. We did it with no outside capital and Nine years after I started the company my former employer said I understand you might be going public Instead of going public can we buy you and I said, what's your number and they said 800 million and I said that could work and made the sale of synapse in 2001 but had a

10:13
very long earn out, a five year earn out. So that brings us to 2006, which is when we created the model that we have today. Now, what inspired that model going backwards was not just Synapse, but I had a partner in the business, a fellow by the name of Jay Walker. Jay was quite the gifted thinker. The word brilliant is often attached to his name, and I think it's well deserved.

10:42
Jay's great asset is to come up with fantastic ideas. And Synapse was much more my baby, I was more familiar with the magazine industry. So Jay became bent on coming up with another idea of his own, and that turned out to be

11:04
So we had incubated Priceline inside of Synapse for the first two years or so of Priceline's life. It was, Ryan, a very interesting experiment. Can you have one workforce, one roof over your head, one system, and can you dual task? Can you ask Jimmy to work the mornings for Synapse, the afternoons for Priceline, and the evenings for Synapse again, or vice versa?

11:34
it or would they embrace it? And it turns out that really, really smart people, no matter how challenging the job, after a year or so on the job, would like to have new challenges. So we found that efficiency went up, job satisfaction went up. So when price line after price line went public in 99 and after the sale of Synapse and after my earn out was paid off,

12:04
I thought, let's go back and take that model and put it on steroids. And that is what we have at Loeb Enterprises or Loeb NYC. The difference being, I called it Loeb Enterprises. My daughter who works here said, dad, that is like so old fashioned, Loeb NYC. I used to call what we do a company factory, likewise old fashioned, so we are now a venture collective.

12:31
But what we do do, Ryan, is we have large teams of people and they come up with ideas and

12:41
Most of those ideas or many of those ideas are de novo startups. Some are ideas, external ideas that we decide to develop internally. And sometimes it's an outside company super early in the curve. We like it a lot. We like the business. We like the business model. We like the management team. We like the addressable market.

13:05
And most of all, we can see ourselves helping, deeply helping with the operation of that company. And if it checks all those boxes, we sometimes will say, come on into the fold. You don't have to worry about raising any more capital. We will be the source of capital. So if you want to think about it, what we do is combine several elements that are discrete in most of the world. And those elements are the ideas,

13:35
the executional know-how in the capital. And we put that all together. And we believe that by putting that all together, you are much more efficient and seamless, and that the opportunity for success is greater. What we're really leaning in on is that if you talk to people in VCDOM, they will tell you that two in 10 is about the success ratio.

14:03
which means eight out of 10 are failures. Of those eight, maybe half are.

14:08
total failures and half returns, some of the capital or all the capital, but don't have enough of a return on top of that return to have anything in terms of an ROI. We don't see why the failure rate has to be nearly that high. I mean, why is it only two in 10? Why do only two in 10 work is the question we asked ourselves. And is it because you're betting on the wrong horse, betting on the wrong idea, or is it

14:38
have kind of a seamless execution from idea to putting it into the marketplace and growing it. We think it's a little of all three, but it probably has a lot to do with having all those pieces in discrete corners and having to assemble them.

14:55
The other thing we say is that when I do my little straw poll of CEOs and I ask them how much time do you spend, CEOs or entrepreneurs of startups, how much time do you spend raising capital or keeping the capital you just raised happy? And I get numbers like 75%.

15:15
Well, these people are not professional fundraisers. What they did is they had an inspired idea. So why is highest and best use you going out and trying to get capital?

15:26
The neat thing is with us, you don't have to. The capital is right here. Again, if it's an outside idea or an outside company, the capital is right here. The know-how is right here. You need a SEO expert, we got it. You need a machine learning expert, we got it. You need tech build, we have it. You need direct mail, we do that too. So it's meant to be that Swiss army knife. When I describe the company,

15:56
discrete pieces and I make the comparison to a Tootsie Pop.

16:03
And the Chocolate Center is all our companies, and the Hard Candy Shell is all of what we call shared services. That ranges from some of the things I mentioned, but also includes back office accounting. Every entrepreneur I know is missing the back office accounting gene. They see an envelope and they shove it in the drawer. They don't open it, they don't code it, they don't plan to pay it. Same thing with receivables, they don't collect. If you talk to them about cash updates,

16:33
wrong about that, they hate putting together balance sheets and P&Ls. So we take that burden off of them because they're not particularly good at it. Again it's highest and best use. And what is the highest and best use? You had an idea and you're passionate about it and that can't be replaced by anybody else in the marketplace. So let's try to free up all that effort that is needlessly spent and refocus it on building your business.

17:03
Back office accounting is one service we provide. We pre-raised all the capital because the capital is my capital. So it's investable capital. We have tech, lots and lots of tech assets in the tri-state area, but also around the world. We have deep analytic assets and AI and machine learning and AR capabilities. And then,

17:33
We have the infrastructure, HR, recruiting, legal, but perhaps our strong suit is marketing, which ranges from old school, which was the school I was schooled in to new school. So old school would be TV. We actually make our own TV ads here. TV, radio, direct mail, tens of millions of pieces of direct mail.

17:56
We were deep in the healthcare, we largely traded out of that, but when we were in healthcare we had a field force of 3,000 people that would make sales calls into 400,000 doctors offices around the country and set up materials. We have our own phone center in Virginia, 100 Seed State of the Arts Center. That is for both inbound and outbound calls. This is all old school stuff. The new school stuff is everything digital.

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SEM, social, programmatic, influencer, podcasts, you name it. So that's the shop. The shared services are free to the companies that we are standing up.

18:43
When we go for outside capital, and we also have an M&A department, a finance department that works with all the VCs, we get, the neat thing is, Ryan, this is not a friends and family round, this is not an angel round, this is not even an A round. Our last big one was an 80 for a 630 post.

19:05
$630 million post. And that gives you the type of capital raises that we do get when we advance the ball down the field. So instead of having like a $3 million on a $5 million, which gets a lot of dilution and not a lot of capital, we will blow through those rounds, develop these companies ourselves, and only when you can make the case that the new capital coming in is for scaling, we're

19:35
a while, but for scaling, that's the way to get a much higher pre-money valuation and much less dilution for the capital that comes in. That I guess is a little bit about our story. I guess one other thing I can talk to is what are our swim lanes, and the fact of the matter is we don't think about the world that way. We think about disruption.

20:00
And we take a look at these giant industries that have yet to be disrupted and we address those, we attack those, we learn everything that we can about those because our philosophy is that everything planet wide is going to be disrupted.

20:17
You add mobility, change in work, nature of work, and you can come to the conclusion that everything is going to be disrupted. So what's an example of an industry that really hasn't been disrupted yet? There's many, many, many. Banking is a good one, although, you know, there's some nibbling around the edges. But we're taking a deep look at insurance.

20:39
Insurance is trillions dollars big and they kind of still do business today and still think today like they did many years ago. I'll give you one example which is we have another company Steady, it's your advocate in the gig economy. One of our de novo startups, it is killing it. Steady has 2.7 million members.

21:04
And what they try to do, Ryan, is optimize your day. So Uber would just as soon have you sit in that car morning, noon, and night. And if it is morning, noon, or night, you're probably doing pretty well. But if it's in the in-between hours, you have no business. And so what Stedi will do is say, OK, Ryan, I have you driving for Uber from 7 to 9 30. At 9 30, I got you walking dogs. At 1, you're at Home Depot. And at 4 o'clock, you're going to be working for Lyft because they pay better.

21:34
Right, so it optimizes how much income you get. They have 2.7 million members, 1.8 of them do some manner of driving at least some of the time. And interestingly, car insurance doesn't begin to understand the marketplace. And that is because there's two buckets. One bucket is, you know, you're driving personal miles, and another bucket is you're driving professional miles, and never shall the twain ever meet.

22:04
because in days of yore you would have a taxi cab, you said you knew New York, and the taxi cab would have a medallion, literally a medallion bolted onto the hood of the car. That used to cost about $1.2 million, now you can get one for $200,000 because all the taxi cab companies are going out of business. But you'd bought a medallion that got bolted to the roof of this yellow car and you'd have six guys.

22:34
up in a garage on a rotating basis and take the car out because that car would be driven 24-7 by a half dozen people. That's not how it happens anymore, right? Now you've got a phone and you've got your own car and when Uber says, I got something, you click a button and you race to the location and you got somebody in the back of your car.

22:57
Insurance companies don't understand that. That never used to exist. There used to be a professional car or a personal car, not a prosumer car, right? And that's what we're talking about now. And if you are a, if you were one of those 8 million, 1.8 million members of Stedi that do some driving,

23:19
You're either driving your car when you drive professionally for Uber or Lyft or DoorDash, you name it, Instacart. You're either driving illegally, right? Because you're doing a professional ride and you have no coverage, right? You get into an accident when you're working for Instacart. You are not covered, right?

23:43
or you're paying three times too much because the presumption is every single mile is a professional mile. So you're either paying too much or you're exposed. And we're trying to create a product that addresses that, right? That you can be a prosumer, you can be both.

24:05
And that would be, you know, that would be charged by the mile. And the neat thing is you got the data sources to say exactly which mile was professional and which wasn't. So that's just an example, right? This trillion dollar plus industry yet to be disrupted really doesn't understand the new economy, hasn't been built for the new economy. The average steady member.

24:30
makes $5,580 actually more dollars through steady than they do without steady, but they're still $40,000 or $50,000 a year incomes. And the average cost of auto insurance, right, for personal auto insurance is $2,700 and they want you to pay that all at once.

24:53
This is not the type of audience that can do that, right? What they really wanna do is they want that chopped up and if it could be chopped up by mile and if you could pay daily, that would be ideal. Anyway, that gives you an example of the things that we go after. Yeah, a lot to unpack there. And a lot of richness as you discussed.

25:20
Before I delve into specific questions on the business and the business model, I mean, I just want to ask, what makes Michael tick? Like, you know, you've been involved with so many ventures, obviously, a lot of successful ones at that. A lot of names there that people know, time, uh, price line, et cetera. Like, what's been your, what do you feel like has been your, obviously in very intelligence, I would put at the top of that, but what-

25:49
What makes you tick and what's been your secret sauce and or what do you feel like? What's been your additive to all of those things? Well, Ryan, I got to tell you, I think, um,

26:02
Entruminers are born, right? I don't think they're bred. No. I was always meant to be an entrepreneur. And I'll tell you one point of discrimination or illustration of this point, which is an entrepreneur, OK, a non-entromanor will be in traffic. And they'll come across a stop sign. And they'll stop. They'll stop. They'll look both ways. And then they'll drive again.

26:32
An entrepreneur will come that stop sign and the first thing they say is, why in God's green earth is that stop sign here? Right. And then they'll see it's a four way stop and they'll say, they'll look left, they'll look right. They don't see anybody. They ain't stopping. Right. Entrepreneurs believe that rules were written for somebody else.

26:55
Entrepreneurs believe that if you turn over every single rock, what you're going to find underneath is an opportunity. And they look at everything, right? They can look at a garden hose, they can look at a chair and they can say, I can do this better. I can do it better, faster, cheaper. And you can't turn it off. And it gets annoying, right? I mean, imagine being in a cocktail party and you say, you know those stuffed mushrooms? Got to tell you. Too much tarragon, right? Too much tarragon.

27:25
I mean what a pain in the ass you are the worst party guest ever so I think lunch is hard they really are born

27:34
They really are the kids with the lemonade stand, but they got a story. And the story is I ran out of, it was such a hot day, I ran out of lemonade. There was no more lemons in the house. It would take too long to go to the store. So I took dad's grass clippings, okay? And I like, you know, put them in a blender and then I added sugar and then I doubled the price and it became green food, right? Like every, every setback is an

28:04
Opportunity every time you serve lemons that becomes lemonade They are not to be denied if there is a wall They will go through it if they can't go through it They'll go over it if they can't do that they will tunnel under it if they can't do that Left or right if they can't do that they're going to build your own wall own wall and tell everybody else That's the fake wall and mine is the real wall. So first of all entrepreneurs are born and

28:33
When it comes to what I want to accomplish or what will be my legacy, number one,

28:44
I like starting things. I like meeting people, frankly, half my age, and they're all half my age these days. And they are so smart and so gifted, and they keep me so sharp. Because, you know, I'm a troglodyte, right? I mean, you know, when I started, you know, learning how to read and write, we had clay tablets, right? And to hear about all this new technology and everything changing,

29:14
Be one of those people on that cutting edge, or at least trying to be on a cutting edge, is really spectacularly challenging and I think just, if you will, keeps me young. Keeps me engaged and keeps me young. And it's fun. And it's fun about thinking of things.

29:32
I had a conversation last night with the head of product for one of our companies and I was sharing an idea that I had that I presented to the CEO of Panera Bread and he loved it, right? And I explained this idea and at the end he said, Michael, how do you think of these things? And I said, gee, I don't know, it just kind of appears is how I think of these things.

30:02
drives me. I sometimes quote Keats on this and keeps Keats has a tombstone and on his tombstone.

30:13
is written, our names are written in water, right? Written as in old fashioned way of saying written, right? Our names are written in water. And there's an irony there, right? Because you're looking at solid granite and those words, right, are carved in solid granite, which means go screw yourself, right? Your name is written water. My name, I'm in granite.

30:42
And I want my name in granite. I want people to look at some of the companies that I built and say, boy, that was smart. That was smart. That was disruptive. That was courageous. Because to go against that grain, the Institute of Public Opinion, the Institute of all the inventions before your invention, and to reinvent something, the presumption is the status quo is the status quo

31:12
for a reason and that's part of the problem of an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur will look at a football game and say, why are 11 people on the field? Wouldn't it be better to have like 13, right? And, you know, why are all the linemen, you know, weighing 300 pounds? What about 500 pounds? Can we make them 500 pounds? Entrepreneurs think differently and are fearless.

31:39
And they they look at the status quo and they say that's for every other idiot Because that for me when I flip that on its head, that's my opportunity Because everybody else is following that bright shiny object And if I go in a different direction, no one is going to be there and that is going to be my fertile ground Love it the

32:06
I want to turn a little bit, I know you didn't bring it up, one of your ventures, but it weighs on me. We work with a lot of B2B companies, do B2B marketing, and one of the biggest challenges we do see is in the B2B e-com payment systems and things like that. I know Credit Key is one of your ventures. Can you talk a little bit about Credit Key and what you guys are doing with that in the B2B payment side of things?

32:32
Sure can. And that's also an illustration of how entrepreneurs think. Pick a number, 15 years we've had alternative payment solutions to credit cards. So you'd have Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, and then you'd have PayPal or Klarna. And

32:56
Interestingly, you would never see that online B2B, in part because online B2B lagged online B2C, e-commerce sales-wise, by 10 or 15 years. And if you're talking about the small business market, and a good example would be, I'm a distributor of dental supplies, and you are dentist Ryan.

33:24
And dentist Ryan comes on to the marketing, comes on to the Michael site, right? The Michael, an old distributor site. And he picks the drills and the chairs and the everything else. And he puts in his card and it says $12,542.

33:45
And he scratches his head and he says, you know what, or you scratch your head. Then as Ryan scratches his head and says, I have a visa, I got a MasterCard, I got an American Express option. I don't like those options for a charge this big. I don't like to mix business and personal charges. I don't know if I'm gonna pierce my limit. What else you got? Well, there's Credit Key. So Credit Key is another bug right at checkout

34:15
you check on credit key and it asks you a couple of questions and then it will give you an instant thumbs up or thumbs down. Behind the curtain we're doing a ton of very fast analytics looking at a lot of things. We do look at FICO, but we look at about 20 different attributes. And then we make a thumbs up, thumbs down decision and it's for more than what's in the cart, right? So we'll say dentist Ryan

34:45
good news, not only did we approve this $12,554 sale, but you have another $30,000 on top of that that you can spend here or anywhere else, right? And that's the idea behind Credit Key. There is no, not in this country, there's one in Australia, there is no integrated online e-commerce instant analytics, instant approval, or frankly disapproval.

35:15
Um, uh, facility except for ours. Yeah. I can speak to invalid validate that working with, we work with Cisco and Microsoft and some large B2B players. And I can absolutely validate that's been the biggest challenge. You've got this, uh, conversion of B2B and B2C things coming together, whether it's marketing tactics, whether it's e-commerce, all of those things. But the challenge has been on the payment side, especially.

35:45
uh, having an option. So, I mean, I, I, you know, when I first started doing my background, I'd heard of you and all that, but that was the biggest thing that stuck out to us because it was just so real world for us.

35:56
All right, so Ryan, we're going to do a little business here because I was very polite and sat down and listened to your questions and answered them, I think pretty effectively. So you've got to get me some introductions, but that's exactly the customers that we want. Cisco, Microsoft, I mean, they have giant sales, right? I mean, what I mean by that is they will sell a hundred million dollars to the State Department, right? But then you got that little guy.

36:24
you know, has 10 or 20 employees wants to, you know, spend a lot less.

36:29
And yeah, Microsoft in a second could get in the credit business and Cisco can get into the credit business, but who wants to hurt all those cats, right? What a headache, because all I have to do is make, you know, one sale to the State Department or the Navy or Harvard University or you name it, right? And you know, a zillion of those guys is not gonna add up to that and what a pain in the butt. I don't wanna be in that business. So if you can make those introductions, I'd be really, really appreciative.

36:59
I can do one better for you because our largest client is actually a company called scan source and they are second in the line in the distribution and they work with those hundreds of partners and they buy in bulk from their check second in the supply chain for the Cisco's and the Microsoft's of the world and they buy, they're a billion dollar company, you can look them up and they buy for the.

37:25
Hundreds of partners that like the ankle biters you just described For the Cisco's and Microsoft who and that's where you would probably want to start those discussions before so well we could talk shop about that No, we're not gonna stop talking shop. We're gonna But we work very nicely with distributors, yeah, we work with manufacturers

37:50
but sometimes they got their own credit options. They don't like to share that with the SMB marketplace, but distributors, right? I mean, the last thing they wanna do is get in the credit business. And, yeah, and so, and right now a credit solution is offline, right? So you back out of the card, it's abandoned.

38:16
and then you figure out what bank you can go to to get a loan and that takes, I don't know, three weeks, five weeks, whole lot of back and forth and questions and the notion that a scan source or anybody else would be able to maintain that sale through that, I mean, you know, you tell me, but one in five, one in 10? Yeah. Once they move offline, you're done, right? Yep. So.

38:44
This is an integrated online instance solution for credit for the, you know, you know, for, um, small and medium sized businesses. Yep. And, uh, and at the end of the day, the distributors, they just want to make the sale, they don't want to get involved with the credit they want to make the sale. They don't want the risk. They want to be able to make the sale and book the sale, not have it re person on them. And that's the idea. Exactly.

39:11
I was summarizing one thing from just talking with you and everything else. You know, you, right now it's big thinking about removing friction. And I feel like that might be your greatest talent potentially. It sounds like is you recognize where there's friction and you are finding ways to remove it. Is that fair? Uh, yeah.

39:41
I think removing friction, yes. The other theme of mine is somebody else's garbage is my gold. I've done a lot with remnant assets. Priceline is a good example of that. It's a remnant asset. As soon as the door closes on that airplane.

40:08
Then that's a wasted asset. That asset has expired. You got an empty seat, it's worth zero. So following me around is turning other people's garbage into gold. So that's another thing. Removing friction, thinking differently, thinking people tried, of course, out of the box. But

40:36
having things go through your mind and looking at the status quo and then say why is that you know executed this way and a lot of times Ryan the reason for that has to do with legacy stuff right that everything is kind of a composite and a tapestry and you know

41:02
you put together a bunch of disparate pieces to come up with an ecosystem, and then all of a sudden something changed. Like one of the most remarkable changes ever is mobility. I mean, you know, now we can do everything on the phone. I mean, that's just crazy. And that has enabled so many things that we're just still figuring out, right? The power of all that. So, you know, a lot of the things that we used to do

41:32
or a lot of things and a lot of the systems that have been kind of the backbone of commerce and how we go about our day.

41:43
All that is subject to incredible change. I mean, who would have thought about telemedicine for God's sake, right? And no, doctor doesn't have to come to you. You don't have to come to the doctor. You can do it. You can do it, you know, over a screen. I mean, how crazy, right? So, but somebody just said, I don't see why you have to, you know, anybody has got to go anywhere. I mean, everybody stays put. You have a conversation, you know, over the phone.

42:10
So, um, no different than what we're doing right now. I would not have thought that I could get Michael Loeb on a video conference and talk his brain and provide that value to our listeners as well as myself. It, you know, it's fascinating. I mean, is the, does the speed with which obviously, uh, Embracing change is, is so key to your, to your success and, and a lot of those things, but is the speed with which all of these things are happening?

42:40
Is it just, is it, can you, is it blow your mind? It blows my mind. And I'm an, I consider myself an innovator. I consider myself, I love change. I'm an, I'm an entrepreneur. A lot of those things that you talked about, but the speed with which change is happening now is mind numbing in some ways. And it's on an accelerated basis. And what we have seen with COVID, I was talking to a friend of mine, Carolyn Everson. She's like number three or four or five on Facebook. And this is back in a conversation in April.

43:09
And I said, what has been the profundity of this? What has been the, you know, what has this meant? Right, some and substance. And she said, the world has been accelerated by 10 years. Existing trends have been accelerated by 10 years. And I believe that's true. I really believe that's true. And the other thing, Ryan, you gotta ask yourself, so interesting about inventions and entrepreneurs and companies.

43:37
If I went to you two or three years ago and I said Zoom, the right answer is there's no room for Zoom. Have you heard of a little company called Facebook that got something called FaceTime? And if it's not them, it's Microsoft, and it's not them, it's Cisco, and if it's not them, it's some, there's no room for like.

43:56
you know, half dozen people in a garage to create zoom. Yeah. You know, you're going to get, you know, but these are companies that are, you know, have, you know, trillion dollar market caps and you are just going to get run over, how could there be a zoom? And it's amazing, right? Somebody created zoom. Yep. So, yeah, I would have been, I would have been a little held back just with Skype and like everything else. Like I, I try to find like these white space and sometimes there's just better space.

44:25
And I really appreciate your time. Let's do a follow up. We can talk how we can get credit key. I would like to talk some more. So maybe I'll get Raleigh to schedule something. I would appreciate it. Okay, that'd be great. Yeah. Hey guys, really appreciate Michael Loeb coming on today of the Radcast. You know where to find us, theradcast.com and at the.rad.cast on Instagram. And we'll see you next time. Thanks, Michael. Thank you.

44:48
Yo guys what's up Ryan Alford here. Thanks so much for listening, really appreciate it. Do us a favor, if you've been enjoying the Radcast you need to share the word with a friend or anyone else, we'd really appreciate it. And go leave us a review at Apple or Spotify. Do us a solid, tell more people, leave us some reviews. And hey, here's the best news of all, if you want to work with me directly, if you want to get your business kicking ass, and you want Radical or myself involved, you can text me directly at 864.

45:18
729-3680. Don't wait another minute. Let's get your business going. 864-729-3680. We'll see you next time.