This Business as Usual is both fascinating and informative as we welcome CivicScience CEO John Dick to discuss how his company is gauging the general mindset of the consumer during the current phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s John going to talk about? Probably: data, human behavior these days, commerce & marketing ... if you’ve not heard him talk about his work, his life, his family and his witticisms aplenty ... eat your lunch with us!
Transcription:
Good afternoon and welcome to business as usual. This is Audrey Russo, President and CEO, the Pittsburgh Technology Council. And I'm also joined by Jonathan Kersting, who's vice president of all things media at the tech Council. thrilled to be here, very excited about my guest today. And I just want to lay up the call for a few things, get some housekeeping out of the way and give a shout out to our sponsors. Huntington bank has been with us right from the onset. I believe we're in our 70 something day of doing these daily calls. I can't even keep track anymore, but Huntington bank actually partnered with us from the onset, and they have been doing a lot of work with businesses of all sizes during this pandemic and through all the loan offerings and accommodation suit cares act. So also we have the web law firm They've been around in Pittsburgh since so 1845 just a short period of time. And they have a lot of experience in intellectual property law. And they represent companies large and small all over the world. And sometimes they're representing some of the most fascinating cases and intellectual property that's even known to all of us. And their disciplines are multidisciplinary, and lots of scientists and engineers on their on their team and additional two lawyers. Thank you, Webb, they've been long partners with us.
So I've muted everyone's microphones so that way, we can hear your background noise, hopefully. And we will also have a chat and the chat is intended to be interactive. So while you're muted, you can interact. And Jonathan will monitor those questions to see if there's any appropriate time to ask John some of those questions. And also, we are not asking you to sell anything, okay, this isn't an opportunity to sell. So I with all that said, I'm just gonna jump right in. I'm absolutely thrilled to have an opportunity to introduce John Dick. I've known John for 12 years. And I watched him when he was just a sole guy building a company. And I think he was located in the terminal way and had one desk and was determined to build this company and to see where he is today. And all the work that he's done is just blows my mind. I am a huge fan of his on. He has an incredible newsletter that comes out every Saturday, they'll share his email address, and we'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. But it actually makes my week he has, you're probably not going to find a guy who cares deeply, not just about his work, but about his family, and about the community and he is just always have something brilliant to say, and that's no BS. I've just watched him and I'm proud to call him a friend and a colleague. So I am going to bring John. How are you? Thank you so much for being here and you know everything I said was not bs
Yeah it was pretty flattering I feel like it's all downhill from here right all down from here. Um CivicScience, just sort of give us you know the elevator pitch about who is CivicScience. So we combined some really kick ass software that was built by some some folks at Carnegie Mellon with a really large database we capture of survey data. Really clever model. I think we we've embedded polls inside of hundreds of different web properties that allow us to engage people while they're while they're reading content. And it just allows us to gather consumer data at a really unprecedented scale. We're up to about 7 million calls a day that we do a day.
Yeah, 7 million Day. So just large scale. Yeah, it was it was like 4 million in January. So it's growing pretty fast. But it just allows us to study everything we our kind of ethos is that everything affects everything, and everything is constantly changing. So we study everything constantly. That's the general idea. So we're adding we're tracking a couple of hundred thousand survey questions at any time and, and studying the marriage in between all of those things. Of course, now, you know, a significant amount of what we do is COVID related and helping brands and retailers and media companies and hedge funds kind of predict where the world's going based on what we can see in consumer trends. And the business has been growing really fast the last couple years really fast the last three or four months. And so, yeah, we are, it's kind of a good time to be in the real time information business, right? Because everybody's looking for any insight they can find to help them manage this new world and where it's going. Mm hmm.
Well, so, so, so you're located physically you were located in East Liberty?
The company's offices, the currently empty offices in East liberty, we miss it dearly. Of course now everybody's working from home. And just a few days ago, you allowed everyone to go in and sort of raid out all their desks and chairs and such because it's so so, yeah, you've made the adjustment. Obviously, it's been rapid fire, you're adapting to this new world. How are you able to grow so, so quickly? In a 16 week period? How are you able to accommodate that?
Well, the accommodating part's hard. I mean, it's been it's all been inbound, right? I mean, we we're not going on sales calls and things. So it's, as we mentioned, we publish a ton of content, right? I think that the thing that we do better than maybe any company I can think of is is content marketing. And because we have we can write about anything on cue, Jonathan, my dog started barking as soon as you don't worry about it.
So, you know that content we've been writing every day about trends, COVID related trends and so forth. And it just got a lot of people to raise their hands and say, Hey, can you tell me this about my consumer and my business and so we were just dealing with a deluge of inbound interest and the hard part's been we're also hiring so onboarding new people and managing the onboarding of new people is very difficult right and also to trying to convey culture right when you're it's easy to convey that in an office setting. Yeah, I feel the same way. I can't imagine that at least I know the people and I've worked with the people and then we've migrated to working from home. I can't imagine what it would be like to be bringing new people in to that group and try to assimilate them. Right. Right. At least you have your history with their existing folks. Right. Right.
So who are you hiring for real quick, and then we're gonna do any vacancies? Any any? Yeah, I mean, account management people honestly, just servicing the new business we're bringing in so yeah, hit us up if you're interested, for sure.
Okay. So let's start. Let's just peel back then, like, I guess it's four months ago, at the onset of the pandemic, you you immediately initiated a plan to ensure small businesses and local restaurants in particular, and making sure that they weren't going to suffer. Talk about what you did.
Well, I wouldn't say we were gonna do much to ensure anything, I think We're hoping to do our parts, right we've, we've, we've we're in love with each Liberty neighborhood, we've done so much to try to, you know, we patronize the office or the restaurants and bars there, obviously. And it just was hard for and we got to know a lot of the owners, right, just being part of the community. And I think whenever the office closed, we we worried about that. And so what we offered, we offered all of our employees full company reimbursement for any meals that they purchased from local restaurants during the lockdown. And so, you know, given the amount of money we've saved, not traveling and not paying for parking, and all of those other kinds of things. It was kind of a wash. So it was just a small gesture that we made, and it kind of grew into a larger gesture because shortly after we did it, Mark Cuban saw us tweet about it. And he did the same thing. And then over the next several weeks, we heard just from more CEOs than I can count of companies that sort of did the same thing. So it was pretty It was really it was cool to watch sort of people's you do see the worst of people at times like this, but you see the best of them to be pretty awesome.
How is that going? Are you still supporting local? How are you still doing it? Yep, we are. So we've encouraged people to try. Obviously being in East Liberty with our ties to CMU, a lot of our team is based in squirrel Hill and friendship and so forth. So they're supporting those local restaurants but we even allow people like, so people who are working from home in Wexford or Peters township or whatever, same thing. We, you know, they keep receipts and we reimburse them for that every, you know, again, what our entertainment budget would be if we were traveling what our I mean, it's still we're still net saving money to be honest with you. So it was it wasn't you know, we're not Mother Teresa here, but it's it's a it was a it was a nice way to feel like we could help.
Right and we're seeing the demise of many, many of these establishments, these local establishments, and you've really ignited you've ignited a lot. A lot of local tech companies have copied it. And doing that for their staff, maybe not as much as you are, but at least maybe on the weekends. Doing things like that.
Yeah, hopefully.
So my hat's off to you. So. So what are some of the bigger picture things? Let's really get into some of your data. I want to, let's talk about pull something out that you want to talk about that you really think that we should, we should be aware of what some of these moving trends are.
Well, I mean, I think the restaurant conversation is a good segue we have you know, what I, when I do any kind of public speaking or such as it is now, I've kind of always start with the same comment, which is that the consumer today is going to have a lot more power to influence our recovery than any state government or political figure or business, right? We, we see very little differences in economic performance whether a state has been open quote, unquote, or not open. It's really driven more by what's the mindset and the profile of the consumer in a given area. For example, we know, we know all of our data tells us that there are really three things influencing a consumers view of this crisis. We're all we're all doing some calculus in our head consciously or not about our measuring our our desire for normalcy and our fear for our safety, right. And different people come down on different ends of that spectrum based on their, their their health risks and their age and whether they live close to a concentrated an area that's heavily concentrated with the virus. And the three things that are influencing that are one is sort of our consumer confidence. So have I lost my job? Has my company shuttered? What's my personal financial situation look like? So that's influencing heavily. The second one is what we call safety and proximity, which is, do I live near a place that is heavily affected by the virus? Do I know people who have been heavily affected by the virus that's certainly ways in which is why we see differences in rural and urban areas. And then the biggest one, which is both obvious and tragically sad, frankly, is political tribalism. There's nothing we can nothing I can predict more. Nothing, nothing that helps me predict more somebody's reaction to this virus in there. consumer behavior than whether whether they watch fox news or CNN, it's that simple. And, and and yes, those things are also correlated to whether you live in a rural area or an inner in an urban area. So, so we studied that, right? So we're studying the interplay of those three things, and how they affect different types of consumers. And based on those types of consumers, which brands and industry categories and things are affected the most, right, so a good example is that if you saw the earnings reports recently for Lowe's and Home Depot, Lowe's significantly outperformed holding the Home Depot. And the very simple explanation of that is is Lowe's is in more rural suburban areas and attracts a more politically right centered consumer who is more comfortable going out to stores and spending more money at Lowe's, right. So there's things that's the kind of stuff that we're tracking. Obviously right now, we're seeing a bit of a backslide in confidence and comfort level with shopping. So we've got The last for everything whether it was eating in restaurants or shopping in stores had been climbing confidence in that had been climbing really significantly for the last until about two to three weeks ago. And it's all been all those games are gone. I just tweeted something before we started. That confidence being in public places is at its lowest now that that's been throughout the entire pandemic meaning even worse than at the very beginning of the law.
Wow.
Yeah. So here in Allegheny County, especially since of all the new I know, I was looking nationally, so that's those are national figures. But you know, it's what's interesting is that we started to see that shift even before the case. The cases were going up. What was happening was consumers were seeing consumers worse were unsafe. They were going to restaurants, they were going to stores they were seeing people flaunting the social distance, and saying, you know what, even in those places I'm not going to we should have our dogs talk to each other Audrey. So it was almost a leading indicator for the cases, right? The consumer on the ground level was saying, You know what, I went to this store and I went to this restaurant, people aren't wearing masks, and it kind of freaked me out. So I'm not going to do it anymore. And and then we started to see the cases increase dramatically. It's almost like it was a bit of a canary in the coal mine. So the weather, regardless of whether a state requires masks or whether businesses required or not, consumers feel safer when they see them. And you can't stop that. Right. So that's trickling its way down into a lot of different industries that we're looking at and how it's impacting different brands or brand categories. Happy to I can go into
Yeah, could you go into that a little bit? Yeah.
Well, I mentioned the Lowe's, the Lowe's and Home Depot example. You know, I think the truth of the matter is, is that restaurants and bars are going to have a really tough time. Simply because the more we learn about this virus move, the more we learned that it's it's it's spread is heavily correlated with indoor activities right and populated sort of dense, densely populated indoor activities. And so the the thing, if you consider that the consumer, the consumer who's most concerned about this virus is an older female. The so like the, the quintessential concern. So we know people who are older and people who are female are more concerned than people who are younger and people who are male. So you think about what does that consumer do? And what does that tell you about how long it will be, though that consumers comfortable doing something again, and I'll tell you very, very definitively, the thing that I would be most concerned about reopening in any year would be like the performing arts. So you've got like the worst of all conditions, right? You've got indoor, closely packed tends to be over tends to be over index audience of older women, right. So I would bet on I would bet on sports and lifestyle. Before I would bet on, ah, performing arts because sports and concerts attract either younger people or men or both, right and so, so they're just a lot of what we can see in trends in in in consumerism are traced back to what's the profile of the consumer that does that thing. chick fil a is outperforming Popeye's because of the audience that they attract chick fil a tends to attract a more politically conservative people who are less cautious about the crime about the virus, right. And so, yeah, it's it's sometimes it's disappointing, how predictable all of that is highly predictable.
Yeah. Well, you know, that's really interesting about the performing arts if you just sort of localized that and I also know your interests with your own family. You have a talented daughter and you yourself play around a little bit music. I know that there's been a lot of experimentation with virtual engagements in the arts and but I'm working for Pittsburgh, if I just focus on Pittsburgh right now in our commitment to the arts, and I'm worried, I'm worried because that has been one of our shining assets.
And it is concerning and and that employs a lot of people in Pittsburgh as well, in addition to just being part of our culture, I think the hope has to be and we do we do sell our information and not and also give a lot of it away to governments and nonprofit organizations who are trying to support the the broader cause here. And I think what we're seeing, which is gives me a little bit of hope and optimism is that this wave of of increases in cases are, are being approached a lot differently because we're looking at very specifically, I think that I think any shutdowns that will continue to happen are gonna be very surgical in nature, right? It's not going to be we're gonna go back to yellow and just shut down everything that was shut down the last time because we're learning. We're not seeing cases from salons and gyms and so right. So where if and the more confined we get in terms of the the places we decide we have to keep shut down, and I'm afraid it's going to have to be bars and restaurants and entertainment venues, then the more targeted we can be with stimulus and government support, right? That first wave of stimulus went to kind of anybody who had a LLC S corp or a word. Now we can say, if we had another trillion dollars in stimulus and said, we're going to push all of that to support, hospitality, entertainment and dining, we could that dollar could get stretched a lot farther. And a lot of those more and more of those businesses can be can be preserved over however long this this crisis is gonna last.
Mm hmm. Are there any any local trends that you're seeing? I know you do a lot of national analysis and polling. Are there any local trends that you think would really be important for us to know? Oh, yes. I mean, I guess the trick here is sort of separating Allegheny County From the rest of the region as well as we at least and because if you think about the political tribalism factor I mentioned before, but also the proximity issue. There are people I grew up in Westmoreland County, and and my friends from high school where I grew up, they don't know, there's not been any cases that they know or anybody that they know that's had it, and that's 25 minutes from here, right. And those are also people who are saying, like, Can I travel out of the city and go to penguins game. Meanwhile, all of us in Allegheny County are seeing, you know, triple figure cases every day. So there's if we just stick to Allegheny County, one thing that is definitely true about Allegheny County as we outpaced the nation in terms of our our adherence to social distance, distancing, at least such that people self reported mask usage observing social distancing rules, by and large for a city like Pittsburgh is higher than average. They tend to be a civically minded kind of rule following place which is great, which is one of the things I love about about About Pittsburgh, and it's playing itself out in these numbers that we're seeing. You know, and even as even as these cases are popping up, it's we see that it tends to be a younger person. And a lot of it is people who left and came back and visited other places. So, so no, I think generally, we are a more socially conscious kind of role conscious group. And I think that's playing itself out and people are more likely to adhere to the rules in Allegheny County. But then again, if you cross over into Westmoreland, or Washington County, you see again, pletely different mindset. And a lot of that's just political.
Well, what do you what do you think so you talked about all this transformation over the last four months in your business and the changes in confidence, etc? What do you think is here to stay? What do you think in terms of your surveying polling?
Well, a lot I mean, certainly I think we're going to see fundamental changes in the way people think about work and work it I would, I would not bet big on Manhattan, commercial office real estate as a long term investment right now. For example, I think Pittsburgh can do better, because we're not in New York, I would bet bigger on office spaces in places like East liberty and sort of not in debt since central business areas. So that's certainly one of them. Incidentally, real quick because I know you saw me wrote about this last Saturday and everybody got a kick out of it. It's like I'll tell you what things that aren't here to stay is like I make up sales are way through the roof and lipstick sales are way in way, way depressed, right? Because of masks because now who needs lipstick and makeup and lipstick, you know. So lots of trends like that. I also mentioned like youth baseball sales, youth baseball equipment sales are way up, because kids can't share bats and gloves like they made games before. So there's, there's a lot of like, kind of discerning between the things that are very, very short lived and very now who knows we're gonna be wearing masks for a while. So maybe that makeup sale data will continue to be true. And then the medium term things will probably be office space, the way people think about that in real estate. The one that I think is most profoundly here to stay in the biggest way is tele health, which probably is relevant to a lot of people on your, in your audience in the tech industry and healthcare tech industry. The rise in the use of telemedicine in the last three months has just been like meteoric. And it's not just been the absolute numbers of of telemedicine users, but that the profile of the user has evolved because it used to be before COVID, the telemedicine user was younger, more tech savvy. Meanwhile, we know that the massive the largest portion of the healthcare population is older and less tech savvy. Well, COVID has sort of been a forcing function to get people who weren't comfortable going to a doctor's office or couldn't go to a doctor's office have learned not only can they have really good care over a device, but it's actually not that hard, right? These were Luddites, I think who were afraid or intimidated of using a device to talk to their doctor and now there's learning that it's actually Really easy. And that's definitely here to stay. Because Why the hell would you go into a doctor's office waiting room with a bunch of other sick people if you don't have to. And if you think about what the true the ripple effects of that will be, is we expect to see a huge growth and industry around at home healthcare tech. So if I can have better and more devices for diagnostics at home measurement at home, I can actually be, it'll actually improve health outcomes because I might be able to do an EKG at home, I might be able to do things much more easily on an app or a device or whatever. And I know there's some of that burgeoning now, but it's going to explode because the population of people doing doing virtual medicine is just and it's across pretty much every demographic group. That's probably the one I would expect to have changed the most. Well, it has changed the most most but I think that's going to be a change for forever.
I've heard that they're doctors right. They'll be able to see more patients right provided the insurance companies reimburse The way that they do in person. So that's probably the big one. I see some questions coming into the chat. And there's some questions. Let's see.
Um, let's see about how do you collect all your data every day, millions of data points. How is that being funneled? In? That's a question tomorrow. Brian Kennedy here. Ah, Brian, longtime listener first time caller.
Yes. So well, it's it's, it helps that we're on hundreds of the largest, you know, websites in the world. I mean, we get our polling widget. So for those of you out there that are in advertising, or ad tech, or digital are polling widgets, which are JavaScript embeds, we'll get over like 1.1 point 1 billion page views of web real estate this month. We don't pay for any real estate, it's a barter with the publisher. We give them some insight into their traffic and they give us back the data. It's all ccpa GDPR compliant, too, by the way, a non cookie dependent but we're just really good at asking questions that people get people engaged in the survey or poll. And so they and we give them some really cool results at the end that get them to come back and ask for more. There's no money changing hands either with us and the respondent, which is most survey research, by the way, or us and the publisher. So it's just this delicate balance of barter we have with the respondent and barter with the publisher that allows us to get that level of volume. Get that 7 million has the potential to double over the summer, we have a couple of really big websites I can't mention by name publisher networks that are coming on board too. So it's almost, you know, the longer we're in business, the more history our data has, the more predictive it is. But certainly the more the more of it we have more data is always better, always better than less. So we've definitely seen an uptick in engagement since COVID. People are opinionated people are glued to the internet a lot more than they were before. So we would expect that to come down a little bit eventually although next thing you know, we'll be in the what what is your, you know, what about the whole notion of all these subscription services, what he are you doing any Polling around that, are you seeing some subscription, like subscription, retail or subscription? What do you mean, everything food services, Home Delivery subscriptions to you know, we're seeing a huge amount of uptick in the market in terms of that.
And we are, you know, interested and there are some winners and some losers in that because a lot of a lot of those services weren't equipped to handle the kind of nonlinear growth that they've seen, right. Actually, grocery delivery in particular blue and opportunity. Think there we've seen we've we sort of have seen a plateau and adoption of grocery delivery because so many people who went and tried to do it had a terrible experience with it, either because they couldn't get a they couldn't get a reservation slot, a Giant Eagle, or they ordered a bunch of things. And then when their delivery was due, two thirds of the things they ordered weren't on shelves, and so grocery delivery had a huge opportunity to have its like moments and The sun in it kind of kind of blew it. And so a lot of consumers have just said, you know what Screw it, it's actually, the more we learn about masks, and so on and so forth, it's not as much of a risk for me to go into the grocery store and I can, if an item I want to buy isn't there, I can pick an alternative while I'm there, which is another big problem with the supply chain issues that we've dealt with. So but then other areas of subscription content actually has improved. So your New York Times subscriptions you're sort of paid online subscriptions for those kinds of things have gone out because people are consuming more news. Yeah, so but by and large, it's it's anything that's at home and direct to consumer is doing pretty well right now. And you predict that people's comfort levels with that will be sticky afterwards. If there's an app, I mean, once you sign up, you know that's the thing about subscriptions, right is it's like you know, people always forget to get rid of them and it's really either lazy or forgetful about it. So whether it continues to grow much beyond COVID I don't know. But the people that have sort of jumped on the bandwagon now will likely stay there. So.
So what's like the most surprising data that you have found over the last few few weeks? Think of something because you're doing polling all the time. I'm constantly one of your people that are always taking your polling, any, you know, some people in their spare time do that I do that I go on to site and I take the polls, some of the some of the questions cracked me up. And I know that you have a method to your madness there. So what is can you give us another example of something over the last, you know, 12 weeks?
Yeah, it's actually Well, one thing I'll say is that the method to our madness is to not have a method to our madness, right. So we we have I think, the coolest job, the coolest jobs in our company that are the team of people we have that just write questions all day. Whether it's germane to the news cycle, or germane to like anything Sort of random thing you could possibly think of about like, you let people wear shoes in your house, stuff like that. Because our idea that the general idea is that since we can ask anything that we want in these massive numbers we ask anything we can possibly think of. And then we let the machines tell us what's related, right? What's predictive and what have you. And it's like, and I'm just astonished all the time and the things we find that are correlated to one another. And I know you've seen some of that and toxic I've given that a million of them. But on a more serious note, I would say the thing that's probably surprised me the most is as we look at and it makes sense, the more you think about it, but it definitely surprised me when I saw the results. Well, two, I have two examples. One was just from yesterday, the question was around How comfortable are you or eager are you to return to work and and that was asked to both people who are working from home and remote people who are working from home and getting paid or actually at home and getting paid but not working. So like lots of maybes people in teaching. For example. And then, of course, the percentage of Americans who've actually lost their job because of COVID, COVID, 15% or so of Americans. The group that is actually less eager and, and comfortable returning to work is the are the people who have lost their jobs? Which seems really counterintuitive to me, right? Because financially you'd think, and so when you dig into those numbers a bit, there's definitely some truth to a group of those people who are making more money on unemployment insurance than they would be in those jobs. But but but that's a smaller group, the larger group or the people who because a lot of the people who've lost their jobs, or people who work in jobs that are considered less safe right now, right people in hospitality people in the service industry and so on. And it's interesting because we see it, a lot of the groups of people who are both confronted with the financial impact of this virus and the health impact of it, which tends to be a lot of the same people, particularly in urban areas and minorities. When when they're weighing Those two things they choose their health and safety over their financial well being. Right, which I think is the way we should be as human beings, by the way, not to editorialize. But the they're saying, Yeah, I could go back to work and put myself in a really unhealthy position or unsafe position. And if and I have to make that trade off, I'd rather not go back to work. And so that surprised me, I think we were we would have expected to see the people who who've lost their jobs and are and because of that are likely in more financial difficulties would probably be more cavalier about going back into the office. And we're seeing the exact opposite, which is both surprising and I think, and I think positive.
Yeah. Anything else?
Well, yeah, that we ran one yesterday where we asked people it was a little bit of a trick question or gamification of a question where we essentially asked people if they would be willing to voluntarily contract the virus to accelerate herd immunity. And
I saw that, yeah, findings.
Yeah. Because, you know, there's this group of people out there. Certainly A certain spectrum certain end of the spectrum, politically speaking, who are saying, Oh, this thing isn't a big deal. Look, the death rates are minuscule. The masks are stupid, because they're not gonna we're all gonna get the virus anyway that it is. So we wanted to see how many of those people would kind of put their money where their mouth is and say, Well, if the virus is really if it's a big scam, and it's really not all that deadly, and and we're going to get it anyway Then why don't I just go voluntarily get it to help accelerate the process. And it turned out maybe it's not surprising, but it was a tiny group of people who said they would be willing to do it, which means they're a little bit pushy when push comes to shove they're they're deep down inside probably more cautious and scared than they want to let on on Facebook.
Well listen, your work in terms of sentiment and confidence and data and correlation is is to me it's priceless and I'm proud to know you and Pittsburgh should be proud to know that you're here. doing this work and because you could be doing it anywhere. So, any final like any song you want to sing for us anything you want to say you want to often, you know, I'm going to tell everyone that you need to sign up for his Saturday morning. I call it email. That's the best way I can articulate it. But every Saturday morning, if you just want to write, john, he can get you on the mailing list. Lexi will put up his email, but it is a pure delight. I hope one day that he puts them into some sort of book and archives that I don't know how you archive it now, but they're just it's personal. It's delightful. It's fact based. And it gives you a little bit of insight into john, the man and john the company that he's run in john also happens to be in a band. And, you know, sometimes when he speaks, he gives us some entertainment. So I just wanted to open that up as a way to Close the down the show. If there's anything All right, the floor is yours.
I guess I just wouldn't want to probably play that back to you a bit and say how proud we are to be in Pittsburgh and be part of Pittsburgh and the tech community here. And it's it's I think what you've done Audrey and Jonathan and Brian keeping, keeping people connected, bringing us together every day almost every day. I talk to peers of mine and entrepreneurs and tech industries and other parts of the country and they're not they're not this isn't happening everywhere. We're not we're not places aren't as much of a community as we are. And even going back to the comments I made before about us, you know, being more socially responsible about social distancing and fighting and all of that, like there's a sense there's a there's a real palpable sense, of course, there's outliers, right? But the the the sense of community here, both at an individual level and in our tech in History. And and and also to I was on another sort of group more smaller like entrepreneur group yesterday and people try to help each other and helping each other through this. And it's just it's an awesome thing to be a part of it's it's not I think we take for granted, because we're so used to the work that you guys do to keep everybody connected that it's not like this and most if any other city that I'm aware of. So thank you for having me. It's love to come back sometime, maybe when we can update you on all the newest and latest things that we're seeing as the holidays approach or back to school or whatever, hey, I can do this.
Yeah, that's back to school. That's a whole other show. We've got parents that want to talk about that.
Nothing I get asked about more than that topic right now. So you know, we'll find it. Absolutely. That's awesome, man. Well, thank you, john. Thanks, everyone, and join us tomorrow. I think tomorrow is Thursday. Yeah, we're not working on Friday. No way, we are going to take the day off. And I want to thank you. You don't know civic science, I cannot tell you enough times you need to get to know them. Take some of their polls, see the data. Follow john on Twitter, you'll see a lot of amazing information that I like to extract from gives me you actually saved me from from watching and reading unnecessary stuff. So I appreciate. I appreciate that. So john Depp with civic science. Thank you, Jonathan, for being with us. Thank you, everyone. And if you want to reach out to john, just let us know if you didn't catch his email address. We'll be sure to share that with you, but you really need to get on his weekly email. I promise you will be worth it. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai