What can we learn from the queen of LinkedIn about telling stories for warm robots?
If you’ve been around LinkedIn, you’ve probably noticed Goldie Chan. The green hair makes her stand out … but her consistent calm, positive, and supportive content help you center and ground and … sure, even feel good about yourself.
A couple of weeks ago I spent some time with Goldie on her show. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, Goldie’s coming on TechFirst to share what she does best.
Goldie is a LinkedIn influencer, owns the longest streak of consecutive video posts on LinkedIn (we’re talking multi-year here), and is the CEO of Warm Robots.
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John Koetsier: What can we learn from the queen of LinkedIn about telling stories for warm robots? Welcome to TechFirst with John Koetsier. If you’ve been around LinkedIn at all, you’ve probably noticed Goldie Chan. The green hair makes her stand out, but her consistent, calm, positive, and supportive content helped you kind of center and ground and feel good about yourself. A couple weeks ago, I spent some time with Goldie on her show and now she’s coming on TechFirst to share what she does. Welcome, Goldie!
Goldie Chan: Hello everyone. And hi, John. I’m so excited to be on TechFirst right now.
John Koetsier: Awesome. Well, I’m excited to have you and hopefully so is everybody else that’s listening and on the podcast later on. Let’s start off right here, why are you the queen of LinkedIn?
Goldie Chan, CEO of Warm Robots
Goldie Chan: Oh, my gosh. Well, I think it’s funny to say queen of LinkedIn. Huffington Post called me the “Oprah of LinkedIn” about a few months into me creating video content, which I think we’ll go into in a little bit, but I had been creating daily LinkedIn videos and some of them were interviews, and so I got that nickname, Oprah of LinkedIn. I’ve also been called the “Queen of LinkedIn.” I’ve been called “Beyoncé of LinkedIn,” which is truly a miraculous title, and there have been a lot of nicknames that I’ve gotten from fans over the years.
John Koetsier: So you started this, you kicked this off by having what I believe is the longest running daily video show on LinkedIn. Is that correct?
Goldie Chan: Absolutely. So I was one of the first ten I would say, very active video creators, and of the ten there is maybe one or two other people who are left who are still regularly creating video content. So when I got into the video beta for LinkedIn, I decided to create one video. And one video became two videos, and then things rolled along from there.
John Koetsier: You’re basically saying that making videos and sharing them online is kind of like tattoos, you can’t just do one?
Goldie Chan: I think it’s actually, yes, it’s a lot like tattoos from my friends who have full like the sleeves and the back tattoo, and then it starts crawling up the neck.
John Koetsier: Exactly, exactly. Well, let’s talk about telling stories. You’re a storyteller. You tell stories with video and other ways, of course, you are also a contributor at Forbes. One of the things that I have on my Twitter is that I tell stories with data. Your company is Warm Robots and you’re about storytelling for warm robots which are, I assume, people kinda like us. What’s so special about stories?
Goldie Chan: Wow. Well, I love this question because stories, I think are magical. Stories are the way to connect something that feels like a dry idea. Of course, John, you do that with data which I think is amazing, and as you know I love your articles, but you can connect a dry idea or a dry concept or a brand that has no life, to the audience, the people. And that’s what I feel is storytelling. I call it the “storyteller triangle” because what you need is you need the person telling the story, you need the audience, but you also need what you’re even telling the story about. So completing the triangle is what helps us tell strong stories.
John Koetsier: Nice. Talk to us a little bit more about that, about creating a story and what you look for, and maybe what even makes a story worth telling. How’s that work?
Goldie Chan: Well, I think that we’ve talked about what makes a story worth telling before. A story that’s worth telling to me falls into two categories, either it’s a story that’s been heard so much, so it could use a fresh retelling, a new version of it that makes sense for an audience. One of the things that I love to do is I love to bring Dungeons and Dragons into B2B marketing. And I know it feels odd for some people when they see articles on personal branding and Dungeons and Dragons, but to me it makes sense because this is such a story-led world in which there’s always a leader who spends days, months, sometimes years working on a campaign to build out and let people play. So I think stories fall into that category of, once again, a story that’s been heard before but has been reskinned for a new audience.
And then what is everyone’s favorite, which is breaking stories, whatever is the newest story that has never been told before. I personally love featuring people on Forbes, especially in group articles of people who have never been on any major publication before and their story is just being told. And I know that my audience really enjoys that too, because they like being able to discover new people. I will say the cutest thing though, and I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, John, is when I get people who send me pictures with their mom or their dad or their grandma even, and they were like, look, I got into Forbes and here’s the clipping, or they printed it out, or it’s just like a picture of them with their grandma holding up a printed version of the Forbes article. That absolutely makes my day the most because it’s so human, and I think in any part of good storytelling, even when we’re talking about Tesla, right, there is a human element and that’s what makes storytelling great is we pull in those human foibles, our weaknesses into trying to tell a story.
John Koetsier: It’s interesting because when I’m looking for a story, or I’m considering doing a story, I’m always looking for what’s a surprising angle. What’s the part that you didn’t expect? What’s the part that is odd or what stands out? What makes it spectacular, right? And it’s interesting because you can have the most obscure story ever, but if you connect it to something that matters, it can be a really, really big deal. So I did a story like a week ago on the IDFA. Have you ever heard of the IDFA?
Goldie Chan: No, I haven’t.
John Koetsier: Good, okay. Excellent. If you said yes, you would’ve destroyed my whole point right here and my story would have sucked. The IDFA is the identifier …
Goldie Chan: We rehearsed this before, just kidding.
John Koetsier: Haha, we did no such thing. The IDFA is the identifier for advertisers Apple is basically killing, in a sense, and it’s got over 600,000 views on Forbes right now. And just because you can find the angle that says, hey, this is the key to an $80 billion industry, right?
And so that’s one thing that I’ve done, but what’s your strategy for telling stories?
And I want to kind of differentiate because we tell stories in person, we tell stories when we’re speaking in public — and you’ve done a lot of speaking in public and keynoting and other stuff like that — and we also tell stories when we’re online, kind of like right now, right? So what’s your strategy for telling stories and getting them across?
Goldie Chan: Well, I’m so glad that you pulled out that stories are different with different contexts. So let’s do public speaking first, which sadly, both you and I are not doing a ton of right now. I wish we both were, but when I’m thinking about speaking in public with people, I love to have whatever I’m saying be directly relevant to the people that I’m speaking with. For example, last year I did a talk in Romania, and so to a very large group of business folks there, and I wanted to make sure that it was relevant to their market. And when you tell stories, as U.S.-centric of course as I get to be, I understand that it may not make sense to tell a story in a certain way based off literally physically where I’m from and where I live. So especially in those face to face interactions, I want to make sure that I’m telling stories that the audience will understand, and I think that’s such an important part.
Now, if we want to talk about how I then think about telling stories online, there’s so many different ways that I try to do that. Obviously with my Twitter, with my LinkedIn, with my Forbes column, and to me, each of those audiences are very, very different. So if you follow my Twitter, you are in for a treat because it is a little bit all over the place, but I try to make Twitter very interactive because I think that is one of the joys of Twitter is that you can respond back and forth with people, you can reshare stuff, you can respond to polls. So I like to do very silly polls where you have maybe three serious answers and then the fourth answer is absolutely bananas and has nothing to do with the rest of the answers, because I think it’s nice right now in this time to have a little bit of relief. But also polls are magical in a way, because they help tell mini stories that you are doing your own ‘choose your adventure.’ And I feel this way about GIFs. Someone once called me a GIFologist, which I …
John Koetsier: You are a GIFologist. You’re also a GIFaholic. There’s a lot of GIF words that we could invent for you.
Goldie Chan: I love GIFs in that I have an embarrassingly high amount of GIFs of just me floating around the internet in general, on Twitter, on WhatsApp, etc. because I have …
John Koetsier: You’re very GIFable.
Goldie Chan: I’m very GIFable, but also on top of that I speak GIF. So, what I like to do is sometimes I’ll open it up to my audience and say, if you send me an emoji I will translate that emoji into a GIF, right?
John Koetsier: Wow.
Goldie Chan: So either that feeling, like somebody sent me a hazard sign, and then I sent back Worf jumping a chair in the middle of an emergency, because that’s what he would do, you know, like if he heard the blaring sound. And I think it’s fun to think about storytelling that way, how we do visual storytelling.
Because for those of us who are especially writers, it can be really easy, I think, to get it stuck in our heads with our beautiful words. And I love words, but I think there’s also so many other ways to tell really cool stories, as well as beautiful words, there’s obviously videos like I did on LinkedIn, and I do on LinkedIn. But I think there’s also GIFs which are like short clips. There’s so many ways to tell stories.
I think it’s really powerful when you find the best way for you to tell a story that you can express yourself really cleanly. I think that’s really magical when you can find your best storytelling method.
John Koetsier: I love that. I really do love that because the story isn’t just about what you’re giving, it’s also about who you are and where you’ve come from. And one of the things that I really enjoy about you on social is that in spite of the fact that social isn’t always a nice place, social isn’t always a supportive, warm, caring, loving space that embraces everybody and loves everything and is very happy and joyful. Social is also a place where people who, maybe they’ve been hurt, or maybe they for whatever reason are looking for somebody to target, and you’ve been the target of some of that.
And yet you consistently share things that are loving, are kind, are gentle, are upbuilding, and uplifting, and I thank you for that, first of all. And just talk a little bit about, you know, kind of your journey and how you’ve come to deliver that sort of stuff.
Goldie Chan: Well, I think a word that is sadly starting to get overused without people really thinking about what it means, is empathy. I’m such a huge fan of empathy because to me, empathy doesn’t mean just a new term that has also popped up “virtual signaling,” right? I’m going to show you that I care by saying I love everyone one and then there’s no heart behind it, there’s no feeling or thought behind it. And I know for a fact that quite a few of my followers, especially on different social media platforms, they struggle daily with a lot of different things. And so I want to try if I can to address some of those things that maybe resonate with me so I can explain them, or I can give resources. Y
ou know, a tweet that I cut and paste quite a bit and repost is just hotline numbers in the U.S. for suicide awareness and depression, because I think that’s something that people don’t like to talk a lot about, but if they’re given the resource then they can take it and address it in their own private time, then it becomes something very powerful. But yes, I think empathy to me is the root of really creating the kind of content that shows care and really has care in it. Because I think you and I both know, and we’re not going to name names of course, because that would be evil, but we both know people who like to pretend that they care and it comes across to me so flatly, because we’re still animals at the end of the day and I think a lot of us can sense, like on a very gut level, when something feels genuine. It feels like that person really thought about it and really felt that emotion, versus somebody who’s just like ‘I hope you feel better, find my link,’ like ‘click on my link, subscribe now.’
John Koetsier: Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. I mean, it is challenging and it costs sometimes as well. There are situations where I’ve been unfollowed, you’ve been unfollowed, I’m sure.
Goldie Chan: Yes.
John Koetsier: Or attacked based on who you care about, what you’ve posted, and other things like that. And yet, at some point, at some level, you have to take a stand and be who you are. I want to ask you, why did you start telling stories on LinkedIn with video? You were, if not the first, you were in the very first cohort of people that LinkedIn allowed onto the platform to use video and what motivated you? What did you want to do?
Goldie Chan: So it’s so funny when people ask me this, like looking back, because they thought I would know that two like …
John Koetsier: You had a master plan, c’mon.
Goldie Chan: … three years later that I had this master plan. And I mean, ask people what they do on — oh gosh, I almost said Periscope, but Periscope is still around, it’s the other one that’s gone, Meerkat, right? Like ask somebody who spent their entire lives on Meerkat, they didn’t plan for it to also go down. So when I started on LinkedIn I got into the video beta, and it’s pretty hilarious to me, the story, because I had just left a head of marketing job at a social analytics startup, so this is like serious marketing. I’ve had a pretty serious marketing career for over a decade and I was burned out, and I decided to just start creating video content mostly because none of us want that gap in employment. And when you go in for interviews, you want to be able to explain what you’ve been doing with all this time and of course, you know, most of the time we’re just having reflective recovery time, but it’s nice to say, oh, I was working on this small project.
So I made one video. One video became two videos. Two videos became 20 videos, and I think around 20 consecutive daily videos, that’s when Jeff Weiner featured me in a keynote on new LinkedIn creators. And I thought that’s like, I didn’t expect that, that was not like I was gunning for it, I had planned for that. I had zero plan for it. So my videos were on branding and marketing and pop culture. So I looked at everything from trains in America to Harry Potter, to all these phenomenons that you could put numbers and historical context behind. And they were just mini episodes. And I think I did, my first 50 consecutive daily videos were only on that. And as things progressed things got more and more, I like to say nutty, because I kept thinking I would stop. S
o I thought I’d stop at 20, but then I couldn’t because when the CEO of a platform shouts you out, you don’t stop.
And I kept thinking I should get gainfully employed, you know, and I was starting to pick up, ironically, clients. I was not trying to pick up clients, but I thought, great, I’ll just do this client work until I once again get gainfully — the goal was to get gainfully employed. And I’m about say 80 consecutive daily videos in, I’d passed that 50 mark which I thought I’d stop at, and I didn’t, I’m at 80 consecutive daily videos and I think I’m definitely going to stop at 100. You know, this is bananas, who does 80 consecutive daily videos? And at this point I’m shooting and editing them all myself, right, which for somebody who doesn’t do a lot of video editing, or pretty much none before this, this was not easy.
And at 80 I’m sick, it’s Halloween, and I upload my daily video, I’m done the day, and I started getting all these texts and people were just texting me, texting me, they’re like, ‘Get on LinkedIn right now.’ And I’m like, guys, don’t worry. I already uploaded my daily video. They’re like, ‘That’s not, that’s not it, you better get online!’ So I go online and I am tagged in this massive post with a ton of comments and likes, of the head of video, Peter Roybal, dressed up as me for Halloween. So he bought a green wig …
John Koetsier: Wow!
Goldie Chan: They made a fake frame like a LinkedIn video frame so it looks like a fake LinkedIn post, and he just got a hoodie, which I love, that’s usually how trashy I dress. So that’s what they did to me. He just had a picture of him looking into his phone doing a selfie video, which is the format that I was shooting at the time, and he just said, ‘Thank you to Goldie Chan and all the other video creators.’ So there was no mention of any other video creator, it was just me. And that’s when I think, at video 80 — so you have to understand that’s 80 consecutive days — I’m starting to really believe this is something real that I should really put more energy and time behind.
At this point, I would say even up to 150 daily videos, it was just purely run by me being obsessive compulsive, and just passionate, and type A, and very stubborn, because the first three months, so the first 60 videos I did everyone said I was an absolute idiot. There, I have no close friends, this is like it literally ruined my friendships. I have basically no close friends, you know, of course I have my long time friends, we all do, but no one who is, I would say, like a second-tier friend. All of them faded away when I started doing these daily videos because they thought I was so dumb and they just kept saying, ‘Go on YouTube, make videos on YouTube, go on Instagram, make videos on Instagram’ they’re like, ‘This will never take off, you can’t even monetize, this will get you absolutely nowhere.’
And it was funny because my response to that was, ‘I know it won’t get me anywhere’ so I actually didn’t think necessarily it would get me anywhere. I just said, ‘I’m really enjoying this creative process right now and I think it’s important that I see this through to the end.’
And I just didn’t know when the end was because there was no playbook, no one had done this before, and I didn’t know when the end point was because no one else had ever tried doing it. And once you get into something that’s like a daily consecutive video streak and you are doing the longest one, I remember I think around like a hundred and something videos, someone else tried to start and they got 40 videos in before they said this was absolutely nuts and then stopped. Because I don’t think people understand like publishing a real original video every single day of the week, including the weekends, means that you have to give up a lot. Like there’s a lot I gave up on in order to do two years, almost 800 plus videos …
John Koetsier: Wow!
Goldie Chan: … of consecutive edited daily videos, right. Because I love live, and I kind of wish they had started with live because live would have been honestly a lot easier.
John Koetsier: Yes.
Goldie Chan: Because of course, like for those of us who do live really well, we’re also still going to go back and edit our live videos and things like that. But live, you just hop on and then you’re live and then you’re done. And these were videos I was editing graphics, I was like learning graphics editing. I was doing lower thirds, I was sometimes doing subtitles. Like these were, this was not just let’s just hop on and the whole video took me five minutes to do. And also the platform because it is consistently in beta, and at the time it was definitely in beta, I remember there were days where it would take me four or five hours to upload a single one-minute video, five-minute video.
John Koetsier: Wow.
Goldie Chan: Yes, but I had to do it or else I’d lose that streak. There was, I like to say this, there was never a plan B in my life. For two years there was no plan B, there was only plan A. So I was, I remember being on a flight between LA and London, and that’s a long …
John Koetsier: Yes it is.
Goldie Chan: That’s a long flight, as you know, and I was panickly trying to upload a video because it wouldn’t upload and I’m like, I have to get it before it’s midnight my time, Pacific Standard, because that’s the barrier that I set for myself. And I remember being so panicked. I remember another time I’m literally running down the gangway to get on the plane because another like very beautiful five minute video that I took a lot of time to edit was not uploading. I shot a 20-second video of me running, trying to upload on my laptop, and then I just set that to upload too, and of course, guess which video uploaded? This really hilarious, slightly embarrassing, but so human video of me attempting to upload.
And it’s a video from my iPhone of my laptop with the little thing looking like the bar is slowly crawling towards uploading, that’s the video that made it onto LinkedIn before the plane took off. And I still fulfilled my daily video content and you know what, my life would have been so much easier if I’d just done bite-size videos like that for the rest of the 799 videos. But it was much, you know, at the end of the day, I thought it was so fulfilling that I shot and edited so many videos, just that in general, even if nothing had come from that, because it was so good to learn how to really edit, how to think about timing, and lower thirds and all this other stuff. That’s honestly very helpful right now for me when I’m doing a lot of video talks and things like that. But as you know, John, things changed for me in my life quite a bit after this time, naturally, because now suddenly I was a known entity.
People were flying me all over the world to speak.
This was not something I did before, too. I think a lot of people think I was always like speaking on stages around the world and that’s absolutely not true. So before three years ago, I was never a public speaker. And I suddenly became somebody who’s speaking to thousands of people as an authoritative expert in a field and running panels, which I love to do moderating panels, and all of that fun stuff where you’re engaging in a very public way with people. And then Forbes asked me to write a column, which is a really rare occurrence apparently, because most people pitch Forbes and ask.
John Koetsier: Yes it is.
Goldie Chan: So Forbes was just like, they greased my ego by making me — I forgot what the title was, but it was something that felt quite made up, it was like a Forbes scholar or something — so I was a Forbes something magical for half a year, and then half a year in they’re like, so how’d you like to write a column? And I’ll be totally honest, I pitched them something and they said ‘no’ and then they assigned me. So people think, I don’t want to take credit for this, people think that I came up with this swim lane. Forbes literally assigned me, which I think is also rare. They said ‘you are absolutely the personal branding and storytelling expert, you know, throw a couple of those words and make your own swim lane, but you literally have to have the words “personal branding” and “storytelling” and we want you to write about that.’
And I just, I mean, to be totally honest, like my brain, right, because I didn’t know that people — I know, I know how to write because I’ve had ten plus years of writing in-house behind the scenes, but I didn’t know that other people would trust that I knew how to write because at that point, everyone thought this is just some girl who makes videos, can she string together two sentences? Because as we both know, there’s people who are magical on stage, there’s people who can make video content, but can they write? Writing is so specific and words are so magical because when you put them together in one order, they’re super offensive. And then when you put them together in a different order, they’re so like warm and considerate and it’s such a craft to be able to write.
And so I’m so thankful that I get a venue that was literally assigned to me by Forbes, writing about — and they were so right, because I now think back on that original column idea and they were so right. So I’ll just say Forbes, you were right on that, thank you for making me write about the subject that I now write on, because it’s so fun to write about personal branding and storytelling. And they’re absolutely right, it’s exactly my wheelhouse, it’s exactly the two subjects I care about.
John Koetsier: Well, it’s super interesting. And Amber’s chiming in saying “Loving this energy!” It’s amazing …
Goldie Chan: Amber, I heart you.
John Koetsier: Haha, exactly, I can turn off this video and just let you go because that’s what you do, but I mean there’s such amazing stuff in what you’re saying, right? I mean, we don’t always recognize ourselves. Even if we’re great storytellers, how to tell our story, sometimes we need somebody else to come in and say, that’s what you are, that’s what you do, that’s how you work. And sometimes we’re so, our filter, we’re looking out, right?
Goldie Chan: Right.
John Koetsier: And then somebody looks at us and tells us — and of course we get lots of people who look at us and pigeonhole us or put us in the wrong spot — but sometimes it’s just magical and it works, and you figure it out, and it’s incredible. So that’s amazing. The other thing that was interesting, what you said was the power of streaks. The power of streaks is amazing. And I have one kid who uses Snapchat and I mean, you know, he will not go to bed until his streaks are done. I mean, like he cannot lose these streaks. I’m pretty sure at one point he had streaks for over two years or something like that.
Goldie Chan: Oh my gosh.
John Koetsier: I mean the power of streaks to keep you doing something is incredible. The other thing that …
Goldie Chan: I love that C word, consistency, right?
John Koetsier: Yes.
Goldie Chan: I think consistency is so, so helpful and important for personal growth.
John Koetsier: Yes.
Goldie Chan: And sometimes just for being on Snapchat with your friends.
John Koetsier: Exactly. The other thing is that’s really interesting, and this isn’t the case all the time obviously because people fail, it’s a reality and we fail, right, and we try something that doesn’t work. But what I love about your story is you did something and it was hard. It cost you some friends, it cost you some relationships, it was challenging, you persisted. You didn’t have a, ‘I’m going to monetize this way, this is how it fits into my career.’ There was no grand plan and yet it’s worked out incredibly well. You’re an Adobe ambassador, you’ve spoken at lots of different places, you consult with a ton of A-list companies. It’s very, very impressive, and congratulations!
Goldie Chan: Thank you so much, John. And I have to say, of course, to be the corny person, I am so, so thankful for it because it has introduced me to amazing people like you, because we probably wouldn’t have met, right?
John Koetsier: No we wouldn’t have.
Goldie Chan: If I wasn’t so present and there are so many amazing people, just like humans that I’ve been able to meet because it’s given me access and a platform, and a place of, I think, authority which is actually very helpful to meet people from, because you’re meeting at a much more equal level instead of that person that’s a fan who’s like asking for a favor. You’re meeting people at their level. There’s somebody very famous I know, and I’m not going to mention his name, but everyone else was dying when they met him. And he spoke at the same event as me, and I just, he seemed like he was having a really tough day, and so I met him at his level instead of being a fan. Because people were like, ‘take a selfie with him,’ and I said, ‘I don’t need to take a selfie with him, but I do want to hear his story.’ So he seemed so sad, he had just gotten off a call with his daughter, and I just gently nudged him and I was like, ‘Hey, are you doing OK? Like what’s going on with your life?’ And we had this super heart-to-heart moment, he cried, like I was …
John Koetsier: Wow.
Goldie Chan: And that wasn’t the point, right? I wasn’t trying to get that to put into a GIF of us like interacting and having a moment, because it wasn’t performative.
John Koetsier: Yes.
Goldie Chan: It was real, and I really wanted to know that this human being was okay. And I’m pretty sure, and even the conference organizer was just like, ‘He was blown away by you Goldie, he was like, who’s that weird green-haired girl that made me cry?’ But I feel like when you have those real moments with people at their level and you treat everybody at the same level too, you’d be surprised how much farther you can go when you’re not either idolizing them or looking down on them.
John Koetsier: I could not agree more. I mean, everybody is human, everybody is, has the same, we are who we are, right? Treat everybody as you would like to be treated, and I think that goes far. I have to end with this. I have, I call it the world famous — it’s not world famous, but I call it that, you know, I’m speaking it into being — the world famous TechFirst 10-in-5. It’s ten questions, five minutes, all about tech. Are you ready?
Goldie Chan: Ready, let’s do it.
John Koetsier: Favorite piece of tech gear in your house?
Goldie Chan: Oh my gosh. It’s probably this, I’m like reaching over ta-da …
John Koetsier: Haha, nice!
Goldie Chan: It’s one of my circle lights.
John Koetsier: Awesome. Can’t-do-without-it tech that you wear?
Goldie Chan: Oh my gosh, tech that I wear, can I count my headphones? Because I live in them.
John Koetsier: You can count your headphones.
Goldie Chan: I would say headphones or AirPods because I absolutely live in them.
John Koetsier: Awesome, excellent. Android or iOS?
Goldie Chan: iOS.
John Koetsier: Okay. EV or gas or none of the above?
Goldie Chan: Currently none of the above, but if I was to, EV.
John Koetsier: Okay, excellent. Mac or Windows?
Goldie Chan: Mac.
John Koetsier: I know the answer to this one because you’ve mentioned it a few times, the question is GIF or JIF? And you said GIF, so you are right, you win the prize.
Goldie Chan: Prize please.
John Koetsier: Hahaha, exactly, it’s in the mail.
Goldie Chan: John, don’t lie on your own podcast.
John Koetsier: I know, I know, shoot. Favorite guilty pleasure app?
Goldie Chan: Oh, my gosh. It’s, you know what, it definitely is Hearthstone. I love playing Hearthstone, it’s a card game, it is very dorky and it is great.
John Koetsier: Awesome, no worries. Excellent. You are allowed to have one guilty pleasure, maybe two. Do you want, if you buy a car, do you want a self-driving car or do you want to drive yourself forever?
Goldie Chan: Gosh, I actually am really excited to watch how self-driving technology develops further. I don’t think that it’s mature right now, as I’m sure both you and I have seen it and been in the cars in action at CES in Las Vegas. I don’t think it’s safely mature enough for regular consumption, but when it will be, I will be very excited for our self-driving cars.
John Koetsier: Excellent. Yeah, I was at CES I think it was two years ago, and I was supposed to say, ‘Hey, Alexa, bring me my car’ and yeah, it didn’t function. So …
Goldie Chan: It didn’t function. Yeah, there’s so many of those things too where they have the grid lines and the car is to know it’s supposed to park between the lines, and I watch it sometimes and it’s a little terrifying. But I think once we get it right, our robot overlords will take care of everything.
John Koetsier: Exactly. Once I stuck my foot in front of the wheel just to see what it would do, but I chickened out so we will never know.
Goldie Chan: John, next time take your foot out of your shoe, take the shoe and put the shoe in front of the wheel.
John Koetsier: Oooh, wisdom, wisdom, wisdom. Okay, Elon Musk calls you up and says, ‘Hey, queen of LinkedIn, do you want a free trip to Mars?’ Are you in or are you out?
Goldie Chan: I, oh man, that’s tough because I would not feel comfortable going to Mars unless I knew that I could undergo the rigorous training, that like physical training, so I would need to do a physical to make sure that I was healthy enough to go to Mars without disintegrating in space first. So I’ll give that non-answer of like, I would need to know if I was physically able to even consider that option.
John Koetsier: Okay!
Goldie Chan: This is the producer side of me talking of course, the risk management.
John Koetsier: Yeah, caution, no worries. It’s all good. Alexa, or Hey Google, or Hey Siri?
Goldie Chan: Oh gosh. I want to say Alexa.
John Koetsier: Okay.
Goldie Chan: I think it’s so tough. I think it’s so tough, they’re all good in their own ways.
John Koetsier: Very good. Very polite. I mean, you know … excellent. Well, thank you so much, Goldie. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show.
Goldie Chan: It’s always so fun to talk with you, John.
John Koetsier: Excellent. For everybody else, hey, thank you for joining us on TechFirst. My name is John Koetsier. I appreciate you being along for the ride, whatever platform you’re watching on, hey, like, subscribe, share, comment, all of the above. And if you’re on the podcast later on and you like it, please rate it and review it, that would be a massive help. Thank you! And until next time, this is John Koetsier with TechFirst.