Announcer:
Hey, everyone, welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast, your place for obscure movie references, cat facts, and everything MagHub related. And now, your host, MagHub Product Manager, Tom Bellen.
Tom Bellen:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the 9.1 edition of the Tom Tips Podcast. This is actually a very special edition. I am your host, Tom Bellen, Product Manager for Aysling. I am joined by always by Zach Gilbert, our Marketing Director. And we have three special guests on today’s podcast. We have Nick Pataro, Sales Director for Aysling. Say hello, Nick.
Nick Pataro:
Hello everyone.
Tom Bellen:
We have Luke Viertel, the Digital Ad Strategist from Gearhead/Premier Guitar. Say hello to the pod, Luke.
Luke Viertel:
Everybody, how’s it going?
Tom Bellen:
And Michael Ruth from Magazine Experts, who is the Digital Ad Coordinator. Say hello, Michael.
Michael Ruth:
Hey everyone. How are you doing?
Tom Bellen:
All right. Well, thank you all for joining. Again, we’re doing a special edition here. Obviously, we’re living in some interesting times, so we’re all working from home, so we thought we’d bring in some outside voices to talk a little bit about their experiences with what everything is going on. I think all of us, if I’m not correct, we’re all working from our respective homes. Is that correct? Yeah. So I guess just general, I’ve been wondering how’s it going for everybody in this move to your domicile to do all of your work? What’s been some of the hard things, good things that have been about working from home?
Michael Ruth:
Well, it’s nice to get back about an hour of my day rather than commute to work.
Tom Bellen:
Oh yeah. Commuting is a nice part of that. I mean it’s kind of funny. I live outside the highway and so the cars that go by, it’s nice. It’s been quieter, it’s been quieter for me. So that is good. I know Zach, is there anything that you very much have enjoyed so far about working from home versus from the office? I mean, I know it’s sad that you don’t see my face every day, but what’s some of the positives?
Zach Gilbert:
I enjoy the solitude quite a bit, so this is pretty nice there. I do miss seeing everybody though. I do miss the office snacks and it seems like getting questions answered through Slack takes so much longer than actually just walking over to someone’s desk. So that’s my struggle right now.
Tom Bellen:
Yeah, it is much more easier for me to ignore you via Slack than it is when you just glare at me from across the desks in that way.
Nick Pataro:
Welcome to my life people. I feel like I shouldn’t even chime in here because I work from home all the time. But yeah, I feel your pain Zach pretty much every day.
Zach Gilbert:
Have fun with that.
Tom Bellen:
Yeah, I guess now we can’t have as many inside jokes about ignoring Nick when we do that too internally at the office. Because he sends a Slack and we all just laugh maniacally as we say, “We’ll answer that in an hour or so. We’ll just say we’re busy while we’re doing that, while he’s doing all that stuff.” So what’s it been like? I know you have a young kids at home, which is a pain for me. How’s that been working for you with having the kiddos around? Have they been helping you with the digital ads?
Luke Viertel:
No, she’s good. My wife’s a teacher so she’s been home as my inhouse nanny so I get snacks delivered, I get fresh smoothies and I get visits from her. I get to have lunch with them every day. So it’s great for me. I have a much nicer computer at home too. So I haven’t really felt the burden too much. I haven’t worn my regular work attire, which is nice. And we’re a very online business so we transitioned pretty seamlessly to online only. About half our staff was already working from home anyway. So it’s been good for us.
Tom Bellen:
Luke’s never go back to the office.
Luke Viertel:
No, I don’t think I’m going to.
Tom Bellen:
Yeah, it definitely sounds like you’re cheering on the stay at home. Let’s be real safe about this. Let’s wait until the kids are in college. I am in a far worse spot. I have two kids, a two year old, or two and a half and six months old. My wife is an essential worker because she works at the hospital, U of M. so I’ve been getting some inside stuff about everything that’s been going on with that. She doesn’t go into the hospital anymore because it’s precautions and all that. But if it comes down to her calling patients or me being on a phone call, I lose, obviously so and there’s usually three days a week where I’m basically trying to work while managing two toddlers. We’ve tried to be creative as we could, my son just got off a Zoom call with his daycare teacher and doing things like that.
Tom Bellen:
But I basically now work from… My productive times are 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM. So if people want to be on the community and Slack me at that, that is a good time to reach me while my baby sleeps on me. It’s been rough. So I’m looking forward to getting back out of this and getting daycare back. I love daycare, but obviously there’s some parts of that, but it’s a hard time for all the businesses out there. And part of the reason we wanted to bring you and Luke on and Michael on is to talk to you and see what are some of the things that you guys have been noticing, how it’s affected your business or ways that you’ve been able to help your customers.
Tom Bellen:
We’ve been trying to do our things, but what are some of the things that you’ve noticed out there with your customers and some of the things that you’ve been doing to try and help them or ideas that maybe you can give to other people who are listening to this? I don’t know if you want to start Luke, what are some of the strategies have you seen to take advantage of that have helped?
Luke Viertel:
We’re a B2B operation, so we deal with high end guitar manufacturers and some low end guitar manufacturers. So the initial issues at the start that we were looking at were supply chain with our customers being able to get parts and things to build their products from China and from East Asia. And that seems to have calmed down a bit. But I think the biggest thing we are dealing with with everybody is the uncertainty, trying to figure out how people should react. We had a company call this morning and our sales team is basically admitting that they are turning into grief counselors rather than salespeople at the moment. So we had a two pronged strategy. The first one as a company uniquely able to help in a way that our competitors weren’t.
Luke Viertel:
So we’re a pretty digital focused platform. We’ve got advertising products available across everything we do. So trying to be creative in ways to give them low cost options to drive e-commerce because a lot of these companies are sitting on product that they were planning to sell that they don’t know whether they can get out the door anymore based on the general public’s anxiety about money or about free movement or things like that. Obviously the live musician market that a lot of our readers are in is severely hurt at the moment, they can’t play anywhere. So trying to figure out a way to help our clients, which would be the manufacturers, advertise things that our readers can do at home. We’ve seen a lot of live stream music, so we’ve been reaching out more to our recording clients or things like that.
Luke Viertel:
So that’s the first prong. And the second prong was offering them actually free advertising. There’s some things coming up that we had holes to fill. We have a lot of what I would call perishable inventory, which I’m sure a lot of people do, whether it’s e-newsletters or specific exclusive spots that we offer on our platforms that once we don’t sell them, they go away forever. So by leveraging those into offering goodwill advertising under the idea that we’re all a team in this, we are trying to hedge cancellation rather than seriously grow the revenue at the moment. And it’s worked pretty well. So we gave away 25, $30,000 worth of advertising and haven’t really seen a great reduction in advertising outside of our print book. But I know a lot of people are in some different situations with that.
Tom Bellen:
Yeah well that’s awesome. Yeah. So I don’t know Michael, if you’ve run into anything similar or different in your different marketplace that you guys have been trying to figure out a way through the uncertainty?
Michael Ruth:
So we’re in a similar boat to Luke. Our main client is a business advice journal for contractors. So we serve the construction industry and we’ve managed so far to hedge off most of the attempts of cancellation into either reducing the ads or give you a free one and we’ll keep you running a little later. Just this, as Luke said, earning goodwill with these people rather than trying to be a jerk about it and charge a cancellation fee or something when they do want to cancel. On the digital end, we’re trying real hard to get the important information which is breaking sometimes every hour these days into the hands of our readers. Things like the tax deadline being postponed. We’re having huge areas of the country where they’re shutting down construction, so our editors are working overtime to make sure that we’re publishing the latest information that we’re talking to industry experts such as accounting firms, lawyers, and stuff to make sure that our readers have the best information they can to deal with this situation.
Michael Ruth:
Whether it means telling people to work at home, whether it means maybe prioritizing industry job sites such as highway construction over residential. Some of our contractors may be working on some of these temporary hospitals. So we’ve really tried to pivot to becoming a source of information on this pandemic and we’re seeing the results of that almost instantly. Open rates are higher than they have ever been. Page views, time on site, bounce rate are all going in great directions. So our efforts paying off, but it’s certainly taking a bit of a toll on our team and being remote is definitely adding some kinks to that workflow. But I think at this point most people have adapted to it. We were all used to working at least partially remote and we’re just getting used to, you can’t say, “Hey, I’ll talk to you about that tomorrow when I see you.” It’s got to be, “Nope, let’s get on a call. Let’s actually work this out on Hangouts.”
Tom Bellen:
Yeah, it’s definitely interesting. I get both points of like trying to be as helpful as you can and human as you can right now is a big part of that. Because we talked about a lot of our company too of what’s the best way for our helping our customers. A lot of it is, like you said, not being a jerk and just understanding at the end of this, we get through it, and our owner says, “People are going to remember the people who were good with them during that time and come back.” Because if you’re going to be too panicky, too scared, it’s going to reflect poorly on you in the future, history won’t be kindly on you. So I know Zach too, Zach and Nick, you’ve talked to our customers, things like that. Anything you’re hearing too of other ways that our customers or people have been able to get through this thing, helpful tips that we could with other people through the podcast? I don’t know Nick, have you heard anything particular that stuck out to you?
Nick Pataro:
I think Luke hit on something that’s really important that I’ve heard, not just in our industry but other industries too, is that when you talk to people, whether you’re prospecting for new business or you’re reaching out to a customer that you’ve been working with for years, you go into that conversation with empathy and you realize that their situation might not be what you expect it to be and they might be hurting worse than you think or they might be doing really well and you won’t know until you talk to them. But being that counselor, being that shoulder to lean on during these types of situations is going to play really well in the long run. So you’re probably not going to pick up the phone and randomly dial someone that’s a perfect fit for your solution and get them to say yes right away, right?
Nick Pataro:
It’s probably not going to happen in this day and age. So just going in with an open mind, being a friend first is definitely a good approach. Like I said, I’ve seen industry experts suggest that type of approach, have heard from our customers that they’re going in with that approach. And even if they don’t go in with that approach, it turns into that that grief counseling like Luke mentioned anyways, and you’re not going to see a huge spike in revenue right now, but three, four months from now, once things settle down, those are the people who are going to remember those conversations and they’re going to want to keep doing business with you.
Michael Ruth:
Yeah, we struggled at first a couple of weeks back when the crisis was really hitting about how to approach sales in this time of anxiety because it does feel very smarmy at a certain point to approach people about selling anything. We’ve all got the emails over the last couple of weeks. How many more puns can we make out of Corona or Covid or staying inside, and it is a fine line to walk. But what we found is that approaching it like Nick said, just checking in with people. You will find companies that are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this time where a lot of maybe a larger manufacturer shut down a facility or a business has shuttered because they can’t really support their people working from home.
Michael Ruth:
On the other end of the spectrum, we have people that are still running their businesses out of their garage with their two brothers and they’re ready to go because they all live together and they really want to take an advantage to get some market share or make sure that they’re ready to increase at this time rather than pull back. So I think the effort has been worth it even though it’s a fine line to walk.
Tom Bellen:
Yeah, I mean there’s going to be that opportunity, it’s going to be a shame comes out of this, we’ve talked about that internally. I think we see things like with producing all these materials right now and trying to get the big companies to help with it. But I know we’re all some geeks instead of out of the 3D printing world and seeing how that’s affecting things like that, being able to create these things much faster, cheaper in different areas. Everyone’s getting in there. So I think there’s definitely going to be some of those new players who come out of it. It’ll be a different world when we get out of it. How many more people are going to be comfortable using online services because they used to go into the bank to do something.
Tom Bellen:
Now they don’t have to. And they realized, “Oh I could do this?” And these other services that are going to get touched that probably never would because you don’t usually change it until you have to. But one thing, it’s interesting you both hit on it in transitioning into some of the release stuff that we’re doing is on digital. I’ve read many times, the open rates, click rates and doing their own newsletters, website traffic is up again because everyone’s inside doing those things. And it’s actually been a focus of somewhat obviously not intentionally, we didn’t have any inside knowledge, but we have done a lot of changes over last release with introducing our DAM integration and this upcoming release actually on a new way to manage the newsletter sales and tracking the inventory and improving on that in this upcoming release.
Tom Bellen:
So for those who saw the last podcast with that, we’re continuing to enhance how we talk to Google Ad Manager so you can actually get in that open click rates into the system. We have plans also so you can show that directly to the customer to let them know that those rates are up and giving them more support to let them know, “Hey, this is what we’re doing and this is how we can support it and be more helpful of the campaign if things aren’t changing, more flexibility in the system.” And then we’re also introducing again, this new slot sales mechanism of, instead of putting things into different issues, you can put things on dates and with all the changing and the craziness that’s happening, maybe you want to push a newsletter out, different times, days aren’t working and you can change that more on the fly and get a better overall view of what is available to sell or not.
Tom Bellen:
So you don’t have to manage all that stuff in spreadsheets. Even more so of people working remotely and who knows how long this lasts, trying to get more information into one cohesive system. So there’s fewer communication breakdowns when we can’t just knock on someone’s door and bother them. Or Zach does glare at me when I don’t send him something soon enough, so that’s a big part of that. You mentioned the eCommerce side of that. We’ve had the storefront for a while. We really were focusing more on the back end and now we are going to be introducing a mechanism through commerce. So if you are selling on the storefront, that orders can get directly into the system. Again, eliminating another one of those points where communication breakdowns and that stuff. We’ve actually been able to use ourselves internally.
Tom Bellen:
Our Dwolla integration to our third party vendors, which we have some. One of our great employees, Travis, he’s my little padawan, our engineer guy who we found out doesn’t know how to check his bank account today but can write code. And so we paid him directly through our platform. He tracks our hours and we paid him so we didn’t have to go to the bank, doesn’t have to send them a check, so another way to help with the social distancing. So that’s been integrated and that’s going to tie more into our editorial improvements. So if you are having these editors and what Michael’s talking about, working overtime, you could have them track the hours what they’re doing and actually pay them directly through the platform using that service as well. That and there’s just a bunch of other things we’re really trying to do to beef up those parts of the site.
Tom Bellen:
So working somewhat serendipitously that those are getting in there now as we’re pushing to those things. So I guess with that is usually when I ask Zach what his favorite thing is coming in the release. But I turn it to customers to say, “I love the things you guys…” So to Luke and Mike, what we’ve been doing over the last few months or some of the things that we’re doing what are some of the things that get you excited or some of the things that we could do that you think could really help your users or your own business develop through the platform? So who wants to jump up first? Let’s go with Mike. We’ll just say that. So I don’t know. What do you think Mike’s going out with the software over the past a couple of months?
Michael Ruth:
Well Jeremy the other day was showing me a lot more on the newer digital ad units, the slot and impression based. So we’ve been looking at how can we expand our offering, how can we maybe make it easier for different customers who prefer impression based to flat or prefer more flat based options to impressions? And so this is hitting us at a good time because we can start learning with this. We’re messing with it in the QA site. Jeremy’s probably sick of answering me on Slack. But we’re trying to get a good hold on what this is capable of so that we have time to revise our offerings by that September, October time when we’ll have a new media kit out. We’ve been talking to our sales reps to see are people asking more about impression based sales or are? Webinars getting a little more popular every year there seems to be a bit of a shift in what’s the hot item of the year, it for a couple of years was definitely e-blasts and I’d stay it’s still continuing, but webinars are becoming a bigger thing, probably with great timing really.
Tom Bellen:
And webinars is actually one of the parts of the slots. I mean we figure a lot of our customers can take advantage of it for newsletters. That seems like the obvious option because it’s say, “Hey, I’m going to schedule this on every Tuesday,” so you can set the frequency every Tuesday. There’s one day and I have different positions I can set up on the newsletters. It makes obvious sense. But this also is meant to tie in those other platforms like a webinar. So if you are running webinars five days a week at different hour slots, you can sell to that time, sell to that slot, make sure that’s booked up and then track it that way. And in taking advantage but realize now, it’s a crazy time but with all that stuff, but now it may be a good time to reevaluate how you’re using the system and we know that this is going to be a disruptive thing, these new ways to sell.
Tom Bellen:
Because he might’ve been selling something for the same way for so long, partly because that’s the restrictions the system had. But this might be a good time to say, Okay let’s take a step back and we have some more time maybe to do some training, other things like that.” But what do you think, I know we’ve talked about the Google Ad Manager integration a little bit personally, but what are some of the things, again you’ve been seeing that you want to interest more, or some of the things that you’re hoping that we get to over the next couple months?
Luke Viertel:
Well you know we’ve always been the pest in your ear, Tom, about implementing a lot of these things. Since the very beginning of our company in 2007 2008 at least in our industry have been really focused on digital products and sales. So obviously the Google Ad Manager is a welcome integration for us. I’m still wrapping my arms around it because early on in Maghub we had to build the way that we sell into the way Maghub operates, so transitioning that will be a larger project than someone like Mike who’s maybe growing that from the ground up. But the one thing that we really have been enjoying is the project we worked on together of the new mail merge integrations and the improvements to campaigns and additional templates, especially in this time when we’re even more working remotely from each other, just being able to track and cohesively pitch different products that we have.
Luke Viertel:
We have tons of different things that we are scheduling out every day. We do eBooks, of course all of our platforms we have the print issues and things like that. So helping to coordinate our sales team around singular pitches, experimenting with subject lines, looking at open rates, click rates, and then being able to track those as much as we can. And the system really beefs up a side of MagHub that we would really like since it is our central CRM, just understanding how our sales tactics can lead to sales and how we can adjust them as time goes on is something I’m really interested in helping grow. So thanks to you and your team for putting that together.
Luke Viertel:
We’re enjoying it so far. But yeah, I’m really also excited to dig into the Google Ad Manager because like I said we run hundreds of campaigns a month through Google so it’ll be really helpful if that can eventually get to client center because a lot of our clients are really integrated into client center at this point and really help provide a cohesive shell that MagHub we can operate out of. I’m trying to get my team as well off of spreadsheets and things like that really well. And I know that the slot integrations and these things like that terms in of inventory availability will be really helpful to that.
Tom Bellen:
Yeah, and so a couple of things I’m going to add. So the client center side, I know, yeah, Luke, you’ve been a past, a joyful pest. But see, many times, it’s not that people put request to me, ask me things and sometimes it seems like I’m not listening or I don’t care. But there’s always a time. There’s always a thing. There’s always other things that come up. So we do try and get to those things we can. But client center is definitely… That’s another time with all the things we’re building out. For the good or the bad, sometimes we release things earlier than they be, “Ready,” but we try and get more feedback from it, more iterative if you want to say it to some people say it’s complete, but we want to get this digital stuff out now so people start playing with it, setting up.
Tom Bellen:
We do plan right now in that June time-frame to have clients that are beefed up for these digital media items, which will include a more digital friendly ticket process for uploading the URLs as well as being able to go in and log in if you are tied to GAM, here’s the creative and here’s how it’s delivered. And then doing things like rotating and replacing crates. So there are going to be a lot more of those pieces that are coming together. So if you are looking at it, just know there is more coming. We definitely spend a lot of our resources and up to two months to do that. One other thing I’ll mention because I know Michael Ruth is, we call him dr data warehouse on our Slack community. He helps so much. I was going to share as far as there’s actually things I put those open and collect data we put into the data warehouse.
Tom Bellen:
So I actually messed around with your data a little bit Luke and tied one of your 2020 May issue campaign and through using the data warehouse and connecting that table with the contacts and the company sales determine all the contacts that got an email based on company who had bought something in that issue from the date that you had sent out that email just because I was having fun with it. Maybe can get Michael in there and create some of those cool reports already using the data warehouse and meta base. Throwing that out there. Maybe we can talk-
Luke Viertel:
Wow, look at you Tom.
Tom Bellen:
Yeah I know, see this is what I do and I have nothing to do. I just mess with other people’s data and have fun. So these are the things I do. I don’t know. Yeah, so Nick, Zach, anything from you guys on the release you’re excited about that you’ve been hearing things about?
Zach Gilbert:
Party mode, hands down.
Tom Bellen:
Jesus. Sorry, I shouldn’t say that. I know people love party mode, I get it. But as you can see, my data nerd things, I get what people like that stuff. And sometimes I do too. It’s one of the things that I understand, but I don’t get it. Maybe that’s the way to put it. I’m glad everyone thinks party mode is great. I think it’s a bit weird. I think it’s polarizing. I think some people think it’s the most amazing thing we’ve ever done. Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder. Some of the features that we release, I think they’re going to be super great and rule and it seems like nobody cares and then you hear something and you’re like, “I don’t get it, but if it makes people happy at this time, I’m all for it.” So party mode for Zach. I don’t know Nick, what about you? If you say party mode, I’m just going to quit.
Nick Pataro:
Well I won’t go there but I will say that I’m excited for the new help center. I think that’s going to be a big change for us. It’s going to be a lot of new content. I know our team, Tom, Jeremy, I know lots of other folks have been working on putting together updated videos and how to guides for certain modules within the system. And that’s supposed to, sans any big issues, is supposed to come out with the release as well. So that’s probably what I’m most excited for because it’s nice to be able to, when someone reaches out and has a question, to send them something that they’re going to be able to dig into and use that has the new menu on it. So that’s my thing.
Tom Bellen:
I thought that if you said party mode, you would make me depressed. Well you brought up something even worse, which is the help center battle with that thing. That being said, I think it will be a vast improvement. It’s just a lot of effort to get all that stuff in and reworking it so it can be a thing. I mean some of the things, it will be actually be embedded into the system more now. So we do other things in the future. And to your point of sharing, one of the features or things that trying to enable with it, well I did put into it, is you can actually print off things from it directly. So if you do want to physically print out something and read it, you can do that as well. But on that terrible note of bringing up the bane of my existence and my epic failure, which is help center, it’s just the thing that’ll always haunt me.
Tom Bellen:
Let’s turn to something a little more positive, timing release and all that stuff. So we talked a lot about things of how we’re doing through businesses through all this time, but what are some of the things you guys have been doing with internal employees or having fun with people? Some of the positive things in the world’s come out. One thing that we did as a team is actually weird, I messaged my friends from college who’ve actually had the same friends since elementary school, middle school because I just can’t make friends. So I just said once I made the ones I have, I’m stuck with it. But we’ve actually been talking a lot more and using Zoom and other things do it. We actually hosted a surprise birthday party for one of my friends because his birthday got canceled cause of everything.
Tom Bellen:
So we had set it up at 9:00 where he had come downstairs and the TV was off and we’d all made Negroni’s, his favorite drink, and we were all sitting around the TV, there was about 20 of us, and we just started singing happy birthday and then all of a sudden turn on the screen and we were all there. And so we just had a two hour conversation through Zoom just catching up. So that was a really fun thing that we had did. I don’t know if anyone else either with employees to try and keep stuff more human enjoyable or other things that you guys have been doing to make use of this crazy time. So Zach, what about you? You’re always full of crazy fun stuff. Have you done anything cool?
Zach Gilbert:
So being the nerd that I am, my buddies and I, they’re all around the country and a few are in different countries and we’ve actually done digital board game night through a GoToMeeting. So we’ve been doing Dungeons and Dragons, Monopoly, and all these different type of stuff and just been trying to do it that way. So it’s been enjoyable.
Tom Bellen:
Anyone else have any cool things they’ve done to stay in touch with humanity?
Luke Viertel:
Being a musician, I did a live stream playing some music for my friends and family the other night, so that was fun.
Tom Bellen:
Awesome.
Michael Ruth:
So we have a off topic room in our Hangouts that has all staff. And some days it’s just us sharing memes about Corona or some of these great YouTube covers and stuff about it. And it just gives us a chance to relax a little and say, “Hey, we’re all in this together. You’re not alone and you’re not the only one feeling that way. It’s all of us and it’s the whole world in this situation.”
Tom Bellen:
And I know like Nick, I don’t know if you’re still in the big cross world, how’s CrossFit people? Do you guys do CrossFit gym sessions now through Zoom or something like that? You can’t go to the gym anymore, what do you do with your life?
Nick Pataro:
Yes. So it’s been really interesting. A lot of gyms are doing Zoom workouts, but everyone has to get really creative because there’s no equipment. So I’m really lucky, I’ve got a couple of dumbbells and a kettlebell and a pull up bar here, so I’m able to be creative. But yeah, it’s been tough. I have to say I’ve gone outside and done a little bit more running since the weather’s turned a bit nicer, which is nice. But yeah, one thing related to work though, I have to say working from home for the past three years, I spend probably like 5% of my time in the actual office. So it’s like once a month, once every month and a half or so. And so I don’t get a ton of FaceTime with people, but one thing that we started doing is every Thursday we have an all company stand-up where everyone goes around at Aysling and says, “Hey, this is what I worked on last week. This is what I’m going to be working on next week.” So we have a good idea of where people are at.
Nick Pataro:
Usually that’s done with the folks in the office around a big table with a single microphone and being remote, it’s hard to hear people, you don’t always know who’s talking, I can’t see anyone’s face. And so what this has all done is everyone’s now working from home, so everyone has a webcam on. I can hear everybody perfectly. And it’s been a really nice change for me because I feel like I’m much more engaged with than those traditional calls that we had. I felt a little bit left out, I was a bit of an afterthought. So I got to say that’s been a nice change for me. Hopefully other people feel the same, but yeah, that’s been good.
Tom Bellen:
Yeah, and one of the things I came up with that call, because my wife was a part of the call and someone said she was going to kill me and I do want to make this a public thing and this is transitioning into the movie trivia and cat facts so don’t worry for those of our audience who were worried we weren’t going to get to that. We’re getting to that right now, is I do want to make it known if I do die mysteriously, it was my wife. She watches a lot of forensic files and studies this thing. She watches the same things over and over again. She knows how to get away with it and now that we’re stuck in the same house for who knows how long, we don’t have many things, there is that concern of how our relationship is going to do with hold under this.
Tom Bellen:
If I die, you all are here knowing that the first suspect is my wife. And one of her favorite movies in that world is actually a film called Copycat. And the cat fact today, I was looking this up, is the term copycat originally came from the fact that the word cat, and I totally get this by the way, medieval times was really thought as a derogatory thing because everyone realized at that point the cats were terrible. How cats have infiltrated our society become… Speaking of memes, probably 80% of the memes that Michael’s team is sending are cats. How they’ve taken over society is amazing. But cats were considered a terrible thing and there’s some different things on that. Some people said it came from the fact that cats imitate behavior.
Tom Bellen:
They don’t really do that. They create chaos. But there’s some different wording of when 18th century different books, but the idea of being a copycat was a bad thing. And there’s some phrase I read from some book in 1887 that they said, “Hey, anyone who copies something that’s already been printed is a copycat.” So it’s really that derogatory thing of you copied something and you’re a cat, two bad things, thus copycat. So the movie Copycat is a great film and it’s a film about a person who has agoraphobia, stuck in their home, which made me think, what’s the opposite of agoraphobia? Is there someone right now who’s afraid of their home and what do they do? That’d be terrible. So anyway, someone with agoraphobia, she’s stuck at home, and she used to study serial killers and there’s a bunch of stuff there.
Tom Bellen:
It’s actually a really good movie starring Sigourney Weaver, who I’ve actually found out through Disney plus, voices a few different Pixar movies. I think she’s the voice in Wall E, which we watched a few times as well as Finding Dory, which my son calls fish. He wants to watch fish. And so that’s one of her favorite movies. And one of her other favorite movies is Hope Floats. So you can see, she’s a complicated woman. She loves the murder and she loves the Hope Floats. And there’s one actor who’s in both films and Luke is a musician. He’s also a famous musician. So if you can tweet the name of that actor who played one of the murderers in Copycat and is in the film Hope Floats, tweet that at Maghub, you can win a prize. Two of my wife’s favorite films shows both side of her, both the dark and light side and from that stuff.
Tom Bellen:
So that is the cat fact for today. And the movie trivia question, so I’m sure right now Luke and Mike are tweeting that to get the prize. But I do want to thank you guys all for joining, it was a good conversation. A lot of that. I just want to see anyone have any last minute things they want to say, talk about, maybe use their plug? Maybe something else going on you guys want to say before we get off the podcast? I’ve never had guests to plug anything so I figured I should do that if you’ve ever heard a podcast. Anybody want to plug anything?
Michael Ruth:
No.
Tom Bellen:
Oh, okay.
Michael Ruth:
No plug. But just stay home. Stay healthy. Stay sane guys.
Tom Bellen:
Yup.
Zach Gilbert:
Yup.
Tom Bellen:
Do our best.
Michael Ruth:
Agreed. Tom, I think you should clarify a that your wife’s name is not Carol.
Tom Bellen:
Oh sorry. That’s over my head. Oh are we talking Tiger King now?
Michael Ruth:
Oh yeah.
Tom Bellen:
Reference, okay. No, she’s not Carol. And I have watched part of that and that’s actually another fun thing. My group, we haven’t watched the final episode yet. We’re going to do a video share and watch it together. So it’ll be a mystery science 3000 of Tiger King.
Luke Viertel:
I will just say that I share your hatred of cats, Tom. I think that they have got so pervasive in our society as we have gotten more comfortable in life. They are very easy to take care of even though they’re meant to be alone. So I think superior people like dogs because they actually take effort.
Tom Bellen:
Interesting.
Zach Gilbert:
Well said.
Luke Viertel:
Thank you.
Tom Bellen:
Yeah, and if anyone wants my cats, they’re more than welcome.
Luke Viertel:
You have cats? That’s funny.
Tom Bellen:
Yeah, well, we wanted a dog, but when my wife and I lived in Baltimore, you couldn’t keep a dog in the apartment. So we adopted two alley cats. And we’ve transitioned them here now and yes, that’s what we’re doing.
Luke Viertel:
They’ll hate you.
Tom Bellen:
All right, on that positive note, thank you all for joining this episode. And again, as Mike said, stay home, stay healthy. We’ll get through it and it’ll be fine. It’ll all be fine until my wife kills me. All right, thanks everybody.
Luke Viertel:
See you later.
Michael Ruth:
Thanks Tom.
