Weekly Rundown:: Week of October 16th, 2024
In the latest episode of the Dailey Blend show, host Reed Dailey takes listeners on a captivating journey through his recent travels to New York City and Chicago. He offers fresh perspectives on networking events, the evolving cannabis industry, and the latest tech tools for planning and productivity.
Reed begins the episode recounting his brief yet eventful trip to New York City. He then reflects on the transformation of LaGuardia Airport and shares insights on innovative networking formats with Progress Partners.
Returning to his hometown of Chicago, Reed delves into the corporate evolution of the cannabis industry, noting the shift in attire and the broader theme of corporate interest in emerging markets.
On the tech front, Reed discusses his experimentation with digital planning tools like Coda and shares his hands-on experience with new podcasting equipment, emphasizing the importance of enhancing productivity without complicating the workflow.
Throughout the episode, Reed's narrative is punctuated with personal anecdotes, adding a personal touch and reminding us of the dynamic and ever-changing landscape of media, business, and tech.
Whether you're a frequent traveler, a tech enthusiast, or someone interested in the latest industry trends, this episode of the Dailey Blend show offers a rich tapestry of insights and stories. Tune in to discover how Reed Dailey navigates the intersections of travel, technology, and industry evolution and why these experiences are shaping the future of networking and business.
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Transcription - Dailey Blend Show Updates Website, Launches Video
Host Reed Dailey (IG & X - @ReedDailey): This is the weekly rundown segment of the Dailey Blend Show
The Dailey Blend podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube
>> Reed Dailey: Everyone, welcome back to the Dailey Blend show with me, Reid Dailey. If you are new around here, the Dailey Blend show is where I feature things going on around the world from media, business, and tech, as well as what's going on with Dailey blend, special projects I'm involved with, and much more. But before I jump into the show, I want to remind you that it is available on Apple podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, and over on YouTube. And if you're a social folks, and we are, you can check us out on Instagram x and threads Dailey blend. And you can follow me, read Dailey on Instagram and LinkedIn.
I was in New York for about 36 hours and then back into Chicago
With all that out of the way, let's jump into this week's show. So, it was a busy, travel week for me. I was in New York for about 36 hours and then back into Chicago, which is my hometown. But I was downtown, so it felt like I was on the road. And, a couple things just like anecdotal about traveling. I, used to live in Queens, and LaGuardia was a dump, and now it's been totally remodeled. Looks great. And my only complaint with the whole airport setup is why you wouldn't do some sort of plane train going from the terminal to the seven train to.
>> Reed Dailey: Make it so easy.
>> Reed Dailey: Yeah, there's some bus, but I don't want to get on a bus. I just want, like, a one stop train, door to door. And so New York City, it's my only complaint with that airport, but other than that, it's beautiful airport. Very easy, obviously, to get in and out of the city.
If you're planning a networking event or dinner series, I highly recommend this format
I was in the city for a networking, dinner event, that we were hosting, or the firm that I work for was hosting with the, good team over at progress partners. And I want to talk about it a little bit, because we've been playing around with this format, and I go to so many, events where they're either just a dinner or just drinks, or it's a panel discussion where you're basically listening to someone or someone's talk for an hour. And what we've done with this is we've sort of flipped it on its head, and we have a theme of the night. We have about 30 to 40 people there. So it's a nice number. It's moderated, typically by someone who has a wealth of knowledge in a domain, of the night, kind of the topic of the night. And then we have essentially account briefs on folks so we know, like, what they're doing and kind of questions to push and pull from them. And, the way that we've really won in these sort of dinner situations is we've sort of put plant folks, in the audience to really anchor the conversation and help push and pull the conversation in a certain direction. And what you end up doing is you end up having the opportunity to learn about 20 people, usually over the course of a, dinner and drinks, versus just hearing about three or four people talk. And I find it way more, the guard is removed because people are much more interested in sharing, stories and giving a little more detail than sort of like the corporate answer, if you will. And so I'm continuing to love this format, for dinner series and going to continue to do that.
>> Reed Dailey: So if you're, you know, thinking about.
>> Reed Dailey: Doing some sort of networking event or dinner series, I highly recommend checking out this format. I think it's really great and it's just a good way to get to know a larger number of people and a little more about them in a m more accelerated fashion.
I had the opportunity to walk through Times Square, and I used to work there
>> Reed Dailey: other comments on New York.
>> Reed Dailey: I had the opportunity to walk through Times Square, and I used to work there about 15 years ago as, a lonely intern above the virgin megastore. I guess it was probably more like 20 years ago. Times Square is time. Times Square. Some of the restaurants are the same, like bubba gumps. I think the naked cowboy is still there, although I didn't see him. Pretty sure Batman gave, me, tried to give me a hug. But, it's always interesting to see just how many people are in Times Square. I will say I haven't spent much time there at night, but, it did feel like there was way more sort of, street performers versus just people trying to get pictures with people dressed up as Batman, Robin, etcetera. So that was kind of cool to see. if you are going into New York and you're not from there as much, I highly recommend you bring your running shoes and stay somewhere on the west side because I had the opportunity to step out for about 40 minutes during my trip and get a quick run in on the west side highway. And it's always one of my favorite things to do. Highly recommend that. And then other things that I got to check out was I had a meeting the next morning before I had to get on my flight and got to go down to the village and have a coffee. and, you know, it's just, I love Starbucks and I love the strength of the coffee, the bitterness, but it's something kind of like interesting and creative. to go to a coffee store that is not a corporate one. so, you know, it reminds me of why, you know, so many people love New York and the charm of New York.
>> Reed Dailey: So that was like a little bookend.
On my trip, um, to New York, I attended two cannabis conferences
>> Reed Dailey: On my trip, to New York.
>> Reed Dailey: Ironically, I flew back to Chicago, and it just felt like I was going.
>> Reed Dailey: To another city, because I usually, you know, fly in and then get a taxi to my house. But in this situation, I took the blue line into the city for not one, but two events. Wednesday night, I had caught, some folks coming in town for the Benzinga event. That's a cannabis conference in around town, and then over to a manufacturing event with the, food and, beverage Chicagoland, food and beverage organization.
>> Reed Dailey: When I think about cannabis, because I've been in and around it from, a technologist and helping with some m and a work, if you looked back five and certainly seven years ago, I would say only about 10% of the folks wore blazers through these conferences. And when I went to the sort of tail end of the event this week, I would say 90% of the folks were wearing blazers or suits, just, you know, meaning it's gone very corporate, even with some of the regulatory issues that are still under, not scrutiny, but are still in place. But, it's very interesting to just see how sort of tides have changed, and we're seeing cannabis as an industry become more and more, corporate and corporate companies and bigger companies are starting.
>> Reed Dailey: To look at it as an investment vehicle.
>> Reed Dailey: Even with some of the risks and.
>> Reed Dailey: Challenges in terms of the food and.
>> Reed Dailey: Beverage, it was great to listen, to the panel discussion. It was a combination of investors, operators, bankers, service, providers. My takeaways were that deals have been fairly stagnant, and a lot of that has to do with the cost of capital and the cost of labor. But, that 2025 is likely going to see a bigger vintage of deals or better vintage of deals, or a more. Greater velocity of deals, I should say, than 2024, in terms of what's going on, like, in terms of tech, and I haven't really talked about that a lot.
I was trying to find ways to organize myself for this podcast and weekly newsletter
I was trying to find ways to organize myself for this podcast, as well as my weekly newsletter, as well as the digital Deep Dive, podcast, which is all about technology. Shameless plug. And I use notebooks. And my challenge with this is I'm usually on the road or, like, in travel when I'm doing some of my planning. And that's just because when I'm home, I'm usually working or I'm doing kind of family time, so I don't have a lot of time while I'm physically at home. And what ended up happening was I'd have all these great ideas. I put in a notebook, and then I would leave the notebook or the notebook would run out.
>> Reed Dailey: And so I said, okay, I can.
>> Reed Dailey: Still use pen and paper to sort of scratch ideas and kind of plan a little bit. And I'm actually using notebook right now, for this episode, but let's try to go all digital and see if we can kind of do themes of the shows and then have almost like a, you know, a dumping ground of ideas that we can leverage and pull into. So I did about, I did a little mapping exercise of kind of what are the themes that I wanted to do for this show? And kind of like almost like a rotation, and then what are the themes that I want to do for the Friday top five newsletter? And, I went ahead and I used Coda, and, you know, many people that I know use notion, and it's much more oriented to individuals and small teams, but, Coda is much more oriented towards the enterprise. And I was interested in sort of getting to know it, personally, so I could, you know, potentially use it in my corporate job down the road. it doesn't hurt that one of my friends is, an employee, a very high ranking employee at Coda. And so I can send them text messages to ask them questions. But, it took me, I don't know, an hour Saturday morning to just get a feel for it. And obviously, pulling from some templates that are available on the web and through coda are extremely helpful. But the one big thing that I'm noticing with all these new wave of technology is they're all like, what I'll call use the term multi homing, where you can have a data point that's used in multiple sheets, if you will. So it's almost like you've got a field, and then that field is referenced in multiple sheets, sort of like a database, that's visually displayed. And so I'm not perfect, obviously. I've only been using it for about a week, but I'm really starting to like the flow of using coda. I'm using it for my social media planning, I'm using it for my show planning, and it's really helped me because I'll have sort of themes that I want to talk about, for this show and for the digital deep dive show. And the biggest thing that I see certainly with the other podcast is I'm doing the first bit on news, and that's going to be more current and kind of real time, but I'm going to be looking at different companies, different pieces of software, and I don't necessarily need to do that all in that week. I can kind of plan it, batch it, do it in my spare time, and then sort of sequence it out. And so that piece has been really helpful in terms of sort of sequencing it out. I also when out and bought an iPad, just because I needed something when I'm on the airplane, when there's a little tighter fit, and I wanted to just continue to see if the form factor sort of met my needs. And I've got to say a computer is still better. and by, like, I don't know, an order of magnitude of at least 25, if not 40%. But I will say that the new os is pretty darn good and it's pretty darn close with a trackpad. So, you know, I can't do heavy, heavy lifting, but you can do enough. In fact, I'm recording this show with my new shure microphone using the shure, motive video app on an iPad, and it's working pretty darn well, I gotta say. And the whole idea was that I wanted to be able to travel and record this show and other shows why I'm on the road when I have a little more downtime, just because you got space and things like that.
>> Reed Dailey: Hey, so you'll. You'll probably notice that, with this video, there was a little bit of a, costume change here. I not only switched clothes, put on a baseball cap, but, we're two days later, the joys of trying to record a podcast when you have family, duties, but, the show must go on anyway. just really, you know, what I was trying to figure to kind of talk through was the fact that, you know, this sure microphone that you can see in the camera, shot here. You know, it was ironic because I went out and I even talked about it on this podcast, was the fact that I went out and rewarded myself for. For hitting a milestone and bought the most expensive sort of podcast mic. And I kind of, even when I was buying it, I was like, hey, this is better.
>> Reed Dailey: But is it better?
>> Reed Dailey: And does it sound better? You bet it does. is it really a pain in the tail to deal with? Absolutely. I mean, this thing works great. It's got a light on the side that I don't know, if you can see in this camera shot, but you know, if it's on or not. Plugs into my iPad and it's smaller, it has XLR and USB C. I call this a win win. And until, you know, I got a million subscribers and the audio is being managed by someone else, I'm sticking with this.
Next up, I want to talk about something that I've been thinking about
next up, I want to talk about something that I've been really sort of dialing into. And I want to like, say the right name that, that one of my buddies actually coined. And I'm sort of, you know, I've just been thinking about this a lot lately. And what I'm calling it is an intelligent brief. And you can look at it as an intelligent brief for a contact or an intelligent brief for a company. But the whole concept here is that I end up going to a lot of events and trying to prep for these events of just looking at like, who is the person? What is the relationship to me, my firm? what it is is the background of their company, them as an individual beyond their, you know, their job, like where they go to school, what are they like personally, professionally, and then what's going on, maybe in their market sector or whatever. And something that I've been sort of thinking about for a long time. So I did a proof of concept. It was, I wouldn't say ugly, but it wasn't great. and you know, I built a little bit of it in power bi and I wish some of the graphics with Microsoft would get a little more crisp and a little more like what, what do you call it? Tableau.
>> Reed Dailey: does.
>> Reed Dailey: But anyway, I'm so happy that I like kind of built in public, and that seems to be the theme of the year for me, is building in public and really showcasing ideas to folks and saying like, what do you think? How could this be better? And I got instant feedback from about ten folks in the last week or so. So I've been really iterating on that. But the idea is really trying to use, you know, all of the research tools, all of this like, information on the web about people to better understand who are you going to be having a conversation with? What should you be talking about with them? So pushing information and what should you be pulling or asking information from them. And so working through that kind of proof of concept. It's been a, it's been a long time since I've built anything or mocked anything, almost like five or six years. And so it felt good. I did this for ten years of my life. And I kind of missed it. I forgot how much I missed building things. anyway, excited for what that's going to look like. Already starting to talk with some companies about their API and what's available and how to pull that into a data lake of some m sort. Be on the lookout. I'll be sharing more information about that over the coming weeks and months, but, yeah, not traveling, over the next couple days. Got a paddle match coming up at home. So, you know, just getting excited and having a bit of fun with that. But, yeah, don't forget to, let's wrap up the show, I think. Don't, forget to, like, follow, subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast and Spotify, you know, don't, forget to follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn. And as I mentioned, throughout the show, I've got the chill deep dive show, so don't forget to listen, to that show. Very technology focused, very sort of business, oriented, from mid market to the enterprise. But how technology can really power the business and create value. So go check that out. And, between now and then, I'll be putting out, some new music, through, read Dailey music, aka Dailey blend podcast. So be on the lookout for episode 154 of that. It's going to be super down tempo, super deep house. Looking forward to that. And, with that said, catch you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in.
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