Paul Jarley: It’s Space Week at UCF and I’m like a kid in a candy store. So many questions. For one, everyone’s talking about going to Mars, but why? What problem are we solving? What does Mars offer that other planets or the moons don’t? And if the answer is survival or curiosity, does that really require an economy, people trading air, power and data in some kind of cosmic barter system? Or is Mars just a science project? Let’s be real. Most moms or dads did their kids science projects. Nobody ever monetized anything from any of them.

This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I’m Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I’ve got lots of questions. To get answers, I’m talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, Is This Really a Thing? On to our show.

In the past few years, the College has been undergoing a transformation. We’ve been asked to build a Business School that’s a key asset to Florida’s leading engineering and technology university. That’s meant bringing in people who are a little different from our typical pragmatic, data-driven faculty. The ones who teach students to manage people and PNLs. A few of these new faces can fairly be called dreamers. One of them is Zaheer Ali. He, along with Greg Autry is leading our space commercialization efforts, including our space MBA. It’s not a nickname, it’s a space MBA. As we were setting up for Space Week, Z claimed that a Martian economy would really be a thing. Well, he said something like that. I gave him a skeptical look, he countered with a panel of experts.

Listen in.

Zaheer Ali: Well, thank you Dean Jarley. I like to say that, you know, in our business, we turn sci-fi into sci-reality. And one of the people who helps make sci-fi and is now helping make science reality is Danica Vallone of the Making Space Agency. Her path to space is very interesting coming from Hollywood of things like costumes and sets of such high fidelity and accuracy that the space industry said we need some of that. In my time at NASA, one of the things we did was we always built very high fidelity simulators and simulation systems to prepare people and equipment for the challenges of the space environment. So welcome Danica.

Danica Vallone: Thank you very much.

Zaheer Ali: We also have Dr. Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute, of the SETI Institute, one of the leading planetary scientists in the US and indeed the world Co-Chair of the National Space Society Space Settlement Summit and International Space Development Conference. Welcome, sir.

Paul Jarley: So I’m going to start this conversation by asking the same question I ask anybody who pitches me an idea, what problem does this solve? If you’re going to Mars and establishing an economy, what problem does that solve?

Danica Vallone: Mars expert over here should probably have first crack.

Pascal Lee: This is an interesting way to frame the question. I’m not interested in space exploration to solve a problem. I’m interested in drawn to space exploration and Mars exploration in particular because as a scientist, I’m interested in this quest for life. We often say we’re looking for life on Mars. What we fail to specify is that we’re looking for the first example of an alien form of life. And we’re not talking about little green men or some intelligent form of life. We know that Mars hasn’t had that in its history, but we’re looking for another example of life. A different biology from ours. All life on earth is connected and going to Mars would solve possibly that problem, which is how alone are we? Is there some other form of life even within our own solar system? That would solve the problem in the sense of giving us a fuller perspective of what we mean here on Earth.

What are we as a phenomenon in the universe? Are we something really exceptional? Are we common? So that’s the scientific quest that I think would be solved by going to Mars. But in a broader sense, going to Mars to me is also opening a frontier. It’s creating new possibilities. It’s allowing our dream to not just be focused on one planet, but sort of be placed our dreams to be placed in a broader context of a universe where we can do things, where we can thrive. And so maybe the problem we’re trying to solve here is to not be confined to the Earth in our thinking, but to be beyond Earth.

Danica Vallone: I love Pascal with every fiber of my being, but I think that going to Mars is a step in the path to solving the penultimate problem, which is the eventual demise of our species. On a long enough time signature, even if we manage to not blow ourselves up or create some giant nuclear winter or implode the Earth, eventually it will no longer be livable here on our planet. So if we don’t, and we’re talking about millions of years of time signature, eventually figure out how to exist off world and terraform and make other habitable places in the solar system and galaxy and universe as a whole, we will inevitably go extinct. So this is the biggest, fastest, juiciest of all of the problems to solve, and Mars is our second-closest neighbor that is viable.

Paul Jarley: Z, you threw out the economy. It’s on you buddy.

Zaheer Ali: So I’m going to go hardcore here. Capitalism, as we know it is based on continuous growth, right? And you see interesting behavior in the last decade. There was a really good article about competing for talent and things, but the real gem in that article was the statement that, look, we don’t have easy growth markets anymore, right? You’re down to tier five in China, the African disposable income has not increased and India is serving itself to a great extent. So if we’re going to constantly drive the system we currently have, we need to grow populations and we need to grow economies. So I think going to the moon, going to Mars and developing economies off world fundamentally solves the problem of continuing to drive the system we have, should we change the system? That’s a different type of discussion entirely. And secondly, the Earth as far as we know it, in our solar system and certainly within reachable timelines is completely unique.

Are there other planets out there that are Goldilocks-type planets where there’s water and the right temperature and all these other things for our type of life to exist? Yes, we found them. Missions like Kepler and TESS and others have identified some of those. But, they’re not reachable. We do not have the physics understanding to achieve that. So in the meantime, what do we do? How do we protect Earth? Well, I would rather that we completely strip-mine the moon. I would rather that we completely pull asteroids down onto Mars, even if it crashes in the surface, it causes different types of damage. It’s a dead rock. But the only place there’s life that we know it is here and creating these economies off world to serve Earth is in my opinion, one of the ultimate forms of Earth environmentalism as well.

Paul Jarley: Okay, I’m going to focus on Mars here, because that’s how you served it up. We’ll get to this more a little bit. Yes, Mars is a rock. I don’t see that Mars has anything going for it. The moon has some things going for it. It’s close, it has some water, right? There’s some other things there. Mars doesn’t seem to have anything. You are telling me that it would be easier to grow and produce an economy on Mars than it is in Africa. I would ask you to rethink that proposition.

Zaheer Ali: That’s fair. I just think we should do both.

Pascal Lee: I both agree with Zaheer and disagree in some ways. But I think the disagree may be on the timescale over which we would like to see these things happen. Mars is a God-forsaken place right now.

Paul Jarley: It’s hell, let’s be honest,

Pascal Lee: Venus is hell, Mars worse, a little better.

Zaheer Ali: The atmosphere will melt you on Venus.

Pascal Lee: Mars is a little bit better. It’s a place to me that we can explore. Now whether or not we should establish colonies and large settlements of humans, I personally don’t see that. That’s not what drives my vision of the future of humanity and space including on Mars. But there are several things that are really changing here in the landscape. First of all, when we say why spend money in space, why can’t we have more of an economy in space? The answer is that money is not spent in space. Even when we go to space, money is spent here on Earth, the economy is here on Earth. It’s benefiting humans every day on Earth with the things that we’re doing already in space. And to me for quite a while still until, and if we ever have a larger population that’s permanently present on some other world, what we really see the economy that’s based on Mars. But for a long time, even when humans are going to explore Mars and even when we establish a first base there and a resort that tourism might actually want to use and send people to, the economy will still be on the Earth. The money will be made on Earth, the investments will be made on Earth. And, you know, it’s farther down the road that I see that we would really transition into what one might call a sort of a Mars-based economy. But I hope that the day for that will come. It’s just a matter of is this really the immediate future that we’re talking about? And for quite a while still the economy is going to be Earth-centered even when we go to the moon, let alone Mars.

Paul Jarley: Well, the economy requires a few things. The first thing is scarcity. Mars has plenty of scarcity. That won’t really be a problem.

Danica Vallone: Scarcity in abundance.

Paul Jarley: Right? Exactly. Then it needs specialization of labor because scarcity and specialization of labor leads to trade and trade is at the heart of an economy. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that currency has to trade. I mean you could see on Mars or on another planet, oxygen credits might serve as a barter system for trade. But I do think also there’s sort of a stage in the middle. So if you think about on our little world how colonization happened, you would think about things like the Hudson Bay Trading Company, which was given a monopoly for a certain period of time, largely for resource extraction. And here I think we’re talking about a resource extraction scenario, at least in the short term. What I worry about with Mars is there ain’t no resource to extract. I don’t know what it would be.

Pascal Lee: Well, water actually would be a very important resource and we know is abundantly present there. First of all, it can be used as a fluid that we use for hydration solution in general, but also for as rocket fuel, you can break up H2O into hydrogen and oxygen and that’s rocket fuel. So in the context of Mars, actually, this notion of using water from Mars, I don’t know how that translates into an economy, but as a resource certainly that we should tap into that buys you a lot.

Paul Jarley: Something to make a settlement sustainable that would –

Pascal Lee: Buy you a lot to be able to –

Paul Jarley: Yeah, that would buy you a lot.

Pascal Lee: To extract water and have a gas station on Mars.

Paul Jarley: Yeah.

Pascal Lee: Now it’s actually less clear on the moon ironically, because right now we have a lunar program that’s completely obsessed by extracting water ice from the lunar South Pole. If you look at the actual scientific data about this, there is water ice at the South Pole, and even people say there’s the equivalent of 200,000-plus Olympic size swimming pools worth of water at the South Pole, but it’s really scattered over a very vast region. And even in places where you have the highest concentration of water ice, according to the one map that we have for now of the hydrogen in the lunar South Pole, it would take the plowing of 26 football field size of a patch of ground on the moon down to a depth of one meter for you to extract enough water to fill one Starship. Forget about the environmental damage you do to the moon.

There’s no economy there in my view because it’s not just excavating the stuff. You have to confine the water, pipe it, store it, preserve it because it vaporizes, it vents, and then eventually you’d have to fill in your rocket. So you have to take the water to where the rocket is because where the ice is is actually not really easy to land or operate. The bottom line is to me, there’s a pipe dream here with extracting water from the moon economically. And yet we are all focused on getting to the South Pole of the moon right now, which I think is actually a strategic mistake to send people there. The biggest source of water on the South Pole of the moon is the Earth.

Paul Jarley: Can we import it?

Pascal Lee: Yes, we can transport water from the Earth. Any single landing of a starship on the moon can bring in 125 metric tons of water. I think for a long while, the water on the moon should be counted as coming from the earth as opposed to extracted on site. It might take a generation or two here of really prospecting at the South Pole, and if we ever get lucky enough to find a spot where we can really extract water in large amounts and in a way that’s economically viable, we would do that. I’m completely on board the dream and desire of growing an economy in space from local resources, but the bar is very high to make it economically viable for quite a while.

Danica Vallone: There is one factor that we haven’t discussed yet, which is the variability in gravity that exists, whether we are in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), MEO (Medium Earth Orbit), GEO (Geostationary Earth Orbit), on the Moon, or Mars. And Mars has its own very unique gravity signature and we do not yet know what kind of manufacturing can be done in very specific gravitational balance levels. Specifically when it comes to organelles or biology or being able to 3D print organs and things like that. Again, when it comes to reproduction capabilities. Essentially all we know when it comes to our bodies and gravity is one G good, zero g bad. And that’s the extent of our knowledge base. So to have a planet-sized laboratory to be able to explore what is possible inside of those bounds is potentially incredibly advantageous.

Zaheer Ali: One other thing that I would add is it’s about real estate at some level.

Paul Jarley: Well now we’re talking property rights.

Zaheer Ali: And that’s being established. That’s why we have a panel on governance at the Space Settlement Summit because we have to figure that out. But –

Paul Jarley: I seriously doubt there’s going to be sovereignty on the moon or Mars.

Zaheer Ali: It might be like the Alaskan wilderness.

Paul Jarley: Or Antarctica, right?

Zaheer Ali: Antarctica is different because the world’s nations got together mostly and said we’re not going to extract resources. That is exactly the opposite of what we want to do in space. We want people to go extract resources because that fuels investment. If there’s an ROI at the end of this, when my ship comes in or in this case when my spaceship –

Paul Jarley: You and I are going to be dead then, Z.

Zaheer Ali: Yeah, but we do have to set this up. I mean that is one thing that is important to realize in the space conversation is we are in this for the species and between (Carl) Sagan and (Frank) Drake, they laid out the probability that our great great grandkids exist. And it is not a hundred percent. And that is a reality that some of us look at and say the way we can make sure that gets closer to a hundred percent is –

Paul Jarley: This is why you need a space MBA. But keep going.

Zaheer Ali: You know, Phil Metzger, who is a professor here, I’ve been telling him to publish this work, but he’s been tinkering with this model and I think you’ve seen it Pascal, right?

Pascal Lee: Phil is a great researcher, yeah.

Zaheer Ali: But he needs to publish the damn thing, so then the rest of us can start playing with it too and optimize it and 20-year-olds can figure it out, which is probably what’s going to happen.

Pascal Lee: And he does publish good stuff.

Zaheer Ali: Yeah, but this particular model on how much mass and population it takes to actually make exactly what you said, that economy –

Paul Jarley: A minimally viable economy in this case.

Zaheer Ali: Right? It’s not a hundred, it’s not a thousand, it’s not 10,000. It’s tens of thousands of people, but it is not all of them on Mars. It is a spectrum from orbit all the way to Mars and back. And the thing is, when you look at distances, particularly you talk to people like Joel Sercel of TransAstra and others, when we think about what is it really going to take for us to advance to other levels of civilization? That and also where does some of these economies kick in? And to access the asteroid belt at some level, we don’t know how to mine an asteroid, but we do know how to mine in gravity. So if we have to pull stuff down to Mars and then process it there, it could become the giant processing plant for the next level, the type two human civilization.

Paul Jarley: Well, that may bring up some ethical issues that we don’t have time for today. But I’m trying to apply a pretty fundamental economics principle here. I’m not trying to pooh-pooh the idea that there’s going to be an economy that has some basis in space. We need to think in terms of comparative advantage. And I don’t see Mars having one. It ain’t close, it doesn’t have any materials that I think we need. I’m thinking there are probably other prospects even in the solar system that would be better for establishing a civilization than Mars would be?

Pascal Lee: First of all, like I said, establishing a civilization on Mars is not at all something that drives my interest and actions and area of space.

Paul Jarley: And we can stipulate, it’s hard.

Pascal Lee: To me, first of all, Mars right now is still a very attractive and some sense romantic landscape, but the reality of this place is really harsh. It’s completely deadly. If you walk out onto Mars without a pressurized spacesuit, you’re dead within seconds from low pressure and other things will kill you eventually as well. But the key thing here is there really is a potential for there to be life on Mars. Not at the surface, we don’t think anymore, but deeper down, or at least in the subsurface, possibly in caves. And there are many caves, there’s over a thousand caves and pits that have been identified on Mars in this day. And when you’re in a cave on Mars, the harshness of the environment is completely different. Now it’s completely moderated into something that many forms of life on Earth could survive in, even at the low pressure of Mars. So really one of the potential major discoveries we could find on Mars, if you find a form of alien bug or life, is essentially insights into an entirely new realm of biology. And we have to understand what biology means today. It’s an entire industry. It’s an entire economy on Earth, understanding life, how it works, how it doesn’t work, how it could be modified, how it could be adapted. All of these things would be revolutionized by another example of life that we could find. So there’s that huge potential I think that really is looming on Mars, but we don’t know that it’s there. That’s a fact.

The other thing is what’s the worth of a National Park? It is just there preserved, it’s beautiful, it has potential, it’s very attractive. People still go to National Parks. Are we necessarily thinking that one day we’ll have to destroy Yellowstone and turn it into a thermal plant or an electrical plant? No. The answer is there are some things out there that we should try to achieve, go explore and possibly settle a little bit because they are just incredible things for us to think about and dream about. So, I think that once again, if you’re in the business of really making money fast, space is only in a very limited way the place where you want to be. But if on the other hand you are really a long-term thinker and you are interested, you believe in humanity’s greater future down the road, and you sort of are an investor in that sense of into our distant future, then the action, as Zaheer says, needs to be taken. Now we are the people who have the responsibility of taking the first steps to making this happen down the road.

Paul Jarley: So we did find some things right on the sea bed near volcanic vents, which showed us forms of life that we did not know existed before. If I may digress for a minute though, our own human experience would tell us that if life exists, it exists everywhere on that planet. It’s not hard to find. It screams at us in various forms.

Pascal Lee: Let me moderate that. I’ve done 25 years of field work in the Arctic. There is life in the Arctic, but a lot less. It doesn’t scream at you anymore. You go to the Arctic, you’re walking on this desert plane. You have to look for life to find it. It’s not harking back at you. And so, I do think that a place like Mars could have life, globally, but in places that are still niche like underground. And there’s the speculation that somehow if it had life at all, it would have somehow colonized the whole planet and modified it. That’s not necessarily the case. On Earth, even on Earth, in extreme environments, you see that life recedes into nooks and crannies where it can survive, but it doesn’t necessarily have enough oomph at that point to change the planet.

Paul Jarley: So, you used the word romance. So talk a little bit about that, about the power of space exploration and storytelling and romance. People make a lot of money off of that.

Danica Vallone: Yes we do. Yes we do, my friend. People need things that are greater than themselves to believe in and to strive for. That’s a unifying human trait. And to do hard things means that we’re solving for all sorts of other problems along the way. So if Mars is the symbolic end goal, the amount of technology and innovation that’s required to get us there will produce an enormous amount of viable, economically viable offshoots that we can make use of. The more resource constrained the environment, the more difficult our solutions are, but we will get there. And as our Earth becomes less inhabitable, as we treat it increasingly poorly, this will become very, very relevant for us to be able to have access to. But the reach itself is noble and if it exists as little more than a symbol that still has intrinsic value to the species.

Paul Jarley: So if you had a few trillion dollars to invest tomorrow, where would you put it? Z?

Zaheer Ali: A couple trillion, that’s a big number.

Paul Jarley: We’re going to think big here, right? Well, it’s not going to be a small task.

Zaheer Ali: Right. If I had to invest it in a short time span or within a few years, it’s going to be a little nuts, but I’m just going to say it.

Danica Vallone: I’m ready.

Zaheer Ali: The material capability of there for a lunar space elevator, it would eliminate the need for keypad zones and directly enable interaction from the lunar surface to orbit and could be a direct last-mile system to kickstart the lunar economy.

Paul Jarley: You got to tell me more about what a lunar elevator looks like so I understand.

Zaheer Ali: It’s a space elevator like this Arthur C. Clark thing where you’ve got weight on one end –

Paul Jarley: And it’s connected to the Earth?

Zaheer Ali: and connected to the body. The material properties are not sufficient.

Paul Jarley: The material science guys need to do some work. Is that what you’re telling me?

Zaheer Ali: Well, I mean even to get to the lunar one capable, they’ve done a lot of work. That’s 25 years of work.

Paul Jarley: Or ladies, by the way.

Danica Vallone: Thank you.

Zaheer Ali: That’s an impressive development. And the reason I say if I had the money now I would invest in the moon is because I believe this is a ladder. And I don’t think we can leapfrog rungs here. It needs to be done methodically. It needs to be done strategically with consistent effort. The moon enables us to develop all the systems at some level and optimize them to go to the harder environment, which is Mars. And there’s a lot there because the radiation environmental Mars is also worse fundamentally than on the moon. And there’s all types of other challenges. So that’s where I would put the money. I would make lunar happen as soon as possible and I believe that would kickstart this and we would have a sustaining cislunar economy because of the comparative advantages to the moon, you know, crater resources, gravity, helium. I actually don’t think that’s going to be a thing. There’s just no market. I mean the tokamak, the type of fusion that would’ve used Helium three is not the one that is going on grid by 2035. And I know this because I’ve been in the Commonwealth Fusion data room.

Pascal Lee: It’s a maybe later thing.

Zaheer Ali: That’s a whole other podcast, nuclear power. So that’s what I would do first, but I would specifically do it in a method that is not focused on, okay, moon and then stop. But Moon as a rung on the way to Mars.

Paul Jarley: Do you agree with that?

Pascal Lee: Yes. At this point, I think going back to the moon is imperative. I was sort of criticizing Artemis and the plan to send humans to the South Pole earlier, but I’d like to see what the alternative is or what it should be, which is to set up a base on the moon off pole, not too far from it, but in a place where, I mean my favorite spot is Clavius Crater, which happens to be where “2001: A Space Odyssey” had its base, for reference. But at the time they didn’t realize how great a place this is.

Paul Jarley: Hal is echoing in my head right now.

Pascal Lee: It’s turning out to be a fantastic place to set up a base and for reasons that Arthur C. Clark or Stanley Kubrick could not have known, but the reasons they had, which is a big wide open place, are still good. But it turns out that it has caves nearby, it has a direct drivable route to the South Pole, it’s much more pleasant to be based out of, much safer as well, easier to access from Earth, etcetera. But setting up a base is really the imperative. Right now, we are in this contrived, self-inflicted race against China to be first to put humans back on the moon when in fact, I don’t think that’s the real race. That race we won 60 years ago, and we don’t have to re-litigate that. On the other hand, where there is a race, is a race to stay on the moon for permanent presence. And so the Artis program in my view, should be redirected as soon as possible to establishing permanent presence at the surface of the moon. Not in the polar regions, but at Clavius or somewhere similar.

Paul Jarley: But that’s a military imperative as much as it is anything else.

Pascal Lee: Well, it’s strategic.

Paul Jarley: Let’s be honest about it.

Pascal Lee: Strategic, but it also opens the way to our future exploration of the moon for science. It’s a better place for a number of reasons. I don’t know if we’ll get to the AI part, but this –

Paul Jarley: Throw it out there.

Pascal Lee: Well, this particular summit that Zaheer Ali here and Dr. Greg Autry organized at UCF with the National Space Society, I think is really a visionary opportunity because, think about Mars settlement as sort of a farther out frontier here that we’d like to someday achieve and get humans to occupy. But there’s also been talk of the role of artificial intelligence. And humanity, while we continue to explore and push our limits in space, humanity’s really on the verge of this huge revolution here, which is the one that’s associated with the emergence of AI and AI-equipped androids. So it’s not just AI that’s making progress, it’s robotics as well. And very soon, just because we are Dr. Frankenstein’s, all of us, we are wanting to see humanoid robots. You can create robots that don’t look like humans at all and have AI, but somehow there’s this global effort to create humanoid robots that are eventually going to be equipped with artificial general intelligence, meaning intelligence that matches that of our human brains and eventually –

Danica Vallone: Supersedes.

Pascal Lee: artificial super intelligence, which exceeds the human brain. But anyway, once you have a robotic machine that’s essentially like ourselves, that we can relate to completely differently from how we relate to a robot rover on Mars, instead, this is a robot that we essentially can talk to as if they were part of our family. Now all of a sudden you are opening an entirely different realm of possibilities for humanity if you extend that definition to include these AI robots to explore space. So as much as I don’t see, ever, a point where we should be thinking of a million biological human beings on Mars, because I don’t think a place could support it, I could actually see a million Android robots on Mars reproducing themselves, extracting local resources, but turning Mars into this incredible playground.

Paul Jarley: You know how that science fiction movie ends though? Mars revolts.

Danica Vallone: Or they claim it for themselves and we negotiate a treaty.

Paul Jarley: The Martians are never happy.

Pascal Lee: I’m banking on the fact that we’ll be good parents in raising these AI for sure, for sure.

Danica Vallone: And we need better stories.

Paul Jarley: Can you sell that movie?

Danica Vallone: Oh, absolutely. I think we have sold that movie.

Paul Jarley: Probably!

Pascal Lee: The point is, if now you have representatives or human selves who are much more resilient, I mean think of sending Android robots to Mars. You don’t need to feed them on the way there. They don’t need water anymore. They just need power, and there’s plenty of that on Mars. They don’t even need a spacesuit to go out on spacewalks. The ones who will occupy Mars on our behalf and be part of ourselves essentially in this process. And so we’ve even talked about interstellar travel and what that can do to us. So you’re correct. There’s no place in sight right now for us to head out to beyond our solar system. But if you have Android robots, then they’re immortal. I don’t actually think that we will ever terraform Mars. I think we’ll have the ability to reach nearby stars that are already habitable and then if we’re just cared for as humans in the form of DNA all the way there, then we could be replicated there.

Paul Jarley: What should students learn about potential missions to Mars or space exploration or?

Zaheer Ali: One thing that we didn’t actually say, but it’s been implicit in all of our discussion, is that you have to get a business case to close. And one of the things the space economy teaches you perhaps better than any other economy is how hard that is and how tightly you have to pull that thread through and connect it. So many things we take for granted about the way we can build a business in all other aspects of our economy. We have ready markets, people understand the products, it’s easy to communicate all these things. Here? You have to get every aspect of your business. So that’s how I’d answer what I think students should take away.

Danica Vallone: It’s a bit like playing your favorite video game on the hardest setting possible. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. So if you’re going to pitch an idea and try to make it work in the space economy, you are set for whatever other endeavors you want to tackle thereafter.

Pascal Lee: I agree completely with both what Zaheer just said and Danica. President Kennedy I think said, I’m going to paraphrase poorly, but he said, we want to do this and the other things not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard. You gain something from doing something that is hard. The benefit is not necessarily out there, it’s here, down here and how you do it and how you get it done. In some sense, even if we couldn’t identify or pinpoint any specific benefit right now, and there has to be a component of everything we do that sort of takes into account this bigger picture out there that’s there. We are just in this tight spot in history where it’s going to take quite a bit of investment to make all this eventually pan out.

Danica Vallone: But this is the most glorious of all pursuits because this is legacy. What greater path to legacy than this?

Paul Jarley: So is the Martian economy going to be a thing or not it when Zaheer?

Zaheer Ali: Yes, a hundred years.

Danica Vallone: Yes. For humans, 200 years. Robots before.

Pascal Lee: Yeah, space economies will be on Earth for the next 50 years until things get going on the moon and then 100 years or so or more for Mars.

Paul Jarley: Well, thank you all.

If you view Mars through an economist’s lens, it’s the least-efficient frontier imaginable. High-fixed costs, negative externalities, no obvious path to comparative advantage. There are way better options than Mars. The moon for one. The only plausible reason to go are psychological and civilizational. Curiosity, maybe the continuity of the species, and the need to prove that humans can live elsewhere. Every generation invents a frontier to prove we’re all still moving forward. Once it was oceans, then continents, then the sky. Now it’s a red dot in the dark. Mars isn’t a business plan, it’s a mirror. It reflects our fear that Earth might be finished, our hope that we can start again, and our stubborn belief that we’re still builders. We don’t chase Mars for its resources. We chase it for its symbolism. A clean slate, a test, a thrill. Maybe we just want to prove that we can bend the universe to our will, even if our will is just for a thrill. Many a Greek tragedy reminds us hubris is a bad investment.

So what’s your take? Check us out online and share your thoughts at business.ucf.edu/podcast. Special thanks to my new producer, Brent Meske, and the whole team at the Office of Outreach and Engagement here at the UCF College of Business. And thank you for listening. Until next time, charge on.

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We’ve all sat through bad slide decks—but what about the ones that change history? In this episode of Is This Really a Thing?, Dean Paul Jarley is joined by Jim Balaschak, Dr. Mike Pape, and Derek Saltzman to explore whether the so-called “billion-dollar PowerPoint” is myth or reality. From Airbnb and Tesla’s iconic pitch decks to the role of storytelling, trust, and investor psychology, they unpack what makes a presentation powerful, what doesn’t, and whether AI or new tools might one day dethrone PowerPoint.

Paul Jarley: We’ve all sat through terrible slide decks, but every so often a PowerPoint does more than communicate. It creates value. Think of the pitch deck that launched Airbnb, the presentation that convinced investors to fund Tesla or the strategy decks that shape billion dollar mergers. So is the billion dollar PowerPoint really a thing? Can a few slides actually change the course of business history, or is it just a fancy way of describing really good storytelling?

This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I’m Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I’ve got lots of questions. To get answers, I’m talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, Is This Really a Thing? Onto our show.

To help me figure this out, I’ve invited three guests. Jim Balaschak is an alum of the college, in our Hall of Fame, and a serial investor. Dr. Mike Pape is an Entrepreneur in Residence here at the College of Business, and Derek Saltzman is a former winner of the Joust and is co-founder of a company called Soarce. Thank you gentlemen for being here today. We’ve all seen really bad PowerPoints. Talk a little bit about what makes a great one. Jim, I’ll start with you.

Jim Balaschak: A PowerPoint that catches my eyes shows a big potential market, a problem they’ve identified that they have a solution for that they can make money on. It’s not necessarily always the slides, but the slides can quickly convey the idea of the thoughts. And a lot of times before I meet with a founder, I’m emailed the pitch deck and going through the pitch deck helps me determine do I want to pursue this to the next step, get on the call with the founder, have them pitch it to me? I think it’s a good way to open the door.

Paul Jarley: The quality of the pitch deck tells you something about how serious and well thought out this is, right? So a schlocky one can really close the door, maybe more than a really good one can enhance it. Is that fair in your view?

Derek Saltzman: Yeah.

Paul Jarley: Derek, what do you think?

Derek Saltzman: I think there’s a lot to take into consideration with the audience and the stage gate of when you’re first starting a pitch or when you’re trying to interact. There’s multiple decks for multiple stage gates. So in the first beginning intro, like for instance, how Jim said, when you’re trying to send and get that initial meeting, it’s all about a hook. Can you describe what you do in the most succinct, effective way possible to get the message across of what the problem is, how you’re solving that problem, and what’s the revenue potential like he described? Because that’s what all investors are really looking for. Once you move past that initial stage gate, you have much more detailed decks that go into your financials that go into your true revenue model, your business model, maybe your IP strategy, and a variety of other topics. The overall optics and the overall clear messaging is I’d say the two biggest things.

Paul Jarley: Mike, what do you tell students?

Michael Pape: The way I deal with the pitch deck is treat it as just one element of a much bigger picture. The bigger picture is what is the business plan? Which you can express verbally and in the old days, if you will, back in the 90s and being part of this first company I did, we wrote that 40-page business plan. It was a very static document, but it had all the elements that we teach about what is required. Do you need a compelling problem, you need a solution? What’s the market? How are you going to market it? Who’s your team? What’s your financial model? All those types of things. So the pitch deck, I just see it as neither here nor there, because it is a way to communicate. The way I talk about this is I kind of view things as a trajectory and the pitch deck is purely in my opinion, a consequence of two things, changes in technology over time, and the other is the just madness of the rate of change of the world, and it creates an easy way to change on the fly.

So the first one, if you think about the trajectory of technology, we always have to present your pitch, whether it was to Wall Street or a merger, an acquisition in some form. PowerPoint came out in ’87 I believe, and really didn’t grab hold till the mid 90s. It was clunky, it was terrible. There was no way to show PowerPoints through a Zoom-like thing. All those things never worked when we do a pitch to VCs or whoever You’d have to print out your PowerPoint. You’d have to print, also, a relatively long business plan document and it was just a lot of friction, and that became really problematic and the people could reduce that friction, they kind of won the game. And Microsoft PowerPoint and just from preparing scientific slides over the years, my gosh, what a savior. You’re getting new data all the time. Before we used to have to take photographs, have the slides. If you just look at that progression of things, the PowerPoint as we have it is a value because it’s a very succinct way to bring in all the important business elements that you’ve got to communicate one way or the other.

Paul Jarley: Now the AI can do it for you.

Michael Pape: Well, it’s –

Paul Jarley: To a degree. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Is that a good idea?

Derek Saltzman: Uhm, no. I think there’s a balancing act. I think there’s definitely, you can utilize the tools of AI to get the ball moving, get in the right direction, but AI is not going to build the business for you. You still got to go out and talk to the customers, build the relationships, develop the actual business, and something to Pape’s point. In the kind of more of course, AI age, more modern age things, I feel the investment cycles have gotten compressed kind of how you’re describing where you’d have to develop a 40-page business plan and really describe how you’re going to attack a market that is almost archaic now, where seed rounds are going a $25 million seed round, $30 million seed round because they have 10-to-15 really great slides and they have AI attached and they’re rocket shipping like crazy. So it’s a really interesting dynamic depending on the business.

Paul Jarley: Here’s my real test on the value of a PowerPoint. Tell me the one that you saw that really stuck in your mind without revealing any secrets. And what about it really stuck in your mind?

Michael Pape: There’s two I got in my mind. One is Dropbox. It is not a pretty PowerPoint. However, it was a compelling problem. We didn’t have cloud computing. We had the USB drives, we had the floppy disks, we had all that stuff all over. Nobody would communicate. You’d have to carry the USB drive.

Paul Jarley: You’d forget it.

Michael Pape: You’d forget it. The flash drives, remember? So if you look at their PowerPoint, they’ve got a picture of just a messy desk with floppies and the things all over, and then they came up with their solution and you’re like, everybody I’m sure just stood up.

Paul Jarley: How about you, Derek? Which one do you remember?

Derek Saltzman: One for us being in the deep tech space is a company called Solugen, and to Pape’s point, one of the really interesting things that they do is just, it’s storytelling. How do you take a really complex, difficult topic like chemical refining and distill that down to really digestible information for someone to understand, oh, you use this chemistry or these processes to develop these things and you sell it for X amount of dollars.

Paul Jarley: Jim?

Jim Balaschak: I think one of the ones that caught my eye is recycling of batteries to repurpose like for EVs, because that’s going to be a really big problem. So just seeing how much of an environmental impact this is going to be and how much can be saved if things are recycled. That really impacted me and is a company we invested in.

Paul Jarley: So if you can’t articulate the problem, you’re in trouble. Right?

Michael Pape: The goal of a PowerPoint in front of investors or potential acquisition partner is to get the next meeting. That’s its goal, that’s its role, and then you’ve got to come up with another one and another one. You’re not going to get investment on your first presentation.

Derek Saltzman: No.

Michael Pape: Your goal, if you remember this, I told you guys, your goal is to get the next meeting

Derek Saltzman: One hundred percent.

Michael Pape: Somehow, some way. And sometimes the next meeting will be a lunch, it won’t be a PowerPoint. Sometimes they’ll just be hanging out and having a drink at a conference.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah.

Michael Pape: So, its role has really got to be minimized to some degree just to maintain the conversation so you can build trust and they can perform due diligence in whichever form they deem fit.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah. Every day you don’t get a no is a closer step to a yes. That’s how we look at it.

Paul Jarley: Our Joust is in the 20th or 25th year. It’s been around a long time. I’ve always thought that in that setting and in business plan competitions, generally, the winner is the group that can tell the best story. That the data really doesn’t drive it very much, that it’s pretty much an emotional decision. And I wonder if that is disconnected to what you guys just talked about … getting the next meeting. Because I worry sometimes that a lot of our students are really good at winning competitions. That’s not the same thing actually as attracting investors. What do you think about that?

Jim Balaschak: I agree. It’s the best presentation …

Paul Jarley: … presentation that wins that …

Jim Balaschak: that wins the Joust.

Paul Jarley: Almost all the time.

Jim Balaschak: Yes. It’s not always the best business idea or best team that can execute the idea. It’s a valuable thing for the students to go through. There can’t be that much due diligence done on a company that’s up there pitching for 10 minutes and has 10 minutes of Q&A. I think it’s still a very good thing for the College to have, and it gets a lot of excitement and interest, and I think it sparks quite a few people.

Paul Jarley: It’s a culture building tool for sure.

Derek Saltzman: Yes.

Paul Jarley: Have you ever invested out of any of the companies that were in the Joust?

Jim Balaschak: I have, yes. But –

Paul Jarley: Were they the winners or were they the team that finished second or third?

Jim Balaschak: I have invested in one winner, it was about five years later. They were a very good presenter. They’ve taken their idea and pivoted several times, but the founder is tenacious, so I’m betting a lot on the founder with that investment.

Michael Pape: If our frame of reference is the students and we’re educators. For them to get up in front of a big crowd, and defend is invaluable. And they’re nervous and it’s like, you know this better than anybody because it’s your business. Be confident. I mean, that just goes so far. Most of them never been in front of a crowd like that where –

Paul Jarley: Yeah, you get serious quesitons.

Michael Pape: It’s nerve-wracking. Totally.

Paul Jarley: I remember the one group where one of our judges made the presenters cry in the semifinals, and the final part of that story, not to mention Merrell (Bailey) by name, would be that they came back and won the Joust.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Paul Jarley: They took that advice to heart.

Derek Saltzman: Right?

Paul Jarley: Yeah.

Derek Saltzman: And as someone that’s kind like trial by fire and walked through that kind of ring essentially with my co-founder. Like Jim said, you’re not going to, at the end of the day, convince an investor to give you an investment on that day. Like Pape said, it takes multiple meetings, multiple interactions, and truthfully, everything is an emotional decision. We’re humans. Whether we want to think we make logical decisions, we’re truly making an emotional decision at the core, and it’s how do I like the person? Do I invest in the jockey? Do I believe in this person to get the job done? And it’s very different when you’re a student, say pitching a research topic, it’s about the science. The science doesn’t lie. It’s like this happened, this happened, this happened. But when you’re going, you’re pitching a business. It’s your idea of what you think you can bring value to the world and extract money from people from. It’s a very humbling experience when you get told no on stage, they grill you with really difficult questions that you may not be able to answer as fast as you’d like, but that trains you to build the thick skin and the nerves necessary that when you’re pitching to a variety of investors, you get pretty used to saying, no, that doesn’t make sense, or move on from here.

Paul Jarley: Derek, what’s your company Soarce? What does it do?

Derek Saltzman: We’re a materials company at the core. So what we do is we developed a process that allows us to take natural feed stocks like basically hemp, wood and seaweed and extract and tune or functionalize specific nano biopolymers such as nanocellulose. So these are tiny little nano fibers that are 10,000-times thinner than in human hair, eight-times the strength of steel. And then we use those and we put them into a variety of different industrial applications. Our goal over the next couple of years is kind of innovate on the overall composite industry.

Paul Jarley: Your degree is in?

Derek Saltzman: Material science and engineering. So background in material engineering. Didn’t start that way. I started off as an aero engineer, then took a couple classes with Pape and we were really into the business side and said, hey, we like this chemistry thing. We should maybe build a business in it.

Paul Jarley: I would imagine describing material science properties to investors is a little tricky.

Derek Saltzman: Oh, yeah. It’s definitely different.

Paul Jarley: I glazed over when you first started for a second.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah, it’s definitely a very different topic. So that’s why we’ve learned there’s different lanes of investors. So there’s investors and investors strictly in SaaS companies where they know how to evaluate a SaaS product. They understand the growth and development cycle, and then you have other individuals that are more into the hard sciences and deep tech sciences, which you have to my right here, a chemistry guy.

Paul Jarley: Exactly.

Derek Saltzman: There are two completely different paths. They all have different outcomes in the end. For us, we sit in more in the deep tech science side where we have to take a really hard chemistry topic and distill that down into really easy, digestible information to then give to investors so they see, oh, that’s the actual value. And to do that, to your point, it’s a lot of visuals. I mean, we deal with nano material, so when you’re saying we deal with stuff that’s so small, you can’t see it. It’s hard to say, “These tiny little things can produce a lot of value for the world.”

Paul Jarley: Ultimately, our podcast is about what we should teach our students. So talk to me a little bit about how you hit the sweet spot between the data and your presentation.

Michael Pape: When I look at the pitch deck, it’s a knowledge framework, and that’s how we basically teach. We teach frameworks. In marketing, we teach the three C’s and the four P’s. We can teach theories like the diffusion of innovation. We’ve got a variety of different frameworks that we teach students in all our classes. Science has the same thing, whether it’s thermodynamics or biochemistry, there’s frameworks and pathways by which we hang new things that we learn as time goes on in undergraduates, basically just to learn the basics. So the pitch deck I have found very helpful because it does provide a framework by which you can hang the data in there. If you’ve got what this slide is, then all the times you’re pivoting and changing, you morph it over time as you get more data. So it becomes the base, and then you just slide in what you need. The other power of the PowerPoint is if you work on it enough, you become a better team because it forces you as a team to actually get something on pen and paper or electrons. Because that makes you more precise rather than just talking about it. And that is a critical piece of it. Furthermore, when you’re talking to other people, what usually happens, I think the good presenters, in their mind, they have their PowerPoint and they rifle through the slides that they’ve already prepared and they know where they are, and that becomes a really powerful framing mechanism by which you can pull out that slide. We worked on that slide here was the main message. You’re not showing them the slide. You are just, it’s so embedded.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah, you do it so many times, it becomes kind of an ingrained pattern in your brain.

Michael Pape: That’s its power.

Paul Jarley: Can you imagine the day that the PowerPoint dies in favor of something more dynamic? Given the tools that we have these days? Are we going to see short movies on business concepts generated by AI?

Derek Saltzman: Actually, I think we’re already there. We’ve actually seen a couple of startups already do that. Startups that we’ve met, that their pitch deck is a mini, one minute skit. I don’t know if they’ve generated investment from it yet, but it’s an interesting concept.

Paul Jarley: Are there companies out there that will help invent do that? I would imagine there are.

Michael Pape: If it will help a company get the next meeting, by all means.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah. Somebody, one of the companies that we’re really close with is a company called Pageport. They essentially automate this process, so they help basically take businesses that are difficult to describe and make it really easy for you to get video updates or this great content from them. We’ve used them, they’re awesome.

Jim Balaschak: I think I like the PowerPoint. I like to spend a certain amount of time on each slide analyzing, okay, let me see the competition slide.

Paul Jarley: Because the investors are old school, right? Let’s be honest about this. I’m not sure how I would react to a short movie on it, right? I might think, oh boy, I am really getting marketed to death here.

Michael Pape: The new school at the end of the day is going to do just what Jim said because they’re going to go through their due diligence and they’re going to have to sit down and go through material if they’re going to be a good investor or if they’re going to do a true due diligence on an acquisition target.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah.

Michael Pape: At the end of the day, you’re only going to be as good as your understanding of business and frameworks and that stuff we teach here, which will not go out of style no matter what the mechanism or the modality is.

Paul Jarley: It’s just the tool.

Derek Saltzman: That’s right. A hundred percent. And I think a great company that also exemplifies that is a company called Potato. No one would think of like, okay, a company called Potato, but they’re doing amazing in one of the top –

Paul Jarley: It’s memorable.

Derek Saltzman: Yeah. It’s one of the top AI research tools that we use in a variety of researchers.

Paul Jarley: What does it do?

Derek Saltzman: Basically it distills research papers for scientists in a much faster, more meaningful way.

Paul Jarley: Yes or no, is the PowerPoint going to stay around and can it generate a billion dollars worth of revenue? Jim?

Jim Balaschak: Yes, the PowerPoint is going to stay around. Can it generate? Not right off the PowerPoint. It can lead to the meeting that leads to a round to another round to another round, another round to another call, and then you’re at a billion.

Paul Jarley: Derek?

Derek Saltzman: I’ll echo what Jim said there. I think the PowerPoint is cemented in for a while here that we’ll continue to use it. I think there might be some new tweaks and tools that get utilized, but at the other core, like you said, it’s going to be to get to the next meeting and have that next conversation.

Paul Jarley: Professor Pape, as is our culture in the College, the faculty member gets the last word.

Michael Pape: Yes, it is important. It is a thing. It’s a powerful framework and you can rapidly change it in an ever-changing, warp speed culture that we’re living in right now, particularly with respect to technology.

Paul Jarley: It’s my podcast, so I get to go last.

My distaste for PowerPoint runs deep. I think it usually gets in the way of stories rather than enhancing them. And storytelling, after all is one of the most powerful tools any leader or entrepreneur has. That’s been true since the invention of the campfire. Yes, there are legends. Airbnb’s 2009 pitch deck of just 14 slides allegedly raised their first $600,000 seed round. The company’s worth over $100,000,000,000 today, and by the way, employs my daughter Maggie. Facebook, Peter Thiel’s deck in 2004, really just a few slides, secured a $500,000 angel investment and set the stage for a trillion dollar company. But let’s be honest, it’s never the slides that make the deal. It’s the power of the idea and the belief in the team’s ability to execute it. PowerPoint just happens to be the messenger and like all tech platforms, it won’t be king forever. One day something will replace it, just like Google replaced Netscape. So is the billion dollar PowerPoint a thing? Yes, but only until the next big thing comes along.

So what’s your take? Check us out online and share your thoughts at business.ucf.edu/podcast. You can also find extended interviews with our guests and notes from the show. Special thanks to my new producer, Brent Meske, and the whole team at the Office of Outreach and Engagement here at the UCF College of Business. And thank you for listening. Until next time, charge on.

The post Is the $1 Billion Powerpoint Really a Thing? appeared first on College of Business.

Quarterly earnings reports have been a fixture of American business for more than 50 years … but are their days numbered? Earlier this month, President Donald Trump reignited debate by suggesting companies should only report twice a year, a move he says would cut costs and free executives to focus on the long term. But would fewer reports build stronger businesses, or erode trust in the markets? In this episode of Is This Really a Thing?, Dean Paul Jarley sits down with UCF College of Business Hall of Fame members Paul Gregg and Jim Balaschak, along with accounting faculty member EB Altiero Poziemski, to examine whether the quarterly report is an outdated ritual or a critical safeguard. Could its demise really be a thing?

Paul Jarley: Sometimes things just come together. Last week I read something about the President’s proposal to shift from quarterly to semi-annual earnings reports. That same week I was holding the College’s fall meeting of our Dean’s Advisory Board. The Board is filled with folks who have a direct interest in this debate. So I convened a quick panel to gain insights into the likely death of the quarterly report. Paul Gregg is an experienced CFO, member of the College of Business Hall of Fame and an Executive in Residence in the Department of Finance. He is joined by Jim Balaschak, a fellow Hall of Famer and serial investor, and EB Altiero Poziemski, a faculty member in the Dixon School of Accounting. Quarterly earnings reports have been with us for 50 years. President Trump has floated the idea of going European and cutting back to semi-annual reporting. Would that save money, destroy trust in markets or both? And what happens when AI makes real time disclosure possible? In this episode, we ask whether the cadence of reporting is about efficiency or about faith in the system itself. Could the end of the quarterly earnings report really be a thing? Stay tuned.

This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I’m Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I’ve got lots of questions. To get answers, I’m talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, Is This Really a Thing? Onto our show.

EB, let me start with you. Talk a little bit about when the quarterly report first came about and why, and the changes over the years.

EB Altiero Poziemski: The requirement to actually have any financial reporting whatsoever from our public companies started with the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. So that was the first time that there was a law that said a publicly traded company had to periodically report their results to their investors.

Paul Jarley: This was a response that Great Depression, right?

EB Altiero Poziemski: Yes. Following on that, in 1955, that was when the requirement for semi-annual reports was added to the rules, and so we saw that sometime between the original 1934 act and 1955, there was an increased demand for more timely information about these companies. And then from there, we didn’t see quarterly reporting required until 1970. So in the grand scheme of things, it’s actually a fairly recent development and not entirely a settled one either because we’re here talking about it right now. But Donald Trump also brought this up in 2018, actually brought it to the SEC for comment. It did go out for public comment at that time, and in 2013, the European Union actually abolished quarterly reporting for the companies that they regulate. So it’s been kind of a push and pull over time.

Paul Jarley: Paul, you’ve been in the corporate world for a lot of years, what actually do you need to report?

Paul Gregg: First of all, the report is unaudited, unlike the 10-K, which is an audited report. And you have to report your balance sheet, income statement, cashflow statement, along with selected disclosures. And of course, if there are material events, they typically show up at that point. Although an 8-K is required if there’s a material event between reporting periods. So it’s basically producing your financial statements and it’s kind of morphed into where the analysts are going to meet with the company. After these 10-Q’s are produced, the press release will go out, the company would then go over the results for the quarter. The analysts are tracking the quarterly results against their forecast that are not looking for surprises. Typically, the company tends to guide during this period, what the remaining year will be.

And there’s some pros and cons to reducing the quarterly reporting to semi-annual. The pro would be we can save on audit fees because our auditors come in and review these quarterly reports and it allows the company to think more long term. Having said that, those slides and that data that is shown to the analyst is done every month for the Board of Directors. It’s not like we have to make this stuff up. It’s already there lots more detailed than we show the public, and so it really isn’t that much more work for management to report. The only out-of-pocket cost really is the biggest, the audit fee.

The bigger issue is that by forcing companies to report quarterly, it flushes out information that has to be shown in the financial statements before the quarter end. The way it works in a corporate world, bad news travels very slow, good news travels quickly. So, it’s a way to force out the bad news to make sure we get it into the public arena. You never want to surprise Wall Street with a surprise report. And so if it were to be twice a year, that would basically be six months of perhaps data that should have the actions management problems that should be addressed. So those problems may not be addressed as quickly because they’re not known as quickly. This quarterly reporting kind of forces them out sooner than later, and of course it’s going to create volatility in the stock. It’s going to create bigger variations. When semi-annual reporting is done, that’s going to add volatility, which adds to the cost of capital.

Paul Jarley: Because people are guessing more on what’s going on. Is that where the volatility will come from?

Paul Gregg: Their forecast would be less accurate, just like the company would not know for six months of what’s going on, a lot can happen in a quarter.

Paul Jarley: I imagine, Paul, the typical CEO doesn’t really love the forecast meeting.

Paul Gregg: They certainly don’t like going to Wall Street and presenting the quarterly results unless they’re good, in which case that’s enjoyable. But if they’re not good, they’re going to get a lot of questions. The stock can actually start moving during these quarterly earnings and conference calls. If the information is not really known or worse than expected, better than expected, it is a drill. We would prepare a book and anticipate every question. We give each person, “If this question comes up, this is how we’re going to answer it.” Ours were pretty well orchestrated and we generally did not have problems, although, I’ve seen really good webcasts on quarterly reviews and I’ve seen some that are not so good. So it just depends on the company and how well they’re managed and how accurate their numbers are.

Paul Jarley: And there’s also some game playing right around when to book revenue or is that overstated?

Paul Gregg: We manage earnings, but we manage it within generally accepted accounting principles. So during the quarterly review, if we took some positions on something that affected earnings, I would discuss it with our auditors. During the quarterly review. I was telling EB, our chairman of the Audit Committee was a former Chairman of the SEC. Anything we did, I’d be ready to go tell him why we did it and why it was consistent with GAP and why it was appropriate. Revenue is a common problem though for many companies and revenue recognition.

Paul Jarley: Jim, you’re an investor. What do you think about this?

Jim Balaschak: I like the current system. I like to hear the quarterly earnings. I do my analysis on what is projected for the next quarter and the one after that, and one after that. Usually I’m looking about two years out of earnings and earnings growth. I like to buy growth companies and the economy can change, the sector can change. I’d like to know about that sooner than later. Also, I know that a lot of the European companies, not only do they report semi-annually, their dividends are semi-annually. And I think there’s a lot of income investors out there that count on that quarterly dividend. So I would think that if companies start reporting only every six months, that many of them would start changing their dividends every six months.

Paul Jarley: EB have there been any studies done on firm behavior and investor behavior in Europe when they made the change?

EB Altiero Poziemski: There was a study done on German firms that showed those who opted to go ahead and switch to semi-annual instead of the quarterly requirement, they actually saw a increase in their cost of capital and an increase in the information asymmetry. So basically the investors, again, weren’t as well-informed, weren’t willing to take as much risk. Basically they were demanding a bigger return because they were perceiving a bigger risk.

Paul Jarley: So there might be a signal in choosing six months rather than four months, which might be negatively perceived by them?

Paul Gregg: Exactly, which adds to the volatility of the stock, which adds to the cost of capital.

Paul Jarley: And let’s understand that even if the SEC did relax the rule, a number of firms might not do it anyway, right? So the stock exchange itself could require quarterly reports, right, to list the stock on the stock market?

EB Altiero Poziemski: So in the UK, only 9% of firms actually decided to make the switch. So they were given the option to drop quarterly reporting and they didn’t do it. And so there is the chance that even though the requirement goes away, firms are still going to choose to do this because their investors are demanding this information.

Paul Gregg: All it takes is Fidelity, Vanguard, some of the big shareholders to say, look, we want this quarterly, we’d do it. I don’t care what the SEC says. If our big shareholders are asking for it, we’re going to do it, but that’s our audience. That’s who we want to please.

EB Altiero Poziemski: We do run the risk though of that information being less reliable if it’s voluntary, if there aren’t rules around it and it’s no longer being reviewed by the auditors.

Paul Jarley: I assume that the audit community would be against this. Is that fair to say?

EB Altiero Poziemski: I think that’s fair to say. I think the audit community, generally speaking, always thinks they should be looking at everything. And also it does help with some of the analytic procedures that they do. Some of those work better when they’re done quarterly, especially the fraud detection analytical procedures. There was a study by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners in 2020 that said that financial statement fraud has a median loss of $1.25 million per case and take up to 19 months to detect even with quarterly reporting in place. So without that quarterly reporting in place, it could take even longer to see the patterns and uncover that fraudulent reporting.

Paul Gregg: I would think the audit committee would want the quarterly reporting just from their due diligence and fiduciary responsibility. You know, they have a lot at stake here, so they’re not likely to want to give up the quarterly reviews even if you didn’t have to.

Paul Jarley: So the impact on cost for the organization would be fairly minimal.

Paul Gregg: Absolute incremental costs would be minor. But if your beta starts to move up because of volatility and your cost of capital goes up 1%, that’s a big cost.

EB Altiero Poziemski: Yeah. It seems more likely that the companies that would be interested in taking advantage of this would be the smaller firms, the ones that are really hurt by those audit costs, those review costs. Financial reporting is expensive. I talked to my class about this. Anytime you add a disclosure requirement, that is a real cost. There is a person who has to write up that footnote who has to collect the information. If you are a organization that operates in multiple jurisdictions, you have to get all of the information, aggregate it, make sure it’s in the same format, and interpret it through U.S. GAAP that costs actual dollars.

Paul Jarley: So with the advent of AI, might all of this be irrelevant? Can you imagine a world in the next decade where all earnings are reported instantaneously for everyone to see?

EB Altiero Poziemski: I mean, I can’t say it’s impossible. I can’t currently see it, only because I think that auditing is one of the things that although we’re going to end up using AI in auditing, I think the audit profession itself becomes even more important in the face of AI because AI is a black box. You put information in, you don’t know what it does, it spits information out. So it becomes really critical to look at anything that comes out of AI with an auditor brain. You have to have that auditor level of skepticism. When you look at that data. You have to have the level of expertise to interpret it and know if what the AI gave you is right if it’s following U.S. GAAP. And so I think it’s going to be a little bit still before we can trust AI to take numbers out of a general ledger system, put them into a financial report, follows all of the rules of the SEC and FASB and is reliably doing so.

Paul Gregg: Yeah, it would seem unlikely, but even if AI could generate perfect financial statements every month, I’m not going to disclose them to the public every month. Because that’s way too much effort for have the public that on top of your business, you do need some maneuvering room and some time to manage the company.

Paul Jarley: Jim, would you want daily reports if you could get them?

Jim Balaschak: I’m fine with quarterly. There’s enough massaging of the numbers as it is. So, I don’t think daily would be any improvement.

Paul Jarley: Can I push back? I mean, we publish stock prices every day. Nobody seems to worry about that.

Paul Gregg: If you’re a mutual fund, your results are published every day, right? You know your gain or loss on your existing securities. But that’s a little different I think.

EB Altiero Poziemski: I do think that gives an advantage to the sophisticated investor who has the computing power to go through all of that information and maybe detect patterns, but maybe not, right? There may be just spurious correlations in there that they’re acting on and it doesn’t really mean anything.

Paul Jarley: Well, there are random fluctuations, right? I mean they happen all the time.

EB Altiero Poziemski: Yeah, accounting data is definitely not meaningful on a daily basis.

Jim Balaschak: I could see AI more estimating sales, but I don’t see on the expense side being able to generate, that being too accurate.

Paul Jarley: Because in the small organization, the person who books revenue could be sick one day sending somebody into it tizzy.

EB Altiero Poziemski: We also have accruals that have, we’re guessing throughout the year, and then we have to fix them when it comes to a reporting date. And so on any point in time actually knowing the true number is sometimes not possible.

Paul Jarley: Why do you think the President recommends it then?

EB Altiero Poziemski: I mean, I know what he said. He said it was to lower cost.

Paul Jarley: Right? He said to lower cost.

Paul Gregg: Some company may be pressuring him or suggesting this to him.

EB Altiero Poziemski: Yeah, he may have constituents who have been talking to him about it.

Paul Jarley: Well, small business to your point, right, might be a place where some gain, some cost savings might happen.

EB Altiero Poziemski: And that’s a place that the FASB and the SEC have kind of always had this push and pull. Where the FASB has maintained forever, that there is one U.S. GAAP, and if you report under U.S. GAAP, everyone should know what that means. Whereas smaller businesses have been arguing, we should have different reporting requirements. You should make it easier for us so that we have a chance. These reporting requirements are too onerous, we can’t do them. So it comes to a point where they have to make a decision to either report wrong, badly, or not do the types of transactions that they want to do because they can’t afford to do the reporting.

Jim Balaschak: Well, that does keep a lot of the smaller companies from going public.

Paul Gregg: It’s very expensive to be a public company.

Jim Balaschak: Very expensive.

Paul Jarley: No doubt, right? Yeah. And perhaps that’s part of the motivation here. Alright, I don’t want, well, two of the three of you EB’s pretty young, to just sound like old guys wanting new people to get off their lawn. Is there a different system that would work better or did 1973 get it right, and it should be the quarterly report forever?

Paul Gregg: I’m certainly happy with the quarterly report. It’s the data itself and how we get accurate data within each month’s financial statements is really the key. Reporting it is a separate issue. How often do we report it to our shareholders? And data will become more accurate with AI. No doubt about it. The real key is forecasting, because that’s where the valuations come in and that’s what everybody’s interested in, not just what you did, but where are you going?

Paul Jarley: Particularly against where you said you would be.

Paul Gregg: Yes. So that gets back to you better know how to accurately forecast.

Jim Balaschak: Yes, that’s more important.

Paul Jarley: So is the death of the quarterly report exaggerated a yes or no? Paul?

Paul Gregg: I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Paul Jarley: Jim?

Jim Balaschak: I don’t think it’s going to happen either. I hope it doesn’t happen.

Paul Jarley: EB?

EB Altiero Poziemski: I’m not as confident, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Paul Jarley: It’s my podcast, so I get to go last.

This debate isn’t really about the merits of quarterly versus semi-annual reports. It’s about trust. Quarterly disclosure has become part of the governance rhythm of our capital markets. Boards expect it, investors demand it and exchanges quietly enforce it. That kind of inertia is hard to break, especially in an arena where credibility is everything. I don’t think we’ll be writing an obituary for the quarterly earnings report anytime soon. If change does come, it probably won’t be wholesale. Big firms will keep reporting every quarter because stakeholders will demand it. And moving away from such reporting, will bring suspicion. But small companies, the ones for whom the compliance costs are steepest, might see some relief. The paradox, of course, is that the smaller firms are also the most vulnerable to sudden revenue swings, which means investors may want more frequent, not less frequent updates. Reducing report frequency might also increase the cost of capital for these firms, negating any positives from the reduction in reporting costs.

The future may not be a choice between quarterly or semi-annual. It may be a world of lighter tiered reporting where transparency is preserved, direct costs are contained and trust remains the currency of the system. Or maybe nothing happens simply because humans don’t like change.

So what’s your take? Check us out online and share your thoughts at business.ucf.edu/podcast. And be sure to follow us on social media to be alerted when our next episode airs. I’ll be joined by UCF’s own Carolyn Massiah and pet mom Amber Downs to learn if pet influencers are really a thing, and more importantly, if my dog Sneaky Pete has a shot at becoming one of them.

Special thanks to my new producer, Brent Meske, and the whole team at the Office of Outreach and Engagement here at the UCF College of Business. And thank you for listening. Until next time, Charge On.

The post Is The Quarterly Report Really a Thing? appeared first on College of Business.

From Lassie to Grumpy Cat to Ruby the golden doodle, pets have long captured our hearts—but today, they’re also capturing serious market share. In this episode of Is This Really a Thing?, Dean Paul Jarley dives into the booming world of pet influencers with UCF Marketing expert Dr. Carolyn Massiah and Amber Downs, creator of @orlandoodle. Together, they explore why pets are such powerful connectors, how authenticity and branding drive this unique space, and whether pet influencing is just internet fluff or a lasting force shaping consumer behavior.

Paul Jarley: Smokey Bear told us that only we could prevent wildfires. Rin Tin Tin and Lassie became household names. Boo The Pomeranian and Grumpy Cat sold merch. So here’s the question, were these the first pet influencers?

This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I’m Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I’ve got lots of questions. To get answers, I’m talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, Is This Really a Thing? Onto our show.

At first glance, it sounds like something new. Dogs in sunglasses, cats with their own merch. But if you think about it, animals have been influencing us for decades. Mr. Ed certainly influenced Wilbur. On today’s episode, we’re asking whether pet influencers are just internet fluff or a real force shaping culture, consumer behavior, and marketing. To help me sort this out and decide whether it’s just hype or real and what lessons we can draw from it, I’ve got Amber Downs, the dog mom, a pet influencer who lives this every day, and Dr. Carolyn Massiah, our resident expert on all things marketing.

Amber, let’s start with you. How did you decide to become a pet influencer? Well, technically your pet. So tell us about your pet and how you got into this business.

Amber Downs: In 2019, I adopted a golden doodle named Ruby. She was six months old. My life was changed forever. At that point in time, as we all know, a couple months later, the world changed. During that point in time, I kind of shifted my Instagram, my personal Instagram content to share ways that we could connect with the community, ways we could support small businesses. And as we stayed in that pandemic state for a while, I realized I had this young dog that needed a way to interact with the world, get out of the house a little bit. So I began sharing both dog-friendly businesses and dog-friendly activities in the central Florida area. So during that period of time, I created this new @orlandoodle Instagram account where I share dog-friendly things to do as well as my favorite dog products and my favorite things in the pet industry.

Paul Jarley: Did you just wake up at night and decide to do this, or was it based on something you were doing before you became a pet influencer?

Amber Downs: I’ve always loved social media. I’ve always enjoyed sharing my favorite things. I had a blog and a different social media account years before, but it really just happened really slowly. I started out, like I said, sharing about things in the community that we could assist during the pandemic ways we could spend our money to help others, and then just slowly shifted to this dog-friendly content.

Paul Jarley: What do you think it is about pets that captures people’s imagination? And is a pet influencer different than a human influencer, and how?

Amber Downs: I think that we connect with the pet part of the account really quickly and we fall in love with this animal, and then we get to know the family and the human around the account and then begin to connect with the account as a whole.

Paul Jarley: So Carolyn’s nodding her head. What does the research tell us about how people interact with pets, Carolyn?

Carolyn Massiah: Let’s go back to brands in general. When we first started in marketing using brands, we stayed away from using humans or individuals or persons in logos or in brands because they could break your heart.

Paul Jarley: Meaning they could misbehave.

Carolyn Massiah: They could misbehave, yes.

And remember, the main goal in marketing is to build a relationship. And Amber was saying those exact words. That’s why I was nodding my head. It’s build a relationship, engage. And so this is why professional sports teams, you see a great deal of animals used in the logos, and now let’s move forward to pet influencers. And we see that jump now to the pets being used in these accounts. It makes sense now to jump from inanimate animals used in the logos to now live pets and pet influencers. It’s that same thing, that relationship. Pets don’t break our hearts.

Paul Jarley: Well they’re certainly authentic.

Carolyn Massiah: They are authentic and we can engage with them. The most followed pet influencing account, Jiffpom, right now has 9.9 million active followers. Do you know that pet passed away in 2019?

Paul Jarley: So what makes that pet so awesome? Why does it have that many followers? Is there something distinctive about it?

Carolyn Massiah: I think it resonates with individuals and particularly in the time period that we’ve gone through. As soon as you said 2019, I knew before you said it what the next phrase was going to be … because then COVID came. Jiffpom passed away 2019, but gained the bulk of the followers from 2020 on when we were looking for something to hold onto, something to connect with that would not disappoint us. And that’s also why I think you see such a major growth in the pet influencing accounts during the 2020 to now period.

Paul Jarley: I just assumed they were cheaper than human influencers. What’s the contract for a pet influencer look like?

Carolyn Massiah: Actually, it’s not that much cheaper. There’s a tortoise right now, it has 3 million followers, and its pet parents gross $400,000 annually from that account. And mostly that comes from the sponsored post and the brand collaborations. The lowest brand collaborations you’re seeing with that tortoise is starting at $1,500 to $2,000, and those are for small mentions, so it’s actually not that much cheaper.

Paul Jarley: So Amber, when did the revenue start coming in? Talk a little bit about that.

Amber Downs: So after 2020, I kind of began doing this account more and more and started connecting with brands. Brands would reach out to me and say, oh, we’ll send you a collar and a leash if you post about it. So I did little very small gifted collaborations like that.

Paul Jarley: So you weren’t reaching out to them, they were reaching out to you?

Amber Downs: At the beginning? Yes, yes. As I got to wise up a little bit, I realized I can charge for this. If I want people to share using my platform and my energy and my time, I need to charge. So then I began working with brands that reached out to me in a more of a paid partnership level. And I’m a smaller influencer in this space, so I obviously can’t charge what the tortoise charges, but there’s still four digit numbers being thrown around in my small account. I had to just do some math there real quick. And so I also began reaching out to brands and kind of pitching just like your human influencers do. So I began pitching as well and reaching out to brands that resonated with me and resonated with my audience that I felt would be a good fit.

Paul Jarley: So what do you think it is about your pet that stood out? Why do you think they reached out to you?

Amber Downs: Well, I’ll be honest, it’s not the pet, it’s the human. My dog is cute, she’s adorable, people love her. But at the same time, I’m the person who’s making sure the photos look good. You can have an adorable dog and post content that’s not great, and it’s not going to sell the same way. In my content, I share high-quality images and videos of my pet, and I include myself in that content because again, while yes, we’re connecting with the pet, the human is oftentimes doing that selling and actually making that final connection later on. So we work together to create content that really stands out.

Carolyn Massiah: That’s the point there. So when people began and say that, okay, I want to be a pet influencer, I have this great Jack Rabbit here, and

Paul Jarley: I have a dog named Sneaky Pete. We’ll come back to that.

Carolyn Massiah: Sneaky Pete, okay, so I have a great dog, Sneaky Pete, and I want Sneaky Pete to be a pet influencer. Well, Sneaky Pete’s not taking his own reels and Sneaky Pete isn’t doing selfies. So it is going to take a pet parent like Amber to take some time to learn about whichever channel they’re on, whichever media they’re using. Also, if I’m the viewer, in order to form that relationship with Sneaky Pete, I also want to see Amber’s relationship with Sneaky Pete so that I can envision myself also playing with Sneaky Pete in that same positive way. It can’t just be, take a picture of Sneaky Pete and post it up there.

Paul Jarley: It seems like a very human-centric approach that you’re talking about here. So look, Sneaky Pete has a pool. He has a swing. He is unbelievably good at catching balls. He believes the entire world was created just for him. So he has some animal magnetism, I would be the first to say that. Now, on the flip side, he doesn’t particularly like other dogs or other people. And I’m not going to be taking reels of pictures of Sneaky Pete. I have other to do. But does personality matter here? Does authenticity matter?

Carolyn Massiah: I think it absolutely does. And actually you just told a great story of Sneaky Pete to tell to others, right? And so it’s going to take, if you’ll allow me to use the pun, it’s going to take a “pawesome” parent here to tell that story. So people can relate to a Sneaky Pete.

Paul Jarley: Could Sneaky Pete get an agent? I’m not really good at this. But could he get his own agent? Are there such people?

Carolyn Massiah: Yes, there is.

Paul Jarley: I assume Mr. Ed had an agent back in the day.

Carolyn Massiah: Mr. Ed had his own agent.

Paul Jarley: How would you go about doing that if that’s what you wanted to do?

Amber Downs: There are actually several people now that are influencer managers for pet families and pet parents. Obviously, you need to build a following with Sneaky Pete on your own and get him to have 20,000 followers on your own first, and then you can partner with an agency that will help you make collaborations in deals. Now, oftentimes, you’re still going to be the number one content creator. Now, you’re bringing in all this money now with these brand deals, you may hire a crew to come in and help with your filming, with your video editing and with that content creation side. But we do have, now I actually know some people that they are an agency that will get those deals. I hate the back-and-forth negotiation process. I don’t like doing that, but I can have somebody else do all my negotiations, say, Amber, here’s the option. Here’s the price. Do you want in or out? And then I can just take that and then do the content creation, which for me is the part that I enjoy.

Paul Jarley: Is there an issue here around the ethical treatment of these pets?

Amber Downs: It’s a good question. I know we see that.

Paul Jarley: Does he get better food? What does he get out of this deal?

Amber Downs: I know for my dog, her quality of life has improved because of our partnerships with these brands. Right now, she’s at doggy daycare that she doesn’t pay for – I don’t pay for it either – because of these partnerships and these brand deals that we’ve done. She eats top-quality, organic, raw dog food. Again, that we have a partnership process, we work with this brand, she gets this great product. There have been times that I’ve stepped away from deals or opportunities that didn’t fit for our dog. I do a lot of hotel collaborations, and I went to a property once, that I did not feel was up to snuff with our expectations. They sold it to me one way, and then I went to do the deal and while the property allowed dogs to stay at the hotel, it was not pet friendly. And I said, nevermind, I’m leaving. And so we do have to advocate for our pets, just like we would advocate for our families or our children, but it is up to the individual at this point in time.

Paul Jarley: Yeah. Carolyn?

Carolyn Massiah: Yeah, and I think that, going back to, what I mentioned about the tortoise, and you think about that pet parent. First of all, you love that pet well enough to establish the social media presence around that pet and then have it come to fruition that it starts to produce this revenue for you and for your household. I believe wholeheartedly that pet is going to be taken well care of.

Paul Jarley: You know, I think the “Tiger King” probably started out with good intentions.

Carolyn Massiah: Well, unfortunately, there are always outliers on there. Yes, there are. Unfortunately, there are always those outliers.

Paul Jarley: Are there animal rights groups that are active in this space? I’m kind of curious.

Carolyn Massiah: Unfortunately, sometimes as always, technology sometimes moves ahead of laws. And this is one case, and I actually was looking at that just recently. So, right now, those animal protection laws do not currently cover pet influencing cases. Do I foresee at some point, probably sooner than we might even imagine, that some case may come up that then we will rewrite a law somewhere along the way? Yes.

Paul Jarley: Let me take you in a little bit of a different direction here. A few years back, we did one of my favorite podcasts on backyard chickens, and you were on that podcast.

Carolyn Massiah: Yes, yes.

Paul Jarley: And we joked near the end of it about whether Kelly could put up cameras and how many people would watch her chickens. And your answer surprised me because you talked about it as a form of meditation. Talk a little bit about that dynamic and whether you think that exists in a lot of these kinds of cases.

Carolyn Massiah: I think absolutely. I think that’s actually why we saw that growth. That’s exactly why we saw, and it’s —

Paul Jarley: The selling of simplicity, right?

Carolyn Massiah: Yes. That’s exactly why we saw that peak start to occur in 2020 of pet influencing. We all went into our home caves and we were looking for something very simplistic and calming. We start to go on the web and skip over the COVID counts and look for something that was calming. And all of a sudden I see a cat or a dog that reminded me of something from another time period. And that period, you can look at the numbers of the growth in pet influencing accounts 2020, 2021. And now as of January 2025, 3.5 million active pet influencing accounts globally.

Paul Jarley: So pets pass on.

Carolyn Massiah: Yes.

Paul Jarley: And I wonder if the influencer stops then or whether they see themselves as lifetime pet influencers. Amber, what do you think? You’re in the middle of it.

Amber Downs: Yes and no. We saw with the Pomeranian, the Pomeranian passed, but they still share a lot of content.

Paul Jarley: It’s a tribute to the Pomeranian to this day. Yeah.

Amber Downs: A very popular account. Hammy and Olivia, I believe Olivia passed away last year, and they still post, and they still share Hammy’s perspective on life. I don’t know if they’ve gotten another Corgi or if they just still have they Olivia in their name, and maybe that’s a tribute to her. But oftentimes, your pet influencers may adopt another dog if they plan to keep on the legacy. I know my dog is six years old. I’m not planning on adopting any dog. My husband won’t let me adopt another dog right now. But I also realize that that may be the end of this chapter, and I’ll have to decide if I choose to adopt another dog to carry on this, to just make this into a tribute page or my plan. I will have to think about that if I want to continue this project.

Carolyn Massiah: So how long is too long to continue the account, the pet influencer account? I want to know your thoughts.

Paul Jarley: Well now AI is bringing back dead people, right? I mean, really. Well, I will say the lawyers are going to get rich.

Carolyn Massiah: Yes.

Paul Jarley: I don’t know if they’ll get rich on pets, but they’re certainly going to.

Carolyn Massiah: Yeah, that’s an interesting, I mean, when I found, I literally did not know, because I’ve watched some of Jiffpom’s videos, I did not know until I was looking into that, that pet had passed away. I did not know that. And six years ago, I did not know.

Paul Jarley: Well, if I recall right, there was more than one Lassie.

Carolyn Massiah: Well, yes.

Paul Jarley: Yeah. So there’s a long history of this here. So how do you decide what to schlep?

Amber Downs: Every content creator has to make a lot of these decisions on what matches their content. I do with partnerships with a lot of hotels and travel aboard type things. Just share pet friendly travel because everybody right now wants to bring their pet. We’ve got the biggest market of Gen Z through Gen X group that oftentimes don’t have children and choose to travel with their pets. We also have the empty nesters now that more and more are spending their time and energy on their pets. So for me, I like to look at my market. And again, that 25-to-45-year-old probably doesn’t have children, probably female. And again, more and more, the 55-plus that is an empty nester that has the disposable income to spend on their dog and the time and energy to focus on them.

Paul Jarley: Ah. So now we’re getting into whether pet influencers are really part of a luxury market.

Amber Downs: I look at brands that are more elevated brands and brands that my followers are interested in. Probably not something you’re going to pick up at Walmart. If a bottom-of-the-shelf puppy chow reached out to me and said, Amber, we’re going to give you $2,000 to do a quick post on our food. I would have to say no, because that doesn’t align with my brand and my product. My followers would consider that whiplash.

Paul Jarley: You would dilute your brand by doing that.

Amber Downs: Exactly.

Paul Jarley: Yeah.

Carolyn Massiah: Amber, I’ve just fallen in love with you. You are absolutely speaking my marketing language.

Amber Downs: I love it.

Carolyn Massiah: Yes, because this is it, right? And I think whether you’re a person influencer or a pet influencer, you need to find your niche. And your niche first needs to be led by a particular segment.

Amber Downs: Exactly.

Carolyn Massiah: Find your segment and then target that segment and find that positioning. And you have found the perfect target market. We call it the DINK, right? Dual income, no kids group, right?

Amber Downs: DINK-WAD, with a dog.

Carolyn Massiah: Right? Right, with the dog. But this is so important that anyone who’s going to be in social media, period, cannot be everything to everyone.

Paul Jarley: Pete’s a little bit of a junkyard dog. I’m not really sure that it’d be appropriate for the luxury –

Carolyn Massiah: We can still tell Sneaky Pete’s story.

Paul Jarley: for the luxury market. So Carolyn, what should students learn?

Carolyn Massiah: So many students want a presence and a future in digital media marketing, or to be influencers of some kind. First and foremost, you cannot be everything to everyone. So find your niche and be consistent with that niche, and then be consistent with who you collaborate with so that it makes sense to the market that you’re targeting.

Paul Jarley: BrandU for dogs?

Carolyn Massiah: BrandU for dogs.

Paul Jarley: Amber. So if I had one of my cute and cuddly students walk up to you and say, I think I would want to be like you someday. I want to be a pet influencer, what would you tell them?

Amber Downs: I would tell them to start creating content. Pull their phone out and don’t be afraid to film the dog, film the interaction, film the walk. Take the content. You can decide later if you’re going to post it, or what to do with it, but the more that you’re practicing and creating now, the easier it’s going to be down the line. It’s not easy to just walk out when you’re 30 something years old, pick up a phone and start filming. Our youth obviously have been filming their entire lives at this point, but practice this, make the content, do the post and see what sticks. And then maybe this pet influencing won’t stick around for them, but they’ve learned so many great skills that they could take into maybe a different type of influencing project or their career.

Paul Jarley: How many hours a week do you put into this?

Amber Downs: At least five, sometimes 10, depending on the week. Between going out and doing activities, editing videos, responding to messages, interacting with followers, editing more content, reaching out to brands, the emails back-and-forth, creating proposals, creating something in Canva to do that proposal.

Paul Jarley: So there’s not a standard pet influencer contract.

Amber Downs: There are many that you can start with, but every brand’s going to ask for something a little bit different. If I work with a hotel, they’re going to ask me to not post any other hotel collaborations maybe a month prior or a month after that collaboration to not dilute their brand.

Paul Jarley: So the final question, is pet influencing a thing? Yes or no, and why? Carolyn?

Carolyn Massiah: Absolutely. It’s a thing. We all want a relationship that’s not going to disappoint us.

Paul Jarley: Amber?

Amber Downs: It’s definitely here to stay. Pets are cute. The internet is a great way to share your cuddly family member and pet influencers, and the industry, is definitely here for the long-term.

Paul Jarley: It’s my podcast, so I get to go last.

Jiffpom, like Elvis, may or may not be dead. But it’s estimated that he pulls down $32,000 a post. Some creature named Tucker Budzyn earns $20,000 a post. Nala Cat gets about $15,000. Her estimated net worth, by the way, is $100,000,000. In this sense, pet influencers are most certainly a thing. But why?

I reached out to a friend who works in the pet business and he told me this. There is an increasing role in companionship that pets are playing, often replacing children as the target of love and adoration for people with busy lifestyles. Especially for generations that postpone housemaking, marriage and such. For professionals, it’s all about connection and connecting to profitable subculture moments that prompt consumption through association. As cars were to many teenage boys in the 1930s to 1980s, so now are pets to millions of teenage girls that, unlike their mothers or grandmothers, are not obsessed with finding potential mates in their teens or 20s. Plenty of time for that later while I snuggle with my cat or pup for now.

That said, for every Jiffpom, there’s some poor pet whose owner just isn’t very skilled with the camera. Maybe, just maybe, someone can eek out a side hustle, but it’s not likely to reliably pay the rent. Fame, my friend, is a fickle mistress. As for Sneaky Pete, honestly, he just wants somebody, anybody, to throw him the damn ball. What do you think?

So what’s your take? Check us out online and share your thoughts at business.ucf.edu/podcast. And be sure to follow us on social media to be alerted when our next episode airs. I’ll be joined by UCF Hall of Famer Jim Balaschak, UCF Entrepreneur in Residence Michael Pape and alumnus and former JOUST winner Derek Saltzman to learn if you can really generate $1,000,000,000 from a PowerPoint. Ehhhhh, this doesn’t sound good. Special thanks to my new producer, Brent Meske, and the whole team at the Office of Outreach and Engagement here at the UCF College of Business. And thank you for listening. Until next time, charge on.

The post Are Pet Influencers Really a Thing? appeared first on College of Business.

Is layaway making a comeback—or has it simply been rebranded as “buy now, pay later”? In this episode of Is This Really a Thing?, Dean Paul Jarley sits down with Jim Adamczyk, Chief Strategy Officer at FAIRWINDS, to unpack the surprising history (and psychology) of delayed payments. From Christmas shopping in the 1970s to today’s Klarna and Affirm apps, they explore why consumers keep returning to installment plans, what it means for financial health, and whether AI could reshape how we manage spending and debt.

Paul Jarley: If you’re as old as I am, you know, things come back around. Today, we’re going to talk about an old classic: layaway. Is it back? Is it hiding under a different name? Should you really put your lunch on layaway? Or buy now, pay later. To help me figure this out, I’m joined in this episode by Jim Adamczyk. Jim is a UCF alum, a member of our College of Business Hall of Fame and is the current Chief Strategy Officer at FAIRWINDS. We recorded this podcast live in front of 100-plus students in The EXCHANGE, and we’re bringing it to you now. Listen in.

This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I’m Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I’ve got lots of questions. To get answers, I’m talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, Is This Really a Thing? Onto our show.

So when I was a kid, my mother spent half of her annual income on Christmas. I’m not kidding. We grew up with relatively modest means, and so she would start shopping in June for Christmas. And the family didn’t have a huge amount of money, so she would buy things on what was called layaway. Basically, you went in and you picked out your item and you gave it to the store and you promised to pay for it before you would pick it up and you had to agree to a schedule. And I was driving somewhere a couple of weeks ago and I was listening to the radio and I think it was Burlington Coat Factory was talking about their layaway program. Literally, I hadn’t heard about layaway in probably 40 years. And so today Jim and I are going to talk about layaway, what it was, how it differs from Buy Now Pay Later, or rent to own things that many of you might see, why it’s on the comeback and what might replace it after that. So thanks for joining us today, Jim.

Jim Adamczyk: Always happy to be here.

Paul Jarley: What is layaway? Had you ever experienced layaway?

Jim Adamczyk: When I was in high school, I was dating somebody and I remember there was a Montgomery Ward in Altamonte Springs and I put a present on layaway. And by the time I got the layaway, I was no longer with the person anymore, so my first experience was: layaway is not great.

Paul Jarley: Just so you understand kind of the world we’re living in at that time, people didn’t have credit cards, people didn’t have debit cards.

Jim Adamczyk: The main way to pay for it was cash. You took cash out and you went to the store and buy it, but if you didn’t have the cash, your primary means of credit was layaway. And it’s not really credit in the sense that you don’t have the item, so you’re kind of saving each month. It’s like a savings plan to end up eventually buying something. It’s almost like delayed gratification in a world of instant gratification today.

Paul Jarley: Right? And if you missed a payment, the retailer put the product back on the shelf.

Jim Adamczyk: And so the retailers had to have an entire inventory management system to keep track of all the different items that were on layaway, the customers that had them on layaway and then the payment plans that were in place to pay for those items as well.

Paul Jarley: And there would be late penalties, right? I think if you –

Jim Adamczyk: Usually you had to put a percent of the item down upfront, 10, 20%, and then if you were late, kind of like a credit card or a loan today, they would charge you a fee on the late payment. And then if you didn’t actually pay it off or you’d stop paying, they would put it back and they would keep your money pretty much.

Paul Jarley: So fast forwarding a little bit, if you did that today and you missed a payment and they put it back, would it impact your credit score?

Jim Adamczyk: On layaway today, there’s no impact. It’s not credit. So the big difference with layaway is that you don’t own the item yet. You’re almost saving towards, and ended up eventually getting it, so it’s not credit. Whereas today if you buy on a credit card or you buy now with those buy now pay later items, that’s credit. Someone is giving you the item before you actually have paid for it. That’s credit under any definition.

Paul Jarley: So mom was shopping in June, she didn’t really need the item until Christmas.

Jim Adamczyk: Right.

Paul Jarley: This is how this would work. And so she would make a payment on it for a few months so that she could have presents under the tree. That’s really how this developed. Let’s go to a couple of other similar kinds of programs, but in some ways different. How’s it different from rent to own?

Jim Adamczyk: With rent to own, it’s a contract, so you’re entering into a contract to buy a particular item and you’re renting it for a period of time and you have the option to buy at the end. Most of these programs aren’t designed for the majority of consumers. They’re usually for consumers that typically don’t have a good track record of saving. And so unfortunately, the programs do target those that aren’t disciplined in our approach like rent to own or buy now pay later. And the buy now pay later, which is what everyone in here probably sees, and probably more than half of you have used it already, I would imagine based on –

Paul Jarley: Based on the number of apps.

Jim Adamczyk: the number of statistics out there. It is more of the payment in four. So you’ll get the item and then you’ll agree to four payments. So instead of paying $100 today, you’ll pay $25 over four weeks or six weeks is typically the cycle that you’d pay that over. That’s pretty much what has put layaway, away. Because buy now, pay later is prevalent in almost every transaction that you see today. And it’s pretty much a dominated small dollar purchases today.

Paul Jarley: Because that’s about instant gratification to your point.

Jim Adamczyk: Yeah, I mean the psychology behind it –

Paul Jarley: Exactly the opposite.

Jim Adamczyk: is really interesting. You have this bias for having something now because you feel like having it now. You over assume the importance of having the item now and you under assume the value that you have to pay over time and the benefit of that. It ends up hurting I think those of us that struggle with savings just in general.

Paul Jarley: And you end up paying more for it over the long haul than you could have just paid upfront?

Jim Adamczyk: I heard it described once as like a treadmill. You get on a treadmill of debt. Most people that use buy now pay later, 60% of consumers have at least two or more active buy now, pay later going at the same time.

Paul Jarley: I’ve noticed now it’s even on my credit card.

Jim Adamczyk: There’s three big firms that control the whole buy now pay later space, and one of the big ones, they want to replace credit cards in the banking system around credit. That’s their whole goal. The short-term buy now pay later does replace credit cards for small dollar purchases for a lot of people, and it works in a similar way like a credit card. If you pay it off when it’s due, there’s no interest on it. But, like credit cards, most people don’t pay those off every month. In fact, probably more than half of Americans with credit card balances don’t pay them off every month. And so buy now pay later unfortunately follows a similar cycle. It might seem like you don’t have to pay a hundred dollars now and it’s only $25 today, but the reality is more than 40% of people that are in that today have some late payment over that period of time.

Paul Jarley: Why do you think layaway might be making a comeback now? Inflation maybe?

Jim Adamczyk: Certainly the cost of goods has gone up and layaway is still a niche product I would say today because a lot of the bigger retailers have gone away from it and moved to the buy now pay later. I definitely know that there’s a couple out there that still do it like Burlington, you’d mentioned, Sears and some of the older traditional players. But the Walmart’s the Best Buy’s the Target’s, they’ve all moved to the bigger buy now pay later firms. And what they’ve seen is just an increase in sales when they move to it, and that’s part of the reason why.

Paul Jarley: Well, and plus the inventory management part of it, right? Of setting it aside and –

Jim Adamczyk: Just imagine you’re at Walmart and you’ve got to manage all of these layaway programs for different consumers and when they come get it and if they’re late, not late, it’s an entire inventory management system. Versus you move to a buy now pay later infrastructure and the consumer gets their product right away and they have to manage inventory and payments and late tracking. So that’s part of the reason why you’ve seen layaway go away.

Paul Jarley: And you don’t need to have a credit score, right to do buy now, pay later?

Jim Adamczyk: I think a lot of people think that buy now pay later is helping your credit score. It is not actively in a credit score today. But if you don’t pay that buy now pay later at some point, that could go to a collection agency which could show up on your credit report. So there’s no benefit to credit for buy now, pay later, but there could be a detriment to your credit for not paying buy now pay later. So I think it’s important that people understand that there’s some misinformation in there out there about whether or not buy now, pay later can actually help your credit today. Now I will say that there’s a couple of the bigger ones have started to send your data monthly to the credit bureau agencies, but they’re not including it in their scores today.

As a company that lends money, we want to know that information because we make decisions on your ability to repay debt. And so if you’re getting a car loan or a mortgage and you’ve got eight different buy now pay later plans out there, that impacts your ability to repay. And so I think you’ll see some movement probably from the larger institutions pushing to have this data readily available to them. I don’t know if it’s going to impact your credit score anytime soon from a positive perspective.

Paul Jarley: So FAIRWINDS is very big on financial freedom and being debt-free. So would you recommend layaway to anyone?

Jim Adamczyk: We are always a proponent of save now, buy later. Okay? It is so easy to open an account and most banks have a little budgeting tool or a budgeting program or even a budgeting like savings goals or something you can use and just start putting the money into the savings goal in your bank account until you get ready to buy the purchase and then go make the purchase. That’s our recommendation a hundred percent of the time. First, it’s buy cash. Second, if you need to buy it, save for it and then buy it with the cash you saved. One of the worst things you can do is put it on credit if you can’t pay it off.

Paul Jarley: And for people who can’t get credit cards right, it’s an option.

Jim Adamczyk: Absolutely, a hundred percent. It is an alternative for people that cannot get credit cards and typically people with no credit. A bigger lesson for me around layaway is the movement of it to buy now pay later. And the most important thing you can learn about buy now pay later is, it’s credit. You got to know all the rules that come around with buy now pay later are like credit rules and you want to manage it in a way that doesn’t put you in a bad position later on.

Paul Jarley: So this is really all about the importance of cashflow and knowing how to manage it. So what tips would you have for our students on how to manage their cashflow?

Jim Adamczyk: The most important thing you can do is one, have a budget. You should know some idea each month of how much money you have coming in and then you should have some idea of the expenses that you’re paying each month. And then once you have the budget, your next goal is to save $1,000 in an emergency account. Don’t touch that money for any reason whatsoever unless some emergency happens. And by emergency is not like all my friends are going somewhere and so I got to go with them on vacation, which is mistakes I’ve made when I was younger. Emergency is like my car broke down or I need books or something like that. Save that money for a real emergency. So now you have a budget, you have a thousand dollars saved. And then, then I think you think about layaway programs or if you need to actually own something. We don’t say buy now, pay later. We say save now, buy later. That’s our approach to this.

Paul Jarley: You know these numbers better than I do. What percentage of households don’t have a month’s worth of savings? It’s a frighteningly high number, I do remember that.

Jim Adamczyk: It’s anywhere between 50 and 60% of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency expense, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember, at least the last 10-to-15 years has not changed. And so the small decisions you make today can influence whether or not you’re part of that statistic or you’re not. Income does not matter a lot because even people that make over $100,000 a year, over 25 or 30% of them are still living paycheck-to-paycheck. The more money you make, the more money you spend is a reality in life. And so the most important thing you can do is spend less than you make.

Paul Jarley: So in today’s world, I got to ask this question. Can AI help you out here?

Jim Adamczyk: Man, I hope so. I’m looking forward to it.

Paul Jarley: A cashflow manager, an AI cashflow manager. Yeah, I think that’s coming.

Jim Adamczyk: There is a future around what AI can do for you, even around managing your money. Imagine that has access to your transactional spend across every platform that you have. It has access to your income coming in, it has access to every expense you’re making on a monthly basis. I see a future where AI is helping you decide what to do next and even telling you, don’t buy that. Or no, no, don’t do that. Do this and here’s how to do it. Or if you’re going to buy it, use this channel because you’re getting better rewards, it’s better behavioral science for you to do that, but it will be your little agent that follows you round and I believe that future is not far away.

Paul Jarley: Yeah. How far do you think, I know you guys are thinking about this and you’re not alone. I’m sure.

Jim Adamczyk: You can see use cases on YouTube and online today where you see people that are uploading all of their transaction data and they’re using it to help – I would never recommend that, by the way – but you can see how the AI is helping them identify and spend correctly. The challenge that most financials have today is most people don’t have just one account. They usually have multiple accounts. For AI to be effective, it needs to know everything happening.

Paul Jarley: That’s called open banking. There’s still some challenge. What are the main challenges with that?

Jim Adamczyk: The main challenges are all the banks having access to the API calls from all the different financial institutions data that’s out there. And then I think you can make a pretty accurate prediction of how you should manage your money. But in today’s world, and I imagine most of you’d say might have five or six different financial apps sitting on your phone, and so having access to that and having financial institutions trust that they can do that –

Paul Jarley: Because options for evil there as well, given what they would know about people and their spending habits?

Jim Adamczyk: You would have to essentially allow access to that. A scale that maybe most people aren’t comfortable with.

Paul Jarley: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. Younger generation seems to give that away pretty quickly compared to –

Jim Adamczyk: Although I find myself giving away a lot of stuff too, as well as I get older. I want convenience. I think people, want convenience.

Paul Jarley: That’s right. People want convenience.

Jim Adamczyk: Most of you’ll probably grow up in a world, or at least you’ll be in your professional world in the next five to 10 years where it’s going to be totally different than it is today, and you’ll have a tremendous opportunity to make more of an impact than people that have been in the industry for 10, 15, 20 years. Because you’re going to come in at the cusp of all this new tech coming in and you’re going to be able to teach people that have been there for 10, 15 years how to use it probably more effectively than they are using it today.

Paul Jarley: What other advice do you have for students before I open it up for questions?

Jim Adamczyk: Well, as it relates to layaway, my biggest advice is that it’s a better program than buy now, pay later because it’s delayed gratification and I think you feel better when you actually work to save for something and then you buy it. The behavioral science behind this will show that almost half of people that buy something now and they have to pay it later, they end up regretting the purchase, especially the bigger the purchase, the more regret happens. Think of all the stuff you bought over the last three or four months. Did I really need to buy that stuff? And if I didn’t buy it, I’d probably have this extra $500 sitting here. And so my advice really to everyone is have a budget, save a thousand dollars and plan for your spending, and I promise you’ll be in a much better position than most of your counterparts out there if you treat personal finance as the most important thing you do as you graduate.

Paul Jarley: I think the psychology around spending is really fascinating. I think it’s also true, and hardly none of you do this. How many of you have more than $20 of cash in your wallet right now? More than I would’ve guessed. How many of you have $50 of cash? I still think paying for things in cash and watching it disappear from your wallet is one of the strongest incentives not to spend money.

Jim Adamczyk: You know what’s funny, if you asked that question to all the 600 people that worked at FAIRWINDS, probably less than 10% of them would have had $20 in their wallet.

Paul Jarley: I’m stunned that about half of the students raised their hand.

Jim Adamczyk: That was pretty interesting. That is fascinating. Would’ve not predicted that that many would’ve raised their hand with $20. I don’t think I’ve had $20 in my pocket in six years.

Paul Jarley: Yeah, me too. Okay, so last question, Jim, do you think layaway will still a thing 10 years from now? Yes or no, and why?

Jim Adamczyk: I think layaway will be as much a thing as the flip cell phone, and I don’t know if I remember the flip cell phone. You remember the little Razor? Everyone wanted the Razor cell phone. There’s still some people that have it.

Paul Jarley: I know a few guys who do.

Jim Adamczyk: Yeah, that’s right.

Paul Jarley: They happen to be wealthy.

Jim Adamczyk: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, they do. They don’t want all the tech on their phone.

Paul Jarley: Discipline buying.

Jim Adamczyk: Discipline buying. Yeah, it could make a comeback. I do think with artificial intelligence, though, layaway might change in the future. Maybe there’s a different way of looking at layaway that becomes more consumer friendly and hopefully puts people in a better position, not a worse position.

Paul Jarley: Well, thanks Jim. Always good to have you in The EXCHANGE.

[Audience clapping]

Paul Jarley: It’s my podcast, so I get to go last.

In a world of instant gratification, credit cards and buy now pay later programs pretty much ensure that Layaways heyday is behind it. But it isn’t dead either, in part because it offers a form of inclusiveness for people with modest incomes, difficulty saving and little access to credit. The real question for retailers is whether this boosts their sales enough to deal with the hassles of keeping track of the payments and reserving the goods. It very well might for the Burlington Coat Factory, but probably not for Bloomingdales.

In some ways, the biggest layaway plan of all is sitting right in front of my students. It’s a college degree. Think about it. You put money down semester after semester, making installments in time, effort, and tuition. You don’t get to take advantage of the degree until the very end, and if you stop partway, you don’t get the ultimate prize. A half a degree is no degree. Paying for the entire four years at the start of a college journey would price all but the wealthiest people out of the market. And it’s unlikely that an 18-year-old could get a loan for the entire amount, unless they were exceptionally gifted academically. Even the government isn’t going to take this deal and give you a loan.

So maybe that’s the lesson. Whether it’s a coat at Burlington or a college degree, layaway survives because it’s the only way some of us can afford the things that matter most. We live in a world of instant gratification, but some of life’s biggest rewards still require patience, persistence, and a long string of installment payments.

So what’s your take? Check us out online and share your thoughts at business.ucf.edu/podcast. And be sure to follow us on social media to be alerted when our next episode airs. I’ll be joined by UCF’s own Carolyn Massiah and pet mom Amber Downs to learn if pet influencing is really a thing … and more importantly if my dog, Sneaky Pete, has a shot at becoming one of them. Special thanks to my new producer, Brent Meske, and the whole team at the Office of Outreach and Engagement here at the UCF College of Business. And thank you for listening. Until next time, charge on.

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