Data Monetization: The Next Step in Data Analytics With Walter Harrison

Walter Harrison is the CEO of Tapestri, an app allowing consumers to earn money from their data. He is also the Co-founder and CRO of Complementics, a mobile audience network that manages national and international data. With over 15 years of experience in ad technology, data monetization, and product development, Walter has worked with major Fortune 500 clients across various industries. As an ambitious serial entrepreneur, his previous product reached five million users.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Walter Harrison shares his experience building data-driven apps
The origin and evolution of Tapestri — and how it helps consumers monetize their data
Leveraging mobile and browser data to target specific audiences
What is the future of data?
Cryptocurrency’s role in data monetization
Walter talks about the various types of consumer data
Advice for proactive data analytics

In this episode…

With popular apps like TikTok and Instagram gathering data with each use, younger consumers have become accustomed to a lack of privacy. However, the widespread adoption of privacy regulations allows consumers to refuse certain types of data collection. How can you target audiences with granularity while facilitating consumer transparency?

Data pro and app builder Walter Harrison has developed an app that pays consumers for personal data collection. This allows users to govern their monetized information and incentivizes them to permit activity tracking on apps and websites. Similarly, e-commerce stores can build an audience by targeting potential customers on corresponding sites and social platforms, cultivating security and trust, and rewarding them for data-sharing. Walter recommends gathering data from mobile apps or website browsers for precise attribution.

In today’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris hosts Walter Harrison, the CEO of Tapestri, to discuss how e-commerce sites can leverage data monetization. Walter addresses the role of cryptocurrency in data monetization, the various types of consumer data, and how to analyze data proactively.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now, let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:13

Hey, everybody, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast. I'm William Harris, the founder and CEO of Elumynt. And the host of this podcast where I feature experts in the DTC industry, sharing strategies on how to scale your business and achieve your goals. Today, with me, I have Walter Harrison, based in Chicago. He is a founder and CEO of Tapestri, which pays users for their data. That's interesting. And we'll get to that later, previously built and sold Growth Systems info.com. And you were the co founder of Complementics as well. You're not busy at all. Welcome to

Walter Harrison 0:46

the show. Glad to be here. Well, thanks for having me.

William Harris 0:50

And I was trying to think about how we ended up getting connected in the first place. And I couldn't remember this. I feel like we've known each other for a decade now. I think was it maybe just through LinkedIn or something through

Walter Harrison 1:03

LinkedIn, and then I saw you at a conference in Chicago? I think it was their retail conference. Yeah. And I was like, Yeah, let's catch up. And then we kind of I knew you're a pro at this space. I kind of touch base every now and then. But I'm glad we reconnected. Yeah,

William Harris 1:19

stayed in touch over the years. And that's fun. Yeah, you're right. IRC. I've met a lot of good people at that show. It's a good show. It is a good Chicago show. And I love that they have it there every year. Before we get too deep into the good stuff. I do want to make a quick announcements for our sponsor here. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired with the largest one selling for nearly 800 million. And we were ranked as the 12th fastest growing agency in the world by Adweek, you can learn more on our website@elumynt.com which is spelled elumynt.com. That said, enough of the boring stuff onto the good stuff. Okay. Tell me the backstory that gets you from, you know, Growth Systems acquired by info.com. Little bit about that, and then walking me through into Complementics. And then where you're at now with Tapestri?

Walter Harrison 2:16

Yeah, let's dive in. So our first product was a browser extension. So this is like 2009 2010. I promise you it was cool back then. So we had Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome really wasn't as big at the time. But eBay had a toolbar, the Alexa toolbar, and we're like, we're gonna build a toolbar that enables consumers to find better prices online. So a bit of backstory of me, I'm a military brat. So I kind of lived everywhere and would buy things from everywhere. But I wanted to do a Google search and then have something slide in, give me the best reviews, best price, and also shipping. So we built it was called the C app, we have literally no idea what we're doing. But we're going to build this thing. And you know, slowly, but surely, over time, we got millions of people to use it. And what we realized then it was ad supported, like, okay, let's just put ads in it. But we were making more money on the data. And we weren't the advertising. And that's when we realized we were on to something. So from there, it was like, Okay, let's find other browser extensions that we can go talk to and say, hey, put this line of code in your extension, bolsters our data. And that's kind of the beginning underpinnings of Complementics. So

William Harris 3:32

right, that's what you were doing when I met you was Complementics. So this is very interesting, especially if you're an E commerce, which most of you are, this is when you and I started doing some stuff this, this doesn't have to be with E commerce. But e commerce brands have a lot of traffic to their website. And so this is where it was like, Oh, you can actually make a little bit of money off of some of that data. Tell them a little bit more about this one, perhaps

Walter Harrison 3:55

jumping into Complementics for a second. So what we realize is, let's say you're an app owner. So there's roughly 5 million apps in the Apple App Store or the Play Store today. How are these apps making money, most of them make money in in app purchases, or they make money and ads, what we realized is we could put a line of code inside that app, give them a revenue source that's complementary to their core business, instead of just saying, hey, you know, I have this app, and all the ads are for get a free Uber ride or go watch the new season of whatever on Paramount Plus, we'll just make money with this app on the data. And that's what kind of built the Complementics network.

William Harris 4:34

I love it. And then that's what led you into Tapestri. And Tapestri is where you almost kind of started allowing individuals to own their data and monetize their own data. Right. Did I get that correct?

Walter Harrison 4:48

Exactly. Yeah, you nailed it. So So complementing, see, realize there's all these apps out there. But behind the app is the user it's actually the user at the end of the day during generating that event. So them using that data that that travel app dating app, weather app, etc. So our premise was our hypothesis, would consumers download an app that pays them? Because they're already getting this data way? Anyway? Right. So that's Tapestri, and we think it's your data, you should get paid for it. And we're kind of off to the races with this app. Now, we're pretty excited about it.

William Harris 5:20

Who are who are some, like the customers that have installed this or use this? Or tell me a little bit more about like what's going on with Tapestri right now in today's state?

Walter Harrison 5:31

Yeah, so the consumer so when we originally thought, like, the person who's going to use this app is like, college campuses, like 18 year olds, beer, money, books, whatever discretionary income. But we do have those users. But our number one user is like a 45 year old female who shops at Walmart buying things for the home, right, buying back to school thing is using the honey browser extensions, their cashback consumer, maybe they're using something for fuel, like maybe a Gas Buddy, something like that. And they use Tapestri alongside like other toolbelt, that because Tapestri runs in the background, that's the key thing. So you don't have to, you know, purchase anything, or do any of that manages pays you for the places you're going to go anyway. So that's currently our audience. And our goal is to kind of go down market, as well as 18 to 24, during demographic, but also get that meat potatoes of middle aged consumer as well. So this is

William Harris 6:27

like when I was 14 came out, and it blocked everybody's ability to track across apps and all this stuff. But people could say, Well, I actually want ads that are relevant to me, feel free to sign me up, go ahead and track me. This is kind of the same idea. But taking even beyond that, taking it into offline stuff as well to say, hey, yeah, go ahead and use my data, just pay me for it. But I also you get the benefit out of potentially better advertising as well. Right?

Walter Harrison 6:56

Exactly. So the benefit and the beauty of Tiktok, and Instagram we all use as products is the ads are very relevant, right? When people buy the products, they see an IG, and tick tock because they know so much about you. But when you jump into the web and other apps, like you know, I'm not going to buy this new Honda CRV, I just saw an ad for it. I'm not a Honda guy, why am I seeing a CRV ad with Tapestri? We want to enable brands and advertisers. Because our apps always on to find the right audience. So when the consumer downloads Tapestri, this app wants to track you across other apps, etc. You kind of have to say yes, that's kind of the nature of the app, and I know other apps struggle. That's why we built it. So with us always on seeing, you know, do you fly domestic internationally? Are you in market to buy an electric car? Or do you grocery shop? Do you work out often? What Jim, all these things that are permission based? That we can then kind of go to our advertisers and monetize it? And the consumer benefits as well. So

William Harris 7:58

yeah, in what can consumers expect out of this? You know, are they making you know, pennies a week? Are they making? You know, $100? Like, what's, what's a typical amount of return that a customer like, uh, the average consumer gets for selling their data like this? Yeah,

Walter Harrison 8:15

it's great question. So it's kind of ranges, so on average is about seven $8 per month. That's typically the way that the average user, some of us are making 25. And some are making you know, a couple of dollars, the benefit is, is really based on where you go. So our users that are in the gig economy, the busy moms and busy dads do exceptionally well, because you're doing all these points of interests. And as you go to points of interest, you earn more, but we also have a gaming, we've added surveys, we get paid you to refer other people as well. So we've added more stuff. And we're actually excited to announce a brand new product powered by Allstate, which is drive to earn. So we're actually launching that in the next few weeks where you can actually drive and are at the same time.

William Harris 9:00

Sure. And so let's say bringing it back to the E commerce, merchants who are watching this, how does this help and benefit them? Are they able to use this data then to target people better than maybe what they're getting by just simply saying, hey, go broad Facebook, which is, which is the trend and there's a lot of benefit to just saying go broad and let Facebook handle it. But sometimes we miss having a little bit more that granularity in in specificity that we had in picking audiences.

Walter Harrison 9:30

Absolutely. And I think e-comm is actually a good tie in for what Tapestri and not just Tapestri other mobile based solutions can provide. So one of the things we do utilize me accessibility on Android, is we look at apps on the phone. So with the consumers permission, we're going to see if overstock and Amazon all these like T mu that is this ecommerce app is on that phone. So that helps with audience building. And also we can see open closed like when did they use it last? So if you're looking to build an app means that becomes useful. And then it jumps to the web. So we can actually grab mobile web data as well. And those are keywords that can be brought back down to a taxonomy. So absolutely, then you go even further does their locations where they go match the apps on their phones and their browsing, and he paints a much, much bigger picture.

William Harris 10:22

So this is, this is interesting. And I think that this gives people the ability, even when you're talking about, let's say, better, RFM segmentation of customers to be more sure of who it is that you're targeting, especially of your current customers as well.

Walter Harrison 10:39

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. You kind of broke up a little bit, but I think I got you're saying is like really diving in to who your customer is. And obviously modeling and lookalike audiences and audience extension works really well. But I think the more granular you can get, the better. And everybody knows we're all talking about first party data, first party data, having a direct relationship and Mindy's ecommerce companies you're working with, they have that. But now it's looking to understand where are they when they're not on your Shopify website, on your Squarespace website, or whatever it is.

William Harris 11:13

Yeah, and so I'm glad you brought up first party data, because one of the things that you and I wanted to talk about then in a more ethereal sense, is the future of data. And we've had a lot of really great people on the show already talking about the future of data. I'm thinking about, you know, Yarden Shaked, over at veros is talking about benchmarking data, Shawn Larkin over@field.io, is talking about how he's democratizing data so that way people have access to their own data like merchants to be able to use that and not just locked down within whatever platform you want. And I think there's Chase Zeiman over@cart.com is doing some really interesting thing with feeds and attributions. You're the first one, though, that brought this idea of of individuals owning their data. And so is this where you're seeing the future of data going, where it's not necessarily the brand and in the data, but you own in your own data? And there's something about Massachusetts law he talks about, but like, tell me, what is the future of data? Yeah, so

Walter Harrison 12:13

in our opinion, I think the future of data is permissioned. wholeheartedly, right? So we think we're about two to three years behind Europe, we typically are with privacy rules and legislation with GDPR, you have Massachusetts coming out this law where you really can't sell it unless the consumer really really opts in. So and obviously, Apple, and Google is doing something similar this fall, maybe January of next year. So with all that said, we you and I were creating the exhaust for so many companies to do really well. And we think you and I should get a piece of it. So if we had some type of data locker of sorts, where you say, hey, this, I'm okay, monetizing this, I'm not this is an absolute no go. And also, it depends on the consumer with us using Tiktok. And Instagram, many millennials and younger think there's no privacy, privacy is dead, you can have whatever you want, I have nothing to hide that type of mentality. I don't think that's necessarily the right approach. I think privacy is real, it should be something that we take immensely seriously. But if you do want to monetize certain aspects of your life, as a YouTuber, as an Instagramer, or as an individual, you should have the right to do that. And that's what we want to enable a Tapestri. Yeah,

William Harris 13:24

I had to laugh when you talked about, you know, millennial, Gen Z, thinking that there's no such thing as privacy anyways. Yeah, I do appreciate how much apple has locked down. I think that's something they've done a really great job. But it is funny, I fall in the camp of, there's really nothing that's private anymore anyways. But then I have my limits. And I feel like there are there are a lot of people who will, you know, download the latest face app or whatever, where it's, you know, show me how old I am. And it's really just owned by some Chinese company that has no interest whatsoever in keeping your privacy at all and, and so they're using that and it's like, and then you also just talked about, like your mother's maiden name in this post, and you're doing all these other things. It's like, you know, tap this, whatever. It's getting to the point where it's like, all of your data and information is out there. So publicly available, the idea of exposing it to be I don't know, just intimidating in some ways. But I like this idea of being able to like pick and choose your I hate this, I'm okay to monetize this. I'm not okay to monetize. Exactly.

Walter Harrison 14:30

I mean, that to your point is saying, so many apps just like pop up on the App Store, the face app or a calculator app that needs your location data in the background, like sure, right? Like there's no utility there. It's these are just data grabs the end of the day, because that email that device ID that cookie is worth money. Right? And that's really the the agenda. So I think with permission, you can ask the consumer very transparently opt in and out completely Usually their choice and potentially see where that product goes. So

William Harris 15:04

permission data in the future I sometimes think a lot about I'm a big fan of crypto, which is decentralizing a lot of things, decentralizing just ownership from from, you know, the perspective of the company as well. How does this play into this? Is there? Is there any crossover between what the crypto space is doing and what you're doing? Or is this completely different? Are you guys a crypto based company in some way?

Walter Harrison 15:30

Yeah, I think there's a lot of analogies between crypto and what we're doing. We're not crypto right now. But the idea of decentralization and democratization clearly are core to what we do, right? Because we think we're creating that exhaust to make these companies billions and trillion dollar companies, why can't we get a piece of it? And the same time, you know, with crypto not necessarily being tied to directly the monetary way that we've been utilizing it before? It's definitely similar. We've kicked around notions of crypto in the past, but nothing quite yet. Yeah,

William Harris 16:03

but I like that, like you said that the democratization of this data is still very much in line with that, that idea that it's like, Hey, this is your data, you should you should own a part of at least whatever is taking place with that. One of the other things you talked about was just utilizing alternative forms of data. You're talking about buying data, buying keywords, what physical retail stores have your similar audience and geofencing. Tell me a little bit more about like the different types of data and how you see these playing into benefiting, let's say the listeners here the e commerce Store owners. Yeah,

Walter Harrison 16:38

so let's, let's use an example. Let's say you have a ecommerce store that sells like, rucking packs. Right? That's like in vogue trend thing is I have organized shipping pack and it competes against something like that. So how do you find your audience, obviously, you can go in meta or Tik Tok, or snap and build an audience. But I think another way to do it is to look at a gym, a traditional gym. For example, let's say we find a Lifetime Fitness and your home state, or Anytime Fitness, something like that. So you find a gym that potentially correlates with someone who finds who likes rucking. So taking those advice ideas as an example, something we also find is that gyms correlate to certain eating places, Lifetime Fitness correlates with Chipotle. I don't know what it is, but people leave the Lifetime Fitness with Anytime Fitness with Equinox gym, and they want to have dinner at Chipotle they before or after. So grabbing those device IDs for target and it gets

William Harris 17:32

those carbs.

Walter Harrison 17:33

Gotta get those carbs, right gotta get those muscles after the end of the day. So I think those are other aspects of utilizing data that aren't just like building audiences, obviously, build that audience it do that audience extension model, but also benchmark it against someone who is at the gym or at the hiking trail, or something like that. So that's one good example, many even goes even further into looking at apps that are installed and things of that nature.

William Harris 17:59

So how easy is this? Let's say that I as the agency owner, or let's say I as the Shopify store, or whomever wanted to use the data that you're talking about, do I sign up and your app? And I can use this? Or how do I actually get this data into my platforms, my email platform into my, my direct mail platform into my, you know, tick tock platform? How do I get that data into this? Yeah, great

Walter Harrison 18:26

question. So you can get the data directly from the app that's kind of we kind of separated and like kind of church from state, but reaching out to the company directly our company like ours, it doesn't have to be Tapestri. And basically, I'm looking to grab mobile device IDs and kind of build an audience based upon certain points of interest. From there, we can send the data to your DSP, we can send it to you and batch process or AWS s3, or and get it to your CRM, and emails or device ID obviously always privacy focus. So you're opting into this, the data we're giving the consumer is benefiting as well, of course, but yeah, I'm sending it directly to you in a secure way. And it's recent, and you can actually test off of that as well. So typically, DSP is kind of the right way to

William Harris 18:26

Yeah, in recent is there like a recency like an updating, you know, to a this data is updated on a daily basis, weekly basis, something like that?

Walter Harrison 19:23

Exactly. So all our data is real time, especially on the Tapestri side, so it's running 24/7 In the background, you hit a POI that we care about, let's say, look, you're talking about Chicago, you're on Michigan Avenue, and you'll walk into Ralph Lauren, if you're in that fashion market, you're a competitor to them, maybe you want to know that and we can send that data to you right away. Sure.

William Harris 19:44

Yeah. Um, what about, you know, attribution you talked about one of the things that's important is being able to know where did somebody originally find you? How are you helping improve attribution because there's a lot of things out there that are attribution has gotten kind of sticky or lost.

Walter Harrison 20:02

So that the key thing for us on attribution and just context, right, so you see an ad and then Instagram. And how does Starbucks know that you saw that ad? And how do they measure ROI with attribution for us with location based, like, if you're walking to see a JCDecaux, at a bus station, or your, you know, you see a billboard, we can actually see that, hey, there's a billboard there, the consumer passed by it, they actually go to that place later. And you can do a lot of measurement around it. So that's how a lot of companies use us now out of home campaigns, and app campaigns and also app install campaign. So if these e commerce stores also are doing user acquisition to acquire users in the Play Store, or the Apple App Store, you know, you can say, yep, that's a net new install, because we can now see or your app on that phone as an example. So but attribution as we all know, is key. Because if you're not measuring it, what are we doing at the end of the day? Right.

William Harris 21:01

Right. Well, and I'm glad that you brought up mobile apps, because that's where I wanted to go next with this, because you were talking about how you can help improve even the understanding between whether it was mobile app mobile web, there's a lot that you're able to do from the Tapestri side on this. Walk me through some of that. Yeah.

Walter Harrison 21:19

So I think when you look at loyalty, so think about your own phones, whoever's listening to this right now think about your phone. Are you on Safari, Chrome, Firefox, brave, whatever browser, you're on your favorite retailer, or are you app based, you're downloading the app, and you're signing in, you're using that more consistently and persistently. I think there's levels if it's brand new, maybe you started on the web. And over time, you're like, oh, you know, I want to sign in with face ID Touch ID, or whatever. And I'll download the app. So we look at internally is just the distance between those two, the most loyal users will download that app and use it more frequently. And then obviously, the newer users not as much. So for us measuring that and then trying to get insights back to the advertiser and the brand, are key and crucial.

William Harris 22:06

Well, and sometimes I feel like as brands, we can rush to try to create that loyalty without going through the steps of creating that loyalty. Where I'll see somebody that maybe pushes the mobile app download before they've established a relationship with that customer. Do you see that being a problem as well?

Walter Harrison 22:29

Absolutely. There's a saying in the app install, like once you get someone to download your app, and they delete it, the chances of them coming back is like 1%, or 2%. It's very, very low, like once they've already tried it. So I think having them try out your product on the web, first may be a good experience, unless it again, depending on your budget, depending on your actual goals, and all those things but app download to get sign up and then use it. I mean, they have to do an action, if you would get someone to download your app within the first few hours. If not, you know that app install could potentially be wasted. So starting out on the web might be a good idea, but old ultimately depends on the goals.

William Harris 23:09

Yeah, get them to fall in love with you first, then they want to install the app because they are already have a mindset of wanting to be loyal.

Walter Harrison 23:19

Exactly, exactly right.

William Harris 23:25

If you were going to give one piece of advice to ecommerce owners right now who are trying to be at the forefront of where you see data going, this future that you've outlined for data, what would you tell them to do right now to at least start getting their feet wet and being proactive about this?

Walter Harrison 23:47

Yeah. So easy, direct answer is kind of like what you do when you're onboarding someone for stripe is KYC. Know your customer, try to understand your customer as much as possible, within the realms of, you know, not serving them too much. And ask them tons of questions, and they potentially bounce. But you know, how did you hear about us? Was it Instagram? Was it tick tock? Was it a Google search? I mean, those are kind of standard these days. It also, you know, it's a impulse buy from social, how are we going to get them back to get them to purchase more things in the future? Yes, we can drip on them, we're going to do that, of course. But if you understand more like the demographics psychographics how, where they come from, it gives you a better opportunity in the future to target that consumer. So absolutely, say, know your customer within, within boundaries and reason. If we're

William Harris 24:39

gonna be practical about it, know your customer, by utilizing the data that you have on those customers get that data in here, match that up with who they are set well, you can start to understand them a little bit better and deeper.

Walter Harrison 24:51

Exactly. match that email, match that CRM data to an offline set or match it to something further mobile if you can, and that will help paint up better picture and then utilize relevancy with further products. The future we're talking to in the summer riots, everybody's doing fall came ready to fall clothes are already out. And what we know what they bought last fall, what could what could you do to potentially change that for this new campaign?

William Harris 25:16

Yeah, no, that makes sense. Walter, this has been a lot of fun and helpful. I want to transition also into the part where we just talked about who is Walter Harrison cuz I think it's fun to kind of get to know the the man behind the machine here a little bit. Tell me about your childhood. What was your childhood? Like you mentioned, you know, army brat, but like, how did your childhood helped to shape you into the person who is now a successful serial entrepreneur?

Walter Harrison 25:46

Yeah, that's a good question. Well, so I think for me is having really curious parents, we traveled a lot. So again, it gave me a very broad perspective of what's possible, kind of back to the data world, it's probably one of the reasons I think I'm in data now is because I kind of had so much inputs, and knowing kind of what's possible in general, so curious kid always trying to ask too many questions. My parents would say, why. What are we doing today? What are we doing today? Where are we going? Are we going that type of mindset, but finally landed in Missouri, where I'm originally from and St. Louis, and went to school there and focused on marketing and analytics. And that's when we built kind of that first product. And that first product was based on, I want to know how consumers shop right now with Tapestri, we want to know where consumers go, but with their permission. So I think that background of having a lot of perspective, living everywhere, trying to know what's going to happen with prediction, it's kind of led me today where I'm at with Tapestri, where it's kind of all about prediction. So we tried to look at where will you shop next? Where will you go next? Where are you traveling next? And hopefully, empower brands and advertisers with that data? Because it's all permission.

William Harris 27:02

Which is, which is really smart. What about? What about routine? Like, how do you deal with stress? I imagine, again, coming from a military background, you could have gone one of two ways where you are either somebody who is you know, you've got your bed tucked in with the quarters. mitered very nice and neat every single morning and you've got a routine, or you ran the opposite direction away from routine. Are you somebody whose routine and

Walter Harrison 27:28

I'm very routine, probably routine to a fault Sunday asked? Yeah, so I think for me, like as us being founders, or just working at a company fast growing, we clearly deal with a lot of stress. So for me, it's like getting up early, I'm a bit of a coffee guy. So have that routine around making coffee, maybe go for a run in the morning, or likely later in the evening and kind of just get rid of everything we had in the day. I don't run on my phone either. So I was like, no distractions helps me think clearly or go for a hike, just nature base, some and then podcasts and books. I'm not the only one who's building a company. There are millions of people all around the world who've done it a million times better than me. So why not learn from people who are more experienced and have traveled this road already. So books and podcasts are also a big key for me.

William Harris 28:18

Well, and I like that you talked about running without your phone and just being able to have that headspace It reminds me a lot about something that I've read before where no almost every single one of like our our idols in times past I don't know people talk about like, you know, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, unlike these just, you know, genius people. They all talked about how they had like a brisk afternoon walk. That was like a thing that they did that they credited a lot of their success to. And I think there's something to that. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned books and podcasts. Are there books or podcasts that you feel are absolutely valuable? Even if they don't have anything to do with business? You're like, I just really liked this book. And I think it's taught me a lot about myself or anything.

Walter Harrison 29:07

Oh, yeah, there's a ton like this. We have three hour podcast that I went through. But yeah, so I think number one would be Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, if you haven't read it. Yeah, got it. Read it. Right. That's a I think that's like a minimum understanding like how humans kind of live in move in the world. A lot of things in behavioral economics so like payments, reverse ski and the book Thinking Fast and Slow. That's a really good book about how thinking works. And then you know, I would say other just business books. I think a degree by Jim Collins is still a fantastic book right? Of having really high standards and how companies can go from here to there. And then just podcast is more on like, history and sometimes something completely ridiculous did not me get me thinking about work. So favorite would Be Dan Carlin's Hardcore History if you haven't listened to it, it's really good. I

William Harris 30:04

haven't what kind of history is it getting into like, American history, world history, ancient history,

Walter Harrison 30:12

everything. So I think he does a podcast like every three or four months. Each podcast is like four hours, like not getting these podcasts is really long. So if you're going on a long trip, this is the podcast to put up. But the last one he did was on, like Napoleon. He's done stuff on like World War Two. He's done things on everything. But he's so animated. In the end, kind of funny. So he's definitely a good podcast. Listen to Dan Carlin, Hardcore History.

William Harris 30:41

I appreciate that. You just said if you're going on a long trip, I actually just got back from a long trip a couple of weeks ago, we went out to South Dakota, this was my first time out there, it was beautiful. And the idea of listening to something while we were driving sounded like a good idea to me. I've got kids, though, you've got kids. And while I wanted to listen to maybe like, you know, Andrew Huberman, the rest of my family, my, my 1310, and seven year old daughters weren't as excited about listening to that as I was, and so not listening to that very much. I imagine you're the same boat. You've got a couple of young kids as well. Do you actually get to listen to that stuff on long trips anymore?

Walter Harrison 31:21

No, not at all. It's like movies playing in the background and songs tied to Disney Channel, for sure. And now I can let you want to listen to human and it's like, you know, let it go. 24/7 I

William Harris 31:33

get it. Yeah, absolutely. Walter, it's been so much fun getting to know you a little bit more you walking us through the depths of the future of data. And I think it's a very interesting picture that you painted. I would say that whether or not this is the future, I hope that it is because I think that there's some benefit to people being able to have access and ownership over their own data, what they're sharing when they're sharing and benefiting from it. So I like the the future that you're painting here.

Walter Harrison 32:01

Thanks. Well, I appreciate that. Thanks so much for having me. I think you're doing a phenomenal job of this podcast and educating many people like ourselves to learn more and just to challenge what we think Do you think even bigger, so fantastic.

William Harris 32:14

If people wanted to work with you or get in touch with you or follow you what's the best way for them to do that?

Walter Harrison 32:19

Reach out to tapestri.io Walter@tapestri that email or Hello@tapestri? And or we'd really love to get in touch with you directly and solve a problem or just learn more about your business.

William Harris 32:31

Awesome. Thank you so much, Walter. Have a great day.

Walter Harrison 32:34

Thanks. William.

Outro 32:36

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.