Editing The Pen Addict 166/transcript (section)

== Mechanical Pencils ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. I mean, this is something that I really love mechanical pencils now. And I only have two of them. Because that's the thing, right? And I've had people send me stuff. People are like, oh, you should try this out. But it's like a plastic one. And I'm not really, that's not where I am with them right now. I want like nice bodies and things like that on them. And I'm as of yet finding, as of yet been able to find like real big defining differences between them that would make me want to pick one over another. That's the thing that I'm struggling with right now. Because like with fountain pens, it's like, you know, you can choose where the nib comes from. And you can choose the nib thickness and stuff. So maybe I need to get into different lead thicknesses and from different manufacturers. I don't know. But I feel like that's maybe the next step for me.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. That sounds good. I like hearing you talk like this.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Mm-hmm. It's reinvigoration of my love.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' There we go. All right. Reinvigorate us with our friends at Linda. And then we're going to get into the good stuff here.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Cool. Today's episode of The Pen Addict is brought to you in part by our friends over at Linda.com, the online learning platform with over 3,000 on-demand video courses that can help you strengthen your business, technology, and creative skills. You can get yourself a free 10-day trial by visiting lynda.com slash penaddict. Linda.com is for people that want to solve problems. It's for people that want to get that business off the ground. It's for people that are curious about a hobby that they've always wanted to try out but have never gotten around to because they don't know where to start. It's for people that want to make things happen, who maybe want to get some new skills so they have a more attractive resume. Or maybe they want to get better in their job and they want some skills for that. Or they have a hobby like we have, podcasting and stuff like that. And they want to learn a bit about some of the software that you need to use to make a show sound great. All of this stuff is available to you at lynda.com. You can learn how to be a developer. You can learn how to be a photographer. You can learn how to put your music onto computers and how to edit it and how to publish it to the web. You can learn how to bootstrap a business. Maybe you want to learn marketing stuff, design, color, typography, illustrator, Photoshop. The list goes on and on of the both practical applications you can use but also how to use things in certain environments. Like I mentioned photography, they have courses on how to take great portrait photos as well as just how to use the software to edit them. There's so much great stuff on lynda.com that is taught by people who are absolute experts at what they do. You can stream their thousands of video courses on demand. You can learn at your own schedule, learn at your own pace. You can also learn on the go with their Android and iOS devices as well. You can create and save playlists of the courses that you want to watch because you can watch them in any order, any way that you like. And you can also save these course playlists and share them with your friends, colleagues or team members. Your lynda.com membership will give you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics for just one flat rate. Whether you are looking to become an industry expert, you're passionate about a hobby or you just want to learn something new. I would love it if you would go and visit lynda.com slash penaddict. That's L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash penaddict because this will also help support the show. So thank you so much to lynda.com for sponsoring The Pen Addict today.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Awesome. So you can learn a lot at lynda.com. And Myke, I think we're going to learn a lot today from Dr. Jonathan Dean. So thanks again for joining us, Jonathan. We really, really appreciate you making it work in your schedule to come on and join us today. No, I'm happy to come. So before we get into the pen stuff specifically, let's talk a little bit about your background because you and I, we've only been conversing probably, I don't know, six or nine months or so. So, you know, I'm learning a little bit about your background and, you know, you're an economics professor in Australia. So why don't you talk a little bit about like your educational background and then how that led into writing a blog that kind of crosses over, you know, your love of fountain pens and things like that as that going along with your educational work. Yeah.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Well, my background is I'm what's called a resource and energy economist. So what I research and what I'm interested in are markets, commodity markets like coal and gas and iron ore and those sorts of things. I was doing my doctorate. They asked me to teach introductory microeconomics. Micro is my field, but I sort of got there on the first day and quickly realized that what I know isn't exactly where the students are at. They mostly know retail, they know hospitality, they don't know these big global markets. And I had to pick up my knowledge basically on those sorts of areas. And it just happened to be that I had a hobby that sort of lent itself to that really well. And so I got involved with Reddit and I think I was sharing some of the stuff I was thinking about there. And eventually that just led into becoming a blog.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah, that's pretty much the story. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, so I think, you know, when I when I first saw you writing on Reddit, I think that you were having some. Your your view, I guess, if you will, of the fountain pen industry as a whole. It was very it was definitely coming from a different place than a lot of us, you know, myself included, pretty much anyone else who who was writing. You know what? What made you like start? I mean, I know you kind of alluded to the fact like you started on Reddit and people just I think were eating up like the things that you were talking about. Is that what got you into? So, you know, OK, yeah, I'm going to make this blog at pen economics dot com and we're going to talk about these things. You know, I'm not doing pen reviews like all these other jokers out there. You know, I'm going to talk about something completely different. What did what was your thought process into actually, you know, getting that domain and starting to write about this stuff?

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Well, there's good feedback on the comments. There was a lot of good conversations, but I guess one of the problems on Reddit is space. You I mean, you could write an essay on Reddit, but it's not going to get very much attention. It's hard for people to go back to read it. If people want to follow what you're writing, it's almost impossible. So I actually came up with a blog idea. It probably be about a year ago. I started a site which was WordPress or a type pad page and I was basically just creating content and putting it on there. And I had shared that with a very small audience, maybe two or three or four people just to, I guess, get comfortable with the format, get used to it. And then I think it was over the Christmas break, I ended up setting up the domain and putting together a proper website.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' And yeah, so it was sort of quietly something I've been working on in the background. But it was really just because I felt like there were things I wanted to talk about and there were conversations that I wanted to have with people. And I wanted a place where those things could happen, where people could find out about it.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' And it sort of turned into this thing where I'm in contact with so many people now who have really interesting insights or they're quite happy to send me an email and say, have you thought about this? Or what do you think about that? And some of the people, like it's pretty exciting when you get an email from someone like Brian Anderson or Brian Goulet just sort of saying, hey, you know, I really enjoy your blog. And, you know, I thought what you said about that was a bit of a different view. And so that, I guess, kept the blog going. Whereas I think in the first month or so, there wasn't a lot of feedback. And I was sort of thinking, well, what's the point? But once you get a few of those emails, it starts to make it really worthwhile.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. When it starts, it can kind of feel like you're just shouting into like a cavern. Yeah. But that is the thing. Like, that's what, you know, I always I talk about this sort of stuff a lot because people ask me these kinds of questions like to how do you kind of get noticed, that kind of thing with this type of stuff. Basically, you have to just keep doing it. And then eventually you might bump into a couple of people like Brad, for example, and then they can help like talk about your stuff in a wider place and you can make relationships. Like, it's not about being pushy, but if you do good work, like it will eventually get noticed, I suppose. But, Jonathan, there is something that I wanted to just I want to just back up a moment, if you'd allow me to do that. Yeah, sure. Would you be able to give like an overview, like a high levels to the kind of stuff you actually write about? Because I think if somebody is not familiar with your work specifically, they might not understand why it's different.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Okay. So what I talk about really is the marketplace. So I talk about the retailers. I talk about the brands. I talk about what everybody's up to in a real business sense. So in terms of what sort of business strategies people are doing, what sort of positions they're occupying in the market or how they're competing with one another. I like to, I guess, go behind the scenes, I guess is how you might phrase it. One of the things that I like talking about, which I haven't seen anywhere else, is what's happening in terms of distribution in the fountain pen community. So the distributors are the middlemen basically between the brands who manufacture the pens and the retailers who sell them. So you've got these national level distributors and we sometimes hear about them. You might have heard of Kenro or someone like them. Sure. And, you know, they're doing work as well and they've got strategies and they've got plans in place and they're guiding the market or they're trying to affect the market in some way. And I think it's interesting looking at those sorts of things. I think you can appreciate a pen looking at it, writing with it, but you can also appreciate the marketplace by looking at a brand and sort of saying, okay, well, they've got this strategy in place and these things are part of that strategy. And so they're probably going to be going in this direction. And what does that mean for everybody else? And what does that mean for prices and for consumers or the users of pens?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Where does your information tend to come from? Because I guess, you know, one of the other areas that I kind of habit it would be, I guess, or where you'd find me is in technology stuff. And it sounds like if you were to say what you do here in the Apple space or in the Microsoft space, you would be basically labeled as an analyst, right? And I would probably see is how people would see, right? You look at the market, you look at trends, that kind of thing. And they would say like, you know, it's his analysis of the market.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Like a Ben Thompson.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's exactly who I'm thinking of.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So these kinds of people, they tend to get their, they think about stuff and they get their information from suppliers or from other industry newsletters and types of things like that. So where does your, the basic information come from that enables you to think about this stuff in these ways? And I apologize if I offended you by calling you an analyst.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' No, no. I mean, to be fair, people who do economics and they move into business, they start off as business analysts. So that's the exact right term. I'd say in the beginning, a lot of my information just came from paying attention, looking around, lots of poking around different websites and sort of trying to glean what's happening in different places. Nowadays, it's a little bit easier. There's less work involved because there's a lot more information that's sort of coming to me from people.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Particularly when a new product comes out, oftentimes I'll get an email from someone who's sort of like, have you seen this? What do you think, you know, this company's up to? And one of the resources, which sadly isn't around anymore, but used to be just fantastic, was back at FP Geeks when they had that sort of blog of press releases and product announcements. That was really useful. And it's actually a shame that that's not, that blog isn't around anymore because that was a phenomenal resource for me, but I'm sure for many other people as well.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Can you not get on like press release lists and stuff like that? I've tried.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' You try. That's, I think the fountain pen market is not as developed as other product markets. There's most of the brands and even a lot of the distributors don't really have press releases that they do. They don't have that sort of marketing setup, basically.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Sure, sure. Yeah, it's not as advanced a market as other places, basically. Not like other industries. Yeah, exactly.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And I think you're starting to see a little bit of change there over the past maybe 12, 18 months or so. It's getting a little bit better, but it's still kind of stuck in these old roots of how business was done. Yeah, I know. You know, I think that the companies that are taking advantage of the newer technologies and things like that are getting an advantage in the market now. And, you know, that's maybe something, you know, we can touch on as we go through the show. But I want to get into some of the specifics and kind of a good jumping off point for people who are new to your blog. And that's a series that you did. It was basically, I call it the taxonomy series where you talk about different brands and, you know, you elaborate it through that. Myke, first, you want to talk about one of our good friends, one of our good favorite brands, Mr. Ron at Pen Chalet.