The Exchanges

Q What was your actual business model? What was your newspaper about?

A So our newspaper was called the local planet weekly, and we really wanted to cover our local planet. Um, it was the same sort of paper. Um, and maybe not everybody's seen these, but, um, the village voice, LA weekly, Chicago reader, those sorts of the stranger in Seattle, Willamette weekly in Portland, those are sort of the biggies, but they're known as alternative newspapers. Um, usually come out on a weekly cycle. They try to do more in-depth stuff, more critique. Uh, they also cover a lot of local culture, arts, fashion, things going on about town. The business model is the paper is free to the reader. They can just go pick it up. The it's, um, supported by advertising. Um, you know, if I could get a quarter for every issue that people picked up, I would have been rich, but that's not the model. Um, and so it's all, all definitely advertiser driven, and this was happening at a time when the whole advertising driven model was being completely turned on its head because of the internet, right? That's when a lot of this advertising driven content started showing up and also classified advertising just went away because there was a thing called Craigslist, which was new then. And, um, believe it or not, also one thing that sustains a lot of alternative newspapers, especially in their early days is sex advertising or sex oriented advertising. So things like strip clubs, um, sex t…

AI assessment note: “The business model is the paper is free to the reader... supported by advertising.”

Q One thing that wasn't clear to me the last time we talked that still isn't clear to me is After she died, what happened with the kids? Did you continue to live with them? Did they go with, like, their grandparents? Like, what, what happened?

A She had three sons, um, and they were all from previous relationships. They weren't any of our biological kids. And so, um, the oldest one who was, uh, when her, when his mom passed away was 17, um, Wanted to stay with me. His dad said, you should come live with me in Las Vegas. And, um, Brad was his name said, no, A, I feel like this is my home and B, you know, I have serious medical issues from Porphyria as well. I'm in no state to pick up and move to a whole nother community and find doctors and all that other stuff. I'm just not ready to do that. Um, the, his two half brothers who were, Walt and Chris, who were younger, did stay with their dad who lived in Spokane. He lived, you know, a few blocks away, frankly. Um, my thought at the time was, You know, I, I didn't have a lot of respect for their dad after some of the stunts he had pulled. You know, everybody has stories about that sort of situation, but I felt like what those kids needed was some peace. They didn't need any more stress from illness or parents fighting or anything else. They needed some stability in their life. And could I deliver that? I don't think I was in a position then. I still had a very sick kid to look after. I had a business that I was still trying to run. I was pretty depleted. Um, I had no legal claim on them. Like I hadn't adopted them. I wasn't officially their parent. And so it just seemed li…

AI assessment note: “the oldest one... Wanted to stay with me... his two half brothers... did stay with their dad”

Q I thought you said the name of this illness once or twice, but I've never heard of it. What is it? And how, how did they both get at the same time?

A What the heck is it? So it's called porphyria and it's actually a class of diseases. Um, and the way it works, your body produces a chemical called heme. It's part of hemoglobin, which most people know. So heme is a molecule that transfers oxygen around the body. You need it. It's a very crucial thing. When your body synthesizes heme, it's an eight step process. You know, if you remember high school chemistry that, you know, this, then this, then this, right? Um, if your body, and at the end of each of those steps, there are byproducts that are left over from the chemical reactions. And your body produces enzymes to clean up those byproducts of whatever that step was. So the, the disease family porphyria is you lack one of those enzymes from one of those eight steps. So there's eight different types of porphyria. And what happens is these porphyrins as they're known that can build up if they're not cleaned up by enzymes. Go on to become a neurotoxin in your body. They can attack any voluntary or involuntary nervous system throughout your body, which makes porphyria a very hard disease to diagnose because it looks like everything else, you know, because if it attacks this nervous system, it looks like a disease of that nervous system, not of the blood basically. And because it's blood, it can go anywhere. So it can cause all sorts of problems. And, and it, it really does look di…

AI assessment note: “So it's called porphyria and it's actually a class of diseases.”

Q But obviously that's not how it works. How difficult was it before you found out about her illness?

A It was manageable, I'll say. I mean, it was still, as they say, drinking from a fire hose. I was still learning stuff, um, but it was okay, and we were making progress, um, towards being, you know, getting out of that investment mode, knowing what we're doing. We started, um, publishing Two issues a month, and we wanted to get to weekly, and so we were, we were climbing up this curve, and, and that was going well, but then the whole nine 11 thing, and then my wife's illness, um, happened pretty much at the same time. She, nine 11 was just a weird day in general, um, and shortly after that is when she really started feeling like I have too much on my plate to do both this startup, because she was the editor of the paper, and Take care of the kids and the family and be the person who I want to be. I, I can't, I can't integrate both of these, right? They're, they're not fitting together and something's gotta go. And I can't, I have to prioritize the kids, which totally made sense. Um, but then it just became harder one because I lost a really valuable ally at the office. And then at home, I gained somebody who needed a lot more support, just a lot more support. Um, and so that, that made it exponentially harder.

AI assessment note: “It was manageable, I'll say. I mean, it was still, as they say,”

Q What is the most important thing related to distribution since every business has a distribution problem?

A I think distribution comes back to the question of audience. Like distribution is how do you reach your audience? How do you reach them in the best way? And so to, to solve distribution, you need to understand your audience. Where are they looking for your content? How are they accessing it? Or where are they looking for your product? Whatever it is and when. So to me, that's really the key, the mechanics of it. Like we could get people to throw our newspaper in their car every Thursday and drive around and put it in our racks. That's what we had to do. Um, but it's where do we put those racks, right? That's how we found our people. Like we, we could put our racks in Type of store A, but is that where our readers go? We had to understand where our readers were physically in order to reach them with the newspaper. And I think it's the same thing with any other business. Where are your consumers, whether it's physically or mentally when you're trying to reach them?

AI assessment note: “to solve distribution, you need to understand your audience.”

Q You had said it was interesting how you discovered that stories play a role in our lives. So I'd like to ask, what roles do stories play in our lives? What did you learn from it?

A Wow, stories play a huge number of roles in our life. Um, I think every day when we wake up, we tell ourselves a story about what the day is going to look like, right? I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. And I, and I'm coming into the story feeling this way, you know, I'm either happy or concerned or exhausted from the night before or something like that. Um, so, I mean, they really influence who we are. There's even some fascinating studies right now that show some people have a constant internal monologue going on that's narrating every action they do. Okay. I'm, I'm picking up my mug. I'm putting it down. I'm taking a drink.

AI assessment note: “stories play a huge number of roles in our life. Um, I think every day”