THE NYC RENAISSANCE: HEALTH, HUSTLE, AND HIGH-SCALE AUTOMATION

E110 THE NYC RENAISSANCE_ HEALTH, HUSTLE, AND HIGH-SCALE AUTOMATION

Transcript

Dalton Anderson (00:00.974) Welcome to Venture Step podcast where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. They say you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, but what they don't tell you is that you're gonna have to survive health scares, blizzard with no heat, all sorts of nonsense. Today in this episode, we'll be discussing a couple things. One being the most important is I'm alive, I'm back, and

Then we'll talk through New York living, making the most of it. And some of these weird stuff that I've got going on side gig experimentation and then scaling venture step. All that being said, I'm back. If you don't know me, I'm Dalton Anderson, the host of interest at podcasts. And it's really been a pleasure over these last couple of years doing this and

Loving the attention that the show has been getting and the guests that are on the show Incredible. It's very interesting people like so interesting. So I am really happy to keep recording and Keep learning right? That's the whole point of this whole thing Okay So I'm officially back Yes energy has peaked

I am no longer having these false starts. I thought I'd be back sooner, but it took a while. think end of December-ish is like, I was like, okay, I'm back. Now I'm like, boom. Like I've got crazy amount of energy. I am ready to go. If I don't do a lot of stuff throughout the day, I can't sleep. I just got too much. I'm an energizer bunny, which is great. energy levels are back. I am not.

super tired after I do something a couple of days later, I have a huge spark and passion for whatever thing I want to do because I've got the energy to exert towards it. And then the other piece is my hair is no longer falling out, which was that's huge. I was pretty bummed about that. I was not a fan. it has grown back. I was putting in

Dalton Anderson (02:22.86) little, I think it's like Jamaican castor oil and some serum that my mom gave me. I've been taking some morning goo thing. I call it my morning goo. It's like mushrooms and other things that's to be really healthy. And I think it works. So appreciate it, mom. And that's been part of my morning routine for some time now.

Dalton Anderson (02:46.232) Which is great. I think there's no other way, right? There's no other way but forward, but it was really tough for sure. And I lost a lot of weight. I got back all my weight. I've regained it. And so now I am big jacked. Yeah, so now I'm in great shape again. And it wasn't that I wasn't in great shape, just I think I was underweight when I got super sick.

I was like 140. So I'm six foot or if you call it, if you to be very technical, five 11 and seven eights.

Dalton Anderson (03:26.414) At 135, 140, that's pretty light. And you could see it. There was bones where you shouldn't be able to see bones, type of thing. So I'm happy to have my muscle back and the energy and passion. Loving it, loving it. So where does that passion go? Well, it's been going into continuous learning and sidebiz.

Venture step is grown and it's into its own animal on its own, which I told you it would, but it has done that. And I'm also working on things on the side. I can't be too public about it on the podcast because people from work listen to it. I don't think it's a bad thing, but still everything's in flight and I'm still tweaking on it, but I'm in the process of just working on data science type.

projects that could be beneficial in a enterprise scenario, who knows? But I think that they could be, they could not. And if they're not, that's not a big deal, right? In the last episode, we'd spoken about.

Dalton Anderson (04:43.448) Just go for it. And the worst thing that could happen is that you're a better person, better employee, you're more intelligent, you're more interesting to everybody, not just work, but your personal life too. Like having experiences, challenges, failures, it's all part of life. Who cares? No one cares. Like the people complaining about what you're doing, that is a reflection of them.

maybe just a sidebar, when I'd started my own business in college, which failed miserably, which was fun, you could definitely tell that even adults were not cool. And when I say adults, like I guess I was an adult at the time, like I was over 18, but college kid, people still see you as a kid.

and adults and other students, some of they, there's sometimes they supported the idea, but they also supported the idea of failure as well.

They didn't like that I was going and trying to do this or they didn't fully support it or they.

You could just tell that they didn't want it to work, which is fine. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion. But I think the lesson there is just worry about yourself. It's great. Even your closest friends, if you go and try to do your own thing or you go take a chance, like maybe you're 35, you want to go back to school and change your career. People are gonna be like, wow, that's crazy. You shouldn't do that. Oh, wow.

Dalton Anderson (06:29.902) Who cares? Just do your thing. Do your thing. That's my advice to you. I'm not some wise man, like monk man in the mountains.

Dalton Anderson (06:46.442) The worst thing that could happen is it doesn't turn out well. Then you just reset. There's risks associated with it. Don't get me wrong. But there's also risks of not doing anything. Not doing anything is a choice in itself. So keep that in mind. Not making a choice is a choice.

So continuous learning.

The real, the real piece here is just do your thing, try something new, learn something. And this data science project, it's, it's be ballooning into a massive data set, hundreds of millions of rows. So what that forces me to do, it forces me to put everything in the cloud. And I've had interaction of doing stuff in the cloud before on, I would say like the front end of the cloud.

But I've never been a, I hit my mic, sorry about that. But I've never been a back-end cloud engineer. I've never done that. learning all the little, I mean, just the UI on Google Cloud, I mean, there's a lot going on. It's just crazy. It's easier to use a search function if you know what the tool's called than to actually find the tool, which I think is ridiculous. yeah, there's just a lot.

And it's fun. I'm learning a lot.

Dalton Anderson (08:20.258) but it is interesting to navigate the UI and running stuff in the cloud, which is similar to running it on your local computer. There's differences and nuances and then structuring everything and learning what they call things. Like they call it a bucket instead of a lake, a data lake. If you're not familiar, that's where you put a whole bunch of data. It's cheaper to put it there than other places.

And I'm trying to get it to a place to where all the data is indexed and combined and then I want to get it to a place where I unify the data and Then run it through BigQuery and make a machine learning model, which would be pretty cool a machine learning model on a couple hundred million rows like I think a four hundred million would be pretty

Decent, what you can make of it and then keep tuning the model until I get something cool. How long that takes, I have no idea. It could take me a week, it could take me a month, it could take me a quarter. But it's a really fun project and I'm enjoying it. And it doesn't have to make money and if it doesn't then that's fine. I think the money part is a byproduct. So maybe you don't make money on the project that you're working on now.

Since that makes you a well-rounded, more skilled, more intelligent, interesting person, you might have a better job networking or getting that opportunity because you've got additional knowledge that you typically wouldn't have. That's where more money comes from. Like this podcast doesn't make any money at all. But eventually I think that somebody will find the show interesting if

I was looking for investors. They check out the show. They're like, wow, this person's really been about their stuff for years. That's crazy. They've said that they're going to be doing these things for years and they're doing it. So just keep that in mind is it's people desire byproducts. They desire love, a partner, a good job to be a leader, like like a leadership role.

Dalton Anderson (10:45.262) awesome life. Those are byproducts. And it doesn't have to be about money. could just be like, all right, well, things that cost no money. Great partner.

Having a great partner is a byproduct of who you are.

Not in all scenarios, but in a general sense, you can get with whoever, but the person that you were talking about, your dream partner. Your dream partner is a byproduct of how you live your life and your habits and the things that you're accepting. Are you open-minded? How well do you take criticism or hard scenarios? Are you a partner?

Are you considerate? Do you have empathy? Can you have hard conversations instead of kicking the can down the road? All of those things.

help keep and obtain a partner, a good one. And you might think that they're good and something happens and they change and they alter and the relationship is no good anymore. It's rotten. That's fine. mean, relationships are super hard. Everybody is changing and evolving every day, maybe at different paces. And sometimes there's a fork in the growth and you guys grow apart.

Dalton Anderson (12:14.53) You can try to grow back together or you can call it. It's really up to you, it's your life. But anyways, continuous learning. Do it, do your thing. If you're listening to this show, that's great too.

But just try something. How deep are you into this AI thing? If you're listening to show, you probably are. But it's gonna be such a big part of society. Such a big part of society. And with the age group of this show and my age,

I'm saying the analytics, there might be above or below, but you've missed the housing crash, you missed the dot com, you missed really the big part of Bitcoin. This is your time. This is your time that you can be like, I was in it. I was right there at the campfire waiting for everything to happen. I was there years before everybody.

That is your moment.

but only if you want it to be.

Dalton Anderson (13:29.972) only if you want it to be. Because this is going to be a revolutionary technology and probably AI and then mainstream or enterprise use of quantum computing is probably next. And then after that, it's like international space travel or intergalactic space travel, international space travel. That's pretty good.

We are such an advanced company. We specialize in international space travel.

That's got a bow on it. That sells right there. That is a salesman statement. we're not. Hear me out. We're not an aeronautical company here. Listen, listen. We are a international space travel company. We don't fly. We explore space internationally.

It's, it sells itself. But yeah, just work on, work on side projects and then just that side project can be a passion or not a passion.

Dalton Anderson (14:49.804) then you'll see what comes of it. No big deal. And it doesn't have to be coding. could be some kind of volunteer thing. It could be starting some group or a clothing company or some kind of software manufacturing thing. It could be coaching your son's team.

could be anything, but just get involved. Be present.

Do what you're passionate about in the moment that you're passionate about, because passion fades. And if you don't set aside time to pursue your passions, well, then you live a life void of passion. And that's so fun. So that's my encouragement. Okay, venture step. Venture step has grown. Venture step has grown in its own thing, as I said earlier. And it's grown so much that one,

I need to be worried about the production quality of the show. And it's not that I'm not worried ever, but it's like, oh, well, it's just me. It doesn't really matter. I I can make mistakes. It's fine. But when you have guests on the show, it's a little different. And especially if they're not my friend, they have a media presence. It's important. It's a big deal. So then it becomes a big deal.

So there's the growth and my podcast infrastructure doesn't necessarily support the growth that the show is sustained. So need to transition.

Dalton Anderson (16:26.2) I need to transition from being a solo podcaster into a recorder slash coordinator versus handling the whole workflow myself. Cause there's a lot that goes into podcasting. It's a lot less work than it used to be. And that's why you're seeing a whole bunch of podcasts pop up because there's a lot of software that handles quite a bit of what a podcast needs to be clipping your videos, making segments of your videos.

editing the audio, helping you make thumbnails, all that stuff. It's still, you've gotta make sure it works correctly, the audio is good, that the clip is coherent, you've gotta download it, upload it to whatever website, you've gotta add captions, you've gotta put it into the playlist and you've gotta schedule everything. Which isn't that much work, hear me out.

But then you have to then put blogs, social media posts. You've got to put together what I'm calling a press kit for the guests so the guests can post and share things. And you've got to post about the guests, hype them up, which are things that I haven't been doing until recently. But that's a lot of work. The back end administrative stuff is a lot of work, especially if you want to present.

the show in a way that the guests would expect it to be and the way that you would attract better guests.

So I'm transitioning from riverside.

Dalton Anderson (18:07.262) I think it's Riverside FM to Descript. So right now this is my first recording in Descript and the reason why I left Riverside was there's just too many inconsistencies. They move really fast but they move fast and break stuff and I can't have my workflow breaking to where I've got to make all the clips or I've got to do the segments or the transcript isn't working or whatever is happening is happening.

And it's like a four hour, five hour unexpected time sync because I've got to figure out what went wrong, redo it, and then process everything myself. It's a lot of work and it's unexpected. And when those things happen, it reduces my confidence. And then there was something that happened on Riverside where this first time it ever happened, but it had combined.

two separate recordings, one with bloopers and the other one that was the recording we wanted. And it combined them at weird times so that I didn't notice, it combined it, put it on the mid...

mid intro, like not the beginning of the intro, the end of it. And so I listened to the first part of the intro, like, we're good. And then I listened to other parts of the episode just to make sure the sound quality was good. And there is a complete blooper in there.

Dalton Anderson (19:40.866) And that, that was unacceptable. And I reached out to Riverside and they didn't really know what was, what was happening. So that was concerning and not good because it happened on a guest episode. So there's these workflow issues, inconsistencies, and then there was that issue, which I was less than pleased about.

So was looking for something where I could share with a team. It could handle quite a bit of the workflows and it's all in one place. It's organized. So Descript acquired Squadcaster, was Riverside's best competitor, closest competitor. And Descript has now taken that platform and fully integrated it.

their technology into Descript.

So basically you get a really good consistent AI based workflow for processing podcasts and more enhanced editing capabilities and team collaboration and organization with respectable recording technology. I don't think it is as good as Riverside, but that's a small part of the experience.

process. So as long as it's good enough, or second or third, I think it's fine. And so I have been working to transition off of Riverside. So I'm migrating all of my 100 plus episodes into Google Drive. And then eventually I'll migrate the raw episode into Descript at one point. wow.

Dalton Anderson (21:38.23) If you're on video or you're watching me or you're not on video, I'm wearing a button down shirt and I was talking and my button came undone. So now it's like, it's like deep chest button my shirt up. It's crazy. They just did that on its own by the way. It's auto unbuttoning. It's a new feature.

Okay, so with VentureStep scaling, I've got to scale with it. So I've got to move off of Riverside. I've got to move into Descripts. I've got to contract additional help with Virtual Assistant to help with this processing, editing, and correspondence with emails. I try to respond to five emails a day. It seems like I just never can keep up on guest requests, which is a good thing. I'm not complaining.

It's just, I've got to figure out a way to where I can provide the right service. While working on, remember how I was talking about working on my side gig, while also having a pretty...

pretty involved job. So I've got a lot going on. I need to take some stuff off my plates too much. So the virtual assistant is going to help me with the podcast and that's going to be huge. And that's going to, to make the production value of the podcast higher, I'll start posting stuff, more stuff on social media. I'm going to specialize in X, LinkedIn and YouTube.

You're already familiar that I post on YouTube every week, but now I'm gonna be posting on LinkedIn and X as well, which is great, super exciting, but definitely some growing pains have big plans to automate a lot of this process.

Dalton Anderson (23:31.694) I am onboarding right now the virtual assistant. I don't want to say her name because I haven't really cleared it with her to talk about it on the podcast. So just keep it private. But I'm onboarding her and she's great. She's very, very good at communicating what she, what she did versus like if she has any questions, think there's times where if you're people managing,

People don't understand something they're afraid to ask, which is a huge issue. If they don't know what they're doing and they do it anyways, it's like, okay, well you wasted your time. You wasted my time. We said waste time here. Like I really wish that you felt comfortable asking, Hey, can you go over that one more time? Or I'm not really following here. Can, can you help me out? And of course I'll be out. I think the only problem is if I have to do that like six times on something, it's like, okay, like what's going on?

Is it a me thing? Should I record a video demoing this? Like how do we approach this differently so we learn? Well yeah, spend a good amount of time onboarding and then after the onboarding is completed, then we're turning and burning, baby. That's VentureStep. I don't want to spend too much time talking about myself. I think the last thing I didn't talk about was NYC, the energy here, Chef's Kiss.

The networking here, incredible. Everything is incredible as long as you got the energy to keep up. If you don't have the energy to keep up, you'll just get stomped to death. So, I think that's gonna be how I close it.

wherever you are in this world. Good afternoon, good evening, good morning. Thank you for listening and listening again next week. See ya. Dawn out.