Jan 4, 2022
For the second part of our 2022 New Year double feature, we sat down with Olivier Travers. Olivier has had quite the data journey that has taken him from France to Germany, Portugal, Italy, and finally, to Chile where he serves clients all over the world as a Business Intelligence advisor and consultant...an expert in Power BI, he's focused on data visualization, SaaS integration, and software architecture! He also knows quite a bit about MMA and Brazilian JuJitsu, and a spirited discussion on who would win in a fight ensues!
Check out Olivier's website HERE!
References in this episode:
The Ascent of Money PBS Documentary
Raw Data with Shishir Mehrotra
Episode Transcript:
Rob Collie (00:00:00):
Hello friends. If you don't yet know why we're releasing two
episodes in a single week, just go back and briefly listen to the
intro at least, to the Jeff [McNeily 00:00:09] episode. Our guest
for this episode is Olivier Travers. Now, Olivier is kind of like a
Microsoft data platform international man of mystery. And of course
that's the subtitle to Austin Powers. But I think Olivia is a
little bit closer to the James Bond end of the spectrum that
inspired that. He's just your average French citizen who moved his
family to Portugal, and now has spent the last decade and a half in
Chile. Pretty standard stuff. And that international flavor pulled
us in some unexpected directions. We pretty quickly got into the
topic of international trade and the role that different currencies
from different nations play on that stage. There are some
positively fascinating aspects of that domain that, believe it or
not, citizens of basically every country on earth are familiar
with, except for American citizens, because the dollar holds a very
specific role in international trade. And it just never comes up in
the USA.
Rob Collie (00:01:06):
Continuing that James bond-like theme, we talk a little bit about
his jujitsu hobby and exactly how long it would take to make me
give up. Spoiler alert, not long. In general, he's just a very calm
and deliberate person. So as you're listening to this, try to
imagine him wearing like a white tux sitting in Monte Carlo,
playing baccarat.
Rob Collie (00:01:25):
On the technology front, we spend a pretty reasonable amount of
time talking about Power Query, pros and cons. We talk a little bit
about the idea of using Power Query as like a SQL macro recorder.
We again lean on Tom to get him into Power Query. I feel like we
got him a little closer this time, but still not quite over the
edge. Just top to bottom a fascinating fellow, and I hope you
agree. So let's get into it.
Announcer (00:01:52):
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?
Announcer (00:01:56):
This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast, with your host Rob
Collie, and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts
at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com.
Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element.
Rob Collie (00:02:20):
Welcome to the show. Olivier Travers ... that's a exactly how it's
pronounced in the native tongue, yeah? What does it sound like when
you say it?
Olivier Travers (00:02:28):
[foreign language 00:02:28] Well, that's only with other French
speakers, so Travers is good enough.
Rob Collie (00:02:34):
I think you should deploy that more frequently than just with
French speakers, because the French speakers won't be as impressed
with it. It sounds so good.
Rob Collie (00:02:42):
Now, it does put a lot of pressure on the other person you're
introducing yourself to, right? It puts a lot of pressure on them.
But depending upon the situation, maybe that's appropriate. Damn.
One more time.
Olivier Travers (00:02:53):
[foreign language 00:02:53].
Rob Collie (00:02:53):
Oh, so good. End of episode. Hang it up. Let's go.
Olivier Travers (00:03:00):
It's hard to top it.
Rob Collie (00:03:02):
All right. So you're just the average Frenchman living in
Chile?
Olivier Travers (00:03:08):
Yeah. I don't know what's average about that, I guess.
Rob Collie (00:03:12):
It's such a cliche these days. We're really tired ... oh, another
one?
Olivier Travers (00:03:17):
There are so many of these, right?
Rob Collie (00:03:19):
Is there anything about that origin story? How long have you been
there?
Olivier Travers (00:03:22):
We've been there for 14 years after spending four years in
something in Portugal. So we left France 18 years ago now.
Rob Collie (00:03:32):
Wow. World traveler. Do you have Chilean citizenship? Are you still
on some sort of long visa or ... ?
Olivier Travers (00:03:40):
It's close enough. I have permanent residency. So for most intents
and purposes, it's the same. I can vote in any election, but I
don't think you can be president or buy land at the border. There
are a few things that are off limits when you're not a citizen, but
by and large, you it's the same. Legally, in most instances, I
would be represented and have the same rights and obligations as a
citizen.
Rob Collie (00:04:07):
Can't buy land at the border? It's very specific.
Olivier Travers (00:04:10):
Well, I don't think they're the only country that does that, is
they don't want some citizens from the country at the other side of
the border to buy and seed that land to Argentina.
Rob Collie (00:04:22):
I see. So it's like a Crimean Peninsula situation.
Olivier Travers (00:04:26):
There's not a lot of trust in the area, generally speaking.
Thomas LaRock (00:04:30):
You're in Chile, but you're from France. And as far as I know those
two countries don't border each other. So I would think they would
let you buy land anywhere, but ...
Olivier Travers (00:04:44):
Probably they wanted to have something generic. You don't really
... a law made of exceptions is not really good law, so probably
they wanted to have a generic case. And also you could say, well,
you can be anything, but we don't trust your loyalty since you're
not a citizen. So I'm guessing that's the Russian element.
Thomas LaRock (00:05:01):
This is weird to me because I don't know that we do this in the
US.
Rob Collie (00:05:05):
No. We're not really concerned about being invaded in this way. The
world's largest military by far tends to not be quite so worried
about selling an acre of land.
Thomas LaRock (00:05:16):
It's the Canadians. You can have North Dakota, all of it. What do
we care? Buy all the land you want.
Olivier Travers (00:05:24):
You can always invade Canada any time anyway, so ...
Rob Collie (00:05:28):
And Mexican cartels don't really need to own the land on the other
side of the border to tunnel under or whatever they're doing,
right? And it's just part of NAFTA.
Olivier Travers (00:05:36):
The drug trade, you mean?
Rob Collie (00:05:38):
Yeah. I just got finished watching Narcos Mexico season two or
three.
Olivier Travers (00:05:42):
Don't spoil it. It's on my backlog.
Rob Collie (00:05:45):
It's a really good show, but it's semi-documentary. NAFTA plays a
big role in the most recent Narcos Mexico season. I'm not spoiling
anything, but who needs elaborate smuggling when you have an open
border for commerce. The only reason you need to dig a tunnel under
the border is to try to break someone out of prison or
something.
Olivier Travers (00:06:07):
There are some edge use cases.
Rob Collie (00:06:09):
Yeah. Still some use cases. But again, whether you happen to hold
an American ... USA passport, doesn't stop you.
Rob Collie (00:06:15):
Okay. So world travelers, you said we, so you're not alone. You
have a family.
Olivier Travers (00:06:21):
I'm there with my French wife and our two kids. Our daughter was
born in France three years before we left. Our son was born in
Portugal, then we moved to Chile when he was still a toddler, so
they grew up mostly in Chile, which makes them, I don't know what
exactly. I don't think they know either. French, but not quite.
Rob Collie (00:06:39):
So was it an itch to see the world?
Olivier Travers (00:06:41):
Yeah, I'm sure it looks that way. There was a bit of a method to
the madness. So the itch, there was an impulse. Let's put it one
way. There was a strong urge to leave France. I was spreadsheeting
public deficit over 40 years and I was ... you can and put whomever
in power and they're still running a deficit year after year for 40
years. So just no way this is sustainable. It's not a good
environment for entrepreneurship and to raise kids. So I'm out of
here. I love French culture and the food and the landscapes and the
architecture. It's great to go on vacation. It might be a good
place to retire. For me, it was not the like to raise a family and
have an active life.
Olivier Travers (00:07:21):
So we wanted to get out of France and originally went to Portugal,
where it fit my motto, which was more send, less taxes. So check
two boxes in one move. But then most of my business was in the US
where I was eight hours ahead of the US for one, and number two, at
that time, the Euro was really getting expensive relative to the
dollar. So even in a relatively local area such as Portugal, I
could only stretch my income so far in terms of actual purchasing
power. Also, there was a kind of real estate bubble and we wanted
to buy a house. So planets were not aligned for us to stay long
term in Portugal, even though we like the place.
Olivier Travers (00:08:02):
So it was okay, where do we move that? We get closer to the US. And
first we consider moving to the US itself. We looked at Austin,
Texas fairly closely. But if you're not a student, if you don't
have a big company sponsoring, et cetera, US immigration is not
that easy. In my case, I looked at E5 visa where I had to put some
money on the line where I was not sure I would be able to stay long
term regardless of the investment, so it was. This is a lot of risk
they're asking me to take, can I get the benefit of being closer to
the US and having a better exchange rate without moving to the US?
So we looked at the entire Americas from Canada down to Chile. And
Canada was too cold. Mexico already had a drug war.
Rob Collie (00:08:47):
Oh, did you hear that? He said that. Already had a drug war. We
need to go someplace where we can start a drug war. We don't want
to compete.
Olivier Travers (00:08:55):
Why compete if you're going to smuggle? Be a leader. You saw right
through me.
Rob Collie (00:09:00):
Yeah. I just watched three seasons of why moving to Mexico might
not have been the move at the time. Yep.
Olivier Travers (00:09:05):
And I've done a couple data projects with Mexicans and those were
the most lovely, easy to work with, serious people I've I've worked
with. And I understand from talking with them that the security
situation is really in certain states. It's not the whole country.
And Mexico is a large, fairly populated federal country, so it's
not all over the place. But you have places where it's pretty much
a war zone, not an improvement from Europe.
Olivier Travers (00:09:30):
And you could say to some extent that's the case ... with
variations, but for lot of Central and South America. We looked at
Brazil. There was affinity with that from Portugal, but Brazil has
European bureaucracy with third world efficiency. So not a great
mix. Even though we love Brazilian culture like sports, my wife
practices, [inaudible 00:09:50] I practice Brazilian jujitsu. We
have Brazilian friends. They themselves, when they can't move to
the US or other places, a lot of the time. The security situation
in Brazil, not middle class suburb America. So we ended up with
Uruguay and Chile on the short list. And Chile at the time had
better internet access than Uruguay, so that sealed the deal for
us.
Rob Collie (00:10:14):
This is the most deliberate journey of all time. I love it.
Olivier Travers (00:10:17):
For something random, right? So yeah, there was a spreadsheet,
there was banking, advisory notes and cannabis reports and whatnot.
And then talking to people, trying to get a bit of the real deal as
well. But then you end up really discovering things when you live
there, it's always different from what they tell you. But yeah,
we're still there. So far, it's worked out pretty well for us.
Thomas LaRock (00:10:38):
So I have a quick question on all of that. Wonderful journey, by
the way, and I love the thought process. Now, you were working on
... you said you were tracking deficit and GDP, and you were
looking at the 40 year history, and I'm guessing you built a bit of
a prediction as to where things would be. So after 18 years, how's
that trend line? Has it continued in the direction that you looked
at 18 years ago?
Olivier Travers (00:11:03):
I'm in the political dynamic where you can have left wing, right
wing, and the mix, the combination of both between executive and
parliament. It stays the same. It's the same course that adjusts
the margin to slightly have less deficit. But there's no structural
changes that can really change the course for good.
Olivier Travers (00:11:24):
I think the numbers are slightly worse than I thought. I thought
some countries would've gotten out of the Euro, not just the
European union, like what happened with Brexit. Actually in my
forecast, Italy, would've gotten out about eight, 10 years ago and
that's not happen yet. And they pull out all the stops with Greece,
with the whole whatever it takes policy where we have magic money
now.
Olivier Travers (00:11:46):
But the fed does do the same in the US. And the Bank of Japan was a
pioneer of creating fake money by their trillions of dollars. So
now everybody has funny magic money. For me, the way I look at it
is like a road runner who doesn't know he's up in the air and
should fall until he looks to the ground and then reality catches
up. So how long can we run up in the air? I don't know. Funny money
works until I guess it doesn't. Right now, we are having inflation
like we haven't had in 40 years, so I'm guessing maybe not forever.
But for sure the macro forecast was fairly good, fairly accurate,
but the political ... because I would say that what Central Banks
do right now is more policy than pure economics was no, I didn't
see that. I didn't think they would just unleash free money. It's
not even truckloads. I mean, there's no vehicle to hold all the
streams of dollars at this point.
Rob Collie (00:12:35):
Okay. So I had no idea we're going to be talking about this, but I
love it. So I have to continue along Tom's line of question. I have
to jump in here and oh so gently ask you, do you perceive any irony
in escaping from the printing fiat regime of the average Western
government, such as France, to the relative safety of South
America. You know what's going on over in Argentina, right? And are
you familiar with the history of Chile?
Olivier Travers (00:13:08):
Pick your poison. Right now we have elections coming in on Sunday,
presidential elections, and I'm waiting for the result to come out
with trepidation because I'm okay with one result. Sophie is my
wife. Where do we go next in the next two, three years? And I've
done a bit of business in Argentina, a beautiful country, great
food, great people, but you don't want to live there. You don't
want to live where there's 40, 50, 100% inflation. It's insane.
Chile on the macro perspective was much more stable. It had a
primary surplus until a few years ago, but now the demographics are
catching up. They've been a bit less responsible. The difficulty
for countries like that is they need to invest more, but they don't
necessarily have the human capital to know how to invest
responsibly and in a way that's going to have an actual
multiplicative effect.
Olivier Travers (00:13:54):
So where they look at the first world with envy and think they can
get there, but how do you bootstrap that when you don't really have
that culture yet? Even just personal discipline ... I mean, you,
you're not going to become German overnight. So you can say, "I
want to copy and pay something from Denmark or Sweden," but the
discipline of the day-to-day interaction and sticking to deadlines
and saying what you will, say and doing that then, it's a different
culture.
Olivier Travers (00:14:21):
There is an irony to that. Japan has a messed up economics, but
somehow they're sort of spurted for two decades of being flat, but
not completely [inaudible 00:14:32] either, who's really performing
well these days it's hard to pin down a country that is going to
have some sort of imbalance somewhere in their numbers, metrics,
policies.
Rob Collie (00:14:41):
Two stories that seem very relevant here. The first one, I don't
know if it's true. It's anecdotal. It's a legend perhaps. There's a
story about this guy in mid-1930s Europe who saw it all coming, saw
the conflagration, saw that it was all going to burn again, maybe
worse, and knew. And so did his homework, didn't have the internet,
did his homework and said, "We've got to get out of here. We got to
get out of the way of this." So packed up and moved his family to
the other side of the world in a place that would never have had
any of these problems, an island in the Pacific called
Guadalcanal.
Olivier Travers (00:15:18):
Yeah, it's ... or you could ... I'll go to Hawaii. I'll just surf.
For five years, I'll just sit another one out. What can happen?
Nothing can happen, right? So no, it's really hard.
Rob Collie (00:15:32):
Yeah. Didn't see in his research the staring match going on between
the United States and Japan over resources and embargoes and things
like that.
Olivier Travers (00:15:40):
I don't know that it's going to be a better outcome. I will retain
some sense of personal agency and free will that I think I was
deprived of in my home country. And some other people will say,
"Well, France has a great safety net and whatnot." And if that's
what they like, then great. I'm more of a libertarian. I'll make my
own life and get the benefit and also the drawback of my own
decisions and mistakes.
Rob Collie (00:16:04):
So the other story is my wife and I went to Israel on business nine
years ago and all the prices in Israel on all the menus and
everything have the letters N.I.S afterwards, N period, I period, S
after it, where the dollar sign would go, where the number of
euros, not in front of the number, but after the number.
Rob Collie (00:16:25):
And eventually I had to go look this up. It's the new Israeli
shekel. Not the old shekel, the new shekel, which was issued in the
80s, the 1980s. So this is ... in many ways we think Israel has
much, much, much more in common with the west than most other
regions of the world.
Rob Collie (00:16:42):
And in the 1980s ... and actually my friends at Microsoft who grew
up there told me that there was a moment in time when their parents
went down to the bank and paid off their mortgage with a handful of
change out of their pocket because of this runaway inflation, that
was eventually ... they just redenominated the shekel. The new
shekel was worth 10,000 or a hundred thousand of the old ones. And
so people started getting paid in the new Israeli shekel. So now
they were getting paid essentially like a hundred thousand times as
much based on what their previous debts were denominated in, which
was the old shekel. And they go down and they pay off their
house.
Rob Collie (00:17:20):
And Israel is in a tough spot, geopolitically. The whole borders
thing ... we can talk about the borders and who's allowed to own
land on the border. That gets very contentious pretty quickly. And
they had experienced runaway inflation in the 1980s, while we were
all alive and paying attention, and they didn't fall off the
planet.
Rob Collie (00:17:39):
So I'm with you. I've spent long periods of my life, very, very,
very concerned about these sorts of things, and at the same time,
slowly coming around to also tempering my concerns. It's amazing
the things that human society seems to be able to survive, even
when it seems like there's just no way that it could, right? A six
order of magnitude or five order of magnitude revaluing of your
currency to essentially catch up against runaway inflation, you
would expect utter collapse. And if you had enemies, they would
overrun you at that moment.
Olivier Travers (00:18:13):
It's easy to overstate ... economists have forecasted a nine of the
past three crises. So the old joke where you can't live and be
consumed by worry all the time when you there, and there's
balancing elements. That said, last time, you also had high
inflation in the West. Not to that extent that the US felt
compelled to issue the new dollar, but [inaudible 00:18:35] they
could, when a house used to cost five or 10 grand, and now it's
$500,000. You have a new dollar by a factor of a thousand right
there between the 50s and now.
Rob Collie (00:18:44):
I agree. I think the difference here is in the United States is
that we don't have to redenominate. We just print it to the new
level.
Olivier Travers (00:18:50):
It's the privilege of being the reserve currency of the world. And
China is trying to balance that and is not catching fire. The Euro
is a fraction of the dollar in terms of trade.
Rob Collie (00:18:59):
So China actually is catching fire at the moment in the way that
you don't typically hope for.
Rob Collie (00:19:04):
Yeah. So reserve currency, this is a phrase that I almost never
hear come out of an American's mouth.
Olivier Travers (00:19:09):
Yeah. Because it's like you're fish swimming in water. You don't
know that since all around you they have that benefit.
Rob Collie (00:19:14):
Americans don't know what a reserve currency is.
Olivier Travers (00:19:17):
The other countries need to have dollars.
Rob Collie (00:19:19):
You've got to be a real weirdo. To be an American ... Whenever I'm
on an international flight and I'm sitting next to someone who's
not an American, I lean over and say, "Hey, do you know what a
reserve currency is?" Nine out of 10 times, they do.
Olivier Travers (00:19:30):
Well, if you go to Argentina, that's really ... everybody needs to
be somewhat of an expert on macro economy, because for them,
inflation is like you're making daily spending decisions based on
these things. Anywhere in south America, really, everybody will
know the exchange rate with the dollar. Even in Chile, the Chile is
not dollarized.
Olivier Travers (00:19:48):
The dollar is used a way to express sums of money, because Spanish
doesn't really have a word for billions, so you have to say a
thousand millions and then you have thousands of thousands of
millions of pesos. That's a bit ridiculous. So large sums of money,
they tend to speak in dollars, but not because that's actually
handled in dollars, just as a shortcut. And you know the exchange
rate with the dollar, because if you're going to buy with just
[inaudible 00:20:10] or what. But you have countries in South
America which are dollarized otherwise informally. Like in
Argentina, the dollar is really what holds value against the peso,
which is a complete joke. So people have to have that awareness in
their daily life, even if they're not in the international trade
business themselves. It's a different outlook.
Thomas LaRock (00:20:31):
I love how this podcast cast has become a discussion on
international and monetary policy. And I'm sure the listeners are
just going to enjoy this pivot if you will for the next hour.
Thomas LaRock (00:20:43):
I wanted to mention this documentary I saw years ago called the
Ascent of Money. I don't know if either of you have seen it or
heard about it.
Olivier Travers (00:20:51):
Yeah. The one in Ferguson. Actually watched that with my son a few
months ago.
Thomas LaRock (00:20:54):
So it's brilliant, and I would recommend anybody listening that
hasn't seen it should probably watch it as well. I think it's worth
the time.
Thomas LaRock (00:21:01):
But the other thing, more importantly, is for a Frenchman to be
criticizing how numbers are done in a different language. You, sir
are from the land of four 20s because you don't have a word for
80.
Olivier Travers (00:21:17):
That's true. Wait until you hear about 90. That's four 20 10 plus
1. 91. [foreign language 00:21:25] Four 20 11.
Thomas LaRock (00:21:27):
I just had to mention that. Wow. Yeah. He's criticizing
Spanish.
Olivier Travers (00:21:32):
That's the French origins for you.
Rob Collie (00:21:34):
We just finished recording a podcast with Lars Schreiber, who's
German. We were joking about the way Germans make words is they
just take a sentence and take all the spaces out and call it a
word, right? It turns out that the French looked over the border
and went, "Oh no, uh-uh (negative). Oh, you're not going to run
unopposed. We're going to do this with our numbers." Why don't we
just count to 91? As we count out loud, that becomes the word for
91. It's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I wonder if this has some
weird side effects. In France, no one ever wants to price any at
80. They're just like, "No, just make it 79."
Olivier Travers (00:22:10):
When you say it in French, you don't think about the root what
you're saying. It's just a word. It's just a sound. You're not
breaking down, oh, I'm actually saying four multiplied by 20.
You're just saying [foreign language 00:22:22] and that's it.
Rob Collie (00:22:22):
Tom, did this documentary explain to you what a reserve currency
is?
Thomas LaRock (00:22:26):
I don't remember that, but I fascinated with how money moves and
flows around the world. And when you start to understand even why
some countries have wealth for the past few centuries and that
wealth could have been elsewhere had a couple of bankers in London,
decided to fund France instead of England, it's really amazing when
you just see and track the wealth over hundreds of years, and now
understanding how and why China is basically such an economic
power. And I think the important lesson is knowing that none of
this is permanent. The money flows in, and then the money flows
out.
Rob Collie (00:23:08):
Well, let me finish springing my slow motion trap. Luke, Tom, as
American citizens, do you know what a reserve currency is?
Thomas LaRock (00:23:18):
Oh, that's what the federal reserve has.
Rob Collie (00:23:22):
The world has had a reserve currency for a very, very long time. It
wasn't always what it is today.
Thomas LaRock (00:23:28):
Are you going to say it's being backed by gold?
Rob Collie (00:23:30):
Similar. Basically the reserve currency ... I'm going to explain
it, and then Olivier can explain it for real. When it comes to
reserve currencies, I'm like a slightly improved American.
Basically, it's the currency in which international trade can be
safely denominated at all times.
Thomas LaRock (00:23:47):
So Bitcoin?
Rob Collie (00:23:48):
That's actually the danger. And I've got a cryptocurrency expert
themed lined up for soon as football season's over. We're going to
go after it. We'll come back to that later. But if you're in France
... let's say you're pre-Euro France, and you want to buy something
on the international market. You're a company and you need to get
supplies from Brazil. You go to Brazil and say, "Here, I'll pay you
so many Francs for your steel or whatever." And they go, "What am I
going to do with Francs? Can't you pay me in my local currency?"
And you go, "Oh, come on. I don't have any of that." But it turns
out if you pay in dollars, everyone's happy.
Olivier Travers (00:24:33):
It's just the depth of the currency market so you have liquidity.
You have almost no spread. Otherwise, if you want to trade in your
own currency and there's ... you're going to be stuck. You're going
to ask for a huge spread if there's liquidity all. So at some
point, Russia, for instance, was non-convertible. They were
trading. I'll sell you weapons for oil or timber or whatnot because
the currency itself doesn't have liquidity, ergo, it's hard to
access its value, because it could be worth double or half of it
next month. You're stuck with it.
Rob Collie (00:25:03):
If you accept a large quantity of Francs, it's going to take you a
little while to resell those. Now you have to go back to the
international market and sell those Francs and trade them in for
your own currency to use it again at home, right? First of all,
it's a hassle to go sell those Francs, right? It's not a lot of
fun. By the time you're done offloading them, Olivier's right. It
might be worth much less. There's a huge risk there. It's really,
really crazy. So because the dollar is the world's reserve
currency, one of the side effects of all of this trade being
denominated in dollars is that everyone holds dollars.
Olivier Travers (00:25:38):
Our currency, your problem.
Rob Collie (00:25:40):
Every country on the world is holding onto large supplies of
dollars so that they can go buy things on the international market,
but also because they just sold a bunch of things on the
international market. Exactly. So when the United States dilutes
its currency, the world pays the depreciation. Of course, when the
dollar loses its value, American savings accounts also lose value,
but the rest of the world loses it too. And so it's much, much,
much safer, it's much easier, this tremendous privilege that the
United States has that no single American citizen seems to be aware
of. So all these things that are trying to attack and displace the
dollar as the reserve currency, this is the single greatest threat
to current American way of life and current American national
security, all of that, is if we'd lost that privilege, we'd
actually have to play fair.
Olivier Travers (00:26:33):
You'd have to pay for the real price for things. You'd also be
exposed to fluctuations that right now everyone else is exposed to.
So if the dollar goes up and down, it's everybody else's currency
exchange risk. American companies see that when they have to
[inaudible 00:26:47] earnings from say the Eurozone and then, well,
we grew by 20% in Euro, but Euro gained 10%, so in the end it was
just plus 10% in dollars and whatnot, you'll see that in SCC
filings ... American companies have such a huge local market, it's
not as material to say for the average German company, which is 70%
expert-driven, so where they need to control that so much more,
because it affects their balance sheet and their real operating
income every year. An American company could be, well, it's just
extra money. We leave it abroad for tax reasons and whatnot, but we
can be happy with 80% of our revenue in the US, such a huge
consumer market, huge B2B market. What you need other countries for
is gravy.
Rob Collie (00:27:31):
Now where things get a little hazy, where you end up in the realm
of conspiracy theories that might be true, but also might not be,
I've read things like the real reason that Saddam Hussein got taken
out the second time around? This is the conspiracy theory. Okay?
The real reason is, is that he tried to sell oil in a currency
other than dollars. So the story goes, whenever you try to sell oil
for something other than dollars, if you don't have nukes, you
don't exist anymore.
Olivier Travers (00:28:04):
Well, without those extremes, you see how ... for instance, how
China is pressuring any country that says we're going to recognize
Taiwan or have dealings with Taiwan, is going to be under huge
pressure. A mix of incentives, like they will bribe countries,
Jamaica or whatnot, Caribbean islands that have sometimes
recognized Taiwan as a sort of defacto country. "Oh, well, if
you'll get a $2 billion investment if you stop doing that." I think
they we're doing that with a small European country this week, play
more of the stick as opposed to the carrot policy of, well, bad
things are going to start to happen to you if you don't stop your
shenanigans, because of China. So I don't know how all, all this
relates to data, but it is very data-driven.
Rob Collie (00:28:46):
This is the curious mindset that keeps picking at a story to find
out what the next level down is. When I got ahold of all of this
stuff, probably, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago ... we're going to
change gears in a second. But it actually kind of started for me
when I was sitting around at Microsoft going, "We have a 40 billion
dollar cash hoard ... " this is in the 90s or whatever, right ...
as a company. And I asked myself, "Why aren't we splitting that up?
There's 15,000 of us here. I don't know. Why don't we get together
and just divvy it up," right? And I knew that we weren't going to,
but I didn't have the precise reasons why. As I started to pick at
that string, slowly over the course of years, it kept leading me
into all kinds of new places and everything, and really truly
understanding how the financial system works and what it means to
be a publicly traded company and all that kind of stuff. And then
eventually it led me into all of this stuff.
Rob Collie (00:29:40):
And I kind of came around to the conclusion that, like you said,
the economists, the famous economists either don't know anything or
are deliberately ignorant to keep the music going, and everything
is so damn complicated that you end up trying to avoid, try to play
it, try to surf it, and you end up in Guadalcanal at the opening of
World World II.
Rob Collie (00:30:00):
And so I went this long, long, long, global journey in my mind
anyway, there and back again, Bilbo Baggins, right? And all I did
was just come back to where I am today and go, "Okay, so what are
we going to do today with the people that I know directly? How are
we going to build a good business?" And all of that. But I had to
go on that long, protracted journey.
Rob Collie (00:30:24):
And if you met me at various points along that journey, you
would've discovered me in varying degrees of radicalism in a way.
"Because you don't really know how things work. Let me tell you how
things really work." And I think I know how things work now better
than I ever did on that previous points on the journey. But I'm
kind of more moderate now about it because everyone's on the take,
including us.
Olivier Travers (00:30:47):
Right. I think there's a bunch of red pills. A single red pill
doesn't unlock the whole thing. So you think you understand it and
then wait, you're telling me LIBOR rates that underpin any mortgage
in the world, or almost, you're telling me that those currency
exchange rate that we're talking are rigged? And that's not a
conspiracy theory. There's been criminal charges on the biggest
markets in the world.
Rob Collie (00:31:12):
Brutal fines have been levied that were equivalent to 0.001% of the
profit gained by rigging it.
Olivier Travers (00:31:19):
Yeah. So it's hard to get the whole encompassing, oh, I know, I
understand, top to bottom, and from the macro ... from the universe
down to what happens within a cell perspective at each zoom level,
which I guess it goes to what we do with BI, which is how can we
drill down from show me the main cash flows of a company down to
how much money do we make in North Dakota before it was sold to
Canada last week on the red widgets?
Rob Collie (00:31:47):
It's the North American Crimean Peninsula.
Olivier Travers (00:31:50):
Weren't there were plans somewhere in the US history,
semi-seriously some president considered invading Canada, or ...
?
Thomas LaRock (00:31:57):
I'm not sure we considered it. But yes, plans for the invasion of
Canada did exist.
Rob Collie (00:32:04):
I think I saw this in the South Park movie, right? Isn't that when
this happened?
Thomas LaRock (00:32:09):
I don't believe that there was any seriousness about it. I'm sorry.
Let's say after the War of 1812. I look at it and to me it's almost
like it was busy work. There was somebody in the cabinet at one
point and they're like, "Hey, you know what would be great? Give
him something to do that we'll keep him busy. Tell him we're
looking to invade Canada. Have him drop plans." And he spent two
months on it and he came back with everything like, "Oh, that's
great. That's great. Now what can we give him to do?" Just to keep
him out of the way for a while. That's how I've always thought of
it. This wasn't a real project. This was something to just keep
somebody else busy.
Olivier Travers (00:32:43):
If you read the Federalist Papers, the state of mind of the
founders of the US and of 18th century competition with Spain and
the potential war with Spain was a big deal. It was right there in
the main list of being able to thwart this huge competitor and a
potential enemy 250 years later to Spain. Don't you go there once a
week to race bulls or have tapas? How's that a foe?
Rob Collie (00:33:08):
It turns out that the Americans ended up being the perfect engine
for warfare over the last few hundred years, right? Tremendous
amount of resources, not easy to invade geographically, and a bit
of a chip on it shoulder. We were attempting to make that right
turn into BI. But we talk about BI a lot on this show and we're
going to come back to it. But I saw it in your Twitter bio. Before
you even mentioned it, we were going to go there. We're going to
turn this into an episode of the Joe Rogan experience.
Olivier Travers (00:33:34):
Three hours?
Rob Collie (00:33:35):
We're going to talk about ...
Olivier Travers (00:33:36):
Mushrooms?
Rob Collie (00:33:37):
Brazilian jujitsu.
Olivier Travers (00:33:38):
Oh yeah, don't get me started.
Rob Collie (00:33:40):
Let's get you started, because we've never talked about Brazilian
jujitsu on this show. When did you first get into that?
Olivier Travers (00:33:45):
Well, so I did judo as a kid and teenager a little bit in France.
It's like wrestling in Midwest, in the US. It's what you do when
you're a kid to bulk me up a little bit, give me confidence, and I
did. And then I did other sports, but no wrestling of any sort. And
I really needed to get back into shape. And I started getting a bit
judo a few years ago. But in the end, when you're middle-aged,
something that's really focused on takedowns, and high amplitude at
that, is a bit hard on the body, so it's just the recovery.
Olivier Travers (00:34:13):
Brazilian jujitsu does takedown, but is mostly focused on
[inaudible 00:34:17] fighting. For people not familiar with it, if
you look at MMA UFC fights, when they're on the ground, most of
what you see is a combination of wrestling and Brazilian jujitsu.
So a dominating position and finding some way to choke out or apply
a joint lock on you, shoulder, arm lock, leg lock of any sort. But
because it's ... you have less explosion than in judo, because you
are on the ground for the most part, it's a bit less harsh on the
body. You can train more often.
Olivier Travers (00:34:46):
And yeah, I fell into that rabbit hole about seven years ago, which
for me is the fun way to do something that's very physical and a
very serious role in one swoop. So when I was young, I could go and
work out and bench press. I've lost any interest. If it's not fun,
I'm not going to do it. I will go and have a run every two months.
That's just not a way to stay in shape. I'm limited by just my
recovery time, but I'll do it as often as I can. So I train three,
four times a week. And it's never ending, the techniques and the
counters. You think you've got it figured out and then, well, but
if you move your arm in that way and your head in that way, then
you can get out of that position and reverse it. So it is really
fun. It's not for everyone, but I find it extremely fun.
Rob Collie (00:35:33):
I've never done it, but I have heard it described over and over
again as almost akin to chess in a way, right? There's a physical
component to it, obviously. Everything has to be physically
expressed. But it is a very cerebral thing. I'm assuming that
Chile, you guys use kilograms and not pounds.
Olivier Travers (00:35:49):
Yeah. It's metric system.
Rob Collie (00:35:51):
How many kilograms do you weigh?
Olivier Travers (00:35:53):
I'm about 80. So I think that's 170, 175?
Rob Collie (00:35:56):
178, 175. Okay. So I'm 220. I'm middle-aged, like you. I've never
done any organized wrestling or jujitsu. How many seconds does it
take you to make me give up?
Olivier Travers (00:36:13):
Do I want to work for it or do I want to throw yourself into the
submission?
Rob Collie (00:36:17):
You're competing in a worldwide competition to submit Rob Collie as
fast as possible.
Olivier Travers (00:36:22):
Are we starting standing or on the ground?
Rob Collie (00:36:24):
Tell me both ways.
Olivier Travers (00:36:26):
Short of striking, but you don't want me to take you down and
you're going to exert your weight and strength.
Rob Collie (00:36:31):
Okay. I'm fighting for my life. You're competing in an Olympic
sport where every 10th of a second matters.
Olivier Travers (00:36:37):
40 pounds is nothing to sneeze at. I don't know your overall
condition, if you do other sports or whatnot. Do you have any
cardio otherwise?
Rob Collie (00:36:44):
I don't know if you have it down there, Orange Theory Fitness. I do
that, let's say, three to four times a week. It's high intensity
interval training.
Olivier Travers (00:36:52):
Yeah. So you're in good shape. So it might take me a minute, two
minutes just for me to protect myself and not put me in a bad
position. If it's on the ground and we're chilling, you want to
practice Brazilian jujitsu, you want to go into that game, then 20
seconds, 30 seconds. Because your energy ... you'll try to, for
instance, [inaudible 00:37:12] you'll try to throw my legs, et
cetera. You'll go in a direction. You'll go way too much in that
direction, and I'll take your back ... untrained people do
sometimes silly ... they don't do jujitsu. So sometimes it puts you
back in more of a real fight mode. If you know jujitsu and then
you're 220 ... one of my spar partners is 220 and muscular, 220, 28
years old. That's work. Yeah. He makes me work.
Rob Collie (00:37:36):
I don't want to play against him.
Olivier Travers (00:37:40):
You don't want to oversell it. Technique doesn't overcompensate
everything. Attributes, it's strength and speed and everything
through technique. But if you're a complete newbie and short of
strikes, which completely changed the game. So if it's MMA, it's
different.
Rob Collie (00:37:55):
I don't have any training in that either, so it wouldn't
matter.
Olivier Travers (00:38:00):
I did that a bit, and then I realized I didn't like to get punched
in the face. Kneeing other people or elbowing them or punching them
is great. But being on the receiving end, I was ... nah, I'm just
not going to do that.
Rob Collie (00:38:13):
That's actually surprisingly common, even at the highest levels of
these combat sports. There are some people who very clearly are not
into being hit.
Olivier Travers (00:38:21):
And especially if you're hit in the head. You're exposed to other
risks like CRT, like concussions, et cetera, and it could affect my
work. I mean, I got hurt several times last year. I got a displaced
rib a little bit. I couldn't sleep well for a week. I got my eye
scratched with someone's nail a couple times, and that's really
painful. I got tweaked fingers. You get hurt.
Olivier Travers (00:38:43):
But then many of those issues, you can get playing soccer or going
on a bike ride with your kids. So it's not like it's the only sport
where you can get hurt. You can control to some extent, and also
selecting your aspiring partners, gym culture, et cetera. You can
control to some extent the level of risk that you're comfortable
with. I warned you. Don't get me started.
Thomas LaRock (00:39:04):
I wanted to. I think the secret here is because he's going to be
expecting you to do ... or you're going to be doing ... you have to
keep him off balance by not doing those things. So I would suggest
you just do nothing.
Rob Collie (00:39:17):
You know what I'm going to do?
Thomas LaRock (00:39:18):
Just stand there.
Rob Collie (00:39:19):
I'm going to walk into the ring or the octagon with him and I'm
going to immediately go into the crane kick position from Karate
Kid. Like as far as I can tell, that is an unbeatable
technique.
Thomas LaRock (00:39:30):
You have to do what's unexpected. You have to do things that he's
never seen before, and by doing those things, you'll last longer.
You ain't going to win, but you could last longer. And now, this is
the important thing, is there's an over-under here and there'll be
some wagering. And what I need from you is I need to know if this
is a sure thing. So I want you to try all of those weird things and
let me handle the money side.
Olivier Travers (00:39:54):
The doing nothing is funny actually, because beginners will try
that after a couple of weeks of trying too hard, and then they
realize, "Everywhere I go is a trap. Oh, there's an arm right
there. Oh, he's choking me out. How does that guy have my back when
I thought that was winning two seconds ago?" So at some point
there's like, "I'm going to try and sit there and see what happens.
And then while I'm going to push you, I'll go get mount and you'll
get choked in 10 seconds as opposed to 20." So you can scratch that
off the list. Doing nothing is not an option.
Thomas LaRock (00:40:26):
See, he's just saying that because he knows that's really the
answer. He's throwing you off.
Rob Collie (00:40:31):
The next three months, I'm going to practice rolling into a perfect
ball like an Armadillo and just rolling around. There's nothing you
can grab a hold of.
Olivier Travers (00:40:38):
My son does that. It was, "Oh, that's my technique. I invented it.
I called it The Ball." I'm like, "That's not going to work for
long, son."
Rob Collie (00:40:48):
Ah, smart kid, smart kid.
Olivier Travers (00:40:52):
He was very proud of himself. It's funny, my son is a French guy
raised in Chile, and somehow default speaks in English. It's like
some kids have been raised by wolves, he's been raised by the
internet seemingly. So he's like, "Oh, I call it the ball ... "
with his. He has a very good American accent. The ball is not a
thing. That's not going to work.
Rob Collie (00:41:11):
I just have a real ... it's like a fascination with things that are
expressed physically, but that involve technique and end up being
just gigantically superior. If I were really rich, a big part of my
life would be spent going around just getting absolutely smoked by
people in their various fields, right?
Rob Collie (00:41:36):
I remember watching Marshall Faulk the football player and
thinking, "Okay, how narrow does the hallway have to be for me to
be able to actually get two hand touch on Marshall Faulk if he's
trying to get past me? There's a point at which the hallway just
wide enough that I'm never going to be able to make contact. His
job is to get past me. We're in a hallway. He's still going to get
past me. I don't have to tackle him. I just have to touch him."
Stuff like that, I'm always fascinated by it. If you make it to
Indianapolis, you make it to the States anytime soon, Olivier, or
even not, let's film this. It'll be two social media stars, Jake
Paul fighting ...
Olivier Travers (00:42:13):
Tyron Woodley. Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:42:15):
Right. We'll just use this. Olivier versus Rob. I'll get 15 minutes
of training and then you'll just smoke me.
Olivier Travers (00:42:24):
Usually it takes about a year, I would say 12 to 18 months of
training, to not have too much trouble with a brand new beginner,
except with their linebacker, taking outside professional athletes
with a serious body mass. But outside of that, the average
newcomer, even if they're lifting, a regular Joe just doesn't stand
a chance ... again, outside of striking. Striking has always that
one punch, bigger chance you can knock out almost anyone, right?
You connect well on the jaw or temple, you could knock out almost
anyone. But you'll break your hand in the process.
Rob Collie (00:42:57):
I'm as likely to hurt myself throwing punches. So I'm going to ...
no striking. Tom, did you have something there?
Thomas LaRock (00:43:05):
I'm amused that you think you have a chance.
Rob Collie (00:43:06):
Look, I'm betting on me.
Thomas LaRock (00:43:08):
The thing is right now, Rob, what's happening is your mind process
thinking about this is you're thinking as if you're still 20 years
old, but you have the wisdom of something smarter. You don't think
you're a middle-aged man in Indianapolis.
Rob Collie (00:43:23):
No, that's true. That's totally true. That's totally true. I can't
move at the same speed. However, I would pick me today over the 20
year old me in a fight. No doubt about it. I would tear up 20 year
old me. I am so much thicker, stronger, bigger. I was still filling
out when I was 20.
Thomas LaRock (00:43:39):
Now, that's fair. I haven't seen you in the ring. I haven't seen
you compete.
Rob Collie (00:43:44):
Well, neither have I.
Rob Collie (00:43:48):
All right. You're in Portugal before you move to Chile. Most of
your clients are in the USA at that point. You need a time zone
change above all else, and maintaining the sunshine. I understand
these are important KPIs. And that was what year, roughly?
Olivier Travers (00:44:04):
2007.
Rob Collie (00:44:05):
Okay. 2007. So let that sink in, dear audience. There was no Power
BI. There was no Power Pivot. So what were you doing? I glanced
through your blog articles and I was seeing all kinds of things
that they're just general technical stuff. How'd you define
yourself as a professional? What was your primary marketable
skill?
Olivier Travers (00:44:25):
Right. So at the time, I had a couple ventures where I was involved
in an operational capacity, more than ... I went back and forth
with consulting. So I had for a while a gig where I was managing a
series of B2B blogs, trade publications, but on the web in
newsletters. So I focused on that for eight years or so, something
like that.
Olivier Travers (00:44:46):
So in that case, I was more the general manager and that was more
of a content business. I applied data to running the business. I
had my dashboard for sales and finance. And also as a publication
... actually I contacted you when you were about ... what was it,
Pivot Stream? 10 years ago. Because where I was trying to get a
retail trade publication out the ground, and they were already
retail publications, magazines, and I wanted to something that was
data-driven. And I saw Power Pivot, but I was ... I need something
that is hosted that I can embed in my own website.
Olivier Travers (00:45:18):
And then I was trying to have a same store sale tracker going on. I
wanted to have something that was across retailers with Walmart and
Target saying, "Well, here's the store to store comparison where
you don't take growth in terms of numbers of stores into the
equation." You're looking at the existing base and you see whether
business is growing pretty much organically.
Olivier Travers (00:45:38):
So it's a metric that some investment bankers will try to compute.
And you see some numbers sometimes, but there was no real dashboard
of same store sales. I was trying to build that out, for instance.
So that's one area where I was trying when ... now we are talking
2010, 2011, where I wanted to have pivot tables on the web for
subscription services or stuff like that. And I don't think the
technology was quite there yet at that time. So we ended up having
one off spreadsheets, more of an ad hoc, a bit podunk, to be
honest, but a handcrafted approach to that.
Rob Collie (00:46:11):
Artisanal.
Olivier Travers (00:46:13):
Very artisanal. And that was part of the problem. I never made that
scale where it became a sustainable long term business. So when ad
sales creator, post-2007, 2008, things became faster. We tried to
increase content sales subscription and sort of made do for a
while. But in the end, that was not enough. So I went back to
consulting, leveraging my operational skills, and I would say my
breadth of experience, as I think now it's apparent from the
various countries, various businesses, industries, languages.
Olivier Travers (00:46:44):
I'm a specialist in generalities. I'm not the best at anything
really, except maybe being good at a wide variety of things. So
what I'm good at, I would say, is from that background is diving in
something where I'll get to understand maybe the key drivers for
your business in your industry, in your country, whatever that is,
fairly quickly. So the business and the acumen, I would describe
that, generally speaking, drives and then the technology follows.
So yeah, Power BI is a good tool. We'll use Power BI, but we can
use other tools as well. I don't to think of myself as a one tool
guy. I think that's not good job security. And also then you become
the hammer that is only seeing the nails everywhere. I don't think
that's good service for clients.
Rob Collie (00:47:24):
Go back to the jujitsu metaphor. You need all the tools so that you
can show those beginners that there's no escape, no matter what
they do.
Olivier Travers (00:47:32):
In this case, it's not as antagonistic with our clients. You try to
make that more of a corporation, a partnership, but yeah.
Rob Collie (00:47:39):
The opponent is the problem. The problem tries to wiggle out this
way. "No, no. Uh-uh (negative). Submission. Arm bar". So do you
remember what it was, or how you even discovered Power Pivot as
early as you did? Because you're right. We were in touch back in my
Pivot Stream days, which ended in 2013. So that puts you in the
first 0.000001% awareness worldwide of the existence of Dax, the
existence of the verte pack engine, [inaudible 00:48:10] whatever
was behind Power Pivot. You'll never randomly bump into someone in
your life that discovered it before you. You might be at a
conference or something. In the random world, you will always be
number one to have discovered it.
Olivier Travers (00:48:24):
So a couple ways to look at it. First off, I used Excel from when I
was in business school. I had a side gig with a local computing PC
assembly company. And the CEO of that company hired me on the side
to create a monthly price striker, a dashboard of all the
competitions. So I was spending my Saturdays reading the monthly PC
shopper magazines and typing in the data and charting specs and
this hard drive and that monitor and that much ram. Then here's the
graph of everywhere, and you're here. My first dashboard was 30
years ago. That was Excel. And I also did a bit of sales for that
guy. At the time, I sold 17 or 18 286 PCs to my business school. So
I went to the IT of my business school like, "I want to sell you
computers." They're like, "Okay, what's your quote?"
Olivier Travers (00:49:12):
Then I worked at Microsoft in the mid-90s and that was obviously a
tool where there was a lot of use. There was a data warehouse for
sales numbers called MS Sales, very creatively, as you would expect
from Microsoft. And I would go and create those awesome pivot
tables. And I would macros refreshing them from that data warehouse
in I think '97. And I would show that to my peers and colleagues
and they went, "How do you do that? Where is that even coming
from?" I was, "Let me show you."
Olivier Travers (00:49:39):
I was in charge of larger country sellers, the companies selling to
the select at the time, licensing mass deals. And I was able to go
and meet the CEOs and CFOs of those resellers, partners of
Microsoft saying, "Well, here's exactly how much you're selling,"
in Francs at the time, and this product line against that type of
license in that region. So we had already a fairly good breakdown.
So it was all pivot tables. So I wanted ... for the publication
business I was telling you about, I wanted to have pivots, but for
the web. And before that, maybe there was something for SharePoint
I don't quite remember.
Rob Collie (00:50:13):
Yeah. Excel Services.
Olivier Travers (00:50:15):
Yeah. There was a startup ... I don't remember the name, that
that's something that ... like the first pivot technology I saw,
maybe a year or two, and they were purchased by whomever and they
sort of killed it. I was on the lookout from the 90S for a pivot on
the web. And then it took forever to materialize into something
that is now credible without blowing in your face. Took 10, 15
years to really happen, I think.
Olivier Travers (00:50:40):
Power BI now is mature. I looked at Power BI desktop designer. It
was not [inaudible 00:50:45] was not called Power BI Desktop, but
in 2015 ... I was, "This is complete garbage." I was playing with
Tableau at the time. I blogged about it, saying, "Microsoft has the
work cut out for them," because it was buggy. The visuals were
fairly crappy. But you could see the intent was better than the
whole Silverlight Power View fiasco, which was ... I could have
told you that was a technical dead end. What committee came up with
that architecture?
Rob Collie (00:51:08):
Oh, I know.
Olivier Travers (00:51:11):
You know where the [crosstalk 00:51:12] is? I buried it.
Rob Collie (00:51:12):
Yeah, but the people that were involved in that, they also have
very, very selectively short memories. Not my department, mm-mm
(negative).
Thomas LaRock (00:51:20):
Are you saying somebody kicked Mr. Silverlight?
Rob Collie (00:51:23):
I saw a tweet today ... Olivier, we'll give you a little background
here. This is a National Football League coach, urban Meyer. The
funny thing about NFL coaches' contracts is that they're almost
always guaranteed. Five years, 7 million dollars a year, and if I
fire you, you get the rest of the money. It's just an incredibly
perverse incentive.
Olivier Travers (00:51:46):
Well, I was about to say, what are my incentives?
Rob Collie (00:51:46):
Yeah. It just turns out that you rely on the demographic being so
competitive that they don't want to go out on their shield. That's
not how they want to go. And I think Urban decided very early in
his tenure with the Jaguars this year that, nah, I'm just going to
keep being awful, like just really awful until they have to fire
me. And I saw a tweet today that said ... it didn't even mention
who it was about. You didn't have to. Everyone knew. It said, "We
just witnessed a masterclass in stealing tens of millions of
dollars in plain sight."
Olivier Travers (00:52:19):
Yeah. Silverlight was really that architectural ... let's compete
with the product that's going to be phase out by the entire market
in two years. Yes. I'm saying that a bit with hindsight regarding
the fate of Flash. But really Web 2.0 was already well established.
Dynamic HTML was already a thing. What are you doing? What is this
Runtime? The .net ... I mean, it was like architecture from the
mid-2000s, 2005, that they tried to pursue eight years later that
it made no sense. Why not ActiveX while we were at it, right?
Rob Collie (00:52:50):
I mean, at least we'd been there. Well, not to go there again, I
think. But it is weird. In 2014, 2015, I was visiting Shishir
Mehrotra, who we've had on the show, when they were working on
their startup. It's now called Coda. And they were writing the
whole thing from the ground up, this entire office suite
application, writing the whole in JavaScript from the ground up.
And I was sitting there just scratching my head. JavaScript.
JavaScript? Really? The thing that makes the web control flash in
HTML? The thing that even is downstream from the server code in the
web apps and web pages today? Yeah. It's come a long way. It's the
new C++.
Olivier Travers (00:53:29):
Yeah, I remember seeing the first cross-browser drag and drop in
some financial web app 15, 16 years ago. And I was, "Huh." I liked
to see it because I was doing some web coding and I had developers
working with me and that was ... and now you're thinking drag and
drop and all those affordances that you have on the desktop. We
expect them by and large to have them in the web browser, right?
But go back 10, 15 years ago, that was edge demos, not something
that you would expect to really work, the whole cross-browser
thing. As long as Internet Explorer was around, that was a big
deal. Now everything is Chromium, that's, to a large extent, not an
issue anymore.
Rob Collie (00:54:05):
We just had another wordagami, affordances. I remember when I was
first introduced to that word five years in my Microsoft career.
And it was new to all of us. Oh, a new way to say capability or
type of UI. It was like an all purpose word that sounded cool. I
think it had about an 18 month lifespan at Microsoft. We burned
through it pretty quickly. But it is a good word.
Olivier Travers (00:54:25):
I think it's a bit more specific than functionality because it's
about the way that it responds. So for me, it's almost something
that's tactile, click and I see that it feels like the button can
be pressed. If you look at the affordances in a game, any game
where you interact with 3D objects, like things magnet and click
and there's noise and there's boom, and you see that things connect
or not.
Olivier Travers (00:54:47):
Why do we have business applications that feel like they're
mainframe screens from the 70s? Why don't you apply what's done in
the gaming world where it's much more like tactile almost? It's
virtual, but you feel like it's boom, it's clicking. You feel like
a physical emulation of a physical mechanism on screen and
reinforced with haptic reactions on your phone, made data entry
possible. And if you don't have the haptic feedback, it doesn't
quite work to type on a smartphone. Right? That's what I think the
breakthrough with the iPhone.
Olivier Travers (00:55:19):
Now, apply that to those dead UIs in business software. Have you
looked at what's been going on in gaming for at least 20 years? I
feel everything in terms of what we accept as adequate performance
is laughable in the business world. You have a whole generation of
managers that go 120 FPS or 240, just because oh, 60 is not quite
... we're coming from a world where TV is worth 24 Hertz, 24 images
per second. Now you're pushing 120, 240, and you're locking that
frequency. And then we're there waiting for five seconds for a
screen to refresh. And you have a blank screen in between. What is
this? I want to send every enterprise software developer working
for a gaming studio and learn what's real acceptable frontend
performance and come back and lock us out of the ... like I feel we
have something that's shinier and better than it used to, but only
marginally. There's a leap when you go into a game, and boom.
Olivier Travers (00:56:15):
I have three screens. The main one is a 49 ultra-wide. And I have
two 27 on top, so I can feel like a trader, even though I don't
trade anything. But play a more ... say a driving game on a screen
like that, it's amazing. And then you go back to Teams and you're
like, okay, how do you get that level of streaming? I would say
bottlenecks. Don't get me started on downloading data from
SharePoint. Say you're, oh, five megabits per second. Wow. Welcome
to, I guess, 2002 broadband.
Rob Collie (00:56:45):
Oh, well SharePoint, it's running a lot of complex garbage SQL
queries to ... let's not go there. So we should send like the
CarMax that made Doom ... we should send them to be technical
fellows on the intelligence platform at Microsoft, bring some of
that quality and response time and production value discipline.
Olivier Travers (00:57:03):
Yeah. I think it's the expectations. We've just grown accustomed
to, well, if you wait two seconds and nothing happens, that's good.
That's fast. If you play a competitive P2P, player against player
game online ... I think you played World of Warcraft. I used to be
sort of semi-hardcore casual 15 years ago.
Rob Collie (00:57:23):
Yeah. Me too. I haven't played World of Warcraft in about, I don't
know, five hours. I was on earlier. Just doing some auction house
work, folks, I wasn't ...
Olivier Travers (00:57:31):
Yeah. I've done that. I've done the arbitrage.
Rob Collie (00:57:35):
I know you have.
Olivier Travers (00:57:36):
You know I have, right? And so ... and I have that
transparency.
Rob Collie (00:57:43):
Have you done any cross-server arbitrage?
Olivier Travers (00:57:45):
I've done cross-faction where you swam for 20 minutes to get to the
neutral auction bay in Booty Bay or whatever, and then you could
buy, but you had to make sure that people were not scamming your
trades because you had to go on the open auction. I made 67 gold in
two months. That was the game.
Rob Collie (00:58:02):
Just making the gold, right? In fact, I'm trying to give the gold
that I'm making away to my friends and they're like, "I don't want
to have to pay it back." I'm like, "You don't understand, this is
the game."
Olivier Travers (00:58:11):
I'm hitting the limit. I'm hitting the account limit. So anyway in
those games, a hundred milliseconds, 200 milliseconds ... 200
milliseconds is about human eye to finger reaction time, more or
less. It increases a bit with age. But you know how that's the
difference? We're talking a fifth of a second. You're going to
perceive it. But then we accept we're saying three seconds is fast.
That's an order of magnitude slower than it should be for people
not to start having their ... your brain is already starting to
wonder and open other tabs. Power Query, I love Power Query as a
tool, but it's impossible to be in zone with Power Query. You
cannot be productive in the sense of I'm in a task and that's all I
do and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. For me, I can't just be there
waiting for the next step to refresh because I changed an earlier
step and all the evaluation to go on for 30 seconds ... it just
doesn't work for me.
Rob Collie (00:59:01):
I feel your pain. You should see our Power BI report that measures
are advertising effectiveness, connects to an Azure data warehouse.
And the way that it's structured is the way that Google, for
instance gives us data. It's just tremendous overkill. So it ends
up with you kick off a Power Query, anything that triggers the
refresh preview, go get a cup of coffee.
Olivier Travers (00:59:22):
Yeah, exactly. So you have to start computing, is it worth it for
me to create a view that is just a thousand rows that I'm going to
develop all the ETL from? Can I build that to the client? Is it
fair? Is it worth it? And you're like, "No, I won't do it," unless
that's really marque project that you're going to keep making and
adding to. But oftentimes it's not worth it and you're just there
frustrated that it's not faster.
Rob Collie (00:59:45):
And of course, with those sub views, those sample data sets that
you would use to develop against, part of the problem is that you
still need to validate that your answers are correct. And you can't
validate artificial numbers in any way.
Olivier Travers (00:59:57):
Yeah. Because it kills your profiling. So then if you are trying to
find exceptions, you can't do that with just a thousand random
views either. So yeah, that's an issue.
Rob Collie (01:00:06):
Nope. Nope, nope, Nope. Tom's going to fix all this for us as he
learns Power Query over the holidays.
Thomas LaRock (01:00:12):
Oh, is that what I'm doing?
Rob Collie (01:00:13):
Oh yeah. You're going to splice that together with SQL, and you're
going to develop a school of operating with Power Query and SQL
that will be called The LaRock School. You know how Matt Allington
named my way of laying out tables in the Schema view of Power BI
the Collie method? If I can have something named after me like that
for just arranging things in two rows, I think you can actually
contribute something of far greater value to the world and we will
make sure that the name sticks.
Thomas LaRock (01:00:44):
Yeah. I'm good.
Rob Collie (01:00:47):
Such disappointment.
Thomas LaRock (01:00:48):
Well, it's Raw Data by P3, not by LaRock. So ...
Rob Collie (01:00:53):
Listen, this is a point in time, Tom. This is the pre-LaRockian
method, the pre-LaRock School era.
Thomas LaRock (01:01:00):
True, because it could be just Power Query all the time.
Rob Collie (01:01:03):
Well, Power Query and SQL, the two of them together.
Thomas LaRock (01:01:06):
Together.
Olivier Travers (01:01:07):
Oh, I see a query folding winter of love for you.
Rob Collie (01:01:12):
I agree. Until Tom is throwing query folding around like the word
affordance ...
Thomas LaRock (01:01:17):
There's so much out there yet for me to learn.
Rob Collie (01:01:22):
Ich bin ein query folder.
Thomas LaRock (01:01:24):
There's so much and it can be hard for me to have focus on tackling
any one thing.
Rob Collie (01:01:33):
I totally get it. That's why I'm here for you.
Thomas LaRock (01:01:35):
So is Power Query a thing for me right now? You know what? I don't
know
Rob Collie (01:01:41):
Top of the stack.
Thomas LaRock (01:01:41):
I don't know.
Rob Collie (01:01:41):
You owe it to yourself, to the world.
Olivier Travers (01:01:43):
Here's a third thing that I did with query folding that I'm told,
"Oh no, you should not do that," but I think the rationale for not
doing that was a bit being a purist, is you can look at the SQL
generated by our query underneath. You get the query. So I thought,
well, do the ETL there and it's a defacto SQL generator, and then
lift that query and create a view with that. Do you think that's
really bad because it's poor SQL that it writes? Or do you think
that's brilliant?
Thomas LaRock (01:02:10):
I won't say poor because I'm not sure it's that good.
Rob Collie (01:02:12):
Here's your in. You're a DBA by trade. You like to complain about
things. You like to criticize, right? That's your people.
Thomas LaRock (01:02:18):
Even if I go into Power Query and I, like Olivier said, we can look
at the SQL that gets generated, and I'm certain it's not optimal.
But I'm also certain I have no idea if it would be even possible to
have a machine generate optimal code. And on top of that, what I'll
say is going forward, the engines are going to be smarter and
smarter and they're going to be able to take that code at some
point, make a recommendation.
Thomas LaRock (01:02:47):
For example, I happen to work for a company who can already do this
for you, right? We can look at what you're doing and we can make
suggestions as to how to optimize certain queries. So that already
exists. I imagine that'll get baked into the engines at some point
and things get better for everyone.
Thomas LaRock (01:03:04):
But if I could do it in a way that would be helpful, but I don't
know enough about how it actually gets generated. So I wouldn't
know enough to say, "Hey Microsoft, instead of doing it this way,
you should probably do it this way." But yeah, if I could help, if
my involvement with Power Query and SQL could actually help move
things in a forward and positive direction, I'd love to be able to
do that. I just don't know that I can justify the time on that
versus all the other shiny things I want to be doing.
Olivier Travers (01:03:32):
Also, you could say it's a suboptimal optimization where the
computing has been let's just throw more hardware at the problem,
generally speaking, the last however many decades where it's hard
engineering scarce power to go and do those marginal optimizations
because you have to go deeply into the code as opposed to just buy
Power BI Premium and you go from say for PPU, for 10 bucks to 20
bucks. Unless you have a massive number of users, it's trivial the
amount of extra money to unlock, applying much more computing
resources to the same issue. And then apply your human talent to
things that you have no readily press a button and apply more
hardware power to solve the issue, I guess.
Olivier Travers (01:04:13):
So I think in many cases, there's the, well it's okay-ish and good
enough when we amp up a bit the resources against it, as opposed
to, well, now it's a bit of an 80-20. To push for the 20% in extra
performance, we have to double the amount of engineering talent.
And that talent might be deployed into brand new problems, for
instance, as opposed to chasing marginal utility.
Thomas LaRock (01:04:38):
Here's the thing though. If they gave you information about the
statement or if you could get information from the statement the
first time it was run, let's say out of the Query Store ... so
here's the thing. You go into Power Query, you generate something,
we go and we look at the SQL and I tell you it really isn't the
most optimal thing in the world. But the generation of that code
doesn't know if it's being run once by one user one time or a
million times by a million users. It has no idea about scalability.
It's like, "Here, here's the answer that you were looking for." And
now a human is going to have to figure out if we need to make that
thing scalable.
Thomas LaRock (01:05:13):
So if you were just given information at the bare bones level that
said, "By the way, to let you know, this was 10 gabillion, logical
reads, logical IO, things like that. It's fine if you're just going
to run this once, but if two people need to run it, you should
probably look into making this code better, because chances are
that's not optimal." And if you just had that information, now you
can talk about the human part and say, "Hey human, go focus on the
ones that we can see are being run multiple times and consuming the
most resources, because maybe instead of throwing hardware at that,
maybe we should spend your time and salary on fixing those queries
first." That at least would be a step in the right direction.
Olivier Travers (01:05:52):
That feeds back into how much human talent are we wasting. In the
case of Power BI, that would be an issue for [inaudible 01:05:58]
query or for the author waiting, getting their coffee while Power
Query is refreshing the preview. But otherwise, if you're doing
imports on the scheduled ... it doesn't matter. Just schedule it
where by the time your users need to have the fresh data, it's in
there in memory and that's it.
Olivier Travers (01:06:12):
So I think that was more ... the impedance was do your authoring
once and maybe you wait a little bit, but the UI sort of makes up
for having to write manual queries. So [inaudible 01:06:22] net is
still productive ETL even though you feel frustrated. And then it's
important, and now you can schedule however many times. As long as
your query doesn't run out, by the time you need to refresh again,
you're good. I guess that's how they saw sort of making those trade
offs.
Rob Collie (01:06:37):
I'm just sitting here feeling very, very satisfied with myself,
almost like this puppet master, as I listen to Tom suddenly start
to enthusiastically spout off about some of the implications here,
some of the directions it could go. I mean, this definitely isn't
the sound of Tom getting engaged with the Power Query SQL server
interface, now is it? Nope. Definitely not. It's not what that
sounds like. Now, by taking the victory lap here, I'm probably
sabotaging. If I was truly a puppet master, I would sit back and
say nothing, just let Tom get started. But he's in, folks. I can
tell.
Thomas LaRock (01:07:12):
Yeah, I'm going to download it right now. Power BI for Mac and I'll
have it up and running here in no time.
Olivier Travers (01:07:18):
I'm losing track of the reverse, reverse, reverse psychology there,
so I'm not sure who's getting whom there.
Rob Collie (01:07:23):
And we're losing respect for Tom and his Mac. These things happen.
But you started to ask that question about query folding a few
minutes ago. Just look up Power Query query folding. And by the
time you're done, Tom, by the time you're done reading that ... in
fact you should just stop right now. You shouldn't read that
because you're going to get hooked.
Thomas LaRock (01:07:41):
Do this. Don't do that. I feel like George Harrison. Just tell me
what you want me to do and I'll do it or not do it.
Rob Collie (01:07:47):
So you started to ask that question, Olivier, about query folding,
and I'm like, "Oh god, here it comes. I am not going to have any
opinion at all on this. I'm not even going to understand the
question. I'm going to look really silly." But then you got to the
end of the question and I'm like, "Oh, I do get this." So using
Power Query essentially like as a macro recorder.
Olivier Travers (01:08:05):
And that's what it is.
Rob Collie (01:08:06):
To then write some SQL for you. Because it's one thing if it's a
macro recorder that writes M for you. But now you've found macro
recorder prime. It's even producing SQL statements that you can
use. Okay. And then you can take those SQL statements, however
clumsy they might be because they're machine-generated, like they
always are, and move that SQL statement to the server, closer to
the source, and have it run that and therefore simplifying your
Power Query script. You connect to the view that you create with
that exported SQL essentially. And hopefully it's a sip of coffee
from now on when you make a change to your Power Query and not
going and brewing one, drinking it, thinking about another one, and
then going back to see if it's done.
Olivier Travers (01:08:51):
So when I did that, I thought that was brilliant. And I felt a
little dirty, which makes it feel even better. But then for some
reason, my data flow would not refresh. I would not get the latest
data, and I was ... nobody's ... that I see is talking about this
online, that kind of an edge case where I'm going to waste more
cycles trying to troubleshoot this than moving on with my life. So
I thought I should bring that up.
Rob Collie (01:09:13):
Tom's got you covered. He's coming for it. Until you said that part
where the data flow didn't work anymore, I was prepared to give
this the Rob Collie Two Thumbs Up Seal of Approval, right? Number
one, it's clever. Number two, it works, right? This is where at
least one of the thumbs gets retracted. Not quite a two thumbs up.
But the third one is, is that it's dirty enough that going to upset
people, who are the kind of people that when they get upset, that
confirms you're on the right track.
Olivier Travers (01:09:43):
The projects I do, I either do departmental projects within large
companies or enterprise projects within small or medium companies,
right? I don't do huge enterprise projects with enterprise
companies. So there's the value of being expedient. And usually I
don't deal with IT. I deal with a CEO or a business owner or a CFO.
I'm going to lose them fairly fast. If I go into the nitty gritty
of my [inaudible 01:10:09]. I try to explain them that it's not a
black box to establish trust, but at some point that's established
and I can skip on some of the technical details and just focus on,
yes, we have this challenge. We're going to solve it this way or
that way. And we'll get the clean data that we can chart it. So
it's not the most elegant. It's not something that's going to win
architectural design awards, but it works and lets me stay within
budget constraints where I'm still going to focus enough time on
the end user result and value and adoption and everything else, as
opposed to I spend 80% of the time cleaning up the damn data.
Rob Collie (01:10:43):
And even the SQL that's generated in that situation, at least
that's potential starting point for someone who's really good at
SQL to go look at this and go, "Okay, I can write this functionally
equivalent in a better way, but in a way it's the clearest possible
specification," because you see the code and you can run it and you
can test for the equivalent of result.
Olivier Travers (01:11:03):
If the result is right. I did the transformations I wanted. So it
is the right query in terms of what is spitting out. Are the inners
clean and performing? Well, it is or it is not an issue. Maybe your
SQL server or VM is slipping 95% of the time anyway, so we're
wasting resources in some way by not using them, you could argue.
Those are trade-offs. Yeah. It's generated art. It's logo by
computer. Maybe that's good enough for 80% of or whatever. Or maybe
it's good enough for prototyping, and then by the time you know
that it's actually the query you need for the data that your CFO
wants to see, then have it written properly, and you'll probably
drop a Power Query by then and do it with the ADF and have a proper
data warehouse and whatnot, and sell them on CNAPS and upsell on
mid six figure consulting.
Rob Collie (01:11:51):
We were sent to put an end to that as sort of our credo. So where
are your clients largely geographically today? Are they USA, given
time zone? Have you put down a lot of local business route in
Chile?
Olivier Travers (01:12:06):
Yeah. The local stuff I do once in a while. I used to push for more
to get it when it was easy to get face to face with people just
because I was craving getting out of the office. It's not been
possible for the last couple of years, so I've not pursued that
nearly as aggressively. Also, pricing is a bit more of an issue
relative to first world countries. So the US is large part. I have
a project right now in Canada. I've worked as far as Australia,
where I have a slice of two hours to get them on the phone early in
the morning. So you have to work a bit to make it work. But if you
look at the curve, then it's mostly the US, and then a bit of this,
a bit of that.
Rob Collie (01:12:42):
Are there user groups for Power BI and things like that in Chile?
What's the local talent level?
Olivier Travers (01:12:47):
There's a user group. Again, back then, when it was easy to connect
physically, I went and spoke a couple times, demoed maps and also
how to connect to APIs. Had a lot of fun doing that. And then COVID
happened. So I already do enough remote. I don't want to just be
stuck to remote on the user group, so I have not been that active.
And you see that the same thing in Brazil, they're getting there,
but they're still a bit more of a state traditional IT approach to
things, generally speaking.
Olivier Travers (01:13:13):
Also just the business culture is risk-averse and very
hierarchical, so it's harder for people who are not in a clear
chain of command to go and do something. So it's a bit more of a
top-down, here's the exact requirement, you're trying to do my job
for me. That's just not going to work out. Let me worry about that.
What is it that you want to know to drive your business? Don't tell
me that I need a gauge or ... you can give me preferences. I'm not
going to be an absolutist again, but give me guidance. Don't give
me directives. Otherwise hire a junior staff. Don't hire a guy
who's been working for almost 30 decades.
Rob Collie (01:13:45):
I love your avoidance of the absolute. Because as we know, only a
Sith deals in absolutes.
Olivier Travers (01:13:51):
I never speak in absolutes.
Rob Collie (01:13:54):
Well, Olivier, this has been great. I'm glad we got to catch up
like this. Thank you so much for making the time to be here.
Olivier Travers (01:13:59):
Thanks for having me. This was really fun.
Announcer (01:14:01):
Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let
the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to
p3adaptive.com. Have a data day!