A Conversation with Ryan Phelan

Ryan Phelan…strategist, marketer, investor, columnist, public speaker; with nearly 2 decades in email, Ryan is a highly respected presence in the email-marketing space. He graciously agreed to be the very first guest on The Future of Email Marketing. Ryan is one of the partners in RPEOrigin, a boutique email agency.

We cover email, Sears, cooking, real-time content, buying lists (don’t), CAN-SPAM, Amazon and a bunch more.

TRANSCRIPT

 

Matthew Dunn 

Hi, I'm Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email Marketing. And my guest today, I'm delighted to say is Ryan Phelan one of the principals of RPEOrigin. Ryan, thanks so much for making the time and welcome to the podcast.

Ryan Phelan 

You bet Matthew. It's great to be here. Excited. Yeah, really excited.

Matthew Dunn 

So we're just gonna talk and there's a few things I want to ask you about? Because we've talked more than a bit in the past. And you were one of the first people I thought at first to kick this up. Tell us about RPEOrigin for starters, like tell us about the company? background? Yeah, focus. Yeah,

Ryan Phelan 

so RPEOrigin is the combination of Red Pill email and Origin email, John Caldwell, my business partner, big friend in the industry or of the industry started Red Pill email 16 years ago last week. Wow. And yeah, and so when I started off on my own, John and i got together along with another friend of ours, and started origin email, okay, and so Red Pill was always the tactical execution integrations, campaign services and all that stuff. Okay. And then Origin has been for the last two years, the strategic arm doing all those customers strategy and, and a fractional cmo practice. Well, now we've, we've gotten to the point where we're going to combine the two and and form a really full agency that could do pretty much when you think of email, anything from the strategy of it to pushing the button, and everything in between design, integrations, data manipulation, data sciences, campaign services, you

Matthew Dunn 

name it, if it's from the start to the finish, we can do everything from start to finish. By the way, if you're listening to this and can't see the screen, RPEOrigin.com. Is the website. Right? Right.

Ryan Phelan 

Yes, it is. Go see it. It's very pretty.

Matthew Dunn 

Yeah, go see it's very, very pretty digitally focused, modern agency. Do you mind talking a little bit about the kinds of kinds of customers that you're working with now the kinds of customers you'd like to see in the future?

Ryan Phelan 

Yeah, sure. We do a lot with financial services. So they're, you know, as as you know, in a lot of your your listeners or viewers will know, Financial Services has always been the laggard in digital ecosystem. So we help them with their digital strategies inside and outside of email. So we work a lot in financial services, credit cards, and then we work retail, travel, hospitality. And technology. But really, if you think about John and I's experience of the last 20 plus years, I've worked in every about every vertical on strategy that I can think of. And on the campaign execution side leading teams, on everything from Lego to Hewlett Packard, you know, and so there's not very many verticals that we don't know about dojos.

Matthew Dunn 

Great don't know about, I want to come back to the background that you touched on. But I do have a couple a couple of questions about customers, specifically financial services, which you mentioned, laggard industry on digital. Yeah. Is that is that changed noticeably in the pandemic period that we're hopefully starting to exit?

Ryan Phelan 

No, it didn't. So one of the laggards in financial services has been the regulatory issues, not only with customer data, but just the presence of lawyers throughout the process. Right, right. And so a lot of you know, every if you've worked in financial services, or consulted or known somebody, right, the you always build in the timeline, this ambiguous number of weeks or days that the lawyers have to look at your message, and try to understand like a marketer, right, and it's worse than an executive sometimes. And it's it, it's for their protection, it's the liability, it's all kinds of stuff. But that does affect a lot of things. And so we have a lot of experience and making sure that clients don't submit stuff that we know attorneys are just gonna balk at, it's if we're almost like a line of defense. And we do that a lot for clients. So during the pandemic, no, we saw a lot of closures, we saw a lot of consolidation around one branch, instead of seven, we saw a lot of digital stuff, but as a consumer, and this is just my own personal opinion, I really didn't see any differences, because the base technology really already allowed for you not to have to go into the to the branch, right. But they, you know, because mobile deposit if you think about mobile deposit naps, and all that stuff transfers when web access. But if you want to start a new account, so I had to turn up a new account during the pandemic, talk about the painful, I'm still waiting for it to get set up. So because it's it's not, you know, it's it's, it's not a it has not evolved. So at least from my perspective, now, you may have a financial service person who's like, Oh, we did X, Y, and Z. And it's like, well, I, I haven't seen it. But that's just

Matthew Dunn 

Well, you know, they they've got a aircraft carrier to, to try to turn with a with a drag anchor behind it called regulation and compliance. And that's not particularly easy. sidebar, but my experience with compliance and attorneys in marketing content is there's a lot of frustrated creative writers who ended up in the legal department. I used to send them PDFs when I was doing more creative work so that they wouldn't try and rewrite it because they invariably did. Yeah.

Ryan Phelan 

Yeah, yeah. And you know, what, we've been lucky to be aligned with companies where their attorneys are very good with marketing. Right. They're still lawyers. Right. But they're not obstructionist. They're not they're not strict. And they will have dialogue, but it's still no matter what kind of legal department you have. It's a two week delay in the in the production cycle at a minimum. Yeah. And so you have to build that into your, you know, think about that. Think about the on the retail side, right? some retailers are used to starting on Monday and sending on Friday.

Yeah.

Ryan Phelan 

You're pushing out that timeline. So there's some complexity there that we've been very successful,

Matthew Dunn 

which is, which is where the, you know, the experience you and your partner, John bring to this pays off, because you've been around the industry, if you don't mind, would you would you fill in a bit about how you ended up, you know, being being in the principal seat in an agency with this much experience in email, like, walk people through at least briefly your background in this particular channel. Yeah.

I have

Ryan Phelan 

been in this space for 22 going on 22 years. I started back in 1998 with a small startup in Omaha, Nebraska. That was later acquired by gift certificates.com. And from there, I just I really fell into email in a in a in a fun way. So I My first job was I was in charge of affiliate marketing and in charge of email, and I did affiliate marketing for a while and and loved it. I started a conference about it right along with two other people. Yeah, started an Affiliate Summit I was on the team that started Affiliate Summit and and then they took it and ran with it and have done fantastic with and I just found out they sold it but I was I fell into email, I chose email because I just saw the potential of it. And I've worked at at info USA, slash, yes, male slash info group slash whatever they are now. And then Blue Hornet and I did a stint at Sears, I serve time. And then Blue Hornet and Axiom and Adestra. And all throughout that that time as an executive, I was either leading groups of campaign strategists or campaign execution professional services groups. Folks, I got to it. Yeah, go ahead.

Matthew Dunn 

Sorry. I just for if someone's listening, especially if they're relatively new to the space I wanted to, I wanted to unfold a couple of the companies that Ryan mentioned in that quick trip through Kwik Trip through 22 years of experience one of the one of the unusual things Ryan brace this conversation and to his his clients, obviously, is that he's been both on the on the marketer side strategy and execution of marketing, and worked at email platform, platform companies, blue Hornet, and a gesture of being two of the big ones that you mentioned, you've seen both sides, the technical side of the equation, technical and vendor side, as well as the using it doing it getting results from it, right.

Ryan Phelan 

Yeah, I'm one of the very few people in the industry that has had the trifecta of experiences, right from being on the client side at Sears the execution side with responses and run a next gen and axiom and the strategy side throughout the majority of my career, right, and Stephen Pollard, who, who was a legend in this industry also had that experience. And so it's a it's a very unique look, especially it informs my strategy, because when I'm working with people, I'm thinking about, how are they going to execute this? And is this data available? Is this person able to do it? So I bring in a lot of experience to my strategy that plays off of everything I've done in the past?

Matthew Dunn 

Yeah, absolutely. I'm particularly struck by by Sears in the list because that you know, that that's obviously an almost an emblematic company, like the dominant retail giant of its day. It's not the dominant retail giant anymore for you know, for a ton of reasons but but you were there as companies like Amazon are starting to grow on the back of things like email, which Sears didn't wasn't able to adapt to and harness in this in the same way. That's a it's probably an invaluable learning opportunity.

Ryan Phelan 

I you know, what, it's funny, we in the 18 months that I was there, which is not untypical from people that went to Sears. We did more in 18 months, than I have done at any one client. In my entire career. Really, I mean, we, we did some innovative stuff, and I gotta tell you, so if you, if you know, Gretchen Schniemann, she was at Ogilvy at the time she was my partner on the agency side. And the great Robert Schwartz who's now at Kara interactive, and that team that I had, we cranked out some innovation that was amazing. In fact, one of my first articles in media was by Diana dilworth back with de m news, where they spotlight and Sears and all the things that we're doing it's a great picture of me because I look like I'm 12 stuck inside a suit that I bought from a guy my age so yeah at Sears right and so it but we did some amazing stuff but but at the time, yes, Amazon was was up and coming and and I've got tons of stories about Amazon and Sears that that would take another podcast but it was very fast paced and very high pressure but man did we do we did a lot of stuff that was fun.

Matthew Dunn 

You know you perfect segue because the the the lynchpin for for this podcast is to talk about what's you know, what's innovative and interesting and compelling and cool and, and changing about email because email has been around for a while. Yes. But it ain't done and ain't going away. And right there are there are mountains of possibilities of things to be done. So when you talk about like, any any particular innovative thing that that you congratulated at at Sears that comes to the top of your mind.

Ryan Phelan 

Yeah, you know what, funny enough I am as old as email I celebrate and I'm not kidding you. I'm celebrating my 50th birthday this year. And email is also celebrating its 50th birthday, Tomlinson, Ray Tomlinson. And one of the things that that I think, and I wrote about this is, email is on us kind of a, it's next evolution, right. And in terms of, you know, if you think about the pandemic, what pandemic did to email in a good way, it helped us pivot into looking at what data we use and segmentation and, and really looking at customer type. Because I'm, you know, every customer that's out there is behaving differently. Now, it's incumbent upon the marketer to, to change the what they're doing, right. And we've had an innovation in email in the last, probably five years with real time with people making email, easier to segment, looking at signals, accessibility of data, the fact that, you know, you can go to one of a zillion vendors and buy pieces of data that help you in your modeling and targeting and that that technology is now scalable. That's a huge step forward. I mean, when we were back with Sears, some of the stuff we were doing was breaking our ESP, because it was too complex.

Right. Right. Right.

Ryan Phelan 

But but that same technology today is being done by companies 10 times the size of Sears. And I think we're just in a spot where email is, is constantly innovating. And with 50 years under our belt, we've got a long way to go.

Matthew Dunn 

Right. Yeah, a very, very long way to go. And, and one of the things that seems to me, at least the the infrastructure, email rides on, you know, when Ray Tomlinson sent that first I think, sent the first ad sign email, it was like, there were eight, there were eight or seven, or whatever computers on the internet, now we're talking about a global infrastructure with with a vailable bandwidth curve that's gone through the roof, like the the infrastructure email rides on is, is so much richer, stronger, more accessible, that you can do innovations, you can change how the thing works, and try things that just weren't feasible. It's too slow, or not enough storage or whatever else. So you talk about the data driven side of it. I'm guessing a lot of the data you're working with in in guiding strategy now wasn't accessible five years ago, 10 years ago?

Ryan Phelan 

I know. Yeah. No, it was all self disclosed data, right? We only knew what we knew, which was what either people told us, or what we could derive from their purchase history, right? We didn't have access to browse data to the customer level, we didn't have access to social data, or affinity or intent, or any of this kind of stuff. And and what that data does is make our models more accurate. And our messages more resonant with the end user.

Matthew Dunn 

Yeah, well, it's it shifts into a more and more and you've you've, you've talked about this, I think in some of your columns, which I want to touch on, but it's it's increasingly conversational, because you've got a way of listening, I'll put that in. I'll put that in air quotes. But you got a way of listening based on data to you know, what did this message mean? Something did it move them and engage them? Did they ignore it? etc? Yeah, yeah. Another thing

Ryan Phelan 

here of influences bigger, right? sphere of influence is bigger. Because usually, you know, in the old days, we could only action, action or message in radio, television newspaper, ad on our website, right? advertising was more affiliate driven, right. And ad networks, were just starting to crop up and pay per click was still like, what, what is this? And you know, and now you have, you have display, you've got geo targeting, you've got push notification, through app, you've got text, you've got email, still, you've got all these different things. Yeah. To push your message, and different ways to understand did they reply or did react to that message? And so the complex marketer has so many different other avenues than we used to, and, and that's, I think, what grows what the what the, what the challenge for all of us is, is to make sure we don't become creepy or overstepping our responsibilities, right?

Matthew Dunn 

Yeah. Yeah. The ethical side of this, which which is worth touching on, as well. You know, back to the data driven piece of it for a second couple observations. I'd love your reaction to on one Seems to be one of the really distinctive things about email, as it sits now is all those other digital channels is, you're not actually paying a gatekeeper for access and data. And if I decide, I want to hear from RPEOrigin and I say, here's my email address, I'd love to keep up with what you're doing. That's like, that's me to you. And you didn't you didn't have to say, Okay, mother Mae eye to to some third party. Sorry, social media overlord or something. Right, right. It's, it's, it's, I call it civil media. We're not social media. Like there's very right. We're gonna we're gonna stay in this compact. If you bug me. I'll say unsubscribe. And most email marketers ago. Yep, you're right, unsubscribe. And, and anyway, it goes. And that's a that's a really different opportunity. Because that increasing richness access data driven science, coupled with strategy isn't held captive by someone who says pay me to go through the door.

Ryan Phelan 

Correct. And, and, and attempts to make you pay to go through the door are summarily dismissed, right. But,

um,

Ryan Phelan 

but what we find too is, is that, for example, in the ISP, or actually our partner, I was on a call, we were talking about section 230, and about self regulation, self governance, and you're on a call and we were talking about how the email ecosystem really does play well together. Because the ISVs are fighting as hard as the SPS are to keep span out of the inbox. And we're almost setting ourselves up as the gold standard to say this is what gets in and this is what doesn't, right. And there are rules and the rules are based upon. Are you relevant and and did the person ask for it? Not what is the message? Say perhaps,

Matthew Dunn 

right. And so even more even more measurement, feedback into the strategic piece of it. By the way, if you're new to the emails piece, ESP email service provider, ISP inbox service provider, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Got it. Yeah, gotcha. And you touched on something there about the email space, like there's a very strong degree of self governance, self regulation, sort of greater good mindedness to too many of the players in the stack that makes email work. Any comments on that?

Ryan Phelan 

Yeah, I mean, we, I've said this many times in my career, can spam the legislative law, right, is at the bottom of the compliance stack, right? What what you know, just because it's legal, and I get that question a lot. It's like, well, I bought a list I can send to it because it's legal. It's like, well, that's, that's, that's technically true. But there are a couple other players in there that don't want you to do that. Primarily, the ISP is the internet service providers, Google, Yahoo, or Google AOL outlook, then you have the espys, that won't let you the MailChimp. So the world, the executor, the oracles, the Salesforce, all those that won't let you set non permission stuff, then you have groups that are like spam house and firewall, you know, those kinds of systems, those kind of infrastructures, then you have industry groups that, that fight against that stuff. And so it's a, but it's a really, I think, in the last two or three years, we've gotten into this very good harmony between all of the different groups to move in the right direction, in the same direction. And, you know, we've, we've, as an industry stood together and said, this is acceptable, and this is not and we're shunning the people that people in organizations that don't play by you know, the the business ethics that I think we all as an industry believe it's a very different industry. And I've had experienced to add your ad agencies and all this different industries and verticals and methods and the email industry is incredibly close, small, but unified in this message.

Matthew Dunn 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, for my not nearly the length of experience in it, but I'd say that's exactly what I've seen. there's a there's a kind of goodwill as well, which you don't find in industry and that's it's a pretty remarkable thing. Um, let's shift gears if you don't mind. And I want to I want to start in the past and come to the come to come to the present the future a little bit in the time that you've been an email you had to live through some of the some of the change waves of this is new, this makes things better. This is an innovation that doesn't stick like what are the some of the things that stick out in in the past, in email of, of big changes, big innovations, good or bad, successful or not?

Ryan Phelan 

CAN SPAM was good for a day? And then we read it? And it was like, well, that's not much. Um, I would say if you grouped all the legislation together with the exception that can spam, that's been a good thing. Okay? Because it's given, it's given marketers the ability to go to their boss and say, Don't legally we can't do that. Right. Right. So you get an executive that wants to do XYZ. Yeah, yeah. And it gives us cover, right gives a lot of us coverage, GDPR, castle, ccpa, all those different things give us cover. So I would say that that's an innovation that I think has been fantastic. I think that the first innovation that started a lot of even what campaign geniuses and a lot of these companies that are in the spaces is there used to there was a company back in the day, and I had the name of it, they they built a system to react to abandoned carts. And it was, you know, the old way of doing abandoned carts was to wait till omniture, or one of the analytics groups sent you the batch file at night to send your abandoned cart email. That's why abandoned carts were always at 24 hours. Yeah, because we waited until that next batch file to get it, right. And then this company got I can't remember it. company came along and said, Wait, if you do it in the first hour, with our technology, you will make a lot of money. And everybody was blown away. Right? And that's where the presence of third party vendors, like a campaign genius, like a lot of the other tech that we see, right, really has benefited this industry. And I think that's one of the things that's incredibly exciting is these third party companies that can innovate faster than the espys. And a very specific and focused way. That's that's where I think it's a win for everybody.

Matthew Dunn 

Right?

Ryan Phelan 

I think the downside for the industry over the years, it's just been the churn of people in and out of this industry. And so there's always a, there's always a what's old is new, again, approach, you know, new people coming into the space and learning it, and then they get so good at their job, because they listen to everything we said they got promoted, and now they got to be replaced. And it's like, well, now we got to teach the person again, you know?

Matthew Dunn 

Well, that's, that's actually one of them, keeping an eye on the clock, because I know you've got you're a busy guy with multiple conferences. I, one of the off ramp, part of the conversation I was hoping to have with you was to talk to email marketing on as both a technical and marketing discipline and possible career track that many people may not think of as a career track. I'm not sure I've met a college kid who said, I think I want to go into email and utilize some of the funds some of the opportunities, it's certainly not going to get smaller comments on on the career track side of it.

Ryan Phelan 

Yeah, we do a bad job as marketing in this industry is a fun one, you know? Yeah. I think when you're on the outside, and you're looking in email looks pretty boring. And social looks pretty cool, or ad looks pretty cool. Or, or this that the other thing look pretty cool. And I would say that as a discipline. Email is new every day. I may know how to do an abandoned cart series. But I walk into a retail client and I'm going to do it well the retail way. But then that client is going to define the message and timing and and offer no offer whatever. Now I move over to financial services. And they're going to do it another way from a form of abandonment on a credit card application. Or I'm going to move to travel and hospitality where it's form abandonment on getting more information about a cruise, it changes every day, because every client is different. Every customer is different. Every every persona group or cohort group is different. And it changes even if you're a marketer on the client side. It's it's the challenge of all the things you can do. I used to have a slide that I presented. And I sat down one day for five minutes and I wrote down everything I could do an email, and it filled up this entire PowerPoint. Wow. I said that was just what five minutes, right? Right. There's always there's always a new test to do. There's always a new design, there's always a new timing, there's always a new data structure or a word or piece of data. It email has the ability to evolve faster than any other channel that is in existence because there's so many possibilities of what you can do inside of the inbox. And to get to the inbox when I think

Matthew Dunn 

I agree with you, you know, outside observation to some extent, but I also think the fact that that that email is, is an ecosystem without super huge dominant players sort of dictating the pace of change really, really enables that, you know, small companies, small e SP, first guy to come up with the, you know, abandoned cart notion that you were talking about, can find a CI

Ryan Phelan 

was the name of the company, what was it? Sorry, see why cy.com? Nice? No, you're right. There's not a lot of there's not a lot of overlords there is, you know, the API was a great piece of technology for this industry. And the ability for, you know, if you look at the middleware vendors, and like their names escaped me, but you have all these middleware vendors that will hook this company to this company, and they play in the middle. And, and, and the ability, you know, that for the marketer expands the universe greatly and, and gives everybody the freedom to do really whatever they want. And you're not reliant on the functionality of an ESP, you're looking at an ESP of canned for what you're good at deliver X, and Y, and Z, I'm going to get from this vendor. And I'm bringing in rusty wonder from Forrester is great about talking about the wheel and spoke versus the all in one. And and my personal opinion has been that the what you want to have is your CRM at the middle and best in class providers surrounding your building your stack. But you're focused on the integration points, how can I share data that actually lifts all boats? Right. And so that's the great thing that we don't have that the only resistance that you have is a company's ability to integrate with another partner and use that data responsibly. That's it.

Matthew Dunn 

Yeah. Yeah. And you don't have I mean, quick contrast is not entirely fair. But who said we have to be fair, it's podcast on? So many of so many, the bits and pieces that make email work are published open standards that have been around in many cases have been around, yes, for for a long time. You don't have a dominant company x, say, we're going to change the game just slightly. And y'all have to keep up because we kind of own the platform, open standards and email versus if you were a Windows developer, you know, 15 years ago, back in the day, Microsoft made a change in the wind 32 API, you had no choice. But but to go along. Yes, do what they and do what they said. And it made for innovation in that in that vertical, but it also stifled the Well, can we make it do something that's not in that API? Nope. Sorry. Don't get too, right. Yeah,

Ryan Phelan 

yeah. Yeah. And apps are that way. Yeah, apps are that way, today, apps have a container, right? And the container is controlled by the operating system. But email doesn't have that the only thing really we're controlled by is the rules of the game, but the rules of the game or legislation, and generally things that make a lot of sense. They're not you know, we haven't had anything that was like guiding. Yeah, I would say, you know, not being able to do JavaScript or some sort of, of cool stuff like you can do on the web. But companies like campaign genius and and others have allowed us to do that and and, you know, we are evolving as a space. But it's it is it that it is in the possibility of the marketer to dream it and do it. And I don't know that I don't know that a lot of marketers are constrained by the idea it's mostly you know, the age old time resources and money time resources and

Matthew Dunn 

the exhausted look on your on your email teams face because they're working so hard. Yes, email vibes to that email volumes have gone have gone up pretty dramatically since we all got locked in the house.

Ryan Phelan 

Yes, yes. my inbox has just been well, you know what, it's gotten a break since the politics are over. It was it was pretty insane there for a while. Yeah. You know what we I was surprised so we had it just my personal experience and reading some stuff. We did have volume increases, but I didn't see a lot of crazy.

Oh, interesting. I saw I saw

Ryan Phelan 

some vendors just the same old stuff. They never reacted to the time they never did anything different, which I thought was telling you saw some that dropped off and you saw some that did increase a little bit but didn't go nuts. Now. I've heard stories of some that just went absolutely. You know To control, but now they're dealing with how to rebuild the list because of burnout. But I think what people saw and this is just my opinion, is I think that executives and companies saw email as a, as a another opportunity to communicate, but not necessarily another opportunity to pull on for revenue generation. Yes, they used it. Yes, they got creative, but it wasn't the will just send more and make more money. Right. Right. And I wanted, I wonder if some of that is not because everybody was at home, and they were having to deal with just how do we work from home and get an email campaign out the door? Right. And so that may have saved us? I don't know, I'm just making stuff

up. But yeah,

Ryan Phelan 

you know, you you use, you know, I think people I want to think that that company's respected the channel enough to not say that's how we're going to make money.

Matthew Dunn 

I don't know that. I don't know that there's any way to have, you know, to have a conversation with a non existent one person who made this decision. But I've noticed that business conversations, video conferences, phone calls, whatever, in the pandemic period, have actually gotten a ton more human because, you know, we're sitting in my office, you're sitting, you're like, looking at your space, you're looking at my space, right? We've got this this human civil thing in common and business conversations tend to start with that not I'm going to jump right into the PowerPoint deck, you know, maybe there's some civility and you know, what if we just if we go pound our list with stuff trying to sell widgets You know, they're dealing with they're dealing with a lot right now. Let's give them a break and think long term and keep them as customers and not not not burn out the list as you said not not split up comments. Yeah, cuz cuz Yeah. Cannon I wrote about that.

Ryan Phelan 

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And I wrote about that a lot in this pandemic, which was empathy and compassion and and and all this stuff. And I think you're you're spot on with that is that I think people in the in the presence of having empathy and, and and compassion softened their natural gut reaction, which was to blast the crap out of

Matthew Dunn 

Well, let's uh, let's hope we can stay going on that on that footing. By the way if you're listening Ryan publishes columns fairly regularly in marketing land. What are the Yes, tech today our tech today

Ryan Phelan 

Mar tech today will do and then media post picks up my stuff every once in a while email and acid does. And then I have my own blog on the website that we that we write on stuff right

Matthew Dunn 

and and and a Twitter feed. Absolutely. Absolutely worth

any or

Ryan Phelan 

if you want cooking all my cooking is on Instagram. So that's where I put all the meals and everything I'm cooking on a regular.

Matthew Dunn 

I was gonna say you need to you need to cook Cooking cooking blog, man. Because if yes, that's some of the stuff you do. It's, it's makes me hungry. Any any parting thoughts about someone who says, Ah, emails dead? I'm gonna give you the softball. Go for it.

Ryan Phelan 

Oh, man, that's so easy. Besides, give me a break, you know, after 50 years, you think they'd stop asking for our death. So I get I get real bullish. I'm like, come on and try. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Put your logo in the pile of ones that have failed.

Matthew Dunn 

Well, and the nice thing is, you know, I just I just picked up a just picked up a new a new iPhone. And it's it's 5g, not that there's 5g where I live yet. But I'm thinking, Oh, so the old don't send me big attachment, or my inbox has gotten full starts to be even less of a concern. Because like, yeah, the pipe can handle. In fact, emails are really quite small when you look at it. So I'm not going to worry about that part anymore. And I don't worry about my hard disk blowing up with my PST and St. anymore. Yeah. So on and so on. So yeah, I don't I don't think it's going anywhere soon. So. So hopefully, this, this conversation can continue. And we can have a repeat of it and check some of these guesses in six months or something. Yeah, yeah,

Ryan Phelan 

it did. I make no predictions. But I'd like I like to watch the story unfold.

Matthew Dunn 

I think I think one ringside seat for that. We should probably wrap and let you get your next meeting. Once again, my guest was Ryan Phelan of RPEOrigin and Ryan, thank you so much for making the time today. It was really great to hear what you had to say.

Ryan Phelan 

Thanks, Matthew. Great to be here in honor and thanks for asking.

Matthew Dunn 

Okay, we're out