Announcer: 0:00

The following programming is sponsored by Marc J. Bernstein. The Views express does not necessarily reflect the view statistication. It's management for Facebook Media Group. Entrepreneur, Founders also, and financial advisor. Marc Bernstein helps high-performing business owners to their business reality through its innovative form and the forward-focused format entrepreneurs to resources that fuel their success. Founders Forum is a radio show and podcast where entrepreneurs check their journeys, revealing the lessons they've learned and the stories behind their success. Join markets for a mix of inspiration, valuable insights, and a little fun. Now let's dive in.

Marc Bernstein: 0:40

Good morning, America. How are you? We are here on a beautiful sunny day in Philadelphia. It's the day after election day. Had some changes in the trade winds of politics, I guess, in the country, but we're not going to get into we don't talk about politics much here. But I've been listening, listening to radio and watching TV about the I like POTUS on Sirius XM. I listen to the what's going on in politics. And it brings up something I've been thinking about the last couple of weeks. And we we have in the studio Matt and Vera. Vera, you've met before. Matt is new. I'll introduce him formally in a few minutes. But I've been thinking, guys, about um what influences me in a good way and what and in a bad way, and what I want to influence me and what I don't want to influence me. I'll give you an example. There was a time that I was most influenced by the books I read. But I've been really busy, haven't been reading as many books, and I find that I'm being more influenced by things around me. I won't get into my stuff, but I'm curious, I'm gonna ask Vera first. And by the way, this is Vera Hempel.

Vera Hempel: 1:45

Good morning.

Marc Bernstein: 1:46

Good morning. And um tell everyone what you do in a s in a s in a quick second.

Vera Hempel: 1:51

My name is Vera Hempel, and I am the co-founder of a user experience consultancy called Cactus Culp Creative. Um we are also developing a product called KissUX, helping aging adults navigate user interfaces more securely and more confidently to make sure they stay safe and they can participate in the in the online world.

Marc Bernstein: 2:12

And Vera is a future podcaster. I I'm teasing her on the Founders Forum Network, I hope, because she has an organization called Hungry Founders for um for startups, and it would be a perfect vehicle um to have podcasts and to connect people that way. So what do you think about what influences you?

Vera Hempel: 2:35

Well, you know, when you asked me that question a couple minutes ago, I was thinking and I was gonna say something profound like my daughter and my relationships, but to be honest, I think it's my mood and if I have eaten or not. Ah and you just have to ask my co-founder Kuba.

Marc Bernstein: 2:52

Right.

Vera Hempel: 2:53

Because if I haven't eaten breakfast, I am usually not in a good mood. And I think that is definitely a big influencer of mine.

Marc Bernstein: 3:03

Well, that shows some self-awareness. That's a good thing.

Vera Hempel: 3:06

For sure.

Marc Bernstein: 3:06

And maybe you haven't had your coffee. No, I'm just gonna let you know.

Vera Hempel: 3:10

Today I have had coffee.

Marc Bernstein: 3:11

Okay, we're we're moving into Matt territory, so and you'll you'll understand that in a minute. How about you, Matt? What what influences you that you notice?

Matt Ramsay: 3:19

Oh, I've uh I've had these this core group of friends for about 20 years. And I've been married for almost 20 years, all these folks I met in college, and uh we live life together. So that that's number one is these relationships around me that we built a life together. Nice we meet every week, we go on vacations together, we live life, we're building houses together. You know, this core of people is it's partly who I am.

Marc Bernstein: 3:42

It's like your community within a community. That's right. That's very cool, or your fam the family you pick.

Matt Ramsay: 3:47

Yeah, that's right, yeah.

Marc Bernstein: 3:48

As well. Very nice. All right, so let's introduce Matt. Matt is Matt Ramsey, he's uh a founder and co-owner of Denham Coffee, and uh he's a former college minister, which is part of his story, who along with his wife Kristen and business partner Tony Deal, say Deal? That's right, uh, has built a coffee. I actually met Tony online first before I met Matt. He's built a coffee roasting business, a bakery, and seven coffee shops across central Pennsylvania. And by the way, thank you for coming to out to Balakinwood to do this today. Oh, yeah, excited to be here. And currently building their eighth location, and where's that going to be? Harrisburg again. Harrisburg, good. And Denham help also helps new coffee shops open and is also uniquely bringing flash-chilled coffee to the market, which we'll get to. And Matt cares about justice, great coffee, and hospitality. And the motto, their motto is, and I have to say, I'm I'm I'm I am ignorant on this because I'm not a coffee drinker. Oh no. I know. It's bad. Well, thanks for having me. And I'm not I'm mad because I I I think I'm fascinated by the coffee business. I've told you my daughter's in the coffee business. I just I never acquired the taste. That's all.

Matt Ramsay: 5:01

There's still time, Marc.

Marc Bernstein: 5:02

There's still time you work on me. But anyway, and maybe because his motto, as I was going to say, is make better coffee. So maybe that'll do it. That's right. That's right. There we go. So, Matt, let's talk about your story and how you went from being a college minister um and got into the coffee business.

Matt Ramsay: 5:20

Yeah, great. Uh thanks for having me. Yeah, first of all.

Marc Bernstein: 5:23

Our pleasure. Yeah.

Matt Ramsay: 5:24

Um Yeah, so we started, uh I I was in college, I was working. My first uh coffee job was on a college campus. And I loved making drinks. Now the coffee was terrible. It was really, really bad. Uh, but I loved making drinks. I did that for three years, and students would come in late at night.

Marc Bernstein: 5:39

You knew then that the coffee was bad.

Matt Ramsay: 5:41

Oh yeah, you could tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But uh I love making the drinks, and the students would come in, and for some reason this coffee shop was open until 1 a.m. in the morning, and students would come in alone. So I'd tell the baristas a story often. They'd come in, one student would come in at 11 at night on a Thursday and say, uh, can you make me a smoothie? And I'd say, Well, why is that student there? They're there for a smoothie, you know, of course, but but then they sit down at a table. Why? Well, uh over 40% of college students are uh lonely, extremely lonely. That that happens in college.

Marc Bernstein: 6:13

Even more so now, I think thanks.

Matt Ramsay: 6:15

Yeah, it could be higher, yeah. That was a step from a while ago. Uh, you know, so they're not there just for the coffee, not just there for a smoothie. They're there to be a part of a community somewhere. They're in their dorm room alone. They're trying to get out somewhere. And so I tell the baristas, this might be the only moment that person has in a day, in a hard day, that and they're interacting. Don't make it a transaction. You know, don't make it a okay, here's your smoothie, here's take the money. Take a moment. And I would do that with students for three years and realize that, hey, coffee's a gateway to relationship building and that kind of stuff. And so it might be a a single parent coming in, might be the only interaction with an an adult in the day. Let's make it nice, you know. It might be a break from work, and work is hard. We all know. Might be a break from work, make it nice, you know. And so coffee is fantastic on its own, but it's also this gateway to building a community.

Marc Bernstein: 7:05

By the way, in business, I'll tell say people, hey, let's grab coffee together. Yeah. Of course, I don't drink it, but what do you get? I get my matcha tea. Oh no. You don't serve matcha, do you?

Matt Ramsay: 7:15

I have a thing against matcha.

Marc Bernstein: 7:16

I'll get I'll tell you what, I'll try your coffee if you start if you start bringing a matcha into your store. I'm the gonna decline. There we go. It's okay. It's all right. Um I'll have to go to to get it then. Oh no. Anyway. Um anyway, so okay, so you uh you made an observation about coffee as a gateway. Then how'd you get started?

Matt Ramsay: 7:40

Yeah. So we uh I was a minister, you know, right out of college. I I I knew that these are critical years that people are deciding what they're gonna do with their life. I got married in college. I met my best friends in college, and I discovered purpose, you know, what I wanted to do. And so I knew uh working with young students. Where did you go to college, by the way? Shippensburg University, almost go ship.

Marc Bernstein: 7:59

Nice Pennsylvania State University. It's fantastic.

Matt Ramsay: 8:02

So uh you know, I knew that was critical. And and so my first job was a co-op. It was Ministry and Coffee in Huntington, Pennsylvania with Junietta College, Standing Stone Coffee Company. Uh, I was there for the first year to open. And I loved it. We'd serve coffee, we'd also meet students, and we'd talk about the big questions. You know, why are we here? Yep. Why do we exist at all? What's our purpose and mission? And it's great to do that over a cup of coffee. That's the best way to do it, or matcha, I guess.

Marc Bernstein: 8:27

You know, but thank you for that.

Matt Ramsay: 8:29

But uh I, you know, I really enjoyed that kind of co-op thing. And so uh after two years, I moved back to Shippensburg University with my community. Uh and I wanted to do ministry full-time, but I could only go part-time. So I had this other part-time I had I had available, and and so I uh thought I could roast coffee like I had in Huntington. We applied for a loan for the roaster. I went to 40 banks. It was like 40 asks. I got shot down 39 times. Um, and then a community co-op, you know, did half with a bank and they split the risk. And uh, we had no rights to uh a loan at that point. I was 25 with one car, you know. Um but uh yeah, they took a risk on us. We opened uh the roastery with no clients. We almost went bankrupt immediately, and uh we just had to grow and struggle and hustle to get uh to a three-year point where we could actually break even.

Vera Hempel: 9:21

It's really interesting because you were talking about loneliness and people trying to build community at coffee shops. So was that the core problem that you saw that made you start your business? And if there's you know more to it, um, why did you start with a roastery and what led you to opening that community space, which is a coffee shop in the end?

Matt Ramsay: 9:44

Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, what what motivated me to get into coffee? Well, A, I saw that that need in our community, our side of the world is uh coffee is one of these third spaces, you know. If work and home are your primary realms, you know, what are the third spaces? We used to have bowling leagues and softball leagues, and we used to have all these places where people could congregate outside of work and home. And now the digital space has taken that over. We don't have softball leagues anymore so much. We don't have these uh even churches and and religious worship, like those those attendances are are down. So where do you meet people that aren't like you and look like you and talk like you and think like you? Coffee is a great third space, right? Uh so I was motivated by that. I saw arts and music and coffee. You can do all these different, I'm a jack of all trades kind of guy. I like being lost, and I thought coffee could be a gateway there. But but also uh here's a quote. The m this is thorough, ready? The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Ugh. You know, and and uh in college, you're the people aren't there yet, they're not worn out yet. You know, they got all the potential, but but still you look at work, you know, you look at people just struggling to get by. Uh th that question always plagued me was well, what's the work for? What are we working towards? Is it just a paycheck or is there something more beyond that? You know, that question uh drove me in coffee to the justice issues around workers on the other side of the planet growing the coffee and getting pennies on the dollar in the profit share, uh, just not making enough. And so there's justice there, there's ecological issues across the planet, how we grow coffee, produce coffee, ship coffee, how we serve coffee here in the States. Uh all single-use cups almost primarily.

Marc Bernstein: 11:23

Sustainability issues.

Matt Ramsay: 11:24

Sustainability. So there's all these there's all these issues in coffee. And you know, one of the questions we'd ask students is, well, what's wrong with the world? Right? And here's the funny thing. In campus ministry, I did 13 years of ministries. This is this is a lot of asking big questions of people. I'd ask the question, I'd stand out there and say, What's wrong with the world? And the the funny thing is, no one ever came up to me and said nothing.

Speaker 4: 11:47

Right.

Matt Ramsay: 11:48

We all know there's something wrong in the world. Uh you know, we can we can debate about what is wrong in the world, but we don't know there's something wrong. And that that's a core so for me, what is wrong with coffee, injustice farmers, ecological issues, how we serve it, the fact that our communities aren't you know more united, those are all issues I was like, uh, if you get angry about that stuff, you could put a lifetime into it.

Marc Bernstein: 12:12

I think what you're doing is unique. On the other hand, you do see more and more coffee shops and and also some you know uh bars and places of entertainment that are built around social justice and community. It seems to be a trend which I see as a real positive thing for the world that that that that we're headed in that direction. Um so you got in we we we heard about the loan issue. That was your first big challenge. After that, it's been a smooth ride building the business, right? Oh, it's been easy street. Yeah.

Matt Ramsay: 12:42

We got the loans, it's been fantastic.

Marc Bernstein: 12:44

Easy. So so tell us about some of the other challenges you've had and from that beginning, what what strengths you've developed to handle those.

Matt Ramsay: 12:53

Great, great, great. Yeah, the the company that supplied our first roaster went bankrupt after 17 years in in the industry. They went bankrupt on that first deal and they shipped us half a roaster.

unknown: 13:02

Right.

Matt Ramsay: 13:02

So we we had to get the other half. And uh so before we even started, I I took a long walk with my wife. I took a long shower alone and just meditated on can we can we keep going or should we sell the other half and just just you know cut the loss.

unknown: 13:16

Right.

Matt Ramsay: 13:16

And we ultimately decided to keep going, obviously. Uh but right up front there was this uh, you know, not everyone's gonna keep their word, you know, and you're gonna have to live with that and keep going. Um and uh we got burnt a few times along the way with people who didn't keep up their end of the bargains. So you learn, oh get a contract, you know, it's just simple, you know, simple things. Just but uh uh it was like that at every step of the way. I'm not I don't have a business background. I I had to learn from the school hard knocks and just make a lot of mistakes. And so the struggles have been mistake after mistake after mistake, and then uh learn from it and make a policy or you know, improve. And and I'm still I I feel like I'll be doing that the rest of my life.

Marc Bernstein: 13:54

You we only have about a minute till break, but um just tell us a little bit about how the company's advanced because now you have you're working on your eighth location, you're doing a lot of wholesale business, you're big into um the cold coffee business. Yeah. So we could talk about that. So just give us a kind of overview of the things you've done before the break.

Matt Ramsay: 14:12

Great. We've been doing wholesale coffee since we got started. That was we didn't have our own coffee shop, so we were supplying to other uh cafes. Uh and then uh we opened our own shops. Tony, my business partner came on, Tony Dio. He's fantastic. Everything you see online is Tony Dio, he's amazing. Uh so we opened up coffee shops together and we've been uh working on this eighth shop in Harrisburg. But Flash Show is really unique. Flash Show is we we brew coffee hot and we chill it to fridge temps within 30 seconds. That's very different from cold brew, which is typically brewed over 20 hours at room temperature. You get very different products when you brew them differently. Almost no one on the planet does flash chill coffee. It's too labor intensive, it's difficult. Uh, but the results, it's a better cup of coffee cold. And so we uh there's a reason no one does it, it's very difficult, but we've been really trying to uh lean into that. And uh we have a distribution network in in five states now where people can order kegs of coffee through our distributor, which is Odeco, and serve coffee at their office. You know, you could have an ice cream shop and pull it off a tap, and now you can pull it hot uh from the same keg. So we have a little superheater. So you can keep this keg cold and pull cold and hot coffee from the same tap. So you heat it back up after you got it.

Marc Bernstein: 15:26

And that's that's innovative, right? I mean, that's a big innovation in the coffee industry.

Matt Ramsay: 15:30

Yeah, yeah, this could work well well for a lot of different places, especially if you don't want to brew batches of coffee all day. You can just pull one cup at a time whenever you need it.

Marc Bernstein: 15:37

Amazing. Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back on Founders Forum.

Announcer: 15:41

Tired of serving coffee that doesn’t match the quality of your menu? At Denim Coffee, we help restaurants, cafés, and shops across Pennsylvania serve exceptional, specialty coffee without the waste, hassle, or guesswork. Whether it's flash-chilled kegs that pour hot or cold coffee on demand or a full-service coffee bar, we offer training, equipment discounts, and expert roasting-- all to make it easy to elevate your coffee program.... and your profits. Visit DenimCoffeeCompany.com/wholesale today and serve coffee that’s worth talking about. Denim Coffee--- Make Better Coffee.

Marc Bernstein: 16:15

We're back on Founders Forum with our guests today, Matt Ramsey and Vera Hempels with me in the studio today as co-host. Rutt nice to have you here. And um so all these things are happening in the business. You've got how many employees do you have today? Well, about 80. About eighty, yeah, it's quite a thing. Mostly part-time, I assume.

Matt Ramsay: 16:35

Yeah, yeah, a lot of young folks part-time doing multiple things.

Marc Bernstein: 16:38

And with all these things going on, obviously there's a culture to this because your your business is about culture. What tell us about the culture of your company and how you're trying to develop that and how you do that with part-time people that are spread out all over the place.

Matt Ramsay: 16:53

Yeah, uh, this is a challenge. I mean, you talked about challenges. This is one of the challenges. Uh yeah, I have things that I really care about in coffee. We care about the hospitality. Like I said, I don't want these to be transactions. You know, I want this to be a community. Uh, and so we have to communicate that well. We have an orientation. My business partner does right now, even though we have eight employees. My business partner usually does most of the orientations on site, in person, one at a time, every hire. Wow. Three hours yesterday he was in with a new hire, you know, just going through slideshow after slideshow. You know, it's like gotten to the city.

Marc Bernstein: 17:23

He's putting a lot of miles on that.

Matt Ramsay: 17:25

Yeah, yeah. Well, it was at our headquarters. But it was like, you know, this is like, you know, there's a clinic that we go through and and uh, you know, but you can't train personality. So we try we try to hire folks who are going to be warm and inviting, hospitable, and also good at what they do. I mean, the other part of that is uh we're trying to make better coffee. That's our it's on every shirt, it's on uh like every bag, it's make better coffee. So you have to be uh warm and inviting and personable. You also have to be talented and good at your craft. And at the end of the day, it's a craft and we're trying to be really, really good at it. So we do a lot of work on training uh there as well. It takes weeks for people to be able to uh make a latte before we're we green light them to serve those.

Marc Bernstein: 18:02

So it starts starts with selecting the right people. Do you have a specific hiring process through which you find out if they're able to be hospitable and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Ramsay: 18:12

Uh yeah. There's there we go through interview questions, we ask a lot about drama on the job and that kind of stuff. We try to find people, get along with lots of different folks because it is a community of all all kinds of people are welcome to work with us and be customers in our shop. So you have to be able to work with everybody.

Marc Bernstein: 18:27

I would imagine your retention is pretty good given that all that work that you go through to get the right people and train the right people and build a culture.

Matt Ramsay: 18:35

Uh I I wish I could tell you the stats on that. I don't know if we're ahead or behind the curve on that. I assume we're a little bit ahead, but but uh barista is a high turnover industry. It's young folks, it's it's often a first or second job. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Transition type job. But we also have folks who have retired and they want to be baristas. We have folks who are doing this because it's a fun job to be a part of and serve people and be in the community out and about and be on your feet. And you know, there's there's something to that too.

Vera Hempel: 18:59

Yeah, as and as someone who has worked in the hospitality industry and in college, I can I can account to that. It's it's uh it is a fun job. And I think personality is such a big part in serving people, but not only, you know, uh serving your customers, but also then building that culture from within. So it sounds like you're really focused on also building that sustainability um yeah, focus within your within your experience in the company with from within.

Matt Ramsay: 19:32

Yeah, yep, absolutely. And we had one shop, it was a lot easier to be on site and just show people, hey, this is how we do it, this is what I like to do. I like to ask a question of the day to customers if you have time, come up with something, make make sure it's not just a transaction. But when we got the eight shops and 80 employees, more difficult. So, how do you keep doing that? We have uh really the answer is just great people that are doing that for you. So Kate is our regional manager, they're fantastic. Uh they hire for us, they know what we're looking for, they have the same values I have on terms of. The quality and the hospitality, that kind of thing. So uh the people that it's it's always the people you work with that make or break the business, right?

Marc Bernstein: 20:07

Trevor Burrus We um this show is a lot about future vision um and forward movement and all on all that. And you certainly have a lot of vision. Um, I'm gonna ask you a question that we didn't prepare for, but your long-term vision, you can pick whatever time you want out in the future, but what are you trying to build? What do you what do you eventually want to have, Matt? And then I'm gonna go to the shorter term.

Matt Ramsay: 20:27

Great question. Uh uh we would play this game with students all the time because most of our ministry is around work, you know. Uh and so so the question would be in an ideal world, if you had a utopia, what would coffee look like? And so you gotta go to the farmers and you gotta say, well, it it's not poverty, it's not famine, starvation, and becoming refugees. The market swings wildly in coffee.

Marc Bernstein: 20:48

Right.

Matt Ramsay: 20:48

It can go up 300%, it could go down 300%. And when the market drops for farmers, they become refugees at times, they face starvation, and some commit suicide. This is for for what coffee is, which is beautiful, right? For the aesthetic beauty that we see, there's no nutrition in coffee, right? For the beauty of coffee, the price cannot be starvation. Skip utopia, go backwards from there. What do we have in the real world that we have to face? We have to face issues of of justice. I I need to be at a certain scale to order enough coffee to make a dent in one community in coffee. Right now we rely on importers to do a lot of that work to make sure that we're getting fair wages and taking care of the environment. But uh if I could shake hands with farmers and buy in bulk, we could ship directly uh by boat, then we can uh create long-term contracts. We can have less market instability for the pricing on farmers. And so they can rely and know that when they come to market with their one harvest per year, they have enough to get going for the next year as well. Uh that's important to me. The ecological issues are important. Flash chill, I think, is is part of the key there that we could order we could if we can sell more flash chill coffee, we can order more coffee like this down the road. We'd like to open more shops, obviously. And our wholesale partners are a big part of our mission. So supporting new coffee shops, we supply equipment, training, that kind of stuff.

Marc Bernstein: 22:03

I do have to connect you with my daughter. I think you guys gotta have a conversation because this is the work she does around the world. Um, you know, it's try trying to make life better for the farmers, and it all starts with the farmers. I love that that's I uh I that surprised not not that it surprised me uh you're what the person that you are would tell me that's where you would start. But I was thinking more about you know the culture of your company and and your service and what you're doing in the communities, but I love that it starts with the farmer, and that's what you're thinking about.

Matt Ramsay: 22:32

Yeah, it's all connected, it's woven together. That's why that's one of the reasons we call it denim. You know, we're all connected.

Marc Bernstein: 22:37

I was gonna ask you about that, and that that makes a lot of sense. So now let's look out just like a year. If it's November of 2026 and we're talking, and I said, Hey, how'd the last year go? What would that have to look like for you to say, Matt, that that was a very successful year in your journey?

Matt Ramsay: 22:54

Yeah, great. Uh that's a great way to phrase that question, isn't it? I've had a lot of practice. Yeah, you're good at this. Uh I I think Flash Show is I think it's unique. There's 3,000 coffee roasters in the United States. We're all roasting coffee. We're all competing for sourcing the best coffee, and we try really hard. I I've got head roasters sampling coffee all the time. Uh he's amazing. And so obviously we want to keep growing our wholesale coffee supplies, retail, coffee shops. Uh, but the the flash show, I think if we could work on uh getting that into a bag and box, because right now it's kegs, if we could go to bag and box and flash show uh in 2026, we could ship that further than we can right now.

Marc Bernstein: 23:37

That sounds like that would be b big business for you, I would think. That would represent a lot of growth for your business.

Matt Ramsay: 23:42

I think the the market would demand that product that it would it could become a national product if we could lean into that some more.

Marc Bernstein: 23:49

By the way, this show is about business owners and business and business owners ultimately about money, but it's interesting that none of the things we've talked about has been about financial growth or revenues or um, you know, it's all been about what you're how how you're changing the world by what you're doing, which which I which makes a lot of sense given your background, but I think that's really cool.

Matt Ramsay: 24:11

You know, it's yeah, that's a good observation. We would like to stay in business though, and you know, turn a profit. We would like you. Somebody told me before I started, said, uh you can't do anything good in the world if you if you don't make a profit, Matt.

Marc Bernstein: 24:21

Of course. Yeah. Of course. So that goes hand in hand. So I'm sure that's part of the vision as well. Viera, you have another question for Matt?

Vera Hempel: 24:28

I don't have a question, but I I like that approach of you know, solving the problem and diving into the problem space and the money will come. I think a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners face this issue where they run after the money. They, you know, you've you've experienced this yourself, trying to get funding for your for your business. If you're building a physical product or a service or a you know, a SaaS product. I think a lot of people are struggling in that financial realm that oftentimes the mission, the pain points that they're actually solving for aren't at the forefront anymore, but I like that you're approaching it from that level because that's that's that's why you're doing what you're doing. And it sounds like you're very passionate about it.

Marc Bernstein: 25:11

Yeah, yeah, great point. I we have time for one last question. Um I know you're a reader. What what book are you currently reading, Matt?

Matt Ramsay: 25:19

Oh God, I uh I've been reading, rereading, actually, because I'm I'm a little bit of a philosophy guy, you know, uh I've uh dabbled around. Uh Marcus Aurelius The Meditations. Ah, you know, I mean I reread that because I hadn't read it in 20 some years. And uh that and the wisdom literature from from scriptures, uh, you know, I've been reading those both hand in hand a little bit to get me through these times. Things are changing and and how do you deal with it? Well, there's some wisdom in in in recognizing that you can't change the external forces, that you can be the thermostat instead of the uh thermometer in certain situations. And uh yeah, that's been that's been helpful for me lately.

Marc Bernstein: 25:56

Aaron Powell By the way, Marcus Aurelius, I I I so I listened in the car, audible.

Matt Ramsay: 26:01

Yeah.

Marc Bernstein: 26:02

But I found out I I picked the original, like the original translations. They're really hard to listen to.

Matt Ramsay: 26:08

Well, what what are you listening to?

Marc Bernstein: 26:10

Well, well, um the original so it's it's in it's sort of in ancient language as opposed to there's modern interpretations. So now I'm trying the modern interpretation. Well, you're working in Latin? No, it's the meditation book, Marcus really. It's not in Latin, it's in English. Oh, yes, but it's the strict translation of the original Latin. Yes, yeah, good. So that's the issue. Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, we just have a couple more seconds. Um one last thing. Do you have do you have any book? What's your next book you'd like to read?

Matt Ramsay: 26:40

Oh, what's on my list? Uh just more, more of that. More uh anything I get in my head. I try to stay learning all the time. So you know, wisdom is the the order of priorities.

Marc Bernstein: 26:50

You know, you like nourishing books.

Matt Ramsay: 26:51

Yeah, yeah. I get my I get my fiction through the movies.

Marc Bernstein: 26:54

Excellent. Well, thank you for being here, Matt. Vera, thank you for being here.

Vera Hempel: 26:58

Thank you.

Marc Bernstein: 26:59

Thank you, Eric, for doing the engineering. Thank you, WWDB, and thank you all for listening to Founders Forum. And we look forward to being with you again next week. Yeah, go birds! Go birds.

Announcer: 27:13

We hope you enjoyed your time with Founders Forum and that you found value to take with you throughout your day. Join us again next week for another episode of Founders Forum on WXKB 10398 D2.