March 13, 2026 – Cannabis Wholesaler Vince Ning and Gov-Tech Entrepreneur Evan Meyer

0:04 Intro 1 :  Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,

0:26 Jim Beach :  hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. I have yet another amazing show. I don’t take credit for this because we have great guests every day. I just sit back and let them tell their story. And these are amazing stories. Got two great entrepreneurs to introduce today. Vince Ning is with us. He has built a wholesale marketplace for cannabis, and unlike anything else out there, it’s legal, and so we’re going to put it on the air and enjoy it. I think that if it’s legal and moral, you should do it and make some money from it. After that, Evan Meyer will be with us. He is doing two cool things. One is beautifying cities. Another is helping governments become more efficient, which makes it easier on us citizens. Here we go with a great show. Let’s get started. Very excited to introduce my first guest. This is going to be an interesting one. Please welcome Vince Ning to the show. He is a junior Olympian, gold medalist in ping pong, I believe, and has had an amazing career since then. He was a two time YC founder, Y Combinator founder, which is very impressive to get into their program, especially to do it twice. He’s a third of Forbes 30 under 30 winner, a Cannabis News cannabis now 40 under 40, and an ex Microsoft engineer. He is currently the founder and CEO of a company called Davis, N, A, B, i, s, you can find it on that internet thing. It sells cannabis, marijuana. Vince, welcome to the show. How you doing?

2:11 Vince Ning :  Doing great. Thanks for having me on the show. Excited to chat. Likewise.

2:16 Jim Beach :  So Forbes, 30, under 30. The last article I read about that was that it’s cursed, that so quite a few have ended up in jail and stuff. And so I would be more excited about the cannabis 40, under 40. What about you?

2:30 Vince Ning :  Yeah, yeah. No, likewise. I mean, I think, you know, sometimes when you give a lot of people too many accolades, too young, they end up, they end up doing, they end up keeping continuing to push the boundaries a lot and then get themselves in trouble. So I think that’s probably correlated.

2:47 Jim Beach :  Yes, I raised a bunch of venture capital in my 20s, 26 I guess, and I didn’t do anything illegal. I just did a lot of stupid things. You like, you know, those laser projection systems that they have in the NBA, where IT projects your logo on the floor, and they can move bounce and stuff, yeah. How many of those do you think our office needed three? Wow, on a laser projection system. No negative infinity.

3:21 Vince Ning :  Oh, boy, yeah. So, you know, at least, hopefully it was entertaining

3:25 Jim Beach :  for a bit. It was a fun, fun thing. All right, tell us about how do you pronounce it, Navis?

3:32 Vince Ning :  It’s called Navis, so it’s the second half of the word cannabis. So that’s the origin of it.

3:38 Jim Beach :  Explain. Tell us about the business. How’d you get started?

3:41 Vince Ning :  Yeah, so, you know what we do today? We’re in the vision is largely remained the same, which is, you know, we’re a wholesale marketplace platform. You can think of us as a, Amazon, B to B, cannabis B to B, version of Amazon for cannabis. And we work with cannabis brands so that can constitute growers and cultivators or manufacturers and processors on the one side of our marketplace who list and sell their products to stores, so licensed dispensaries, licensed delivery businesses and even events too. So you know, we, we very much operate as not just a marketplace, but we also own the infrastructure underneath. So that makes it more truly like an Amazon, where we handle the storage and shipment and fulfillment and the payment processing, versus versus something like an eBay where you know, the supplier as a third party, you know, ships themselves and uses eBay as a marketing platform, so we kind of own the entire end to end lifecycle of an order. And, yeah, it’s a, you know, it was very much needed to be built this way to maximize, sort of like, customer happiness, and also, just in this highly regulated market, it’s, it was, it was critical to manage every. Step of the process. Given how scrutinous the regulations are to shipping this, you know,

5:04 Jim Beach :  this potent product. Tell me about that regulations. I’m in Georgia, I would think that it’s illegal to ship here. Tell me about all of that regulation.

5:14 Vince Ning :  Yeah, yeah. So that is one of the big topics lately. There’s, there’s at the federal level. First and foremost, there’s no banking, there’s no interstate commerce, and there’s a it creates a patchwork of regulations at the state level. So every you can imagine, every state has its own country, and every state has its own set of cannabis regulations. They can be similar to each other, but they’re not particularly the same. So it’s really hard to scale if you’re a brand or anyone in the cannabis industry across state lines, because you essentially have to start a new business every time.

5:56 Jim Beach :  So is Georgia legal?

6:01 Vince Ning :  Not to my knowledge. I think it’s, it’s, there’s probably a healthy black market there, but it’s not, I don’t think it’s legal to the degree that California is or New York, for instance.

6:12 Jim Beach :  How many states do you operate in? Then we currently operate

6:16 Vince Ning :  in three, but we’re actively expanding into a few more in the coming years, we’re the largest cannabis wholesaler in the nation, just by just with those three we distribute about 7% of all legal cannabis in the country. And you know, by function of that, you know, we exist in the largest legal markets in the world, especially California and New York, and you know, Nevada, with Vegas, it attracts 40 million unique tourists around the world. You know, we we serve our brands, and we try to build this platform that will eventually serve all 50 states, to be able to be this infrastructural layer for the cannabis industry, digitally and operationally, to be able to help a brand, be able to get access across various markets, across various sets of regulations, and truly become that sort of Uber for cannabis,

7:11 Jim Beach :  if you will. All right, so when you say cannabis, pot, a lot of people aren’t going to understand the variety of SKUs that you have in that space, pots. Pot, right? You just get a bag of green stuff. Is there anything else you know, explain variety of SKUs?

7:29 Vince Ning :  There’s, there’s quite a bit, I would say. There’s four or five, five or six main categories. There’s vapes, there’s pre packaged flour in glass jars. There’s pre rolls, which are essentially, you know, ground up flour and that are already pre rolled in a joint. There’s beverages, there’s edibles, there’s concentrate products, and then there’s this long tail of miscellaneous accessories and other products as well, like you can, you know, name it. It’s like depositories, or, you know, big tinctures and things like that. But the main categories are the first few that I mentioned. And then within each category there are subsets as well. So concentrates is a whole, you know, it’s a whole culture of cannabis that attracts the whole culture of cannabis connoisseurs. So you have, you know, butter, shatter, live rosin, liquid diamonds. You know, there’s so many different ways to create concentrated product, and they all smoke a little different. They taste a little different. The high is a little different. And even most flour, they’re grown differently. So you can think of the cannabis markets already eclipse the wine market. But you know, when you’re drinking your wine, you have table wine, you have really expensive wine from Napa as well and so or imported wine. And in cannabis, similarly, for the raw flower, you have indoor grown flour. You have mixed light greenhouse flour. You have outdoor ground flour that relies heavily on the environment. And some people like one style better for the consistency, and some people like the other for it’s sort of like natural, more organic flavoring and taste profile.

9:18 Jim Beach :  How does this compare to any product that someone would have gotten in high school or college 20 years ago? Yeah, that’s a loaded question.

9:28 Vince Ning :  I think there’s two dimensions, two ways to answer that question. One is, you know, it’s, there’s the public health and safety angle, where, because it’s regulated, every piece of cannabis product, which is, you know, part of our responsibility to manage is run through a testing lab. So we work with testing labs across the markets. We work in to be able to test the products for in California, at least, it’s nine different tests. So it’s very strict standards that everything from pesticide control to. Heavy Metal control to potency and consistency and homogeneity tests and so legal products are a bit more expensive, but, you know, due to taxes and otherwise, but at the same time, you’re you’re not going to blow along while smoking legally tested cannabis product illegal. It’s cheaper. You know, there’s a habitual behavior of going to your dealer, getting them deliver products to your door. Oftentimes, the service quality is better too, just given they go direct to your door and very fast. But, you know, I do think that that will be phased out over time, because it’s just an unhealthy product. It can be, I should say, and the second is, over time. Now there’s also this component of more potent product too. So whether you’re in the black market or you’re in the white market, back then, you didn’t have these industrial grow operations. You had people with hydroponic, you know, couple of plants in their house trying to grow this and packaging it shoddily and sending it to you as a consumer. Nowadays, you have people doing genetic testing. You have people doing cloning. You have, like, a lot of nurseries researching this stuff and making a hybrid genetics that are, you know, pest resistant, that are that that maximize the potency. And so what we smoke today is a lot more potent than what we smoked back in the day. So that’s another big difference as well.

11:36 Jim Beach :  Okay, interesting. What did your parents say when he came home and said, Mom, guess what?

11:43 Vince Ning :  Yeah, I mean, I first validated the business before I told my parents. I mean, I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart, and so between my last company and this one, I had a couple of little startups in college as well. They knew that I was always up some business or side hustle, but for this one, I definitely wanted to prove that we could build a scalable business first. And my parents actually found out through a Forbes article when we announced our first fundraise, and my dad dropped the article in our family, text message, group chat, and that’s how my mom found out. And I got a call pretty, pretty fast right after that, asking me what I was doing. But by then, it was, you know, already sort of destigmatized, if you will, given the article and the funding at least within my family. But yeah, I think there’s still a lot of work left to do across the market and industry and just broader society as well. To you know, to clear cannabis is named from sort of like worst drugs list in the world that that’s occurred back in the Nixon era.

12:54 Jim Beach :  Would you compare it to alcohol drinking? Yeah. I mean, yeah. Sorry, heroin and shooting up in my eyeballs.

13:03 Vince Ning :  Oh, it’s definitely more comparable to alcohol. I mean, there’s been studies, especially even from the the feds, from the human HHS department, the health department, starting from the Biden administration and onwards, stating that alcohol can be a carcinogen, and cannabis has potential health benefits we don’t quite know about yet. So the recent Trump rescheduling has been a big boon to the industry. It’s not fully materialized yet. It was just an executive order, but it definitely demonstrates the tailwinds the industry has and the curiosity of human nature to understand this plant more and the positive benefits of it.

13:44 Jim Beach :  Do you think that the stigma is still there? What would you from a zero to 100 where would you put it? And do you think it dramatically differs from state to state, Georgia versus California?

13:57 Vince Ning :  Yeah, I would say so. I think West Coast states are a lot more liberal and open about it. You know, there’s a whole concept of California sober as a as a slang term, local term, where people stop drinking but they’ll smoke weed. And, you know, I think there’s, there’s certain more, there’s more conservative states who, you know, they’ve taken a little longer to regulate this stuff and legalize it. But I think a lot of folks, whether you’re on the left side of the aisle or the right, see a lot of benefits from legalizing this. Cannabis has always existed, whether in the legal market or not, and so by regulating it, it brings it into light, reduces crime, it increases tax dollars, boosts the economy overall from a business perspective. And, you know, I think it improves education for consumers too, from a public health perspective. So I think, I think that legalizing it sooner is is a good thing for every.

15:00 Jim Beach :  State. So my perception would be that we all know drinking and driving is horrible, and lose your ability to drive. I My understanding you smoke a bunch of pot, you fall asleep. Yeah, yeah.

15:18 Vince Ning :  I would say it ends up you don’t drive as aggressively, but probably overly cautiously. I’ve seen people on the road driving at like 30 miles an hour when it’s a highway. And, you know, I don’t know whether you know, you look in the window and they’re definitely not like an 80 year old old person. So you wonder what’s going on there. And, you know, I think that’s, that’s the that’s probably how it materializes from a behavioral standpoint, which is unsafe in its own way too. So I do think that there is something to be said about how cannabis plays into the rules of the road.

15:55 Jim Beach :  I would hope so. I want anyone messed up driving, period, you know, totally sober. Drivers completely agree, completely agree. And, you know, I’m a libertarian in a lot of senses. I don’t care who you’re sleeping with, you know, don’t do it in my bedroom. You know, exactly sheets, you know. And I don’t care what you smoke or drink or whatever. Just keep me out of it or invite me in with a big smile. You know,

16:24 Vince Ning :  just exactly, exactly, do no harm. Do no harm. That’s the key.

16:28 Jim Beach :  And leave only pictures. Yep, yep. Those with you, though, that’s right. So how did you get started? What was the first thing you did walk us through the build process?

16:41 Vince Ning :  Yeah, so, you know, coming off the heels of my last startup, I had a slew of experiences building enterprise software tools. You know, in college, I definitely, you know, smoked and dealt weed, and when I went to work at Microsoft, that was the same year that cannabis legalized in first states, which is Colorado and Washington state. And so I didn’t join the industry then, but I definitely thought it was really interesting to see this newly legalized market get stood up. And then, you know, when I sold my last company, I was already in the bay, and cannabis legalized there, so I just felt like there was a bit of a stars aligning moment. I had a college friend who quit his job at McKinsey, moved up to Humboldt, California to grow cannabis. And, you know, I sat, I sat down with him at a bar, and he just sent me on deliveries, basically to meet all of his supply chain partners, and so I basically was just driving up and down the state. He was paying me a cost for gas and my time, and it was a lot of learning for me. And over time, as he wanted to split costs with other brands to ship the products across the state, my work became a little bit more unscalable. So that’s when I started to apply my software skill set to automate a lot of the processes and really scale the platform up. And so the process for trying to learn about the industry resulted in the service that was needed itself. And you know, at that point there was the market was probably only a few 100 million dollars large in California, and now it’s a four to $5 billion market. And so you know, just by the numbers, there’s several 100 brands, there’s over 1500 dispensaries. That’s just, uh, one big math problem to solve, like having every brand shipped to every retailer is, uh, that permutation can get pretty complex, and with all the different processes, payment terms, products, in a highly regulated market with a lot of compliance, that’s that’s definitely a jumble of mess that we wanted to optimize and automate. And yeah, over the years now, we have expanded and copied our model into a multitude of states to try to abstract the operational complexities, but also the compliance nuances within every locale. And you know, we distribute over a billion dollars worth of products per year now, in going one by one and building, putting brick by brick, down, one truck at a time, one product at a time, one order at a time. So it’s been, it’s been a really interesting journey for the past eight, nine years. Now, I’ve certainly learned a lot. It’s almost felt like building two businesses in one, because you have the software side and then you have the physical operational side too. And then to marry those two is a is definitely a interesting challenge due to the different cultures and ways that they think and so, you know, it’s, I think it’s definitely a skill set that has just been brutally beaten into me over the years, whether it be me driving out products on the road and learning the rules of the road to the. Developing software in real time as regulations were unfolding.

20:05 Jim Beach :  There are companies or websites that do deliver to the illegal states. Aren’t there? I pretty sure I’m not a naive person. I’m pretty sure some of my friends get it delivered through FedEx here from websites. Is that true, or am I?

20:22 Vince Ning :  Yeah, yeah. So in our market, and when I say our market, I’m describing the legal, regulated cannabis market, there is a cottage industry of the hemp market, which, you know, hemp farmers typically grow, you know, things, this plant that looks like cannabis, it’s a very close cousin. It produces THC, but in very small amounts, and they usually just use those plants and that plant material to make a rope cloth, industrial material. But, you know, people are creative, and they found ways to hyper optimized the hemp plant, which is unregulated under the US farm bill to create high potency hemp, produced cannabis. Hemp produced products. And so there’s, there’s been this legal loophole where, under the Farm Bill, farmers can grow hemp and sell it anywhere across the US or anywhere in the world, import, export as well. And that recently got clamped down. It was a it was an unintended effect of the farm bill from 2018 from Trump’s last administration. So in November, Mitch McConnell made a big push to clamp it down. So So in the previous market, you could sell up to point 4% THC, in any product across the market, legally, federally. But people realize that you can make beverages which are very high volume, and when you have point 4% of a large 16 ounce beverage, you can actually get something like 15, if not more, milligrams of products, which is actually over the legal limit of a cannabis product. And so that legal loophole allowed for higher potency products in the unregulated market, and that’s what’s being sold online, but that there was regulation that actually clamped that down back in November, and they gave a one year grace period to have everyone shut down their businesses. So by November of this year, that activity should stop, or at least the hemp industry right now is trying to advocate for change, to at least regulate the hemp industry, to allow it to exist, but put rules around it.

22:42 Jim Beach :  Okay, very interesting, yeah, yeah. So it’s what was the setup? Are you programmed the site yourself? Yeah, yeah.

22:50 Vince Ning :  And now we have an engineering team. We are, our company is over 500 people strong, and wow, yeah, we have seven warehouses across the three markets we operate in today, and a corporate staff as well. But yeah, the initial, the initial platform, was delivering products by day and codifying it into software by night. So it’s a lot of time on the road.

23:13 Jim Beach :  You know, most like the guest I interview, a lot of people have just written a book or something like that, or a cooking company, and they send me some cookies. You know, it’s fairly typical to send the radio host a sample, yeah, yeah.

23:26 Vince Ning :  I mean, if you’re if you’re interested to have a sample, I can help organize that for you.

23:33 Jim Beach :  Operator too old for that now, yeah, well, we can send you some merchandise. Dad had, yeah, what did you just say dead what Dad had?

23:49 Vince Ning :  Dad had? It’s like a looks like a hat you’d wear when you go fishing as a dad,

23:55 Jim Beach :  I thought you said deadhead. And then in my immediate Oh no. Was what percent of your market is dead heads?

24:01 Vince Ning :  Oh, that’s a pretty healthy percentage. I don’t have the exact numbers, but you can imagine, everyone in San Francisco, basically is a deadhead, and they all consume cannabis.

24:13 Jim Beach :  Yes, in the 80s, I went to hundreds of shows, and enjoyed the shows quite a bit, and just had some great stories from that that I actually remember. So, yeah, yeah. Well, you don’t index 30 under 30 Forbes list in jail, like Elizabeth Holmes and No, certainly this one went to jail I saw.

24:39 Vince Ning :  Oh, really, yeah, no, that’s definitely not the desired path for me.

24:45 Jim Beach :  I think it legally with all of the you know, restrictions and rules that you have to regulate.

24:52 Vince Ning :  Yeah, yeah. I mean, a big part of my job these days is to go talk to government officials, elected officials. Regulators in every level of government to make sure that what we’re doing is compliant. If there’s anyone that has more innovative product, I’ll describe it, you know, we try to come forth with it, first with the government, and now a lot of my work extends itself into the federal realm too, just given the recent executive order by Trump. So ultimately, our standpoint is we want to be the infrastructural layer for the cannabis industry, promoting positive public health PR and image and destigmatize the space. Find medical benefits for use of the product, and, you know, give people a healthier way to relax and enjoy themselves beyond, you know, the substances you described earlier,

25:49 Jim Beach :  I have Crohn’s disease. Is that one that helps? What about the medicinal uses?

25:55 Vince Ning :  Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of folks, I have a friend who has Crohn’s disease. And, you know, for folks who know, like other auto amines. I, I think it doesn’t, it doesn’t cure the root cause of the problem, but it certainly helps with the symptoms. So, you know, a lot of post chemo cancer patients who suffer pain or anxiety or just depression, they’ll, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a sort of holistic way to help with any of the withdrawal effects of other other medicines, and it generally just helps with relaxing anxiety as well.

26:32 Jim Beach :  Vince, how do we find out more? Get in touch. Buy some stuff from you, all of that.

26:36 Vince Ning :  Yeah, you can visit us@navis.com you can check us out on LinkedIn, Twitter. It’s all just, you know, Navis is the handle, and you know, our marketplace, if you’re a licensed retailer, you can sign up for an account on our marketplace, and then you get states we operate in. And if you want to be a partner of ours and a state we’re not in today, you can reach out to us that way, too.

27:01 Jim Beach :  Fantastic. Very interesting. Vince, thank you so much for being with us, and we’d love to have you back in a year and get an update see what the market’s doing. Then great appreciate your time. Jim, thanks for the call, and we will be right back.

27:24 Jim Beach :  And we are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. I’m very excited to introduce another great guest. Please welcome Evan Meyer to the show. He has got a really interesting career going on, and is doing a couple of things that are really important to me, and I think are just great businesses. He runs a business called beautify, where he helps cities townships become better looking, helps them figure out how to integrate art into their communities and create more public spaces that are places that you want to hang out in. He also has started a business about a year ago called gov tools, which helps governments become more effective and engage with their citizens and their constituents. Very cool. Evan, welcome to the show. How you doing?

28:15 Evan Meyer :  Thanks for having me, Jim, it’s good to be here. Appreciate it.

28:17 Jim Beach :  So you’re a gov tech entrepreneur. I haven’t heard that one in a while, and a civic ninja. I love it.

28:25 Evan Meyer :  Yeah, self proclaimed. Of course, I made those names up for myself because I think they accurately define my skills developed and accomplishments over 20 years, I guess,

28:37 Jim Beach :  or more. So I love it. So here in Atlanta, we have a highway, the major highway, it’s actually two highways, and it goes south, and then it makes a right turn through the middle of downtown, and then makes a left turn to go back down the other side of the city. It couldn’t have cut the city in half. More than anything, it actually in the 50s and 60s, a lot of cities made this mistake of cutting neighborhoods in half and tearing their soul out of neighborhoods, and now they’re trying to put a roof on the park that goes through town and to beautify it and to make it into an art and community center. It’s going to be about seven or eight acres there as the roof of the highway. We need to hire you to come in and make that beautiful. Tell us about what you do.

29:26 Evan Meyer :  Sure. Well, you know, it’s interesting. My career spans, you know, now, a number of different companies and working for in and with government. I never thought I’d be a government guy, in a sense. But I, you know, each one, each of the businesses, does it a little bit differently at the beautify level, you know, yeah, we, we work with cities to improve the well being of the communities ultimately, you know, we believe art is the, is the, the fundamental. Experience you’re going to have when you go anywhere is whether it looks, I call it the beautify index, right? It’s like, does this look sad, dilapidated, neglected? Does it look like people care about this place or not? And and that’s sort of like the ground level of whether something should be improved. And we care a lot about improving neighborhoods that that really need it, that need the support, and that could use that inspiration, color and and creativity to essentially and often beautify their own communities, right? So empowering the people within to do a lot of the work, get paid for it, etc. You know, when it comes to individual projects,

30:43 Jim Beach :  you know, I think that is great. I think the

30:48 Evan Meyer :  mission of beautify has always been, like, you know, this million walls kind of thing, right? Like, we

30:55 Jim Beach :  not really

30:57 Evan Meyer :  a million walls is, is essentially beautify, a million

31:00 Jim Beach :  walls, okay, right? Like there’s that

31:05 Evan Meyer :  number is ridiculous, because if you do a million walls, you’re essentially beautifying the whole world, right? Beautify Earth. So we try to build plans with cities, using our technology to be at the center of the connective tissue of making art happen in a community. We have just 1000s and 1000s of muralists on our site across the world, the and wall opportunities and project opportunities, but the best thing that can happen for us is when a city goes, let’s make this the centerpiece of the beautification that’s needed, so we can showcase how amazing our city is, build that cultural pride and showcase our artistic talent here. So that’s a lot of what we do. And work with them to develop those plans, using the system as a hub.

32:00 Jim Beach :  And is it always art that your goal is to place, not green spaces? Or what are your thoughts? What tools do you use? A lot of different things you could do with to beautify?

32:12 Evan Meyer :  Of course, yeah, we primarily do murals because wall space is so abundant and the

32:21 Jim Beach :  relatively easy to

32:23 Evan Meyer :  go paint a wall, as compared to we work with a planning department to develop, you know, the blueprints for a new park, or, you know, stuff like that. So the reason I say a million walls is because beautify Earth is a mural company, and walls are our medium, or our our service. Surface, right?

32:43 Jim Beach :  So that’s why it is a mural based company. Sure that makes sense. Okay? Is it have funding and things like that? How do you actually get these projects done? Paint is not free, of course, yeah.

33:02 Evan Meyer :  Funding comes from all sorts of different places for Beautify. Sometimes it comes from cities, neighborhood groups, Chambers of Commerce. It can come from corporations who sponsor walls or campaigns. You know, we don’t do like, true advertisements, like, we don’t paint ads for them, but we will do like, campaign based stuff around values, and if they want to sponsor a neighborhood or a city, often, corporations will sponsor schools and come to, like a paint day and help the schools become beautiful. We painted 50 LA USD schools with multiple murals each, and some often with corporations. Sometimes it funds. The funding is directly from school district that’s just in LA adjacent in Santa Monica. We’ve done 15 schools, right? So schools are a huge opportunity that we find to beautify, and the kids get to get involved, showcase their creativity. Be part of the solution, right? Be part of the oh, we could make that beautiful. Let me, I have an idea. Let me execute it, right? There’s so much of murals that’s like, I have a vision and I can execute it relatively easily. And that’s why murals are so powerful. It doesn’t take again, when I say relatively easily, compared to like building a park or putting a garden on a roof or something, right? So that’s but the funding comes from a lot of, very often, a lot of different places. It can really come from anywhere. Sometimes it’s a landlord or a real estate development company trying to beautify their own building or office space. Sometimes it’s inside an office, when you see a blank wall, you should think of beautify and be like that needs to be beautified, you know.

34:50 Jim Beach :  Well, again, this is Atlanta we had when they were building the last airport. Some reason, some of the art got to the building before they were done in. And they there was a piece of art that was worth $3 million and the construction company threw it away because they thought it was just a tapestry, like a drip cloth or something. And then a building downtown did go and put a big mural up, and the city came in and fined them for doing it because they didn’t get permission first, you know, that’s the kind of morons we’re dealing with here in Atlanta.

35:25 Evan Meyer :  Well, you know, getting things done again, I think it comes back to murals are often the simplest way to make something beautiful with the most impact. That’s why we chose it. You know, what’s

35:37 Jim Beach :  that makes a ton of sense. Yeah.

35:40 Evan Meyer :  Just like, how can I make the most call 20? I remember, we start on Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica, and it was called stinking Lincoln. And I was like, I didn’t go paint the walls, and I hadn’t just gotten friends to get in early on. It was just like getting friends who were artists to go, like, you want to come paint with me on Saturday, I got approval to do this. Let’s beautify this wall to make this experience different for the 20,000 cars a day, or whatever that go down Lincoln Boulevard, or 50, whatever the number is, right? This like, we could change the experience of Lincoln. And this was like, right at the beginning, when, you know, I like to say that we were at that forefront before street art got cool, right? There was three art was always and even when we started, it was like, kind of looked down upon. It was look like, like, graffito. You mean graffiti, right? People didn’t know the difference between graffiti, art and vandalism, right, or tagging Right. Or even worse, like gang tagging right, like they just put it all in the same bucket. It’s like, you’re gonna go spray paint a wall with whatever. That was like, maybe 15 years ago. So it’s only been recent where the approval of this type of art, this beautification, has become so mainstream, a lot of people have used it to really make things better for communities. What I say is like almost almost anything. Not there, not anything, but almost anything is better than a dirty, big, boring, 20 by 20 canvas that on a main thoroughfare that you’re like, that’s just a block of dirt. You know, it’s like, it’s, it looks like dirt. And if that’s you, you should paint your wall. You know, our goal is to make you see that. A lot of people don’t realize that opportunity, they just think, I’ve got land, I’ve got a property. It just makes money. Don’t bother me, whatever. But if it doesn’t look nice, then the experience in your community

37:31 Jim Beach :  doesn’t feel nice, and it should feel nice. Yes, imagine if you could. Here’s an idea, and I don’t know if this is possible or not, but get Banksy to do something in town in an unknown place, and just have it appear overnight. You know who Banksy is?

37:48 Evan Meyer :  I sure do. I don’t have his phone number. I don’t think the problem.

37:51 Jim Beach :  And that’s why I said we don’t know who Banksy is. For the listeners, Banksy is a world famous artist who does most of his art. Unexpectedly. Would you agree with that? Is that the right way to say it? Evan, to say it? Evan, it just pops who he is, or how it

38:05 Evan Meyer :  got there? Yeah, sort of faceless, nameless. And it goes for a very high value. I mean, some of the things that he does, and they’re often like, interesting statements, political statements, sometimes he makes big a lot of it is in the messaging that he puts out there. And the reason of why that he portrays the resort, and it’s been very, very

38:30 Jim Beach :  provocative, or minimum, evocative, in terms of the experience you have when you look at it. Yeah, he does amazing stuff, and finding out who he is is one of the great mysteries of our time, just like, who started? Not Bitcoin, but, yeah, Bitcoin, Satoshi, somebody or another? Yeah, Gov tools? Sure.

38:58 Evan Meyer :  So gov tools is, let’s see, that’s my this is an interesting one. This came from a lot of the work I was doing. I had a short time where I was temporarily a district director at the State Senate California. I had the opportunity of learning a lot about how the state works and what’s missing, some of the good things and a lot of the things that really need improvement, right? So I started building this platform to to to make my life easier. As a district director, I was like, I don’t have any of this data. Let me just like, build the thing that can make my life easier. You coming with zero you’re working off like, Hey, where’s the previous lists of information and the previous like, how do people find out all the things I need to do to send reps

39:48 Jim Beach :  to the right places, right like,

39:51 Evan Meyer :  where is there’s no say. There’s really no central place for all that information. So I started building a central place so you can represent the dish. It better, and it was shared, share other districts. Was started using it around the country, sorry, around the state. And eventually I met with a friend of mine, who was the mayor of Santa Monica London, ready, and we realized that one of the things that we could work on is this email, will, you know, a lot of local electeds don’t have the staff or money or time. They’re very busy running other, you know, their businesses, and then they have this full time job that they get $1,000 a month stipend or whatever to try to run with no staff. I was supposed to do all this, right? It’s a lot. So we created this tool for local initially, at least for now local elected leaders doesn’t have to be that, but that’s who were, who was originally developed for and targeting for the value of this, to have this newsletter weekly go out that we do. We get them to, like, 80, 90% of the information by by by combination of, you know, smart tech, some AI, getting the right. We have just, you know, a master, master prompt of how we kind of use AI and scrape and their personal info and social media, and we really help them build this newsletter concisely, transparently, authentically. That. Then they go, we give them that, that that template, and then they go, spend, you know, 10 or 20 minutes just personalizing, making sure it’s right. But we take that bulk time out of the newsletter creation process and for them, and we found that it’s that repetition that that consistency and the and the not trying to sensationalize this. Don’t throw your agenda there. Stick to your campaign promises. Get out the information. Get it out factually the best you can and and don’t bias this. Make this about improving communities. Get people engaged. We give them the tools to get more people engaged as well. So it’s a lot about, you know, that grassroots democracy, but really keeping people informed as to what’s happening in their community. So that’s our that that’s been the thing that we’ve really been focusing on lately, and a lot of those other tools that I was mentioning around the you know, the improvement of the data sets are used to support,

42:32 Jim Beach :  ultimately, that newsletter tool, and how does that make money? Do you does the city pay for this? No, the elected spec, elected

42:45 Evan Meyer :  elected is the name of, like a local representative. Okay, who they were elected? So I guess a locally old maybe

42:53 Jim Beach :  that’s part of their campaign budget.

42:57 Evan Meyer :  Yes, often it can be part of their campaign budget, or personal budget, or however they, you know, want, but if they have a newsletter, they’ll probably subscribe to, you know, MailChimp or Constant Contact or something like that. So we had sort of a full suite of services. Instead of them having to go in and write it and do it and send it that way, we kind of just take the 90% of the load off using a variety of different technologies and some personalization on our side,

43:22 Jim Beach :  it’s not just AI written

43:27 Evan Meyer :  that just say, Here personalize this and let’s get it out so that we can get the right information to people. And it’s amazing on how well it does taking the information from their you know, their background, their the things that they report on in social media, perhaps, if they have, like, an Instagram channel or whatever, and it really delivers a comprehensive and concise, you know, the trick is concise. It’s not about, let me put an image of like, of cameos, of being a congressman or, you know, that’s not the that’s not the idea that stuff doesn’t

44:02 Jim Beach :  matter. People want

44:04 Evan Meyer :  information that helps them know that the electives and their representatives are working for them as they promise. So this helps be that kind of system of record as well. And go see those newsletters on the website right now. We save them on there so that they have that system of record. And it’s amazing. I’ve never seen anyone reply to newsletters before, but like, we get, you know, responses like this newsletter is amazing. It’s like, who says that about a newsletter? But they do, and we’re like, okay, there’s something cool here.

44:33 Jim Beach :  Well, that is such a great idea. I have no clue what my representatives are doing. You know, just absolutely no clue. Wouldn’t it be nice? It would be amazing. Yes, now that it’s campaign time and we’re starting to get all the damn ads and stuff, I don’t know what they’ve done for me in the last year. I just don’t know anything. And so it would be a wonderful change to be able to pay. Attention to all of that.

45:01 Evan Meyer :  Sure, and look, the local, local is where the things really matter to most people, right? The Federal stuff is outside of most people’s hands control, or even getting to the Source Truth of what’s happening in politics, but at the local level, the and that’s what I talk a lot about, that on my, my podcast, my your side chats.

45:21 Jim Beach :  It’s a pun on the name my side chats, yes, you

45:25 Evan Meyer :  got that. I know you were savvy enough to get that. You’re making sure everyone else who’s hearing it in that, just in case. I don’t know enough

45:32 Jim Beach :  to actually remember. FDR, so I remember sitting to some of those chats, yeah, yeah.

45:40 Evan Meyer :  Meyer, side by the Fireside. In fact, the early ones were done by a fireplace in person,

45:46 Jim Beach :  which is interesting. You Yes, my early No, mine, okay, yeah, fireplaces in California

45:58 Evan Meyer :  at the time. It was in when I first started it, it was in my in my apartment in Santa Monica.

46:05 Jim Beach :  Ah, okay, so I was, what are they going to do with the PCH? For people who don’t know California talk, that’s the Pacific Coast Highway, and it used to be one of the most beautiful places in California. Now it’s just got Rubble from the fire all on both sides. Yeah, what’s going to happen there? Can you go in and beautify that dump for us?

46:26 Evan Meyer :  Well, Rick Caruso is all over it. You know, our LA City Council member. There’s some stuff going around there. You know, it’s a very interesting way to think of how government’s going to support private capital coming back in there, how they’re going to mitigate the regulation that would prevent them from making things happen quickly and the right type of plans and infrastructure that need to be developed, like putting the power lines underground, for example, right before they weren’t. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of innovation and technology that can be used to much more rapidly move through the development process. And LA and California is not known for making it easy

47:11 Jim Beach :  to develop

47:14 Evan Meyer :  places and further even after that, how do you you know making it easy for businesses to come in and commercialize in your development, right? That’s like the next thing so that the developers can start making money back. That takes time and and the businesses don’t have to pay rent for a year, just so they can get the, you know, the conditional use permits or whatever, in order to operate. That we see that so much. It’s like, oh my god, this business paid, what, 15 grand a month in rent for two years, just until they can get through the policies. It’s like, who has that kind of money even to throw away before you even start your business, just on rent? So that happens a lot. We see that a lot, and look hopefully, on in the Palisades, where so much damage was done, they figure out how to put their differences aside. And because it’s going to get political, it already has come become political. There’s, there’s lawsuits going on, you know, who should have prevented this and what they could have done so, you know, I just hope it goes smoothly and people put their differences aside to make what’s best for that pre existing community and the new one to

48:30 Jim Beach :  be, well, you should be the one in charge with beautify and your government experience. You should be the Mr. Pch hero. Yeah, let’s see if I see

48:42 Evan Meyer :  if I can get mired another pun in that, in that conversation. You know, I work with people who are involved in that. Sometimes it’s hard. Some of these states. I remember there was a school in Santa Monica that they wanted us that went through like it had a mural on it, a special mural for like, 30 years that just became, basically couldn’t even see the mural anymore. And instead of beautifying it, because we’re just 30 years old, right? It’s just like it weathered and became like mud instead of a beautiful nature scene or whatever. And instead of making it beautiful again, they made it political. They spent a ton of money and bringing in the old artist and doing all this work to try to, to make, to recreate, this 30 year old mural. And you know what ended up?

49:35 Jim Beach :  There a billboard. Try again. Nothing.

49:42 Evan Meyer :  Yes, nothing big, keeping pile of nothing. And I can’t even, I don’t know how much they spent on it, of flying these people out and having these meetings and community time, it was at least a decade or more of this, and just nothing’s there. So you know, part of what I say. Stand for, and always have stood for, is like something is better than nothing, almost always, you know, keep it clean. Keep it neat. Don’t, don’t, don’t post political messages and, you know, angry stuff. Make it clean, nice and pretty. You know, it doesn’t take much. Kids hand prints on a wall. You had a preschool come and just plop their hands on there. It would look better than most of this crap that just exists on all of these thoroughfares. Someone’s cousin is painting in a basement, wishing they can have a wall like that. It’s these, you know, the message here is to landlords, hey, go get your cousin who’s painting in the basement to put those flowers

50:38 Jim Beach :  on the wall on your ugly building. Come on, get out there. You know,

50:43 Evan Meyer :  when it comes to things like Palisades, you know, I these are going to be all new buildings. So, you know, I do hope they consider not having big, bland, white blight, blighted walls they I mean, it’s Palisades. They didn’t before. I don’t expect

50:58 Jim Beach :  they will now, right? So back to Gov tools in the newsletter. How many of those are you doing now? For how many different politicians? Oh, geez, handfuls. Handfuls, you know, every politician in the United States, so the 435 House members, and 100 Senate and then all of the local people in the, you know, the Georgia House, every one of those needs a newsletter like this. This is a huge opportunity, especially because you know who they all are. You know, your target market is so easily defined, and it’s easy to get in touch with them. Do you charge? What do you charge for that service?

51:41 Evan Meyer :  Believe it or not, it’s not, you know, I would think it would be easy to get in touch with them, but one of the hardest pieces of the puzzle is getting in touch with them. They get so many emails,

51:50 Jim Beach :  you know, you rep itself. You try to get to their campaign manager. They don’t

51:55 Evan Meyer :  necessarily, it look at the local level. It doesn’t really, you know, it’s them directly. They don’t have teams like that. I mean, they may have had someone who helped them out with the campaign, but that person’s not on their website saying, email this person. I mean, sometimes they are when it comes to local representatives, there’s a lot, most of them are in smaller cities who don’t have the budget. They do it on the side. You know, they don’t get paid salaries. They they don’t have those types of type of staff. If you work in the city of Los Angeles, for example, tons of staff. If you’re a senator in the state of California, you get 10 or 15 people, probably, you know, depending on how much you pay them and what they’re hired for it, I suppose. But like, you know, bigger cities have that. When we think about politics, we think, Okay, well, Los Angeles, right? That’s managed very different than Santa Monica, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Manhattan Beach. You name your you know, name it.

52:56 Jim Beach :  I could talk to you for hours. I find you fascinating. And simpatico and I share your missions. How do we find out more? Get in touch. Follow you online. Learn more about these businesses and listen to meyerside talks.

53:08 Evan Meyer :  Yes, and by the way, we spoke about two of them for the most part today. Two of my things I care about. I probably have about 10 things I care about deeply. I’m going to list those. I’ll try to list them all off right now. You know, my first really running at a time. Fast, fast, fast. Okay. Ryan beavers.com, beautify earth.com, my curve tools.org, Myers side chats on YouTube. Evan meyer.io, is my personal you can find me on LinkedIn as well. And, and, yeah, that’s53:41 Jim Beach :  what I got. Fantastic, Evan, I love you. Thanks for coming. We’d love to have you back. We are out of time for today, but you know, that’s right, we come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye Now!