Season 1: Episode 12

0:53 Megan Ingram (MI): Are you struggling to evangelize digital analytics in your workplace? In our Devil Wears Prada, analytics edition, we chatted this week with data science tech all-star and the current VP of Marketing, Brandee Sanders. We discuss balancing strategy versus the trenches, the power of delegation and educating and evangelizing data literacy and the impact it can have on your organization. Well, Brandee, really excited to have you on today. I'm a self-proclaimed data geek, so I'm really pumped to talk about all things digital analytics. How's it going? 
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1:28 Brandee Sanders (BS): It's going fabulously. I'm feeling very Devil Wears Prada in my leopard today. For those of you who are listening and cannot see it is a very fierce ensemble. I'm just excited to be wearing real clothes and not sweat pants. And secondly, super geeked to chat with you because we're both huge data geeks. And I love sitting down and talking about the real world more than conceptual handling for all of that. So thank you so much for having me. It’s totally an honor.
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1:55 MI: Awesome. Like I said, I'm really pumped to have this conversation today, so to kick it off, from freelancer consultant to now you're the VP of Marketing. Tell me about your digital marketing road. What lessons have you learned? What's helped you now as you're in this new role? 
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2:21 BS: Wow. So the journey is wild and I feel like it's public disclosure. It was a non-traditional path. I didn't wake up one day in sixth grade and go, Hey, I'm going to go to MIT major in CS. And then like suddenly get into tech. It was the opposite of that. If you go pull my high MTB, I started in film. I started music. I started in professional performance, did a lot of amazing projects that I'm super proud of and earned all of the drama, Glee fan person accolades that you could get before you hit your late twenties, where it's not sexy anymore to get paid with pizza or exposure as every single consultant on this call has probably been offered before. Living in New York, I realized I just wanted something that would give me the flexibility to be on the beat for auditioning or doing projects like creative, film, and stuff like that. And then would also just let me work from home if I wanted to, or not necessarily have to take the C train all the way and then transferring, then do all the crazy grind they usually have to do with waiting tables or teaching yoga classes or whatever. So I tripped into e-commerce and then by sheer happenstance, 2008, 2007, 2006, that crazy econ boom that came with like the economic bust. It all happened at the same time and I was extremely lucky and I'm gonna use that word lucky, to be in the right place at the right time with the right stuff lined up. I sprung my e-commerce business. It was wildly successful. Under the bridge of Rob Caitlin's Etsy. And when the Etsy boon happened, I got featured in Inc magazine with a lot of other e-commerce sellers. And because I had taught myself everything, I was studying Shakespeare while people were doing my coding. So I was from a radically different world. I was doing Music Man, when they were doing HTML. And so I taught myself all of that through YouTube, Google back in the day, prior to the YouTube stuff, you actually go to this crazy thing called the library. The Internet's made out of paper called books. And I taught myself a lot of that, marketing for dummies, analytics for dummies, way before it was suddenly sexy to like data. And because of it, I was wildly successful. And then really the next decade just turned into a snowball of crazy consulting gigs that led to digital marketing that led to data science that led to data warehousing and data lakes and ETL. And then that tripped back into B2B tech and SaaS, which as you well know, is just huge right now. Full disclosure, a wildly great place if you're looking for income or benefits and the land of Vietnamese pour overs and ping pong tables. So I was like, wow, this is great. When you're gigging it in New York, you're not getting in, there's no benefit to waiting tables in the upper east side, shout out EJ’s Luncheonette. But it was a whole new world. And because of that non-traditional path though, I think it's informed – one - how I work with people and then two - where I see opportunity because I see opportunity nearly everywhere and have the ability to chameleon through those different roles. And then also see it from the client perspective. And that's what has led me to Modal today, which is just a rockstar in automotive e-commerce. And as COVID has taught us, digital first mobile friendly end to end seamless transparency. It's the new norm. We're not going back from two day, Amazon delivery. We're not going back to waiting in car showrooms for eight hours with your kids, losing your mind and then doing FNI. So I feel like it's a perfect match because it's a great legacy industry and automotive, and then also e-commerce, which is my Zen state that I've been in for almost 20 years now.
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6:02 MI: Yeah. That's pretty cool. I would agree with you, all of those things are on the cutting edge as we think about the future and what those trends are and what it's going to look like. You think about mobile and e-commerce and video.
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6:17 BS: There’s no going backwards. That's what I think is so funny because a lot of folks think automotive is a notoriously legacy industry. And so it has a very legacy style. And I spent time at Sony Music and BlackLine. Those were FinTech before FinTech was FinTech. So accountants are slow to change as is the music industry, which was heavily legacy. And so when you take something like legacy and try to change it, it's just an enormous effort to re-educate folks and then make sure you're listening to the people who have been doing it for 20 years, but then also lean into the technology to better serve your clients. And I think that's universal, not just for my personal job at Modal, but universally for anyone who's doing anything. Being able to take the best of both worlds, the legacy tribal knowledge that has lived for however many years in that vertical or industry and the technology and the mobility and the agility to move quickly in COVID is taught that I think time and time again, in the past like year and a half has been a struggle for a lot of folks and some industries moved quickly and could adjust to it. And some did not, which was a really hard lesson to learn. 
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7:21 MI: Yeah. Interesting using the word agility, diving into the next question, which is I'm an analyst, I'm also a strategist and both of those roles sometimes you do the fine balancing act. The ever seductive - I'm in the trenches, but I also need to execute and strategize. So tell me, how have you been able to execute and strategize at the same time while still having that strategic 3000 foot view, but wearing a lot of hats? 
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7:54 BS: I think honestly, it makes me chuckle to say it out loud and I laugh every time I say it out loud. Is that coming from a performance-based background really helps because day in, day out, you are living through three different careers, right? You're living the career of your dreams, which is, I'm chasing the stage. You're going in constantly pitching, constantly having to sell yourself, look, I'm ready, hire me. Okay. You're not into me. Rejected again. Like you go through really rigorous QA in your life and there's a lot of bugs and I feel like that rapid pivot, pivot, pivot again, and again, and again, and again, and again, execute, execute until you get it right. That came from a traditional discipline, an actual discipline of performance and music and film it's like grind. And once you've gone through that kind of punishment for like 20 plus years, I think when you come into something and you see, oh, all right. So I have to not only plan it from a very high level and say, for the year or for the next four quarters, how are we going to divide our execution up and then flip to the other side of your brain? And this is why polymathic or polymathic. I know I'm going to say this word wrong and everyone's going to come at me on LinkedIn. So I have a three-year-old and I'm only one coffee in. So that classic Renaissance thinking, I made that word up where you're split. So usually the hemispheres are like either you're hyper creative and you're super cool at being artsy and fun and campaigns and marketing and content, or you're purely analytical, your data, quantifiable, statistical, empirical knowledge. And you think like a machine and you function as a robot and you're in a very low queue. I feel like I can blend those two worlds together because my natural is clearly creative because that's where I came from. The statistical, analytical, empirical, qualitative, quantitative analysis and measuring things like efficacy mattered. Because when I flipped to my own business, I had to sit down and say, is this worth my time? And I applied that same kind of methodical thinking and structure and processes, processes, translating to punch lists to do. Execution. Dependency. What comes next? And if we move stage A to stage B and that classic agile or square mentality, it's going to impact that and move it forward. So when it comes to straddling the two, I think that I am fortunate because I came from a background where I already had to do that where you had to think, okay, so here's the 3000 foot view of the next three quarters. And then here's three feet away now through the end of the week. And what are we doing and who are we talking to? And how are we talking to them? And I think that rapid fire ability to standardize and templatize - that's where half the work is to be honest, it's that day-to-day grind of templatizing and having the bones there. And this is what people skip over. They just want to go from good to great. And I'm like, hmm, fascinating. Do you know in dance, if you try to go straight from like your first plié ever into a grand jeté, you're going to fall on your face. You’re going to have to start small. You have to get the basic discipline pieces down first that expands to any role, but particularly in technology, because if you just come in wild, willy nilly, at the 30,000 foot view and go content and just start throwing stuff out the door and throwing it against a wall and seeing what might stick, it's not really scalable. And even if you accidentally get successful, you have no idea why. So my process structures operational excellence, all of that is tied together. And I think that's what makes it easy to balance the two because it looks intensive, but it's not because there's a standardized template. There are steps that I take with every single thing that we're talking about in the marketing or digital or data side, and that's laid down and you iterate and experiment upon it, but you are very systematic about how you're doing it. And then each time you do it, you can make it more complicated. The same way if you were dancing or performing, you take something very simple and you do it a thousand times and then you can come back and do it a thousand times more and add more complex bits on it. Then when it comes to campaigns or data or measuring or reporting or execution, all of those things are universal rules that can make you more successful if you execute them.
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12:17 MI: Yeah. As someone who was in a junior analyst role, as we're talking about struggling between the executing and the strategizing, one of the things that can often come up is how do you delegate? What do you delegate? What are the things that you let go of? And what are you things that you hold onto? What have you learned about the power of delegation?
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12:42 BS: I am a huge fan of a couple of things. So, first off, I over-communicate, in case you haven't picked up on that, in the last 90 seconds, there's no mystery anymore. There's no romantic interlude where you don't know what I mean. Or you have to sit here and take out your Little Annie decoder ring and figure it out. I'm hugely transparent to the point of over the top-ness. That transparency makes the act of saying, what can we do? Who's doing it? What is the quarterback? What are the dependencies? Can they execute alone or will they need a curb from underneath like supportive execution? And so for me, delegation is an act of trust. So I personally don't hire anyone that I wouldn't trust. If I leave the office and I'm gone for two weeks, or grandma breaks a hip or something and you're gone, you have to believe, hopefully that the people that you've hired and put in those roles are going to continue to execute with operational excellence, regardless of whether you're hanging there or not. And my personal biased opinion on micromanagement is poisonous and toxic, and it will drive the most talented folks out of your org. And you have to trust the people that you hire. And if you do not, then you need to hire new people or look inward and ask yourself why you have that problem. So I think that hiring good people who are passionate self-learners regardless. I don't care if they're a C-suite person, if they're claiming to know everything, stop the presses because every single day something new is coming out, the algo changes, something happens. There's a disruptive technology. So the ability to be a lifelong learner is one of the first things and the reason I'm tying all of that back to delegation is the people who I put next to me are going to be lifelong learners. They're going to be people who are invested in understanding that if they don't know the answer to something and they've been delegated that, or they're responsible for it, that they're proactively going to find the answer or we come together, I cross and up-train them until they do. So I think continuously investing in the mind frame of I'm going to invest in you, your career is my career. Your success is our success. It's not just one little group that comes together and it's like, yay. I get all the credit. I got to show the board, the PPT we made, super important to do that. And I think when we speak about delegation in the act of giving some of the power or perceived power in your role is that it's collaborative. Yeah, there's no one and very rarely knock on my shabby little desk here. There's no one who's really executing alone. No CEO is great in and of themselves unless they literally built everything and never hired a single soul. And at that point they're an entrepreneur. So, you have to understand that when you think about delegation, you're thinking what you're really saying is trust in the people that I hire and keep around me. I inherently trust to execute and have operational excellence. And I think if it's not there, are you open to this idea of learning how to do this? Are you ready for that? Do you want mentorship? Do you want support? And I always like to hear a yes there. Because of the continued growth benefits. Heads up, you're going to get paid more if you have more skills. So always being open to that and keeping an open mentality on it. It's huge. 
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16:04 MI: Yeah, I totally agree. Continuing a little bit further talking about organizational barriers. One of the things that I've often struggled with throughout my career, especially as a digital analytics person, is just people who don't understand the language, they don't get it. So how do you help educate people on being data literate, so to speak, and understanding the numbers for people who maybe don't get all the details, all the rigor that is behind data and the analytics side of the business?
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16:33 BS: I think it's so funny because all of these things are literally connected to each other when we talk about it. Think about the world, your work world that you're living in as a spider web. And if you pull on one side and it's marketing, then you're tugging sales towards you. And if you pull on one side and it's product, you're tugging marketing towards you. And if you pull on one side and it's web, you're tugging social with you. So all of these things are literally a part of each other. And when we're thinking about translating, what you really have to do is understand. And I think I'm fortunate in this regard, because mostly I'm a storyteller, I'm a storyteller by heart, genetically predisposed to tell long stories in case you haven't picked up on it. Painting that mental picture is something that I love. And I think that when you try to communicate something, you have to make sure that it has a value for that other person. If you're just putting together reports and saying, here's the KPIs and here's your conversion rates congratulations, you're up 10%. Their sales are just going to be like, what the hell would I care about that for? I'm just looking at SQLs to demo, to deal to one close one loss. So I think for me personally, I always make it I’m a personal UN translator, right? I feel like I'm a UN translator in the sense that, and it's benefited my career. You have to be able to put yourself into that person's role and make sure that you understand that when you're speaking to them, you're speaking to them in a language that's relevant to them. So let me give you an example. You're going to go talk to the engineering people. They've got their headphones on. They're working in the dark. Yes, it's a generalization. Don't come at me. We know it's mostly true. Guess what I work in the dark with headphones on, too. Welcome to my world. You're going to have to come to them. If you're asking them for something and speak their language, speak the language of sprint, make sure you understand the difference between prod and dev. Make sure when you're speaking to them, that it's in the same technological language that they understand. And then when they give you an answer, like, Hey, we're pushing to prod XYZ. And here's the user story and it's highly technical. On the marketing side, we have to take that and then march it over to client success and client success is talking to existing customers about a new project product feature, right? You can only do what you want, but your job, if you choose it, this scrum will delete or self destruct in 30 seconds. Your job, if you want is to take that highly technical language and translate it into simple speak. They're doing 55 amazing technological updates with the code and they're changing the architecture and the UX/UI and all this other stuff. And then AWS, and you're coming over to CS and saying, what this means is they're going to get through checkout faster. And that's the message you have to carry forward. And then for marketing, when you're coming out and you're talking to prospects, we have a brand new optimization experience that's going to blow your mind. We're the only end to end, authentic end to end hard credit pool, like checkout, schedule deliverability, FNI, all of this stuff. Here's what we are and it's fantastic. And it just squashes our competitors, come check us out. And so each of those parts are just uniquely different in how you carry the message forward. And I think as marketers, it's a little bit of our job to do that translation for them, because we're really going to be the stewards of the message for the company. If you're getting something from product and it's highly technical, you gotta flip the script and make sure it's applicable to CS. If CS is telling you something about a case story, you have to translate that to both the prospect, to the clients, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's really our job, or at least in my opinion, to be a bit of a UN translator. And so when we talk about being able to work with people at a very highly technical level, and then also at a granular level, all the way down to the social media intern, you really have to be able to explain it as I think it was either Sagan or Einstein. If you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't get it. You have to be able to take it from the very high level that you would explain it to C-suite that you would explain it to VP, to manager, to director, to intern, to prod, to CS. And I think that that is where a lot of folks have a bit of a gap because we get insulated in our own little bubble. And I think that it's actually a benefit when you do spend time. I spent time leading product teams and working on things like data warehousing and data lakes. You spend time doing stuff like that, that's highly technical and then coming back into marketing and I think it makes a huge difference. It makes a huge difference because I can understand their cognitive neural mindset and speak to it in a language they understand. And at the end of the day, that makes you more successful because then everyone's speaking the same language, right? 
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21:29 MI: Yeah. I always say, I spent a lot of time working in insights and that's really the difference between a data observation and what it actually means, right?
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21:36 BS: Yeah, exactly. Well, it's cool that that number is big and green. But what does that mean to me? Or what does it mean to - if you had to explain it to a board member or an investor in 30 seconds in an elevator? Well, could you explain what it really meant? Half of the time not really. We get so obsessed with the data visualizations. The tablet looks so sexy right now. Oh my God, this Salesforce report is gorgeous, but then you get into it and you're like, but what does it really mean? Does it mean that we've risen up or lifted our MRR? ARR? Does it mean we're retaining more customers? Does it mean, et cetera, et cetera? Having the ability to say that's what it means to me, but what does it mean to this department and being able to carry that forward is huge because a lot of the time, marketing and operations, they’re the creatives, that's it. And we've talked about exhaustingly before that world is completely gone. It's not mad men. We're not just sketching ads. We're analysts in a lot of ways. Data scientists, data analysts, a lot of folks are getting closer and closer to the traditional IT role than they are purely creative. And it's a powerful place to be in because you have both hemispheres of the brain working towards a greater good goal. And I think that's pretty cool. 
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22:56 MI: Yeah. Or you talked a lot about being an over-communicator to a degree. Sometimes power and transparency can feel really hard to attain together. How do you break down bad organizational norms to create transparent leadership? 
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23:17 BS: Oh, my gosh, this'll probably be the shortest answer. I think the best way to do that is by example. It's by example. So I'll give you a little, tiny parable. So I joined an org, not the org I’m at right now, full disclosure, but I joined a different org and they were still working with email and Excel and everyone was just kind of putting stuff in Slack. And it was very siloed. People barely talked to each other and there was a partially remote organization, so that made it even harder. And I opened up my Basecamp, shout out to that tool because I actually love it. I'm just biased. It's not an ad. I wasn't paid to say that I just love Basecamp. I opened my Basecamp and I have a rigorous amount of templates that I've built over years and years and years of doing marketing and doing operations and running web and all that stuff. And I just started sharing those templates. Hey, if you're doing CS and you have 15 steps for every client integration or launch, here, you can use this and just retitle it and make this yours. And then you clone it every time. Instead of going 55 manual heart grinding steps that drive you through the madhouse or, Hey, I see you're in Excel. Do you know you can actually put this in Salesforce and you can create this - We're laughing, but half of the time they don't realize this because they've developed a bad habit from organizational legacy. So hey, I know you're still doing this manually, but you can create validation rules and picklists in Salesforce that will do this for you with a process builder, we'll execute this for you. And then you can focus on higher level strategy rather than spending eight hours out of your 12, 14 hour day doing manual inputs. Operational excellence comes by example. So when I join an org or I've been at an org, I try to set that bar early to say, here's what you can expect. Here's how I communicate. Here's the frequency or cadence of the sequences that I give to you. And then here's the information you can expect to get. And that's by literally ripping away any cloak and dagger that was there before. And it's fully transparent like my calendar wide open. You can see everything. You want to see that I'm getting my cavity filled, who knows when in 2021, but like, you're going to see it. So it's fully transparent. It's like every campaign, social posts, piece of stuff being built, like all of that in the beginning, it can be like a whole new thing for people. And they're super intimidated by it, and it's just too much because they haven't had that flow with people before, where you've been able to see everything and you don't have to guess or whatever, but over time you'll actually see people start to adopt that. I haven't been at a single org where those people haven't adopted the templates or at least some of the tools and the mindset of, every time we're having a meeting, we're taking notes, we have action items and follow ups that get triggered. Everyone gets it afterwards. So everyone knows we met. Here's what we discussed. Here's who’s responsible for the next action item. And here's the date it's expected by. Any blockers? Share it now. And I think that kind of thing is huge because it sounds so conceptually simple, but as anyone knows, if you've joined an organization who is wildly siloed, it can take months to get there. So I felt the easiest thing to do is to lead by example and to show people, here you can save two hours a day. If you just repeat this and set this one standardization up. If you measure twice, cut once, I'm a bit of the measure three times and cut once, because I'm a little nuts like that. If you set those processes up when you take something you've done at once and suddenly next, webinars, great example. Oh, we did one webinar a quarter. Now you're doing 10 a quarter because it's virtual and COVID’s everywhere. How are you going to handle that template? Are you just going to go - It was easy when you just had to talk to one vendor and do it one time, but now you're doing it 10, 20, 30 times in a month because you had to move quickly to accommodate a fully remote digital virtual conference world. So if you don't have those templates, it gets very difficult and you're underwater. It's Tuesday and you're already buried under emails and Slacks or whatnot. And so I think setting that up and showing other people, here's a way to standardize it so that you can always scale it so that you can always make it bigger without fear of collapse underneath the granularity of it.
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27:40 MI: Yeah, I totally agree. We've now been working from home for, I guess a year plus now. I'm the rare pre COVID work from homer, which you are as well. And we were advocating for it long before we started this new reality. Why are you pro-work from home? 
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28:03 BS: Well, that's a great question I’d love to answer because I've been working from home now for nearly seven plus years and off and on I was severely hybrid, like 70-30 prior to that. And it all started selfishly because I knew one day I decided I wanted to have children. I did not want to be stuck on the C train coming out of Utica at like seven in the morning, trying to get my butt into Manhattan. Bedraggled just slugging through the snow on Madison avenue, just dragging my butt to a cubicle where Sally over here is reheating her tuna fish sandwich at 9:00 AM. I refuse to live that life. And so I started pushing for remote work cause I was in e-commerce and there's zero reason that you have to be on site for that. And I got fortunate, I got into some great orgs that were with it, but I was really pushing for it because it’s freedom. And for folks who are shoved into it, because of COVID, it is not going to feel like freedom. It's going to feel like it sucks, man. My ping pong’s gone, my lunch with buddies is gone, but in the long run, I actually think it's beneficial because it’s not the way I would've wanted it to be evangelized, but the organizations that I worked at where I was like, preaching the value of like, Hey, even if we're not full remote, let's try hybrid. People have children. We have to accommodate some of these things where we could lose them because they're really talented. And they're going to walk out the door and go to like the next company that is allowing some of that hybrid stuff. So they could pick their kid up from baseball, right? What's the difference? I think that there are obviously some roles that are simply not possible, but for those, the vast majority that we're all working in digital spaces and we're all on our computers and our Zoom, I think COVID has just been a great lesson in there's a value there. We're seeing the children more now than ever. So take a beat and think of that. Yep, this sucks. We're all stuck inside. I think I'm on day 385 or something of quarantine. It's exhausting and it's awful, but I've also seen my child's face every single day. I have not been interrupted by a flight. I have not been interrupted by having to leave to go to something urgent for work. I haven't had to do extensive three weeks here, four weeks there. And I think that it's like a paradigm shift and a revelation. And I'm glad that the idea of remote work is actually getting embraced more. I'm sure there's going to be so many articles in the next like five years, but I think it's a testament that some of those companies that I pitched remote work to. And they were like, no, we definitely need to be on site and everyone will need to be like, the only way you can collaborate is if you're right on top of each other. And I think it's just been completely proven is just being like totally - There's no data to support that. In fact, there's actually pre-existing data prior to COVID that said your productivity actually goes up. Heads up everybody, we work longer hours because we're home. So I feel like there's actually a positive spin to that. Now we have the option and people, large corporations that I pitched, were picking up the phone a couple of weeks in and going, remember when you were talking about that remote work stuff? Yeah. Could you walk us through how you were thinking about that? Because it looks like we're going to have to do it now and I'm like, here's my consulting package. I'm looking forward to working with you. And so I'm just kidding. I did it pro bono because those people need to stay employed. And so I feel like in the end there's a benefit to it and pros and cons for everyone. I do miss having hybrid on-sites because it was super dope to have those kitchens full of snacks where I didn't have to do my own dishes, but there's a wonderful benefit in that the ability to see your kiddos or your fur babies or your plant babies or whatever it is that you love doing. Even if it's just taking a walk at the end of the day down your street is wonderful. Not to mention carbon imprint. Like your footprint is infinitely smaller. There's a great article I wrote on LinkedIn way before COVID. It's so funny to watch that become popular again, way before COVID that goes into these great statistical empirical data sets that talk about - Did you know, there's like twenty-five percent increase in divorced people if your commute is longer than an hour and a half or something like that, it's like some crazy, crazy data points. But particularly for carbon imprint, it's nuts to think that we don't have to necessarily have a two and a half on the 405 slugging it through West Hollywood to get all the way out to Woodland Hills to just sit at a desk that you can clearly have done remotely.
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32:54 MI: Yeah, totally agree. And I think we're going to see more and more of that out of companies. 
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33:00 BS: You can't take it back now. The Genie’s out of the bottle.
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33:06 MI: Well, last question to close it out. Give me one big thing you foresee for digital marketing in 2021. 
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33:12 BS: I think it's probably going to be probably what we just talked about. That remote work thing, I think you'll probably see, and I'm just like Johnny Carson envelope to the head. And for you guys who have no idea what I'm talking about, you're going to have to Google it on YouTube because you might be too young to know what I mean, but like Johnny Carson, what was his name? The one Deni or something like that. Psychic intuition is saying, we're probably going to see a pendulum of folks, once we get the vaccine fully rolled out, especially with J&J and the efficacy rates they’re talking about, and it doesn't require refrigeration, which is great. Once those things hit the greater public, I think you're going to see a huge kick up of people who do want to be back in office and then you're gonna see another segment whose like, I want hybrid. And then you're going to have some other segment who's like, I will never step foot in your stupid open office again, sir. And now there's huge mega logos in the valley, in the bay that are totally down with that. So I think you're going to see the definition of “workplace” continue to change. And beyond that, I think that there's also the past couple of years have been challenging in the world of, oh God, I even hate saying the word. It makes me feel like I need to go get an antacid, politics, and data. And I think you're going to see, because of COVID most Americans never saw a Tableau visualization in their life. Like Sally Bo peep who lives in culdesac number nine in the housing development in the middle of suburbia, never saw a data visualization from Tableau showing some of the stuff around either election results, or voting, or COVID mortality rates, or vaccine efficacy. More than ever data literacy for air quotes, non data folks, like people who are just - I'm a receptionist at a medical office or I'm John and I'm a teacher in elementary school. Most people aren't digging into data analysis. But I think that's changed. I think that data is now inextricably tied to politics, and inextricably tied to medical. And also the general consciousness of a nation, because looking at it for better or for worse on a 24/7 news cycle. And with COVID suddenly pie charts are hot again. So I feel like here we are looking at data through the lens of standard civvies, who would never step foot near SQL R Python and having to digest that and rationalize it and see how it corresponds to their life. So I feel like those two things, the work from home pendulum swinging and then neutralizing and coming into spaces. And then secondly, the idea that your standard American now realizes that data, science, and literacy in those spheres are extremely important. And the gaps that are there are very visible to folks who are data or science literate. And I think there's so much work to be done there to further evangelize the importance of STEM and to make sure that kiddos have a chance to really dig into that and have a chance to step past some of the biases that exist around science and really, really embrace it. And I'm super excited about that. 
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36:40 MI: Yeah. Well, thank you for joining the show today, it's been a pleasure and blast chatting with you. Where can listeners find you?
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36:49 BS: Oh, well, you can find me at brandeesanders.com. Here we go. This is how I know this year has been really hard. Or on LinkedIn, Brandee Sanders. There's a couple of us. You can't miss me. I have a giant colorful brick background all the time. Brandee Sanders on LinkedIn, always interested in opening doors for opportunities or mentorship or anything like that. And if you have any questions or are looking to get into the data or technology or digital, please feel free to reach out. I love facilitating and supporting and lifting folks up and giving them opportunities. 
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37:27 MI: Awesome. Well, again, it was great having you on the show today and chatting with you, and I look forward to the next time we can talk.
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37:34 BS: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.