So funny. 21,000, 34,000. Ed, did you ever look up how much you made? I got the emails from Jackie. I forget what her total was. Milton, just some really big numbers on the board. And it's not even earning season, but even for the day training room every day this week, we made money. I mean, so we're off to a really, really good start for 2020. We are off to a very good start here. And it's not even earning season. So I want to be perfect the whole year. I need rest and sleep and a vacation at some point this year. All right, KBH is out tonight. WD-40. Infi is tomorrow. I remember tomorrow was a big day for data. And since we don't know what that result will be, you made 4,000 in Tassan? Great. Oh, this is higher. Again, I think yesterday was a great exit in this, but I'm not calling any more trades in this, but is anybody still in this? To watch Trump's speech and to watch those green bars was exciting. I really didn't listen to the whole thing. I just kind of listened to the first two minutes and then I just turned it off. I was trying to focus on what was going on here. I didn't want to get in my head about anything that would affect, because we actually sold off initially, I think. We went, we went, and then we flipped around. Yeah, here it is. We sold off here, boom, then swung around. Actually, this looks like it's just made a new low, 44.75, 44.72. Yep, it was a stop, drop, and roll. So anyways, good start to the year for everyone, no matter, like I said, if you're doing just day trades or if you're doing the day trades on the options or if you're just doing the options, this is a good start to the year, and it's not early in season, so it starts next week. So I'll continue to make the calls, but you guys are the ones that are doing them, okay? I'm happy everyone's making good decisions, okay? Yeah, stop, drop, and roll was the theme of the week. Move, you could have done both of these. I don't think we could have made a mistake today either. Like if I hadn't had KSS, I would have done this or vice versa, but they both ended up hitting at the same time and they both ended up working. This is, you know, like whatever it is at this point, you know?  That's number one. Like literally, this could go today, tomorrow. Seriously, literally. And second of all, you don't give up on the conviction. I had that lecture yesterday about the market because the market was down the previous night from the, from the Iran bombing, the place, which I guess nobody was killed. Oh, that's like amazing. But anyways, you got to hold the conviction. That was the whole lecture I did yesterday where we're talking about gaps and skill set and buying and selling, but really it's also conviction because if you, if one thing trips you up on your conviction, you're basically screwed. I mean, how can you survive? How can you make it? How can you make any money? How can you get anywhere? How can you do anything at all? I mean, I'm not just talking about trading. I'm talking about anything in life that you want to accomplish. I mean, you have to be able to learn to deal with stress and situations, and we all got to deal with it better. But the reality is that when you have the conviction in a trade and you take it and you're down, or you see something doesn't work and you hold the conviction because of what you know, it helps you. It helps you at least handle the stressful situation until it goes back in your favor. Now, if you're making a flat-out mistake and you're doing something wrong, that's a different story. So this is interesting here. Again, market gapped up today. People, it looks like people are going to try to short this market here. But I'll tell you right now, if the data is good tomorrow, we're going to, we're going to have another third day up. And again, I would be out of all the market stuff and I wouldn't hold anything to the last day unless you're not up. But as far as this goes, if we have good data tomorrow, we'll have another pop. I mean, I don't know if anyone has any questions or if anyone wants to go over anything. We certainly can. This is up again too. And this is going to, I think this is on the move here. This apple is on the move. 310 is in sight for this. Just like 320 is in sight still for a, no, not 320. What was the number? 220. I'm sorry. 220 was in sight for the, for the cues. We got to 214.41. But 220 is in sight for this. This was Isabelle's dream target yesterday. Didn't get there yesterday. Does that, did I remember me saying 218 yesterday? Because I did. I said 218 is the real target on this today. I mean, look at that. 220 was a dream target, but 220 is a real number. So I think 220 here, 310 here, 330 here we talked about. Let's look at the high with this. It was 326 and change. This was the 14, 20, 14, 25 that got through these already. So you could be out of Google, but if everything else is higher, that's going to go in 1920 in Amazon. Actually, you know what? I'm going to look at when these, when is that day when everything comes out? Let me just see when Apple, Google, Amazon, all those ones are, because it's good to know that it states Amazon is January 30th. Apple is on January 28th. It's like a Google. You know, I'm playing a while Facebook. I just kind of forget about that. It never, I like, it's not in my purview. I don't know why. I don't know why. Like, kind of forget that it exists. I think it's on a different date. February 3rd is Google. That's weird. James is excited of this year of trading with me. Well, you've been gone long enough. Some of you take hiatuses and then you always come back to the mothership at the list of interesting because the longer I'm in business, the more I see people come back around to me. Oh, I should have never left you. Have a great day, everyone. Have a fabulous, fabulous day. It's freezing. I'm going to try to get some stuff done today, get organized with my life, work out and go to bed early. You're sticking around this time. Good. Good start to the week for you and great trade here on this. Good exit too. All right, I'll see everybody tomorrow. You're welcome, Riley. Very good.


Okay, so to start us off this month we have Tim Sherritt. As I said he has been looking at ways that wiki data can include Australian government data such as linking wiki data to the National Archives of Australia. For those who use Twitter you may have seen his regular tweets on that very subject and the amazing work that he's been doing creating resources around his own Glamwork website. He'll also be at the WAO conference next week so don't miss that. And I will put the Glamwork bench into the chat and a recent blog post that he wrote for us as well which you can read later on. Don't read it now it's about to be a presentation. And then I'll also put a link into the WAO just in case you haven't registered because you will be able to watch it online later. And now I'll hand you over to Tim. Thank you. Thanks James and thanks everybody. It's great to be here with you. And thanks of course to Wikimedia Australia for supporting the work that I've been doing. Although I'm sort of reporting on it tonight it's not at all that I feel it's finished. It's not the end of the project. It's really the beginning for me in some ways because working on this has really opened up all sorts of interesting questions and possibilities that I want to explore further. And I'll be talking a bit more about that as I go on. Apologies if I'm a bit croaky. I've already given a six hour workshop today. So I'm hoping I just don't start speaking gibberish at some point. But I might start sharing my screen. I don't have slides today but I do have some things that I want to show you if I can find where Firefox has gone to. There we go. Okay so that's the blog post that James was referring to where I've talked in detail about some of what I'm going to be describing tonight. But I thought I'd give use tonight to give a bit of context to this and what I've been doing and where I think it might go in the future. So first of all I mean I suppose it starts for me this particular project with the collections of the National Archives of Australia which I've felt very passionate about for a long time. As a baby historian it was really the place where I started to do my first research and just the richness of the collections is just amazing, astonishing. And they make obviously their data available. That's one of the annoying things about Record Search. They make their data available through their online database Record Search. And again it has a very rich data not only about their own collections but also about the agencies that create the records in their collections. And I'll talk a bit more about that structure in a minute. So there's fabulous data there but Record Search itself as an interface to this material is quite limited and I mean I should also say I did work at the National Archives for a number of years and again was frustrated by you know lacking really ways to make people understand the richness and the possibilities of the material that's held by the National Archives. So over the years I've been involved in a number of projects which has tried to sort of expose that material and make it available for people to use and see and understand in different types of ways. So for example the real face of White Australia is actually a sort of ongoing project that I'm involved in and back in 2011 Kate Bagnell, historian of Chinese Australia and I downloaded I think about 12,000 digitised images from the National Archives of Australia, ran them through a facial detection script and created this wall of faces. This has been updated a little bit since then but it's pretty much the same. To show you the documents that these photos come from. So these were documents which were used in the administration of the White Australia policy. So basically if you were you know deemed not to be White and you travelled overseas you had to carry special documentation with you or else basically you wouldn't be let back into the country. You would face the dictation test and that was a mechanism of exclusion. So there are thousands of these documents and they're amazing and they're sitting in the National Archives of Australia and we wanted to make them more visible. We wanted people to understand them so we created that wall of faces. We've since done other things so actually just a couple of weeks ago we launched the latest version of a transcription project which is actually getting people to transcribe information from these certificates so that we can actually explore in more detail the sort of the population and their movements across that White Australia period. I've also spent a bit of time downloading publicly available ASIO files which are also available through Record Search and wrote a little program which found redactions in ASIO files and assembled a collection of something like 200,000 redactions and you can actually, I do have a red bubble store where you can actually buy scarves which are covered in redactions amongst other things and again it's you know giving people a different perspective on those collections these things that are in Glam collections giving people a different ways of seeing them and using them and understanding them and one of the best things that happened in terms of pulling out these redactions was I got to discover a whole new genre of art which is redaction art so some of the people who were actually doing the redactions of the files obviously got a bit bored and they started turning the redactions into little little animals and ships and things like that so these are actually in files in the National Archives of Australia. So as well as sort of creating these sort of alternative interfaces I suppose to Record Search data I've also created a series of tools to help people get data out of Record Search. The latest version of this this is the latest version of this data scraper so Record Search doesn't have an API and application programming interface so to get data out of it it's a it's a matter of screen scraping the data and it's quite a complicated business because of the nature of the technology behind Record Search but versions of this scraper have you know been around now for I don't know nine or ten years and I've used it in you know a number of these projects such as the Redactions and the White Australia Policy one so this is available now the software it's a Python package and you can download it and you can pull out data out of Record Search to do you know all sorts of analysis or whatever sort of projects that you're interested in and some examples of that in the Record Search section of the Glam Workbench so the Glam Workbench really brings together a whole lot of stuff that I've been working on over the past of 10 years or more in terms of helping people make use of the data that's available through Glam Collections and so it's not obviously just the National Archives of Australia it's also there's a lot of resources and tools and examples of working with data from Trove for example both the newspapers and other bits of Trove various other libraries and archives mostly focused on Australia but some other collections so there's a quite a big collection of tools and resources that help you use web archives for example both the Internet Archive as well as the UK Web Archive and the Australian Web Archive so this is something that I'm continuing to develop and I'm very pleased we've added a wiki data section as as part of the work on this project and I'll show you what's in there shortly but this brings together a number of examples of using that data from Record Search so various things that I've developed over the years ways of looking at that data that exists within Record Search now just to I suppose talk about the the nature of the data in Record Search a bit more so Record Search and I sort of descend into Archives Nerdery a bit here because it's really fascinating the data structures within there so Record Search is based on something called the Commonwealth Record Series System and it's a way of organizing knowledge organizing the collections within the National Archives which it was quite revolutionary at the time in terms of describing archival collections because they didn't just sort of describe a body of records and say that that was created by a particular agency they actually documented the little histories of agencies how they related to each other how they changed over time and also described the functions that different agencies carried out within the context of government over time so and then around those agencies or connected to those agencies which are all interconnected themselves are the records they create which are organized into series so an agency performs certain functions and it creates certain records or record series and I can actually show you a little thing I actually created this when I was at the National Archives this little pyramid it's still there which shows you how much record search has changed it's been 10 years but it just shows you the the arrangement of the entities within Record Search so agencies which is the ones I've been working with lately they're connected up to organizations they perform functions they create series but then of course there's a whole lot of relationships within the agencies so agencies have you know predecessors and successors they have they can be controlled by other agencies or they may control sub agencies so there's some really sort of rich connections data connections and relationships there but and again this is getting back to the limits of the sort of interfaces that we have currently to work with these sorts of collections you it's difficult to actually search across these sorts of relationships or explore or visualize the relationships between agencies within Record Search itself it's very much you know type your text into a search box and get back a list of results you've got no way of understanding that totality that sort of you know rich model of Australian government which is effectively documented within Record Search so that's really where why I suggested this as a project of working with wiki data because if we could get some of that data out of Record Search and into wiki data and linked with data which is already available in wiki data we would then open up new ways of querying that data and of course the the you know the data model within wiki data the the having properties and statements and relationships fits very well with that sort of entity relationship model which is at the basis of the series system within Record Search so I thought if we could you know as a first instance start to get well as I should also point out that each agency within Record Search has its own unique identifier which is obviously a crucial element to this indeed all of the the different parts of them have have their own identity identifiers so organizations agencies series and Commonwealth persons there are people as well all have identifiers and so as part of this project we've got that those entity identifiers as a property now in wiki data so I've been focusing on the agencies but those identifiers can now also be added to people as well those Commonwealth persons identifiers so yes so the idea of of getting those identifiers into first of all into existing wiki data entries but then also adding entries that are that are not there and you know when you're talking about government agencies or government departments first of all I suppose the sort of top level agencies they are you know those sort of changes are documented by you know when we have machinery of government changes you know when a new government comes in or there's a shape up of shake up of shake up of departments you have a machinery of government document which shows how different pieces of what pieces of legislation are being looked after by different government departments and so that you have those sort of different changes so it can you know get quite complex at times as we'll see so the first stage obviously of this project was actually well the first stage was getting the property into into wiki data accepted as a wiki data property and then I using the tools that I had I harvested out all of the agencies from record search agency data it's about there's data on about 8 000 agencies within record search and then I started to think about how that could be modeled within wiki data and you know that's when I started to really grapple with some of the complexities and the the limitations of some of the data so the first thing I I suppose I should say is in terms of agencies within record record search there are a number of record search identifies different types of agency this is under agency status down here so we've got department of state head office regional or state office in these other ones as well so my first focus was departments of state so you know these are the government departments which do the the core work of government but I've also been adding head offices in some regional or state offices as well so in the first instance I've been taking those those identifiers from record search for government departments then using you know tools which you'll be familiar with in terms of open refine and quick statements to match those agency records with ones which were already in wiki data add the identifier and also add some other data from record search specifically the existence dates of departments so record search has all of the records have the dates when an agency started and and a finished within them so making sure that all that's added into wiki data as well as just a few other sort of making sure they're all sort of associated with Australia and things like that and particular instances of departments of state and government so there's and having got those identifiers in and I added departments which weren't obviously already in wiki data and sometimes you know this is one of the when things start to get complicated is that you may have a government department which has the same name over a period of time but whose functions have actually changed so machinery of government has actually changed some of the their responsibilities over time so you'll see you know there's a number of different departments of defence for example I think there's a couple of treasuries as well the only I think pretty much the only department has which has gone through unchanged is the department of Attorney General's department so that meant that you know where some agencies would be in wiki data as a the sort of current agency with a particular name but I had to add the sort of historical versions of that which related to those previous groups of functions and legislation so having added the entities I then added the relationships between them to get the predecessors and successes that was a bit complicated because in many cases you know agencies aren't sort of fully replaced by another agency it's that they're the functions that they do maybe split up between a number of agencies they may even go to an agency which is already in existence so some of their functions are hived off and given to another you know all these sorts of complexities right now I was hoping to sort of be able to sort of map those changes a bit more accurately than than I was in the end so record search where it has that sort of relationship where one agency goes to another it does have the dates when those sort of changes shifted and it sometimes does include a note about what sort of responsibilities shifted but there's a sort of a bit of a mismatch there because really what record search does is it describes the you know the activities of government as functions they've got to have set a a thesaurus of functions which are used to describe those but they're not currently used in describing the transitions from one government department to another so there's a bit of a gap there what would be fabulous to to and what I would like to do some more analysis of is seeing there are functions I'm getting into far much too much detail here I'm sorry it's you know getting a bit enthusiastic about it but the functions are associated with agencies and they do have date ranges though past analysis has shown that even they can be a bit inconsistent but there is the sort of beginnings of that data which could actually break down the functioning of the the activities of government to individual functions and map those over time as they move between departments but there's a lot more sort of data analysis and cleanup I think that would be needed in order to get to that point but that that would be a really exciting thing to do but as it is so we've got that data about departments in to wiki data now and I was able to start then doing some visualisation of that that those relationships so this this is within the glam workbench so the glam workbench has a and these are now public so you can go in and use them so the glam workbench is a collection of Jupiter notebooks I know that the wiki media itself has a has a notebook environment where people can work with data so you may have seen something similar but it's really just showing the sort of sparkle queries that you can do of wiki data with across the government agencies and sort of then ways you can start to explore and analyse it so this is I can just I'm just hitting shift enter on these little cells here in order to run them and you can start to this was a sort of example of a like a gantt chart of agencies showing the years that they were they started and then ended and you can mouse over to see the department so up the top here we will have the sort of regional apartments like attorney general's department it slides off here so you can see attorney general's department going through to the present day so that that was a sort of early attempt to start playing with that data this one is a bit more interesting so this creates a network diagram I need to run it again so it's pulling the data from wiki data using sparkle queries and then just sort of developing a sort of customised visualisation so this is the network graph so and I find this quite interesting so the colours here represent decades and it's basically going down in time so we're starting at 1901 and heading towards the current departments down here and you can see that things were relatively stable for effectively the first 50 or 60 years of the Australian Commonwealth government well this is the world war two era and there was some changing of departments the defence split up into different departments during the war and we had the department of post-war reconstruction and those sorts of things so there are a few changes there but what you can see is when we get to the 1970s and particularly the Whitlam government we had you know a lot of rapid changes in the structure and organisation and functions of government departments and that has continued on ever since so the the size of these nodes indicates how long they lived for effectively so you can see there none of them have well most of them don't have a very long lifespan as they get sort of merged and re-divided and things like that so it was an interesting exercise to actually sort of explore see how you could visualise these sorts of things I've created another a notebook which enables you to do this for an individual department and this actually runs as a sort of an app effectively using a thing called voila which is a way of representing Jupiter notebooks so we can in here we can just from the drop down choose a department to get an idea of its sort of context and change over time so again this is pulling data live from wiki data and showing the connections so this is the agency we selected and then it goes sort of three steps in either direction to see the agencies that were associated or its predecessors and successes so and since then I mean this was the sort of start of that work and I've added more agencies so I've gone down that list of different types of agencies to look at the head offices and others so I think there's about 1400 now in wiki data which have those national archives identifiers I've still got some relationships to add between the head office type agencies head office is a bit misleading because it includes things like royal commissions for example and various other authorities and committees and bureaus and things like that so yes I've got some more relationships to add for those but I've also started to get you know a bit fascinated by some of the other possibilities particularly for HASS researchers humanities and social sciences researchers which the Glamwork bench was developed for to enable them to think about how they can use wiki data in their research so so I did start doing some playing around with looking at data about that's not the one data about individuals people so just pulling out sort of a year of birth for example of people born in Australia who are in wiki data I did some work around occupations and occupations over time so this is again pulling data from the the sparkle interface and then building some custom visualizations on top of that so these are Australian rule footballers Australian rules footballers first names some word cloud so I just sort of started exploring different ways we could represent some of that data in terms of thinking about uses for humanities research also become rather fascinated with the range of identifiers which are already in use which you probably have been adding to these records so you have been adding to these records but sort of the range of them was really interesting so looking at what's already there and then thinking about you know what becomes possible when other collections are sort of adding to that and linking their own records and that sort of network of relationships that they can then pull back from wiki data in order to enrich their own collections there are obviously some fabulous possibilities there which you know would be would be great to explore further and I suppose getting back to that point so the you know in creating those visualizations of the government agency data in record search what has really become possible is that we can query record search effectively within wiki data so we can understand what's in that collection by building these wiki data queries which are using those identifiers and so I started to think about other ways of doing that with other collections so there are obviously a lot of entries within wiki data which have Australian dictionary of biography identifiers and the adb doesn't actually make much of its own data available openly but by using wiki data we can actually build queries around the adb content in a way we can't within the adb site itself so from the outside we can build more complex and different types of queries and questions than we can within the interfaces which are provided by these sorts of services so just as an example of that this is a sparkle which shows us the people in the adb the youngest people who have entries within the Australian dictionary of biography so this is obviously not a query you can do within the adb site itself but because those identifiers have been added to wiki data we can build a sort of parallel interface to the adb and explore it in different types of ways so this has got me sort of really excited about thinking about other ways we can build these sort of you know parallel interfaces by adding these identifiers into wiki data and that's all because of the great work of people like you have been adding these identifiers in that we've got to this point now where we can really start to to to make use of this explore it in different types of ways so really from here I'm continuing to to add some of that agency data but I will also at the moment the Glamwork bench has as I said has a wiki data section so it's got those three notebooks which visualise information about government departments within it and you can run these live online but I'll be adding a number of more notebooks so the ones around people the ones around the adb and things like that will be added to that over coming weeks and again I'll be trying to use this as a way of getting humanities and social sciences researchers thinking about the data that's available there and the perspective it gives them on these sort of existing collections so yeah I think I better wrap it up there again thanks very much for supporting this and really looking forward to continuing to develop some of these things specifically in making you know new resources available through the Glamwork bench Excellent thank you very much Tim and does anyone have any questions for Tim I saw there was some put into the chat there's a question there about is the model the same for state archives generally yes the series system is used across other government archives within Australia the level at which things are described you know the amount of data they may have make available is can differ but the series system is also used in other sort of archives as well so not just government archives the series system is can be more is more broadly used Sam just put a question in the chat here just asked if the data model is compatible with gov directory.org I don't know the answers to that I did sorry I probably could have just looked it up myself couldn't I it's a new seemingly new idea of using wiki data as a back for a government directory it sounds exactly like what you've done for Australia so there was actually a tweet about this too somebody responded to the post I think from people who are doing that the gov directory asking about some of that data I haven't had a chance to sort of look at the at the answer to their question yet but yeah so so I don't know exactly but I mean it's obviously the same sort of sort of data and the same sort of intention behind it I think I mentioned it to you in an email oh yes yes yes yes yes that's right yes it's not a question but but yeah and I think I might have mentioned this to you in an email too but but I'll you know just something similar I was I'm sort of had in mind but haven't had a chance to work on giving my not copious free time but um was was sort of ministry so that's in not department departments but the the ministerial portfolios or positions and and you know that's sort of quite similar in that usually I guess it's there they're almost parallel and the department changes name or splits or merges you know the the ministry is the same thing so um so yeah it'd be interesting to to sort of try and tie what you've done there to make it a bit easier to to see the history of that over time and yeah and some of those commonwealth people relationships might also help in that I'm not sure I've never been quite sure the extent to which that is used within record search like how how many I I don't think it's complete basically but but certainly you know there are some of those relationships between both at the ministerial level but also you know department departmental secretaries are sometimes named as as commonwealth people and associated with agencies as well um and then Amanda's just raised her hand she's got a question yeah yeah I was just thinking about um as I put a comment in the chat you know an issue like arts or science you know they they sometimes they're in sometimes they just disappear you know with the the previous government there was no science in anywhere and that was a big you know kind of proof haha about that and then it got added in is there a way to sort of see where say something like arts presumably you know you when you look at your history but when they only had what five five agencies at the big get you know in 1901 arts wasn't there somewhere along the line probably in 1971 and got it added in uh and then you know it gets it's a classic thing that it gets sort of shunted around from different to different agencies or drops off is there a way to see some of that kind of yeah so you sort of you can see some of it so I'll just um if I just go back to that that network uh graph for example I can show you with the things that you're showing is a bit hard to see because there's nothing nothing that was identifiable as a particular agency like you know could you track the agency as it as it went down through time kind of thing so um so yes so these uh you know individual agencies and if you click on any of these uh sort of nodes in the network graph and it's it and you can zoom in and you can see where that the sort of functions of that agency have gone to different agencies so you can start to track those connections through time in terms of the sort of named functions and that's what I was saying it would be great to to have those sorts of data about the named functions in there but it's not at the moment not sort of consistent enough within record search to pull out to show so you could say you know the arts function and you could trace that through individual departments so what you're sort of really working with here are the the the names that they're looking at the departments and seeing what sort of what sort of departments then followed them and how that sort of tracks through time and similarly those sort of individual ones as I was showing here you can start to see you can choose a sort of department from here and start to see where the connections are from that how the sort of responsibilities are flowed from there so there are possibilities there it's the data's not quite complete but I think it's certainly something to explore further so we've got two questions so I think Margaret may raise her hand first then we'll get to Sam Margaret you're muted I popped my question into the chat but I was interested in the connection between your departments and legislation yeah yeah yeah and just sort of hoping that it might tie in beautifully because um yeah anyway so I was hoping you might have to expand on that perhaps yeah yeah yeah no that was something I certainly been thinking about and I was going to mention it so thanks for thanks for raising it um yeah so I mean machinery of government changes link departments to specific pieces of legislation so they have responsibility for certain pieces of legislation that data isn't I mean it's in the machinery of government documents wherever they might be it doesn't seem to be available directly through through record search at the moment but it's not just government departments I mean what's I think also very interesting is the range of other types of agencies that are specifically created by legislation so you know various boards or councils or commissions or whatever and they're often quite easy to find the connections because the name of the agency is in the piece of legislation and I was finding this you know as I was trying to disambiguate government agencies I was getting the the legislation pop up so I think there's certainly with some a number of those sort of lower level agencies linking them to the the legislation that created them would be fantastic it would be because one of the things that bothers me about Wikipedia is we're really very ahistorical I mean it's all the present and um anybody born after whatever thinks that life has always been you know exactly as it is now and um I just you know you know I was thinking about writing an article about a person and one of the things that was important was that in the times when we didn't have dual citizenship you know heads of department who reported to ministers were required to be Australian citizens but you know that's sort of all lost in the midst midst of time and I sort of love to be able to tie it all together because um life has changed enormously and we don't see it in Wikipedia as well as I would like to see it you know neither in wiki data yeah and I was also the um that the work um that has been done on the Australian legislation is just fantastic and I was I was looking at that too as a um as something to point like humanities researchers too um to have that available in that sort of form to be queryable um again opens up some really interesting possibilities uh Sam did you want to go ahead uh yeah um I think your your um creation of an API for record search is is wonderful work um I mean you're no longer at the the national archives but um do you know what their plans are it is record search gonna ever change is there gonna be an API um and also like yeah what is the legal status of your scraper uh well the the all of their data is now available cc by so oh cool um uh so yeah I don't think there's issues there they've sort of aligned themselves with other government departments in terms of um that that sort of metadata um uh look I don't know um I um like we even when I was at the national archives you know there was money being spent on planning for a record search replacement which never happened um and um you know I've heard that there has been some well there were already there've been a couple of projects which have come and gone and nothing's actually happened and so I'm not quite sure where things are right now I mean there was you know I did have discussions about an API probably you know six seven years ago um there was a short lived API to some of the World War One records which now seems to have gone away um so I wish I had an answer for you but I really don't and and the the um copyright thing um like importing into wiki data obviously cc by isn't uh public domain um is there a an issue there I mean not that data is copyrightable anyway so it's the wrong license for a database but um um well the data imported so far is like dates and identifiers um so um I don't think there's an issue with those if uh there might be I don't know like if they have sort of text descriptions of departments there may be other issues around if you were going to sort of import those um but you probably don't want to because they're a bit of a mess anyway um but that sort of basic metadata I don't I don't uh I think there's a problem uh pretty had a question yeah thanks Tim lots of questions but I guess just going to all right if we you know who are going to do more um give more grants two questions one what could we do you know what does wiki data need to make it more accessible for people to work in and and and then how do we actually attract people to want to do that work so you know with how what kind of things could be attractive to past researchers for instance yeah um I've had a number of uh you know since doing this work I've been talking to people about different sorts of projects and really um you know it's changed my thinking around a number of things and thinking that you know really they should be going to wiki data first in terms of starting to for example today so at this workshop um there was somebody who was talking about bringing together resources relating to designers in Australia um and yes I know there's already Dow that um um directory of uh archives sorry my words are really going now um but um but they they want something a bit different um and um uh and you know I I really thought that thanks for looking to Dow yeah um but I really thought that uh you know in terms of what they were wanting to do which was actually just create linkages between collections and information about people and things like that um you know it was something to be done within wiki data and then they could uh you know build a uh any interface to that uh on on top of that data rather than create yet another platform or yet another um you know database or whatever um so I think there's and obviously you know there's been work done by glam organisations across the world making use of wiki data and more and more um perhaps I don't know perhaps be less in Australia than say in Europe or or the US um specifically around um you know putting their own identifiers within wiki data in a way that enables them to find those connections with uh with other people in collections and things like that um and again I've had some conversations around that recently about um you know encouraging organisations to to do more of that um just to understand the value they get in terms of enrichment by um sharing their own identifiers and information um so um I mean I know you're doing all that already but I mean I think I suppose just sort of reinforcing those sorts of opportunities and and what I can do like through things like the glam workbench is to demonstrate um some of the value that accrues from those sorts of things by showing how you can explore linkages and and create alternative pathways and interfaces to some of this material um I think um you know in terms of HASS researchers particularly I suppose my discipline history um we're still at the beginning of really understanding of working with um a lot of uh data uh collections so you know a lot of my work is basically pointing to things like trove newspapers and say okay well let's not think of this as a list of search results let's think of this as a as a huge data corpus that we can explore in all sorts of ways and people are starting to to do that um and starting to explore those data possibilities and I think sort of wiki data then sits alongside those sorts of other uh platforms and projects in terms of humanities data and and seeing the possibilities again for linking some of these things up um which aren't possible in the platforms themselves um and that's sort of what I'm going to be talking about at the the well uh conference is really those possibilities for building a round sort of glam collections using a variety of tools like wiki data and creating these sort of alternative ways of seeing and using and exploring them um so yeah I mean um uh and yeah I suppose um no I think that's probably what I had to say thank you and thanks for your advocacy you know because that you know you have an important voice in that uh area so really you know happy for you to connect people with wiki data or with us if they need um further support great awesome


This is Startup Storefront. Growing up in New York City, sisters Mabel and Chayita have been working since they were 14. After years of savings, they decided to go all in on their dreams and start Lunamagic. Their first 18 months were a whirlwind. They landed three major retail accounts and made it on Shark Tank.  They hadn't yet quit their day jobs and their bosses had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. But once they found out, it was nothing but love and support. This isn't a mystery as to why it occurred, as the energy and passion they bring to their endeavors is apparent. By the end of the episode, you'll likely feel the same way. In today's episode, we chat with Chayita and Mabel about how Craigslist is a secret hack for all small businesses, how small businesses can have the upper hand when it comes to negotiations with major retailers and what it takes to become a hero to the kids in their old neighborhood. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to the lovely sisters of Lunamagic. Thanks for coming. People who don't know your company, what do you do? What do you guys make? A pleasure to be here. We provide high quality cosmetics at great prices, con mucho amor. I love that. Look at that. Rehearsed. Sure did. What made you guys want to start this company? I mean, we saw avoiding the marketplace for authentic cosmetic brand, like, you know, it's not the typical, I hired this celebrity, the Spanish celebrity to launch a brand.  Let's see what we can do. You're the user. Yeah. And what was missing? Was it like the shades that were missing? What was the thing? Or was it just like the founder, the story? Yeah, the shades, the quality for the price point. You know, we believe in, we're in mass retail, so we believe in everyone having quality to great quality cosmetics at approachable prices. And the founder story, the creative, the marketing, the positioning, I think we do an amazing job of bringing all that bilingual flair. The saboteur. The saboteur. La cultura. La cultura. I feel like, you know, people from our neighborhood, Washington Heights, they're like, oh my God, you guys made it. And we're like, yeah, and you can make it too. Yeah. You want to be that example for your neighborhood. Absolutely. That's a real thing. That's a big thing. And so what was the first step in you guys wanting to do this? Like, were you guys always, I'm assuming, obviously, it's weird to ask a woman if she's into makeup. The answer is probably yes. But to like decide to then get into the science of it, or like the manufacturing, what was the like the first step you guys took to do that? I think it was like conversations between us. At the moment, I was living in Boulder. And I just. In Colorado? Yeah, I was living in Boulder, Colorado. Were you lost? No. Actually. She chose. No. Actually coming out of New York City, it was beautiful. It was me funding. It's really nice. Finding myself, you know, living the typical housewife life and she would come and she used to talk to me about her life in corporate America and you know, the void she saw in the retail side of like bringing in like small businesses, cultural businesses into retail, how hard it was. And she used to be, you know, advocating for those brands all the time. So I went to makeup school after my journalism career. And I was like, oh my God, I like makeup, but I knew I didn't want to be a makeup artist. That was not my thing. I wanted like the business side of makeup.  I think we started from there. What year was that? What year did you guys start this? 2018 was the first time that, you know, because it was kind of like when in the retail market, like she was saying, I was seeing like brands like Fenty Beauty were coming out like this unapologetic diversity, inclusivity stories. And those became the first manifestation for what I was seeing on the trend side. Like finally somebody did it. What's our version of that? But a lot of it started like Saida said, conversations and also inspiration, meaning looking at the women in our family and the power that beauty and makeup plays in our community. I mean, Latina women and we say this, and I say this with so much respect. Somos vanidosas. Literally from birth. We love to look good, to smell good, to feel good. Parents were in the salon. Like it was always like when I would come back from college, my family didn't even ask me about my grades. They were like, why is your hair like that? Like, are you going to have a chance to like hit up the salon? There's a pride in that. Yeah. I remember so growing up, we'd go like Machu Picchu in Peru. And then my mom would be there and it's like a rainforest. And so it's like, I mean, it's going to rain at some point every like hour or so. And so we're there and it's a bunch of Peruvians and we're just like in a pack of them, we're all walking up and all the women are like doing their makeup. Absolutely. It's a ritual. Hilarious to think about it's going to start raining in a second. And I don't know, I'll never forget that. Because all the men were like, of course, like the Peruvians, you know, it's like that's what they do. Yeah, yeah, they're a prideful woman. And so any time you're going to take a photo, they're going to look or try to look proper. Correct. Yeah, yeah. And so OK, so then you guys, what was the first thing you did? What was like the first product you guys made? We always thought about it as a collection. I always I remember telling Saida curation is everything. It's because the smaller you can curate and be intentional with every product, the better you can tell the story. So we started with five products and we focus on color names. Salud, Dinero y Amor, Gostosa, Amor, Mamacita and Reggaeton. Like Salud, Dinero y Amor. Like we were just really created with putting like the culture in the product. So we started with five products and that actually got us. What were the five? An eyeshadow palette. We call it the Uno Collection. Uno, number one, first.  We were like, let's do it like in that fashion. So the Uno Collection, Uno. So we had an eyeshadow palette, two lashes and two lipsticks, a red one and a pink one. And they were both for they look good on both my skin tone and Saida skin tone. And then we went to town. We launched the site and in four months, we got our first yes from Walmart, our first retailer. Yeah, because the thing with being curated is you can tell the story. The retailers didn't feel overwhelmed by, oh, my God, you guys have two hundred skews, right? They're like, OK, there's not a lot of risk in launching five things. Why don't we try with these five things? So I think that was the best strategy we came up with. Yeah, less is more. I mean, if you look at the retail space, everything is cluttered. And, you know, I was on the other side of the table. So I was thinking like a merchant, right? Merchants, your job is to bring in, look at skew productivity, cut things if they don't work out. So I come in with that training, I understood how to like position it to minimize the risk for them and us, but also focus on telling the story and the opportunity that our brand had for the for the long term game. And what markets did you guys start in? Like, what was it where Walmart felt comfortable to say, OK, we're going to start in these regions? That's funny. You say that because we also came with data. We came with our own data to say, hey, we were regional strategy. Yeah, we were very intentional. We went down to zip codes, zip codes. We're like, we want to be in this zip code and this zip code because we know our people are there. Exactly. Where is Lauda being played on TV? Exactly. I downloaded census data here. This is a nerd. Census data and we clustered the data. So we started in regional markets, obviously New York for Target, the second retailer, but New York, California, Texas and Florida. Yeah. So we're deeply. And then there's great markets, massive. Massive markets. So it's super helpful. Yeah, but then we learned with the retailers that there's random markets in the middle of America, where they're 50% Latino population, like one store in Walmart store in Wisconsin. And we were like, we didn't know that. So we start learning from them, too, about where these customers clusters are located because they have access to that information. Yeah. The one thing I learned recently by doing this podcast is like, if you're a brand and you can and you can partner with a retailer on a problem they're trying to solve, it's the best way to do it. And I never considered that. And I think at least the way I was thinking about just as an interviewer, it's more of like, if you if you if you think mindset wise that you're the entrepreneur, there's a there's a part of you that's going to feel really small when when talking to like a Walmart or a Target. But if you can partner with them on like a strategy, correct, all of a sudden it's like it's bigger and they respect you more and they're going to look out for you and then probably like ensure success because of this alignment. That is exactly what we learned. Obviously the first year we were super scared.  But then we realized that these merchants have so many accounts. So it's up to us to come to them with information. Hey, why don't we do this? And why don't we do that? And they love that from us. They're like, oh, my God, thank you for telling me. Thank you for telling me. And then we started building that relationship. And what was the pricing at the beginning? Like, how did you guys nail that down? That's funny, because at the beginning, to be honest, when we launched this site, we were thinking like 30 the price went between 25 and 40. But then we started studying the market and realizing, OK, where are our customers? I found this report that said where Latina customers are shopping, and they ranked in 1 to 10. Walmart is at the top of the list. Target, CVS, yadda, yadda, yadda. So then we looked at our pricing. Obviously Walmart is, you know, everyday savings. So then we re-looked at our pricing. But to be honest, when we re-looked at our pricing, we understood that mass means volume in a different way versus selling 38 to a specific segment of customers. It's about reaching as many people as possible. So you lowered it. Yeah, we lowered it. But it didn't matter because it's like we weren't anywhere nobody knew, but we did at the beginning. Like, we look at pricing to make sure it made sense. And for me personally, and we had this conversation multiple times, I am the high, low shopper. Like, I can buy the highest of the high. And then I'm like, oh my god, this is cute. This is $10. I go and I buy it. And I think in our culture, we think that way. We're like, OK, we're driving this Mercedes Benz, but we're living at home with mom. We like to dabble into the highs and the lows. So I just went to my sister and I'm like, you know, we all know we want this to be $32. But I'm thinking as a buyer, as this girl who's in college who's getting minimum wage, what is she willing to pay for this product? So then that's how we started. We're like, OK, let's be realistic to reach the mass. Yeah, that and like we say something that we said in our Shark Tank page. Bueno bonito barato, when our parents used to take us shopping. My grandma used to say that all the time. Exactly. It had to satisfy those three things. It had to be bueno, like good quality, bonito. It had to look beautiful and barato.  Inexpensive. Inexpensive. Inexpensive, just right. Affordable. Just the price, yeah. It has to make sense. In affordable luxury. Affordable luxury. And the beauty of that, of having that Latino cultural insight, is that we know that we have a large propensity to be unlawful shoppers. Once we find a brand that we like, like for example, Roscanilla, like there's certain things that I grew up in that I know I should buy probably like the more nicer version of it. But because that rice has so much significance to my family food culture, it's a loyalty there. It's highly unlikely that I'll ever trade up. You know what I mean? But that's the Latino customer that once we find something we love, we're deeply loyal. And so when you rolled out, how did it go? Like were you right about your assumptions? Or who did you find out your buyer was? How old were they? So the good news is, so we got, everyone is always asking, introduced and we, our buyer just understood it and it happened because to what you were saying earlier, they knew that they had a void with this customer base. So by the time we came with our Nielsen data and our regional strategy and our marketing and our packaging, it was, they were waiting for that. They've been wanting that. So that's why it almost always feels like a marriage. It was synergies. And you know, other Latina brands did go to these retailers but they couldn't maintain inside the retailer. And that's the biggest thing, maintaining. It's not getting in, getting in, it's great. Staying in. It's just staying in. And because they had the higher price point, they couldn't stay in retail. It didn't get sticky. And how are you guys going about marketing this? Was it Instagram? Social media, social media. And I think our first big push was Shark Tank. Like people don't realize that when we did Shark Tank, I still had a full-time job, okay? That I went back to and we're like, oh my God, I think everyone's gonna know that I'm doing this little magic thing on the side. But it was social media, press relationships. I brought in a lot of my industry contacts into the, and low key, I was slowly building those internal relationships without telling them that I was working on Luna Magic. In a nice way, I was like, what do you think about this idea? What do you think about that idea? But everyone was all excited and ready to push us. Everyone, but I think why we were so lucky is that everyone believed it wasn't hard to sell. Right, they got it. As soon as you explained it, they got it. Yeah, like even when you think about like the consultants, everybody just, there was something. Understood, which we. They were like, finally, yeah, that makes sense. I don't wanna say that the process was easy because it was not. I don't wanna say that. But I think there was a synergy where, you know, how we were selling it. There was a synergy going on of the atmosphere. You know, this was pre-BLM. It was organic. So at what point during your journey, did Shark Tank reach out to you, or do you guys? We reached out to Shark Tank, so it was funny.  Let me put in an application, how to get into Shark Tank. And then I found the application on abc.com. Then I called my sister, I sort of got in and I fill it out. And I'm like, this is a lot of questions, but whatever, enter, who cares? Then someone emails us in 48 hours. And I said, Sharra, you're not gonna believe this. They got back to us. She's like, what? I was like, I swear to God, I'm not making this up. And then the rest is history. And what I love about that story is, I think people think that entrepreneurship is just like, it is difficult, but it's just like this hard thing. But a lot of the internet, there's access to all these things. There's LinkedIn, there's abc.com, it's all available.  It's funny, when we had a Matt Higgins on who was a guest shark, he was like, you guys should focus on Shark Tank on the podcast for a little while and see how it goes. And I was like, all right, cool, we'll do that. And then I went to chat GPT, and I just input LA, so top Shark Tank companies based in LA. And it gave us a list of 20. And then we just reached out to the 20 on Instagram. There you go. But it was an interesting thing to think about of using GPT that way, which is a total hack, but it worked out.  Are you going crazy? What is happening? Yes and no, yes and no. What a lot of people don't realize is that Shark Tank, we went to sell the dream. We didn't have a warehouse. We didn't have a lot of things. That's how it goes, by the way. That's how it goes. We were like, I, because I had worked in startups before.  Yes. That's it. One thing that I learned in startups is MVP. Prove the concept in a small way before you invest all this energy, time and effort, creating something that nobody actually wants, right? So we were like, okay, two of us, we look cute. We can sell this thing. Let's focus on our pitch. Let's focus on our visual identity. Let's focus on understanding the questions that we think they're going to ask us. Let's focus on getting a full set of samples of products that we intend to create should we get all these things and then let's go with these Walmart POs and let's see what happens. So it's just so funny to us. Now that I look at it, I'm like, how dare we think? We were standing there with no warehouse. Exactly. Everything, everything was in my garage. That's the best though. Everything was in my garage.   We were so, I say this in the nicest, graceful way. We were so naive. That's the best though. Exactly. We were so naive. That's honestly the best. But you know, the good news is when we did the experience, which that's a whole nother conversation about the out-of-body experience that we both shared from that, is they asked us these questions, but again, we got information. They were like, you need a warehouse that or not. Then the next week, we were like, Craigslist, warehouse manager. Oh, we gotta go find it. You know, it actually gave us information to know how to take the next step. Because you listen to the questions. Exactly. We went there to learn. You learned a lot. We went there to learn. They're like, you need a warehouse. Lori said. Put your faces on the packaging. Lori said, put your faces on the packaging. Barbara said, it's you guys, selling the vision. You can sell stocks for all I care.  People believe in you. And it gave us confidence to know that the founder's story is what's probably gonna drive this brand. Did you know Alex Rodriguez would be there? No, no, no, no. He was a guest shark. They didn't tell us anything. What was that like? I was not surprised. Yeah, we were like, mm, okay. But we shout out to Alex. He helped. I feel like somebody like him helped us. People know who he is from baseball, right? Everybody knows Alex. That man's a businessman. Yeah. But he's a businessman, right? Like he's like a mainstream Dominican. Like everybody. So I think it helped create that cultural connection. Yes, he helped. He understood. He literally helped tell the cultural meaning of what it is to be Dominican. He was like, he helped us with the shark. And we had a Spanish moment, which I think it was cool to show on national television like us straddling between speaking to these American business sharks and then this Dominican American businessman. And Mr. Wonderful, he kind of went into you. He kind of went in, but I think he had a good day. He's such a teddy bear. He had a good day that day. He had a good day. He was actually, yes, he was tough, but he was actually really kind. I think everything he said was true. Yeah, that's true. But again, we don't listen.  It's the way he's, his delivery, maybe. The, what did he say? The ocean is gonna.  You went out fishing and you caught a whale. Caught a whale and you're just trying to get a whale.   Oh man, that's pretty funny. Did you guys go in there wanting a specific shark? We kind of knew who made sense. Yes. And who did in your sense. We were open, we were open. And probably Lori. Yeah, we thought Lori. We thought Lori would come in. Because of QDC and her setup like that, right? Yeah, we thought she would come in, but to be honest, like Barbara made the most sense. It was like a New York city energy. That's right, yeah, that's right. And she likes investing in pairs. She told us she likes twos. Yeah. Like two co-founders? Yes, if you look at her history, she's always investing in co-founders, siblings or cousins or family. The lobster boys, she loves those guys, yeah.  So then she kind of understood that she had access, yeah. That's actually really good information. And then you guys made the deal on TV. Correct. Did it then work out after? No, we chose not to close. We both mutually decided that what we needed out of, from the, for the business, it wasn't, there wasn't a synergies, but it was very amicable. Yeah, she wanted 30%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of massive. Yeah, yeah. But she's a shark, right? Yeah. I mean, we're a killer, I don't know. But she gave us great advice. She gave us great advice around, and if anything, we walked away very inspired because she believed in us.  Like she gave us the best advice. We were like, okay, where do we start? And she said, why don't you start on Craigslist? And I'm like, huh, finding employees on Craigslist? It's a thing. Yeah. And she said, yes. We didn't know how scrappy she actually was. That's a pro tip for anyone listening. Correct, it is. Go to Craigslist. I would have never thought of that either. Our number one employee who's been with us for two years and our most loyal, it came from Craigslist. Jose, shout out to Jose. Craigslist. Exactly. Craigslist. No, it's true. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. That's amazing. And so then what happens when you guys go off to the show airs? I imagine, I can only imagine what happens on the sales side. That goes crazy. Yes, spike in traffic. Well, first of all, the promo went up and somebody at my job saw me. Is that you? And I'm like, who? Where? And I was like, oh, I think I need to quit. I think this is- You were exposed. I was like, ah! Oh my God. But on the sales side, you know- Did you quit? Did you- No, I did.  And she goes- Just take all your time. It's your side project. I was like, yeah, it's kind of like taking off but I'm not really sure. And then she goes, okay, so what's the deal? And I said, well, you know, we're gonna be on Shark Tank. She's like, what? And then I go, yeah. And we're rolling out at Walmart 1500 store. She goes, girl, you don't have time to be here. You need to go run that business. So on the premiere night, when the episode aired, my team from my former company, we did a viewing party. And it was, everybody was just excited for us. And that's a beautiful thing to be able to transition with peace and optimism instead of like, you know, quitting and everybody thinks somebody's dying. Yeah, that's hard to do. We didn't negotiate that. That's tough. And at least she was supportive. It could have went the other way. No, she was- No, we actually learned how people thought we were brave Yes. By being entrepreneurs. And on Shark Tank, like that night, phone calls from former bosses, interns, exes, like people- Oh my God, oh my God. What works easy? LinkedIn, phone, email. It was crazy. People from like high school, people from like mentors. It was like, oh my God, it's crazy. Yeah, but it was a shared win. Everybody was like, wow, like we're not surprised, but also we're so happy for you guys. Yeah. And that was nice. Did you guys raise capital after that? Or did you need to raise capital? No, no, no, we're so family funded. Okay. And so the sales are enough where you guys are in good shape. Yeah, we're very profitable. We were very- That's great. You know, we launched, now in hindsight, three retailers in 18 months. Walmart, then we fast followed with Target and then CVS. It was very aggressive growth. That's a lot you're saying, yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's, you know, we've been, we were actually running a profitable business. So that's nice to build a business. Usually startups don't make any money for a really long time. Yeah, especially, well, I guess maybe in the makeup game, things can be a little bit more high-market. Yes. Which is kind of nice. That's why we like to call ourselves Mastige. What's that mean? Mastige. It's that we're targeting the masses, but it's like at a price that it's more elevated. So we're like- The quality of the products. The quality of the products. Our products quality is like a $30 quality for like eight bucks. Beauty lovers are into quality. They know when they're getting a deal. Exactly. Like we stand for values. For example, our lash facts. That's one of our highest repeat purchase because A, you need them all the time, but like they know like, wow, we can't believe that we're getting this quality product at this price. Yeah. How many stores are you guys at now? 2,500. Okay. Same retailers? No, across all three retailers. Are you targeting anyone else? Is there like- Oh, yeah. They are targeting us. Who's on your list? We've had to, to be honest, because it's been 18 months of like, you know, of these three retailers, we've had to pause- And COVID. Yeah. And COVID. Yeah, growing a team. We've had to pause other retailers because we're like, oh my God.  We're catching up. Yeah. This is the year of catching up. Yeah. Cause also we have to build a team, build a culture. We also had to move. We outgrew our first warehouse in nine months and we had to move the warehouse. So it's like the growth has been like, it's not just like the retailer side. It takes so much work to even do business with these retailers. And what a lot of people don't realize is that we're an indie brand, but the process is still made for the big boys. Sure. So we're jumping, we're like growing into like, operating like the big boys. It's a big commercial operation. When you think about the future for your business, what does it look like in terms of like, do you guys want to sell this eventually? Do you want to expand into other things? Maybe fashion? Like what's the curiosity? For us it's to be really open. And I say that because the natural trajectory of beauty is acquisition, but I think that the Luna Magic brand is starting to be A lifestyle brand. A lifestyle brand. So it could be different categories. It could be interesting experiential opportunities. Like we're actually in that space of like saying, we did an exercise of like, if money wasn't an issue, and we could partner with any brand in the world. Dream collab. Across beauty, fashion, food. You know we- Let's do it. Let's do it. Who is it? Tell me who it is. Who is like the dream collab? So for other beauties, it could be us having a narrative story with a legacy brand. I think that could be interesting. Like old beauty and new beauty, and how do we could tell a cool updated story. I think Nike could be interesting. If we look at beauty through the lens of performance, like for example, like now athletes are wearing lashes on the court. Right. Like female athletes are looking. The intersection of like athleticism and sexiness. I think Nike could help us to, hey Nike, exactly. It could help us tell that story. Obviously your fashion brands could be, could we be the official beauty sponsor of Oscar de la Renta? New York Fashion Week. Like why not stretch ourselves to anything? But what about what do you think? Other verticals, haircare, fashion, clothing. We just, so many things. Skies of limit. Yeah, I think that's so fun. I think about also sometimes these brands that like when they're so mission driven like you guys where you're trying to like do it for your community or be the example entrepreneur to people like you or that look like you even. It's like you can become a movement. Yes. And then that takes on a different life. You start thinking different, right? So it's not a business anymore. It's you're past it. Now it's about the movement. Yeah, that's what we learned after Shark Tank. All these emails about, oh my God, you inspire us. You inspire us. We're like, okay, this became a hobby. This was a hobby. This was fun. And now we're like, okay, we have this community that is looking up at us to like inspire them. So we have a like a huge responsibility to like to keep going and giving them the resources. And that's why we started Mentor Magic. Because instead of us like answering one email at a time, we're like, no, let's just do this properly. Let's do this annually where we, you know, open it up for our community, answer any questions that they have, give them the resources. Because you know, there's a lot of companies that say follow your dreams. But what does that mean? And we're like, okay, what does that mean? What comes after follow your dreams? No. What are the steps? Exactly, what are the steps that you need to take in order to get there? That's where we are. So you guys help them with that? Yeah, yeah, like through Mentor Magic, we provide like community events where we kind of host a Shark Tank style or like we're intimate. Tell us what your problems are. We'll give it to you 100% real. We'll tell you like the behind the scenes of what retailers won't tell you. Like I keep it real with all my entrepreneurs, but we keep it in a very safe space. So it's not gossip. It's more like there aren't that many people like us that even had this chance. And if you look at the new brand entry rate, let's say a Walmart, they only allow 2% of new brands every year. So how do we level the playing field to our community now that we've made it, sharing with them, think about it this way, right? Having that information that can help change somebody's life. And is there a success story in there yet? Or we have a couple brewing? Yes, so I have two success stories, I think. I advise a brand called Okua Beauty. They're two Dominican sisters in the haircare space and they're ramping up to launch in their first retailer soon. And then Bonita Fierce Candle, a woman that came to our Mentor Magic event in New York City. And she's being presented with some interesting opportunities for next year from a major retailer. So it's just, to us, it's like to me that's how you know you're moving the needle. Like as we learn something, don't make the same mistakes. Or don't, you know what I mean? And in the same way that we've actually benefited from mentorship ourselves. Like we have people telling us, don't go, you know? And thankfully our company has resources that we are surrounded by amazing quality experts. That's why people don't realize in the background we're being guided. So how can we pay that forward to people who are a little bit early on? And you're listening. Yeah, we're listening. Which is the whole secret. I think that's the thing. Some people don't listen to good advice. And understanding that there's a piece of the pie for everybody. Like I feel like sometimes we have this mentality. It's like, okay, if you guys have it, I don't wanna share the resources. I don't wanna share my secrets. Like no, let's just be open and let's all make it together. And what I tell my sister is like a selfish thing. I said, you know, you always hear these stories of people who made it, but they're lonely at the top.  So I don't feel alone when we exit or whatever the end goal of this, you know? Like to have a community of people who I call, like we started from the bottom. Now we're here and like-minded and also mission driven forward that wanna pay it back. I think that ecosystem to me is what gets me up every day. That's actually one of the reasons on all our real estate deals, we'll have investors because it's like, if it hits, everybody wins. Correct. Everybody has to win. And then you're not the guy paying for everyone. Right? You hear those stories. Like there's one person and then everyone doesn't know how to add value.  Have you given the startup bug to anybody in your family? My brother keeps telling me now. Now he's who I was to her like five years ago. My brother was like, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? You know, I think everybody's startup idea has to be unique to them. Yeah. Totally true. It's such a personal thing that an old me would be like, I think you can be the next Bill Gates. Now I'm learning to listen to what they're telling me. All the therapy is working. This is so good. Yes, I have a therapist, a coach. Now I listen to what they want and I make sure that I ask questions around making sure that it's their dream and not mine. I think entrepreneurship is so personal. It is pretty. And it's almost like a mirror. It is a mirror. And so what the world sees is sort of how you see yourself. Yeah. That's the thing. And I think at the beginning it's like, we try to like guide people, you can do better. You can do better. And then we learn, no, if they're okay going to this level, happy content. At their pace. At their pace, let's just guide them to that level. And it's okay, they're happy, we're happy and let's go with it. Everybody's happy. That took me a long time to figure out. I know you got frustrated, right? You can do more, you can do, no, you gotta let people, and they get there on their own. They get inspired. Like I spoke to somebody yesterday who said the words, I could tell that he was in a runt and then he like figured it out. And then we reconnected and he said, and I said, how are you doing? It seems like you have all these wins. He goes, I'm inspired. So that's how I know when somebody's like on the path when you could figure out how to create things that make you feel good and inspired.  It's easy. Yeah. So what's next for you guys? I know your bigger warehouse. You mentioned that. World domination. World domination is number two. Just growing the team. I feel like. How big is the team now? How many people do you guys have? 16. What I call my hustlers. I mean, everybody in there. So if you're listening and you're looking for a job. Lunamagic.com. Lunamagic.com. We're hiring. We're actually hiring. We're looking for people. What kind of roles are you hiring? Operations, mostly supply chain. Okay. Account management and marketing. Okay. Any marketing guru, social media. But you must love Instagram. Like it's your life. You have to be a bloodline. You gotta be a pro. Yeah, exactly. We don't care about the age. We care about the passion. All right. So you're hiring, new warehouse. What else? Dreaming big. Now we're like looking at the vision. We're looking at like financial forecasting and how big we think this can be. Talking to different types of companies around. I'm going to shoot my shot right now in case somebody's watching. I have this vision, or we have this vision of putting a Lunamagic lip balm in a first class flight. I don't know if it's Delta, JetBlue. Oh yeah, do that. One of those airlines. So thinking like, and we spoke to somebody and they're like, that's possible. We did something that, that, that, that. That's totally possible. Exactly. So those are the kind of ideas that we're kind of getting excited by. Like where's our customer? What is she doing or they're doing outside of coming into retail? Where are they shopping? Is it Forever 21? Are they on a plane? Are they at Coachella? Would you ever do your own retail? Like your own location or pop-up even? She wanted that at the beginning. You know what I think is possible? A beauty salon experience. Oh, that's fun. Right, like where there aren't that many, like dry bar is an end to end experience. But imagine a dry bar with a culture. So this, as you were talking about this earlier, I don't know why I thought this, but I was like, I thought that, but then I thought about it at a sports stadium. Ooh. Because women, if you think about it. It's true, they're bored. They're kind of like, hmm. Not all women, but some women, right? And it's mostly like a dude's thing. And so in this scenario, you almost change it up a little bit. I also thought about it like a sales pitch. Like you can convince somebody to try this pretty simply. You know what, it's a funny why you say that because we went to ComplexCon, which is a mostly boy thing. And all the women that followed their boyfriends to support them. But it was interesting that the guys came to the makeup section. Oh, my girlfriend would like this. My girlfriend would like this. I'm buying this for my girlfriend. So that sparked my interest to your point. Like men are actually also looking for cool things to give their girls. Yeah. So the sports. Maybe a pop-up. I don't know why I thought about it, but I was like, this would be dope. That sounds cool. I think the Yankee Stadium. That would be dope. Yeah, the Yankee Stadium, I think. Right for the top. Right for the top. Alex, this is where you would come in. You had that complex. Of interest then, but y'all are together no more. It's the week. That's true. We're so shady. What else should we know? Where can people find you? Where can people shop? Find us on lunamagic.com. We have a store locator page. We're distributed in CVS, Walmart, and Target. Hit us in the DMs, mabel.friasexo. Saida is. Saida.frias. And Lunamagic Beauty. We want to hear from our community, from anyone, anybody that's inspired by this podcast and maybe thinks something that we didn't think about. We're always open to hearing new ideas. And our next mentor, Magic. We're giving out a $10,000 check. Oh, wow. That's huge. Yeah, that's amazing. For you, yes. For your business. We're having an event in September, partnered with a hair care company that we'll announce later. But that to us is how we want to grow with our business and our community. The first step was providing advisory services and being real and intimate spaces. And next step is capital. A check to match the advice. And then the question is to those who are watching, how do we turn a $10,000 check to a $50,000 check to a, right? And how do we put more people of color in more favorable entrepreneurial spaces? I love it. I think that's gonna be cool. Thanks for coming on the podcast, guys. That's great. Of course, we had a blast. Un gusto. Thank you. Muchas gracias. Thank you so much for the support and making it to the end of the episode. If you haven't already, please do review and show the episode with your friends. If you never want to miss a beat on all things entrepreneurship, make sure to follow us on socials for daily content. See you next Tuesday for another great episode.


So, I have a podcast on Anchor by Spotify. It's called the 3000 Step Stories and I actually started it during the first lockdown to encourage people to exercise. There were some elderly people that I was trying to support near my place and I was very worried about their mental and physical health and I was trying to figure out ways to get them to move, to be more active and I thought, stories, really fun or weird stories on a podcast that you can plug into your ears and off you go. But then the panic set in because I am the biggest technophobe on the planet and I was like, how do you make a podcast? And that's when a couple of friends told me about Anchor by Spotify. You know, this app is like magic because you can record over here, you can edit over here, you can even publish it from here and it just sends your podcast directly to Spotify and the best thing, you don't even need a mic because you just use your phone's inbuilt mic to record. Honestly, it's as easy as recording a voice note and sending it. You don't need this whole recording studio. All you need is your phone, an idea that you're really passionate about and then just open your heart and say it with Anchor by Spotify.


We are now at war. There are the two alternatives, total victory or total defeat. There can be no such thing as a military stalemate that would result in the survival of Hitlerism. That is the opinion of a man who knows. Douglas Miller, for 15 years commercial attaché to the American Embassy in Berlin, presenting a radio series based on Mr. Miller's book, You Can't Do Business with Hitler, Episode 4. Two for me, one for you. This is Douglas Miller speaking. I want to talk to you about Nazi bottom method. You know what bottom is.  A $50 radio for a $50 vacuum cleaner. Fair enough? An even exchange is no robbery. One for you and one for me. But Nazi bottom is something different. Two for the Nazis and one for their customers. Or perhaps three for the Nazis and nothing for the customers. In other words, the Nazis used bottom as a weapon of world conquest, attacking the trade markets of the world with its unscrupulous weapons, just as they attacked their neighbors with dive bombers and 50 ton tanks. Now let's get back to the beginning. When Hitler came to power, he announced Germany would trade with the world on a bottom basis. That sounded all right and American businessmen wanted to give it a try. In 1934, the American Chamber of Commerce invited me to a meeting in Berlin. The meeting was called for the purpose of appointing a committee of American businessmen to negotiate border deals with the Nazi Ministry of Economics. And as far as I'm concerned, there's been too much funcum about this whole business. Let's get down to brass pack. You men know me and what I stand for. I'm a hard-headed business man and I'm proud of it. Well, I've seen my business here and Germany stock the pieces. Since this fell over, Hitler's come over and I guess they're all in the same boat. They're all boiled down to this. The Nazis can't buy American goods because they haven't any money. A lot of them are building their war machines with the Garcuban. That's very pun. But we need more than 20 cracks to put off in this industry. The point I'm making is that the Germans won't pay us cash for our goods, whether they have money for their army or not. But by heaven, they have offered to battle with us. And if we have any brains, we look into it. What's the difference between a cash deal and a border deal anyway? It all comes right down to the same thing. You trade your goods to the Germans, they give your German goods in exchange. You sell the German goods back home for American dollars and there you are. You'll make your profit far and over. Gentlemen, I know we appoint a special border committee. The committee will assist members in negotiating border deals with the German Ministry of Economics. The chair recognizes Mr. Miller. Gentlemen, Douglas Miller, our commercial attaché. Gentlemen, you are apparently enthused in Mr. Brownell's motion that we set up a border committee. I have no intention of being a wet blanket. But I must warn you that doing business with the Nazis, either on a border or any other basis, is not going to be as profitable as you might hope it to be. A phase realized that the Nazi policy is one of deliberate discrimination against American goods. Mr. Brownell. Mr. Miller has the floor. That doesn't mean he can fill us up to the next with a lot of rubbish. Mr. Miller, you don't seem to realize we have to eat the bottom of it. I see the bar of business. Oh, Mr. Brownell, it's quite possible you'll save money in the long run if you do go out of business. Oh, come now, Mr. Miller. Mr. Brownell, I'm only trying to point out that men who rule their country with black jacks and submachine guns will think nothing at all of cheating American businessmen. You imagine they'll give you a square deal? What? Well, they'll very probably have your pants. Mr. Miller, if the Nazis will pay me costs and 10% they can have my pants. Mr. Miller is obviously confusing politics with business. Mr. Brownell, I'm afraid the same traits that make the Nazis so difficult to deal with politically make them shizzlers in business. Ah, Tommy Rock. Gentlemen, I made a motion that we try to fix up some volunteers on the ground. I'd like to have your response to that motion. Gentlemen, is anyone any objection to taking a vote on Mr. Brownell's motion? Very well. All those in favor of the motion signify by saying aye. And so the motion was passed. I have been quite willing that American businessmen attempt to bother with the Nazis. I had only wanted to warn the Chamber of Commerce not to pin their hopes too heavily upon the success of such deals. However, the committee was organized and Mr. Brownell was selected as chairman. A few weeks later, the committee negotiated his first deal. An American wellness drawer named Davidson was to borrow $100,000 worth of wellness for $100,000 worth of German barbed wire. Mr. Brownell asked me to go to the German Ministry of Economics with Mr. Davidson to help him arrange the final details. Unfortunately, I was detained. When I arrived at the ministry, Davidson was there before me. He and an Nazi official were engaged in a violent argument. Well, Miller, I'm so glad you are here. Will you explain to your countrymen that I cannot ignore national socialistic regulations just to please him? God, God, he's trying to hide that. Hide that? What does that mean? That it's not an English word?  It's an American word. Mr. Davidson, will you please stop talking? Gentlemen, gentlemen, please. What's this all about? He's trying to back out of the teeth. We are not backing out of nothing. You are the one who is backing out. Gentlemen, please. Now let's talk this over quietly and calm. Sir, let me explain. I came here in good faith to save my $100,000 worth of wellness for the same value in German barbed wire. You follow me? Yes. Go on. Well, now this seller here tells me I have to put up $200,000 cash on the side. Yes, Davidson. How many times must I tell you that it is not on the side, it is all part of the same deed? Not for my money, it is. Out of some minute, gentlemen, please. Now let me see if I understand this. Mr. Davidson, you came here expecting to trade $100,000 worth of wellness for $100,000 worth of German barbed wire, right? That's right. But you understand, my chief's purpose wasn't to buy barbed wire. My chief's purpose was to sell my wellness. I'm only taking the barbed wire in the hope that I can sell it as a profit back home. Yes, yes, I understand that. Now then, Airbnb is quite willing to make such a trade if you will, in the kitchen, buy an extra $200,000 worth of barbed wire and pay for it in cash. Yeah, naturally. That's what you say. Mr. Davidson, I'm just beginning to see the trouble here. You made a mistake. What was I have been saying to you? No, wait a minute. How do you figure I made a mistake? Well, didn't you expect to put up cash? Not the regulations don't permit Americans to secure barred deals on an even basis. The Nazis pay their share in goods, yes. But you're permitted to pay only one-third of your share in goods. You must pay the balance the other two thirds in cash. Oh, oh. I'm just about enough.  Or is it that this, the stuff Brown's here to take me for a fuck? What is he stuffing, sir? They're not paying me cash for my wallet. Why should I pay two-thirds cash for their rotten barbed wire? I don't know anything about the barbed wire business. I don't mind trying to sell wire that I got from my wallet. Maybe I couldn't sell the wallet anyway. But $200,000 worth of cash for a lot of barbed wire I haven't any use for? It's utterly impossible. It's fantastic. Well, but what did you expect, Davidson? Didn't the barter committee explain the naughty regulations? No, they shouldn't. Well, they should have. Let's forget the whole thing. I'm sorry I caused you so much trouble. And as for you, Mr. C. Mueller, all I can say is that the bill's off. Good day, Johnson. Uh, hey, I'll tell you this soon. Just one minute, sir. What is it? Why won't you take our barbed wire? It is very high quality, you understand? And you could surely tell it in America. Mr. C. Mueller, market for barbed wire in America is very limited. But there are hundreds of things you can do with barbed wire. Name what? Well, in the rice, we use thousands of feet of barbed wire to strengthen concentration camps. Mr. C. Mueller, I think you have unconsciously stumbled onto the fundamental reason why you and I can't do business. You see, we don't believe in concentration camps in America. This was one of the first barter deals any American had attempted to negotiate with the Nazis. And as you've seen, the deal fell through. Over a period of several months, various American businessmen who had American goods they hoped to exchange for German goods were sent to the Ministry of Economics. But it was always the same story. Americans had to conform to Nazi regulations. And this, they discovered, was impossible. You want proof of all of this? Get a copy of the magazine, Science, Atlantic Trade, on November 1934. This magazine was published by the American Chamber on page two and reads the story as told by the businessmen themselves. Well, the members of the barter committee finally gave up and discussed, except Mr. Brown-L, the chairman. He was something of a die-hard. I ran into him later at another meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce. A meeting that just ended and the crowd was leaving the hall. Well, hello there, Mr. Brown-L. How's the barter committee coming along? Oh, hello, Mr. Miller. Well, some of the members were a little impatient, dropping out, you know, but we're not doing so badly. Oh, come, come now. Don't you think it's a hopeless proposition? I wouldn't say that. We have completed a few deals, Miller. Very satisfactory deals, too. Where were those deals, small affairs, involving only a few thousand dollars at the most? Every deal that really amounted to anything failed, didn't it? Well, yes, but that wasn't my fault. The deals I had in mind were very good. The only trouble was they didn't conform to Nazi regulations. What's the point? No deal satisfactory to Americans ever will conform to Nazi regulations. Oh, I don't know about that. Hey, stop just a minute. Oh, hello, Dudley. Mr. Brown-L, you know, Mr. Dudley? He's the representative here, one of our American machine tool manufacturers. Yes, we've met. No, I was just having a little argument about barter, Mr. Dudley. Barter, don't mention that word to me. My company just completed a barter deal today.  Big. Well, it went to the tune of about one million dollars on our side of the ledger. Oh, there you see, Marist. Now, what have you got to say about barter deals? I was right all along, wasn't I? Fair enough to press. Dudley, what did you get in exchange for that million dollars? 200,000 canaries. Did you say canaries? I said canaries. The Brown shirt owed us a bill for a million dollars worth of machinery. So we took the canaries in payment. A name of heifer? You wouldn't ask that if your firm owned a subsidiary in Germany, as my firm does. You mean? I mean, we're in no position to bargain. After all, we don't want our properties confiscated. You can't do business with Hitler. You have been listening to Episode 4 in a radio series entitled, You Can't Do Business with Hitler. This series is based upon the actual experiences of Douglas Miller who was for 15 years commercial attaché to the American Embassy in Berlin. Listen to the next episode in this series which is entitled, Mass Murder. This program was prepared and directed by the author for emergency in Washington. Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music


Looking forward to the game on Wednesday, let's hope we can pack the stadium out and get the place rocking and get us into the next round.


It's increasingly ironic how often my time is spent Staring at some red-blue-green lights as my corneas are bent By a fragile magic talk box with a black reflective screen As I watch all of the funny like I used to on TV Say some words that are nostalgic and I'll pray to you with likes Substitute my inner growth so I can go to sleep tonight It's so cap or some bullshit that we say to stay in trend While we silently get better by hoping the world will end Maybe one day I will put down this device that's in my palm As it softly rolls me back in time to where I most belong But I'm not 16 anymore, I'm not adolescent I'm an average adult white guy who pays way too much in rent So maybe I'll find a portal, maybe God will strike me dead If he does then like my boyfriend I hope he goes for the head But until then I will watch and weep and let my time be spent Staring at these red-blue-green lights as my corneas are bent


The first ever Northwoods pond hockey classic took over hole in the day Bay on Gull Lake last weekend. Our Sarah Winckelman has that story. One, two, three, hole in the air! Skates, hockey sticks, a puck and a whole lot of smiles were out on the ice as the Northwoods pond hockey classic got underway. The two-day tournament is all about going back to the basics of hockey. Pond hockey is all about just the enjoyment of the way the sport began. It started out on frozen lakes, frozen ponds and rivers. For many, there's no better place that comes to mind than being out on Gull Lake. It's such a breath of fresh air. It's fun, great to get outside. I'm not skating today, but it's always fun to watch my friends participate and skate their hearts out. In its first year, the founders weren't sure what the community response would be, but were happy to have 17s participating in a round robin style tournament. It's like a kid on Christmas morning, you know, open it up. You don't know what you're going to get, but when it's here, you just love what's going on. Love Gull Lake. This is awesome. It's been a blast so far. It's getting really windy though. Kind of chilly. But the weather didn't stop the team members or onlookers from enjoying some classic pond hockey. You know, some team spirit always helps. It's a Minnesota tradition that's all about bringing people together. Bring hockey back to this community and have a fun sport for everyone to come on. Enjoy the ice. With its first time in Brainerd, organizers hope to continue to grow and spread their simple message. Just generate some fun and just have some good times out here.  Reporting in Brainerd, Sarah Winkelman, Lakeland News. Northwood's pond hockey classic will be an annual event on the same weekend in February. I played in a couple of those. You wouldn't think it'd be that much of a workout on a smaller ice like that, but you're stop, stop, start, start, start. Yeah, yeah. It's actually pretty, pretty good work. Yeah, good for the legs. Yeah, that's for sure. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.