S6E10: Celebrating Our Heroes of Innovation & Enterprise

Transcript:

Jason Dressel  00:12

Hello and welcome to The History Factory Podcast. I’m Jason Dressel. Welcome to a special edition. We have a cast of History Factory all stars here today, and we’re here to celebrate in our own History Factory way America’s 250th anniversary. And so, perhaps you’ve seen on on social media over the last couple of weeks, our team has been celebrating some of the innovators, the iconic captains of enterprise that that perhaps you will not see celebrated as often as the sort of typical pioneers of American innovation and enterprise that we often see celebrated. So what we’re going to do in this session today, is we’re going to have our team talk a little bit about who they chose as their inspiration, and a little bit about why we’re celebrating them as we celebrate 250 years of America, American innovation and enterprise. So let’s get started. We’re going to jump right in. So we’re going to go around, and with each of our team members, they’ll introduce themselves and they’ll talk a little bit about their choice. So let’s start with you, Dario.

Dario Sarlo  01:32

Thanks, Jason. I think this one was no surprise. I think there’s a sort of a shared storytelling that we all hold at History Factory, people that we come across in our work, heroes that stand out, that jump out, and their stories become very sticky for us because of something or other that we uncover along the way. So for me, it was obvious, that there was a gentleman that we uncovered during some work for KPMG back in 2017. This this gentleman, James Marwick, and the M for Marwick is the M in KPMG, and what was exciting for us is that we got to humanize that story and understand who these who these individuals were. So James Marwick, a Scottish accountant, who, he was so restless, he left Scotland, went to Australia, Canada, and ended up in the United States to pursue the American dream essentially, and built his business here, and the rest is history. What was fun about Marwick was that he ended up on a ship crossing the Atlantic and met his business partner in 1910. So to think that in a day before websites or any way of understanding who that individual was, these two gentlemen found themselves just wanting to be in business together, so it was the P and the M in KPMG, and they merged their businesses at that point. So the idea that these two human beings felt such a connection and a partnership on a sailing across the ocean, and they built business together. And so James Marwick, this fascinating guy, six foot tall, once he retired– something very special–he set up a sort of care community in California, and he did that under the radar. He found the money. He made it happen. And today, that care community is still there. It’s a retirement home for dozens and dozens of individuals, and that legacy flew under the radar. And it wasn’t until we unearthed that back in 2017 that we even knew that this gentleman, outside of the big business world that he had inhabited, went and did something so special and and set up this legacy that today is is thriving. Monte Vista Grove Homes in Pasadena is the is the location, and they have a little shrine almost to this this man, not because he was a great businessman, because he was a great community leader and set up this legacy.

Jason Dressel  03:45

So, I have to ask, Dario is our senior group creative director, as you can hear from Dario’s accent. He’s not American. So, was anyone else kind of struck by the fact that we’re kicking off celebrating America’s 250th year with a Scottish accountant.

Nick Hiebert  04:02

Yeah, yeah. No surprises. My hero was also an immigrant, and maybe a few others too.

Ryan Szarwark  04:09

It’s a melting pot.

Tracy Ulmer  04:10

Yep.

Nick Hiebert  04:12

It’s an American story.

Jason Dressel  04:15

So let’s move on to our next pick, Tracy. Tracy, maybe quickly introduce yourself and who your pick was.

Tracy Ulmer  04:24

Yeah, I’m Tracy Ulmer. I’m a senior archivist at History Factory, and my pick is Mary Pickford. So, who many call or many know as a famous silent film star, early years of Hollywood, kind of created the modern celebrity literally with with her. She’s also known as America’s sweetheart. Also a Canadian immigrant, known as America’s Sweetheart. But she was she wasn’t just an actress. She was also a philanthropist, an educator, a producer, into real estate, but what she absolutely refused to do was be a cog in the Hollywood machine. She hated it. She wanted creative control, financial control over her work. So, and especially the distribution system that was just monopolized by the Hollywood system. So, specifically in 1919, she, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith came together to form the United Artists, which was a pioneering film studio and distribution company, because they heard word that some studios were going to merge and form an even greater monopoly for distribution to theater chains that they also owned. They literally hired detectives to go spy on the executives, find out this information, and because of that, she was really pioneering that creative and financial control for actors, directors, anyone in the film industry. And while United Artists itself didn’t like you know overturn the Hollywood studio system or anything like that, it did, I think, throw a wrench in the works that kind of led us come today to, especially in the ’50s and ’60s, studios not owning everything– the factories, the sets, the theater chains, the actors’ contracts–and it gave, it made room for… you think of a film, and you think of the director, you think of the actors. So United Artists over the years put out films like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Gold Rush” with Charlie Chaplin, “12 Angry Men,” “West Side Story.” So lots and lots of just great creative work came out of the studio. And I will say the funny thing is, is that down the line, United Artists was fighting against the big studios like MGM. MGM eventually acquired United Artists in 1981, and then Amazon acquired MGM. So Amazon actually brought back the United Artists label in 2024.

Jason Dressel  07:02

Fun fact. What what inspired you to pick to pick her, Tracy? I’m curious.

Tracy Ulmer  07:07

So I actually came to Mary Pickford through Charlie Chaplin. I went through a big silent film kind of phase in grad school after watching ” Hugo” by Martin Scorsese in 2012. So ended up going the Charlie Chaplin route, and through Charlie Chaplin learning about Mary Pickford, who was an even bigger star than he was before he came along.

Jason Dressel  07:28

Excellent. So we we’ve kicked it off, I believe, with two immigrants. And Nick, you’re next, and I think you’ve already implied that you also are bringing an immigrant to the table.

Nick Hiebert  07:43

I I know it might be treasonous, but I picked a Brit in America. His name was Eadweard Muybridge, and he was a photographer who traveled the American West in the 1800s kind of middle 1800s, late 1800s taking photos of beautiful places like Yosemite Valley and like projecting that out to America and sharing that, often you know people seeing these landscapes for the first time. Muybridge was a really interesting, very strange, very iconoclastic guy who kind of like sat at the intersection of art and photography and science. And one of the reasons why I landed on this guy is because he’s often credited as kind of the godfather of motion pictures. I read a book maybe 10 years ago, by Rebecca Solnit, called “River of Shadows,” and it was a biography on this guy, and it kind of changed my… I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, but it kind of changed my life and how I how I saw the American West and how we kind of define progress as acceleration and I guess it gets a little heady, but he lived during this time. If anybody’s ever seen ” Train Dreams” or read the book, he lived through this time similar to the character in ” Train Dreams,” where he’s straddling two different worlds: the old world and modernity, driven by technology, progress, forward motion, and speed, and really, it was this experiment, this motion picture experiment he did with Leland Stanford, starting in 1872. Leland Stanford, obviously the the railroad baron, t here’s kind of a university that shares his name, and also you know a university that captures the kind of like milieu of like progress, acceleration, technology, art, science. And you know it was this groundbreaking experiment where he did motion picture capture, like using a series of photography, photographs to prove that horses left the ground when galloping. Because at the time the human eye couldn’t capture speed quickly enough, and people thought that like you know when horses run they kept their feet on the ground, and Muybridge through a series of experimental photographs, and then an invention called the that he invented was able to show–oh, horses leave the ground when they run. It’s kind of a small aha moment, but you know through that process, he basically invented motion picture capture that you know became the story of California and the story of Hollywood and the story of Silicon Valley, and so yeah, it all kind of traces back to this strange artistic British guy in California.

Jason Dressel  10:56

I love that you and you know what’s interesting about that is I don’t know about you all, but when I think of Muybridge, the only thing I think of is the picture of the horses. So it’s interesting how history often over time, what people actually really accomplished in in really meaningful ways gets completely sort of forgotten or diluted into this, just kind of one sort of iconic, you know, image or innovation, and I know we’ve got a couple of other folks on the list today that I feel like also kind of fall into that bucket.

Nick Hiebert  11:35

Yeah, it was definitely his moment, but he had so many other moments. You know, he like captured a lot of nude motion picture and human studies, and at the time, kind of broke all these conventions for you know Victorian era like buttoned up culture. So, you know, maybe the, those pictures are pretty iconic too.

Jason Dressel  11:57

So, so it seems like we’ve got some, some interesting themes emerging. We’ve got, we’ve got immigrants coming to America and, and being pioneers and innovators. We’ve got a little, a little media and motion picture theme here. Okay, let’s move on. So Ryan, how about you?

Ryan Szarwark  12:20

Yeah. So you know I’ve really always been obsessed with independent creators, like you know on YouTube or you know TikTok that sort of thing. And there’s really something about you just one person kind of sitting in front of a camera, really sharing unfiltered opinions, and you know building this kind of authentic community to rally around that, you know, larger media machines–they really can’t replicate that almost like parasocial relationship, right? And that’s exactly why I chose Gertrude Berg for this campaign. You know, she’s really this kind of the blueprint, the person that set up this sort of style, like individual creator, you know, one to one relationship that we watch today. But she was really pioneering that model almost 100 years ago. So it’s like this isn’t really even really a new thing. This is something that’s been kind of around for a long time. Just a little bit of history for her. You know, before she was this household name, she’s, you know, born in East Harlem. She’s pure blood New York through and through, and her early life was really kind of marked by tragedy. Right, she learned her craft on the ground, writing skits at her at her father’s resort in the Catskills. But you know her true pivot happened during this crisis, where her where her husband worked in this like sugar factory. There’s this huge fire that destroyed it, and you know really kind of threatened the family’s survival. And you know instead of panicking, she really bet on herself. She kind of took that in and used her lived experiences of like writing, you know, at this these skits for her father to write about herself. You know, she was a working-class tenement family. As she pitched it, you know, to this radio show and ended up starring, producing, and writing, you know, “The Goldbergs,” which eventually turned into a television show. So she really took this kind of personal disaster into this multimedia empire and kind of drew it into this big like merchandise, all sorts of things.

Ryan Szarwark  14:29

You know what I why I love her story, of course, is how her model really mirrors the creator economy today. She built this profound trust with her audience. You know, during the show, she’s like leaning outside that you know simp… like you know simulated window of a tenement to pitch a coffee brand or something. It was literally her opinion. It wasn’t a, you know explicit commercial, but it was her pitching what she liked and what she really thought was good to her audience, and really built that trust with them, and she continued to do that through everything else she produced, including you know dresses and cookbooks, all sorts of things. There’s so much, and so it’s like that kind of one voice pioneering, still carrying through today, but just the way the technology shifts things. It’s, it’s this you know the lesson for, for modern enterprise that this has worked for a while and it will in the future.

Jason Dressel  15:31

Who do you kind of associate with her like today or maybe over the last like 30 years in terms of that parallel? Do you see her as like the sort of the pioneer of folks like, like an Oprah or or …

Ryan Szarwark  15:46

Yeah, like kind of that, like that talk show the talk show vibe yeah, but I mean the, the really thing about the personal stuff now is when it isn’t backed by a you know corporate, you know person where it really was built off one person, and there are, they’re like creators and like movie reviewers and music reviewers and stuff that I follow on YouTube and I’ve followed since I was you know a kid basically for just like kind of discovering that and just seeing how they’ve kind of even built up their audiences and stuff is… I was like you know, kind of, w here did this begin? So,.

Jason Dressel  16:25

Almost like a lot of parallels, yeah, with like our current podcast community as well, right? Followers you, you follow and you trust them because of their, because you feel like you have that like personal relationship. So, so let’s go now to Erin. Erin, who do you have for us?

Erin Narloch  16:46

Um, sure. Thanks. Happy to be here. I picked someone who has really captivated my imagination for all of my working career. Her name is Ray Kaiser Eames. You might know her as the partner of Charles Eames, but she, as a figure of history, has been so influential to the way I see the creative process. So, she was you know born in California. She makes her way eventually through time at Cranbrook to New York, where she studies painting with Hans Hofmann, so very important abstract painter of the last century. She studies modern dance with Martha Graham, and you know we think of we think of who she, who she had the opportunity to work with, and ultimately, she was, she was really a collaborator with Charles Eames, her husband. And there’s so much that I can think about that inspires me about who she is. One, this idea that creative practice and design, the honesty in it, and the collaborative spirit of it, she also produced dozens of textile designs, covers of Art and Architecture magazine. She worked on such influential exhibitions like Mathematica by, you know for IBM or the movie the “Powers of Ten,” which I think if you haven’t watched, I encourage everyone to watch the “Powers of Ten” video to help us understand our place in time and space and scale. But there’s something really, I don’t know, joyful about the way she approaches her work and the way she’s moved in so many different areas of creative design practice, like I mean… They collaborated with the, the Navy during World War II to do molded plywood and just really problem solving in a different way, but also joy. Like she, she did a product called the toy with Charles, so just that joyfulness in the Eames office, I think we think of as something that stood out over the last, you know, I don’t know, 80 plus years. So, and I think it there’s something to be said about the you know that good design is timeless. And I had the opportunity to get to know Ray really early in my career when I was working on a mid-century modern furniture exhibition with Herman Miller at the time, and that for me was just a gateway into learning and understanding more about the you know her impact and wanting to be able to talk a little bit more about her because I do think that sometimes she, she’s the “and” and I think that giving her own shine really talks a lot about what it means to be creative in collaboration. 19:20

Jason Dressel  19:56

Yeah, and it’s interesting much like Nick’s portrayal of Muybridge, I feel like Eames is always sort of narrowly defined through a few iconic products, and she certainly was truly a an every woman of creativity and artistry who did so many multidisciplinary things. I think that they even like made films for IBM at some point. I’m curious if you could pick Ray to be the chief creative officer for any brand right now. Who might you who might you pick?

Erin Narloch  20:36

Wow, I that’s a great question. I could see applying her skill set across a variety of different industries, and so maybe that’s what makes it difficult to just choose one, because I think she goes from communications design to product design to whatever it might be. So I don’t know if I have a definitive answer for you, but I could see her making you know an impact in a variety of different industries.

Nick Hiebert  21:13

Yeah, can I, can I just make a comment about Eames? I had no idea this story and her story in particular, but like it, I find it super interesting that, like that spirit of artistry and creativity and like you know collaboration with Martha Graham, the dancer, like all of that feels like it’s captured in the product. You know, I think of like an Eames chair as like very elegant and alternative and artistic, but it’s a chair, right?

Erin Narloch  21:42

And it’s very honest, right? It solves a problem, a problem. Yeah, there is a sense of that, and there’s this magnetism I think if you look at the constellation of creatives she had the opportunity to work with, great friends with Lee Krasner, right? Like partner to Jackson Pollock. Like there’s so many interesting touch points, and I think you know we talk about you know mid-century design as being great, but was it great because of the community that came around the concepts? Was it great because of Cranbrook? Was it great because there were challenge grants with the U.S. government to solve problems, to use materials, I think there’s, a there’s there there’s so much we can look at, kind of at at that time, and probably take forward with us.

Jason Dressel  22:32

Yeah, to that point, it’d be interesting. Back to the idea of my question to like pair her up with like a completely unexpected entity, right? Because of that that approach. So maybe she could just maybe she should have she could have been a great chief creative officer for like America250 as an example. That would have been a great opportunity. All right, where do we go next? Let’s go to Christy.

Christy Bobo  23:01

Alrighty, I’m ready. I’m seeing a clear path to a lot of people’s choices of leadership and giving back in a community, whether that’s a local community or a community of lots of different people. So it makes me feel like I made a good choice. I found a loophole here, and decided if everybody could choose a hero, then I could choose a dynamic duo. I chose a married couple. I chose Miss Terry and Coach Nick Saban, and they’re significant to me because I feel they revolutionized the American sports industry, not just in Alabama, the state that I’m from, but nationwide, and they’re still living, so they’re here and they’re around all the time. I get to see them, and that’s that was another key indicator of why I chose them. I’ve had personal experience with them, but they’ve transformed and revolutionized college football from this traditional pastime into what I see as a multi-billion-dollar corporate engine because they’ve integrated this NFL-style infrastructure, you know, elite executive training, and really an unmatched standard of civic responsibility. They have built everything right here in the state of Alabama, and they’re still in the state of Alabama, giving back day after day. Not just in the state of Alabama, though, because Coach brought in over 30 former assistants who have now become head coaches. And not just that, also his former athletes have gone on. They’ve created their own foundations. They’re giving back in the communities that they’re in as well. And I just feel it’s one of the most successful leadership pipelines in our current day American history. They’ve done something brilliant by taking struggling mid-level managers from other like companies or coaching retreads and upskilled them under this brutal operational standard that spun them off into running our major competitors, and it’s kind of I see it as an industry-wide monopoly on best practices. There’s just a commitment to excellence, and there’s no excuse for anything less than excellence.

Christy Bobo  25:18

One of the funniest things that always makes me laugh about Coach Saban is every single morning he sits down with Miss Terry every morning, h as a cup of coffee and two Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies, and his reasoning behind that is because it takes too much time away from him to make a decision. So we’re gonna have that coffee. We’re gonna have those two Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies. I’m not gonna waste that brain power that I can use on strategy and leadership informing what dynasty I’m gonna go after next. So it’s just that culture of dynasty for me, leaving a legacy, leaving something better than you find it for other people. And I’m enjoying getting to hear everyone else’s choices because I feel that everyone has chosen someone so far who has made something better. They are leaving it better than they found it, and that is really, for me, what I’m passionate about, why I enjoy being in partnership here at History Factory.

Jason Dressel  26:20

That is an awesome choice, and both completely unexpected, but if you know Christy, completely expected. And it’s interesting too, right? Because what you’re sharing is like layers of insight behind these large college sports programs, which, as you say, have turned into you know multi-billion-dollar enterprises, and you know I mean I maybe this has been done before… It’d be really interesting to like see something like Saban’s program like through the lens of like you know like an Acquired podcast, or like a Harvard Business Review case study, or something in terms of like how a lot of those principles are applicable, and I’m sure there’s got to be stuff like that. I just you know personally am not familiar enough with them, but that’s really that’s really interesting. If you could imagine Miss Terry and Coach Saban like running like a Fortune 500 company, what might it be?

Christy Bobo  27:27

And I’m going to have to combine Blackstone and McKinsey and Company. Because they’re coming in and they are defining a process for everyone. They’re changing the world around them and they’re helping other people be great every single day. They’re still doing it. He’s retired from college football. He’s going after changes that need to be made in the NIL right now. Every day, their foundation is still giving back. That’s how, even working at History Factory, I’ve still been in so much contact with them as a local elected official. They helped me, partnered with me, and we built playgrounds. They are still giving back through Habitat for Humanity and building housing for people, and it’s just you know building that ecosystem where the community is and the community incorporation of it all just growing together. So yeah, definitely coming in, finding out where the weaknesses are, strengthening those, and putting it out there to just keep leaving a legacy, but also helping others build their own legacies.

Jason Dressel  28:29

Amazing.

Nick Hiebert  28:31

Yeah, I mean, with the exception of last season, you know, I feel like building that ecosystem of excellence has actually produced a better product, like year in year out, Alabama football is just a masterclass in how you dominate the SEC. And you know you think of it as bigger than football what they built, but it also comes back to football, and you know how they’re able to recruit the best talent, produce the most number of NFL players, you know, all of it.

Christy Bobo  29:04

It’s crazy because you know UA, and that’s where I went to school, and I have this incredible loyalty to UA. But with the over 30 former assistants now coaching at different schools, it’s hard to hate any other team. You know, I want to pull for everybody, especially the ones that I worked with in the past. I want them to win too. I want them to be successful. I want all of the former athletes to be successful because I see the impact that they’re creating in their own communities and they’re building out their own foundations to give back. So it’s very touching how it just keeps growing.

Jason Dressel  29:41

Micah, I’m so sorry. I’m going to ask you to follow that, but Micah, who do you have for us?

Micah Lebowitz  29:49

My hero is true American story, George Carver. He was born into slavery, and then he was freed when Missouri abolished slavery pretty early on in his life, and despite the pretty serious start to his existence, he kept a good sense of humor as he rose in popularity. He kept getting the mail for another George Carver, so he threw in a W, became George W. Carver, and in an offhand comment he made it, he said someone asked him, “What’s the W stand for?” and he’s like, “Washington,” and it stuck, and that’s how he became the second most famous George Washington in U.S. history. As a DC-based organization, I hope we all are pretty familiar with what George Washington, the president, did, but Mr. Carver is often reduced to just being the Peanut Man. And I think it’s interesting because he did a lot more than that, and the reason or two that he resonates with me is, one, education. So he went to school, learned all he could about science. He took that and helped start what’s now a circular economy, taking food waste, taking scraps, making sure that all of the bio offput was then used as fertilizers to maximize crops. The reason he’s known for the peanut is because it’s a legume, which is great for keeping fertile, fresh and growing as much as you can. And he, yeah, always looked for that most direct path for sustainable longevity, which is awesome, and then he realized that wasn’t enough. So, in History Factory fashion, he went on a road show. He started the Jesup wagon, and he made sure to go around to different areas and show the benefits of maximizing that productivity in your field. So, the American or most American thing about him, though, is all of that was for the greater good of maximizing productivity and output. So when you do the right thing from both a sustainability standpoint and from a farming standpoint, he would do side by side studies and see that you got a lot more crops. But then he took that a step farther and was like, well, people need to work the fields. People need to make sure that everything in the states is running, and so with that, he also within his works published a lot of recipes, and so that’s where I think we think of him with peanut butter, but you name it, he’s got recipes for peas, bacon, what have you, making sure that the people who are behind the operations are equally fueled as well, so really interesting guy. Again, always synonymous with the peanut, but has a lot more to him.

Jason Dressel  32:30

Yeah, I mean, you’re absolutely right. Like, I feel like he has been completely diminished in like a caricature that we all learned in elementary school during Black History Month or something, and I had no idea the scope and breadth of the impact and influence that he’s had. So, again, very much like you know some of the other revelations about some of the other figures that folks have highlighted. Now, what about Rod? Rod, we’re going to close it out with you, with someone who I know no one’s ever heard of, but I know you’ve got some different perspectives. So, so who’s your who’s your icon?

Rod Vera  33:11

I chose Steve Jobs, and I know it’s very cliche to choose someone like him, but I didn’t choose him for the reasons that people might think. So, I mean, I’m a designer, and I wasn’t always a designer. I was originally actually pre-med. So when I was… but  I was lucky enough to have a father that really appreciated Apple and what they were doing. So he, I was the only kid that in my whole my whole group of friends and mostly in college that had a computer and I had a Mac. So I I’ve been using a Mac since I was, and I’ve been using a Mac since I was 13. So what I love about Steve Jobs is that he’s not just an entrepreneur; he is an inventor. I mean, that’s really what he was. He brought, he wielded things into existence. He did it, getting the best teams imaginable to help him do it. He didn’t do it on his own. He always valued expertise and getting people that really were obsessed with perfection and doing amazing things. He built these tools, not just they … all did. They built them because they didn’t exist and they wanted them to be in existence and they wanted to be able to use these tools. And he h a d a lot of people around him like that. So I really identified with that young… I was in college, and when I heard ” put a dent in the universe,” that’s probably the first time I realized what my primary objective is in this world. Right. So I think it was a calling for me. It was not… it was what he stood for. It wasn’t exactly what he was doing. You know, when I went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where I studied, I remember one of my professors say something like we here, everybody here, we are what the world looks like. So when everybody, industrial designers, all these different types of designers, we wield things into existence based on solutions and actually with the ultimate goal of making human life better. I mean it’s always to enhance life in general. But I’ll never forget the moment that really made me. I kind of heard about Steve Jobs at this point. I was pretty young. I knew about Macs and Apple and all that, but I didn’t really know a lot about the man behind it. But I remember when I was in design school, there was this poster that was in the hallway, and it just had a huge button on it that looked like it came from a Mac, and it just said “Create” on it, and the whole poster was white for the most part, and then underneath a little Apple logo, a nd it had a statement on the bottom that has never, has completely changed my life. It says, “You were not put on this earth to do what has already been done” and I’ll never forget that moment because that was the moment I realized what I’m what I’m meant to do. But not only that, now I realize what design really is and what it can be. So I was just really struck by that, and it was sort of like a turning point in in my life, honestly. And so the idea of inventing and creating, but also solving while you’re doing that, I thought was just amazing. He really he just inspired me. I mean, I didn’t want to just be a designer. I wanted to be an inventor. I wanted to create things that didn’t exist and amazing things. So that’s kind of why I chose Steve Jobs. I think it’s the spirit of his innovation, and but it’s really the inventor in him is what really appealed to me the most. So yeah, that’ s my little speech.

Jason Dressel  36:14

I love it, and I you know, and one of the things that you highlight that’s consistent with what everyone talks about. One of the consistent themes I think we’re hearing is the cross-disciplinary qualities and attributes of all of these individuals, right? And they, they, they brought you know a sense of artistry with engineering or entrepreneurial spirit or vision and imagination in a lot of different spaces, and you can imagine, you know all of these people could have been successful in so many different endeavors, right? If their world had worked out in just a different way, but one of the unifying themes I think we’re all hearing is that you know all of them are misunderstood a bit and a bit narrowly kind of defined, but they all you know brought these really interesting combinations of experiences and skill sets. So very very cool.

Rod Vera  37:22

And some of this, some of these people, their lives were cut short, and I think Steve Jobs is one of those people that who knows what he could have done. I always wonder if he would have, he would have the Apple car was a product he never got to.

Nick Hiebert  37:33

Yeah, I mean I think about that like cross pollinating, cross disciplinary thing, and I think of like you know what we do for a living here at History Factory. It’s often said like, you know, creative agencies are where artists go to pay their mortgages. But at History Factory, it’s not just like artists and creatives. You know, we also have like project managers and relationship experts and account folks with engineering minds, and I think it’s you know it’s being able to mix it up and to hang out all on a Zoom call with our different personality types and put out a, you know special product.

Erin Narloch  38:13

I think that’s right. That’s where some alchemy exists, right?

Nick Hiebert  38:18

Alchemy.

Erin Narloch  38:19

Yeah.

Jason Dressel  38:21

Well, this is fun, guys! Thank you for joining, and thank you for sharing your insights. I hope everyone enjoyed this very special edition of The History Factory Podcast, and we’ll be back soon. So, thanks, everyone, and happy birthday, America!

Jason Dressel  38:45

That concludes this special episode of The History Factory Podcast. Thank you again to Dario, Tracy, Ryan, Erin, Nick, Christy, Micah and Rod from History Factory. Thank you all again for listening. Take care of one another, and happy 250th birthday, America.