June 5, 2025 • 67 mins
Kevin Griffin shares insights on managing offshore teams, quality control, and the importance of developer events. He discusses handling live TV nerves, roller coasters, and blending travel with work. Discover vibe coding, AI in development, and Hampton Roads' tech evolution. Hear about Kevin's networking skills and resilience in local entrepreneurship. Topics include his career journey, LinkedIn strategy, the origin of Shedquarters, promoting the developer community, and event catering challenges. Personal anecdotes and sponsor acknowledgments wrap up the episode.
(0:00) Offshore team oversight and quality control
(0:56) Live TV appearance and handling nerves
(4:42) Organizing and sponsoring developer events
(13:14) Roller coaster enthusiasm and combining travel
(23:27) Introduction to vibe coding and leveraging AI in development
(28:10) Tech landscape evolution and community initiatives in Hampton Roads
(39:55) Networking and Kevin Griffin's community involvement
(48:25) Resilience in local entrepreneurship
(50:07) Kevin Griffin's career and LinkedIn strategy
(51:54) Shedquarters origin and work-life balance
(57:22) Promoting the developer community
(59:19) Worst roller coaster experiences and personal anecdotes
(1:03:02) Event catering challenges and venue costs
- Trusting an offshore team requires a technical professional to oversee the work to ensure it meets the required specifications and quality.
- The emergence of vibe coding allows developers to use AI to quickly iterate and refine projects, making it a valuable tool rather than a replacement for skilled professionals.
- Hampton Roads has a growing but quiet tech community, and increased participation and leadership in local tech events could significantly boost the region’s innovation ecosystem.
Offshore team management, Quality control, Live TV nerves, Developer events, Vibe coding, AI in development, Tech landscape evolution, Hampton Roads community, Local entrepreneurship, Work-life balance.,
Innovate Hampton Roads is on a mission to foster the growth of Hampton Roads' innovation and technology ecosystem by educating entrepreneurs and business leaders, providing access to essential resources, and building connections that drive synergistic partnerships. We are committed to creating a supportive environment that empowers entrepreneurs, strengthens the regional economy, and fuels long-term prosperity. By growing, guiding, and connecting key players in the ecosystem—including investors, industry leaders, universities, corporate partners, and community organizations—we aim to build a more innovative and inclusive economy. It’s time to unify our efforts, amplify our collective voice, and streamline resources to benefit aspiring entrepreneurs, students, employees, and businesses throughout the region.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
A lot of the success of using an offshore team is if you have a a trusted professional to oversee them. Because I what I've seen in a lot of cases, I've worked with overseas teams. Like, there's there's a lot of talented folks overseas. But what happens is you have, usually a nontechnical person come in and go, I'm gonna pay this overseas team to build my vision and do my v one. And they're just they're just cranking out code.
(00:01):
And it's never to the the spec of the requirement or to the expectation of the person who's who's paying them. So a lot of times, those offshore projects will fail just because there's not a person overseeing the work being done to comment on this is good, this is crap. And AI is very similar to that. If you're a nontechnical person asking the AI to do something, the AI is probably gonna give you crap.
Well, for the first time ever, second time for you, you and I went live on TV.
That's right.
And, you know, they say, camera adds a couple pounds. They made me look like a freaking giant.
Well, Looking at the replay, man, I look like I'm just a a a little little tiny fella.
I know I have large legs. Okay? But it looked like I had tree trunks that were four times the size of yours. And you got some pretty strong legs because, you know, you're running forty thousand days in a row.
Speaking of which, Zach, tomorrow is tomorrow is the 11 year birthday.
Whoop. Whoop.
Yeah.
I got an email today. Two hundred sixty nine days until the one city marathon.
I
don't envision me ever doing a marathon again. Could be wrong, but maybe I'll do a half. Throw in
Half is a good distance. But yeah. So it did you like being live? Live and in color?
You know, it was interesting. Once I got going, I was fine. I I I definitely I felt myself rocking on the I could see I could at one point, I looked down, and I could just see my leg going.
I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just so funny.
I mean, we do we do this. We've this is year six as we've discussed. We're in front of the camera a lot.
It's different.
It's different.
This is our controlled environment. It's completely different when you're in someone else's in someone else's home. You know, I'm sitting there. We were only in the studio for four minutes. The whole thing was three minutes.
Three minutes and forty seven seconds. Yeah.
My hand was slobbering, soaking wet. Went to shake the guy's hand. It was it just went down. He was, like, disgusted, but, you know, whatever. Today's guest, Kevin Griffin.
(00:22):
Have you ever been live on TV before? Not like a podcast or something like that.
No. No. No.
Do you think you'd I don't
think I have. I I saw the the clip. You guys did a great job.
Thank you. It was, I think if we had a second segment, we would've been a lot better. You know? Maybe the
pause that everything went well. It it was just it was funny. You just have a lot on your mind. Your your mind is so it's just like trying to slow everything down. And then once we leave there, Megan, Zach's partner in crime.
She's like Yep. Zach, you didn't smile at all. And then I got to thinking. I'm like, jeez. I didn't even think about smiling either, but just because I had so many other things on my mind.
I have RBF. I have a bad case of it. It's really bad. People, like, people don't get it. I'm not mad.
I'm not angry. I I'm literally just I'm focused, and I was I was concentrating.
Yeah. Yeah.
And, like, I wasn't thinking to smile. You know?
Yeah. Thankfully, I was.
I did see a little smirk, though. I did make a smirk at one point. Was
Well, you had the you had the, the sweet basketball.
I did. I got that in there.
You got the little coco in.
I yeah. I referred we we got a quick little coronavirus, coco in there. It's called the coco cap. I told people the worst advice you could take in business is listening to your mother because she's gonna give you bad advice. I thought I had, like, 2.5 good one liners in there, including my missed shot at the very end.
Yeah. It was good. I appreciate them taking in interest in the World Cup. It's a big deal with something we all need to rally around.
Yeah. Thank you to thirteen News Now. Hopefully, other stations as well will be interested in having these two clowns.
You're no, Kevin. You're no stranger to putting on events. It's it's a lot of work. It's a hustle.
I I was looking back at the the calendar, and I think I've been developing I I've been developing developer events for almost twenty years, like, coming up coming up to that milestone.
(00:43):
I feel like I met you at Mad Made Expo.
Mad Expo. That's right. Yep.
And that had to have been well, I quit TV news in 2010. Yep. It had to have been Titan days because that would have been ten to twelve. So it had to have been somewhere in there because you did that
11:20 twelve, I think. Yeah.
Hampton Hampton Convention Center?
Hampton Hampton Convention Center. I was surprised we got that venue. It turned out to be a great venue. Cheap. Did yeah.
Was exactly what we needed at the time. Yeah. I really missed that event, and it's a great story about why we didn't do a third version of it. Not sure if anyone wants to hear that, but it's great for over beers and stuff.
No. No. No. No. No.
No.
Event stuff. So you try to get speakers to come in. We are looking for sponsors. We're, selling tickets. And we were doing these biweekly check ins as kind we had a core group of guys that were managing the the event.
And I think we are about a month before the event. We are more month before our our go date, like drop dead go date, where we had to commit to the venue. And one of the folks said he was in charge of sponsorship, like, reaching out, and we already had relationships with a lot of them. He said, I'm gonna reach out to the sponsors today. And we're like, have you not reached out to any of the sponsors?
Do we not have any committed sponsor's dollars? And turns out we had zero sponsor dollars, thirty five days before the event. And, we went back and looked at ticket sales. Like, alright. Well, how many tickets will we need to sell?
The assuming the worst case, we had absolutely no sponsorship, and we made the decision that because we didn't have any sponsorship dollars, there was no way we were gonna sell the number of tickets that we had to sell that we we actually decided to cancel the event. And once you cancel an event, you can never uncancel an event. So we decided Mad Expo was done, and was just a fond memory of all those involved, but that was the reason the the folks in charge of sponsorship did not do any outreach for sponsorship. And I I learned a big lesson from that was that it's never one person in charge of sponsorship. It it always needs to be a team effort for sponsorship.
And whenever you look at budgets, you always talk about sponsorship. Like, it's it's always the conversation piece because you it's very difficult to do an event without any sponsorship. Like, you have to charge people outrageous dollars to get into the door, and I don't think people really realize how much sponsorship offsets an event. And we had to cancel because we didn't have any sponsorship.
Yeah. Well, venues are not venues are not cheap in in in many cases. I don't know what
Well, the crazy thing about that, it's just like, I don't ever want anyone to lose money. Yeah. But it's like but a lot of some people are like, we're we're willing to keep this thing empty, lights off, and, like, just don't take advantage of us. You know? We're just trying to make you know, build community, get something started.
It's not like the city state of city addresses, you know, where there's a huge budget for things like that. You know, I think a lot of times, it's it's exactly what you said. It's community building and stuff like that. I remember after starting off at two I feel like this is the right time frame. We had sent out a this is hatch days.
We had sent out a survey. What's missing? Everything that was great about Start Norfolk, people wanted more of, but people like, we had these speaker sessions. I don't know if you ever spoke at Start Norfolk. I can't recall.
But at certain over two, I think that's the one where we had about 350, four hundred people, 73 ideas. And we had a and then a single track of speakers going while people were also building in a separate room, but it was great. Great speakers were there, but a lot of people weren't able to go over there because they were over here. And people were like, well, what if we could just do the speaker thing? I was like, cool.
Let's do it. We'll do this event called drop anchor. We landed this we we we landed this venue in Norfolk, which is where TC's theater is. I can't think of what that's called right now. Roper?
The Roper. Roper Theater. Yep. 600 it was 600 seats. We had sponsors, though, Kevin.
(01:04):
Yeah. So we did okay on the sponsor side, but then could it
sell tickets? Getting speakers too.
Yeah. Oh, you speak like, I remember looking back at this maybe since we've done the show, really good speakers that have now even gone on to, like, do some really crazy things. So I'm like, damn. I can't remember what we charged per ticket. I wanna say $300.
But we made some I don't I feel like sometimes you can get customer discovery, and it doesn't really tell you the answer. And I feel like in this case, we we we maybe it told us the answer, but we didn't go deep enough. Whereas, like, okay. Like, a two day event, maybe the money was too expensive. People have to work.
There's too many assumptions on our part. But, cancel that. I remember when I canceled that, like, that was real tough.
Yeah. That was You're not a guy that stresses about much, and that that was that seemed to be a stressful dark place for you.
I must hide it really well. That is great. No. I mean, look. It sucks.
Like, I feel like you're you're you have this trajectory where, like, everything's going great, and you're feeding off of those things and you're trying to play off of that. And then when it doesn't, you're like, damn. The good thing is, though, is because no one really knew about the event, once I canceled it, no one knew that it was canceled because no one care. Like but I just think you have I mean, that was, what, twenty thirteen, twelve years from now or twelve years ago. You just have high hopes for the people and the community and the region.
Like, you want to show them, like, you can do something big. And sometimes when people don't jump on board, I think that can be it's like, you have to look look inside and say, okay. Like, what am I doing wrong to show this thing that I know you want because you've told me? What am I like, what is the is the facade wrong? What could I do to kinda open the door and say, come at me?
There's definitely a running theme in every event I've run since. So, primarily, we've had, let me point. So RevolutionConf, it was our big four three, four hundred person event we ran here in in Virginia Beach. Hampton Roads DevFest is our smaller it's our hyper local locals event. That one was about 200 people.
But, like, every time we sit down to to do one of these events, I ask myself the question, like, do I trust this area to show up? And I, you know, I say that. I go through the events, and they show up. Like, I I I feel like sometimes I'm gonna run an event. I'm gonna put all this money and effort into something, and no one's gonna show up for But they've done a good job in the past of of showing up.
This, DevFest we did this past year, we broke our records in just the number of people that showed up to it. So they'll they'll show up. It it's just really hard to start doing all that work without the guarantee that that they're gonna come. So, yeah, it's the biggest reason I haven't done another RevolutionConf is I wanna hit numbers like four or 500 people, and that it just takes a lot of trust for folks to show up for that. That's I I don't think I'm ready to to pull that plug yet.
Well, if you're stressing, all you have to do is crack open a crunchy hydration. This one is watermelon calm plus stress relief. Sponsored?
Shout out to Meg.
No. But they should be now. Right? Well, I mean, they they they gave me this. So, technically, I had to give them some product placement, I guess.
You know?
Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna drink out of my Portsmouth YETI.
You know, Tim has never had a YETI cup before until about a month ago?
I'm too cheap.
Like that.
Too cheap.
(01:25):
How did you guys meet?
It was at Eurobet.
It was? Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. Okay.
So we talked about events. Though that's a badass poster, by the way. I think the the DevFest one, whoever designed that, super rad. We have something very much in common outside of business, outside of events, and maybe yours still love. I don't it's not that I don't love these things anymore, but I just haven't really done in a while.
Roller coasters. I think I've been on about a hundred
Show the names up on the bottom of the screen. I think that's a roller coaster
Oh, yeah.
It puts
the emoji in my name. And it wasn't just for this. I've always had the emoji in my stream, StreamYard link.
Really?
Yeah.
And here I am. I can't figure out to do it. There we go. There we go. There we go.
There we go.
There we go. That's cool. I need to figure out how to do that. Okay. So you just hit your one hundredth roller coaster.
I think I'm somewhere between one fifty, one 60.
Yeah.
There used to be a a place, a website where you could track all of them. I tried finding it the other day, but I couldn't remember it. Is there something like that does that now?
A lot of folks use an app called LogRide to track their rides. I know a lot of people just use spreadsheets. Yeah. That's kinda what I do is I just It
would be hard for me to figure that out. Rides.
Because there's something level of tracking. Like, some people don't just track their unique rides or unique credits. They track the number of times they've been on certain rides. Like, I don't I can't tell you how many times I've been on any given ride. Like, that is a level of analysis that I I can't do, but I can tell you unique rides I've been on.
A polished chariot's your go to. I know I've seen some writing about that.
(01:46):
Love that. Right? Yeah.
Great ride. Is is that your all time favorite?
It's all it's it's my all time favorite, not because it's
it's not
the best or anything, but it's like you it's like my La Z Boy. I can go get
on a holiday period. Yeah.
Yeah. Just I would just sit there and take a nap. Just let me enjoy, up and down around and around. There are similar rides in other parks that are probably better ride, like subjectively objectively better rides.
Well, Nitro in the same year as that. At Six Flags Nitro at Six Flags Great Adventure, same company B and M. We're getting we're nerding out here, Tim, as as the ones who built Apollo's. They also did Alpenguise.
Yep.
A couple others.
But, I rode Orion recently at Kings Island, similar similar model as Apollo's Chariot. Probably a better ride, but Mako down in SeaWorld, Florida, you know, same type of ride. But, you know, Apollo's Chariot is just I just love it. So it's always gonna be my number one until they tear down and still gonna be number number one.
I think it's a little too short.
It could be longer. Yeah. I agree.
What is what is the longest duration ride of a roller coaster?
Well, Beast. Right? You're 100?
Yeah.
Beast is the longest wooden coaster, I think, in the world.
And oh, longest running or the longest in duration of the ride?
Oh, which one do you want?
I was looking for the duration of the ride. Just figured they all
had to be There's one in Europe that's like a mine train Yeah. That it's got a couple couple lift hills. I'd say the most rides are probably, what, two minutes, and the majority of that is lift hill. But I think this one's, like, three, four minutes. Beast, I think, is longest wooden coaster.
(02:07):
I think so.
What was your like, how what did you think of that?
I love the beast. It's so I chose it as my hundredth simply because it's a classic. I wanted to make sure I had a classic coaster as my hundredth. And because there's a lot of throwaway coasters that that just exist because they needed to fill a spot, And I didn't want one of those to be my hundred, so I planned the entire day around riding beast for number 100. So I'm a member of ACE, the American Coaster Enthusiasts.
They they have several landmark coasters throughout the, I would say The US, but around the world. So there's a couple in Europe as well. But Beast is one of them that it's a designated classic coaster. And, like, you could say Beast, anyone who knows coasters at all knows Beast. I I love the ride.
It wish I could have done it at night because, apparently, night rides on Beast are an out of body experience. I didn't have the time for that, but we did, you know, late afternoon ride. It was raining. It was running really fast, and there's there's two halves of it. The first half was amazing.
The first half threw me a little bit. I don't think I was ready for the second half of beast. So a little bit of Tylenol could fix that issue, though.
Yeah. So it's two lift hills. It goes up, and then the first part, Tim, it goes basically through the force at basically ground level, but a lot of twists and turns. And so where a lot of roller coasters now will do the this side of it, a lot of it is really the turns, but not really turning. And then it speeds up allegedly faster at night.
And then you get to the second lift hill, and then it goes down this double helix, which when my mom's been on this in, like, two thousand, so twenty five years ago, it bruised her. It was that rough. So it's a it it's pretty brutal. It would not be my fur my favorite. I think Raven is my furthest favorite at, Holiday World.
Steel would be Millennium Force.
I love the Millennium Force. Yep.
So good. Tim, what about
you? The top three for me.
The Millennium Force, that's your point?
Yeah. Yep. You've been on it?
Yeah.
Hell yeah.
There we go.
Is that it? Is that your favorite?
No. That was that was good. I liked I mean, I I am an Apollo's chariot guy.
It's good. Come on, man. What are we
talking about? It was a long time ago, man. So I can't the the adrenaline is no longer flowing from that. When I was a kid, Darien Lake was always a really popular place, and I think it was the Viper. That was, like, the first steel coaster that, that they had.
(02:28):
So, dude, I've rode that many, many, many, many times.
It's not a Woody? No. Okay. They got a Woody there. Yeah.
I can't
Have you guys been to Darien Lake?
Yeah. I have. I have. They have okay. So my home park growing up was Six Flags America.
It's closing this year. They had a Superman the ride, which was basically up, down, around Yep. The helix, up, down, boom, boom. Another helix, I think, and then a crazy crazy bunny hop triple. Yep.
And Darren Lake had a mirror image of that. So during the time, I was going this way, but then we went to Darren Lake. It went that way. This is what we did growing up. My brother and sister hated it.
Our vacations would be going to amusement parks. I was told this when I got married when my brother gave a speech and was like, I had to go to all these stupid places instead of going to the beach every year or something like that. And now I don't write them at all. So is that, like, your hobby?
To a poor and couldn't go to never went to theme parks. I only went to Busch Gardens. And, like, when I was a teenager, I got to go to Kings Dominion for the first time. Like and then when I started making my own money and I could start affording to go places, like, that reinvigorated my love of roller coasters. So now I can now I'm trying to get a new park, like, one or two new parks a year.
That's kinda my goal.
Busch Gardens is underrated.
It is. Yeah.
What's the first instance you have traveled to attend a park?
I plan a lot around conferences. So if I go do conference speaking, so la actually, that's so that's why I went to Kings Island was I was in Columbus for a conference, and I scheduled an extra day, drove out to Kings Island. And I took my son with me, and we did everything there. Last year, I was in Kansas City, so I planned a day before I went to worlds of fun, rode everything there. That was great because I was I took an Uber to worlds of fun, which I've never done before, rode all five, six coasters they have, and then it started thunderstorming.
I'm like, alright. I'm good. Got an Uber, came back to the hotel. So got everything knocked down in, like, three hours.
Is that Mamba there? What's their what's their
I'm trying to remember what their steel, is. I don't know.
And Dorney Park and then Valley Fair, I feel like, all have, like, the same similar stuff. The fact that I don't watch any roller coaster things and I still have that in my brain is ridiculous to me. This is all muscle memory. And this is what I did from, like, '16, '17, '18, '19, '20. I did I did what are those, like, boards that you do that you, like like, construction boards, Like, you do, like, projects for in school?
Like, mine were always rolling those to Vision board. Oh, those,
like, trifold?
No. Not a vision. Yeah. The trifold thing, not a vision board. People thought I was gonna design roller coasters.
(02:49):
That was, like, the thing. Oh, god. It's crazy.
Roller coaster tycoon. Loved that game. Yeah. I was there.
Dude.
Alright. We could I could talk about roller coaster now.
I I have a question. Let's And, you know, so I'll I'm gonna borderline make myself look foolish. But, dude, all of a sudden, like, out of nowhere, like, within the last month or two, the the phrase that I hear all over the place is vibe coding.
Mhmm.
What is what is the deal with vibe coding, and and why all of a sudden is that such a a hot phrase?
Okay. So I I do a lot of vibe coding myself. So vibe coding is essentially you're you're sitting down with an editor, and you're giving instructions to to AI to build a project for you. So strictly, vibe coding is you're never actually doing the work yourself. You're instructing the AI to to do the work on your behalf.
So I like to create a an iOS app, and it should be called blah and, you know, add a here's some requirements for what the the app should do. And the I AI will go off and build it, and then it will come back and go, did I do a good job? And go, no. You didn't because it never does. And you give it follow-up, instructions.
Oh, I like you to make the color blue instead of green, and I like you to do this and that. And it's a vibe because you're just, like, spitballing ideas and requirements to the AI, and the AI is going off and doing the work. That's I do I do a fair bit of that now. It's a a really good way to, I guess, for call myself a trained professional. I'm a trained professional to go do a lot of work very quickly that probably would take me hours if I was doing all by hand, but having the AI do a lot of it for me upfront, makes just makes my life easier.
So I'm not sure if that directly answers your question. That that's that's essentially what vibe coding is, is letting the AI do the work for you and you not touching the code at all.
It is quite the it's it's quite the buzzword. I hear it everywhere.
So I think lot of a lot of people are threatened by the robots.
Yeah.
But you as a full time developer.
Yeah.
You're like, let's let's jump on this ride. Sounds
like. It's a it's a tool. Like so everything I do is building a bigger toolbox and filling it with tools that I can use to solve problems. And Vibe Coding AI is a tool. And I think some people look at it as this is the tool that's gonna replace me.
And that's not wrong depending on what level of professional you are. But I think the the people who are really gonna win are the professionals that take the tool and just add it as part of their their workflow. I use AI to help me talk through big problems. And in the same way, whereas before, if I had a big problem, I would jump on a call with two or three folks I trust immensely and just toss ideas back and forth. I don't have to talk to a person now to do that.
I can talk to an AI, and the AI will give me feedback. In some cases, give me references to different ways that I can solve the problem. And in a lot of cases, we could we, me and the AI, we spitball a solution, and then I can say, well, can you go mock that up for me? And the AI will go do all the hard work of mocking up a solution for me to review. And what ends up happening is they'll do that work, and I'll go, you know what?
I changed my mind. That's awful. I don't wanna do it that way. I think I wanna do it a different way. And the AI doesn't have any sort of ego.
(03:10):
So the AI will say, okay. Let's just throw away all that work I did. Let's start from scratch, and let's do something different. So I think it's gonna make in the future iterating solutions much faster. I can do a very fast v one and then a very fast v two.
And then usually by your v three, you're honing in on the thing you actually wanted to build. And for a variety of businesses out there, that's that's the critical part. Like, so much so many resources are wasted on that v one. And once you finish v one, you realize that's not what you actually wanted. What you wanted was v two or v three.
So being able to get that v one done soon
is It makes me think like back in the day for all the kids that are listening, there used to be cameras and you would have 24 exposures. Yeah. And you had to be really, really selective on what you wanted to take a picture of because once the film was gone, the film was gone. Switching over to digital as we know, you know, you can take as many pictures as you want. And now with, vibe coding, you can, it's kind of the same deal, but with code as opposed to film.
I never thought about that, but that's a great analogy.
So over the years, you've heard well, first of all, do you have a name for your, robots? No. I have a name for mine. You I mean, the way you were talking to it, like, you probably should. You kinda
I don't think I can say it on the air.
Oh, I wasn't there a movie about that, like, or Ah Machina or something like that? Like alright. Well, thanks for being on the show today, Kevin. We appreciate it. You know how so many people would outsource overseas, like Yeah.
Tech tech stuff? It almost I never thought of this until just now. It almost makes me think that if they had gone through a process like what you just said, first iteration, second iteration, third iteration, and had done that first and then shoved it overseas, maybe they actually would have gotten their money's worth.
Yep.
Because you hear so many horror stories. I don't I don't know if people still do this. I guess they do. Right? Outsource to The Philippines and other other nations from that perspective.
But if they go through that process, you could probably fix a lot of that challenges.
A lot of the success of using an offshore team is if you have a a trusted professional to oversee them. Because I what I've seen in a lot of cases, I've worked with overseas teams. Like, there's there's a lot of talented folks overseas. But what happens is you have, usually a nontechnical person come in and go, I'm gonna pay this overseas team to build my vision and do my v one. And they're just they're just cranking out code.
And it's never to the the spec of the requirement or to the expectation of the person who's who's paying them. So a lot of times, those offshore projects will fail just because there's not a person overseeing the work being done to comment on this is good. This is crap. And AI is very similar to that. If you're a nontechnical person asking AI to do something, the AI is probably gonna give you crap, and you're not gonna realize it.
But having a technical person overseeing that process and understanding that, oh, this is an issue. That's an issue. That's not what the the business owner wants or or whatnot. If you don't have that person, you're just gonna keep getting crap. You need that you need that person with technical chops to to oversee everything.
Have you seen the, the technical landscape evolve over the course of the last fifteen, twenty years here here locally within Hampton Roads?
Here locally. It's gotten better. It's gotten bigger. We we actually have a lot of we have a lot of tech in the area that is very quiet. Yeah.
I think ten, fifteen years ago, if you asked me, what's the technical landscape of Hampton Roads? It was a military contract or health care contract. And, you know, since then, it's there's a lot more private businesses. You all did a thing with Yellow Dog, not too long ago. Like, Yellow Dog was one of those companies that I had never heard of until we were doing DevFest, and they just kinda came out of the shadows.
Well, like, oh, yeah. We're a we're a software company in in Hampton Roads. It's like, oh my gosh. It's like these all these companies exist. They're just very quiet, very to themselves.
And it's, yeah, it's kinda relieving because when I was starting events here, and I've run user groups in the area for for developers for years and years and years, it's just it's always been military. It's always been health care, and it's never been never been private business.
Interesting.
(03:31):
Yellow dog. I used to golf with Jay Livinggood a lot. Like, he like, like, two times a week when I golfed. You know? I was not I don't think I've ever hit par.
Hell, I don't think I've ever gotten three over par. I mean, on one hole. Not not anything crazy.
But I always say high score wins. Right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Very I I watched that video. That was pretty cool. Like, because I had asked him to invest in Hatch '20 '11, '12, '13 time frame. Passed on it, which is fine. No.
I mean, there's no problem there. But he was just starting to ramp that up. Because I think in the video, he said it's 17. They're 17 years old or something like that. So that means it would've been, what, o eight time frame.
But, I mean, it's pretty it's pretty wild, like, when you can get resilient and gritty, stick with it. What can happen? There's 75 employees now. They do the inventory management for a crazy amount of stadiums in in the country, maybe the world. I can't remember.
But it's pretty cool that something like that is happening in your own backyard.
What is what is what is the series that you're talking about, Zach?
Oh, you're talking about disrupting the tide?
Yeah. What is that?
Well, I believe, disrupting the tide is a series of documentary style videos that tell the story of Hampton Roads businesses in a way that they've never been seen before.
Love it. Clip it. Let's roll.
Well, I'll consider it. No. But, I mean, I think kind of back to, like, your point, like, earlier, like, do I trust the region?
Yeah.
Or do I do I trust that these people will show up? Right? I think a lot of times people in this region are negative first, but there's a lot of people that are positive first that are like, we're doing these things for you. Like, there's opportunities here. Right?
And so, like, I think just from the tide is is is also telling that story and being like, okay. Like, I talked about the facade earlier. So, okay. Well, let me show you the facade a little differently. Right?
This is a peel be peeling back of the onion of some of the companies that are doing some pretty rad stuff in the region. Maybe you've heard of them. Maybe you haven't. But then, you know, I think at some point, like, you you keep telling that you you keep going up that roller coaster, at some point, like, it's like, okay. We're at the top.
Let's start going down that ride and realizing, like, this is a fun little thing that we got going on here in the old seven five seven.
Yep. Also all
(03:52):
know it's good stuff. You know?
Yeah. It's all good stuff. I think another comment I would make just in the general landscape of the the all the events going on is there's, what's the nicest way to say this? There's a lack of up there's a lack of upcoming leadership. Like, there's it's the same folks doing all the events doing putting in all the initiative to to get this stuff off off the ground.
Like, we're kinda alluding to it earlier. Like, we've been doing this
Yeah. I
for a long time.
Desperately, anybody that wants to be my replacement, let's let's start working and doing that now.
The people who say, hey. Can I help? Yes. Like, you want the easiest way to just meet the people worth knowing in this area. Like, get involved in any of this.
Like, I'm not even talking to the developer stuff. Like, if you wanna get involved in developer stuff, you know, talk to me. There's a bunch of other leaders in the software developer space here. But if you wanna start, you know, do something leadership wise in the startup community, like, no one's gonna tell you no. Never is gonna tell you no.
And we desperately need that next generation of leader coming in to help run these events. I the biggest reason I haven't done RevolutionCon, because I'm tired. Like, I've run four of them. I've run four or five DevFest. Like, I'm just I need a break.
Like, my kids are teenagers. I I can't do all this work. I really need someone else to show a little bit of initiative. Like, the the seeds are already planted. We just need someone to come help water them.
Yeah. It's a new fresh ideas, young energy, always a a super positive thing and and always welcome it.
I have not attended this, but I've seen it through the socials. Maybe but either of you guys have seen it. But it sounds like there's some version of Start Norfolk out there called seven five seven Build Weekend.
Every Yep.
I know Lionel Sapp, who we've had on the show, is somehow involved in some of these things. He seems like an an interesting individual. Love his energy. He has volunteered. He he'd helped us volunteer for the world CEREC World Cup last year.
Love his energy and stuff like that. But it's like what you're saying. It's like, who who are those next people? And we we had Jared Jared Bieler of Sway on an advertising agency on a few weeks ago. He kinda said the same thing.
He's like, you know, I'm doing these things now for the next wave of people. Yeah. And it's it's just really interesting to sit back and to even think that. Like, hey. Like, that was a long damn time ago.
Yep. Like, I I saw something the other day. Was like, damn. I haven't talked to that person since 2017.
Yeah.
That's almost a decade ago. And I talked to this person a lot back then. Yeah. So it's just it's just crazy. Yeah.
I mean, it's it's
It is wild. Just I mean, it's a I don't feel like I have aged at all. And when I look back at those pictures from back in the day, I'm like
(04:13):
Oh, dude. These kids. Yeah. I
had I had just for the audience to know, Apple has this. I got an iPhone. And, like, every day, they have, like, a new feature picture of the day, which is, like, your old stuff. And, usually, when I have a picture with Tim and there's not a lot of them. Right?
We probably see each other four times a year if that. I will send it to him. And one of this was at, I believe, your celebration of Launchpad.
Okay.
And that was 2015, '20 '16, because I'm pretty sure you're wearing the star suit.
Yeah. That was the debut.
Zero grays in that in that hair, Tim. Just wanna let you know. So ten years ago, no grays. I'm skipping gray. I'm going straight to white.
Look at this beard. Like, this this is ridiculous. And I'm not gonna die. I'm not gonna be one of those people. I refuse.
Yeah. I'm gonna
say that now. I say that now, but maybe when it all
I thought about ship has sailed. If I change it now, man, everyone would know. I don't think you can make a grant
It's everyone can know when it happens.
That's absolutely right.
Like, don't like, I look at these people, Mike, seriously, like, I I may maybe I I haven't lived to that, so I have to be empathetic with that. But it's like, we can tell. That's not your natural color. Like, it ain't working. Like, don't just get the just for men and just put it in.
It ain't working. This this episode has gone way off the rockers, and I'm all for it.
Well, I knew that it was gonna go down this way because we've been we've been at we all of us have been at this for a really long time.
Yeah. Well, I mean, if I go back and I look at my career, I I guess, kinda bring it back into, I guess, what I think the original topic was supposed to be. Like, the best career mood I made back so I got out of college in 02/2006. Best career move I ever made was going to a group in 02/2007, saying hi to someone, and then, like, coming back. Like, people don't understand how much of a leg up you get if you just show up.
Yeah. Like, because just showing up to a group wasn't even here in Hampton Roads. It was up in Richmond. Like, there was nothing here, and I was going to Richmond to participate in groups up there before I started doing groups down here. And, like, just showing up more than once or twice, like, people will start to remember you, and that was the springboard for me being able to go into independent consulting and basically becoming a a known quantity in the the software developer, you know, group here in Virginia and most of the Mid Atlantic.
It's just show up. Like, it's easiest thing to do, and you'll never have to worry about a job if you just show up.
I call that raising your damn hand. You never know what can happen.
Never.
(04:34):
I got good news, guys. I found the picture.
Oh, boy.
Here we go.
Oh, yeah. There it is. Actually, now that I think about it, I don't no. You weren't wearing that might not that might be the second party. I don't know.
Anyways, I haven't worn that shirt in a while. I haven't worn a white undershirt in a long time either. Look at that. Look at Tim. Look at you.
But I've got you know, look. That is it's embarrassing to say, Zach. That is the same shirt pant combo that I wore on our new segment.
I'm glad it still fits.
You still got it. For for everyone to know, that is not the same thing I wore the other day, but it's okay. It's quite alright. Yeah. But, yeah, just show up.
I mean, it's it's Yeah. It's such a silly little thing to say. It's such a silly little thing to even think that you have to say it. But at the end of the day, most people don't show up, and they wonder why. And it's just I mean, Nike has the greatest slogan of all time.
Just do it. Yeah. Just do it. Yep. You know?
What's what what's the worst thing that could happen? Well, if you don't do anything, nothing. Yeah. So everything's gonna be better.
And everyone has an excuse for why they don't show up. Like, my favorite is oh, I got kids, man. I'm like, got I got three sons. Like, I I still show up. Like, the the groups I run are an hour, maybe two hour commitment a month.
It's not it's not like I'm dedicating a substantial part of my life to to community stuff, that I do. It's just a couple hours, and it's it's all stuff we prescheduled. So it's not like, oh my gosh. I have this thing tonight. It's just put it on your calendar.
The groups I run have been at the same time every month for fifteen years. Like, you could set your calendar back in 02/2009, and you would never miss a meeting because it would always be on the same day. So the yeah. I people like to make excuses. Don't don't make excuses.
Just show up. There's your short.
Yeah. How have you always been doing the, the consult with Griff thing? Is or is that
That was I started that in 02/2011. So the so the way it worked was I so the story is I graduated college in 02/2006. I went to work for Symantec. Symantec had a office over in Newport News off of Oyster Point. And I went there.
I was a junior software developer or junior software engineer. I was super important. I was an engineer. And I worked there for three months. And then one day, walked into the office.
They were doing all hands meeting and which was now the ordinary. They did them every couple weeks. And all hands meeting, they said, hey. We're shutting down the building. Symantec's going out of business here in Newport News, and most of you are gonna just get severance, and you're done today.
So I lost my job three months into my first first career job. And so I learned then. I'm like, alright. I'm not gonna rely on a business to to take care of myself. So any career decisions I make, it's all gonna be me focused.
I went to work for another company after that called Antech Systems in Chesapeake. Great company. Love them to death. I worked there for a couple years. And when I got there, I started looking for community outside of my job.
(04:55):
And we were doing a lot of Microsoft dot network. And there was nothing here for that, but there was there were groups up in Richmond. And I would go once a month up to Richmond to hang out with those groups and just learn as much as I could, but then also just meeting people. Like, networking became insanely important to me, and I've met a lot of great folks who I'm still friends with today. That led to me helping run some events up in Richmond.
So Richmond used to have this thing called the Richmond Code Camp, and it was twice a year. And it was a free event on a Saturday where people would come out and just learn whatever whatever is being taught. And they were getting a couple hundred people to that event, and I just met more and more people. And because I was just showing up, and even that, I was showing up after driving an hour and a half, two hours to get to Richmond. The the folks there asked me if I wanted to get involved in running events, so I started helping run the Richmond Code Camp.
I had started the HamptonRoads.net group down here in the area because I didn't wanna drive to Richmond every month anymore. And, you know, that ran for a couple years. We ran MAD Expo, the Mid Atlantic Developer Expo. That led into several years later doing RevolutionConf. And then we also ran Hampton Roads DevFest.
I've always been a big advocate of trying to get people together. I've been an advocate for teaching everything I know, and that has just kinda guided my career journey, my career success, since getting laid off by Symantec. And, yeah, it's where I am today. It's because of just being trying to be a figure in the developer community and help developers be better because we are we're all just so scattered. And every time I have had a low in my career, there's always been someone saying, hey.
I need some help, or I have a gig for you, or I have a a customer who needs, some extra hands. Could you come help? And that's led to a ton of success as a independent consultant. Oh, which I kinda totally skipped over, in 02/2011. So I was working for Antech, and I got an opportunity to to do some big contract work.
So I ended up leaving Antech to go do that contract work. I thought that was gonna be short lived, after about six, nine months, And I have been doing that since, just working with individual businesses, around the world. And I I think I would kinda put it into the bio. I've worked with military. I've worked with small mom and pop businesses.
I've worked with Fortune fifty companies and everything in between. Like, everyone everyone has a need. And
Well, I love that. I mean, just in the sense of I'll have some media people contact me, you know, in this sense of panic. Oh, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty going on in this region right now. I mean, it's just a with the shipyard or recently NASA or whatever the case is. You know?
And what are your thoughts on this? You know? How is this place gonna survive without government funding due to make this happen? And it's just like, I think we're gonna see a lot more entrepreneurship pop up as a result of this. You know?
These Yeah. Folks, they get a severance package. They bet they realize that they gotta bet on themselves much like you did. They they've identified areas and problems that need to be solved. You know?
That's I I I see that as, you know, that we're gonna see more entrepreneurship, more business pop up as a result.
The interesting just to piggyback off of that is people have been talking about that, ourselves included, for a long time. Like, you need to get off of some of these things. Yeah. And it would be better if we get off of some of these things. And so I've always, like, from a narrative perspective, would have liked people to take a more positive spin like you just did there, mister Ryan TNT, because it is a positive for a lot of people too.
Right? And you know what? Maybe a couple hundred of those people hated their jobs there. So this is actually an opportunity for them to do something that would be, you know, not so stressful for for them. And maybe there there is an opportunity for them to to learn how to vibe code and and get out there into the world.
And so yeah.
I I it's just Tiny wise is great. If you found yourself that you're like, yeah. You know, what do I do now? What do I do next? Show up to one of Kevin's events.
You know? Get you know what I mean? Like, that that's where it all starts.
You somewhere in there though, Kevin, when you were talking about your your life, you've neglected to acknowledge your previous role as a male model. I'm just wondering when that stopped.
It it never started. It makes makes good LinkedIn bait for this specific reason.
You wouldn't expect that. Were you just were you like, wait
a wasn't expecting that question, but, yeah, I I am very I very much try to not be a vanilla, like, just another face in the crowd. LinkedIn is a place where it's very easy to get lost in just to see of of people trying to sell you shit. And the you know? So when I did my LinkedIn profile, like, how do I make my header look like, you know, where I don't look like one of just the random people? And I'm like, yeah.
Bring a little bit of humor to it. And you look at me, you don't think male model. Right? So, you know, you you look at my LinkedIn header and go, oh, you know, he made the right decision not doing the modeling anymore.
(05:16):
I thought I think I believe you have one of the best headshots I've seen, So I appreciate that.
Look at
Big Balls.
Gonna make that much knows Big Balls now.
I don't know that is, but okay.
Big Balls from from Doge? His that was his LinkedIn name?
No idea. That's the most
Come on, Sam.
Oh, no. Oh, no. One of one of his boys. Yeah.
Okay. So Yep. Tim, I don't know if you know this, but Kevin Griffin is live from a shed in his backyard right now.
That's the shed quarters, man. I we follow one another on the x and
us about the Alright. Tell us about the shed quarters.
Yeah. Yeah. Because you you DIYed it. How did how did it all come about?
So what so I've been working from home since 2011. Right? I quit my job. I had nowhere to go. I didn't have to go to an office anymore.
So I was working from home, and we had a room over our garage that I was using, and that was my home office. Had kids. My first son was born in 02/2011, then another one in 02/2012. And then they got up to school age, and my wife, she, she's a doula. She works she basically stays home, and then she goes out to, to births, when when people are having babies.
So she wanted to homeschool the kids. She used to be a teacher before we had kids. And, she wanted to homeschool, and she said, I I'd like to have a dedicated place to to homeschool the kids. And our house, it was meant meant to be our starter home. Right?
And, you know, the way the housing market is, turns out it's gonna be our forever home too. The the room over the garage was the best place to to set up homeschooling stuff. And, obviously, I couldn't work in the same room as the kids were trying
to
homeschool, so I just made a off the cuff comment. I'm like, why don't I just build an office in the backyard? And my wife said, that's a great idea. You should totally do that. So I I looked around, and this is all pre COVID.
Right? So things were much, you know, more inexpensive. I ended up getting a prefabbed shed from from a place called Stateline Builders, out in Suffolk, and they, they built it. They delivered. They dropped it right in place.
And I came in, and I refinished the entire thing. So I put in insulation. I did all the drywall. I have a mini split over there for heating and air, and I ran I ran power and, Ethernet out here. So I have fully wired, ready to go.
(05:37):
Only thing I don't have is a bathroom, so I still have to go in the house to, you know, take care of business. And this has been my office for eight seven, eight years. And the best part about it and I always say, if you work from home, you should have a dedicated space for work. It shouldn't be it really shouldn't be your bedroom. It shouldn't be your living room.
I like having the dedicated space to work because I'll I come out to work. I go to work, and I work. But then when I leave work, I leave work at work. When I go in the house, it's it's family time. It's hobby time.
It's it's, you know, hanging out with my kids, doing stuff around the house. If there's a work need, I have to go into work. So there's I'm not I'm not the type of person that's just gonna go off into the corner and try to slip some work in on the couch. Work is down in the in the shed quarters, and it's I've been like that for years, and I I love it. It's made my my life so much easier, so much less stress.
What's the commute like on rainy days?
Oh. Oh, man. I have some pictures where, like, we will get those monsoons or the snow. Like, when we got the 13 inches of snow not too long ago
It was not 13, Kevin. We live close to each other. It was nine to eleven. Don't lie.
Yeah. My gosh. When we got the 26 inches of snow, you know what? If it's more than one inch of snow, it might as well be 12 to 13 because
That's right.
I I looked I looked out the back door. I'm like, crap. I have to walk through this. So first thing I did was I went out and I shoveled the the driveway, so the kids could go out and not slip. Then I brought the shovel in the backyard, and I had to shovel myself a path to my office.
And I have a little porch on the front, And I shoveled off my porch, and that's how that's how I got to work. But, yeah, there's some days where I thought about, yeah, maybe today's a good day to not work because I don't wanna have to walk through this. I bought jacket, umbrellas. Yeah.
I bought a shovel for the first time this year. I have lived here eighteen years, and this was the first time. And I'll tell you this. I'm I'm glad I bought it. Do have a shovel, Tim?
They come in handy.
Yeah. The problem is it just it just sits there all year. I I use it for thirty minutes, and then it just sits there. I mean, what a waste is $18.
Put it in the back of the garage. Put it out in a we have a garden shed as well. It lives in the garden shed. And when I know it's gonna snow, I'll move it into the garage just so it's available.
What's something we haven't talked about that you wanna talk about?
Oh my gosh. I don't know. We talked about the so developer community, we just need we need people. We're getting ready to do a a happy hour for the technologists in the area. We launched a new site a month or two ago called 757technology.org.
Great site. Super clean. I dig it.
I vibe coded that to bring this back around. Yeah. I vibe coded that entire thing because I didn't want I didn't wanna spend any time on it. I I had a couple of free hours on a weekend, and I've been working with another gentleman in the area, Ted Patterson. And we had talked about doing this, and I just sat down, vibe coded it based off of a Notion layout that we had.
And, yeah, the best part about it is it updates every day with information from meetup.com. So if we see a new event pop up on someone's calendar, it automatically gets put on the site. I'm trying to push that towards doing a weekly newsletter of the events going on for developers. Our whole emphasis is if you're a technologist coming into the area or you've been here and you're just trying to find community, you can go to 757technology.org and just see what's available. And, like, you don't have to come to my group.
There but there's a dozen other groups that would love to have you. And I wanna be a cheerleader for all the technologists in this area because that's like, we have so much talent here, and there's no reason why RevolutionConf or DevFest shouldn't have two, three thousand people showing up. Right. We have the talent here. We just we just need the people to show up.
And I think a lot of times people wanna show up because they actually probably don't know we exist. So we just need to be loud, and we need everyone to be cheerleaders for everything that's going on. So I always try to tell folks that come to our meetings or come to our conferences, come to our happy hours. Like, just, bring a friend. Bring a coworker.
(05:58):
You know, bring a random person off the street. I don't care.
That's it. Is there anything else? Worst roller coaster? Worst roller coaster you've ever been on? Like, know, it'd be one Worst roller coaster?
Oh, man.
That's a big apple coaster in New York, New York, Vegas. That one hurt.
The Togo? The one that does the upside down?
No. At the casino. Right?
At the casino in at New York, New York. Yeah. That sucker. That is one I just remember hurting.
So I just how long I mean, how how often is that maintained or inspected? Yeah. I mean, I just can't imagine that there's a
Daily?
I would assume in in Vegas, it's probably yeah.
I think they have to be I think part of, like, the whatever, the health inspector. I don't know if health is the right word. I think you have to do it daily because
Do they know what they're looking for? I don't know. I mean, it's just like for me. Like, my whole deal is and I don't think that they necessarily put up roller coasters at back in the day when there was carnivals. You know?
Like, these people at these carnivals and fairs. I mean, this stuff is getting, yeah, they're constructed, tore down, and constructed every day. You know? You know these guys, they can't wait to just finish the job and go do it, whatever it is that they do. I just don't trust it.
I mean, you've seen final destination three. That was portrayed to be at a carnival. Like, bad news bears happened that day. I mean, we can't have these kind of things. No.
Accidents do happen, but roller coasters are the are the safest form of transportation.
I did a report in high school. You are more likely get injured by a shopping cart than you are on a roller coaster.
Well, that's because people just don't put those shopping carts in in the cart corral. Great Instagram channel to follow is the cart narcs, if you've never seen it.
I've seen them. Yep. I when I was a teenager, I worked at a Kmart, and I was the cart guy. I would always go get the an iron. Learned that you know you know how you talk to someone who used to be, in the restaurant business as a server and they would say, I always tip because I know what it's like to be a server.
Those are the same people that are gonna leave a shopping cart on the other side of the parking lot. Like, always return my carts because I used to be the guy who had to walk across the parking lot on a 10 degree day to get this shot.
Be a good person.
That's what I'm saying. That's why you're a good human, Kevin Hart.
(06:19):
Mhmm. Dude, I'm with you there.
When you have a, a a great event, we're gonna vary we'll do a little variation of this, Zach. You have a you have a great event, You have to bring a go to heavy horse d'vor snack. What what what's your go to, food item that you would want to bring to this that's always, generally a hit with with your attendees?
With our attendees? So we make the joke of anything that's not pizza or subs. Like, that's but because that is the easiest way to feed a lot of people, right, is subs or pizza. If I was, you know, trying to feed a lot of people and, you know, seem like I put some time and effort and money into it, We found taco bars work really well, like make your own tacos or nachos. Those work great.
However people feel about it, Chick fil A nugget trays are always a winner. Like, those disappear overnight. But, usually, the fallback is some sort of sandwich or some sort of pizza. HR DevFest, we did sandwiches. RevolutionConf, we had a pasta day that that worked well.
Yeah. Feeding feeding a lot of people on a budget is really hard.
The challenge too, though, venue wise, is a lot of venues make you use their caterers. Yeah. And it can
be Yep.
But even but even, like, I remember we did one at ODU, and I think it was starting off at three, four. I can't recall. Pizza was the meal, and they were charging $17 a person for pizza, and it was like a slice and a cookie and a drink. I'm like, yo.
Yep.
You're robbing me. It's, like, $25 in food cost.
We the only reason money. So Revolution Kopf was at the the Wyndham down off 50 Seventh Street at the oceanfront. So first, great hotel. Like, I'm not gonna say anything about them. They're a great venue.
The biggest reason we chose them was because our food and beverage minimum was 12,000 per day. So you essentially get the space for free, but food and beverage minimum was $12,000. I'm like, I can do that. Like, that is easy. And I forgot what our actual numbers were at the end of the event, but but that's the cost of the event is usually in the food and beverage or they'll
Well, 400 people, Tim, two or three meals. That's not that bad.
Yeah.
Whatever. What was the, the hotel in Portsmouth? The Renaissance? Is that what We Was that pre or post the renovation? They've renovated it now.
I haven't been there in year. We never did an event there. We looked at doing an event there.
Oh, you looked at doing it. Okay.
We looked at doing one. Their food and beverage was, I think, would have been $3,040,000. Like, it was it was up there. We looked at doing it at the Virginia Beach Convention Center. I don't know how anyone doesn't have been there.
Like, because their food and beverage minimum was so high for Rubber And then and that's only to give you one little room up on that Second Floor. If you wanted a ballroom or anything, they they're like, oh, well, then that's an additional however many thousand dollars. And then they say, oh, did you want Wi Fi or Internet? Right. Yeah.
That'd be great. Like, alright. We can offer you a hundred KBS, for however many thousand dollars. I'm like
And would you like to start a trip? Did you yeah.
(06:40):
And I remember having this discussion going, oh, there's absolutely no way we can be here. Like and this is even after we had, Ray over at economic development. Like Ray White. Yeah. Like, we should have had help, and we got nothing.
So we ended up going to these hotels. It's why the Zeters Theater in Virginia Beach was was great. It's a nonprofit.
Who owns those venues? The cities? Are conventions, convention centers owned by cities? Are they a city run thing?
I think I think it's kinda like a half and half situation. I used to work for the city, and I remember setting up networks over there. So I think a good portion of it is city employees.
So Well, they didn't see the worst. Especially when you're trying to do something from a community perspective.
How else you gonna pay for all this other junk they're doing?
Well, I will say, for those that do sponsor events that we put on, I I do take that to heart, and I will frequently support them
Yeah. In return.
Well, mister roller coaster man, congratulations. This was great. Appreciate your time, Kevin. Good to see you. We there's so much more we could have talked about.
Maybe we'll do another episode in a couple years.
Yeah. Anytime.
Can't wait to look at the, what's your male model status is at that point. You know?
You hit the gym a little bit more. Yeah. We'll see if it comes back.
Well, you know, they say you can make some money on OnlyFans. So, well,
on that note
Thank you all. Have a great day. Like, subscribe, download. Thank you for watching, listening. Have a great day.
Cheerio. Shabbos.
A lot of the success of using an offshore team is if you have a a trusted professional to oversee them. Because I what I've seen in a lot of cases, I've worked with overseas teams. Like, there's there's a lot of talented folks overseas. But what happens is you have, usually a nontechnical person come in and go, I'm gonna pay this overseas team to build my vision and do my v one. And they're just they're just cranking out code.
(00:01):
And it's never to the the spec of the requirement or to the expectation of the person who's who's paying them. So a lot of times, those offshore projects will fail just because there's not a person overseeing the work being done to comment on this is good, this is crap. And AI is very similar to that. If you're a nontechnical person asking the AI to do something, the AI is probably gonna give you crap.
Well, for the first time ever, second time for you, you and I went live on TV.
That's right.
And, you know, they say, camera adds a couple pounds. They made me look like a freaking giant.
Well, Looking at the replay, man, I look like I'm just a a a little little tiny fella.
I know I have large legs. Okay? But it looked like I had tree trunks that were four times the size of yours. And you got some pretty strong legs because, you know, you're running forty thousand days in a row.
Speaking of which, Zach, tomorrow is tomorrow is the 11 year birthday.
Whoop. Whoop.
Yeah.
I got an email today. Two hundred sixty nine days until the one city marathon.
I
don't envision me ever doing a marathon again. Could be wrong, but maybe I'll do a half. Throw in
Half is a good distance. But yeah. So it did you like being live? Live and in color?
You know, it was interesting. Once I got going, I was fine. I I I definitely I felt myself rocking on the I could see I could at one point, I looked down, and I could just see my leg going.
I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just so funny.
I mean, we do we do this. We've this is year six as we've discussed. We're in front of the camera a lot.
It's different.
It's different.
This is our controlled environment. It's completely different when you're in someone else's in someone else's home. You know, I'm sitting there. We were only in the studio for four minutes. The whole thing was three minutes.
Three minutes and forty seven seconds. Yeah.
My hand was slobbering, soaking wet. Went to shake the guy's hand. It was it just went down. He was, like, disgusted, but, you know, whatever. Today's guest, Kevin Griffin.
(00:22):
Have you ever been live on TV before? Not like a podcast or something like that.
No. No. No.
Do you think you'd I don't
think I have. I I saw the the clip. You guys did a great job.
Thank you. It was, I think if we had a second segment, we would've been a lot better. You know? Maybe the
pause that everything went well. It it was just it was funny. You just have a lot on your mind. Your your mind is so it's just like trying to slow everything down. And then once we leave there, Megan, Zach's partner in crime.
She's like Yep. Zach, you didn't smile at all. And then I got to thinking. I'm like, jeez. I didn't even think about smiling either, but just because I had so many other things on my mind.
I have RBF. I have a bad case of it. It's really bad. People, like, people don't get it. I'm not mad.
I'm not angry. I I'm literally just I'm focused, and I was I was concentrating.
Yeah. Yeah.
And, like, I wasn't thinking to smile. You know?
Yeah. Thankfully, I was.
I did see a little smirk, though. I did make a smirk at one point. Was
Well, you had the you had the, the sweet basketball.
I did. I got that in there.
You got the little coco in.
I yeah. I referred we we got a quick little coronavirus, coco in there. It's called the coco cap. I told people the worst advice you could take in business is listening to your mother because she's gonna give you bad advice. I thought I had, like, 2.5 good one liners in there, including my missed shot at the very end.
Yeah. It was good. I appreciate them taking in interest in the World Cup. It's a big deal with something we all need to rally around.
Yeah. Thank you to thirteen News Now. Hopefully, other stations as well will be interested in having these two clowns.
You're no, Kevin. You're no stranger to putting on events. It's it's a lot of work. It's a hustle.
I I was looking back at the the calendar, and I think I've been developing I I've been developing developer events for almost twenty years, like, coming up coming up to that milestone.
(00:43):
I feel like I met you at Mad Made Expo.
Mad Expo. That's right. Yep.
And that had to have been well, I quit TV news in 2010. Yep. It had to have been Titan days because that would have been ten to twelve. So it had to have been somewhere in there because you did that
11:20 twelve, I think. Yeah.
Hampton Hampton Convention Center?
Hampton Hampton Convention Center. I was surprised we got that venue. It turned out to be a great venue. Cheap. Did yeah.
Was exactly what we needed at the time. Yeah. I really missed that event, and it's a great story about why we didn't do a third version of it. Not sure if anyone wants to hear that, but it's great for over beers and stuff.
No. No. No. No. No.
No.
Event stuff. So you try to get speakers to come in. We are looking for sponsors. We're, selling tickets. And we were doing these biweekly check ins as kind we had a core group of guys that were managing the the event.
And I think we are about a month before the event. We are more month before our our go date, like drop dead go date, where we had to commit to the venue. And one of the folks said he was in charge of sponsorship, like, reaching out, and we already had relationships with a lot of them. He said, I'm gonna reach out to the sponsors today. And we're like, have you not reached out to any of the sponsors?
Do we not have any committed sponsor's dollars? And turns out we had zero sponsor dollars, thirty five days before the event. And, we went back and looked at ticket sales. Like, alright. Well, how many tickets will we need to sell?
The assuming the worst case, we had absolutely no sponsorship, and we made the decision that because we didn't have any sponsorship dollars, there was no way we were gonna sell the number of tickets that we had to sell that we we actually decided to cancel the event. And once you cancel an event, you can never uncancel an event. So we decided Mad Expo was done, and was just a fond memory of all those involved, but that was the reason the the folks in charge of sponsorship did not do any outreach for sponsorship. And I I learned a big lesson from that was that it's never one person in charge of sponsorship. It it always needs to be a team effort for sponsorship.
And whenever you look at budgets, you always talk about sponsorship. Like, it's it's always the conversation piece because you it's very difficult to do an event without any sponsorship. Like, you have to charge people outrageous dollars to get into the door, and I don't think people really realize how much sponsorship offsets an event. And we had to cancel because we didn't have any sponsorship.
Yeah. Well, venues are not venues are not cheap in in in many cases. I don't know what
Well, the crazy thing about that, it's just like, I don't ever want anyone to lose money. Yeah. But it's like but a lot of some people are like, we're we're willing to keep this thing empty, lights off, and, like, just don't take advantage of us. You know? We're just trying to make you know, build community, get something started.
It's not like the city state of city addresses, you know, where there's a huge budget for things like that. You know, I think a lot of times, it's it's exactly what you said. It's community building and stuff like that. I remember after starting off at two I feel like this is the right time frame. We had sent out a this is hatch days.
We had sent out a survey. What's missing? Everything that was great about Start Norfolk, people wanted more of, but people like, we had these speaker sessions. I don't know if you ever spoke at Start Norfolk. I can't recall.
But at certain over two, I think that's the one where we had about 350, four hundred people, 73 ideas. And we had a and then a single track of speakers going while people were also building in a separate room, but it was great. Great speakers were there, but a lot of people weren't able to go over there because they were over here. And people were like, well, what if we could just do the speaker thing? I was like, cool.
Let's do it. We'll do this event called drop anchor. We landed this we we we landed this venue in Norfolk, which is where TC's theater is. I can't think of what that's called right now. Roper?
The Roper. Roper Theater. Yep. 600 it was 600 seats. We had sponsors, though, Kevin.
(01:04):
Yeah. So we did okay on the sponsor side, but then could it
sell tickets? Getting speakers too.
Yeah. Oh, you speak like, I remember looking back at this maybe since we've done the show, really good speakers that have now even gone on to, like, do some really crazy things. So I'm like, damn. I can't remember what we charged per ticket. I wanna say $300.
But we made some I don't I feel like sometimes you can get customer discovery, and it doesn't really tell you the answer. And I feel like in this case, we we we maybe it told us the answer, but we didn't go deep enough. Whereas, like, okay. Like, a two day event, maybe the money was too expensive. People have to work.
There's too many assumptions on our part. But, cancel that. I remember when I canceled that, like, that was real tough.
Yeah. That was You're not a guy that stresses about much, and that that was that seemed to be a stressful dark place for you.
I must hide it really well. That is great. No. I mean, look. It sucks.
Like, I feel like you're you're you have this trajectory where, like, everything's going great, and you're feeding off of those things and you're trying to play off of that. And then when it doesn't, you're like, damn. The good thing is, though, is because no one really knew about the event, once I canceled it, no one knew that it was canceled because no one care. Like but I just think you have I mean, that was, what, twenty thirteen, twelve years from now or twelve years ago. You just have high hopes for the people and the community and the region.
Like, you want to show them, like, you can do something big. And sometimes when people don't jump on board, I think that can be it's like, you have to look look inside and say, okay. Like, what am I doing wrong to show this thing that I know you want because you've told me? What am I like, what is the is the facade wrong? What could I do to kinda open the door and say, come at me?
There's definitely a running theme in every event I've run since. So, primarily, we've had, let me point. So RevolutionConf, it was our big four three, four hundred person event we ran here in in Virginia Beach. Hampton Roads DevFest is our smaller it's our hyper local locals event. That one was about 200 people.
But, like, every time we sit down to to do one of these events, I ask myself the question, like, do I trust this area to show up? And I, you know, I say that. I go through the events, and they show up. Like, I I I feel like sometimes I'm gonna run an event. I'm gonna put all this money and effort into something, and no one's gonna show up for But they've done a good job in the past of of showing up.
This, DevFest we did this past year, we broke our records in just the number of people that showed up to it. So they'll they'll show up. It it's just really hard to start doing all that work without the guarantee that that they're gonna come. So, yeah, it's the biggest reason I haven't done another RevolutionConf is I wanna hit numbers like four or 500 people, and that it just takes a lot of trust for folks to show up for that. That's I I don't think I'm ready to to pull that plug yet.
Well, if you're stressing, all you have to do is crack open a crunchy hydration. This one is watermelon calm plus stress relief. Sponsored?
Shout out to Meg.
No. But they should be now. Right? Well, I mean, they they they gave me this. So, technically, I had to give them some product placement, I guess.
You know?
Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna drink out of my Portsmouth YETI.
You know, Tim has never had a YETI cup before until about a month ago?
I'm too cheap.
Like that.
Too cheap.
(01:25):
How did you guys meet?
It was at Eurobet.
It was? Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. Okay.
So we talked about events. Though that's a badass poster, by the way. I think the the DevFest one, whoever designed that, super rad. We have something very much in common outside of business, outside of events, and maybe yours still love. I don't it's not that I don't love these things anymore, but I just haven't really done in a while.
Roller coasters. I think I've been on about a hundred
Show the names up on the bottom of the screen. I think that's a roller coaster
Oh, yeah.
It puts
the emoji in my name. And it wasn't just for this. I've always had the emoji in my stream, StreamYard link.
Really?
Yeah.
And here I am. I can't figure out to do it. There we go. There we go. There we go.
There we go.
There we go. That's cool. I need to figure out how to do that. Okay. So you just hit your one hundredth roller coaster.
I think I'm somewhere between one fifty, one 60.
Yeah.
There used to be a a place, a website where you could track all of them. I tried finding it the other day, but I couldn't remember it. Is there something like that does that now?
A lot of folks use an app called LogRide to track their rides. I know a lot of people just use spreadsheets. Yeah. That's kinda what I do is I just It
would be hard for me to figure that out. Rides.
Because there's something level of tracking. Like, some people don't just track their unique rides or unique credits. They track the number of times they've been on certain rides. Like, I don't I can't tell you how many times I've been on any given ride. Like, that is a level of analysis that I I can't do, but I can tell you unique rides I've been on.
A polished chariot's your go to. I know I've seen some writing about that.
(01:46):
Love that. Right? Yeah.
Great ride. Is is that your all time favorite?
It's all it's it's my all time favorite, not because it's
it's not
the best or anything, but it's like you it's like my La Z Boy. I can go get
on a holiday period. Yeah.
Yeah. Just I would just sit there and take a nap. Just let me enjoy, up and down around and around. There are similar rides in other parks that are probably better ride, like subjectively objectively better rides.
Well, Nitro in the same year as that. At Six Flags Nitro at Six Flags Great Adventure, same company B and M. We're getting we're nerding out here, Tim, as as the ones who built Apollo's. They also did Alpenguise.
Yep.
A couple others.
But, I rode Orion recently at Kings Island, similar similar model as Apollo's Chariot. Probably a better ride, but Mako down in SeaWorld, Florida, you know, same type of ride. But, you know, Apollo's Chariot is just I just love it. So it's always gonna be my number one until they tear down and still gonna be number number one.
I think it's a little too short.
It could be longer. Yeah. I agree.
What is what is the longest duration ride of a roller coaster?
Well, Beast. Right? You're 100?
Yeah.
Beast is the longest wooden coaster, I think, in the world.
And oh, longest running or the longest in duration of the ride?
Oh, which one do you want?
I was looking for the duration of the ride. Just figured they all
had to be There's one in Europe that's like a mine train Yeah. That it's got a couple couple lift hills. I'd say the most rides are probably, what, two minutes, and the majority of that is lift hill. But I think this one's, like, three, four minutes. Beast, I think, is longest wooden coaster.
(02:07):
I think so.
What was your like, how what did you think of that?
I love the beast. It's so I chose it as my hundredth simply because it's a classic. I wanted to make sure I had a classic coaster as my hundredth. And because there's a lot of throwaway coasters that that just exist because they needed to fill a spot, And I didn't want one of those to be my hundred, so I planned the entire day around riding beast for number 100. So I'm a member of ACE, the American Coaster Enthusiasts.
They they have several landmark coasters throughout the, I would say The US, but around the world. So there's a couple in Europe as well. But Beast is one of them that it's a designated classic coaster. And, like, you could say Beast, anyone who knows coasters at all knows Beast. I I love the ride.
It wish I could have done it at night because, apparently, night rides on Beast are an out of body experience. I didn't have the time for that, but we did, you know, late afternoon ride. It was raining. It was running really fast, and there's there's two halves of it. The first half was amazing.
The first half threw me a little bit. I don't think I was ready for the second half of beast. So a little bit of Tylenol could fix that issue, though.
Yeah. So it's two lift hills. It goes up, and then the first part, Tim, it goes basically through the force at basically ground level, but a lot of twists and turns. And so where a lot of roller coasters now will do the this side of it, a lot of it is really the turns, but not really turning. And then it speeds up allegedly faster at night.
And then you get to the second lift hill, and then it goes down this double helix, which when my mom's been on this in, like, two thousand, so twenty five years ago, it bruised her. It was that rough. So it's a it it's pretty brutal. It would not be my fur my favorite. I think Raven is my furthest favorite at, Holiday World.
Steel would be Millennium Force.
I love the Millennium Force. Yep.
So good. Tim, what about
you? The top three for me.
The Millennium Force, that's your point?
Yeah. Yep. You've been on it?
Yeah.
Hell yeah.
There we go.
Is that it? Is that your favorite?
No. That was that was good. I liked I mean, I I am an Apollo's chariot guy.
It's good. Come on, man. What are we
talking about? It was a long time ago, man. So I can't the the adrenaline is no longer flowing from that. When I was a kid, Darien Lake was always a really popular place, and I think it was the Viper. That was, like, the first steel coaster that, that they had.
(02:28):
So, dude, I've rode that many, many, many, many times.
It's not a Woody? No. Okay. They got a Woody there. Yeah.
I can't
Have you guys been to Darien Lake?
Yeah. I have. I have. They have okay. So my home park growing up was Six Flags America.
It's closing this year. They had a Superman the ride, which was basically up, down, around Yep. The helix, up, down, boom, boom. Another helix, I think, and then a crazy crazy bunny hop triple. Yep.
And Darren Lake had a mirror image of that. So during the time, I was going this way, but then we went to Darren Lake. It went that way. This is what we did growing up. My brother and sister hated it.
Our vacations would be going to amusement parks. I was told this when I got married when my brother gave a speech and was like, I had to go to all these stupid places instead of going to the beach every year or something like that. And now I don't write them at all. So is that, like, your hobby?
To a poor and couldn't go to never went to theme parks. I only went to Busch Gardens. And, like, when I was a teenager, I got to go to Kings Dominion for the first time. Like and then when I started making my own money and I could start affording to go places, like, that reinvigorated my love of roller coasters. So now I can now I'm trying to get a new park, like, one or two new parks a year.
That's kinda my goal.
Busch Gardens is underrated.
It is. Yeah.
What's the first instance you have traveled to attend a park?
I plan a lot around conferences. So if I go do conference speaking, so la actually, that's so that's why I went to Kings Island was I was in Columbus for a conference, and I scheduled an extra day, drove out to Kings Island. And I took my son with me, and we did everything there. Last year, I was in Kansas City, so I planned a day before I went to worlds of fun, rode everything there. That was great because I was I took an Uber to worlds of fun, which I've never done before, rode all five, six coasters they have, and then it started thunderstorming.
I'm like, alright. I'm good. Got an Uber, came back to the hotel. So got everything knocked down in, like, three hours.
Is that Mamba there? What's their what's their
I'm trying to remember what their steel, is. I don't know.
And Dorney Park and then Valley Fair, I feel like, all have, like, the same similar stuff. The fact that I don't watch any roller coaster things and I still have that in my brain is ridiculous to me. This is all muscle memory. And this is what I did from, like, '16, '17, '18, '19, '20. I did I did what are those, like, boards that you do that you, like like, construction boards, Like, you do, like, projects for in school?
Like, mine were always rolling those to Vision board. Oh, those,
like, trifold?
No. Not a vision. Yeah. The trifold thing, not a vision board. People thought I was gonna design roller coasters.
(02:49):
That was, like, the thing. Oh, god. It's crazy.
Roller coaster tycoon. Loved that game. Yeah. I was there.
Dude.
Alright. We could I could talk about roller coaster now.
I I have a question. Let's And, you know, so I'll I'm gonna borderline make myself look foolish. But, dude, all of a sudden, like, out of nowhere, like, within the last month or two, the the phrase that I hear all over the place is vibe coding.
Mhmm.
What is what is the deal with vibe coding, and and why all of a sudden is that such a a hot phrase?
Okay. So I I do a lot of vibe coding myself. So vibe coding is essentially you're you're sitting down with an editor, and you're giving instructions to to AI to build a project for you. So strictly, vibe coding is you're never actually doing the work yourself. You're instructing the AI to to do the work on your behalf.
So I like to create a an iOS app, and it should be called blah and, you know, add a here's some requirements for what the the app should do. And the I AI will go off and build it, and then it will come back and go, did I do a good job? And go, no. You didn't because it never does. And you give it follow-up, instructions.
Oh, I like you to make the color blue instead of green, and I like you to do this and that. And it's a vibe because you're just, like, spitballing ideas and requirements to the AI, and the AI is going off and doing the work. That's I do I do a fair bit of that now. It's a a really good way to, I guess, for call myself a trained professional. I'm a trained professional to go do a lot of work very quickly that probably would take me hours if I was doing all by hand, but having the AI do a lot of it for me upfront, makes just makes my life easier.
So I'm not sure if that directly answers your question. That that's that's essentially what vibe coding is, is letting the AI do the work for you and you not touching the code at all.
It is quite the it's it's quite the buzzword. I hear it everywhere.
So I think lot of a lot of people are threatened by the robots.
Yeah.
But you as a full time developer.
Yeah.
You're like, let's let's jump on this ride. Sounds
like. It's a it's a tool. Like so everything I do is building a bigger toolbox and filling it with tools that I can use to solve problems. And Vibe Coding AI is a tool. And I think some people look at it as this is the tool that's gonna replace me.
And that's not wrong depending on what level of professional you are. But I think the the people who are really gonna win are the professionals that take the tool and just add it as part of their their workflow. I use AI to help me talk through big problems. And in the same way, whereas before, if I had a big problem, I would jump on a call with two or three folks I trust immensely and just toss ideas back and forth. I don't have to talk to a person now to do that.
I can talk to an AI, and the AI will give me feedback. In some cases, give me references to different ways that I can solve the problem. And in a lot of cases, we could we, me and the AI, we spitball a solution, and then I can say, well, can you go mock that up for me? And the AI will go do all the hard work of mocking up a solution for me to review. And what ends up happening is they'll do that work, and I'll go, you know what?
I changed my mind. That's awful. I don't wanna do it that way. I think I wanna do it a different way. And the AI doesn't have any sort of ego.
(03:10):
So the AI will say, okay. Let's just throw away all that work I did. Let's start from scratch, and let's do something different. So I think it's gonna make in the future iterating solutions much faster. I can do a very fast v one and then a very fast v two.
And then usually by your v three, you're honing in on the thing you actually wanted to build. And for a variety of businesses out there, that's that's the critical part. Like, so much so many resources are wasted on that v one. And once you finish v one, you realize that's not what you actually wanted. What you wanted was v two or v three.
So being able to get that v one done soon
is It makes me think like back in the day for all the kids that are listening, there used to be cameras and you would have 24 exposures. Yeah. And you had to be really, really selective on what you wanted to take a picture of because once the film was gone, the film was gone. Switching over to digital as we know, you know, you can take as many pictures as you want. And now with, vibe coding, you can, it's kind of the same deal, but with code as opposed to film.
I never thought about that, but that's a great analogy.
So over the years, you've heard well, first of all, do you have a name for your, robots? No. I have a name for mine. You I mean, the way you were talking to it, like, you probably should. You kinda
I don't think I can say it on the air.
Oh, I wasn't there a movie about that, like, or Ah Machina or something like that? Like alright. Well, thanks for being on the show today, Kevin. We appreciate it. You know how so many people would outsource overseas, like Yeah.
Tech tech stuff? It almost I never thought of this until just now. It almost makes me think that if they had gone through a process like what you just said, first iteration, second iteration, third iteration, and had done that first and then shoved it overseas, maybe they actually would have gotten their money's worth.
Yep.
Because you hear so many horror stories. I don't I don't know if people still do this. I guess they do. Right? Outsource to The Philippines and other other nations from that perspective.
But if they go through that process, you could probably fix a lot of that challenges.
A lot of the success of using an offshore team is if you have a a trusted professional to oversee them. Because I what I've seen in a lot of cases, I've worked with overseas teams. Like, there's there's a lot of talented folks overseas. But what happens is you have, usually a nontechnical person come in and go, I'm gonna pay this overseas team to build my vision and do my v one. And they're just they're just cranking out code.
And it's never to the the spec of the requirement or to the expectation of the person who's who's paying them. So a lot of times, those offshore projects will fail just because there's not a person overseeing the work being done to comment on this is good. This is crap. And AI is very similar to that. If you're a nontechnical person asking AI to do something, the AI is probably gonna give you crap, and you're not gonna realize it.
But having a technical person overseeing that process and understanding that, oh, this is an issue. That's an issue. That's not what the the business owner wants or or whatnot. If you don't have that person, you're just gonna keep getting crap. You need that you need that person with technical chops to to oversee everything.
Have you seen the, the technical landscape evolve over the course of the last fifteen, twenty years here here locally within Hampton Roads?
Here locally. It's gotten better. It's gotten bigger. We we actually have a lot of we have a lot of tech in the area that is very quiet. Yeah.
I think ten, fifteen years ago, if you asked me, what's the technical landscape of Hampton Roads? It was a military contract or health care contract. And, you know, since then, it's there's a lot more private businesses. You all did a thing with Yellow Dog, not too long ago. Like, Yellow Dog was one of those companies that I had never heard of until we were doing DevFest, and they just kinda came out of the shadows.
Well, like, oh, yeah. We're a we're a software company in in Hampton Roads. It's like, oh my gosh. It's like these all these companies exist. They're just very quiet, very to themselves.
And it's, yeah, it's kinda relieving because when I was starting events here, and I've run user groups in the area for for developers for years and years and years, it's just it's always been military. It's always been health care, and it's never been never been private business.
Interesting.
(03:31):
Yellow dog. I used to golf with Jay Livinggood a lot. Like, he like, like, two times a week when I golfed. You know? I was not I don't think I've ever hit par.
Hell, I don't think I've ever gotten three over par. I mean, on one hole. Not not anything crazy.
But I always say high score wins. Right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Very I I watched that video. That was pretty cool. Like, because I had asked him to invest in Hatch '20 '11, '12, '13 time frame. Passed on it, which is fine. No.
I mean, there's no problem there. But he was just starting to ramp that up. Because I think in the video, he said it's 17. They're 17 years old or something like that. So that means it would've been, what, o eight time frame.
But, I mean, it's pretty it's pretty wild, like, when you can get resilient and gritty, stick with it. What can happen? There's 75 employees now. They do the inventory management for a crazy amount of stadiums in in the country, maybe the world. I can't remember.
But it's pretty cool that something like that is happening in your own backyard.
What is what is what is the series that you're talking about, Zach?
Oh, you're talking about disrupting the tide?
Yeah. What is that?
Well, I believe, disrupting the tide is a series of documentary style videos that tell the story of Hampton Roads businesses in a way that they've never been seen before.
Love it. Clip it. Let's roll.
Well, I'll consider it. No. But, I mean, I think kind of back to, like, your point, like, earlier, like, do I trust the region?
Yeah.
Or do I do I trust that these people will show up? Right? I think a lot of times people in this region are negative first, but there's a lot of people that are positive first that are like, we're doing these things for you. Like, there's opportunities here. Right?
And so, like, I think just from the tide is is is also telling that story and being like, okay. Like, I talked about the facade earlier. So, okay. Well, let me show you the facade a little differently. Right?
This is a peel be peeling back of the onion of some of the companies that are doing some pretty rad stuff in the region. Maybe you've heard of them. Maybe you haven't. But then, you know, I think at some point, like, you you keep telling that you you keep going up that roller coaster, at some point, like, it's like, okay. We're at the top.
Let's start going down that ride and realizing, like, this is a fun little thing that we got going on here in the old seven five seven.
Yep. Also all
(03:52):
know it's good stuff. You know?
Yeah. It's all good stuff. I think another comment I would make just in the general landscape of the the all the events going on is there's, what's the nicest way to say this? There's a lack of up there's a lack of upcoming leadership. Like, there's it's the same folks doing all the events doing putting in all the initiative to to get this stuff off off the ground.
Like, we're kinda alluding to it earlier. Like, we've been doing this
Yeah. I
for a long time.
Desperately, anybody that wants to be my replacement, let's let's start working and doing that now.
The people who say, hey. Can I help? Yes. Like, you want the easiest way to just meet the people worth knowing in this area. Like, get involved in any of this.
Like, I'm not even talking to the developer stuff. Like, if you wanna get involved in developer stuff, you know, talk to me. There's a bunch of other leaders in the software developer space here. But if you wanna start, you know, do something leadership wise in the startup community, like, no one's gonna tell you no. Never is gonna tell you no.
And we desperately need that next generation of leader coming in to help run these events. I the biggest reason I haven't done RevolutionCon, because I'm tired. Like, I've run four of them. I've run four or five DevFest. Like, I'm just I need a break.
Like, my kids are teenagers. I I can't do all this work. I really need someone else to show a little bit of initiative. Like, the the seeds are already planted. We just need someone to come help water them.
Yeah. It's a new fresh ideas, young energy, always a a super positive thing and and always welcome it.
I have not attended this, but I've seen it through the socials. Maybe but either of you guys have seen it. But it sounds like there's some version of Start Norfolk out there called seven five seven Build Weekend.
Every Yep.
I know Lionel Sapp, who we've had on the show, is somehow involved in some of these things. He seems like an an interesting individual. Love his energy. He has volunteered. He he'd helped us volunteer for the world CEREC World Cup last year.
Love his energy and stuff like that. But it's like what you're saying. It's like, who who are those next people? And we we had Jared Jared Bieler of Sway on an advertising agency on a few weeks ago. He kinda said the same thing.
He's like, you know, I'm doing these things now for the next wave of people. Yeah. And it's it's just really interesting to sit back and to even think that. Like, hey. Like, that was a long damn time ago.
Yep. Like, I I saw something the other day. Was like, damn. I haven't talked to that person since 2017.
Yeah.
That's almost a decade ago. And I talked to this person a lot back then. Yeah. So it's just it's just crazy. Yeah.
I mean, it's it's
It is wild. Just I mean, it's a I don't feel like I have aged at all. And when I look back at those pictures from back in the day, I'm like
(04:13):
Oh, dude. These kids. Yeah. I
had I had just for the audience to know, Apple has this. I got an iPhone. And, like, every day, they have, like, a new feature picture of the day, which is, like, your old stuff. And, usually, when I have a picture with Tim and there's not a lot of them. Right?
We probably see each other four times a year if that. I will send it to him. And one of this was at, I believe, your celebration of Launchpad.
Okay.
And that was 2015, '20 '16, because I'm pretty sure you're wearing the star suit.
Yeah. That was the debut.
Zero grays in that in that hair, Tim. Just wanna let you know. So ten years ago, no grays. I'm skipping gray. I'm going straight to white.
Look at this beard. Like, this this is ridiculous. And I'm not gonna die. I'm not gonna be one of those people. I refuse.
Yeah. I'm gonna
say that now. I say that now, but maybe when it all
I thought about ship has sailed. If I change it now, man, everyone would know. I don't think you can make a grant
It's everyone can know when it happens.
That's absolutely right.
Like, don't like, I look at these people, Mike, seriously, like, I I may maybe I I haven't lived to that, so I have to be empathetic with that. But it's like, we can tell. That's not your natural color. Like, it ain't working. Like, don't just get the just for men and just put it in.
It ain't working. This this episode has gone way off the rockers, and I'm all for it.
Well, I knew that it was gonna go down this way because we've been we've been at we all of us have been at this for a really long time.
Yeah. Well, I mean, if I go back and I look at my career, I I guess, kinda bring it back into, I guess, what I think the original topic was supposed to be. Like, the best career mood I made back so I got out of college in 02/2006. Best career move I ever made was going to a group in 02/2007, saying hi to someone, and then, like, coming back. Like, people don't understand how much of a leg up you get if you just show up.
Yeah. Like, because just showing up to a group wasn't even here in Hampton Roads. It was up in Richmond. Like, there was nothing here, and I was going to Richmond to participate in groups up there before I started doing groups down here. And, like, just showing up more than once or twice, like, people will start to remember you, and that was the springboard for me being able to go into independent consulting and basically becoming a a known quantity in the the software developer, you know, group here in Virginia and most of the Mid Atlantic.
It's just show up. Like, it's easiest thing to do, and you'll never have to worry about a job if you just show up.
I call that raising your damn hand. You never know what can happen.
Never.
(04:34):
I got good news, guys. I found the picture.
Oh, boy.
Here we go.
Oh, yeah. There it is. Actually, now that I think about it, I don't no. You weren't wearing that might not that might be the second party. I don't know.
Anyways, I haven't worn that shirt in a while. I haven't worn a white undershirt in a long time either. Look at that. Look at Tim. Look at you.
But I've got you know, look. That is it's embarrassing to say, Zach. That is the same shirt pant combo that I wore on our new segment.
I'm glad it still fits.
You still got it. For for everyone to know, that is not the same thing I wore the other day, but it's okay. It's quite alright. Yeah. But, yeah, just show up.
I mean, it's it's Yeah. It's such a silly little thing to say. It's such a silly little thing to even think that you have to say it. But at the end of the day, most people don't show up, and they wonder why. And it's just I mean, Nike has the greatest slogan of all time.
Just do it. Yeah. Just do it. Yep. You know?
What's what what's the worst thing that could happen? Well, if you don't do anything, nothing. Yeah. So everything's gonna be better.
And everyone has an excuse for why they don't show up. Like, my favorite is oh, I got kids, man. I'm like, got I got three sons. Like, I I still show up. Like, the the groups I run are an hour, maybe two hour commitment a month.
It's not it's not like I'm dedicating a substantial part of my life to to community stuff, that I do. It's just a couple hours, and it's it's all stuff we prescheduled. So it's not like, oh my gosh. I have this thing tonight. It's just put it on your calendar.
The groups I run have been at the same time every month for fifteen years. Like, you could set your calendar back in 02/2009, and you would never miss a meeting because it would always be on the same day. So the yeah. I people like to make excuses. Don't don't make excuses.
Just show up. There's your short.
Yeah. How have you always been doing the, the consult with Griff thing? Is or is that
That was I started that in 02/2011. So the so the way it worked was I so the story is I graduated college in 02/2006. I went to work for Symantec. Symantec had a office over in Newport News off of Oyster Point. And I went there.
I was a junior software developer or junior software engineer. I was super important. I was an engineer. And I worked there for three months. And then one day, walked into the office.
They were doing all hands meeting and which was now the ordinary. They did them every couple weeks. And all hands meeting, they said, hey. We're shutting down the building. Symantec's going out of business here in Newport News, and most of you are gonna just get severance, and you're done today.
So I lost my job three months into my first first career job. And so I learned then. I'm like, alright. I'm not gonna rely on a business to to take care of myself. So any career decisions I make, it's all gonna be me focused.
I went to work for another company after that called Antech Systems in Chesapeake. Great company. Love them to death. I worked there for a couple years. And when I got there, I started looking for community outside of my job.
(04:55):
And we were doing a lot of Microsoft dot network. And there was nothing here for that, but there was there were groups up in Richmond. And I would go once a month up to Richmond to hang out with those groups and just learn as much as I could, but then also just meeting people. Like, networking became insanely important to me, and I've met a lot of great folks who I'm still friends with today. That led to me helping run some events up in Richmond.
So Richmond used to have this thing called the Richmond Code Camp, and it was twice a year. And it was a free event on a Saturday where people would come out and just learn whatever whatever is being taught. And they were getting a couple hundred people to that event, and I just met more and more people. And because I was just showing up, and even that, I was showing up after driving an hour and a half, two hours to get to Richmond. The the folks there asked me if I wanted to get involved in running events, so I started helping run the Richmond Code Camp.
I had started the HamptonRoads.net group down here in the area because I didn't wanna drive to Richmond every month anymore. And, you know, that ran for a couple years. We ran MAD Expo, the Mid Atlantic Developer Expo. That led into several years later doing RevolutionConf. And then we also ran Hampton Roads DevFest.
I've always been a big advocate of trying to get people together. I've been an advocate for teaching everything I know, and that has just kinda guided my career journey, my career success, since getting laid off by Symantec. And, yeah, it's where I am today. It's because of just being trying to be a figure in the developer community and help developers be better because we are we're all just so scattered. And every time I have had a low in my career, there's always been someone saying, hey.
I need some help, or I have a gig for you, or I have a a customer who needs, some extra hands. Could you come help? And that's led to a ton of success as a independent consultant. Oh, which I kinda totally skipped over, in 02/2011. So I was working for Antech, and I got an opportunity to to do some big contract work.
So I ended up leaving Antech to go do that contract work. I thought that was gonna be short lived, after about six, nine months, And I have been doing that since, just working with individual businesses, around the world. And I I think I would kinda put it into the bio. I've worked with military. I've worked with small mom and pop businesses.
I've worked with Fortune fifty companies and everything in between. Like, everyone everyone has a need. And
Well, I love that. I mean, just in the sense of I'll have some media people contact me, you know, in this sense of panic. Oh, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty going on in this region right now. I mean, it's just a with the shipyard or recently NASA or whatever the case is. You know?
And what are your thoughts on this? You know? How is this place gonna survive without government funding due to make this happen? And it's just like, I think we're gonna see a lot more entrepreneurship pop up as a result of this. You know?
These Yeah. Folks, they get a severance package. They bet they realize that they gotta bet on themselves much like you did. They they've identified areas and problems that need to be solved. You know?
That's I I I see that as, you know, that we're gonna see more entrepreneurship, more business pop up as a result.
The interesting just to piggyback off of that is people have been talking about that, ourselves included, for a long time. Like, you need to get off of some of these things. Yeah. And it would be better if we get off of some of these things. And so I've always, like, from a narrative perspective, would have liked people to take a more positive spin like you just did there, mister Ryan TNT, because it is a positive for a lot of people too.
Right? And you know what? Maybe a couple hundred of those people hated their jobs there. So this is actually an opportunity for them to do something that would be, you know, not so stressful for for them. And maybe there there is an opportunity for them to to learn how to vibe code and and get out there into the world.
And so yeah.
I I it's just Tiny wise is great. If you found yourself that you're like, yeah. You know, what do I do now? What do I do next? Show up to one of Kevin's events.
You know? Get you know what I mean? Like, that that's where it all starts.
You somewhere in there though, Kevin, when you were talking about your your life, you've neglected to acknowledge your previous role as a male model. I'm just wondering when that stopped.
It it never started. It makes makes good LinkedIn bait for this specific reason.
You wouldn't expect that. Were you just were you like, wait
a wasn't expecting that question, but, yeah, I I am very I very much try to not be a vanilla, like, just another face in the crowd. LinkedIn is a place where it's very easy to get lost in just to see of of people trying to sell you shit. And the you know? So when I did my LinkedIn profile, like, how do I make my header look like, you know, where I don't look like one of just the random people? And I'm like, yeah.
Bring a little bit of humor to it. And you look at me, you don't think male model. Right? So, you know, you you look at my LinkedIn header and go, oh, you know, he made the right decision not doing the modeling anymore.
(05:16):
I thought I think I believe you have one of the best headshots I've seen, So I appreciate that.
Look at
Big Balls.
Gonna make that much knows Big Balls now.
I don't know that is, but okay.
Big Balls from from Doge? His that was his LinkedIn name?
No idea. That's the most
Come on, Sam.
Oh, no. Oh, no. One of one of his boys. Yeah.
Okay. So Yep. Tim, I don't know if you know this, but Kevin Griffin is live from a shed in his backyard right now.
That's the shed quarters, man. I we follow one another on the x and
us about the Alright. Tell us about the shed quarters.
Yeah. Yeah. Because you you DIYed it. How did how did it all come about?
So what so I've been working from home since 2011. Right? I quit my job. I had nowhere to go. I didn't have to go to an office anymore.
So I was working from home, and we had a room over our garage that I was using, and that was my home office. Had kids. My first son was born in 02/2011, then another one in 02/2012. And then they got up to school age, and my wife, she, she's a doula. She works she basically stays home, and then she goes out to, to births, when when people are having babies.
So she wanted to homeschool the kids. She used to be a teacher before we had kids. And, she wanted to homeschool, and she said, I I'd like to have a dedicated place to to homeschool the kids. And our house, it was meant meant to be our starter home. Right?
And, you know, the way the housing market is, turns out it's gonna be our forever home too. The the room over the garage was the best place to to set up homeschooling stuff. And, obviously, I couldn't work in the same room as the kids were trying
to
homeschool, so I just made a off the cuff comment. I'm like, why don't I just build an office in the backyard? And my wife said, that's a great idea. You should totally do that. So I I looked around, and this is all pre COVID.
Right? So things were much, you know, more inexpensive. I ended up getting a prefabbed shed from from a place called Stateline Builders, out in Suffolk, and they, they built it. They delivered. They dropped it right in place.
And I came in, and I refinished the entire thing. So I put in insulation. I did all the drywall. I have a mini split over there for heating and air, and I ran I ran power and, Ethernet out here. So I have fully wired, ready to go.
(05:37):
Only thing I don't have is a bathroom, so I still have to go in the house to, you know, take care of business. And this has been my office for eight seven, eight years. And the best part about it and I always say, if you work from home, you should have a dedicated space for work. It shouldn't be it really shouldn't be your bedroom. It shouldn't be your living room.
I like having the dedicated space to work because I'll I come out to work. I go to work, and I work. But then when I leave work, I leave work at work. When I go in the house, it's it's family time. It's hobby time.
It's it's, you know, hanging out with my kids, doing stuff around the house. If there's a work need, I have to go into work. So there's I'm not I'm not the type of person that's just gonna go off into the corner and try to slip some work in on the couch. Work is down in the in the shed quarters, and it's I've been like that for years, and I I love it. It's made my my life so much easier, so much less stress.
What's the commute like on rainy days?
Oh. Oh, man. I have some pictures where, like, we will get those monsoons or the snow. Like, when we got the 13 inches of snow not too long ago
It was not 13, Kevin. We live close to each other. It was nine to eleven. Don't lie.
Yeah. My gosh. When we got the 26 inches of snow, you know what? If it's more than one inch of snow, it might as well be 12 to 13 because
That's right.
I I looked I looked out the back door. I'm like, crap. I have to walk through this. So first thing I did was I went out and I shoveled the the driveway, so the kids could go out and not slip. Then I brought the shovel in the backyard, and I had to shovel myself a path to my office.
And I have a little porch on the front, And I shoveled off my porch, and that's how that's how I got to work. But, yeah, there's some days where I thought about, yeah, maybe today's a good day to not work because I don't wanna have to walk through this. I bought jacket, umbrellas. Yeah.
I bought a shovel for the first time this year. I have lived here eighteen years, and this was the first time. And I'll tell you this. I'm I'm glad I bought it. Do have a shovel, Tim?
They come in handy.
Yeah. The problem is it just it just sits there all year. I I use it for thirty minutes, and then it just sits there. I mean, what a waste is $18.
Put it in the back of the garage. Put it out in a we have a garden shed as well. It lives in the garden shed. And when I know it's gonna snow, I'll move it into the garage just so it's available.
What's something we haven't talked about that you wanna talk about?
Oh my gosh. I don't know. We talked about the so developer community, we just need we need people. We're getting ready to do a a happy hour for the technologists in the area. We launched a new site a month or two ago called 757technology.org.
Great site. Super clean. I dig it.
I vibe coded that to bring this back around. Yeah. I vibe coded that entire thing because I didn't want I didn't wanna spend any time on it. I I had a couple of free hours on a weekend, and I've been working with another gentleman in the area, Ted Patterson. And we had talked about doing this, and I just sat down, vibe coded it based off of a Notion layout that we had.
And, yeah, the best part about it is it updates every day with information from meetup.com. So if we see a new event pop up on someone's calendar, it automatically gets put on the site. I'm trying to push that towards doing a weekly newsletter of the events going on for developers. Our whole emphasis is if you're a technologist coming into the area or you've been here and you're just trying to find community, you can go to 757technology.org and just see what's available. And, like, you don't have to come to my group.
There but there's a dozen other groups that would love to have you. And I wanna be a cheerleader for all the technologists in this area because that's like, we have so much talent here, and there's no reason why RevolutionConf or DevFest shouldn't have two, three thousand people showing up. Right. We have the talent here. We just we just need the people to show up.
And I think a lot of times people wanna show up because they actually probably don't know we exist. So we just need to be loud, and we need everyone to be cheerleaders for everything that's going on. So I always try to tell folks that come to our meetings or come to our conferences, come to our happy hours. Like, just, bring a friend. Bring a coworker.
(05:58):
You know, bring a random person off the street. I don't care.
That's it. Is there anything else? Worst roller coaster? Worst roller coaster you've ever been on? Like, know, it'd be one Worst roller coaster?
Oh, man.
That's a big apple coaster in New York, New York, Vegas. That one hurt.
The Togo? The one that does the upside down?
No. At the casino. Right?
At the casino in at New York, New York. Yeah. That sucker. That is one I just remember hurting.
So I just how long I mean, how how often is that maintained or inspected? Yeah. I mean, I just can't imagine that there's a
Daily?
I would assume in in Vegas, it's probably yeah.
I think they have to be I think part of, like, the whatever, the health inspector. I don't know if health is the right word. I think you have to do it daily because
Do they know what they're looking for? I don't know. I mean, it's just like for me. Like, my whole deal is and I don't think that they necessarily put up roller coasters at back in the day when there was carnivals. You know?
Like, these people at these carnivals and fairs. I mean, this stuff is getting, yeah, they're constructed, tore down, and constructed every day. You know? You know these guys, they can't wait to just finish the job and go do it, whatever it is that they do. I just don't trust it.
I mean, you've seen final destination three. That was portrayed to be at a carnival. Like, bad news bears happened that day. I mean, we can't have these kind of things. No.
Accidents do happen, but roller coasters are the are the safest form of transportation.
I did a report in high school. You are more likely get injured by a shopping cart than you are on a roller coaster.
Well, that's because people just don't put those shopping carts in in the cart corral. Great Instagram channel to follow is the cart narcs, if you've never seen it.
I've seen them. Yep. I when I was a teenager, I worked at a Kmart, and I was the cart guy. I would always go get the an iron. Learned that you know you know how you talk to someone who used to be, in the restaurant business as a server and they would say, I always tip because I know what it's like to be a server.
Those are the same people that are gonna leave a shopping cart on the other side of the parking lot. Like, always return my carts because I used to be the guy who had to walk across the parking lot on a 10 degree day to get this shot.
Be a good person.
That's what I'm saying. That's why you're a good human, Kevin Hart.
(06:19):
Mhmm. Dude, I'm with you there.
When you have a, a a great event, we're gonna vary we'll do a little variation of this, Zach. You have a you have a great event, You have to bring a go to heavy horse d'vor snack. What what what's your go to, food item that you would want to bring to this that's always, generally a hit with with your attendees?
With our attendees? So we make the joke of anything that's not pizza or subs. Like, that's but because that is the easiest way to feed a lot of people, right, is subs or pizza. If I was, you know, trying to feed a lot of people and, you know, seem like I put some time and effort and money into it, We found taco bars work really well, like make your own tacos or nachos. Those work great.
However people feel about it, Chick fil A nugget trays are always a winner. Like, those disappear overnight. But, usually, the fallback is some sort of sandwich or some sort of pizza. HR DevFest, we did sandwiches. RevolutionConf, we had a pasta day that that worked well.
Yeah. Feeding feeding a lot of people on a budget is really hard.
The challenge too, though, venue wise, is a lot of venues make you use their caterers. Yeah. And it can
be Yep.
But even but even, like, I remember we did one at ODU, and I think it was starting off at three, four. I can't recall. Pizza was the meal, and they were charging $17 a person for pizza, and it was like a slice and a cookie and a drink. I'm like, yo.
Yep.
You're robbing me. It's, like, $25 in food cost.
We the only reason money. So Revolution Kopf was at the the Wyndham down off 50 Seventh Street at the oceanfront. So first, great hotel. Like, I'm not gonna say anything about them. They're a great venue.
The biggest reason we chose them was because our food and beverage minimum was 12,000 per day. So you essentially get the space for free, but food and beverage minimum was $12,000. I'm like, I can do that. Like, that is easy. And I forgot what our actual numbers were at the end of the event, but but that's the cost of the event is usually in the food and beverage or they'll
Well, 400 people, Tim, two or three meals. That's not that bad.
Yeah.
Whatever. What was the, the hotel in Portsmouth? The Renaissance? Is that what We Was that pre or post the renovation? They've renovated it now.
I haven't been there in year. We never did an event there. We looked at doing an event there.
Oh, you looked at doing it. Okay.
We looked at doing one. Their food and beverage was, I think, would have been $3,040,000. Like, it was it was up there. We looked at doing it at the Virginia Beach Convention Center. I don't know how anyone doesn't have been there.
Like, because their food and beverage minimum was so high for Rubber And then and that's only to give you one little room up on that Second Floor. If you wanted a ballroom or anything, they they're like, oh, well, then that's an additional however many thousand dollars. And then they say, oh, did you want Wi Fi or Internet? Right. Yeah.
That'd be great. Like, alright. We can offer you a hundred KBS, for however many thousand dollars. I'm like
And would you like to start a trip? Did you yeah.
(06:40):
And I remember having this discussion going, oh, there's absolutely no way we can be here. Like and this is even after we had, Ray over at economic development. Like Ray White. Yeah. Like, we should have had help, and we got nothing.
So we ended up going to these hotels. It's why the Zeters Theater in Virginia Beach was was great. It's a nonprofit.
Who owns those venues? The cities? Are conventions, convention centers owned by cities? Are they a city run thing?
I think I think it's kinda like a half and half situation. I used to work for the city, and I remember setting up networks over there. So I think a good portion of it is city employees.
So Well, they didn't see the worst. Especially when you're trying to do something from a community perspective.
How else you gonna pay for all this other junk they're doing?
Well, I will say, for those that do sponsor events that we put on, I I do take that to heart, and I will frequently support them
Yeah. In return.
Well, mister roller coaster man, congratulations. This was great. Appreciate your time, Kevin. Good to see you. We there's so much more we could have talked about.
Maybe we'll do another episode in a couple years.
Yeah. Anytime.
Can't wait to look at the, what's your male model status is at that point. You know?
You hit the gym a little bit more. Yeah. We'll see if it comes back.
Well, you know, they say you can make some money on OnlyFans. So, well,
on that note
Thank you all. Have a great day. Like, subscribe, download. Thank you for watching, listening. Have a great day.
Cheerio. Shabbos.
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Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!