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Hosted by Jared Correia, Legal Late Night is a weekly, pop culture-infused romp through the latest & greatest business management ideas and technology tips for lawyers, featuring engaging guests, and constructed in the format of an old school television variety show.
Jared Correia (00:00:00):
Hello, everybody. We've got a show that promises to be at least mildly interesting for your listening and watching enjoyment. I'm your host, Jared Correia. I'm the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting. For my monologue, I'm talking about the end of Stranger Things and the beginning of an It prequel series. In the interview, it's Rob Simpson of Waverider Communications. We shall ride the wave into a structured marketing program for your law firm. In the Counter program, we're bringing back a seasonal game called Holidays on Holiday. Now, I've got some strange and even stranger things to address with you.
(00:00:45):
I love Strangers Things, or should I say I loved Stranger Things? Because Stranger Things just ended and I'm about to spoil the fuck out of the last season, Stranger Thinks Five. Okay, so don't say you weren't warned. If you're unfamiliar, Stranger Things is a sci-fi show from Netflix created by the Duffer Brothers, real brothers, which became a massive hit during its initial release in the summer of 2016. Stranger Things is fucking great, and I've seen every episode. I love '80s pop culture because I lived through '80s pop culture. I was a young child in the '80s. In Strangers Things, my friends is steeped in '80s pop culture. I'd say almost shamelessly referencing it. Stranger Things is like a big soup of all the great stuff from Gremlins and ET and Goonies and references to lots of other iconic '80s movies too. It's like the JJ Abrams movie Super eight, but a whole show spanning an entire decade.
(00:01:43):
I'm a sucker for this shit and I probably would've religiously watched Stranger Things even if it was fucking terrible, which it is not. The good news is that Strangers Things was not fucking terrible. It's always been quite good, in fact, to me at least. Even the Russia storyline from seasons three and four that kind of disappeared and that everybody complained about, I was very into. I was like, "Hell yeah, the Cold War. It's back on. Kind of wish our current foreign policy reflected that same deal, but I digress." In addition to the sumptuous '80s throwbacks, the other thing I love about Stranger Things is that they actually put time into character development. And that's only true of the main characters like Jim Hopper, The Cranky Town Sheriff for The Heart of Gold, or Mike Wheeler played by Franchise Mainstay, Finn Wolffard, the leader of the nerds, or Steve Harrington, the playboy who becomes everybody's big brother, or Joyce Byers, sci-fi icon, Winona Rider.
(00:02:42):
Winona Rider, that was weird. Or even Nancy Wheeler, who's basically Rambo. Stranger Things has also done an amazing job creating side characters or characters with one season arcs who people just love. There's not a Cousin Oliver in the bunch. You've got characters like Eddie Munson from season four, the metalhead and presumed Satanist who saves the day. This basically put Joseph Quinn's career into hyperdrive. And Bob Newby, Joyce's well-meaning boyfriend who is summarily dispatched by a Demogorgon at the end of season three, and who was played by Sean Aston. Rudy, Sam from Lord of the Rings. Then you got Robin Buckley who's played by Maya Hawk, who's the daughter of Ethan Hawk and Umer Thurman. She effectively became a member of the main cast after being introduced in season three. And let's not forget Derek, the breakout star of season five, Fat Little Derek Turnbow, not the former Red Sox reliever, just a chubby little bitch who ends up helping to save the day along with this catch of amazing one-liners.
(00:03:45):
And maybe the best introduced character was Jamie Campbell Bauer, who plays the series Big Bad Vecna. This dude is an amazing actor whose real human face is scarier than the monster version of his character. I even liked the new Holly Wheeler played by Nell Fisher. She was great this past season. One of the reasons I think most action movies and series are terrible now is because they don't put any time into character development. It's like the hero gets the powers and then nothing really happens until the battle sequence at the end and then we pimp for the next movie. That's like everything Marvel does and it fucking sucks. Stranger Things doesn't always hit, but they're at least always trying to get people to care about the characters on the show, which should be the main thing. That was a big deal in the '80s. Let me tell you, I was there.
(00:04:31):
Plus, the showrunners are also very good at building suspense and setting up tremendous action set pieces with a crew of alien baddies like two-faced dogs, The Mind Flare, a giant spider that controls people's minds. And they afro mentioned Vecna, who's kind of an evil tree man, very much a dick, and the nemesis of Will Byers who was kidnapped by the Mindflare in season one to kick off the whole series of events. So all this begs the question. How was season five? I thought it was very good and I didn't have high expectations necessarily because I've always felt like this was going to be a hard plane for the showrunners to land. Stranger Things reminds me of another sci-fi show I love called Lost from the mid 2000s. In that, they just kind of threw shit against the wall in season one because they had no idea whether the show would become popular.
(00:05:20):
Same as Stranger thinks. Then it was like, "Oh dang, we have to figure out what this smoke monster is actually all about now." The writers have lost had to paint themselves out of a corner multiple times to just invent shit, which they largely did pretty well in the same way that I think The Strangers thinks True has done here. I think that with these types of shows, you're kind of in it for the lore or you're in it for the characters. And since the Lord is always kind of bullshit that people make up as they go along, it's difficult to keep crack of. I think it's easier/better to just be in it for the characters and let the lore and the action sequences kind of wash over you, which is what I try to do. And if you watch the last season of Stranger Things, with that in mind, it was enjoyable for sure.
(00:06:02):
So season five was released in three segments. Four episodes came out on Thanksgiving night, three on Christmas night, and the two hour finale was on New Year's Eve. Thank you, Netflix. Now I don't have to talk to my family. I felt like the first five episodes of season five started out really strong and were the best part of the season, frankly, and maybe even the first four. So episode one, The Crawl that kind of reoriented everybody. Effectively, they're looking for Vecna in the upside down, the Through the Looking Glass type of underworld on the show, which is effectively evil version of the real town of the fake town invented for the show, Hawkins, Indiana, where all the bad creatures live and the upside down that people live in the real world. See, what did I say about the lore? Then the action picks up at the end where Holly, the youngest member of the Wheeler family, they're the cheap protagonists of the show.
(00:06:55):
They're about to be kidnapped by Vecnas Minions where she is. The second episode, the vanishing of Holly Wheeler has some kick-ass action sequences at the beginning as the Wheeler parents try to save Holly from the Demogorgons to no avail. Those are the dog creatures. The episode three / four arc though was the best of the season, in my opinion. Episode three is fucking great, and it was directed by Frank Darabont. If you don't know who that is, he directed the Shawshank Redemption heard of it, and also Majestic, an underrated Jim Carrey movie. Apparently he came out of retirement just to do this. Now, one thing I love about 80s media and Strangers Things in particular is the development and launching of the crazy or dangerous plan. The best parts of Stranger Things are when the group develops these insane plans that would never work and inevitably pull them off.
(00:07:48):
In the best sequence of the whole season, the kids and their betters come up with a plan to kidnap Derek's whole ass family by sneaking sleeping pills into a pie. And here's the best part. They basically set up a series of Home Alone-like traps for the Alien that's coming and grabbed Derek. Props to Lucas's sister, Erica? Erica? Yeah, Erica. By the way, she's the glue guy for these type of segments usually. This was so awesome. I was cackling the whole time. Give me more crazy plans. The crazier and stupider, the better. In the companion episode four, the plan obviously goes awry as Derek wakes up and attracts the demogorgons, and then everything goes to absolute shit. As Vecna kidnaps the kids and just starts fucking up a military platoon, including shooting his tree fingers through some poor bastard skull for the best kill of the season.
(00:08:40):
That was amazing. But the best part is that Will Byers initially kidnapped by the mind flare and essentially Vegna's bitch for the entire show. Finally, finally starts to fight back and takes over Vegna's mind to control the demagorgons. Really cathartic scene because Will is a great character. Fuck yeah, Will. Good for you. Now the next set of episodes five through seven. They don't really advance applaud a tremendous amount, but they're mostly character development. The Stranger Things is very attuned to. So Nancy and Jonathan break up. Steven Dustin fight and then makeup. They're best friends now. Hopper struggles with the danger. 11 / Jane, his adopted daughter is constantly in. So Levin's a basically a super soldier. She's being tracked by the military. She's also Vecna's foil because she's the only other person with similar powers. Robin, who's a lesbian, starts talking with Will who's gay about his sexuality.
(00:09:35):
From a plotting standpoint, there are really two things going on. First, Holly and Max previously also kidnapped by Vecna. Yeah, he kidnaps everybody, basically, are trying to find their way out of Vecna's mind, which segments are all kind of based on a wrinkle in time. Meanwhile, everyone else is trying to locate Vecna who ends up being in another world entirely. The penultimate episode of Stranger Things, episode seven, features a crescendo in which Will comes out to all his friends so that he doesn't have to fear them finding out and the results therefrom. Remember, this is the 80s. Thus, he can be free of mind to battle Vecna and the mind flare in the finale. And this is one of the things I love about Strangers Things that rather than a battle with alien dogs, the most essential part of the episode that they want to center is Will's friends accepting him for who he is.
(00:10:22):
Great stuff. Seriously. I thought that the finale was largely more good than bad. It was a lot better than the Seinfeld finale. I can tell you that. It was kind of like the lost finale, actually, which people hated at the time. There was a wrap up to the lore and then there was an epilogue about the characters. And I think this was probably always the way the end of Strangers Things was trending. So in the first half of the episode, the perfectly titled The Right Side Up, very clever. The hunt for Vecna is finally resolved. The gang uses Steve Harrington's plan to get to Vecna's height out and then kill him in the mind flare in pretty short order with basically no fatalities. And this is one consistent beef that people have about stranger thinks. Only the side characters die, the main cast never do.
(00:11:09):
People say there's too much plot armor. I guess, but this whole Game of Thrones thing where main characters have to die all the time just to give a show of stakes, that doesn't really seem necessary to me. And if you're splitting hairs about which characters would die while facing a 100 foot alien spider and his evil minion that can control people's mind and is made entirely of tree roots, the answer is all of them. All of them would fucking die. So just given to the suspension of disbelief already. So yes, despite a couple of fakeouts, no one in the main cast is actually killed. Until 11 sacrifices herself, she gets blown up along with the upside down, so the military will stop chasing her friends. If I have won real beef with the end of Strangers Things, the military plot was kind of stupid and unnecessary and just seemed like a way to sneakle into Hamilton into the show for more 80s vibes.
(00:12:00):
Proving how silly the military sublot was, once 11 dies, apparently everybody just goes back to their old lives. Like Hopper who must have killed over a hundred Marines in this series by himself, is just allowed to go back and become sheriff like nothing ever happened. Right. Anyway, the second half of the finale is just an epilogue for all the characters and pretty much everyone guess what they want except for 11 because she's dead. Or is she? The very end of the finale I think is actually quite well done. In it, the main cast is playing Dungeons and Dragons and Mike tells a story in which Elle was actually saved by her super soldier sister. I'm not going to get into that and lived on. Is this a real story? I don't think so, but I do love ambiguity. Finally, things come full circle as Mike's sister and her friends, including Derek, rushed down to the basement to play their own game of D&D.
(00:12:54):
So I'm sad that Strangers Things is over. And if you're a hater, I just have two things to say to you. First, as Derek said to Vecna, "Suck my fat one." Second, there is an animated stranger thinks prequel is coming out, as well as a new live action series with a new cast because every valuable IP has to become its own universe these days. So I guess this strangers thinks isn't over after all. Now, as I mentioned also, there's a new Stephen King series on HBO called It. Welcome to Dairy. It's effectively a prequel to the it movies and it sounds like Finn Wolfard. That's Mike from Stranger Things and he was also in Ghostbusters and previously he was Richie in the first it movie. It's said to be involved in season two of that program. I think I read it when I was 10 and yeah, that's steeply fucked up.
(00:13:44):
I get it. There's some gnarly shit that happens in the it book. And it, the movie and the book is kind of a mixed bag. The first part of it with the kids, especially the 2017 movie is pretty great. But the second part of it, when the kids come back to Battle of the Monster again as adults post hibernation, it's pretty boring and the ending is really stupid. Basically, they just make fun of the alien until it dies. You can come up with that shit earlier. So this series, the new series, Welcome to Dairy, focuses on events occurring in 1962. The novel and the previous movies take place in 1989. That's part one. And then 2016, that's part two. So it is an alien that feasts on humans, of course, every 27 years and hibernates in the intervening periods. This explores the prior cycle before the first period examined in the book and the movie.
(00:14:39):
Now, the first part of the show was kind of boring and weird with some of the same flows that Strangers Thinks has, ironically. There's kind of a dumb military subplot, but the second half of the first season fucking rips. One of the things about the it movies is that the It Creature doesn't make a whole lot of appearances and there's a whole lot we don't know about it. Now, while this show doesn't introduce the it character as Pennywise the Clown, one of his alter egos, though there is a cool opening sequence where an entire family is it? Until episode five, that's when The Clown comes in. That's when the second half really pops off because it's all it all the time after that. Bill Scarsgard, who is the best penny wise, is going crazy here, just tearing shit up. Honestly, it's fucking great. You know how people are like, "Hey, Jaws is a great movie because Jaws, the shark isn't in it that much?" Well, I bet if Jaws was in it the whole time, just killing people, Jaws would be a pretty fucking unbelievable movie also.
(00:15:42):
And that's what this show is about. I can't actually believe that Scars Guys signed up for this because none of the other movie actors returned, but he is an absolute toward the force here. We even get its full backstory and the backstory for Pennywise the Clown. Not only that, but they're developing additional seasons of the show, likely tied to its active cycles, which also gives them the opportunity to explore different time periods on a recurring 27 year basis. I'm floating. And you'll float too because we've got Rob Simpson of Wavewriter Communications coming right up. We're talking about marketing strategy and advertising on streaming. Ooh, so float down our stream. Next.
(00:16:32):
Well, I've effectively run out of things to say, which is awkward because this is a podcast, so I'm just going to make some hot chocolate and sip it very slowly while you watch me. I have to wait for it to cool down after all. No, this is not meant to be entertaining at all. I just really want some hot chocolate. Actually, we do have a podcast to record. We even have a guest, so that's fortuitous. And that guest is Rob Simpson of the television Simpsons family. No. Rob is the CEO and founder of WaveRider Communications in Boston. Rob, welcome to the show. How are you? Happy New Year.
Rob Simpson (00:17:09):
Happy New Year, Jared. Thank you for having me.
Jared Correia (00:17:11):
My pleasure. I'm delighted. We talk every now and then, and it's good to get one of these on wax so people can see how it goes. I was thinking back and I want to say that we met either at the Boston Bar Association or through one of our mutual contacts at the Boston Bar Association, which would probably be Chris Strang. Am I right on that or?
Rob Simpson (00:17:37):
Yes.
Jared Correia (00:17:37):
Okay.
Rob Simpson (00:17:38):
You are absolutely correct.
Jared Correia (00:17:40):
Okay, good. I feel good about that. Shout out to Chris Strang. I'll have to have him on the show sometimes. You are very good at participating in networking groups and organizations. I am terrible at that. So can you talk to me a little bit about how you leverage that for your business?
Rob Simpson (00:18:01):
Sure. I got some advice when I started the business, which is going on 14 years now. Congrats. It goes back to half the battle is showing up. And I have an extensive background of many years of being in sales for 25 years before I started the business. So the advice I got was go to networking events. When you're starting out, go to every networking event you can find,
(00:18:32):
And as time goes on, you will learn which are the good ones and which are the bad ones. So I used to give everything three strikes. If I went to an event once or twice, and by the third time it was like, "Eh, this really isn't for me. " Then I said, "Okay, let's put that one off onto the side." And I would go to the events and make sure that I had plenty of business cards with me. And I looked at it from a salesman's perspective of instead of sitting at my phone and making 50 or 100 phone calls and cold calls, which was the way things used to be done and the way I was brought up in the business, which I absolutely detest. I did it because we didn't know any other way to do it and I hate-
Jared Correia (00:19:16):
Dialing for dollars. That's the whole deal.
Rob Simpson (00:19:18):
Yeah. Oh my God. It was awful. I used to call it mashed potato ear because you had to use a real phone back then. And I worked in situations where I had a sales manager who would sit in the middle of the office while we were supposed to be making phone calls and he would spread out the paper and he would read the paper while he was listening to all of us.
Jared Correia (00:19:36):
Oh my God.
Rob Simpson (00:19:36):
Make calls. So the trick that we all came up with was before we sat down to do this, we had all the appointments made.
Jared Correia (00:19:44):
Oh, that's funny.
Rob Simpson (00:19:45):
And you would call and you would be like, you would do ... And it was ridiculous. It was like out of a sitcom. You pick up the phone and you hit the dial and then you hit the plunger and you'd pretend you were making the call so your boss could hear you making the call. It was absolutely ridiculous. Non-productive and yeah, it was insane. Yeah, get the correct time so you could check your watch. I mean, it was ridiculous. Oh my gosh. So
Jared Correia (00:20:09):
You preferred the networking events, obviously.
Rob Simpson (00:20:12):
Right. So the way the networking ... How this translates into that is that the networking events are, I looked at it as if I went to an event and there were a hundred people in the room, that was like, I'd be better off being in a room with a hundred people than if I was trying to make a hundred phone calls.
(00:20:27):
So you go around and you strike up conversations with people and have your business card and talk to people and see and everything like that. And my goal was I wanted to meet on average, I wanted to meet six people that I wanted to follow up with and get their business cards. And I figured the formula that I worked out was, okay, 52 weeks in a year, two weeks off for vacation, 50 weeks left in the year. If you went to averaged one networking event a week, because like this time of year, there used to be two or three that you could go to, the summertime is slower. So let's say you averaged one a week and that's 50. And then if you went and you saw six people and you followed up and sent them ... I used to send emails, send them an email and say, "Hey, we met at this.
(00:21:22):
Would you like to have coffee? I'd like to know more about what you do. " Not trying to sell them anything, not anything, just wanting to establish the contact. If you meet six people and get the contact information and you get three of them to meet you for coffee and you get half of that number, say one and a half on average to be somebody that you can put into your networking circle, you're somebody that you can rely on to get ahold of on a regular basis, to network and to talk. It might be two years before something happens where you can give them business, they can give you business. Well, that's one and a half times 50. That's 75 solid contacts you've made in the course of a year. And I'm thinking that if you make 75 solid contacts in the course of a year, you can't help but by Osmosis fall into some kind of
(00:22:09):
Business opportunities or they're going to refer you to somebody and always be willing to help first. If you could help somebody, try and help them first so that you're showing your integrity, you're not just trying to get something out of it, you're trying to do it, you're doing it as a two-way street. And if you do that, now I'm talking about, like I said, there's 75 contacts and then you take those contacts and you put them in as they refine and you get to know people, you put them into your address book. So my address book is on my computer and then what I would do is, then what I do is once a quarter, and this should be like in the first couple of weeks of the year, I will sit down with a legal pad, very old fashioned, sit down with a legal pad and look at my address book and scroll down the address book and write down everybody's names.
(00:22:59):
"Oh, there's Jared. Oh, there's Chris Strand. Oh, there's someone else that I know haven't talked ... "And that would come down to a list of maybe ... My list has been as high as over a thousand names within this email directory. And you go through and it's just like something that clicks in your head and you come up with say 50, 50 to 75 people. It doesn't have to be a lot. And then you send all those people an email. And someday, if I ever write my book, it's going to be how to successful. When I write my book, how to succeed in sales, one cup of coffee at a time.
Jared Correia (00:23:31):
I like that.
Rob Simpson (00:23:32):
Probably
Jared Correia (00:23:32):
Shouldn't have given that away on the podcast, but let's keep going.
Rob Simpson (00:23:35):
I know. I know. I'm a giver. So it's a matter of you have that first cup of coffee in the morning and I would tell ... I've advised clients to do this. So now I've got 75 people, so I'm going to have my first cup of coffee in the morning and I'm going to send out five emails to people. That's it. Hi, how you doing? Would you like to get together? Five emails times five days is 25 times, it's three weeks. So if you do this for the first, to start off your year as your resolution, you do that for three weeks in January and you set up your meetings and you never know what's going to happen. And it might be, " Hey, how you doing? "You've been on my list for doing that for over 10 years.
Jared Correia (00:24:19):
I feel very fortunate.
Rob Simpson (00:24:20):
That's why you-
Jared Correia (00:24:20):
Wow, I'm honored.
Rob Simpson (00:24:21):
You'll hear from me once every three months. And I have people who've said if you didn't contact me, I would never get out to do anything or something like that. So I'm helping shut-ins, I guess. I don't know. But it's a really great way to stir the pot. If what all else fails, do that because way back in the dark ages in the previous century when I started my career, the theory was, the philosophy was when in doubt, grab a handful of business cards, get in your car and go to an area depending on what you're selling, industrial parks, offices, different things like that. Obviously, it was a lot easier to get into office buildings before September 11th. If you wore a suit, you could walk in anywhere.
Jared Correia (00:25:11):
Right. Yeah. It's open season.
Rob Simpson (00:25:12):
And you could walk in and you could just knock on any door and be very polite and introduce yourself and do that. Well, as things evolve and things change, I found a much better and more efficient way to be able to do that. And I do a thing, I recommend that people do this say once a year at least, is I do what I call a client genealogy. Okay. There's another thing I should trademark it. I
Jared Correia (00:25:40):
Know. I know.
Rob Simpson (00:25:41):
This is
Jared Correia (00:25:41):
Great. For the audience.
Rob Simpson (00:25:44):
Right. So what you do is you go back and you look at everybody that you're doing business with and you ask the question of, how did I get them?
Jared Correia (00:25:51):
Oh yeah.
Rob Simpson (00:25:53):
And if it was from networking, then not just I got it from networking, it's from what event? Was it the Boston Chamber of Commerce? Was it from a networking group I'm in? Was it from another, was it the Boston Business Journal had an event and I met that person there? Were they referred to me by somebody that I know from my networking efforts? So you try and go one or two levels deep to find out where it is and then you can make a list and then you can see, well, I always thought that I should be making a hundred phone calls a day and I'm finding out that after the course of 10 years, I've gotten zero business from doing that. Whereas if I use my connections and I do this, this particular chamber of commerce or this particular group is accounting for 50% of my revenue.
(00:26:39):
Well, okay, then I'm going to go where the 50% ... Another great salesman saying that I learned a long time ago is they asked Willie Sutton, why did he rob banks? And he said, Because that's where the money is. So if you're going to do that, why am I going to continue to do that because it's that which I've always done and I'm comfortable with, as opposed to analyzing and looking at the performance of what have I been doing so that I can do more of what works and less of what doesn't.
Jared Correia (00:27:10):
I love this. This is great. I appreciate you breaking it down systematically like that because I think a lot of attorneys don't consider themselves salespeople, but these are all good tips. All right. Let me ask you this. Yep. Can you talk a little bit about why you started your own business? What did you do before and why did you decide I'm going to do my own thing now? Because you worked for somebody else for a while before you started your own company.
Rob Simpson (00:27:33):
Yes. Yes. I started my career in advertising and as the years go on, it kind of turns my stomach more and more to say it. I started my career selling yellow pages.
Jared Correia (00:27:43):
Oh yeah. Let's get into it.
Rob Simpson (00:27:46):
And
(00:27:47):
I grew up in Connecticut and I worked for the now non-existent Southern New England telephone company. And believe it or not, I started out my career. Not only was I a Yellow Pages sales representative, but I was one of the last union sales representatives in the world. Really? We were part of the telecommunications union. And I was with the company for six months. They went on strike. The strike was supposed to last for a week because people wanted a week off in the summer and it ended up lasting for four months. And part of the deal that they made with the union was that we could go back because the thing they had agreed on was we were going to no longer be union salespeople.
Jared Correia (00:28:25):
Oh yeah. They must have
Rob Simpson (00:28:26):
Lived that.
Jared Correia (00:28:27):
Walt Disney would be very
Rob Simpson (00:28:28):
Cut. The union salesperson was just foreign to me. Anyway, so I did that for five years and then I got into what was that golden era. I went to television and I started my career at an independent TV station in Connecticut and then I went to when there was a WB network
Jared Correia (00:28:53):
When
Rob Simpson (00:28:53):
The WB network first went on years.
Jared Correia (00:28:55):
And they had the Dancing Frog, right? Is that the WB network?
Rob Simpson (00:28:58):
At Michigan J. Frog. I still have the poster. I have it rolled up in here. Someday I'm going to frame it. I have a poster from the opening night of the network.
Jared Correia (00:29:07):
That's amazing.
Rob Simpson (00:29:08):
The reason is that the network opened, the network premiered on my birthday and the date is on the poster. So that's why I kept
Jared Correia (00:29:14):
It.
Rob Simpson (00:29:16):
So it was the WB and it was a startup television station in the Hartford television market located in New Haven. And I was the first account executive they hired. Really? That's crazy. So I got to do everything. I created the presentation folders. I created the collateral material. I did everything and I based a lot of it on my Yellow Pages training and put everything together. And it was very successful and went very well. And then the joke is, as soon as they hired the second account executive, I got my account list cut in half because the entire world was my account list. And I went from there. I was there for two years and then I went to WFSB, which is the CBS affiliate in Hartford. So I went from the real little guy to the biggest station in the market. So it gave me a really good look at the haves and the have nots of that.
(00:30:16):
And then I left there in the end of 1999. I was offered a job at Channel 38 in Boston. And that's what brought me to this area to move up here.
(00:30:29):
And I was there for a few years. And then I went and I was with Comcast selling regional cable for seven years. And after seven years of doing that, they had made a company-wide offer to people with a package. Get the fuck out. Here's your parachute. I looked at my numbers and I took it. I planned on thinking of what could I do on my own. I had a couple of wise mentors who always said, have an FU fund so that if he said, "Do you have an FU fund?" And I'm doing this because it's a kid's program. It's
Jared Correia (00:31:10):
Not a child. But that's all right. Okay.
Rob Simpson (00:31:13):
You can swear. I give you permission. Okay. So the deal was have muff money so that if you got sick one day, you could go in there and tell them where to go and you could survive for a period of time. So I always had it in the back of my mind was if the worst ever happened, what would I do? And I went in on Friday and they said, "We're making this offer. Come in Monday morning and talk to your wife about it and let us know what you want to do. " I was free to stay if I had wanted to. And I found out that the reason that they did this was because I had a lot of experience and about a month later, Comcast announced that they were buying NBC.
Jared Correia (00:31:47):
Yeah, there you go. That's right.
Rob Simpson (00:31:49):
That's right. So what they did was they made a lot of offers to people. And I just saw from being on LinkedIn over the last week that there are people that I worked with that were still there who have taken the most recent offer that they've
Jared Correia (00:32:04):
Made. Right. The circle of life.
Rob Simpson (00:32:07):
Yeah. So I took that offer and I ran with it and I started my own business. It was Robert Simpson Associates, which actually happened to be a business that my dad had incorporated in Connecticut when I was a kid. Yeah,
Jared Correia (00:32:23):
I was
Rob Simpson (00:32:23):
Going to say. So I did it as an honor to
Jared Correia (00:32:25):
Him. That's cool.
Rob Simpson (00:32:26):
And I did that for a year and realized that I need to have a name, I need to have this, and I put a whole bunch of time into it. And I always say that the time that it was Robert Simpson Associates and that year, because I had the cushion of being able to really do things and settle in to do it the way I wanted to do it. And I always say that was the year that Bruce Wayne spent in Tibet when he became
Jared Correia (00:32:51):
Batman. Oh wow. We got a Batman begins reference. Beautiful.
Rob Simpson (00:32:56):
And it was the trial by fire. And I originally thought when I started the whole thing, because I used to handle this in my TV career, I was planning on producing paid programming. I thought that would be a really fun thing to do. And that model did not, for a small business, was not an economical model to have. So as I got out of that and then formed Wavewriter and formed the LLC and did all of that, we've evolved over time from consulting in all different forms of advertising to email campaigns, social media, all kinds of digital things like that. Sales consulting, which is kind of the secret sauce that I have that a lot of marketing agencies don't
Jared Correia (00:33:49):
Have. Well, yeah, clearly you're quite good at that.
Rob Simpson (00:33:52):
Sidestep, a lot of small agencies start because traditionally you have a copywriter and an artist who are paired together as a creative team and they get mad at the big powers that beat and they go off on their own and they're very creative and they come up with wonderful copy and wonderful campaigns and all kinds of great work and everything, but they don't know how to get any clients because they have no sales experience. So I kind of did it the opposite way of I knew how to set up structures and prospecting and going after business and how was I going to do this. And then I started a team of, I have my Confederation of people where I have producers and editors and writers and videographers and people and the team and the company is as big or as small as I needed to be.
(00:34:47):
And it took me almost 14 years to come up with this. But you can see the career in television and everything else like that. And the way that I think, because this is kind of how I have fun in having my own businesses, I've come to look at it like the Avengers. Oh,
Jared Correia (00:35:04):
This is great. I like that. We got a lot of references
Rob Simpson (00:35:06):
Going
Jared Correia (00:35:07):
Today. Well
Rob Simpson (00:35:08):
Played. And what you need is you have, so sometimes you need Iron Man, sometimes you need Captain America, sometimes you need whatever Scarlet Johansson was.
Jared Correia (00:35:21):
Black Widow.
Rob Simpson (00:35:23):
I can't remember. Yeah, Black Widow. I should know this. Sometimes you need all. You
Jared Correia (00:35:28):
Got DC, you got Marvel, you got a lot to balance.
Rob Simpson (00:35:31):
Yeah. So sometimes you look at it and sometimes you just need one or two of them. And sometimes the whole world is at stake and you need the entire team. So I look at it that way as I have professionals that I can bring in to be able to do what we need to do. And I think what really has driven this and really kept it going, to be honest, over the last 14 years is that it's creative and it draws on my experience that I can do, but it got me out of the corporate end of things where I had to continue to produce reports and I had to do all of that stuff. So it's all of the good stuff that I've been able to do without all of the bad stuff- No
Jared Correia (00:36:24):
TPS reports.
Rob Simpson (00:36:25):
... that I didn't want to do. And what it's done is, well, it's been challenging and everything has its ups and downs. It's been a lot of fun and it may sound trite to say that, but when it's fun, it's a lot more fun to get out of bed in the morning. Sure.
Jared Correia (00:36:43):
Okay. Let me ask you this. So congrats on all your success. Now, we were talking recently about advertising on streaming, which I think is fascinating and I know very little about. Let's talk about law. How does that work for a law firm? If they wanted to get into streaming advertising, like first steps.
Rob Simpson (00:37:06):
Well, of course the first step I'm going to say is first you have to do is call me. Of course, naturally. So what you want to do is there are multiple streaming services that are out there. So you can, there's Hulu, there's Paramount Plus. My company, we are certified Hulu ad managers. We are certified Paramount+ ad managers. There are also other companies that go on multiple different platforms. There's a terrific company I work with called Jam Loop that could put you on anything. And they also do internet advertising in addition to doing the streaming TV.
Jared Correia (00:37:47):
Oh, so you could do a double dip basically if you want to.
Rob Simpson (00:37:51):
You can do a double dip. I had a client that was in Brooklyn that has 12 vintage clothing stores and our campaign was about 60% online and 40% big screen. They call it television streaming. So you can have it that way. And it's vintage clothing and they're around a lot of college campuses in New York. So it was designed for that audience.You
Jared Correia (00:38:18):
Could target that effectively on a streaming platform. Yes.
Rob Simpson (00:38:21):
And that is the biggest point to streaming advertising is we used to have the age of broadcasting and broadcasting is you send the signal out over the air and somebody has something that can catch it and you see it and you get a lot of waste because you're out in that area. And then cable TV brought us narrow casting where you could be in a cable zone where you could be in like six or seven or eight towns or like one big town like Boston was split up into four different zones to be able to get that. But you're still in a larger kind of area now. Now we're into microcasting where if you tell me that I want adults 18 to 35 with an income of under $75,000 who have an education level of X who drive this car or whatever, they will come up with a profile and you get, it's like, I'm going to do it again.
(00:39:19):
It's like the old back computer. It comes up and gives you a list of, if you want this person that has all of these characteristics, this is what they watch. And there are computer programs where it's done automatically where we say, "This is who we want. " And what you may think at the top of your head is, "Well, if I want this audience, I want this programming." And it turns out to be the complete opposite. That's interesting.
Jared Correia (00:39:46):
Everybody's watching like antiques, right? No, go ahead.
Rob Simpson (00:39:49):
Right. So you think that. Well, it's funny, you mentioned in the intro about the Simpsons and way back when they used to have diaries for TV ratings and you'd have diaries and people would write down what they watch. And then they went to meters in the bigger markets where there was a machine hooked up there. So you didn't have to write anything down. It just recorded what they did. And one of the biggest things they found was the first season that they did meters in those markets was the ratings for 60 minutes came down precipitously and the ratings for the Simpsons went up precipitously, or not precipitously, but went up dramatically because people were writing that they were watching 60 Minutes because they wanted everybody
Jared Correia (00:40:35):
To think they were
Rob Simpson (00:40:36):
Smart and they were really watching the Simpsons. So then the numbers came out as to what they were really watching. There was a discrepancy
Jared Correia (00:40:44):
There. That's awesome. I'm so arranged. I'm over here watching 60 minutes.
Rob Simpson (00:40:48):
Yeah. So you can't fully ... What is that Dan Rather said? The camera never blinks. You can't fool what's actually being recorded going on there. So instead of ... So the way it would work is a firm would decide who are they looking for? I'm looking for this demographic using personal injury as the most obvious case. I'm looking for people in this age group with all of these characteristics, you come up with who you want your message to go to. And then we decide how many impressions we want to get, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 a month, however, 100,000, however many you want to get. And you set up the schedule that way. And it's not like in television, when I sold broadcast TV, you had to sit and sweat the next morning. Okay. I put somebody in the Bruins game and I told them it was going to do this rating.
(00:41:39):
Did it do that rating? And you had to wait for the ratings to come out. This is, it's guaranteed delivery. So if you want to reach 50,000 people that hit that demographic in the course of a month, you're going to reach 50,000. And if we're halfway through the month and you're at 40,000, they up the number of times it serves. They look for more people.
Jared Correia (00:42:02):
Can you do multiple shows or events or is it just like you're targeting?
Rob Simpson (00:42:05):
Yeah, absolutely.
Jared Correia (00:42:06):
Okay.
Rob Simpson (00:42:07):
Absolutely. So it's not like you're just putting it into one place. You can get anywhere that you want and if it's too fast, they'll slow it down so that it paces itself
Jared Correia (00:42:16):
Out
Rob Simpson (00:42:17):
For the end of ... Because like, okay, we got you 100,000 and it's the 15th of the month and we're going to stop. They don't do that. So everything is programmed. It's programmatic so that it goes through that as far as that goes. And the other thing that is the big selling point of this is you could do it in a small area as a zip code. Interesting. So instead of having to reach a cable zone or an entire town or however you want to do it, and the way that this would fly into what I think of from my background, the way this flies into this and what we're talking about is Morgan & Morgan is everywhere to use a legal example. No, I'm just kidding. Go ahead. Yeah. So I mean, I was in Los Angeles on business a couple of years ago when I'm driving from the airport and every other billboard is a mortgage.
(00:43:05):
They're the official firm of the Angels and they're this and that- There's old
Jared Correia (00:43:08):
Firm of every sports team in America.
Rob Simpson (00:43:11):
Yeah. And so they're all over the place with that. And so they have the wherewithal to be able to do that. But if I am in Massachusetts or New England or anywhere in the country, but I'm really the top-notch personal injury guy or the top-notch family law guy or the top-notch, whatever segment you want to say it is, but I'm in Worcester County, I'm in Suffolk County, Norfolk County, I'm in this area, I'm in this town on the South Shore, and maybe I want to start developing my reputation and everything, but I don't have those types of resources to be able to do this. This is the perfect way to do this. So instead of spending ... There is a lawyer. I will not use his name because I don't want to get in trouble and say a lawyer's name, but I was told by a colleague that there is a certain law firm or lawyer in the area, in the Boston area who as of about five or six years ago, I think was spending $100,000 a month in Google AdWords.
Jared Correia (00:44:19):
I'm holding back forgive- Go on, please. Okay. Help me save me for
Rob Simpson (00:44:23):
Myself.That'll be a conversation for lunch. Yes,
Jared Correia (00:44:28):
We'll do that
Rob Simpson (00:44:29):
Offline. I'll run it past my lawyer and see if I can say it. So you do that and then you don't have to have $100,000. You don't have to buy that much influence in being able to do that. The guys I work with at Jam Loop say that their average is usually between their average in all kinds of businesses, usually runs about three to $4,000 more.
Jared Correia (00:44:54):
Yeah, it's just totally reasonable.
Rob Simpson (00:44:56):
You can do it for as little as ... But I mean, I would rather, and in my career have done this, I would rather tell someone, "Don't do it if you're not going to spend enough to try and make a significant dent in something just because I'm not saying hundreds of thousands of dollars, but if you want to do streaming advertising and you want to produce a commercial and you want to spend $100 on it over one week and not do it anymore, don't do it. " But if you want to do a commercial and you want to have something put together and you want to look at 2,500, 3,000, 3,500, now what you do is take one or two zip codes in your area where you're relatively well known and own it, own that area, be the Morgan & Morgan of area code one, two, three, four, five, six, and be that guy and dominate that area.
(00:45:50):
And then as you start to see cases come in and results come in and you can leverage it and you can go from there, then we go to two zip codes and then maybe we go to four and then you can take it from there and see how it can grow from there. I'm a very big believer in when you do something, make sure you do it with a solid foundation and if your legs underneath you so that you're not biting off too much, do it solidly, do it responsibly, and then be able to grow intelligently because in the long run, you'll be much better off.
Jared Correia (00:46:22):
How about the content production because you got to put a commercial together. Do they assist you with that? Go ahead.
Rob Simpson (00:46:30):
Yep. I have a producer that I work with that I've worked with for years going back to my days when I was in sales and he took care of commercials for clients that I worked with. So in fact, on my website, I think this is the point I'm supposed to say, wavewritercom, comn.com. There are video clips of things, some things that we've done, and one of them was an animated ... We did an animated corporate video for a freight forwarding company. And it was really cool because the guy who did the voiceover is the guy who does the voiceover for Nova on PBS.
Jared Correia (00:47:07):
Freight forwarding, that sounds like Vandal Industries from Seifeld. I mean, the import/export business.
Rob Simpson (00:47:14):
Right. So it's funny because I tried to explain it to a friend. I did this as a test. I tried to explain what this company did and I couldn't do it. It was like five minutes and I couldn't- Could
Jared Correia (00:47:24):
Be almost anything. Figure out
Rob Simpson (00:47:25):
What I was doing. We did the video. I showed it to a friend of mine. The video was a minute and three seconds long and she looked at me and she said, "You've been trying to tell me this for a month as to what this company does. Now I get it.
Jared Correia (00:47:35):
" That's awesome.
Rob Simpson (00:47:38):
So this was a company that's so good at what they do. They worked for data contract with a pharmaceutical company in the Boston area and they actually had some substance that was a white powder that was used for industrial
Jared Correia (00:47:52):
Purposes. Oh, for industrial
Rob Simpson (00:47:53):
Purposes. They were able to get white powder into Columbia.
Jared Correia (00:47:59):
That's great. So they're
Rob Simpson (00:48:02):
Good at what they do, what did they do? Somehow they got from North America down to South America, Shakira's piano or some type of stuff. It was like international freight forwarding to be able to do the logistics of moving that kind of stuff. And if you look at the video online, it's a minute and three seconds long. What I just said doesn't do it justice, but it explains
Jared Correia (00:48:26):
It.
Rob Simpson (00:48:26):
So that's the kind of work we do. We've done everything from that to doing the commercial for the stores down in Brooklyn as far as that goes. And we can do very effective, very efficient producing of getting the message out. So if you come to us, we can do it as a one-stop place where we'll evaluate your needs, we'll figure out what you want to do, we'll come up with what the creative is. We'll create the spot for you and everything else like that. And then we'll make sure it runs and then we'll work with the company that whoever we place it with on the platform and you can get real time results so that if you wanted to every day, every week, every couple of weeks during a schedule, we can give you a report as to how we're doing so that we know what kind of progress we're making.
Jared Correia (00:49:15):
Rob, thank you. This was truly delightful. I think we'll end on the white powder reference. Will you hang around for one last segment? Do you have time? Sure. Okay, great. We'll be back in a second with Rob Simpson. All right. Welcome back everybody. It's time for your favorite segment of mine, The Counter Program. It's a podcast within a podcast. This is a conversational space where we can address usually unrelated topics that I want to explore at a greater depth with my guests. Expect no rhyme and very little reason. For this segment, I'm bringing back an old favorite called Holidays on Holiday because we're still pretty close to the New Year's Day and 2026 is already looking fantastic. Anyway, Rob, welcome back. How you doing? I'm fine. Good.
Rob Simpson (00:50:07):
Thank you.
Jared Correia (00:50:08):
All right. This game is pretty straightforward. I'm going to tell you about a holiday, which is either real and possibly defunct, or I've totally just made it up. So all you have to do is tell me whether it's a real holiday or not. So I hope your bullshit detector is strong on this one. I'll start slow. I'll start slow. Are you ready for number one?
Rob Simpson (00:50:33):
Yes.
Jared Correia (00:50:34):
I'm not going to read the ... I won't read the description right away because you may know this one off the top of your head. We're going to start easy. No, December 23rd, it's a holiday called Festivus. Is this a real event or something that I just made up? I could read you a description if you want. Festivus. That's a trick question. It kind of is. Go ahead. Explain to the people why.
Rob Simpson (00:51:03):
It kind of is a trick question because it really isn't a holiday, but there are people who now celebrate it because I get messages- It's become real. December 23rd. I have friends who send me messages on December 23rd. I'll get a text from a friend of mine that says Happy Festivus or Festivus for the rest of us.
Jared Correia (00:51:21):
I feel like it should be a holiday. I think it's real. I
Rob Simpson (00:51:25):
Will tell you that when I worked at Comcast, we had a Christmas tree and a menorah in the office and I went to the defunct Bed Bath and Beyond and I was in there with my wife and I found this paper towel holder and it was a silver thing in the ball and it was a stick and you're supposed to put the paper towel roll on it. Well, I bought it and brought it to work and I put it on my desk and somebody said, "What is that? " And they said, "It's my festivus pole. I'm entitled to celebrate a holiday." That's great. So I'm going to have to ... I don't know. I don't know if there's a correct answer to that.
Jared Correia (00:52:03):
You get credit for both. All right. I just wanted to start us off the record. Talk about a bullshit attack. All right,
Rob Simpson (00:52:07):
Really.
Jared Correia (00:52:11):
Are you ready for the second holiday? I hope so. This one is called The Feast of the Long Shadow. The Feast of the Long Shadow, December 21st. Time to coincide with the winter solstice. This holiday is a celebration of geometry and local geography. Communities gather at the highest point in their town to observe the exact moment the sun casts the longest shadow of the year. Participants use colorful chalk to trace the shadows of trees, buildings, and loved ones on the pavement, creating a frozen map of the year's lowest light. It's a day of quiet reflection and scientific curiosity, often followed by meals of long foods like noodles or asparagus. The feast of the long shadow, December 21st. Is this a real holiday or am I completely full of shit? We love math here.
Rob Simpson (00:53:09):
I'm going to say this is not a real holiday.
Jared Correia (00:53:11):
You got it. You're two for two. It's a fake holiday.
Rob Simpson (00:53:14):
Okay.
Jared Correia (00:53:14):
Totally made up. Totally. All right.You're pretty good at this.
Rob Simpson (00:53:18):
You know what it was? It was the long noodles was the tip off to me. I don't know why,
Jared Correia (00:53:22):
But ... You're in the gauntlet now and you're doing quite well.
Rob Simpson (00:53:26):
Okay. All
Jared Correia (00:53:26):
Right. Number three. Number three. Unplugged Eve, December 14th. Unplugged to Eve. Born out of a modern desire for mental clarity. This is a contemporary secular holiday dedicated to digital silence. From sunrise to sunset, participants power down all electronic devices to reconnect with tactile hobbies and face-to-face communications. The day is characterized by analog exchanges where neighbors trade physical books, handwritten letters, or jars of preserved food. In the evening, the holiday concludes with the lantern walk where neighborhoods are illuminated solely by candlelight or oil lamps, reclaiming the dark winter night from the blue glare of screens. Sounds beautiful. Unplugged Eve, December 14th. Real or fake?
Rob Simpson (00:54:23):
I'm going to say that's real.
Jared Correia (00:54:24):
That is fake.
Rob Simpson (00:54:27):
Okay.
Jared Correia (00:54:28):
Totally made up.
Rob Simpson (00:54:31):
I've heard of people doing that though, having a- It
Jared Correia (00:54:34):
Might be an unofficial holiday.
Rob Simpson (00:54:35):
There is something like that. There's an unplugged day or something that people advocate for, but-
Jared Correia (00:54:39):
No unplugged eve, unfortunately.You're doing good though. You're still doing good. Two out of three is not bad. All right, next. The festival for the souls of dead whales. December 10th. It is attributed to the Inuit, originally celebrated by indigenous peoples of the Arctic and subarctic regions. It remembers the souls of whales who have died due to whaling and other human activities that impacted them. It acknowledges the ecological harm imposed by whaling. There's no specified traditions for this day, but some observances include a ceremony for the souls of the dead whales. Whale watching. But I didn't call you. I'm watching documentaries about conservation like blackfish. The festival for the souls of dead whales, the food must be amazing. December 10th, real or fake holiday.
Rob Simpson (00:55:33):
I'm going to say fake.
Jared Correia (00:55:34):
That is a real holiday.
Rob Simpson (00:55:37):
It is. Okay. You
Jared Correia (00:55:37):
Can celebrate it yourself next December 10th if you wish.
Rob Simpson (00:55:41):
I will. I will. I'm going to put it in my phone. No, the reason I thought about that was I thought that people like that were ... Their cultures were based on whaling, so I didn't think that they would feel sorry for the whales because that was their-
Jared Correia (00:55:54):
They've turned around and now they love the whales.
Rob Simpson (00:55:56):
Okay. So it was a logical ... It was a logical line that unfortunately went absolutely nowhere.
Jared Correia (00:56:03):
This is why I like having smart business owners on the podcast because they really try to reason it out. All right. I got two more for you. Let's see how we do.
Rob Simpson (00:56:09):
Okay.
Jared Correia (00:56:11):
Zaminhof Day, December 15th. Zaminhof Day, celebrated by the global Esperanto community. This day honors the birth of LL Zamenhoff, the Polish, Jewish ophthalmologist who created the world's most successful, constructed language. It's a celebration of linguistic idealism and international peace. Unlike national holidays that celebrate a single culture, Zamenhoff Day is inherently borderless. Participants around the world gather for cultural meetups, poetry readings, and lectures often conducted entirely in Esperanto. It is customary for Esperantis to purchase a new book in the language or exchange literature, honoring Zaminhaw's belief that a shared neutral tongue could dissolve the walls of misunderstanding between nations. Zaminhoff Day celebrating Esperanto on December 15th of every year, taking place after Unplugged Eve. Is it real? Is it fake? I'm really getting into this.
Rob Simpson (00:57:14):
I'm going to say real.
Jared Correia (00:57:16):
Real, real. All right. This is great. It is? Yes. It's a real holiday. I got it right. You
Rob Simpson (00:57:21):
Did. Wow. Okay.
Jared Correia (00:57:23):
Okay. So I got one more for you. And this is the difference between splitting and going three for three or bat and above 500. I got one more.
Rob Simpson (00:57:32):
There we go.
Jared Correia (00:57:33):
It is National Emo Day. National Emo Day December 19th. As a celebration of personal expression, National Emo Day identifies those who are part of the emo subculture. The emo subculture was born in the 1980s music scene combining post hardcore, alternative indie, and punk rock. Bands associated with emo culture include Weezer, Jimmy Eat World, My Chemical Romance, and Panic at the Disco. Most emo bands are noted for wearing black clothing, heavy makeup, and studded accessories like body piercings, as well as band t-shirts. Although none of this is required to be an emo fan or part of the subculture. More than anything else, those who identify as emo respect the art form and the emotions expressed through both the sung and spoken word. National emo day also taking place on December 19th. Real holiday or nay? I'm going to say no. Can you tell me why?Because you're very wrong.
Rob Simpson (00:58:39):
Okay. Yeah, very wrong. Okay. I don't know. It just didn't make any sense to me. And I was almost thinking how many have been real and how many haven't been? So at the end, I was trying to figure out what the law of averages would say.That's the numbers guy in me, I guess.
Jared Correia (00:58:56):
And that's why I didn't do three and three, but instead four and two. Okay. Maybe after this, you can go listen to a little bit of Wheezer and just have a day.
Rob Simpson (00:59:06):
Okay. Then I will emo with it. I did. I do have one. Thank you. Here's one for another time for you, Z.
Jared Correia (00:59:15):
Yeah, go ahead.
Rob Simpson (00:59:17):
I created something that I always call it. I'll tell you right up front. It's not a real holiday, but I call December 21st, International Optimists Day.
Jared Correia (00:59:28):
Oh, really? I like that. I would
Rob Simpson (00:59:30):
Have gone to that. It's the shortest day of the year. So if you're an optimist, you say every day is going to get longer from now on.
Jared Correia (00:59:38):
That's good. I think we should try to establish this as a regular holiday before I do this segment again. I think we
Rob Simpson (00:59:45):
Can do that. It's kind of like it's Festivus Eve Eve because it's December 21st.
Jared Correia (00:59:50):
I love it. It's amazing. Rob, lots of holiday input, lots of streaming input. Thanks for taking the time, man. I had a lot of fun. Oh, thank
Rob Simpson (00:59:59):
You very much. Much. I've been hopeful. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I'm glad we got to do it.
Jared Correia (01:00:03):
Me too. All right. We'll talk again soon. Take care. All right. Thank you.
(01:00:08):
Thanks for our guest, Rob Simpson of Waverider Communications. To learn more about Rob and Waverider, visit wavewridercomm.com. C-O-M-M.C-O-M. Waverider.com is in communications.com. Now, because I'll always be a 90s kid who's definitely not emo, but can appreciate Jack's Mannequin nonetheless, but whose true passion is burning CDs for anyone who would listen. I'm now just doing the modern version of that, which is creating Spotify playlist for every podcast episode that I record, where the songs are tangentially related to an episode topic. This week's playlist is extra frightening given the sci-fi bent we've taken here. We've got songs from horror movies. The Strangers Things series might be over. Now, I've got to wait for the movie, I guess. This is all sponsored by Count Chocula Cereal. No way, it's not sponsored by Count Chocula. I've got my friend and Barry's and a bunch. Join us next time when I read the entire Torah.