Episode 6: Pascal Weinberger on bringing the "superpower" of automation to everyone

For our sixth episode of Working Smarter we’re talking to Pascal Weinberger, the co-founder and CEO of Bardeen, an AI-powered automation platform. 

Weinberger wants to help people effortlessly automate repetitive tasks in the apps they already use for work—no code required. His hope is that by removing some of the friction that makes it hard for people to do their jobs, they can use the time they save on more rewarding, impactful work.

Hear Weinberger talk about what people are already automating, how automation can benefit teams as much as individuals, and why he doesn't want to build tools that replace us. 

Full episode transcript

When I used to work as a journalist, I filed a lot of requests for public records. Emails, contracts, briefing notes—you name it. By asking governments for these documents, I hoped to better understand the decisions they made and their impact on peoples’ lives. Anyone can do this, by the way—you don’t have to be a journalist—but there’s a bit of a catch: it’s manual, tedious work.

I’d fill the same web forms, over and over—jumping from text file to browser to spreadsheet and back. There was a lot of copying and pasting. Sometimes I’d mail letters, or even send my requests by fax. Fax! 

It didn’t matter that I was brimming with ideas and questions to ask. I could only work as fast as the technology would allow. And the requests I didn’t send? All those records, lost in time—like tears… in rain.

Okay, I’m being a little dramatic. But even if you don’t care about public records, some of this probably sounds familiar. All the time we spend switching between countless apps and tabs. The sheer number of places where data lives. All the hoops we have to jump through to get the answers we need to build that slide deck or spreadsheet or bug report. It’s a lot! 

But this wouldn’t be an episode of Working Smarter if I wasn’t about to tell you: there’s a better way. 

I’m your host Matthew Braga, and on today’s episode we’re talking to Pascal Weinberger, the co-founder and CEO of Bardeen, an AI-powered automation platform. 

With Bardeen, Pascal wants to help people effortlessly automate repetitive tasks in the apps they already use for work—no code required. His hope is that by removing some of the friction that makes it hard for people to do their jobs, they can spend more time on things that have impact, however that looks for you—whether you’re a public records journalist or a security engineer.

That’s coming up next on this episode of Working Smarter.
 

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Pascal, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me, super excited about this one. 
 

I'm so glad you're here. At Dropbox we've been thinking a lot about how work is changing. That's something that we think a lot about on this podcast as well. So I want to start by asking you maybe a bit of a big question. I'm wondering, what do you think is wrong with the way that we work today?

Oh my god, where do I start? That's a big one. So, I don't know about you guys, but I always have, like, 60 tabs open in my browser at any point in time, with a minimum of 40 different logos of all sorts of different apps, right? There's a different specialized SaaS app for about anything we do in our work lives today, which in and of itself is a great thing. They're all really powerful apps. They're really specialized. They solve a really big pain point for customers. And it's kind of what has fueled this SaaS revolution over the last few years. 

Now, as a user of that, I end up finding myself in this situation where I have to juggle work and data and things between all these different apps all the time. And that can be quite frustrating. It leads to a lot of loss of time. It rips me out of context every single time I do it. it feels like I'm the, figuratively speaking, monkey moving data around. And I don't think that's how work is supposed to be. The interesting thing is we've seen this with the web—like, the web as a whole, pre-search engines. If you think back to what search was like pre-search engines, you kind of had to know which website to go to, where you're going to find the data, pull the data from there, synthesize it for your needs, and so on.

Now what you end up doing is you just go to your favorite search engine, ask it the question, and it goes and does all this delegation, basically, of the search for you. And I believe that we will see a very similar transition happen with the “do” part of work. Not the information retrieval part, but the action part of work.

So like, “Hey, send a follow up email to the participants from the last meeting, reminding them to do X.” For me to do that, I have to go into the calendar, find the last meeting, get the email addresses, go into whatever email program I'm using, paste those emails in, write the email, draft it. It's like three or four tab switches every time, copy and pasting around. It's really painful to do. That's kind of the problem we're trying to solve with Bardeen. We're trying to build an action engine that lets you automate things across the web.
 

That was literally going to be my next question. What are you trying to solve then with Bardeen? 

At Bardeen we believe that work should be frictionless. And in order for us to do that, we have to solve this automation and repetitive task friction problem that we all have because of all the, again, context switches, many tabs, many different purpose built tools for every single individual task we do every day. Ultimately, we believe that will unlock a huge amount of human productivity in the workforce. It will make people less frustrated about doing the work that they're doing. So we want to just make this easier, and do it in a way that's really accessible to the end user, right? There's existing automation solutions on the market, but they're mostly built for engineers or operations people that then let them control the automation instead of applying it across an organization. We think that to really drive this change and to really bring automation to the end user, it has to be as easy as using Dropbox is. Everyone has to be able to do it.

With Bardeen, the way we do it is we have these language models that—basically, I can just describe in natural language what it is that I'm trying to automate, and then we will try to understand what the intent is of what you're doing. We will build the automation for you. You can preview it, edit it, and there’s an easy-to-use code builder and all that stuff. And then it's right there in your browser. You hit a shortcut—Option+B— and Bardeen pops open. I think with that we can really make automation accessible to the end user, to the people who are actually doing the work—not the operations people or anything like that. Not to disregard it, it's also super important that they have control over this. But ultimately, enabling the person who actually does the work to automate it, we think that's going to drive major change in the workforce and that's what we're trying to solve for.
 

I want to dig a little bit deeper into what we're actually automating here. There’s all of these different tabs, these different apps and services and pieces of software, that we're using on a day-to-day basis. What are some of the specific tasks or actions that you can use Bardeen to automate? Both within those tools, but even across those different tools?

Yeah, that's a great question. We see the biggest value of these automation tools in the cross-platform workflows. Every platform kind of has a little bit of automation built-in these days. So if all you're looking to do is automate things within Dropbox, Dropbox has great ways to do that. But the truth is, most people use multiple different tools, so the value of what we're focusing on is cross platform. 

It really depends on what it is that you're doing. Let's just take sales as an example. If I'm a salesperson, I'm scouring LinkedIn all day long to find prospects. I see Matthew at Dropbox is a great person I want to sell my product to. Now what happens is I copy and paste some of your relevant information into my CRM system. Then I will try to draft a personalized outreach message based on some information on your profile. I go to my email and take the template message, personalize it, find your email address using some sort of third-party lookup tool, and then copy and paste all this data together and send that email. That takes me 5, 10, 15 minutes, depending on the complexity, every time I do this. And again, if I work in sales, this is a vast majority of my time. 

With Bardeen, you can do this in a single click. So you're on the LinkedIn profile of a person—say, Matt, that you want to reach out to—and you have a pre-built automation. All the backend copy and pasting and drafting the outreach email and all that stuff's taken care of for you by Bardeen. And again, it really saves a lot of time. 

So that's one example. There's many, many more. I use Bardeen personally. We use it across the team, from accounting to product management, just for personal productivity, meetings, reminders, follow-up scheduling, sharing things in meetings. Sales is a big one. Research is a big one. All these different workflows you can automate. There's a lot of power in everything that looks like prospecting. Whether that's for sales or for recruiting workflows, time equals money. The better I do it, the faster I do it, the more productive I am. But there's also a lot of stuff around just general task automation.
 

You sort of answered this a little bit, but who is the audience for what you're building? You mentioned sales as being a big role, but what other kind of roles or jobs are we talking about here in terms of who Bardeen can help?

For us, in terms of audience, we really focus on the people who are actually doing the work. So it's those frontline workers, if you will, in those roles that are highly repetitive and usually very output performance driven. That is sales, recruiting, project management, C-level executives, founders, agency owners and, to some extent, product managers or project managers that have to juggle a lot of different tools and tasks across things.

There's also a long tail of what we call personal productivity. That's just like the little annoying tasks we all have to do every day. So, you know, I get an invoice in my email and I need it to be saved in a specific Dropbox folder and added to a Google Sheet for accounting or something like that. But I'm not really working in accounting. That’s just something that, as a founder, I have to take care of it. Or even as an individual, for reimbursement I have to take care of it. 

So there's a very wide array of this long tail of personal productivity workflows. Your imagination is the limit of what you can automate. We've seen people do all sorts of things that we haven't expected. 
 

Like what? 

We had some fun ones—for example, teachers that were preparing history homework or something, they want to have some snippets from a website that they're getting sources from. They highlight that snippet, then it automatically gets copied into a Notion database along with the timestamp and the URL of where it was accessed. And then that gives a very easy way to, with a single click, maintain your references and so on.
 

Why is this something that's important to you? Why is this a challenge that you feel passionate about solving? 

My background is in machine learning and computer vision. I was always drawn to this idea of automation just because, like any engineer or machine learning engineer, you kind of inherently grew up with this idea of writing shell scripts and writing little shortcuts for every little thing you do. Whether it's training a model or uploading some stuff, you probably have some shell script for that—like, one job scheduled that will take care of it automatically for you.

As I progressed into a more founder/leadership role, I really missed this opportunity to automate stuff. I had this experience where I had to recruit a bunch of people for a company I was working at. Again, I just found myself manually copying and pasting data from LinkedIn and GitHub and other sources that we were using for lead gen into various databases, and then reaching out to recruiters with a little note of why I think that person is interesting. And then they would draft an outreach email for me, which—this is already half-automated, right? But I would have needed to do that myself otherwise. 

I tried to hack together my own little Chrome extension to do that, where I just click the Chrome extension, and it would do it for me. And then over time I realized that there's many, many more automation sectors, and as I shared this with the team, people kept asking me to build Chrome extensions for them to automate little tasks. And at that point, I realized that I obviously can't scale building a million different Chrome extensions. But as I talked about this with my co-founder, who had a very similar experience himself leading an engineering team, we saw a big gap in the market.

On one side you have these If This Then That-style automation tools. Those are the cloud-based, trigger-based automation tools—Zapier being the most famous one, but there's hundreds of others. And then on the other side you have this really powerful, but fairly inaccessible robotic process automation (RPA) universe—UiPath automation and all those types of things. They're very powerful tools. Fortune 500 companies use them, but even there they come along with an army of consultants to implement a solution for them. It's a very top-down approach, and not really helping the end user do much. And there's also a lot of resistance in those adoptions. So we saw this opportunity in the middle for something that combines the best of both worlds and makes it really accessible to end users. I believe there's a huge opportunity in unlocking productivity across the board. 

The reason I think this is an important project to work on is because ultimately, if you think about it, and this might sound like a bold claim, but if you can make every person at least 10 percent more productive—and I'm 100 percent convinced that everyone can shave off 10 percent of their time by automating some of the repetitive, annoying work they're doing—now you've made human productivity 10 percent more productive. Think about all the things people can achieve if you give people 10 percent of their time back.
 

That's one of the things that I think you often hear about AI tools—how they have this potential to take on the repetitive and the boring tasks and the drudge work off our plates. I’m wondering, more generally—like, for the average Bardeen user—what do you hope that automating some of their tasks will free them up to do more of instead? 

I think these are really individual answers. There's one element to it that’s like, okay, you have more time to do other things. Most people will just end up doing more work, right? We live in a very performance-oriented society, especially in this market environment. Everyone's looking to do more with less. Every founder and company at scale-up I talk to, they're looking to increase their average revenue per employee. It's a big metric people are talking about right now.

However, obviously there's also this element of just removing annoyance from your workflows. One part is being more productive, but usually these highly repetitive workflows, that's the thing that isn't fun. As a founder, I love having engineering discussions, product design discussions, talking to users, understanding their needs. Yet I have to do all these things like recruiting people, accounting, this, that—and that's not usually what I get my energy doing. If I can spend as little time as possible doing that because I automated most of it, I can be a much more productive founder myself, because I have more time and energy to do the things that actually matter and move the needle. And I think that's true for everyone in every role. 

Obviously there's also the other part. You're happy with your output and you just want to spend more time with family or doing sports or whatever else you want to do. Again, it’s very individualistic what people end up doing with their time.
 

You've danced around this a little bit, but I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit more about how you've been using Bardeen in your day to day work?

I mean, I'm obviously very biased, right? Basically every single task I do I think, “Okay, is this something I can automate?” But the thing I actually find a lot of value from is recruiting, for example. There's a lot of stuff with doing personalized outreach. We do a lot of hiring from LinkedIn, being the obvious example, but we also do it from GitHub. We look at open source projects that are adjacent to our space with the same expertise profiles and so on. And then I try to figure out like, “Okay, who are the people who contributed to this? And how can I best reach out to them in an automated way so that it doesn't take me two hours to do it every time?” 

Another big thing for me is handling a lot of the admin work that is involved in running a smallish startup company. So a lot of the day-to-day burden with these types of mundane tasks, they're still on us, the founding team. So we automate a lot of it. If I get an invoice, it will automatically trigger emails to our accounting team to forward the invoice. 

There's also some really cool recent functionality that we're adding—for example, for research. Every day there's a new company popping up, or new things popping up, and we have some really cool automations now with AI agents that you can use in Bardeen that will go and find out a lot of information about something. Say I wanted to research Dropbox. What are the reviews? What are people saying about Dropbox? I would want to look at your website’s about page and get a summary of that. I would want to look at your founding team on LinkedIn, all that kind of stuff. Just that research project would take me an hour, maybe two hours to do and find all that information. Or I build this once, and now I have a research bot that always goes to the same sources and I just type the name of the company. It'll pull all that information for me and write me a nice, summarized research report, almost like a junior analyst-type work product. They would spend a few days doing this. But with Bardeen I can actually build a really powerful automation to do that. 

Those are just some examples. I could go on for hours about it.
 

I love that. You have me wondering—have you or your customers been able to quantify some of those savings? Can you put a number on number of hours saved, amount of money saved, things of that nature?

Again, it really depends on the person and the use case. Having said that, one thing that we do in the product is we actually track—so this is a very guesstimate or pseudo-scientific approach, but every action that you do within Bardeen, we have a very rough estimate as to how much time that saves you. So for example, uploading a file to Dropbox I think we say is like 30 seconds. You have to open Dropbox, find the right folder, wait for it to load, drag and drop the file or select it. And then as you use these things in aggregate—so you might have an automation that takes the current page, downloads a PDF of the current page, uploads it to Dropbox, and then figures out who are the web participants in the meeting I'm in right now so I can share a screenshot of the product description I'm looking at right now with everyone here on this call, like it goes through my calendar, pulls that—each of these things saves, say, 20, 30, 40, 50 seconds each step. Across the whole playbook you just add that together and then you multiply by the times I run this, and this gives us a very rough estimate of what we call time saved that people can see in their account. 

Now as we're pushing more into teams or wide enterprise adoption, that’s a big part of the value proposition of how we communicate value to users. It's something that we're trying to be very vocal about. It's ultimately also a big north star metric that, for us as a team, we're optimizing both for overall aggregate time saved across all user bases, but also average time saved for each user. Because that obviously is, I think, the biggest driver for value creation for us.
 

I'm glad that you mentioned teams a second ago, because while I think I have a pretty good sense of how a tool like Bardeen can have an impact on an individual level—I'm already thinking of automations that I could use to improve the way that I do my job—what are the implications here for teams more broadly? How do the benefits of automation trickle down or trickle outwards into the organization at large?

We've seen this a lot with our early user base. We’ve scaled to about 250, 000 users now, and we had a lot of requests from people that were like, “Hey, I built this automation in my Bardeen account, but I have these six colleagues on my team. They essentially do the same thing I'm doing every day. I want to share this with them.” We created this sharing flow that basically would allow you to share a single instance of an automation. But that created this whole mess where people were creating Google Docs where they were like, “Okay, for this process, here's the video description of how you can use this. And here's the link to the automation.” And then they would almost create, like, a standard operating procedure-type document of how you run your processes in a team or company. 

That obviously created this need for an actual teams experience. It’s similar to a shared Dropbox folder. I have my own Dropbox folder that I have my personal stuff in, but then I have my team Dropbox folder that has all the things that my team needs access to and where I can collaborate. Very similar, you can think about the Bardeen teams version—or Bardeen for Business, as we call it—which basically allows me to have my own private space for the things that I individually need to automate. But then you would simply drop it into this team space, and similar to a Dropbox shared folder, everyone in the team would have access to the same automation. And it would create this almost standard operating procedure that's encoded into the automations across a whole team or organization that we see a lot of value from.
 

So with Bardeen you have these pre-made automations, but people can also create new automations with natural language. You just describe what you want Bardeen to do almost as if you were asking a colleague for help over Zoom, and Bardeen can construct that for you. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit on how that actually works in practice? How can you create automations that way?

So we use these language technologies, using large pre-trained transformer models in the background, and a lot of tooling and semantics. And we have our own programming language, if you will—it’s a domain specific language that we call Bardeen command language, or BCL—that underlies the whole product.

As you describe a workflow, I would just write in natural language, like, “Send the current page of this PDF to the participants of the ongoing meeting.” Then, what we call Magic Box—so, the language model—would basically understand the intent behind what I'm doing. It would also understand the context in which I am—like, what are the integrations I have enabled? What is the tool I typically use for sharing stuff? What's the calendar I use that it needs to go and look up? So across that whole board. Then the language model builds the prebuilt automation for me on the fly and reflects it to me in this no-code builder. You see a preview of what it will do, like step-by-step, and I can go in and correct it.

I can say, like, “Oh no, not this, use this tool instead of that.” Or like, “You misunderstood something” or something like that. You can iterate on it, and then once you're happy with the workflow, you save it as a prebuilt automation. And next time you need to do the same thing, you don't need to go through this whole flow again. Just click the button and you're done. So that's the flow that people go through, and we think it's very powerful.

You can also do this with the no-code builder. It’s a very standard automation builder, the way you would expect. You have these building blocks, and you can drag and drop them around and connect them with each other. But what we saw there is people actually struggle with this blank canvas problem, right? For me to build this workflow, I have to almost think like an engineer. And for technical people this is very easy to do, but for your average sales rep or accountant, they're not necessarily trained to think like this, or they just don't have the time to deal with it, frankly. They're just like, “I just want this done quickly. Here's what I need to do. Do it for me.” This whole build-from-scratch experience is pretty challenging, so you want to pre-build as much as you can. Either you have fully pre-built automations, or you take a language description and use that to create a pre-built automation that I can then refine as I need to. 
 

How has that resonated with users? The fact that they can create those automations with natural language—you know, no code necessary.

I think it's a big selling point for us these days. Again, for us, the way we think about it is we want to bring automation to everyone. Ultimately where we're working towards is really automating the full end-to-end automation experience. It’s kind of funny, like automating automations. But if you think about it, for you to automate something, three things need to happen. First, you have to identify that what you're doing is automatable. A lot of people don't even do that. I've done this for 20 years maybe, and I might not even fully recognize that what I'm doing is even automatable. Next I need to build it. The current solutions are pretty hard, technically. I usually want to talk to an engineer or some consultant to help me with it, which creates a huge amount of friction. And then the third thing is, I have to actually run it. Most existing solutions are pretty hard and not super accessible, where I have to go to a separate tab, I have to deal with all this authentication stuff and so on. 

Ultimately what we're trying to do is solve for all three of these things. We already have, I think, one of the easiest ways to actually run the automation. Now, through this language interface, we have a very easy way of building the automation. And thirdly, what we're working on now is actually identifying the automations. We're rolling this out now as we speak to a small number of testing users, but the idea essentially is that because we're in the browser, we can see and detect repetitive workflows that you're doing. We do this in a very—it's privacy preserving, but essentially how it will work is it will look at the things that you're doing. Say, for example, I'm switching tabs from LinkedIn to Google sheets all the time and my clipboard content changes. That probably means I'm copying and pasting data from one website into Google sheets. With that example, it would identify what you're doing and suggest a prebuilt automation or build it for you on the fly. And with that, you really close the loop. With that, you identify, build, and automate on the user’s behalf, which really makes this accessible to everyone.
 

I know at Dropbox we often talk about AI as being like this silicon brain—something augmentative, assistive. You know, we're not trying to replace people with our tools. I'm wondering what kind of frame you use to think about Bardeen? 

I think this is something that, also on a philosophical and human level, I spend a lot of time thinking about. We don't want to build bots to replace people. The whole product positioning and the way the product works is it makes you superhuman. You're still in the driving seat. You’re still the person doing the work. You're still orchestrating, and actually also building the automation. So the way we think about it is, if anything, we give more power to the end user, the knowledge worker, frontline worker, however you want to call it to, to be more productive themselves without having to wait for senior management to implement some RPA solution that will then ultimately try to replace them.

Obviously, as you automate more things, there is a certain risk—and definitely something that we as society have to think and talk about—that comes with: now that maybe one person can do the work of two, do I still need that big of a team? There's still this discussion. Ultimately we believe— any company I know I talk to, they want to grow, they want to be more productive, they want to have more output. So I don't see a huge risk there over time. But there will be certain periods where just the fact that people can automate will lead inevitably to savings and overhead reductions and so on. But longterm we want this to be something that empowers the end user and helps people.
 

What are you looking forward to next in the future—both for Bardeen but also for where AI technology and machine learning is heading? 

That's a good question. I think I'm generally what people would call a techno-optimist. I always see the positive in technological development. I think for Bardeen, one thing we're really at the beginning of, which I'm really excited about, is just the scale-up journey. Similar to Dropbox, you built the initial version of the product and then you got it rolled out to hundreds of millions of people. And we're kind of at the very early stages of that. 

I think we built a very powerful piece of technology. We understand that people get value from it. There's some really exciting stuff we're doing. I want to learn what to automate for people based on their behavior, and really close the full loop for the whole automation journey. That's something that I think will be a huge unlock for the automation industry in general, bringing the superpower of automation to everyone. So for Bardeen, those are the things I'm most excited about.

And then AI in general, I'm excited about new application fields there. One is the medical and gene sciences space. There's already a bunch of companies working on this that are starting to show some promising results, that friends of mine are working on, that are now learning to speak the language of life itself. That means genetics and proteomics and all the different levels of interactions that genes and molecules have in our body, and understanding biology at a very deep level. And I think that will become an amazing tool at solving cancer diseases, autoimmune diseases, and so on—anything that's, basically, something wrong within our body and interactions within the body that we can then solve much faster than with historical experimentation methods. That's one thing that personally I'm really excited about. 

The same thing is true for material sciences and other things like that. I think there's this big need for better and more sustainable power sources in the world, which ultimately boils down, to in a lot of aspects, a material science problem and a physical simulation problem—both of which are things that AI models are getting really, really good at. So it's this acceleration force in a lot of these big fields that I think is super exciting. 

And then I think the most exciting thing about this is that, probably if you listen to this a year from now, you'll be like, “Oh, this is so wrong.” Like, the most unexpected change happened and no one saw that coming. I think that, to me, is the coolest part about it.
 

Optimistically, we've been saying to people that we hope this podcast is something that people will want to listen to a year from now. But increasingly, to your point, it may not be relevant anymore.

It's hard to predict—although actually, that might make it more fun. I like to look at the stats of people in the ‘80s. People were asked to predict a lot of things, like when will AI solve self driving cars, or language, or this and that—and they were so terribly wrong. Famously, humans are horrible at predicting the very long term. We always overestimate change in the very long term, but we usually underestimate change in the short term.

We always think about how, in the 1950s, they were like, “Oh, the future in 2000 will be so crazy with flying cars and all this crazy stuff.” But we still have all these diseases and all these other things that actually changed drastically that people didn't think about—like lifespan, life expectancy, and healthcare and all these things. So I think, yeah, that's exciting to me.
 

That's a good spot to leave it. Pascal, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a lot of fun. 

Thank you so much, Matthew. It was really fun being on the show. Great conversation.
 

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So I’m actually a little annoyed. Not by anything Pascal had to say, but because I actually did try automating my public records requests a few years ago. And it didn't go well.

In fact, it went nothing like Pascal described. The technology was just not there. But if I was still filing those requests today? I know exactly what I would use. 

We’ve talked about a lot of AI uses cases on this show, but I especially like the idea of AI as a sort of glue for the pieces of your digital life. As a tool that can take the apps and tabs and documents you need, and stick them together in one place—all on its own. Something that doesn’t try to change the way you work, but learns how you work, and then works alongside you.

Even when a government fax machine is working against you. 

If you want to learn more about Bardeen, you can visit Bardeen.ai

Working Smarter is brought to you by Dropbox. We make AI-powered tools that help knowledge workers get things done, no matter how or where they work. 

You can listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can also find more interviews on our website, workingsmarter.ai

This show would not be possible without the talented team at Cosmic Standard: Our producers Samiah Adams and Aja Simpson, our technical director Jacob Winik, and our executive producer Eliza Smith. 

At Dropbox, special thanks to Benjy Baptiste for production assistance and our illustrators Fanny Luor and Justin Tran. 

Our theme song was created by Doug Stuart. 

And I’m your host, Matthew Braga. Thanks for listening.

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This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.